breathe. (original horror story)

breathe.

breathe.

Trigger Warnings: Dissociation, anxiety, panic attacks, blood, gore, uncensored f-slur, vaguely implied self-harm

***

Rylan opens his eyes.

He is standing still, straight and tall in a blue-tiled hallway. The lights above flicker, creating eerie yellow light, and long, looming shadows.

He doesn't know how he got here.

He doesn't know who he is. All he has is a name: Rylan, and pronouns he feels vaguely attached to: he/him.

This is very much not a whole lot to start with, especially when your breaths are getting short and your hands have started to twitch nervously.

Breathe, in and out. Four in, six hold, eight out. Breathe.

"Hello?" he calls out into the dark, stretching hallway with its flickering lights. His words echo, but there is no response. He tries again, but he is met with the same answer.

He inhales a long, slightly shaking breath, trying to calm his erratic heartbeat and unsteady, shaking hands. This is weird.

Rylan examines the hall he's in, a full 360. Everything looks the same; the tile colors and pattern, the way the light flickers and hits the walls, the spacing of every door. And he knows that a big thing with hospitals is how clean, pristine and exact they are (how else would people survive?), but it still is quite unsettling. Maybe you wouldn't understand. Rylan sure doesn't and it is not helping his anxiety.

He decides that the only way he'll be able to understand, even if he is scared half to death and clueless even about who he is, is if he finds someone who can help him. And so, he sets off through the hall, his wavy, sand-colored hair insistent on staying in front of his eyes.

It's frustrating, but he tries to ignore it. That is, for sure, the least of his problems at the moment.

***

A few minutes of cautious strides through the hall do admittedly nothing to help Rylan figure out who he is or what is happening to him. He finds nobody, although he hasn't been looking inside the rooms. The idea of them is daunting, and he doesn't like the idea of entering them to find something he'll wish he never saw.

And so, he continues to walk through the hall. It's strange past the point of "Oh, wow, I don't remember anything and I'm in an empty hospital." That is clearly very strange, but it's something more than that. There are no signs—none on the doors, none on the walls to direct people to different wards. Speaking of which—there seems to be no other hospital apart from this hall. There have been no turns: just hallway, forever and ever.

This feeling is almost familiar to Rylan, which makes him incredibly sorry for whoever he was before this. Nothing feels really there, and there is ever-churning dread in his stomach.

He inhales sharply, trying to ignore the unsteady warnings of an oncoming panic attack and attempting to control his breathing, but he fails. He, almost subconsciously, sinks down the side of the wall to the floor, where he holds his head in his hands and tries to breathe. Rylan's hands twitch violently, and his right knee shakes rapidly while he tries, (and he is trying very hard), to center himself. This whole situation makes absolutely no sense, and he wishes he had some sort of anchor to the life he knows he must have had before this. Some sort of memory, something, just to help his focus and maybe get things back—but he needs to breathe.

In and out.

Breathe, in and out.

He lets his hands fall to his sides, still shaking, and he curls them into fists and then back out to rest, palms down, on the cold, hard tile. He can feel the same cold seeping through the thin material of his gray shirt, and with his head resting on the wall, he feels it through his matted hair.