Title: Slipping Through the Cracks
Author: Harper Kingsley
Character: Franz Caulder/Ryan Wilder, Dr. Pamela Werth, Nicole Carson
Genre: mm
Rating: mature
Summary: Kid Nitro went to sleep in his own bed, and woke up on another Earth in the body of an alternate Franz Caulder. It’s a world without metabilities, which is jarring enough, but it’s also a world where Other-Franz is a mental patient grappling with some serious problems.
Leave a comment at the “Hop Against Homophobia and Transphobia” post and receive a PDF copy of the complete story after the hop.
***
Sleep had become one of his havens in this new world. Sleep was the place he went when he simply couldn’t handle anymore and he needed to get away for a little while.
To fall into a dream and feel safe and warm at home. He was thankfully free of nightmares. All he got to see night after night were the people he loved and the city he’d vowed to protect. It made it hard to wake up in the morning and face reality.
Franz was fitting into this new life uncomfortably well. He thought sometimes that maybe he was losing himself–had been losing himself this entire time–and simply hadn’t noticed.
He pulled his hoodie tight around himself and curled up on his bed. He could still see daylight outside his window, but he didn’t care. He felt exhausted, his body heavy and ungainly and his eyes scratchy so he blink-blinked them until suddenly they seemed to stay closed on their own.
Sleep felt like the easiest thing in the world.
Waking up was hell. He felt like he was being ripped out of the arms of his loved ones and dragged kicking and screaming into a world that was too bright, too harsh, where even the things that weren’t supposed to hurt made him feel beaten and small.
His mouth was dry and tasted awful. His skin felt pulled so tight that every movement he made was nearly painful. When he climbed off the bed he stumbled and nearly fell, his knees trying to fold up under him.
He made it to the bathroom and the sink, where he hurriedly rinsed out his dry mouth and drank five handfuls of water before saying “Fuck it,” and stuck his mouth right under the tap. He drank and drank until he finally had to stop, not because his tongue felt any less dry, but because his stomach felt stretched and he seriously worried about suffocating.
Then he peed for a worryingly long time, and his urine was dark and cloudy yellow and he wondered if there might be something seriously wrong with him. Would he even know if his kidneys were shutting down?
“This place is driving me crazy,” he said, slathering toothpaste on his toothbrush. His mouth still tasted horrible, though it wasn’t as bad as when he woke up.
He brushed his teeth and there was a little blood and he added it to his list of things to ask the doctors. The last thing he wanted was for the medication he didn’t really need to make his teeth all fall out.
At least it was something he could use as proof to show himself that none of this was real and he didn’t belong here. Other-Franz would have been hardened to the drug combination, yet here he was reacting badly.
He needed to switch back. He *needed* to go home.
It felt natural to pull his hood up over his head. If he’d had some goggles or something to hide his eyes, he would have worn them too. Walking around with his face uncovered was unnatural and strange. He felt exposed.
Breakfast was spent with Nicole again. She had become his de facto friend and he wasn’t fighting it. Even when she was being her most acerbic, she always seemed glad to see him when he came in. Even if it was only because he gave her someone to bitch at. He didn’t mind listening to her angry babble, not when it was so easy to see that she was on the raggedy edge of something.
Terrible things had happened to her, the kinds of things that he didn’t even want to imagine, and she’d been damaged by them. Yet she still got up each day and she still found things to be passionate about. He had to give her respect for that.
From what he understood, the things that had seen her locked up in this place were the kinds of things people wrote horror stories about. Her family had screwed her over in their attempts to change everything about her from her sexuality to the clothes she wore. Like being a dress up doll was going to make it better when they were killing *her* to make her into someone they could love better.
It made him wish that Nigel was here, because Nigel didn’t take any kind of crap and he always knew the right thing to say. Franz just had to stumble around figuring things out for himself. Badly.
“Hey playa,” Nicole caroled when he approached the table with his tray. She gave him a smile that stretched across her whole face like Gumby and there was a disturbing amount of sparkle in her eyes.
“Good morning,” he said cautiously. “You seem really cheerful this morning.”
“They gave me some of the new stuff. New stuff. Its like fucking a rainbow with my brain. I don’t know why they never gave me this before. It’s complete assballs, dude. I feel like if I wanted it enough I could totally fly. *I believe I can fly*,” she sang, tossing her head back and forth.
Franz took a careful bite of his eggs, chewing slowly to keep his mouth from hurting. “Please don’t try to fly. Or if you have to try, follow the rules of people taking acid or shrooms for the first time: Fire is hot. The ground is hard. Water is wet and can’t be breathed. And if you absolutely have to fly, test it out from the ground first.”
“You are a major buzzkill. Seriously, you sucked the fun out of the room so fast I think you gave me herpes.”
“Hm.” Franz opened his juice box and took a sip when really his dry mouth wanted him to suck the whole thing down in one go. It seemed that it was going to be another one of *those* days with Nicole.
He buttered his toast and settled in to be the silent listener. If he said anything she didn’t like, he would be listening to a spittle-flying rant. Better to be quiet and eat his breakfast, never mind that he had very little appetite and had to force nearly every bite.
He was surviving this place, he was. One day at a time he was making it through and it wasn’t as horrible as he’d imagined it would be. There was no shock therapy at least and the food wasn’t too bad.
Franz calmly ate his toast and half-listened to Nicole. She had a habit of dropping information he could use in the flow of her conversation.
TBC…
[table “24” not found /]
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