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yourdeepestfathoms · 2 years

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i'm trembling (so please hold me tight)

Whumptober Day 4: Dead On Your Feet - Waking Up Disoriented

you can also read this fic here if you prefer seeing tags and a summary!

title is from Spinal Fluid Explosion Girl by rerulili (ft. Hatsune Miku and GUMI), which is a song featured in the concert Ocean and Constance watch in this fic!

(this isn't meant to be shippy, so please don't take it that way!)

---------------

Liquid fire rains down over Ocean’s body, and she can’t help but wonder if this is what the victims of Pompeii felt in their final moments. Sprayed with volcanic matter, they were seared all the way down to their souls, burning everything they once were and everything they could have been. Their fates sealed by a thick shell of calcified ash, the whim of Mount Vesuvius put them on a pyre and immolated them to the gods.

…Alright, maybe comparing a hot shower to a historical tragedy may be a bit overdramatic.

However, in Ocean’s defense, it certainly feels like she’s being incinerated by the pyroclastic flow of an active volcano (although, pyroclastic flows aren’t liquid-based, unlike this shower. they’re actually made up of ash, hot gas, pumice, tephra, and lava blocks, so saying that a sauna or a steam room feels like being smothered by a pyroclastic flow would be more accurate. look at her, being so smart, even when she’s uncomfortable! she’s so amazing!). The sun is weeping molten tears of magma down over her, burning her up from the outside in, as she is already burning up from the inside out.

Now, she’s not saying she’s stupid because she ISN’T, she’s the most intelligent, academic, clever, bright, sharp-witted person in all of Saskatchewan, but maybe taking a hot shower while she has a fever wasn’t the wisest idea she’s ever had.

She really thought it would help, though! Her body had been aching from her illness, and nice, hot showers usually helped when that happened. Plus, chills had wracked through her, and what better way to combat chills than with warm water!

But now she’s starting to get woozy, and her throat is uncomfortably dry, and she feels like she’s about to burst into flames. She’s thirsty, so she just opens her mouth to drink the shower water (it’s there; might as well use her resources), but it doesn’t really make her feel any less dehydrated, and the temperature only succeeds in warming her up even more.

A fuzzy numbness starts to creep into the edges of Ocean’s consciousness. It feels like the whole bathroom is spinning, colors bleeding messily into one another, and she realizes that she needs to get out of this shower right now.

Pawing frantically for the knobs, Ocean turns off the water. The moment the rain of fire has ceased, a terrible chill bombards her, a sharp contrast to the feverish heat broiling in her skin. Shivering begins, and she really needs to get dressed, so she steps out of the shower.

…Except her body isn’t ready for so much quick movement just yet, so dizziness smashes into her skull like a sledgehammer. Her right foot snags on the lip of the tub, and she stumbles forward. She tries to catch herself on the vanity, but her wet hands slide uselessly against the granite countertop, doing little to nothing to stop her descent. She falls to the ground with a disorientating crash, and the freezing touch of the tile floor biting into her bare skin is the last thing she remembers before everything goes black.

--- --- ---

Ocean isn’t sure how much time has passed, but her awareness swims back to her eventually. The first thing she takes notice of is how unbearably cold she is, like she’s laying in a pile of snow while naked. The second thing she takes notice of is that her whole body aches as though she got the snot beat out of her by a really angry monkey with a baseball bat. And the third thing she takes notice of is that her head is resting on top of something soft and warm. It’s like sitting a distance away from a fire; she can feel the heat, but it isn’t near enough to warm her up entirely, so she wants to get closer.

Her eyelids are impossibly heavy when she tries to open them, and even when she succeeds, she’s nearly blinded by how bright it is in the room she’s in. It’s like celestial daggers burning with heavenly fire have driven directly into her eyeballs, and she shuts them tightly to try and save her corneas from completely melting off. A soft groan breaches her lips in reaction. Whatever her head is resting on shifts.

“Ocean? Are you awake?”

The voice sounds so far away, like she’s listening to someone shout at her from the other end of a long, dark tunnel. A fuzzy echo surrounds the words, making them hard to discern in her half-conscious state.

“Are you with me?”

“Mmmm…” What comes out of her mouth isn’t really a sentence or even just a single word. It’s more of a noise, almost one that an exhausted heifer would make.

That metaphor is enough to hotwire her brain back into working order, mainly thanks to the embarrassment that filters in because of it. She struggles under the sticky, smothering black blanket of insensibility, eventually gathering the strength to rip it off of her mind. Once it’s gone, memories flood in like an unclogged pipe, and she both remembers and realizes what had happened.

She took a hot shower with a fever and then promptly passed out on the floor because of it.

“Ocean?”

Oh, and Constance is here!

WAIT—

Ocean’s eyes snap open fully, and she stares up at the face of her best friend. Constance looks a little startled at her sudden wakefulness but then breathes a sigh of relief.

“You’re awake, thank god,” she says. “I was about to go get my parents. I was worried you hit your head on something.”

“I— you— wha—” Ocean stammers horribly, strangled by her own embarrassment.

“Oh no,” Constance says. “That doesn’t sound good. Did you hit your head?”

“No, I— I, uh—” Ocean can’t get anything comprehensible out of her mouth. The back of her neck burns blisteringly hot, and those flames fan out to encompass her whole body in its heated humiliation.

…Or maybe that’s just her fever. She honestly can’t tell. Both are making her feel like a crab boiling alive in a pot of water over a stove. At the same time, though, she’s so cold. Why is she so cold?

“Do you want me to get my mom?” Constance asks.

Ocean shakes her head frantically. She doesn’t need anyone else to see her like this. See her naked.

Except when she looks down at herself, she notices that she’s got a fluffy pink bathrobe tugged over her, as well as a towel draped across her body. She’s lying on her back, and her head is in Constance’s lap.

Okay, so she’s not butt naked, that’s good. But Constance still saw her completely nude and had to handle her body while she was completely nude, seeing as she has the robe on, and that doesn’t make her feel any less embarrassed about this whole thing. She does have to give Constance credit, though; getting her into the robe had to have been equally as awkward as this is for Ocean, and yet she did it anyway. Ocean wouldn’t have even tried—not because she didn’t care, but because she’s a prisoner to her own sense of shame, and attempting such a thing would probably make her combust into a thousand pieces. She would rather kill herself than see one of her friends naked and then have to live with that image in her head for the rest of her existence.

“Are you sure?” Constance presses.

“I’m sure,” Ocean manages to get herself to answer verbally. Her mouth is as dry as a bone. “What… what happened?”

“I can ask you the same thing,” Constance says. “I heard this loud crash from my bedroom, and then I ran in here to find you unconscious on the floor. I thought you were dead!”

Ocean kinda wishes she was. Ugh, she doesn’t even want to know how she must have looked to Constance when she was found, sprawled out on her bathroom floor with no clothes on like a hooker that had too much to drink.

“I assume you blacking out has something to do with your fever?” Constance says, one eyebrow raised.

Ocean grimaces. “Maybe.”

Constance sighs. “You should know that a hot shower won’t help a fever. It’ll only make you, well, hotter.”

“Well, a fever is the body’s natural defense mechanism, so if anything, I was helping by raising my temperature, therefore meaning more bacteria was burned up,” Ocean points out.

“It doesn’t work like that, hun,” Constance says. “Hot showers raise your blood pressure, so you must have gotten dizzy because of that, added with the fact that you’re already overheated, and you’re probably also dehydrated because you never drink water and— here, sit up.”

Ocean does so, and getting off of the cold floor is nice (she can feel it even through the bathrobe), but chills still sprint through her whole body. She tugs the sides of the robe closed over her chest, feeling the freezing bathroom air strike against her bare skin like arrows made from ice. Despite it making her pass out, Ocean has the urge to crawl back into the shower and let the rain of fire fall down on her again.

Constance must have noticed the way she starts to shiver because she asks, “Are you cold?”

Ocean answers, “Yeah, a little.”

Constance frowns, then reaches out and feels Ocean’s forehead. Her hand is cold, too, and Ocean flinches away from such a glacial touch. “You’re burning up, hun.”

Ocean shrugs, pulling the bathrobe tighter around herself. “And yet, I feel like I’m standing out in the arctic archipelago.”

“It’s probably your fever playing tricks on you,” Constance says. “Here, get dressed, then come out to the living room. I’ll make soup!”

“You don’t have to—”

“I’m making soup.”

Ocean can’t help but crack a small smile at Constance’s insistence over soup.

Once Constance is out of the bathroom, Ocean gets dressed in the clothing she had laid out for herself. Taking off the robe is like a freezing torture segment, her body assaulted all over by the frigid air, and she scrambles for her clothes to try and protect her skin from any further icy onslaught. Her teeth actually start to clatter from how cold she is, and she’s really beginning to debate hopping back into the shower. However, this isn’t her house she’s at, and she doesn’t want to blow the Blackwoods’ water bills through the roof, so she thinks against that idea.

Walking barefoot on the hardwood to the living room is like treading through snow without shoes on. Her shivers become more intense, and she’s quick to get onto the couch, raising her feet off of the ice-like floor. In the kitchen, she can hear Constance preparing the soup.

“Do you need help?” she calls.

“Nope!” Constance calls back. “You just get comfortable! You can turn on whatever you want to watch.”

Ocean takes her up on that offer, turning on her favorite channel: HGTV. It may be the whitest program in existence, but she loves looking at all the pretty houses that are shown in the different shows.

There’s a basket of folded blankets beside the couch, and Ocean takes three, as well the one draped across the top of the couch itself. She bundles herself up in all four of them, forming a sort of nest around her, but she still feels cold. It’s like some icy dragon has curled itself around her heart, freezing her to the core. She thinks back to her Pompeii allegory in the shower and would give anything to be that hot again because this is just miserable.

“You look like a little fox in all of those blankets.”

Turning her head, Ocean looks over at Constance, who’s holding two steaming bowls of soup. There’s a pitiful smile on her face.

“Foxes have fur to keep them warm,” Ocean says bitterly. “I don’t.”

“I know,” Constance says. “You’re going to make your fever worse with all of those.”

“I don’t care.”

“Well, I do. I hate to do this, but I’m going to need one of them.”

“But I’m cold!”

“I know, honey.”

“I am dying from hypothermia—”

“You’ve just got chills from your fever.”

“—and you want to take my blankets away!”

“Yes, yes, I know. I’m horribly cruel for doing this to you. But, again, your fever is too high for you to be wrapped up like that. Just give me one. That’s all.”

Ocean is less than thrilled, but she’s too uncomfortable to argue, so she huffs and begrudgingly hands over a soft white blanket with sloths printed across it. The moment it’s gone, the cold presses inward, and she pulls the other three blankets in tighter, trying to replace the warmth that was just lost.

She doesn’t want to know how absolutely pathetic she must look right now.

“Thank you,” Constance says, smiling softly.

“Whatever,” Ocean grumbles.

Constance hands her a bowl of soup, then sits down next to her. The porcelain of the bowl is hot against Ocean’s hands, but Constance’s body heat is even more enticing to Ocean’s chilled mind. She instantly scoots a little closer to her friend, desperate to get warmer but wanting to be subtle about it.

Apparently she isn’t subtle enough because Constance calls her out. “You can lean against me if you want. I know you’re cold.”

Well, since she offered…

Like metal to the pull of a magnet, Ocean instantly presses herself into Constance’s side. Constance is warmer than all of the blankets combined, slowly thawing out the ice inside of Ocean. The hot soup certainly helps, too.

“Feeling any better?” Constance eventually asks.

“A little, yeah,” Ocean nods. “Thanks for the soup. It’s really good.”

Constance puffs out her chest in pride. “I’m glad!” She pauses for a moment, and then an impish smile comes to her lips. “Wanna watch something fun?”

Ocean looks at her in interest. “I’m a bit worried, but sure.”

Constance’s eyes light up, and she snatches up the remote. She goes to YouTube and searches for something called “NicoNico Music Party.” She runs up to turn off all the lights, plops back down next to Ocean, and then plays the first result.

“Constance…” Ocean says slowly. “What is this?”

“Shhh,” Constance hushes her. “Just watch.”

“Is one of you Vocaloid things?”

“SHHH. Yes, but, SHHH! It’s good!”

Ocean owes Constance this much. After all, she had to see her naked, and she made her soup. She can humor her best friend’s strange little robot concert.

---- --- ---

“Which one is Miku?” Ocean asks.

“Blue hair,” Constance informs her.

“Who are all these other ones? Why are there so many?!”

“Why do you sound so scared?”

“I didn’t know there were this many!”

“There’s a lot more than just these guys. There’s, like over fifty. Maybe over one hundred.”

“WHAT.”

--- --- ---

“Did she just come out of the SCREEN?!” Ocean gawps after Miku literally breaks out of a computer screen with a sledgehammer on the TV.

“Yup!” Constance confirms.

“Oh no,” Ocean whispers fearfully. “They’re emerging into our world.”

--- --- ---

“Which one is that?” Ocean points to a green-haired girl, who had also broken out of the computer screen with a sledgehammer, à la Hastune Miku.��

“Thaaat’s Gumi!” Constance tells her. “She’s one of my favorites!”

“Gumi,” Ocean repeats. “Gu-mi. That’s a weird name.”

“Okay, Miss Named-After-A-Body-Of-Water.”

“HEY!”

--- --- ---

“Oh, there’s two of them,” Ocean says as a pair of blonde children appear on the stage. “They’re multiplying at an alarming rate.”

“Those are the twins,” Constance says. “The girl is Rin, the boy is Len.”

“Twins?” Ocean echoes. “They have families?”

“Yeah, some Vocaloids have entire lore and family trees,” Constance nods, and Ocean can easily tell how nerdy she is about this topic. “ Technically, the twins aren’t actually twins, they’re ‘mirror images’ of each other, but most fans agree that they’re brother and sister. Some people think they’re in a relationship, though.”

“That’s…weird.”

“Yeah, absolutely. It’s like two gingers getting together! It’s just not right.”

“What.”

--- --- ---

“Oh my god, there’s so many. ” Ocean gapes at the colorful array of holographic people on the screen. “They’re all so vibrant!”

“Yeah, that’s kinda the whole point,” Constance says. “I mean, they’re more eye-catching with all the colors.”

“They’re definitely eye-catching,” Ocean says. “I’m going to need you to tell me which one is which, please.”

“Gladly! So, Miku has long blue hair, Gumi has green hair, Rin is the blonde girl and Len is the blonde boy, Luka has pink hair, Gakupo has purple hair, and then IA has white hair.”

“Thanks, I’m going to immediately forget a few minutes later and ask you to name them all again.”

“I know, dearest.”

--- --- ---

“Catchy, isn’t it?” Constance asks as Ocean is swaying back and forth to the song the silly little blonde boy (Len, if she remembers correctly) is singing.

“Yeah, it is!” Ocean nods.

“It’s about this boy’s giant penis,” Constance tells her.

Ocean stops grooving and stares at Constance in horror.

--- --- ---

“I like this one,” Ocean says, nodding to the screen, where the silly little blonde boy’s sister (Rin, she’s pretty sure) is singing.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah!”

“Nice! It’s about a girl wanting to commit suicide by blowing herself up in a nuclear reactor core.”

“What the freak?” Ocean says in dismay.

--- --- ---

“Oh, now she’s a news reporter?” Ocean tilts her head at the screen, watching Miku sing in a weather reporter suit.

“Miku’s multi-talented.”

“Clearly.”

--- --- ---

“Why does she sing better than me?” Ocean says as the white-haired girl (she can’t remember her name) is singing some song she can’t understand the words of.

“Ocean, are you jealous of a musical computer program?”

“No! …Maybe.”

Constance laughs. Ocean laughs, too.

She can barely remember being cold at all.

#don't tag as ship #ride the cyclone #rtc #rtc fanfiction #ocean o'connell rosenberg #constance blackwood #whumptober 2022 #i'm trembling (so please hold me tight)

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