2019-10-09 - They're Not Dates

Do I want to live?

The upsetting query spilled into her mind like poison, his voice overtaking the forefront of her conscious thoughts.

These days, I'm just so tired.

Isabella Reede tossed her pen and paper across her workspace in frustration, lifting her fingertips to rub furiously at her nosebridge.

To her credit, there wasn't a lick of alcohol to be found anywhere on the desk where she spent the majority of her afternoon, piled high with volumes of different but interconnected subjects. Books and printouts on recent maritime archaeological findings mingled freely with manuals and paper lectures on the cutthroat trout and the latest, but general issues that concerned the modern-day marine conservationist. There were others, though not necessarily tied to her work - a copy of her approved application for membership to the Gray Harbor Historical Society rested on top of a mostly-buried, but lovingly framed photograph, its negatives taped to the back. She had been trying her best not to look at it all day after she had dug it out of the empty bones of the Reede family home, and be reminded that in a few days, that, too, was going to be gone from her life forever.

I'm sorry.

She heard that all too often, these days, mirroring the last words her twin had ever said to her before he was swallowed by the dark, and all from the other men in her life that had some impact in her day-to-day; her father, Alexander, Captain de la Vega. Reflecting on it now, she couldn't help but be slightly grateful for Byron's seeming inability to apologize for anything, because she didn't know how much more of that she could take - this perennial need to take everything on their shoulders until their knees buckled under the sheer weight of it, and blame themselves for things that were beyond their control.

A breath taken, she pushed herself up from her half-draped position against the back of her chair, fingers lifting to clap sharply against her cheeks in an attempt to focus. The largely unfinished document loomed before her from her laptop screen, her personal Everest of eighty thousand words beckoning at her while the accompanying pamphlet - the University of Oxford's guidelines on its house style - mocked her from nearby. A frustrated hand scrubbed at the side of her face, glancing down at the word tally on her text editor, the savage gauge with which she measured her current progress: Twenty-five thousand words.

Jesus Christ.

Her head found the cradle both her hands made, her elbows braced against wood and fiberglass. Eyes stared at her in-progress paragraph, having been at it for so long that she knew the words by heart.

...many of the major cities were located on along the coast of the Mediterranean: Portus, Massalia, Alexandria, Carthage, Antioch Cesarea among the others. These locations ultimately served as the most important foci for a maritime trading network that enabled the Ancient Romans to declare proudly, but accurately, that the Mediterranean was "Mare Nostrum"...

"I'm missing a comma." Oggling the same thing over and over again had its benefits, at least, moving her cursor between Antioch and Cesarea to put one in. The device nearly pushed her smartphone off her pile of papers, and her returning reflexes managed to seize it before it clattered completely on the ground. But with it in her grasp, she couldn't help herself, settling back in her seat and going through the logs of her past text messages. She ignored the last chain from Alexander, though the sight of his name across her screen tightened her chest, worsened by the mortifying reminder that she had left an embarrassing voicemail in August Roen's phone the night before. No details, never that, but the fact that she had to wrankled at her pride and she felt it rise again, the roiling ball of rage that only kept growing since taking the call about her mother's murder, gestating like something alive and alien and ready to burst out of her ribcage, aggravated by the splinter of William Gohl still living inside her.

She tried to ignore that, too. Pressing her lips together, she scrolled through her other messages. The latest string from Erin, the excitement there about her date, drew the slightest of smiles on the corners of her mouth. The one from Easton drew a frown and she scrolled past the words about his damaged relationship to get to the bits in the end, coincidentally also about Erin and his marriage to Geoff in Vegas.

Texts from Max, which never failed to make her roll her eyes in both exasperation and amusement:

marry me, isabella reede

First of all, ew. Second of all, ew.

ice cold

You only ask me every year because it annoys me.

that's only because you're so cute when your lip curls upwards in rage

From anyone else, that would be flattering. From you, it's just gross.

is it because i'm like family? like a husband?

Gross. More like....not even a brother. Like a second cousin. Not that close, but close enough to be gross. Have I said it enough yet?

what if i was a really really really really really distant cousin

Her thumb stopped at that particular line, and groaned audibly.

I hate you. What do you want.

just wanted to tell you that i'm on 66K words ::angel emoji::

I hope someone drowns you in the Thames. ::fire-breathing dragon emoji::

The urge to reiterate that was suddenly there, picturing her grip around his throat and pushing his dark-haired head underneath the waves, waiting placidly until the bubbles and flailing stopped (and really, in that particular instance, she wasn't quite certain if that had been Gohl's influence or just her). Her fingers moved away from that conversation and scrolled through her camera roll instead. The selfie she had sent Easton of nursing an entire bottle of Scotch with him was still there.

It was the second-last image, however, that captured her attention, and she scrutinized the black text within yellowed paper carefully. She had almost forgotten about it, not when she saw the names of the dead from the book in the Archivist's records room everywhere she went for an entire week while the flu was active in her system. Eyes and mind refreshed herself with the names.

2000: Jones, Anthony
2001: Smith, Marjorie
2002: Shellenberger, James

"One per year," she mused thoughtfully, her perpetually busy brain latching onto that specific puzzle, desperately shoving everything else, the worry, the sorrow, the rage, somewhere at the back of her mind to focus on something that had nothing to do with any of that, while taking a break from the thesis she had been struggling with. Though there was guilt there, also. She was procrastinating and she knew it.

She tilted her head back, expelled another breath, rubbing a hand over her face again as she refocused on her laptop's screen, and her insistent, blinking cursor at where she had put the comma between Antioch and Cesarea.

The epiphany came swiftly and suddenly, striking her hard - so much so that it felt like a truck plowing directly into her face, sending her flying. Her hands frantically searched for her pad of paper and pen, uncapping it so she could scrawl the words across the blank page with her sweeping, feminine script. The name of the book, Grippe Outbreak Volume 2: Deaths 2000 - 2999.

It was dark in the hall, when she and Byron had been in there. The Archivist kept getting angry, and every bellow blew out some of the candles in the free-hanging chandelier. Had she missed them? The book was moving, squirming in her hand when she grabbed it. With the lack of light and all the movement, not to mention the adrenaline spike of doing something she shouldn't, it wouldn't be all that implausible.

With her pen, she marked the places where she thought the commas would go, and leaned back in her seat. The slightly altered notation rose from a field of white, lined with pale blue. She stared at it, shifting to the list of names, and then back again.

"They're not dates," she murmured.

The implication of that, in the end, planted an indescribable look on her features as to what kind of records the Archivist must have spent centuries tracking, and keeping account. "Holy shit." Because it was disturbing.

After a pause, she moved again, pushing away more of the clutter off her desk to get to work, losing herself in the following hours on research, diving into historical records and online databases; extraneous, in the end. A momentary project that she shouldn't be undertaking when there were so many that ought to take up prime real estate in her mind, but she needed something else - a Rubik's cube that she could solve, because all the other problems were so damned complicated that the realization that there were no easy answers was both frustrating and immediate, and she needed the break.

And wasn't that just like her, to take a break from thinking by thinking?