Someday Maybe
folder
Original - Misc › -Slash - Male/Male
Rating:
Adult ++
Chapters:
22
Views:
2,838
Reviews:
23
Recommended:
0
Currently Reading:
0
Category:
Original - Misc › -Slash - Male/Male
Rating:
Adult ++
Chapters:
22
Views:
2,838
Reviews:
23
Recommended:
0
Currently Reading:
0
Disclaimer:
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of characters to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. The Author holds exclusive rights to this work. Unauthorized duplication is prohibited.
My Normal Approach is Useless Here
A/N: Title of this chapter is taken from xkcd, a free webcomic that is hilarious and you should go and read right n- after you read this chapter and leave me a review.
I enjoyed this chapter a lot. The only thing I didn't like about it was the fact that I didn't write it yesterday like I was supposed to. I played Spore all day instead and I feel bad about that. I have to write about two thousand more words today to catch up to where I'm supposed to be so I'll try to stick another chapter up later. I'm just trying to decide if I'm going to write another scene with "little Ty" in this next chapter or wait until after I've introduced another character.
Anyway, despite the shortness of this chapter it serves it's purpose and I hope the transitions are okay. (Were the transitions in the previous chapter from "little Ty" to "big Ty" okay, I wonder?)
I think I've rambled enough in this note. Thanks to Lisa for reviewing and to everyone else who read it.
Lisa: Yes, they found out about his powers and arranged it so he ended up where they wanted him to be. His father has never been in the picture, Ty doesn't even know who he is or why he was never around it didn't occur to him to ask when he was little and he hasn't since gotten the chance.
This chapter explains a little more about Ty's condition aside from- well, the reason I wrote it.
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Ty watched the news and ate breakfast. He played video games and lounged around and had a snack. He ate lunch while watching a movie. He went online and played games for hours. He ate dinner while he watched the evening news. He watched sitcoms and crime shows and stayed up until ungodly hours of the morning. Slept for a while and woke up and did it all over again.
Admittedly, some days weren’t like that. Sometimes he took a walk or went out to lunch. Or went to the bookstore and drank lattes and read magazines and bought an armful of new books and monitored the steadily lowering price of the digital reader they had on display there and calculated how long it would be until digital was cheaper than paper and paper books became the “snob” books and digital readers were for the poor. What would bookstores turn into then? Internet cafes where you came to preview books and buy coffee? Or would they take some strange new turn he couldn’t predict?
Some days he couldn’t bear the thought of getting out of bed and only did so for the barest necessities of going to the bathroom and snagging snacks and drinks from the kitchen and even when he did venture out he dragged the heavy covers with him for whatever security they provided his mental state and spent the rest of the day cowering in a pillow fort, making some attempt to read just to distract himself and in general spending the day in fear and inactivity or sleep.
And those were just the days when he was left to himself. When he had something to do there were the inevitable days of reading through crisp white typed pages stacked neatly in manila folders. And research. Lots of research. Creeping around and studying people from afar long before he ever approached them. He had to know just how to do things beforehand. Of course, most of the time he was never required to actually interact with his targets. Go someplace and sit quietly with his eyes closed and read their minds without ever letting them know what he was doing. In some ways that was actually the harder thing to do.
Skimming the top of someone’s mind and picking out what they were thinking about right at that moment was easy to the point that he did it without conscious effort and there was no way he could actually make it stop. He could concentrate on one person or another and focusing drowned out everyone but that one person for the most part. Or he could read a book or concentrate really hard on a video game or something of the sort and as long as it was enough to hold his attention- well... it didn’t make the noise go away but it did mute it to a constant background murmur that he didn’t have to pay attention to.
He figured that this was what it was like to have ADD, every little thing could distract you unless you focused on something you enjoyed. Except obviously kids with ADD did not heard other people’s thoughts. Not that he knew that for certain. It was possible they had some touch of the gift that ordinary society could not understand and so they shoved it into their kitchen draw of mental instabilities and drugged them up.
It was strange and sobering to wonder what would have happened to him if they hadn’t found him. He wouldn’t be here for starters. Would he be in college now? But that wasn’t the important part. Would his powers have gotten to this level? No. Of course not because he wouldn’t have- no he was not thinking about that. They wouldn’t be, suffice to say. Would they have faded to the point where he was normal? Would he have had a few lingering effects and be pigeonholed as a kid with ADD or be more like the woman with parlor tricks he had so recently ridiculed in the lobby of their office building?
Still though, he was here. He could read minds but it took something out of him. The human brain composes only 2% of the mass of a human body but it uses about 20% of the energy of the human body when it’s at rest. When your brain was working and you were thinking parts of it would consume even more glucose and oxygen than usual so it was impossible for Ty to do something like jog and read someone’s mind at the same time because he couldn’t get enough oxygen for both activities at once.
Ever conscious moment he used a part of his brain that was dormant and useless in others. His brain was never really at rest so he used more energy in that way than most people anyway. And when he was actually making an effort to turn his powers on digging through someone’s unconscious memories looking for information the activity in that part of his brain spiked way up. And since PET scans tracked tagged glucose to measure brain activity it meant his brain required a lot more fuel to sit across the room from someone and rifle through their memories without their ever knowing than it did to sit and talk to them about the things he wanted to know and skim the information off the top.
That was why they were so concerned about his food consumption. He needed a lot of food just to maintain his weight and blood sugar levels where they were supposed to be because of the hyperactivity in his brain. He needed even more when he had a lot of assignments and most of what he needed were carbohydrates. They were the easiest thing for your body to produce glucose from, he knew. Carbohydrates and water and oxygen were all that his brain needed. In order to get the protein and vitamins and sugars that the rest of his body needed he had to consume a lot of food.
The same way that a champion swimmer needed 12,000 calories a day to fuel his body Ty needed tons of calories to fuel his powers. Unfortunately for him he didn’t have his own personal dietitian to plan his meals and make sure he ate them and such. He had to try to do it on his own. Sometimes he did better than others. Sometimes he had strings of assignments and bad days at the same time and just couldn’t do it. And then he lost weight and his blood sugars and everything went way off and spiraled him down into even more bad days and he got scolded and told to eat more. He tried not to let it happen often.
But that was his life. He ate and tried to concentrate on things that weren’t other people’s thoughts and he ate more and didn’t sleep as much as he should have until a bad day caught up and he spent the day in bed and then he went out and did his assignments like a good boy. It wasn’t normal, he could recognize that. But what the hell was normal anyway? And besides, what other job could he have where he did something he was really good at for a few days here and there and got paid well enough to laze about and read and play video games the rest of the time? It was... he wouldn’t say it was a good arrangement there were definitely bad things that happened but it... it worked for him. And that was good enough, normal didn’t factor into it.
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A/N: Be kind enough to leave me a review, please and thank you?
I enjoyed this chapter a lot. The only thing I didn't like about it was the fact that I didn't write it yesterday like I was supposed to. I played Spore all day instead and I feel bad about that. I have to write about two thousand more words today to catch up to where I'm supposed to be so I'll try to stick another chapter up later. I'm just trying to decide if I'm going to write another scene with "little Ty" in this next chapter or wait until after I've introduced another character.
Anyway, despite the shortness of this chapter it serves it's purpose and I hope the transitions are okay. (Were the transitions in the previous chapter from "little Ty" to "big Ty" okay, I wonder?)
I think I've rambled enough in this note. Thanks to Lisa for reviewing and to everyone else who read it.
Lisa: Yes, they found out about his powers and arranged it so he ended up where they wanted him to be. His father has never been in the picture, Ty doesn't even know who he is or why he was never around it didn't occur to him to ask when he was little and he hasn't since gotten the chance.
This chapter explains a little more about Ty's condition aside from- well, the reason I wrote it.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Ty watched the news and ate breakfast. He played video games and lounged around and had a snack. He ate lunch while watching a movie. He went online and played games for hours. He ate dinner while he watched the evening news. He watched sitcoms and crime shows and stayed up until ungodly hours of the morning. Slept for a while and woke up and did it all over again.
Admittedly, some days weren’t like that. Sometimes he took a walk or went out to lunch. Or went to the bookstore and drank lattes and read magazines and bought an armful of new books and monitored the steadily lowering price of the digital reader they had on display there and calculated how long it would be until digital was cheaper than paper and paper books became the “snob” books and digital readers were for the poor. What would bookstores turn into then? Internet cafes where you came to preview books and buy coffee? Or would they take some strange new turn he couldn’t predict?
Some days he couldn’t bear the thought of getting out of bed and only did so for the barest necessities of going to the bathroom and snagging snacks and drinks from the kitchen and even when he did venture out he dragged the heavy covers with him for whatever security they provided his mental state and spent the rest of the day cowering in a pillow fort, making some attempt to read just to distract himself and in general spending the day in fear and inactivity or sleep.
And those were just the days when he was left to himself. When he had something to do there were the inevitable days of reading through crisp white typed pages stacked neatly in manila folders. And research. Lots of research. Creeping around and studying people from afar long before he ever approached them. He had to know just how to do things beforehand. Of course, most of the time he was never required to actually interact with his targets. Go someplace and sit quietly with his eyes closed and read their minds without ever letting them know what he was doing. In some ways that was actually the harder thing to do.
Skimming the top of someone’s mind and picking out what they were thinking about right at that moment was easy to the point that he did it without conscious effort and there was no way he could actually make it stop. He could concentrate on one person or another and focusing drowned out everyone but that one person for the most part. Or he could read a book or concentrate really hard on a video game or something of the sort and as long as it was enough to hold his attention- well... it didn’t make the noise go away but it did mute it to a constant background murmur that he didn’t have to pay attention to.
He figured that this was what it was like to have ADD, every little thing could distract you unless you focused on something you enjoyed. Except obviously kids with ADD did not heard other people’s thoughts. Not that he knew that for certain. It was possible they had some touch of the gift that ordinary society could not understand and so they shoved it into their kitchen draw of mental instabilities and drugged them up.
It was strange and sobering to wonder what would have happened to him if they hadn’t found him. He wouldn’t be here for starters. Would he be in college now? But that wasn’t the important part. Would his powers have gotten to this level? No. Of course not because he wouldn’t have- no he was not thinking about that. They wouldn’t be, suffice to say. Would they have faded to the point where he was normal? Would he have had a few lingering effects and be pigeonholed as a kid with ADD or be more like the woman with parlor tricks he had so recently ridiculed in the lobby of their office building?
Still though, he was here. He could read minds but it took something out of him. The human brain composes only 2% of the mass of a human body but it uses about 20% of the energy of the human body when it’s at rest. When your brain was working and you were thinking parts of it would consume even more glucose and oxygen than usual so it was impossible for Ty to do something like jog and read someone’s mind at the same time because he couldn’t get enough oxygen for both activities at once.
Ever conscious moment he used a part of his brain that was dormant and useless in others. His brain was never really at rest so he used more energy in that way than most people anyway. And when he was actually making an effort to turn his powers on digging through someone’s unconscious memories looking for information the activity in that part of his brain spiked way up. And since PET scans tracked tagged glucose to measure brain activity it meant his brain required a lot more fuel to sit across the room from someone and rifle through their memories without their ever knowing than it did to sit and talk to them about the things he wanted to know and skim the information off the top.
That was why they were so concerned about his food consumption. He needed a lot of food just to maintain his weight and blood sugar levels where they were supposed to be because of the hyperactivity in his brain. He needed even more when he had a lot of assignments and most of what he needed were carbohydrates. They were the easiest thing for your body to produce glucose from, he knew. Carbohydrates and water and oxygen were all that his brain needed. In order to get the protein and vitamins and sugars that the rest of his body needed he had to consume a lot of food.
The same way that a champion swimmer needed 12,000 calories a day to fuel his body Ty needed tons of calories to fuel his powers. Unfortunately for him he didn’t have his own personal dietitian to plan his meals and make sure he ate them and such. He had to try to do it on his own. Sometimes he did better than others. Sometimes he had strings of assignments and bad days at the same time and just couldn’t do it. And then he lost weight and his blood sugars and everything went way off and spiraled him down into even more bad days and he got scolded and told to eat more. He tried not to let it happen often.
But that was his life. He ate and tried to concentrate on things that weren’t other people’s thoughts and he ate more and didn’t sleep as much as he should have until a bad day caught up and he spent the day in bed and then he went out and did his assignments like a good boy. It wasn’t normal, he could recognize that. But what the hell was normal anyway? And besides, what other job could he have where he did something he was really good at for a few days here and there and got paid well enough to laze about and read and play video games the rest of the time? It was... he wouldn’t say it was a good arrangement there were definitely bad things that happened but it... it worked for him. And that was good enough, normal didn’t factor into it.
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A/N: Be kind enough to leave me a review, please and thank you?