(Untitled)

[moirabyrne]

Who: Moira and Ian!
What: Moira doesn't quite know!
When: Now!
Where: Moira's on the phone in her house to begin with...

Comments

[sonof_ealltuinn]

"Ian Delaney."

Ian spun on his chair, head tipping over the back of it as he stared up at a pock-marked ceiling. It was getting late, or early depending on which way he looked at it and if he got lucky, his replacement would show up on time for once in her life and he'd get to fall into his bed before ten.

He knew Moira was on the other end, her ringtone was a corny little song he'd found while browsing the internet but it held and he smiled, just a tiny little grin. She barely called him anymore when he was at work, but that was usually because she was more than willing to meet him at the train station the next morning or talk to him online at late hours.

When she didn't answer right away he frowned, checking his phone. "Moira, are you all right?"

[moirabyrne]

He sounded the same but there was something different there. He sounded a bit older, the same way she had seemed from pictures and the mirror. Perhaps her voice sounded different, too. "Ian. You knew it was me." Of course he'd known it was her. If she had him in her phone, of course he'd have her phone number in his. "I...don't know."

She honestly didn't have any idea if she was all right. She was in Canada, couldn't remember any of the pictures they'd taken, was older, had a purple housemate who was actually very sweet. Moira was more confused than anything else, but she couldn't understand why she didn't remember how she'd gotten here.

"I'm...confused seems like the wrong word, but I'm bloody confused, Ian. We're in Canada. Why are we in Canada? And why does every bit of technology say we're in 2010?" Ian would know what was going on and how to fix things. Moira was sure of it. Even just hearing his voice had made her feel slightly more calm.

[sonof_ealltuinn]

"Aye, I knew it was you. You text me enough." He meant it as a joke but sobered fast enough. Moira didn't sound quite right. She sounded quite off, actually and that was before she began to babble.

Oh Goddess was she babbling and Ian's knuckles were going white around his phone as he listened.

"Moira...you've been here for years, love."

[moirabyrne]

"Y-years?" Moira was glad she was sitting because she felt her knees go weak. "I...I woke up in this place in Canada. And there are all these pictures of me and you and this lovely girl Clarice, she's purple, but she's sweet as anything. But I don't remember taking them."

She paused. Moira was rambling. She was nervous and she didn't understand and that lead to rambling. "I. It. I look the same as in pictures, but I swear I must be older cause my hair's longer'n I remember it being, my green part is more faded than before. I just." Moira paused again, trying to regain her composure.

"I don't know how I got here, Ian," she said as her voice cracked.

[sonof_ealltuinn]

"Moira, this is going to sound rather daft, but bear with me." Ian scrubbed his free hand through his hair and stood, powering down his computer without a backwards glance. He grabbed his jacket from the back of the chair and swung it over his shoulder already heading to clock out. He knew a train would be leaving in another twenty minutes and if he ran he might just make it.

"I'm going to come back, but it's going to take an hour or so. Think you can make yourself a cup of tea?"

[moirabyrne]

"You're an hour away in Canada?" Moira asked, confused. She assumed he was somewhere closer. But he was going to come back to see her, so it was fine. That didn't matter.

Moira pressed her lips together and nodded slowly. "Yeah, if I can find the tea. I know where the kitchen is." She could make the tea assuming she didn't drop and shatter any glasses or anything while she was at it. To say that she was shaky was a vast understatement. But Moira could probably handle tea. She'd handled much worse before.

[sonof_ealltuinn]

"I work outside the town." He never regretted it before. Never thought he'd need to. Ian regretted it now. He punched out without backwards glance, racing down the steps toward the train station. His lungs ached as he tried not to pant into the phone. He didn't want to worry her, but Goddess she worried him.

"It's a well thought plan. You should have some in the cupboard by the stove."

[moirabyrne]

Moira slowly tried her feet and after a few shaky steps, made it to the door and onward without incident. She listened to Ian as she walked down the stairs and looked where he'd told her and found the tea. He sounded as if he was almost out of breath.

"Ian? Are you okay?" She opened a few of the lower cabinets before she found a kettle and filled it up with water, placing it on the stove. Okay. Tea was set to make. That was fine. She managed that somehow.

"What do you work doing over in Canada?" What was there to do here that wasn't in Ireland? And for that matter, why were they both here in separate houses, since he didn't appear to live in the room with her? None of this made sense at all.

[sonof_ealltuinn]

"Computers. It doesn't--hang on." Ian squished the phone between his ear and shoulder as he fumbled for his wallet, pulling out a card to slide through the machine. The station was nearly deserted only one or two people straggled through and the security all stayed in the center.

It didn't matter. There was a train coming and Ian would be on it, whether or not he had to make up a spell to get himself on it.

"All right? How's the tea coming along?"

[moirabyrne]

"The kettle's on. Still not hot enough yet." She wasn't sure how this stove cooked, but if it were anything like the ancient one at home, it would take forever. Moira wandered around into the living room adjacent to the kitchen. There were a few books lying on the table. One that she'd never heard of in her life, some sort of Shakespeare tome, and much to her surprise, the last thing she'd been reading back home, Wuthering Heights. "The books here...some of them look like they're mine," she murmured into the phone, picking it up and flipping through to page 47 where she'd accidentally spilled hot water on the book. Moira's mum nearly had a coronary when Moira came flying down the stairs begging for a spell to clear up the wrinkled page, but Morgan wouldn't give it to her. This book, however, appeared to be much newer. The copyright was older, though, some time in the very early 2000s. She was never going to get this.

"Is there a spell to fix this? Clarice was wondering and I didn't know what even was wrong to try to fix."

[sonof_ealltuinn]

"The memories are going to come back." Though some Ian wished he could shelter her from. It was going to hurt her when they did. They would probably bring her to her knees if she let them. He would be there to help her back up.

"I don't know of any magick that could fix this."

He took a seat on a cold bench with a small, incessant frown. He'd been frowning a lot since answering the phone.

[moirabyrne]

"Memories? You mean...I've just forgotten everything that's happened in the last Goddess knows how many years?" Moira moved the mouth piece away from the phone as she took short deep breaths.

How in the bloody hell did she forget years of her life. There was no sign of trauma as far as she could tell. And that didn't explain why Clarice forgot them as well.

[sonof_ealltuinn]

"Aye, love. That's it exactly." Ian closed his eyes briefly, tired beyond reason. He dragged a hand over his face and stared blankly at the platform. Her breathing changed and he could almost hear her thoughts as if she'd been sending them.

"Forget I said anything."

[moirabyrne]

"Right, because that's going to happen," she replied a bit more tersely than she'd intended as she was pacing back and forth. "How much time did I lose, Ian? When we came here...how long ago was it?"

[sonof_ealltuinn]

"You came here first." Ian didn't like thinking about it. Hated it. It was the moment his carefully reorganized life began to unravel. "Four years ago."

[moirabyrne]

"Why did -- four?" She stopped dead in her tracks. Moira was missing four years of her life. "I'm almost twenty-three?" Because according to all clocks, it was September. It'd been half a year or so before her nineteenth birthday when she last remembered at home. She stood for a second, going through the fact that she had almost a fifth of her life that she couldn't remember when the kettle whistled. Blinking, she went over and took it off the stove. "Mugs?" she whispered softly into the phone.