WookieeBeta

The minute hand clicked over another notch, but regretfully. It crawled impossibly slowly towards that final stupendous moment when the class would fall silent, the bell would ring, and all pandemonium would break loose as three thousand teenagers raced for the exit.
But for now, Viserys Stark still had thirty minutes of History to suffer through.
The class quieted a bit as Mr. Coaltin wheeled the television set to the middle of the room. He was a tallish man, going grey around the edges, and even though his lectures were generally intolerably dull he was well-liked by most of his students.
"Now don’t get your hopes up too much," he warned as he plugged the set in. "It may be a movie, but you’ll have a quiz over it first thing next class. So I’d suggest paying attention." He pressed play and stepped back.
As it turned out, Viserys would rather have heard another lecture. The film was a documentary on the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Utterly enthralling. One could spend a lifetime studying just the layout of the theater and how it contributed to the president’s death!
His sarcasm must have shown in his face, for Coaltin sent him a warning glance. Viserys resigned himself to watching the thing. He couldn’t afford to fail another quiz in this class anyway.
Now that he was actually paying attention, he realized that the documentary wasn’t so bad as he’d thought. The narrator’s voice faded away, replaced by the soft murmur of hushed voices broken into intermittently by the actors onstage speaking their lines. Coaltin had apparently turned the lights off, for the room was dim. Viserys shifted in his seat in an attempt to make himself comfortable.
Wait. Since when were the chairs cushioned? And with velvet, no less?
He glanced to either side of him, not realizing that he had never intended to move his head. His scrambled mind was slow to realize that the people to either side of him weren’t his classmates, that Coaltin was nowhere in sight, and that the stage was most certainly not a picture on a television screen.
He was in the Ford’s Theater.
And unless he was very much mistaken, he had an excellent seat.
He cast his eyes upwards, not meaning to but not having any control over the action either. The door in the back of the Presidential box was opening; Lincoln must have summoned someone in. Satisfied that his charge was safe –
his charge?
- he turned back to watch the –
television?
Viserys blinked. He was back in the classroom and the lights were still on. The narrator continued to ramble on about something to do with a horse. All this registered in his mind at the same instant, immediately followed by the realization that he was, for no apparent reason, falling over. He put out a hand to stop himself and
grasped the door handle, turning it slowly – carefully – so that no stray noise would alert the unsuspecting man on the other side. The thrill of icy rage that had driven him earlier had evaporated, leaving in its place a quiet, deadly calm. He knew what he had to do.
The door opened, and he stepped through. The cold hilt of his pistol seemed to slide into his hand of its own accord. One of the women looked up (I should probably kill them too, he thought, ...but I won’t) and he raised the gun and fired in one swift uncalculated movement. The planet stopped in the midst of its revolution; by the time the president's body had crumpled to the floor, he was across the box and over the balcony. He twisted in midair to avoid landing on the theater seats. Not fast enough! He landed on one foot, grimaced at the sound of his ankle fracturing under the unaccustomed stress, and then he was
crying out in pain, the hand that he had thrown out to catch himself now flying back to his throbbing ankle. Viserys hit the floor with a resounding thud.
"What the?"
"Hey, man, you all right?"
"What’d’ya fall outta yer desk for?"
"Quiet, in the front!"
Breathless, head spinning, Viserys pulled himself back into his – thankfully hard and plastic – seat. He didn’t notice the class snickering quietly at his fall and they, in kind, didn’t see that as he walked out of class half an hour later he was limping heavily.

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Several weeks passed without further incident. The pain in his ankle had dissipated fairly quickly and by the time he went to bed that night he had almost convinced himself that it had all been one long hallucination. The only reminder of the entire experience were the bonus points he’d gotten on the quiz for knowing exactly how Booth had broken his ankle.
Viserys meandered into his math classroom, bag slung over one shoulder and mind focused more on the homework he’d forgotten to do than some vision he wasn’t even sure he’d had. Usually he sat in the far back corner of the classroom, behind his friend Nik, but today Nik was absent. Viserys glanced out the window. A light wave of dizziness washed over him; he paid it no heed, attributing it to the fact that he hadn’t eaten in nearly thirty-six hours. Nevertheless, he sat down in the nearest desk, two rows away from his normal place.
The bell rang, and his math teacher Mr. Verrel started in on his daily drone. Today it was compositions of equations. For all that he hated it Viserys was in reality fairly strong in math; he understood the lesson already, having explained it to a senior the year before, and he felt no compunction about letting his attention drift.
The midmorning sun streaming through the window played across the dust motes that frolicked through the otherwise still air. Viserys watched them lazily. Lost in thought, he did not hear the first vague rumble; by the time the second rolled through the classroom a few seconds later, it was too late to do anything. The giant window pane slipped easily out of its precarious perch in the ill-crafted sill and landed with a tremendous crash on what on any other day would have been his and Nik’s heads.
The glass shattered, sending tiny glittering missiles flying in every direction. They bounced off of wire-rimmed glasses, lodged themselves in elaborate hairdos, and skittered across the polished desks to clatter to the floor on the other side. One particularly pointy piece drew a long scratch along the underside of Viserys’ chin. Fortunately the window had been made of safety glass, and save for a few other equally minor abrasions no one was hurt.
Verrel gave a sigh of relief at this and then proceeded to inform them all – quite vehemently – of all the shortcomings of the custodial department. He pressed the security call button while he gesticulated with the other hand. The class buzzed animatedly, ignoring him, and told each other in emphatic voices how they were going to report the entire event to the local newspaper. Viserys held his tongue, but that afternoon he went home deathly pale for the second time in as many months.

"I can’t find anything wrong with him," the doctor told Ana and Jonathen Stark. "Physically he’s perfectly healthy, if a bit underweight – nothing a few square meals and some decent sleep can’t fix. I’ve prescribed a minor sedative to take care of that. He appears to be mentally sound as well; there’s nothing in any of the tests – psychological or otherwise – to suggest any instabilities. All I came up with was drug-induced hallucinations, but the lab ran those tests too and he’s squeaky clean. That’s a good kid you’ve got there."
Ana forced a polite smile.

Viserys dragged himself – almost literally – up the short flight of stairs and into his room, were he promptly collapsed onto his bed. He was unbelievably exhausted. Not surprising, considering that he’d only gotten about an hour and a half of sleep in the last two weeks. And those had been snatched only at odd moments during class, between the visions.
He’d finally had to accept them as reality. The first few weeks’ worth had required visual stimuli to set them off, and the transition had been smooth and relatively slow; now they were apt to come at any time and were always breathtakingly sudden. He estimated that he spend rather les than fifty percent of the day in his own time and body. The nights were even worse. The flash-visions (they usually started with bright flashes of light these days) began the instant he walked through the door and often didn’t end until one of his parents propelled his barely-conscious body out the door in the morning. Today the warm fuzzy feeling from whatever that doctor had given him seemed to be keeping the things at bay. He felt quite confident that he knew the entire history of the patch of land upon which his house stood, all the way back to the dinosaurs (though those were vague and fuzzy, rarely more than brilliantly colored impressions).
It was interesting in a way, he thought. The ones brought on by visual stimuli – television, movies, pictures, even a sign across the street – had generally involved other people, other places. But those that seemed to occur spontaneously had always been visions of the precise location in which he was standing. Just on a hunch, he’d stayed for a moment in History class and sat in the seat behind his own; apparently his experience with the Ford’s Theater and his subsequent fall had taken all of about three seconds. Funny. It had felt like hours.


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[A/N] Yes, I know - yet another version of this same freaking thing. This makes what, six? Seven? I lost count a while ago. Changing some characters, relationships, and in a fairly major way the plotline... No worries, though, we should be out of Mandreka and into Khrennad pretty soon. The only thing I really have left to figure out before I can continue with something akin to confidence is the "Enemy." I still don't have a name, a motive, anything...grrrr. (Usually the bad guys are what I have the easiest time with.) Anywho, I'm off to go find some grub before I die. *is huuuuuungry*

Random Quote:
Perhaps in time the so-called Dark Ages will be thought of as including our own.
- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742 - 1799)