Chapter Text
The human brain, much like the technology on a word processor, fills in and corrects ‘mistakes’ in the human memory. So when Jade Harley wakes up at the age of 18, the game over and done with, and remembers nothing? Her brain, with the help of latent coding from the game, fills in the cracks.
Suddenly it’s like five years of her life never happened. But she doesn’t know that.
She doesn’t wonder where her best friends are, because her brain tells her they drifted apart years ago, as friends sometimes do.
She doesn’t remember the three years on a ship with John. Or meeting Rose for the first time. And she certainly doesn’t remember Dave dying in her arms and desperately trying to kiss him back to life.
When she wakes up on the morning of April 13th, her first birthday since the game ended, though to her it’s just another birthday, the sun is shining brightly through the dome of her laboratory. A smile graces her face and she pads into the living room in her oversized shirt and pajama shorts, smiling out of the window at the bright day. She doesn’t really mind that she has no one to wish her a happy birthday. Instead, she heads for the kitchen and sets about making herself a treat. A cake, from scratch. For some reason, the reason being locked away in the part of her mind the game doesn’t want her to remember, she just can’t bring herself to use Betty Crocker mix.
While her cake is baking, she perches on the counter top, nose stuck in a book of poetry she ordered herself. She looks a bit like a perfectly composed photograph, sun filtering in the windows and shining off her dark, wavy hair, glasses sliding slightly down the bridge of her slim, freckled nose, legs hooked at the ankles, and one arm resting behind her comfortably, supporting her. Her phone, next to one tan, muscled thigh in the counter, buzzes. She picks it up and sees the airmail line calling her. She picks it up, tucking it between her ear and shoulder.
“Hello?” her voice is bright and cheerful, as always. “You have a package? But my scheduled grocery drop isn’t for a week! Huh, alrighty! I’ll be right out!” she slid off the counter and walked out into the island sun, shading her eyes with her hand. The roar of the copter grew as it neared the ground and dropped a parachuted package. She scooped it up and waved at the pilot, grinning broadly, and headed back inside, setting the box down and pulling the cake out of the oven. Whiel it cooled, she pulled the box over and cut the tape with a knife sitting on the counter. It was swaddled in bubble wrap, whatever it was. She unwound all the wrap and revealed the gift.
It was beautiful gilded frame, slight and ornate, with a pattern on vines wrapping around it. Inside the frame was a painting. A single red rose in bloom, a few delicate drops of dew sliding down its’ petals and a green stem with delicately spiked leaves snaking out from under it. It was beautifully detailed and painted. She looked for a card or a note, but found none. Only the letter ‘D’ written on the back of the frame in a red sharpied block letter. She pondered it for a moment, then simply shrugged, carried it up to her room, and hung it on her wall. She looked at it from time to time, trying to puzzle out who could have sent it, but usually brushed it off in favor of other thoughts, like what to cook for dinner that night, or what to watch on Netflix.
Months rolled by uneventfully, spring into summer and then summer into fall. There’s not much of a difference in seasons when you live on a tropical island, so she hardly notices the time passing. October rolls around, and October is the rainiest month of the year here. She spends most days curled up in the observatory, watching the rain pour over her island, nuzzled into a nest of blankets. On October 25th, along with her usual grocery order, she receives a large box, punched with air holes. She opens it carefully, only to find a bouquet of two dozen half bloomed roses, as red as the sky on a stormy morning, with leaves and stems greener than her eyes. They smell like heaven.
She asks the pilot who sent them, but he shrugs and tells her he’d tell her if he knew, but he hadn’t a clue. She puts them in a clear crystal vase on her breakfast table.
Her whole house smells of fresh roses for weeks.
When they start to wilt, she wraps them and hangs them upside down to dry, and hangs them underneath the oil painting she received for her birthday. It seems fitting. She dreams about frogs that night and it takes days for the inexplicable melancholia she wakes with to dissipate.
Some time after the new year, after completing her online PhD in microbiology, she decides to move to the mainland. Packing up her life is sad. As far as she knows, or fake remembers, she’s lived on this island her entire life. She finds a small apartment at a seaside town in Southern California, where it is warm enough to suit her tropical tastes. She develops a taste for the avocados from the organic grocer across the street, and she even befriends the owner, who tries repeatedly to set Jade up with her son. The apartment has a bay window looking out over the ocean, and above it she hangs the painting and the dried red roses.
By the time another birthday rolls around, she’s made a few friends in the lab she works for, doing research, and a few of them are over for a modest dinner party, mainly idle chatter and sweets. They’re several years older than her, but no one seems to notice or mind. The door bell rings and she rises to get it, seeing a small box sitting there. She cocks her head, her inky tendrils of hair shifting out of the loose bun, held together with pencils. She tears it open, suspecting somewhere in the back of her mind what it is.
Her suspicions are confirmed when she gets it open. Another gilded frame, all plant vines and leaves, with a painting in it. This time it’s a watercolor, a brilliant green orchid with a delicate dusting of red pollen. She looks at the back of the frame. Just like last time, a block letter D is written there in red Sharpie. She hangs it on the wall with the other painting and the bouquet. Her friends ask who sent them, inquiring about admirers, but Jade simply shrugs and tells the truth.
Time passes, as it is want to do, and Jade notices more, now having a job and living somewhere with seasons other than dry and wet. October rolls around and she decorates her apartment, placing a cheerful jack o lantern on her balcony. And, as she half expected, the doorbell rings on October 25th in the early hours of the evening. There waiting is a large bouquet of orchids, dyed as emerald green as she’s ever seen, and a delicate coat of red pollen and tied with filmy red ribbon. There is no note, no card, nothing. She puts them in the same crystal vase and they sit on her coffee table until they start to droop, and she dries and hangs them with the paintings, just like the roses.
Life goes on. She gets a promotion, dates a co-worker, gets her heart broken, and moves on. She spends a lot of time at the water, and is slowly but surely learning to surf, her already tan and toned arms and legs growing moreso. She gets published for the first time in a major science magazine, and throws a small party to celebrate.
Every once in awhile she dreams of frogs, or a lost golden moon, or a glowing ship, or, most hauntingly, a pair of soft red eyes. She doesn’t understand these dreams, but she awakes from them shaking and cold, and it usually takes at least two days for her to feel normal again. The last time she dreamt of the red eyes, she awoke to a heavy cold weight on her body, as if someone had been lying beside her and left suddenly.
Another April 13th rolls around, and just as she predicted, another package. It’s not a painting this time, but a drawing, done in oil pastel, all rich textures and strong lines. It’s of a bunch of lilac, delicate purple blossoms held together by a thick blue ribbon, fluttering in an imaginary breeze. She traces her finger over the now familiar D over and over again, trying to recall every person she’d ever met who had a name that begun with a D. She recalled a few people, but none of them made sense.
Two or three hours north, in a Hollywood bungalow, Dave Strider punches the wall in frustration, much to his sister’s dismay.
‘Strider, I know you hate that she doesn’t remember. But if you tell her she might go into shock. The best we can do is hope to jog her memory.” Dave snarls at her, and John shakes his head sympathetically, frowning. None of them like the situation they’ve been put in, living life with out their fourth best friend, but Rose has a point. They all managed to remember and find each other. Jade is still lost, or in denial.
So every year on her birthday he sends her a painting or drawing of a flower. And on the anniversary of the end of the game, he sends her a bouquet of whatever was in the painting, and hopes one day that bold red D will make her remember him. He takes a swig of scotch and throws himself onto the sofa.
Come October 25th, a bouquet of lilacs tied with blue ribbon appears on her doorstep, and as usual there is no note. But they smell delightful and when they dry they turn the most beautiful shade of purple.
One night in December she has a dream, more vivid than any she has had before. She can almost feel the mud of a marsh beneath her feet, hear the crack and smell the burn of gun powder, feel the weight of a person in her arms, and those eyes, those red eyes staring straight through her. She wakes up, her body wracked with sobs and guilt and grief for someone she can’t remember. But she realizes, after three years, that there is something she’s forgotten.
She reads all her old journals and checks old pesterlogs and looks in old sketch books, and it’s there, it nags at the very back of her mind, like a hangnail that just won’t rip away. She thinks she might be a little bit crazy, but she can’t shake this feeling that her own brain is hiding something from her.
At one point her frustration is so strong she punches her window. She gets 17 stitches and has to pay for an entire new window for her bathroom. She spends a lot of time tracing the letter D on the back of the frames, staring at the flowers and trying to put two and two together.
Her dreams get even worse, slowly turning into nightmares. She doesn’t sleep much anymore, and her work is suffering. She keeps it together enough to not get fired, but she’s so preoccupied that it’s April 13th before she has a chance to notice it’s not cold anymore. But instead of a buzz from the bell there’s a knock. When she opens the door, it’s not just a package but a person, and the minute she sees the sandy hair and the dark shades and the red sleeves, the wall between what the game does and doesn’t want her to remember starts to crumble.
Dave Strider nods at her and hands her a box wrapped in black paper, silver and green galaxies swirling on it.
“Can I come in?”