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By the time they'd actually left the Pizzaplex, the sun was high in the sky.
They'd had to stay longer. Some guys and the fire department showed up not too long after they'd escaped to put out the fire and survey the damage.
And from Gregory's hiding place in the backseat of Vanessa's car, when the men in suits started yelling and holding their heads in their hands, he had assumed the damage was pretty bad.
They had talked to Vanessa too, and they'd must have noticed she stumbled every other step and looked like she dug herself out of a grave, because they'd let her go early with only a slap on the wrist.
Now driving back to her apartment was a different story. Vanessa had basically been falling asleep at the wheel and Gregory had to stop her from driving them off a cliff. And when they'd finally gotten there, Vanessa had parked very crookedly into a parking spot and only had enough energy to walk inside before she was asleep on her bed, dead to the world. Smoke stained uniform and everything.
Gregory wasn't much different. He'd only prowled around her apartment long enough to find a blanket and pillow, and to clean and bandage the cut on his cheek before crashing on her couch.
But Gregory is nothing if not cautious, so as soon as he woke up, it was earlier than Vanessa, if the distinct lack of life in the apartment was anything to go off of, and still only the afternoon, if the beams of sunlight streaming through the windows were accurate.
Vanessa probably wouldn't wake up for a little while. So... he decides to take a look around.
"I do not think it is good manners to snoop around Officer Vanessa's apartment, Superstar." Freddy says disapprovingly.
Freddy had woken up when he did, if robots even could sleep, but Gregory thinks charging is the likely equivalent, and he saw Freddy remove a phone charger from a port in his neck when he'd first gotten up.
Yeah. Apparently that's a thing.
"It's fine, Freddy." Gregory waves him off. "What she doesn't know won't hurt her."
He thinks Freddy will protest more, but the bear just stomps off to the kitchen and says something about breakfast.
That's fine. Gregory just shrugs, looking at shelves holding dusty figurines of things he doesn't recognize, and a bookshelf full of movie DVDs.
Vanessa's living room is surprisingly bare. He expected her to have lots of photos around, most peoples houses do. But even as he searches around the apartment, he finds the place is devoid of pictures of friends and family.
The only things he finds are decorations and movie collections that look like they havent been used or touched in multiple years. All of her items have a thick layer of dust on them, like she just... forgot they were there.
Or maybe, she wasn't there at all to care for her belongings.
He shakes away the thought as soon as it came. He turns his attention to the other side of the room, and a brightly colored paper of some sort catches his eye.
When he goes over to look at it, it turns out to be the calendar. The words on the top page read 'Viking Blood Eagle'. But that's not what he's focusing on. Next to the callender, on a shelf, theres a flipped over picture frame.
It feels like an invasion of privacy. But his curiosity overwhelms his guilt, because he moves the picture frame, careful as can be, as if it's an ancient artifact, and sets it delicately back against its stand.
Inside the frame theres a photo of Vanessa; well, not just Vanessa. The first thing he notices is the distinct rainbow highlights in Vanessa's hair, but theres also three other people in the photo he doesn't recognize. Next to Vanessa, with an arm around her waist, theres a woman with dark, curly hair and glasses with blue streaks in her hair. And next to her, theres a man with blond slicked back hair wearing a proud smile.
On Vanessa's other side, theres another man, with a rich reddish brown hair color and olive skin. He has an arm slung around Vanessa's shoulders, and wears a grin matching Vanessa's own.
It's the first picture he's seen of actual people in the house so far, and it was flipped downwards, purposefully moved out of sight to not be noticed.
Why?
He doesn't have time to dwell on it, because all of the sudden, a scream comes from Vanessa's room that makes his heart seize up.
Its not long before he's bursting through her door.
"Vanessa?!" He asks. He has one hand on the door, stance defensive as he looks for the danger, but he quickly deflates when the only thing he sees is Vanessa, crumpled on the ground next to her dresser, sitting on her knees with a hand over her mouth.
He moves to sit beside her, and when she doesn't protest, he looks her over.
She's still in her Security Guard uniform, which, ew. But that's not what's wrong with her. She has something brown and rectangular clutched in her hand, white knuckled, and when she still doesn't respond, too busy staring at it with wide tearful eyes, he ducks his head around her to get a look at it.
It's a picture frame, the same exact one he'd just looked at in the living room, like they came in the same set. But the picture inside is not the same.
The picture in Vanessa's hand is of her and only one other person. Her hair is bare of the rainbow streaks they possessed in the other photo and much shorter. She looks multiple years younger-- and shes standing next to a middle aged man in front of a lake, who, upon closer inspection, shares many features with Vanessa.
"M--My Dad..." She whimpers, finally. After only staring at the picture and trembling. Gregory switches his gaze to her eyes. "I--I forgot him..."
Gregory just stares at her with wide eyes, not knowing what to say. Freddy steps into the room.
"Officer Vanessa? I heard screaming." Freddys eyes fall on them and he moves to sit next to them. "Is everyone alright?"
Gregory opens his mouth to tell Freddy to leave it, but Vanessa's speaks first.
"My Dad." Her hand is still covering her mouth, voice muffled and eyes aghast. "I-- I forgot him. Oh God-- How could I--"
She cuts herself off with a sob. Gregory doesn't know what to do, so he just shares a look with Freddy, and scooches closer to her to wrap his arms around her in a comforting hug.
Freddy hums. "Well, perhaps you could contact him. Catching up with him is sure to refresh anything you may have forgotten." He advises.
Vanessa just stares at him with red rimmed eyes, and Gregory doesn't understand why until she speaks again.
"N-No I--" She sighs shakily, putting the picture to the side so it's out of sight, and rubs a hand across her eyes. "My Dad... he passed away a few years ago, Freddy"
Freddys eyes widen. "Oh..."
She whimpers again, eyes darting around as she runs a hand through her greasy hair. "H-- How much else have I forgotten?" She murmurs. "I-If I forgot my Dad I-- Oh god.."
Shes spiralling, ducking her head into her hands and closing herself off from the world, trapping herself in her mind.
That's not good, so Gregory intervenes.
"Tell me about him." He says.
Vanessa peeks up in-between her hands, then slowly lowers them. "What?"
He repeats himself, looking her in the eyes.
"Tell me about him. Your Dad."
She just stares at him like he just grew a second head for a few moments, but it's not long until the crinkle in her chin smoothes out and her muscles un-coil beneath him.
"My Dad... uh..." She takes a long time to continue, but it happens eventually, and her sniffles die down and her eyes stop looking as terrified. "...He was, um... we were really close. After my mom died, it made us grow closer."
She talks about her dad, and their history, and what they would do together. Gregory listens, even when the thin beam of sunlight filtering through her blackout curtains gets dimmer and travels across the room all the way to her bed. The sun is setting, but Gregory doesn't dare stop her.
"When he was still healthy enough to move, he would take me fishing a lot. I think he wanted a son, like how I was a mommas girl." She chuckles, and her eyes are long dry now. Shes holding the picture again, but with delicate care, instead of a white knuckled grip. "...I think that's why we got closer. Because we weren't at first, but..." Her lip wobbles. "It just makes me wish I had spent more time with him before."
Gregory smiles. "You kinda are right now."
She glances up at him. "Huh?"
"Think about it." He tells her. "You're revisiting these memories you have of your Dad, it's kinda like your reliving them... so, you're like spending time with him all over again."
It's something he does a lot. When he sleeps in alleys with only newspapers for blankets and forks to eat with to his name. He dreams of the memories he had with his parents before everything.
He doesn't like thinking about them. Or rather, he likes thinking about them so much, he saves the little memories he has of them to remember later.
Gregory thinks Vanessa has a lot of memories she'd like to forget, and based on this conversation, a lot of she'd like to keep. Apparently, she'd lost a lot of them. Ones that were important to her.
Well, that's okay. Well... its not, but it will be. Gregory has a lot of wisdom to share, and Vanessa seems like she needs it.
So he'll share with her. He'll share until she has enough memories she'll want to revisit at night and until she can stomach the visions of the ones she doesn't.
After all, it was shared to him first.
After that, she just kinds stares at him, gaze far away like she's turning the words he said over in her head.
"...Yeah." She says finally. "I guess you're right."
So when it becomes apparent that he actually can help her, he makes a decision right then and there, in the floor of Vanessa's bedroom on her dirty carpet, that he'll never let her fall into the hole that's her own mind on her own. He'll always throw her a rope.
"So," He starts when shes fully calmed down. "...How about breakfast?"
It had been two years.
Two years of her life. Forgotten. Taken from her... that easily.
It was the first sight she'd been greeted with when leaving her room. Her Viking Blood Eagle callender had been flipped all the way to december, and when she'd asked Gregory, he'd said it was 2036.
2036.
She hadn't had anything to say to that. She'd just handed Gregory some instant ramen she'd thrown in the microwave as his breakfast and immediately went to the bathroom to change from her filthy uniform.
After a shower, or two, or five. She'd started feeling less like a zombie that had crawled out of its grave.
At least physically.
2036. That's two years.
She sure feels like a zombie. She feels like she had been buried underground, believed to be dead, before digging herself out with dirt caked under her fingernails and a dream.
Its like she had wool over her eyes and a puppeteer controlling her strings for the last two years. No matter how hard she wracks her brain, she can't remember anything. Nothing about herself.
The only memories that are left are Vanny's (not hers not hers--). And well...
She would rather not remember those.
"Vanessa?" There's a knock on the door. Its Gregory. "Are you okay? You've been in there a long time."
She sighs, and runs a hand down her face, her damp, stringy hair falling over her arm. "Yeah, I'm okay."
Silence. Then, "You really should eat something. I made food for you too."
She only gives herself a second to wonder why Gregory cares so much. Why he's putting in all this effort to make her feel better, to take care of her, when she'd (it wasn't her it wasn't her--) tried to kill him--
She just comes to the conclusion that maybe, Gregory is better than her. Because in that sense, she would have left herself to die if she were in his shoes.
And she almost did. If it weren't for him, she really would be buried underground. Except, she wouldn't be able to dig herself out that time.
And only after looking at herself in the mirror for probably the fiftieth time, once again taking note of the dark, thick bags under her eyes and the age lines that definitely weren't there before, does she finally respond.
"I'll come out in a minute." She says to him, and she probably won't. Not for a while. And she thinks he knows that too.
He doesn't respond for a moment, and she thinks she hears muffled conversation between Gregory and Freddy on the other side, but she doesn't catch what they're saying.
"Okay." Gregory says after a while. "Its in the microwave."
"Okay." She responds back, and after she hears his footsteps receed, she goes back to looking at herself in the mirror.
She looks at herself and blinks once. Twice. Three times. Each time expecting to see blood splattered on her face or her eyes purple the next time she opens her eyes. But nothing ever happens.
The memories play in her head, over and over. All the children she (it wasn't her she didnt want to--) killed, their eyes wide and mouths open in a scream. It's only been a day since she was freed, but she dreamed of the memories. The awful ones. And even ones that didnt happen.
She's glad Gregory covered up his cut. The one that she (not her not her--) sliced open on his face. She had dreamed about him. About her, knife in hand, finishing him off.
(She'd clamped a hand over her mouth when she'd woken up, a scream caught in her throat. She hadn't wanted to wake Gregory, or get his attention. Because she didn't think she could handle seeing him. She had waited hours before finally getting out of bed.)
She blinks again, this time her gaze fixated on her eyes, and she expects to see Gregory's terrified face reflected in them, but once again. Nothing.
Sweat beads on her forehead and make her hands hot and clammy, and she decides to take a sixth shower.
"Officer Vanessa does not seem well." Freddy points out.
Gregory scoffs from his place on the couch. "Yeah. No kidding."
Freddy stands. "She has been in the bathroom for three hours and forty-three minutes straight." He says. "I think we should check on her."
"Just leave her, Freddy." Gregory tells him. He curls up on the couch. The TV is off, he would turn it on, just to fill the silence, but he doesnt think he would be able to pay attention to it.
Freddys eyebrows curve downwards. "Why would we do that? It is obvious she needs help."
Gregory rolls his eyes. "No duh." He says. "But you can't force someone to accept your help, Freddy. You've just gotta offer it to them, and theyll let you if they want to."
Freddy frowns, well, as much as a robot can. "But they do not always want it."
"Yeah..." Gregory trails off, and his eyes fall onto the bathroom door that he can hear running water behind.
"But I have a feeling Vanessa does."
He remembers her eyes, right when they'd left the Pizzaplex, and how she'd told him about her dad, and listened to him when he'd talked to her.
"It might not be easy, but I think she does. And I know she can."
Freddy seems to understand.
And that's that. So he keeps sitting in silence, and waits until the water turns off and the door clicks open to move again.
"Hey." He says to Vanessa when she finally exits the bathroom, and he has a cup of ramen in his hand, not steaming, not anymore, but waiting for her.