CW: Panic Attack, Dissociation, Derealization
It tries to keep its grip on her but it fails. Her hand slips away from it as the crowd jostles them. It stops in its track the moment its fingers are bare.
It really doesn’t want to do this today. Not today of all days, not when it woke up feeling like nothing was real. It tried to distract itself but the only thing that grounded it was talking to its Dearest. The moment she started talking, it was tethered to the world in a way it had been searching for the entire morning.
Even tethered as it was, there was still a sense of unreality creeping up on it. It was ignoring every flash of something in its peripheral vision, its paranoia was making monsters out of random objects. It was still floating, relying on her grip leading it through the city to keep it aware of its feet hitting the ground.
And now it’s adrift. The crowd feels like it’s pressing in around it, squeezing, choking, suffocating it. The collar of its shirt is tightening, its breath is missing. It can’t feel its fingers anymore, or the rest of its body.
It can’t feel the ground beneath its feet and that makes it panic more. Seeing is believing, and it’s not seeing much beyond coloured blurs. Who’s to say reality even exists? It's not an expert, it doesn’t know if anything is real.
Does it exist? Does its actions mean anything, do they have any impact on anything at all?
It can feel tears in its eyes. Does that mean it's real? It thinks therefore it is? If it can feel, does it exist?
That is not reassuring, it’s thoughts are becoming less coherent as they float off. If it doesn’t think, it isn’t?
It’s suddenly slammed back into its body as something hits its chest hard. The world comes back into sharp focus as its eyesight clears and its hearing is overwhelmed by the roaring cacophony of the crowd and ambient noises.
Its Dearest is kneeling in front of it as it's on its knees. That reminds it to tune back into its body. The pain from its knees starts up, a shocking sensation as it wasn’t aware enough to notice slamming its knees into the concrete.
It’s still gasping for air as the pain from the hit to the chest registers, adding on to the knee pain. It sags forward as everything combines into one overstimulating sensation but is caught by soft hands.
Its Dearest tugs it forwards into a hug, trying to block out some of the noise and the hurt. It tries to bring its hands up to hug back but it's still breathing too heavily to move. Dearest holds them tighter for its efforts.
Its breathing starts to even out as the minutes tick by. The crowd no longer feels so suffocating and it leans more on Dearest as time passes.
It’s still on the ground after a major panic brought on by a derealization episode that was a whole morning long, but it thinks that maybe it might be alright. Or maybe that's just Dearest making everything okay again, as usual.