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Chapter Text

His mind felt uncomfortably full of an emptiness, an emptiness that stretched at the seams and shouldered its way past the boundaries of his brain. The doctor repeated, several times, asking if he was alright; what could he say? he only nodded, slowly, as though moving in a dream. His lips felt numb.

Of course, it was from his father. The way his father would explode, erupt his vitriol over Hari, over his mother, for infractions that never happened, for slights that were never there. He just thought the man was bitter and poisoned from a life of hardship and desperation. Never would he have realized the slowly growing lesions over his brain, slowly eating away his self control, his memory. Hari wondered what must it have been like after he had left for the university, left for good.

He felt cold, seeing a distant, dusky reflection of himself in the clouds of Helicon's dust kicked into pluming swirls by the moonshrikes. Would he scream at Raych? At his students? His colleagues, what few of them would still speak to him? Would he be found wandering the streets of Trantor, become a doddering old man decades before his dotage should be upon him?

He wondered briefly, briefly terrified, what the provisions were like for those with Lethe Syndrome on Trantor. Locked in a small, filthy room with no one to care for his demise? Or would he take the rancher's way out, the fate he saw in many a person in the outskirts of Helicon.

Hari only dimly absorbed that the doctor had prompted him to call someone-- had he anyone to call? "Yes..." he said, his normally confident voice trailing off. "My son." He felt another bucket of cold water being thrown on him, covering him in an icy wave of apprehension. How could he tell Raych? It would destroy the boy.

A boy no longer, Hari reminded himself, but a painful lump had formed in his throat. Yes, a man, but a man with the saddest spaniel eyes Hari could recognize from the waif he had met years ago in the gutters. A man deeply fond of his father.

They had already spoke of the slowly whirling machinations, set in place years ago, waiting for the right moment for the trigger. This would complicate things enormously.

Raych deserved to know, he thought with a guilty pang. Hiding something of this magnitude was ungrateful in the extreme, considering how much trust Raych had in Hari's truthfulness. And how much the boy had already sacrificed for Hari. He would be wounded to be told; he would be devastated to not know. Unwillingly, the tableau sprang to his mind of Raych rushing to find him-- the Streeling campus, or a clinic, where he had been confined from a brief and terrible episode.

Hari normally came home himself after checkups, and had never asked his son to accompany him from the clinic before. But the doctor was refusing to let him leave without an escort-- this sort of shock often disturbed people immensely, he had been told gently.

His throat was tight, but not for himself. How would he tell the son he loved more than life itself that Raych would be forced to watch his father wither away into oblivion?

Chapter Text

Raych answered his call with a vague but palpable sense of panic. Hari forced his throat to ease enough to let his voice issue forth, tried to force it to be normal and soothing.

"Dad?"

"Hello, Raych. Might you come by the clinic? I thought we would walk home together."

There was a steep moment of silence. Hari pictured Raych standing there, eyes huge, brain whirling.

"I'm coming. I'm coming." Raych's voice sounded distant, almost muffled, as though speaking from behind his hand. The line went dead.

Hari drew in a breath, and felt it escape him in a hefty sigh that shook treacherously at the end with the threat of unshed tears. /What would Yanna think?/ flitted briefly into his mind, before he shut that thought away before it had the potential to unmake him. It was too late though, and the combination of blows made his eyes sting. He passed a hand over his face, wiping away the film of moisture on his cheeks.

Raych was there quicker than he had expected, and it shook Hari more than he had anticipated. He had been waiting for the doctor to return to give him further instructions, or discharge forms, something. Instead, the door opened with force, like it had been under pressure.

Raych stood in the doorway, hand still on the doorknob, eyes wild. Hari realized, with a further twist of the knife in his gut, that Raych must have thought Hari had been assaulted. Hari felt his face crease with concern for his son, with a paternal consternation that always bloomed in his chest whenever Raych was overly concerned with his father's health. He lifted a hand, palm up, to invite Raych in, to invite him to come close enough to touch his son.

Raych came closer and, to Hari's horror, dropped to his knees before his father, staring up into Hari's eyes. "What is it?" Raych asked, his voice younger from fear. "What happened?" One deft brown hand stole to Hari's knee, which Hari, some self awareness gradually trickling back in, like sensation to a numbed limb, realized he was still clothed in the flimsy hospital gown. His knee, pale and covered with sporadic freckles, seemed washed out in the anemic clinical lighting. He felt a mirrored wounding for his son, wishing desperately for Raych's sake this would not happen like this.

Hari couldn't find the words to answer, so he only reached down, smiling at his son's worried face, gently seizing the roundness of Raych's chin, stroking a broad thumb across the bristly dark stubble there.

Raych must have seen something there that Hari hadn't accounted for, because his face twisted in anguish. "What happened?" He asked, his voice small and insubstantial. Hari could only see the boy, twenty years ago, fear woven into every sinew of his body, every line in his face. Hari would sometimes wake at night to hear Raych breathing softly in the dark, and looking on the floor would find the boy asleep by his bed, as though like a wretchedly loyal work dog.

Hari asked him, once, some weeks after the orphan had started doing this, if he found his own bedroom unpleasant. Raych recoiled at the question, as though personally injured by the implication he was ungrateful for the unaccustomed finery. He shook his head mutely, fiercely. Hari, sensing that this path of questioning was going to be very rocky and possibly holding unanticipated drops, asked gently why he was sleeping on Hari's floor, then. Raych only sighed at this, half in youthful frustration at Hari's denseness, half in self conscious reluctance to reveal his fears. "Needed to make sure you kept breathing," was all he said, as he attempted to plow through his second bowl of cereal of the morning.

Hari knew Raych would not respond well to censure or derision. So instead he spent some time observing his son's behavior before bedtime, how he would gradually get more anxious as it approached, and gradually managed to work it down so that it didn't appear to be something he dreaded.

The worry and fear in the twelve year old's face could have been a mirror to the thirty-two year old's now. "I'm fine," he heard himself saying, in the same tone he used to reassure Raych decades ago. He flinched inwardly at his own lie, but then justified that it wasn't entirely a lie. He was fine right now, regardless of some spotty memory issues. He spanned a hand across his son's cheek, and lifted his chin to point it at a cabinet across the room. "I think my clothes are in there, can you get them for me?" He kept his tone light, slightly self deprecating, as though admitting this was not dignified and he was counting on Raych to follow suit.

Raych only shook his head slowly, eyes still locked with Hari's. Hari felt a little shiver of apprehension travel through him. "I spoke with the doctor," Raych said softly, distinctly. "He said I should speak with you." Hari watched his son's throat bob as he swallowed his emotion. "what happened?" His voice was compelling, confiding. The note of fear had slipped to the back of his words, only barely there.

The thought I have lethe syndrome spilled across his mind, almost made it to his lips, and he had opened his mouth to speak before his years of restraint jerked the bridle on this impulsive train of thought, and he took in a short breath. "This is a conversation for home," he said softly, trying to grapple the situation back under control. He looked across to the cabinet, preparing himself to slide to the floor, however undignified, to retrieve his clothes.

Hari felt a pressure on his knee, and found Raych had clamped his hand there. He only shook his head again, deliberate, patient. "Now. You'll never say anything if I have to wait for you to tell me at home."

Hari felt a sudden flare of fear and exasperation, followed hotly by the prior fear that he might snap at Raych. He let himself take a large breath, and felt his throat tighten again, felt the battery of emotions wear at what reserves he had built. He lifted a hand to pinch between his eyes, give hmself the illusion of some distance between himself and Raych's tragic, expectant face. "Lethe syndrome. It's lethe syndrome. They found... the beginning of lesions." He lifted his hand, letting his eyes slip closed, to trace at phantom spots around his skull.

When he opened his eyes, the boy of twelve had reappeared, with an expression of terror on his face that rivaled any Hari had seen on his son before. Raych looked stricken, truly stricken, as though someone had cut a large vein, or had murdered his father before him. The boy's terror stoked that paternal instinct again, and Hari felt his face fold into a mask of fondness, comforting his son.

He brought his hands down to cup raych's face, a gesture he remembered doing often when the boy was still small. Holding his son's jawbone clasped lightly between his fingers, feeling the thundering pattern of Raych's fear in his neck, he said soothingly, "It will be a long time before this is something either of us has to worry about. It will be many years before I even begin to exhibit symptoms." He punctuated his words by gently shaking Raych's chin with an affectionate touch. "I'm old, Raych," he said gently, "This is simply a feature of the encroachment of time."

Raych closed his eyes as though slapped, and he shook his head again, this time curtly. He didn't respond to Hari's overture of comfort, instead standing and stepping easily to the cabinet, but all the lines of his body were tense, like he were a wire crackling with electricity. He opened the cabinet, taking Hari's dark woolen tweeds from the interior, folding them over his arm. Hari heard him sigh, as though steeling himself for something, and he turned back to Hari gracefully, approaching with his clothes.

"You're 57, Dad," he said, as though this statement explained everything he cared to say.

Hari felt a flush of confusion climb his neck. "Yes, I am."

Raych separated his pants from his shirt and jacket, shaking them out, and offered them to his father. His dark eyes were depthless as he met Hari's gaze. Hari took the garment, but let them fall into his lap. "I'm afraid I don't understand, son," he said gently.

"You're 57," Raych repeated, still deliberate. "Lethe syndrome is common in the very old: octagenarians, nonagenarians." He paused again and repeated, "You're 57."

Hari looked away from his son's gaze, finally beginning to intuit what Raych intended, but unable to respond. This unfairness, he thought, this injustice to a boy already so embattled by life.

"This isn't just aging," Raych's voice continued, and a meager note of fear crept into his tone, making them thin. "You aren't just feeling the effects of getting old. And you know it. You can't lie to me, Dad. Please don't lie." The last three words held a kind pleading desperation that made Hari's eyes snap up to Raych. His son's woundedness seeped into Hari.

"Raych," he said, hearing his voice hoarse in his own ears, intending to allay the fear that was winding around his son, threatening to strangle him, but Raych broke in. "No. You need to tell the truth. How it will be. How soon. What's happening."

Hari felt his mouth go dry, as though he realized he was right in front of a steep precipice in the dark. Faint memories of his father flickered in his mind, the timbre of his voice when he shouted, the feel of his hand against his face, the angry tears that scared him. The weakness that began to wither his limbs as Hari grew.

Fifty years later, Hari was looking back into a dark mirror of his future. His son stared at him with a kind of frantic insistence.

Hari felt his voice calcify in his throat. His words were dry, hard but trailing, as though crumbling under their own weight. "Years. We have a few years before the lesions begin to grow. They will scar and replace healthy tissue. I will likely be a cross, bitter, spiteful old man, and then I will begin to lose psychohistory." The words seized in his throat, the sudden realization that his life's work, Yanna's work, will sift away in his mind, like dust through a sieve. Overlapping this was the memory of his departure for university, the relief he felt leaving his father's bitterness behind him.

He looked up at Raych, feeling a vague sense of franticness to preserve the boy, an almost superstitious feeling. "You will leave," he said, as though this were a given, but seeing the look of hurt on Raych's face, ammended it to, "You must leave. You can't watch this happen to me." Raych looked at though Hari had stricken him full in the face, stunned disbelief warring with pain. He said nothing else, only watched Hari climb into his pants and shuck off the hospital gown. Under the whiteness of the clinic's lights, old small scars stood out. After he put in his shirt, Raych handed him his jacket, and Hari met his gaze again. Raych looked utterly terrified, and hs breath was coming in small, short hitches, as though privately hyperventilating.

Hari suddenly felt as though he had pitched Raych into a pit, and he was watching the boy falling away from him into a dark void. "Raych," he said, reaching out to clasp the back of his neck, but Raych stepped back too quickly. His eyes were wide and wounded, and he was carefully trying to hide his hurt. Hari watched as Raych's instincts took over, and he took three quick steps backward, and he turned to the door and fled.

Hari felt his heart break neatly in two.

It was a very distinct and  palpable sensation, and he grasped at his chest. He felt a well of tears limn his eyes, and he tried to blink the feeling of his heart rending away.