2006's nano, part 2

[parcae]

“We’re going to a party tonight,” Anna told him as she gave him a cup of coffee, and Isaac wondered if he wasn’t still half-asleep, because he was fairly certain he hadn’t heard that right. He rubbed his eyes, then one ear, then the other, and Anna laughed. “Yes, you heard me right, silly. Don’t worry, it’s not going to be horrible at all. You could even,” and here she stopped, looking him up and down with half a smile on her face, “go in your pajamas if you wanted.”

“Anna, is Tom coming with us?”

She smiled, but it seemed to have an edge of a smirk on it for no reason Isaac could identify. “Yes, he is. Why?”

“Then I am not going to be allowed out of the apartment in my pajamas. You remember when we met?” She nodded. “My clothes that night?” She nodded again. “That was him.”

She raised an eyebrow. “He dressed you?”

“Occasionally, yes. Well.” He sat down at the kitchen table, curled his hands around his mug for the warmth. “He told me he was going to come pick me up at seven, because his car is a good deal more reliable than mine, and then he showed up at six instead.”

“Huh.”

Isaac woke up and, for a short moment, he wasn’t confused; he was simply content to lay there in the darkness, comfortable and warm.

Then he realized that half of the warmth was coming from another body - another body in the bed - another body in a bed that wasn’t his - and he was simultaneously completely awake and utterly confused. He supposed that he gasped, or made some other noise of surprise, because half a moment later the other body rolled over and the face smiled at him, a touch amused. “Morning,” the face said. “Feel any better?”

Quick inventory: completely clothed, except for his jacket, which was hanging off a chair near the bed. His wallet was still in his pocket. And he was in bed with a woman who was also, as it happened, completely clothed.

Well, not completely, but she wasn’t bareass naked like people who woke up in these situations usually tended to be. A nightgown, in this case, was probably the same thing as a full suit of armor. (And, thinking about it, he wouldn’t mind one of those right about now.)

“You don’t remember me, do you.” It wasn’t a question, the way she said it; he would have been worried if it wasn’t for the fact that she was smiling like it was perfectly fine that a man had woken up in her bed and didn’t remember who she was, like it happened all the time.

Maybe it did, he thought, and was suddenly extremely worried about his safety.

“Well, no matter,” she said, and swung herself out of bed. Watching her made him dizzy, and he suddenly realized that he had a headache. As soon as he realized it, it seemed to take on life inside his head, to shout I am a worthy being! why didn’t you notice me? you’ll pay for that now, sure you will! and certainly it was true, because what had up until then been a mild annoyance had suddenly turned into a major annoyance. Not a migraine - it wasn’t quite that awful - but it almost felt like he had half a hangover, and he couldn’t for the life of him remember why.

No, wait, strike that. He remembered Anna saying something about a party, a party he could wear his pajamas to. He also vaguely remembered actually going to the party, and drinking something she’d given him and thinking it was awfully sweet for something that was alcoholic.

“Who are you?” His voice, it seemed, had decided once more to work. All things considered, he rather appreciated it.

“My name’s Daisy,” she told him, standing in the doorjamb. “I’m a friend of Anna’s - I live a lot closer to where we all were than you two do, so she asked if you guys could crash here, considering the state you were in.” The state I was in? “And I was a bit worried that you’d, I don’t know, suddenly stop breathing, or something, so I thought it best not to leave you alone.” There was a pause, as she considered him. “Once you feel like you’re up to walking around, the kitchen’s just out this door and to the right. You can’t miss it; it’s the brightest room in the house. And it’s probably where Anna is, if I’m right, so it’ll also be the most populated room in the house.”

Five or ten minutes later, he made his way into the kitchen, finding a lot of yellow paint and two women, just as Daisy said he would. One of them, the one with the head of thick red curls, was poking at something on the stove with what looked like a wooden spoon, and Isaac resisted the urge to groan, instead hoping that Daisy had a durable kitchen. Anna and cooking tended not to mix, unless the thing she was cooking was, say, a can of Spaghetti-O’s in the microwave. Or popcorn, oddly. She made popcorn damn well.

When he sat down, she turned around and grinned at him. “Good morning, sunshine. How’s your head?”

“Somewhere between my oh my what a wonderful day and please, let me go home, I can’t handle work today, thanks for asking.” He scowled at her; all she did was grin more.

“See, Daisy? I told you it would work!”

“I never said it wouldn’t, you know,” said Daisy, rolling her eyes ever so slightly, “and besides he didn’t say he had no headache at all, now did he?”

“That’s easily fixed, though.” Anna dug around in the fridge for a few seconds and pulled out a bottle of water and, bizarrely, two aspirin. Before he had time to wonder about the relative sanity of people who kept their painkillers in the refrigerator, she had put the water in one hand and the aspirin in the other. “Take them. They’ll help.”

Taking them seemed the wisest course of action, all things considered. He did, and then, thinking better of it, just drained the bottle of water. “What did you tell Daisy would work, Anna? And why do I have the feeling it had to do with experimenting on me?”

“It wasn’t an experiment! She just didn’t believe me.”

“I never said -“

“Did you know that you’re a lightweight, Isaac dear? Can’t hold your liquor for anything.” Anna shook her head solemnly. “It was quite a thing. So we made you drink a lot of water, and eat bread and things, and take an aspirin, and then drink some more water, and then you fell asleep.”

“… how much did I have to drink?”

“Hardly anything, I told you, you’re a lightweight and it’s shameful.”

“Yes, I heard that bit. How much?”

“Two drinks, maybe?” She looked to Daisy for confirmation, got a nod. “Yeah, just the two.”

“… what was in them?”

“Well now.” She smiled again, waggled her eyebrows. “That would be telling, wouldn’t it.”

“I left an hour and a half after you two did,” Tom told him over lunch that day. “It gave the drink time to wear off, and anyway I’d found someone I knew from my last job and we started talking.” He chewed a bite of his sandwich thoughtfully. “I actually think it’s probably for the best that you two left when you did.”

“Why?” Isaac poked at his salad, made a face at it. “I know I’m a lightweight, so there’s no need to tell me again.”

“Oh, no, not that; I’ve known that for ages, dear Isaac. No, no, it was something I heard Anna say about five minutes before she went over to you.” And then Tom had some more sandwich, and Isaac knew he was going to have to ask.

“Which was what?”

“It was something to the effect of he shouldn’t be here, I shouldn’t be here, this shouldn’t be happening.” A pause. “Her voice seemed fairly even, but it was the sort of even that hides abject terror beneath it. I don’t know what she was talking about, but I’m sure she would’ve found some way to leave one way or another. At least with you she didn’t seem suspect.”

“Yeah.” The soup, at least, was fairly decent. “You think I should ask her about it?”

Tom just shrugged.

Isaac woke up slowly to the feeling that something was wrong, but he couldn’t place it. It was Saturday morning, he was in his own bed this week, it was warm, and nothing seemed out of place. He had not, he decided as he looked around his bedroom, been robbed, or if he had the burglar had stayed out of his room. Which was probably a good idea, he thought, all things considered, and then wondered just exactly why he was debating how to rob a house.

He put his finger on it when he went to go shower: he couldn’t smell coffee. Anna usually made coffee on the mornings during the weekend - she was always up before he was, and she made it better than he did - but today there was no coffee, the kitchen strangely silent with her absence. For a moment he almost worried, but then decided against it; he was up earlier than normal this morning, and maybe she’d just decided to sleep in today. It wasn’t completely out of the realm of possibility, certainly, and he thought he remembered her mentioning being tired the night before. So he shrugged, and hoped she would feel better when she woke up, and took his shower.

Two o’clock rolled around, some hours later, and she still hadn’t gotten up. He decided to give her until three before he checked on her, but even that was being generous, as he was starting to get incredibly worried. Was she sick? Had she broken a bone and couldn’t move? Had someone stolen her away during the night?

That idea summoned to mind the image of someone trying to drag Anna out of bed against her will. It made him laugh, so he dismissed that possibility, but the worry remained. If she was sick, she needed to at least eat something.

Three o’clock, now, and he knocked lightly on her door. “Anna? You awake?”

No answer.

“Anna?” He knocked harder, this time. “You up?”

Still no answer.

“Anna?” For the third time, he was met with silence, and made a decision. “Okay, I’m coming in anyway.”

He only made it about three feet into the room, once his eyes registered just exactly what he was seeing; after that his mind sort of disconnected from his body, and they coexisted very much as two separate entities for a while.

“I guess she just had to leave,” he told Tom later that day, and believed it. “I mean, she wouldn’t have taken all of her stuff with her if it hadn’t been important. It looked like she had some help, or she wouldn’t have been able to do it all in just one night. And quietly, too. I never woke up once.”

Except she hadn’t had all that much stuff, he realized a bit later. It had never occurred to him before, but besides her clothing, she hadn’t owned many things. So maybe she had just, spur-of-the-moment, decided to go somewhere else for a while.

He hoped she’d come back.

“Hello,” said one of the seedy-looking men standing in Isaac’s doorway. “Does a woman named Dextra Sinistra live here?”

Isaac frowned. “No. I’ve never heard of that woman.”

“Come on,” said the other man, shorter and greasier. “We all know you were close. Maybe close, if you know what I mean.”

“She may have been going by the name of Anna,” said the first, in what he probably hoped was a helpful sort of way. It wasn’t.

“Nobody by that name lives here,” Isaac said truthfully.

“Your lease shows two names on it. One is yours, Isaac Armin, and the other is a woman by the name of Anna Rollins.” The second one gave him a menacing look.

Isaac opened his mouth to respond, but it was just at that exact time that Tom showed up, wrapping an arm around his waist and giving him a kiss on the temple. “What’s going on, sweetheart? Who’re these men?”

“I don’t know, hon,” said Isaac, playing along and wrapping an arm around Tom. “They said they’re looking for someone named Dextra Sinistra.” He paused for what he hoped was an appropriate length of time, then said: “And then they said that it was you, with a name like Dextra Sinistra.”

Both of the seedy-looking men gave Tom and Isaac confused looks; Tom let out a very put-upon sigh and squeezed Isaac once gently. “I told you this was going to get us into trouble one day, you know,” he said, not quite under his breath. “My name is Anna, gentlemen. My grandfather was a bit unreasonable when he was alive, and it showed in his will - my brothers and I will only inherit if we are born with and keep the names of our great-aunts - his sisters - and if we ever change our names we lose it all.”

“… that’s, uh.” The first man blinked a few times. “So you two live here.”

“Yes,” said Tom.

“Together?” The second one, this time.

“Mmhmm. We can show you our bedroom, if you like,” offered Isaac cheerfully.

“No!” Both men protested at the same time, giving the answer an odd choral quality. “We must have come to the wrong apartment,” the first man said.

“We sincerely apologize,” the second one said. “We won’t bother you again.”

Isaac watched out the window until he was sure the men were out of the building, and then he and Tom fell onto the couch laughing.

“Isaac!” Daisy grinned, walked over and gave him a one-armed hug so she didn’t hit him with her bag of shoes. “How’ve you been, boy?”

“Pretty good, I guess,” he said, transferring his bag of books to the other hand so he could hug her back. “Haven’t passed out after two drinks again, so all things considered I think I’m doing pretty well, yeah?”

“Oh, definitely.” Daisy let him go and the grin faded to a smile as she looked him up and down approvingly. “And you look like you’ve been doing pretty well otherwise, too.”

“Life is life,” he said, and shrugged, and Daisy laughed.

Then: “Hey, do you know what’s going on with Anna’s phone? I’ve called her a couple times, but I just get some kind of error message and she hasn’t called me back.”

“Oh. Um. She, uh, left, about two weeks ago.”

“Left?”

“Yeah, uh. I just woke up, one morning, and she’d gone, and her stuff was gone, and she hasn’t been back since.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, you are the logical person to ask, you know,” Tom told him from the other end of the couch. “I think the phrase I’m going for here is attached at the hip.”

Isaac threw a pillow at him.

“I have to take my break, Isaac, I feel like I’m about to pass out,” Erica told him, and the white knuckles on the hand she was using to hold on to the bookcase backed her up on it. “Do me a favor and go fill in for me up at the counter for a while?”

So here he was. No, they didn’t have that book because it hadn’t been published yet; yes, they did in fact keep magazines in the magazine section; no, he couldn’t waive those fines, yes, really.

And then suddenly one of the seedy-looking men was at the counter, checking out a number of what looked to be trashy romance novels. - not that Isaac judged, certainly.

The startled look on the seedy-looking man’s face - somehow, he still looked seedy, and Isaac supposed that some people would always look a certain way, just as he was sure that he always looked slightly confused - was probably nothing compared to the one on Isaac’s face, but he didn’t let it get in the way. “Library card, please?”

“Oh, right,” the man said, and handed it over after he dug through first one coat pocket and then the other. “Sorry about that.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Isaac said, giving the man back his card and pulling the first stack toward him.

“How are you and your Anna doing?” The man didn’t look quite sure that he wanted to ask that question, but then again he also didn’t look quite sure that he wanted to let the silence that had descended stay where it was, either.

“Oh, we’re doing wonderfully.” Isaac smiled at the computer screen. “We’re thinking of redecorating. He knows someone who can do the whole house in black and blue with little bits of leather here and there.”

The man made a strangled sort of noise, and Isaac had to keep from laughing.

“How are you and your partner doing? Did you ever find that woman you were looking for?”

“Hm? Oh, no, we didn’t, actually.” He scowled. “Unfortunately.”

“Why? What did she do?”

“She made our boss very angry,” the man said, and the scowl had increased to something resembling a thundercloud residing in his face. “And she knows it, which is why she ran like the rodent that she is.”

Isaac blinked, still scanning the books. “Oh really.”

“Yeah. Some people, you know?” The man shook his head. “They never learn.”

“I suppose you’re right,” Isaac said, and pushed the stacks of books toward the seedy-looking man. “Now, these are all due back in three weeks, except for this one here, which is due back in a week because it’s a new release.”

“All right. Thank you.”

“Have a nice day!” Isaac called after the man, who had started walking away, but he gave no indication he’d heard.

“So do you think she’ll ever come back?”

“Oh, yeah. After all of this has blown over. She said she liked this city almost as much as the one she grew up in, after all.”

And Isaac believed himself.

The light coming in through the curtains looked kind of pretty, Isaac thought, and he almost smiled. It was a shame he used this room so little, but then again after next week it wasn’t going to be his room any more than it was going to be his kitchen or his bathroom, so the problem wasn’t really a problem, all things considered. He was glad that Anna had gotten this room, though; he liked sunrises and she had liked sunsets, so it was appropriate.

She hadn’t left anything in the room when she’d left, so all he had to pack up was the stuff he’d had in there when it was a guest room. It was a good thing, too; he was running out of boxes. Somehow he always seemed to run out of boxes when he moved no matter where he was moving from; he always needed two or three more than he’d bought. It was a little weird.

Pictures down off the wall, and that was easy; he wrapped them in newspaper and into the box they went. He made sure to wrap them in extra, remembering the horror stories his mother had told him of one of the moves she’d made when he was small.

Knickknacks off the small dresser, wrapped in newspaper, into boxes; he didn’t have many, though, so that didn’t take long.

He stripped the bed one piece at a time: pillowcase, comforter, blanket, flat sheet, fitted sheet. They’d need to be washed before he used them again, but he folded them up anyway because they took up a great deal less space.

There wasn’t anything under the bed, to his surprise. There always, in his experience, managed to be things under the bed, even a bed that nobody ever used anymore. But oh well. He lifted the mattress up a little, just enough so that he could pull the bedskirt out, and as he did an envelope fell at his feet. It had been hiding, he saw, in between the mattress and the box springs.

To my Isaac, the front said in glittery silver pen. The envelope was dark blue, and when he turned it over it was sealed with a sparkly silver star sticker.

It looked like Anna’s handwriting.

“Isaac, I found this -- “ Tom’s voice stopped, then, and then Tom’s footsteps stopped too. “What’s wrong?”

“She didn’t look Italian, you know,” Isaac said. “But I guess it’s not necessary to be Italian to be involved. I mean, it helps, look at all those old movies. Not necessary, though.”

“Isaac, what happened?” The footsteps started up again, and then he felt the couch sag down a bit as Tom sat on the other end. “Who is it who didn’t look Italian?”

“Did I tell you I bumped into one of those seedy-looking men at the library a few days ago?” The ceiling didn’t respond, but then he didn’t expect it to.

Tom, on the other hand - “… no, you didn’t. What happened?”

“I told him we were redecorating in leather.”

“… all right …”

“And he asked about us, so it only seemed fair that I asked about them. So I asked him if he’d ever found that woman he was looking for, and he said that unfortunately they hadn’t, and scowled. I asked why that was unfortunate, you know, asked him why they were looking for her, and his face turned into a stormcloud and he told me that she had made their boss very angry, and knew it, and that was why she ran like the rodent she is.”

“… oh.”

“So do you believe them?”

“I … don’t know.” Tom sounded torn, confused, and that was wrong because Tom always had a handle on what was going on.

“You know, she seemed like an Anna. Wasn’t her name, of course; she doesn’t seem like a Dextra, though. That sounds like an alias. She seemed like an Anna.” ”You’ve got to get a grip, Nancy dear,” she said in his dream, arms wrapped around him, and he shivered just a bit.

“How do you know that was her name?”

Instead of saying anything, Isaac passed Tom the note. It was pretty crumpled, or at least it felt like it. He stared at the ceiling some more, then, not that he’d ever stopped; the blandness, he’d decided was soothing. And it wasn’t as if it was completely bland, after all. The little pieces of popcorn or whatever they were called gave it a nice varied sort of look.

Tom un-crumpled it, Isaac heard, and then there was silence, and then more sounds of paper moving against itself. Tom was probably folding the note up neatly and putting it back in the envelope, Isaac thought, and almost laughed.

Isaac felt the couch move, and then Tom scooted a little closer to Isaac so that their legs were touching before settling an arm around his shoulders. It was reassuring, which was probably what Tom meant to do anyway. “She’s safe, though, and that’s what’s important, right?”

He closed his eyes and let his head drop down; if his eyes had been open, he’d now be staring intently at his lap. “I know that. I do, I promise. It’s just - she was my best friend. I loved her.”

“What about me?” Isaac opened his eyes, looked at Tom as quickly as he could; he had a feeling his friend was giving him an odd look, one of the looks that Isaac had seen more and more lately and just labeled a Tom-look and left it to the ages to deal with, but Tom wasn’t doing any such thing. On the contrary, Tom was just looking at Isaac in what passed, for him, as a normal way: eyebrows slightly raised, half a smile on his lips. It looked natural, looked like it had been there all along, but Isaac had seen him slip into that expression in about a tenth of a second before, so there was really no way to be sure.

“Don’t even,” Isaac said, after a moment. “You’re Tom. You know that. You’re more than my best friend. You’re - you’re practically my brother.”

Now Tom laughed, but there was an edge to it. “We’re brothers, huh?”

“… yes?” Had he just said something incredibly offensive? He had, hadn’t he. Shit.

“Oh, no, Isaac, don’t worry.” Tom smiled, but it had just the same edge to it as the laugh had, and as such Isaac wasn’t remotely reassured. “It’s simply this - if we’re brothers, why have I been wanting to do this for so long?”

This? “What do you -“

And then, suddenly, Tom was kissing him.

"Good morning," she says, and Isaac stops dead in his tracks.

Her hair is too short, and her eyes are too green, and there's just something wrong about her.

Besides the fact that she got in your apartment without being let in? his mind asks, and he promptly tells it to go fuck itself, because there are more pressing matters at hand. Like the fact that Anna, his Anna, his best friend in the world Anna, is sitting at his kitchen table, her beautiful long hair in a pixie cut, wearing ridiculous shoes and a ring on her left ring finger.

"How've you been?" She's got a mug of something in her hand, something that smells an awful lot like coffee, and he almost laughs when he sees that she picked the mug he'd always thought of as hers, the mug he still thinks of as hers. He doesn't use it, even now, unless all the other ones are dirty; he feels a little bit like a traitor when he does.

"I've, uh." He clears his throat. "I've been doing pretty well, I think. It'll be five months tomorrow," he says, and feels the smile that's always on his face whenever he talks about Tom appear. It feels weird, right here, right now, in the dark before dawn with a missing person in his kitchen, out of place, but he doesn't care.

She smiles, seems like she's almost about to laugh. "I'm really glad to hear that, Na -- Isaac. I really am." Beat. "I'm glad you finally got the hint, mostly."

Now he laughs, sinks into a chair opposite her. "If by got the hint you mean kissed back when Tom suddenly kissed me then yes, I certainly did."

Now she grins, quick and sharp, but he can feel that it's fond. "Yeah, Nancy told me. He was blushing like crazy," she says, taking a sip of her coffee, "and M'sieur Poisson was about to die laughing. Well, if he would ever do something so incredibly undignified, anyway."

"... um," he says eloquently, and blinks. This has gone from bizarre to surreal and almost past surreal to straight-up creepy, he thinks, and he wishes it would go back. "Who are Nancy and ... that French person?"

She opens her mouth like she's going to answer, and then she closes it, has another sip of her coffee instead. "It's a long story," she says eventually, and sighs.

"Oh."

"Yeah."

There's silence for a while, and then Isaac watches himself walk into the kitchen.

No, scratch that; that's impossible. Isaac watches someone who looks an unnerving amount like himself walk into the kitchen.

And then he bends down and presses a kiss to the top of Anna's head, and then she moves her head and grabs his at the same time so that a second later they're kissing the other's lips, and now Isaac is fairly certain that he's dreaming, because there is absolutely no other way to explain what's going on.

Even if it's a dream, it's a fucking weird one.

"He woke up, you know," she says to the man who isn't him, and the man -- the man has a ring on his left ring finger, and Isaac knows that it's the counterpart to the one on Anna's hand -- nods.

"I know. Just like you know the rest of her life. I remember this," the man says, and nods in Isaac's direction, "in an odd, blurry kind of way. Hi, by the way."

"... hi," Isaac says to himself.

"I just needed a card," the man says. "I had the present, just in case, and then of all things I forgot the card." He shrugs. "Oh well. But I left it on your couch, so it'll be there in the morning."

"-- oh, is it the --"

"-- yes, it is, and hush, Jack, you don't want to spoil the surprise, do you?"

"I wasn't going to, Nancy dear, I was just going to ask if it was what you bought last week," she says, and as the man she called Nancy nods Isaac's eyes get very wide. He almost asks if the person she called M'sieur Poisson is the man he calls Tom, but he's not sure he wants to know.

"We ought to get going, actually," the man called Nancy says, and she nods.

"Going? Where?" He doesn't want them to go, for some reason; he wants to know more. Wants to know how it is that he and Anna got married, somewhere, even if it's not really him, not really Anna.

"Back home," she says, and smiles sadly. "Sorry." Then she's standing up, goes over to the counter and rinses her mug out in the sink, walks back over and slips an arm around the man called Nancy's waist as he slips an arm around her shoulders.

"Oh," Isaac says dumbly. He can't think of anything else to say.

"Goodbye, Isaac," she says, and leans forward to kiss him gently on the cheek. "Go back to the man you love."

So he does.

Isaac jerks awake, suddenly aware that he's kicked all of his covers away, and tries to remember the dream he was having just a minute ago. It was -- Anna had --

"Nnnnnng," Tom says, his eyes just barely open, and reaches a hand out to pull Isaac closer to him so their skin is touching everywhere it isn't covered by fabric. "Go back to sleep. 's not even five yet, an' it's Saturday."

"'kay," says Isaac, pulling the covers back up over both of them, and smiles before he closes his eyes and falls right back to sleep.

"I had the weirdest dream last night," Isaac calls into the kitchen from the living room, drawing the curtains to let the light in. "It was --"

But then he turns so that he can see their couch, so that he can see the vaguely square-shaped box and card sitting on their couch, and his voice dies away.

She loved you until the end, Anna's handwriting says at the bottom of the card, under something in his own handwriting.

"Hm?" Tom comes out of the kitchen, glass of orange juice in one hand, and yawns. "Is that why you woke up in the middle of the night?"

"Must've been, yeah," says Isaac, dropping the card on the couch. "I don't remember what it was, though."

"That's weird." Tom has a sip of orange juice. "Looks like it's going to be nice out today."

"Yeah." Isaac turns his head to look out the window again, and then turns back to look at Tom. "But you know what?"

"What's that, my dear Isaac?"

He takes the glass out of Tom's hand and sets it down on the table. "I love you," he says.

"I love you too," says Tom, and kisses him, and Isaac smiles.