The alarm detonates in your ear, not ringing but violating, a metallic screech so sharp it feels like it is itching all the wrong parts of your brain, burrowing deep into the soft parts of your brain, the ones that have not fully woken yet, itching, scraping, like the damn thing is personally offended that you dared to sleep.
"God...fuck-why do I still use this thing?" you groan, slapping at the offending object on your nightstand without even looking.
The screech continues.
Absolutely relentless, at an absolutely unnecessary volume for this hour. It feels intentional. Punishing. You force yourself upright just enough to land the killing blow, slamming your palm onto the right button at last.
Silence falls.
The high-pitched ringing in your ear does not. It lingers, thin and high and ghostlike, your own personal reminder that the day has already started wrong.
A sigh slips out of you as you push yourself up, rubbing at your eyes with the heel of your hand until colours smear behind your lids. You blink several times, trying to make the world align itself.
Your room greets you with its usual charm.
Clothes draped over your chair like a corpse thrown over a railing. More clothes slumped across your dresser. A mountain of them across the floor. Not even one inside the dresser itself, as if the drawers have developed some kind of moral opposition to doing their job.
A half-eaten protein bar lies on your desk, congealed and melancholy, next to a mug of cold coffee with a thin layer on top. The air has a slight aroma of old coffee and yesterday's fatigue.
The general aura of please clean me before I become sentient.
A perfect reflection of your life.
Miserable, cluttered, and somehow still functioning.
You blow a stray strand of hair away from your face. "Great," you say in a harsh voice. "A visual metaphor for my life."
You almost slip on a sweater as you swing your legs off the bed. Perhaps it is a towel. It is difficult to tell right now.
When you push it away with your foot, it simply falls into the remaining pile of laundry. When you kick a stack of shirts in the direction of the bed, they suddenly vanish beneath it, exiled into the void where misplaced objects perish.
As you stagger towards the bathroom, your head is still pounding from the alarm's attack, your joints are tight, and your skin is chilly.
The hallway is dark and narrow; the kind of early-morning dimness that makes everything look slightly wrong. Your bare feet hit the tile, and the chill bites straight up your legs.
When you flip the switch, the bathroom light flickers once, twice, as if it is considering if it is worth illuminating you today.
At last, it begins to buzz.
It is a terrible light. Cold, unforgiving, the kind that highlights every flaw on your face you'd rather not acknowledge before coffee.
You lean over the sink and twist the faucet.
A shock of water bursts out, splashing over your palms, which your hands quickly cup and drag the liquid over your face, soaking your skin like someone who has just crawled out of a desert with a personal vendetta against hydration.
YOU ARE READING
Send the Dispatch (Dispatch x fem!reader)
Romance"Dude, I think I miss working as the Dispatcher..." It wasn't supposed to be like this. One minute, I was behind a desk, pushing papers. Next, I was thrown into chaos. I used to only read about it in incident reports. Somewhere along the way, I stop...
