Grohm could feel the complete disdain the copycat had expressed. Her body no specific sculpture of Venus or Aphrodite, the flowers all incredibly poisonous to humans. Each one with insulting and bitter messages of which he presumed were directed towards himself. Perhaps someone was unruly or had grown tired of waiting on him for their fix. He let out a sigh and rubbed his eyes beneath his glasses.

“You really have nothing do you.” Anderson furrowed his brows with a huff. He slipped on gloves and approached the flora with bare wrists. 

However before Anderson could truly approach the flowers, Grohm grabbed his arms. Lingering there for a moment before furrowing his brows and pulling Anderson’s sleeves down. The silence that ensued felt uneasy and tense, even those around them could notice the sudden change as both Hanes and a fellow officer stared with a slight look of concern.

“The pollen can harm you, these are extremely dangerous for humans to handle.” His eyes refused to meet Anderson’s. His hands were warm and gentle, treating the sleeves so delicately like fragile and brittle oil paintings with hundreds of years of age. 

Anderson stared at him for a good minute before saying anything. “Thank you Doctor Grohm.” He wasn’t sure what else to say, his curiosity over the man had began to rise in his mind again. How was it that he knew so much about plants? And what was it that he did before being a Psychologist? Even if he was something before, how was he able to do so, switch professions, and do so before he was 40? It truly baffled him.

As anderson picked apart the display of florals, and peered in to the caverns of the body, he found himself smelling something familiar. Putrid and grotesque, he swallowed down the lump in his throat and continued gathering the flowers, one by one, second by second, his hands began to shake.

“Anderson?” Hanes stood beside Grohm as the two watched him work from a safe distance. “Michael- You alright there?” The two gave each other a shared and mutual feeling glance.

“I’m fine- Uhm-” He fought to find his words as his lungs struggled to inhale the crude smell. Was it the body before him? Was it older than they initially thought? It still bled, still had soft tissue and loose joints, and yet it smelled of his waking nightmares. 

As Anderson blinked, as his eyes fluttered to open and close, he was no longer in front of a body. No longer was he in the dense and lush forests near his home, for he was standing in a field. He was heaving and looking around frantically, searching for anything of familiarity. He held his hair back from his face with his hands, feeling a simultaneously slick and dry substance crackling and flaking from his hands. As he whipped his hands away from his head to stare at them under the dim light of the moon, they were coated in black. 

Hanes and Grohm stared at Anderson as he knelt there, frozen and unresponsive. “Michael?” Hanes approached slowly, and once Anderson’s body fell to the side, that approach became a rush. “Michael?! Michael!” Hanes and Grohm knelt down beside him.

Anderson’s eyes were struggling to keep peering forward, his mind struggling to keep himself in the present. He was too lost in the manifestations of Stevens’s crimes, too lost in a place he didn’t know how to escape.

He stood in that field, holding his hands as far from his sides and he could muster. It was just him, in a foggy field of damp wheat grass and wildflowers, it was just him until he heard the heavy footsteps that once echoed through his home. Only now the smell wasn’t putrid and vile, it didn’t smell of burnt hair and rotting meat and viscera. It was sweet, it was comforting even in the state of panic Anderson was quickly succumbing to. It felt warm in his lungs, it felt new yet so violently familiar. It was something he had smelled before. And as he turned to face this creature that had haunted him so many nights before, he was met with the hollow caverns where eyes would sit, peering down at him. 

Grohm held Anderson’s face, opening his eyes one after the other. “Michael, I need you to do something for me, I need you to try and smile. Can you do that for me?” His voice was direct, hoping to echo through to wherever Anderson might be.

“We need an ambulance-” Hanes looked to his friend and now colleague. 

“He’ll be alright, we just need him to come back.” Grohm removed his coat and folded it nice and tidy before lifting Anderson’s head and slipping it under him. “Michael I need you to smile.” 

The two sat there beside Anderson, time seemed to tick by slower, each minute feeling as though it were an eternity and a half.

The creature reached out it’s hand, the spindly and boney fingers stretching out, though it didn’t grab ahold of him. It didn’t tear through him and scratch at his lungs, it didn’t threaten to bite down on his head or chew through the layers of skin. It offered it’s hand. For the first time, Anderson had a choice. And even though he wanted to give into the curiosity, he turned, and he ran.

Hanes and Grohm waited beside Anderson’s body, the minutes growing longer and longer as they hoped the ambulance Hanes had finally called for hurried to the best of their ability, and then some. They shared a look once his body began to twitch and shake, tensing and loosening. Grohm moved his hands to Anderson’s shoulders, he didn’t just want Anderson to come back to them, he needed him to wake up from this, to come back to consciousness from wherever he was. 

Grohm leaned over, and once more, though now it came out with a twinge of a plea, he asked the same question. “Michael, can you smile for me?” Grohm payed more attention to his eyes than the sound of sirens closing in.

The two went quiet, the air of anticipation washing over them as they waited with hopes held up high. All they needed was a smile, something to show he was there, something to prove he wasn’t all gone. Silence, even though there was sound, there was silence. And then the corners of Anderson’s mouth twitched, his whole face struggling and furrowing to shape an awkward and ill smile. 

Hanes let out a deep breath and held onto Anderson’s shoulders. “Michael- Hey-” His tone was coated thick with worry and concern. “Can you hear me?” He curled his lips in and furrowed his brows.

Anderson’s face relaxed, his eyes blinked and squeezed together. His head hurt, the pain ringing from behind his eyes. He felt sore and dazed, his jaw felt like it had locked and clamped down on itself for too long, so long that he could taste blood in his mouth. 

With a weak voice, he responded. “I can hear you.” Both Hanes and Grohm hung their heads, Hanes’s falling forward, and Grohm’s falling back. 

Anderson sat on the edge of the open ambulance, blanket draped over his shoulders and paramedics poking and prodding at him. He simply stared off, not speaking much and complying to the requests of those who worked to figure out what had happened. And once he was left alone, when they began to talk to Hanes, he took a deep breath. He rubbed his face with now ungloved hands.

He thought about what happened, how suddenly he wasn’t in his own body and mind, how suddenly he was far from reality. He held his head, his hands holding his hair from his face, and perhaps it was residual panic, but immediately he pulled them away from his head. He stared at them, they weren’t painted with blood that looked black under the moonlight, flakes didn’t chip off when he moved his fingers, he was in his own body. He was in, his own body, a fact that was somehow bittersweet to him.

“You gave us quite the scare Mr.Anderson.” Grohm approached with a warm smile. His coat was draped over his forearm and his glasses seemed to be further down his nose than usual. “How are you feeling now?”

Anderson folded his arms and kept his eyes to the ground, he exhaled and furrowed his brows. “I don’t know.” His voice was groggy and sore. Grohm sat down beside him, his elbows coming to rest on his knees as he sat. 

“Do you remember anything? What you saw? If there was anything to be seen at all.” His words trailed off, suddenly he took off his glasses and rubbed his eyelids. His thumb and index pressing down on his eyes just hard enough to see the flurry of colourful specs that plagued his vision day to day. The tense moment of silence was broken with Grohm’s lungs releasing the sigh he held in. He motioned his hand for Anderson to speak, his eyes were still closed as he held his glasses firmly in his other hand.

“I, don’t remember a whole lot.” He admitted. “I was, kneeling in front of the body, and then…” And then? He swallowed thickly and hard, his expression furrowing and twisting. He cleared his throat and a confused and almost frustrated smile came to his lips. “I was, gone.” What he meant by gone was, he remembers exactly what happened, what he saw, what he heard, what he could smell. Only he didn’t know how to approach it.

Grohm held his hand over his own mouth, his gaze firmly sat on Anderson. “Gone?” He pushed, he needed to push just over that edge, to remind him that he could spill over the line he treaded so carefully. To remind him that he could once again break the dam down.

“I wasn’t here.” He turned his head, his eyes staring into Grohm’s. His aversion to eye contact had seemed to mellow and ease once he was with the doctor, he found himself peering into the light brown that looked so dark and hollow staring at him now. “I was-” he turned his head to look at the ground once more “I was, in a field.” 

The two grew silent, suddenly they were sitting in that field. The trees far off in the distances around them, the ambulance sat in the middle of the clearing. “I was alone, there weren’t any- any houses or- buildings.” Michael swallowed hard and inhaled rough through his nose.

“There’s something that still troubles you though. Tell me.” Grohm’s voice felt warm like a security blanket.

It was just the two of them, alone in that field. The more Michael thought about it the more he felt it was familiar, the more he felt as though he had been there before. He took a deep breath, his face still furrowed as he wet his lips to speak.

“I saw, that- thing.” He rubbed his face, his hand now holding his cheek as his head leaned it’s weight into his palm. “No real shape- no defining features- no eyes and yet I still…” He paused, he could feel the frustration writhe and scratch at his ribs, yearning to get out in shouts and screams.

He felt Grohm’s hand smooth over his shoulder. The field was gone, the sound of sirens ringing at his ears. Anderson swallowed down the frustration. “I…I can’t remember a whole lot.” A lie in earnest, but the feeling of Grohm’s hand on his shoulder felt off. It felt familiar as if this had happened time and time again only that, this was the first time that space between them had closed.

As Grohm removed his hand, the sudden cold biting at Anderson’s shoulder, Hanes approached with his hands stuffed in his pockets. “Take a day.” He looked dejected and hollow. “Cali, Brahms, and Brown will handle everything. I’ve already made the calls.” His brows were knitted, he felt as though he were watching his son struggle. Just as he did so many years before.

Both Hanes and Grohm walked Anderson to his car. The former patting his shoulder and bidding him goodnight before finding his own vehicle. However, Grohm lingered there for a moment, standing in silence before he inhaled to speak up. He reached into his pocket and pulled a slip of paper from it, as he held it out, it was a phone number, neatly printed and very obviously had been done the night before or even week before. 

Anderson looked at the paper, his eyes tired and over the whole situation. “What’s this.” His voice grew groggy as he spoke.

“My personal phone number. Seeing as I don’t reside in my office all hours, if you need anything, at any time, I am just a call away.” His voice was warm, it weighed on Anderson like stones on his collar.

Taking the slip of paper felt odd, like a barrier being broken, like a dam falling down. “You do this with other patients?” He raised a brow, speaking more from one side of his mouth rather than the whole.