Paranormal Who Walks Between Worlds

Roger was trying to be politic about it and I understand WHY - he owed John a conversation or 60 in PRIVATE, not openly like that. And Roger has a lot of guilt and I don’t think he knows how to handle it. But yeah. He fucked up badly.

I’d post this on John but I’m fighting with an update and running all these users is lagging my comp.

ANYWAYS

yes. Roger owed John 60 conversations in private.

He does say “No, I’m sorry. The burden we placed on you, what my brother and I asked of you…”

It was a non apology to John, meant to make it very clear John was not at fault to everyone else. Roger’s having to step into a role he doesn’t really want to play. As Jeffrey said - had Roger been asked, he would not have chosen to come back, not then. Had Stephen not gotten to “what about ME” he probably wouldn’t haven’t. And I think at that point, Roger was sure he wasn’t going to survive, which was why he wanted that one night with his wife and sons. 

John had Roger from the time he was eleven or twelve until he was twenty-one. Luca only had Roger for six, Stephen for eight. 

I understand why Roger did what he did. That doesn’t mean what he did to John was right.

As I’ve said to others - Roger carries a LOT more of the blame than Jed, for what Ultra became and for what happened. Roger wanted to kill Bathory, but couldn’t walk up to him and shoot him in the face, wanted to but couldn’t, without stopping time to do so, and he refused to do so. Instead he manipulated boys like John and Killian so Roger could say he didn’t do it himself.

I don’t doubt at all that Roger loved them. He wouldn’t have felt the guilt he did if he didn’t, and I think there was a lot of not knowing what to say to John going on. 

Despite the often repeated, and very wrong, idea that humans have five senses, there’s many more. And as teleportation matures, a paranormal’s senses of proprioception, equilibrioception, magnetoreception, and others all sharpen to create a wickedly keen sense of spatial awareness. While not all paranormals are good athletes, in fact many aren’t, and it’s difficult to tell, from a layman’s point of view, what’s a paranormal borne sense and what’s merely a teenager growing into gangly and awkward limbs, it’s something which can be used to pinpoint a breakout.

Between the darker!Roger stuff and rewatching the first few episodes again, I go to thinking.

Marla has been hiding in plain sight for decades by simply not using her powers.

Roger was moving them around the country for a couple of years and was on and off medications during this time.

Marla put Stephen ON antipsychotics, according to Jeffrey, because she knew breaking out would expose him to danger and she was trying to protect him a while longer.

Now, I’ve been assuming that Roger’s medical stuff was Ultra-related and him trying to wean himself off anti-psychotics and dealing with the long term effects of them.

But now I”m wondering. What if that wasn’t what it was at all? Ultra’s a biomedical research company. Jed has always said he was trying to help Roger. Helping Roger do WHAT though. Suppressing his powers wasn’t the goal, Jed was helping him use them. What if the drugs he was on, the ones Marla was referring to, the ‘mountains of medical bills from some psychiatric hospital’ wasn’t Ultra at all - but someone trying to use drugs not to suppress powers but to simply fuck up Ultra’s detection of them?

Stephen says Ultra gets false positives all the time, and it certainly makes sense when you realize Hugh has been using a tag-and-release policy for years, but what if it’s ALSO some drugs just fucking with Ultra’s rhythms and detection methods? What if Roger was beta testing a way to use his powers and avoid Ultra and that’s what finally set Hugh off - because Roger was managing to out start the very company they had built, was undercutting Hugh at every turn?

Send me ± for a headcanon about our characters

Roger wasn’t blind to what was going on between Jed and John - it wasn’t that Jed didn’t play favorites, he always did, but with John it was special. And even if he had been blind to it, Jed’s frequent - occasionally panicked - questions about all things Kid would have clued him in. It wasn’t even that odd that Jed tended to drag John around or leave the boy to sack out at his apartment - Jed had a point about John being smaller and younger than the other kids and Jed was sincere in his worry the boy might be picked on. But it wasn’t until after that birthday party, when he saw John with that pocket knife that he really understood it, something that had been in the family for several generations and Jed had given it to John. Roger understood the meaning even if others hadn’t figured it out yet. 

So he really started to take an interest in the boy, joining Jed in dragging John around with him, from everything to grocery stores and dry cleaners to just around the city. Jed could cook enough to keep himself and John fed, of course, but Roger tended to cook when he was there, and he almost always needed to hit the store. But generally it was just a small trip, food for a few days.

However, John’s first November after that birthday video was taken, Roger’s first Thanksgiving away from Marla and the boys, he decided to make dinner for the three of them and that meant taking John, simply because there were going to be more bags than he could carry at once. He got a duck, not a turkey, since there were only the three of them, cranberries, oranges to juice and zest, chestnuts for dressing, a bottle of wine to cook with and sparkling water and fruit juice for them to drink, everything. Roger didn’t even blink when the register blinked over three hundred dollars, just for one meal and a couple leftover lunches. It wasn’t like he spent that much money on food normally, this was special. But John did blink. Turned and looked at Roger at little shocked. Sure there was a lot of food on the belt but not that much food.

Roger reached over and rubbed John’s back, encouraged him to pick up his share of the bags, and took them, in Roger’s words, “home”. Back to Jed’s apartment, and started organizing the kitchen, calmly telling John where to put things and so forth, and started cooking. John was quiet for a while, finally asked Roger this was normal. It took some probing for Roger to get what John meant - the big expensive meal - and Roger explained that it both was and wasn’t normal. He and Jed had had a bit of a tradition of making a large expensive meal for each other, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Finals, Jed’s acceptance at Princeton, Roger’s graduation from NYU, so on, but they’d let it drop after Roger and Marla had lived so far away - even if Jed had flown out and cooked a large breakfast for them to celebrate them bring Stephen home, but it was something they’d always planned to do with their families. 

“Your families.” John had repeated. 

The first therapist - Jakob Schodle - he was referred to wasn’t convinced Roger was mentally ill, though he did believe there to be something going on. He only worked with Roger for a few weeks, he had a large patient load already and wasn’t really invested in a difficult (read: refused to talk) patient who seemed to be handling things more or less well.

The second was a college of Schodle, Mark Richards. Richards was older than Schodle, by a couple decades. He was old school but cared about his patients. While he was concerned with Roger’s sudden 'sleepwalking’ he didn’t believe they had any deeper psychological roots than normal adolescent angst, he was more concerned with teaching Roger to handle stress and anxiety than quickly putting a diagnosis on what he considered atypical but not worrisome behavior. He was concerned with Roger’s 'telling tales’ about hearing the thoughts of others and his 'losing time’ - thinking much more time had passed than had - but he would have been more concerned had it been the other way around, Roger thinking seconds had passed when minutes or hours had. As for the 'telling tales’, he became concerned that Roger was, in fact, witness to a friend or classmate’s troubles and trying to get attention for them without outing that someone had said something. Basically, he thought Roger was a very stressed out young man whose warm and caring nature was allowing him to become the emotional dumping grounds of others and Roger was acting out because he wasn’t able to handle the problem. He wasn’t wrong, but he also wasn’t right - still he was the closest anyone came to understanding Roger’s actual issue. However, despite working with Roger for months and actually making progress helping the boy to cope, he was older and retired shortly before Roger turned fourteen.

Inside Roger’s psychological chart, he’d written a note:

Notes on family: Father: Works hard. Patient respectful but fears disappointing him Mother: Old dragon type. Good attachment. Older brother: Very attached. May have some psychological issues himself.

It was that last note the third therapist, Andrew Nealson, zero'ed in on. Nealson had studied Cornelia B. Wilbur’s work, and was one of the few psychiatrists who had studied enough of Freud’s work to know that Freud’s earliest works centered around the possible sexual abuse of his female patients at the hands of their fathers and older male siblings and that due to societal pressures, Freud decided the patients had to be reporting fantasies rather than recounting abuse. In some ways, he was more interested in research and publishing than providing psychological care, more interesting in proving a theory of his than providing care, and was in many ways, deeply sexist. Nealson believe it was impossible for the young to actually have mental illness, believed mental illness was the result of brain damage that occurs over a life time, that those under thirty could HAVE mental illness. He believed children, teens, and young adults who appeared to have mental illness were in fact victims of abuse and “merely” acting out as a result of trauma. He also believed it was unnatural for male siblings to have close emotional bonds, because male children only had close emotional bonds with care givers while they were young but in the one to three years leading up to puberty, male children would start rejecting those emotional bonds to reserve them for sexual partners. Female siblings, he believed, should naturally have close emotional bonds with one another and the lack of bonding pointed to a problem. When you were talking about mixed gender siblings, age mattered. Male siblings with older female siblings may have a close emotional bond with that sibling, due to her taking on a maternal role towards the younger brother (and so the relationship may mirror the relationship with mother with less formality and more coddling due to the siblings having a closer age than the mother and son and immaturity of the maternal instinct in the sister). Male siblings with a younger female sibling should not have an emotionally close relationship as the older sibling approaches puberty, even if the siblings are close in age, as males conflate emotional intimacy with sexual intimacy. Nealson believe brothers as close as Roger and Jed were pointed to abuse, likely incest between the two, and didn’t believe it was consensual. As Roger’s telepathy matured and he began to pick up more of the man’s thoughts, understanding what he believe to be happening, Roger became more and more (“inexplicably”) hostile and difficult, refusing to cooperate, non-compliant on his medications, and yet clung to Jed more. Roger was dismissed from that practice (nineteen months after being taken on) after he kicked over a table and attempted to physically attack Nealson.

There was talk of institutionally the “clearly deeply troubled” boy after that incident, however, a nurse in the practice - Margaret was the only name Roger knew her by - intervened and got Roger in with a therapist who had recently left the practice, a man who focused more on younger children with developmental disorders rather than teenagers with psychological disorders. 

Nathan Crux was the youngest permanent psychiatrist Roger ever had, only two years finished with his internship. He was a bit quick to prescribe medications, and medications to deal with the side effects of those medications, but at least he believe Roger when Roger said no one was hurting or abusing him. Crux’s easy hand with scripts lead Roger to develop a rotating list of medical complications and a laundry list of side effects hit him over the next year and a half. Roger was nearly seventeen when he began seeing Crux and was still being treated by the man when Papa Price died. It was Crux who finally pinned the 'paranoid schizophrenia’ diagnosis on Roger.

A note about Jedikiah during the dealings with Nealson and Crux - Jed always has been, to use a quote from another canon, “as smart as he is dangerous, which is to say very.”

And Jed, for all his own issues with self worth and depression is a very arrogant person (it might seem like “arrogant” and “little sense of self worth” don’t fit together, but in fact they very much do) and being a teenager and being smarter than the doctors didn’t help. Jed was so overly polite to Nealson that he was clearly being condescending, almost mocking, when he was forced to talk to the man and finding out about the completely unfounded and insulting allegations Nealson was making against him did not help. Jed very often felt like he was the smartest person in the room, the only one intelligent enough to see the truth. 

However while he tolerated Crux much more, he was disdainful of his habit of drugging Roger and often complicit in Roger going off his medications or in others being the one to force Roger to take them so he didn’t get hit with the worst of the withdrawal effects. (Fun fact: Going off antipsychotics can cause psychosis, seizures, and death. Roger had two of the three more than once.) After their father died and Jed assumed more and more of the responsibility of being Roger’s medical proxy, he quietly approved of Roger stepping away from him as a therapist.

Linds has LESS PAINFUL headcanon about John’s former foster brothers than I do.

Not that I had headcanon for all of them. Just two. One we see, one we don’t.

One, the second who runs to John. I always called him David. He didn’t age out of the system, so much as just was lost in it until he was eighteen, years since he was four bouncing between foster care and home, a mother with a drug habit and no father to speak of, sometimes his mother being so high or having crashed so hard he’d have to literally beg her for food. It wasn’t that she didn’t love him, she did. Very much. She just couldn’t be a mother.  As he got a little older than we see, it became a rotating system of home-juvie-foster care-home, ending when he was eighteen. He lived, but he can’t hold down a job or hold onto money, has ‘anger issues’ and nightmares frequently, mother died of an overdose when he was twenty  and he ripped off the crash register with a friend in order to pay for her funeral. Of course he was caught and bounced. There’s still  warrant out of him, but he’s several states away, no valid ID and floating jobs under the table to get by.

I mentioned earlier that the only violent mood swings I’ve ever experienced were the result of a medication I was taking. In fact, many of the symptoms often associated with schizophrenia – think of the stereotypical twitchy, drooling man hiding under a bridge and talking to himself, unaware of anything going on around him – can actually be attributed to side effects of medication, rather than to the disorder itself. That guy might not need to get help; it’s more likely that he’s getting too much help.

It can be really easy to become overmedicated. At one point, during a nice vacation to the psych ward, I was taking a whopping 23 different medications. That’s because antipsychotics all come with horrid side effects, which then have to be treated by other medications, which then come with their own side effects that have to be treated, and on and on. That did indeed leave me a sloppy mess lying on the couch in the common room, with no idea that my parents were there when they came to visit. But you don’t have to become a walking pharmacy before you start seeing the effects. Lots of common medications cause nervous tics, manic energy, and even sensitivity to the Sun, which makes you itch like a bitch. Golly, doesn’t that kind of sound like our twitching, drooling friend from earlier? He’s probably got a lot of reasons for hiding under the bridge, but pharmaceutically-induced vampirism is almost certainly one of them.

With all of that awful stuff going on (such as, say, the agonizing muscle cramps Moban caused me) and no more voices in your head, it can be easy to start thinking that you’ve got this thing under control. You forget that the medication is the entire reason for that, because you’re a little distracted by the excruciating pain and whatnot. “All this stuff is doing for me is making me miserable, so why keep taking it?”

Well, did you know that you can go into serious withdrawal from antipsychotics, like you can from narcotics? True story: when I was released from inpatient treatment, I was pretty over those 23 different medications. It turns out that going cold turkey off an Ozzy Osbourne number of drugs was so hard on my system that it earned me a trip straight back to the hospital, this time to the emergency room. I showed up looking like a heroin addict – shaky, anxious, nauseous, and sweaty. The weirdest part was a thing called brain zaps. That’s when, every so often, it feels like someone has jammed one of those prank handshake buzzers inside your head, and it’s a fun little reaction your body has to suddenly not taking psychiatric medication.

That was an extreme case, but even after landing on a much more manageable regimen, going even one day without them makes my symptoms pop back up like a particularly unpleasant game of Whack-a-Mole. Within a few hours, I start to get headaches, and I can kind of feel the voices coming. They start out whispering, barely audible, and gradually get louder until they’re yelling. Luckily, the medication can take effect just as fast – I know I’ve landed on a good one when the voices start to quiet down after about 30 to 60 minutes, although it does take a bit longer than that to fully take effect. Over the course of about 2 or 3 weeks, they’ll gradually get quieter and quieter until they disappear completely.

I do still have what are called “breakthrough” symptoms about one to three days a month, when the voices taper on and off, gradually getting louder and then quieter again. But hey, voices one-tenth of the time is exactly ten times better than voices all of the time.

Most of this article doesn’t apply to Roger, other than most of it people how people - even medical personal  - see him. 

But the one that really does, is this one. How they have effected him (Stephen, at least how I play him, doesn’t really have most of these - Marla was damned careful to monitor the side effects and kept him away from the worse of the drugs - but over that year, he did have some issues, which is another post since I’m focusing on Roger.) Because Roger DOES have some serious issues, or at least he should.

I understand WHY, but it’s one of my biggest beefs with the show, how Roger was stated to have been on all these drugs, had all these medical bills and YET. He’s…fine. I honestly think the ‘mountain of medical bills’ Stephen referred to weren’t fake psychological appointments but medical appointments to deal with the side effects we see.

The simple ones are just as dangerous - Roger’s body is covered in freckles, even if they aren’t that different from his skin tone, but due to the medications, he’s probably had at least a few really severe sunburns, enough that he’s had some skin cancer scares.

Fever and flu-like symptoms are side effects, but they are serious one, and as such, in a person taking antipsychotics can signal a medical emergency and there is no 'go to bed and see how you feel int he morning’ - it’s being closely monitored. Off the meds, that’s not an issue but that panic over it doesn’t go away, at least not quickly. 

Dizziness and drowsiness are the two most common side effects, and Roger is physically active - there’s had to be so many minor injuries during his adolescence and early adulthood due to this, or even some near failing classes because he couldn’t stay awake.

Seizures can occur with some medications, as often as 1 in 25 or 1 in 20 patients - it’s VERY likely Roger’s had a few before being pulled off those, and if you’ve never had a seizure, they can be very frightening. And not all seizures are the most well known tonic-clonic seizures, the full body seizure. You can have absence seizures, where you are “frozen” mid speech or action, muscling twitching in the face or fingers. Or automatism, sleepingwalking behavior or repetitive motions. 

The biggest side effect with antipsychotics however, is a medical condition called tardive dyskinesia. It’s not the most horrible side effect, generally limited to involuntary movements in the muscles of the face, but that doesn’t mean it’s no upsetting. And it’s almost always permanent. While on the medication tardive akathisia is common (which people describe as 'torture to sit still’) and dystonia, which is similar but much more serve than dyskinesia.

Dizziness, headaches, orthostatic hypotension (falling blood pressure when rising, which can lead to fainting), dry mouth or drooling are also all very common.

Think about high school. Think about what utter and complete fucking shitheads teenagers can be. Throw this in.

Withdrawal from the meds - needed in Roger’s case as he didn’t need to be on them to begin with - also happens, and can include:  nausea,emesis (vomiting), anorexia (lack of appetite), diarrhea, rhinorrhea (way too much mucus in the sinus cavities) , diaphoresis (sweating), myalgia (muscle pain), paresthesia (“pins and needles feeling”), anxiety, agitation, restlessness, and insomnia. Oh and psychosis.

My Twitter conversation (Twittersation?) with Jeffrey Pierce. One of the reasons I love Twitter.