comeoutwrong | Room 323 [Tuesday, Evening]

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Room 323 [Tuesday, Evening]

Effy's head was still full of the fogged up confusion as she ran back to the dorms, and her mind was barely starting to wrangle the stray thoughts and overriding fear into something manageable by the time she reached her room.

There was trippy and there was wrong, and that had been all wrong. Under her hands had been a person, and in her head there was a misshapen monster, and there was blood and fear. But bits and pieces were starting to slip back into reality through the haze, and she almost didn't want that. Someone got hurt.

Desperately needing something safe, she firmly closed her door and dropped flat on her stomach, scooting into the enclosed space under her bed while she tried to gather her thoughts and recover her control. She might be there for a while.

[[The Fog might've worn off, but she's still a little unstable. It can be open should anyone have a reason to stop in. Following this ~~once it's played out~~.]]

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Effy slid her hands over the one he'd tried to stop her movement with, squeezing briefly. She couldn't control everything in her head, but she could turn the control of that little gesture.

"Grabbed me." She frowned again as she went back over it in her mind. "Kept trying so I hit it, and ran." Very abridged version, but really, what could you ever expect from her. "All that fog... And I don't know where she went."

It sounded like what had happened to him only he'd come back to himself to realize he'd been trying to attack Rose before he'd taken off. The fucking fog. Alex shook his head and tried to nudge her closer to her bed, at least but let her keep a hold of his hand.

"The fog's fucking insane," he muttered, ducking down some to her level to try and check for any injuries that might belong to her. "Did you get hit or anything? Am I gonna find anywhere like that?"

"No." Effy shook her own head as she stepped that way at his encouragement, "... no." Got away remarkably lightly on the physical side, considering she was damn sure that thing had been bigger than her. Any blood on her hands was it's, not hers.

She'd told him she could look after herself, and apparently when it came down to it, she could.

"Sit down," Alex said again, glancing down at her hands briefly before stopping his movements so she could finally sit.

There was something fucked in that fog. Alex shook his head and took a breath. "You got any water around here? In bottles?"

Simple things, Alex decided, were best for the moment. It wasn't the first time he'd had to clean someone he cared about up.

"Somewhere," she muttered, following his eyes down to her hands, curling one into a fist as she watched it. Helpful. Really. Remarkably, if he checked in some of the bottles she kept around her desk he'd find they didn't all have alcohol in. "Why?"

Cleaning up hadn't really occurred to her.

"Because, unless you wanna take a shower, we should try and clean you up some," Alex said briskly, already moving away from her to try and search the bottles he spotted around her room. "Get some of the fucking dirt and anything else off you. It'll help."

Alex didn't know if that was necessarily true but, at this juncture, giving false statements was natural for him. Sniffing bottles to try and separate alcohol from water was not.

That... sort of made sense. Enough that Effy nodded, still looking down.

"It wasn't the same," she said after a moment. "Not like the gremlins and shit. Fucking trippy." Except she'd been completely sober.

"Yeah, I know," he said, gathering up the few bottles he'd found that would work and dragged that, her desk chair and what looked like some sort of hand towel closer to her. "I was out in it earlier. There's something fucked up out there. Hell if I know what it is."

He shoved the bottles and towel to the floor so he could sit down and try to catch her eye. "Still feeling like that? Trippy?"

As he came closer she glanced up to look at him, and shook her head slightly. Not in the same way, at least. She wasn't right, but the improvement on earlier was immense.

"Somethings," Effy corrected, idly worrying at the seam of her jeans with her thumb. "Could hear them. Thought I could."

Alex nodded once before reaching for the one of the bottles and the towel. He dumped some water generously into that towel, letting it soak before holding out a hand.

"Can I see one of your arms?" he asked, consciously making it a question directly due to how he'd reacted to his touch of earlier. "It won't take me long."

Effy only hesitated a moment before offering him a hand palm up.

There was a long moment before she looked back up at him. "Didn't feel like what it was," she said finally. "Didn't seem to matter at the time, but..."

"I know," he said, cradling that hand with one of his and sliding the wet towel over her fingers and around her wrist quickly but firmly. "I would've done the same thing you did, you know. What's still feeling trippy to you?"

"Leda. She was there." And then she wasn't, and that thing was, and the split second where the two had been the same wouldn't quite leave her mind. "It was her, but it wasn't. It wasn't."

Effy pressed her free hand to her forehead, like that could remove the image. "It's fucking with my head."

"I believe you," Alex said, swiping the towel along her arm to remove at least some of the dirt before wringing it out and then adding more water so he could get her other arm. "You just need to stay inside, out of the fucking fog and it'll stop fucking with your head."

Of course, he didn't know that for sure but, again, false statements just to fill the silence. Alex rubbed his own eyes tiredly, forcefully pushing everything he'd seen away so he could deal with this. He reached for her free hand, trying to snag it both to wash it and get her attention off the images in her head.

Managed to do that for her, taking her attention and putting it back on him. Effy nodded, sort of seeing the logic there. Couldn't know it was the fog, but really it was the only change between today and any other.

Few seconds of watching him she offered a quiet, "Thanks." Kept his word, Hadn't even been serious when she'd said it, but he had. Moments like this, she felt crazy, and it would've been understandable.

"For what?" he replied, half distracted. He glanced up at her briefly, half smiling, before focusing back on swiping the towel along her arm quickly. He hadn't lied when he said it wouldn't take long. It didn't and he was tossing the wet towel aside.

"Clothes next," he said, not waiting for her to answer before he was up to try and locate said clothes. It was easier to be busy and focused then letting his mind think too much. "You're gonna need to take yours off."

Effy let herself just watch him for a few long moments as he moved around before his words caught up with her. Any other day she might've rebelled at being ordered around. Today it was probably exactly what she needed.

Delayed reaction, but she did start wriggling out of her shirt for him. Obviously still a little out of it, she seemed to have skipped over the question before.

He didn't press that question either since it wasn't that important that he knew. Right now, he was more focused on finding something that she owned that wasn't the size of a stamp. It was proving somewhat difficult.

Eventually, he did find a shirt and a pair of pants and considered that a success. Alex crossed back over and handed the shirt to her since that's what she'd gotten off so far.

"These should work," he said by way of explanation. "You'll be more comfortable in things that aren't caked in dirt and mud and grass. Come on."

Edited 2010-03-26 12:50 (UTC)

To this point, Effy'd remained mostly oblivious to the damp and dirt. Now he mentioned it, she was noticing a little more. "Shouldn't go for that natural look," she commented, fingering the fabric briefly before she put it aside and slipped the new, clean shirt over her head.

A little on the hazy and vague side, as if her mind was really somewhere completely different, but she was making sense which was progress.

"Seems to only really work for lumberjacks," he agreed, tossing the pants on the bed beside her so he could step back and dig his cigarettes out to get one light and between his lips. If he hadn't already smoked, days like this could make him.

"And dirty hippies," he added after taking a few puffs of that cigarette to get himself a little calmer.

Effy nodded, and gave a sudden and slightly out of place snicker as she pulled on those pants, that faded almost as quickly as it had popped up. "Not one of those." Making her thing of other things, that was obviously helping somehow. "Couldn't hack the kumbaya initiation."

"That's not a bad thing. Pretty sure I wouldn't like some dirty hipster," he said idly, shunting her discarded clothes aside and cleaning up the mess of water bottles he'd made. The towel got draped over her chair which got pushed back towards her desk.

"Sit back down," he said quietly, nodding back towards her bed and carding his fingers through his hair before trying to encourage her to actually lay down or, at least, do more than slouch on the edge of her bed. "Give yourself a break, all right?"

Break... sounded nice right about now. Effy didn't really have the energy or inclination to fight or try and claim she was fine. Pretty obvious she wasn't.

She started to do that, but only at the same time as reaching for his hands to try and keep him with her. As usual, if she could get that across without actually having to admit it, so much the better.

Alex hadn't been planning on fleeing as soon as she'd gotten settled so when she reached, he let her and just followed her lead since she'd initiated the contact.

Sure, she'd let him do that earlier but there were times when he could actually be patient and not make assumptions and when she was this freaked out, he figured it was a good time to do so.

Easy enough, he found, to do that. To just stay quiet and let her do what she wanted.

At the moment, all she was really aiming for was not to be left on her own. That put her at a little clingy as she followed his encouragement to relax a little, curl up on her side and try not to dwell on her muddled senses.

Better to concentrate on circling her fingers around his hand, squeezing, and bringing it up to press his knuckles to her lips.

At this point, she was going to have to push his ass out the door since he'd gotten an up close and personal view of how this was affecting her. And even if she tried, he didn't know if he'd go.

He watched her idle movements for awhile, half smiling every so often before he asked, "You want me to read to you for a little while?"

He wasn't going to try and force her to talk but taking her mind off things was always a good way to go.

"Hear that's good," she said, twitching a distant smile behind his hand. Tony always said so, and if anything spoke highly of that one to her, it would be his reliance on it.

"Then, I'll do that," he said, doing some creative reaching to grab the first book of hers he could without making her let go of his hand. He took a minute to check over the title, make sure it wasn't in some foreign language before opening it.

He let the book rest against one bent knee and just started reading. It was her book, she'd know what was going on. He just had to know the words.

He could do that.

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Room 323 [Tuesday, Evening]

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