August groaned in annoyance as the sun rays passed through his window and hit him in the face. It was his second morning waking up from the coma. He reached over and closed the blinds to save him from the glare of the sun. Looking at the clock mounted on the wall above his bedframe, he saw it was around 8am so he got up. He looked around and found himself to be in his bedroom at his apartment, for a moment, everything felt normal. Then it all came back to him. Waking up in STAR Labs, having everyone pestering over him, Jeff and Sheri taking him back to his apartment after serious protests that he was ready to live alone once more. It was still a strange feeling. He had to keep reminding himself that it was October now-that nine months had passed by without him.
Leaving STAR Labs had been a huge battle of its own. They wanted to keep him back to run some tests, and some more tests, and so on and so on… He supposed he couldn't blame them. In their eyes, he was a medical marvel, struck by lightning and didn't die but was sent into a coma for nine months, and during this period of time, his muscles didn't deteriorate but instead looked even more active and ripped than before. It simply went against everything anyone knew. He had a hunch that the lightning had changed something inside of him, but it was his body and he was a scientist as well, he wasn't going to subject himself to the same role he usually designated to mice and guinea pigs. No, siree, he would not. So he promised the staff at STAR Labs that he would watch himself carefully and report even something as mundane as a mosquito bite and that is how he was successfully discharged.
Sighing, he pulled himself out of his thoughts and padded into the next room, his parents had not been able to keep both his apartment and his Lab, instead sacrificing his lab and putting all his materials in his spare bedroom. He surveyed the room carefully cataloguing mentally, his specimens and research notes. They had done well, everything was there, and even though some of his specimens were no longer viable because of the preservation method, who cared. He would just throw them out and do it all again.
There was another thing he had discovered ever since waking up, he'd always been smart, He'd had an IQ test done in high school and he'd scored a whooping 225 and astounded all his teachers but this, this was something else entirely. He felt like his brain had expanded like more processing speed and computing power had been added to his brain. On the way back from STAR Labs, riding along in the Car, his mind had been cataloguing irrelevant things that he normally would never have noticed, and deducing logical explanations for the little things that caught his eye. For example, when they'd drove past a man with a walking stick, he was able to tell that the man had a dog that he loved so much that was roughly larger than a terrier and smaller than a mastiff and he knew this because of the marks of the teeth on the wooden stick that he had just taken a simple glance at, he could tell that the dog was in the habit of carrying the stick behind the man and the spaces between the marks of its teeth was too broad for a terrier and not broad enough for a mastiff, his conclusion was that it was likely to be a curly haired spaniel.
It was simply amazing and that was why he felt really good despite his compromised specimens. The only thing that sucked was the loss of his papers on the Tachyon experiment as it contained experimental data that he had yet to confirm and it would take a long time for him to get to the values again as well as the fact that due to his accident, he had no more money to begin new research for something as esoteric as Tachyons.
Suddenly he felt it. The same sensation he had felt two nights before. He held his hand up in front of him and, once again, couldn't believe his eyes. He blinked several times, but no matter what he did, his hand kept vibrating. He sat on a chair, trying to feel anything to assure himself that he was awake-that he wasn't dreaming.
No. his hand wasn't vibrating. It was just shaking. His brain was playing tricks on him again. He only thought it was vibrating. Using his non-vibrating hand, August reached over to his bag on the table and grabbed the bottle of Flexeril Caitlin had prescribed him. He quickly popped open the lid and tipped a pill out of the bottle before quickly tossing it in his mouth.
She said it would help with cramps and spasms and August hoped to God it worked fast because if it didn't, he was going to lose it. That is if he hadn't already lost it. He was having hallucinations for crying out loud.
Gus took several deep breaths, closing his eyes and trying to stay calm as he waited for his hand to stop vib-shaking. As he waited for it to stop shaking. It didn't. the medication wasn't working. Gus tried not to panic, but that idea was thrown to the wind when the other hand started to vibrate as well.
He trembled in fear only for him to realize a moment later that he wasn't just trembling in fear. His entire body was starting to shake uncontrollably.
August had spent half his life being told that he was crazy and delusional. Whenever he mentioned the death of his brother, he was always told that he was suffering from trauma and had created fanciful ideas of his death in his head in other not to deal with the harsh reality of the truth and so he just stopped talking about it altogether. He needed this to stop. He didn't want to add to that stigma by alerting everyone that he was suffering from post-coma hallucinations. He didn't want to see the way Jeff and Sheri would look at him, the way they would treat him like he was out of his mind. He took two deep breaths trying to calm his racing heart, he did it again, and again until finally it stopped and he was back to normal.
Sighing again, he shrugged into his casual wear and ambled out of his apartment, walking down the busy road filled with hurrying commuters, school children and the occasional hobos angling near the park.
Walking into Jitters, the scent of Coffee fully woke him up and he smiled as he walked up to the counter to place his order. There was someone new there, someone he hadn't met before. Her tag said her name was Iris. 'Cute name' he thought offhandly. After picking up a cup of Cappuccino, saying nothing to anyone and just nodding his head in return to the greetings echoing around, he turned to leave. Turning around quickly, he bumped into a waitress that was standing behind him and the collision tipped her tray, with the coffee pointing towards his direction about to be dumped all over his shirt when all of a sudden, time stopped.
August turned around, everyone was frozen in place, no, they weren't frozen in place, they were still moving but very, very slowly. It was like the universe was a gameplay, and someone had set the game speed to the lowest speed available. He could see Iris's face widening in alarm, at her coworker's accident, see the horror on said coworkers face, and the coffee still falling slowly, and he decided to act. He righted the coffee on the tray and just as put his hands behind the waitress to try and break her fall when all of a sudden, time returned to normal, he caught the waitress' falling figure and his other hand caught the tray, balancing it perfectly with the Coffee standing upright. He was still for a moment, stunned at what had just occurred, then he caught himself, releasing the waitress and waving off her apologies, he hurried out of the café.
On the street, there was chaos. The police were involved in a high-profile car chase, it seemed and he could count a total of twelve squad cars hot at the taillights of another car that was speeding without regard of the traffic rules or the accidents it was causing. He shook his head disdainfully at the Car as it sped past him, ready to walk away when it happened again. Time slowed down, he could see the face of the perp driving the car being chased, see the mocking smile at the corner of his lips directed at the Cops behind him. That smile was so familiar, he had seen it every day in high school on different people. Bullies. He hated bullies. Before he knew what he was doing, he'd sprung forward catching up to the almost standing still car. He swung the steering wheel hard to the left where there were no casualties and pulled up the handbrakes and then knowing he didn't have much time left, he ran back to the front of Jitters on the side of the road. Just as he'd predicted, time sped up once more but this time it brought a shock to our driver, as his wheel jammed itself to the left and drifted hard to the oncoming wall where it crashed.
Looking around and seeing no one paying any attention to him, August hurried home, sipping his coffee in deep thought. As expected, the lightning had done something to him. The thing with his brain, and now this.
Could he control time?
If he could, then how? What was the trigger for it to happen, it kept on happening randomly and for him to be able to control it, he needed to know the common factor in both events, but he just couldn't figure it out.
'Looks like even a super brain has its limitations,' he sighed to himself. Upon getting home, he strode straight to his makeshift Lab and shut the door.
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August sat down in his desk chair with a sigh. He had just finished setting up the spare bedroom as a temporary lab and it had taken all morning to set it all right. He could pick up from where he left off at any time.
He didn't have time to worry about old research right now. He was more preoccupied with whatever was going on with himself. Whatever was happening in his body right now, he was going to get to the bottom of it.
He sighed and turned on the webcam of his computer. He often recorded his thoughts out loud particularly whenever he was dealing with a tricky topic, and this was definitely one of those times. It was weird, though taking auditory notes and speaking out loud about himself.
"Subject spent nine months and three days in a coma after being struck by lightning," he started.
He sighed and pulled out a blood collecting kit. He continued to speak as he drew a vial of blood from his own arm.
"Subject has been experiencing the passage of time at a different rate," he said in a strained voice as he loaded the vial of blood into the analyzer, "Pathophysiologic reasons for hallucinations and skewed perspective could be explained by hypoxia and swelling of the brain"
He pulled out several scans he had gotten from STAR Labs. He studied them carefully, looking for abnormalities.
"Scans show no visible signs of brain damage," he said quietly, "Medical reports indicate increased brain activity. Pulse is better than normal, and no cardiac dysrhythmias have been recorded. Tachycardia is mentioned in the report, but the subject's heart rate seems to be stable despite its fast pace."
August glanced over at his blood analyzer to see how much time was left on the analysis. His eyebrows furrowed as he looked at the time. It still read 00:00:00. He must have forgotten to turn it on. He was just about to press the start button on it again when suddenly, the clock changed.
00:00:10
August stared at it.
The machine was on, but according to the timer, the analysis had only been running for one tenth of a second. He looked at his computer then, at the recording time on the case video he was recording.
Video time: 00:00:10
"That's not possible," August whispered.
He stopped the video and then played it back. He watched himself on screen. He was moving in a blur as he drew blood from his arm and loaded it in the machine. His words weren't even audible because he was speaking too fast. August paused the video, his hands shaking as he moved the cursor. He slowed the video to a tenth of its original speed and pressed play. Only then were his words audible and movements visible. His movements even so were still too fast to be humanly possible.
"The world's not slowing down," August said shakily to himself, "I'm speeding up."