Detox

KamiKaze · #1

((TW: Suicide and mental health themes))

It was something she was familiar with her entire life.

It should have been something she was familiar with her entire life.

Like many other mornings, Nora Moriarty woke up to the ceiling of a hospital room. This felt different. Was different. She gulped and breathed.

And screamed.

Things were weirdly normal for Nora once she got back. They’d only found out later that her and Melodie were still alive, so they weren’t as besieged as much by the press at first. Even then, her family was doing a good job making sure that people weren’t hassling them. It did result in a ton of phone calls, some polite, some… not. And she did get weird looks when she went out, but it wasn’t as frequent.

She didn’t want to tell the police what happened, but the interrogators were so skilled and she was so unprepared that they found out pretty quickly she poisoned Orion. For a few hours, she feared the worst, until she got the news that she was pardoned. They all were. Even the ones who had personally, obviously killed.

Nora wasn’t sure if she deserved it, but she was still welcomed home. While her family walked on eggshells around her, knowing her trauma, Orion never came up. For a while, it was quiet, and then–

Then the compilation leaked.

And everyone’s eyes turned from Joel to her. She never saw it for herself, but there was a shot of her swapping the bottles. What she did was now the talk of America. That’s when the hassling truly started. The phone calls became more frequent. More news reporters wanted to talk to her. The weird looks happened more often. News articles talked about her, as if she was some oddity. She guessed ‘high school student poisoning a classmate with her Gift’ did make good headlines, but…

She still looked out the window. And thought.

What if it was someone else who had her Gift?
What if it was someone else who was kidnapped?
What if it was someone else who died from the gas?
What if it was someone else who was poisoned?
What if it was someone else who poisoned?
What if it was someone else who wandered alone in the desert?
What if it was someone else who had been freed?
What if it was someone else in that video?
What if it was someone else who had to deal with all this?

And when she looked out that window, the anger from the game reared its head. Nora hated feeling like that. She’d repressed it for so long, but the game brought it out. And she couldn’t push it back in. And what’s more, she could relate to other people who went through it, sure. Some of them even went through a lot worse.

But still. Crispin was a bully who also killed people, Astrid was still Astrid and also killed people, Ximena had driven back to grab people but was probably still crying her eyes out, Alan also helped her with the escape thing but was still nuts, and Stephen also did the right thing, unlike someone similar who didn’t.

Could she relate to people like that?

Probably not.

She could relate to Melodie some, let’s be fair.

But she had trouble reaching out to anyone else. Because in some ways, her experiences were different. She never officially killed anyone, at least in a way that didn’t initially slip under the radar. She wasn’t involved in any escape attempts. She and Melodie were picked up alone. She didn’t understand why someone could be nasty and repulsive in the same way Alan and Crispin could be, or why… anything about Astrid.

In some ways, she was alone again. Even more alone than before. Before she went to Duniway, she never had to deal with the knowledge of her actually intentionally poisoning someone, or people calling up her family, or anything like that.

So that’s why she…

…

‘Attempted.’ That was the euphemism they used.

Nora had stolen some of her parents’ alcohol, enough to numb any pain. She found some rope. And she was stopped. It turned out that as much as she looked outside that window, people could see in. And the blonde girl from across the street, the one who could talk to dogs, saw her with the noose and the chair, and immediately called her family and the ambulance. Rusty had busted open the locked door to see her hanging and cut her down within seconds. She only vaguely remembered any of this, and the only part of it she fully remembered was that she was on a stretcher as they carted her in.

And that’s why the next morning Nora screamed the second she fully processed what had happened.

She’d been so scared to die, even then. But she had survived even that. And she wasn’t sure if that was a good or bad thing. She just knew that for some reason, she was saved.

It took a few days before she left the hospital. Most of Nora’s physical damage was from asphyxiation rather than anything breaking and she was unconscious for only a few seconds, but they had to deal with that for obvious reasons. Her Curse made CPR and such trickier, something else she became guilty about.

And not only that, but they had to address not just her physical injuries, but her mind. What lead her to that state. So, she stayed there to get psychiatric treatment as well. News had broken out about her attempt, and she did get visitors. Once again, they didn’t really talk about what happened in Nevada, let alone Orion. It was mostly them talking about books, or them giving her flowers and plushies and candy, or watching a movie together. It was almost like it was one of her more ‘normal’ hospital visits.

So, why did she poison Orion? That was one of the things she had to unpack during her mandatory therapy sessions.

At first, it seemed straightforward. Owl had threatened them that if they didn’t make a move at that point, she’d kill them all. So, Nora swapped the bottles to prevent that from happening. From the start, she knew that she could inflict her Curse on other people to save herself in the game, hence why she spat into that bottle to begin with. But that was the impetus to make a move, and Orion was the unlucky subject of that. And then Joel… did what he could. And Lucine called her out.

But then it might have been a bit trickier. Why Orion?

Nora talked about how he approached them, talking to them through his Gift rather than his mouth. And how it frightened and irritated her. And then her therapist asked ‘was that why you picked him?’

At first, she denied it, but it made a disturbing amount of sense.

Nora always hated how people like Lily and Orion showed off how wonderful their Gifts were, like how you’d get annoyed if someone showed off fine jewelry you could never dream of affording. Or people eating your favorite food in front of you while you’re on a diet. It was…

Envy. She finally could just admit that was how she felt.

Something that came up in her support group she still went to and her therapist’s appointments was that when you go through something like Nora’s Curse, other people expected you to deal with it with grace. Never complaining, never getting angry, never getting frightened or frustrated or anxious. You could never get upset about people talked about you, not to you. If you opened up about much it hurt, people truly wouldn’t understand unless they went through it. So, she dealt with it by being ‘the nice one’. People always told her how kind and sweet she was, how good a student she was, and how ‘inspirational’ she was. But in actuality, she was not acknowledging how she felt in a healthy way.

She was on good terms with Joel, and while Lucine did scare her a little, Orion was the one who hit that sore spot the hardest.

Nora could only look back in retrospect and speculate that it played a part. Maybe that was a reason, maybe it wasn’t.

Nora went back to being homeschooled. Once she made a recovery she felt well enough to attend, but it wasn’t for the old reasons why she had to stay home.

Being there hurt so much.

Excerpt from YouTube video titled ‘5 YouTube Channels with Dark Backstories’, uploaded to a YouTube channel primarily focusing on true crime, horror, and other dark subjects. It was taken down briefly due to controversy but re-uploaded after a few weeks..

[text on screen: #3- ‘Nora’s Cooking Channel’: Connections to Deerstalkers Incident]

Narrator: [over a screenshot of the YouTube profile] ‘Nora’s Cooking Channel’ was created in the fall of 2020, and sat at a small subscriber count before its discovery. [cut to clips from the channel, followed by images of Nora before the abduction] The host was Nora Moriarty, a junior at Duniway High School who wanted to share her passion for cooking and food science with others. Nora was plagued with chronic illness throughout her life due to her Gift of secreting highly toxic venom into her saliva. Additionally, she had to take a significant number of safety precautions. Nora spent much of her education in homeschooling, only attending public school when she was enrolled in Duniway High School. People who met her in person often say she was polite and sweet-natured if anxiety prone and sometimes odd. On October 21st, Nora, alongside her classmates, boarded a bus to attend a field trip to Huntington’s Potato Farm, [cut to a printed advertisement for the farm] an annual event for the Duniway class. However, they never arrived.

[cut to a photo of the wreckage from outside, non-graphic] Their bus was found the next day, heavily wrecked and with identifiable human corpses inside. Despite the number of corpses being inconsistent with the number of students, it was generally believed that the bus had a major accident, killing everyone on board. Until the 26th, when the case took an unexpected turn.

[clips of news footage describing the Deerstalkers Incident. Once they end, the narrator continues to talk] Nora, like many of her classmates, had been thrown into a death game by a group of terrorists calling themselves ‘The Deerstalkers’, allegedly with a pro-Gift extremist stance. Their MO was heavily inspired by the 1999 novel Battle Royale by Koushun Takami about a class of students forced to fight to the death. The surviving students were each instructed to use their Gifts to kill each other, resulting in a total of 33 known casualties. Around the third day, the students left had escaped, with Nora’s classmate Astrid Millar announcing her and the other students' survival on Twitter. [screenshot of this] Although Nora was not initially listed among the surviving students, she was confirmed alive later that day, alongside her friend Melodie Bernard who was with her. In a controversial move, the state of Nevada decided to pardon each of the students for any actions committed during the incident.

However, two days later, a video was leaked onto the dark web seemingly by the Deerstalkers themselves. It opened with a monologue, recreated here:

[voiceover of someone reading out loud the Deerstalkers Manifesto]

From here, things took a dark turn. Most of the students’ deaths were edited and compiled in such a way to demonstrate their point. Some of this footage made its way toward shock sites and other gore videos. Of particular note, though, is a student named Orion Williams.

[photos of Orion on screen]

Orion was an active member of the school’s drama club and a former member of the basketball team, with a noted love of astronomy. He was remembered as having a strong sense of humor, often playing pranks with his Gift, a form of telepathy. While he was already confirmed among the dead, the footage revealed the full circumstances of his passing. From those who have watched the footage, Nora can be seen swapping a bottle of water with one inside his bag. A cut shows Orion falling ill, presumably from ingesting Nora’s toxins. It’s eventually revealed that he was euthanized by another student, Joel Foster, who did not survive the trip. While it was reported during the initial interrogation, this led to Nora’s poisoning of Orion becoming more public knowledge.

[photos of Nora] Nora has remained off social media since the release of this footage, and there have been no channel updates. However, the comments on her videos have been removed. Nora has since been taken out of Duniway High School due to trauma and public scrutiny. [clips from her videos] The channel itself is still up, but it’s unsettling to realize that Nora would eventually go on to poison one of her classmates.

Sometimes people visited her. Some were people from Duniway, some were family, and some were delivery. She finally found out the girl across the street’s name. It was Amber, and she could only talk to dogs, no other animal. Mr. Meller, the older man with blade arms, had stopped by and offered some pastries. Macie, the one with the magnetic abilities and the darts, had gotten married recently, and her new husband loved to stop by and chat with her parents.

He once showed her that he was able to make a small whirlpool inside his glass of water. Nora had smiled, but in the back of her head, she remembered that Orion’s mother was also apparently able to manipulate water.

Nora didn’t get out much. They had supplies delivered to them, Nora’s courses were online, and the toxins still affected her body. Sometimes she’d do the usual thing where she’d go the library, or the park, or the Blockbuster. But there were times when she stared at the spot where Astrid and her friends used to like to spend time, which was now conspicuously vacant. She went to therapy, and she still went to the same support group. Sometimes she’d have to go to the pharmacy. Nora had since added a new medication to her roster, but this time it was intended to stabilize her mood. It’d been difficult when she started it, as she felt weepy about everything, but once her body got used to it she felt comparatively calmer.

It was still very normal. That’s how she’d describe it. Rusty would still sometimes text her with jokes about Mr. Meaty, Amber would stop by to visit, sometimes she'd text Ruth, sometimes Nora was in pain, and other times she wasn’t. She still wore those face masks she hated, still took those same precautions she hated. Orion, the Deerstalkers, and Joel started to fade out of the conversation. Sometimes she thought about Lucine, and how apparently Melodie was in close proximity to her death without realizing, but she too faded out of the convo. It was like an odd dream in another life.

Eventually, she got fed up. Nora decided to try something she hadn’t before.

Nora looked at the selection of Gatorades sitting inside the fridge before eventually selecting a lime-cucumber flavor. She’d previously picked out the Smart Food white cheddar popcorn and Sour Patch Kids (she’d never had them, but she was willing to indulge and try), and looked towards the cashier.

She’d heard about this place, this Circle K, before. It was more out of town, probably why Auggie went there. Rusty told her the owner was antsy about Gifts and gave him a hard time because he was non-verbal, then threw a fit when he used his tongue to eat Doritos despite the fact that he was by then outside the building. Nora also heard about his habit of getting angry whenever Auggie came by because his Gift messed with the card reader or something, and how apparently Astrid’s friend group did something to scare him because he was rude about her eyes, but she never heard the specifics of what exactly they did. But she saw someone standing there at the cashier with the name ‘Dave.’

That was him, she was guessing.

To be honest, Nora wanted to go to this gas station because, uh… it was kind of funny? In that sort of horrible way. Nora already knew how weird people could get with her Gift, so she kind of wanted to see how he would react to her. She just never tried because… uh, she was sensitive, so she probably wouldn’t laugh while it was happening to her.

But, for the first time, she was here. She was braving it, just to see what would happen.

Her therapist kind of warned her about intentionally triggering herself by putting herself in situations she knew would make her upset. Nora prayed that the reason why she wasn’t doing this was because of that.

Thankfully, no one else was there, so she walked up to the front with her loot. Dave gave her a look, and Nora was fully prepared to pull out her disability card from her wallet. It was something she got some time ago that quickly explained her Curse, how it affected her, why she wore a face mask, and why she took special precautions. She also added her parents’ numbers in case someone needed to contact her family.. It took some time off her hands when she needed to explain things, plus it was helpful in the event that she might be unconscious. Her doctors helped her with the process, of course.

As Dave rang her up, Nora spaced out. She noticed a sign about wearing a blindfold or no service. Under what circumstances…

Dave spoke up, snapping her out of her stupor. Her total. Right…

Nora slid some neat bills onto the counter, and she couldn’t help but notice that he just left the change on the counter and that he was a little hesitant to handle her money. Did he somehow pick up on her Gift or a possible reason why she wore the mask? He also kind of made a comment about it, too, but it was under his breath so she didn’t hear what he said. It was more weird than anything, but honestly, she was disappointed that it was the normal kind of weird for her.

She took the change and her food.

“Thank you,” she said while smiling under her mask, then turned towards the door.

She was… going to be polite about this. But she could feel his eyes on the way out. Nora kind of laughed a bit.

Nora had stopped by the Blockbuster on the way home and picked out Monty Python and the Holy Grail, a movie everyone quoted but she’d never watched so she didn’t get what they were joking about. It still felt odd, not seeing Astrid and her friends there. But once she made it home, she started watching it. Her hands poked and prodded at an embroidery project while she curled up inside her blanket. Her parents hadn’t noticed the colors she selected for her project yet. Or, they didn’t know what horizontal stripes in oranges, pinks, and whites meant. Either way, it was good for her hands to stay busy.

Occasionally she’d set down the hoop and take a swig of Gatorade, or get a handful of popcorn. Eventually, she tried the Sour Patch Kids. A little too sour for her at first, but she enjoyed them fine the longer she got used to them.

The movie ended, and Nora took it out and tossed out the wrappers and the empty plastic bottle. She watched television for a while afterward. Mostly Food Network, where they were showcasing a recipe for homemade hot chocolate that she took a mental note on.

Eventually, she dozed off.

She thought things might eventually be okay.