Author's Note: Let me know how I'm doing.
Back to Reality - Part 14
Later at night, when the couple was in bed, Snake Eyes couldn't sleep. He looked up at the ceiling and folded his hands behind his head and used them as a pillow. The bright effervescence of a cloudless, full moon night through a window, in the early hours of the morning, cascaded the room and all the furniture therein in a dim white and blue hue.
He turned and looked at the sleeping beauty that slept soundly beside him, and sighed deeply. He couldn't explain why, but he felt like he was committing a form of adultery and having an elicit affair with this woman, whom he was told was his wife. But he didn't remember the woman or the three kids they had.
The telephone conversion he had with Dr. Mindbender before he went to bed was supposed to assure him that everything would turn out all right and perhaps if he got a good night sleep, his memories might have time to reorder themselves and be restored. But it was almost five o'clock in the morning and he still had amnesia.
Very softly he slipped out of bed and put a robe on, then crept like a ninja in the night out of their bedroom. He found it curious that he didn't make a noise why leaving the room, as he tip-toed into the hall. It was almost as if he was inbreed with the ability, like he knew exactly how to place his toes to walk stealthy. But then he shrugged it off, and after closing the bedroom door quietly he made his way down a C-shaped set of stairs to the lower floor.
His mind raced with many thoughts, sudden bursts of images, fleeting just as quickly as they came, of things he thought he ought to remember. Was his memory trying to restore itself?
His stomach growled loudly, like a monster in the night, and he put a hand to it, feeling the reverberations of his insides moving. In all the excitement he had forgotten to eat today. Shana said the family had already eaten, as he had send he was staying late at the office that day, and if he was hungry he could fix himself something in the kitchen. But her suggestion was soon forgotten as he tried to reacquaint himself with his children. He knew how fragile children were, their mindsets weren't developed and disciplined like adults, and if you said the wrong thing to them, it would upset them. So, he had to play the part of a good and loving father to his kids despite not really knowing who they were. The only thing he had to go on was the photograph Billy had showed him in the car of his wife and kids, Clayton, Ralph and Hara. But why did those names ring a bell? He knew those names, and not because they were his kids names. He knew them from somewhere else.
Suddenly a series of jumbled images flashed in his mind, delivering a prick of pain as each one came. Everything came at him very quickly, and he felt his head, grabbing the wooden banister of the stairs with the other to settle himself, feeling disorientation and pain.
Snake Eyes. His name was Snake Eyes. But he knew that already. He liked to gamble and was lousy at it. But something didn't make sense about that name, however. If he liked to gamble and had that nickname, how could he afford this beautiful house? It didn't make sense.
He collapsed to his knees and grabbed his face with both hands trying to make sense of the images that had just bombarded his mind. Faces, places and events, all coming at him like a vortex of information filtered through a tiny computer memory board, crashing his brain.
One of the images was of Shana, but she looked different. She wore a skin-tight yellow jump-suit and her hair was shorter. There were other images of Tommy and Billy, but they looked different: Tommy wore a mask and Billy wore an eye patch over his right eye. Maybe he was remembering a past Halloween where everyone dressed up, he thought.
He got back on his feet and as quickly as the pain had come it disappeared, the images no longer plaguing him. But the feeling, the emotions of those images, were still present, and he felt something was wrong, that something in his life was missing.
Whereas he should've turned right to get to the kitchen, he instead turned left and came to a closed door at the end of a long corridor. He blinked a couple of times to retain focus and looked back from which he came. This was obviously not the kitchen.
Still, he opened the door, and saw that the light was on inside the room. At the far end of the room was Tommy, sitting on the floor in what looked like a lotus position, meditating. From the equipment and floor mats, the room looked like it was used for exercise.
Tommy opened his eyes and saw Snake Eyes. "Can't sleep either?" he said. And Snake Eyes opened his mouth to talk but then suddenly realized he had left his Digital Voice Box, that allowed him to speak, on the bedside table in his bedroom. Instead he nodded and then walked over to him. "You left your DVB upstairs, didn't you?" And Snakes Eyes nodded. Snake Eyes used his hands and gestured to Tommy, indicating a question. "I'm mediating," he said. "I don't know why, but it's helping me focus my thoughts. Wanna join me?"
Snake Eyes accepted his offer, but thought skeptically that it would do any good. He sat down and got into a lotus position, crossing his legs over the other, and rested his hands on his knees, with his palms upright, following Tommy's example. Tommy was impressed. "You seem to have done this before," he said, and Snake Eyes shrugged his shoulders. "I don't know about you, my friend, but I have an eerie feeling that there's something wrong here. Oh, and thanks for allowing me and Billy stay over for the night. I appreciate the hospitality."
Snake Eyes smiled thin and mouthed, "Anytime."
Tommy read his lips and understood.
--
Slice leaned his chin on his hand, balancing his right elbow on the edge of the computer console, and watched Snake Eyes and Arashikage meditate. He yawned, and then scratched a finger across his right temple.
Cobra Commander and Firefly had given him night duty to watch the unending feed from the game. But he was having a hard time staying awake with no action to watch. The two protagonists in the game were having trouble sleeping, and it was so boring.
He wanted something exciting to happen, but the Commander ordered him not to interfere with the game matrix or something unexpected might happen. But he was having a difficult time focusing on anything else than inserting them into a life-and-death scenario. "This is so boring, I need something to do," he said out loud, turning his chair around to look at Kamakura resting, still shackled to the wall. "What if I beat you up some more, that'll keep me going." But the ninja didn't answer. Though Slice didn't expect any answer to his rhetorical question.
He swiveled around in the chair and looked around the warehouse. Other than a dim overhead light and the glow of the screen, the entire place was dark. It was sort of spooky, but he had never been afraid of the dark. While most kids had night lights, he embraced the void. He liked it. There wasn't anything in the dark that wasn't in the light.
He decided he had had enough boredom and turned back to the computer console. As long as he didn't disturb the main program things wouldn't go wrong and the Commander and Firefly would be none the wiser. So he thought for a moment, and then interacted with the programming code and inserted his own brand of entertainment.
"This is gonna be so fun!" he said, giggling in an extremely excited manner. Then hit ENTER.
-- tbc