Chapter 7: Dim Half-light Dawn

-Present Day-

Walking into the lobby of my apartment building I wave at a neighbour as she leaves to walk her dog; her dog ignores me, I tripped over him once and he's never forgiven me. I make my way towards the elevator and hit the call button, waiting the few seconds before it reaches my floor and dings as the doors open. I lean inside, press the button for the third floor and then the close button, and then leap back.

The beast stalls a few seconds longer before the doors begin to close. The minute they're firmly sealed I take off, running to the stairwell and hopping up the first few stairs until I hit a rhythm of two at a time.

I enjoy racing the elevator. It makes coming home from work more enjoyable.

Only when I'm getting home though, I've learned that in the mornings when I'm half asleep I'm not always coordinated enough to run down the stairs.

That may or may not be the reason the dog hates me.

I'm stepping out of the stairwell just as the elevator dings that it's arrived, and, puffing out a few breaths, am standing in front of it just as the doors open.

"Beat you today," I chirp to the empty space before walking down the hall towards my apartment.

When I reach my door I shift my bag on my shoulder and dig around for my key; I can already hear Hobbes mewing at me from the other side of the door. When I find my key and open the door he slips into the hallway and bunts his massive head against my leg.

"Hey, mister man, how was your day?" I ask him, watching as he threads between my legs and leads me back inside.

Instead of answering politely he waits until I've closed the door behind me before yowling obnoxiously loud at me, demanding attention. His eyes glare at me unblinkingly from where he sits a few steps away, tail thumping impatiently against the floor.

"What'd up, Hobbes?"

He yowls once more before marching away. He doesn't bother checking over his shoulder, he knows I'm going to follow.

My cat leads me into the kitchen, where I smile at the sight of his up-turned water dish. "Chasing shadows again?" I ask as I pick it up and go to refill it. He sits patiently at my feet, watching silently as I rinse it and refill it for him. When I put it back down next to his empty kibble bowl he stands and daintily begins drinking.

Following his lead I open the fridge and grab a bottle of water, drinking from it as I move around the apartment. I hang my coat up properly in its place on the back of a kitchen chair, dump my work bag on the coffee table, and flip on the radio.

Dancing back to the kitchen area I scoop Hobbes up off the floor and dump him on the counter as I set at making dinner for us. I bought one of those already-cooked chickens from the store yesterday, so I'll finish that with some salad, and cut off a few chunks to add to Hobbes' kibble for his dinner. My man is a spoiled prince.

Hobbes is a pretty ridiculous-looking cat, to say the least. The vet says he's mostly an Orange Maine Coon with a bit of something else thrown in; I usually tell people he's a miniature orangutan.

He's pretty chubby, but a lot of his size is just fur – like an orangutan. He's got long fluffy hair that makes him look ten pounds heavier than he actually is, though he is pretty hefty. He's light orange, with an all-white belly and darker orange patches on his back that make it look like he has giraffe print. And his ear, all four feet, muzzle, and the tip of his massively bushy tail are all white.

I say ear, because it kind of looks like he only has one; he's got a big chunk missing from his left ear. He's a rescue cat, so I don't actually know how he lost part of his ear, but he seems to hear perfectly fine.

His eyes are all yellow like they're supposed to be except for the bottom right corner of his right eye, which is blue. He's like those dogs, Malamutes? Sometimes they have two different coloured eyes. Hobbes is kind of like that, except the eye that is supposed to be blue got confused and is mostly yellow except for the one quarter.

Mostly he's just a big, orange, fluffy beast. And, like an orangutan, he likes to climb. On everything. If I hadn't lifted him he would have found a way to come and join me at the counter anyway, and probably end up breaking something in the process.

He paces back and forth a few steps before settling down to watch me – on the other side of the sink, not the part I'm standing at. I let him do as he wants most of the time, but I'd rather not have cat hair in my dinner.

I flick a piece of chicken at him before moving everything to the microwave. While it's cooking I get myself a drink and the rest of the salad from last night. When the microwave's done I drop some of the pieces of chicken into a bowl with his kibble and set it down for him and then take my own food and go sit on the couch.

I swear it's like Hobbes inhales his food most of the time. In the time it takes me to sit, turn off the radio and turn on the television and find something to watch, Hobbes is already finished and jumping to sit on the back of the couch behind my head, purring loudly in my ear as I eat and hoping I give him more food. My man is a spoiled and very demanding prince.

Hobbes and I have our regular after-work routine we tend to follow day in and day out. After dinner we'll lounge on the couch for a little bit, then I'll let him out on the balcony to glare at the birds while I open my laptop and do some work things. Once it starts to cool off I go for an evening jog, and when I get back Hobbes is usually asleep on some piece of furniture he isn't supposed to be on – on top of the fridge or the television, in the sink, places like that. Then its shower and sleep. Then get up, get ready, go to work, and do it all again. Rinse and repeat as needed.

During my run tonight I try very hard not to think about what Drew and I talked about during lunch today, but it's no use. I've been working at the labs for five years now, and though everyone knows Grant got me the job initially, I moved up and made a name for myself on my own. And it seems like everyone also knows that Grant has a thing for me, and either pity me, envy me, or are disapproving of me because I ignore each and every one of his offers.

Grant is a flirt, with everyone. But for some reason he has this fixation with me and won't let it go. I have no interest in him; something inside me makes it feel like he rubs me the wrong way whenever he tries to get close to me.

Drew is right, I would be damn lucky if I ended up with Grant. But I can only just stand him most of the time.

I stay out longer than usual, running until my head feels as clear as its going to get and my body feels like it's buzzing with energy. I'm tired, my breath coming in short little gasps, but I feel good. I like moving. I like dancing and running and moving. I have all this energy and sometimes it feels like the only way I'll calm down is if I can move to the beat going on inside me.

I wonder sometimes if this is a recent thing, or if I was like this before the accident too.

It's late by the time I get back, finding Hobbes asleep in the bathroom sink. He squints at me as I enter the room and turn on the lights, yawns, and re-curls himself into a tighter ball.

"You are the strangest cat ever," I tell him as I strip down, sighing contentedly as soon as the cool water hits my overheated skin.

When I'm finish and dressed in my sleep clothes I pick up the sleeping beast and move him onto the counter so I can brush my teeth. Immediately he begins batting the toothpaste lid across the counter while I scrub at my teeth. Then he chirps at me and bunts against my free hand, wanting attention. I pet him a few times, but have to shove him to the side at one point so I don't spit toothpaste on him.

Hobbes follows me out of the bathroom and runs ahead to beat me into the bedroom, jumping up and curling into a sleepy ball at the foot of the bed.

I'm so glad he hasn't learned yet that the pillows are the most comfortable part.

I gasp, sitting up in bed and breathing heavily. The blankets are twisted around me and my body is covered in sweat. My heart is pounding repeatedly against my chest, trying to break free so it too can run and hide.

Everything is black around me; it takes a few minutes to adjust to the darkness of my bedroom, and a few more to calm my breathing down to a normal pace.

There's no warm body pressed against my feet, I must have been kicking out and forced Hobbes off the bed.

I get really bad dreams sometimes. Not, not nightmares exactly, but vivid and confusing dreams that leave me almost shaking when I wake up. I stay sitting up for a few moments longer, willing my heart rate to slow, before swinging my feet over the side of the bed and getting up. The floor is icy against my bare feet as I pad into the bathroom, intent on getting an aspirin. Dreams always mean bad headaches.

I don't bother turning on the light, I just move through muscle memory. Open the medicine cabinet, grab the bottle on the end, pop the top and dump a pill into my palm. I reach for the spare glass I keep in here, fill it and toss back the pill. Then I make my way back to bed, crawling back into the warmth of the blankets and pillows.

The dreams are always the same. Things from my past, things I'm able to remember when I'm sleeping but that slip away as soon as I wake, leaving me feeling empty and longing for a way to hold onto them.

Some stick better than others, a house with a big front lawn and massive tree, a sea of nameless faces that should but don't have names attached, a football field with blurs of moving red. Stages, where I can feel the heat from the bright lights beating down, the sound of laughter and splashing in a pool in the sun, the feel of a hand tugging mine.

They're all there, the memories. They're all still inside my head. I'm just trapped from reaching them; there's a gate blocking me from getting too close to them.

They, the memories locked inside my dreams, they're the reason it's been five years and I'm still alone. They're the reason I push Grant and anyone else trying to get closer than friendship away. Because the dreams haunt me, taunting me with my old life, not letting me move on. The emptiness inside my chest, preventing me from being happy, isn't because I chose to forget. It's because I can't remember. It's because I can't remember as soon as I wake up.

The worst one is the singing. The music, the songs, the voice in my dreams. It's the same one from when I first woke in the hospital. In my dreams the beauty of the melodies leaves me breathless, but as soon as I'm awake I can't remember who is singing or what the lyrics are. Everything fades as soon as my eyes open. I can feel it, right there and tugging at my heart, begging me to remember, but I never do.

I know the voice is important, that it belongs to someone close to me, that their words are sung for me and me alone. But I can't remember them. Their face and the words they're singing are as clear as day when I'm asleep, with coy smiles and loving looks and a gentle tugging for me to come back to them. But as soon as I'm awake the words dull and blend together so I can't make them out. As soon as I'm awake the face blurs, smudges so I can't see them anymore.

The dreams don't come every night, but they come often enough. The dreams – the people and places and things inside them – are trying to help me remember who I am. They don't come every night, but when they do, they leave me curled in a tight ball on my bed, wishing I could remember.

When I get to work the next morning, Drew is already in my office.

"Why are you using my computer?"

"Mine broke," he answers casually, not looking up at me. "I.T. hasn't made their way over to look at it yet."

"You know there is a whole room full of computers to run your sequence tests on, Drew?" I ask as I hang my coat up and slip on my lab coat. Drew, of course, isn't in his. I enjoy wearing mine; Drew on the other hand only wears his strictly when necessary.

'Why wear it if you're sitting at a desk all day?' he asked once. I said it was about the principle of things. He just rolled his eyes at me.

"I know, but yours already has everything I need."

He's sitting at my desk, so I stand at the other side, hands on my hips. "And what am I supposed to do?"

He shrugs, "Not my problem."

"Move, Drew. I told Davis I'd try to have those new colony growth projections ready by-"

He waves me off, "Fine, fine. Send me away. I see how it is. You're just jealous your brain isn't near as big as mine."

"You mean my head," I say as he gets up and I drop into my chair, "My head isn't near as big as yours." I look away from him and at my screen. He wasn't even working, he was playing Minesweeper.

"You beat my high score, didn't you?" I growl, narrowing my eyes at him.

He smiles sweetly and plops himself down into the spare chair on the other side of my desk. "I smoked your high score, actually."

I click the little icon to display the high scores. My name fills spots two through nine, his name sits above mine in first place, his time significantly faster than my highest score. Damn it.

I glare at him again and he smiles his dopy, happy smile, long hair falling in front of his eyes. "You can't stay mad at me, B. I know you can't."

"This is for the mayo thing, isn't it?" Of course it is.

"Of course it is," he answers.

"You know it will take me forever to win enough times to wipe your name from here?" I ask him.

He shrugs, smiling innocently.

"I hate you."

He waves my comment off again, "You love me." His eyes light up suddenly, "Oh hey, did you hear the big news?"

"No," I say, mentally scrolling through my calendar to make sure I didn't miss anything important today. "What?"

"Some big head honcho corporate guy has a meeting with the Duncan's today," Drew answers, spinning to one side and then the other on the chair. Usually people's personal lab rooms have a wheely desk chair and regular chair for someone they're meeting with to sit on. Drew and I only have wheely chairs in our rooms; we switched them out a few months ago. It was a whole stealth operation, replacing the swivel chairs in two of the private labs one floor above with the ones we didn't want in our office.

We had to do this with five other rooms near mine and his office though, so no one would suspect it was us, obviously.

"What?" I ask him, wondering how this is relative to me.

He elaborates. "Some guy is coming by. Grant and his father are apparently signing with him in some investment partnership thing – I'm a scientist, I don't know the bureaucratic details." He smiles wickedly, "But I do know we may be getting the labs retrofitted."

I let off an energetic fist pump. "New equipment!"

"I think you are missing my point though," Drew says, looking sweetly at me.

I don't like that look at all. Especially on Drew. Drew is a scientific genius, but he's also a conniving evil genius. "And what's that?"

"Head honcho corporate guy is probably going to want a tour of the place before he signs anything."

"Drew, this point is still not pointy."

"Grant's probably going to be the one giving him the tour."

I blink a few times, understanding immediately. "Shit."

"Yeah." He sounds almost sympathetic. Almost, but not quite. More like he feels bad but is also very much enjoying my pain.

"Damn, he's going to do the stalker thing again," I whine, pushing away from my desk and spinning my chair to look out through the glass window into the hallway, half expecting him to be standing right outside my door.

"B, he isn't stalking you."

And the argument from yesterday starts right up where it left off. "He won't leave me alone," I insist, spinning to face him. "He keeps trying to date me and I keep saying no so he just hangs outside my door and stalks me. He's stalking me, Drew. Stalking me."

"Whatever you say."

"As your superior, I order you to go on lookout and warn me when he's coming."

He gawks at me, clearly not expecting me to say anything remotely similar to what just came out of my mouth. After a few seconds he frowns stubbornly, "You're not my superior."

"I've worked here longer. And I'm older." Now it's my turn to shrug, "It's close enough. So you, lookout, now." I wave towards my door, "Tell me if he's coming."

"And what are you going to do if he comes? Hide?"