Chapter Text
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Slowly, Jared opens his eyes. His sticky lashes part to reveal a ceiling and four walls, hazy in his peripheral gaze.
This is not his room. This is not his bed. The sheets feel funny and his head hurts and oh God, oh God, what--
This is not his room.
Jared sits up and his head spins. He passes a hand over the sheets and they feel slick although they look like cotton. Anyway, they are white and his sheets are not white and his head hurts. He tries to stand up and falls onto the floor. It’s like lying on a sheet of paper. He heaves and then his vision goes black--
This is not his room.
Jared sits up. His head hurts and his neck hurts and he can’t be sure but he thinks he’s awoken here before. He has a flash of lying on the floor, vomit clinging to his lips in a hot, stringy mess, but that image quickly falls from his mind. He passes his hand over the sheets and they’re slick to the touch and it feels wrong, like a grocery store plastic bag. Tilting his head to look down at the fabric clenched between his hands hurts. The sheets don’t feel the way they look, like cotton sheets, anonymous issue from a mid-range hotel chain. His High School Mathalete group stayed at a Best Western on their way to Nationals and he remembers the bleached white sheets, coarse and cottony, against his bare back. It had been hot outside but the sheets in the hotel had been cool and bland. Hot. He is so hot now. Jared lets his eyes flutter shut.
When Jared wakes again he is sure this is not his room. This is not his apartment. The lights in his student apartment had been a mix of sad fixtures abandoned by prior students and cheap, junky lamps surrendered by his parents to the cause of higher education. The light had been poor and scattered in some rooms, overly bright and industrial in others. But this room—not his room, his mind reminds—is lit with pale, diffuse light, the source unknown. Jared slowly turns his head to look around and his neck twinges. He’s sore there, sore on the left side of his neck, the muscle throbbing slightly. Probably wrenched during a pick-up basketball game, Jared thinks, and then there was no game, there’s nobody left to play, not for months and Jared buries that thought down deep and takes in the pale ceiling and pale walls of the room that is not his.
Jared sits up and his head spins for a moment, dizzy and sick, and he grips the sheets to steady himself. Again he can’t help but register how strange they feel under his hand, slick and plastic-y, which is weird because they look like plain old cotton sheets, nothing particularly fancy. Jared thinks he should push the call button, but that suddenly seems a ridiculous thought. This is no hospital room. The walls are smooth and blank, the light soothing and mild, and there is no sound of a monitor beeping or purposeful footsteps. There are no shouts or cries, no running feet, no alarms blaring. No blood on the walls, blood on his hands, bodies stacked like wood along the halls, screaming, screaming, he is screaming--
Jared shoves the memories away and takes a shuddering breath. There are no screams, no blood. The only sound here is his own hoarse, rapid breathing.
This is not a hospital room and this is not his apartment. Jared clings to these simple facts as he gingerly swings his legs around. The bed is high, high enough for Jared’s naked feet to dangle before he slides forward and rests them on the floor. The floor feels strange under his bare soles, like the coarse grain of construction paper, just waiting to be ripped up or cut up, but curiously sturdier under his toes than any paper would be. To Jared’s gaze, it looks like tile, and he shuts his eyes hurriedly to remove the skin-rippling sensation of seeing and feeling two different sensations at the same time. There’s no hurry to stand up and Jared lets himself slump to the side, feet coming back up to rest on the bed. No hurry at all.
This is not his room.
Jared wakes from his slumped position on the bed and he remembers. He’s been awake in this strange room before and he’s probably sick, but this is not a hospital. Everything looks different than it feels and that’s perhaps because he’s sick. His head hurts and his neck hurts and he’s very tired. Moving seems to be an effort and he’s lost time, perhaps, fading in and out of consciousness. Right now he’s thankful that so much of his attention is focused on his feeble body and making it do simple, mundane tasks. Sitting up and keeping his eyes open, and breathing in and out. If he stops to think about what has happened to him, happened to everyone and where he should be right now—
Oh God, oh God, oh God, please please please—
Jared wakes up. This time, he’s pretty positive he didn’t pass out or fall asleep. In his last panicked moments of consciousness, a misty haze had risen from the floor, blurring the walls and sending Jared’s eyelids into a flutter. There had been a chemical taste, drifting into his mouth to coat his tongue. Gas. Jared’s pretty sure it had been gas, as sure as he is of anything, which is to say not sure at all. But he had been having a panic attack and now he’s not. Now he’s calm, and if he just pushes those ugly, useless thoughts away, he can focus on the here and now. Focus on what his body needs to do and the room he inhabits. There’s nothing and no one else.
There is a door.
Jared sits up gingerly and he can see now that there is a door in the wall. It’s the same milky, bluish gray of the walls of the room and it’s closed. If he gets up, if he could get up, he could walk out the door. Maybe there would be someone on the other side.
Nobody for months, his mind gibbers, nobody, nobody and what might you find out there—
Jared swings his legs over the side of the bed and stands up. There’s a wave of dizziness and he almost topples over. The floor under his feet is soft and slightly rough, but he can ignore it like he can ignore the slick sheets and the light coming from nowhere and a gas inexplicably rising to calm his nerves and make him sleep. Somebody put him in this room and covered him in sheets and turned on the gas to calm him down and make him sleep. Someone is out there.
Someone is better than no one.
The door is as pale as the walls and there is no handle. For a moment, Jared wants to panic again, unsure if he can get out. Then his fingers brush the surface of the door and it swings away from his shaking hands a bit before swinging back closed. It’s open. He can push the door and it will open.
Jared reaches out and pushes the door open.