(no subject)

[11calls]

This, whatever was happening with Navi had been going on for a long time. Too long, and they’d passed through too many miles for it to be simply another anomaly that was affecting Them. Slowly, almost incrementally there had been changes to those who had teenage minds still. The signs had been slight when they’d started and they were ones that seemed pretty normal given what happened when they traveled through space. Alex had lost some weight (not that much but definitely equal to how bad she was during the whole not sleeping, not eating, crazy and paranoid version of herself) at first, and then somehow she was tripping over any pant that wasn’t a legging. While she was normally the first person to jump to conclusions with the smallest amount of data possible (even if she was more right than she was wrong) this time Alex filled the space around the questions with much smaller and more rational things: laundry grows sometimes, she hasn’t been hungry, and all of that.

But when there was finally a sign that Alex could no longer deny it was both something with the insignificance of a single atom but with all of the energy of the big bang. Alex had been sitting in one of the chairs in the library and she’d been reading a book for the third time. No matter how many times the pages had been run over by nervous fingernails or the book had been used by someone who had no respect for it, it was still possible to get a papercut from the edges. Getting one with a hiss, the immediate response was to put it into her mouth to suck as if it would somehow make it better. But as she raised her hand, there was something that was entirely missing.

During one (of thousands) of the attempts that Alex had made with cooking, where her hand and index finger met had been accidentally dragged over the top of a hot oven. It wasn’t a particularly bad burn, and it had faded into a rather unremarkable scar on the back of her hand. It’d just been one of the sorts of injuries that people accrue over the course of a lifetime, even if it had only been thirty years or so. But it was gone. Watching the thin beads of blood form into a line that ran across the back of her hand (chaos of the universe and all of that) only cemented that the scar had disappeared.

In a bit of a panic, Alex shoved the sleeves of the sweater that she was wearing almost to her elbows, and yeah there were things missing there as well. How often, really, does one actually look at their skin with an eye towards inspection? Tiny differences, each just slight enough that taking off her makeup at the end of the night or applying eyeliner didn’t inspire any sort of panic in her. As a frog in a preverbal bucket of water that was slowly raising its temperature didn’t notice neither did one Alex Reagan. Racing down to her room and standing in front of the mirror in the bathroom, she just stood there, finally noticing the things that had happened and were still in the process of happening. Pulling up her sweater and turning to one side, Alex couldn’t scream as she realized that the tattoo that ran along her ribs was much darker than it had been. It was much darker than it should be, not touched by the time since she’d first snuck into a tattoo shop in Vancouver to get it against her mother’s wishes.

Alex panic only increases more, questions of how and why and what racing along the hamster wheel inside her head. There was another question of course, but her other questions swirled around it like the spiraling arm of a hurricane: what does all of this mean?