AFTERIMAGE

Content warnings: emeto, internalized ableism, illness, slight unreality.

Augur slept without dreams. Or rather, without coherent dreams. Usually when he slept, he wasn’t given stories or tormented by otherworldly horrors; rather, all he dreamt about were images. Vague and incomprehensible. Smudged watercolor. He’d tried drawing them once or twice in his journals, but the paint just ruined the paper, and his cheap colored pencils bought for this express purpose couldn’t quite make the right shapes.

So, from this nearly-dreamless sleep, Augur slipped back into half-consciousness. He woke to the sounds of the town—wheels on the street, people yelling. Light filtered through the window through the thin film of the curtains. For one barely-there moment, it was peaceful.

And then his brain started working again, and he shot upright. His window wasn’t by his bed. It wasn’t big enough to give off this much light. And he didn’t have curtains—none would fit the odd shape.

Shoving the heavy quilt off his bed, he stood, and promptly fell, tripping on something near the floor. He didn’t have a quilt—and the floors were wood, not cement, and the walls didn’t look like cinder blocks. And his legs hurt like hell.

From over on the other side of the room, Augur heard a sound—he must have woken Lane. Sure enough, there he was, laying on the couch. “Wow, I feel a hell of a lot better than I usually do, sleeping on your shitty futon. Did you replace the cushion or something? ’Cause whatever it is, do it more often—whoa, dude, what are you wearing?”

He looked down at himself. Both he and Lane were wearing near-identical long white nightshirts. Was that what they were called? He didn’t really know. They looked worn, like someone had been wearing them for years. Augur’s shoulders tensed at the thought of wearing someone else’s clothes.

“I don’t know what’s going on, but something is very, very wrong here,” Augur said carefully. “Give me a minute to stand and get my glasses, and we’re going to figure this out.”

“Don’t let me fuckin’ stop you, man, it’s not like you’re any help to me blind and on the floor.”

Kind as always. Augur sighed, bracing himself against the bed and the nightstand beside it, and pushed himself up to standing. The joints in his knees and ankles protested, cracking louder than usual as he did.

His glasses were on the nightstand. Almost exactly where they usually were, except in Augur’s room at home, his dresser was by the side of his bed, not this heavy wooden nightstand. There was a basin and pitcher sitting beside them, and what looked like an oil lamp. Who the hell used oil lamps anymore?

He squinted down at his glasses that were not his glasses. They were the right prescription, or close to it, but they were made out of thin gold wire instead of his sturdy acrylic frames, and they were almost pill-shaped, not rectangles. But they fit, and he needed to see, so it would have to do for now.

Lane, who had been sitting on the couch that wasn’t Augur’s couch for the whole time Augur had been struggling, stood to offer his arm to help him walk. Augur gratefully took his offered elbow, and stopped.

The skin under the thin white fabric was pink and warm.

Slowly, Augur turned to face Lane, tugging the neck of his nightshirt away from his chest.

“What are you—”

“Shh. I need to focus.”

With the sternum exposed, Augur pressed his hand to the right side of Lane’s chest, staring at the dip of his clavicle just for something to focus on. The tone of the skin was still the same, he noted, and there were a few round pink scars that looked to be about where the rotting patches usually sat on Lane’s torso. But that wasn’t important. He turned his head to listen to Lane’s chest.

Under the thin skin, where the flesh would ordinarily be cold and still, Augur felt a heartbeat.

“Lane,” he said, feeling very lightheaded all of a sudden. “You’re not dead.”

“Yeah. I’m not.”

“That’s not right.”

“Nothing here is right,” Lane said, sitting back down on the couch. All the furniture in here was far more well-made than anything Augur had, but it was all laid out in a similar way. The bed, the long wooden table and chairs that stood where the gurney usually would, a long couch where his futon was. The bookshelves were in the wrong places, and all the books were the wrong way around.

Augur sighed. He was fairly certain this was a hallucination, but if things were this solid and real, either he was having a psychotic break, or someone was playing a very, very cruel prank on him.

“Hey, uh, so if this is the olden days, what are you supposed to do about your meds?”

Augur swore loudly. “I don’t have them. However long we’re in here, I have to miss doses.”

“Okay, well, that sucks ass,” he said. “No braces either. Your joints are going to suck, dude.”

This was, unfortunately, very true. He could already feel the dull ache starting in the base of his spine. Usually he’d take a painkiller and lay in bed for a while, maybe put his heating pack on his back, but there wasn’t really much he had in the way of a heating pack right now, nor painkillers.

“Is there anything here? This is supposed to be my home, even if it’s… a century out of date.”

Lane craned his neck. “Not really. There’s a bunch of old-timey looking meds in this cabinet—okay, we are not letting you get hooked on fuckin’ morphine, no meds for you today—and some bandages. Could maybe use them like a… pseudo-brace.”

Augur groaned, falling back onto the couch and closing his eyes. “Really. There’s nothing.”

“Mm. Well. Not nothing.”

That was a dangerous tone of voice. Lane sounded excited. Something bad was likely about to happen, or had already happened, and the bad thing would very likely involve Augur being made to look very ridiculous.

Very slowly, he opened his eyes. Lane stood over him, grinning, and holding…

“No.”

“It’s better than nothing.”

“I know it’s better than nothing. I don’t see why we need to leave the house in the first place, I can sit here and… convalesce, or whatever they called it—”

“Come on.” Lane waved the old-fashioned walking stick in his face. It really did look ridiculous—deep reddish wood, polished and varnished, and with a bulbous head. It was by no means the kind of cane he would choose for himself, if he needed one. It was the kind of cane that a robber baron would use. Or a very eccentric rich asshole who liked to roleplay as a robber baron.

“We don’t need to leave. We can just sit here, and let things sort themselves out—”

“Come on,” Lane said again. “Don’t you wanna go see the past?”

Augur did not want to go see the past. Augur wanted to bury his head under a pillow, wait until he was back in his own time, and then never think about this again. But that didn’t seem to be an option for him.

“Do we at least have clothing.”

“Let’s go check,” Lane announced, with far too much excitement for their situation.

Thirty minutes later, Augur stood outside the house that was not his own, wearing a suit that didn’t quite fit him. He looked absolutely ridiculous, and was in a significant amount of pain, but Lane apparently didn’t want to stay inside, and that took precedence.

“Where are we going?” Lane asked.

“I don’t know. The street names are different, and I don’t exactly think we’ll be able to find anyone who’ll understand our situation.”

“Great.”

Augur stared. “How in the goddamn world is that great?”

“It’s great,” Lane said, grinning down at him. “We get to do whatever we want. Can we go borrow someone’s—what’s it called, stagecoach? I wanna learn how to drive one of those.”

“Absolutely not.” Augur set off towards what appeared to be the town center, leaning heavily on the cane. He felt ridiculous. It was humiliating, and he didn’t want to be here—

“Oh shit,” said Lane. “Is that Verity?”

“Just because everyone here dresses like Verity does—”

“It is! It’s—hey, Verity!”

To Augur’s shock, Verity turned around. That was Verity—her sharp, knifelike face was unmistakable. She walked up to them, wearing a very similar dark red dress to the one she wore nowadays.

“Hello. Do I know you?”

“Wait, no, something’s wrong. Why are you—you’re too alive.”

“You two know me?”

“...well, clearly you don’t know us right now. I’m sorry for the interruption.” Augur felt awful. Here Verity was, just a young woman at this point in time, and she must have been so completely confused.

“Time travelling, aren’t you?”

“...I think so, yes.”

She nodded to them, very politely and very normally, considering that two random people had just run up to her yelling that they knew her. “I see. Come with me, then. Do you know what year it is?”

“...not really, no,” Augur said, looking around at the horse-drawn carts and the people in tailcoats walking past them on the street.

“Well, this is the year eighteen eighty-two, and I’d say that you’re very much out of your element. I know this must all be so terribly confusing for you, mustn’t it?”

Augur shrugged noncommittally. He didn’t know how much to reveal to her, or how much she knew, or how much she needed to know.

“Right.” Verity offered her arm to Lane. He linked his arm with hers, and Augur sighed, resigning himself to playing catch-up with the tall people once again.

“You haven’t introduced yourselves,” she said. “You know my name, but I don’t know yours.”

“Augur. And the uncomfortably tall one is Lane.”

“I suppose these names are usual for your time,” she said, leading them down the street to a set of row houses. Augur recognized these—they were still in that same location today, just refurbished and a little bit more modernized. “I’ll let you inside. Come sit, take tea with me.”

The inside of Verity’s house was bright and colorful, with the sounds of chatter coming from upstairs and a copious amount of dog fur on the furniture. She breezed her way into the kitchen and put a kettle on, gesturing for Augur and Lane to find their seats.

“You’re taking this remarkably well,” Augur said, sitting down at the table with her.

“Time is thin here,” Verity said, pouring the hot water into their cups. “I haven’t met you yet, but I’m sure wherever you know me, in the future, I am realizing certain things about my past. Do I live a long life?”

“Well, your tombstone says you die in 1920, so I’d say you do pretty good,” Lane said.

She mulled this over for a long moment. “I see. Forty more years isn’t too bad. And I’m sure the turn of the century brings some excitement.”

“We know you after death as well,” Augur said with a sigh, “as I’m sure you guessed when Lane so helpfully told you that you looked ‘too alive’.”

“How was I supposed to know she wasn’t a vampire yet?”

“Based on the fact that she hasn’t died.”

“Well, I’m sure that’s all very fascinating when it does happen, but let’s not… ruin the ending for myself, as it were. From what year do you come?”

Lane told her, and she nodded, keeping a remarkably straight face. “I see.”

“You’re taking this all very well, considering we just told you you’re dead and we’re from the future.”

“Ah, well, you are not the first person that this has happened to. Not six months ago a young woman with very short hair ran up to me, insisting she was my bosom friend, and I hadn’t the faintest idea who she was yet. It’s been happening here for years. When I was a child, a man who didn’t speak a word of English appeared. I think he must have been Scandinavian—the shoemaker down the street knew a bit of a language nearly like his, and they spoke, and it turned out he was from the year ten hundred and twenty-five! Isn’t that remarkable?”

“Hm.” Augur considered this. “And for you, this is… common knowledge? Everyone in Coldwood knows about this?”

“I’d say so. It’s become quite commonplace. As my mother used to tell it, God rest her soul, people from other times have been appearing here since, well, since Coldwood was founded.”

“Hm.”

Maybe this still happened in his own time. He’d have to keep an eye out.

Keeping an eye out wasn't exactly an option right now, though, considering he wasn't in his own time. The second day they woke up in the eighteen-eighties, Augur was frustrated. The third day, he was concerned. The fourth day, he started to feel sick.

They had been staying in what would eventually be Augur’s house, eating what Verity could find to give them and avoiding water at all costs. It was incredibly difficult, avoiding all gluten, considering he wasn’t sure the meat was cooked all the way and he didn’t find the sad, limp vegetables Verity offered particularly filling. The meat he ate anyway. It would help with the iron deficiency he was surely rapidly developing.

He couldn’t be in a worse situation, honestly. No iron tablets—no safe iron tablets, he didn’t trust the ones from this time to not have poisonous metals in them, so his fatigue and pain was getting worse. No salt tablets, and he wasn’t drinking a lot of water considering the very high possibility of getting cholera, so he was constantly lightheaded. And no gluten-free foods that weren’t, well, always gluten-free, so his blood sugar was low. Absolutely perfect.

Verity had been adamant that spending time where they had arrived would make them more likely to get sent back home. Slipping through the sieve, as she put it. Augur thought that all of this was about equally insane, but if he believed that he was actually in the past and that all of this wasn’t a major hallucination, then maybe sitting in the same place he arrived was some kind of logical.

They’d spent a while just talking. Augur was adamant that he and Lane not tell her anything about the future, especially since she’d already heard that she became a vampire, but nonetheless they managed to carry on an okay conversation. Verity had even had a theory about why Lane was… well, not dead.

“Seeing as he’s… before his death date, technically, I think perhaps he might just be alive again. It should likely resolve itself before you return home.”

“Resolve itself.” Lane had laughed at that. “Yeah. Great. I’ll be so excited to rot when we go home.”

But they hadn’t gone home. It had been four days, and they hadn’t gone home.

The suit was starting to fit him. He was losing weight, and fast. This was not a good sign, considering Celiac disease hadn’t been discovered yet and if he stayed here any longer he’d very likely die. He was just glad he didn’t actually live in this time. He was hit by an image of himself, unable to keep down food and not knowing why, and shook his head hard to get rid of it.

Then again, not knowing might have been better. Knowing and not being able to prevent it from happening might have been just as bad. He wouldn’t have the first idea how to survive in this situation—he would have to find a lot of incredibly salt-heavy food to eat, avoid bread entirely, and guess at what foods in this place were gluten free.

The lightheadedness was getting worse, and had been for several days by this point. It wasn’t exactly a surprise. Whoever had decided to paper this house’s walls entirely in arsenic fucking green had made his life a lot more difficult. Granted, that was someone who didn’t have the context or medical knowledge that he did, but still. Bad interior design choices were unforgivable either way.

He felt a sudden wave of dizziness hit him, and he collapsed back onto the couch.

“Fuck. Are you okay?”

“You two are starting to flicker,” Verity said. Augur was glad. He’d thought it was just his eyes going bad from the… well. Grab bag of illnesses he was currently unable to treat.

“Yeah, yeah, fine, sure. Augur. Are you okay?”

“Lane,” Augur said, voice level and calm. “I’m going to pass out very soon. Probably as soon as we get home, from low blood sugar and low iron. And also, likely, dehydration. You’re going to get me to a hospital. There’s a medication list on the fridge when we get back, you’re going to get that and my cane and you’re going to bring me to a hospital as fast as you can.”

“Fuck. Shit. Okay. Okay.” Lane grabbed him by the shoulder. “Take a deep breath—”

“Wow, Lane, that’s a wonderful idea, I hadn’t thought of that—”

“Shut up! I’m trying to help you—”

And then the feeling of the fabric beneath him changed, and the smell of the room was different, and the goddamn popcorn ceilings of his basement apartment was the last thing he saw before he got deeply dizzy and passed out on the futon.

AFTERIMAGE is immediately continued in the next story, SIDE EFFECT.