Fluff, Relationships, and Traditions
This entry is part 52 of 52 in the series 365 Challenge
So characters have habits, ways they interact with certain people and situations, things they do and like to do, stories and histories together. I've known a lot of my characters' for a long time but getting them all into fic is interesting, particularly for the ones I don't know that for.
I've ( Read more... )
“Do you want to remember?”
The question stopped him. He had just finished a consultation for another business, and he was tired, ready to return home to his family, to the smile from his daughter that could make all of the fatigue disappear, the love of his wife that sustained him, that kept him thriving. The words, though, shifted him from consultant to operative, sharp and suspicious. He turned, trying to prepare himself for anything that might come. “Excuse me?”
“Do you want to remember?” The woman repeated, and he frowned, taking in the dark clothes and unusual hair.
“It’s not possible,” he said, though he should not have let her know that her question had an audience. He did not recognize her as any operative he’d known or heard of, though the possibility of her being someone like the leader of team thirty-four came to him. Still, if it was, why meet him like this?
“For your genetically modified humans, your specials, no, it’s not. I’m a different sort of anomaly,” the woman said. “Your memories got lost in processing, and they say that can’t be undone no matter how great the mental gift. Me? I can and have pulled memories from a man who rewrites his genetics and wipes his mind clean more than once. I can help you. If you want.”
He shook his head. “I have no reason to believe you, less to trust you, and I don’t think I want to know the cost.”
“I’m a woman who can’t touch without getting memories from people. There are only a few ways to cope with that-you go insane, you blackmail people, or you find a good reason to dredge up the memories and give them back. I think I passed the first option a few years back, I did the second for a while, and nowadays I spend my time doing the third. I don’t have a cost. I just... If you’ve got a curse, why not put it to good use? Isn’t that what you do in applying your training to helping those that consult with you?”
He knew there was a part of him that did want to believe her, that wanted to accept her offer. “Why would you come to me?”
“Fracture doesn’t need me anymore. I had to find someone who did.”
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Okay, calming down. Very interesting. Of course, the truth is on regaining memories... it depends. On the serum used, how well the body integrated it, etc., but yeah. This is intriguing.
I'm not sure if I've got enough Recall to write her well yet. Will have to consider bouncing this one back with a reply fic.
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I wasn't entirely sure how much they could get back of their memories, but I couldn't help thinking that she might be able to help the people that couldn't get them back another way.
You could always do one with him discussing it with his family and if he wants to go ahead with it, if he thinks he can trust her, all that fun... If you want to do a reply, that is. You don't have to.
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Whisper looked up and flicked off the silent floor cleaner. Wolf was leaning on the wall at the inside of the entryway, arms cross, and frowning thoughtfully. He had never asked that or addressed many of the issues lying under her surface.
Instead of speaking, she simply shrugged. It was always more complicated than yes or no when it came to matters of the Department.
His eyes narrowed thoughtfully. He was looking in a mirror, then with a soft sigh, he came in and sat down on the couch.
"You never ask questions without reason," she said softly.
He nodded, then held out a hand until she took it and he could draw her nearer. "You remember, don't you?"
"Some," she conditioned. "Plenty. Not everything. There was some degradation in the hardware."
He considered that. Red serum then. Those targeted and broke down the physical structures in the brain related to episodic memory. Though there were anti-serums that could restore scarred tissue, none could retrieve a memory completely destroyed. "Would a healing fix it?" he asked, even though he knew the answer. Healing was how they restored episodic memory function in the first place.
She shook her head.
"Would you want it to?" he pressed.
She stared at him, eyes searching his. "Your episodic centers were completely destroyed," she said quietly.
He knew that. He closed his eyes and scrubbed one hand through his hair. He knew that. Most given red serum were given enough to wipe out their history, not enough to completely annihilate an entire portion of their brain and then restore it in essentially a reset. He knew that what he did remember was strictly by the mercy of the brain's keeping nonepisodic memories in a different location. He still had all his skills and different, familiar things he had clearly loved before-such as music.
"I don't know if I would want it to," he said quietly. He opened his eyes and looked at his wife.
Whisper's open gaze was a mirror of his, troubled. "I was a daddy's girl," she said. "He left before my mother did..." She trailed off, then shook her hair out of her eyes as if dislodging the remembrance.
He slid his hand into her hair and leaned his head against hers.
"I remember laughing." Whisper rarely laughed freely anymore. She had seen too much, done too much. She shrugged that tiny shrug, said in that sotto voice of hers that was almost a whisper, "I think you would have liked the woman I could have been."
Would she have liked the man he once was? He wrapped one arm around her shoulders. "What happens if who I was and who I am are irreconcilable?"
After a long moment fraught with tension, she admitted, "I don't know."
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I feel bad for Wolf, since his memory is completely gone.
I want to believe she'd still love the man that he was, just as he would have liked her. I was thinking about AU Shift/Kilter and what that would be like (I blame the whole Lovemark thing for starting me down that thought process and a bit of this because I was wondering what Wolf was like in it and if he would have met Whisper and a lot of other things, like how Shift and others might be, too.)
And I do have to ask... would Red be okay with who he was and who he is?
Also thinking... My ideas defy science/logic again, at least in what Recall does (wait... in what Fracture does, too,) but I did have more thoughts on the idea of her interacting with people from K&T, a few lines that were almost impossible to rid my head of, though I should say that an impossible AU crossover is better than thinking about parts of Fracture's life I'd never write about.
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I feel bad for him too, and I haven't really sat down and dealt with the fact that his wipe was so complete specifically because of Storm's instruction to medical. Eventually, I'll have to dig through that mess I suppose. Maybe.
They would have been smitten and head over heels, provided they met. Snippet from Lovemark:
Dreamer sat down at table five on the last day of winter while you waited impatiently trying to appear patient at the counter while I leaned over the table to wipe it for her.
"This isn't real," she said suddenly.
I didn’t pause what I was doing. I kept wiping down the table, tucking the rag away, and flipping open my pad to take down her order. “You dreamed it?” I asked as I scribbled. I knew everybody’s usual, even operatives that had not belonged to my team, that had not waited for the rebellion to escape. Dreamer's was latte with extra cream on the side.
Dreamer started to shake her head, then nodded. “I’m dreaming it.”
My stomach clenched. This wasn’t real. You weren’t real. Nothing I was living was the one world, the one timeline that was real. I put away my pencil and looked at quiet, unassuming Dreamer with her soft ash blonde hair floating around her shoulders, her soft grey eyes apologizing to me. The girl who dreamed reality.
I took a breath, then asked softly, "Couldn't you make this world the real one?"
"No, I couldn't," she said as softly. "You'll have him either way."
There were others then affected by the particular change this timeline contained. "Who won't?" I asked, selfish enough to compare.
Dreamer replied simply, "Quite a few." She hesitated, then went on slowly, "I looked because I wanted to know if Justus was right, when he said there had to be some good out of what happened to him."
My heart felt cold for a moment. I bit out harshly, "What happens to him?"
But she smiled that enigmatic smile at me and I thought of you and what had she done to you, but she answered, "Nothing. Here."
That was the point. She had looked in here because somewhere in the world that was real, you had been hurt and here you hadn't. I looked back at you and you seemed to catch my discomfort. Concern flitted into your eyes.
Dreamer's hand brushed mine. "Don't worry. I'll keep dreaming," she whispered.
You were mine either way, she said, but you didn't seem like mine at all.
I guess I should've said excerpt!
Truthfully, no. He would not be able to reconcile the two sides of himself without a LOT of work and probably years and therapy. Justus named it right when he said "Forgetfulness is its own absolution." He never reached out to tell Red Wolf about who had been, even after they both realized Justus could, more as a mercy than anything else.
I like your ideas. It's more an alternate science. In this world, this is how things work. And I know I want to read more, which is why I bounced this back.
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Does she ever meet up with her father again?
Would it anger him, knowing what Storm did?
Hmm. It's a bit sad knowing that Lovemark is just a dreamed reality. That means none of it is real. :(
I like the idea of seeing them as they might have been not as operatives, and I suppose it wouldn't be real no matter what, but it's still a bit... sad.
Ouch. Poor Wolf. I guess I don't know enough of who he was before, but I was hoping since he was still a good guy that he'd be able to. He's probably not the best candidate for what Recall can do, then, either.
I did write down the dialogue that was bugging me, and I did some more mental percolating with Recall's side of it.
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I have no idea. Depends, probably, on how he found out.
I might exclude the scene, I might not, but since the whole thing was AU anyway, I needed to make it canon and one of the weird factoids of Dreamer's ability is that it IS real-but only WHILE she's dreaming it.
That bit is interesting to me because while Whisper and Wolf would make a good nonoperative couple, I can't see them meeting each other if she were an operative and he were not, so it would require a more complete AU.
He is still a good guy, but... :ponders this: His differences were more fundamental. Justus' behavior changed radically to put it mildly; Wolf got to literally live a whole new life. His personality is different, his thinking is different, his moral choices are different, his world is wholly different. It's not so much knowing as being unable to turn two different people into one. The underlying person is the same, but not in a way that would be easy for him to work with.
That's half the beauty of fanfic though. You can explore the questions. And if Recall doesn't bring it back in a way that makes it all HIS, if it's just piecemeal memory, then it might be fine.
Care to share?
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It would be interesting to see how that played out, though painful, too.
It's hard to know out of context, but it would be hard for anyone who knew about the dreaming to cope with knowing it was only real while she dreamt it.
That would be an issue. I don't know how they'd meet, either, but they need to meet because they need each other. Though I suppose... She'd be happy if her first love lived, and the other Wolf might not need her the same way.
Yeah, that would be very difficult to come to terms with. Poor Wolf.
It might work in just pieces. She can do that. It's what she does with Fracture.
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It depends. Some mind a lot and some don't mind at all because if Dreamer chooses not wake up, that's the reality. It's not a dream in the "it was all a dream" sense; it's a dream in the "let's shift reality for the time being." So I might omit the scene or I might not, but I needed to know how it could/would work to make myself happy writing what is little more than a novel's worth of glorified fanfic of my own work. :le sigh:
I think he's going to do well overall with reconciling with his family. He doesn't have the weight on his conscience that Justus' does.
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One of the first things I did after writing Nickel and Dime was write a crossover with a tv show I used to watch. I also plotted crossovers with my own stuff. It was fun, though most of them haven't materialized to more than a few scenes. In my mind, though, most of my characters meet and are good friends with each other despite their supposedly separate worlds.
I figured eventually I might throw them in as bonus stories in the books or something, so I was okay with writing them.
That's good, though. Wolf could use his family, though they might have a hard time at first, knowing how different he is.
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Storm leaned down into the hold from the small galley between hold and cockpit. "You figured out where we're taking him?" he asked dryly. In Wolf's absence, Storm would be team leader.
It almost startled Whisper into shattering something-she was too tense, holding too much air around them taut-when she realized he was treating her as second where he was third. She looked in his dark, determined eyes and knew they were both committed. Wolf had to make it.
Her mind flitted through possibilities, picking them up and discarding them with the rapidity of necessity. She found one and hesitated to let it go. She nodded sharply and gave him the coordinates quietly.
Storm looked at her oddly.
"Let me go in first," she said, sotto voice. She held a little more tightly to Wolf, then let him go and slid forward into the cockpit behind Storm. It was time for her to lead.
A dark, quiet neighborhood appeared out of the night. Storm's jaw was tight as he landed the jet in a field barely big enough to contain. Maker's dimension shimmered around them, cushioning the landing and acting as the silencer on a gun.
Whisper inhaled gently. She could hear the crickets singing outside in the tall grass. She unbuckled and headed down the ramp.
She had always been a tracer. Almost before she had heard of the courses, she threw herself headlong into learning how to control and manipulate computers, security systems, surveillance, networks, and government databases. She had known for years now what had become of her family, her parents, her illegitimate sister; there had simply been nothing she could really do with that knowledge. Until now.
Storm shadowed her out of the jet. He would soon be needed elsewhere to help head up this rebellion she had ordered into existence, but for right now, he could walk with her down the streets of what could have been her childhood and wait down on the walk as she stepped up to a homey door and knocked lightly.
It was late, but there was light in the window. Her father had been a military man before she was born. He had always kept long hours, early and late.
Harold "Harry" Lewis. He was good people, as they said in the business. Always had been.
Had it been anyone less patient than Whisper, she would have knocked again, but it wasn't, so she waited quietly in the shadow of the eave over the front porch, pressure taut between her open hands, with only a whisper to warn of how deadly she could be.
The door creaked open and there was Harry framed in the doorway, looking exactly the way she'd always remembered him, perhaps a little more tired, a little greyer around the edges. His eyes narrowed slightly in disbelieving recognition. "Sierra?"
"Hi, Daddy," she said softly, almost a whisper but not. "I need your help."
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"Your husband?" he asked in that soft, rough voice of his.
She turned, keeping contact with Wolf, but accepting the cup of hot spice tea he handed her. Her ability to speak openly was rusty at best. "Common law," she finally managed. If the administration had ever found out, both of them would have been dead. Her eyes flicked up to meet her father's gaze.
He sat down beside the fire in a shabby, but comfortable old chair. "You could have come sooner," he said quietly, pained.
Her mother had been a negligent alcoholic, but somehow she had managed to get custody and take away his right to see her when the two divorced. But she was too negligent. Nobody had even known when one day, her daughter Sierra Lewis simply disappeared.
Whisper knew because she had been that daughter. She shook her head sadly and answered, "I couldn't." She sipped her tea and turned back to Wolf. "I wish I could have," she murmured, low enough that she didn't know if her father would hear.
She was here now. Wolf was alive. For a brief moment, that was all that mattered.
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That's good.
I'm glad he could help her, that she could finally have her father back again when she needed him.
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“You weren’t on a team.”
“Never had a team. Just a partner,” the woman said, closing her eyes. “Gone now.”
“Can you actually do this?”
She uncurled herself from the reports and rolled her shoulders, then her neck. “I don’t know. Science was never something I understood or wanted to understand. Vules didn’t make himself very welcome when he was testing me, so when he explained things, I didn’t like to listen. He said something once about Fracture actually rearranging his brain when he fractured-he rewrites his genetics to be whatever he needs to be and genetics supposedly includes the mind-so that was why he never remembered anything when he was done, but if he rewrote his brain, his memories shouldn’t be there like a normal person’s. Then again, taking memories from Fracture always hurt a lot more than it did with others-my theory being that his were ones I had to work harder for because they’re not where they’re expected to be. Looking over what they used to do this stuff to you, I’m thinking-”
“That you can’t?”
“I might get something. I might get nothing. The only thing I can guarantee is that it will hurt.”
“Hurt?”
“Mostly me, though I’m told it stings sometimes when I give people memories.” She let out a breath. “I can do this if you want me to try. If you don’t, I’ll go. I’ll find something else to do.”
“How do we know you can do any of what you’ve said you can do?”
“I can prove it if you want, but that still means me having access to someone’s memories.”
“You won’t like what you see.”
“I have the memories of a man who stopped a nuclear holocaust on his own in my head. I have murderers, rapists, and terrorists in there. There isn’t much I haven’t seen and processed already. I’m not afraid of what I might see-and I’m already insane, so that’s not an issue, either.”
“Child soldiers?”
She met his gaze, neither confirming or denying anything, and in the end, he held out his hand. “Here.”
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