Fic: In Human Hands (23/30?)

Nov 07, 2010 17:59

Title: In Human Hands
Author: rallalon
Beta: vyctori
Rating: PG13, AU towards the end of Season One; 9!Smith.
Disclaimer: Do not own.
Summary:
He’s not mad. Maybe he’s a little looser in the head than he should be, but he’s hardly mad.

That he feels like he should ask someone to check is probably a bad sign.



The Tourist
The Girl
The Runaway
The Puzzle
The Passenger
The Victim
The Absent
The Found
The Determined
The Unaware
The Celebrant
The Nurse
The Visitor
The Illusion
The Distraction
The Guest
The Companion
The Confidante
The Defenseless
The Flatmate
The Mermaid
The Ape
The Waitress

Is it still safe?

For me to be here/here?

Yes.

I don’t know.

I think I’m going insane.

Nah.

I could be. I’m talking to myself.

Everyone does that.

Crazy people do it more.

No, crazy people talk to people who aren’t there.

Or to aliens.

Yeah.

So I’m crazy.

No, I’m broken. There’s a difference.

Where did my heart go?

Away.

I want it back.

Then ask him for it.

But is it safe?

Since when do I care about that?

I care about her.

There is that. I don’t think I knew what I was doing.

Do I ever?

“No,” he mumbles, rolling over. Can a man be mad when all the voices in his head are still his?

Just shut up and get some sleep already, would you?

He tries.

.-.-.-.-.-.

He’s not mad. Maybe he’s a little looser in the head than he should be, but he’s hardly mad.

That he feels like he should ask someone to check is probably a bad sign.

.-.-.-.-.-.

They walk to lunch, to a restaurant someone from the chip shop told her about. She natters on about this and that, occasionally pausing to wait for his reactions.

Eventually, she takes the direct approach: “Someone’s been quiet today.”

“Oi. Something wrong with companionable silence?”

“Not with companionable silence, no.”

He rolls his eyes.

Almost tentative about it, she slips her hand into his.

The amount of guilt he feels is extreme and unexpected. It makes him bristle.

She drops his hand soon after.

.-.-.-.-.-.

Her next attempt doesn’t go much better. Lunch was a fairly silent affair that he doesn’t remember eating and after, her palm is sticky from something he can’t recall, much less identify. “What d’you want to do?” she asks.

“Dunno.”

“You don’t know?”

“Just said, didn’t I?” he snaps.

“Sorry I asked.” Her look is more incredulous than hurt but it still hurts his gaze away, the guilty man bristling on.

“I don’t always have to know everything. It’s normal, being a bit clueless. That’s.... It’s human, that.”

She tugs at his hand, makes them stop walking along the street and stop at a rubbish bin.

He looks at her.

Her eyes are very wide.

“I’ve got a lot on my mind,” he explains in a gentler tone, cliché the closest he’ll come to apology today.

“Like what?”

He shakes his head. “You bother those friends of yours today. I’ll see you later.”

“No, really,” she says. “What is it?”

“Tell you when I know.”

He drops her hand, his palm sticky now from hers, and she grips his forearm. “Don’t.”

“Fine, I won’t tell you.”

She shakes her head, holds onto him with both hands. “I meant, don’t do this. We can, I dunno, ride out to a field somewhere and yell it out.”

“Not everything is about you, Rose.”

She falters a little from that, looking hurt for the first time.

“I didn’t mean-”

“Doesn’t matter. Shoo.”

“Did you have some plans for last night?” she asks, at once on the mark and completely off. “Is that it?”

“Would you care if I had?”

That was uncalled for and he doesn’t need to see the look on her face to know it.

“Okay, fine, I get it,” she says. “You want to be alone today, fine.”

“Give the girl a medal: the ape’s got a working brain.”

She fights down her retort so visibly that it comes across anyway. Her eyes are those of a woman about to slap or snog or shout, about to do anything to crash through a barrier. Her eyes tell him he should be taking shelter behind that rubbish bin but then, with clear reluctance, she lets his arm go.

“When can I come back to your flat?” she asks, so abruptly polite over it. “Sorry - when may I?”

It takes so much effort not to rise to the bait, but he’s other things to do. “Around eight,” he says.

“Fine,” she says. “Perfect.” And she makes him be the one to walk away first.

He feels more like a bastard than a madman now, but it’s not much of an improvement.

.-.-.-.-.-.

Despite having a haven in the flat, he doesn’t go back there, not right away. He runs instead, a poorly dressed jogger with jeans and heavy work boots. He asks himself questions to the thumping of his feet.

What. Is. Wrong. With. Him.

What. Is. Wrong. With. Grace.

He shouldn’t’ve called her. He knows that now. It was a horrible idea. And it’s more than a moment of emotional infidelity. It’s more than even that moment of ignorance, more than reaching for his own name and not finding it. There’s something at the back of his mind, some restless place he’s woken up, but he doesn’t know what.

He keeps his breathing regular. Forces his strides to match.

Why didn’t Grace remember him? No, it was stranger than that. It was almost as if she was waiting for some kind of codeword, or maybe he’s only imagining. But he’d seen her last winter. She should have remembered that. He’d gone and he’d....

His strides lengthen, chasing after that thought.

Why had he gone back to San Francisco? He can’t even remember anymore. He had gone, though, he had gone and then....

And then....

Then....

He must have missed Fred and Susan. If he’d been lonely enough to shag Grace, he would’ve been lonely enough to go and visit their graves.

The thought sits poorly. It falls away, peeling a plaster cover off cracking details.

He can’t picture the graves.

He stops, ostensibly waiting for a light to change, but for a moment, he can’t move. The world is turning too quickly and his feet have given up in jealous despair. His one heart is doing a poor job by itself as he visualizes the faces of his girls.

Susan, her hair dark the way her mother’s was before she’d taken to dyeing it to a light brown. A girl you had to look after when she went out to play, so prone to falling over things and screaming at bugs. A nose so like her mum’s but without Fred’s way of wrinkling it.

He sees Fred in the ways Fred was, sees the ice queen he’d let get away and the playful mother he’d come so close to catching. Practically an entirely different woman, his Fred, after Susan had been born.

The light changes.

He runs on.

While he can’t actually put his finger on anything more than a kiss or two in a park with Grace, he remembers a great deal more for Fred. A great deal more. If he tries, if he really tries, he can see her across the table in the galley, in the kitchen she’d insisted on calling a galley. Or he’d insisted. Some joke from always being traveling, that was it, but he couldn’t remember who’d started it. Not important now.

There would be tea and toast and he would be cooking. She would mock him for having the skill, praise him for the degree of it, but mostly, he would tell her everything he thought of, names of ingredients and histories of dishes. Even now, he can still see her blatantly displayed surprise and her playfully concealed pleasure at the delivery of a loaded plate, can see her hands as she takes it.

It’s strange, the way he can’t picture her hands with an engagement ring.

It’s even stranger, the way he can’t remember how he proposed.

It will come back to him, he promises himself. Like his name did. It will come back to him.

He runs and he keeps running and his feet hit pavement in a reassuring pattern.

It. Will. Come. Back. It. Will. Come. Back. It will come back it will come back itwillcomeback.

He runs.

He runs so fast.

But he should be running so much faster.

He slows only when his lungs protest, slows and doesn’t stop. His t-shirt clings to him with sweat, with the same moisture that rolls slowly down his temples and the sides of his face. He wipes at his brow for the sake of his eyes, uses his forearm to do it. His arm has just a trace of that stickiness on it, a trace left from a London girl’s hand, and he laughs, a strained, breathless sound.

How had he proposed? How different had that love been from his current one? Does his girl remind him of the woman, is that it? Or is that not it at all?

A practical question comes out of nowhere: How had Fred’s full name fit on a headstone? An eight-syllable first name on a bit of rock and he can’t remember what it looks like. He can feel the grief, remember the agony; that, he knows down into what another man might call his soul, but he can’t visualize the trappings of death. He knows they’d been cremated, knows this almost on an instinctual level, but then where did the ashes go?

It doesn’t make sense.

Were there graves to visit? No, he would have brought the ashes back to Fred’s home, to her family. But if his girls weren’t there, why would he go? Why return?

He needs to sit down.

He finds a café. He sits down. Orders lemonade rather than water when it becomes clear that sweaty, out-of-breath men are expected to pay for something.

“What do you know about amnesia?” he asks the waiter when the boy returns.

That gets him a bit of an odd look in reply, but the boy does answer. “It’s soap opera stuff, isn’t it? My mother watches a show with that.”

“A bump on the head kind of thing?”

The boy nods. “Sounds right.”

“Not anything that happens in real life, though?”

His question earns a laugh. “Not as far as I can tell. Not often, anyway.”

“Thanks,” he answers but the kid’s already being called over by a pair of impatient businessmen.

He drinks his lemonade, hand around the sweating, sugar-touched glass and, if nothing else, he finally realizes where that girl’s sticky palm came from.

.-.-.-.-.-.

He walks around for a while, telling himself stories.

He thinks about trying the library, thinks about looking up the murders of Fred and Susan Foreman and memorizing the details properly this time, but that feels too much like admitting defeat.

He’s having an off day, that’s all.

.-.-.-.-.-.

Upon returning to the flat, he nearly panics. Nearly, almost, sort of panics. It’s a dry kind of panic, a hard kind that renders the body still and the eyes wide and he simply stands there for a moment, stands in the doorway with a lopsided pounding in his chest.

Her bag is gone.

There is a note on the coffee table.

He moves his feet.

He picks up the note.

She’s spending the night at her friend Tonya’s flat, a girl he only vaguely remembers from San Juan. She’s spending the night there and going straight to work in the morning. She reminds him that he has her phone number if something comes up.

He looks at his mobile on the counter, still turned off and untouched from the night before.

He puts the note down on the counter next to his mobile.

If she wants to run away, that’s her problem, isn’t it?

.-.-.-.-.-.

He makes himself dinner and eats it absently at the counter, not tasting a thing as he scribbles on the back of her note. They don’t have much in the way of paper in here, only museum maps and take-away menus.

Call it the coping mechanism of a madman, but he’s trying to draw up a timeline.

The problem is, there’s a six year gap in it. Six years from the deaths of his girls to seeing Grace again, and he doesn’t know what he was doing. No, he does know what, just not where. Left to his own devices, he drifts around fixing things. Mechanic, handyman, even plumber at times, he knows his way around broken tech and broken homes.

It’s a jarring thing, realizing how much time he’s wasted.

Before the transition into the twenty-first century, before his world ended, he knows exactly what he was doing. He can remember meeting Fred, can remember his annoyance and her arrogance. He can remember the first time he saw her frightened, walking through a cold city in winter and both of them startled by wild animals in the catacombs. The name of the city escapes him, but that’s not the important part.

He can remember the first time Susan’s parents left her with him. Such a small thing she’d been. Small and a bit of a bother and him trying to act older than his age, trying to act as if he were old enough to be a proper mentor to the girl. He can still see the face of that homeschooled child, begging to be let loose upon the public education system - and then that day she came home with a radio and made a racket while he was trying to fix the phone.

He even remembers those teachers of hers, Barbara and Ian Sullivan. Annoying at first when they’d visited the house, but they’d made such a difference in Susan’s life. That had been back in England.

All of this is jotted down, keywords and names fitting along a sloppily marked line. It’s a strange hodgepodge and the line of it seems too straight for some reason, but it’s his life, all mixed up in itself.

So the question is, what about the last six years?

Narrow it down. No sense in getting overwhelmed at the big picture when there are details so close to hand.

All right, what about the last few months? Mechanic’s job in Barcelona. Why would he have chosen here of all places?

Easy answer: he speaks Catalan. Why not work in Catalonia?

...Difficult question: where did he learn Catalan? And, for that matter, why?

He looks back over his timeline, focuses in on his education. He’d been a boarding school brat. He could have picked bits up from a friend who’d been stuck abroad. Of course, that friend would probably have had a name and a face to go with it.

Tapping paper with pen, leaving little black dots, he stares into the middle distance.

He thinks and he thinks, but while he can remember conjugation in detail, he can’t recall conversing.

Panic starts to grow in him once again, a hot sort of panic this time that demands movement and yelling at people. He forces it down. Finds himself sitting there with one hand pressed over the empty patch in his chest.

This is more than having an off day.

Walking himself through his life of late, he tries to accept that he has a linguistic reason for choosing Barcelona and that this linguistic reason seems to be without origin. It could have been some sort of taped language lesson set-up, he wants to tell himself and wishes he could believe. It could have been something he would listen to in the car, but that option is too slow and clunky. Too dull. Besides, his car, his Bessy, hadn’t exactly been the kind of car to learn a language in: too open up top. So that’s wrong.

He knows the decision to come to Barcelona had been made. From where, though? Somewhere where he had left most of his life behind, taking only some too-warm clothes, some books and his bike. Everything he owned could be tucked away into those saddlebags, so there was no question of how he’d transported his things.

He’d gone shopping his first day here, though. Some basic cooking supplies for a kitchen with only appliances, some sheets for a bed that was only an old mattress on a frame. He remembers moving in here with a dull feeling, but he does remember it.

What he’s less certain about is how he’d wound up in this flat, in this building. Flats in Barcelona are hard to come by; there must have been some sort of waiting list. Still, he thinks a man who stuck himself on a waiting list would have been more excited to finally get here.

He’s not a waiting list sort of person. Him, wait? Plans in advance aren’t his specialty. They always get ruined. Time can’t be forced into following plans and making a plan follow time isn’t planning. It’s improvising. He’s an improviser. It’s like how he has only a bit over two weeks left until he’s paying rent for another few months and he’s yet to decide if he’s staying or going. He’ll know when the time comes. No sense in setting his hearts on....

He looks down at the hand pressed over that hollow piece of him. There’s no heart there, never was, only lung; thinking otherwise is a strange habit he can’t seem to break. Something left over from his bout of heat stroke? A piece of rewiring in his brain brought on by dehydration?

Whatever it is, it’s harmless as long as he keeps it to himself. Delusions of an extra organ don’t qualify as a medical condition. Not as a physical one, at any rate.

He fetches himself a glass of water on the off-chance it will help. When he downs it, he fetches himself another. All it really does is send him to the loo after another hour of thinking in circles. He can’t help but feel he’s missing something incredibly obvious.

Rather than return to the counter, he dumps himself on the couch. He squirms a little and pulls out his billfold, once again looking at the license inside, at the name on it. It’s not exactly a distinctive name. In the Middle Ages, about one in five Englishmen shared his given name, effectively a tenth of the population. It wasn’t so bad now, but he might as well not have a name at all. That strange thought fits nicely in his head.

He searches through the rest of his billfold bit by bit. Credit card, library card, second library card, third library card, miscellaneous currency; it all seems to belong to a generic, if well-read, man.

Spread out on the coffee table, the library cards have the benefit of being from three different libraries. One of them seems to be a joke card, actually, now that he looks at it. University of Mars: it can’t not be a joke card. Not even well done with all those spelling errors. For the first time that night, not remembering something is fine with him; considering how frequently he cleans out his billfold, that thing could’ve been in there for years. Probably picked it up on a lark. It would’ve made Susan smile. Maybe he’ll show it to Rose when she gets back tomorrow, help her forget about him being a git today.

Of the other two cards, one is in English, the other in English and Spanish. The second one is the one he uses here, a recent addition. He’s not so sure about the other one, is even less sure when he flips it over to check the back. While the correct name is signed on the back, it’s far from being in the correct handwriting.

He frowns at it for a moment, then laughs. He’s stolen some bloke’s library card. That’s brilliant, that is. Absolutely fantastic.

There’s nothing bizarre here at all. All normal and he’s sure he’ll remember where it all came from come morning.

Feeling better about himself, he returns the contents to his billfold and his billfold to his pocket. He’s still grinning a bit, delighted by his admittedly immature souvenir of an admittedly immature earlier time. That one, he’s definitely going to show Rose.

He heads out on a sudden whim, goes for another run, a good one this time. He’s strange, but he’ll be all right. Maybe even better than. Well, probably not better than, but he won’t hesitate to claim that. He walks back feeling silly and absurd for the way he’s spent the day. He can almost laugh at himself, almost, and thinks he’d like some help from a blond in having that happen. A specific blond, of course. It’s not everyone he lets laugh at him.

Before turning in for the night, he turns his mobile back on. No messages, no texts, but it’s not like he was expecting anyone to get in contact with him anyway. Or waiting for anyone to, for that matter. He’s more proactive than that.

He almost crumples up the timeline he’s made as he dials, as he listens to a specific blond’s phone ring, but he decides not to. Looking at it with fresh eyes, it’s reassuringly filled in where it counts. There’s nothing strange about a bloke drifting after he’s lost his family. His life only ever seems to come into focus when there’s someone else involved, after all.

The mobile rings until it gets to a recording: “Hey, it’s Rose. I can’t get to my phone at the moment ‘cos aliens stole it, probably, but I’ll get back to you soon.” Halfway through the message, the girl from UNIT laughs.

“It’s me,” he says after a beep. “Just calling to say good night. That, and I’m stealing your pillow.”

He hangs up, still grinning.

.-.-.-.-.-.

The man he was slaps his hands. “Quit picking at it!”

“It itches,” he protests.

“Scabs do that,” his self replies.

He rolls his eyes.

He also rolls his eyes. “You’re going to get her hurt, carrying on like this.”

“Like what?”

Something slaps the ceiling, jarring him, rattling the dark room. “Aren’t you ever quiet?” asks an old man’s voice.

“Sometimes,” he answers, yelling up at the ceiling. “Have to breathe now and then, don’t I?”

“You breathe?”

He’s beginning to feel offended by this giant from above, this giant keeping him in a... a box? “’Course I breathe. I’m alive, aren’t I?”

There’s something of a pause.

It pulls out an answering silence from within him, the quiet between the counting. “I am alive,” he insists. Looks at his self for confirmation, but he’s alone now in the dark.

“You’re not,” the man contradicts. “I don’t know what you are.”

“You don’t need to be scared.”

“I think I do.”

“What do you think I am?”

“Trouble. Or madness. You’re a strange thing to go senile over, I must say.”

“I’m not a thing.”

“Maybe not. But I’m too tired for debating. Don’t you ever sleep?”

He frowns in his mind, distantly feels a human body echo the motion kilometers away. “I’m asleep right now. This is me, dreaming.”

“Watches can dream?”

“Sorry?”

“Watches,” the man says again. “I don’t think they can dream.”

“I’m not a watch.”

“That,” the man says with a breath almost like a laugh, “would explain a great deal. But I need to sleep now. Please be quiet.”

“You don’t need to be scared of me.”

“Please be quiet.”

“You don’t-”

“I’m not. Please, be quiet.”

He quiets.

It’s a long night.

.-.-.-.-.-.

Halfway through the morning, he knocks on the door to Sanchez’s small office. He told himself he wouldn’t do this, he told himself he was fine, but now he’s fixed everything in the garage that needs fixing. He hadn’t really meant to: it had simply happened, his hands busying themselves while his head tried not to think.

He knocks the once and thinks Pedro’s music might have drowned out the noise, but before he can accept his failed non-attempt, Sanchez yells for him to come in.

He opens the door, slips inside, and closes it behind him. It’s a dingy sort of room, the kind of garage office that has a floor with the dirt built into it, the sort of office with a desk half made out of clutter. A computer sticks out of a pile of papers, the monitor thick, the keyboard graying into a vaguely yellow colour as if trying to better camouflage itself among the manila folders around it. Sitting behind his pile of clutter, Sanchez has a phone against his shoulder like a sleeping infant. The way he’s clicking away at the computer can only mean a game of Minesweeper. “I’m on hold,” the man explains. “What is it?”

“Might seem like a strange question,” he says.

Sanchez waves a hand dismissively “I’ve been on hold for ten minutes. Ask.”

“How did I get this job?”

The way Sanchez looks at him, that’s more of a stupid question than a strange one. “You applied. You were qualified. You got the job, three month trial to see if you want to stay and if I want to keep you.”

Three month trial matches his three month rent, that’s consistent enough. “Have you got a copy of my application?” At the other man’s surprised expression, he starts weaving together a sane explanation. “A virus got my laptop, one of those forwarding traps from a friend. I don’t have all of the info on me with it gone.”

“Ah,” Sanchez says. “I can email you-” He pauses, processes the story he’s been given. “I can print a copy out,” he amends.

“The email’s been an issue,” he agrees, now wondering if he has an email address somewhere. He has no idea what the address would be, let alone the password for the account. “Thanks, jefe.”

Another dismissive wave of the hand and Sanchez checks to see if he’s still on hold. He is. He reaches down and switches on the printer sticking around the side of the desk. Watching Sanchez locate the file on his computer, he’s stuck standing there, nothing in his fisted hands. He can’t seem to unclench them so he keeps them hidden behind his back.

Halfway through the printing process, Sanchez is taken off hold. He hands the papers over once they’re done.

Mouthing a “thank you,” he takes his application and resume and heads back into the garage where Pedro is pretending to have something to do. The other mechanic has made it clear that he doesn’t mind his coworker’s somewhat freakish efficiency as long as the reduced work doesn’t reduce his paycheque; it’s something they only vaguely discuss and always where Sanchez can’t hear.

He leans against some empty space on the wall and looks over the papers. He drinks in the words on his CV, feeling something relax and tighten in him at the same time.

The information is here. He has it.

And he doesn’t remember any of it.

.-.-.-.-.-.

How can a person not realize they’ve forgotten half their life?

.-.-.-.-.-.

“Rose, I need to talk to you,” he says after the beep, mobile pressed to his ear, folded pages in the other hand. “It’s important. Meet you for lunch at the regular bench.”

His pocket vibrates before he’s halfway there and he checks the text as he waits for a light to change. She’s working tables lunch and dinner today. She’ll be home by eleven.

She’ll be home.

He clutches those words and presses them against the chaos in his mind like ice on a sprain, like a bandage on a wound, like the temporary aid that they are. He heads to the library instead of the market and their bench. If she’s not going to be there, he’s not even going to try to eat.

As the walk to the library wears at him, he starts to wonder why he doesn’t own a laptop. He thinks he’s good at computers, he’s sure he is, but every time he wants to use one, he’s walking to the library. The papers Sanchez gave him don’t look like copies of a scan, so he must have applied for the job online. If he applied online, he should have his own computer. If he has enough money to switch continents every so often, he should have his own computer.

It occurs to him that he should discover what bank he’s with, then check with it.

...Where are his paycheques going? Forget cashing them, he’s never seen them. He tries to sort out how he’s been making his spending habits work without that and he’s not really sure. He knows he’s stopped by an ATM every once in a while, but he can’t think of a specific instance, only of being annoyed at waiting. Mostly, he just uses his card. How long has he been running on automatic?

He admits it: he’s getting scared.

When he gets to the library, he’s shaking inside, but his steps are even as he climbs up the stairs, his hands steady as he pulls open the door. For some reason, today is a busy Monday when it comes to the computers. He fidgets the wait away, fighting down the urge to yell at everyone. He has- He can’t- There is something wrong with him and he can’t fix it because this lot is busy blogging.

“¿Podría ayudarse?”

He jumps a little, almost into uncrossing his arms. It’s the first time Karmen the librarian has spoken to him. He hadn’t noticed the woman get behind him. Fairly remarkable, what with the cart she’s hauling around, returning books to their shelves.

“No, estoy bien.” He’s a little beyond the help of a librarian.

Possibly because of his body language, she doesn’t believe he’s as fine as he says. “Pues, si necesita algo....”

“Sí, sí, gracias.”

She nods and gives him a polite sort of smile.

He manages to wait three seconds longer before he can’t stand being alone inside his own head. “Me llamo John Smith,” he tells her. Realizes this is something he’s needed to tell someone since failing to tell Grace.

“Karmen,” replies the librarian, slightly bemused. “Mucho gusto.”

“Mucho gusto.”

He attempts chitchat and mostly manages it only to bolt when a computer finally opens up. He unfolds his papers and smoothes out the crease while the browser loads. He stares down at the list of jobs he’s had, all of them in vastly different places. Each location, he can clearly picture. There’s no problem there. England, Australia, France, United States, Japan, Brazil; he runs his eyes down the list and refuses to allow himself to continue until he can summon some sort of mental image.

That’s all he seems to be able to manage, mental images. There’s no reaction to the visions inside, no recollection of a conversation here or a struggle there. He thinks and he tries and it feels as if he’s trying to balance his thoughts on top of a rolling ball. Every instinct he has is yelling for him to close the browser and walk away, to forget this, to be fine.

The problem is - one of the problems, at least - is that he doesn’t understand that instinct. He runs, yes. A coward every time, him, but this isn’t the sort of thing he runs from. Likely because this isn’t something that can be run from, not successfully. It still freezes him inside. He doesn’t feel like a man who’s spent the last six years in Japan and Brazil. Who would forget that?

Once he exhausts what he can remember, he tries to look up his references. They’re references from businesses very much abroad and when he checks, they’ve gone under. Worried now for legal reasons, he tracks down the dates his old employers became unemployed themselves and it seems that he’d managed to leave before crashes.

With a very strange feeling, he searches for every business he has listed on his CV, every garage, every electronics shop, every vacuum repair store. All he learns is that he’s good with his hands and good at knowing when to leave. Every last one of his old jobs is no more.

He stares at the screen, seeing the results and still not seeing them. Coincidences like this don’t happen. They just don’t.

Is it his fault?

Is that it? Not that he’s unlucky but that he’s done something. Something to give him enough money to get up and move a long, long way from job to job, perhaps. Something he feels guilty over, guilty enough for his memories to scab over.

He thinks about it some more and has to conclude that he knows next to nothing about money. That can’t be it.

A moment more of thought and he resolves not to doubt himself. He’s a man who likes to travel: he knows this. He also knows he loves to fix things, to mend ever so slightly and achieve such remarkable results. He doesn’t know what he’d do with money, besides not think about it.

Between the wait and the long, tracking searches, he’s used up his lunch break and has little to show for it. Still, it’s an immensely stabilizing thing, knowing that the places on his CV are real. Were real, past tense now, but the point remains that he has a past and he can reach out and touch it. Each dead end is more like a stone in his pocket than a stone in his shoe, each pebble fetched from somewhere he’s been.

He heads back to work, feeling far too heavy to be adrift.

.-.-.-.-.-.

His stomach is trying to gnaw itself into pieces by the time he eats something and he tells himself that this is why he’s feeling sick. He downs a trail mix bar and a bottle of water, using a small amount of the money he has in his billfold to get the items and feeling very leery about it.

Back to the library he goes, this time to face facts rather than to look for them.

“¿Karmen? ¿Dónde está la sección de psicología?”

.-.-.-.-.-.

There’s a small pile of books on the coffee table and by the time she gets home, he’s already read all of them.

“Hey, what’s up?” Her bag slaps down on the floor and hits against the side of the couch as she turns to lock the door up behind her. “That’s not a usual look for you.”

“Thought I’d try something different,” he answers, not sitting up from where he lies on the couch, head up against the side of an armrest and feet on top of the other. Her folded sheet is under his knees, her pillow stolen and still in his room. Now that she’s here, he lowers his arms, crossing them over his chest rather than keeping them folded over his eyes.

“Headache,” she assumes.

“In a sense.”

She comes over, pushes the books to the side and sits on the edge of the coffee table.

Feeling sick from the scent of chips she’s wafting, he turns his head to look at her.

With a frown, she reaches out to touch his forehead with the back of her hand.

“Nah,” he says. That’s not it.

“Might be,” she argues. “Hard to tell, though. You’re always too hot.”

The corner of his mouth pulls up. “Thanks for noticing.”

“Shut up.” She pets his hair a little.

He closes his eyes with a small sigh.

Her fingers slowly play through his hair, caress his scalp in a way that would have greatly helped a true headache. Even without relieving some true physical pain, the touch tries to guide him into relaxing, tries to trick him into it. “You said there was something important?” she prompts.

He doesn’t answer, merely lifts his hand to catch hers. Threads their fingers together. It twists his arm awkwardly, but he doesn’t care.

“You’re setting records for moodiness, y’know, even for you.” She nudges him with her knee. “Did you just sit in here all night? Ruin your eyes like that, reading in the dark.”

“Think that’s going to be the least of my problems, Rose,” he tells her.

He opens his eyes in time to catch her checking the titles of the books, all of them thick and all very alike in their titles. Her expression does this amazing, horrifying thing: it goes away. There’s no trace of confusion or worry or disbelief. Hers is simply the face of a woman who, for the moment, isn’t feeling anything.

She lets go of his hand to pick up the top book.

He lets her.

“Human Memory and Amnesia,” she reads aloud. She picks up the next one. “Dissociative Disorders.” She looks at the rest of the titles. Puts the books down.

She looks at him.

“Yeah,” he says.

“I don’t....” She bites her lip. “Sorry, I just- Are you being a git or something?”

“No,” he says.

“So,” she begins to say. Her eyes focus on a point located far, far beyond his knee. She looks at that point for an eternity of seconds. “How is, I mean.” She shakes her head, tucks her hair behind each ear. “What’s wrong?”

“I think I was in a fugue for six years,” he says.

Her response isn’t the one he expects. Disbelief or concern, those he’s tried to prepare himself for. The complete confusion in her eyes takes him entirely by surprise. “You mean something other than classical music, yeah?” she asks.

Unwittingly, he smiles; it doesn’t last long, but it still happens. “Yeah.” He sits up. “You ever hear about people who go off without warning, go by new names and just start up new lives?”

“Generally call them deadbeat dads, but yeah.”

He shakes his head. “Less of a choice here. It’s not a condition people understand too well just yet. It’s too rare. More common in veterans, though.”

“Are you saying-”

“I don’t know if I am,” he interrupts, though he’s considered it. “Nothing on my CV about it. Got a copy of it from Sanchez today. He wishes you’d start visiting again, by the way.”

Her eyes take on a stubborn light and she absolutely refuses to follow where he’s trying to lead. “You think you lost your memory?”

“I think,” he says, slowly enough for any idiot to understand, “that after my fiancée and my almost step-daughter were violently shot to death, I let go of reality for a while. I did something or another for six years, and then I came back to myself when I moved here.”

“That’s it?”

The second it’s out of her mouth, she looks like she wants to take it back, but he has to protest all the same: “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Sorry,” she says, uncomfortable in the way she usually is when she’s lying badly to him. “Sorry, I just- I just want to check that this is all you’ve forgotten. That six years is all of it.”

“You don’t believe me.”

“That’s not it,” she argues.

He stares her down.

“Okay,” she admits. “Maybe a little. This isn’t, I dunno, some weird practical joke?”

“Not on you.”

Brown eyes watch his, as if she’s trying to track something behind his pupils, and the humming of the fridge builds under her silence.

“Okay,” she says at last. “Okay, I believe you.”

He scoffs.

“Now who doesn’t believe who?”

“Rose....” A warning.

She has grace enough to look sheepish, at least for a moment. Then she gets an idea, her eyes lighting up and her words coming out with a strange sort of excitement. “Maybe it was the heat stroke? When you collapsed and all. Something just short-circuited or overloaded or, I dunno, got erased.”

“What am I, a computer progamme?”

“But that’s possible too, yeah?” she asks. “There’s gotta be something like that in one of these books.”

“Either way, I forgot six years in Japan and Brazil.”

She stares at him. Blinks. Keeps staring at him like this, out of all the mess, is the one thing she can’t process. “...What, seriously?”

He nods.

“Wow,” she says. The word is pure filler.

“Yeah.” So is that one.

“Why Brazil?”

“No idea.”

She gives him a weak little smile. “Fair enough.”

He manages to return it. “I’d say.”

They try to keep smiling but can’t quite manage it. He winds up looking at her knees, at the little spot on her shin where she missed while shaving her legs.

“Hey,” she says after a long moment.

He looks up into dark, worried eyes.

“You want to be left alone or should I start hugging you?”

“You left me alone last night,” he says, trying to force the words into a statement rather than an accusation. “I could do with some variety.”

A guilty and defensive creature, she comes to him nevertheless, sitting across his lap and filling his arms. He tucks his face against her shoulder, at once reducing his air supply and making it easier for him to breathe. He’s adjusted to the chip smell by now. She rubs all of his back that she can reach, a motion more apologetic than tender, a motion so much like the rest of her. Eventually, the touch stills, his girl holding onto his shoulder with one hand, lightly touching his chest with the other.

“I’m sorry,” she says and he knows she doesn’t mean the night before. He deserved that.

“Nah. Not your fault.”

With her hand over the empty patch in his chest, with her hand there as if in echo of his own vain search, she shakes her head. “Maybe not,” she answers, holding him tight, “but I’m still sorry.”

.-.-.-.-.-.

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