Chapter Text
May 3rd, 2019
Paris
Marcus keeps seeing this woman on the metro. She gets off two stops before him, and is always in the second car when he enters himself, his daughter in tow.
When he can, he sits across from her, and they spend twenty-five minutes staring at one another.
White girl, late twenties, hidden in a black hoodie. He knows her.
Or he doesn’t. Because he doesn’t remember her. Except every time he looks at her, his instinct tells him he does. His gut tells him he knows her favourite food, the things she does that irritate him, the places to find her when she sulks.
So he sits on his commute, occasionally placating Astrid, and locks in eye contact, waiting for the spark. Because Marcus doesn’t forget faces, he simply doesn’t , and he hates the limbo this woman is putting him in.
She never breaks eye contact, until they reach her stop, where she’ll rise with a chillingly familiar smirk. It’s as though she’s challenging him, but he doesn’t know why she’d do that.
Astrid brings it up at some point over the dinner table. “Papa, who’s the lady you stare at on the train?”
He almost chokes on his stew, especially when his wife shoots him an almost fatal look. “I don’t know her, sweetie,” he tells his daughter. “She just looks a little familiar.”
Except it’s not kind of . It itches his brain, makes him want to bury his fingers knuckle-deep into the grey matter and dig around for answers.
It’s not until Astrid stays home from daycare with the flu, two weeks since Marcus has started noticing this woman, that she speaks to him.
She leans forward across the aisle, elbows resting on her knees. “No kid today?”
Marcus shakes his head. “Ah, no. She’s sick.”
“That sucks.”
And Marcus says, “Do I know you?”
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”
“I’m Marcus.”
“Jayme.”
He almost says I know .
Jayme. It’s not a name he’s ever heard, despite the spark it strikes somewhere in his brain. “What university did you go to?”
She snorts. “Oh, I didn’t.”
“Then how long have you been in Paris?”
“Two weeks.” The train begins to slow. “This is my stop.” Jayme jerks her head towards the door. “Coming?”
Marcus scratches above his ear.
This is crazy, it’s insane, it’s ridiculous. He’s probably about to be mugged.
He can’t sleep for her familiarity.
For two weeks, he has laid awake listening to his wife breathe, systematically reliving every goddamn second of his life in search of this woman.
Five minutes later, they’re seated outside some random cafe, and Jayme has dumped four packets of sugar into her coffee. It’s cloudy, and she seems suitably cranky.
Marcus takes it slowly. They unspool their lives scene by scene, until it becomes clear that for most of their lives, they were not even in the same country, and when they were, they were still miles away. Neither has been on television or in ads, they have no mutual friends.
“Why did you move to Paris?” Marcus asks, as the coffee is finished.
“Eh, kinda broke down in Marseilles,” Jayme replies. “I had this psychotic break, convinced myself I’d hallucinated my entire life. Once I got on meds, I just took a train over here to clear my head. Which reminds me-”
She rummages in her hoodie pocket and emerges with a blister pack of pills. “ L’chaim ,” she drawls, swallowing one with the last dregs of her coffee.
“Hallucinated your entire life,” Marcus says quietly. “I know the feeling.”
He knows it when he looks in his daughter’s eyes and feels nothing. He knows it when he phones his mother and doesn’t recognise her voice for a split second.
He feels like he’s living a ghost of his life.
“Maybe we met outside the hallucination,” Jayme says, smirking slightly. “See you on the commute, Marcus.”
His wife - Susanna. Her name is Susanna. She is Congolese, and she’s a psychiatrist, and she plays football with her amateur team on Saturday nights. She’s allergic to cats, she plays nature documentaries every night to sleep to. She dresses pretty in her suits for work.
She is, with emphasis on both words, a perfect stranger. They’re supposed to have been married for five years, and, suddenly, in the span of days, he has nothing more to say to her. About anything. He asks politely about her day over meals, with no feeling.
She gives him searching looks with her pretty eyes, and even though Marcus can’t read her like he knows he could last month, he can tell he’s breaking her heart. He knows she knows.
It’s terrifying.
So, Susanna. She smiles at him when he returns home from work, and Jayme, and a sniffly Astrid toddles over to hug his leg.
“She insisted on staying up to say hi to you when she got home.”
Marcus scoops up his daughter, though she feels like dead weight. She has his eyes. Everyone says that about people’s kids, but she does. “Hey, baby.”
She’s as scared of him as he is of her. She is three, but she can pick up on her parents’ dynamic shift. She’s trying to ignore it, though, burrowing her face into his neck as if to try and reach the Papa she thinks is on the inside.
He feels like he’s in a hotel as he carries her to her room, the smell and decor of their house alien, despite the family pictures everywhere.
One thing Marcus is very certain of is that he and Susanna both suck things up. Overtime, the things they do that irritate the other, shitty bosses, Astrid’s difficult days.
His recent break is no different. He kisses her once Astrid is tucked in and asleep, but he says nothing else to her all evening.
***
The meds have cleared Jayme’s phantom feelings right up. Mostly.
There’s still the dreams to consider.
They mostly involve getting her face burned off by some old guy with a Walkman. The pain sears, like her cheeks are being crushed into a hot oven, then vanishes as her nerve endings melt alongside her eyes.
She can taste the blood, and she knows, she knows she’s dying, she can feel her heart go almost immediately. But just between that and the darkness, she turns towards someone, squirming with the last strength her shattered body has.
That someone closes his fingers around her wrist.
Her head is filling with static and colours, but a woman yells her name, and the name of the man holding her. (Jayme never remembers the other name when she wakes up.)
She sounds broken. Like she very much didn’t want Jayme to die.
When she wakes up, she stares at the ceiling for a long time, considering how unlikely it is that anyone in her waking life would try and hold her hand as she went, or shout for her like she meant something.
Then it’s time to knock back her pills, shut down the pity party, and do what she does to make it another day.
She has never felt like she needs a partner in crime, but since moving to Paris, there’s been a gaping hole in her routines. She needs another half, she thinks, when she lets herself do that. Someone to distract shoppers, stand guard by the locks she’s easing open, take any necessary hits.
Maybe someone to hold onto her wrist as she goes.
But thoughts open the door to more thoughts, so, usually, she will simply find somewhere to sleep, and knock back some less-official medication until the dream comes back.
***
Marrakesh
“Fairuz - can I call you Fei?”
“Everyone does,” Fei replies, in a tone that suggests she’d rather they didn’t.
She takes a slow drink of her mint tea, and tilts her head slightly towards the sun, feeling it hit her cheeks, casting deep shadows through her glasses.
Here’s to a new life, without this dickhead.
Clink.
Bittersweet bubbles on her tongue, and in her belly as she gulps them down. A promise to help somebody.
Her dream-self can see, she feels her stomach drop in horror as warmth, then heat envelops her.
So she turns away from the sun, tilting her head back towards the new girl. She’s from the coast, she said. Halima. She’s still talking, and it’s unnervingly unlike Fei to not have listened.
“It’s just such a beautiful city, and if you don’t mind me saying, it’s an honour to meet you. I saw you in court the other day, you were… Incredible.”
Fei lets her new colleague run her course, filing each snippet of information away in its own mental file. She can hear rather than see the blush, and finds it somewhat irritating. She doesn’t appreciate being liked. In the workplace, she’d much rather be distantly respected. Attorneys don’t get into the game to make lifelong friends.
Halima has read her old case notes but, despite her extensive background, she doesn’t seem to quite grasp what Fei was trying to conclude about French legal precedent.
Frustrating.
She is from Casablanca, and she thinks the mountains look so beautiful from the cafe they sit outside.
She squeaks, then, and Fei hears her cup clatter. “Sorry, I didn’t mean - they’re not -”
“Things are allowed to be beautiful,” Fei says. People walk on eggshells around her, expecting jealousy, but do they yearn for a snake’s heat-sensing pits? A shark’s sense of electric fields?
One cannot miss a sense they were never capable of experiencing.
Besides, the mountains don’t need to be seen to be beautiful. The scent of the wind that rolls off them is, as it picks up snow and street food. Fei doesn’t need to look at them.
Except, except. In her dreams, she is sighted. She doesn’t see , but she feels herself react to things she can. Like Christopher’s death.
Who is Christopher? She doesn’t know a Christopher.
“Right, right,” says the girl, and Fei can sense her sweat in the semi-desert heat.
This woman reminds her of another she worked with, whose name uncharacteristically evades her. Someone enthusiastic, clumsy in her words. Though that person didn’t insist on constantly noticing the obvious.
For the life of her, Fei does not remember where she came from, or even what year they studied together, but she knows that she was, for some reason, one of the few people she’s ever hugged.
Silk-straight hair against her cheek, an outfit of clingy fabric. Sweet shampoo under layers of blood, sweat and tears.
Fei had forgotten about her until a few weeks ago. She keeps meaning to ask her grandmother about her. She has always been her eyes in this world, and will remember this girl if she was worth it.