He has lived in San Francisco eight years. There's nothing, he thinks, like the anonymity of that city. It's booming and progressive, the arts are alive. He's not the only celebrity to sheath himself in the err of everyday people like it's natural, and sometimes he can almost forget the way he missed it back in Domino or Duelist Kingdom. Things are always moving forward and that keeps him moving forward, too.
Most of the time, anyway.
People go there to advance careers, chase dreams. Some people follow broken hearts to the waters under the Golden Gate Bridge.
He cries for them.
Of all the things he has to shed tears over, and more importantly, all the things he never allowed himself to cry over, strangers are the ones who draw sobs from his chest. Raw and heaving, broken in ways he never knew another person could be, before the gray printed name in the paper.
He thinks he keeps much stranger things than a collection of unknown obituaries.
He thinks he remembers them the same way he remembers the pain he caused so many people, back when he let himself believe his hurt had sharper teeth.
They are close to him, like a vow.
More than anything, he thinks that's a little fucked up.
It takes him six years to find Café Sophia, and while most people shake their heads at the ego of a twenty-something plastering her name on her father's, father's, newly refinanced, ramshackle shop, Pegasus finds it endearing.
She has heart.
She also has mice, but people with dungeons don't throw stones.
He takes a chance that becomes a routine that becomes a ritual. She calls him "foundering artist" after the first three months, when she realizes he likes the 'atmosphere' of worn wooden floors and a few old men ogling her behind the New York Times while he makes intervening conversation. She knows she won't lose his business, and he knows even before he shows up to find a sick five month old in her arms, his business is all she wants.
At first.
He realizes a month later, when she tells him the story of the place beyond the books (a book) of sales; his own judgment can't be trusted. It's her father's shop, her grandmother's name; she works to pay off student loans from a failed stint at college that ended in pregnancy. She even says pregnancy, not forlornly, but as a truth hardened by the number of times it's been thrown in her face. She kisses her daughter's – Faith's – head, and calls her a miracle, but somewhere behind the scent of rain on the pavement, the word echoes of failure.
Pegasus buys her a cup of coffee and waves off the look of offense, sliding his mug back from the baby's curious fingers and tearing a napkin to ribbons to hear her laugh.
He comes the next week so she doesn't think she's scared him off, but skips the week after for his own sake. Blames the flu.
With no interest outside her being the only consistent contact he's had with a person in…a decade, he's already idealized her.
Made her out to be a bold, up-and-coming, supremely maternal woman with her life entirely together. Maybe she is and maybe she isn't, the point is that he doesn't really know her at all.
He's dusting off bad habits and asking someone else to bear the brunt of them.
And maybe everyone constructs versions of people from who they really are, maybe everyone sees who they want to see, doesn't make it right.
He really hasn't been right since she died. Maybe he should go to therapy.
Within six months, "foundering artist" becomes "Mr. Art," within eight months, just "Art."
They never give their names and for some reason that's comforting. He carries the obscurity of San Francisco and she lifts a mug to meet it like the tide rolling in to meet the shore.
A year after he first steps through the door, one of her regular old-timers steps out for good. He frets for all of a minute about chasing her business away – she relays his final words as something like "not needing the heckling" – before she dissolves into teary thanks behind the counter.
It's the first time he wonders after her father, who owns the place and supposedly lets her live upstairs.
The first time he wonders how a few regular customers support the upkeep.
Looking is enough, mind you, but it's the first time he wonders if old-timer number two, who has the audacity to slide his "friend's" old chair close enough to prop his feet on in a show of not being run off, does more than just stare.
He misses a meeting to flip her open sign to closed, waiting with a patient smile as the old man shuffles out. Pegasus follows right behind him. It's getting dark, and she's dealt with more than enough of the wrong sort of male influence. It feels appropriate to go, but about halfway down the cobblestone strip he starts to think it was a mistake.
His entire being aches when he reads the obituary on Monday, tracing the unisex name on the page.
Her tears come back to him, their sheer brokenness an echo where Cecelia's concertos used to be, and he wonders for a split second, almost potently enough to go back two days in a row, if it's her.
He thinks about how he'd be forced to remember her, or she him.
Without a name.
He wonders if she still wants to be as such.
The following week he resolves to ask for it and doesn't.
Neither of them can say why – and both of them notice – but the thirteenth month of knowing one another suddenly leaves him more aware.
Maybe it's because he still hasn't forgotten old-timer number one's face, maybe it's because it's only gotten stronger with time, but Pegasus watches the windows for it while he nurses his coffee. And he notices. It's embarrassing, really. He considers himself a perceptive man and for thirteen months he's somehow genuinely missed the straying eyes lingering on his face through the door.
They don't come in, but they watch. They know.
Once he leaves he camps out on a bench four shops down, face veiled by a book, confirming. It only takes twenty minutes for a swarm of customers to appear. Not old timer – he checks twice – but several men and women he's nodded to as he passed them by. The place is fuller than he's ever seen it.
He frowns, refolds the newspaper unevenly, and drives home with too many questions.
The fourteenth month gives him hope it hasn't been this way the whole time. Faith is whining from the sling on her mother's back, matching red curls matted to her sweaty forehead. He sings Pretty Woman and her mother does a little spin through the laughter. It gets a laugh out of Faith too, and her laugh is one of the best sounds he's ever held onto.
When he gets up to leave, she catches his arm gently and tries to give him back half his tip.
"You always leave too much." She says. "Coffee is only three dollars."
And there's a twenty in her hand, pressed to his suit sleeve like her determined glare can serve as adhesive. He looks down at her long fingers and as she pulls them away several moments later, rewarding his smile with a frustrated sigh, she lets one trail the label on his wrist.
Designer.
Pegasus's tip is so meager in the scheme of his finances it's embarrassing. But anything else would be insulting, and even the twenty, judging by her reaction, is toeing the line.
"Until next week." He says, and neither of them knows it yet but her forgiving smile is a lie.
Pegasus arrives at the usual time, which in and of itself is a paradox since it changes every few months, and finds a crowd in the café. There are so many people he at first assumes the line is pressed to the door. But they're just patrons carrying drinks, chatting with too much emotion to be random stop-ins.
An unfamiliar man is behind the counter, dark hair streaked with silver, and Pegasus swallows his anxiety to try and alleviate it. He doesn't even have a name, like asking after half a person.
But before he even gets the nerve, most of the conversations stall, the shift in noise level is so jarring it lets the air out of his lungs. Things trickle back to normal in record time, but it's far too late to mask that he's the subject of too many people's curiosity. He orders the usual, to go, and doesn't feel bad about not lingering. He hears his name on the way out, likely from her father behind the counter, and can't bring himself to face the pain of looking back to confirm it.
He knows he should at least call back for the man to keep the change, but continues walking. Briskly.
The obscurity of San Francisco goes up in smoke. Every pair of eyes trailing him is a knife drawing blood from different points, by the time he makes it to the car, claustrophobic and unable to breathe, the blades have shattered. Thousands of fragments slice him open and write her ownership into his vulnerability.
He wonders how long she's known.
He wonders why she never gave her own name.
He wonders if he's making treason of her kindness by feeling he's owed it. Because whether this ruse was his first or hers, it was shared.
The words in his head are loud enough that he almost stays away, and he learns the following week that he should have.
It might not be betrayal, but it feels like it, and it isn't her last.
The following week he steps into Café Sophia for the last time. But he doesn't know it is an end and doesn't mourn it fully. Like everything else, it slips from his grasp quick enough to be gone but too slowly to take the warmth of its presence with it.
It's a little after two when he opens the door, eyes cast down, counting seams in the cobblestone path rather than the number of eyes making holes in his back. When he lifts them, one familiar face becomes two.
Tea Gardner eyes him with one part guilt and two parts determination, the rust stain of his past on her lips. Behind her, the eyes that leaked relief into the fabric of his suit jacket return to the inside of a coffee mug.
He understands everything, all at once.
Her father steps up to the register with a smile that might be tired, offers to take his order.
Pegasus thinks of the story of this place, wonders after its namesake, catches the note of failure on the word 'pregnancy.'
He tries to smile and remembers the face of old man number one, the shame of reading the same paper he read, and the deeper shame of needing it for the obituaries. Like they were the only things he could feel completely. Like the rest of the world was stuck in grayscale at forty or fifty something percent.
He wants to know how much of his life was leaked without his permission – fucked up – but can't ask that.
Because she won't look at him.
Why won't she look at him?
He wants to know if any part of this was real, if this man is her father, if Sophia is her grandmother, and strangely enough if she thought he looked her up, he had the resources to – fucked up – and a little whisper asks where the baby is. He wants to know that too.
His hands shake in anger and shame when Tea Gardner smiles at him and he can't wonder if she's well because that man is standing at the register, having offered to take his order.
That man never stood at the register while old timers one and two harassed her.
He never offered to take their orders – fucked up.
The hurt in his chest radiates, stealing his breath and making him light-headed. He doesn't know how long he's been standing here, but he knows that he needs to leave.
When he fumbles back to the car, he doesn't hear her quiet whisper of his name, like she's saying something she shouldn't be.
He doesn't cry for her, maybe because it would really be crying for himself. He doesn't have the kind of past he'd want for his daughter if he had one.
Fucked up.
Fucked up.
Fucked up.
Fucked up.
And he knows now that it's just an excuse but as he hugs the newspaper, thankful there are no suicides in the obituary, it crosses his mind.
He hasn't been right since she died.
He wonders if it's his pride that keeps him from going back, or if it's the right thing to do. He's never been great with social graces but he's never felt this lost in them either.
Daily he thinks about leaving the city.
Sometimes he thinks about paying off her school loans, calling up anonymously and lifting the burden. She'd know it was him, but it wouldn't matter.
Sometimes he thinks that's crossing a line and sometimes he thinks he owes it to her for being a lifeline, even if she didn't know it.
He finds a park to drink chain coffee and a therapist who tells him to keep the obituaries if he needs them.
He wonders if it'd make a difference to say he prays every day they're not hers.