Derek had begun taking the sleeping pills as a way to finally get some sleep. And the sleeping pills had given him that.
But unfortunately, they had also brought with them…the fog. No matter how hard he tried to keep up with the fast paced world that he lived in, nothing came easily to him any more. And with each passing day the fog got thicker and thicker until he was reduced to just grunting along, and trying his best to make it look like he knew what was going on when he was completely lost. His mind often switching off at some point after greetings were exchanged.
Things were not that bad, he tried to reassure himself. Sure his mother was giving him even more worried looks in the brief moments when they saw each other. But the person he spent most days with, Emily, did not seem to notice anything amiss so he had to have been at least somewhat functional. So lost in the fog it did not even occur to him that something might be wrong with Emily, just as something was wrong with him.
Choosing to believe that she would have asked if he seemed as though he was not being himself, Derek managed to fool himself for a little while. But that all came crashing down around him with a visit from his uncle.
"Ahh, nephew, so glad I caught you…" Derek stared at his uncle. He blinked, once, twice, trying to figure out if he had forgotten some meeting, but he could not think of anything, so he simply nodded.
He had been staring at a blank screen for over half an hour. But when his uncle moved deeper into the office, Derek shut his laptop. It was better if the man thought that he had been working on something.
Sure enough, his uncle's eyes followed the move. Green eyes similar to his own narrowing before his uncle could catch himself.
"Come now nephew, what do you think I would do, steal company secrets and sell them to the highest bidder?" The older man laughed, the sound too loud for Derek's ears.
He tried to move his chair back, but his uncle was not having it. He moved in close, bypassing the chairs on the other side of Derek's desk and coming to stand right next to him.
He reeked of not only awful overpriced cologne, but also cigarette smoke. The combination was enough to make Derek nauseous.
"Now, nephew, seeing as I seem to have caught you while you have a bit of free time, let us talk business," A hand came up and rested on his shoulder. The smell of cologne and cigarettes intensified.
Derek wanted to be anywhere but there, but when he tried to move away, his uncle's expression shifted. His eyes going cold even as a smile stretched his face.
"Come, let us talk business nephew,"
If Derek were to be asked what exactly it was that they talked about in that awful half an hour, he honestly would not know. All he knew was that, his uncle had opened his mouth and had never stopped talking.
The sound of his voice, his words, his stench, all of it bearing down on Derek and leaving him so confused he could barely think. When his uncle, all of his teeth on display, produced a document out of thin air and asked him to sign. Derek found himself doing it on auto pilot. He knew almost instantly that he had made a mistake.
But by then his uncle was snatching the paper away and grinning like a cat.
"Excellent, I knew that you would see reason nephew, now I just have to go and get copies of this made," The man had left after that, leaving Derek with the unshakeable feeling that he had done something awful.
That night when he got home he did not waste any time. He went straight to his wing, found the sleeping pills and ground them all into dust one by one. He scattered the powder through the manor grounds while using the excuse of taking a walk.
As expected, that night, sleep did not come for Derek. But he did no mind watching the shadows as much as he usually did. That night, his brain slowly but surely came back online. Cells that the sleeping pills had made dormant sparking as they came alive.
And little by little, as complex reasoning came back to him, he realized something very important.
He had made a terrible mistake by signing whatever it was that his uncle had brought along with him.