"Or you got dumped into?"
    "Whoever's responsible." I shrugged.
    "This would be Party Beta?"
    "Presumably. At least, that's what he said when I asked him, I don't know. They went to an awful lot of trouble. They were going to rehypnotize me, or whatever they used for the blocks, and ship me off to Seattle. Like I would have liked it there." Weird town, from what I hear. And it rains all the time.
    "Just somewhere away from the rest?"
    "Where I wouldn't be in any danger of tripping over the truth again."
    "Alaska, Hawaii, something."
    "Someplace out of the way," I agreed. "But it was... unpleasant." Quite an understatement even for me, and he wasn't going to let it go at that.
    "Which is why you jump up in the middle of the night, find yourself in strange rooms, and panic? Sounds a little bit...." He raised an eyebrow.
    "Okay, I can be a little more precise." I took a breath. "I learned a lot about where my limits are." Long pause while I tried to decide if I wanted to say anything more than that. "I've been thinking about it for the past week, and I wouldn't have volunteered to go through it, but it... might have been a good thing. I can't really tell."
    "At least now you know?" he said quietly.
    "Yeah. Kind of forcing me to deal with some things I've been avoiding."
    "Such as?"
    "Fear," I replied bluntly; it was at the top of a rather long list. "I don't deal with it... well."
    I think I have now been as terrified as I am capable of being. Those first few hours, especially. Unable to move. Alone. No hope. Nothing I could do, nowhere I could run, no one I could take it out on, no way to lie to myself that no I wasn't scared to the point of paralysis anyway.
    On the other hand, I did survive, and I didn't (quite) snap. That's something.
    "Yeah, if I remember properly whenever you start to get worried or scared, your language goes to hell?" Trent inquired with a bit of a smile.
    "I tend to tense up and snap at people," I allowed.
    "Does that explain the last month, then?"
    "I don't think so." I gave him a questioning look; the last month had been a lot like the months before it, as far as I could tell.
    "From what I saw you were pretty tense and snapping."
    "Well, I do that to a certain extent anyway. I don't know. I don't even remember what I used to feel like before all this happened," I admitted somewhat painfully, looking down again. "It's like somebody else's dream. Which is fitting," I added softly.
    "How are you doing on the friends thing?" he inquired gently.
    I blinked, startled. "What?"
    "Acclimating to a semi-normal existence, developing another communication and support web."
    "Oh." I shrugged. "I don't know. I don't get out much. It's a busy job."
    "You at least have your teammates, though, right?"
    "Yeah. They try to help."
    "Are they really your friends?"
    I thought about that for a moment. "Not particularly." I mean, I work with them. It's different. Not like I have a whole lot in common with any of them. "This isn't really odd, I never really had any. It's a nomadic lifestyle. I like to be alone," I assured him.
    "Just so long as you have a support structure, which it seems like you do, considering they just broke into a major criminal installation in order to rescue you," Trent observed.
    "Which I appreciated. 'Cause I think they were about to decide that maybe I wasn't essential after all." A little shiver. "I don't know."
    "I could start going out there for a once a month session, if you like," he offered.
    "I don't want to drag you all the way out there." That didn't seem right.
    "Not a big deal. Professional courtesy."
    "I'll think about it," I decided after a pause.
    "Whenever you're ready. Whenever you want to talk."
    There was another long pause; my thoughts were nothing concrete.
    "I just don't know how to deal with it," I said quietly. Finally.
    "The being hunted, the artificial life...?"
    "The latter, more than the former. The former is just a problem to solve, in a weird way." And given the odds, one I hold very little hope of solving, but that's a subject for another day.
    "All of our lives are aggregations of memories."
    "It's not real," I whispered, eyes shut tight again. It hurt to say it out loud.
    "Is it? I mean, I know that biologically it's not, chronologically it's not. How different would it be for you to find out that your parents had just died in a car wreck, two years ago, and you were never able to see them again?"
    "I don't know," I murmured, hardly hearing him; as always when I confronted that central fact I found myself lost in the sheer magnitude of it. Thirty years, everything I'd ever thought I knew, everything that anchored me to a world that made sense... gone.
    "That you moved from California to Boston in order to get away, and lost contact with the remainder of your very small and rapidly dwindling family. People do that sort of thing all the time."
    I sighed and shook my head wearily, trying to focus on what he was saying. "I don't think it's the same."
    "Do you want to have contact with your parents? Assuming for the moment that they were real," he added.
    "Well, yes." I gave him a rather startled look. We hadn't been very close—they hadn't been that cruel, for whatever reason—but there had been enough of a connection that sometimes I had felt sorry that there wasn't more.
    "How often did you talk to them?"
    "Every couple weeks or so. Not really in depth, but kept in touch." I couldn't read his expressions at all in the room's dim light.
    "I think something you haven't properly done," he said in a quiet voice after a moment had passed, "is grieve."
    "I think you're right." Of course not, I thought automatically. It's stupid to be upset about losing something I never had. Stupid or not, though, I obviously am.
    "You lost everything in a fire."
    "Pretty much."
    "And if it had been a tangible fire rather a metaphysical one, you would grieve," he pointed out gently.

| Top |