Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

For the record, I really did lose my memories. They came back later, and in probably the most traumatic way possible, but there was a ten year period where I lost several days of my life. I know that my mom and probably everyone else at some point or another has wondered if I was just making it up, but it is the truth. Are we over that now? Good.

The last thing I remember before the Great Time Skip of 2000 was going to grab some more sticks for kindling. Dad had just left, and mom decided that some bonding time between us was what we needed to get over it a bit. She decided on camping, mostly because we had only a little money to spare for a vacation and also because I’d been making noise about wanting to join the Boy Scouts, so she figured a taste of what was to come would be good for me.

It was not the middle of nowhere. It was a commercialized camping ground with public restrooms and showers within spitting distance of the lots where the customers would park their RVs or tents (which was what we had). Go a bit beyond that and you would get the beginnings of a forest, with some lovely (or so the brochures all said) caves and streams deeper in. It was early summer and the place was, if not packed, at least sufficiently full that I always saw at least three or four other people wandering around.

Despite this (or maybe because of it), mom had told me in no uncertain terms that I could not leave the camping ground without her. I, being six and therefore stupid, thought this was horrendously unfair and whined about it every chance I got. There was the pristine wilderness, waiting to be explored and conquered by the brave Jack Darby! How could she say no to my true calling of adventure?

As it turned out, easily and repeatedly.

Five days in however and nothing horrible had happened, so she dropped her guard. It took about an hour for the fire to heat up enough to cook our dinner, so we always started it while it was still day, and we were out of kindling since we’d made breakfast earlier. She told me I could get the kindling by myself if I stayed at the edge of the woods, didn’t grab more than I could carry, didn’t go with anyone who wasn’t her or a park ranger, didn’t eat anything I found, didn’t poke the wildlife, etc. The list was long and I ignored most of it.

Finally, I was free. I remember running to the edge of the trees, feeling my heart race, sure that this two minute wood gathering chore was going to be the greatest night of my life….

… And then I woke up a week later in the hospital.

Now, again, I was six. I was a stupid six year old who thought death was something that happened to other people only and my mom was a nurse who had taken me to her hospital on a few occasions, so I wasn’t wondering where I was or feeling scared. I mostly remember feeling very confused. I had been at the campground and then I was in a hospital bed, covered in bandages and with a bunch of wires taped to my skin. There was no in-between and this was rather bothersome to me.

My mom was sleeping in an oversized chair not too far away and she looked like garbage even to my adolescent eyes. Her hair was out of its usual ponytail, there were dark shadows under her eyes and she had the slightly shiny look of someone who has let their body oil build up over the course of a few days. Her clothes were wrinkled and she did not have any shoes on, which did not seem fair since she had always told me I could not take off my shoes while I was in the hospital.

I was about ready to wake her up and tell her she needed to find her shoes or we had to go home (again, I was six. This made perfect sense at the time), when….

…Well….

…When someone said, [Where are we, creature?]

I stopped my mouth mid-word, my lips forming a perfect oh shape as I began the “ah” part of mom.

There were two reasons for my surprise:

1. My mom and I were, as far as I could see, the only people in the room.
2. I had not heard a voice.

Well, let me clarify.

There was no noise. No vibration of the air reaching my inner ears to be translated by my brain into a recognizable set of syllables.

But, someone had spoken.

There was a silence after that. Long enough that I began to wonder if maybe I had just imagined it. I had just woken up after all and sometimes my dreams were not quick to let me go.

Except, there it was again.

[Can you hear me? Where are we?]

There was not a voice. There was a Voice.

It spoke. I know what it said.

But I did not hear a thing.

If I had been a little older, if I had been a little less dehydrated and starved, if I had been a bit more coherent in any meaningful measurement, I would have freaked out, people may have taken me more seriously and that would probably have led to a lot of complications.

As it was, I considered this with all of my child logic and decided it was rude not to answer a question.

“We’re in a hospital,” I said. “How come I can’t see you?”

There was silence again for a long time. Then….

[I… believe I am seeing things through your perspective. Would you please raise a servo?]

“A what?”

[A servo. The… multi-digited end of your upper limbs.]

“I think you mean a hand,” I said softly as I raised my left hand up to stare at it. An IV needle was slid under my skin and held in place with a bit of tape.

[Can you feel anything?]

“No. Should I?”

[Considering I am trying to flex our… hand, yes, I was hoping you would.]

“My hand, not ours.”

[I do not think that is true at the moment. I can feel what you are doing. I simply do not seem to have any input myself.]

That got my attention. He was speaking a bit strangely – why all the stiffness and big words? – but he was still telling me that he could feel what I was doing to what should have been only my body.

{Are you in my head?} I thought.

[… I… will say yes, given the… evidence. My own body was nothing like this, I do not find anything familiar about these surroundings and Rhis -!!!]

That was the first of the very few times that Voice ever well and truly flipped out.

[Where is my blade?! I am never without it, where is it?! Why can I not feel it?!]

And I did feel something then, a static-charged burn that spread through my whole body. I yelped, which woke up my mom. She immediately rushed over and hugged me, saying over and over again, “Thank God, you’re awake, I knew you’d be fine, thank God,” and so forth. I was banging on her shoulders with what little mobility my tiny arms had and finally she let go to look me in the face.

“You need to find his sword! He’s screaming over and over, and you have to make him stop!” I sobbed. It was the yelling that was doing it, really. I had by that point learned that an adult yelling – and the Voice was definitely giving off adult vibes – meant serious trouble. Your-father-is-gone-forever trouble. We-can’t-afford-the-house-on-one-income-and-have-to-move trouble. I didn’t care that I was in a hospital or that I couldn’t remember anything in the immediate past, I just wanted that person to stop screaming in my head.

When my mom asked who’s sword and who was I talking about, I told her everything I had gone through since waking up.

At the time, I thought it very strange that my explaining everything made her look more upset rather than less.

And the seizure five seconds later really did not help matters.

Chapter Text

So, seizures.

There are actually a several different kinds. For a small example, you can have myoclonic seizures, which are kind of annoying, but basically not worth mentioning. Have you ever had a twitch in a muscle that caused it to spasm without any input from you? Myoclonic seizures are basically that, but they last for a while. Then there are absence seizures, where you just… stop for a bit. To everyone watching you, you have spaced out. Then you come back to yourself and a little slice of your life disappeared when you were not paying attention. These are slightly more problematic, especially when I’m in class or having a conversation, but they are, again, not much more than annoying to me.

And then there are the grand mal seizures.

When someone says seizure, these are probably what you are thinking of. The entire body spasms, every muscle clenching and unclenching in rapid fire succession, you collapse, you usually do not remember what happened, you probably have minor injuries, you might have serious injuries, you might even have brain damage, and everyone around you is usually panicking.

Guess which one I had first?

I woke up and found my mother holding my hand in a death grip, while a strange man flashed a light in my eyes and a strange woman touched my chest. Everything hurt like I had fallen down a hill and hit every single rock on the way down, and I was breathing hard and fast.

[Cccrkkshshshsh.]

Voice was not feeling very well either.

“Jack? Can you hear us?” The strange man asked.

“Yeersh,” I slurred out.

“Okay, we’re going to sit you up on some pillows. Bear with us.”

I did not know why he was giving me more pillows. I did not know why my mom was crying again. I did not know why I felt so horrible. I did not know why I was in a hospital. I was six and stupid, and so I asked something I should not have.

“Mommmma, ‘m I dyin’?” I asked faintly, not really believing it, but wondering if maybe I should reconsider the whole “children do not die” thing.

I wanted mom to tell me no, that was stupid, we could go home now.

Instead, she started crying harder.

An endless round of tests later and it was decided that I was not dying. What they could not figure out was what was actually wrong with me.

Physically, I was a bit dehydrated and malnourished (better than I had been when I came in, mind you), had scrapes and bruises up and down my body, was sensitive to bright lights and my body’s EM field was kind of weird. They were not sure how it was weird, which was another thing. An electrocardiogram was ordered first after my seizure, with an electroencephalogram to follow when the results for that came out wrong. Then when that came out wrong, they ordered a magnetocardiogram, a magnetoencephalogram, a CT scan, full body thermal scan and more blood tests than I care to remember. I was x-rayed, ultrasounded, had a camera shoved into several orifices and worse things. I had a spinal tap and that was the only time I ever cried in a hospital. These tests were repeated whenever information from one contradicted the other, which happened often.

The only conclusion they could give was that I was healing perfectly fine, except when I was not. When I was not fine, I was seizing. No one could figure out what was causing that, but they all seemed to agree that getting my heart rate up seemed to increase the chances of it happening a lot.

The one consistency that remained throughout multiple repeated exams was my body having a particularly bright MRI image. They put me in that tube about a dozen times and each time, the image came out looking like I was lit up on the inside.

This continued on and off for about two weeks. Eventually, they ran out of tests to try. Eventually, the insurance company started sending mom notices that there was only so much our plan covered. 

It took about twenty-three days from the time I first woke up, but finally, I could go home.  

By the time mom pulled our battered, second hand Honda into the driveway of our house I was basically fine. I had nothing wrong with me that could be seen. There was just the constant threat that I was going to seize again and… him. The Voice.

He had not gone away. He had, in fact, been quite vocal about everything that was done to my – not our – body, since he could feel every bit of I as well as I could. We shared opinions on the spinal tap. 

I had told everyone about him, of course. Some had thought it was just a response to stress – make up a friend to keep me company until things were better again, or something along those lines. Others took me more seriously and they proved to be more troublesome. In hindsight, I was pretty sure the CT scan was more because I said I had a voice in my head than because of the seizures. Voice picked up on the response to me getting more tests every time I reminded someone that he was still talking and told me to tone down the constant whining about him. I did not have a lot of enthusiasm for obeying him until he explained that it might have less people poking me and make mom less of a nervous wreck.

[Listen child, it is a simple cause and effect relationship. You telling your… creator and crafters that there is another voice in your head seems to cause them distress. This in turn causes them to seek to cure what they perceive as a defect. However, they cannot find that defect with one test and so they use another and another. As long as you keep telling them you have me speaking to you, they will keep testing you.]

{But you shouldn’t be in my head.}

[I AM WELL AWARE!]

Yeah, mom….

She was not taking any of this well. At all. I think it might have been worse since she’s a nurse and had a perfect understanding of everything the doctors said when they were examining me at an atomic level. By the time we went away from the hospital (which she was not happy about, but there was nothing else they could test me for without sending me to some multi-million-dollar specialist clinic that our health care providers would not have let us within fifty miles of without attaching five more zeroes to our monthly payment), she had lost about six pounds and gained the beginnings of crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes. The fact that she had used up over half of her vacation and sick days hanging around while I was poked and prodded was also a decision. We were not on good financial ground after moving to Jasper. The house had taken up most of the divorce settlement for a down payment, moving out there had cost a lot of money too and with my lengthy stay in the hospital on top of that, she needed to get back to work.

Dad had not sent me so much as a get-well card during all of this, which was the final nail in the daddy-doesn’t-love-you-any-more coffin, just in case you all wonder why I never talk about him.

Anyway, it was not so bad at first. I hadn’t mentioned Voice for a week by then and I was pretty sure they had believed me when I said, “No Dr. Price, I don’t hear him anymore.” I’d figured out that exertion = more chance of hitting the floor and had, through supreme effort, limited all my activities to reading and watching television (once they confirmed flashing lights did nothing to trigger my attacks, anyway). Mom kept me home for three more days and, after nothing happened, decided to risk sending me back to school.

Voice did not like school.

[This is an inefficient waste of resources,] he said on the first day back. [With how lax your attention span is, having a ratio of twenty-nine students to one instructor results in next to no progress each cycle.]

We had progressed a bit from him having a screaming panic attack and me responding in kind. Mostly, he told me things and I listened, except when I did not. Sometimes he asked me things, mostly clarifications about what we were seeing and hearing.

{Teacher helps anyone who asks for it,} I said back, putting an extra coating of glitter over the glue smeared around my paper crown.

[And what is the point of this? What point is there to instructing your young in how to create flimsy, gaudy looking decorations that will in all likelihood be destroyed or lost before the next solar cycle?]

{It’s fun.}

[How vital.]

Yeah, he wasn’t terribly big on arts and crafts.

Still….

With the benefit of hindsight, I think that was where it started.

Me listening to him.

Me building things.

It would be a little while before I progressed to anything more meaningful than that construction paper, Elmer’s glue and glitter crown, but….

Yeah, I think that’s about the time Voice and I started getting along.

Chapter Text

The health problems were not going away.

I mean, hey, I was a kid. My mom and my teachers could tell me a hundred times a day to take it easy and each time, I’d forget they said anything five seconds later. Voice was a help, but only when I felt like listening to him. I knew that he was more responsible than me, but that was only so much of a reason to obey him when I felt like doing something else. Like racing. Or getting more candy from the snack bin. Or staying up later than I should.

It was kind of like having my mom watching me 24/7. Got old quick.

So, there was a lot of fighting. And screaming, mostly on my end. Which raised my heartrate.

The first fit I had after getting out of the hospital was three weeks after I got back into school and it resulted in me heading right back to the hospital, my mom going off her shift early and me eating more of that bland, disgusting cafeteria food. Then there were more tests, a repeat of the ‘we don’t know what’s wrong with your son’ routine, which mom was as sick of as I was, and I was released the next day with a doctor’s note excusing me from recess indefinitely until they fixed what was causing my problem. Six-year-old me was not pleased. Voice was ecstatic. Mom was slowly losing her mind.

I spent a lot of time reading that school year. The only exercise I got was under the paranoid eye of our physical education teacher, who showed me a set of stretching exercises I could do to stay limber and absolutely nothing else. My diet started having all the sugar cut out of it. No more candy, no more soda, no more joy towards life. I was even less pleased. Voice told me to suck it up.

The problem was, even if they removed all available opportunity for me to run wild like a child in nature should have, they did not separate me from my peers. And little children? Love to scream and run. I was not given leave to run, but I could still scream. All it took was one argument over the merits of Bugs Bunny over Daffy Duck and I was back in the hospital for a third time. Mom was crying by the time I explained what had happened, which made me feel like a massive jerk. Voice agreed that I was.

I promised to behave and bow out of any arguments before they made me excited. I whole heartedly meant it at the time. I kept it for about five weeks.

In my defense, Vince would not take ‘leave me alone’ for an answer.

Then there was the issue of pulling me out of school. I was all for it, until I learned that I was still going to have to be home schooled. I knew mom needed to go to work to get money, so she could not act as my teacher. She could not afford to hire one either, so it was public school or bust.

My teacher at the time, Mrs. Shaper, swore up and down to keep a better eye on me and separate me from any other children if it didn’t look like we were getting along. It proved unnecessary as the second time I’d had a seizure was seen by the entire class and they were even more freaked out about it than I was by that point. No one bothered me again. It was rather rare for anyone to talk to me, period.

So, isolation and boredom. Great combination, let me tell you. Great for resentment, great for mistakes… and great for deepening your existing relationships.

{So, are you going to tell me your name now?}

We were sitting by the window while the other kids played outside in the sand box. Mrs. Shaper was looking through our coloring assignments at her desk behind me. The Cat in the Hat was keeping half of my attention, while the other half waited for Voice’s reply.

See, I knew he wasn’t actually Voice. I had just started calling him that for convenience’s sake and he never bothered correcting me. When I finally had gotten around to asking after I’d gotten home and calmed down a bit towards the idea of him, he’d told me it didn’t matter.

[No. You are the only one who knows I am here. You are the only one who can speak to me, for a given definition of speaking. What does it matter?]

{Because it’s your name. Voice is just something I started calling you. What if I’d called you Screamer or just You?}

[If you had called me Screamer, I would have kept screaming. As it is, Voice is fine for now.]

{But what’s your name?}

There was a sound like a sigh. [I will not tell you that, Jack. Leave it.]

I was starting to get angry by that point. The reminder that he knew my name did not help.

{That’s not fair. Why can’t I know your name?}

[Because if you know it, you could tell someone.]

Now that was just rude.

{I said I wouldn’t tell anyone about you anymore. I promised, remember? I won’t break it.}

[Like you promised your mother to keep calm and not be rushed to the hospital again? Even when you mean your promises Jack, you can break them by accident.]

{But I wouldn’t break this one. How could I accidently say your name if I don’t talk about you?}

There was quiet then, but it was a contemplative kind of quiet. I could… kind of feel him thinking things thought very carefully. In hindsight, I think he was trying to find a way of saying things so that they wouldn’t scare me.

[I… still do not remember how I came to be within you. Jack, I was chasing a… a very bad person. Possibly the worst person who ever lived. If he knew where I was, I believe he would come to get me. By extension, that would now include you. Possibly your mother as well.]

That got my attention. I was slowly starting to understand that being little did not mean I could not be hurt. The hospital visits had been good for that if nothing else.

{You think he’d come get you? Even like this?}

[If he still lives and he ever learns of me? Yes, I think he would. And I cannot remember whether or not I had found him before waking up with you. It might be that I fear for nothing, but I dare not risk it even a little.]

{So,} I carefully thought out all of my words. {You were chasing this scary guy and you can’t remember if you found him or not. Then you woke up with me and because I’m so little, you worry that he can get you easy if he figures out that you’re inside me. Which he might, if I learn your name and say it out loud at some point in front of the wrong person.}

[Yes.]

{You’re really paranoid.}

[It’s kept me alive. And nothing I’ve seen leads me to believe we are secure in this place. There is mention of you hearing a voice in your head now stored in that hospital’s records, which are electronic if I recall. The chances of their network being impenetrable to a determined spark are infinitesimally low. Now, if someone had seen you and I together before… this occurred, then might they not wonder whose voice that could be?]

{But people don’t just leave their bodies to get inside others. That’s a dumb thing to think. Why would anyone think you were in me, even with that to go on?}

[Because I am not a human and neither is he.]

That made me pause. The Cat in the Hat was set down on the desktop, fully ignored now. Outside, the other children were lining up for a head count by the yard attendant before heading back to their classes. I could hear Mrs. Shaper getting up to open the door behind me.

{What are you then?}

[An alien, by your standards. I was not created on your world, on Earth. Neither was my foe. I do not recall exactly how I arrived here, but I was created amongst the stars.]

I can still remember feeling the smile stretch across my face.

{That’s so cool! What was your planet called? What do you really look like? Do you have a spaceship?}

I could feel a combination of amusement and surprise. [This does not distress you? I remember your reaction to Invasion of the Body Snatchers.]

{No, that was just a movie. The worst thing you ever told me to do was lie to the doctors and mom. And this makes a lot more sense than you being a human. Humans can’t share bodies. So, what are you called?}

[We’ve discussed this.]

{No, your species. What are all of you called?}

[We… I can’t give you a name that would be safe for you to know. No, leave this alone Jack. The point of this was to explain why I can’t tell you any names.]

{Then tell me what you looked like before.}

The other kids were starting to return to the classroom. I knew I only had a little bit of time before he started telling me pay attention to the arithmetic lesson we were getting, so I pressed as hard as I could.

{I can say it’s a story I made up if I have to. Please, give me something!}

[…You watch a great deal of those cartoons. I suppose you could play it off as something you saw on Batman or something along those lines.]

{Yeah, exactly. Now spill.}

Everyone was filtering in through the door and heading back to their desks. It was only after everyone was in and the door shut that he spoke again.

[We are mechanical beings to your biological. Do you recall watching The Iron Giant? Something along those lines, but not quite so big, more verbose and able to mimic other machines. We could scan something for a disguise, or for more mobility, and then transform into it.]

{Cool! What could you change into?}

[A flying machine. Now pay attention to your mathematics lesson.]

I knew that tone meant he was not going to budge. He never did when it came to lessons he deemed useful. Thankfully, this was limited to mathematics, reading, writing and nothing else provided by my first-grade curriculum.

I sighed and put my book into my desk, took out some paper and went to work.

Mom was waiting for me when I got let out for the day. The days of me riding the bus home were a long-gone memory by then.

“Did you have any problems today?” mom asked as I got into the car. The days of her asking if I had fun were also a long-gone memory.

“No mom, it was fine,” I responded. It was kind of a moot point. I knew for a fact that my teacher, the school nurse and the principal all had my mom’s phone number memorized, so she would have known within a minute if something had gone wrong. I think it was just a way of reassuring herself that I was not going to have a fit that day, since I had nothing to get excited about at home. At all.

[You could tell her more than that. What about that book you read?]

{She knows I have it, remember? She gave it to me.}

[She might still enjoy hearing about you finishing it though. I was given to understand that you were rather exceptional a reader for someone of your age.]

Somewhat true. Most of my classmates were still working on upper and lowercase letters. There were only two other kids that were actually reading whole books on their own and I was pretty sure I was the only one who did it for fun. It was more out of a lack of other options, but still.

“I... finished The Cat in the Hat today. Can we go to the library again later?”

“Oh honey, good job! Let’s go home first so I can drop off the groceries, then we’ll head out.”

The mention of groceries caused me to perk up a bit. “Did you get any candy?”

“Jack, we talked about this.”

[You should not be eating that.]

I sighed.

I picked out two more Dr. Seuss books and the first Harry Potter novel from the library’s child section. I was not at Rowling’s preferred reading level yet, but mom had begun reading to me again before I went to bed and she could get all the big words. We got through the first chapter before she kissed me goodnight and shut out the light. I lay in my bed and tried to count the bumps in the ceiling of my little room.

[You should be trying to shut down for the night.]

{I’m not tired yet,} I responded.

I had not done much that day. The most exciting thing had been Voice’s admission that he was an alien, easily. It still made my heart race a little when I thought about it, something he was quick to point out.

{What did the bad guy do?}

[Jack,] Voice had a warning in his tone.

{I’m serious. You said he’s a bad person, right? Why were you after him and what if he does come here? What would he do?}

[Nothing you could stop, so do not bother worrying over it. It is my problem, if it even is a problem at some point in the future.]

{Would he destroy the planet?}

[Recharge, Jack. We may speak again in the morning.]

{You’re a stuffy jerk.}

[What does stuffy mean? …You do not know.]

{Shut up.}

…What?

Yeah, I did learn about Voice’s true name and who he was chasing and why he was chasing them and, well, everything. More than I ever wanted to know really. That was a while in the future, though. And it involved me almost dying multiple times in one day, something mom was delighted to hear once I finally got around to telling her the truth about all of this. I mean, the first time it happened, she almost had a heart attack of her own, but finding out I’d intentionally gone into trouble….

…Oh, no, I mean the first time I almost died more than once in a day. That happened before.

How?

…Well, my health problems didn’t exactly… stay constant.

Chapter Text

I was seven and a half years old when things reached their breaking point.

If I’d been a regular kid, money would have been the absolute last thing on my mind, but I was a kid with a worry-wart 24/7 minder and mom left all of the bills in an easy-to-reach coffee tin on the kitchen counter. When I had asked mom two days earlier if we could get some ice cream at the grocery store, just one of those $0.50 popsicles they kept in a small cooler near the checkout as a last-minute temptation to desperate children like me, mom had responded that money was getting tight and we were sticking with the grocery list. That struck me as a bit odd, given that her usual line was just “no, you can’t have sugar,” and in hindsight I think stress was making her a bit more honest than she would have liked.

For me it was a moment of curiosity, but for Voice it was an alarm. He’d been rattling around in my head long enough to have a basic understanding of employment and money, and he knew that mom never took a day off unless something was wrong with me. The fact that she cited financial difficulties as a reason not to buy a $0.50 popsicle struck him as rather alarming.

So, after we had gotten home and mom had gotten into the shower, he gave me a little mission.

[Now, we are going to look through all of these and we going to find out what has your mother upset,] Voice said patiently, as I asked again why I had to read through the boring letters.

{A lot of these words are really big, though,} I whined.

[Then it’s a good thing I was sitting in on your reading lessons, isn’t it?]

The first few were utilities bills and there wasn’t much of an explanation there, just more confusion and the beginnings of worry for me. Mom had been making minimum payments for a few months and had last month made a payment to PG&E that was under the minimum. Unless she paid the full amount due, we were going to be without power in a few weeks. The next few bills were for her credit cards. Cards, as in multiple, when I had been fairly certain she only had the one. Again, they were all getting minimum payments. At this point, even my stupid child brain was figuring out something was seriously wrong because mom had told me before that she liked to pay extra to bring her balance down faster.

And then I found The Letter.

The Letter read, “we are sorry we cancelled your health insurance after you began costing us so much money it would have been less of a waste to just burn it all, but hey, you couldn’t keep up with the premiums. Best of luck with your ill child and no, we will not reconsider.”

It was dated three months ago.

My last seizures had been two months and then six weeks ago.

And mom was apparently stuck paying for all the hospital costs that had come with them out of pocket.

There were bills from the hospital too. They had a lot of zeroes.

At this point, I was just staring at the pile of paperwork that said, in some uncertain way, that mom and I were in very big trouble. I didn’t know what happened to people who couldn’t pay their bills, but it was probably something bad. And, the niggling not-Voice in my head helpfully reminded me, all of this was because of me.

{This is bad,} I thought.

[It is not good, no,] Voice agreed. [Your medical costs have begun to exceed what your mother can pay, but I do not think she will agree to not take you to a doctor when you have a collapse.]

{What if we just stopped the tests? Those are the expensive things, right?}  

[The most expensive ones, yes, but there is the matter of the various medications they have you trying and the cost of seeing those specialist they have flown in now and again.]

{Can’t you think of something? What if you talk to her -}

[No. We’ve been over this.]

{But you’re the reason all of this is happening!}

[I’m… I am aware of that, yes. But there has to be a solution that does not involve exposing me to the curiosity of your scientists.]

{Oh, so it’s okay if they mess with me, but not you?} I thought back grumpily.

[They are trying to help you. I do not know that they would do the same for me. And… I may have a solution for this, if you are willing to help.]

{…Okay. What are we going to do?}

[Your mother needs a great deal of money and she cannot obtain it by means of her employment. We cannot locate a higher paying job for her and I believe she would have already done so if it were simple. So, we will have to offer an opportunity for money outside of that. It needs to be relatively fast, plentiful and legal would be best of all.]

{I don’t understand some of those words.}

[You do not need to. I simply need you to figure out the rules for that lottery contest we always see advertisements for on the television.]

{You want us to win the lotto?!}

[No, I want your mother to win the lotto. I cannot imagine anyone giving that amount of money to a child.]

That did seem like a perfect solution. However, I knew what kind of odds winning the lottery involved. Voice had gotten me up to percentages and fractions a few years ahead of my classmates.

{So, how is she gonna win the lottery?}

[Because she is going to buy a ticket with the correct numbers, provided by us, as a way of cheering us up after we very likely wind up in the hospital again after we do a rather reckless thing.]

What was the rather reckless thing in question?

I present to you: Voice’s lecture on fortune telling, human child version, condensed format.

1. Broadly speaking, space is time and time is space.

2. They are both vaguely circular. Do not think too hard about that part.

3. As you can travel through space, so too can you travel through time.

   3.a. As you can travel in multiple directions through space, so too can you travel in multiple directions in time.

      3.a.i. No, we are not going to time travel. That takes far too much energy and is completely unnecessary for this problem and it causes its own problems and just stop bringing that up.

4. As you can look through space to see where you have been and where you are going, so too can you look back into the past to see what you have done and look forward to see what you can do.

   4a. Look, I’m using simple terms here.

5. There is no set future, merely a set of high probably possibilities and less probably possibilities. Free will exists.

6. Paradoxes also exist, so (and I can’t emphasis this enough Jack) WE ARE NOT GOING TO TIME TRAVEL AND CHANGE A FIXED EVENT. PARADOXES ARE BAD.

   6.a. Yes, you can have free will and fixed events. No, I am not going to go in-depth on that now because it isn’t relevant to this purpose. I am older and wiser than you, little human.

7. The safe, easy way of looking ahead is using probability calculations based off of known data combined with crazy high-end mathematics skills.

   7.a. I am still not giving you the answers to your homework. You can do it yourself, don’t whine.

   7.b. We do not have ANY data on the current lottery, be it the managers, the equipment, the company behind it, etc. So, this method would take a while.

      7.b.i. We probably did not have a while.

8. The hard, dangerous version was to brute force it via torturing the space-time continuum until it ripped a bit and you could peek through it like a torn curtain.

   8.a. We were absolutely not doing this.

      8.a.i. NO!

9. The middle-of-the-road method was to ditch the intense calculations and the physics breaking, and simply “float” along the timeline towards your destination and then “haul yourself back” to the instant and place where/when you left.

   9.a. Given that we had a time and location in mind, no large energy source to brute force it and Voice didn’t trust my squishy human brain to handle all those calculations at once (at least not yet), we were probably going to do this.

   9.b. With the slight problem that neither he nor I knew if I could do it.

Yeah, kind of a let down. Voice had none of his capabilities in my body except his mind and while in theory he did not need anything special to look around in time, that was because he described the process as beginning with leaving said body. Physical matter either moved “forward” naturally or “backward” with great force involved. Energy of the kind Voice said his true self was made of could ignore a lot of laws when unconstrained, time being one of them, but it needed to be constrained in a body to act upon the world. Voice was reasonably certain he could leave my body if he had to, but getting back? Telling me what those numbers were and then passing them on to mom? He wasn’t so sure about that. There was the very real possibility that he was going to leave my body and never come back. This was more of problem for him than for me, as he pointed out. If he left me and did not come back, then there was every reason to believe I could have a healthy body again. He would be worse off, but that was not to say he would never find any other container to stick himself. It just might take a few million eons. I had to ask what an eon was. I did not like the answer. 

Hm? Why didn’t he do this to find out how he’d come into me and what happened to his original body? Well, he needed a time and a location for this, remember? Neither of us could remember exactly when or where we had first met. There was a week where I went missing in a national park and then woke up in a hospital, and that was not a small window. Maybe if the lotto test run had gone better, he could have used the first days of my vacation as a jumping off point and hunted around from there, but it turns out riding through the currents of time is kind of a bother when you don’t have all your strength about you.

Also….

Well, look. We knew there was going to be some danger. Voice was in substandard condition and neither my mind nor my body were built for this. But we were both a bit desperate, I was a stupid kid, Voice honestly thought the worst I would suffer was another hospital visit and those hadn’t killed me yet, I had a bunch of toys I wanted to get my hands on, and we had even taken some precautions. I told mom that I had felt a bit funny, waited until it was her day off so she wouldn’t miss any work, didn’t start until I was laying down in my very soft and padded bed, made sure that all of the medication the doctors had stuck me with was within easy reach (they didn’t do a damn thing to stop the seizures, but some of them made the recovery a bit better) and even written out a set of instructions beforehand for mom to read if I passed out. Granted, honoring her son’s wish to go buy a lotto ticket under a certain set of numbers that he may or may not be mumbling probably wouldn’t take priority over taking him to the E.R. if he started foaming at the mouth, but I thought of it beforehand.

We were both well-meaning idiots, is what I’m trying to get at.

But neither of us realized how bad it was actually going to be.

Voice, as much as he and I still didn’t like thinking hard about it, was co-opting my body. My tiny, organic, relatively fragile body. Which was not designed to handle temporal feedback from a second consciousness dropping out of the metaphorical time stream and slamming back home with all the stability of an egg fired from a slingshot. At all.

So, the good news was that at 2:52:33 p.m. on a Saturday afternoon, Voice managed to wriggle free of my body and go off in search of a man pulling a set of five little balls from a hand-cranked cage one week hence. He succeeded and clawed his way back to my waiting body, which he had left an unmeasured time ago and which I had felt him leave not even one second earlier. I was not going along for the ride and had waited for him, frozen in the single moment he pulled free.

The related bad news was that at 2:52:33 p.m. I suffered complete heart failure, got some brain damage and died a little.

Yeah.

I said we were stupid, right? Right. 

Mom, it’s 23-7-56-92-4-31.

Mom, can you hear me? 23-7-56-92-4-31.

Mom, it’s important. 23-7-56-92-4-31.

Mom, write it down, please. 23-7-56-92-4-31.

Mom, you won’t be worried anymore. 23-7-56-92-4-31.

Mom, don’t be upset with me anymore, okay? 23-7-56-92-4-31.

Mom.

23

…Mom….

7

…M.o.m…..

56

….

92

….

4

….

….

31

….

….

….

…m.o.m.m.y….

i

feel

Maybe it’s different for everyone.

I never bothered seeking out anyone else who’s been revived and asking them what they went through.

It seemed too personal and, well, kind of grim. I’ve read some stories and I know some people don’t remember anything, some saw an endless void, some saw a well of light, some saw their families; you get what I mean. There was no pattern.

Here’s what Jackson Darby remembers from when he died at the age seven and a half.

Moving.

Not walking or running. This was floating. I was floating in an airless current, being dragged along in the wake of a falling star. The star was furious, righteous and powerful. It charged through the nothing after a black hole that consumed everything it touched. It consumed the light of the star when it caught up. I saw a hand, fingers bent out of alignment and nearly torn to pieces, raising up high as the light died. Then there was an evil light, a purple light, and it covered everything that had been nothing and it saw me and it hated me.

I woke up on a Saturday.

Not that same Saturday, but a Saturday. Mom was in the chair again, looking how I felt. Voice was in my mind, a wordless query forming as soon as I opened my eyes.

[Do you feel all right?]

{Did it work?}

There was something like a sigh. [Of course you ask that. Yes, I believe so. Your mother had to stay away for much of the last two days and I heard her say that cost was no objection, so I believe it worked. We can ask later. For now, rest.]

I did. I felt like garbage, but even with that, I could not help but smile. We were rich, rich, rich and I was going to get ALL the toys. It was almost enough to make me ignore the ache in my chest and the throbbing in my head. Not quite though, which was why I slid the hand that didn’t have tubes and wires attached to my chest to give it a rub.

The pain that followed was enough to make me start screaming and have my mother wake up by falling to the floor.

Voice sighed again.

[Yes, there were some complications.]

He likes to understate things sometimes. Have you noticed that?

Chapter Text

They had cut open my chest.

They had actually cut open my torso to get at my heart and keep it going. I had flatlined on my bed three minutes after my mom found me and the paramedics* who came in through the door another three minutes after that found her giving me CPR*. She tried to grab the AED* out of their hands when they came in and one of them had to physically restrain her while the other one kept me alive and got me into the ambulance. I died again on the way to hospital, although only for a few seconds. And then I died a third and fourth time on the exam table, after which they figured out that I was getting constant heart block* and someone decided I needed a pacemaker* jammed in there a.s.a.p.

The pacemaker… sort of helped. A bit. It kept my heart from stopping entirely, although I still had arrythmia attacks every few hours. Which they still couldn’t figure out the cause of. Said cause was lurking in my head, paying rapt attention to everything the doctors said around me and recovering from his own misadventure. This mostly involved passing out when his strength faded and then snapping awake every few hours. Not so coincidentally, these always matched the timing of my attacks.

So, they had the heart attacks as handled as they could. The brain damage was another thing and I definitely had brain damage. The CT* scans they put me through showed that my frontal lobe and cerebellum both had their fair share of bleeding and the pressure had built up. They had to open me up there to relieve the pressure and stem the bleeding. How bad the damage was would be hard to judge until I woke up.

I took seven days to wake up.

In that time, while I dreamed about cosmic horrors and Voice struggled to stay conscious, mom went a little insane.

They had to sedate her on the ride to the hospital. She was better when she woke up, at least until they made the mistake of being completely honest with her because she was a nurse who worked there and told her how I had died twice more, was getting a pacemaker and appeared to have a bleeding brain. Then she had to be sedated again. Then she woke up, went to my room where I was stuck looking like the littlest vivisection victim and stayed there without moving for three days. She used the bedpan in the room so she wouldn’t have to go into the adjoining bathroom and had her coworkers bring her food and water.

She snapped out of it on the fourth day. I don’t what did it or who did it, but she started acting like her old self again. Her pre-Voice self, who always found a way to make things better and was never scared. She showered, changed her clothes and left, telling my nurse that she had some stuff to take care of. I found out later that ‘some stuff’ meant selling our car, her jewelry, most of the appliances and (this was the part I couldn’t believe) asking dad for money. She got about $12,000 from all the sales. She got nothing from dad.

Then she went around paying the minimum due on all of our bills, getting a few small things that she thought I would like when I woke up and… buying a lotto ticket. Which meant crossing the border to Arizona, because it turns out Nevada does not have a lotto and oh my, did I feel like an idiot when I found that out. That’s one more point on the ‘Voice and I were being idiots’ chart. I mean, Arizona is only about a half an hour away from Jasper, but still.

Yeah.

She had heard me, after all.

She had read my note.

And, for reasons I still don’t understand, she had decided to go through with it.

I’m not seven anymore. I know that when your child is literally dying on a bed in front of you, going out to gamble on becoming a millionaire is not the usual response. Maybe she thought it was going to make me feel better when I woke up. Maybe she thought it was honoring her son’s dying wish. Maybe she wanted to shove the ticket down my throat when I woke up, because I had clearly planned something and it went badly. She never told me why, no matter how much I asked.

Four days after I made possibly the biggest mistake of my life, mom went to Albertson’s grocery store to stock up on the basic necessities, get me a few treats and purchase one Mega Millions ticket that would go on to win the $42 million jackpot shortly thereafter. Technically, about $29.5 million after taxes, but still.

Needless to say, money stopped being a problem for us after that.

It was a whole new world I woke up to; one with abundant money, a more confident mom, stabbing chest pain, unpredictable migraines and partial paralysis.

Because my legs decided to stop working properly.

Well, no, that’s not quite right. My legs were fine. It was the portion of my brain that had been responsible for them that was a bit messed up. Motor control in general was a bit messed up, but it was mostly my legs for whatever reason. They felt like lumps of meat and I had little to no control over them anymore.

But all that stuff I just told you? That came later in the day, when Voice and mom each had a chance to catch me up on things. When I woke up, the first thing, the only thing, that I could do was cry.

I had never been in so much pain.

The cut that they had shoved the pacemaker through was not shallow. The pacemaker itself was a hard pressure against my chest. I had just rubbed my hand directly over both of those things.

My mother fell out of her chair and onto the floor at my first scream. She had scrambled up off the floor and over to my bed by the time I took a deep breath to begin the second one. She had found the problem by the time it ended. As I took another breath for the third, she adjusted my IV* drip to let the painkillers start flowing properly again. By the fifth sob, the pain started to fade.

I had buried my head in her shoulder and was crying my eyes out. The fact that I almost never cried made it worse. I was in pain and I felt like an enormous baby.

Mom hugged me as tightly as she dared, whispering over and over again that she was so glad I was awake, that everything was going to be all right. I knew it was a lie by that point, but it was still nice to hear.

Eventually, the doctors came around and I got another watered down version of my medical chart, complete with another warning that I’d have to take it easy while they did some more tests on me. I threw them a curveball* when I asked why I could not move my legs, although they connected that with the brain damage pretty quick.

It was another round of tests, another round of hospital sleepovers and I was 100% done with it all by then. Voice got his strength back around the same time I woke up, so the constant heart attacks stopped. They eventually took out the pacemaker after about ten days when it became clear that my body’s unusually strong electric field was causing it to glitch, so there was a scar on my chest for nothing. My hair started slowly growing back around the stitches in my shaved scalp. I got into contact with a physical therapist who would eventually help me learn how to walk again. Mom quit her job and became a stay-at-home mom, alongside me finally becoming homeschooled now that we could afford it. We kept the house because we liked it and Jasper was a nice town, if a bit boring.

So, things weren’t great, but they could definitely have been worse.

At least, I know that now.

At the time, though?

I was miserable.

[Jack, we need to talk.]

{I don’t want to talk to you,} I thought bitterly, staring out the window at the parking lot below the hospital. It was three days after I’d woken up. I’d been told I was going to be in the hospital for at least another four. The television had been unplugged after the doctor gave strict instructions that I shouldn’t get my heart racing by “so much as a sparrow’s fart.” That meant no fun, period.

I was a very unhappy little kid.

[Jack, you will recover,] Voice said, almost pleading. It was a strange reversal of how our conversations usually went. He was the naively hopeful one, for once. [Your physical therapy starts in two weeks and your age is a beneficial fac - ]

{I DON’T WANT TO TALK TO YOU!}

I could have dealt with the boredom. It was unpleasant, but I was a hospital veteran by this point. What was rattling me was the continued lack of control over anything below my hips. Moving was nearly impossible and walking was impossible.

I was seven and a half, and seven and a half year-olds are not meant to stay still.

Mom was out doing paperwork for our newfound millions and I had been left alone with some crayons and a coloring book until a nurse brought me my lunch of bland hospital food. I had very quickly gotten sick of the coloring book and turned my attention to the window. Half and hour of me staring at it with no sign of stopping and Voice had decided it was a good time for a chat.

Unfortunately, I had decided that I hated Voice.

I had agreed to this, even listened to his warnings that he didn’t know what the after effects would be, but living with the results was something else. It seemed that the constant hurdles life had been throwing at me were not enough to dim my optimism because learning that there would be lifetime consequences for my one second of idiocy had been crushing to me. It was not completely Voice’s fault. It was equally my fault, young or not. But it was easier to blame someone else.

Thing was, Voice didn’t have anyone but me. Having the only person alive able to talk to you suddenly becoming unwilling to talk to you wasn’t great.

[You will learn to walk again with time, they were all very clear on that.]

{But not run,} I thought back bitterly. {And I’m going to be clumsy forever. And I’m still probably going to have heart attacks. And they might put a new pacemaker in me because of that. SO I DON’T WANT TO TALK!}

I was being a brat and I kind of knew it, but like I said, it was easier to blame Voice for everything. It was easier to blame him than think about how much trouble I was going to have in the coming months. Years.

Forever.

I think that was when I started accepting that there was never going to be a ‘better.’ That the best I could hope for was to be healthy enough to live without day-to-day care. That I was always going to have to be careful about everything. I didn’t particularly like it.

And, as I stated previously, I was a stupid little kid, so I took it out on someone else who could only listen.

I honestly don’t know why Voice still talks to me. I mean he was in no position to leave, but he still made an effort to be friendly, to be patient, even when my only responses to him were yelling or silence. I don’t think I would have been as quick to forgive someone who treated me so poorly. I kept my bad attitude up for days and even after that I would be quick to snap at him if something went wrong, even when it wasn’t his fault.

I guess it was a matter of perspective. Voice was indefinably old. What I think of as being an ass for a long time might have just been him putting up with me for a little bit. I never asked. Was kind of scared of the answer. What if he hadn’t actually forgiven me and was just bottling it up?

I had Voice and I had mom. I didn’t want to find out half my world was only tolerating me.

I went home ten days after waking up with a wheelchair, a physical therapist and a new car. Mom had received our money the day before and paid cash for a new car with a ramp installed inside to help me get the wheelchair in. I was in a slightly better mood, mostly owing to the fact that I was leaving the hospital, and was very interested in the car. I had never ridden in such a big van before and I pretended that it was a rocket ship.

Stop laughing.

There had been some changes in our house too. The contractors were still installing the ramps to the front and back doors when we pulled up. My room had a few new additions, the only one of which I cared about was a new television placed directly in front of my bed. No longer would I have to ask to stay up late and watch TV, or so my little mind thought. I hadn’t yet learned that parental controls existed.

She had gotten me a bigger bookshelf and bought copies of all the books I had been reading for the last few months. I had art supplies, a radio with CD and cassette capabilities, a whole new set of clothes and shoes in my closet (I honestly didn’t care so much about that), a bigger toy chest that was just waiting to be filled and there was a shopping bag full of posters featuring every cartoon I loved. As far as homecomings went, it was great.

I settled in while mom went to make me a snack and someone in a very stained set of overalls who had called me a ‘little champ’ as we passed by went about noisily modifying my hall bathroom to be more wheelchair accessible.

There were a few machines around my bed, smaller versions of what I had seen in the hospital. There was an EKG and that AED I mentioned. They both looked brand new and, as I found out later, they were. After setting things up with the car dealership and the contractors, mom’s third port of call the day before had been a medical supply store. I didn’t know it at the time, but there was a massive first aid chest right under my bed too. Mom might have quit her job, but she wasn’t planning to stop being a nurse any time soon.

Which was good, as I was going to need medical care more than once in the coming years.

Jack explains!*

1. CPR stands for cardiopulmonary resuscitation and is a pretty basic first aid technique taught around the world. It’s meant to be used when someone stops breathing or their heart stops beating, and involves repeated chest compressions and forcing air into the patient’s body to keep the body oxygenated. Speaking from experience, it hurts and often is worse than what is causing you to stop breathing. It’s not a perfect technique either.

2. AED stands for automated external defibrillator. It’s a medical device that sends a powerful shock through two handheld paddles pressed against the patient’s torso. This can stop any arrythmia (i.e. irregular heartbeats) by jolting the heart and hopefully forcing it to begin a regular rhythm again. They DO NOT always work and, just like CPR, hurt to an unbelievable degree. Mom got one to keep at the house and I’m not allowed to touch it.

3. Heart block is when the heart’s electrical system, which I will remind you is what controls the beating pattern, is slowed or stopped as it moves through the heart. There can be a lot of reasons for this. In my case, there’s enough circumstantial evidence to say that it’s the result of someone shacking up where they weren’t meant to.

4. A pacemaker is a medical device implanted underneath a human’s skin to control the beating of an irregular heart. To get the pacemaker in place, the doctor has to thread the pacemaker wires through a vein and correctly position them in your heart using an x-ray monitor in real time. Then you get a cut into your chest, where the doctor places a small metal box containing the battery and generator. This is hooked up to the wires and the cut gets sewn shut. Congratulations! Just ignore the weeks of irritation and pain as the cut heals, and remember that any strong magnetic field or contact with electrical devices can cause your pacemaker to malfunction. …Yes, I’m aware of the irony, thank you.

5. CT stands for computerized tomography. It uses a series of x-ray photographs, produced when you shove x-rays through the human body and they pass through areas of varying density leading to changes in their absorption rate, to give a complete look at the brain and check for bleeding, blood clots, bruising or swelling.

6. IV stands for intravenous, or inside the veins. Our veins and arteries are a system of little tubes running through our body, which carry oxygen and a few other things where they need to go. Sometimes, you need to get a substance into the human body as quick as possible, so just having them eat or drink it isn’t going to work well. An IV drip can take that substance and place it directly into a person’s blood circulation, bypassing the whole digestion time waste.

7. Throwing someone a curveball comes from a baseball technique and it means to catch someone off their guard. I guess this means curveballs in baseball are always unexpected. I don’t play baseball, so don’t take that as indisputable, though.