It's the Return of the Much-Longer-Than-Planned Chapters! *cue scary theme music*
Also, whew, sorry about the drought. I do regret to inform you that there will be another of indeterminate length after this one as I continue attempting to overcome my writer's block, but hey, at least you know what's going on this time. And hopefully the extra length of this chapter somewhat makes up for the wait. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. Let me know what you think!
The second night after Mary, he has a dream.
It opens on Juliet, sitting at her kitchen table, eating a bowl of soup. The bandage is off her forehead, but the cut is still quite visible, and her arm's still in a sling. He himself is nowhere in the dream; just a nameless, faceless outsider. But he's also the reason she's crying.
It takes him several seconds to realize that she's not actually producing tears; he just somehow has a clearer view into her heart than he expected. He wants to reach out, offer a hug, an "it's all right," but he can't figure out in what sense he's actually present. He has all his senses about him, but he has no body with which to do the sensing.
He tastes the soup in his mouth—noodles. Thai. He's never liked Thai, always considering himself more of a Chinese takeout man. But Jules loves it. She always has a stash of prepackaged soups for whenever she's not feeling up to actually cooking something. He feels the softness of her robe on her shoulders, smells the spicy aroma of the soup wafting up and around.
He's seen her take only a few bites when the doorbell rings. She sits there for a moment, staring into her soup, and he feels her trying to decide whether to answer it. Suddenly a name pops into her head, and it's his, and even though she knows that if there were news, she'd get it immediately via phone call, that thought doesn't really register with her until she's already halfway to the door.
She slows down before she reaches it, but continues without hesitating. Once she pulls it open, Arashk is unsurprised but at the same time overwhelmed to see his best friend standing outside.
He's wearing his navy pullover over his light blue pinstriped button-down and both his hands are stuffed into the pockets of his grey slacks. He has the air of someone who isn't really sure exactly what he's doing here, but knows it's the place for him to be. Arashk can easily picture him coming home from work, lying on his couch without changing out of his dress clothes, staying there for half an hour, getting up, and just throwing a sweater on before heading right back out.
Juliet wipes her dry eyes with the back of her good hand and puts on a small smile. "Hi, Gus," she says. "How are you?"
He gives a wry smile that reads About as well as you. "Guess I just felt like I needed some company. You doing okay?"
She shrugs. Of course not. "It's just been one of those days. There are things to do, and I do them, but…" She trails off. Gus understands. "I was just eating, actually. Do you want to come in?"
For the first time he removes his hand from his pocket, putting the off-white cast encasing it on full display. But all his fingers are free, and his hand seems to still be more or less functional. And with the hand comes a small package. A Ziploc bag, containing five or six chocolate chip cookies. "Dessert's on me."
Arashk feels himself smile on some plane other than a physical one. He can't be there for Jules, but Gus is taking care of her. They'll be all right until he gets back.
He watches as the two of them get out the materials for Gus to make a sandwich, and then sit and eat together, making light chitchat between almost-comfortable silences. The two victims of both his capture and his quest to free himself, helping each other through it. He listens to Gus's critiques of the commercials he saw while channel surfing as he ate breakfast, and Juliet's newest story of Lassie's tactlessness when he was talking to some trainees the previous afternoon. It's all perfectly normal, and mundane, and for just a few minutes, all is right with the world.
Until he realizes he's waking up, and with that realization comes sudden full consciousness and awareness, and he lies there staring at his ceiling, the reality of what just happened coming to him in a single unforgiving rush of realization.
Arashk sits up, panting, thinking maybe he wasn't really asleep and was just vividly remembering that conversation, only there's no way he could have been there for it because he wasn't present in the scene and it clearly happened very recently, or maybe even hasn't happened yet, or—or—
He rubs his arms, runs his hand through his hair, puts his head in his hands, sits up straight again, rests his head on his fist, gets out of bed, gets back in, tries six different positions, and finally realizes that he's not going back to sleep at any time soon.
However, he also resolves to try his hardest to do so. Time to think is exactly what he doesn't need right now.
He spends the next two hours replaying the content of the dream in his mind while successfully barring himself from considering its origin or implications. It's a very plausible scenario that it laid out, and therefore pretty easy to accept as something that actually happened, and it's the first legitimate near-firsthand update he's had on these lives that are so dear to him in way, way too long.
Arashk falls asleep eventually, and the dream replays throughout the night, sometimes starting and ending at slightly different times but never varying in its details. It's the most peacefully he's slept in a very long time.
The fourth day after Mary is the first one they don't have a show. They spend most of it on the move, as they have another show coming up in just a couple of days a few states over, so Arashk has a lot of time to kill in his room.
They've had only a handful of days like this since he showed up, and he's hated all of them. There's very little with which to fill the long hours. Typically he eats a lot of snacks, rearranges his furniture in eight different ways, and plays a little bit on the three handheld video games the Master gave him after his second show. They're old and cheap and he gets bored with them quickly, but he must admit that they are better than nothing. Slightly.
Shortly after he mentioned to Livia that he hasn't got much to entertain himself with, she started letting him borrow her books. They're mostly classical novels—she says her favorites are To Kill a Mockingbird and Pride and Prejudice—and he's not able to pin them down for long enough with his short attention span to actually read any of them from beginning to end, but it's nice to have some books lying around that he can skim if he wants.
At one point he was given a thick pad of paper and a few pencils as well, and though he's never been much of a drawer, he's done a lot of doodling on days such as these. One time he even produced a halfway decent rendering of Juliet's face. He suspects every day that he'll come back to find it's disappeared, but until that happens, he hangs it above his dresser with a push pin he borrowed from Sebastian.
In times of high energy, he's taken to doing some exercises, like halfhearted pushups and jumping jacks and laps of rapid pacing back and forth across the room. In times of low energy, he can nap with the best of them.
But on this day, the fourth day after he felt something he absolutely could not explain, he finally has time to himself and the option to think about it. This occurs to him about three minutes after he rolls out of bed, as the echoes of last night's dream are fading from his mind. There's nothing for him to be prepared for, not even a reason to get dressed. He doesn't have to choose clothes for himself or head to his tent to decorate its interior. Today's breakfast and lunch will be out of his mini-fridge. He heard yesterday that they're going to stop for dinner.
There is quite simply nothing else worthier of lending thought to.
"All right," he whispers. This is important enough to have a conversation out loud with himself. Not that there necessarily has to be an important reason to talk to himself; he's been doing it a lot in the last several days. Though he's found that he can't get too loud, or he'll bother his neighbors on the other sides of his moderately thin walls. He can hear one of them talking fairly clearly right now, if he listens—on the phone with his brother, catching up. At the moment they're talking about his niece, who just entered kindergarten.
Maybe he should try to keep this one in his head.
Possibility one: he was, for reasons he can only guess at, drugged. Given… some kind of hallucinogen. He sighs immediately. So, either Mary didn't mind or didn't notice that he was saying stuff that didn't make any sense, she and all clients before and after her were figments of his imagination—because he would have had to have been affected for the majority of the workday—and he was sitting alone in the tent tripping balls for hours on end, or… he wasn't drugged.
He gets up from his perch at the edge of his bed and starts pacing, running a hand through his getting-too-long hair and chucking that middle option out the window. What he heard in that tent… Mary confirmed it. If he imagined that voice, he imagined her responses too. He has seriously no clue why the Master would want to drug him on a workday, but he has no clue why the man does anything that he does.
Arashk's head is already starting to feel a little clearer. This is much better than pretending it didn't happen, even if he still doesn't understand the first thing about it. Possibility two: He is… genuinely losing his mind. He gulps. He's been called crazy his whole life, and came to own the label. This kind of crazy though… this is something different.
He pushes these thoughts away. He must stay practical and focused. And (fortunately?) a lot of the same problems with the drug theory are applicable to this one. Mary's presence and input rule out a lot of possibilities.
Unless… this is all a scam?
No. None of it makes sense. There is no logical reason anyone would slip him something to alter his perception of reality, hope that his hallucinations manifested in the form of psychic visions, and plant an innocent-looking old lady among his clients who has been told to go along with whatever he says.
And… he's been drugged before. Only a handful of times, and he knows every drug affects you in a different way, but… he can't imagine any chemical compound making him feel how he did in that tent. While his skin maintained more or less the same temperature, his bones felt like they were frozen solid. His muscles stopped working. His heartrate went down—or would have, but given his panic at the moment, it actually remained pretty much constant.
And that voice… he heard it, but not with his ears. So… he didn't hear it?
"How does a person pick up a voice but without the sense of hearing?" he asks his empty room, and immediately regrets it, but fortunately there is no answer back.
A quick run through the other senses later, he comes up dry. So it wasn't any of the five traditional senses. Not that that makes sense (har har, he thinks), but whatever. Which means… it was another sense. Totally illogical. Isn't it?
But there are also the dreams. One night it was Juliet and Gus, but when he had a nap during his lunch break the other day, he saw Lassie being called into Vick's office. She told him to go home, that she had nothing for him for that day. He argued, of course; she came back with a reminder that she was in fact his superior, he said he was worried about his partner, she asserted that Juliet would have to work through this on her own and so would he. Eventually he relented, and on his way to the parking lot called home to tell Marlowe to be ready to go out to lunch.
They talked about him directly, if briefly. And Arashk knows they used his real name, but by the time he woke up, all his brain could supply was "O'Hara won't talk about him anymore."
Sure, he could slip into idiotic denial and say there's no reason to believe these dreams have anything to do with reality, but the fact is, his dreams have never made any kind of sense until these last few days. They were always chaotic amalgamations of thoughts and feelings and experiences of the day, many of which he couldn't even recall by the time he went to sleep, all tied together with whatever flimsy thread of a "plot" his subconscious could come up with. This is completely different.
It's not even just that; since Mary, every time he imagines what everyone back home is doing right now—a practice that has become very frequent in recent weeks—it feels less like his own choice, and much less like guesswork. It's like… rather than suddenly wondering, of his own volition, how Dad spent his evening, a memory pops into his head of seeing the man having dinner with Mom and trying to think of things to talk about other than their son, but slipping into retelling stories from his childhood and pretending not to notice the tears in each other's eyes.
"I know what I felt," he whispers, and blinks, surprised at his own locution. But it's true.
He felt death.
He sighs, and takes a seat. He knows what lies ahead, barring unexpected developments. It's just that he's not ready for it—not yet.
That's enough theorizing for the day, he decides.
He needs more data.
The conversation with himself helps. He's basically made the decision to be at peace with not having all the answers yet, and while there's a definite itch in the back of his mind that is going to grow the longer he doesn't know for sure what's happening to him, it's bearable for now.
It's almost 12:30, and he went back to sleep right after breakfast and only just got up again ten minutes ago, and he's spent the entire time sitting on the edge of his bed, going back and forth between pondering whether or not Lassie-face has admitted yet to missing him and glancing incessantly at an empty space at the end of his dresser. He can't figure out why the latter keeps happening, but it increases in frequency as the minutes pass, until he's full-blown staring at that dresser corner, trying to figure out what's missing.
It's at this point that there is a knock on his door, and he looks up in alarm. He doesn't get a lot of visitors, but no news is good news. He stands up, crosses the room, and peers into the spyhole in the middle of his door.
Smiling blue-grey eyes look back at him. He stands still for a moment, registering surprise, and in the lull she calls, "Arashk? It's Livia."
He unlocks the door, and pulls it open to reveal his new acrobat friend. She's wearing a grey sweater over a white tank top with blue jeans, and her hair is pulled back into a ponytail. She looks very comfortable, and is holding a couple of grocery bags.
"Hey Liv," he says, putting on a smile.
"Hi," she says, offering a smile of her own. "I was just in town and… well, at lunch the other day you mentioned again how bored you get on our off days, and then the Master mentioned this morning how you don't like to go to really public places because the visions get overwhelming, so it was on my mind… so while I was in the store I picked up some things." She holds the grocery bags up a bit higher to demonstrate.
His head is spinning. He suspected it before, but this is pretty solid confirmation that he is not at any time allowed to leave the location where they set up camp. At least this time the Master was gracious enough to provide him with a reason to give to people when they ask. "Aw, really?" he asks, eyeing the bags and actually feeling some excitement as he considers what might be inside. "You shouldn't have."
Her smile widens. Arashk stands aside, saying, "Please come in," and she steps over his threshold.
As he closes the door behind her, he realizes that he's never had a visitor in here who wasn't the Master or sent directly by him. Part of him hopes that she'll notice the stark nature of his room and get suspicious or at least worried, while the other part is certain that whatever the Master told her will have that covered.
"I wasn't sure exactly what you might like, so I went pretty generic," she says as she walks to his bed and places the bags on the spot where he was just sitting. "I know my novels aren't exactly your favorite things in the world."
"Well, I do understand the appeal in some of them at least. Darcy sometimes sets even my heart aflutter."
She laughs. "I'm glad they weren't a total waste." She removes something from one of the bags, and turns to face him. It's a box—a 500-piece puzzle of an image of a bowl of fruit. "There were a couple other pictures to choose from, but this one seemed classic enough."
"Any pineapples?"
She blinks, and examines the box closely. "Uh, no."
He gives a barely perceptible shrug. "That's a shame. Did you know they're the international welcome fruit?"
Livia shakes her head. "I did not."
"They are. They are also nature's yellowest form of sweet goodness coated in only the spikiest of armor to protect their precious interior. However, apples are fairly worthy as well. Just not as badass."
She's smiling widely again. He pretends not to notice, and just keeps going, enjoying hearing his own voice (especially without that fake accent—it's really been bugging him lately). "I do very much appreciate the sentiment, and will tackle this puzzle challenge with all of my faculties, but I should warn you that the last time I put together a puzzle was probably before the turn of the century. I was a damn good puzzler, but the number of pieces I worked with never rose to the triple digits."
"Well, if this proves to be too challenging, I brought a couple other things," she says, and starts to reach into the bag.
"Yeah, the sketchbook, nice close-up of a pencil tip on the front." He waits expectantly for a fraction of a second, and then suddenly realizes what he just said.
He catches Livia's first words—incidentally, they're "That's one thing, yes; you said at some point how…"—but after that they've faded so far into the background it's like they're only reaching him through water. He slowly and almost unthinkingly makes his way across the room and lowers himself onto his bed next to the bags.
How did he know that? Did he see it through the slightly translucent bag? He looks to his left to examine it. No, he couldn't have—and how did he even know which bag it's in? He puts his head in his hands.
By this point it's fairly obvious how he knew. But he's still not ready. Not yet.
Livia's presence is gone from his side, and after a moment he realizes that she's gone silent. Her last words suddenly echo in his head, though he doesn't recall hearing when she actually said them: "Arashk? Are you all right?"
He looks up. She's standing by his dresser, and her feet are facing towards it but her body's turned in his direction. Her eyes are wide and concerned, and suddenly more of what she was saying is processed in his brain: "I'm not sure just how much you draw, but don't worry, it was just a few bucks… I do notice this picture though; it's quite good. Who is she? …Arashk? You okay?"
He shifts his gaze to his drawing of Juliet that hangs above his dresser; clearly it's what she was looking at. Even as he does this, his brow furrows in confusion. Processing something that you heard or saw a few seconds after the fact isn't so unusual, he knows. But in this particular instance, the duration of that which he processed with a delay was… impressive.
"Well," Livia says after a pause. "That's that, I suppose. I should probably go practice, there's a new move the Master thought might be neat to try to be show-ready by the time we reach Springfield, so…" She heads for the door, and looks back one final time. "Take care, Arashk."
She sets the puzzle she still holds on the corner of his dresser, and leaves the room, closing the door behind her.
He spends the entirety of the next day, their first at the new site, guessing the first name of every other person who walks into the tent. The ones he gets wrong, he seamlessly plays off as a joke, and everyone responds with a polite chuckle and moves on.
But he gets a good thirty percent right.
It's far more than is reasonable to expect, and the first few times freak him out a little. He has at least some basis for a lot of his guesses; if they remind him of someone he knows, or has seen on TV or even met briefly, he goes ahead with that name. But naturally, when he turns out to be correct and looks back on his thought process, he finds that there was none. A name just popped into his head, and he went with it. And at first, thinking about where that information could possibly have come from makes his mind work so furiously and desperately that it nearly grinds to a full halt. Which turns out to not be so conducive to convincing fortunetelling.
But as the hours crawl by, it becomes easier to just trust his gut, and less surprising when it turns out his gut did not steer him wrong. And it's not just with the names.
The first time he registers that information that turned out to be correct really came from no logical source whatsoever is with a twenty-year-old girl named Dana who was a contestant in a statewide speech competition, having only just been eliminated in the semifinals. There's no reason that he can find just by looking at her to come to that conclusion, but when he allows himself to say it—very slowly and tentatively, reading her facial cues—she immediately confirms it to be true.
He puts on a serene face, but inside, he's losing it.
The thing about his readings is he's never had any capacity to tell people for certain anything about their futures, so with the people who make it clear they're there for more than to be impressed at what he knows, he has to come up with some vague platitude based on what he can figure about their pasts and presents. If he acts intense enough, they don't question him, and the Master's never said anything about people being dissatisfied with the amount of information or advice he gave them.
Now, though… things are changing.
When a middle-aged man called Jeremiah comes in, Arashk immediately blurts on seeing him, "Don't go to the store tomorrow!" The wisps of undeniable truth swirling around his mind are dissipating before he can get a solid picture of why he's said this, so it's a bit difficult and Jeremiah himself cuts the reading short when it becomes clear Arashk is grasping at straws.
As he walks out, Arashk realizes that even though he never confirmed his name, he finds it quite difficult to convince himself he could possibly be wrong about it.
The thing about noticing more than he can explain, especially when he's still not quite come to terms with that even being possible, is that it exhausts him. He closes the line around the end of the second hour, promising that he'll reopen in five minutes, but ends up giving himself fifteen.
What he accomplishes in those fifteen minutes is about five minutes at the beginning and end sitting in one of the bean bag chairs and breathing deeply, and five in the middle pacing around whispering fiercely to himself, "Listen, the Master's biggest concern is not the quality of your readings. Don't know what it is, but it's not that. As long as he has no reason to think you're trying to get away or cause discontent or concern, you should be fine. Do what you have to to figure this out. Take small risks. Act like a lunatic, but a confident lunatic. Can't learn anything new without doing anything new."
It's six clients later when he not only is able to tell a man that in two days he plans to go hunting with his brothers, but hears the gunshots like explosions in his head, that he loses the will to continue seeking alternate explanations as to what's happening.
All right, he's a freaking psychic.
He lies awake that night, staring upward, going back and forth between not being able to convince himself this is such a big deal, and being mildly concerned at how hard that convincing is turning out to be.
A psychic.
Sure, considering his line of work and the constant lies it entails, he's asked himself on multiple occasions whether he really believes in all this stuff. His answer is generally along the lines of not really, but he'd be open to believing given solid evidence. But… this kind of reaction goes beyond the cushioning provided by having casually considered it being potentially conceivable to be reality for someone other than him.
Why am I taking this so well?
It occurs to him that he may be experiencing disassociation. Or maybe the psychicness has been coming on gradually, stealthily insinuating itself into his subconscious so by the time it surfaced in a big way, he'd already be, on some level, used to it. It almost actually makes sense.
He tries to think of any possible reasons for this to happen. Just completely out of context—when do people in the movies become psychic? After sustaining some brain injury, usually. Awesome. Only problem: the last time he can remember hitting his head with any force was five months ago when he fell off a chair trying to reach his favorite cereal from the highest cabinet in Gus's kitchen. He can't imagine there would be such a delay, although he admittedly is not as much of an expert on this kind of thing as he would have the entire precinct believe.
Now, when he was first taken… they did drug him. He distinctly remembers checking himself and finding no bumps, nor does he have any memory of hitting his head—not that he has any memory at all of the actual kidnapping, but that's beside the point. But there's still a possibility that he took some kind of damage during the incident that may not have left a mark, but still could have hit him just right in whatever part of the brain that's in charge of this stuff, and turned on some ability that's been very gradually climbing into the limelight ever since.
He sighs. None of this makes any sense.
When he first told the police department that he was psychic, he said he'd had it all his life, but his father had for some reason gone with the story that he hadn't really come into his abilities until he was eighteen. Could that possibly be what's happening here? He's simply growing into it? He's never heard of anyone "growing into" anything at his particular age, but nobody exactly has this topic down to a science. What if… what if he really was psychic his entire life, but it just manifested in really small ways, allowing him to notice the right things at the right times? That's a weird thought. He's not sure if he likes it. Maybe these abilities were just in the incubator up till now, and with all the stress of the situation, not to mention the sudden necessity of actual fortunetelling, they've finally become usable?
There's something about this he doesn't like. It's too convenient. Mere weeks after being kidnapped by a guy who seems to want nothing from him but his alleged psychic prowess, he actually develops psychic prowess? This isn't just some sudden coincidental development in his life that lines up with a case in a weird way; this is in his head, and he's heard dead people dammit, and it changes way too many fundamental aspects of his life and world view that he should have been able to count on.
His mind has always been his haven, his greatest tool. He's proud of its level of functioning, he's constantly entertained by it and loves using it to entertain others, and in the various times of his life when he's needed an escape, he could withdraw into it and be safe there. Now? He doesn't know what kind of new corners and facets may be in store for him. And all this on top of forgetting his name…
Screw it. He has a headache—hardly surprising, considering—and he's exhausted, and maybe if he manages to sleep tonight, he'll be able to see Juliet again.
