Accouchement

1.1

Yoshimoto Tohru is drifting through hypnagogia when she realizes something's absolutely off. She can feel it in her body: her hips are stiff, her arms are heavy, there's a static lilting in her ears and she feels as if she's trying to muscle through a foam block pit. It's different from how she normally feels - weightless, lethargic, of course, but blissful. Serene. Instead, there's fatigue in her bones and a perpetual layer of ennui saturating her post-dream haze.

At first she thinks it's a dream - she's prone to both lucid and vivid, especially when stressed - but as she drifts along the edges of wakefulness and unconsciousness, there's a very real sense of presque vu* dancing through the part of her brain not normally occupied by the tedious list of habitually neglected daily chores she knows she needs to get done today. And while there's no shortage of laundry, meal prep, cleaning, research and a variety of other common tasks that make her feel as if stress is climbing down her throat and breathing acid into her stomach, when she breaches the line of consciousness and gains full awareness of herself, she can't shove away the paranoia.

Yoshimoto shifts, regretfully pushing aside that painful yearning for more sleep to grope for the night stand she always places her glasses on before slipping into bed but, then, her fingers glide through open air and the static is suddenly replaced by a screeching panic that rolls from the top of her head to bottom of feet like electricity and she notices, for the first time, that everything is different. She's out of bed in a moment, squinting against the ineffectual use of her eyes and a bright, blinding light - the kind of light that hums because it is over fed with power and flickers because its loose in its socket. Everything around her is a blur, but she can see that the walls and floor are a different color than the putrid, stained acrid yellow of her apartment's.

Then she's flinging herself from the bed, intent on clarifying matters, only to end up crippled on the floor by a wave of sudden vertigo, temporarily blind and absolutely nauseous. She's bent over, shaking and confused, unbelieving of the circumstances she's currently found herself and suddenly very aware of a gap in her memories.

Her last memories are from work. She'd fired an incompetent employee and turned in an article about her interview with All Might and his decision to accept tenure at U. A. High. She remembers specifically handing in her assignment on a thumb drive...then nothing. She thinks and she thinks and thinks, but it's like ramming herself against a concrete wall. There's a gap between work and now that makes her stomach churn and nerves light on fire.

The vertigo quickly evolves, reshaping itself into a headache, pulsating behind her eyes and making it difficult to concentrate. She wants, so desperately, to be curled up in her apartment right now, but, as Yoshimoto fights down another bout of nausea, she stands and searches, arms extended because her depth perception without her glasses is literally nonexistent, for a wall. After a few steps she feels it. It's rough under her fingertips and un-blessedly cool. Grudgingly, she leans against it, walking along the border of the room. She's hoping to find something, anything, close to a door and, as she's about to give up, her fingers run along something just barely jutting out from the flat surface she'd been skimming. It's the same color as the rest of the room, so the protrusion is nearly invisible without her glasses, but she quickly finds hinges and sees the blurry darkness of an outline of, what she believes is, a door.

Yoshimoto frantically runs her hands along the face of the door, searching for the handle that should be there, but isn't. And the feeling of helplessness that drowns her sanity is enough to break her.