Aberrant: Mutant High - What Lies Beneath

[Weft]

I've had the chance to be insane...

asylum from the falling rain.

--Chili Peppers

Smoke. Thick and fast, smoke creeping into her mouth, into her nose, into her longs. Sometimes, for a moment, she had wondered what it would be like to smoke a cigarette. Would she gasp for breath, convinced that she was going to die? Would it stink like her father's cheap cigars?

She gasped for breath, taking another pull on the invisible cigarette the fates had held to her mouth. She choked. It stank. She smelled something burning, but try as she might, she couldn't open her eyes. Against the outline of her eyelids she could just...see...flames -

She woke up, sweating and short of breath in a bed not her own, sheets tangled around her chaotically, naked and still far too hot with the heater blasting into the room, banishing even the fleeting thought of a winter chill.

She slipped out of bed, almost stumbling over the bedside table, and just managed to find the bathroom door and fall to her knees at the porcelain toilet before the retching began. It was just as well that she had short hair, she thought blearily. She hadn't eaten much the night before, and so she dry heaved for several minutes, waiting grimly for the end.

Slowly, equilibrium returned to her stomach, and she raised herself painfully off the tiled floor. She washed her mouth out and trudged back, already falling asleep. The room is lovely, dark and deep, she thought giddily, banging her way to her bed and throwing on a pair of sweats and a t-shirt. The hotel room was nicer than any she had ever stayed in before. She knew this because it had a balcony. Through the window she could see a blanket of white, faintly illuminated by the few remaining lights. It was a vast drab horizon of white and black and grey. It looked miserable. And at this time of night, very empty.

She stepped onto the balcony and the cold was on her immediately, assaulting her like a physical force. The air swirled with ice on its edge, like the harsh strikes of whips. She squinted her eyes against the emptiness. But there was nothing to see. A formless grey expanse, sloping down to the grey earth, lifting into the grey wind.

Goosebumps had long since broken out on her arms, and the pins and needles in her feet were beginning to be replaced with nothing at all, but by God she was awake. The wind whipped her and a part of her felt like she deserved it and another part said she needed it. The cold felt pure somehow. Uncorrupted. She trembled.

When she was sure beyond a shadow of a doubt that if she stayed out for a second more she would fall over and become an ice statue she slipped back inside, shivering violently, and fell onto bed. The flames seemed very far away now, but that was almost its own curse, because now her mind's eye was clear, and in it she could see all the things she'd been doing her best not to think about for the last few days.

Her father's face. Her mother's face. Her cat ran between her legs, nearly making her fall down the stairs. She just managed to grip the banister in time to keep from going arse over teakettle, but it was a close thing. Max was always pulling crap like that.

Low voices, speaking, and she strained to listen but could not. The smell of coffee, her father's cigars, Max's anti-flea medicine. Warmth.

And it was funny, wasn't it, that even the happy memories, the good memories, cut at her now? That the bad things had managed to poison them so she couldn't even remember her mom's smile without turning into an utter crybaby?

She was growing warm again, and pleasantly drowsy, and the blackness that stared back at her was expressionless. It offered no judgment. She closed her eyes, feeling tears prickle her, and turned into the pillow. Somehow, she didn't want the blackness to see anyway. And slowly, slowly, like a baby learning to walk, the night turned fuzzy and was no longer quite so harsh, and the hurt was no longer quite so immediate, and she could feel her stuffed duck, Mack Mack laying beside her, and feel her grandma's threadbare comforter swaddled over her body. She couldn't keep the clarity; the faces, the fire, it all fell away. So did the worry; so, eventually, did the pain. All that was left, in the end, was the sound of a conversation half-heard, words unable to be made out, and the smell of her father's cigars, lulling her into a deep, dreamless sleep.