Anna is often the first thing he sees when he wakes up in the morning. Mornings in Karnaca are often cool, with the tawny sparrows chattering away and the dust-filtered light slowly crawling past the closed curtains. Sometimes he awakes in that hazy light blue world, where morning is just on the cusp of arriving, but more often than not, it's her hand on his shoulder that brings him back to the world.
"Good morning," she tells him gently, and when he's sufficiently cognizant of his surroundings, she gives him a quick embrace. The momentary pressure soothes him, and his body relaxes in her presence.
He calls her name softly, and she's always delighted when he does. Did she expect that he would never learn her name? How many more of those hidden expectations were there?
She lets him know what day it is, as if he'll remember, and he's glad for it. Then, she prepares his cup of tea for him, chatting to him about this and that, and listening to him respond in kind. She waits until he's ready and aware to begin the day with a change of clothes and a shave. Afterwards, they have breakfast together. It's highly unusual, but she's found that he is uncertain without environmental cues. He prefers a light breakfast, and she takes a heavier one.
Some days, he remains disoriented, and he cannot express how unsettling the feeling is: it's as if he woke to a world that's slightly off and incomprehensible. His words don't work correctly, and he can't focus on anything. On those mornings, she holds him close to her and sings a few simple songs to him. Sometimes, he stays in bed, unable to bear any sudden sensation, and other times, he takes the day slower than usual and spends much of it being held and chatted with.
This morning, however, he can grasp the world just enough to move in it. On his morning walk, he and Anna travel a little farther than usual, as the notebook fills up with its daily record of the plant life. Anna stops periodically to point out a new plant or emerging mushroom, and she helps him make a record of it in a special notebook just for walks. He's always amazed at what appears, and revisiting his notebook gives him a point of reference for the next day.
Farther down the path, on the outskirts of the city, they're met by the open, white mouths of the morning glory sprawled through the undergrowth. Tucked away from the bustle of the city, the patch of earth is quiet. Quail and chukar partridges shuffle through the shadows, pecking and bobbing. The grouping of skeleton flowers, peeking from between the ferns and the damp, decaying leaves from last year's fall, are still translucent from the morning rain. It's an unusual flower to find in Karnaca, and if he'd asked Daud, he'd have learned whose hand put it in the earth so many decades ago, though not in this particular spot. This grouping had slowly but steadily migrated across the patch of curated earth, its smuggled rhizomes slowly multiplying and spreading across the soil. Scattered throughout are grey fallen branches. if there was once upturned earth here, it has been claimed once again by the aggressively advancing life. (Oh, but the end must come. That's only the way of things.)
He's been here before, he's certain he's been here before, but nothing tangible comes to mind now. It's a small, residual pain.
Anna points out the mushrooms on a dead log, their caps staggered like shelves. A grasshopper climbs among them, its tan legs twitching and stretching in the cool breeze. How curious that there was an order beyond him, a secret order to the natural world. Black ants scout the area, dipping into the deep crevices of the log. Minuscule green eggs hang onto the underside of milkweed leaves, while aphids graze. How curious, how curious.
He's not sure what he's watching anymore—it simply fades from his mind again—but he's holding Anna's hand as the tall, pale, and feathery grasses shake off moths.
He glances at her, piecing together the scene again.
"Ready to go back?" she asks, as she bends towards him.
He lets her bring them back to the city.
When they return home, he's tired. Anna settles him onto the sofa, putting aside the pillows and bringing out a folded blanket to cover him with. He leans back into the softness. He thinks of the garbled thoughts in his mind, analogous to crumbling static, as the Too-Much Time, and he welcomes the quiet darkness behind his eyelids. The rhythmic clicking of Anna's tatting shuttle soothes him: he can tell where she is by the sound of it. The clicking pauses, and the cover adjusts itself around him in careful, gentle movements. Fingers squeeze his, before brushing away some hair from his face. They linger, as if she wants to kiss him goodnight on his forehead but decides against it.
Before she leaves him to rest, she turns on the audiograph to play a music recording. The orchestra seeps around him: he doesn't know if he falls asleep—he never knows now—but when his mind begins to clear as much as it can, he opens his eyes.
Movement in the kitchen piques his curiosity. There's a maid there—a new one in her late twenties with dark hair neatly pinned back as she chops fresh strawberries. Does he know her name? He studies her closely from the hallway for any sign of what her name might be but finds nothing.
Why is she there? Where is Anna? Maybe he's woken up in a new house. That wouldn't be good. He doesn't know how to find his way back home now. Will the new woman be angry with him? He's very afraid that she might be.
As if she can hear the scattered fragments of his mind, she pauses, frowning in consideration of some thought. The knife lowers onto the grooves of the cutting board. Her dark eyes widen a little when she spots him—fear or worry?—but she quickly recovers.
"Hello," she says softly. "You're awake. I'm the new hire. Would you like to help me with the jam?" She gestures to the quartered strawberries.
He tries to hold onto the the most important words—awake, new hire, jam—and from there, make some sense from all of it. His head is stubbornly opaque, though, and he just stands there, uselessly.
"It's alright," she says, and he realizes that a choice has been made without him understanding it—a little pain of fear and confusion alights in his heart. The world is moving too quickly again, receding from him. No, no, no, it wasn't supposed to be like this. Not again. "You don't have to help if you don't want to.
He doesn't even know if he would have liked to help her—he's not sure what she's referring to. The fear stretches inside him. How quickly everything returns to how it was.
Something moves across her face—pity? Confusion? Nervousness? Perhaps, she's not sure what to do with him. He's painfully aware of how different he must seem to her. He doesn't want her to laugh at him.
"Do you need something?" she asks, not unkindly.
"Anna?" he replies, hopefully. He wants her to be there now, and to tell him what's going on.
"She's washing the floors right now," the new maid says, "but she'll be done in a little while. Would you like to stay with me until she returns?"
He twists his fingers in thought.
"I could... make you something warm to drink while you wait," the new maid continues.
That sounds nice. "I would like that," he replies.
Relief shows on her face: she was anticipating something—but what was it? It remains a mystery to him.
"I'm glad," she replies, as she reaches for the kettle. "What kind of tea would you like?"
She presses two tins into his hands to choose from, and dread fills his heart. The labels—can he puzzle them out? What if he gets it wrong and she laughs at him? A dim memory of being in the mines—near the mines?—almost resurfaces. There had been a letter… it's no good.
He sets himself to deciphering the labels, now more than slightly nervous. This feels like a test he's about to fail. "Rose… rose and…" he reads aloud to himself, trying to keep each word in focus. "Rose and hib… hibi… hibiscus… rose and hibiscus…"
It's so difficult to read the words, so different from reading his own notes, but he has to try. (His notes, as Daud discovered, are taken in an archaic shorthand practiced in some parts of Serkonos. A product of self-study.) He wants to try. Right, he's got one tin deciphered. The next one is…
"Orange… bloss… blossom… blossom... orange blossom…"
Now, he just has to hold these two different labels in his mind and decide. What would be an easy task for her is exhausting for him, but he doesn't want to give this up. He can't.
"Please, the orange blossom," he says to her and hands her both tins.
She smiles back at him. "Of course. Would you like to sit down while you wait?"
"Please," he replies. He's exhausted again.
She pulls up the stool from the corner of the kitchen, and wipes off the dust with the corner of her apron. "Let me help you," she says, reaching for his arm, and after a moment of hesitation that's laced with a dread he cannot name, he lets her.
He settles beside her, and she gives him a smile in return.
"I'm Sybil," she tells him.
He repeats her name, feeling out the syllables.
She smiles again at him, but this time, an unmistakable ease has crept into her form. Her own worries have been settled by something. (He'll never know that he's at the center of the most popular rumors in Karnaca. It went that the Clockwork Mansion had changed hands because he had met the Outsider during one of his unholy experiments; the experience had left him much gentler but also hopelessly mad.)
"Anna says you like to paint," Sybil says, as she heats up the kettle. As she waits for him to respond, she resumes her chopping.
He watches her instead, transfixed by the chopping. "She helped me pick the colors," he replies haltingly, thinking of the beetle in the hallway. Instead of being a static thing, the lines waver, as his thoughts do, and the creature is poised between stillness and flight, caught between two states.
Sometimes, as he lifts the brush, he feels as though he has already done this before, already painted these lines, and it's a jarring thought, as though he's fallen into an invisible groove, damned to repetition without resolution. But then, Anna is there to reach for his hand and remind him what he wanted to do. Sometimes, he tells her how frightened that feeling of repetition makes him, and she gives him a quick hug to soothe him. He doesn't understand why she does so: she's not the one troubled by these suspicions, but he's grown to accept it.
Once, he found her sobbing her heart out in the tall grasses. She'd tried to hide her tears from him, wiping them quickly as they came, but eventually, she'd confessed that she'd been crying over a dead dog in the street. It would often greet her on the way to the market, and she'd grown to love it. Kirin hadn't understood why she had been sobbing over it—all things must die—but he'd recalled what she'd done for him and patted her shoulder in a facsimile of reassurance.
"You're a sweet thing," she'd told him, her eyes bright and her face flushed.
Back in the present, or at least, what passes for it, Sybil stirs the bubbling jam, as the sugar melts into the fruit, lemon juice, and pectin. She sets aside a few spoonfuls in a small bowl to cool. the rest will be ladled into jars and canned. Kirin, in the meantime, has gotten lost in his own thoughts again, periodically murmuring asides to himself. He doesn't see the way she glances at him from time to time, just to check that he's not addressing her.
He dreams of wonderful marvels, caught up in their moving intricacies. They fade and dissolve into sea foam the longer he pursues them, but that doesn't mean that they never existed. Beside him, his tea has gone cold.
Sybil separates a small portion of the cooled jam to the side and scoops it up. She tries the jam, checking if it's too hot still, if the consistency is good. She nods with approval. "Mmm," she says. "I think this jam is quite good. Here, try some."
She pulls out a fresh spoon and setting the jam onto it, offers it to him.
He startles, his thoughts disrupted. He tries to get his bearings again. He's... in a kitchen; there's a maid he doesn't know. It might be afternoon from the sun. Weariness fills his heart. How many times has he done this?
She repeats her offer, concern in her dark eyes.
He's nervous again. He's afraid she'll be angry with him if he doesn't want to try it right now. A strange thought alights in his head that she will hurt him—why else would she be so close to him?—and that is simply the order of this new world. He doesn't brace for this blow that never comes.
He shakes his head, and she nods in understanding.
"It'll still be good later too," she tells him with a gentle squeeze of his hand.
He stares after her as she returns to jam-making. Was it really that easy to be a person? He hadn't expected her to accept his answer, rather he'd expected to hear how he didn't really know what he wanted, how difficult he was being, how people like him shouldn't be free to be around ordinary people. He's not sure where any of these thoughts have come from; he doesn't think they're his.
He glances back at her a few more times (and she pretends not to notice), before he decides that she is, surprisingly, not angry with him. It's not that she's decided to humor him, seeing him as a poor little addled thing, but rather that she recognizes that, even after everything, he's still his own person, with his own wants and preferences.
He settles back in his place, pleasantly bemused by this turn, and spotting the now-cold tea, tries some of it. It's lightly floral, a whisper of summer and the Serkonian orchards to the west.
It's wonderful.
They fall into a familiar routine: after lunch, Anna helps Kirin into his painting smock and then, they select the paints. Then, he sketches and paint. It's one of his favorite times of the day, and knowing that there's a part of the day assigned to this joy comforts him with its consistency. He might not be entirely sure where or when he is at every given moment, but that part of time, at least, is accounted for.
He's found that he wants to continue painting, and he has his brother enroll him in one of Karnaca's new art projects. These are some of the multi-pronged approaches of the Duke to renew Karnaca: public murals, art installations, grants to include illustrations in new books, tree-planting and natural habitat restoration to prevent the dust storms, and more. Under the guidance of Lucia and Hypatia, expansive social welfare programs are constructed and rolled out, helping to alleviate poverty.
Karnaca begins to flourish again: trees and small shrubs are planted hold back the dust storms, the ruins are torn down to provide free and low-cost housing for its people, the oceans are conserved, the silver mines are carefully managed with limited quantities extracted under stringent conditions.
His brother moves down to Karnaca soon afterwards, transferring to the Karnacan branch of his company. Another room in Kirin's house is filled, and his brother spends time with him as well. It's a new dynamic, removed from his brother's pseudo-parental one, but it's an easier one for them.
One day, his brother takes a day off to take him to one of the festivals around the city. His brother and Anna take turns holding his hand and guiding him through the brightly colored, noisy marvels. His brother buys him some candied almonds to snack on as they explore the festival. From time to time, his brother and Anna check in on him to make sure he's not overstimulated. Eventually, they come to the carnival games: the strength tests, the brightly colored balloons,
Anna pauses at one of the high strikers, and pays for a go out of her own pocket. She picks up the oversized mallet, and surveys the strength chart. Then, carefully, deliberately, she swings it down.
The bell rings out as the puck shoots to the top.
She grins back at them. "I've lifted a few pots in my time," she says.
She collects her winning trinket, a thumb-sized figurine cast in plaster, and rejoins them, smiling.
This is only the first of his many forays back into the world. Every few weeks, he, Hypatia, and Anna plan out any excursions: local events, plays, concerts, community classes, festivals. He takes a bookbinding class with Anna, and through he can't remember much of it, he produces a charmingly bound, blank book with her help. He'll take it down periodically to marvel at it and trace a finger down the spine. Sybil teaches him how to garden, which ends up working out to her doing much of the work as she chats to him. (He sees the same inexplicable fondness in her face as Anna's; it baffles him to no end but he grows to accept it.)
Not everything is so enjoyable. His periodic lapses in consciousness return, and the first time he finds himself on the floor and staring at the ceiling, his head more muddled than usual and an intense unease in his body, a sinking dread overtakes him. Everything must come home in the end, it seems. But he could have done without these reminders that his brain damage didn't go away.
He's afraid to find Anna crouched over him. He doesn't want her to know about this, doesn't want her to grow angry and resentful towards him over something he can't control.
But she doesn't.
She only covers him with a clean towel, strokes his hair, and quietly talks with him. He can't focus on her words well; he knows she's telling him something, but the words refuse to register. Staying next to him, with her hand on his shoulder, she speaks with Sybil about something. He can't catch any of the words. He's afraid he's entered some new horrible state of noncomprehension, but the longer he rests with her, gradually the words start to make sense again.
She waits with him for a half-hour, until she's sure he's recovered enough to move again. He can tell from the searching look on her face. Then, she helps him into a pleasantly warm bath and then into clean clothes. She's gentle and careful with him throughout the process. A relief sweeps through him, and he cannot help but hold onto her.
It can be different this time.
(What of the time that passed and did not come to pass for Kirin, what could be said of it? If he'd continued down the endless possibilities of lives in the Void, he'd have seen this one as well. In that one, he'd spent that time alone, hurting, and malnourished. After he's Marked, he draws on the Void the next time someone tries to abuse him, and he uses it to kill. He quickly becomes a dirty, uncared-for thing that recoils from other people; they're only out to exploit him or worse. His visible neglect draws them in. Down in the depths of the Dust District, someone attempts to abduct him to sell him into slavery down in the silver mines. Not long after that, another tries to lure him into Albarca Baths.
He kills both of them with his terrible gift. He isn't sorry for any of it, nor is he intrigued by their deaths, the harsh acridness of guts spilled open. He only carries on in the miserable darkness of Karnaca. He kills, and it becomes a reflex quicker than he could have ever imagined. The world runs on blood, and he means to supply it. If he is only a waste of space now, so is everyone else.
The bones of the whales sing to him. It's the only thing he can bear now. That and the dim lights. The bones clatter their horrible language to him, and the knowledge rots him from the inside out. He spits up blood in their humming presence, but what else is there? As he carves their forgotten language onto the rigid white of the whalebones, he forgets his own name. The freshly gathered whalebones lose their pink hue, slipping from the world of the living into their pale-pearl white. There is only the here and now. The Outsider speaks to him, but he doesn't care at this point.
The bonecharms grow in strength for a reason unknown to him, as Daud slips past the veil of the world into the inky tomb of the Void and the Outsider, trembling, takes his place among the living. And Daud will fade away, pulled apart like wool roving, unaware of the place in his heart that will not be opened in this timeline. Then, the bonecharms go dull and silent; their power shudders away, as the Void is settled again, not with its human ballast, but through another means. Another mystery. Kirin abandons them all the same. The infernal humming under his skin goes silent, and the Mark fades away.
He's always hungry and cold and weak afterwards. He doesn't remember who he used to be, only the unrelenting misery of it all. He wanders from dilapidated, bloodfly-infested ruin to the next, aimlessly searching for something in the spilling sand. There's no shortage of derelicts in Karnaca, and wandering is safer than staying in one place. Eventually, though, he's found.
It's the Month of Seeds. The bloodfly ruins are been cleared out or torn down as hazards, and better housing is being built in its place. One of the survey crews spots him: it's not unusual in Karnaca, but he doesn't want to go with them. He understands they see him as a wild animal, and as wild creatures know, the only safety is found in distance. He doesn't want to wake up in a silver mine.
He chooses a different place to rest the next day. But one of the crew finds him again. The man has the build of a miner: broad shoulders, square form. Talkative.
The man stays far away, just close enough to be seen, and Kirin cannot decide if the man will hurt him or not. There are a thousand things to fear in Karnaca, and it seems he must anticipate them all. The man says something to him, but he cannot hold onto it long enough to respond.
They watch each other, before the man leaves again.
The man returns night after night to see him, and after a while, Kirin accepts that this is just a new facet of his life now. The man keeps his distance, and always leaves so Kirin can fall asleep. But the mystery of it all draws Kirin in. If this stranger wanted to kidnap or murder him, he'd have done so already.
The man talks to him about his daughter mostly, how clever she is, how much joy she brings him. How he's begun to learn his letters for her, so that they can read together when she's old enough. (This is familiar, somehow.) He wants to know about Kirin, but Kirin doesn't remember any of the time before, only fragments: the abuse, the perpetual confusion, but not much else.
Kirin doesn't give a response, having grown used to being quiet.
Slowly, gradually, the man wins Kirin over with his strange manner. He gets him registered with the workers appointed to make sure care and housing are allotted to the vulnerable. It's a slow process.
The first week Kirin stays in his new housing, he prefers to sleep on the floor, unused to a bed now. Rumors swirl: he's a runaway from the silver mines; he's a former factory worker, disabled in an industrial accident; he's a disinherited lord fallen onto hard times; he's been abandoned on account of his disability; he's someone's lost son, loved and tended to and kept safe despite his disability.
But in the end, no one can quite decide what he must be, and he's forgotten that anyhow.
One of the new trainee doctors from Addermire—one of dozens sent to train there by the Academy—speaks with him to assess him. He's nervous around the trainee doctors who try to teach him how to live again. One of them plays memory games with him, to try to strengthen his recall. It doesn't work, and they never learn his name, but he finds that he doesn't mind the company.
In the meantime, they assign him a carer from one of the dozens of workers who are being retrained. He is terribly afraid of her, for reasons he can't consciously access. It takes a full week before he consents to letting her clean him. She's careful and gentle with him, making sure to check in with him several times throughout the process. When it's all over, she wraps him in a wonderfully fluffy towel to dry next to the fireplace. Fireplaces in the bathrooms are unusual in Karnaca, but the chilly nights and cold mornings make it worthwhile.
When he's ready, she dresses him in plain but clean clothes. And it feels as though he's left something behind, though he can't say what.
He settles into his new life of anonymity, never choosing a new name for himself. He's allowed to come and go as he pleases: this little room is his, freely given by the Karnacan government. And the years settle into their own pattern as well, as they're wont to do. He's well taken care of, though he's quiet, lost in his own thoughts. He might never live without a carer, but one is always assigned to him. They cycle out through the years, which takes its own toll. He doesn't understand why they're always sad to leave him for another posting; in turn, he misses the stability. But, aside from that, he's kept well. He's encouraged to take up art, but he prefers to spend his time in his own head.
That feels safer.
And this lifetime plays out in a peaceful pattern somewhere in a turn of fate unknown to Kirin.)
Out of the chaos and misery of Karnaca, a new literary movement of surrealism emerges and Kirin cannot help but be fond of it: what else represents the world as it seems to him now? And so, he becomes an illustrator under the new push to revitalize Karnaca. As Anna reads the manuscript to him, he twists a clean dish towel to focus on the words until she comes to a scene that feels particularly evocative. He then sketches out what comes to mind for him in pencil: the drawing is often disjointed, torn between two worlds. Over the next week, he refines the drawing in charcoal, tuning the lines on the page until they match the same feeling that the words evoked for him. (Sometimes, he puts part of his own anger on the page, and when the illustration is all finished, the anger is pinned and, thus, rendered harmless there, though not anesthetized.)
Anna stores the finished drawings and mails them to the publisher when they're finished. It's a coordinated effort between her and his brother, who handles the legal side of the publishing arrangement. It's always a delight to receive the finished book in the mail. He has three so far, and is working on his fourth. High up in the Clockwork Mansion, he'd never thought he'd enjoy illustrating, but the world continues to find its way back to him.
It's as if each new thing to love awakens a new one in him in an endless chain. He rediscovers that he enjoys playing music, even if he can no longer read sheet music without great difficulty, so he plays impromptu pieces on the piano, each one unique to the moment and his mood. Some of them stretch on, and others are brief, crystalized moments. Anna records some of Kirin's improvised playing with an audiograph for his brother to listen to later, and it becomes a way for them to bond.
"I have a surprise for you," Anna tells him one day, as she helps him out of the painting smock. "Your brother thought you might like it."
Beaming, she shows him a partially assembled dollhouse: it's three stories high, and made of solid pine.
"We can make furniture for it," she continues, her joy over-spilling. "And decorate it however you'd like." She points out the tiny windows and doors, then she pulls out the instructions for building different pieces of furniture.
He pores over a few pages, flipping through the detailed projects. Then, he glances at her in amazement.
"It's wonderful, isn't it?" she replies.
With that, she continues to assemble the house with a series of bolts and nuts, occasionally consulting the instructions. He watches with some envy as she gradually builds the room. Of course, it would be a waste of time to ask him to help. What could he do? He couldn't even remember which way to turn the bolt to tighten it.
When she notices him watching her, a realization crosses her face. "Here," she says. "Put your hand on mine."
With her left hand, she guides his right hand to rest on hers. Then, she resumes her task of tightening the bolt. His hand clings to hers in the familiar clockwise direction, and his breath hitches—he never thought he'd ever be able to lose himself in the bliss of simply tinkering again. His throat tightens. It's not the same; it won't ever be the same, but the movements are so familiar, so comforting that he wants to cry from relief.
The tendons in her hand twitch and contract as she finishes setting the bolt in place; by the Void, he can feel it all. And then, her hand is at rest.
She smiles at him gently. "You did so well," she tells him, and this time, he believes her.
For that day's project, they decide on making curtains for the tiny kitchen. She stretches out her lines of pale linen thread and tats them into endless rings, each interlocked and pulling back on its neighbor. With his head on her shoulder, he watches her hands at work, the way her wrists flex and bend to let the thread pass over itself and form a knot. Again and again, circling back on itself. Has he chosen wrongly? Is it possible to choose wrongly?
He glances at her, but she misses it.
When the edging for the curtain is finished, she attaches it with a few whip-stitches to a small piece of hemmed linen. And as she holds the finished curtain—a handkerchief for a mouse, she jokes—up to the tiny kitchen window to check the measurements, the dollhouse starts to look like a home.
The world is waiting.
AN: Thank you for reading! I had a blast writing this.
