As soon as Norman had left the centre and rounded the corner, he'd leant against the wall and sank to the floor. Since he'd given up the tripto completely, he'd found the withdrawals a lot harder to control, especially when he got upset or stressed out. And a lot of that seemed to be happening lately... He couldn't blame it entirely on Blake, although he certainly didn't help. It had been the Origami Killer case that had been the final straw. After David had left him for his sister, he had finally agreed to the stupid trials on the ARI, not really caring at that point what it would do to his health. Then there had been the dizzying switches between reality and the imagination as well, even when he had the ARI off. He had often woken up at night in a cold sweat, in the middle of a dark forest, twigs snapping all around him as something came closer, even though it wasn't real... And those were the good ones. There were also the times when he woke up on the dusty surface of Mars, unable to breathe, and sometimes he was underwater.
The worst reality/extra-reality blurs were when he was underwater. Those happened usually at the most inconvenient of times, and generally when he was in a very stressful situation... He usually didn't realise until it was too late that he was having one, he guessed because by then he was so stressed out he couldn't think straight. It scared him even more than in testing for the ARI, the FBI had told him that it was actually possible to die if you died in a hallucination. It was very rare, but if you had a really bad one you could get so scared your heart would stop beating. Literally get scared to death...
Jayden shuddered at the thought, stood up, and tried to pull himself together. He'd just have to scrounge a meal from somewhere else...
"Hey, Jayden. Thanks to you, I've just lost a day's gas for nothing! You happy now, you little jerk?" Norman turned round to see a shark talking to him.
"Wh..." he started off fearfully, but the shark just kept swimming closer, and it butted in before he could say anything.
"Don't pretend you don't know what I'm on about, you ass-wipe. You came here just to try and muck things up for me, didn't you? Well you succeeded. You happy now? Well? Are you?" Jayden backed off slowly, but the shark just came closer quicker.
"Oh, don't think you can run away from me, you little shit. Just try it. I'll fucking eat you for breakfast..." It was circling around him, and a shoal of brightly-coloured fish were wearing scuba-diving kit. Jayden laughed a hysterical high-pitched giggle.
Fish didn't need scuba diving kits, they could breathe underwater! ...Underwater?
"Are you even listening to me, you little shit?" Jayden snapped his attention back to the shark-with-a-voice-like-Carter, just as the overgrown fish shoved its toothy grimace into his face, ready to take his head off, Jayden was sure.
He screamed, but no sound came out, only a muffled gurgle as he choked on the water that he was trying so hard to remember wasn't there. Trying to hold his breath usually worked, but with a lung full of water already, and a fucking great white shark in his face, that wasn't an option. As much as he found it possible to, Jayden started to hyperventilate. He was gonna die, he was gonna die, he was gonna fucking die!
He was ashamed as the tears came streaming down his face, only to realise as his sight turned red that it wasn't tears but blood, which spread out slowly in the water.
Blood, oh fuck oh fucksharks and blood didn't mix and he was going to get eaten alive!
Those were his last rational thoughts before the Carter-shark lunged at him with a fin, and he went into cardiac arrest.