A/N: An AU based on the 2004 film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

- 1:30 A.M., January 12th-

"What are you reading?"

The subway train clattered noisily along its track, hand rails swinging to and fro and the fluorescent lights flickering on and off. What of those weren't flickering were dim and humming loudly, ready to burn out. When she'd gotten on the train, he'd been asleep, headphones hung around his neck. They were hooked up to some device, but there was no music playing. She had deemed him a non-threat, some college student who had stayed out partying all night (though this had an equal chance of being unlikely, as he did not smell of alcohol).

She looked up from her text and saw that he had not moved, with his head still resting against a metal hand bar. His eyes were blue, like from the pictures she'd seen of the ocean. Whenever she'd been to see the ocean herself, it was dull and gray, or a sickly green. His accent was not local, not from New York. He most likely hailed from the Los Angeles area. He appeared to be 5'10", although slouching, and—and she'd promised herself to stop analyzing everyone that she met.

"It is a collection of Voltaire's plays." To show him this, as if he could have disbelieved her words, she held up the second-hand book, which had the title clearly printed on it. He studied it for a moment, squinting in his disorientation, before rummaging through his bag and pulling out a similar copy of the same text.

"Man is free at the instant he wants to be." he quoted without opening the book, and she dog-eared her own copy and closed it.

"Brutus, Act II, Scene I." She supplied, and he grinned widely from ear to ear, then hefted his bag and moved to sit beside her without any invitation.

"Are you reading that for a course?" He asked, watching her with those ocean-blue eyes. Now that he was closer, she could see that he was possibly of Germanic descent, from the facial shape, and that his choice in store-bought scents was expensive, though not overused. She could smell his natural scent underneath it.

"No." She answered simply. "I enjoy his work."

This answer seemed to please him, and he showed it, grinning from ear to ear. "Me, too. I mean, sure, the guy's a sarcastic asshole, but he's one of the better Enlightened thinkers. He's probably one of the only Frenchmen I'd get along with."

She tilted her head and frowned, just a bit. "You are naturally combative towards the French?"

He stared at her for a moment in pause, making her feel uncomfortable, like she'd done something wrong. Then, he laughed; the sound was warm and seemed to fill the entire train car. She enjoyed it.

"Isn't everyone? I'm Julian, by the way." He took off his glove and extended his hand to her. She took it in hers and shook it. His hands were warm and strong, like he'd not had to perform any sort of manual labor.

"Laura." She watched him pull his glove back on and shoulder his bag. The train was coming to a halt at the next station, her station and his as well, if his preparations were of any valuable indication.

"You're getting off here?"

"Yes. I intend on retiring and spending the majority of tomorrow in bed. I have not slept in 43 hours."

"Christ, you have a big assignment or something?" Julian winced, sympathetically. Apparently, he had also had to go for long stints without sleep before.

"You could say that." The word 'assignment' was close enough to what she'd been doing for the past forty-three hours.

"Well, let me give you a ride home. My car's parked near here. I'll drive you."

Laura considered this. It was several blocks' walk from the subway station to her apartment, and it was below freezing at this time of night. The chance of her being assaulted was very high.

"Okay." she agreed, and she walked side-by-side with him to his car.

-12:45 P.M., January 10th-

Julian lugged the two large black plastic garbage bags into the small, sterile-smelling clinic, ignoring the couple of other prospective patients that sat in the hard, plastic chairs. He marched straight over to the receptionist, whose name he'd never caught and never cared to, and leaned up against the counter.

"Tell Dr. Frost I'm here," he told her, probably a little more harshly than he'd intended to.

"No need, Mister Keller, I'm well aware." He heard the doctor come down the cramped hallway and stood aside so that she could open the door. She was a younger woman, probably mid-thirties, who'd had plenty of very expensive and very good plastic surgery done.

"I trust you've brought everything we need?"

He held up the bags and looked at her impatiently.

"Very well. Right this way, please. My assistant will take those for you—Celeste?"

A woman identical to the receptionist took the two bags from him, and handed one to a third. So there were triplets. Maybe if he were a stupid high school sophomore and didn't feel like he'd had his heart ripped clean out of his chest, he would have tried to get all of them in bed at once. He would have failed miserably.

Frost led him to a room and had him sit with his head in a strange contraption, while one of the triplets (this one's name tag read Irma) drew two little blue circles on either side of his head.

"This machine mimics mutant telepathy. I invented it myself." Frost explained, and she turned on a light on the machine, so that two blue lasers shone on his head in correspondence with the circles. "We are going to show you each of the items that you've brought us. As a natural response, you should come up with a memory that's associated with that item, and with the person that you wish to forget. After we have cycled through everything, we will dispose of the items so that you have no reminder of this person in your home. We will place these memories in order from most recent to least recent, and while you sleep in your own bed tonight, my assistants and I will cycle through them from there, erasing each one from your mind while you are in a drugged sleep. Tomorrow morning, you will wake up as you did normally, though it may take extra time for the effects of the drugs to wear off."

Julian vaguely nodded along, listening to her dull recitation. The English accent didn't do anything but make him sleepier as he listened to her. Another assistant, this time Celeste, turned the machine on so that it whirred, like an MRI.

"Let's begin erasing Miss Kinney, shall we?" Frost smiled, and Irma set a picture down in front of him on a small tray.

The photograph was one of his favorites, of the two of them on a beach over the summer. They were both smiling, which was rare because she didn't often smile. He had his arm wrapped around her waist, and she had her head resting against his shoulder, and the sun was rising somewhere nearby. Her eyes were so fucking green and gorgeous that they could have been emeralds.

He looked at the picture a minute longer, then leaned back as best he could in the contraption, and began to remember what it was that he was paying several thousand dollars to forget.

- 6:30 A.M., July 1st-

Julian dismantled the camera from its tripod and shoved everything back into the bag. They'd finally gotten one good picture together in the light of the rising sun. It was damn near impossible to get a picture by moonlight, but they'd waited up the entire time, pretty much chasing the waves.

She'd laughed so much more that night than he'd ever thought possible. Laura had the most beautiful laugh he'd ever heard, and he wanted to hear it every day.

He looked over at her, and saw that she was knelt down in the wet sand, which clung to the soles of her bare feet. She was studying something very intently, and the look on her face was so goddamned adorable that he had to go see what had grabbed her attention.

"What is it, Laura?" Julian kept his voice quiet, as there was no need to yell with them being so close. He reached out and brushed some of her hair behind her ear and followed her gaze down to the sand and her hands in front of her. A hermit crab had unearthed itself and was scuttling across the palm of her hand.

"I could hear it moving beneath the sand." Laura looked up at him. "The sounds were very small. I was curious."

"It's probably trying to get out of here before it drowns in the high tide." He explained. Immediately, Laura looked concerned, and she rose up to her feet and hurried to move the crab to higher ground. She sat with it for a moment, ensuring its safety, before returning to sit by Julian's side. He laughed wrapped his arm around her shoulders, pulling her close and kissing the top of her head.

"It would have been fine on its own, beautiful." At that, Laura looked a bit embarrassed, her cheeks going red.

"Perhaps, but those with power should ensure the safety of those that have none. That is what I believe." She explained. Julian cupped Laura's cheek in his hand and kissed her, then ran his thumb over her cheekbone when they pulled apart.

"It's a good belief. Now, come on, let's get home and get to bed." Laura held onto his hand tightly and watched with that ever-present amazement as he lifted the camera bag with that green aura that came directly from his powerful thoughts.

- 7:23 P.M., April 18th-

"You are a mutant."

"Yes," Julian coughed and rolled onto his back on his couch, enough to see the rainbow of light that shone onto his ceiling through some prism. He felt like hell; his neck was stiff and his entire body ached and he wasn't even able to make it into his bed the night before. It took all of his telekinetic exertion to pull the phone from its base in the kitchen and call Laura over, the one person he'd trust with a secret like this.

He regretted it now. She was too quiet, way too quiet, and he was afraid that she was going to run out of the apartment and never want to see him again. Julian didn't want that. God knows he didn't want that.

She made him take some medication and kissed his forehead as a reward when he'd swallowed the pills down with a gulp of honey-sweetened tea. The tea was weak, like she'd been too worried about letting it get cold to let the teabag steep long enough.

"You are not alone." Laura covered him with a quilt, something she'd brought from her apartment, and she sat in a nearby armchair, not at all intending to leave until he was better. The thought alone made him relax enough to want to sleep, and he drifted off, with the white quilt pulled over his nose.

- 7:03 A.M., September 8th-

He woke up to the sound of her sobbing against his chest and thunder rumbling angrily outside. Her head was tucked underneath the white-bordered quilt with a blue sky patched into it, the kind with white clouds that weren't a thing like the angry gray ones outside.

"Laura, honey, what's wrong?" Julian pulled her closer, running his fingers against her bare shoulder blade. They were still naked from the night before, and despite the fact that he could feel her breasts against his chest, there was nothing sexual about any of it.

"You should not be with me," Laura cried. Julian ran his fingers through her hair and tried to calm her down with gentle touches.

"Why the hell not, beautiful?"

"I am a monster." She hiccuped and looked up at him with those tear-filled emerald eyes that made his heart ache. "I was created to be a monster. A tool that is only good for killing." Laura cried on him more as she explained to him her origin in a laboratory, her harsh, inhumane training, the forced activation of her mutant gene, the missions she'd been made to go on. The life she'd been forced to live. By the end of it, Julian was crying, too. He kissed her everywhere, her face, her lips, her neck, anywhere he could to keep her calm.

"You aren't a monster. You're mine. You're mine and you're beautiful and you're perfect and not a goddamn thing in the whole fucking world can say otherwise. Do you understand?" Julian rest his forehead against Laura's and looked into her eyes, which were a little red and puffy but spectacular nonetheless.

"Yes." She replied, sounding watery and a bit broken. He kissed her again, and rubbed her back, and closed his eyes.

"I love you, Laura."

He heard her make some little noise, something that he couldn't quite pick up against another loud clap of thunder, but he most definitely heard when she spoke against the downpour of rain.

"I love you, too, Julian."

- 12:21 A.M., January 11th-

"I can't believe it."

"Are you really thinking about that?"

"You know that's against Frost's rules."

Celeste Cuckoo stared down at the cup of coffee in her hands and then glanced back at the patient that they were dealing with that night; Julian Keller, a healthy young 21-year-old who was very attractive and who would shortly be very, very eligible.

"Like you two haven't been guilty of wanting to do—and then actually doing—the same thing." She looked accusingly at Mindee and Phoebe, whom she'd caught in bed with former clinic patients on separate occasions, and whom she'd heard flirting with several more. It was embarrassing, to think that since Frost had opened up her clinic, that she'd been the good triplet.

"This is different. Those weren't mutants." Phoebe pointed at her with a crueller in her hand.

Celeste 'harrumphed' and went back to looking at the monitor.

"Well, the erasure process is proceeding as planned. Only six more hours until completion."

They all collectively groaned at the thought of being in the apartment of an attractive, sleeping man that they couldn't do anything to or with. They weren't even allowed to turn on the television or use his phone to make calls.

All that they could do was to sit and wait and observe him as he lost the most important part of his life.