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mediumgayitalian · 29 days ago

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Step One: A Question

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The thing about vitakinesis is that it is intensely difficult, if not impossible, to perform on oneself.

There is a kind of separation between the conscious and unconscious mind, you see. The body, constantly sending signals, communicates mostly with the unconscious brain. The unconscious brain could even, honestly, be argued to perform the vast majority in function to keep the body alive. Very rarely are you aware that your heart is beating. Rarer still do you know your stomach acid boils food down to molecules. And never, do you notice, the split and pull of your cells.

The body is a very busy thing. And the unconscious mind is very good at taking that information, processing it, and storing it in the appropriate filing cabinets. A pinnacle of administrative excellence. The conscious mind is really only barely aware of what’s going on — not unlike most straight men. It certainly thinks it is in charge, but really can only handle so much before it cracks and rages and spirals down into a hole of despair fixed mainly by binge drinking and stress-induced amnesia.

All this to say that when Will places his hand gently on the strongest pulse point of his patients, he takes that grand, endless flow of informative signals from the body of another and interprets them in his own conscious mind. While certainly an overwhelming process to learn, it has become over time something like reading — unbelievably difficult in nuance to learn in infancy, but second nature in constant practice. His unconscious mind works merrily away on his own body, filling up those filing cabinets. His conscious mind flicks over someone else’s files before they’re tucked away. Simple.

The difficultly comes in when trying to decipher his own files. For all the ease in reading someone else’s, his own are tucked away — since his body, conscious mind, and unconscious mind are all connected, he cannot simply dip into a stream of information and filter out what he needs. He has to detangle all that shit. And anyone who has ever taken a brush to a pile of curly hair can tell you — that shit is hard! Honestly, impossible. He has no idea what’s going on in his own body other than it’s probably not bad.

Thank the gods for Gracie, or else he never would have gotten the chance to find out.

“It’s like grabbing fish from a moving river,” he tries, having never fished even one time in his life. Gracie looks at him with wide, nervous eyes. “A little noisy. A little scary. A little maybe-you-fall-in-and-drown-y. But mostly, you just gotta chill out and grab the first little fish that pops out at you.”

“I don’t want to drown,” worries Gracie, hunching even farther into herself, and wow, in hindsight, Will needs to work on his brain to mouth filter. Any word choice would have been better.

He pats her on the head. “Nah, kiddo, you’ll be fine. You healed that little bunny yesterday, remember?”

Instantly, the fear melts off her face, replaced with her narrowed eyes and scrunched up little nine-year-old nose. Gods, Will wants to squish her. She’s so godsdamn cute. Who authorized that? She certainly didn’t get it from their father.

“Damien should not have kicked it, even if it chewed up his underwear.”

“Yes. And then you did a great job healing the bruise you left on his nose. See? You can do this. You’re just all in your head.”

HA. There. Will can be normal. He just needs a second try.

Finally, she agrees, hesitantly reaching out her hand and wrapping it around Will’s elbow. He squeezes her free hand encouragingly, breathing through the little twinge in his chest as his body remembers the last time he did this, hand over Lee’s elbow, searching for his nod of approval.

“You got this, squirt. Close your eyes. Breathe out. Listen to the rush of the water, and when it’s not so loud, grab the first fish you see.”

Gracie closes her eyes, breathing slowly and leaning ever so slightly forward as a rush of information buzzes through her softly glowing hands. She scrunches her forehead, hands tightening — for her sake, Will tries to make his own vitals easier to read, but remembers quickly he has no way of doing that and abandons the idea — and twists her mouth the way she does when someone says something stupid at dinner and everything gets a little chaotic. Sweat beads on her forehead.

Will holds his breath.

One.

Two.

Three.

Four.

Five.

Her eyes fly open.

“Your heart rate went from 60 BPM to 90! I felt it!”

“Awesome!” he exclaims, holding up his hand for a high-five. “You got that fish right from the tail!”

Lord, he needs a new metaphor.

Regardless, the fear has completely fallen off Gracie’s frame. She bounces on the tips of her sparkly light-up sneakers, braids flopping all over the place.

“Again! Again! I wanna see if I can get your glucose levels!”

He snorts. “Knock yourself out, kid.” He blinks. “Or, well, maybe stop one step before that. Here. Have a Kit-Kat bar.”

She takes it, likely more because it’s chocolate and she’s nine than for its restoration abilities, but regardless. He sits back in his chair, reaching over for his clipboard and lazily running through some paperwork as she digs her nails into the crook of his elbow, cheering every time she gets a new reading.

“Your glucose reading is average!”

“Dope.”

“Your respiratory rate is within the expected range!”

“Love to hear it.”

“Your blood pressure has an abnormally high reading at 140 over 90!”

“That would be your older sister’s fault.”

So on and so forth. He keeps an eye on the time — from his own experience he knows that she can do fifteen, maybe twenty minutes of this before she hits the ground, and he would like to learn from Lee’s mistakes and stop her at fourteen — but mostly lets himself space out and his sister go ham. Absentmindedly, he watches her wide, missing-teeth grin, her fluttering hands, her bright green eyes. He can’t hold back a smile and wouldn’t anyway. He’s so freaking pumped to have another nerd in the house.

At the ten minute mark, he starts tuning back in, tapping her shoulder.

“Two more minutes,” he warns.

She pouts. “Aw. I wanted to see if I could find out what you had for lunch based on your blood sugar levels.”

“Girl, you were there.”

“Still!”

“Just — fill out this chart. Height, weight, resting heart rate, things like that. Practice.”

She does, scrawling it out in print worse than his — a little doctor in the making, he is going to melt — and more, flipping the page over to record every bit of information she gleaned from checking it over. He finds himself peeking over her shoulder, tilting his head in curiosity. Huh. His red blood cell count is a little high. He didn’t know that.

He never gets to know any of his stats. Chiron always says something about his obsessive anxiety disorder and some of the worst ADHD impulse decisions he has ever seen, blah blah blah. As if. He’s pretty much almost kind of sixteen years old. Geriatric, as far as demigods go. So it’s fine. He can find out. Plus, Chiron is a big fat exaggerater. So.

The timer on his watch beeps.

“One more minute,” Gracie begs. “I want to know how much water you have in you.”

The gears in Will’s brain don’t even turn. They spin like a test tube in a centrifuge.

“Not sure that’s entirely medically relevant,” Will says absentmindedly, and the faintest itch starts tickling the back of his throat, as if his infernal and nonsensical allergy is calculating the percent truth level in his words. The brain gears spin faster.

Now.

He’s not taking his own vitals. So. Technically, he is not breaking any rules. He’s not trying to steal his medical file from the Big House again. He’s not following Kayla around stretching out pleeeeeeeaaaaasse until she snaps, loses her shit, and shoots him in the shoulders. In all honesty, he didn’t even ask for all this. It just happened, really, it’s fate, and who is he to tempt Fate?

(Now. Is it unethical to maybe kinda sorta lightly manipulate his baby sister into letting him make questionable (but interesting!) medical experiments.

Perhaps.

But, honestly, so is training her in the medical arts at nine years old, so. Penny, pound, et cetera.)

He checks his watch. Time is up.

“Okay,” he says, gently peeling his sister’s hand off his elbow and holding it, steadying her as she sways a little (he checks. She is fine. All is well and mostly ethical). Her whining makes the corners of his mouth twitch. “Write down what you learned, okay? We can practice again another day.”

Gracie pouts. “Fine.”

She scribbles down everything she can remember, far out-writing the chart’s answer boxes, then dashes off (after several Kit-Kats and also an apple, ‘cus Will’s healthy like that) to play. Will waits a heroic seven seconds before snatching the paper up and reading it with more care and interest than he’s ever read anything in his life.

“Oh ho ho ho,” he mutters to himself, well aware he sounds like a villain in an eighties cartoon and choosing to ignore it, “oh, the things I can do…”

Not all of it is new information. Height. Weight. Vibe (which is not part of the chart, but he appreciates Gracie’s rating of ‘pretty solid’ regardless). Resting heart rate (average). Blood pressure (bad).

But GCI. Red blood cell count. Total water content, gods above.

The gears finally slow to a stop. A question floats to the very forefront of his mind, in Times New Roman, 12 point, stark black. The Mrs. Rightman in his head cheers.

He carefully folds the paper. He sticks it in his lab coat pocket. He grins.

And he runs to find the one person in camp who can help him with phase two.

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