#and her routine checkup turned into: hey yeah I think your cat should be Medicated

[witchcraftingboop]

My cat potentially getting on antidepressants and anxiety medications before I do was not on my 2024 bingo card

[transitverse]

Eggshells: Chapter 6

WORDS: 1104 CHAPTERS: 6/9 CHARACTERS: Aubrey, Kaveh CONTENT WARNINGS: Implied past abuse

Soundtrack: Clear Honey - Jetty Bones

You're sitting across from Aubrey when she runs out of painkillers.

You glance at her from the other side of the couch, because the rattling of the bottle sounds distinctly hollow; she upturns it completely, and the last two pills fall into her palm. You hear her swear under her breath as she discards the bottle and reaches for the glass sitting on the end table.

"You got through all of those already?"

"Yeah." Aubrey shoots you a look as she takes a sip of water and pops the pills into her mouth. Don’t question me, it says. But you have to, when the only way she could have burnt through them so fast is by maxing out her doses every day for the past week.

"Has it been bothering you that much? After this long?"

She doesn't answer. She turns her gaze away, swallows, and takes another sip of water to chase it all down.

"Aubrey?"

"No," she mumbles, still looking at the TV. You wait for a further explanation; she fails to deliver.

"So what's it for?" More silence. "Aubrey?"

"It's--other stuff, okay?" she snaps back, taking another swig of water like it'll excuse her from having to talk.

"What other stuff?" And nothing. God, if she's developing a dependency on top of everything else-- "Aubrey--"

"It's nothing. It's just... pain. It happens all the time."

"What pain?"

"I don't know, just, like, pain. Generally." She looks visibly distressed, now, as she puts her water back down on the table and sinks lower into her blanket pile. "I'm fine. Don't worry about it. You can't fix it."

"How do you know that?"

"Because it happened a long time ago, and you can't change that."

"Aubrey, what happened a long time ago?"

"Stop it." She shrinks into the corner of the couch and pulls the blanket up around the lower half of her face; though it muffles her voice, you can still hear it crack. "Stop asking about it."

The sudden fear in her voice trips you, and you stop, blinking. You didn't realise it was such a sensitive topic. Perhaps you should have.

"Okay. Okay. I'm sorry." You let the apology hang in the air for a minute, leaving her time to absorb it and for the tension to dissipate. It's not worth pursuing the past when your concern, right now, is her present state, and you don’t know that you’ll glean anything meaningful from interrogating her about her history. Once you feel like she's had enough time to cool off, you test the water with another, hopefully-less-invasive question.

"You said this happens all the time?" She refuses to look at you, and doesn't move, but reluctantly murmurs an answer.

"...Yeah."

"Is it--what is it? Where is it?"

"It's... everywhere. Anywhere. It moves. I don't know."

"Is there anything else that helps?"

"I guess, sometimes--If it's a specific place, then heat, or ice, or..." She trails off, shrugging her shoulders. "Hard to do that when it's all over."

"Right." You take a moment, again, to process everything. You wish you’d known. There was no way you could have, but you feel a vague, nagging sense of guilt nonetheless. "Well, I'll... grab you some painkillers when I go out. They won't be as strong as the prescription stuff, though. I'd say go back to medical and ask for more, but they'll probably start poking around and doing a bunch of tests if they think it's your side still giving you grief." And you don't need any kind of response from her to know that that is completely out of the question.

You run a hand back over your hair and sigh. "I think you should... still talk to the doctors, though. I know you don't like them," you add hastily when you see the look on her face, "But they might be able to come up with something. A long-term plan."

She continues to eye you warily. She looks like she wants to say something--but, ultimately, she doesn't; she uncurls just slightly and pulls the blanket back down from her face.

"Yeah. Sure. Maybe."

"I'm just saying, you... you shouldn't have to live in pain all the time. I mean-- Jesus, have you been coming to work like this?"

"I can still do my job." She spits the words out and scowls at you, but there's a hint of that all-too-familiar desperation in her voice. "It doesn't get in my way, if that's what you're implying."

"I’m not. But it's not about whether you can. It's about whether you should. And you shouldn't. You shouldn't have to." You turn your whole body towards her, now, and you'd put a hand on her shoulder if you didn't think she'd break your arm for trying. "There's ways we can manage this. I don't want you showing up every day and having to be on your feet for ten hours when you're hurting the whole time. That's not fair to you."

She gives you another look, but this one falls somewhere between surprise and confusion, like you're proposing a completely alien concept to her.

"Just give it some thought, okay?" you continue, when she remains silent. "I won't make you do anything, but I'm--I'm worried about you. You have a lot going on. If there's anything that might make your life easier right now--and this might--I think it's worth seriously considering it."

Aubrey glances away, shrugs, and then nods slightly.

"Sure. I'll think about it."

"Okay. I'm sorry I got pushy with the questions a minute ago."

"It's... fine." She shakes her head and shrugs again. "If they know, they--they won't stop me from going back to work, right?"

"No." Your answer comes quick and decisive. "You're not the first person to turn up with chronic pain. Plus, you said yourself, you've already proven you can still do your job, and I can vouch for that. Don't worry." You get a little nod in response, and Aubrey sinks down against the back of the couch, laying herself flat with her head propped up against the pillows.

"I'm so sick of being stuck here."

"I know. I’m sorry. I mean, I do have to go to the store, if you wanna get out just for a half hour. If you’re feeling up to it."

"I don't. That's the worst part." She laughs defeatedly and rakes her fingers down her face. "My legs hurt. Everything hurts."

"Maybe next time, then." You reach out and lay a hand on her shoulder--successfully, without her snapping your wrist like a twig in response. She closes her eyes and sighs.

"Yeah. Next time." 

***

Aside from a few bumps here and there, the rest of Aubrey's stay passes by relatively uneventfully. You take her back for a checkup ten days after her discharge; she's tense in the waiting room, but the nurse gives her the all clear and you're in and out again within minutes, much to Aubrey's relief. 

Your messages to her from work, letting her know you're still alive, become a simple part of your routine. She's steadily regaining her mobility. She stops wincing when she bends down; trips down to the laundromat to get her out of the apartment for a few minutes turn into short walks to the convenience store. She's iffy with dogs, you learn, as she eyes a big, clumsy-looking mutt passing by on the sidewalk, only to spend five minutes enthralled by a friendly neighbourhood cat that catches her attention on the walk home.

You still find her crying, some nights, but you learn to take it in stride.. She offers no explanation and you don't ask for one. A half hour spent soothing her so that she knows, for once, that someone is there for her is worth the sleep interruption that leaves you yawning at work the next day.

Though there are no further major incidents, you do continue to be concerned about her. It's hard not to be, when she's on the defensive at any perceived slight, or always expecting you to be angry at her, or paranoid about her absence at work and whether or not they'll take her back. You quietly hope that her impending psych assessment flags up her issues so that they can be addressed, properly, by someone who's actually equipped to do so. This is way out of your depth. You want her to get help. You want her to thrive here, not just scrape by, isolated and grappling with her demons alone.

Happy. You want her to be happy. She’s suffered enough in life. It’s time that changed. But she needs more than you have to give.

There are still days when she wakes up in pain, too, and they're harder to manage without her prescription meds, but the two of you do your best. Sometimes, it gets better; others, it lingers, despite your efforts. All you can do is keep the OTC pills coming and make sure there’s always an ice pack or heat pad ready to go.

(She admits, here, the one thing she misses about life with gangs: she never had any trouble getting hold of strong painkillers.)

When you return home from the gym one night, you almost bump into Aubrey in the hallway. She's got a mug of coffee in one hand and a snack bar in the other, a chunk of it already bitten off and still hanging between her teeth.

"Hey," you greet her, as you slide your sneakers off. "You good?"

"Mhm." She nods, quickly chews through her mouthful and swallows. "Yeah, I was just--just watching something."

"Watching what?"

"It's an old movie. Some animated thing." She looks… embarrassed? Uncomfortable, in some way, but it's hard to tell exactly how. "I used to… watch it a lot when I was a kid. I can turn it off, if you want to put something else on."

"No, no, it's fine," you assure her. "You carry on. There's nothing I wanted to watch. TV's all yours." She perks up, just a little bit, and wastes no time returning to the living room. You hear the TV start up again as you go about getting a glass of water for yourself; voices in a language you can't understand.

Curious, now, you exit the kitchen and lean against the living room doorway. You don't recognise the movie playing at all; it's not reminiscent of any of the mainstream animation studios you have a crude knowledge of through cultural osmosis. You're still no closer to placing the language, either, as you watch a woman in armour kneel before another that you'd guess is royalty. You can make out the subtitles clearly.

-And you would be?

-Your champion, Your Grace.  

"What is this?" you ask, as you slide into place on the couch beside an enraptured Aubrey.

"Knight Saviour Luna," she answers, after a moment, looking kind of sheepish. "I know it's tacky, but it's… I don't know. I like it."

"I've never even heard of it. How old is it?"

"2043. It's Serbian, actually, too, so it never got a ton of publicity in the UCAS." Well, there's the language mystery solved.

"How'd you find it?

Aubrey pauses, then shrugs. "We had a lot of immigrants living locally who ran their own shops. They used to import stuff like this. Then I got the--the cyberdeck, when I was older, and it's easy to dredge this stuff up on the Matrix, if you know what you're looking for. It’s not like I had anything better to do.”

“Huh.�� Animation’s not your thing, but you’d be lying if you said you weren’t at least a little bit interested in what’s going on on the screen right now. It obviously didn’t have a huge budget--the animation gets choppy in places, and there’s some very questionably-drawn backgrounds--but in a world choked by a handful of megacorps and their subsidiaries regurgitating the same repackaged visual media over and over, it’s at least a refreshing change of pace.

At the end, when the war is over, the knight and the princess stand on the balcony of the reconstructed palace. The knight takes the princess’ hand and kisses it softly, smiles on both their faces.