Paranoid

Headphones

Wild sat on the couch, wrapped up in a blanket and wearing headphones. He thumbed through a cookbook, marking pages with sticky notes.

The tv was on, but it was muted. Wind and Legend complained about that, but Time quickly got them to stop. He didn't explain to anyone what went on with Wild or why that happened, but they all kind of silently agreed that it had to do with the tv. Nobody asked Wild about it. In fact, he was refusing to talk to anyone.

Minish had joined in on the tv watching, and he was now sitting between Wind and Legend.
Twilight was sitting on one of the chairs. Well, he wasn't really sitting. He was upside down, with his legs over the back of the chair.

Wild glanced up at the tv, then back down at his book. He sighed and closed it, then he took the headphones off.

"Okay, I can tell people have questions. Ask away. I promise I won't get unreasonably angry like usual. Probably."
Legend looked over at him and paused the show. "Uh, yeah, what the hell was that for? I mean, it was just the tv. It wasn't like anything was actually exploding."
Wild groaned. "Okay, I take back the promise. Here's your answer: I don't want to do that shit either. It's not my fault. Or yours. It's just that shit like that kind of sets me off or something. I dunno. That's why I don't watch violent shows."
"But you have a gun. And you use it."
Wild laughed a little. "There's a difference there. When I use the gun, I know it's going to happen. It's like tickling yourself."
"Oh. I guess that makes sense."

"So what makes that happen?"
Wild looked over at Warrior, who asked the question. He shrugged. "I don't really have a definite answer. There are a lot of things, and sometimes, they won't do it." He started listing off some examples, counting them with his fingers. "Some obvious things are gunshots, explosions, fire, stuff like that. Some less obvious things are cars backfiring, dogs barking, loud yelling, sirens, extreme heat, the sound of wood burning or breaking, smoke, screaming, glass breaking, ticking clocks, those clocks that make loud noises every hour, smoke alarms, alarms in general, emergency alerts on the news, drag racing, lightning and thunder, big things falling, birds that make weird noises, clapping, etc etc."

"Wow. That's a lot."
Wild laughed. "Believe me, there's more. And even more that I haven't even thought of. I don't really keep track. Hell, some songs do it. You won't believe the amount of things in songs that will do it. I actually have a list of songs on my phone not to listen to."
"Huh."

"So!" Wild clapped, then winced as he remembered that his left arm was still injured. "Any more questions?"

Nobody answered.
Then, after a minute or two, Time spoke. "So what do you do to prevent it?"
"I don't."
"Wait, what? Is that all your going to say?"
Wild nodded. "Yep. That's it. I don't prevent it. I can't. That'll just stress me out. Believe me, I've tried."
"Oh. I don't know what I was expecting, but it wasn't that."
"Heh."

Wild smiled, fully aware that because of that... incident, he'd probably close himself off again. He did that a lot when it happened more often. But for a while, he hadn't had any. So he had been able to relax. But now... now that he had another... well, he couldn't relax anymore.

He then realized that on the morning of the... day, he had one of these incidents. It just wasn't triggered by one of the usual things. It was the date. So that would probably happen every year. Fun.

Wild sighed.
"What is it?"
He looked at Time. "Nothing. It's nothing. I'm just... thinking."
"About what?"
"That doesn't matter. And it's none of your business."
"Right. Sorry. I don't mean to be nosy, I'm just... I just want to know how I could help."
"I understand. Zel does the same thing. She cares too much, and she's awfully persistent and stubborn. And I get stupid and don't think when I'm angry or annoyed. So those things don't really go well together. It just gets annoying. And often times, it doesn't help at all. As evident by the crash. Although, that's a pretty extreme example. Probably the most extreme one. The worst thing that's happened because of her pestering me before that was just me going outside in the middle of a thunderstorm and just standing there in the rain. I did not get struck by lightning."

He laughed, then coughed and looked away.
"You good?"
"Haha, yeah. I just accidentally made myself think of one of my old friends. She thought lightning was the coolest. She'd sit at the window during thunderstorms and just watch the sky for ages."

There was an uncomfortably long silence after that.
Legend unpaused the show and unmuted it. Nobody stopped him.

Stupidly enough, there just happened to be a lightning storm going on in the show just then.

Wild quickly grabbed the headphones and shoved them over his ears, pressing them up against the sides of his head.
Legend turned the volume down. He unlocked his phone and handed it to Wild. "You can listen to some music with my phone."

Wild nodded and tanks and plugged the headphones in. He found a song, then curled up and wrapped the blanket around himself tighter. He wasn't really curled up that much, seeing as how his leg and arm both hurt a lot.
Still, he did his best to relax. Which was hard, given the current situation. And Legend had a lot of the songs he couldn't listen to on his phone. So that was helpful.