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There exists a lethally poisonous mushroom by the name of Amanita bisporigera. It is also known as the Destroying Angel, or, rather, one of a few species of ‘destroying angel’ mushrooms— specifically, this species is found in eastern North America. It’s quite innocuous looking, as mushrooms go, A. bisporigera being a variety that sports a bland white cap on a bland white stem with bland white everything else. A great deal of mushrooms look eerily like A. bisporigera, including harmless ones that taste good in stir-fry. It is for precisely this reason that amateur foragers are strongly urged not to partake in consuming their forest finds if they appear anything like A. bisporigera.
You do not forage for mushrooms, because you had never stepped foot in a forest, or a meadow, or any land-bound nature whatsoever until you were sixteen years old. You are not, however, an amateur.
When it is poison that you consume, it is not an accident.
“Dirk?”
The sound of Jake’s voice jolts you from your reverie, and you look up from where you’ve been staring blankly into the hollow chassis of Brobot 2.0 for the past… god knows how long. He’s giving you an odd look over his mug of cider from where he stands in the doorway. The corners of your mouth twitch into a single frame of what might be a smile, a perfunctory gesture you have almost automated entirely for Jake’s benefit.
Your throat feels tighter than usual. “What is it?”
Jake knows the smile is tedious, he must know, it’s not fooling anyone who’s ever met you or seen you or heard literally anything about you, but like every time he has before, he smiles back as he understands your gesture to simply be a quirky expression of contentment. “Oh, nothing. Just… wondered where you’d gone off to, is all. Carry on!”
His jovial tone is betrayed by the slight strain in his face and voice. It’s common enough by now that you register it only as a mental check of a box. Jake absconds from the garage doorway back into the house before you— or he— can say anything more.
There is an odd thing about how the poison of A. bisporigera works. When you first consume it, you will become afflicted with gastrointestinal issues within the day, as one might expect from a lethal mushroom. Then, however, after you suffer through that, you will enter a period in which you feel better. Normal, even. As if the poison is fully flushed out of your system, and the misery is over.
It is not.
During this period is when the lethal damage to your liver and kidneys takes place. Cells undergo necrosis rapidly, as DNA transcription within the cells grinds to a halt and thereby ceases production of proteins. Your liver, sensitive as organs tend to be, begins to hemorrhage into acidic waste products that will lurk in your body unfiltered, because your kidneys are undergoing the same necrotic dissolution. Meanwhile, you feel fine.
When you and Jake had broken up during the Game, you’d thought that was it. You’d tried, the relationship failed, things ended. Whatever you felt about him still was irrelevant.
Until the Game ended, and everyone settled on Earth C, leaving you and Jake to drift back into each other’s orbits. You were familiar with him, he was familiar with you. It made sense. You started spending your nights at his house more and more, and then you started to spend some days there, and then you set up shop in his garage, and then you started spending all your days there, and he never said a word about it.
Only when the damage of A. bisporigera’s toxins are fatally irreversible will you start to feel the consequences. Jaundice, seizures, and more gastrointestinal issues before death is how this manifests.
There is also the potential for you to become delirious in this downward spiral before the coma that is your death knell.
Later tonight, you will gasp and writhe against the sheets while Jake bites bruises into your shoulders as he fucks you, fast and hard, and you will moan and make all the right noises that he needs to finish inside of you like he always does. This— sex— is the one circumstance that you will let him think he sees you, the real you; he will think he knows the truth of you as you both lie on the bed, winded and sweaty in the darkness, exactly as you have designed yourself to be seen.
For half a second, you, too, will even believe it, that he can see you then.
The fantasy will shatter when Jake starts to say something in a very, very small voice that you will pretend you cannot hear, because you will pretend to have fallen asleep, and he will be relieved. He will succumb to your own supposed fate himself only minutes later, leaving you to your thoughts in the silence of his bedroom. The hollow ache will threaten to drag you under until you postpone that train of thought yet again, as you set back the toxic clock of your own demise for another day of living seemingly asymptomatic.
But that will be later tonight.
Now, staring into the bland white walls of the bland white garage, you think you can hear your own voice behind a stethoscope and a long white coat, playing doctor just as facetiously as you play yourself for Jake, and you think his words will always be true, god tier immortality be damned:
Dirk Strider, you are a dead man walking.