Archive of Our Own ^beta

“They made me think I was crazy! They put me on pills!”

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To be fair, no one had ever point-blank cornered Jordan and told him he was crazy. He’d been called plenty of other things—painfully shy, socially withdrawn, devoid of interpersonal skills, Jon’s weird twin, etc. No one had ever said he was crazy.

But no one had to, because nothing Jordan was doing or feeling suggested he was even remotely normal.
Normal people didn’t need to be taught to breathe correctly and journal their emotions instead of bottling them up until they exploded.
Normal people didn’t wake up dreading the most basic interactions with other people.
And normal people definitely didn’t need to take pills to keep that dread from spilling over into full-blown panic.
And there had been a lot of pills, though that wasn’t where he started.

He’d started seeing counselors at school, but once they decided he was beyond their help, Jordan had been referred out to psychologist Dr. Siegel, a nice grandma-like lady who was big on breathing exercises and feelings journals and worksheets. Lots and lots and lots of worksheets— triggers worksheets, mindfulness worksheets, positive and negative self-talk worksheets, good coping skills, bad coping skills, gratitude journaling, cognitive distortions, exposure tracking logs, safety behaviors, thoughts logs, hierarchy of fears, mood charts…While the worksheets were questionably useful, Dr. Siegel did teach him some helpful things, like box breathing to calm down from a panic attack and grounding exercises to stop his anxiety from spiraling.

But no matter how many worksheets Jordan filled out or breathing exercises he practiced, it didn’t change the fact the therapy sessions existed in a controlled bubble.

A nice, safe controlled bubble where nothing bad happened.

Dr. Seigel wasn’t going to snicker behind his back like some kids at school did when the teacher called attendance, and his voice cracked.
She wasn’t going to ignore him just to hang out with Jon, the way other kids did when they realized he was awkward and shy and nowhere near as fun as his brother.
She wasn’t going to give him that annoyed look his teachers did when he froze up in class and couldn’t write on the board or answer questions.
She wasn’t going to randomly knock him over at PE or shove him against the lockers for no real reason, the way Cutter and the bigger boys did.

And no amount of box breathing or counting by sevens or naming every blue thing he could find in one room could erase the existential panic that sprung up like weeds in his mind and paralyzed his thoughts for hours at a time.

Like what would happen if Mom fell off a bridge and Superman couldn’t get to her in time.
Or if he had too many sick days so he failed 7th grade and had to repeat it without Jon.
Or if Dad lost his house keys again and someone stole them and broke into the house.
Or if he never got over his anxiety and became some weird shut-in with a bunch of cats.

Jon usually pointed out that Jordan was allergic to cats, so he’d probably become a shut-in with like, fish or something, which was kinda funny but not the point. Besides, by the middle of 7th grade, Jordan was well on his way towards becoming that shut-in anyway, cats notwithstanding. He’d begun having multiple panic attacks a week, and the triggers (one of Dr. Siegel’s worksheets!) were all over the place.

Sometimes it was skills demonstrations in music, sometimes it was the claustrophobia of riding the bus, and sometimes it was just the existential dread of sharing his brain with a monster clawing away at his subconscious. Eventually, after a particularly bad after-school rehearsal, Jordan gave up on music altogether and told his parents he wanted to quit.

Consequently (and possibly since she’d run out of worksheets for Jordan to try), Dr. Siegel referred him out to a psychiatrist.

That’s where Dr. Schuster came in—short, terse, chronically late, and almost always tailed by students from the university medical school. His first order of business was giving the monsters a name: social anxiety with concomitant panic attacks.

If Dr. Siegel was all about the emotions of anxiety, Dr. Schuster was all over the science of it. He was a med school professor as well as a clinician, and treated Jordan’s appointments as an opportunity to lecture the ever-present med students (and Jordan) on the neurobiology of anxiety—the imbalance of serotonin and dopamine, the overstimulation of the amygdala and prefrontal cortex.

That’s where the pills came in, so many that Jordan had nightmares about drowning in them. Bottles and bottles and bottles of sanity in pill form—except half of them didn’t even work. The propranolol did absolutely nothing and he forgot to take it half the time. Hydroxyzine made him feel more anxious, Xanax caused migraines, and paroxetine gave him hives.
But eventually, halfway through eighth grade, Dr. Schuster settled on a combination that worked: fluoxetine for maintenance and clonazepam for panic attacks.

And for a while, things were okay. The pills kept the anxiety spirals on a leash and made the panic attacks manageable, and Jordan managed to get through most of the year without the monsters in his mind completely taking over. They were trying, though. Toying at the ends of his mind, messing with his thoughts, threatening to pull him under a storm cloud of dark moods. Plus, there was an uncomfortable prickling sensation under his skin that he couldn't quite shake. It came and went on its own accord, burning away at him from the inside out and threatening to destabilize the precarious equilibrium of sanity the pills managed to maintain. Dr. Schuster dismissed it as 'psychosomatic' (aka, you're clinically nuts but there's only so much we can do) and Dr. Siegel suggested a referral to see a dermatologist (who prescribed a steroid cream for Jordan's nonexistent rash and suggested a consult with...wait for it...psychiatry).

Since that spiral of professionals seemed as pointless as the anxiety-laced circles he dealt with regularly, Jordan didn't exactly have a lot of hopes for freshman year. Mostly just going to the nurse's office a little less and avoiding Cutter and Co. a little more.

But then, right as freshman year was starting, the world turned on its axis.
Grandma died.
Dad was Superman.
Jordan fell 20 feet in a barn and started shooting laser beams from his eyes.

It was more than the laser beams, though. It was superpowers. Jordan had superpowers. A litany of enhanced abilities that were cool and useless and terrifying and exhilarating all at the same time.

It took a while to get everything under control, but by the end of freshman year, Jordan felt, for the first time in a really, really long time, that he had a handle on things. He had really cool powers and a girlfriend and even played football for half a semester. It almost felt weird to say, but he actually felt...good. Happy, even. Less like Jon's weird, moody shadow and more like himself. A cooler, upbeat, happy version of himself that hung out with people and could relax around his grandfather and didn't need to hide behind his twin every minute of his life.

Honestly, things could not be better.

“I think I’m cured,” he tells Dr. Gardener confidently, the summer after freshman year.

Dr. Gardener was the pediatric psychiatrist at the health clinic in New Carthage. She was younger than the last two doctors and had a weird (for someone who lived in landlocked Kansas) obsession with analogies involving boats. But she was also the nicest doctor he’d ever met. The last guys always made him feel kinda crazy, like he was a less a person and more a lab experiment gone sideways. But with Dr. Gardener, things always sounded...fixable. Salvageable. Not entirely hopeless. She was the kind of doctor he wished he could have started with, though none of that mattered now.

“Cured?” Dr. Gardener repeated, arching an eyebrow. She started explaining remission and relapses and something about rudders and oars (again with the boating fixation); Jordan listened politely but largely tuned her out. She was amenable to letting him taper off fluoxetine and that's all he needed to know.

Seriously, he's fine. Everything is fine. Maybe this whole anxiety was just a dark period that he can put behind him. Like Sarah, he's moving on and burying that anxious phase in the proverbial backyard.

And it felt really good to be off meds. His thoughts are his own and under control. The monsters have been exiled to the far reaches of…wherever intrusive thoughts go when they’re not bothering him. Maybe superpowers were the answer to everything that had felt so wrong with him before. Take that, insufficient serotonin and deficient dopamine. Superpowers are it. No more mood swings, panic attacks, or thought spirals. No more wanting to feel like clawing himself out of his own skin.

He was good. Awesome, really.
Nothing could possibly—

Sophomore year was a disaster.
A disaster on steroids that caught fire and exploded.

Sarah was being…weird.
Jon’s new girlfriend was annoying.
Jon was annoying—he spent all his time griping about the other guys on the football team and researching protein shakes and division I college football teams.
His interdimensional half-sister materialized out of thin air and spent a few months in the Kents’ house, which made Mom sad for some reason.
He and Sarah spent most of their time fighting, making up, and fighting about making up.
Aunt Lucy came to visit and brought an interdimensional club of psychos with her.
Dad lost his superpowers and then disappeared for a month.
Jon—the rational, reasonable, supposedly emotional stable twin—started doing space drugs and got arrested.

Oh, and the Western Civ history teacher hated Jordan’s guts.
He wasn’t sure why, though. Maybe it had something to do with the 7-page term paper he wrote on the League of Nations. Woodrow Wilson was like, Mrs. Miller’s hero, so maybe she didn’t quite appreciate Jordan’s description of the League of Nations being as “effective as button batteries powering a Tesla” (Grandad’s words, not his...though he wrote them in his paper so maybe they were Jordan's words after all...should he have cited it?).

Maybe it was because the paper was two pages too long and he used the wrong font. Maybe it was because all his current event papers focused on sports news instead of farming and the economy and Superman. Maybe this was a sign Jordan wasn’t a very good writer. Or maybe it was just paranoia talking.

Dr. Siegel would have been proud of Jordan recognizing his own hypervigilance and probably disappointed he couldn’t think of a single gratitude worksheet to keep himself from spiraling.
Dr. Schuster would probably hate that Jordan couldn’t remember what part of his brain was overreacting and which neurotransmitters were misfiring. Dr. Gardener would probably make some analogy about boats and tell him to be patient with himself because mental health was a marathon, not a sprint (and that had nothing to do with boats).

As it was, that’s exactly what she said when Mom scheduled him an appointment after the school year ended.

He was supposed to go for a follow-up months ago, during Christmas break, but he kept putting it off for one reason or another until the school year ended and he ran out of excuses. Which was probably for the best, because he hadn’t been feeling all that great lately. After the fallout from the crazy mess Aunt Lucy was tied up in, things just kinda fell apart.

Sarah apologized (again?) and she seemed genuinely impressed when she let him explain about his powers, but shortly thereafter she started avoiding him, canceling plans without saying why.
His history teacher decided that she really did hate him and passed him with a B-. Which stung, but not as much as French II, which he barely passed with a C-. Admittedly, the worlds colliding into each other and a creepy Jon-clone making trouble around Smallville had kinda taken precedence over memorizing French verb tenses, but still. His grades had been so much better last year (ironic, considering how many sick days he’d had to take), and the extremely low scores in two of his best classes was pretty demoralizing.

So by the time summer rolled around again, Jordan was feeling…antsy. Not outright panicking, but definitely anxious and cranky and just, nothing good. Maybe Dr. Gardener had been right a year ago, and he wasn’t actually cured. All his neuroses and anxieties were still there.

Superpowers notwithstanding, he was the exact same weird kid who’d left Metropolis a few years back. Nothing in his brain had evidently changed--all the monsters were still there.
So where did he go wrong?

Sarah had gotten better, right? She seemed (almost annoyingly) okay. So if she could get there, why couldn’t he?

On the bright side, if there was a bright side (and Dad would say there always was), it was evidently unprofessional for psychiatrists to gloat when their patients were proven wrong. Or maybe Dr. Gardener was just being nice (or maybe...no, nope. That's the paranoia talking. Shut up.)

At any rate, she prescribed a new medication—venlafaxine—and recommended he come in for a sooner-than-normal follow-up to work on cognitive distortions.

He starts his new pills as instructed and for a few weeks, the peace holds.

Jon was obsessing over his new truck and his driver’s license (which felt slightly less unhealthy than the protein shake fixation from a year ago), Mom and Natalie were on good terms, and Sarah kinda sometimes wanted to hang out. Jordan was even kinda looking forward to the community-wide barbecue thing that Mom and Dad were setting up for his and Jon’s 16th birthday.

So the venlafaxine was working. Kind of. It quieted the endless chatter inside his brain and forced his racing, spiraling thoughts back into something concrete he could manage.

But in its place, he felt…off, somehow. Wrong. Unsettled, even.

It wasn’t anxiety, picking through his thoughts at random to dwell on something innocuous until all his brain could foresee was inevitable disaster. It certainly wasn’t depression, so exhausted by his inability to be normal that the world around him started to look as morbidly pessimistic as he felt.

No, this was something…else. Something new. Something oppressive and empty and void of all feeling.
Like he was going through the motions of living without being alive.

Somewhere, in the back of his brain, alarms were sluggishly going off. This--something--was wrong. Definitely wrong. But maybe this was like the psychosomatic 'rash.' Maybe he's just imaging the alarms. Or maybe it just means he's getting a new power--the prickling had stopped around the time he developed heat vision and he still hasn't managed to unlock x-ray vision like Dad.

Or maybe he's just crazy. He’d been a freak back in Metropolis; why would Smallville let him be anything else?

Besides, Mom was really sick. Stage 3 breast cancer was serious, and bringing this up with his parents would just be—Mom just needed to focus on getting better. She just looked so frail these days, like the chemo was sucking the life out of her. Killing her while trying to save her at the same time.

And his parents were always worrying so much about him anyway, so adding to their worries would be even more selfish. And unproductive. And pointless because he was a high school junior and well beyond the handholding. It’s not like it was before high school, when he was having panic attacks all the time.

No, this was fine. He was fine. Everything was fine.

Probably. Maybe? Who even knew?

Well, Dr. Gardner probably knew, but Jordan was in no mood for psychoanalysis and self-reflection. He’d tried being open with Sarah and look where that had gotten him.

So, he worries about Mom and goes to school and takes his pills and buries the niggling wisps of concerns under geometry and American literature and beating Dad’s training modules at the fortress. Meanwhile, the numbness spreads like a fog through his brain, tinting everything gray and miserable and ugly. Stupid, irrational anger forms the clear moments, the days where the haze wore off a little, as if his subconscious was lighting fires under the fog so he could feel something—anything—for once.

Jordan gets himself into a lot of trouble that way.

He argues with Grandad about getting a haircut and snaps at Candice for using all the hot water. He tells off Sarah for being a lousy friend and picking Junior over him.
He makes fun of Jon’s internship firefighter-thing because he’s jealous that his brother gets to play hero while he can’t.

He even stops talking to Malcolm because all the guy ever talks about now is D&D, with its stupid confusing rules. It’s a low blow, considering how much Jordan loved Star Trek, which was no stranger to nonsensical plots and retconned realities. But isolation requires less mental effort, so he says something mean and doesn’t apologize for weeks.

And the pièce de résistance? He stops being careful with his powers.

Mom, Dad and Grandad were horrified, to say the least, but it felt hard to force himself to even care. He’s grounded, literally and figuratively, for a month after he pulls that stunt with the tornado.
He just wanted to feel something, for once. And cheesing with people he doesn’t know, pretending to be a cooler version of himself than the neurotic version that really exists, feels better than feeling nothing at all. But for all the trouble it caused with his parents, the emotional high was temporary. And when it wears off, he’s back to feeling nothing.

In a grand stroke of irony, though, his end-of-year grades are much better this time around. Shockingly, people who speak English do better in English class than they do in French, so his AmLit grades are pretty good. His geometry scores are decent, and the school guidance counselor assures him that his roughly B average in all his other classes compensates for his poor performance from sophomore year.

Not that he can really bring himself to care.

Whatever he’s feeling, it’s like depression but without the teeth, and after admittedly sulking for about a month, Jordan gives up and talks to his parents about everything.

"I think there's something wrong...with me."

When he finishes explaining himself--it's always weird trying to explain where his head is, when half the time he feels like he doesn't know either--it’s a combination of exasperated ‘why didn’t you just tell us’ and ‘well, that explains so much’ and ‘please for the love of our sanity throw that stuff out.’ He stops taking the pills that night and it's almost embarrassing how much better he feels even a week out. He owes a lot of apologies after that, but it feels so good to be able to think straight for once that the embarrassment doesn't faze him at all.

Dad talks him off the edge enough to make peace with Sarah and Mom schedules him for the soonest possible opening with Dr. Gardener. In the meantime, Jordan tosses the rest of his prescription. It feels weirdly cathartic, like he really is closing the book on something this time. Not on anxiety--that monster is apparently dead set on following him everywhere--but maybe, just closing the book on losing to it. On giving the monster more power than it's due, on constantly feeling like he can't fight back.

Getting out of his own head though, Mom was doing better. She was eating and sleeping and looking more and more alive by the day. With her chemo and surgery over, all she had left were radiation appointments and a lifetime of preventative follow-ups. Her doctors seemed adamantly allergic to the word 'cure,' throwing around clinically sterile phrases like "cautiously optimistic" and "a high likelihood of remission" in its place. But the terminology didn't matter. She wasn't dying, and that was good enough news for everyone.

To celebrate, the whole family makes plans to go on vacation, Grandad brings his new girlfriend around, and Jordan hangs out with Malcolm for a very over-complicated DnD campaign. Things start going back to normal, and it feels good to laugh at things again and joke around with Jon.

And for the first time in a really long time, Jordan feels like he can actually breathe.

So maybe that was the whole point. It wasn't about beating the monsters or medicating them into submission--he'd tried--it was just...making peace with the fact they'd always be there. But so would he.

Just like Mom, he hadn't lost the game just yet.

And he wasn't crazy after all.

Just different.