Strawberry Banana #3, Rocky Road #19
Author: winebabe
Title: Runs in the Family
Story: The Gemini Occurrence
Rating: PG (Content: mentions of mental illness)
Flavor(s): Strawberry Banana #3: hallucination; Rocky Road #19: the breakfast table
Word Count: 1893
Summary: 2025; Carrying on from D.R.U.G.S. Devyn gets a call from his sister and goes out to spend the night with her.
Notes: Devyn Lively, Macklin McDaniel, Mona Lively. (Sorry if y'all are getting sick of me! I have so much freetime and all I do now is write.)
"Wake up," Macklin says and kicks Devyn's chair. "Come on, I know you're not dead."
"I'm just a little bit dead," Devyn says and lifts his head with a groan. "Wanna sub my class for me?"
"Not one bit. Look alive, Lively." Mack pats him on the shoulder twice in quick succession, grinning all the while, and then leaves the office while Devyn is still trying to wake his brain up.
Class moves quickly because Devyn literally cannot shut up. He's slept off the high and, as if to compensate for its time in the haze state, his brain is flooded with questions, pointless facts, and directions to take his lecture in.
His students give up on trying to take notes less than halfway through class, and most watch with a curious excitement as their professor violently scribbles on the projection behind him, his mouth moving far too quickly for his hand to keep up.
"And--dissection! Dissection, that's what we should do next. Show of hands, who has cut open a once-living thing? Preferably in a classroom setting, but hey, I don't judge. Does anyone have any moral objection to dissection? Because, like, I know that's a thing and even though I personally don't agree with it, or whatever, you know, I want you all to be comfortable." Devyn's mouth is open as though he's poised to continue firing off words, but his phone is ringing and vibrating inside his pocket, and for just a moment, everything slows down.
"Sorry," he says, and pulls the phone from his pocket. "Sorry." At the sight of the name on his screen, Devyn drags his fingers back through his hair. "I'm going to take this," he tells his class, eyes fixed on the door. "Sorry."
There's silence as Devyn rushes out of the classroom. He shuts the door behind him, lifts the phone to his ear, and hesitantly whispers, "Mona?"
"Devyn?" she answers in a very small voice, and Devyn sighs in relief.
"Yes, Mona. What's up?"
There's a beat before she speaks again, and her voice comes out stronger. "Let's have a sleepover tonight."
"Mona," Devyn sighs.
"I have alcohol, and I'm alone, and I want my brother," Mona says very definitively, and Devyn just nods against the phone.
"Alright," he says. "Alright, I'll get takeout on my way over."
"Good. Great! See you soon!" Mona says, and hangs up before Devyn can get another word in.
"Good. Great," Devyn echoes as he pockets his cell phone. He takes another brief moment to collect himself before bursting back into the classroom with an enthusiastic, "So! Where was I? Cutting into brain tissue, right?"
Devyn does as he promised and picks up takeout Chinese on his way to Mona's apartment after his final class of the day. She lives in an even sketchier part of the city than he does, which isn't really a surprise considering her lack of income, but it worries him every time he goes out to see her.
He and Mona are 11 years apart; he'd been a teenager before she could even speak to him, and their relationship reflects that disconnect. He loves her, and always has, but has to try not to parent her when they're together. There's no room to talk, as far as self-destructive habits go, but he still feels some kind of responsibility over her.
Maybe if their parents hadn't been such damaged goods, he and his sister would have turned out better. He knows all about heredity and the impact his parents' genetics have had on them, including but not limited to: his eye color, his allergies, his predisposition to addiction, Mona's plethora of mental illness diagnoses. Some of it's nature versus nurture, and he knows that, but chooses to wholly blame them anyway. If ghosts do exist, he's pretty sure they can't read minds.
Mona's loud and manic when Devyn finally knocks on the door, and he can smell the alcohol on her breath before he's even inside her apartment. She doesn't hug him or do much of anything a normal person would do as a greeting; she just swings the door wide open and walks away, shouting about how there's a spider in the bathroom that he absolutely needs to kill for her because she can't pee until it's dead.
Really, just a normal day in the Lively family.
Devyn sets the bags of takeout on Mona's kitchen table, in the one uncluttered space not filled with notebooks and papers, and then follows her into the bathroom. There is a spider, hanging in its web in the corner near the toilet, but it's small and he almost doesn't see it until Mona points it out for him.
He squishes it with a balled up tissue, flushes it down the toilet, and then turns to Mona with his hands up. "Is that all?"
"Get out," she tells him. "I have to pee."
Mona doesn't calm down for the rest of the night, and eventually the siblings drink themselves into oblivion, as is the tradition. Devyn says nothing of his brain procedure, doesn't mention any of the worries and fears that have been plaguing them, and Mona doesn't talk about her own problems. Instead, they sit on the floor and watch zombie movies, and debate the best plan for making it out of a zombie apocalypse alive.
Devyn wakes up the next morning with his face pressed into Mona's dirty carpeting, in a damp spot where his drool has collected. Mona's no longer there with him, but the apartment smells like freshly-brewed coffee, and as he slowly pushes himself up into a sitting position, he can hear the sounds of life in the kitchen.
Sure enough, when Devyn finds the energy to get up and pad into the kitchen, he spots Mona rifling through her cabinets in search of something. She's wearing the same clothes as the previous day, same as him, and he smirks to himself. Well, if this isn't just like college, he thinks to himself as he leans against the doorway.
"Hey," Mona says, once she turns around and catches sight of him.
"Good morning. Did you black out on the carpet too?"
She laughs and then passes him a mug full of coffee. "Yeah. I saw you drooling on my carpet."
"Good. Great," he says and smiles.
"I don't think I have any breakfast food," Mona tells him as she carries her own coffee mug over to the table, "but there are a few cafes around. You can stop and get something if you want."
Devyn glances over at the stove clock, which reads just after five, and shakes his head. "I'm good. We're up early."
"Yeah, I don't sleep much lately," she replies, pushing aside some papers to clear a space for him.
"Me, either," Devyn tells her, sitting down beside her at the table.
"Well, I'm a crazy person," Mona says, smirking over the top of her coffee mug. "What's your excuse?"
"Mona," he scolds, but she just sips her coffee and doesn't acknowledge him. "Actually, I was hoping I could talk to you about something."
"Go for it."
Devyn swallows hard and then takes a few gulps of coffee for good measure. "I don't exactly know how to explain this, but basically, I have someone else's brain hooked up to my own."
Mona regards him suspiciously. "You're taking after Mom, aren't you?"
"What? No, listen. I'm not--Mona. And you're not a crazy person, would you quit saying that?" Devyn sighs and then takes another drink from his mug. "I'm not showing symptoms of some mental illness, Mona. I have...an implant. In my brain."
That actually gets a reaction from Mona, who frowns and raises her eyebrows all at once, leaning in towards him like he's telling her a secret. He can almost see the interest sparkling in her eyes. "What the hell does that mean?"
Devyn tips his head and brushes aside some of his hair, so that Mona can get a look at the scar. Just for proof. "I've explained to you how these things work, right?" he asks her, gently taking her hand and flipping her arm over so he can touch the surface of her heart.
"Kind of," she says, looking down at where his fingers rest. "Something about...physiological processes. They work off of those."
"Right," Devyn says. There's a lot more to it than that, but he doesn't want to turn their morning into a lecture. It's not important, after all. Most of the population has a heart without any knowledge of how exactly it works. "But the whole soulmate phenomenon--it goes deeper than that. Yes, we understand that there's some kind of consistent biochemical reaction when two people who share this connection meet, but the question remains: how do our bodies know to have this reaction in the first place?"
"Great. If I wanted a science lesson, I would have enrolled in one of your classes, Devyn."
"Mona," he says and sighs. "I've been seeing things. And feeling things. They put this--this circuitry in my brain, and--God. I don't even know what it does, that's stupid, but I jumped at the opportunity to do some real science again, and--" He drops his face into his hands and sighs heavily. "My consciousness isn't the same. I'm not experiencing the world the same way."
"You don't feel like you're you," Mona finishes for him, smiling. "Yeah, I know how that goes."
"Mona. This isn't a joke. I feel like I'm experiencing someone else's life sometimes."
"That's pretty cool," Mona says, and Devyn can't help the smile that spreads across this face.
"It is, isn't it? I mean, can you believe--okay, I mean, there are some cons, it's not actually that cool. I've been getting headaches a lot, and these weird dreams, but if this ends up working, if there's a tangible link between me and whoever out there drew the short straw as my soulmate--" He cuts himself off with a whistle, grinning and shaking his head.
"That was a complete 180," she notes.
"I know," Devyn says and sighs. "It's exciting. I mean, it's really exciting, when I think about it. But the actual effects from this are just--just--"
"Scary?" Mona provides, and he nods.
"Scarier than I had initially expected."
"So, do you think whoever you're supposedly connected to is out there sharing your brain, too?" Mona runs her fingers through her short hair and ruffles it.
"Probably not. I mean, it wouldn't make sense unless they knew who they were, and set them up with the same interface I have." Devyn reaches up to rub behind his ear, over the scar. "I really don't think too many people would be lining up for that procedure."
"What if they just lobotomized you?" she suggests with a laugh. "How can you be sure there's even anything there?"
He knows she's joking, but instead responds with complete honesty, "Because, sometimes I can actually feel electrical shocks in my brain." He doesn't add that he thinks the interface is being messed with remotely by the people who operated on him. He also doesn't add that he signed a waiver, acknowledging among other things the risk of sudden death by electrocution from the implanted materials. Instead, he just smirks and says, "It doesn't feel all that bad, actually."
Title: Runs in the Family
Story: The Gemini Occurrence
Rating: PG (Content: mentions of mental illness)
Flavor(s): Strawberry Banana #3: hallucination; Rocky Road #19: the breakfast table
Word Count: 1893
Summary: 2025; Carrying on from D.R.U.G.S. Devyn gets a call from his sister and goes out to spend the night with her.
Notes: Devyn Lively, Macklin McDaniel, Mona Lively. (Sorry if y'all are getting sick of me! I have so much freetime and all I do now is write.)
"Wake up," Macklin says and kicks Devyn's chair. "Come on, I know you're not dead."
"I'm just a little bit dead," Devyn says and lifts his head with a groan. "Wanna sub my class for me?"
"Not one bit. Look alive, Lively." Mack pats him on the shoulder twice in quick succession, grinning all the while, and then leaves the office while Devyn is still trying to wake his brain up.
Class moves quickly because Devyn literally cannot shut up. He's slept off the high and, as if to compensate for its time in the haze state, his brain is flooded with questions, pointless facts, and directions to take his lecture in.
His students give up on trying to take notes less than halfway through class, and most watch with a curious excitement as their professor violently scribbles on the projection behind him, his mouth moving far too quickly for his hand to keep up.
"And--dissection! Dissection, that's what we should do next. Show of hands, who has cut open a once-living thing? Preferably in a classroom setting, but hey, I don't judge. Does anyone have any moral objection to dissection? Because, like, I know that's a thing and even though I personally don't agree with it, or whatever, you know, I want you all to be comfortable." Devyn's mouth is open as though he's poised to continue firing off words, but his phone is ringing and vibrating inside his pocket, and for just a moment, everything slows down.
"Sorry," he says, and pulls the phone from his pocket. "Sorry." At the sight of the name on his screen, Devyn drags his fingers back through his hair. "I'm going to take this," he tells his class, eyes fixed on the door. "Sorry."
There's silence as Devyn rushes out of the classroom. He shuts the door behind him, lifts the phone to his ear, and hesitantly whispers, "Mona?"
"Devyn?" she answers in a very small voice, and Devyn sighs in relief.
"Yes, Mona. What's up?"
There's a beat before she speaks again, and her voice comes out stronger. "Let's have a sleepover tonight."
"Mona," Devyn sighs.
"I have alcohol, and I'm alone, and I want my brother," Mona says very definitively, and Devyn just nods against the phone.
"Alright," he says. "Alright, I'll get takeout on my way over."
"Good. Great! See you soon!" Mona says, and hangs up before Devyn can get another word in.
"Good. Great," Devyn echoes as he pockets his cell phone. He takes another brief moment to collect himself before bursting back into the classroom with an enthusiastic, "So! Where was I? Cutting into brain tissue, right?"
Devyn does as he promised and picks up takeout Chinese on his way to Mona's apartment after his final class of the day. She lives in an even sketchier part of the city than he does, which isn't really a surprise considering her lack of income, but it worries him every time he goes out to see her.
He and Mona are 11 years apart; he'd been a teenager before she could even speak to him, and their relationship reflects that disconnect. He loves her, and always has, but has to try not to parent her when they're together. There's no room to talk, as far as self-destructive habits go, but he still feels some kind of responsibility over her.
Maybe if their parents hadn't been such damaged goods, he and his sister would have turned out better. He knows all about heredity and the impact his parents' genetics have had on them, including but not limited to: his eye color, his allergies, his predisposition to addiction, Mona's plethora of mental illness diagnoses. Some of it's nature versus nurture, and he knows that, but chooses to wholly blame them anyway. If ghosts do exist, he's pretty sure they can't read minds.
Mona's loud and manic when Devyn finally knocks on the door, and he can smell the alcohol on her breath before he's even inside her apartment. She doesn't hug him or do much of anything a normal person would do as a greeting; she just swings the door wide open and walks away, shouting about how there's a spider in the bathroom that he absolutely needs to kill for her because she can't pee until it's dead.
Really, just a normal day in the Lively family.
Devyn sets the bags of takeout on Mona's kitchen table, in the one uncluttered space not filled with notebooks and papers, and then follows her into the bathroom. There is a spider, hanging in its web in the corner near the toilet, but it's small and he almost doesn't see it until Mona points it out for him.
He squishes it with a balled up tissue, flushes it down the toilet, and then turns to Mona with his hands up. "Is that all?"
"Get out," she tells him. "I have to pee."
Mona doesn't calm down for the rest of the night, and eventually the siblings drink themselves into oblivion, as is the tradition. Devyn says nothing of his brain procedure, doesn't mention any of the worries and fears that have been plaguing them, and Mona doesn't talk about her own problems. Instead, they sit on the floor and watch zombie movies, and debate the best plan for making it out of a zombie apocalypse alive.
Devyn wakes up the next morning with his face pressed into Mona's dirty carpeting, in a damp spot where his drool has collected. Mona's no longer there with him, but the apartment smells like freshly-brewed coffee, and as he slowly pushes himself up into a sitting position, he can hear the sounds of life in the kitchen.
Sure enough, when Devyn finds the energy to get up and pad into the kitchen, he spots Mona rifling through her cabinets in search of something. She's wearing the same clothes as the previous day, same as him, and he smirks to himself. Well, if this isn't just like college, he thinks to himself as he leans against the doorway.
"Hey," Mona says, once she turns around and catches sight of him.
"Good morning. Did you black out on the carpet too?"
She laughs and then passes him a mug full of coffee. "Yeah. I saw you drooling on my carpet."
"Good. Great," he says and smiles.
"I don't think I have any breakfast food," Mona tells him as she carries her own coffee mug over to the table, "but there are a few cafes around. You can stop and get something if you want."
Devyn glances over at the stove clock, which reads just after five, and shakes his head. "I'm good. We're up early."
"Yeah, I don't sleep much lately," she replies, pushing aside some papers to clear a space for him.
"Me, either," Devyn tells her, sitting down beside her at the table.
"Well, I'm a crazy person," Mona says, smirking over the top of her coffee mug. "What's your excuse?"
"Mona," he scolds, but she just sips her coffee and doesn't acknowledge him. "Actually, I was hoping I could talk to you about something."
"Go for it."
Devyn swallows hard and then takes a few gulps of coffee for good measure. "I don't exactly know how to explain this, but basically, I have someone else's brain hooked up to my own."
Mona regards him suspiciously. "You're taking after Mom, aren't you?"
"What? No, listen. I'm not--Mona. And you're not a crazy person, would you quit saying that?" Devyn sighs and then takes another drink from his mug. "I'm not showing symptoms of some mental illness, Mona. I have...an implant. In my brain."
That actually gets a reaction from Mona, who frowns and raises her eyebrows all at once, leaning in towards him like he's telling her a secret. He can almost see the interest sparkling in her eyes. "What the hell does that mean?"
Devyn tips his head and brushes aside some of his hair, so that Mona can get a look at the scar. Just for proof. "I've explained to you how these things work, right?" he asks her, gently taking her hand and flipping her arm over so he can touch the surface of her heart.
"Kind of," she says, looking down at where his fingers rest. "Something about...physiological processes. They work off of those."
"Right," Devyn says. There's a lot more to it than that, but he doesn't want to turn their morning into a lecture. It's not important, after all. Most of the population has a heart without any knowledge of how exactly it works. "But the whole soulmate phenomenon--it goes deeper than that. Yes, we understand that there's some kind of consistent biochemical reaction when two people who share this connection meet, but the question remains: how do our bodies know to have this reaction in the first place?"
"Great. If I wanted a science lesson, I would have enrolled in one of your classes, Devyn."
"Mona," he says and sighs. "I've been seeing things. And feeling things. They put this--this circuitry in my brain, and--God. I don't even know what it does, that's stupid, but I jumped at the opportunity to do some real science again, and--" He drops his face into his hands and sighs heavily. "My consciousness isn't the same. I'm not experiencing the world the same way."
"You don't feel like you're you," Mona finishes for him, smiling. "Yeah, I know how that goes."
"Mona. This isn't a joke. I feel like I'm experiencing someone else's life sometimes."
"That's pretty cool," Mona says, and Devyn can't help the smile that spreads across this face.
"It is, isn't it? I mean, can you believe--okay, I mean, there are some cons, it's not actually that cool. I've been getting headaches a lot, and these weird dreams, but if this ends up working, if there's a tangible link between me and whoever out there drew the short straw as my soulmate--" He cuts himself off with a whistle, grinning and shaking his head.
"That was a complete 180," she notes.
"I know," Devyn says and sighs. "It's exciting. I mean, it's really exciting, when I think about it. But the actual effects from this are just--just--"
"Scary?" Mona provides, and he nods.
"Scarier than I had initially expected."
"So, do you think whoever you're supposedly connected to is out there sharing your brain, too?" Mona runs her fingers through her short hair and ruffles it.
"Probably not. I mean, it wouldn't make sense unless they knew who they were, and set them up with the same interface I have." Devyn reaches up to rub behind his ear, over the scar. "I really don't think too many people would be lining up for that procedure."
"What if they just lobotomized you?" she suggests with a laugh. "How can you be sure there's even anything there?"
He knows she's joking, but instead responds with complete honesty, "Because, sometimes I can actually feel electrical shocks in my brain." He doesn't add that he thinks the interface is being messed with remotely by the people who operated on him. He also doesn't add that he signed a waiver, acknowledging among other things the risk of sudden death by electrocution from the implanted materials. Instead, he just smirks and says, "It doesn't feel all that bad, actually."