(no subject)

[freosan]

*****************************
Solan had seen a lot of weird things in the last week, but that crazy girl, in his kitchen, finishing a casserole, won hands- down. It took him several tries before his brain managed to interpret what his eyes were telling him; even after that, he still didn’t quite understand.

“What the hell are you doing here?” he asked, too surprised to even be angry.

“Cooking,” she replied, and pulled something that smelled like eggs out of the oven, as if to punctuate.

“Of course, why didn’t I notice that. Are you another fucking hallucination?” The anger was beginning to get a hold, but he was reminding himself that he couldn’t hit girls. Unless she tried to hit him; then all bets were off.

She shook her head. “Real.” Something was frying on the stove. She poked at it a few times with a utensil Solan hadn’t known existed, dumped it on the egglike thing, and slid the whole mess over a waiting pan of rice. Since when did he keep rice around?

“Lunch?” she offered, though she didn’t wait for an answer before digging out two plates and dishing the casserole onto them. She put them on the table, found forks and motioned for him to sit down.

She looked very domestic, and not at all capable of breaking three paramedics and an ambulance window.

Surreal. That was the only word that Solan could even come up with. Surreal enough to melt a clock.

“Gonna try again. Why are you here?” She paused in her domesticity to stare at him with her single visible eye. He wondered what had happened to the other one. He kind of wished it were back, since her stare seemed even more intense with less surface area.

“Need to be,” she said, as if it were the most logical thing in the world. Possibly, somewhere in her mind, it was.

“…Why, do you have a hit out on me or something?” It was sarcasm, but she seemed to consider it for a moment before replying, which was pretty frightening coming from her.

“No. You, I remember. Need to be around you,” she said. Solan supposed that made as much sense as anything else he’d heard from her. “Please. Sit.” She did as she’d suggested, sitting opposite him at the table. He remained standing on the other side; he had a few more things he wanted to get out before he resigned himself to this.

“I’m not getting rid of you, am I?” he asked. She didn’t say anything, but the negative was very obvious in the look she gave him.

“Even if I call the hospital?” he asked.

“Don’t,” she said, flatly. He decided to leave that line of questioning alone, since the last thing he needed to do was to make her mad. Amnesia or no amnesia, if she’d conjured up that staff thing once she could probably do it again.

“Right. If I call Dr. McClintock? I know he was seeing you.” he had to ask. “Or how about if I get in contact with the space aliens that brought you here?” he added, finally dropping in his chair. He eyed the egg- and- rice stuff suspiciously.

“Don’t. Not an alien,” she said. She really had no tone at all in her voice. Solan had thought that only Chinese and languages like that depended on tones. Turned out English sounded just as weird without any variation to it.

He gave up. She was eating, anyway, so she probably hadn’t poisoned the stuff, and it smelled like it’d taste okay.

They ate in silence – the casserole was surprisingly good – for several minutes, until she’d finished and stood to wash the dishes.

Solan considered helping her, decided that as long as she was here against his will she could clean up her own damn dishes, found that he felt unreasonably guilty, and got up to help.

She communicated very clearly, without saying a word, that she wanted him to dry things. Fine, he could do that. About three plates in, he thought of something.

“How did you get in here?”

She seemed slightly startled, but answered, “Window upstairs.” She maneuvered around him with animal grace to get to the knife rack on his other side. Despite himself, Solan shivered at the sight of the knife in her hand.

“You realize breaking and entering’s illegal, right?”

She gave him a sideways look that suggested either she didn’t care or ‘illegal’ was irrelevant. “Broke nothing.”

Solan had to bite back the laugh that was his immediate response. “No freakin’ way are you that clueless… no, wait, maybe you are,” he mused. She neglected to respond.

“What is your name, anyway? Kinda hard to have you around if I can’t figure out what to think of you as.”

She shrugged, and continued rinsing pans for a minute before replying. “Not important,” she said.

He couldn’t help raising an eyebrow at that. “Uh, sure.” He left off his opinion of her sanity, but he thought it was pretty clear from his tone of voice. Was she possibly trying to make a joke? No; he doubted she had any sense of humor at all.

Nothing made sense here. It was annoying. Solan was a very big believer in the laws of physics and in common sense; common sense said that people didn’t fall out of the sky, and the laws of physics said they didn’t survive it, and even if they did, neither paradigm allowed for the same person climbing in your upstairs window after doing it.

The dishes were done; he put them away simply because she was a foot shorter than him and must have had to climb on the counters to get them out. “I’m gonna call you Vega,” he announced. She gave him that sideways blank look again.

“’S what my parents were gonna call me if I was a girl. I gotta call you something, and it doesn’t not fit,” he found himself explaining.

Just then, the phone rang. “Hang on, getting this…” He picked up. “Hello?”

“Solan. Hi.” Brian. Since when did Brian call his house? Brian barely even talked.

“Hey, man. What’s up?”

“Turn on your TV.”

Solan was in the living room and picking up the remote before he thought to question him. “Wait. Any particular reason why?”

“Local news has something you’ll be interested in,” he heard. Shrugging, he turned on the set. The girl – Vega – had followed him into the living room and perched on the arm of the couch, and looked searchingly at the TV screen. Solan wondered if she had any idea what it was.

Then the images on the screen started resolving themselves in his mind. “Brian, why are we on TV?” That was himself, on stage, with his band behind him. Damn, did he really look like that much of a dork when he was singing?

He could hear the shrug in Brian’s voice. “Because we got filmed.”

Solan tried not to let his voice get irritated. “Yeah, and when? Don’t tell me at Virginia’s, ‘cause I know there weren’t cameras there…”

“No, this is old footage. That’s my old set of keyboards. I don’t think this is about us, exactly,” Brian said, and then the band’s image faded out and was replaced by a grainy police- tape video. Solan groaned; he’d seen this tape often enough in the past few weeks. He glanced over at Vega. From her lack of expression, either she had too, or she wasn’t associating the blood- soaked girl on the screen with herself.

“Damn it. So what, they think I’m associated with this somehow? I didn’t know we were famous enough to rate tabloid reporting,” he growled. Brian said nothing for several seconds.

“I think we just became so. Coco will be happy,” he eventually responded.

“Huh. Yeah, I’m sure.” His name was scrolling across the bottom of the TV screen, along with ‘unidentified young female’. He’d somehow thought that the first time he caught press coverage would be more… exciting. And less weird.

Vega – that name actually fit her really well, and how strange was that? – crept carefully to the TV screen and started gently prodding at the images. She seemed fascinated, maybe, by the fact that the screen was flat, or that it all went red and green when you got close to it, or something – how was he supposed to know what she was thinking?

“Not me,” she said, in a very final tone.

“Hang on a sec, Brian,” Solan said. He covered the mouthpiece. “What are you on about?”

She pointed to the screen, kneeling in front of it. “Looks like me, isn’t,” she said. She sounded very certain about this.

“Y’know, there’s only a certain number of teenage girls going around with scars on their face and hair to the floor,” Solan pointed out. What was this, some brand new and disturbing form of psychosis?

“Solan, is that girl in your house?” Apparently Brian had better hearing than he’d thought. Must come of being so damn quiet all the time.

Well, he had to say something, and after this long of a pause Brian wasn’t gonna believe a ‘no’. “…For a given value of ‘is’.”

“Give me the value.”

“Physically yes, mentally… I really couldn’t tell you, since she’s poking my TV screen like it’s gonna explode… Vega, will you cut that out?” The girl looked up at him, her single visible eye opened wide, and sat back on her knees in front of the television.

“Why is she in your house?”

“That’s what I’d like to know.”

“Did you let her in?” Amazing how Brian could keep his tone exactly level and still manage to imply his deep condemnation of one’s actions. Especially Solan’s.

“No, she climbed through the window while I was out.” And the weirdest bit about that was that the windows upstairs were never open. She must’ve broken the lock, no matter that she’d said she hadn’t.

“Did you call her Vega just now? Is that her name?”

“You sound like a goddamn psychiatric evaluation. I called her that ‘cause she didn’t know hers.”

“What if you’ve just stopped her from remembering her real name?”

Hadn’t thought of that. Hadn’t thought of that at all. Solan was suddenly, irrationally sure that Vega was her name, but of course, he shouldn’t be mentioning that. Brian would probably latch onto it and drag the story of the last few days out of him, and Solan didn’t need that. He’d just finished living it, he didn’t need to talk it out.

“Don’t think she was ever gonna get to it anyway. Chick’s not all there even now she’s healed,” he said, dropping his voice a bit. He needn’t have bothered; Vega was staring out the window. God, did the girl ever blink?

“Keep her there, I’m coming over.”

“What.”

“I won’t tell the girls. Virginia’s opinion of you will remain unsullied. Give me twenty minutes.”

He hung up.

Solan stared at the phone as if the dial tone were visible, realized he probably looked like the girl staring at the window, and hung the phone up. Vega was still kneeling in front of the television, completely poised like a three- dimensional photograph. It was unnatural.

“Talk to yourself?” she asked, and Solan found himself thinking, query: talk? That was probably part of the weirdness. She seemed programmed.

Maybe she was part of a cult? Did that happen nowadays?

“No, talk to – I was talking to Brian. Friend of mine. He’s coming over.” Solan dropped onto the couch with his arms spread out; the girl kept staring until he felt uncomfortable enough to shift to a more defensible position.

“How were you talking to him?”

“On the telephone? You know, wonderful new invention, lets you talk to a known person anywhere in the world, got little numbers on it. Great invention, you should try it.” She had to be messing with his head, right? ‘Cause she really needed help that way.

“Tele- phone. Greek tele afar, Greek phone voice. Far- off voice.” Solan stared. Exactly, exactly like a computer – programmed not quite well enough to pass a Turing test, with a dictionary and voice- reproduction software and a distinct lack of human response.

Maybe there’d been something to that UFO theory. Maybe the blood actually had been motor oil, and when the doctors tried to sew her up she was metal inside.

Okay, impossible, but not that much further out there than anything else that’d happened lately.

Brian showed up exactly nineteen minutes later, and Solan jumped up to open the unlocked door for him just to have an excuse to get out of the room. A few minutes after their conversation, such as it was, she’d just shut off again. Standby, he thought. With her eye flicking back and forth behind the lid for a screensaver.

Brian nodded to him in greeting, then pushed past, toeing his shoes off at the door. Solan followed him down the hall. “She’s still here?”

“Yeah, hasn’t moved since you called. Girl’s not normal, I’m telling you.”

Brian got to the living room first, so Solan didn’t see whatever it was Vega did that made him jump a bit, but he did catch the bow that she gave Brian in greeting.

“I am Vega.” Bow, ‘til the braid hit the floor in front of her. Brian returned the bow like he knew what he was doing, the bastard.

“I’m Brian.” She accepted this with a nod, thankfully not coming up with the origins of the name, and gestured for the men to sit on the couch. Solan was about to follow suit when he realized he was supposed to be the host.

Actually, come to it, he couldn’t think of any way to go about refusing that wouldn’t be utterly weird, so he sat down anyway. Vega resumed her perch on the arm of the chair, this time with feet folded into the seat, and managed to make direct eye contact with both of them at once with only one eye.

“’Kay, the whole stiff silence thing doesn’t work for me. Vega, Brian does keyboards. In our band. You saw him earlier on the TV, remember? Might not’ve been you - ” Solan rolled his eyes to show his opinion of that, though it was probably clear “- but it was definitely him,” Solan said.

She nodded, Brian didn’t even move, and silence fell once again.

“Continuing! Brian, she’s the one I told you about with the homicidal urges. Though I should probably mention the cooking. It was pretty good cooking, even though I’ve got no idea where she got the rice from.”

More silence, more minimal movement.

“You guys just sit here in silence then, I’m gonna… go… do something,” Solan muttered, standing up as he did. What the hell was wrong with these people? Did they not have vocal cords? Were they operating on a word count system?

He wound up in the entrance hallway, listening. They were more talkative without him present.

****************************

She sat on the chair, eyeing the new arrival. He was wearing colours, but they were all wrong for him. If she looked at him out of the corner of her eye his hair was purple, but straight on it was almost blond. Hurt.

He was very still, unnaturally still the same way she knew herself to be. It was possible he’d had the same sort of training. More hurt. At least he should appear to be breathing.

The first one, the green- black- memory one, threw his hands up and left chattering. It was very quiet, which she appreciated, but the new one moved then, easing the headache, and spoke.

“I don’t know what you’re doing here, but you should leave,” he said, very reasonably and calmly.

She shook her head. “You don’t know, you can’t say,” she pointed out. He shrugged, fluid in a way that really didn’t work for him.

“I can say that you’re driving Solan insane. He started out pretty down- to- earth, you know. He’s… not anymore.”

Down- to- earth was an unfamiliar expression and one that did not apply in any way shape or form to the green- black- memory- boy. Maybe to the one in front of her, with his alarming stillness.

“Not insane. Confused.”

“Mm- hm. Pre- you Solan didn’t randomly freak out in the middle of the night and run out to sleep on the lawn.” She cared why? The boy could do whatever he wanted, so long as he didn’t try to get rid of her. Not that he could have. She had some confidence in her ability to get her way.

She didn’t respond, so the boy apparently took it upon himself to fill the silence. Interesting how everyone did that. What was the point?

“Are you going to?”

She shook her head, looking down her nose at him. He thought he could give her orders? He was welcome to try.

“I can see I’m unwelcome here. I’ll leave.” And with no further attempt to sway her, he stood up and walked out the door, murmuring a ‘goodbye’ to the other boy as he left.

Her host finally reentered the room, looking a little annoyed, and dropped on the couch again. She regarded him impassively. She didn’t think he’d had anything to do with the other’s attempt, but if he did, he’d certainly admit to it somehow. He talked enough that he might well blurt it out with no effort on her part at all.

**************************

Brian smirked at Solan, listening from the hallway, as he left. Solan shrugged; he hadn’t wanted to leave them alone, not really. Though he wasn’t sure if he could do anything if she’d tried something.

“See ya.”

“Goodbye. I’ll work something out.”

And then he left, leaving Solan to figure out what to do with his houseguest.

He walked back into the living room, sprawling on the couch. Vega stared at him, not that that was any kind of surprise.

“Okay, now you’ve met Brian. I see he’s unconvincing. That’s cool, I never listen to him either.” Stare. Blink.

“So, are you a robot? I ask merely for information.”

“Not a machine,” she said, after a few moments of thought; Solan expected that she’d had to figure out what a robot was supposed to be.

“Right, I guess you’d know. Not an alien, either, you said. So, Mafia? Assassin? Military, maybe? Nah, the’d’ve picked up on you. Really paranoid drug addict?” He was morbidly curious, and hey, maybe she’d pick up on something – but she stayed completely silent and immobile until he finished his list of options.

“Never taken drugs,” was her only response. Interesting…

“How do you know that, if you’re so unsure about everything else?”

“Never harmed myself,” she said, dead certain. Right then.

“’Kay, I’m going upstairs. I’ll be in my room. Please don’t break anything,” Solan added, perhaps a bit viciously. He was still pretty wary around her, but he didn’t think she’d actually destroy anything for the fun of it.

What the hell did he know about how she thought, he asked himself as he stomped up the stairs. She was pretty obviously a world away from anything he’d ever tried to understand before. He knew guitar pretty well – ah, damn, that reminded him he still hadn’t picked his up from wherever he’d left it, probably gone by now – and he knew how to sing, and how to play to a crowd, and he was pretty good at snarking the teachers from the back of the classroom. He had no experience with the kind of mindset that would let one attack an automobile without even hesitating, and he sure as hell didn’t know what was running through the mind of someone who broke into people’s houses and then cooked them dinner.

And then sat perfectly still and declared that her image wasn’t her. Somehow that was really disturbing. Wasn’t there some kind of disease or mental malfunction that made people not recognize themselves? Maybe she had that. She sure had enough other problems.

Yeah, time to stop introspecting about her before he gave himself a migraine. He picked up a book and tried to read, but stopped when he realized his eyes had gone over three pages and he didn’t even recognize the main character. He looked at the cover. Stephen King. No, not the time for things that go murderous in the night.

Instead, he started working on those lyrics again. There were definitely wings and angels trying to creep into the refrain. He snorted. How insanely cliché could he get? Not much more… at least there was no true love in it, or broken wings. Had he randomly started singing about fallen angels he’d’ve had to go shoot himself.

He didn’t look up from his notebook for almost an hour, at which point the downstairs phone rang to distract him. He glanced out the window – it was dark out, later than he’d thought. He hadn’t agreed to another band session, right? So who was calling him?

He got downstairs to find Vega staring at the phone like it might bite. He went to it.

“Not dangerous, just ringing. See?” he said, exaggerating his motions as he picked the phone up. “Hello?”

“Mr. Carter?” A man’s voice Solan couldn’t quite place.

“Yes?”

“This is Keene McClintock, you remember, from earlier today?”

“Oh, hi – what’s up?” Weren’t psychologists supposed to stay the hell out of people’s personal lives?

“Um, you remember I spoke to you earlier about the young lady you found?”

“…Yeah.” Of course he did. He might have even if she hadn’t been sitting right in front of him with an expression like a five- year- old with a question. At some point she’d taken the bandage off her eye, revealing the bright red scar across the right side of her face. Solan had to wince at that.

“She’s gone somewhere, and to be perfectly frank, we don’t think she should be out on her own,” McClintock continued. “If you see her or hear from her, please, give us a call.”

“…Yeah, okay, I’ll do that.” She’s sitting right in front of me. Why wasn’t he telling the man this? He thought he was okay with the guy; for a psychologist, he was even pretty nice. And he wanted her out. Right?

“Have you seen her at all?” Sounded suspicious.

It must be ‘cause she was right there and he was afraid of what she’d do, especially since she knew where all his knives were. That was it. “Nah, not since I visited.”

“All right. Please, use this number…” McClintock rattled off ten digits in quick succession and Solan wrote the number on a pad by the phone. “If you hear anything, don’t hesitate to call at any time.”

“Sure, whatever. Don’t think she’ll be around me, though, if she knows you guys want her so bad.” The innocent eyes had turned to a narrow, measuring glare. Solan tried to look innocent.

“She seems drawn to you, so she might. She’s not entirely logical.”

“Damn straight. I’ll call.”

“Thank you. Goodbye.” He hung up.

Solan stared at Vega, and replaced the receiver. “Well, that was… huh, the word ‘weird’ seems to have lost all meaning, but two days ago, I would’ve called that weird. I guess you’re not supposed to be here?”

Vega shook her head. “They shouldn’t care.”

“They do. I guess missing your appointment doesn’t endear you to them. I should’ve told ‘em you’re here…” Perhaps they could deal with the insanity.

“Best that you didn’t.” She didn’t look threatening, but Solan was still nervous. Hell, Solan didn’t need anybody’s help to deal with a girl, did he? No. So she could stay.

“So.” Stare. She didn’t really approve of meaningless filler. Too bad for her. “I’d ask if you need anything, but your answer might scare me.”

She cocked her head to the side and, apparently, started calculating in her head. “Need to get clothes,” she said, eventually. “And cooking supplies.”

Solan shrugged. “Shopping it is, I guess.”

*********************

Keene had a headache. It was a result of either the patient who thought she was a werewolf, the patient with the schizophrenia who thought he could had to send the government messages by tapping on any hardwood he came across, or the intermittent reports from Miss Davis explaining that no, they hadn’t found the amnesiac girl yet.

She walked in again. “Someone saw her leave while she was outside today, but they don’t know where she went.”

Keene gave her a blank look. “And they didn’t tell anyone because…?”

“This was another patient, and I suppose he thought she’d checked out. She didn’t look like she needed to be here, after all.” Miss Davis sat down on the arm of the big chair, and Keene gave her a disapproving look.

“What? This thing is older’n you are, it’s stood up to three decades of patients, I’m not going to hurt it.” Her tone went from playful to serious. “Now, you’re done with your appointments for today. Have you filled out the application for Johns Hopkins yet?”

“You know, I expected to get away from mothering when I moved out of my house… yes, I filled out the application. It’s sent in.”

“Oh, good. And you called that Carter boy? He seemed nice enough.”

Keene nodded. “Not that I got anywhere. If she did go there, he wasn’t talking about it.”

“Mm. Too bad. Well, he at least will come in for his appointment in a week, and you can talk to him then.” She walked out, leaving Keene to the mercy of his case files.

It would have been easier, he thought, if he hadn’t kept imagining the girl. It was a very, very clear mental image, almost like….

No, Keene flatly refused to go mad. He was not hallucinating, unlike the poor kid who’d got an appointment in – he checked the clock – two hours. And that was his next distraction. He sighed, and got back to the paperwork.

*********************

Ah, the mall. There was a lot of humanity here. Solan could tell that Vega wasn’t really enjoying it; she flinched every time someone walked into her personal space – which seemed to extend at least twelve feet from her body in every direction including upwards – and she’d sent more than one teenager running after they spent too long trying to figure out her scars. Turned out even apathetic mall- goths were afraid of the girl’s glare.

They were a few miles out of town – Solan had decided it was probably best not to go to the local mall, for fear of someone recognizing Vega. He’d only been to this particular mall a few times before and he wasn’t entirely sure he remembered there being so many weird teenagers. Of course, last time he’d been here, he’d been a weird teenager himself, so maybe he’d not noticed. Now he was a weird twentysomething, which made the whole experience much… weirder. That word really was beginning to lose all meaning. He needed something else, like… ‘uncanny’. Bizarre? That might provide interesting pun fodder applied to a shopping center. He could always ask Vega, she probably knew where the word came from right back to Old English and a dozen synonyms besides.

Solan snapped himself out of his reverie to find that he’d been staring at the women’s underwear section for the past three minutes. Great. Maybe if people’d seen him they’d think he was trying to pick something out for his girlfriend.

He looked around for Vega, who had a weird – an uncanny way of slipping into a crowd, despite her very distinctive appearance. She was deep in conversation with – okay, probably being talked at by – a guy who looked ten years older than Solan and a whole lot creepier. Solan walked over to see if she needed any protection, though it was probably the guy who’d need it if he went anywhere she didn’t want him to go.

She was more or less vibrating with tension, but she relaxed a bit when Solan stepped into her personal- space radius. Solan didn’t want to think about that.

The guy was going on about something to do with swords; he must’ve taken her for some kind of fighter, which wasn’t really too far off the mark. She just looked confused, not that she didn’t always look like that.

“So yeah, from all the descriptions they’re supposed to be heavy but if you’ve got a good repro they’re really… hey, kid,” the man trailed off, looking at Solan like he was something small and slimy.

“Hey. You done annoying my friend, here?” Solan asked, though Vega didn’t look annoyed. Blank, but not annoyed.

“I’m sure the little lady would’ve said something by now if she weren’t interested, right, miss?” the guy said. Vega raised an eyebrow. Solan wondered if she’d catch the condescension.

She probably had, because it was at that point that she grabbed Solan’s wrist and walked, well, more strode really, away at high speed. Having no other choice – unless he wanted his wrist removed, she had a hell of a grip – Solan followed, leaving guy to stare after them blankly in confusion.

“Ooookay, I guess you could’ve dealt with that yourself… ow… can I have my arm back, please?”

“Still attached to you,” she muttered, now headed in the direction of the escalators.

“Yeah, but it’s not likely to stay that way – thank you,” he said, when she abruptly let go to have a hand free for the rail. They rode down in silence and when they stepped off, she started heading for the doors before he grabbed her and reminded her that they hadn’t paid yet.

“Paid?” Oh yeah, he should’ve remembered that she really was that clueless.

“You know, give the people money so you can take that stuff and not get arrested?” Solan took the bags and headed for the line. Wait. He doubted she had any money at all, so… He sighed, but pulled out his credit card. There went the last gig’s earnings.

They began walking towards the doors again, Vega slightly behind Solan. It took him a minute to figure out that it was because she was avoiding looking at other people by staring at his back. She said he looked right, whatever that meant.

“Who was he?” she asked, and it took him a second to figure out who the heck she was talking about.

“What, that guy? Some random creep, I guess. He’s like ten years older than you, you didn’t need that,” he said.

“…Thank you,” she said, after a pause for thought.

He took his best guess at keeping up with her thought processes. “What? Nah, it was no problem, you kinda needed the stuff…” He trailed off. She was shaking her head, looking serious.

“No, for before. For distraction,” she said.

“Distracting that guy, you mean? Ah, yeah, like I said I didn’t think you needed that… though really I guess you could’ve handled it on your own, yeah? He would’ve gone down like nothing, swords or no swords,” he said, trying to joke. He realized that it was probably in poor taste when she winced.

“No. Could’ve hurt him, didn’t need to,” she said, biting her lip. She looked nervous, which Solan realized he hadn’t seen on her before. Angry and/ or threatening or totally blank, yeah, but nothing that would make her seem more human – before now.

“Well, yeah, but…” ‘I didn’t think you’d care about that’? Was that how he wanted to end that sentence? He didn’t think so. Stupid! She looked so, so worried about the whole thing. It wasn’t normal for her, and Solan had thought he’d tossed normal out the window a long time ago.

She seemed to take his meaning, or maybe interpret it as the worst possible thing he could have said, which might be the same thing, and she looked at the ground. He thought she was actually blushing. That was as alarming as the earlier nervousness.

“Okay! Okay, relax, nothing happened, right?” he tried to say. He didn’t think he was helping, much. She was still looking at the ground.

“Could have,” she muttered. “Wanted to…”

“But you didn’t! And can we take this out of the hallway, people are staring.” And he wasn’t in the mood to get glares from the women around him who apparently, from their postures, thought he was some kind of abusive boyfriend. He wanted to set them straight but that could very easily result in a visit from nice men with white coats, so he just put his arm around Vega’s shoulders and walked her out of the store.

He fully expected to lose the arm once they left, but though she stiffened, she didn’t try to hit him. Which, he guessed, she’d just been telling him: she didn’t want to hurt people. Why that was he couldn’t even begin to think about.

He decided not to push his luck, and got them out of there as soon as humanly possible.

************************************

There was silence. Solan had come home almost an hour ago, and though Vega had been there, waiting for him, she hadn’t said a word. When he’d said ‘Hi’, she’d darted off with a flick of braid and gone… somewhere. Every once in a while she’d walk by Solan’s room, glance in at him nervously, and run off as soon as he made eye contact.

It was different, the silence. When Solan was alone – and he’d gotten used to that, over the last six months – the silence wasn’t oppressive or nerve- wracking. It was companionable, a silence that he knew well.

With Vega around, the silence was tense, as if it would be broken at any moment, but never quite made it. Each time she ran away, he thought of what he would say next time; each time they made eye contact, he forgot it entirely, too… either confused or uncertain, he didn’t know. Maybe afraid that she would react badly, though he wasn’t afraid of her being violent anymore.

His guitar refused to tune. The E string was either flat or sharp, no matter what he did. He cursed, breaking the silence, and immediately felt embarrassed. It was like being in an empty church or something – the same hush. It got into your brain, making you jump every time you heard a noise.

She darted past his room again as he tried a chord, which went sour. He was too busy glaring at the instrument to catch her eye this time, but he saw the tail end of the braid and an edge of her skirt as she went past.

He didn’t hear her steps going down the stairs, though, when he paused in his apparently futile task for a moment. Just the silence. As soon as he went back to tuning, he heard the sound of footsteps. She could be very light on her feet when she wanted to be, but she seemed to make an attempt to make noise when he was home. If she didn’t think about it, though, she’d often be right next to him before he noticed her.

Only part of it was that she was short and quiet; there was something less canny about it, something that bothered Solan. It wasn’t that she was unnoticeable, she was very distinctive, but she wasn’t there. Solan could feel her stare if she looked at him, would notice her touch if she came that close, but if she wasn’t interacting with him, it was like the universe just painted over her and pretended she didn’t exist. Sometimes, if he didn’t see her for hours at a time, he’d forget why the house seemed so oppressively quiet; then he’d do something like knock into a wall and she’d show up out of the corner of his eye and he’d shiver and go back to being reverently silent.

It was like living with a ghost, though maybe living wasn’t the right word for that… but she was definitely living. Definitely. Whatever else she was, she still breathed and bled like anyone else – he’d seen that, often enough. She had no concept of personal space.

Damn the E string! Now it was sharp again. He loosened it about a sixteenth of a turn, struck the chord – flat. Damn it.

He bent over the end of the guitar, trying his level best to turn the screw a single thirty- sixth of a turn. Then he felt a breath behind him, and a soft touch at his back, and he tightened the string so fast it snapped. “Shit!”

“Sorry,” he heard, and before he could turn around a hand came from behind his back. The hand was holding a blue guitar case, slightly scuffed. A very familiar blue guitar case.
“What the… where’d you find that?” he asked, reaching out to take it. He paused just before grabbing the handle, waiting for the answer.

He felt her shrug behind him – she was so close the only reason they weren’t touching was electromagnetic repulsion – and her only answer was a very quiet “You needed it.”

He took it, not caring so much how she’d found it as that she had. “Thank you.”

She nodded – her bangs brushing against his shoulder – and he opened the case. Yes, this was his. The same green and white flames on black – he’d made the stencils himself – and the same scratch right at the bottom of the body where he’d dropped it doing some ridiculous trick, and, when he struck a chord, the same familiar tension in the strings.

He didn’t know how she could have known, but when he turned around to ask her, she’d gone. He didn’t even hear her footsteps.

*******************

Solan woke, stretched, took inventory (limbs: check; headache: check; existential angst: check; memory of last night: no check; conclusion: either I went out drinking or we had a concert), and experienced the now- habitual moment of panic when he saw Vega sitting on his window sill.

It’d been two weeks. In that time, Vega had mysteriously failed to kill anything, or indeed do more than glare vaguely at anyone who talked too much – which pretty much always included Solan. She’d also developed the slightly disturbing habit of waiting for him to wake up every morning. No matter how early it was, she was already leaning on the window, staring at him, in time to watch him do the usual morning run- through of ‘where, what, who, and why am I’.

They had done a concert last night, Solan recalled. Someplace a bit bigger than usual, a club or something. He remembered low lights, lots of people, good acoustics, and a screaming audience. Good times, good times. He stretched again, satisfied.

Now, why’d he woken up? A quick glance at the clock told him that it was only eight thirty. That didn’t make much sense, he’d usually have slept ‘til noon the night after a concert…. Come to it, he didn’t think he’d gotten in ‘til almost four that morning.

He would’ve gone back to sleep if it hadn’t been for the girl staring at him. She lived on some kind of monk’s schedule, Solan swore. She was always up in the morning – not even the morning, more like whatever the AM version of twilight was – and she’d usually been out for a run, back in for a shower, and in the kitchen cooking breakfast before Solan even started exiting REM sleep.

Oh, right. The dream. Yeah, that’d been what had woken him. Another one. Not as weird as the first few – checking himself over again, he was pretty sure he wasn’t bleeding, hallucinatorily or otherwise – but still not particularly pleasant. This one had involved a guy who looked a hell of a lot like him.

It wasn’t the first dream that had involved that guy, and he doubted it would be the last, but the sequences were starting to get embarrassingly personal. Much more of this and he’d really snap. He’d not told that doctor McClintock about that particular bit of the dreams; it was bad enough that the guy went over all Freudian half the time anyway, he’d never let Solan live it down if he knew that he was having perverted dreams about his own doppelganger. Besides, Solan wasn’t that narcissistic.

Vega was still waiting for him to move. He stuck his head back under the pillow and attempted to ignore her gaze.

It almost worked; he heard her walk out, but she paused long enough to rip the cover off him before leaving the room. She did this about half the time. When pressed, she’d admitted that she felt she had a duty to keep him on a regular sleep cycle. Solan figured that whoever it was she’d associated him with had also appreciated the occasional experience of sleeping until noon.

Every time he tried to figure out who that person might have been, his mind started going places he really didn’t want it to, starting with the thought that it was the guy in his dreams. If it was, he didn’t want to know about it – and that was impossible, right? That she could throw that sort of image in his mind? He hoped so. It was probably paranoia to think that someone was sending you dreams.

He was cold, so he got up and threw on the first pair of pants he found on the floor. He should probably help Vega with her bandages, anyway. He’d started doing it since the first time he’d noticed her flinch – just a tiny bit, she must have really good control over her reflexes, but he knew that – when he put a hand on her shoulder. Turned out she hadn’t replaced the wrappings that the hospital had put on her, and the stitches were exposed. He’d been torn between ‘not my problem’ and ‘what the hell’, but eventually he’d figured that if things got infected, it’d somehow become his problem, so he’d taken it upon himself to wrap the things.

They were nasty cuts, and Solan, looking at them, was hard- pressed to explain how anyone could’ve bought the ‘car accident’ excuse. There were two sets of four parallel scratches running right along her shoulder blades. They were deliberate, and they were bad enough that Solan was sure they’d hit bone. To be able to move like she had after getting those – the woman must have a will like iron and a body to match.

She was covered in other scars, too. Solan had asked about them and she’d just shrugged – another thing blanked out in her memory.

She was making tea when he managed to stumble down the stairs, and he knew better to bother her, so he slouched around the counter until she’d finished. She’d dug up loose green tea and a nice teapot with matching cups from somewhere, and she made the stuff like a ritual – he’d never seen her deviate from it once, and she did this every morning. Set the water to boil, wipe off the teapot, measure the tea, drop it in the strainer, get the water – because it was always just coming to a boil when she’d finished her thing with the pot – pour it, grab the cup, wait five minutes with a completely Zen expression staring at the steam coming out of the cup.
Solan was aware that his mental picture of her was beginning to sum to ‘warrior priestess from some mythical Eastern country’, but he couldn’t stop it, so he momentarily tried to picture her wearing that red- and- white thing he knew Japanese priestesses wore.

It was much easier to imagine her as a black- clad ninja. Or something with a sword.

She’d finished the tea, poured it, and poured back the entire cup like a shot. Now she was looking at him – not quite expectantly, because she didn’t do that much emotion, but not as blankly as she usually did.

“C’mon, let’s get the stitches taken care of,” Solan muttered, and slunk off to the bathroom. Another little ritual; she wouldn’t ask if he didn’t offer.

She had no modesty at all, either. It wasn’t that she was flaunting anything, it just didn’t occur to her to be embarrassed. She was much more touchy about showing her legs – one of which had a large, pale burn scar splashed across most of the calf – than her chest. It made it much easier to deal with the cuts, but tended to leave Solan slightly frustrated. He wasn’t particularly attracted to her, he preferred his girlfriends to speak every once in a while, but she definitely wasn’t bad- looking. Despite the scars. Or maybe because of them.

“These are practically healed. You should get back to the hospital so they can have a look at ‘em.” Her only response was a sigh. He’d made that comment every day for the last three; at first it’d gotten him a glare every time, but she seemed to be resigned to his comments, just as he was resigned to her presence. “Fine, whatever, give it another week and I’ll take them out myself.” He wasn’t going to take them out before he was sure they were healed, and he didn’t think cuts like that were supposed to be completely healed in a matter of what, two and a half weeks? – but if the stitches hadn’t still been in, he would’ve thought the cuts were as old as the ones on her face. He added ‘Wolverine- like healing powers’ to his mental list of her weirdnesses.

He was good at this by now. Five minutes later, he’d gotten the gauze taped to her back and finished wrapping the bandages around her, and a minute after that she’d pulled her shirt back on and escaped.

He didn’t know where she went during the day, except that it was not the hospital. If pressed, he’d say that she probably went exploring the city. Every once in a while she came home with some new object or bit of clothing that he really, really hoped she’d not shoplifted, but if she had any kind of money he didn’t know where she was getting it from.

Today, he had another appointment with the psychologist. It was at noon. Oh… that explained why she’d forced him out of bed; the time, though not the purpose, was written on the calendar.

He wondered, for about the eight hundredth time, why she was still around. Surely there were better places to be than in the house of a completely random guy – no matter what she said about remembering him, he was sure she was wrong – who talked too much (in her opinion) and who was constantly sniping at her about leaving him alone.

Then again, being an amnesiac with deadly reflexes and a tendency to scare small children probably hurt your prospects of being hired anywhere, and she didn’t know who she’d lived with before, so unless she felt like being homeless – unlikely – she was stuck with him.

He was so damn tired. He wouldn’t get this introspective if he weren’t drifting off asleep every two seconds. Shower, he decided, then caffeine, and maybe he’d be able to stay awake until he had to go catch the bus.