Chapter Text
She found herself staring at the computer looking for something to distract her mind with, but it wasn’t working. Everything had been in a monochromatic sequence - wake up, eat, sleep, eat, sleep. No more, no less was done in a day, except maybe assignments that had to be completed on time lest she risked the wrath of just about everyone she knew worrying about her mental health. Again. In her mind the monochromic sequences broke down into a thousands tiny pieces and those tiny pieces shattered in her mind. Always racing, always forming new sequences - always, always, always. The drugs only helped slightly, and she could still feel herself doubting their benefit, did they work? Were they something the doctors had told her to take in order to trick her into a false sense of cure? Was there even a cure to a racing mind that flipped and turned and mixed emotions together in an angry explosion of emotions? Her paranoia was the worst - the doubt of the medication was a irony in itself, was she just thinking that the medication was a ploy and that, in fact, it only highlighted the stress of requiring more medication? The thousands of questions rattled through her brain like a freight train slamming into a wall. Always, always, always.
She clicked her way through the accepted pastimes; Facebook, Google, the Guardian. But it couldn’t stop the whirring in her mind. She processed the information given to her from her computer screen that lit her small university apartment like an illumination (dark was what dark was, it didn’t stop the Always) but it didn’t stay in her mind very long - it wasn’t conducive to her mind nor did it actually make a difference to anyone else’s life. Her unbrushed curly hair was swept back by a lazy hand, used to having to push the same part of her fringe back into the cotton candy coloured frizz. Clicking through the links, processing information quicker still, her emerald green eyes came to a halt on a blog. And so too did the Always.
‘Holmes Detective Agency; For the Bizarre, Complex and Worthy.’
The pinkette’s mouth twitched in dismissal, a glimmer of a smirk that died as quick as it had appeared. Her fingers had gone to click away from the screen when a link to a blog post had caught her eye;
‘Murder Solved: The Case of the Wounded Soldier’
In her trawling of the internet she had briefly read something to do with the series of murders that had led to the assassination attempt of an army Colonel. It had been foiled by the police in the knick of time but she had noticed in the background a man of a similar age to herself, perhaps his mid-twenties but no more. He had dark tousled hair and his chiselled cheek bones had caught her eye for longer than the usual second she spent skimming the web. It was then that she’d noticed him in nearly all of the police photographs, but never at the forefront of any of the images. All news reports had indicated that it had been a ‘special detective’ that had done most of the leg work; but the met had a habit of hiding their shortcomings behind the success of the actual case regardless of who had done the actual solving. Even the Always had stopped momentarily as she looked at the man in the background of the image, his eyes avoided the camera but one couldn’t mistake the emerald green that had been caught by the flash itself. Was he this ‘special detective’? She assumed it was probable given the earlier blog posts with similar images and the man in question hidden like a jewel at the back of the furore.
Her thin, pale finger went to click the mousepad to move away from the site, the Always had been momentarily sated but it still demanded sustenance for its breakdown in her mind. A pop-up stopped her from leaving the tab. ‘Are you sure you’d like to leave this site?’ Her mouse automatically clicked onto the ‘yes’ button and with no expectations of being stopped again she began to bite at the corner of her nail.
‘Are you really sure? You’ve been to this site 17 times in the past 48 hours. What are you looking for?’
This time the box didn’t have a reply function - her hand fell slowly from her mouth to rest on the keyboard as if ready to write a response. Her brow furrowed in concentration as she looked at the screen. What was she looking for? Did she even know herself? Had she really been to the same site 17 times? She could feel the Always building up like a monster waiting to burst out of the closet, it was desperate to erupt out of her mind, to send her into an absolute state where she felt so uncontrollable no one would be able to bring her down. She had been there twice before in her life, once she had ended up on a drug and drink binge before being picked up by the police. The second time had been substantially more… dire. The strait jacket and nurses and drugs only helped in enraging the Always. It was not something that would or could disappear regardless of the medication. Her best solution, though not a cure, was to keep the Always satisfied. More information, more knowledge, no emotions, no conflicting thoughts - pure, unequivocal facts derived from the rest of the world. This had been her solution long enough to abandon her hometown like some girl out of a chick flick and distance herself from all she had ever known, all the Always had ever known. It helped - there were no emotions in fact finding. But it only helped for so long.
She had just begun to resign herself to more paranoia, that the site had just been fucking with her, before an answer box popped up with a message beside it. ‘Well?’ The cursor blinked at her expectantly awaiting an answer. She bit her lip thoughtfully, debating whether the Always was dripping its way slowly into her own reality. It didn’t really matter, she thought to herself, the Always did what it wanted sometimes - even if she tried her best to keep herself, and it, distracted.
Flexing her fingers, she began to write;
‘A cure for the Always.’
The message box didn’t even blink, nor did it have a send button. The cursor sat there blinking at her. Internally she tutted, resigning herself to the fact it had been the Always seeping into her skewed reality. Perhaps she needed to sleep. To shut herself off entirely from everything. She rolled herself away from the computer on her desk chair, her small frame lifting easily off of the chair and collapsing into her bed not two foot away from her. The cushion swallowed her head with surprising comfort and her eyes closed to the darkness behind her eyelids. She tried her best not to think, but as always that was a futile attempt, her mind pulsed with questions and irritation. Why did that man in the images seem so striking? Why did she answer the silly spam bot? Surely she would be receiving hundreds of emails now for various cures, at least she supposed she’d have something to laugh at, the cure for male flaccidity, the cure for arthritis. She’d have something to read for a small while.
A ping from her computer sounded, and her eyes could barely focus on the flickering light on the screen before she sat up and looked across the room in a daze. The Always had stopped pounding at the recesses of her brain because it too had been shocked at what she saw on the screen.
'112B Baker Street, London. 11am tomorrow. Welcome to the Always, Lexi.
~ SH ’