Eren moves in a haze. The pills work, so much so that he convinces himself he is just crazy after the effects first set it. He wasn’t supposed to take it in the morning, but the suffocating anxiety that threatened to rip him apart was too much to bear. He was a mess at breakfast. He was shaking, hyperventilating, his eyes were wild, and he soaked himself through with sweat before walking out the door.

  It took Mom and Dad both nearly force-feeding him the medication. At first he refused. He wanted to be alert and aware of everything around him. He didn’t want to be sedated and complacent, but eventually he gave in.

  It’s perfect. Not a single lick of anxiety all day. He barely felt it when he was slammed into a locker and punched in the stomach on his way to lunch. An unexpected side effect but a welcome one.

  Eren has never touched drugs or alcohol before, but he imagines this is what being crossfaded feels like. The whole world swirls around him. Everything is fuzzy. He can talk fine, mostly. He can think more or less straight, but it’s all very relaxing. He can barely feel the cold air as it blows his hair into his face at a very slow PE, and that's perfect.

  The effects start to wear off by AP lit, so he takes another one—he doesn’t want to crash after all, better more than less, right? He doesn’t want the anxiety to tear him apart again, not today. This is the first time in what feels like months, in what has been months, that he feels adjacently close to normal.

  He has enough medicine to get him through to his visit with the psychiatrist, and that will have to do. These pills are dangerous though, he can already feel that they’ll be addicting.

  Maybe it isn’t the pills that are addicting, but instead the fact that it makes him not care about anything. He can look people in the eye and walk without worrying about everyone who watches him. Hell, he doesn’t even notice Mrs. Anderson has a sub until halfway through the class. That is the kind of not caring he lives for.

  Eren narrows his eyes.

  Did the sub say why Mrs. Anderson is absent? He doesn’t think so, and he doesn’t care—it’s great. He doesn’t even care about the crow tapping on the window.

  At this point, he figures he is crazy. None of the other students care about the crow, which is basically impossible if you think about it. Not a single student all period, nor the sub would be annoyed at a crow loudly tapping on the classroom window? Not a single comment about it? No one even looks at it as its beak crashes so hard into the window it practically rattles the whole room? It has to be fake, some hallucination. The sedatives don’t stop it, but it makes him not care, which is more than alright with him.

  Sophie tries to talk to him in the halls. She says something about needing to go home early today, that she has a really bad headache, and that she wants to take care of it before the match today.

  Eren ignores her mostly, which pisses her off. She calls him... something, probably a stupid name, before the reality of the conversation clicks into place.

  “You aren’t listening to me...”

  “No, I wasn’t sorry. I was zoned out. What’s up?”

  “How many of those pills have you taken?”

  “What? Why does it matter? It is enough not to lose my mind. So that should be good, right?”

  “No, it’s not good. You’re like a zombie! I don’t like this.”

  “Would you rather I be curled up into a ball on the ground crying about cameras in the air vents?”

  Sophie frowns and crosses her arms. “I’m just worried about you...”

  “I’m fine.” Eren rolls his eyes, though they stop halfway through the gesture as he watches a crow fly and land on the roof above Sophie.

  “Hey, can you see that bird?” Eren points.

  Sophie huffs and turns around, gesturing broadly with her hands. “The crow? Yeah. I see it.”

  “Really?” Eren huffs. “Guess that one’s real.”

  “I need to go home. Can you walk me?”

  “What? Why?”

  “Because my head hurts. I think I’m coming down with a fever, which would really suck before my match. Mom said she could make me some soup...”

  “I still have other classes. You can go home yourself, right? You’ve done it before.”

  “But I don’t want to! I’m nervous. What if something happens?”

  “Why would something happen?”

  “I don’t know! I have this... this feeling, this feeling that something bad will happen.”

  “You are starting to sound like me! Want one of the sedatives?”

  “No, I don’t want a sedative, I want you to walk home with me... please?”

  Eren rolls his eyes again. He’s feeling great, and this is the first time he felt like he could actually start making up for his failing grades. Sophie will be fine. She’s stronger than him, probably more intelligent than him too. She doesn’t look sick at all, and a little bad feeling isn’t anything to worry about. Eren has had bad feelings for weeks, and it turns out he was just clinically insane. No biggie.

  “You’ll be fine. I have to go to my next class. Call me or something if something happens, and I’ll be right over.”

  “You’re being a dick,” Sophie huffs and turns, crumpling up her doctor’s note as she leaves.

  Eren grumbles. He didn’t mean to tell her off like that—he’s just too lost in his own world. He’ll have to pick her up something on the way home. After all, she is already so far away, and it would be dangerous to try and run after her to catch up in his current state. Yeah, after school. He’ll make it up to her after school.

  ***

  The way home... How does he get home again? He took another pill at the end of class, just to be safe. This is usually when his anxiety spikes, and the feeling of people watching him are at their worst, but with the medication in his system the usual wave of near-paralysis is absent, and he’s desperate to hold on to that feeling.

  Eren stumbles off campus, trying to hold in his giggling as he thinks about how stupid he probably looks. Luckily, the only thing watching him are his bird friends. If they’re angry about going hungry yesterday they don’t show it. They must really like him, he thinks, even if some of them are hallucinations. They even follow him all the way to the gas station where he picks up two cups of hot cocoa—both being for Sophie of course, as an apology.

  She was really worried about him the other day, and today he totally blew her off because he was high on medication. The guilt tugs at his stomach, but not for very long—those pills are damn good.

  “Woah, you guys sure have a lot of friends. I don’t think I have that many peanuts.” Eren chuckles, noting the gathered flock on the roof of his house. One of them tap tap taps his window, hungry for peanuts. Or is that one of the fake ones? Who knows.

  “I’m coming, I’m coming!” Eren shakes his head as he struggles to open the door to get inside. It’s hard to do with both hands full, let alone both hands full while he’s also high.

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  Eventually he manages, letting himself in.

  “Sophie! I got you something!” he calls out into the house.

  Eren stumbles into the kitchen, the smell of soup and propane meeting his nose. Mom must have been getting it ready for Sophie. She did say she had a headache. Maybe she had a fever? In that case he should bring up the cocoa to her himself. He doesn’t want to make her come all the way down stairs, or make mom take an extra trip once the soup is done.

  Tap tap tap

  “Yeah, I’ll feed you in a second!” Eren shouts to the crows, bumping his way into Sophie’s door.

  “Hey! I got you something. Open up.”

  He waits a minute, listening to the tap tap tap on his bedroom window.

  She must be tired, but then again, he did make her walk home by herself, in the cold, with a fever.

  Shit, she’s probably feeling awful then.

  Using his brain this time, Eren sets one cup down and opens her door, letting it swing open, though it bounces off of something halfway and nearly closes itself on him, so he sticks his foot in to prevent that before picking up the cup from the floor.

  Eren pauses, but he doesn’t really know why. He wants to continue into Sophie’s room, but he can’t—his legs won’t obey him.

  He frowns, annoyed with his body’s inability to listen to his otherwise simple commands. He walked all the way here just fine. Maybe this is a side effect of the medication?

  He looks down at his feet, wondering what all the fuss is about.

  There doesn’t seem to be any reason for his stopping. So why wouldn’t he go?

  With a groan, he looks over to Sophie in her bed.

  Something is... wrong about it. He can’t place it, but she doesn’t look right.

  “Shit Soph, are you okay? You look like crap,” he chuckles, trying to force his leg to step into her room, but it still won’t obey him.

  His stomach turns, bile rises in his throat and before he has time to react he spews a fountain of vomit into his sister’s room, the chunky fluid soaking into her carpet, joining the stale air.

  Something is wrong. Eren's conscious mind can’t quite place it yet but something deep in his subconscious can. A primal kind of wrongness, something baked deep into the animal side of his brain is telling him something isn’t right.

  “Hey... hey Sophie, I...”

  Tap tap tap

  Eren turns his attention back to his door. It’s open. That isn’t right...

  His parents never go into his room.

  A piece of paper drifts down the hallway, the piece of paper he had set up this morning, just in case.

  Setting the cocoa down on the ground again, Eren approaches his bedroom, letting the door swing open the rest of the way.

  His bed is made, his desk is neat, his clothes are in their usual piles, his closed curtains flutter, and a crow continues to tap tap tap on his window.

  Everything seems in order, and he almost turns back to Sophie’s room when he notices it.

  The curtains are fluttering...

  Eren steps towards the window, and pulls the curtains away, revealing a small crack in the window, where air lets itself in.

  Closing the window, Eren returns to Sophie’s doorway and picks up the cups of cocoa from the ground.

  They get halfway into the air before the bottoms fall from both cups and splash into the carpet, spraying the hot liquid over his already saturated and soaked shoes.

  “Damnit,” Eren curses.

  Soaked shoes? Why are his shoes wet? It hadn’t been raining, and it hadn’t snowed yet. Better yet, why did the cups break?

  Eren holds one of the broken cups up to his eyes, trying hard to focus his vision in the haze of the drugs.

  They are soaked through, so much so that the bottoms fell out.

  The rich scent of copper fills his nostrils as he struggles to bring the cup closer.

  In fact, everything smells like copper.

  Eren lowers his gaze to his feet once again, straining against the effect of the drugs to make sense of what’s going on.

  Bile rises in his throat again as he sees it.

  Blood soaks into the carpet, pooling from something behind the door. His shoes splash through it. His body freezes, and he begins to shake.

  This can’t be real. None of this can be real.

  Eren fumbles for his phone, taking it out and snapping a picture of the room. He struggles to click through to the gallery to see if any of what his eyes are seeing is real, but the phone slips from his hands. It’s like he is wearing gloves or something, his fingers are too numb—the drugs.

  Eren falls to his knees, soaking his pants through with warm blood. He fumbles through the mess, grabbing his phone but his fingers are too saturated to use the screen.

  He can barely see, tears stream from his eyes, bile rises again and he vomits hard, his body convulsing in time with the burning in his throat, his eyes, and his nose. The scent of copper is so strong he can taste it, making him vomit again.

  He tries to pull himself up, pull himself away, he needs to call 911, he needs to do something.

  Eren panics, fumbling around on the ground until his hand touches something cold.

  His eyes struggle to find the source, his phone?

  A sob catches as his fingers clutch at cold, gray skin. His index finger finds a long gash where his mother’s throat should have been. Her hollow eyes stare up at him, empty, reflecting himself in their dead gaze, along with another figure towering behind him.

  This isn’t real—none of this is real. This is his imagination. He’s having another episode. It’s all fake. It has to be.

  Eren screams, but it’s cut short as a massive gloved hand presses itself into his mouth. Spit and bile fly around the black leather. He tries to tear his head away but before he can muster any further strength another arm grips at his chest and pulls him upright.

  His voice is muffled, so instead he bites—hard. He forces his jaw to grind down until the hand tears away. Eren sucks in a breath to bellow out a cry for help, but the air is driven from his lungs as a fist crashes into his stomach, sending the last remnants of stomach acid up into his shirt along with a trace of blood.

  The hand again grabs his mouth, though this time puts something inside it. Eren bites but the hand doesn’t release this time. He tries to kick but another set of arms grab his legs. He swings wildly in the air, his fist connecting with something solid. A crack rings out in the room, and a man grunts, but their grip holds firm, and Eren’s hand pulses with excruciating pain.

  “Get him out of here,” a voice calls from somewhere in the hall—a voice Eren doesn’t know.

  He tries to look backward, but a fist cracks against his face. His vision fills with stars, his head thumps in time with his beating heart. Blood fills the cloth in his mouth along with fragments of a tooth he is forced to swallow along with mouthfuls of blood.

  When his eyes reopen, he is pulled away from Sophie’s room. He tries to call her name, call his moms name, anyone’s name, but they don’t respond. Sophie doesn’t move from her bed, his mom doesn’t move from the floor, not even as more men appear to flow through the space, pouring gasoline over their bodies.

  Eren is dragged through his house, kicking and screaming. He watches as dozens of men rummage through his father’s things, his mother’s purse, and his sister’s school bag.

  He screams at them to stop, to put their stuff away, to not touch their things. But the men don’t listen, they can’t hear him, or if they can they ignore him.

  Mom’s soup bubbles over. The gas is on the other burners. The room reeks of propane.

  Eren is hauled into the garage. He struggles to see where he’s being taken when his eyes land on his father's car, and his father in the driver's seat, A star-shaped hole in the place his eye should be. The black leather is soaked through with red. He looks like he is waking up from a nightmare, one eye wide, mouth agape.

  The black Suburban waits parked next to his dad’s car. Its trunk is open, revealing a metal-lined interior compartment and another body, a corpse.

  Men remove the corpse from the back of the suburban; Black hair, blue eyes, pale skin with freckles, the same lithe build. It’s identical to Eren’s own body, the sight of it shakes him to his core. It conjures up a sensation he can’t place words to, not even as they haul it into the living room to be doused with gasoline along with the hardwood floors.

  “Don’t do this!” Eren screams, muffled by the blood he keeps having to swallow. Another punch comes down hard on his head, enough to stun him.

  The pressure of the men holding him is gone, replaced by the sickening feeling of falling only a short distance, and soon everything is replaced with pain and darkness.

  The sound his body makes as it smacks into the cold metal echoes loudly in his ears. His skull rattles, and his ears ring. The suburban's trunk door closes, and the engine starts.

  He can’t see anything. It’s pitch black. He can feel the vehicle move, and he is helpless to stop it as his body is tossed around in the back like a ragdoll.

  Eren screams. He screams as loud as he can, he screams until his ears ring, he screams until his voice is raw, he screams until the sounds of a muffled explosion somewhere impossibly far away deafen him—then, all he can do is sob.