A/N: I meant to write lots and lots of fics in the hiatus, but then it didn't happen—so, apologies. I felt inspired to write this, though, and I hope you all like it :)

Her life is good, and centered, and balanced…and she smiles sometimes with the corners of her lips tight and knowing, a smile of someone who's dealt with a lot of crap (because she has), but who's past it now (because she is).

She wonders, though, if her life is a little less good—centered—balanced—because she spends so much time thinking about how it is, how it must be…

…all despite the whisper in her mind.

The whisper's been there as long as she can remember (maybe longer?—ah, but there it is again, with another of its nonsensical suggestions). It's an insistent hum in the very farthest depths of her mind, flitting unbidden to the surface now and then to sink invisible claws into something or someone in her life.

Once it was the shoelace she keeps round her wrist. The whisper was a howl, that day, and her wrist seemed to burn—and she heard snatches in her thoughts of a lilting voice and tortured eyes…and she snatched it off and threw it in her nightstand drawer, couldn't look at it for days.

But it's around her wrist again, because she can't shake the feeling that it belongs there.

The whisper's moved on, anyway. Sometimes it's about Henry, about the way he cuts up his food…so differently than she does, knife and fork in different hands, though they're both right-handed—

Sometimes it's his name. Henry, Henry, Henry. It's a good, strong name, and it fits him, but she wonders why she chose it. It doesn't seem like her. When she rifles through her remembrances of his birth, wide-awake once at midnight, she doesn't find any record of why or how…there's nothing.

Nothing but the whisper.

She forces down the whisper as best she can, and sometimes she thinks she's mastered it. But the whisper's tricky, and it starts up again when there's a knock at the door that is terrifyingly not quite unexpected.

And a rather violently handsome man in black leather is standing there looking like "it is the East—and Juliet the sun"—but she's no Juliet, and she's never, ever seen him before…

And he's speaking to her the next moment, in a lilting voice that is not the one about the shoelace—no, this is different, but it makes her very fingertips ache with memories that she knows she doesn't have—and then he kisses her.

The whisper's a roar, now, and she's so very terrified because he's crazy, absolutely crazy, but maybe she is too—

So she kicks him out quite literally and slams her back against the door and wonders if the whisper has been her heartbeat all along (because that's what's pounding in her ears now).

And it isn't just a shoelace, now, or some such object…she's what the whisper's latched onto, and it won't let her go…

Is she trying to remember herself?

She can't—won't—doesn't—

But she can't forget that she's supposed to.