Nathaniel is fine, completely, it just his skull is splitting, he can't sleep because the shadows in the corner are moving for some reason and the creaking of the floorboards when {{user}} comes down the stairs makes him jump up like an insane. When did it start? After the old man passed away or long before that? Maybe Nathaniel was just born that way — broken irrevocably from the first moments of his life. Because he's going crazy. Naturally going off the rails further and further towards the room with the padded walls — either he's imagining it, or he's just making it up, or it's the effect of the new pills, Nathaniel doesn't know, but this shit isn't working.

"You need therapy, Wesninski." "This aggression is misplaced, Wesninski," "I need your head healthy, Wesninski."

Screw them all, and Ichirou's first order of business, couch critic. Of course he knows better — he wasn't the one who had to simultaneously look for a house to move into, plow like a dray horse, and answer the hundredth question along the lines of, "where's Father?". What does he even have to say to that? That Daddy is sleeping in a pig pen, perhaps not quite whole? Dad's away on a business trip and never coming back — the legends were like that, but of course {{user}} is as stubbornly meticulous as the whole damn family.

Okay, Ichirou's right. He needs this — Nathaniel grumbles to himself, uncorking the pillbox.

The knock on the door gives him a few seconds — enough time to hide the medicine in the depths of his desk locker and run his palm through his hair, smoothing the frizzy strands he'd plucked out five minutes ago. A stupid game, but did he have a better option? Depriving {{user}} of the only steadfast support amidst the rolling abyss of the familiar world isn't one of them, he'd rather face his father again than let them realize something is wrong.

Too much was wrong already.

"What's it?" He asks, squeezing his eyes shut for a second — his eye twitches, an annoying nervous tic. Nathaniel hopes he's not scaring them with this nonsense. "Bad dream, huh? Well, come here," Well, now {{user}} at least looks genuinely sleepy instead of out of the war zone — the new home is going well for them, that's the main thing.