Chapter Text
Wilbur knows the doctors think he’s lying.
Beneath the blinding lights of the clinic, he watches the doctor’s face twist. He had said he treated Wilbur when he was younger, before he supposedly fled for the city.
Wilbur doesn’t remember that or the doctor’s name, but he does know that he wears that same look that the ones in the hospital did. The disbelief. The uncertainty.
He’s only here at Phil’s insistence. A last minute appointment stenciled in following his immediate arrival. There will be no change in what is said.
There is no injury. There is no tumour or disease. There are no anomalies in his bloodstream. There is no sign of drugs in his system.
There is no answer to the question he has been asking since he woke up.
There is just Wilbur Soot who woke up already awake on a beach barely two days ago without a single memory in his head. There are blurs, twists of colors that slip through his hands, knowledge gained during a life that he has been told he lived, but nothing concrete. Nothing that doesn’t feel like some distant dream he can’t crawl back into.
He’s pretty sure they only believe him because of how his flatmates reacted.
Now, this small town doctor looks at him like he is a puzzle that does not need to be solved. “Wilbur, I hate to say this, but there is nothing wrong with you physically.”
Wilbur, I hate to say this, the doctor means, but you’re probably fucking insane.
“I know.” He licks his lips. They’re dry, the September chill is unkind even indoors. “I know.”
“Maybe you should start seeing Puffy again,” the doctor suggests, and Wilbur does not know who Puffy is or why he saw them in the first place. It is a dismissal if Wilbur has ever heard one.
He does not bother asking for clarification. He grits his teeth.
He stands, and his knees crack like he is some old man. He stumbles slightly, and the doctor is frowning, and he needs to get out.
Leaving the clinic is a blur of people and fake smiles. He makes an appointment for a check-up in a few weeks' time. He pretends he is not blindsided by the way everyone seems to know him when he does not know them, when he doesn’t know himself. He pretends he is not an aching wound bleeding dry while everyone smiles and won’t meet his eyes.
The parking lot is relatively deserted. The old strip mall is dead for a Monday afternoon. Half of the storefronts hold signs reading out CLOSING SALE and FOR LEASE. Maybe it is always a barren wasteland. Maybe Avalon is just a dead town full of people who refuse to bury it. Regardless, out of the maybe ten cars in the lot, the old green car is parked where it was when he arrived, likely over an hour ago.
Phil is in the driver’s seat still. He’s fiddling with his phone. He looks tired, but Wilbur doesn’t know him well enough to say that. Wilbur’s father is a stranger.
He opens the passenger door and slides into the seat. Phil slips his phone into his pocket, whoever he was texting not meant for Wilbur to see. He buckles up. Phil watches him, and Wilbur hates the look in his eyes.
Everyone looks at Wilbur with that sadness, that pity, that almost grief, but Phil looks at him like he has killed him. Phil looks at him like he is the one who ripped apart Wilbur’s head and scooped away every little piece of his mosaic until there was nothing left but a blank canvas.
That’s how Wilbur feels. Like a blank canvas. Like nothing at all.
He is completely alone in the unknowing. He is alone in his body. He is nothing at all.
“How’d it go?” Phil asks, and Wilbur wonders how he can sound so nonchalant when he looks so miserable.
“It was alright. They cured me, clearly.” Wilbur replies, looking around the parking lot.
“Wil, mate.” Phil starts, and there’s some edge in there. “Things like this aren’t easy, but-“
“Who’s Puffy?” Wilbur cuts him off.
“Puffy?” Phil repeats, half incredulous and half tired. “She’s uh, your old therapist.”
Therapist. Wilbur does not know why he needed therapy. He knows there are old prescriptions in the cupboard in the bathroom of his father’s house with his name on the bottles. They’re all expired now, which makes sense because he’s been told he left Avalon and never looked back, but the bottles are there. Fluoxetine, Diazepam and Olanzapine. Pills he took at one point to fix some broken part of himself that he cannot name.
He hadn’t looked them up. He had closed the cupboard and walked away.
(He knows what they are anyways. He knows because he took them, and even if his memories are gone he still has the knowledge. He can point out any country on an empty map. He knows how to play songs on guitar even if he doesn’t know what they sound like. He knows he was taking a chemical cocktail of antidepressants and antipsychotics and anxiolytics for most of his childhood, that he was maybe still on them before he forgot.
He just doesn’t know why.)
“And why was I seeing a therapist named Puffy?” Wilbur lets the words fall out of his mouth as disinterested and cold as possible.
“You struggled a lot when you were younger.” Phil says, and he finally starts the car.
It ends the conversation. Wilbur watches a town he grew up in but doesn’t know fade into a forest as they drive towards a house that raised him that he can’t recognize, and his stomach twists.
His hands twitch. His fingers seek something that he can’t name. A cigarette, maybe. He’s been told he smoked, but he doesn’t have a pack here in god forsaken Avalon. He wouldn’t even know what brand to buy if he could be alone long enough to go to the store.
The house appears just up the ragged street. It’s a nice little place, or maybe it would be, if the forest around them wasn’t so viciously trying to reclaim what once was it’s to hold. Truthfully, the house that raised him looks like it has been vacant of any human life at all for years. The grass reaches upwards to just about above his own knees, and the weeds and wildflowers consume what few slivers of land are not cast into shadows by the surrounding trees. Even the inside, Wilbur knows from dropping off his bags earlier, feels stiff and wrong and cold.
Wilbur watches it grow closer, and feels like a wasteland has made itself a home in his body. He doesn’t know how this house once felt like home, if it ever even did. He doesn’t want to think about the implications of running. He doesn’t want to know.
Phil makes a noise, some strange sound that is not a breath and not a choke. Wilbur turns to look at him. His father’s hands are tight around the wheel, and his blue eyes are stuck on something in their yard. He whips them into the driveway with the practice of a man who has done it a thousand times but whose attention is elsewhere, a little too harsh.
Wilbur follows his line of sight to where the trees converge at the edge of the yard.
There is a boy sitting in the overgrowth. His head rests on his knees, and he watches them with unblinking grey eyes. The late afternoon sunlight drifts over his pale face with a kind caress.
There is a boy sitting in the overgrowth.
Wilbur’s heart shatters and burns at the sight.