some die looking for a hand to hold

[gramarye]

Who: Wolfgang and OPEN
What: Antipsychotic medications have been known to exacerbate psychosis. There is a risk of permanent chemical dependence leading to symptoms worse than before treatment began.
Where: Badside, Mog Hill, Echomire, Brock Marsh, Raven's Gate, Chimer
When: Veerdi-Shundi
Notes: FEEL FREE TO SKIP THE OP it's me tl;dring. Thread starters in comments, if none of those work just... post whatever and I'll roll with it. Also, a polyvore.
Warnings: Medical/health care. For real. Specifically, this post touches on symptoms of mental illness, drug dependence, side effects and withdrawal, medical treatment, and seizures. Very possibly TW for suicidal ideation.

He's halfway down the block before he realises he left his body behind.

Panicked, he runs and hides, waits for whatever this is to end. It doesn't. He slinks back to his bedroom at five in the morning, watching his body sleep, pacing the length of the room and wondering if he can get back inside. Eventually, it becomes less terrifying, but it is frustrating to be outside of his body while the flesh sleeps and unable to do anything -- unable to touch anything, to speak to anyone, to even be seen. It further blurs the line between dream and reality; which is which? Which really happened?

It was supposed to get better. He was supposed to Awaken and this would stop. He'd be fine, he could stop taking the meds, he could get his life back, everything would be like it used to -- when he was young and wild and free and knew he could do anything he wanted, whenever he wanted. Only this time, he wouldn't have to be so lonely; people would understand...

Instead, it's getting worse. When he's not on them, he can't tell the voices apart, can't tell what's real and what's in his head, feels smothered under the weight of the irrational thoughts that plague him. He argues with people who aren't there in public, not realising he's the only one who can see them, or that maybe they're not there at all. He gets random pains -- swift, shock-like ones and longer-lasting muscle pain, stiffness in his neck, long-lasting headaches that aspirin doesn't fix. His hands shake so hard he can't use them. When he's on them, the side effects now outweigh the benefits. The sedative effect of antipsychotics makes day-to-day living harder when he is already sleeping thirteen hours a day. He falls asleep anywhere, at any time -- on the train, at work, in bars -- but no matter how much he sleeps, it's never enough. He is losing time. He'll sit down and the next thing he knows, the sun is much lower, or else it's dark out, and he's confused and disoriented. Once, he wakes up on the floor of his living room with a paintbrush still in his hand, and his entire body feels as if it was just tazed, just one giant, sore muscle, and there's blood in his mouth -- he bit through his cheek.

It only happens once, but it's enough to thoroughly scare the shit out of him.

Above all else, though, it makes it clear that no matter how many times he smiles and says "fine, thank you, how are you," he is not functioning. He is consistently late for work, if he manages to go at all, and when he gets back to his house, he has barely enough energy to collapse on the mattress he set up in the living room, and then he sleeps the rest of the day. He needs a drink -- or six -- just to get through the day, and if he has to go outside and socialise like a normal human being, he takes stimulants. After the incident last week, he has stopped answering his CiD, and he quits one job, gets fired from another, and stops showing up for the third. Having free time again is nice. It's not much, a few hours between sleep, and even then he doesn't use it very effectively. Does some work on the house. Reads, when he can muster up the energy, the big medical texts he borrowed from a public library.

Does not like what he finds.

Clozapine has been shown to lower seizure threshold and produce significant EEG changes. Although not a commonly used drug, both clinical neurophysiology technologists and interpreting electroencephalographers need to be aware of the effects of clozapine on the EEG...

CNS Effects of Haloperidol
Insomnia, restlessness, anxiety, euphoria, agitation, drowsiness, depression, lethargy, headache, confusion, vertigo, grand mal seizures, exacerbation of psychotic symptoms including hallucinations, and catatonic-like behavioral states...

The words keep ringing in his head, over and over. He has to read it over and over again because it takes that long for anything to sink in -- he sees the words, but he can't make any sense of them, and when he finally does, he just sits there quietly and thinks about what they mean. He is not sure how long that takes.

Maybe he should tell someone.

He thinks about that, those words still at the forefront of his mind, when he drags himself out of bed, forces himself to get dressed, and leaves the house, like maybe if he just goes out and does something, he'll be okay. He has always been able to push through this before. It has been one thing after another all year, and he thinks maybe it's indicative of some kind of personal failing that he can't take it in stride like the rest of the city. He has never been strong -- he thinks -- and ten years later he has been made more brittle by a lifetime of expectations and disappointments, by the slow reveal of an unjust world he is completely powerless in.

And it has been following him into his dreams. The old nightmares -- memories of past lives, people he's been before. Some he's had before and some he hasn't, but they're all familiar because they all really happened, except something is wrong in them this time. The way the trees begin to curl in on themselves when he looks at them too long. The patterns of spiderwebs, reflecting rainbow from morning dew, too unnaturally perfectly round. The thin lines of clouds curling inwards, inwards.

Always in a spiral.

Every time it interrupts the dreams he knows he should be paying attention to, knocks him out of the memory and into awareness, but still dreaming. No. He runs from them instead, swinging from memory to memory like handholds, but when he sees it again he misses the mark and falls. No. This is real running, the background warping behind him and he has to get away, really away, because he's not even safe here and he can't tell if this is real. He only jerks to a stop because there is nowhere else to run, he's standing on the edge of a cliff that is wrong because there's nothing behind him except more ocean. The sea, all around. Deep, open water, impossibly grey.

There is more than one way to go. He looks upwards, but he can see the clouds beginning to move, twisting and starting to spiral, and -- No. Just one. He jumps.

Seven miles under the surface, there is no light. No sight. No sound. No smell. No feeling. He can taste salt water sometimes, but that fades eventually. Above him there are hundreds of pounds of pressure threatening to collapse or explode his body, but that fades, too, until there is nothing but this -- drifting in blackness, enveloped in it like an isolation tank. A Ganzfeld cocoon.

Safe. The only safe place there is.

But in the waking world he wanders around like a zombie, hollow-eyed, closer to broken than anything else and too tired to fight anymore. He would just go under, if he could.

This is his last-ditch effort to find a way to believe that not everything in the world is evil.

Comments

[gramarye]

He laughs lowly although there is zero humour in it. "A lot of bad things have happened. To everyone."

So he's not special, so he has no right to complain, because really what does he have to complain about? He's alive, he has a place to live, he has work -- of a sort. He knows it's irrational to think this way, he would never once suggest to anyone else that their problems aren't important because they're not starving in the streets, but. Knowing and believing aren't the same thing.

He picks something less personal. "There was a demon out in Howl Barrow." Was. "It hurt a lot of people. Kids." He stares at his hand, eyes tracing the curve of the scar. "I've seen a lot of evil things -- I mean really evil, not just... bad. It wasn't that different. I'm different. It used to be easy -- make the evil thing go away, and then things were better, but... things don't get better here. They don't really get better anywhere. It's just -- this," he touches the scar on his forehead lightly, "all the time, everywhere."

[wontturntofoam]

"A demon?" This conversation... is so far beyond the realms of Shrieky's understanding of the world, that it leaves him feeling somewhat adrift. He doesn't know how you can tell the difference, between really evil, and regular bad, he doesn't know how you can ever make it go away, and he knows that the idea of anything ever getting better has always been a desolate one to him.

"I don't... I don't think that can be right. About it always being terrible, everywhere. I used to think it was, but now I'm sitting here with you, and we are talking and having a drink, and even though you are sad I don't think that there's anything really evil here." Cake and hot chocolate and beer all arrive at once, but Shrieky doesn't look away from Wolfgang, "So, there's one place, and one time, where it isn't, and where it doesn't have to be."

[gramarye]

"I know. -- I mean, I know that. In my head, I know it, but I can't believe -- it's all I can think about, and I just -- there's something wrong with me." That's more than he intended to say but he can feel the encroaching knife-edge of panic and it's making him careless; he knows if he doesn't reel it in he's going to blurt out every thought currently stewing in his head and that will definitely make anyone think he is crazy -- irrational, paranoid, incoherent, out of touch with reality. He shuts up a moment, slumping back in his seat, and tries to breathe and calm down. It's fine, he's fine, he can handle this.

He stares at his beer without touching it, dead-eyed, and wishes again that it were stronger. Dimly he is aware that this is becoming a problem, his habit of using liquor as a crutch, and that he needs to cool it before he finds himself unable to stop, but. It's hard to turn down anything that offers any relief.

[wontturntofoam]

It takes him a moment to formulate a response to that, because... it's hard for him to entirely fathom the idea of there being something wrong with Wolfgang. It occurs to him, after a moment, that Wolfgang might mean... an injury or a sufferance, rather than a failing, and he doesn't want to dismiss that either.

"Do you need... is there any way that you can be helped? That, what is wrong with you can be mended?" He glances down at Wolfgang's beer, following the other man's gaze, before flicking his eyes back up to his face, "I think that you're wonderful. You know that, of course? Even if it seems as though things are bad now, there is much more in you than just the thing that is wrong."

[gramarye]

"I hate doctors." He runs his hands over his eyes. No. That's not right. Rationally he knows that most of them are perfectly capable people with pretty impressive skills who are largely concerned with helping people or getting paid -- sometimes both -- and that the experiences he remembers but which didn't actually happen to him are just a series of unfortunate circumstances.

"No. I don't trust them. And they scare me." He's not sure why that's so hard to say, but it is. "And I can't afford it, and..." Now it just sounds like he's making excuses, so he stops, leans forward again, braces his head in his hands. He still looks and sounds sad, but his mouth turns up at the corner. "I know. I'm sorry I'm -- like this. Thank you for saying so."

[wontturntofoam]

"I've never met a doctor." Shrieky confesses. He still feels somewhat adrift in this conversation, as if he's climbing up the edge of a cliff face, searching for footholds, and constantly aware that the wrong move could ruin everything, "But I think that probably, it is normal not to trust them? They need to know an awful lot of things, in order to do their job, and you need to put a lot of faith in them. I think that doubting someone like that, is probably not something that you should feel bad about."

He picks up his fork, and stabs experimentally at his cake, "Is there no one else who could help you though? I have found that... for most people, Baedal has things which would never be found in their own worlds? Perhaps there are people here who could help you, without being Doctors?" Scooping up a little forkful of the cake, he pauses, before popping it into his mouth, "And I like you, however you are. There isn't anything for you to apologise for!"

[gramarye]

"I don't know." He finally takes a drink. "I don't think so." The alternatives he can think of are fucking with his head with magic, which -- no.

Wolfgang shifts uncomfortably, now more just playing absently with the bottle. "Sorry," he says, about apologising, which... is not him being cheeky, but he catches himself, winces, opens his mouth, then closes it firmly. Apologising for apologising for apologising may be utterly ridiculous but so is he, and he could very well get caught in some kind of infinite loop.