You grit your teeth.

The Earth growls beneath your boots. It twists and thrashes at your grip, straining against you—but struggle as it may, it slows. Slows, painfully slows... slower... and with a shudder... stops.

And with a sound like a collective gasp of panic, everything moves backwards.

REGRESS.

0-0-0-0-0-0

You turn around, slowly, like the lone eye of a lighthouse.

"NASDAQ. Dow Jones. S&P." You say the words tonelessly. "Next fourteen days. Paper. Pen."

Kurt is immediately up and slides the notepad across the table. You begin scrawling out dates, numbers, names-all before you forget.

"Whoa, hey—"

"Good thing we didn't invest in gold," you mutter as you jot it all down. "Of all the paranoid—"

A red punctuation mark appears on the paper.

You blink.

... And there's another.

And another.

You hold a hand up to your face, your nose, and it comes away red. You watch the blood run down your hand, fill into the tiny valleys of your palm.

"What the fuck" is all you can say before you collapse to the floor.

... Well, you get about halfway there, anyway. Kurt catches you mid-fall- he's faster than he looks. So instead, you just look at the floor and look at the patterns your blood makes as it drip-drops to the hardwood.

Your vision blurs. You squint, wondering why Kurt's house seems to be flooded with sunlight when it's well past midnight. Or is that moonlight? It's not a full moon, is it? Nah, can't be, since—

"Hey. Hey! Are you— hey, look at me!"

Don't be condescending, Kurt. You're right there. You see him. Just turn the lights down, damn, you're going blind, here. Damn hot lights. That blood or sweat on your face?

"Put me down," you utter, reaching an arm out to find a wall or furniture and groping at empty air.

"Your wish is my command." Kurt drops you unceremoniously into an armchair, and you sprawl there, staring up at the ceiling. Seems farther away then usual.

Something like moths on your face. You sputter, swat at it-but it's just Kurt with a wad of tissues.

"Get those out of my face."

"You're bleeding all over my everything, asshole. You stop bleeding, I'll stop tissue-ing."

So you sit there like a petulant child as Kurt tidies up your nosebleed. The room twitches back into focus in rhythm to the uneven stutter of your heart.

"Shit," you grunt, rubbing at your temples. You feel warm. "Shit."

"What the hell happened there?" Kurt's scanning his eyes over the rest of you, as if expecting blood to leap from your pores.

You just shake your head—and regret it, as you get dizzy again. "I don't..." You sniff, rub gently at your nose. Blood's crusting already. "I don't know."

0-0-0-0-0-0

"What are these?"

"Iron supplements," Damien says. "Don't take them on an empty stomach."

"I don't—"

"You're grey."

0-0-0-0-0-0

You grit your—

"Hey, hold on," Kurt says, grabbing your arm. You jolt back into the present, stumbling. "Are you sure— maybe you should—?"

"I'm fine," you say, pulling away.

"You're a shitty vision of fine," Damien says dryly, stepping forward. "Just wait another day."

You snort. "Catch me," you say, and REGRESS.

It's not a tunnel, or a vacuum, or a riptide.

It feels like home.

Is that strange? To have home be not a place, but movement through places you've already been?

0-0-0-0-0-0

The first time you see it, you're positive you didn't see it.

Time and space was reversing around you, folding over and over again like the wrinkles of your brain. Familiar. Comfortable.

And then you saw something.

Just for a moment. As you were REGRESSING from the bank to Damien's house to a department store to the city proper to your home— you saw it, hunched low to the ground.

You saw it, yet saw through it. Not opaque, no. As though it was there and not there.

You grind to a halt, back in your home, breathing unsteadily and struggling to tame your heartbeat. You reach out, touch random things in your room to ground yourself. Foundation. Here. You're here.

Was that... ? No, it was nothing. And since it was nothing, you didn't see it.

That's that.

Problem is, it saw you.