There's the display, on all of this kind of fountain, that tells how many water bottles it alleges to have saved from landfills.

This one has a 6676, in the middle of the string, and he's not superstitious but he can tell when he's being sent a signal.

Okay!  So!  He will have to calm down some other way.  He - takes some deep breaths - is the air - surely not, or if it is he's done for.

(Maybe he's done for already.)

He heads home, slings off his school bag in his room and picks up his work one, goes to fill up his water bottle -

- There's a spider.  Not in the sink, but up in the corner above it, where the light is, and it was not that long ago that Julien was home and that spider was not there, not then, and now it - is - and Julien likes bugs all things considered but he can take a hint.

Fuck.

He checks the fridge, and the first thing he sees is the cheese that he'd moved to the front in a hurry this morning because he was pretty sure it was about to go bad if it wasn't already.  He checks it over.

It's not horribly moldy, but - that corner, he thinks -

So, yeah.  He's not as grossed out by off food as one of his housemates, but he can put a pattern together.  When it's as obvious as this one, at least.

He goes to work without a snack.

Starbucks is like it always is (because whoever's conspiring against him can source really good actors).  Julien is more chipper and friendly than usual.  No one calls him out for it.

By the time his shift ends, which is after only four hours since it's a school night, he's really quite thirsty.  Hungry, too, but it's thirst that he's having trouble not thinking about.

He walks home, dragging his feet except when there's a passerby or a bird who he needs to look cheerful for.

- Oh fuck his phone.  He realizes when he goes to put on some music that all of his information is in there - he restarts it as surreptitiously as he can manage and pockets it without unlocking it.

Home is like it always is (because whoever's conspiring against him has really good sound designers).  Julien gets something written down for the homework he hadn't quite finished that's due tomorrow and fiddles around on the guitar and tries to read and tries to sleep.

He has a headache.  He has a headache and also if he turns off his desk lamp something is going to come out of the darkness and eat him, and maybe he'll just stay up until his classes.  He's pulled all-nighters before.

He dreams of eyes, hundreds of them, all around him, opening out of the smooth surfaces of desks and curtains and flooring, everywhere, all around him, except that wherever he turns to look they disappear.  But as is sometimes the way of dreams, he knows they're there anyway.  He can propriocept them when the perspective is in his body, and sometimes there's instead a movie-camera thing happening and he can see them all back, as their gaze remains locked on his every movement.

He wakes with plenty of time before his first class; at 6:32.

At 7:45 on the dot he pads out into the common area, waves blearily to his housemate, pours himself some off-brand Cheerios, with milk on top, and takes it to his room.  (He forgets to bring a spoon.  He doesn't think anyone noticed.  He hopes they didn't.)  At 8:15 everyone else should be either out for their morning classes or still asleep, so he feels decently safe sneaking to the kitchen and dumping his milk down the sink and the not-Cheerios in the trash.  He's hurried about it; some cereal pieces go in the sink and some milk goes in the trash, but if someone comes out and he gets caught -

School.  College!  Trying to look happy and normal and fine but also in a way that doesn't cause people to start conversations with him.  Trying not to fall asleep on his desk.  Trying to pay attention to what's on the board, not because he thinks it will impart true knowledge to him, but to try and catch a discrepancy.  Often failing and just watching the gray squiggles in his vision instead.

He walks into the wrong classroom, then across campus to the right one, and the professor asks if he's alright when he staggers in twenty minutes late.

(Fuck.  Fuck.)

"No, I'm fine, thanks!"  But he turns around on his heel and heads back out the door before she can turn into a dragon and start torturing him.

He goes home and mopes in his room, trying to melt into his bed (NOT literally).  He doesn't have a work shift tonight because he instead has one tomorrow morning.

He has a headache.

There's less and less reason to go to the bathroom, but he has to keep up appearances, and one of the times he does he sees in the mirror that his eyes are substantially lighter than normal.  Has a very quiet panic attack and has to fake a shower so that he can get his face to a state where his housemates won't immediately clock how hard he was crying.  (The water doesn't dissolve his hand, when he sticks it in, so he figures it's safe to get his hair wet as long as he's very careful that none of it goes in his mouth.)

(Even if he really wants it to.)

At some point he checks his phone on bored instinct, before he remembers, and finds it dead.  Fine.  That's fine; he wasn't using it anyway.

He goes out for another fake meal midmorning next day; one of his housemates asks about how wasn't he supposed to be at work right now?  Julien tells him he got the day off unexpectedly when...

when.....

- Because you're sick?, fills in the housemate.  Yeah, you look beat, go and get some rest.

So Julien goes back to his room.

(He still has a headache.)

Around suppertime, that same housemate knocks on Julien's door with some sort of vitamin-y electrolyte-y water and a bowl of soup, and Julien has to pretend to be grateful even though he's trying not to cry from how badly he wants it and how nice of a gesture it would be if it weren't instead evil awful trying to get him to -

His performance is adequate, and he's left alone.

Around 2:30 AM he staggers out to the kitchen to dispose of the 'gifts'.  He goes slow enough that even though it's dark and he can't walk very straight, he doesn't make up enough noise to wake anyone up.  Or, enough for them to come out of their rooms, anyway.  Obviously they're all listening to him and just pretending to sleep.

The next day is Sunday, and this one he has off from both work and school.

And he dies.