11 Delirium (1/2)

”You know, I saw you at lunch today, and---”

Hunter cut himself off mid-sentence: he noticed Ash's eyelids were twitching. It looked like she was about to come to.

[Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit,] he thought, panic rising in his chest.

She was still haphazardly dressed and propped up on his knee. He would have wanted to put a modest distance between their bodies (making room for the Holy Spirit, as the teachers called it) especially considering her state of undress, but that would have meant putting her back on the cold ground.

He settled for cradling her shoulders: it seemed like a reassuring thing to do for her (human contact after passing out and all that) but more importantly for him, he could at least keep her from slapping his face the moment she opened her eyes.

”Heeeey, Boots. Wassup?” he said.

[Wassup? Where the hell did that come from? That sounded so lame!] he thought to himself, cringing inwardly.

Ash slowly opened her eyes. She didn't slap him.

She blinked slowly---too slowly. Her eyes were unfocused and seemed to be wandering. Then she started murmuring. Hunter strained his ears to listen to her, but she wasn't speaking words, just nonsense.

”Are you okay?” Hunter asked, a little too loudly.

Ash turned her head to face him, but she couldn't seem to focus her eyes. They seemed to look past him despite being trained in his direction.

[She's delirious,] he thought.

Ash turned her head away from him and continued to murmur incoherently. Hunter had to pull her toward him to keep her from falling over. As Hunter continued to observe her strange behaviour, a thought occurred to him.

[Was this her first time shifting?]

It definitely accounted for a lot of things: the torn clothes, the strange behavior, and the loss of consciousness. Ash likely shifted while she was still wearing her uniform, panicked while she was in werewolf form, and passed out after she shifted back to human form.

The first time a human successfully shifts in and out of werewolf form is immediately followed by a state of delirium. The human brain becomes overwhelmed with the chemical processes involved in the physiological transformation into a werewolf that it, in effect, overloads. This overload results in mild to serious cognitive impairment that lasts anywhere from hours to days. Disorientation and difficulty in speaking is common, and so are hallucinations.

Hunter had gone through the same delirium himself after his first transformation. He remembered the debilitating anxiety and the disassociation from reality. He had been with his father in their family orchard, and he had thought that the trees were going to kill him. He was kept inside his room for 3 days, 2 of which he spent in a deep healing sleep.

Finally, the confusing events of the night made sense to Hunter. Now, he could wrap his head around the situation.

First things first: he needed to get Ash somewhere safe to ride out the delirium.

He thought about carrying her back to school through the front gate and making up an excuse about being outside with her. But with her torn clothes and his weird leather outfit, there was no way that was going to work out well with the school authorities. One look at them and the guard on duty would probably throw him on the ground and call the police before he could say hello.

He could try and sneak her back to his room and take care of her there, but there were too many risks involved: getting her over the fence, getting her to his dorm building, and sneaking her in to his dorm room, all while he was wearing his ridiculous leather getup and she was half naked.

Even assuming that he could accomplish that, keeping her in his room was going to be a problem. The Dormitory Supervisor always checked the rooms in the morning to make sure that none of the students skipped classes. If he found her in his room, she could lose her scholarship and they could both get expelled.

The best thing to do was to somehow get her back to her own dorm room. But how?

Ash's eyes were still unfocused, but she was now able to sit on her own. As Hunter had been deep in his own thoughts, she had been sitting quietly, swaying from side to side, moving to music only she could hear.

”Hey, Ash?”

”Mmm-hmmm?” she answered dreamily.

”Can you stand up?”

”Cadenza,” Ash drawled.

”What?”

”Sshhhh.”

Ash put a finger to Hunter's lips, shushing him. He stared at her as she squeezed her eyes shut, lifting her ear to the wind as if she were straining to hear something important. She was lost inside her own mind, oblivious to Hunter and his panic.

A moment later, she opened her eyes and looked at him, moonily.

”Dear,” she said.

”Yes?”