sweet chemical indifference, predisposed to perpetual sickness [open to multiple]

[postictal]

It’s barely been ten days, and he’s already halved the amount of precious white capsules he has on hand, and it’s the compressing, painfully familiar fear worming its way through his chest, down his throat, that drives Tim out of the hotel in desperate search for the clinic he knows has come down to his last hope. A medical center specifically for rifties should be capable of figuring out what the hell is in his medication, and from there somehow get him more of it before anything goes wrong. They've got to have dealt with some pretty weird demands, right? Maybe they can just - synthesize it somehow. Tim doesn't know how that process works. It's just medicine, it's one part anticonvulsant and one part impossible-terror-be-gone; how hard can it be?

Things can be different here. Things can be different, and better, and normal, and right now Tim doesn't even want normal. He just wants to not wake up in some anonymous forest clearing with weeks of missing time scraped out of his head. That's it. That's his bare minimum.

God, please let him find a way out of this head.

So. Clinic. This is his plan of action. He just has to actually get there, but he's doing a great job of it so far. It'll be okay. It'll be fine. No more missing time or coughing fits or getting his brain hijacked or seeing things in the corners of his vision. He's gonna be fine.

Irony nearly doubles him over with a clenching knot of pressure to the chest when he's slammed in the lungs by a fresh surge of ragged coughing, which not only collects a whole lot of weird looks from the other pedestrians but earns him a wide walking radius as well. Oh, that's nice. He doesn't dignify any of them with a glare, just keeps shuffling forward, trying without any real success to suppress the coughs that leave his shoulders quivering and him staggering along like he's contracted a deadly plague of some kind.

[ooc: Tim needs to socialize more, so he's taking a nice long route from a hotel by Central Park to the rifty clinic and back again. Feel free to run into him at any point. Don't mind the coughing, it's just, er - chronic.]

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[postictal]

Kudzu. Thorns and underbrush tangling his hair, snagging his jacket as he stumbles to his feet, grasping tree trunks with scratched-bleeding palms, pushing bedraggled hair from his face. Trees and miles of trees, stretched out in a dismal pattern he's come to recognize.

He won't miss that.

"Exciting's a word," Tim says neutrally, tipping his chin back to scan the surrounding tall buildings. "Crowded, though. Lotta people." His eyes flick to her and back again as he bites his lip, shrugs. "Lived around forests most of my life, yeah. Not sure I'll miss 'em for a while yet, though."

[apidae]

Something happened there. Bad associations? In any case the attempted laugh at the expense of New Yorkers didn't work out. He's distracted by something and maybe laughing is something he doesn't do. Humor and happiness are really distant in him, buried, maybe. It's not about her, she didn't do anything wrong; she has to tell herself that a few times. It's hard for him the way other things are hard for her.

Her smile fades and she tilts her head down again, back to low-level fidgeting.

"Yeah," she says. "Crowds are hard for me, too." Not for the same reasons, she thinks, but it's hard to tell without looking too close.

"Listen, if... if there's ever a time when you need to be alone," she says slowly, carefully, "I live in the Rebel apartments. It doesn't matter if you're with them or not. If you go up to the roof, I have sort of a garden up there, it's where I take care of my bees." She waves a hand, like never mind that. "I go up there sometimes to be by myself. If you want, you can do that too. People don't usually go up there, especially early in the morning. It's important, I think, to have somewhere to go." She shrugs. "It's an open offer."

[postictal]

And just like that, Tim successfully manages to derail another person's good mood. He wasn't even trying this time. He crosses his arms over his chest to hold back the pang of guilt, which works about as well as he expected. Bee sounds like she's extending another conversational olive branch, but Tim can't figure out why. He's already trampled over her excitement of finding something familiar in Manhattan.

"Oh," he says, eyebrows lifting, mentally scrambling for a response. "Uh, well I do have a - I know someone who lives there. So I know where they are, um. So. Uh, I can - yeah, that sounds nice," he finishes a little desperately, "thanks."

[apidae]

"Good," she says quietly, nodding. She says nothing for a few moments, letting them just walk in silence. They're nearing the clinic now, and she nods toward it. "There it is," she says.

They're both going in, but she doesn't want to cling close to him in there. That's private business. And so's hers, really.

"I'll be heading back to the apartments after this," she says cautiously. "If you want to come with, or..." She shrugs noncommittally. "Or I suppose I might see you around?"

There's so much she wants to ask him, tell him, tell him what she can see, that he doesn't need to be so alone here. But doing that is so terrifying, it can mean the end of a friendship, right then and there. She bites her lip again, weighing the guilt and the consequences.

"I... I'll give you my number," she offers, fishing her phone out of her pocket. Not sure what else to do.

[postictal]

Conflicting surges of relief and refreshing anxiety tense Tim's shoulders and neck when he sees the place, one hand dipping unconsciously into his jacket pocket to grip his inexorably shrinking supply of medication. This is all he has to help. This place is the only possibility of help when he can't even leave the city.

He can't consider the fact that there might not be anything they can do.

"I, uh. Yeah," he says, shooting her a look of mingled confusion and gratitude. "Think I'm just gonna head back to my room once I'm, you know. Done here."

It's safer, he almost adds, but thinks better of it. Instead he rattles off his number, because that seems a decent compromise. Distance is good. Distance is safe.

[apidae]

"Okay," she says agreeably, and inputs his number. "Well let me know whenever you want to go up there, I can make sure it's empty first if you want. My bees are really well-behaved, so long as you don't bother them."

She pockets her phone and stops outside the clinic, smiling at him. "It was nice to meet you, Tim," she says warmly. She figures she'll let him go in first, and then go in a bit later, just to give him as much space as possible. He really does seem to need it.

The urge to say something else is gnawing at her as always, terribly difficult to resist, and in fact, often impossible.

"Don't hide yourself away too much, okay?" she says quietly, seeking out his eyes. "Things are different here."

No. Too much. Too much, just like with Peter. She regrets it instantly, and looks away, her expression contorted. She can't bear to see his reaction to this so she doesn't look back, instead turning her back on him like a coward and slipping away, into the neighboring building, a little coffeeshop. She'll order some tea and sit and organize packets of sugar until the frustration and the self-beratement and gentle twitches of anxiety have passed.

[postictal]

It's almost unbearable, how much she's trying. She's trying, she's being so clearly, desperately friendly, and Tim's the same unresponsive, self-secluding asshole he's always been, and he doesn't know what to do about it. He just makes himself helpless against everything - pills, nightmares, masks, his own terrified guilt that anything he dares do or say will just make things worse.

"Nice to meet you too," he echoes mechanically, warily, hating himself for draining his tone of any kind of positive inflection. He doesn't have an answer for Bee's parting words, brows knitting in clouded bafflement, and she's gone before either of them can clarify.

Familiar guilt wells up immediately once she's gone but Tim brushes past it. He has to worry about things like medication and hotels and nightmares and keeping himself breathing and keeping everyone else breathing too, and he has to ignore the rest. Because it's safer. Because it's safer.