A tip of my hat to likeit. (Most excellent critiques, my dear. I am improved.) Heartfelt thanks to most excellent fanfic readers and writers for mountains of support. This crazy unicorn is humbled.
It was too much. Right now was too much.
Right now, too many things were passing back and forth through that shimmering membrane - the Looking Glass-Alice backwards reflection of herself and her own life behind which she kept these things. She had chosen to leave some things over there in the pearly blue half-light.
Right now there was her truth. There was his truth. The membrane was a belling and bowing. Cracks were going to appear. Then the things that were over there were going to flow unchecked to this side - a pool of tears. She'd drown in it all.
Sitting in his lap, she put her hands on his face. Told him,
"I have to run."
"Okay," he said, "I'm coming too."
//
//
Some people get into cutting when they're numb. Like young Regan Radcliff with her loneliness and her rage and her long ragged sleeves pulled down to cover. Or maybe they get into drinking, drugging. Or fucking, like Regan Radcliff's mother. Like lots of people. Eames gets that. One-nighters and hangovers and married liars.
She could have gone that way.
The body holds onto the memory of things that happen. It's how we can manage to do such complicated things with such ease - walk, write, drive a car. Play a guitar. Shoot a gun. Our bodies remember.
It's the same with trauma. The body remembers everything that happened. It's one of the reasons why people don't like to talk about it - talking is like remembering in action. And all the things that happened, the little details that are just right there, tucked inside the larger memory - all the sensory phantoms and spectral terrors, (hands doughy and sweaty, low smell of his breath, texture of upholstery fabric, sound of him breathing through his nose, colour of the sky), talking brings all these things back up to the surface.
Who wants that? Maybe some kind of masochist.
She might appreciate a little well-placed erotic pain stimulus now and then, sure. But Eames is no masochist.
Still, she gets it - the urge to relive it, feel it all over again. Then while it's right there at the surface, kill it. Kill the rest of anything that might be like really feeling.
At one time, this might have seemed like all she'd been left with. And because Eames is a good sport, she might have pretended it was something like fun.
But then, the miracle.
Now she wants something else.
//
When she gets stretched so numb inside that she feels like she might just need to cease to exist for awhile, instead of doing any of those things, she runs. She runs and runs and runs and runs. Running is free, and she can do it until she is unable to keep doing it. She can rest, then do it again.
She has an always-varying route in her neigbourhood. She likes best the run up the low, gentle hill to the top where that old ash tree is growing. She has to push it to keep her pace to the top of the hill. She thinks that the ash tree has been growing in that spot on the top of the hill since before the city was there. It's been growing there for that long. That tree will still be there after she in her grave, and everything she knows will be in her grave with her. The tree will stand, and she will rot, and that's how important all this shit is. She thinks as she reaches the tree and circles it, veering right and into the park. Running on the trail, running to the track for one measured mile, or maybe two, then back. I'll be dead and all this shit won't matter because it never did matter, and that tree will still be standing there. She thinks. It hurts. She runs until she can't think anymore. She runs until it hurts.
She runs and runs.
//
//
Not a jogger, he was waiting (near enough to see her running the track, distant enough for her to be alone,) leaning against the big tree, under cover of it's fresh green.
He stepped out to meet her as she approached, dropping her jog to a walk, cooling down.
"You okay?"
"Just a little out of shape. It's been awhile."
She walked around the tree once, twice, blowing, hands on hips. Circled the tree again, swinging her arms.
"These trees are in die off all over the world. Maybe climate change," he remarked. She gave him a long stare.
"You're sure? Brady for sure?"
He kept his gaze shifting from her face to the ground between them.
"Yeah."
She was unwavering. Kept walking to cool down, kept her golden eyes on him. Kept staring. Didn't look away. And he relaxed a little bit.
//
//
He was holding her hand, right there in the booth in the diner. Had pushed their squat diner coffee cups aside, plates, juice glasses. Was holding her hand loosely in his, thumb in motion. And right across the table, where anyone could see them. Anyone they knew could see them.
He looked different somehow. As though the last traces of what might have been his youthfulness had been rubbed completely away. Maybe she looked different too. Maybe nothing would ever seem funny again.
Eames is a disciplined person and she can usually decide what she will think about, and for how long. But this morning sitting in the booth in this diner, she was trying her hardest not to sink into the space between these two memories - when he was there, rubbing her feet. When he walked away and didn't look back.
He was there now. Looking right at her.
"Hey Alex," he said, and smiled. "I know who you are."