(Untitled)

[vicarious_v]

Maybe all of that nonsense with the Thing hadn't been such a good idea, after all.... But all he wants to do is sleep. The sideroom is dark and quiet and he lies down, asleep almost instantly in the cocooning silence

Comments

[ockette]

hmmm, interesting.

This voice is separate from the memory, softer and ringing, as if from a tunnel. Is it a child, standing there in the distance inside his small cell, watching him?

[vicarious_v]

Another hallucination. But... no, he'd never had hallucinations like that before. After a beat, he raises his head to look at the source of the voice from where he lay curled in a shadow. Reality blinks--there's no other word for it--as it so often did. Voices muttered about that (hightened kinesthesia and reflexes), fading in and out with flickering forms, black against bright yet watery lights.

The child is still there.

"Are you... really here?"

[ockette]

She's outside-inside the cell, too far away to be inside the walls of it, but on the same side of them as himself.

"Really really. I think we've met." She doesn't sound like a child.

[vicarious_v]

The place had ceased to have definite proportions ages ago.

"We have?" Not a child, no. Just very small. Something flashes through his memory, and the entire room turns white for an instant before returning to the vague dark cell, blurred round the edges, chilling one's bones while drowning one's head in a hot, thick fever and something clicks.

"...Another one. Another doctor?"