#ajco stuff

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It could have been a dream.

It felt more like a yawn, at first; if it were possible to yawn inside your chest.  Muscles twitching, tightening in readiness and shorting his breath, then a half-real feeling of opening out – impossibility framed in diverted sensation, as his mind scrambled to make some sort of sense from the synesthetic chaos that seemed to be unfurling beneath his heart.

And then it spread.  He could feel it, almost a contour-line, the lip of the yawning void that bloomed outwards through his body with terrifying ease, until it washed and pressed up against every edge of him.  Until he might have been nothing more than an outline, his skin shivering and tensing and so alive with the near-agony of a strange anticipation; a frantic, hollow ache that had him clutching at his own arms, desperate to feel the bones and muscle still underneath, to assure his panic-tossed mind that he was here, he was solid.

It didn’t last long, this first time.  A couple of moments, a few heightened heartbeats that seemed to echo between his ribs – and then the sensation fell back, folding closed, and he was left shaking and trying to get his breathing back under control, curling and uncurling his fingers until the tingling went away.  Fading, like the nightmare it might have been; born of exhaustion, or stress, or any of a dozen reasons.

It could have been a dream.

-

It wasn’t.

-

How did you tell if you were having a heart attack?

S_R bit back on a groan as he pushed through the door to the Mothermen’s quarters, and immediately slumped against the wall inside, all the angry determination draining out of his stance as the door closed on the FAC behind him.  He was sweating, beneath the suddenly-tight pressure of his damned Citizen’s clothes, and he managed to stumble over to the small locker in front of the shower cubicle, which tended to get used as a general dumping ground for misc.  Random items went scattering as he swept them aside and sat down heavily, grabbing onto his knees hard as he tried to steady his breathing.

He vaguely remembered Health and Hygiene films, droning on as they listed symptoms to watch out for, and a tiny part of his mind that was still calm noted with grim irritation that he wasn’t entirely sure which list he should be trying to remember.  Nothing official he’d ever encountered had ever bothered with the specifics of his sort of physiology.  Because that would be too fucking easy, wouldn’t it?

There was no other sound in the room except his own rapid breathing, so either R_V was absent or sufficiently sedated by Agri-swill that his usual nighttime rattlings had actually quieted, and S_R gave up.  Buttons slid and skidded under his shaking fingers as he undid the waistcoat and the shirt beneath, wrenching the sudden-noose of his tie aside, and yanked off his gloves.  The air of the room was cool against his bared fingers as he pressed them to his chest, skimming across the skin in case there was going to be something there, something he could actually feel to explain the bizarre sensation writhing beneath – but all he encountered was skin, and hair, and the rough-smooth lines of his pectoral scars.

Nothing moving underneath.

Which was ridic– of course there wouldn’t be.  What the hell was he thinking?

What was he thinking?

Focus.  Calm the fuck down.

His heart was racing, and his breathing was going quickly enough to add a flush of lightheadedness, but it felt more like panic than anything else.  His headache hammered, but remembering a day he hadn’t ended with some variation on that recently was… difficult, even when he hadn’t been playing nice with Citizens for hours.  And the churning in his stomach was most likely the results of over-indulgence in the fermented.

So.  So.  There was… this.  He pressed his hand to his chest again, closing his eyes as he tried to centre it over the strange feeling there.  It didn’t… hurt.  Not really.  A shivering, fluttering strangeness beneath his ribs, a tension, like a long-idle muscle needing release.  Like something was shifting, disquieted, but the actual bone-and-flesh feel of him under his fingers was quite solid.

Okay.  Okay.

He probably wasn’t having a heart attack.  And he sure as hell wasn’t going to go whinging to the aberrant or the vet about… whatever this was.  Stress, maybe.  The fact he’d hardly slept more than a few hours a night for several months.  This whole place, and it’s endless fucking baggage and minefields of history, and whatever the fuck was going on with Halstead and C_K…

...who would probably be back soon.  Who he didn’t exactly want to find him sitting half naked on a box, prodding himself in the sternum.  Certainly not right now.

S_R groaned quietly as he levered himself upright and lurched towards the door to his bedroom.

It could wait until tomorrow.  Everything could wait until tomorrow.