"You don't want my help, do you."
His defeat hangs heavily in the air between them. She stretches out a bit further on his grey couch. Cracks a mint between her teeth. "Nope." She says, popping the 'p'. 'There is,' she notes mildly, 'a hole in my sock.' He sighs. She snorts and wiggles her toe, flashing her teeth at him briefly.
"What do you want me to say doc?" "We could start with why you don't want my help." He sounds tired. "Well it all started when I was 12—" "Weren't you 10 the last time you fed me that story?"
She rolls her eyes to the ceiling and fixes on the crimson fire alarm. 'I can stop coming here if it burns down.'
"Well excuse me, there's only so many times I can say it without getting it mixed up. Reconstructive memory. You did graduate, right?"
"I don't think you forgot." He says and sets his clipboard on the table between them. She could look if she wanted to.
She doesn't.
"I think," He continues. "That you like this. You like lying to me, watching me go round in circles."
"Aren't you going to ask me if I've lost any other memories?" She asks, ignoring him. "It's a side effect of my medication." "I asked you that last time." He says patiently. She smiles.
"Yet another reason to be concerned."
"When's the last time you've forgotten something? Don't give me that look. I mean really. When's the last time you've forgotten something?"
Her eyes slide from his, fixing on his ear instead. 'I could probably bite it off. I've seen it in movies.'
She bites her lip, playing her hesitation in a creased brow and a silence that pricks into them like needles. "I…" "Yes?" He says, sitting forward. "I forgot how damn useless you were." He sits back heavily, the old leather moaning beneath him.
"Fine. Fine. You haven't forgotten a damned thing. You never do. That's how you passed the bar exam, isn't it? You memorized everything you needed to, passed with flying colors, then stabbed one of the legal partners through the eye with a corkscrew."
She jerks up, swinging her legs to the ground—she knocks over her boots and leans forward, elbows on her knees. "Right?" She grins, gesturing with long, narrow fingers. "It was like, so wild!" she laughs and falls back into the couch. "Like, dude, why did you even have a corkscrew in your office?" she shakes her head. "Wild."
"You would never mix up your stories." He says softly, breaking the silence that had fallen in the wake of her harsh, jagged laughter. "Why do you like lying to me?"
Her eyes flatten and the illusion of humor falls off her face. She clasps her hands between her knees. "You didn't take the bait." She notes mildly. "I didn't." He agreed. "I laughed at blinding someone." "Does it bother you? Never forgetting anything?"
"No. His office had excellent acoustics: My laugh played well with him screaming."
He sighs. "You didn't laugh."
She grins. "How do you know I didn't? You think I'm lying to you doc."
"Because," He says. "You first tried to distract me from you lying by bringing up the…incident. Then I took the bait, which was good! Except then I said something you didn't like, so you waved the lying thing in front of my face again."
He shakes his head. "You can't keep doing this." "Sure I can." "People notice." He presses, leaning forward again—he's looking over his glasses at her now, earnest. "People notice when you try to manipulate them."
They're close. She could kick the coffee table right into his throat.
"Yeah." She says softly, quietly. She can see the darkness of her eyes reflected in his baby blues. "Yeah. People do notice when you manipulate them." Her lips peel back from her teeth, splitting her face in a display of bone. "You put me on a placebo, didn't you."
She sees his tongue roll over his teeth beneath his lips, bulging grotesquely beneath the white lights. He sits back, slowly. She leans forward, following him, and she isn't sitting anymore—her hands are on the table between them, and her spit flecks his face when she snarls: "Am I on a placebo, doc?"
"Security." He whispers and when her eyes widen and she lunges for him: "Security!"
The table crashes to the ground, the glass bowl of mints shattering. There's a shard in her foot when they drag her out, thick fingers around her arms and her boots abandoned in the office.
"What!" She laughs, as they drag her toward the stairs, stumbling and streaking blood behind her. "Did you think I was faking it! Did you think it was Narcissism?" "Get up!" One of the men snarls at her, and she goes limp and lets them wrench her down the stairs. Her knees hit every step.
"This was supposed to help me!" She screams, raw and high pitched.
"He can't help you if you don't want help!" A woman cries at her. She's protected by a thick glass pane and rows of pharmaceuticals behind her. There are people here, and they watch her with tense gazes. She remembers flirting with that nurse once, still early into her treatment.
"What do you know!" she roars and sinks her teeth into one of the knuckles clasped around her arm. He curses and shakes her off. She's flung through the doors. They swivel behind her. "Order number 69." Calls the automated response from inside, and someone goes to pick up their real prescription.
"Nice," she snorts then scrambles to her feet and runs. 'They're going to call the police. I'm going to jail for real this time.'
She laughs wheezily and uses a streetlight to swing herself into an alley. It's freezing, and bits of ice come away on her fingertips. She stumbles when she realizes just how cold her feet were, socks wet and feet numb.
She stumbles straight into the road.
She…she'd always had especially high 'cognitive' functions. Reflexes, memory, coordination: A real prodigy she was.
There's light in her peripherals. It's white, and she sees it before it sees her. Her head twitches toward it and the leg with the shard in it buckles.
Her knee hits the road. The lights see her, and the horn shatters the air with a bellow. 'Idiot.' She thinks and catches herself on a hand. Bits of the asphalt glitter beneath the headlights. 'You're too slow.'
She died kneeling.
(The bumper caved in her nose, maybe worse—all she knew was that every breath made her lungs feel heavy. They were filling up.)
Well, that was what it looked like. Maybe that was her punishment. A lie, for all the lies she'd told when she was alive.
('Can't they hear me? My hearts so loud.')
They thought she'd been killed on impact: she'd been dragged beneath the wheels instead.
('I can keep track of time like this. One beat. One second.' Her fingers twitch toward the sliver of light from beneath the truck. She can't feel her other arm, but she can hear it: the bone grinds and crunches as she shakes, trying so hard to reach.)
How humiliating. How could she let people think she'd died on her knees? Didn't she know the lineage of the lives she'd led before this?
("What are you doing, man?!" "I'm, I'm so sorry she came out of nowhere!" "It doesn't matter, go back! Maybe we can get her free!" 'No!' She screams with a rasping wheeze. A door slams and the engine guns. 'No! you have to wait for the emergency services!')
How…ironic. She'd had an entire life full of people trying to listen, and she'd wasted it. Now they weren't listening, and where did that leave her?
(She isn't breathing anymore, but she tastes the exhaust fumes thick in her throat. Her eyes burn but she can't feel the tears. Has it been 6 seconds already? No, longer. Her hearts slowing down.)
Perhaps the lineage should end here. It's not like she'll learn anything. What if she dies on her knees again?
(She's screaming. Can't they hear? The light is getting closer. It sounds like crunches and snaps and cracking bones. It's white and it's cold and she's furious. If she'd been driving, she'd have braked in time. If she'd witnessed, she would have made them wait for the emergency services. She was better than them. She was smarter than them. She was everything they were not.)
(She was dying. They weren't.)
(Her fury burns.)
Every death had ended in fire. A fire of the mind was…different.
(She dies, and she's pissed about it. Later, she realizes she'd bitten off her tongue: It was why she couldn't speak.)
What was later, if she was dead? The answer to that is simple.
(Her heart beats once. She counts every millisecond of the rush that fills her ears. It sounds like the ocean.)
Later, was when she woke up.
Sato was the most common name in Japan. Takano was the name of the woman across the street from the orphanage: she owned a Dango stand.
It was how Takano Sato had gotten her name. It was how 7 other children in her nursery had gotten their names too. (Dango Stand Takano had not appreciated the slew of rumors that came with several orphans taking her name.)
Sato was below average. Her eyes glazed over when she looked at the sky, and she couldn't run two feet before tripping on her heels.
Sato was good for one thing, though: The children liked to make her look into the sun, so they could see her brown skin turn caramel and her eyes, honey.
They found it fascinating.
They stopped finding it fascinating when a ring of red bloomed around her irises. They'd cried, come running to the matrons screaming that they'd blinded her: 'Its only a bit of coloring,' they were soothed. 'I'm sure you just didn't notice before.'
Sato started acting differently after that. It wasn't obvious at first.
She stopped tripping when she ran: instead, she ran until her legs gave out, with the frenzy of someone being chased. The children didn't find it strange: they thought it was fun! She was the best at tag, even when her feet bled and her eyes glazed and she stumbled and lurched like a drunkard.
"Why are you running?" One of the girls had asked her. "They're going to arrest me." Sato had replied in English. No-one else had heard, and the girl forgot.
A year later, Sato was 4. She'd fallen sick. The sick room was damp, sweat sticking your lashes together and filling the air with a stench like rot. She'd looked up at one of the matrons with wide, clear eyes. Clearer eyes than any other child in there, and for a moment the woman forgot why she was holding a wet cloth to the girl's head.
"What are you doing?" Sato asked. The matron, who was fluent in 3 languages, thought the girl must have picked it up from her when she wasn't looking. "I'm cooling your head." "My head is fine." Sato said. "But you have to check my heart, doc. It's ticking in seconds." "Go to sleep, Sato." The matron soothed. "That's not my name." She said and slept.
Sato liked drawing. She drew flowers, and trees and the Dango Takano gave them if they ran errands for her. One day, she started drawing a man without an eye. The matrons grew concerned: Was there someone like that lingering around the children? (He was wearing a suit. Everyone knew what the suits meant.)
"No, silly." Sato had said. She'd stopped speaking in English, but sometimes her Japanese slowed down to a thick crawl. "The blood is bright red, not dark red. This is a…fresh wound. An artery. It's important. I think I did this."
"What do you mean?" One of the matrons asked, kneeling next to her in the lush grass. There was a small area behind the orphanage with a fence they'd built themselves. They grew most of their food.
"He told me I wouldn't do it." Sato says, staring mildly down at him. Then the moment passes, and she draws him a flower in his pocket. The matron stares at her. They keep watch for suited men.
Sato is complaining of the ocean. "It's in my ears. I can hear it rushing." "Do you mean your blood?" Takano asks and makes her count the money in the tip jar. Sato is quiet for a long moment before she turns and smiles. "Yeah. Thanks. I didn't recognize it without the crunching."
Sato is becoming faster at sums, at languages, at everything. She outpaces the others easily and devours the books in the orphanage with a hunger. "Isn't there anything else?" She demands, in sharp, slick Japanese. "You could play with the blocks?" A matron offers distractedly, looking through an accounts book. Sato teaches the kids density instead.
They don't have any books on density. Dango Takano never graduated Highschool.
Sato isn't teaching herself. She's reteaching.
This happens in months.
It gets worse after that.
"I need more." She begs the matron that speaks 3 languages. "I don't feel right like this. I need to know more than this. I…I used to know more than this." The matron looks at her, Sato's eyes filled with tears like starlight, and her heart softens. "I know Hindi." The matron offers her gently.
They're only a week into her lessons when Sato becomes fluent. "I didn't teach you that yet." The matron frowns. "I know," Sato replies miserably. "Someone else did. I've only just remembered."
Sato remembers more things after that. Little things, here and there: how to braid a girl's hair in different ways, how to fold origami cranes and make paper boxes for the matron's to put their earrings in.
She remembers other things too. Like the property laws that help Takano keep her shop when the men in suits come knocking, rattling the woman's windows with metal pipes. "Who told you this?" Takano demands, clutching Sato's shoulders. When she doesn't answer, she's shaken until her head spins. "Who told you this!" "No-one!" Sato cries and wrenches herself free.
She doesn't like having her arms pinned. It reminds her of crunching bone and a thin, sliver of light she was too stuck to reach. "No-one," Sato repeats, when she's certain Takano won't grab her again. "I just remembered how much I hated that chapter."
It escalates when Sato remembers how to break a man's knee with a crowbar. He'd pulled her into an alley. "I was just going to ask you something!" He wails. His eyes are red and his teeth are rotting. "Maybe." Sato allows and wraps her fingers around the rusting steel. "But I'm curious if this will go the way I remember."
It does.
Sato is 5 and she won't stop checking her left arm. "Will you stop that!" A matron snaps at her, when she drops the basket of opened pea pods to clutch her arm. "I can feel it." She says. "I don't remember being able to feel it." The matron, fed up, reaches out and twists her ear.
Sato's teeth sink into the bone of the knuckle and she doesn't let go. She traps the woman's arm against her chest in an elbow—her other hand is pushing the woman's head down, forcing her prone even when the bite turns into gnawing.
It's a practiced motion. Why would a child know that?
The screaming rings in her ears long after she's pulled off and the children are crying and someone's pulling something thick out of her mouth and into a bag of ice. Sato sobs and sobs, and says she panicked with the honesty of a child.
A couple of hours later, she sees the blood between her teeth and realizes: 'I'm lying.' She stands on a stool, staring into the mirror above the sink. Water drips hollowly for what seems like forever (6 minutes, by the heartbeat.) and she goes through it in her head. Thinking feels slow, like moving through tar.
'I'm a child. I can't bite through bone. I can't bite through flesh. I should have left one of my teeth in her hand, at least.'
Then she looks up from her teeth. Her eyes are lavender.
She screams.
It's the same day. She dreams, and when she wakes up, she wonders how she ever could have forgotten.
'I never forget.' She thinks and knows it's true. Sato wanders for a long time after that. She spends hours staring at hands that were supposed to be hers. She spends hours looking at people with dazed, blank eyes. She stares at the sky because it's easier than looking at the unfamiliarity that surrounds her.
The matrons think she's in shock. They can't afford a therapist: the injured matron is suing them and others left after the incident.
They were understaffed.
Sato is 5 when the orphanage falls on hard times. She's 5 when she becomes a pariah. When she finally begins to fit into her skin again. (When the orphanage can't pay the protection fees anymore. When children start to go missing.)
Then, there's something trying to fit into her skin with her: It burns swathes in her mind with relentless lavender fury.
Sato wakes up on her 6th birthday and knows that death wasn't cold: it was scalding.
(A/N) For new readers, this is a rewrite of an older fic: I wouldn't recommend checking it out unless it's to compare 2 years difference in writing style. It's fairly interesting in that aspect.
For old readers...Thank you for the overwhelming support you've given me, and the interest you still show despite how I treated the last fic. It was honestly humbling to see the feedback for a rewrite, even after 2 years. I only hope to keep this interesting and better than the old one. :)