(no subject)

[whatrosesmean.livejournal.com]

When; 18th of Dec
Rating; PG?
Characters; Nick Hardaway, Wanda Maximoff, Faye Valentine
Summary; Nick arrives in the city, requires a shower, a change of clothes and a smoke.
Log;
The first thing Nick notices - aside from the fact he's finally capable of noticing things on his own again, alone in his mind inasmuch as he's ever been alone in his mind - is that he doesn't have a heartbeat. Or much in the way of a decent body temperature. What he does have is a headache.

It makes perfect sense, except he's not in (that fucking house) Rose Red any more. This is the second thing he notices, and he's too tired (too relieved not to be trapped any more) to worry about exactly where this is, besides 'not hell on earth'. Here is better than there; it'll do, it'll have to do. He cracks his knuckles, rolls his head backwards and from side to side, and absently pats himself down for a pack of smokes while he takes the opportunity to casually skim the area with his mind - populated, evidently...very populated. Hello, there.

No smokes. Some sort of device, though - right, that'll come in handy, probably. He's aware, on one level, that he's compartmentalizing; that he's focusing on a metaphorical one foot in front of the other rather than the reality that he's spent the better part of a year dead, tied to the thing that killed him like living in the belly of a parasite, and that he has no bloody idea where he is now or much of what happened to everybody else. He can take a good stab at who made it out - who wasn't in there with him - but beyond sincerely hoping that he didn't die for Cathy so she could get taken out five minutes later by something else, he's not altogether ready to dwell on it.

He's too tired for this; he's too old for this, he thinks, agelessly unrepentant tendencies aside. His head hurts and all he can think is to wonder if anyone noticed him gone. If his parents, in Marske, know their bewildering boy who owes them a call or thirty isn't actually getting back to them like he said he definitely would this time.

There's no psychiatric handbook for the kind of PTSD you get from being eaten by a house; there's no one to tell him how to handle this if he were inclined to listen to them, or if he were inclined to let them know it needed telling in the first place. Nick mentally ranks his priorities: shower, clean clothes, beer, cigarettes, personal mental health. Right then. 'Not reeking of death' seems like a good start, and probably useful toward the end of asking the important questions like 'where am I', 'how did I get here' and 'really, are all afterlives kind of crap, then?'

...maybe he'll sit still for a while first, though. His head is killing him.