Sheraton Academy

Bat Country

Rating: R

Warnings: Drugs, bad trip, detoxing, death mention, vomiting, vague suicide references

Notes: This fic is about Jen and Kylie, the main characters of my also currently updating In the Basement, In the Sky. They were originally Sheraton Academy characters and met as teens in a boarding school, rather than as young 20-somethings in the city one afternoon. This was the original canon, but you can read it as an AU if ITBITS is your canon. :)

"Oh, shit."

The moment Jen stepped into his new room, he started crashing. He could feel it, the anxious tug at his nerves and the ache in the back of his skull and the sharpness in his throat that could fool him into thinking it was strep if he hadn't experienced it before all pointed toward one thing. A drug crash.

It hadn't even been a full twenty-four hours since he'd gotten busted at the rave. Realistically, it was closer to twelve, and more horrible things had happened in that time than in the past five years of his life combined. His boyfriend was comatose in the hospital, his girlfriend was in jail, and Jen had two black eyes, bloodshot from lack of sleep and a split lip and his wrist was in a cast. The only reason it wasn't worse was because the one of the police recognized him before the beating got any worse. Thank God for wealthy parents.

He'd managed to pop two pills and snort a few bumps of K the cops hadn't found, but though he'd tried to space them far enough apart to keep himself running, his ecstasy started dying an hour ago and now he was going into a ketamine crash.

He slammed and locked his door the moment he got to his room, shoving his suitcase against it and throwing pillows, sheets, clothes, even a teddy bear everything soft he owned on the floor because this time he wasn't just crashing, he was detoxing, and he had to do his best to do it right or he'd hurt himself, or worse, someone else.

The first wave of nausea hit. He grabbed his empty trash can, dry heaving and coughing up liquid because he hadn't eaten anything in days. With all the stimulants running through his blood, he didn't need to.

When his stomach calmed down, he collapsed against a bare wall. His throat twitched. A crack came from the base of his skull and his eyes flew wide open.

He could smell the bats before he heard them – rank, vile, rotten, the most horrible bruised black and blue shadows and oh shit the larvae were back and burrowing under his skin, wriggling and writhing through his veins.

He screamed, a hoarse, hopeless, desperate sound that tore at his throat and burned his tongue.

***

Kylie laid on his bed next door, tapping his feet in the air as he worked on his English homework. It was his worst subject by far – give him the straightforward syntax of sign language any day.

A loud thunk from the connecting wall shocked him out of his work. It took him a moment to place the sound. A slamming door, maybe? He sighed and rolled his eyes. His neighbor must have been having a bad day.

But a bad day didn't call for the bloodcurdling scream that came from the room next door. It was one he'd heard before, though the tone had been deeper, then. Kylie winced. The noise was bad enough, but the guilt that followed after it...

This has nothing to do with you, he told himself. You don't know him. You have no responsibility.

He reached up, trying to decide if he should take out his implants. He hesitated a moment, then let his hand drop back to his book. He'd wait. He'd wait and see if it got any worse. Maybe it was a bad breakup, or someone his neighbor was close to died. That could be a scream of loss, too, right?