“I need to get my cottage cheese, Sarah” Abigail’s voice cut through the darkness of closed eyes and sleepy thoughts.

Sarah found herself on the floor of the kitchen, feet against the base of the counter in front of her, her back leaning against the fridge. The tip of her cane was placed between her two be-Birkenstocked feet, and both her hands were on the handle, her chin resting on her knuckles. Her feet hurt, and so did her butt.

Another blackout.

“What time is it?” she asked Abigail, without looking up, yet.

“Um,” Abigail looked around, as if trying to find the clock, before settling her eyes on it, on the wall, where it always was. “Four thirty-two.”

“How long have I been here?” Sarah asked.

“I don’t know.”

“I’m so sorry. I think I’m going to need help getting up,” she told her housemate.

“I’ll go get Peter,” Abigail said.

“Thank you,” Sarah replied to her retreating back.

She’d missed most of the day. She just hadn’t woken up with Goreth, and she had vague memories of a really long series of tumultuous dreams. And there were no residual working memories this time.

Considering where she found herself, she guessed that Goreth, or maybe Ashwin, had fallen asleep here. And then she’d woken up.

The last thing she remembered was going to bed, in her bed, last night. To her, this was the equivalent of almost a whole day’s worth of sleepwalking.

It kind of reminded her of when she’d go to bed at her grandma’s house during a late night of visiting, and waking up the next morning in her own bed. When she was really young, her parents would carry and drive her home while she slept. It always felt magical. But this was disheartening and disturbing.

If this kept up, they would qualify for a DID diagnosis again. Just from the terrifying inconvenience of it. It was distressing, so it was disorder worthy.

Nevermind that they had no way of getting that diagnosis, even if they wanted it.

She was just taking the moment to ruefully acknowledge the situation while waiting for Abigail to return with Peter.

Out loud, she said, “Hey, everyone. If we end up in the emergency room for any reason, no reporting these blackouts to the nurses, or anybody there, OK?”

No one in her system responded, but she knew at least one of them probably heard that. Usually there was someone listening.

Hopefully they’d spread the word.

She wasn’t used to thinking of having to spread the word through her system, with having had only three members until now. Four felt like a lot, though.

After coming out as trans, and finally fully reaching for their transition, they’d spent so many years finding a nice equilibrium and a functional set of routines, it had been comfortable. She and Goreth would waltz through each day, conversing internally, and anticipating each other’s moves and needs, and it was almost as if they were a singlet, except that they could always feel each other and enjoy each other’s company when they wanted to. They’d created a new norm that had helped them feel like they maybe could do anything, if their feet just didn’t cause so many problems.

Well, their feet, their gut, their allergic reactions to things, their sensory needs, executive dysfunction, emotional dysregulation, dysgraphia, dysautonomia, their heavy trans girl periods right on the dot every month with the shits that reminded her of bowel prep…

It had felt like they could do anything, even if they really couldn’t.

Her fingers started aching, so she tried cracking her knuckles, resting her cane on her collarbone as she did so. It didn’t work, but stretching them helped a bit. So she shook her hands to jostle up some better circulation.

Peter came loudly stumbling down the stairs and stopped in the kitchen doorway, hands resting on either side of the door frame to hold himself as he leaned forward a bit. Abigail could be seen right behind him, when Sarah looked up, peeking around his midsection. Abigail was really short. And Peter was taller than Sarah. And an EMT. Which was good, in many ways.

“Dysautonomia?” he asked.

“Everything,” she said.

“Ah, yeah, gotcha,” he smiled and stepped forward, holding his big sturdy right hand out, fingers relaxed and thumb up and out of the way. The perfect arrangement for her to grasp it with her right hand.

Which she reached up to do, taking her cane in her left.

“Here. Hand me your cane,” Peter said. “I’ll be your cane for a moment, and then give it back.”

Sarah looked up at him, and he nodded, so she handed him her cane, which he took in his left hand and carefully passed it back to Abigail without looking.

Abigail took it automatically.

“Thank you, Sweetheart,” he said to her.

“Of course,” she said.

“OK, now grab my hand with both of your hands,” Peter instructed Sarah. “And then let’s have you pivot so that you’re facing me.”

She followed his instructions.

“I’m going to pull you toward me, and I want you to brace your feet against mine as you bend your knees and let your butt slide forward. OK?”

Sarah nodded.

“Alright, now I step back with one foot and pull you to a crouched position, so you’re on your feet, butt in the air, and your body upright, with you still holding my hands.”

Sarah could visualize this pretty easily, since they’d done it before. It seemed to be the best way to get help standing up for her and Goreth. But hearing the instructions over again really helped anyway.

They both did as he’d said to do.

“OK. Now I’m going to carefully reposition myself in front of you, and grip your elbows. I won’t let go of you. Focus on keeping your balance anyway, and pull your elbows in so your arms are parallel to your ribs.”

Well, perpendicular to her ribs, but parallel to the sides of her ribcage, but she knew what he meant, and did as he asked.

He ended up crouching with her.

“And now, we’re both going to lift with our legs,” he said. “Breathe in as we lift. Slowly, and carefully, letting your vagus nerve do its thing and then relax again. I’ll hold you until you’re steady enough to remain standing on your own. Nod when you think you’re good. Or tell me if you aren’t, and we’ll get you to your bed together.”

“Thank you,” she said.

“Of course,” he replied.

The really nice thing about standing up this way wasn’t so much the accommodation to her dysautonomia, which seemed to be mild when it came to standing up and sitting down. But more that it didn’t require her to put pressure on her toes in any way. Still, it was good practice for when her dysautonomia got worse and maybe developed into full blown POTS or something. Which she hoped would never happen, but worried about it nonetheless.

Peter took it all very seriously. But it was also good practice for him, and he seemed to enjoy being able to use his expertise and training.

When she was standing strongly, with her eyes open again, roughly two inches shorter than Peter, he turned to Abigail to retrieve her cane and then handed it to her.

“You good?” he asked.

She smiled, “Yeah. Sorry to trouble you with all of this.”

“No, no trouble at all,” he replied. “I’m just glad you live with us.”

“I just wish I could contribute more to the household,” she admitted. Like she had so many times before. She couldn’t help saying it every now and then, now. But she inwardly kicked herself for making it a thing.

“How’s Goreth doing?” he asked.

She looked down at the floor where she’d been, and said, “Well, they left me here, so I expect not great? But it’s probably a body thing. Our feet are hurting a lot again.”

He put his left thumbnail perpendicularly between his teeth, and gently bounced his lower jaw on its springy curvature in thought. “I wish we could get you a specialist that can figure that out,” he said around his thumb.

Sarah sighed, “We’ve been working on it.”

“The front stairs are going to be a real problem,” he observed.

“They already are,” Sarah said, looking around to see the best path out of Abigail’s way.

The kitchen had two doors. It was like a kind of hallway that went from the hallway in front of the bathroom to bend in an L shape at the outer wall of the house, and an exit at the dining room, which was really just the far end of the living room. And that’d be the way out and around to her bedroom, if Peter wasn’t going to move aside immediately.

Sarah gestured behind herself, and said, “I’ll go out this way, but I think Abigail wants her cheese.”

Peter looked like he had been about to sigh and respond to her statement about the stairs, but he shook his head as if waking himself up and said, “Oh, of course! Sorry Abigail! Let me just…”

And he skootched his feet toward the counter, bracing his hands against the other side of the door frame, making a sort of half arch with his body, so that his girlfriend could walk through.

She grinned up at him, and he grinned right back down at her.

“I’ll be upstairs watching Doom Patrol if you need me,” he said.

He was straight, but he liked and understood that show. Mostly a mark for him, there.

The DID representation in it was extreme and used all of the stereotypes, but it was nuanced and subverted most of them, too. And Crazy Jane and her headmates regularly ended up saying things that sounded like someone familiar with healthy multiplicity had written their script.

There were definitely aspects that could spark discourse online, but Sarah appreciated it for what it was.

And even though the ending of the series involved a medicalist trope of sorts, it was described in the most plural positive way she’d ever seen on screen. And she’d felt pride and power in feeling good for Crazy Jane.

Like, if she’d written the show, it would have been very different. But then it wouldn’t have been the Doom Patrol.

And when it came down to it, she’d very nearly cried with the realization that a writer working under TV execs had seen her for who and what she was, or people like her, and had gotten it all through editing without having pluralphobia slapped mechanically onto it.

She only hoped she and Goreth could do the same for just one other system, some day.

But, right now, she had to make some progress on their disability claim.

Fuck.

The day was almost gone and there was still so much work to be done on it.

Most of it involved calling or emailing people, and trying to put together some kind of case. And she wasn’t at all ready to do any of that. Less so with most of the day gone and feeling discombobulated by it.

Maybe just making a checklist tonight for herself. A list of things she could do, one a day for the next month, until it was all done, just before the deadline for their SNAP and Medicaid renewal.

That could be done on Notepad on the laptop.

And then that old sticky note trope, because sometimes it worked.

Thick black Sharpie on a yellow square stuck to their bed lamp, saying, “NO MORE BLACKOUTS, PLS.”

She said it out loud, too, to make sure.

She followed that with a pink sticky note with Goreth’s name printed as nicely as she could make it, and a red heart drawn around it.

She then followed that with a blue sticky note with Phage’s name on it and underlined its name.

It could stand a bit of sternness and implied accusation. As long as she didn’t shut it out, it would comply and apologize if it had actually overstepped. Or help out where it could.

On the whole, it had been a reliable boon to her life, and she loved it. But it was also pretty business-like.

And then, on another yellow note, she wrote “Welcome to the family, Ashwin.”

And then she realized she was getting hungry, and wondered what she should eat for dinner.

She thought she remembered seeing her backpack out in the living room, presumably where Goreth had left it. It should be in their bedroom, so she went out to get it, carefully using her cane on the way.

When she used the cane in the house, it was a sign that things were bad. But it definitely helped. One hand on the cane and the other on the wall or a piece of furniture.

Just a year ago, it hadn’t been this bad.

But, she was still able to pick up her backpack easily, at least.

And when she did, she heard something odd crinkle in it.

When she checked, there was a vaguely familiar looking bag of spiral pasta with a partially crumpled receipt near it.

She looked at the receipt and discovered that there should be broccoli, bread, cheese, deli meat, and a sparkling water in the kitchen. Some of it in the fridge. But since she wasn’t feeling ravenously hungry yet, she guessed that the bread, cheese, and meat were in her intestines. And probably the sparkling water, too. It looked like a Goreth lunch.

OK, so pasta and broccoli for dinner!

By the time she was stirring the pasta, Goreth had returned, and along with them flashes of memories of what they’d done that morning.

It started with the dinner ingredients looking more and more familiar, and then she remembered running them through the self checkout kiosk.

Then she remembered climbing the front stairs in pain and exhaustion, which then gave her flashes of riding the MAX and being frustrated at Pioneer Square. And then watching the couple in the library.

And, honestly, besides the pain and falling asleep in the kitchen, it had been a really good day.

She started feeling a lot better.

And then she got a vision that just took her breath away and filled her eyes with tears instantly.

Like she was looking down at a weird and not at all accurately rendered Puget Sound from space, only she was looking up from in front of her stove, through the ceiling. And she was surrounded by purple leafed trees in a park where she stood, with the sound of large birds running through the brush of the forest around her. And she saw the spokes reaching up into the sky, like space elevators, to meet at gigantic rings of electromagnets that the sun would pass through.

It wasn’t an hallucination. Not like how Erik described them. It was just a really strong, full sensory memory. Like how she remembered the best and worst parts of her childhood.

The smell had been hard to describe. Familiar. Comforting. But rotten. Full of life. And alien.

Thanks Ashwin, I’ll take more of that any day, she felt Goreth thinking.

“Why did that look so much like Washington?” she asked aloud.

Probably for the same reason that when I look at Ashwin I see an opossum, Goreth responded. Our own memories distort the perception of it. Our brain puts something familiar there, but the differences that matter to Ashwin come through.

“Like the purple trees?”

Like the purple trees.

“Thanks for updating our Patreon, by the way,” she said.

My pleasure.

“So, if we were to try to draw the inside of the Sunspot – you know, like, for our Patreon – how would it come out? Would it look that much like Washington State? Or if Ashwin drew it, would it be more accurate to the real thing?” she asked.

Only one way to find out.

“Yeah,” she said. “Another question, then. If, hypothetically, we do stuff like that, would we be trying to convince people it’s real? Or would it just be enough to pass it off as some sort of fun kayfabe? Because, you know this is going to get the attention of the sysmeds and fakeclaimers, and the backlash is going to be really annoying. Either way.”

Well, I’d like to see an accurate map, regardless of the bigots, Goreth replied. And if it’s just to our Patreon and not our blogs, I don’t see how the bigots will get wind of it. Unless you’re thinking in the long run about our future book.

They really were thinking about writing that book now, apparently.

“Yeah,” Sarah said. “I am. But Erik and the Audreys deserve to see it, too. Fuck the bigots. We’ll figure them out when we get to it. Are you up for helping to draw that map, Ashwin?”

A very feeble maybe came as the reply from nem.

“Cool. Thank you,” she said. “I’d like to make it clear that I’m still very frustrated about some things. The blackouts and hurting feet, specifically.”

Understood, came the reply from Ashwin, even though she wasn’t directing that statement at them.

We should draw a contract up with Phage, Goreth thought, providing her with a vision of what they meant by that and a snippet of a dream of a conversation with Ashwin.

“Oh,” she breathed. “That explains a lot.”

“That’s what I said,” Goreth replied out loud.