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You don’t really remember how it started.
Maybe it was on the day that you first went to the little library, the one on the corner with an out-of-order card catalog and books piled haphazardly up to the ceiling.
Maybe it was after you’d found the section at the back of the library marked “study of the naturally obscure” in peeling script.
Maybe it was the day you checked out the Grimoire for Summoning the Zoologically Dubious from that little section in the little library, and began to read about ghastly eldritch horrors, colossal beasts writhing with tentacles and teeth.
Your name was the only one written on the card of the Grimoire, in somewhat messy script, though the corners of the book were worn round and the pages were wrinkled soft.
You remember having strange dreams when you read the Grimoire before going to bed, but you assumed they were just nightmares. After all, what sort of eleven year old wouldn’t dream of terror after reading of creatures with a thousand beady eyes and needle-sharp teeth, complete with skin that oozed poisonous mushrooms and the stink of death?
They never really scared you, though, and that was the strange thing. If you did have fears, they were more subtle, and if they did manifest themselves at night, it was not in images of the Grimoire’s horrors but in glimpses of dead friends and tiny whispers of gibberish filtering through a dark space with no boundaries and no substance.
Just nightmares.
When you’re thirteen your dreams start getting more intense, more highly colored and deep. They aren’t the usual subtle horrors, and they aren’t the randomness of your early childhood. They are neither and both and in-between, because you actually like them but sometimes they hurt.
Suddenly, as you enter middle school (a place where you aren’t too fondly regarded by your peers) your dreams are filled with friends.
You figure your subconscious is just trying to come up with help for you, since you don’t have any means to get your own. You’re fine, but you’re lonely. Everyone you know is either scared of you or amused by you, and the scared ones pretend to be amused and pretend to hate out of a self-preservational instinct that tells them you can smell fear.
You can’t, of course, but sometimes it seems like you can, especially after a particularly intense session of reading in which you may or may not have mumbled a few incantations to yourself, just to see how the words felt in your mouth.
Somehow, the gibberish feels natural, and it leaves you feeling powerful and uplifted, but sometimes it leaves you overwhelmed, too. Sometimes you walk out of the library and are immediately assaulted by the utter humanity of the outside world; you can somehow sense the emotions of the man walking by, and the things he feels as he glances at your short skirt makes you want to vomit.
During the worst of this you don’t go to school, since that place is so awash with hormones and drama that you can’t breathe, can’t think, all you can register is the cloyingly sweet heaviness of people
Like
You?
No, you’re nothing like them. You don’t think you ever have been, but if you used to be you certainly aren’t any more.
The friends in your dreams don’t bother you like that.
At first, when the dreams really start, there are only three friends there: a blue boy, a red boy, a green girl. John Dave Jade. You love them with all your heart and then some , because they’re family, far more than the mother who had traded affection for liquor around your sixth birthday and subsequently stopped caring what you did with your time. Your friends don’t do that, they would never abandon you, they love you. They love you. They aren’t really alive and you know that, they were only in your head, but they love you and you love them back with all your heart.
You know it’s childish and clichéd but sometimes when the words at school actually sting you imagine what it would be like if your friends were there with you.
Later on, John and Dave and Jade are joined by other friends and other people, gray-skinned, orange-horned, rainbow-blooded. You’ve always been a writer, but when you started writing about the dreams and the friends you wrote page after page even when you’d just woken up and there was a risk of being late. When you’re fourteen the librarian tells you to just take the Grimoire, you’ve renewed it so many times and no one else ever wants to check it out anyway. The next day you cough up black sludge in the sink of a middle school bathroom.
Immediately after it happens, you deny it. You deny everything about it and turn on the water full blast and wash the sludge down the drain and rinse your mouth twenty times and don’t look at what you spit out with the water.
Even though it’s the middle of the day, you go straight home and write about your friends.
You love them all, truly, but there was one you were in love with, you think. She was a grey-skinned, orange-horned, rainbow-blooded and more rainbow-blooded than most since she drank the others’ rainbows. Rainbow Drinker. Vampire. Like something out of a paranormal teen romance, except not really. (you’re not sure why these thoughts always come in past tense- it wasn’t a past event. It was a never event.)
Rainbow Drinker wins you 250$ in a short story contest when you’re fifteen.
Your English teacher, Ms. Mary, is your only friend. Your only physical, corporeal, solid friend. You’re done with calling your dream-friends imaginary, because for all you care, for all you were concerned, they’re insubstantial but still as real as anything.
(Despite your conviction, you still feel a bit silly whenever you think this.)
You like Ms. Mary from the day you first see her because she looks a little bit like the rainbow drinker you were in love with, and because she has tattoos that curl under her clothes and just peek through where she pushes the school’s dress code to its limits.
She says you are a very gifted writer and have you considered a career in writing Rose because I really do think you could excel! You told me you won a short story contest once, right? Do you write regularly or just for things like that?
You stay after school nearly every day with Ms. Mary, sometimes reading, sometimes writing, sometimes talking because she’s so interesting. She’s the only person besides you who’s ever read something you’ve written that wasn’t meant for the public eye.
You were sure she knew what people said about you but she doesn’t seem to care- either that or she pretends not to because she’s a teacher- but either way you enjoy her company.
Still, a favorite teacher isn’t the same as a friend, and some of the things you write you don’t share with anyone.
These things are the more intimate, personal ones; some of them are romantically intimate, yes, but some of them are just very close to your soul.
A lot of them contain dead friends.
In one of the more prominent stories, a dream you have nearly once a month, you die with a timeless boy dressed in purple but bathed in red, and come back as a god with his hand in yours.
You don’t let anyone read that one until you’re out of high school.
That year though, the year that you meet Ms. Mary, is the one during which everything really starts going bad.
The beginning of the school year sees you retching on the floor of your bedroom because it feels like something on your insides is trying to claw its way out. Once or twice, the retching sees itself through and you vomit what looks like bits of seaweed and great clumps of pearly white things that you only realize are eggs when you’re pouring them down the drain. You push the thoughts these little accidents give you out of your mind- I never ate anything like that, those came from me and whatever I’ve done to myself, they’re mine, they’re dark and deep and horrid and mine- and replace your mind’s own productions with those of published authors, magical realism and fantasy mingling with eccentric but assuredly nonfictional nonfiction, and you actually start writing a book. Your writing had largely been only drabbles and excerpts from your dreams and your subconscious wishes up until this point, (maybe with wizard fanfiction mixed in from time to time-Harry Potter was very important to you) but your dreams had gotten deeper, there was more plot and depth and emotion to them, and though this was good for your writing habits it also meant that sometimes you started crying silently in the back of the class and if anyone asked you what was wrong you could only shake your head and wipe viciously at your eyes.
Because “someone I’ve never met died in my dreams” isn’t really all that good of a reason to be sad, now is it?
One day you’re walking home from the library, a new load of mystery-drenched books in your arms, when you feel something writhing in your stomach.
You barely make it home by the time you’re choking and gasping, trying to keep your breathing even trying to keep the things inside you down, but before you know it you’re vomiting on the hallway’s hardwood floor and when it pauses for a moment and you see that the stuff is black and slick with clumps of more black writhing things you start to cry.
You’ve gone in far too deep.
You manage to get it cleaned up before your mother comes home (not that she’d care anyway) but the thing, tentacles are too big to flush away so you stuff them into a garbage bag but they’re still writhing and you take a dull knife from the kitchen and stab them one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten and put the knife in the bag with them because you don’t want any of that near your mouth even though that was where it came from in the first place
When you pull your hand out of the bag one of the tendrils is attached to it and when you yank it off it leaves a pattern of small, circular marks.
Sucker marks.
You retch again because you can’t help it but this time the vomit is normal and you shake and cry because what have you done to yourself Rose Lalonde what have you become
You hole yourself up in your room for the rest of the week, eat your meals in there, don’t do your laundry, don’t do anything that requires leaving your bedroom.
You do research.
The term grimdark comes up in your internet searches but that’s something from the old legends and bedtime stories meant to scare little English children in the nineteenth century, not a medical condition.
“In many images grimdarkness is depicted by the change in color of the grimdark one’s skin, hair and eyes. Often the grimdark one is surrounded by tentacles or tendrils of dark energy, which could allude to the horrorterrors from which the grimdark ones take their powers. Grimdarkness has always been depicted as a simultaneously natural and unnatural process, simply achieved by giving in to dark things unseen.”
When you look up from your computer you catch your reflection in the mirror and for a moment think your eyes and hair to be glowing white and your skin to be a dark, ash gray.
You jump and look down and your eyes reflected in your screen are the normal violet and when you pull a lock of hair out from your forehead to examine it it’s the same blonde as always.
Grimdarkness, you think, hmm.
No way.
The day after that you don’t go straight home and into your darkened bedroom after school, but instead to the library for the first time in over a week. You search the entire “zoologically dubious” section for something about the conditions one can contract from this sort of thing, and come up with a very modest pile of books.
To be fair, it’s a very modest section.
There’s a warning in one of the less interesting bestiaries that when converted from flowery, crumbling Old English into modern text reads
“one must take care not to immerse themselves too far into contents of the same nature that this book holds: the beasts are powerful things, and know more than a tiny human mind will ever understand”
The wording is a little awkward and maybe a little ominous, but ultimately it doesn’t do anything other than confirm what you already know: the summoning incantations (with or without circles) the homemade altar in your room, the poems of gibberish, the language of the old ones (which you’ve been teaching yourself and think you’re doing quite well) has been pulling you in.
It’s okay, really, at least you have a place where you belong. But you’re not going to become a priestess of the old ones, that doesn’t pay the bills, and you’re not going to
Well
If you’re honest with yourself you probably are going to get yourself in deeper.
Tentacle vomit and overloads of human emotion aside, it’s kind of fun.
It makes you feel powerful, powerful and free.
So nothing changes.
When you’re 16 you get your first girlfriend. She’s plump and pretty and has long black hair and sometimes she reminds you of someone you saw once, maybe in a dream (probably in a dream. It’s usually in a dream.) Her name is Fennea and you meet her at the library because she’s the only person other than you who you’ve ever seen pursuing the Naturally Obscure section and when you approach she looks at you and her smile is genuine.
She must not be from around here. No one smiles at you.
It turns out she’s homeschooled and has just moved to town and you meet in the library every day for two weeks until she finally asks you if you want to hang out sometime and you don’t realize it’s a date until she shows up at your house wearing a gorgeous fuchsia dress, ready to take you to the movies.
You can relate to her better than to any of the other people at school- she’s from a family that has always been interested in beasts and magic and the old ways- it’s like a birthright and she’s much better at picking up the language of the old ones and at drawing sigils and summoning circles than you’re ever probably going to be, but you can do it together. After a month and a half of dating, you think you’re in love with her. You even tell your mom, and she congratulates you, but forgets the next minute and asks you what you said. You don’t repeat yourself.
One night at the beginning of the summer you go to a party that you haven’t been invited to but Fennea says it’s okay and her smile when she said it and the way her eyes glittered and her laughter bubbled out past her fuchsia-painted lips made you want to agree, so you did.
She said she’d meet you there, but when you arrive you can’t find her and you don’t until an hour later when you’re looking for the bathroom and open a door only to see your girlfriend, shirt off, mouth suckered to the lips of a tall boy wearing a purple scarf and cheesy hipster glasses.
You drop the cup of water (you refuse to drink alcohol, look what happened to your mother) that you’re holding and it clunks and spills and startles them and when Fennea realizes it’s you her lips part in a perfect “o” and she pushes away from the boy and cries that oh no rose it’s not what you think I swear we’re childhood friends I-
You start screaming. You don’t even know what you’re screaming just that there’s something in there about childhood friends don’t make out with eachother when one of them has a girlfriend and there’s also something in there about the old ones and the elder gods and some of that is gibberish and before you know it you’re nauseous and you fall to your knees and vomit what you’re sure is going to be gallons of black sludge but when you open your eyes it turns out just to be the cup of water you were drinking.
It was much saltier than you remembered, though, and your throat burns.
You look up at Fennea, sobbing, and there’s a shocked look on her face but she quickly switches gears to sympathetic and reaches out a hand and an invitation of a ride home and we’ll talk on the way Rose I swear-
You tear yourself away from her because you don’t need her help you yell as you leap to your feet and this is a bedroom you suppose and the mirror on the dresser has caught the light from the doorway and it reflects your face back to you in gray skin and gleaming white eyes and you are grimdark and you are powerful
As you’re leaving someone catches you by the arm and look who it is! The big bad goth! Never expected I’d be seeing you here, Morticia, but I gotta say you look even worse in a skirt than I expected and you turn your head to give whoever it is a death glare but someone pinches your thigh and all of your energy is focused on not yelping or jumping and suddenly they’re descending like vultures, your tormenters, and their emotions are all so hot and damp and stifling that it’s almost hard to breathe and you can’t fight back because you’re drowning and you must be tumbling through a river because things are connecting with your skin, hard and fast and they leave you bruised on the lawn and if you were anyone else you’d be out cold by now but you’re awake enough to see Fennea as she watches you be beaten and she’s holding someone’s hand and it’s not yours.
She didn’t stop them. She knows what the elder gods do to a person. She knows she would have gotten hurt.
You still would have liked it if she tried.
When you get home you go straight for your mother’s liquor cabinet, to the top shelf where she keeps the stuff she only takes out on special occasions and when her friends come over to drink and laugh about nothing and she looks happy for once even though you know it’s false and empty like a paper mask. You pull out bottle after bottle, setting them one by one on the counter until you’ve amassed quite a collection and your finger brushes something with sharp corners and there they are, the boxes of chocolate filled with brandy and port wine and rum and you sit on the floor and eat them until your fingers are sticky and left scrabbling for purchase in an empty box and then you yank the top off of the nearest bottle and drain it and then take another and open that one too.
When you finally vomit the stuff that comes out is dark and writhing and has things in it and sacs of pearly white eggs and just the sight of them makes you spit up more sludge and water that’s far salty and far too much to have come from a cup at the party and two gallons later you’re woozy and shaking and you hardly clean up all of the sick before everything goes too bright for a second and then too dark and you’re lying as if dead on the hardwood floor.
As you wake up you think something along the lines of that if this was a soap opera your loving mother would be leaning over you asking what was wrong and you would break down and cry and tell her and soon enough, with your mother on your side, everything would be okay.
The sun hurts your eyes and the silence doesn’t help.
You smell of vomit and alcohol and you know it and hate yourself. You don’t want to shower and you know your mother won’t care either way but you let the hot water cascade over you anyway, crawling under your skin and scouring the smells of a night wasted from your nostrils.
The steam clouds your vision in more ways than one- you like taking extra hot showers because when all you can feel is near-scalding water and steam in your face the unnatural things shrink back for a while.
You don’t dislike them of course, the things your grimdarkness gives you. You appreciate them, they make you special and special is fun, and being above the ham-fisted sweaty jocks in your classes in another thing besides intellect and delicacy is good too, because even when they corner you behind the dumpsters and call you a freak and say you’re so pale you could pass for snow white if you weren’t so skinny and ugly and strange, you can feel really hard and scare them away with ashen skin and white-hot eyes.
And you can taste their fear as they run.
But sometimes, when you’re especially weak, when you vomit wet sand at midnight and wake up the next morning with sucker marks on your arms, when your mother can’t see them and asks you what you’re afraid of in that dark corner where something you’re not ready for yet is waiting to converse with you and you’ve already had such a long day and Rosie it’s just a shadow what’s wrong, you remember how it was like when you weren’t this way.
It was strange and definitely not you but it was also kind of pleasant not carrying the shadows of the deep in your belly.
After you shower you spend the rest of the day writing because your dreams were especially vivid (probably alcohol-influenced but still vivid) and the glowing vampiress was sitting very close to you and holding you even closer and telling you it was going to be alright you would get through this together it isn’t the end of the world and you felt so free somehow, even though you supposedly had a terrible drinking problem, because there were no dark claws clasping on your every word.
You write poems.
You’re usually a prose type of girl but with black just encroaching on the edges of your mind but still warmed by a lump of glowing comfort from your nonexistent friends it feels like you can write anything, so you do.
You write about the boy with the broken sword and the girl who held the planets, you write about light and space and warmth, you write about the boy with the blue hood who could blow down the sky.
You don’t write about Fennea and you don’t write about yourself. You feel like you’re not worthy of the person you are in your dreams, because you remember being her being grimdark and it wasn’t like being you, it wasn’t running and then falling downhill while tentacles wound tighter around your neck and your skin stripped away, it was power and control and vicious delicacy and besides she escaped it because she grew.
You don’t think you’ve grown much lately.
You forget Fennea as best as you can even though she tries contacting you several times and you get through the rest of highschool as quick and dirty as possible and leave your mother in the fall to go to college for writing. She gives you a tearful goodbye and you’re sure she’ll go home and get piss drunk as celebration of her daughter’s success. In class you’re stellar, a natural, a real talent, and by the time you’re a junior you have a publishing contract since you’ve been going every weekend that you don’t feel sick to get your manuscripts reviewed and it finally paid off.
Your first book, titled Ascend by R. Lalonde, gets rave reviews and makes the bestseller lists and they’re calling you for an interview and you accept graciously but the morning of the event you wake up with your eyes on fire and when you call to cancel your ears sear from the pain of a gentle human voice.
The voice asks if you’d like to reschedule and you choke out some reply that you don’t remember in the next second and slam down the phone.
It turns out you do get interviewed after all, the next week, and it’s published in a popular magazine and you read it eagerly because you don’t remember half of what you said. You weren’t having the best day but you still got the words out and managed not to talk about your dreams. The ideas just came to you, that’s what you said.
You write more books, four more make an even five and you’re working on a sixth. The first four are all pretty short but well-loved and when you introduce the gray aliens with the candy-corn horns and the rainbow blood in the much longer fifth volume, your popularity reaches “internationally acclaimed.” Your life is full, you go to conventions and parties and social events every weekend to meet fans and friends. Friends.
They’re not really friends, of course. They’re fellow authors, they’re successful people turned fans of yours, they want movie deals and to talk about your latest book and for you to tell them more and have a drink with them, which you politely decline. You’ve dated at least ten people since your disastrous first relationship and you say at least because there might have been more. You can’t remember. None of your relationships were ever very memorable.
It just feels wrong. It just feels so wrong. You miss the people you’ve never met, the best friends whose faces you’ve never seen, the girlfriend whose skin you’ve never touched.
You stop going to conventions when people start dressing as your ‘characters’ because that’s disgusting, that’s so, so wrong. That 13-year-old has painted her skin bright white and her lips green to look like the girl you’re in love with and objectively you’re sure it’s a good costume but you have to leave the signing for a few minutes and vomit.
This happens almost every time you try again, so you stop trying and headlines begin showing up. “troubled author Rose Lalonde: what her problems really are” “problems at home: what’s really wrong with America’s favorite writer” “Rose Lalonde discusses her troubled pass and her uncertain future” (that last one is a complete fabrication; you never gave any such interview.)
But you like being with fans, you really do, because even if they don’t know your friends they love them like you do, so you keep going to your therapist and you keep writing and you keep living and a year later, when your sixth book is half done and you’ve gotten your little “episodes” of tentacle vomit and hypersensitivity down to one or so a week, you go back to your old hometown and hold a reading in the little library that shaped your life.
One of the people who shows up looks uncannily like the windy blue boy but he must not have been there for the signing because the next time you look for him he’s gone and he didn’t speak to you or get a book signed but he looked sad. You’re sad too.
You get more comfortable with the cosplays as time goes on, even appreciate some of them, but the ones you appreciate the most are usually the ones that look nothing like your friends, because they don’t scare you, they don’t make you think you’re crazy or that your friends are really real, really there because although that girl dressed as jade is gorgeous and has sewn an amazing rendition of one of jade’s outfits (it really is stellar and you take a picture with her) her hair is far too straight and her skin is far too pale for you to confuse her with your friend. You’re thankful.
Conventions are still overwhelming due to the sheer variety of costumes and people in them but you start being able to go again, start being level-headed enough to not throw up on the boy dressed as Dave who happens to look exactly like him. You compliment his costume, and though your smile may have been a little strained he thanks you excitedly and you’re able to separate him and Dave in your head because Dave would not be jumping up and down like that but it’s definitely cute.
You haven’t let up on the dark things. You mail-order books now and you’ve built up quite the library. There are things like bones and preserved sea creatures and pressed flowers and bits of gossamer fabric and tarnished metal that you found in the woods draped all around your apartment and most of your furniture and dishware are antiques. You like antiques. They have personality, but not in the way that most people who like antiques will say that antiques have personality. Sometimes when it’s late and you haven’t eaten you can feel the feelings of the people who had them before you on them, and usually the memories are much better than those of minimum-wage workers at the Chinese factory that that new set of bowls just came from. You don’t want to feel exhaustion and anger and pain when you’re just trying to make a cup of tea.
The consequence of all this is that your apartment gives the impression of a veritable nest, one belonging to some type of witch.
You don’t mind, of course, it makes you feel safe because it’s a bit off just like you, but it sort of freaks out anyone who comes to visit.
That’s why you graciously refuse an in-house interview every time they ask which is more often than you might think.
You visit your mother every Christmas. You didn’t see her for several years after you first left for college, but she’s been getting back on track with the whole “sober” thing and you can’t resist a chance to play with cats. You want to get a cat, one of your own, but you live in a city and you think the combination of too little space and too many cars and whispers from horrorterrors in the night might not be the best for the little creature.
You have a better time at Christmas every year than you expect. Since your mother is semi-sober now (she is insistent that opening up a bottle of champagne for her and guests on a holiday doesn’t count and with the way the bubbling makes your senses go all fuzzy and the pain of your headache go dull you’re inclined to agree) and since you’re older she seems to be willing to talk more freely with you, and you talk about your lives and the cats and friends and even about your books a little bit, though she seems a bit reluctant to broach that topic (though really you don’t blame her- you practically hissed when you found her looking at one of your writing journals back in highschool.)
You have another Christmas with fans when you get back home the last week of January. You’d wanted to stay for new years but your agent had organized an auction and the twenty highest bidders were to come to a gourmet-catered Christmas dinner with you (at a rented space since you absolutely refused when the subject of holding it at your house was touched upon.) The proceeds were to go to charity, though your agent hadn’t specified what charity and you expected you would just discuss it later on. Talking to your agent made you a bit sad, so you tried not to do it so much. He reminds you of one of your friends characters too, though for some reason you imagine him as just a voice sometimes. A bodiless voice, like an AI. You’ve never written anything quite that sci-fi though.
The dinner goes well. Everyone is very nice and very excited to be there and they give you the presents they brought for you, fanart of all forms and things they said they thought you’d like from seeing your blog, and you thank them graciously and give them all their packages of books and memorabilia, each with personalized based on the little profiles they’d sent in with their bids. When dinner finally ends and you all go your separate ways you regret it just a little bit but you’re fine, you don’t even know those people.
They know you though, and that’s kind of nice if you’re honest with yourself.
You assume the food was delicious from all your guests said about it but you couldn’t manage to choke down anything and when you get home you order sashimi from the sushi place on the corner and keep calling back to add more to your order until it finally arrives and you eat two orders of everything with salt shaken over it and then salt shaken directly onto your tongue in quantities you don’t want to think about but the container is empty.
It’s a week or so later when it all gets worse.
You’re just getting ready for bed. You’re in the bathroom brushing out the tangles from your hair before you go to sleep when you feel it. There’s something writhing inside you and you set down the hairbrush, lean on the edge of the bathtub for support. No. No way. This hasn’t happened in weeks and damn if you’re letting it take you over now. You’re back to a healthy level of obsession and even if sometimes you can’t go outside because there are too many people and too many memories, even if sometimes you crouch cowering because in your mind a mash of scenes is flashing, dead friends and living friends and dead friends again interspersed with glitched coding and dark things and tentacles slithering towards you you’re okay this is where you’re meant for you’ve just been doing some more reading than usual lately and ok maybe you tried a summoning ritual two days after that Christmas party because you were feeling especially bad about your dead friends but it didn’t work, nothing came of it and you just
This unnatural, this supernatural has always been just natural for you but it’s still not much fun at times like this.
You run downstairs and take saltines from the kitchen cupboard and mix ginger and honey (and maybe more salt but you can’t be sure you don’t remember) into hot water and take them back to the bathroom because you don’t trust your stomach even if you’re taking these measures.
You eat the crackers and drink the tea and if anything it makes you feel worse because this isn’t a digestive issue, it never has been.
You sob as you feel the things start to rise up and in a second you’re leaning forward, hands braced on the sides of the bathtub, heaving, and you vomit what seems to be gallons of black slippery things coated in goo and thin salty liquid that’s just water when you open your eyes but it’s too much you can’t hold that much inside of you and there’s nothing you can do to stop it because each time your body heaves another gallon of whatever slides onto the floor of the tub
You imagine that there are hands on your shoulders, the jade green girl with the sharp teeth, Kanaya, who you’re in love with and shes’s telling you that it’s all going to be okay but you find that so, so hard to believe because she isn’t real she isn’t here she’s not and no matter how warm her hands are they don’t drown out the murmurs in your head which are getting louder
The hands become slowly more tangible, and it’s as if your body is flowing into them because with every gallon of seawater you throw up there’s less of you and more of the dark until you’re puking straight blood and feel like you weigh nothing. You fall into Kanaya’s soft warm arms and she tells you it’s going to be all right but everything you are is shadows and guttural whispers.
The magazines call it alcohol poisoning but that’s only because you couldn’t have drowned, there isn’t an ocean for miles.