abrightboy | Voicemail (IC Contact Post) OLD

That's true. Though only some of us started off that way. ....Still more than in an average population. What happened after you left the city?

Neal had an hour or so of his meds wearing off the first day to know he doesn’t want it to happen again. He dozes through the move to Malcolm’s couch, falls properly asleep when George climbs on his chest, and gasps awake some time in the middle of the night to a full-bodied ache that gets particularly severe at two points deep in his back and one through his torso.

Malcolm is sitting in a nearby chair, legs pulled up under him, a book on his lap, the lamp next to him aimed at it. He looks up at the gasp.

"Are you okay? Do you need anything?"

“Fuck,” is what he manages, gasping a little. None of his previous tolls have been this physically painful. Most were wrapped up primarily in nausea and fatigue and general aches.

Neal blinks a few times, knocking tears loose as he tries to clear his vision and remember where he is.

"Try not to move too much. There aren't any more painkillers. Do you want... some tea or something?" Malcolm asks, setting his book aside to scoot forward in his chair.

Oh, that kiss is nice. And so is the gratitude. He smiles against Malcolm's lips.

And he's happy to get into his breach life, but- "Before that, I want to mention. Shaw considers you a friend, too. She likes you. Apparently, she likes a lot of people she finds annoying." Eiffel. He's mostly thinking of Eiffel. "So I don't think you're going to mess that up, honestly."

He could go into theories, why Shaw is acting like she is with him- but it's a delicate topic, and he'll follow Malcolm's lead on moving past it. "No, I didn't make it to Raylan, unfortunately. I assume that's who Olenor was? But I did get sidetracked by this butterfly and found Jasper. I met Iris and she was starting to teach me chaos magic. She was a major player in the resistance movement, so- all in all, a good couple of days before I was yanked back here."

“It hurts.” Neal is not a fan of pain. A little sensory play in the bedroom, sure, but he’s not that kind of masochist.

Truth be told, unless the situation demands it, he has a pretty low tolerance for pain in general.

“Fuck, just kill me again.”

"I did a lot of math," Malcolm tells him, laughing. "What was chaos magic like?"

Malcolm's brow creases. "I'm not going to kill you," he says. "But I still have some of that tea that you brought the other day."

Will laughs, too. "I wondered if you just went back to work after that. I guess there wasn't much else to do, if you hadn't been recently caught and thrown into a fantasy army."

Honestly, Will's pleased. He didn't want Malcolm to be in danger, and it sounds like he was just fine for the duration.

"Chaos magic was amazing," Will says, with a bit of a far-away smile. "It was holding the entire universe in your hand and knowing that with a poke here or there, you'd change the whole thing. It was plucking the strands of a spider web and feeling that one movement reach out further and further, knowing that eventually it would turn into a raging storm. I liked it a lot, and I barely touched it."

“Why does it hurt this much?”

Tea, tea. Tea?

“Refresh my memory?” he manages, before squeezing his eyes shut tight.

“I was nobody special,” Malcolm remarks, but he doesn’t sound displeased by that. “And everyone still found me annoying, so I guess that’s just me,” he jokes.

But he listens to Will talk about chaos magic in rapt silence.

“I’ve never had any kind of special powers in a breach. It must be hard to go back to just…. being a person after that.”

“You brought tea over when I invited you to talk about my…. wolf thing,” Malcolm reminds him. “I have an ice pack, if that would help.” Lies. It’s a pack of frozen peas.

“I’ll try it,” Neal whispers, remembering a moment later what the ice pack probably is. He manages a tiny laugh, and tries not to be too embarrassed at the soft whimper that follows. “Wolf. How is the wolf? How’s that…”

It’s almost as hard to focus as before only now it’s not fun.

“Wait… is—this is your cabin.”

“I haven’t really… wolfed much. I argued with Raylan really badly after Lark disappeared and… I don’t know. I just. Haven’t been feeling it so much. Just. With Will a little bit. It’s kind of fun to play with his dogs in the Enclosure.”

He’s moving around while he talks, putting the kettle on, taking the tea and cups down.

He looks over at the next question. “Um. Yes. Is… that okay? You were really out of it. It didn’t seem like a good idea to just dump you in your cabin.”

“No, it’s fine, I just… figured if Will was living here you probably wouldn’t want someone couch surfing.”

He manages to get through all of that with only two words tightening sharply at bursts of pain.

“Will doesn’t stay here all the time,” Malcolm tells him. He glances over. “And he knows how important your friendship is to me,” he adds as he carefully scoops tea into a diffuser.

He tries to smile, but it twists into a grimace. "No painkillers left?"

"They didn't give me any more. They said you can't have more." He looks over. "You had a lot. I can teach you a technique to breathe through the pain, if you want."

He resists the urge to point out that maybe they gave him a lot for a reason, squeezing his eyes shut instead. "Yeah. Sure. Please."

Oh, they definitely did and he doesn't know if they're now conserving supplies or if they're worried about dependency or what, but they didn't give him any to keep the high going.

Malcolm walks over and leans over the back of the couch. "Take a deep breath in through your nose and push it out through your mouth, but as you breath out, picture that breath going through wherever the pain is. It's weird but it works."

He also resists the urge to say that sounds stupid. He knows that's the pain talking, and he doesn't want his first conversation with Malcolm in almost a year to be marred by bad temper that Malcolm did absolutely nothing to deserve.

Neal tries. It takes a little bit. He struggles, loses focus more than once, remembers in a weird far-off way how Malcolm started teaching him the breathing exercises for anxiety.

It's a little bit easier after that.

He's still making the occasional soft sound of pain.

"I like the lethargy and nausea better," Neal manages, half-joking.

"Yeah. Everyone does. That's why drug addiction is a Thing," Malcolm points out, folding his arms on the back of the couch, like he's settled in for a good lean, at least until the kettle whistles.

Neal grimaces again, remembering Kendall's oblique request for drugs. "Yeah. I'll take the temporary throes of agony."

He'll stop whining about it, anyway.

Malcolm gives him a smile and reaches over the back of the couch to gingerly pat his shoulder.

“Probably for the best.” He goes back over to the kitchen island to work on the tea. “Why were you in the dining hall anyway? You know I would have been happy to see you. I would have made you breakfast. …If you like tea and…. I might still have a couple apples? Okay. I answered my own question. We could have had very nice coffee, though!”

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post-hole death toll~~

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YOU SAW NOTHING

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