Reprogrammed (Hunter Angst)

The Boundaries Between Reality and Imagination

It took a lot of convincing, but eventually he managed to get them off of his back. They were incessant, and he just wanted to go to sleep and stop thinking for awhile. Darius and Camila asked him a barrage of questions, including why he decided to run, if he had hurt himself, if he was going to hurt himself, and what was going on with him.

Lying was just as easy as telling the truth, and with the help of the anxiety medication, he didn't care quite so much about fibbing. He told them that he simply hadn't been taking his Triazolam, and he hadn't been sleeping so well because of it. Hunter also told them that school was stressing him out. This part hadn't been entirely a lie, school was stressing him out. But he told them that he could handle it, that he was doing fine, that he just needed to take a break and should've done a better job of communicating this. Finally, after an hour of seemingly endless questions, they allowed him to go upstairs and take a shower.

Hunter passed Vee on his way up. She smiled gently at him. In her eyes, he could see that she'd known that he was lying, even if she didn't know what the real truth was. If he was being honest with himself, he didn't even know what the real truth is. The teenager had no idea what was wrong with him. He had the perfect combination of things, and yet it still didn't fix him.

He had caretakers who loved him, spent time with him, allowed him to see his friends. He had a therapist who also cared for him very much, and wanted all of the right things for him. There was always enough medication to help him out, and yet he seemed unable to be receptive to any of that assistance.

With the bathroom door closed and his shirt off, Hunter stared blankly at himself in the mirror. Have I always been this skinny? He asked himself as he scrutinized the scarred skin stretching across his ribs and collarbones. The medication made him feel so nauseous, and it was hard to eat because of it. Drinking water was also a challenge.

Showering took forever since the Alprazolam made everything sluggish and a little blurry. Luckily, with the adjusted dose, he no longer experienced that awful crash like the first time he'd taken the medication. He supposed that was a small win.

Finally, after what felt like whatever, he trudged down to the basement and laid down on his familiar mattress pad. Belos's skull sat on the couch, towering over him; his one glowing eye boring a hole into Hunter's eyes.

"I don't have the energy to indulge you in nonsense tonight, Belos." He said in a whisper.

"No nonsense tonight, my nephew. All I wanted to say was that I'm proud of you for standing up for yourself and leaving that ridiculous quack's office" It replied, face emotionless.

"She's not a quack, and it's not her fault that she can't help me," Hunter shot back, getting under his blankets. Belos told him something else, but he was already drifting off. In his dreams, he wandered aimlessly in search of something, anything that would make him feel whole again.

In the morning, he opted to go through the portal a bit earlier under the excuse of having a lot of homework. He did have a lot of homework, but he'd been in and out of classes so much that he didn't know how to do very much of it. This revelation filled him with shame. To cope, he chose to lay in his own bed at Darius's, spaced out as he scrolled through Penstagram. The numbness had returned like a tsunami, burying any other feelings that even vaguely brought him closer to reality.