2020-04-12 - .....faded

While Joseph eats his lunch or sips his coffee or talks to the (terrible) waitress or whatever else occupies him at the diner, he feels eyes on him. It's one of those sensations that's hard to shake, but the source of the feeling is unknown. Just as he's settling his bill, about to leave his booth, a slight brunette slides in across from him, wearing a sweartshirt, jeans, and hair that falls down across her face. It makes her easy to overlook, quick to be ignored and dismissed as just another grunge-kid in the Pacific Northwest.

She looks at him, her dark eyes smudged as if with sleeplessness, and she foregoes a greeting, cuts straight to the chase. "I can help you remember things."

She puts her elbows on the edge of the table. She puts her chin in her hands, sleeves still covering her palms, leaving only her fingers bare. She looks across at Joseph, patiently letting him finish his slowly asked question, and then she laughs in his face. It's a short, sudden burst of sound, quick and bright and... okay, yes. Probably a little cracked. But isn't everyone?

Buttoning up her laughter, she shoots a look around the diner. But no one is paying them any attention whatsoever. Someone a couple booths over glances this way, but his eyes slide beyond Megan to Joseph, then promptly return to his lunch. So she says with delight, "The facility. Thomas? Joseph? Cavanaugh?" She lifts her voice to put question-marks after all three names, but she's not really asking, just confirming what she already knows.

"I know." She makes a face, then straightens it out and concludes drolly, "I remember. I remember forgetting. So." Her attention, having wandered a moment around the area without settling on anything, finally hones back in on Joseph, settling there like a fly might settle, easily swatted away but likely to drift back now and then. "What about you? Do you want to remember? Or keep on forgetting? I'm not gonna lie." A quick drop of her voice, very secretive, very dramatic. "It's not always great. Sometimes, I think people would rather they kept on forgetting." There's a very grave nod and she mumbles, "It's a real Red Pill Blue Pill kinda thing."

No hesitation. No second thought spared. "Absolutely. How do you stand not knowing what happened to you? Where you even were?" And she looks off into the middle distance for a second, attention flicking back around to Joseph again at length. "But it's okay. I get it. If you don't wanna know, you don't wanna know. Just - " She shifts toward the edge of the booth, a hand there, poised to lift herself out. " - think about it, I guess. I'll be in town a few days, at the motel. Where those people got murdered. What a grim town."

Her posture relaxes somewhat, back into the booth. She doesn't turn all the way back into it, legs still aimed into the aisle, but she's not right about to spring to her feet. "I don't mean trade. Not that bullshit they do to us, did to us. I mean just take them back. They're in there." She taps her temple with her index finger twice, knock-knock on the noggin. "You just have to be willing to want it." Her eyes snap back to Joseph's again, seriously. "It might leave you... faded... for a while. But it's worth the trade-off, if you ask me." She smiles vaguely at him. "Different strokes."

Her thumb comes up and stays there. Yep, "Nailed it." That's what she's saying. As for .....faded? She slumps her shoulders and inhales a long breath, looking at him for a moment before answering, "Is there some other meaning of the word faded that I never heard of? You know. Faded." The thumb she was cocking reaches over toward the napkin dispenser, and there's a little arc of electricity between her and it - could just be static cling... but it's almost definitely not. That was sparkly shit she was doing. "The opposite of that."

"Not permanently."

She pauses, inhales, breathes out. "At least, it hasn't been permanent so far." Her smile comes again, the just slightly manic one. "Things are always changing." Then his focus sharpens in time to find her smiling patiently at him, awaiting his response. "I can do it and you can't. What difference does it make how I do it? And I'd do it for reasons. Here's an altruistic one, if that makes you feel better." The manic smile is gone, her attention fixed straight on Joseph: "Fuck that place."

As for his last question, she shrugs. "You don't."

Shaking her head, she eases back into the booth. "Unless you have somewhere you have to be." She throws a look out the window, in case anyone is coming along toward the diner, looking like they're looking for Joseph. "We can do this now. Here. It's just - have you ever done it? Where you pick something up and you feel whatever it felt?" She looks for recognition, but - whether it's there or not - the conclusion is the same. "It's like that, only more."

Dismissively, like it's the first time she's even noticing these other people here... these boring people here... she answers, "They never notice anything. We used to kidnap people in crowded theaters, snatch them - anyway." And she waves off that thought quickly, drumming up the flash of a smile. "It'll be fine."

Until it isn't.

She leans back into the booth, frowning at him. "Why does everything always have to be a struggle?"

"How do you know that I'm not selling something." It's not a real question, so it's punctuated appropriately. She takes a deep breath, fixes her chin deep down in her palms, looks across the table at Joseph... and crams his brain full of memories he forgot he had. It's like having a light shone in every nook-and-cranny in Joseph's mind, soul, psyche, whatever he wants to call it, till all the missing pieces of that time suddenly resolve back into a cohesive picture, but the glare is intense. Like staring into a mirror reflecting the sun, it sears his mind's eye, going to leave a blind spot for a while, that one will. Might even leave him feeling .....faded.

It comes back in a sudden, sickening wave. All of it. From the hospital in Savannah to a nurse that recognized him for what he was, how she shone as he did. Meeting Doctor Marshall - he seemed like someone that might ought to be in a mental institution himself, scattered and old and distracted. But kindly. Joseph can remember the trip from Savannah to Seattle with Marshall, the long car ride through all that forest in the Pacific Northwest, and he can remember… he can remember going into the basement of the building that he now recognizes as Two If By Sea.

Marshall put a brass key in a door. The door opened. Joseph's mind split, fractured, broke, and reknit itself when he stepped through that door, twisting his brain as two realities collided. And then he was in a doctor's office, Marshall's office, meeting a nurse that would help him with some intake paperwork.

For a long spell, everything seemed almost normal. The place was bizarre, but it was something Joseph could handle. It was just close enough to normal that his brain was fine with it. Like other hospitals, there was a routine, and Joseph learned it. It wasn't until he was settled… comfortable… that he first began to feel how close they always were. If he so much as thought about reaching for his abilities, THEY were on him like buzzards on a corpse, exciting his symptoms, driving him toward the suicidal edge.

But he can also remember the long talks with Marshall, the group therapy sessions with the other patients - Steve and the woman whose name he never knew that spoke in backward nursery rhymes and Alice Whitehouse and all the others. He wasn't alone. They all suffered with this… these… it… he wasn't alone.

And he remembers when Marshall came to him in the middle of the night - or, well, the middle of sleeping time. There was no day or night to speak of there, just the rooms with no windows and the artificial light that emulated the sun. But Marshall woke him hurriedly, saying, "It's time. You're released. Off with you." He recalls Marshall hustling him down a dark corridor and into what seemed to be a broom closet, shoving a folder full of papers at him and saying, "Release paperwork, money, here." He pushed a duffel bag into Joseph's hands; it had a couple of changes of clothes in it and whatever personal effects had accompanied Joseph to the facility on that first day. "Go."

Marshall shoved him into the broom closet. His brain twisted uncomfortably again. And he was standing in the morgue of Addington Memorial Hospital. Unable to remember anything. He'll never remember the exact sequence of events that followed - how he got out of Gray Harbor and back to his "real life," only that now… right now… he knows it's all true.

"You're welcome." She nods simply and slides back over to the edge of the booth, making good on her earlier intimations that she was about to bail. "Just be careful. If they know you remember..." Her eyes sharpen for a moment, brighten as if eagerly. "And they probably will. They might come looking for you."

She also has a slightly... faded... look to her now, as if the bright after-image left her mind smudged with the same visual purple as his.

"Yeah," she answers honestly for what he probably put out there as a rhetorical opening question. She's nodding about his acceptance of taking care, then pausing at the reaching across the table. His hand gets a look, like maybe this isn't going to happen... then she just sort of pats the back of his hand with hers, stiffly and briefly. There, happy? She's a real person. Whose name is, "Megan Keene. Good luck, I hope our paths never cross again." And she's pulling up the hood of her sweatshirt, assuming her secret identity (jobless street urchin - they're everywhere in this town!) on her way to the door.

It jingles. She's gone.