Though one night changed the trajectory his life was only just starting to accelerate on, that day did just as much damage, and not solely to his psyche. His body was affected too, still is. Most days, he thinks it may be more of an autosuggestion thing, but how can he deny the pain ripping through his ribcage and his muscles suddenly going into inertia now and then? Whoever he would go to, a doctor he is seeing for the first and last time or a trusted professional, they could tell him that it is rather difficult to narrow down the symptoms and pinpoint a single cause to his many afflictions.
But whether it is merely in his head or not, he knows how hard it hit him. That maniac’s voice piercing through the dark, blurs of gold & purple flashing under closed eyelids whenever he is hoping for at least a while of uninterrupted rest.
When he came back, they did not waste a brittle second to drag him out of the chopper and straight to the lab. Routine check-ups, they called it. Hooked up to machinery, a handful of sedatives and painkillers, blood samples that drove him even more dizzy. Then he came back again, to himself. More or less. During his first week in the office after his unofficial sick leave, one of the coordinators slid a therapist’s contact card across the table, with everyone sitting around the conference room and boring their eyes into him like they were all in on the joke that flew over his head.
He did go. Once. What stuck with him was the bowl of hard candy and not a scrap of the greeting monologue about how the clinic specialises in helping people like him. Brooding in silence for the rest of those covered sixty minutes, the bare words he spoke on the way out was a thank you. None of his colleagues asked about how it went. Maybe because they saw him later that very same week, curled up behind his car in the parking lot, palming for that orange bottle and nearly passing out from hypoxia.
“ I know you’ll be okay, Ashley, but I want to be here with you until you are. ” Leon emphasises calmly, taken aback by how steady his own voice is when seeing her like this does tear him in half. She is so young. Almost his age when his careless youth was snatched out of his grip before he even managed to feel its transient weight in his hands. There is not anything he can do to erase what happened, what left the irreversible mark she will most likely never be able to scrub off, but he can be here to shoulder the burden. His arms slack, giving her the space as he looks at her and answers with a tentative nod.
“ You don’t have to, if it’s too much, or… ” Trying to clarify, a mild furrow crosses his eyebrows. She might have said so little so far, but he can gather where this is going. It has not stopped haunting him either. “ I have those dreams, too. Sometimes I can’t tell them apart from what actually went down there. ”
