Arc V

Chapter XLVII

The Ties That Bind

"Why should you particularly like a man who resembles you? There is nothing in you to like; you know that."

Charles Dickens ― A Tale of Two Cities

Everything happened so fast. The name covered his skin like fresh mud, and it quickly contaminated his entire anatomy. Before he could even understand what was going on, the young woman closed the door behind him, secluding the shaken cowboy inside the limits of a borrowed identity and an alien house that were now welcoming him as a crucial factor in their story. Still trapped inside the girl's tight embrace, the cowboy tried to look over his shoulder and his impatient gave him away. The awkwardness of his gesture was equally generous and obvious. She broke the embrace with a delicacy he had seldom seen before, then brushed his shoulders gently before stepping back and giving the puzzled man some well-deserved space.

As the woman examined him with curious eyes, the cowboy did the same. It was strange for him to be able to find pieces of her in that incandescent face staring back at him now. He feared, even if only for a brief instant, that she might notice.

The girl tilted her head to the side, ever so slowly, as a timid grin began to curl up her lips. She looked shy, even moved by his presence.

"It's really you…" She whispered, moving closer to the nearly petrified man. "You may not remember me but I do remember you." The girl took a step back again and walked towards the small living room, beckoning the man to join her. When she sat on the old olive couch the gunslinger finally obeyed, taking a seat on the lonely armchair by the window.

"I'm Lily, Alex's youngest cousin," she introduced herself, even if in her mind she was only reentering the life of someone she had known back in the day. "I was only nine when she went missing; I can't blame you if you don't remember me," she said, toying with her own fingers; her hands now resting on her lap.

All of a sudden, visual contact seemed forbidden for both strangers.

The cowboy nodded in silence, looking away instinctively.

"What brings you back to Fillmore after all these years?"

Unable to provide her with an answer, Black simply shrugged his shoulders, trying to protect his fragile alibi composed only by silence and bewilderment. His conscience was screaming at him that he couldn't just inform the girl that Alex was sitting on the car right across the street – this was an unparalleled chance for him to test the waters and see what was waiting for the doctor.

"I was in the neighborhood and I… I just knocked," he offered, "force of habit, some might say."

Even when he didn't know a thing about that family or about the man he was supposed to be impersonating now, his own past was still resonating all around him: he knew how to walk in those seemingly foreign shoes, knew what it was like to return to a place he had once called his own; knew what it was like to try to summon the memory of the one he had loved the most. It couldn't be that hard, after all, he pondered. It was only going to feel like an alien déjà vu – like the memory of something he had never truly experienced. Only he had experienced it, millennia ago, in a world that didn't exist anymore.

As Lily stopped playing with her own clumsy fingers, a bittersweet gesture took over her delicate features: she hadn't lied to him, she could still remember him; the young and desperate man he had been twelve years ago, in the inconsolable quest of finding his missing woman. She was just a child back then, yet the vivid image of that young man, so in love and so desperate to know… she had felt a great deal of respect for him back then, even inside the innocence of an uncorrupted child's mind.

But she wasn't a child anymore. Twelve years had gone by.

She knew she was supposed to be cautious. If he had been wandering around Fillmore until he found himself knocking on her door, the past and the present could merge into a thin veil of nostalgia and regret.

"And what's with that hair now?" Lily asked, livelier than before, trying to breathe some life into that somber space they were awkwardly sharing. "It's really not your style."

Black – now Nate – smiled tenderly as he raised both hands in a defensive stance and they both laughed for a brief moment until silence encompassed them again.

"Can I offer you a cup of coffee?" She asked timidly, already standing up and walking towards the kitchen. When a simple 'yes' escaped his lips, Lily froze in place and turned around, her hands at the sides of her waist.

"That voice… I guess you never quit smoking, did ya?"

It had been one of Alexandra's most brutal tasks, Lily remembered: to get him to give up smoking for good.

An amused Black offered her a mischievous smile as the young woman entered the kitchen. If only she knew her long-lost cousin was a smoker too now… When the sounds of cups and silver spoons began to caress his ears, Black stood up and walked around the room, trying his best to learn every detail, every single secret that house could offer to someone like him. The walls were covered in pictures; children and adults, men and women… and the smiling faces of an old couple.

Now he understood her beauty.

Nature had graced her with her mother's eyes; a deep, rich blue resembling the quiet ocean. The bonfire of her hair, exactly like her father's, completing the equation of her entire existence.

But the lonely picture resting on the wooden cupboard caught his eye. It was the only picture in the room exposing the whole family, the three of them together and happy: the doctor, her mother, and her father. When he heard footsteps approaching him from behind, he tried his best to regain his composure and act natural, grabbing the book that was carelessly placed on the same old battered cupboard.

Emile Durkheim's Selected Writings.

Lily cupped his hand in hers, squeezing gently.

"Sociology…" he whispered, yet the girl only nodded once. She took the book from his hand only to put it back in its place. Then her fingers hovered over the picture, finally releasing the man.

She held the photograph for a moment, nervous fingertips clinging to the metallic frame.

"It was a shock for us…" she began, her voice a mere whisper, "when you didn't attend their funerals."

She didn't want to sound reproachful; she knew he had tried his best to detach himself from the memories of a past he could never recover. Still, her weakened voice traveled the space between them, caressing his ears with such overwhelming sadness.

"I didn't know," it was all he managed to say.

"My mother tried to contact you," she remembered. "She said she left you a message with your secretary when Aunt Rosie died. But you never came. Uncle Robert died only four months after that, but most of us were so mad at you that I couldn't tell for sure if they even tried to contact you when he passed."

He was at a complete loss for words, already thinking about the woman waiting for him in the car right across the street.

"That was two years ago," she added. "I moved in a few months after Uncle Robert…" The lump in her throat was making it impossible for the young woman to go on. She let the picture rest where it belonged yet Black grabbed it again, holding it in his hand.

"I'm so sorry," he found himself whispering, his eyes unable to leave the image of that happy family, smiling back at him.

"I like to think they're together now," Lily whispered, placing her hand on his shoulder and guiding him back to the quiet living room. Their coffees had grown cold yet they both drank them anyway. Then silence, once more, stretched itself around them and impregnated the whole room.

It was taking too long. Alex was still waiting outside.

"I'm sorry about your father," Lily breathed, breaking the silence with her heartfelt condolences. "I read about him in the newspaper."

Black nodded pensively, trying his best to keep up with the scene yet it was intrinsically hard for him to play the part of a man grieving his father. There was no emotional memory for him to hold on to; only questions and regrets, and a profound feeling of injustice.

"Can I use your bathroom?" The man requested, looking for an excuse to leave the living room. He wanted out, he needed out, yet he still wasn't ready to face the doctor waiting outside. He needed a moment to process all the information he had received: he needed a moment to think about the future, to reconsider their chances. Lily nodded in silence and tilted her head to the side, indicating the familiar stranger that the bathroom was upstairs. Then she laughed, nearly soundlessly, as she remembered who she was talking to: there was no need to tell him where to go – even if time had taken him away from their family, he had been there a million times before.

The man knew that house like the back of his hand. At least, the real Nathan did.

But Erron Black didn't.

He went upstairs, just as he had been told, and the small corridor greeted him with a warm, yellowish aura as the sun outside struggled its way through the thin, green curtains. A moment alone was all he needed, but the second door to his left compelled him to stop.

Alexandra

Her name, handwritten on a piece of wood shaped like a white cloud, was still hanging on the door. He took a deep breath and opened the last gate secluding her past. Pink, an old and pale pink, sun-kissed by yesterday's sun was still the color of the walls. The small bed, the lonely desk, the old TV… Pictures, hundreds, maybe thousands of them. Her books, her music, her clothes. It was all a hurricane of pieces of her – pieces he had never seen before, pieces he had never dared to imagine.

Her parents had kept her old room intact and the room - the whole room - had become, in exchange, their box of memories.

He sat on her bed, overwhelmed by the feeling. He was meeting another Alexandra: the one before him, the one her parents had lost forever. He thought about her now; the one after him. The one who had opened his sacred box of memories without his permission, the one who had met the man before her.

They were part human, part memory.

They were their own boxes.

"When you moved out of the apartment you used to share with her, Aunt Rosie took most of her stuff back home and tried her best to put everything back in its place," he heard Lily whispering nearby as her slender figure came to rest against the doorframe. "Mine is a limited type of independence, as you can see. I live here now, by myself, yet I can't seem to bring myself to make this place my own."

He didn't look over his shoulder to meet the warm look on her face but he admired her sense of honesty and her commitment to her family, to the ones she had loved and lost… His hands reached out and caressed the beautiful photograph resting on her petite wooden nightstand – boyfriend and girlfriend, together forever in the paused universe of that picture.

They really resembled each other, he reckoned. The same color of their eyes, the same jawline… But at the same time, they were so different. So intrinsically, irrevocably different.

Unable to see the obvious connection between them, Black focused his undivided attention on Nathan's face with eyes about to rain. He could fully understand Nathan's pain; he could still hear the echoes of his own voice in the shape of that young man.

A man who had lost the woman he loved. A man who searched but never found what he was looking for. A man lost in a sea of questions no-one could answer. A broken man.

"Can I keep this?" Black asked. His eyes, unable to leave that picture; his fingers tenderly caressing her image as if trying to summon the one she had been before him.

"Sure," she said. "Are you sure it's not gonna cause you trouble back home? You know… with your wife."

A piercing pain invaded his chest and there it stayed, as he finally realized there was no one left for her to hold on to.

"I see her around campus from time to time but she never says 'hi' – sometimes I wonder if she doesn't remember, or if maybe she feels it's better this way," Lily went on, her voice softer than before. "I even saw your kids a couple of times... She's a professor there; they even say she's really good," she looked down, unable to hide the tears any longer. "Maybe she thinks I hate her, you know?"

He didn't know what to say.

"You have a beautiful family, Nate," she finally said, mustering her courage. "Your boy looks just like you and your baby girl… god, she's so lovely…"

He stood up and wrapped her up in a tight embrace. Even if she was just a stranger and he was nothing but a coldhearted mercenary, her words were the sad lyrics to a song he knew too well to pretend otherwise, a song of loss and defeat. He broke the embrace little by little, giving her enough room to wipe her own tears.

"Maybe she feels like she doesn't belong in this family," he finally offered.

"And what about you, Nate?" she asked. "Do you still belong to this family?"

Tongue-tied by her straightforwardness, the man planted a soft kiss on her forehead and then left the room in silence. The girl understood his missing words, sheltering her shivering figure in their ethereal truths. Back in the living room, she walked towards the cupboard and handed him the other photograph: the one with their broad smile; the one still talking about better times.

"You should take this one too," she offered softly and he accepted it, a quiet grin taking over his face.

"Bardsdale cemetery," was all she said before walking him to the door.

Her parents were dead. And her boyfriend was now somebody else's husband. He was a father. Ironically enough, he had fathered two children. The same amount of children she had chosen not to have.

Black thanked Lily on his way out, his chest still assaulted by that indescribable pain. Outworld had never felt like home but Earthrealm was not home either and, sadly, that cruel notion could now be equally applied to both the doctor and himself.

He took a deep breath as he made his way back to the car.

They were their own world now. Part human, part memory. They were their own boxes.