Next To Normal
Dinadan has barely left his room since he crawled, shaking, out of the wreckage of Star City to a pay phone and travelled the lines home. His dad has been patient and supportive; his teachers have been understanding, and the Lighter Than Air Society almost ridiculously forgiving considering that he'd terrorized and murdered them. But even after he's cleaned the blood from under his nails and stammered his shakily-voiced apologies, the world still seems wrong. Too brightly-lit, too full of things that move suddenly out of the corner of his eye and make him jump out of his skin with his heart in his throat. He feels like a character from a black-and-white TV show suddenly transplanted into a Technicolor world without the color touching his own flesh.

The first time he went outside since he got back, he'd crept out of the house in the middle of the night and gone to the spot in the yard where he’d died. He wasn't sure if it was reality or his own imagination, but he could have sworn he still smelled his own blood. He'd hidden in a shoe in the back of his closet after, and had only come out when his dad had started to panic.

He doesn't know why it's affecting him like this. It's not even the fact that he (or his dead body) had killed people. He's killed before, not that he ever talks about it to anyone up here – different worlds, different rules. But everyone else seems to be handling it better. Jai's even been seen out and about, according to what his dad has told him through the closed door (because Dinadan's only recently been able to be in the same room as someone else without wondering if he could still plunge a hand into their chest and rip out their heart).

Really, it's Jai's name that's gotten him moving again. He'd been sitting in the room, watching the dim light filtered through his window shades make patterns on the wall when it had occurred to him that he ought to write his friend a note to let him know that he doesn't blame him. But then he'd started hitting blocks. Email was definitely inappropriate – he'd started typing the words, but they'd looked so dead and meaningless on his computer screen that he'd almost gotten his sword and stabbed it straight through the monitor. No, what he really needs is fancy calligraphy paper and a fountain pen, but that's not really something that he and his dad keep around the house, so he's made do with printer paper and a ballpoint. The problem now is that he keeps getting stuck after "It's not your fault". Over and over again, no matter how many times he crumples the page and starts over.

Dinadan Palmer is beginning to think that he might be going mad.