[open] you told them all I was crazy

[onlyhymns]

WHO: Cade, Simon, and anyone brave enough to visit them
WHAT: Blue Flu Boogaloo: Two Dudes Askew, Hijinks Ensue
WHEN: Phase II
WHERE: Simon's room, now with more Cade
NOTES: Ultra mega content warning for a variety of topics that might come up in flashbacks, most notably childhood sexual abuse, graphic violence, and possibly more which will be added as necessary.

I. Visit Both!

During the day, when they're both awake, the room is just a regular disaster zone. Simon's tools are laid out with no rhyme or reason, anything that could have at any point been tidy is in total disarray, and the room contains a frightening sense of lost control.
For more specifics, see their individual prompts:

II. Just Cade

Being easily worked up at the best of times, the lyrium problem has Cade nearly out of his mind and dissociating for what began as small spurts and has expanded to nearly all of his waking hours. It can be difficult to tell, being that it most often manifests as reclusiveness, with the thirty-something man sitting with his knees curled to his chest at the far end of his bed, his demeanor that of an eight-year-old with a monster in the closet. When it looks different, it's endless pacing, agitation, frantic muttering, the telltale signs of someone in danger of hurting himself.
Sometimes Simon or visitors can bring him out of it; sometimes he doesn't know who they are, or where he is. Dosing him with more lyrium results in pockets of lucidity, which rapidly turn despairing as he realizes he's losing it again, and they often aren't worth the trouble.

III. Just Simon

Anyone entering the room could be forgiven for not immediately realizing that Simon is there, when he is. It may be the first time in his entire life that he hasn't been the most immediately noticeable person in a given space. His bed is strewn with tools and books, the blankets pulled over his head to dampen whatever noise Cade makes, and beneath the covers, he shivers faintly.

He doesn't sleep, though, when he can help it--not here. Never here. He fights sleep now as hard as he's ever done, and if it means hauling himself out of bed inch by freezing, head-pounding, light-sensitive inch to go seek pharmaceutical help for it, he does as often as he can manage. His ability to manage grows increasingly less frequent by the day. He's promised himself to the researchers as a test subject, all but flinging himself at them in his desperation to find something that will help, magic or otherwise, but his memory of that commitment fades in and out and gradually dissolves altogether unless he's reminded of it.

He knows how this goes. It isn't the first time he's found himself in this lyrium-deprived boat with no memory of how he got there. The powerlessness is the point.

Comments

[paladingus]

The chill of her hand soothes him, even if the marrow-deep ache in his own from the cold of them makes a subconscious part of him hurt with empathy for how it must be paining her too. Nonetheless, he leans into the touch, just-perceptibly, while it lasts. Safety and support, you are dear to me, before that too floats away again.

He's given up on water long ago. It hasn't occurred to him even for a moment that the negligence might be why his head is screaming the way it is.

Still, he should know that--should know it better than Cade, who was always the dutiful knight, always the platonic model of pious obedience, who would never have defied orders at all, let alone so routinely as to know this whole dance like muscle memory. But Simon had never been alone in confinement when they'd cut his rations. It had never been incumbent upon him to fetch his own water, or keep track of the guards' comings and goings as their names and faces grew increasingly foreign in his mind. It's a different matter entirely when he doesn't know what brought this punishment on.

"Too well." He might remember only intermittently who Wren is to him right now, but the answer to that question is seared into his mind. "Doesn't get easier."

[limier]

"No," She agrees, and how Simon knows is a point to consider later, when considering things is altogether less intensive of a task. "It does not."

Another glance, sidelong, to Cade. She braces against the desk, fingers dug like claws about a pen. Let him stand. Better to stand, however shakily. Better to keep moving.

"Your names are Cade Harrimann, and Simon Ashlock." Ink tracks the jagged blocks of script, records word for oversized word. "This is home. You are safe."

What little use any of that is. A token for her sake, as much as it's anything; there's nothing to be done of this, nothing she can do directly,

But Maker knows they have to do something.

"And this will end."

One way or the other. She blows on the ink, shoulders tensing at the wait.

[onlyhymns]

The platonic model of pious obedience is about as useful as a dog on sedatives, so unused to the lack of lyrium-- and affected by it so extremely in tandem with his typical undercurrent of anxiety-- that saying Cade is working at even half-capacity is too generous.
He watches Wren fixedly, nods when he understands his name, nods again but less certainly when she reassures him of where they are, then seems to ramp up with nerves again at her conclusion.
"Am I-- ser, am I in trouble?" The question is urgent, life or death. "I don't... I don't remember." The last time he was in this room for an extended period, he was waiting to be executed. Or... did he never leave it? Is that still now?