Chanel knew her brother had gone, and there was even a part of her that understood she was supposed to be sad about it. When he was deployed, she cried at being left alone, feeling like a piece of her that had always been there was suddenly ripped away. So she threw herself into her job at the Botanic Gardens and her studies, choosing to major in biology. She was determined to fill her mind with what made her home alive rather than what might make it dead. These flashes all felt more like phantoms and shadows now than memories, and most days it took all of her energy just to focus on finding breath. It seemed like one day someone had begun loading her down, clogging her mind and filling her up, increasing the influence of gravity around her until she couldn't take it anymore. There was no more room. If Aiken had asked her, and if she'd been able to recover enough of her faculties to respond, she would have told him she didn't feel like she was standing behind a wall, or beneath a black sky. She was drowning. Drowning in sludgy black tar.
"Well Chanel," Dr. Jude appeared before her, lab coat crisp and unblemished, clipboard in hand. "Can I show you to your room?"
In the years since he'd begun working for Helian's Psychiatric, Doctor Tray Jude had seen many things; patients who spoke to themselves, patients who saw things that weren't there, even patients who thought they were living in the Civil War or the apocalypse. Yet never before had he been as unnerved as he now was by a pair of dull, unblinking, unflinching aged eyes.
The girl made no answer but stood in one fluid motion, so quickly that Dr. Jude was taken aback and nearly knocked his fashionable glasses from his face. Clearing his throat in an attempt to regain his composure, he turned on his heel and made his way down the hallway, assuming she would follow. She did.
Her treatment began, and like an accommodating shell, she did as her brother had bid, and took the pills. But she did not answer when they asked her the questions.
"Why?" Always they wanted to know why until its whispers teased her senses and invaded her dreams.
Dreams.
In her dreams she was able to regain a bit of herself, but it was also in her dreams that she was least able to stave off the horrors that played on the fringes during the day. At night, in the darkness and the oblivion, they could not be tamed or kept at bay. They roiled.
One such dream overtook all the rest, the second week into her "treatment." She ached in her mind and her soul and her bones and she knew she was no better, even though Dr. Jude told her otherwise at every session. She stood amidst a field with no recollection of how she had come to be there. She felt only the constant hum of adrenaline thrumming in her veins and a sense of urgency that brooked no distraction. There were people and they were running, running like one only runs when it is the one thing keeping them alive. They were running and she was running, and screaming, and shouting orders. Then she was bleeding, and making others bleed, and dying dying dying over and over and over again. There were faces in differing stages of agony, confusion, terror, betrayal, and rage. The light was always dimming. The air was unbreathable. She felt stinging and pinching and coughing and stabbing and pain. Always the pain. Muscles ripped from bone, flesh torn asunder, bonds shredded and severed and souls crying out and cries fading away. Red skies and shapeless beings filled the air and she could see that they were the ones responsible. They were to blame for it all and they thrived on it. They drank in the pain and the cries and the suffering and the agony and they laughed. Laughed in sadistic glee. A dark shape broke off from the mass above and dove downward suddenly; from amidst its folds something glinted and tapered to a point that was aimed directly at her heart. She threw up her hands to cover her face.
Only to find that she still stood unbroken and her palms were heating up like sun shone upon them. It was in fact the very sun that now stood before her with a silver needle between its palms, the end embedded in its chest. Gasping, she closed her eyes.
And woke up.
