A/N: Hugs and kisses to everybody who left a review; you guys are the best. Seriously, it was so awesome getting positive feedback on something I wasn't sure if I had done right! So again, thank you thank you thank you, darlings, for giving me the motivation to get this updated faster than I have in a long time. You are all WONDERFUL and you don't know how much it means to me to hear that you guys are reading, and even better, LIKING! Even better news, the NEXT chapter should be up within a week, I just really wanted to focus on Agura for this one. So thank you once again, and we left off with AJ leaving Vert to find Agura.
Chapter Ten: Crash and Burn
"No… please no… not now…" Agura gasped for air her body could not find as she tore through the hallways of the base that had always been her second home. Now every wall closed in on her, each shade of blue burned too bright. Her lungs were on fire, stinging hotter than the tears that pricked at her eyes and searing like the mark on her cheek. She stumbled and limped and hurtled and careened, a chunk of burning rock blazing desperately through space in the hopes of landing somewhere safe.
She found her door. Her hand slammed down on the scanner as horror, dread and fear surged equally through her system. Just a few more feet and she would be there.
The network trilled her admittance, and nothing in the world had ever sounded so sweet.
Stepping through her bedroom door was like getting flattened by the Buster. Anxiety toppled her; a feather dragged into the stirring power of a hurricane. Her stomach churned; her heart pounded desperately. Agura's fists clenched until blood was drawn from her palms in tiny scarlet crescents, and she slowly slid down her wall, crumpled onto the floor. Everything she had been holding in for the past week was released in a flood of terror. Goosebumps raced down her skin, but the room felt sweltering, suffocating, stifling, thousands of degrees all collapsing down on her lungs. She gasped for air and then cried, as panic dashed throughout her body, surging from nerve to vein to limb to heart to head, flashing forth and back again, a relentless attack on her system. Worry and fear and apprehension and dread seized her like a vise that was relentlessly tightening. Knocked down and entirely helpless against the swell, Agura curled up and sobbed, praying it would be over.
The attack passed. They always did. Too exhausted to move, she stayed huddled on her side and watched her hands violently quake.
"I'm out of control," she whispered. "I don't have a single ounce of control." Her chest ached; she couldn't tell if it was from the emptiness, or crushing pain. Agura felt as pitiful as she looked; deposited on the floor in a heap of shuddering, sobs and panic.
A knock, soft as a whisper, on her door.
"D—don't come in!" Her voice shook as violently as her hands.
AJ came in anyways. He found Agura in the fetal position on the floor, with tear-stained cheeks and blood-stained palms. There were smears of red on her Shocksuit sleeves as well, but he couldn't tell how they had gotten there.
"Vert sent me after you." He informed her quietly. Humiliated at being found in her position, Agura forced her recovering frame off the ground, and managed to sit upright, leaning against the wall.
"How c-considerate of him," she stuttered bitterly, in between slow, deep breaths. Her heart rate refused to relax, her body was still pouring out sweat, her ears wouldn't stop ringing and she was incredibly dizzy. All she wanted was for AJ, the great, well-meaning and yet overwhelming blur of white in her vision, to go away.
"Go away." She was in no state to be mature about things. She had already asked him not to come in.
The poor Canadian was entirely at a loss. Vert had asked him to do this; he couldn't just leave Agura in her condition. He stood with caution; leaving a few feet of space in between the two of them.
She wasn't looking at him. He cleared his throat. "Did you… do this to yourself?"
"It was just an anxiety attack, AJ," she snapped. "God." Agura began furiously swiping away the tears under her cheeks. She hated that he had found her like this.
"It kind of looks like it was a bigger deal than that, Agura," he responded quietly. Her marred palms were leaving trails of blood. She realized it after a moment; inspecting them to find bloody crescent marks.
"Goddamnit," Agura whispered bleakly. She let her hands fall to the ground and leaned her head back against the wall, closing her eyes. AJ would have reacted, but he was stunned into silence by the dark coloration that had now been made clear on her right cheek. After all his years of the luge, the Canadian recognized the mark well. The situation had officially gone from bad to downright lousy.
"Damn it, Vert," he cursed under his breath. Agura opened a single eye.
"It's not his fault," she said tiredly. "It's the medicine Sage has to give him. He's been like this all week."
AJ sighed in relief. She didn't know about the toxin. The situation was still admittedly horrible, but at least she didn't know.
But… come to think of it, not one of them had known about this behavior. His stomach twisted.
"All…all week?" AJ swallowed hard. Vert had been the picture of normalcy around him. "Why didn't you tell us he was doing this to you?"
She blinked. Agura looked exhausted to the point where even such the most insignificant of reflex actions caused her physical pain. "I didn't want you guys to worry," she said wearily.
Her sacrifice just about knocked him flat onto the floor. Here was Agura, suffering through God-knows-what kinds of abuse from the one person in the world she loved the most, and holding it all in for the sake of her teammates.
"For the love of God, Agura." AJ sat down, legs crossed, facing her. Careful to give her space. "Are you okay?" He asked seriously. "I can't even imagine going through…that, for a full week!"
"He never hit me." She said it entirely devoid of all emotion. "Not until now. There was just…yelling. Sometimes I cooked for him and he would just throw it all—" Agura's voice cracked, and it was the most heartbreaking sound AJ never thought he would hear.
"But…" Agura forced her recovery, only for the sake of saving what little scrap of dignity she still clutched. "He never did it around you guys. So, I guess he only hates me now." The superficial joke was an attempt to fool him into leaving her alone, under the pretense that she was okay. AJ wasn't buying it.
"Agura, this isn't okay. You can't just let him treat you like this, domestic abuse is a serious issue—"
"It's medicine, AJ. He never meant to hurt me," she said blearily. God, she had never hated herself so much. In truth, Agura's indifferent attitude was nothing more than a veil around how she really felt. Her head was still reeling from the first attack, and his application of the phrase domestic abuse had her stomach twisting in that all too familiar it-just-got-real knot. And though she hated to admit it, the grave concern of her well-meaning teammate wasn't helping.
"But he did!" AJ pointed out. "Agura, you know he's my best friend, and it's hard for me to admit too, but this isn't okay—"
"I know it's not okay!" She snapped. Oh, God, it was all coming back now, anxiety like a tsunami wave and no way to stop it. "I know it's not what people do when they're in love with you and I know that I'm not supposed to let him treat me like this! But the problem is that I love him, AJ. I love him with every broken, shattered little part of me, and even if I wanted to stop I couldn't, so I have to let him do these things and I have to put up with whatever it is that's going on in his head right now, no matter how wrong I know it is and no matter how much it hurts!"
Agura took a deep breath. He watched, as she clenched and unclenched her hands, in an effort to stop them from shaking.
"I know he sent you to try and help me, and I appreciate that, but you can't," she said quietly. "I'm trapped."
"How…" He trailed off, and looked at her curiously. "How do you even do this?"
"I don't." She shook her head, slightly more calm. "I'm literally falling apart. I used to be able to hold it all together so well, and when I couldn't, Vert was there."
"And now Vert's not here," AJ inferred.
"And now Vert's not here," Agura sighed. "And it's… hard, you know? Being in love with somebody who either hates you or is asleep. It's…" she took a deep, rattling breath. "Actually really shitty," Agura added quietly.
AJ had never heard her cuss before. "He doesn't hate you—"
"But how can I be sure? I'm in LOVE with him, and he…" Her voice almost broke, but Agura regained control. "He…did things, today," she continued softly, "things that he never would have done before. And it's getting to the point where I can't tell which one of us is going crazy but I almost wish it was me, because then I would just be able to forget everything, everything that's happened since… just everything. It's all such a mess."
AJ blinked. Swallowed. Inhaled, and then exhaled. Went through just about every automatic bodily process he could until the only option left was to respond to her. To try and solve the unsolvable, answer a question that had never really been asked.
"Do you want me to talk to him for you?"
"Yes. No. Maybe?" Agura grimaced, and rocked her head in her hands. "Oh, God, AJ, I don't know. I haven't known which call was the right one in a while."
"Do you…" He swallowed again. His extroversion had never failed him this severely before! Why was everything he had ever learned about females suddenly evacuating his brain? "Do you need to be alone?" He stood up so slowly; you would think the Canadian was rising on a hidden platform from the floor in his debut concert.
"Wait." Agura stood, moving for the first time since he had found her, and grabbed a pad of paper from her desk. She scribbled a note, tore off the first sheet, and handed it to AJ in the form of a neatly folded rectangle.
"Just give that to him for me. I'll… I'll visit him tomorrow," she added softly. "Yes, tomorrow." Agura had retreated within herself now, and AJ slowly backed out of the room. She was still standing, and made her way into her bathroom, feeling as if she were floating in the midst of a dream. Everything felt too wrong to be real. The tile beneath her toes was cold, and it sent a shock all the way up to knees that still hurt from the fall. She stared in the mirror, at teary red eyes ringed by dark, sleepless circles. At the dried streaks of mixed tears and blood all over her face. She looked down and examined tiny crescents of red, embedded in her palms, and looked back up at bedraggled strands of hair, pulled from their place.
Finally, Agura lifted trembling fingers to her cheek, and pressed them in the same place his had found.
The anxiety attack seemed to have taken years, but the wound burning red-hot against icy fingertips made it seem as if he had only just struck her. Everything Vert had said, all of the words he had shouted came flooding back. The hatred in his eyes twisted around her neck and choked her; the mark on her cheek burned with his anger.
He was powerful. Strong. Agura had always known it, in the way he would hold her, but she had never been on the receiving end of such raw brutality. She had fallen back with the force of the blow and tumbled down to her knees. God, that was embarrassing. They were bruised now, of that much she was certain. Bruised like her cheek.
Why had he done that to her? What in God's name had compelled a man who could be so calm and collected under pressure to act so absolutely berserk?
He had been aggressive and bad-tempered all week. For that much, she had been prepared. He had snapped at her, thrown things, and demanded she leave him alone for days now. And, it did hurt. It stung like salt in a gash. But she never would have predicted such a degree of ferocity.
She slowly collapsed onto the tile floor, cold and unforgiving, a stone dropping through murky water in slow motion. She curled her knees to her chest and wrapped her arms around them, and started trembling in cruel anamnesis. The encounter played through her head nonstop until Agura thought she would have another attack.
"Get it together," she whispered to herself; with a voice as shaky as her frame. "Get it under control."
Her body, wracked with anxiety for far too long, would not listen.