Who saved Who?

Chapter 2
Chapter 2: Burnout

Chapter Description: Felix experiences burnout and a meltdown as years of forcing everything down (masking) have taken their toll, not looked on kindly in the Diaper Dimension

Chapter 2

Felix sighed, he hadn’t slept very well the last couple days, there had been a storm and the noise had kept him up. His bunkmates thought he was crazy, they said you could barely hear it over the regular noise of the ship, but to him it was like night and day the difference between a clear and stormy night. The storm last night made him toss and turn nearly the whole light, only dropping off for a couple hours of sleep before dawn. He awoke feeling dreadful even worse than the day before which had already been less than stellar; he had burned his tongue on breakfast the previous morning and the small injury on his tongue annoyed him the rest of the day.

He made his way throughout his morning routine and duties like a zombie, he had made it through lunch without any significant accidents (he had dropped a box of cables that scattered across a passage floor and he had to rush to pick it up before anyone came along). After lunch though he had a hectic interaction with his CO (commanding officer) that started with him scolding Felix for not completing all the jobs that had been assigned to him the day before and ended with him thanking him, barely restraining himself from yelling, apparently one of the jets that was due to be updated yesterday had not been, and when the jet was being prepped today for a routine flight an emergency shutdown had to be performed when a critical failure was detected in the jet’s computer core.

Felix hardly moved while Rodney his boss finished his tirade. “Well what do you have to do say for yourself Barnkind (Felix’s last name)”

Felix was frozen like a deer in headlights for a moment before grabbing for his personal work pad from the desk he was working at one of the four in the relatively small room, he quickly pulled up his jobs from the day before and stammers out “I..I…I don’t know what to say sir I completed all six of the assignments given to me.”

“Six? Here on my pad I have seven listed.” Felix’s brow furrowed in confusion, feeling slightly more confident that fault did not fall with him.

“What is the file tag sir” Felix entered the sixteen digit code as his Sergeant read it off to him. “I see, there is a……foolish protocol that that deletes scheduled updates if an update has been performed within the previous 24 hours, it look like the jet in question had a bug 3 days ago and a thorough workup was performed including run of the mill updating, this flagged the system to delete the order for the new non-scheduled update.” Felix ran out of breath at the end of his speech looking up.

Rodney’s face had stilled his breathing returning to normal and having had a chance to calm down while Felix spoke. “My God we are lucky this only happened to the one jet”

“Yessir” Felix was still shaken from having the man five or six times his size yell at him, no matter what distance he stood away in the IT workshop, it still felt like he was standing over him the size difference was so stark. The sergeant and the rest of the Amazonian sailors struggled at times on the ship, knocking their knees shoulders on things, Felix had plenty of space and was use to climbing over things sized for Amazons. The Sergeant and the rest of the IT department he worked with tended to try to avoid spending much time in the IT workshop preferring to be out working on jobs for the ship. As Felix watched the sergeant trying to fit comfortable into the snug space it was clear why.

“I’ll have someone reprogram that protocol, thank you for your professionalism,” the Sergeant paused, many on the ship were not totally positive how they were supposed to treat a Little sailor so Felix was treated to a lot of sentiments and niceties that most of the Amazonian sailors never afforded each other “I’m sorry for coming down so hard and coming in so hot, I should have approached you calmly, you haven't made any mistakes I should have given you the benefit of the doubt”

“I appreciate sir,” Felix looked down, it made him uncomfortable sometimes when he could tell he was being treated differently because he was Little “Have a good rest of your day”

“You too Barnkind” The sergeant left and started heading above decks, as he walked he felt bad about how harsh he was, it was simply because of the danger that he had gotten so worked up, still though, he could tell that the boy had been frightened. Man he reminded himself as he called Felix a boy in his head, it was hard, harder even than it had been with other Littles Rodney had known to think of him as an adult, there was just something…….naive about him, it wasn’t quite the right phrase but it was the closest one Rodney could come up with.

As Felix was left alone he tried to calm down but felt rather odd, both tired and fine at the same time, numb to the whole situation. Weird Felix thought as he sat down to try to finish the project he had been working on before his Sergeant pulled him away from it. As he worked on his project the sun started setting as it began to rain. Felix, too distracted by his work, didn’t notice the storm until an epic peal of thunder made him jump in his seat and almost knock what he was working on onto the floor. He took some deep breaths to calm himself and realized he needed the next tool for his project, he had finished all his adjustments and just needed to measure everything to make sure it had come out correctly.

He walked over to the tool cabinet and retrieved the Boltometer used to measure if all the power was being distributed correctly. As Felix retrieved it from the large shallow cabinet covering most of one wall of the workroom thunder pealed again making him spin in surprise.

“Felix” He chided himself, after all it’s one thing to have a storm keep you up and its another to be scared by one in this day and age. As he made his way back to his seat he didn’t notice that when the thunder made him spin he left open the precision equipment cabinet, something no one is supposed to do because everything is only secured when the cabinet is closed, which is an important feature of shelving on the high seas.

Felix wasn’t sure what was going on with him the past few months, he had always been a weirdo, always knew he had to try harder to seem normal than everyone else, but over the past few months he had gotten jumpier and frazzled, it was so much harder to pretend than it used to be. He just didn’t always feel like he had the energy to do his daily duties and interactions, but he knew he had to, so he forced himself. It used to be that simple, but now every day he could tell it was getting harder to hold it together, he just felt like he needed a break.

Sometimes when Felix was being more objective about it he would acknowledge that he had always had breaks growing up, spring break, summer break, and winter break would give him time to decompress and want to go back to school when it started again, or if not wanting to at least feeling ready. Now he had been going nonstop for almost 4 years straight, sure he got vacation days, but it wasn’t enough.

When Felix was younger he had always been sensitive, didn’t like sad stories or even the sad part of happy stories, and sad things would just get stuck in his head for days on end, around the time he was going into highschool it became easier not to be as sensitive, it became part of the rest of his pretending to be normal, if it wasn’t normal to be so sensitive and have such strong emotions then that could get shoved down too. Lately though he would qualify himself as becoming “more sensitive” as it was harder for him to brush things off like he had learned to, to move on easily when something went wrong or schedules changed, to not let a random sad story he heard keep him up at night. On the clear quiet nights it was still a roll of the dice whether or not Felix could sleep these last few months, and he had to be careful not to let himself cry when he was perseverating about something lest someone think his Maturosis was presenting itself.

And, so it had been longer than Felix could remember that Felix had lost it crying upset over something when all at the same time the loudest crack of thunder yet sounded, a gigantic wave hit the side of the ship and the whole ship jolted to the side, and, already scared by the turbulence, there was a world shattering crashing smashing and shattering sound as all of the precious instruments fell out of the ajar cabinet door to the floor below.

Felix spun with his heart pounding out of his chest, tears filling his eyes as he viewed the devastation before him. This. This was his fault. Entirely his fault. Felix felt disconnected from his body as an overwhelming surge of emotions hit him. He started breathing faster, gasping like he was in danger, the tidal wave of emotions was making him feel like the world was ending even though he knew that while it was bad, it wasn’t worse than some things people had accidentally done and still went on to have successful careers.

Felix held his hand to his chest trying to breathe deeply but failing as his breathing came quick and shallow, it wasn’t working his normal method of just pushing away the emotions proved ineffective and he found himself sinking, feeling like he was spinning and falling even though he wasn’t moving at all. His tears broke and streamed down his face as he started sobbing. He couldn't stop shaking, no matter what he did it felt like everything was out of his control. Feeling like he had to move but not knowing where to get he slid off the bolted stool he had been sitting on and moved to the far side of the room from the mess, not that the other side of a twenty foot wide room was far.

He didn’t know how long he was like that before someone came in, he noticed them pause in the doorway viewing the destruction and then focusing on him crying in the corner, he was too upset to recognize who it was, too upset to hear what they tried saying to him, there was just nothing past the world ending. He was aware of when someone slipped hands under his armpits and started lifting into the air. He sobbed harder and reached out grabbing the jacket of whoever was carrying him and burying his face into their neck. He knew he should care about someone carrying him, but he couldn’t focus on why, couldn’t care at the moment.

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After an unknown amount of time whoever was carrying Felix started trying to pull Felix away from his body, to set him down, the hand that had been supporting the small of his back retreated to make him lean back and the hand under his buttocks tried pushing up a bit for the same reason. Felix just gripped the shirt tighter sobbing, not wanting the one source of stability he had found to leave him. He heard words being exchanged and the hands resumed their previous holding position the hand on his back rubbing in small circles. Slowly the hands shifted him higher until he was looking over his holder’s shoulder.

There was a man wearing glasses looking kindly at him, he said something but Felix couldn’t hear him over his crying and the pounding in his head, his vision too blurry to make out the shape the lips made. After a repeat of the same the man nodded kindly speaking in what Felix could barely make out as a comforting warm voice. Felix closed his eyes sobs continuing to rack his frame, he heard more words and felt himself shift lower against his bearer’s body. His crying hitched when he felt fingers at his waist and then a breeze on his buttocks. He started to struggle but the arm holding him tightened, pinning him in an iron vice to the chest he faced.

He felt a pinching sensation on his right cheek, his crying strengthened but the vice holding him lessened slightly, the circling hand on his back resuming it's soothing motion.

He cried, cried like there was no tomorrow as everything….faded……he was..…so…..tired……

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End Chapter 2

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