by S. Gates
She quirks one eyebrow, but the sour-lemon expression doesn't return. "Not to sound catty here, Doug, but... what?"
"I found it somewhere, and it's way too small for me–" which, you realize as the words leave your mouth, is the truth–"and I thought you might like it." At her skeptical look, you roll your eyes. "It's not a trap, Admiral Ackbar. I don't have a use for it, and I thought maybe you might."
After staring at the proffered ring for a few moments, Amanda heaves a sigh and plucks it from between your fingers. That simple action fills you with a monumental sense of relief that flows from your empty hand down to your toes. Amanda pockets the ring like you had done at the hospital, and you let your arm fall to your side. Whether you'd been hallucinating Ori or dreaming him or simply just been delusional, that duty is now discharged.
"Are you done with that?" Amanda asks, inclining her head toward your half-eaten meal.
"Oh! Uh, yeah. At least for now. I think I maybe do need to sleep off the rest of that pain pill and not take another one." You push your glasses aside with your hand to rub at your eyes.
You can hear the way Amanda smiles when she responds, and you feel somewhat accomplished that the awkwardness appears to have fled your conversation. "All right. I'll put these up for you for when you wake up again, and I'll put a note on the fridge so Simon will know not to feed you any more painkillers."
* * *
The next few days pass in a tedious blur of phone calls, insurance claims, and paperwork. You refrain from taking another pain pill, even though your chest aches like it had been used as a percussion instrument and your joints feel like they've been filled with shards of coral. At night, you dream about endless reams of paper upon which you're forced to scrawl your signature with one clawed hand. You think it's fitting.
Your insurance company approves a rental car for a few weeks, but your follow-up appointments with the neurologist and your general practitioner both bar you from returning to work, and the neurologist only clears you to drive during daylight hours. That doesn't particularly upset you. You need to find a new vehicle to replace the Jarethmobile, and trying to function is difficult when you aren't assisted by codeine. You aren't sure you could fulfill your duties at the newspaper anyway. Shifting hundreds of pounds of newsprint a night is not something you think your ribs would take kindly to, and you're fairly certain you shouldn't be operating heavy machinery besides.
After the first week, you've nearly forgotten about the strange boy in the hospital.
On the sixth night after being discharged, you break down and take another co-codamol tablet.
You do not dream of endlessly signing your life away.
* * *
There is someone next to you in your bed. You do not need to open your eyes to know this, because you can hear them tittering, high and light, near your ear. It takes little effort to twist around and prop yourself up on one elbow.
When you open your eyes, they do not immediately focus on the intruder in your bed. The house you rent with Simon is deep enough in the suburbs that little light trickles through your blinds from the outside world, but it's enough for you to be able to make out the vague shape of things.
Your first thought, as your eyes take in the dim silhouettes around you, is that you have not, in fact, woken up. The dimensions of the room appear to be the same, as well as the approximate placement of the lone window, but much of the room's topography has subtly changed. There isn't enough light for you to be able to discern much, but you've been living in this room for the past five years. You can tell whenever someone (something) has been rearranging your things.
The person on your bed snickers, and you can see them lift a hand to their mouth to stifle the noise. "Oh, Douglas, you are so precious." The voice is familiar and yet different somehow. The speaker continues smothering her laughter (you can tell it's feminine, now), while your brain slogs through the dregs of the codeine in your system.
"Ori?" you ask. Your voice is hoarse; you must have been snoring or maybe talking in your sleep.
"Very good, Douglas," she says. "I admit, I was a little surprised by this development, but I can't claim to be displeased." She pauses, and you hear the sound of rustling fabric as she ostensibly moves. There's a click, then the room is bathed in light.
The first thing your eyes fix on is, in fact, Ori. Instead of a boy in a square-necked tunic and loose pants, you find yourself facing a girl who looks to be fourteen or fifteen years old (she looks pubescent, though perhaps only barely) with skin that appears almost waxy and ashen. She wears a simple shift only barely lighter than her skin tone, and two shades darker than her hair, which looks longer and bone white. Were it not for her large, empty eyes and her disconcertingly toothy grin, you might begin to doubt her identity.
Having taken in her appearance, your eyes drift away.
You expect the distortions this time: you took the painkiller before bed, and you noticed how the shadows of things in your room had changed since before you fell asleep. You can no longer see the walls of your room, covered as they are by a thick coating of pink stuff that seems to be caught between the consistencies of Jell-O and curdled milk. It's streaked through red in some places, and in others you can see thick fibers almost as wide around as your fingers squirming their way through the substance.
Your furniture is gone (with the exception of your bed), and in its places are strange scabrous things that remind you of some uncomfortably close-up photographs of warts, though they look–for lack of a better word–juicier than any warts you've ever seen. The one that has replaced your bedside table sprouts a protuberance that looks like the fiber on the walls, but it is tipped in a bulbous object that's the source of the light.
Your stomach rolls. You close your eyes. Ori resumes her giggling. "Do your surroundings displease you?"
"I'm hallucinating. I am having a bad trip on the codeine, and I need to contact my doctor or something." Somehow, the words sound calm as they leave your mouth, and you're not sure how they manage it. You can tell that most of the drug has worked its way out of your system by now, enough so that you can feel the panic your last hallucinations lacked starting to clench in your chest. And yet, your voice refuses to tremble while you make excuses for what's happening.
You feel delicate fingers on your cheek. They rest under your right eye and do not move. For a handful of dreadfully long seconds, neither you nor Ori make a sound.
Finally she says, "Douglas, I cannot emphasize to you enough how important it is for you to recognize what is happening. I warned you that your life is in danger, and the key to maintaining your ability to exist without a perforated body cavity depends on your ability to accept things as they are and move with them." Her fingertips trace your eyelid, light as the beating of butterfly wings against your eyelashes.
"I suffered brain damage when that fuckwit hit me, didn't I," you say at length, not really posing it as a question.
Ori's fingertips leave your eyelid and reappear on your scalp, just above your hairline. "You did very nearly die, though no one gave you nearly enough credit. Not the least of them being the individual who blundered into trying to kill you. But, I can safely tell you that your delicious gray matter is quite undamaged." She sighs, letting her touch fall away. "It was not unexpected, perhaps, but it did put in motion some things I had been hoping to delay out of respect to your mental state."
"If you're trying to reassure me that I'm not going crazy, you're barking up the wrong damn tree here." You don't open your eyes, but you pull your brow down as if you were glaring at where you estimate Ori is sitting. "This is ridiculous. I just got out of the hospital after suffering a massive concussion and nearly dying, and now I'm seeing disgusting things whenever I pop pain pills, and this is on top of having an imaginary 'friend'–" you use your fingers to form the appropriate air quotes, "–who shows up at random and talks about nonsense as if it fucking matters."
Your right hand is shaking. You've clenched it into a
fist on top of your blankets.
Ori takes your fist into her hands, uses her tiny little fingers to pry it open and smooth it flat. Her skin is smooth and cool, as if she did not maintain a humanoid body temperature. She moves your arm, rests your open palm against her cheek, nuzzles against it. Her hands grip your wrist, and you can feel the skin beneath your palm twitch as her expression changes.
The first time you felt Ori's tongue on your hand, it was startling and brief, and the primary impression you retained from the experience was one of revulsion at the cat-like quality of its texture. This time is every bit as startling, and her tongue still scratches like that of a cat, but that is where the similarity ends. She drags the flat of it in a broad swipe from the heel of your palm, up and across to the base of your index finger. It's almost searingly hot on your skin and in the moment before your eyes fly open and you try to jerk your hand away, you wonder if your estimation of her body temperature had been incorrect.
Her grip on your wrist is implacable and cold like a steel cuff. Your initial attempt to pull your hand away does nothing, so you throw your entire body away from her. For all that she seems to care, you may as well be an insect on a string. She locks eyes with you, her tongue frozen with the tip of it resting on the ring she left for you that first night in the hospital. The weight of her regard pins you to your bed, renders you unable to form words.
She withdraws her tongue from your skin and frowns at you. "Dearest Douglas, I have been so patient with you. I have watched you grow from a tiny babe into the person you are today, and I have indulged you in so many things. Don't make me regret my choices. I can't afford to indulge you much longer."
Using her hold on you, she pulls you into an upright sitting position such that your face is inches from hers. Most of what you can see is the jewel-like glinting of her inky black eyes. One of her hands shifts, fingers questing for something, latching on to the silvery ring. Before you realize what's happening, she jerks the ring, twists, and you howl with pain as the joint tries to bend in a direction it was never meant to go. You feel it pop, pull apart, and you can't see through the tears that the pain brings to your eyes. Your heart beats rabbit-fast as adrenaline floods your veins and try to thrash away.
Ori holds you there for a moment, face eerily blank even as you let out a strangled noise. "Douglas Fitzmoriah, I will give you three days only because I have grown fond of you. I doubt that others will be so gracious." She lets go of your finger and your wrist at the same time, allowing you to pull your hand in to your chest and cradle it there, whimpering. "Should you desire my presence, or–more likely–require it, bleed on that metal around your finger and I will come for you."
The void expression gives way to one of concern: the corners of her mouth turn down, her brows draw together, her eyes shine as though she might cry. Her hands flutter like wounded birds between you before they settle lightly on your shoulders. "Oh, Douglas, what will I do with you?" She presses you gently back onto your bed. You don't bother fighting. Even if you didn't feel so drained, there's no point to it now that she's demonstrated her superior strength.
"This is so fucked up," you croak. Her hands move along your collar bones, up the tendons of your neck, settle on your cheeks. She strokes your face with her thumbs. You shiver.
"You have no idea," Ori whispers, and it's almost like she's purring. She leans down, rubs her cheek against your chin, lets her thumbs brush your eyelids. "Go back to sleep, Douglas. I'll do my best to make sure no other bogeyman gets to eat your flesh but me."
She digs her thumbs into your eye sockets, but her nails are blunt and her angle just right that she manages not to rupture your eyeballs. Instead, her thumbs slide under them, pop them out with a sickening slurping sound, and you can see the imperfections of her hands as your eyes come to rest against her skin.
You scream. She giggles.
* * *
You wake with one of Simon's hands on your shoulder, shaking you. Your room is still mostly dark. Through your sleep-gunked eyes, you can see that his hair sticks up at odd angles on one side, and he's wearing only his plugs, a thin silver necklace, and a pair of plaid pajama pants.
You swat his hand away, pushing yourself upright and grabbing your glasses off your nightstand. "M'up, m'up," you grumble. "Th'fuck d'you want?"
He crosses his arms, and your eyes (oh thank god they are still in your head it was just a dream) follow the motion. Distantly, you note that he's changed the hoops in his nipples, and you wonder when he'd finally gotten the rest of the color on the hawk over his heart done. "I hate to break it to you, Dougie, but you were shrieking like the blonde slut who's gonna be the first to die in a slasher flick. I thought I was gonna have to get a steam cleaner to get the blood out of the carpet so I could rent your room out again."
"I just had a shitty dream about someone breaking my finger and popping my eyes out of their sockets. Shouldn't have taken that co-codamol before bed. Gonna have to call the doc tomorrow and tell 'em I can't handle the codeine and ask for something else." You rub at your eyes to knock some of the crust from them.
"Well, I'm not going to be able to get back to sleep now," Simon says, trying to make a show of looking grumpy, but failing.
You snort. "Yeah, me either."
He cocks his head to one side. "Street Fighter?"
"Oh god, is that your answer to all of my problems?" you groan, throwing off your covers and rolling your eyes. You went to sleep wearing a plain gray a-shirt and a pair of elephant-print boxers. Most of your bruises are covered, though you know there's still a fair amount of yellow-green blotching around your neck and shoulder. It's been a while since you bothered shaving your legs; you haven't dressed in a particularly feminine fashion for over a month, and you don't see the point to it otherwise.
Simon favors you with an expression somewhere between laughing and kicked-puppy. "Marvel vs. Capcom?" You throw your pillow at him, which he deflects back into your lap. "All right! Jesus, Dougie, no need to get violent."
"I hope the irony of the fact that you're saying this while suggesting the names of fighting games we can play is not lost on you," you grumble. "How about we kick it old school and I set up my laptop in your room so we can run through Diablo II."
He sticks out his tongue in an exaggerated expression of disgust, but he still laughs. "Whatever. I don't care, as long as I'm killing some pixels somehow."
It doesn't take long to get things set up: Simon sprawls out in his ridiculously expensive desk chair and keyboard pulled into his lap, and you stretch out on his bed with your laptop on one of his pillows. In what seems like an instant, you've both slain thousands of hell-spawn, and sunlight is beginning to filter through the blinds.
After glancing at his plastic cat clock (one of the ones with a swishing tail to count the seconds), Simon scrubs at his face with one hand. "You going back to work tonight, Dougie?"
You park your avatar in town and quit the game. "Nah. Still have one more visit with the neurologist before I get cleared to operate heavy machinery again, and JD isn't going to have me sitting around on the clock if I can't do my job." You shut down your laptop and start coiling up its power cord. "What about you?"
Simon stretches, his spine popping as he twists around. "Yeah. The shop's doing a drink-and-draw this evening, so I'm on the cafe. You should keep me company, dude. It's boring with everyone fawning over the models."
"Dude, don't even try to pull that one over on me," you say, rolling your eyes. "You ogle the models as much as the next guy."
Simon seems to have enough dignity left to look incensed. "Do not. That's why I'm the favorite on d'n'd nights. They know I'm not going to try to cop a feel, give out free shit, or try to snag a scantily-clad woman's number."
Ah. The truth comes out. Crossing your arms over your chest, you glare at him from his bed. "Oh my god. You're hoping someone hits on me, aren't you." It's less a question than an aggravated statement of fact. "You have to be kidding. I told you, I'm not r
eady to date again yet." It's a battle you and your roommate have been fighting since almost the second Amanda broke it off with you. The fact that he'd let things slide since the wreck had caused you to let your guard down.
To your surprise, he only shrugs, though a strange expression crosses his face. "Nah, not this time. I just worry about you, Dougie. You've been kind of off since I brought you home. I don't think it's good to leave you alone. You might fall and hit your head on something."
"Thanks for the vote of confidence, dude," you grumble as you scowl. "You're not making me want to keep you company this evening."
"What if I bought you lunch? Can I bribe you with food? Please don't leave me alone with the wannabe art students." Despite the mock-desperation of his words, he's grinning at you. You sigh; living with him for so long has gotten him well acquainted with your weak points.
"Fine, sure, you asshole. Taking advantage of the fact that I can't turn down food I don't have to pay for." You continue to scowl at him, but you're pretty sure the effect is ruined by the smile you're trying to hide.
* * *
Food that you don't have to pay for ends up being sushi. Simon, despite his retail job, possesses a not-inconsiderable amount of money, mostly from the trust fund his parents left him when they passed eight years ago (well before you met him). His favorite sushi joint is only a mile from your house, but it's chilly so you both pile into his car so he can crank up the heat.
For the first time in days, you aren't too tender to wiggle into your binder. It's a nice feeling to finally be wearing it again. You pull on your favorite pair of jeans and layer a thermal shirt and a t-shirt over your binder, and then meet Simon back downstairs. He's chosen to skip dealing with his contacts for the day and instead wears his stereotypically hipster black plastic-framed glasses. Combined with his skinny jeans, his Chuck Taylor's, and his plaid shirt, it does little to keep him from looking like an entitled prick.