Chapter 1
You stumble down the streets of New York. Rain soaks your skin. Your neck aches terribly. The migraine is already well settled into the left side of your head and it pounds. You don’t have the grit to make it home.
You shift your meagre tote bag of groceries to your right shoulder to try to alleviate some of the pain, but you know you’re too far gone. Your medication is at home. There’s no escaping it now - the migraine will have to run it’s course.
It was stupid to go out today, just stupid, but you didn’t have a choice with your pantry as bare as it was. You wish you could’ve left going out for groceries just a day longer, or could’ve pulled yourself painfully from bed a day or two earlier to make the trip, but here you are. All the telltale signs of a rising migraine were there, too, in the prodrome state - tight muscles, nausea, dread in the pit of your belly - and you couldn’t think straight enough to bring your medication with you. Of course not.
So here you are. Stumbling down streets from the corner store in Greenwich Village, your clothes soaked, hair plastered, and your food? Anything not packaged properly will be gone, though at the moment you can’t recall what you’ve picked up. It was whatever you’d managed to recognise through sunglasses and a painful brain fog.
You keep your head down against the bright white sky, trying to block out light and water and still keep track of where you are. With the pain the way it is though, you’d taken a few misturns to keep to streets with more trees and awnings and now… you’re lost.
You turn to look for a street sign and slip on wet leaves, crashing to the concrete. Your forearms take the brunt, and save your head another searing pain, but, oh hell, you’re crying out anyway as the jolt resounds through your bones up to your head.
Laying in the rain, you wait for someone, anyone to come by you, to see you, to pick you up - hell, to end you. Come on, Thanos. You think at the sky. Come and do your worst.
He doesn’t come. And no one else does either. No one picks you up, no one sees you or kills you. Now, as ever, there’s no one around to push change in your life. And frankly, you’re sick of it. Sick of this. Sick of stagnation. Sick of sickness.
“Okay, shut up.” You murmur at yourself, trying to shush yourself soothingly on your exhales. “Just get out of the rain.”
You can’t make it another six blocks or however far you’ve got to go - at the moment you don’t know where you are and your head is screaming. You’re laying on the concrete, mouth gasping and drooling with pain. Someone has to take some damn pity.
Forearms torn and leaving small blood patches on the ground, you drag yourself to an unsteady crouch. Slowly, tears and saliva and blood mixing with rain, pained out of your head, you drag yourself up a stranger’s steps and grit your teeth as you bang the door with the heaviest fist you can muster.
Time, so much time slips by. It’s all beats to you. Heartbeats you can feel in your temple, another and another. And if no one comes maybe you’ll just lay down and wait for it all to pass. It’s cold on the step. Maybe that would help.
A figure steps out as they open the door inward. The rain above you suddenly stops and, oh, that’s nice. Is it an alcove? An umbrella? It doesn’t matter. It’s nice.
“Can—nngh,” you clutch at the side of your head as even the sound of your voice and the effort of speaking makes your stomach flip and roll. Your own voice feels like nails against the inside of your skull. You take a moment to breathe through gritted teeth. “Help?”
The deep resonance of the man’s voice is soothing - help! Here is help! “Come, out of the rain.” He says. There's a soft orange glow coming from inside, but it flickers and dies in a moment and the man steps aside. You don’t move. “Can you tell me how to help you?”
“M-migraine.”
His hesitance breaks when you sob.
“Can you walk?”
You nod, barely, and shuffle past him into the space. A large open foyer. You feel the open space, the air, the natural light.
“Hold on,” he says, putting a hand to your shoulder.
His soft padded steps retreat and return, you aren’t left waiting as long as you were on the doorstep, but you stand there and curl in on yourself, shivering with pain and cold.
You hardly hear him return before you feel a towel being wrapped around you. You flinch against the contact, wanting to be sick as soon as it touches your back in the slightest of brushes.
“It’s alright,” he says, hushed. At least he has a bare understanding of what a migraine is, or that he needs to be quiet with you. You greatly appreciate that from him. “I’ll let you do it, you’re just sopping wet. Can I dry your legs? Your arms are bleeding.”
“It’s okay.” You blearily dry yourself, patting at your forearms and wiping down your body as best as you can, your movements as small as possible.
The man is soft, pressing at your legs lightly with the towel, travelling no higher than just over your knees. “You skinned your knees, too. Take a fall in the rain?”
You only hum in reply. Now that you’re out of the rain and less than completely dripping, the lack of other stimulus to focus on made the pain in your head flare up again, glaringly obvious and inescapable. You focus on keeping your breaths even, slow, and steady, with one hand pulling your hair and one hand clutched to your stomach with the towel.
You feel the man's hand touch yours over your stomach - a gloved hand. “Are you hurt anywhere else?” He strokes your hand slightly, as if he's soothing a spooked animal. He means your stomach, you realise, maybe he thinks you've been hurt there.
“Mm-mm,” you shake your head lightly but even that’s enough to drive the pain searing up through your eye socket. You push your palm against your eye and cry out with a sob.
“Okay, we’re okay.” He murmurs, a hand on your shoulder. “I’m going to pick you up now.”
You can’t form any words, but you don’t want to be jolted. Careful, careful, please be careful, you want to beg him. You reach out and he’s there, his chest and open arms, letting you take the initiative.
Slowly, slowly, you wrap your hand around his neck as he lowers down. Soon it’s both hands around his neck, he has an arm to your back, you lean into it and he dips to lift your legs off the floor, careful to readjust you in his arms.
“You’re okay?”
You hum, still on the brink of tears, unable to think of anything but wanting to be in a cold, quiet room.
And then the man slips slightly on the wet floor and you jolt against his chest. “Ah, now. We’re okay. I’ve got you.”
You clutch at the side of your head with both hands and whine into a sob. Oh, crying would only make it worse, you know it, but the pain burns so badly. It burns and burns. You should’ve just gone home, shouldn’t have even left home. Of all the days to be completely out of food, to be completely overworked and rained out of your walk and, and—
“Hey, hey, you can rest, it’s alright.” He says, but you’re flinching, and clenching to keep your body curled up against the jolting with your arms and hands over your face, almost writhing in pain. You can’t stop. You can’t stop. “You can rest now. I’m a doctor,” he says softly, and the words thread their way into your mind. Something in his words must be magic because it’s a pin pulled from your consciousness and your strength releases.
You give yourself over to the sedative, to his arms, to sleep. You’re pulled away.