Transformers ( Bayverse ) - I Bleed Into Darkness

13 - Safe With You

        Fay paced around her room, antsy. She’d missed the morning medicine call, but not on purpose. She’d overslept. A lot. And now she had to stay here and wait for the medicine that would keep her sane. She frowned, pinching her arm, wincing just slightly at the pressure, but didn’t alleviate it. She refused to let go. And kept tightening the pressure until it was the only thing she focused on. She groaned, hating the pain and savoring it. But she liked it a little less than she had before.

        That was something, right? She wanted to start pacing again, but pinched harder when the urge hit her. She had to control herself. She had to learn how to get by without medicine. She didn’t need medicine. She didn’t need this place or all the people and facilities inside, even as the corridors got emptier every day. People were going home. And she was still stuck.

        ‘I do not need medicine to be sane,’ she told herself bitterly. ‘What I am does not rely on any form of medicine. I am fine on my own. Medicine is not my mediator nor my support system.’ She began twisting the skin on her arm. ‘I am fine on my own. I do not need this place. I am not what they’ve made me to be.

        ‘I do not need Malakai . . .’ That thought, however, turned to dust as the man she was trying to shun from her mind entered the room, and she quickly released the pinched skin of her arm.

        He smiled, raising a brow at her. “Am I missing something, Far?” Something seemed almost dark about his grin, but she couldn’t quite make out why. She blinked for a moment, watching him, and the darkness was gone. She quickly shook her head and took one of the water bottles on the tray, downing her medication the second it was dosed out for her specific needs at the moment. She ignored the way he watched her, the way he smiled as she consumed the pharmaceutical drugs without a second thought. She didn’t have time to second-guess.

        Not when the shadows were beckoning to her. She hated the way they began to find her after just under twenty-four hours. Every morning she faced the harsh reality that something was dark inside her, and she could neither identify nor fight it. She despised that fact so much. And those medications were such a sweet release. Such a delicious reprieve from having to see those dark images invade her mind.

        Unfortunately, the medicine took about fifteen minutes minimum, one hour maximum to start working. And it was terrifying to know that she had more time to suffer through those flashes. The ones where she tore through the halls, splashing the blood of innocents on the walls like paint splatters. It terrified her when she couldn’t stop. Even more so, when she stopped being her. When she became a spectator in an out-of-body experience. And she saw their terrified expressions as the body, but not mind, that was hers, attacked them and left them broken on the floors.

        Fay screamed in her own mind, and it offered only a temporary reprieve for the victims. Because then her body turned on her. And charged at where she watched from outside herself, rushing forward and striking. Mutilating herself, spreading her own blood into a small pool in the realm of impossibility.

        Fay always watched the rampage, watched her own half-death. She couldn’t piece any of it together. All she knew was that it terrified her. That it was a horrible experience and she never wanted to see it again. But it came again every day in her waking hours, striking just before she was capable of attaining her medication. No matter how hard she tried, the shadowy tendrils snuck up from the corners of her mind and snaked around every crevice and thought, tainting everything she thought and saw.

        Until the medicine kicked in, at least. After the drugs were safely back in her system, she was capable of normal thoughts. As normal of thoughts as she had, anyway. Somehow, she didn’t think a secret attraction to a male nurse was all that normal, but she wasn’t exactly doing anything to stop it, was she? She frowned at the thought. At the many thoughts consuming her mind so thoroughly, so easily, that she didn’t realize Malakai had been calling her name. Not until he placed a hand on her shoulder.