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[You’ve received a bag of treats.  Happy Halloween!] 

[This is easily one of the best parts of the year. No reason Lv can't go get hyped with his brother and get this sugarfest started early, right? Nice.]

You put on some slippers that had been by your bed before you walk over to the dresser. Already seeing the shimmering from slight shards of glass both on the floor and on the dresser, you knew you had to be a little careful and have some protection for your feet. Didn’t want to end up stepping in that, after all. Perhaps you should be a little worried about your hands, too, but you think of them as being in less danger than your feet when it comes to the glass.

As you approach the dresser, you see that some things that had been sitting on the top still sat there, just a bit scattered. Other things had fallen to the carpet, but had been safe due to the softness of it, or due to the items being tiny and not having much to break, anyway.

Most of the things, basically, had been safe. But you find the one thing that hadn’t been -- the one that broke -- was the one picture frame that had been hanging above the dresser. It had been the thing that fell victim to your wind; the thing that crashed and woke you up. By the looks of it, it had come off from it’s nail on the wall, and when it did, before your wind could pick it up and carry it anywhere, it had just fallen to the dresser and the glass had shattered.

Maybe it wouldn’t have been too big of a deal... but as you get close enough to pick up the frame, you see and remember what picture had been in it, and your heart sinks. Not because the picture was ruined or anything -- because honestly, even though the glass had shattered and all, the picture hadn’t gotten too ruined. If it had, you still had the picture on your phone. But which picture it had been, specifically, had you thinking.

It was a picture of what you’d come to see as family, even if they weren’t all technically family. It was a picture you’d taken one day of Dave, Karkat, and the girls; Reese, Seyria, Aileen. During a day at the park, while you were sitting back and relaxing, watching them, you’d had the urge to capture the some of the moments of that day. Some of the pictures, they known about, because you’d asked them if you could take a picture of them or with them. But some of them, they didn’t know about initially, they didn’t know about until you’d gotten the pictures developed. With those pictures, it was simple things: little smiles, actions, moving about. Little conversations and the faces they made. Things that made your heart swell at the sight, things that made you at least a little happy, for that moment.

One of those kinds of pictures, you took and had developed into a slightly bigger picture, so you could frame and hang up. It had been a picture of Dave and Karkat on the bench of a picnic table, with the girls sitting with them. You’d been walking over to join them, but as you did and they began to chatter to each other and to themselves, they looked so happy, and at peace. And with them not paying much attention to anything, you sneaked a picture of the moment. You had no regrets about snapping it, and getting it framed, either. You had no regrets because it was one of the things that made you think about them, and one of the few things helped you get through some days. It may not have always helped or did much, but it usually did help a little to push you through. The picture had still been one that you’d come to love and cherish.

You purse your lips as you drag yourself out from the thoughts of the picture. Then, you’re dragged into another line of thoughts, remembering why this frame fell, what happened, why you woke up. When you’d slept, and woken up to a noise, or to find something had broke or something had happened to an item, you knew it was because of your powers. You were out of practice with them now, and you didn’t have full control.

A pause in thought occurs, before the gears starting turning again, with a thought: What if one day, that lack of control caused you to hurt them? To hurt Dave, Karkat, or the girls?

You might be able to suppress your powers during your waking hours, but when you slept, you lost your control of them currently. The worry begins to burrow deep in your mind, because what if one day when that happened, they were with you or nearby, and you hurt them. You wouldn’t be able to forgive yourself for that. Even if it would be unintentional, you wouldn’t be able to forgive yourself for causing them harm. Thinking about it, you couldn’t forgive yourself for causing them or anyone harm, like this. What if you ended up hurting Jongkyu, Vin, Kay, or any of your friends or loved ones?

One hand sets down the remains of the frame and picture back down onto the dresser, while the other comes up to remove the glasses resting on your face. You close the temples of them shut, so you can hold them in your hand without struggle, and drop that hand to the side. Then, you bring your other hand, now free, up to your face and pinch the bridge of your nose as you squeeze your eyes shut.  You let out a shaky sigh before you talk to yourself a little, thinking aloud. “I’ve gotta do something about this.”

As much as you hated to think about it, you think you were going to have to come to terms with your powers again, that you were going to have to work with them and practice. You were going to have to remember things about it. 

Getting out of bed after calming the winds proves to be a bit of a struggle. You might have had control over your winds again, for now, but that didn’t particularly mean you had all of the energy to get up. Your energy lately had been drained for a variety of reasons, ranging from how down you’d been feeling lately, to the suffering and awakenings from nightmares, to your insomnia worsening again. If you hadn’t been forcing yourself to get out and do things lately, you’re almost certain you would’ve wasted many days away, laying in bed, wide awake but doing nothing.

You knew you needed to get up this time though, whether you liked it or not. It wasn’t just a matter of forcing yourself just for the sake of getting up, but actually needing to get out of bed. The damage needed to be surveyed and cleaned up, before anyone could get hurt by stepping in the area. So after fighting the struggle for a moment, you find it in you to force yourself out of bed. Except that you literally kind of force yourself out of bed, turning too quickly and jumping out of it.

The decision is one you come to regret. A rush that comes to your head in response to what you actually did, and find yourself feeling a little bit dizzy for a moment. You groan as it hits you, and turn to put your hands on the nightstand, you keep yourself up and steady until you can feel the dizziness begin to pass. Should’ve gotten out of bed slowly, you think, but at least no falling occurred and at least you still got the end result you wanted: you were finally, completely up.

Once you’ve found yourself stable again, you look up. Things were blurry, but you could still see that a bit of sun was peeking through the blinds. At least that told you it was daytime, though what time exactly, you didn’t know. But it was day, and that was a source of light. But thinking about a little, you’re not sure your eyes could quite handle sunlight yet, so you decide against opening your blinds to get some more light in your room.

Instead, since you were already by it, you turn the lamp that was sitting on your nightstand on. It was bright, so it’d light up the room well enough to look around, but it wouldn’t hurt your eyes too much. If you really wanted to look around your room and find what had fallen down though, you’d need your glasses, because your contacts were out and everything was fairly blurry to you, aside from things within close view. Thankfully, your glasses were in the nightstand drawer, so you grab those and throw them on.

You finally move away from the nightstand and your bed, and begin looking around. Looking at the wall closest to you, any of the pictures that had been hanging there still seemed to be up, surprisingly. They still hung on the nails on the wall, and the only thing off about them was that they were crooked from the wind. Well, at least that’s easy to fix. You look towards the bathroom door, before you remember that you closed it the night before. Well, at least the things in your bathroom were fairly safe from your winds. The walls around the bathroom seemed to be fairly okay, too, nothing have fallen and the things around it appearing to be okay.

It takes another moment of looking around before you finally look at your dresser, near the door. You’d had a few things on it that you couldn’t bring yourself to move out of the room, such as a few pictures. Things that helped you get ready for the day, things that pushed you forward a little when you were struggling.

Crash.

A crashing sound in your room is what finally pulls you from the clutches of a nightmare. Usually you woke up from a nightmare, itself, pushing you into a state of panic and jostling you awake. But this time, it was a noise.

It wasn’t any sort of good noise, either. It wasn’t the sounds of early morning, when the house began to wake -- it wasn’t any sort of other normal noise. Sadly, the noise was still one you’d become much too familiar with the past couple of months. One that came with the sudden surge in the strength of your powers. The first few days of that surge, your control of the wind had been completely out of whack. With the lack of control you’d had, your powers had become more responsive to your emotions, and you had no way of suppressing it, because you couldn’t remember how.

After some self-searching, unfortunate visits to memories of the game, and a little bit of practice, you’d finally remembered and learned how to keep them in check. Well, to an extent, at least. If a wind started up due to an intense burst of emotion, you’d been able to calm it, push it back. You’d learned how to keep it in check under your emotions for the most part, too. You’d gained... some control over them.

But there were times you still had no control over them. Such as the fact that the way you leaned to suppress it didn’t extend to your dreams and nightmares. It was an unfortunate thing, really, and it’d costed you a little bit of the belongings your room. You’d moved some things out, because there were some things you just couldn’t afford to risk, but other things, well, you had to have in there, or you couldn’t stand moving out.

You pull yourself from your thoughts for a moment, thinking about that. It would probably be good to assess this dreams damage. You sit up in your bed and sigh. The sigh comes out feeling like a cold breeze on your lips, and as you come to your senses a little, you come to realize that your breath was cold because the wind was still kicking -- you’d yet to calm them.

Deciding it would be best to get things under control before assessing the damage, you close your eyes, take a deep breath in, and hold it for a moment, and then very slowly exhale. You feel the winds calm a little. Once you’ve repeated the process two or three times, and gotten yourself focused, the wind in your room completely stops, and you can feel the warmth of your breath come back.

After John said he was okay with you coming over, that he trusted you, you had been up and out of bed pretty quick. It takes a little digging in the medicine cabinet to find the painkillers, but eventually, you find them. It was a bottle with a weeks worth of pills; you’re not sure how many he needed or for how long, but hopefully a weeks worth would do him well, if he was in bad shape.

Having decided already not to bother with changing to look presentable, since it was best to just get these to him as soon as possible, you just shove the bottle in your hoodie pocket. You didn’t think he would really care how you looked anyway, considering how he said he was doing himself.

Once you’ve made sure you had both the pills and your phone, you head back to the room with the transportalizer and you run back through the list your saved locations to find John’s. All it takes is a quick selection, a timer, and stepping onto the platform, and you’re off.