i’m thinking about Hughie post Temp-V
Hughie having constant shakes and tremors through his hands that make it difficult to pick things up/use his phone. It’s hard to hide it from everyone else, especially Annie, but he passes it off as nerves and nothing more.
He gets extreme migraines that blind him and cause his ears to ring louder than freight trains. All he can do when this happens is lay in bed with the windows covered and beg for it to stop.
Meals have become smaller since he took the temp V and now that he’s having sickness from the after shocks of it all, he can hardly eat without being sick and he’s lost weight he didn’t have to lose.
His body temperature is thrown completely off: he runs hot 24/7 and sweats through his sheets at night. Annie has stopped sleeping in his bed as often due to this, but by Hughies request.
This all comes to light when it is simply too much and Hughie can’t hide it anymore. Not that they didn’t notice, Hughie just refused to talk about any of it.
They find him in the kitchen, gasping and sweating on the floor as he held his head in his hands. Every sound they make has Hughie tightening in on himself and asking them in a small voice to please be quiet. They can’t just leave him there, so they force him up and help him to his bedroom while he tries his best not to curl back up and beg for them to kill him.
By the time they make it to his room, he can’t feel, hear, or see. However, what Annie and M.M see, is Hughie’s face with track marks of red and black dripping down his cheek and neck. It was no wonder the agony was so excruciating, his brain was leaking out of his ears.
They question whether they should force him to the hospital and make him miserable, but risk the bleed getting worse, or to leave him until the episode is over. When Hughie began hyperventilating and shaking violently, they made their choice and gathered him up into the back seat of M.M’s car.
In the hospital, the bleeding was discovered to be from a head injury he must have taken when he fell to the kitchen floor. But that diagnosis came with another discovery: an ‘unknown’ insect, perhaps a bug or worm, attempting weakly to burrow into Hughie’s ear-drum. The moment they pulled it out, it died and they discovered no more of them but did find possible signs some of them had gotten through.
The assumption was that in the unclean basement, maybe something had crawled into his ear while he slept but they couldn’t be sure. Annie and M.M had their suspicions, but agreed with doctors.
Hughie was allowed to go home the next day. He was put on pain-killers for the headaches, and he spent most of that week sleeping and taking medicine to keep the pain from encroaching back. It seemed to help quite a lot with the headaches. Now he just cries instead of wishing he was dead.
It was clear the affects had come from the Temp-V. It had hardly been six months since he last took any, and the symptoms just kept getting worse. He was angry towards Butcher, but he was also grateful for being stopped before it was too late. It just didn’t feel fair, especially not since he still wondered if he could handle just one more shot of V. He’d loved every second of the Temp-V and if he could get up, he would find Frenchie and ask how he can get it. Just this last time, he’d say.
But he can’t even open his eyes without throwing up. And with that, M.M and Annie are now worried sick about him which just caused embarrassment to overtake Hughie. They would linger near him almost all of the time to make sure he was still breathing. It wasn’t like he didn’t appreciate it, he did, because when it got bad it was scary. He wouldn’t be able to breathe; The heat would be so suffocating that the sweat glueing his clothes and sheets to his back would be like a coffin. It was much preferable to have someone there to take him out of that state than to ground himself by clawing at his chest.
Worse than being treated like he’s made of sugar glass, he was rendered useless. He couldn’t do anything to help the boys and it was made worse when they all tried to comfort him about it.
Hughie cant even decide if he’s glad this won’t kill him, or if he’s disappointed it wasn’t enough to do exactly that and remove the choice from his own hands. He just hoped it wouldn’t be permanent.
