POA ch005 — Indecision

Summary: Henry’s mind is all tied up.

Author's Notes: I’ll be honest, I didn’t think we’d get a tie this early! I am delighted. Henry, unfortunately, is not.

Content Warnings: Doctor’s offices.

“Wh— I— Um,” Henry, pulled in two directions, stumbles over his words. “It— You— A—”

Henry puts his head in his hands, groaning with the effort. He grimaces as a headache blooms across his temple.

“Henry?” Seonjae asks worriedly. “Is everything alright?”

Her words reach his ears as though through cotton, muffled and distant. Henry’s consciousness is drawn deep away.

“Y-yes,” Henry manages, “I-I, uh— everything is fine—”

A stab of pain.

“Nnng,” Henry grunts, and brings his hands to his head. His phone clatters to the ground. “Not fine, I—”

Another stab of pain. Nothing Henry says can make it better.

Then, Henry screams.

…

Oh.

A note hums, like a struck tuning fork, in the silence.

Wait, no—

No, no, no, n—

…

“—speak with him, you can’t tell him that—”

The words flutter into Henry’s mind as he crawls back into consciousness.

“—et me explain, he’ll—”

What happened to him?

“—can’t undo it, anyway, there’s no poi—”

Henry lets out a groan and curls up, bringing his knees to his chest. He’s lying on something soft and plasticky. He shifts, disoriented. I thought I—

“Henry!” Seonjae’s voice breaks over him. “Are you alright? You—”

“That’ll be all, Seonjae,” Dr. Pembroke’s voice comes, next. “I can take it from here. Your next patient is waiting, I believe.”

A beat of silence. Henry’s eyes open. His face feels crusty and bleary, like waking from a hangover. As he blinks to clear his vision, he catches sight of Seonjae’s hands, clenched in anger but hidden from Dr. Pembroke in the folds of her lab coat.

“Yes, Doctor,” Seonjae eventually answers, as crisp and cold as biting an ice cube. She turns and walks towards the door. As she grips the handle, she glances back once more and meets Henry’s eyes. All she offers him is the smallest of sympathetic frowns, and she is gone. The door swings shut with a resounding thunk.

“There, now,” Dr. Pembroke says. “Tell me how you’re feeling. You really quite scared us, for a moment, there. Are you prone to migraines, or…?”

”Migraines?” Henry replies confusedly. “No, I— I’ve never had a migraine before. I—”

Henry swallows. He feels nauseous, terrified of what this means. He wishes Seonjae had stayed, or that his friends were here.

“This is… new.”

“I see,” Dr. Pembroke says, and writes something on her clipboard. “Well, first of all, let me assure you that you’re still in perfect health. To the best of our knowledge, there is little risk of death or grievous harm.” Her placid countenance is entirely at odds with her words. “Can you describe what happened leading up to the event, just now?”

“I— Well, Seonjae was just asking me, um… if anything strange had happened. She’d said my vitals were fine, and that she had some questions for me.”

Dr. Pembroke nods, scribbling away. She glances up with narrowed eyes when he stops speaking. Henry chooses his next words carefully.

“I was trying to figure out how to answer,” Henry says, “when— when suddenly my head felt like it was splitting open. Then— I must’ve passed out. I think I might have screamed?”

”Interesting,” Dr. Pembroke murmurs. “Anything else?”

“No, then I— I was waking up. H-how long ago was that?”

Dr. Pembroke checks her watch. “Seonjae paged me about an hour ago. You were unconscious, but otherwise seemed normal. I’ll be honest with you, Mr. Choix,” Dr. Pembroke says with a practical click of her pen. “This is not entirely unexpected.”

“You mean others have, what, collapsed? Randomly?”

“Whether or not it occurs ‘randomly—’” The word curls Dr. Pembroke’s lip in disgust. “—remains unclear. But, in a word, yes. We knew this might happen.”

“And you didn’t think to tell me?”

“Calm yourself, Mr. Choix,” Dr. Pembroke says, which only angers Henry more.

“Based on what we’ve seen…” She continues, carefully stacking each word like a house of cards. “Well, we are concerned that revealing that this might happen is liable to trigger it to happen sooner. So, yes, we did think to tell you, you and all our other patients, and we decided it was not worth the risk.”

The anger coalesces in Henry’s stomach, tight and hot.

“Can I opt out of the study?” Henry asks, keeping his voice level.

“You are welcome to cease showing up to your check-up appointments,” Dr. Pembroke says, “But I am afraid the procedure was… permanent, and cannot be undone. You did agree to it.”

She flicks through some papers on her clipboard and pulls one out. It’s a consent form that Henry does not remember signing. She hands it to him, and he sees his signature at the bottom. As he scans the form, the memory comes back to him — before he went into the procedure, they’d had him sign a number of different papers. Henry remembers reading them over quickly, eager to get it over with.

“Right,” Henry says, faintly.

“Given this event,” Dr. Pembroke reattaches the paper to her clipboard and flips back to the top sheet. “We’d like to move your next check-up to as early as possible, just in case. Do you have availability Monday?”

“Um,” Henry says, “Yes, although I— have a meeting with my thesis supervisor.”

“Of course,” Dr. Pembroke says. “We can work around your schedule.”

“Sure,” Henry says, itching to leave. “That should be fine.”

”Excellent.” Dr. Pembroke removes a blank form from her clipboard and hands it to Henry, along with a spare pen. “Please, fill out this questionnaire, sign it, and pass it to Deborah at the front desk. She’ll schedule you in. Have a lovely day.”

And, with that, Dr. Pembroke offers Henry another plastic smile and departs.

…

As he fills it out, Henry notes with some befuddlement that the questionnaire Felicity had had so much trouble with is completely routine. Henry is able to fill it out without incident. It asks for his name, some basic identifying information, and a series of questions relating to the past twenty-four hours. Has he had any headaches? Well, yes, he marks; now I have, he thinks. Did he get take-away or eat leftovers for dinner? Take-away, he marks easily, though still wondering why they could possibly want to know. The final question does give him pause, but it’s a normal sort of pause, nothing migraine-inducing.

“How are you feeling?” The question reads. The options are ‘fine’ and ‘not fine.’

Now, though, Seonjae and Dr. Pembroke will know that he is lying if he says ‘fine.’ Henry ponders the decision for a moment. As he does, he winces in anticipation of another stabbing pain.

None comes. Henry makes his choice, answers ‘not fine,’ and signs the bottom of the form. He stands up from the cushioned examination table he’d woken up on and tests his balance. No dizziness, no lingering pain. He feels rather like he’s a bit hungover. The rest of his leftover pizza — if Ash left him any — sounds absolutely divine.

Henry lets himself out of the examination room and turns to leave. Glancing around for an exit sign, Henry gets turned around and ends up wandering down the wrong hallway. At the end of it, a makeshift sign is erected across the front of a wooden office door.

TEMPORARY OFFICE OF PROFESSOR WILKINS

FOR INFO, CONTACT OXFORD PHYSICS DEPT.

The sign is tattered, nearly illegible, and half-falling off. Beneath it is a far more official sign that reads:

RADIATION IN USE. PLEASE REMOVE ALL METALLIC JEWELRY BEFORE ENTERING.

“Henry?”

Henry whips around, heart lurching as though he’d been caught trespassing.

“Naomi!” Henry gasps out, relieved beyond belief to have run into her.

“Are you alright?” She asks, coming towards him. “You seem shaken.”

She braces his elbow with her hand, and he leans into her like a grateful cat.

“Had a weird checkup,” Henry explains. “But I’m okay now. What… what are you doing here?”

“Meeting my advisor.” She gestures at the sign. “Dr. Pembroke brought him in on her study, whatever it is. So he’s here half the time and basically impossible to schedule.”

“Right!” Henry had forgotten all about it. Guilt churns in his stomach. I’ve been so wrapped up in my own saga, Henry thinks. “I was just looking for the way out, actually.”

Naomi walks him through a series of hallways and out into the waiting area.

“Sure you’re alright? I can walk you home. Wilkins made me wait, like, four days between emails, so I reckon I can be a little late to our meeting.”

“Nah,” Henry says. “I feel fine. Tell you all about it later. Have a good meeting!”

“If you’re sure.” Naomi’s eyebrows furrow at him, but she acquiesces and retreats back down the hallway.

Henry hands his questionnaire over to Deborah. She makes him an appointment for Monday afternoon and sends him on his way.

…

When Henry gets home, Ash isn’t there. Henry swallows a bit of disappointment. He doesn’t want to be alone, not right now.

Henry goes upstairs to his room and flops down on the bed. He pulls his phone from his pocket — thankfully, it hadn’t cracked when it had fallen from his hands during his… episode. Henry should probably work on a chapter of his dissertation, but he can’t focus and his head still feels stuffed with cotton.

A slip of paper, caught on Henry’s phone case, flutters onto his chest. Henry examines it, confused. Then, it hits him. Felicity.

He hesitates over the number, with that scrawled, trailing ‘7.’

Seonjae had given him her phone number too, hadn’t she?

Henry pulls out the paper Seonjae had handed him yesterday. Sure enough, her phone number is written out in neat handwriting along the bottom edge.

Henry bites his lip, unsure.

Poll 

Image Descr.: A screenshot of a poll at the bottom of a Patreon post, with two options. Option One — Contact Seonjae. Option Two — Contact Felicity. Initializing... Polling... Twenty-eight percent, contact Seonjae. Seventy-two percent, contact Felicity. We have chosen to contact Felicity.

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Points of Articulation is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 4.0 International License. It is written and created by Hannah Semmelhack, with beta-reading by Fiona Clare.