Save Me (An Eddie Diaz 911 Fanfiction)

Monsters

Trigger Warnings: Depression, Dark Thoughts, Depictions of Rape; Blood; PTSD; Death of a Child

It was a common enough scene. Jane was sitting at her kitchen table, browsing on her laptop for a present for Chimney on Amazon. His birthday was coming up soon, and she knew exactly what she was going to get him. It was a pleasant task, if a bit banal. Still, banality was welcome after the last few weeks she'd had. Jane didn't register how much time had passed as she was clicking away, when her stomach rumbled and she realized that her throat was feeling just a little bit parched. She figured she'd probably worked long enough to earn a snack. In fact, Felix could probably use a snack too. She bet he'd be annoyed that she'd ignored him for so long.

"Felix," she called, looking around her apartment. "Felix!"

She began to feel a bit weird and then it hit her. She didn't live here anymore. This was her old apartment. She was sitting at a table staring over at her old couch, her old rug, and her old coffee table.

"Felix!" There was no response. The air felt disturbingly still, exactly as it had all those months ago. Just before her second attack.

Then it changed. Her laptop disappeared and in front of her was a plate of raisin toast and peanut butter. Just like that, she felt as if she were six years old again.

Jane really didn't like raisins, but she'd eaten raisin toast at least three times a week growing up because it was the only bread that the group home had by the time she could eat. She never had peanut butter on it, except for one time. The time she'd been told that was all they had when she was packing her lunch, and it was only then, after she'd gone into anaphylaxis, that they'd discovered that she was deathly allergic to nuts. She'd been really lucky she was at school when it happened because the nurse had realized what was happening and had administered an epi pen. It was a day that had always stuck with her for all the wrong reasons. For the obvious reasons, Jane hadn't ever kept either raisin toast or peanut butter in her house.

Yet the offensive dish sat on her table, innocuously on one of her plates. Mocking her. Taunting her. Trying to send her into a panic as she thought the place was moving towards her.

Except she wasn't a kid anymore. She was an adult, and she had a good job. She knew her allergies and had control over them. But there was another thing, now in the room, that made her feel less like an adult and more like a child or a teenager who was still at the whims of the thoughtless adults around her. Sitting across from her was Greg, the man who'd run the group home. He'd been the first monster in her nightmares. Greg was the one whose verbal abuses she'd internalized for years. He sat across from her, smiling, and casual as you please, reached over and picked up the toast to take a big bite.

"I'm sorry," he grumbles, spewing peanut butter in her face as he spoke with his mouth full. "Were you going to eat that?"

I have to find my epi-pen, she thought frantically, feeling her throat begin to close up and her fingers and face begin to tingle and go numb.

Instinctively, she tried to get up. She always kept her stash of epi pens in her kitchen drawers. She also had one in her bedroom, her purse, and at the station house. She'd taken care to prevent this situation. She went to retrieve one of the epi pens, any one of them, but she couldn't move. She tried to stand, but it was as if her legs were glued to the seat and the seat to the floor. She couldn't even reach out to grab her purse, which was now on the table, next to her plate. Out of reach for someone who couldn't move. She was completely immobile. Helpless. Out of control.

Jane wanted to cry in frustration. It wasn't fair. None of this was fair. She'd been stuck with this man for fifteen years and she never wanted to see his face again. She knew that he probably never gave her a thought beyond the incident with his car. Neither she, nor any of the hundreds of other kids under his care, had ever meant much to him while that car had been the most important thing in his life, over his own wife. She probably meant nothing to him, but to her he represented a lifetime of self-hatred.