wc: 24219
Pepper did not know how long he sat, alone, on the floor of Bertie Higgs' office. It was darker in here. Quieter. Less chance of people walking in and out and seeing him and him seeing them and then there'd be-- something, god, everything, too much, talking and explaining and maybe freaking out and what the fuck did they have to freak out about anyway he was the one who--

So he sat, alone, in the corner of Bertie Higgs' office, practically paralyzed in an effort to touch nothing. He barely disturbed the air except for the rise and fall of his chest and that was weird because if he was-- and if he held his breath his chest didn't tighten and hurt and beg him to relent and let in that much needed oxygen. It wasn't even an effort, really.

Nothing hurt. Except, in a strange way, the absence of pain.

It couldn't last forever though, and eventually the door opened and Bertie Higgs strode in, report in his hands, forehead sort of crinkled up as he stared at it and started to move around his desk and then he must have seen Pepper because he looked up with a start and stared at him, right at him, and they just sort of looked at each other for a long moment (one that he could not measure in heartbeats) until Pepper opened his mouth and said, "Hi."

"You're--" Higgs stopped, cleared his throat, then seemed to remember he was holding something. Slowly he put it down on his desk, still staring at Pepper. "What happened?"

Vaguely he remembered that he didn't like Higgs very much. He should have gone to Gawain's office, really, except that it was all the way across the DMLE floor and that had just been too far for him to contemplate going, not when he'd... what, woken up? appeared? by his desk just on the other side of the wall. The wall that he'd walked through, right through, as though he or it was insubstantial and made of nothing at all, and he'd had to screw his eyes shut because he didn't want to know what he'd see when he was inside it. Even so he'd expected to bump into it, to feel stupid for walking right bang into a wall, and when he'd come out the other side he'd instead just felt a vague sort of not-really-physical sickness.

He looked away, not sure how to explain. How did you explain something like that? How did you explain--

"Pepper, you've been missing nearly two weeks. What happened?"

Two weeks. Fourteen days. Only two, three of them had been-- and then the black room, absolutely nothing except for slowly going out of his mind and hunger and thirst and pain, ten days of it if that was right, except that it had felt like longer. Much longer.

He felt ill again, an unease that started in his mind and sank down through his body-- could you even fucking call it that? "I don't--" His voice sounded off even to him and god, he couldn't do this, he couldn't sit down and give a report like nothing had happened, like it had happened to someone else, when he was dead and ghostified and his body was still lying somewhere in the blackness underground and he couldn't even think about that without his mind seizing up and stalling and fuck he just had to get out of here, lurching to his feet and through the wall behind him into... he didn't even know what this thing was, some kind of dark crawlspace, good enough to hide in since he'd never even fucking known it was here, and he let himself fall to the ground (he slowed to a stop rather than actually hit the floor, a weirdly peaceful sort of movement) and just lay there, not breathing, not seeing, not thinking.