Drowning Lessons

I fall onto my bed. My head is pounding and fuzzy and my skull feels raw. Every part of me feels heavy and I need a fucking smoke.
I didn’t think I’d fallen asleep but I guess I must have. When you’re not able to keep your eyes open or your thoughts straight maybe drifting into sleep is the best idea.
Alex is poking me. “Get up,” he whispers.
My eyes dart open but don’t focus on anything because it’s pitch black. “What time is it?” I mumble, slowly making out the outline of Alex standing over me. I’m still fully dressed from earlier. I think it was more of a collapsing and becoming knocked out than falling asleep.
“Like three am? I dunno. C’mon, shut the hell up and follow me,” he whispers and pulls on the bedroom window bars. They slide upwards. Alex eases the window upward and slips onto the windowsill. He stands, jumps and slowly the silhouettes of his feminine legs disappear upwards. I follow suit, climbing out the window that is just awkward to reach height wise.
I look up and see Alex pull himself up from windowsill to windowsill. I’m afraid being a total midget is going to impair my ability to climb this but whatever. I jump and scrape my fingers off the ledge above me. I’m unbalanced and three stories up so honestly I don’t want to jump much more. Eventually I grab the windowsill overhead and pull myself up, scraping the toe of my shoes off rough brick as I heave myself upward.
On the next ledge I look in; the room is completely empty. There aren’t even sheets on the bed. I look up and see Alex hoist himself onto the roof. I jump up and begin scrambling onto the next sill. Whoever was in this room is currently not there so I’m assuming they’re on the roof too. It was definitely occupied because there’s underwear on the floor.
Jump, catch, hoist, grunt, flop, repeat. At last I’m on the final sill before the roof. I must be about seven stories up now and I feel completely disorientated looking down at the small patches of light coming from ground floor windows.
I catch the edge of the roof and begin to heave myself up when I hear a crack. It’s not the roof but the drain. I give in to the fact that I’m probably going to fall to a premature death when hands wrap around my wrists and I’m lifted upwards.
There’s a small fire burning on the flat of the roof illuminating the faces of Gerard, Mikey, Kellin and Jaime. Vic and Alex are holding my wrists. “Difficult climb for a short guy,” Vic says at like an inch taller than me, “yea I should know I’m small too, but you get used to it.”
“Who else did you ask?” Gerard grunts from the small fire.
“That’s all,” Vic says and leads us over to the fire.
Gerard lights a cigarette on the fire and sits down. The smell drifts over to me and the cravings return with a punch.
“Do you have one for Frank?” Vic asks smiling at me. I try to cloud my thoughts or just not think at all now I’m around Vic but that’s difficult.
Gerard lights a cigarette and passes it to me. Alex is lying back staring at the sky. Jaime sits flicking the fire around up into the sky and Kellin is staring at Vic. Vic has his eyes closed like he’s just listening to everything we’re thinking. “I am,” he mumbles. Mikey is staring into the flames and Gerard, Gerard is staring at me.
We both break out of the eye contact quickly and blushing. Vic’s eyes snap open and he looks over at Gee eyebrows raised. Gee squints for a second and Vic’s face drops and he goes back to listening to thoughts.
“It’s annoying how no thoughts are safe here,” Kellin mumbles and then starts humming.
Every now and again I look up to make awkward as fuck eye contact with Gerard. He’s gorgeous in the firelight… I won’t go on because I don’t want Vic to hear me think the thoughts of a college girl on a camping trip with her boyfriend.
After a while conversations begin, which one by one becomes a large discussion on the Stranglers. I join in wearily at first but that changes rapidly as Kellin challenges my opinion.
Vic laughs every now and then looking at someone after nothing funny was said. It’s weird hanging around with a mind reader.
After an hour and a half Alex and I climb back down into our room. Climbing down is even harder than climbing up. It’s not as difficult physically but mentally it fucks you over. I mean you know you’re up really high, you lie half off a ledge and without being sure there’s a solid you can touch you drop off. Each time I land it is the biggest relief imaginable.
We sleep like an hour before breakfast. It’s the kind of sleep I’m not sure actually happened.
Gerard sits opposite me at the table. We don’t talk because it’s the morning and neither of us do mornings. The main thing is is that Gerard sat opposite me despite having loads of other seating options.
From down the table Vic winks at me and laughs eating toast. I go red and focus on the bowl of soggy cornflakes and mug of coffee in front of me. For the entirety of breakfast I eat silently while stealing glances up at Gerard while he downs a pot and a half of coffee with Mikey mirroring him.
After lunch I roam the gardens on my own. I see white coats (Alex’s term) walking toward me and even though I’ve done nothing wrong, I jump sideways into a bush. I break through a few branches and trip into a clear patch. I stumble along the roughly made path and the weather seems to be getting hotter. Like it was normal October weather on the main path, drizzly and cool, but here it is like the Sahara.
I’m not joking, the farther down the path I went the hotter it got, like I was growing closer to the centre of the earth on a slight uphill. I was about to sweat my skin off I push through one thin wall of ferns and fall face first into a clearing.
“Oh fuck sorry!” I blurt and avert my eyes. In the middle of the mossy clearing, amidst black clothes are Brendon and Ryan. They pull apart quickly and Ryan covers himself with a t-shirt. Brendon looks so scared and the temperature drops. The sky clouds over as I remember Brendon controls the weather. “Um… Uh… I’ll leave now…”
I turn around and am about to push through the clearing. “Wait!” Brendon calls worriedly, “you’re not going to tell anyone are you?”
“Of course not,” I reassure not looking at the completely naked Brendon.
“Try not to remember this at all when you’re within like fifteen meters of Vic. I think he already knows but in case he doesn’t…” Ryan cautions.
“Yea sure. Fuck sorry guys, Brendon just keep the temperature down a little please I’m sweating more than you,” I say trying to sound okay with the fact I’ve just seen two guys I was hoping to befriend butt fuck in the forest.
I shake myself and push back through the fern.
Back on the main path the heat is normal again. I round a corner and a whit coat takes me by the elbow, “time to get cured,” he says and I’m brought back to the room with the tank.
This Drowning lesson goes much the same as the last; I try hold my breath and choke and then have my brain ribs raw against my skull as I struggle for air. I notice my breaths become shorter, even if just for a millisecond I notice it and it bothers me. Suddenly I need to breathe faster underwater to get enough to function. This scares me mainly because it means the treatment is working. And as much as I don't want the government fucking killing me I don't want to be able to drown in water, only thoughts.

I sleep for a bit when I get back that afternoon and then go to dinner. And tomorrow we do it again.
At dinner that day Vic comes in pale and shaking. “What’s wrong?” Jaime asks and the table goes quiet. No one sees Vic speak only close his eyes and his whole body shake. Kellin tried to run away dressed as a white coat and they caught him and tried to drain all his powers Vic’s voice played through my mind. No one saw him form the words but it was obvious we could all here it. Vic looks ill. He closes his eyes and starts shaking again I heard something meet me on the roof at one am bring Alex, Mikey, Ashley and Ray. This time it was obvious not everyone heard. I look over at Alex, he doesn’t seem to have heard anything or he’s super used to Vic getting inside his head. Vic poked at his dinner but ate none. He looked like he was going to faint.
We all go to that room again. This time we all take turns at the two guitars and singing. Gerard and I end up sitting side by side and we talk. He even laughs a bit and I feel like I could fly. Vic smiles menacingly at us constantly and even winks at Gerard. He can obviously hear my thoughts gushing about how fucking awesome Gerard is and how hot he is and how happy I am every time he agrees with me or laughs at my feeble attempt to be funny.
Back at the room Alex says he did not hear Vic’s second message and said he felt it was weird that Vic contacted me instead. I told him it was probably that I was closer.
I found it extremely hard to fall asleep that night. My mind was fully trained on Kellin being so severely drained that Vic looked in morning and the thing that Vic had heard. It’s obviously something important that he couldn’t let the white coats have any idea. Even at dinner I’d noticed they’d put more guards on. Like we’d try to escape rather than eat soggy meatloaf and this weird ass pink vegetable no one knew existed before.

Notes

Whoop new chapter written faster than I thought! I decided to put it up straight away because ideas for the next chapters are swimming around like Frank in the tank :3 The next chapter will probably be as short as this too but they will be getting longer so warning. Thanks for reading and leave a comment if you have time to let me know what you think, means a lot :))))))))