Chapter Text
The seatbelt clicks, and Tyler stares at it like he’d never seen one before.
Has he? He can’t remember.
“Tyler, buckle up,” his mom says, her tone sharper than she meant it to be. She’s already impatiently tapping her freshly manicured nails against the steering wheel—tap-tap-tap, the rhythm of someone holding back irritation.
“I did,” he murmurs, “I think.”
The Joseph family car’s engine hums to life, trees sliding past the windows as they pull out of the parking lot. It feels a lot like Tyler’s the one moving, that the world was perfectly still.
“Momma,” he frowns. “Where are we going?”
His mother’s jaw tightens, her icy blue eyes freezing over as they narrow in the rearview mirror. “I already told you. I tell you every time.”
“I know,” Tyler presses his forehead against the autumn cool of the window, grounding himself. “I just… I forgot again.”
“You always forget,” she mutters to herself, her tone almost guilty. “They said that would happen. This is normal.”
“Who did?”
“The doctors.” She doesn’t look back. “At the centre, remember?”
He doesn’t. Not really. But somewhere beneath Tyler’s eyes, somewhere he can’t dig his fingernails into, he can feel the hum of flashing white lights, the air conditioner ripping through his skin, an endless corridor that leads nowhere.
“Is it like school?” He questions, his hands fixated on the strings of his hoodie.
“No.”
“You said there were doctors. Is it like a checkup?”
“For fuck’s sake,” she snaps, slamming on the brakes. Tyler bashes his head into the driver's seat headrest, feeling pain throb red, bloom purple, and settle into a weird, ugly green. “It’s not… Just drop it, okay? You’re going again today. That’s all you need to know.”
Something buzzes behind Tyler’s eyes again.
He knew that feeling.
He hated that feeling.
The engine hums. And then the hum changes.
His teeth vibrate, a throbbing migraine bursting red behind his eyes. The world splits, not in half, not open, just sideways. Blue fills his eyesight.
“Tyler.” Not his mom’s voice. A softer one. Closer, inside.
The car dissolves around him like hot breath on glass, and as he tries to push open the door, no real direction in mind, his hand closes around cold plastic instead.
“Tyler?” A voice slices through his mind; calm, soft, familiar. “Are you with me?”
Tyler opens his eyes, disoriented. The car is gone, replaced by the harsh glare of fluorescent lights that hit him like a punch, buzzing so loudly it may as well have been screaming at him. The walls are white. Too white. The linoleum floor gleams so perfectly that it feels sticky and wrong.
Tyler’s awake now, the large waiting room enveloping him whole like a megalodon eating him alive. He looks through his eyelashes at the nice-enough-looking lady who was crouching to his level as if he were a child. On her ID badge, directly under the huge COLUMBUS JUVENILE STUDY UNIT logo, was her name—which was apparently Dr. Kim—in big, swoopy letters, the kind Tyler remembers from his old Disney DVDs.
“Tyler?” Dr. Kim crouches again, holding a clipboard and gently tapping her fingers against it.
“I don’t… remember…” he mumbles, voice small and tired as he takes in just how overwhelmingly white everything is. “What’s going on…?”
“You’re here for your session,” her voice pours out like scalding lemon tea. “Do you remember last time? With Mr. Toro?”
“I think…? Was I bad?”
“No, honey, not at all,” she hums, running a soothing hand through Tyler’s hair before extending a hand to help him stand up. He reciprocates.
The walk down the hallway feels never-ending.
Tyler’s Vans scrape against the linoleum, but the sound seems to absorb into the walls. “Everything’s so quiet.”
“Quiet?” Dr. Kim raises an eyebrow, blue eyeshadow dragging into the crease of her eyelid.
“Not the good quiet, where you can breathe and think,” he passes the same doors over and over again: white, unmarked, bare, with big blackout curtains that don't let him catch his reflection. “The scary quiet.”
“Scary quiet?”
“Yeah. Like, uhm…” he's lost again.
“How about we save that thought for your session?” She cuts Tyler off. “You’ve always been quiet anyway.”
Tyler blinks a few times, the white light burning into his brain through his eyelids. He thinks about baseball, running down the field with mud on his knees and grass staining his skin while he screams wildly. “Always?”
Dr. Kim seems to hesitate, debating how to respond, before ultimately shutting up. “Forget I said that. Dr. Toro’s waiting for you in the Butterfly Room, down—”
“Down the hall, take a left, Room 203,” he responds, almost practiced. It's all he can remember from here. As he approaches, the door to the Butterfly Room swings open.
“Tyler, there you are,” Mr. Toro smiles, his voice like a bedtime story. He ushers Tyler inside, his large, unusually cold hand welting and blistering against the boy's back. “I was waiting for you.”
Tyler forces himself to keep moving forward, each step manual and disorienting. “My Momma said we're doing tests today. I didn't study. Are they easy?”
He can't remember how long he’s been coming to the Butterfly Room. Since he was twelve, thirteen, maybe? Has he always been thirteen? Has he always been Tyler?
“Not those kinds of tests, Tyler,” Mr. Toro corrects. The two walk by the doctor's table, a metal tray of syringes filled with shiny blue liquid glaring back at Tyler. The blue stings.
Tyler sinks into a plastic chair, the cool metal backrest stinging his spine. As he sticks electrode stickers to his arms, Mr. Toro’s eyes are calculated, unreadable, as if he could see right through him.
“Okay, Tyler,” he hums, a pen in one hand and a wooden clipboard in the other, “you’re going to close your eyes now.” Tyler squeezes his eyes shut, to which Mr. Toro smiles approvingly, “Now focus. Visualize.”
Tyler obeys before the words fully land.
At first there’s nothing. Just the buzz of lights burrowing into his skull, the chemical smell of disinfectant soaking the back of his tongue. Everything is dark, quiet. The good quiet this time.
“Think of something familiar, something safe,” Mr. Toro instructs.
Safe?
Sunny. Wooden. Old planks and badly carved windows. A memory Tyler thinks might be his, but he can’t quite get it past the tip of his tongue. He’s sitting in the treehouse that lived in the huge forest by his childhood home. The frayed rope ladder sways gently in nonexistent hums of wind. From outside, somebody laughs before disappearing into the trees.
And then everything catches fire. Not slowly. Violently.
Flames lick the the edges of the rope ladder until they’re chewing on the floorboards, swallowing him whole. Heat slams into Tyler’s chest, causing him to jerk himself in his chair. Smoke fills his lungs, thick and acidic, his skin melting down to the bone. The laughing becomes screaming. His screaming. He drops the gasoline.
“Good,” Mr. Toro hums, the sound of his pen scratching against paper frantically echoing in the walls of the treehouse. “Keep going.”
The fire crackles louder and louder until everything tilts.
The treehouse splits sideways, as if someone grabbed the world and dragged it off its axis and to the left. Orange flames smear into red tail lights. Smoke becomes exhaust. The smell of burning wood and gasoline becomes the sharp, acidic tang of his mother’s perfume.
Tyler is inside the car.
The seatbelt digs into his neck like a noose. The brakes slam.
Tap-tap-tap.
His mother’s voice snaps in his skull—
“For fuck’s sake—“
And then the world bursts red, purple, green.
His head hits something. Hard. Not the car, not the headrest.
Tyler slams his head on the large metal table in the Butterfly Room as he collapses to the floor. The impact reverberates through him, his brain shaking in his skull, sharp and electric, fanning the fire from his body but only feeding it more.
His body is shaking, his ears ringing. The linoleum floor is cold against his cheek. Too cold, like Mr. Toro’s hands. Like an ice pack slapped onto a bruise that he can already feel forming beneath his skin: red, bleeding into purple, seeping into green. The same colours, the same pain, the same pattern. Hands grab at him; too many hands, or maybe just one pair that feels like too many. Tyler can hear Dr. Kim, her dismissive tone now razor sharp, stabbing into his chest and letting it bleed onto the floor. He can’t stop bleeding.
Someone peels Tyler from the floor.
The voices are tossed back and forth like a beach ball—Dr. Kim’s panic, Mr. Toro’s rehearsed calm—as they haul his lanky body upright and sit him back in his chair. His head swims, colours bleeding together until everything is blue.
“Tyler? Tyler, sweetheart, can you look at me, please?” Another voice cuts through the static. It’s softer, warmer. Not familiar, though it tries to pretend it is.
Tyler blinks hard until a shape forms: a nurse with swoopy brown hair, just like his, and a big badge that reads NURSE AMELIA, her eyebrows furrowed tight with concern.
“What happened, kiddo?” She asks, one hand on his shoulder to steady him. Her other hand gently lifts his chin, inspecting the bruise swelling beneath his hairline. “Did you hit your head before your session? Did you fall?”
He swallows, his throat raw and burning. The flickering overhead lights burn white holes into his vision.
“No, no…” he croaks, “I was in the car. My mom… she braked really hard. I hit my head. The seat. It was—“
He lifts a hand to gesture, but Nurse Amelia freezes.
“Tyler, honey, what car?” She asks carefully.
“The… our car,” Tyler babbles, confused by the question itself. “The family car. We were driving, and I was asking too many questions. She got so mad— I, I hit my head, and it hurt, and—“
Her face empties. Not shocked, but blank, like someone wiped the expression clean.
“Kiddo,” she says slowly, low and intent, “you haven’t left the unit in eight years.”
His breath catches.
“No, that’s… that’s not,” he shakes his head, dizzy. “No, we just… we just came from the parking lot. I saw the trees. The seatbelt. She yelled at me.”
“Tyler,” Nurse Amelia repeats, firmer this time, her voice losing its feigned gentleness, “you haven’t been in a car since you were nine.”
He stares back at her. The bruise throbs again. Red. Purple. Green. The same colours. The same pattern.
Nurse Amelia trades a glance with Dr. Kim; one of those silent, heavy looks adults use when they think kids can’t tell they’re being talked about. Dr. Kim’s mouth is a straight line. Mr. Toro’s face is unreadable, his pen scribbling against paper.
“No,” Tyler hiccups, his heart racing, “no, I remember it. I remember her voice, and the brakes, and the fucking tapping, I remember. I remember it.”
He grips the sides of his chair, his knuckles bleach white.
“Why do I remember it?” Nobody answers.
The quiet is back. The scary quiet.