Mentally, Skyler was in that room again. The school gymnasium. After. She'd never had a good experience in a fucking school, and that had never changed.

At that moment, she didn't know whether anyone was still coming, or that they ever would. It was the least of her concern; it felt most fitting to stand there until, in the absence of human hands to maintain it, the building fell in around her and everyone else that had been in it.

Her chest and shoulders heaved and sweat rolled down her face and neck, and she was utterly silent. Reflexively, she wiped a droplet rolling past her brow towards her eye. Something wasn't quite right in the way that it smeared, and she realized dimly that she was too splattered with blood to clear anything off.

A sort of paralysis took hold, caught in the conflicting signals to run back into the next room to check just one more time, and that doing that to herself was useless. The crack in the doorway behind her felt enormous and yawning.

Forward was the direction that she chose eventually. Her shoes squelched on the linoleum, leaving bloody half-prints behind her on her way to the nearest body. Skyler stood over the dead man while minutes passed, taken by how placid his expression was, considering the contortion of panic she'd seen in the last few moments he'd been alive. Too bad; she'd been hoping with a deep, burning spite in the pit of her that it'd have stuck with him until the last second.

Once the moment passed, her own features curled into a bitter snarl and she put her boot down on the dead man's chest, kneeling to rip her stuck knife out of his throat.

Bright and early. It'd been a bit since Skyler had been up early enough to catch the high sun since running with Adrian. For once, he hadn't wedged himself under a bed or into the closet, though she didn't know what to make of his having chosen the foot of the bed where she was sleeping instead. He was still there, shrouded in every blanket available in typical vampire-like fashion to keep out the light.

She, in the meantime, wandered a loop through the bedroom and the hall draped in a blanket cape as though she were waiting on breakfast while she waited for this psychiatrist. She'd even briefly radio-ed up Cat ("Good morning, sunshine!"), who'd mentioned that she was wandering into town up ahead to check up on some kind of movement, so now she was just wandering and stewing.

Was this even the right thing to be doing? To be honest, she'd never been too sure about all that therapy shit in general. Did she keep up the elaborately crafted ruse she'd started via literally just not saying anything about exactly what it was that was wrong with Adrian?

At the end of the hall, looking out over a small backyard garden onto what looked like a clear, cold day, her wait ended.

"Hello? Theodora Skyler?" a particularly soft-spoken voice asked. Skyler turned the volume up a couple of notches.

"Yeah. That's me. It's, um. Skyler. Theo if you really need."

"Skyler then? Hi there. I'm Judith Dent, I don't believe we've ever spoken." All right. Off to a decent start so far. "I think we can skip over the 'how are you doing' part, considering what I've heard about your situation?" Reasonable assumption. Smart lady.

"Yeah. But, look. This isn't for me," Skyler jumps in, for one not sure why she's so fast to defend herself and for another knowing as she spoke that was probably the easiest way to make it sound like she was in fact in major need of a good therapy session.

To Judith's credit, she didn't push this too hard, simply redirecting with an, "Oh?"

At least Skyler didn't have to pull something entirely out of her ass here. It was true enough.

"It's... the guy I'm with out here," she explained, then proceeded to stand there stupidly while this woman waited expectantly for her to say something more. "Okay first let me tell you why I didn't say anything to Four Dog and Jack or whatever his name is like you know what it would sound like if I was like, 'Oh, he's freaking out and I don't know what to do-,'"

"Skyler? Can I stop you for a second?"

Uh-oh. "Um. Yeah."

"You don't have to explain yourself to me. It's not my job to interrogate you." Oh. "Do you want me to talk to him?"

"I don't think he can talk."

A vivid image of this poor woman questioning whether what she'd just said still held arose. She stayed true to her word, though, and once that pause had passed let it go with an, "Okay. Can you tell me more about what it is that's going on?"

Her pacing had taken her back by the bedroom door. The lump under the blankets shifted as Adrian buried himself deeper away from the disturbance.

"Um. A lot. It's hard for me to tell, you know. Since he doesn't talk to me either. A lot of the time he'll be acting like he's seeing and hearing stuff that isn't there. Sometimes like he doesn't really know what's going on or where he is. Yesterday he had kind of... a freakout. And I... didn't know what to do." She hated how hard words were to string together when she had some lump in her throat. "I can tell it's scary to him when it happens, and I feel kind of useless."

She kept her back turned to the door, as if he would understand if he overheard her or see that her face had heated up a little.

Judith's tone spoke of choosing her words carefully, "That's all... very concerning. You know this. Or else you would have mentioned something in your other calls."

"Yep."

"Okay. I just wanted to check that we were on the same page. You asked to speak to me, though. So, what is it that you're hoping to take away from this?"

Skyler sat down on the floor outside the door. "I figured you would have a better idea how to handle that. When someone is hearing voices and all. I've only ever seen it on TV," which sounded even worse saying out loud.

"Alright, so the first thing I'm going to tell you is to forget pretty much everything you've seen there. That's just about the worst reference you can possibly get of how to deal with someone having those symptoms. The second it sounds like you've already got, and that's that movies like to make episodes like that seem very scary and dangerous. Which they can be, especially... lately. But that's an exception and not a rule, and even then, they're almost always scarier to the person having the delusion. It is important to back off and give him some space if he wants it or is behaving aggressively."

Got it. So try to avoid being trapped in a closet.

"Has it seemed to get any worse? Is it different from when you first saw it?"

With some thought, Skyler replied, "I don't think so. Seems more like it's when he's stressing, or that he just has bad days."

"That's a relief to hear. I want to say, too, I'm glad to see you asking about this for him. Not everyone would, and I think that says something about you."

Skyler twisted a loose bit of the bandage around her arm into a tight little ball. "Uh." She was quick to redirect back onto what she told herself were more immediate concerns, "So that thing they say about how people don't know they're seeing stuff, and you're supposed to pretend it's there. Is that true, or another TV thing?"

"He might or he might not be able to recognize that the hallucinations aren't real, and that might not be the case every time, either. About playing along with it, that one's a little misleading. I'd actually encourage you to be honest with him that you can't see or hear what he does. He might be looking to you for a reality check. What you should remember is not to challenge or confront him if he doesn't believe you, if you want him to feel comfortable sharing those feelings with you."

Wholly focused, Skyler nodded along. "Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense." Honestly, it had hardly occurred to her before now the possibility of him using her like that.

"Skyler?"

"Yeah?"

"Are..." Judith trailed off, then briefly came back in with a single syllable, then finally settled on, "I... guess it might not be the most accurate thing to ask if you'll both be okay after this. You don't feel like you're in danger?"

"Less, now."

"I can live with that. Is there anything else that you need from me?"

"I think we're alright. Gonna focus on getting home. Thanks for the help." With everything that she'd just said, she couldn't rightfully ask Judith not to tell anyone, but she could hope. There were some dots to be connected, and any place they could lead wasn't great.

"I'm going to risk sounding cheesy to tell you I'm here if you need me. Good luck."

Adrian woke to one of the soft things he'd swaddled himself in being tugged on and wished he could say he felt better about this day, but truthfully there was still entirely too much light out for his taste. Not quite enough that he couldn't even stick his head out of the pile, but he still groaned in complaint about having to be up during it at all. Sleepily he yanked his hood down as far as it would go and cracked one eye open at Her. Why were the Clean Ones ever awake at this time?

She leaned into the frame of the room's entrance, motioning out the same way and following up with those noises, "Yes? No?"

It seemed she was giving him a choice in the matter. As much as he whined, he did roll out of the heap and drop to the floor to stretch and yawn. He was still groggy and his eyes wouldn't be happy about it, but it wouldn't be the first time he'd ventured out before the sun disappeared to evade the attention of Others, which must be what she was doing. As long as he could remember to keep his eyes shut...

While he was still on the floor, She crouched down and held something towards his face. Huh? She wanted him to take this? Her hands avoided his when he went to grab the object though and took advantage of him being too groggy to readily swat her away when she got unnervingly close and slid something over his ears. He snorted and leaned back, but something was already sitting on his nose and there was some strange sort of dark film. He repeatedly blinked to clear his vision, but the layer didn't go away.

Once it connected that this was because of whatever was covering up his eyes, he realized that the light was considerably more bearable like this and sighed in tangible relief. Oh, he wished he'd had this a long time ago. Tired and grumpy as he was, he did bump up against Her side briefly on their way out in thanks.

Being out in daylight was a supremely strange experience, not wholly bad but all alien. The exposure, he didn't like at all. His instinct craved the ability to slip away into darkness at a moment's notice, the shadow wrapping around him like a secure, comforting soft thing. Conversely, the sun beaming down through the chilly air was pleasant in a similar way that the warm water had been. There was a sensation he could best describe as his skin having craved this, actually.

The bleariness of their early start wore off with brisk movement, and his thoughts came into clearer focus. The first crumb he got was the way he'd woken up, which he followed through into the revelation that he hadn't been disturbed or removed from Her space until she'd been ready to go. That caught him by surprise, led him to stop and process for a second before catching up with a tilt of his head and a huff as though she could understand the question in it. He hardly remembered having crawled up there, but how had she known he wasn't going to hurt her while he slept? Because he didn't know if he was sure of that.

As usual, she neither had answers that he could understand other than a shrug or could hear his thoughts. More so than when all of her sounds meant nothing more than vague, painful flashes of familiarity to him, there was this infuriating wall that he felt trapped behind. Like him and every thought in his head were shut into a room too tight for either him or them to escape. It wasn't a new feeling, especially when the ones like her were screaming at him and he felt like he had to shriek his own fury until his throat couldn't take it or he would die from the intensity, but it'd never occurred to him that there was anything else. The couple that he was starting to consistently recognize though, his name and the "yes" and "no", were so much more purposeful. There was something they conveyed that was more complex than the raw emotion of screams and growls or a simple grunt or chuff to call attention.

One try, maybe.

He scuffed the ground with one foot then hummed to get her focus, in his own nervousness taking her uncharacteristically intent study into any sheltered nook that they passed to be out of caution of the pack that was surely too close for comfort. Why was the tremor in his hands worsening? There was a fluttery, queasy pit in his gut that wanted to bury that bit of comprehension along with that secret and dreaded certainty of something being wrong, neither of which could be quieted by the promise of the hunt like he'd tried to do for so long.

She was wrapped up in whatever her interest was, frowning into some clear, tall shelter containing nothing more than the half-stripped and partially desiccated remnants of one of the Skittish Others. They'd likely been unable to reach better shelter for one reason or another and died where they laid. She gave him her attention fairly quickly, but Adrian was silent up until she presumably wondered what was happening.

"What?" From her tone and the turn of her head, it seemed like a question, though this one was still fuzzy. There was some unrecognizable emotion on her face when she repeated herself, this time directly facing him and pronouncing very clearly, "What?"

He could feel an actual, physical ache in his head, sharpest between his temples. Why, why did it feel like he should know this? Just copy that sound back at her. His throat caught. He opened his mouth and tried to put sound to it.

"Uhn," was all that came out, slurred and mangled. Not even close. Because his awful, broken brain didn't know how to do anything except confuse or enrage him-

"Hey," her voice jolted him back into awareness, where he found himself growling and flexing his claws into the wrappings around his hands in sheer frustration while he'd been unconsciously struggling over that sound. That could have been bad.

Adrian let go of the garbled attempt in an exhale that wafted through the cold air. He didn't know why he'd expected anything different, but there was a dull clench in his chest regardless. As he was ready to (pretend to) forget about it and move on, her hand on his arm stopped him. While her demeanor wasn't telling of knowing what to do afterward, it was still a gesture of reassurance and that was what he needed.

Alright, Not-Other. Show him where you were taking him at this horrible hour.

For a long while even before she'd been sporting the pirate look, Skyler hadn't been known for being particularly observant. When she was like fifteen, the school counselor had called a meeting with goddamn mom, to talk about how it was impossible to get her to stare at the front of a room for an hour, and that her comprehension of half of what she heard was piss-poor. Further, that maybe she had some kind of deficit and should get tested or something, to which of course mom had been like 'No she doesn't,' and the guy had been like, 'Okay'. Not much had improved by twenty-three. Sometimes though, something would get roots, and then regardless of what she did, it wouldn't shake.

Passing by the eerily still central drag of town, unfortunately, the roots were in. They twisted around the backdrop of abandoned cars and small-town coffee shops and called attention to hidden windows giving a glimpse inward on the fact that this place wasn't actually entirely depopulated; just by anything much living, at least during broad daylight like this.

It was kind of fucked up, wasn't it? The way you could sort of see the last moments. Against her will, the demon taking up residence in her brain had decided to practice its directing hobby and create little videos of what must've happened. Suddenly there was a story there, that she couldn't shut off.

A deteriorating couple of corpses lay piled on top of each other, what looked like another of the Hunters and a Smoker backed up against the far wall of a street-facing lobby. Nearby was an even more desiccated scrap of what was now little more than smashed ribs and jerky. All three were laying in bucket-loads of long-since dried blood. This was a pathetically desperate struggle over the morsel; the tongue wrapped tight still over the Hunter's chest and neck and some of the Smoker's innards very clearly made into out-ards. That they themselves hadn't been picked over much in itself said that by the time that particular end came, there hadn't been much of anyone left to take advantage of the fresh- albeit scrawny, fatless- meat. Yeesh.

There was a vibe that was creeping up on her again, too. It took her a while to place since it was swirling around in there with the events of the past couple of days and for whatever reason the... station Lauren had never made it out of. Something else was crystallizing in there, which she did her damndest not to let hound her because there were current concerns to be had, and someone who needed her to be on top of oh fuck she'd really just thought that, hadn't she?

Oh, she was so boned.

Speaking of which. It was only really beginning to register now how detached Adrian seemed from all of this passive death; it wasn't as though they hadn't been surrounded by degrees of it since the second she'd stepped out of the camp, she'd assumed that the zombies didn't particularly care what happened to their own. What she'd seen back there with the Witch though suggested otherwise. He definitely saw what she was seeing, with absolutely no surprise and with apparent confusion that she'd even stop to look, maybe some sadness. Then, was it he was just that used to it?

Well yeah, dumbass, she punched herself a second later. That was what happened. They died, and they died in droves. Sometimes that could be easy to forget since there'd been so damn many of them, but she supposed that for Adrian, it was a fact of existence.

"Sorry, kid," she mumbled, "Guess I'm off my game."

Great start to the year.

This was Middletown by now she thought, maybe. How far out would the pack be willing to follow them? Maybe she should check in if Cat had seen anything, since she'd said she was in the same general area. She'd try once they weren't quite so out in the open.

Near an intersection, there was a blue car parked jutting out into the street with one of the rear doors left hanging open, resting on which were yet more skeletal remains, this time hunched into a curled position with a barely recognizable plush bear resting by the stomach. Another survivor out here who had frozen to death in the car? No, anyone in their right mind would have at least pulled the door closed.

Ugh. Even Skyler's imagination wasn't free from a slideshow of dead people. The fuckers at the station, for one, but not just those survivors. Dead infected people. There's that one, the Smoker that had staggered trying to yank her off the building and himself fell into the waiting horde below. The fleeting terror on his half-face and the screams that had come afterward. Her, who maybe couldn't have done anything, but hadn't even thought to end it quicker with a bullet. There was the Witch who, while she'd been hanging on when they'd encountered her, was as good as done for at this rate if she didn't do something to clothe and feed herself, and had quietly accepted the offer of a blanket for comfort.

Was there a worse alternative to one person who it turned out wasn't a shell of a human being having been written off as already dead?

Yeah. That he wasn't special in that sense.

Oh, there was that vibe. Maybe why the high school had barged its way into her head, too. They were stepping stones, and the missing one had been the other evac center, the one she and Adrian had stumbled upon. The crypt. Except it was everywhere, and there was no walking away from it.

Some noise reached her ears but entirely evaded her attention until it was repeated again. One of those quiet, attentive chirps Adrian had been directing at her lately. He crossed in front of the path she was walking and stopped, first tilting his head, then raising his shadowed line of vision to both sides and where she'd unintentionally been staring into the middle distance, then back towards her and repeated the questioning chirp. Though the two of them were stuck playing a shitty game of charades, she was pretty sure she got the gist of, "what are you looking at?" His concern in the actions added something else, though, and now that some of the puzzle pieces were put together, another slotted in: Judith's suggestion that he might've been using her as a reality check. It hadn't occurred that he would offer the same.

"Nah, nah," she assured with a wave of her hand, though "that doesn't happen to me" might still be beyond explaining, "Thanks."

They'd made some decent progress, but didn't get much farther before a particularly harsh, shrieking wind tore up the road, forcing Skyler's eye into a watery squint and stinging her exposed face. Fun. She was going to call that time to duck inside someplace for a minute, which she was sure Adrian's eyeballs would be grateful for. Between the two of them, they were already down one of those, so it was likely in their mutual best interest to avoid him winding up like the Hunters who clawed them out of their skulls.

The first door that seemed promising and would open led into a multi-level main street shopping center, nothing too huge and only a bit too large to scour quickly. Nothing was there to rush them right off the bat, which was both a good and grim sign of the state of things. Satisfied, Skyler heaved the front doors closed back behind her and shoved a convenient cinder block in front of them to ensure they wouldn't blow open.

Adrian had already darted ahead to scout, only halting in his determined foray for her patting a knee and gesturing him back. Look, in a place with as many hiding spots as this, she would prefer it if they could stick together because if something did jump them, he wasn't going to be the first one with teeth in their throat.

While they were still near the entrance, she took a minute to catch her breath and get out her radio to make good on her thought to see if Cat had caught sight of anything up this way.

"Hey. Cat?" Nothing for a minute or so, then some muffled sounds like someone had started picking up and then changed their mind. "Cat?" Silence. Huh.

Other than their shoes scuffing tile down the central aisle, there was neither sight nor sound of life. Great. Excellent. If she was really lucky, there'd be something useful left, since the place didn't look horribly looted. Once they got a bit further in, Adrian's Super Hunter Senses were on alert which got her nerves going, but he seemed to be having trouble sussing out just what it was that he was picking up on as well. She could only hope that it wasn't their friends who had followed them out of the city, but unless she was overestimating him while he was relatively alert and lucid, her impression was that he would have turned them right back around for the door if that was the threat.

There was little doubt in her mind there was something though, judging by the hairs on the back of her neck if nothing else. To solidify it, there was something tracked onto the floor up ahead by an emptied sweets stand that under other circumstances might look like a random piece of garbage, some scrap of cloth. On intuition, she moved to investigate, identifying a black bandana with a footprint tracked onto it. Now, where did that look familiar?

She'd kneeled down to pluck it up off the ground when Adrian hissed out a rather intelligible complaint between an, "ah!" and an, "ow!" By the time she turned around, he was rubbing at his back and grumbling in irritation while baring his teeth slightly in a vague circle with nothing glaringly wrong and occasionally swatting at nothing. Almost definitely he'd been insect-bitten because of his need to drench himself in whatever blood he could. It surprised her that there was even anything left around, but they were indoors.

"We've got to get you another shower," she sighed.

Uh-oh. The bandana was exactly what she'd thought it was, emblazoned with a pink "3" forming a cat face emoji, undeniably the one that Cat wore over her face because who the fuck else would be running around in that? From the print, it looked like she'd lost it and then had it trampled in some scuffle. Oh, hell. They might have wandered into some real trouble here.

"Fuck," she hissed, clutching the bandana as she stood, "We've got to check it out. Shit. Are you even gonna be cool with people? Like, I know that- Yo. Adrian. Kid?"

Adrian was responding, but in a way that was very much off. He directed a vague grumble and hand wave at her until shortly after, he dropped into his all-fours crouch, unsteady, which rocketed her alarm up to a ten. In seconds she had her hands on his shoulders, trying to get him to look up at her as he clumsily brushed her off, appearing to abruptly much prefer the thought of a nap than dealing with this. Fuck! His gut injury was practically healed by now, wasn't it?

"No- Hey! What is it, what's going AH-!"

The "bug" had returned, which Skyler in that instant realized hurt a good deal more than a horsefly and was larger, too. Something hit the ground when she swatted at her right shoulder where it'd gotten her. Disbelievingly, she gaped down at a couple of syringe darts on the floor, which were quickly joined by Adrian, who couldn't do much more than huddle his arms up over his head. Her vision swam and the baked beans in her stomach lurched.

"MotherFUCKER!" she shrieked, losing all of her restraint to not call every infected in a mile radius.

With no glimpse of whatever had done this, she resorted to fueling her rapidly-tiring body with all her fury of a Massachusetts driver and pounding ground towards the stairs leading upward. Oh, hell. Why weren't they getting any closer?

"Who in the hell?! Going to... rip your guts out myself! Wait until... fucking..."

Out.