July 9-20: Operation: Sundowner
Jul. 7th, 2012 10:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lysistrategicThe first time it happens, Joan wakes and curls toward the warmth of the sun on her bed, eyes shut tight against the sight of her husband not there. When she rolls, her hand touches flesh, a broad barrel chest; an arm lifts, and as she always has, Joan curls into the curve of his strength. She doesn't dare open her eyes and find it's just a dream, but it's so powerfully real, tears leak from the corners of her eyes.
"Joanie?" Arthur rumbles, half asleep but worried half to death.
She knows the tone and the reason, of course; she never cries and if she is, then something is terribly wrong. When she shakes her head, her tears dampen her hair and it sticks to him. He smooths her hair, catches her chin and makes her look at him but she's still afraid to open her damp, sticky lids. Finally, she does and his thumb sweeps against her cheek, questions in his eyes.
"I dreamed you were gone," she says, because she's a spy and she knows if he's confused then it has to have been a dream. Nightmare, the longest of her life. Months. Is Emily real?
"I'm still here." Confirmation, still.
She nods and he kisses her, in that steady, certain way that he has. It's always been her undoing. "Love me?" she asks, and after he tells her, "Always, my wife," he does.
Hours later, when they rise from bed well after breakfast to an empty kitchen - their own home, Emily and Matt moved out last week - Joan remembers. She knows the island's playing this trick, but Arthur will worry. So she leaves it at nightmare and moves on. But she spends the rest of the afternoon making notes about everything she knows on the island and everyone. At the top of every page in the notebook, it has her name and Arthur's, the date of their marriage, and Annie and Auggie's names. Just in case it happens again.
****
The second time it happens, she is doing laundry. Hers and a man's. She doesn't recognize the room she's in, but she knows her name and her job. There's a notebook in her back pocket, a dangerous crutch. She pulls it out, reads, and wonders...are Annie and Auggie the names of the children this cover are supposed to have? Practical, she puts the load in to wash and hops up on the washer (she's young still, she can get away with these things) and reads what she's written. It's beyond strange and she can't begin to imagine the stakes if she's ended it with It's all real. But she hides the notebook under the dry laundry and she runs with it.
It's not until two days later that her memories return.
****
After that, it comes and goes. Sometimes for as short as minutes, other times for days. She converts the notes to a locked file on the computer she's borrowed from Dairine and it pops up every time she powers it on. The password her first phone number, 4645215, which she keeps despite the temptation toward security change because the first thing in the file after Arthur is your husband is always Don't change the password, Joan.
It's terrifying, this journey back and forth in time. But she does her best to keep it to herself, not wanting to worry Arthur and Emily and Matthew, Annie and Auggie and Sarah, Anatoly, Jonas, Dairine, and John. Arthur's name becomes a mantra. A totem. The day she's at the beach and it takes her back to the hospital, she finds a pleasing shell and pockets it to rub with her thumb. When she finds her way back home (carefully, carefully, because something is obviously wrong), opens the computer and the file, she uses ink from her drawing class to write Arthur's name inside the shell. After that, she never leaves it home.
The worst are the days when she's ten and Daddy's gone again or in the field and Megan's missing, at least until she ends up back in the terrible six months where everything with Arthur was wrong. She finds the notes and knows they've made up and he never strayed, but the new ring on her finger sits wrong and it's impossible to pretend she's deeply, warmly in love when she wakes up wanting to strangle him for the brush of his fingers against her skin.
Most of the time, she's in the field again, which makes her think it's a coma she's in or a concussion on the lucid days. There's almost always an op she has to finish, some dire countdown or parcel trade or seduction. When she comes back around, memories restored to the present and all is well, it's not the tear-stricken days of her youth or almost losing Meg that kills her. It's almost betraying Arthur that - uncharacteristically poetic for her - rends her soul.
Eventually even her good days turn sour, filled with fears of forgetting. The coffee she always has in hand cools, forgotten while her thumb sweeps against the inside of the shell. Even when she remembers who she is and where, Joan's cast adrift on the stormy sea of memory. The island is responsible, she tells herself firmly, but the specter of Alzheimer's, sundowning, early onset dementia looms large, leaving her often raw, frightened, stripped bare.
[ooc: find Joan anywhere on the island, any time between now and let's say the twentieth of July. Things she does regularly: her classes, cooking in her kitchen or the main one especially when she's stressed, laundry (and if you want to tag her off the laundry scene here email me because I only want one), drink coffee and read off her laptop, run in the mornings, yoga at night, help Matt with the garden he's putting in, wandering aimlessly looking for her targets. If you need a specific date/date-range, let me know. And if you want her without amnesia on one of the raw days, let me know that too. I'll decide what she does or doesn't remember for your thread. If you want to discuss in advance, drop me an email at technosagery @ gmail and I'll get right on it.]
"Joanie?" Arthur rumbles, half asleep but worried half to death.
She knows the tone and the reason, of course; she never cries and if she is, then something is terribly wrong. When she shakes her head, her tears dampen her hair and it sticks to him. He smooths her hair, catches her chin and makes her look at him but she's still afraid to open her damp, sticky lids. Finally, she does and his thumb sweeps against her cheek, questions in his eyes.
"I dreamed you were gone," she says, because she's a spy and she knows if he's confused then it has to have been a dream. Nightmare, the longest of her life. Months. Is Emily real?
"I'm still here." Confirmation, still.
She nods and he kisses her, in that steady, certain way that he has. It's always been her undoing. "Love me?" she asks, and after he tells her, "Always, my wife," he does.
Hours later, when they rise from bed well after breakfast to an empty kitchen - their own home, Emily and Matt moved out last week - Joan remembers. She knows the island's playing this trick, but Arthur will worry. So she leaves it at nightmare and moves on. But she spends the rest of the afternoon making notes about everything she knows on the island and everyone. At the top of every page in the notebook, it has her name and Arthur's, the date of their marriage, and Annie and Auggie's names. Just in case it happens again.
****
The second time it happens, she is doing laundry. Hers and a man's. She doesn't recognize the room she's in, but she knows her name and her job. There's a notebook in her back pocket, a dangerous crutch. She pulls it out, reads, and wonders...are Annie and Auggie the names of the children this cover are supposed to have? Practical, she puts the load in to wash and hops up on the washer (she's young still, she can get away with these things) and reads what she's written. It's beyond strange and she can't begin to imagine the stakes if she's ended it with It's all real. But she hides the notebook under the dry laundry and she runs with it.
It's not until two days later that her memories return.
****
After that, it comes and goes. Sometimes for as short as minutes, other times for days. She converts the notes to a locked file on the computer she's borrowed from Dairine and it pops up every time she powers it on. The password her first phone number, 4645215, which she keeps despite the temptation toward security change because the first thing in the file after Arthur is your husband is always Don't change the password, Joan.
It's terrifying, this journey back and forth in time. But she does her best to keep it to herself, not wanting to worry Arthur and Emily and Matthew, Annie and Auggie and Sarah, Anatoly, Jonas, Dairine, and John. Arthur's name becomes a mantra. A totem. The day she's at the beach and it takes her back to the hospital, she finds a pleasing shell and pockets it to rub with her thumb. When she finds her way back home (carefully, carefully, because something is obviously wrong), opens the computer and the file, she uses ink from her drawing class to write Arthur's name inside the shell. After that, she never leaves it home.
The worst are the days when she's ten and Daddy's gone again or in the field and Megan's missing, at least until she ends up back in the terrible six months where everything with Arthur was wrong. She finds the notes and knows they've made up and he never strayed, but the new ring on her finger sits wrong and it's impossible to pretend she's deeply, warmly in love when she wakes up wanting to strangle him for the brush of his fingers against her skin.
Most of the time, she's in the field again, which makes her think it's a coma she's in or a concussion on the lucid days. There's almost always an op she has to finish, some dire countdown or parcel trade or seduction. When she comes back around, memories restored to the present and all is well, it's not the tear-stricken days of her youth or almost losing Meg that kills her. It's almost betraying Arthur that - uncharacteristically poetic for her - rends her soul.
Eventually even her good days turn sour, filled with fears of forgetting. The coffee she always has in hand cools, forgotten while her thumb sweeps against the inside of the shell. Even when she remembers who she is and where, Joan's cast adrift on the stormy sea of memory. The island is responsible, she tells herself firmly, but the specter of Alzheimer's, sundowning, early onset dementia looms large, leaving her often raw, frightened, stripped bare.
[ooc: find Joan anywhere on the island, any time between now and let's say the twentieth of July. Things she does regularly: her classes, cooking in her kitchen or the main one especially when she's stressed, laundry (and if you want to tag her off the laundry scene here email me because I only want one), drink coffee and read off her laptop, run in the mornings, yoga at night, help Matt with the garden he's putting in, wandering aimlessly looking for her targets. If you need a specific date/date-range, let me know. And if you want her without amnesia on one of the raw days, let me know that too. I'll decide what she does or doesn't remember for your thread. If you want to discuss in advance, drop me an email at technosagery @ gmail and I'll get right on it.]
no subject
Date: 2012-07-14 06:22 am (UTC)"I don't think I knew you had a laboratory in Rapture," Joan ventures as she takes a seat beside him. "You'll have to show it to me sometime. I've not even ventured down." At least, not that she remembers and there's nothing in the journal about it, but she seems to remember everything else just now. "What happened to your hands, John?" It's asked in the same tone, slightly more concerned perhaps, but without a missed beat and or any particular emphasis.
no subject
Date: 2012-07-15 09:17 pm (UTC)That would have been disturbing if it were not for the fact that John had likely faced far more dangerous things than whoever lurked down in Rapture. Not only that, but it kept him sharp and aware.
"And my hands, well, as I said some experiments took a nasty turn. It's nothing really."
no subject
Date: 2012-07-20 02:32 am (UTC)Joan dismisses that as best she can by returning to the subject of his hands. "Those look like glass cuts," she observes. They're somewhat distinctive. Once you've seen a human body after it's thrown through plate glass, you tend not to forget how it heals. "What were you working on?"
no subject
Date: 2012-07-22 04:12 am (UTC)"All manner of things. Trying to recreate some of the comforts of home that aren't available here. I've managed to develop a rather passable imitation of Pepsi Cola for a friend."
no subject
Date: 2012-07-24 05:46 am (UTC)She stretches one leg out into the sand in front of her and brushes at the sand with her foot. She hates to ask so bald a question, it's not very subtle and this isn't an interrogation, but he doesn't seem inclined to offer an explanation either. "If you don't mind my saying, John, you really don't strike me as the type for seaside meditations. Is there something on your mind?"
no subject
Date: 2012-07-24 06:09 am (UTC)He took a moment to ponder her question, or rather his answer to it. He didn't want to lie to Joan, and he wouldn't, but nor did he wish to share everything that he was going through. That was simply not how he did things.
"For the record, I spent quite some time in a monastery doing nothing but meditating," he said. John had been trying to find a way to control himself at the time and for a short time it worked. Unfortunately, it was only for a time and ended with the massacre of every monk in the monastery.
"But yes, there has been quite a bit on my mind lately and this is my attempt to clear it."
no subject
Date: 2012-07-24 06:34 am (UTC)She chuckles warmly at his correction and admits, "Touche. I don't know you as well as all that, but I did say seaside meditation, not meditation in general." It's a neat point, but it had been the waves that had struck her as an unusual fit for him for whatever reason. "I'm content to be wrong for the moment, if it means you're finding comfort from the practice."
Does she want to know what's on the mind of the man who was once Jack the Ripper? "God knows I'd be useless as a shrink--" Though not an analyst. "But if you've a mind to talk, I've a will to listen."
no subject
Date: 2012-07-24 06:59 am (UTC)"I had a therapist here on the island," John said. "Of course, he married the love of my life and I recently learned they're having a child which is... quite a blessing for them."
no subject
Date: 2012-07-24 07:47 pm (UTC)A quiet sigh, a nod, her eyes warm enough to match the hand that reaches to rest briefly on his arm. "I'm sorry, John. That must be very difficult."
no subject
Date: 2012-07-24 08:46 pm (UTC)In retrospect it had been desperate and foolish of him and could only end in the heartbreak he was feeling now. It was nothing short of what he deserved.
"Bringing along with her the man on the island I hate the most when she told me about it did little to make the revelation go easily."
no subject
Date: 2012-07-24 10:49 pm (UTC)In all it's rather more than she shares with most people, although Emily knows more of the story and Auggie and Arthur of course. It's enough, however, to explain some of her sympathy for the situation.
"And when the other doesn't strive to make it painful. Why on earth would she do such a thing?"
no subject
Date: 2012-07-24 11:14 pm (UTC)"I believe she feared that I would be so upset at the news I would possibly harm her. Or for moral support. Either way, she had to know the choice of Nikola would be painful and insulting. Perhaps it was a message."
no subject
Date: 2012-07-24 11:59 pm (UTC)Instead, she's frowning over Helen's behavior. "It is something of a strange choice, isn't it?" It's not really a question, more of a bemused affirmation of John's thoughts. "Will would have been awkward, certainly, but she could have met you in public." As she had with Geena. "Helen doesn't strike me as the sort of woman to deliver a message so backhandedly, although admittedly I don't know her very well at all. If she did have something to say, I suspect she would have said it outright."
no subject
Date: 2012-07-25 04:28 am (UTC)That was his best guest. Kate would have been a much better choice, he respected and got along with Kate and she could handle herself better than Tesla could. No, Tesla had been a message of sorts, of that he was certain.
"But, that portion of my life is... completely closed to me now. Which is why I was here, contemplating what to do next."
no subject
Date: 2012-07-25 07:15 am (UTC)It's difficult, today, with the specter of early onset dementia looming over her, but she manages a small, reassuring smile. "I managed to make peace with Arthur's previous wife. Maybe in time it will become easier. Not that it's much of a consolation."
no subject
Date: 2012-07-25 10:08 pm (UTC)"I'm glad that your particular troubles in that area are behind you though."
no subject
Date: 2012-07-26 01:44 am (UTC)She's not entirely sure why she's picked John of all people to discuss this with other than conversational drift and the emotional exhaustion from days of pretending to be in love with her husband when she wanted to claw his face off. Today isn't one of those days, but she's still so tired.
"The island has been unkind in reminding us both of her lately," she confesses, but doesn't elaborate.
no subject
Date: 2012-07-26 10:44 pm (UTC)John could only imagine how awful that would be, for one of them to know they loved the other but to have your partner forget that. It seemed the sort of thing that the island would indeed do to someone. A cruel trick to bring her Arthur, only to have him spend time loving someone else.
no subject
Date: 2012-07-29 08:17 am (UTC)She rubs her hands over her arms, suddenly chilled.
"I had...it was just an incident, a day or so, where I forgot back to their divorce," she admits, even though she hasn't told anyone. She supposes she can play it off as just the one or two days. "And then recovering it, I was forced to relive a rather unpleasant afternoon where I accused him of having a girlfriend." She lifts a hand. "Relive isn't exactly the right word. Recall vividly."
no subject
Date: 2012-08-01 10:31 pm (UTC)As least if she was stuck in the mindset of being in the past she could attempt to live some sort of normal life without much difficulty. She may be hurt or upset by what she thinks her husband is doing, but John is sure this is much more difficult, not knowing just who it is you'll be in a short while.
no subject
Date: 2012-08-03 08:47 pm (UTC)Joan sighs as she feels her shoulders and head pulling tighter together. "I could wish it had chosen my body rather than my mind to manipulate, but I suppose that's largely the point. Test us where we are strongest or weakest. Finding myself abruptly male for several days would have been alarming, but at least it would have been educational."
no subject
Date: 2012-08-05 04:16 am (UTC)He wondered that if he was affected if he would be as he was, a madman with an unquenchable urge to kill, or if the island would spare him that. It was unlikely that he would be granted any kindness by the island, but it was not his mind that was so twisted, but that of the creature in him.
John had never heard so much emotion from Joan though as he did now. There was a good chance it was because this had challenged her relationship with her husband.
"Though it would have to go back a great deal to alter mine."
no subject
Date: 2012-08-05 07:01 am (UTC)With a sigh, Joan reaches over to John and pats his arm. "I find I'm terribly poor company today and unlikely to help you find the peace you're looking for." She pushes to her feet. "Perhaps another day?" If she remembered him then.
no subject
Date: 2012-08-06 06:21 pm (UTC)John knew what it was like to not be the master of your own mind and sympathized with her. He also knew the desire to be alone with that same mind and how the worry that something could go wrong at any moment made you seek solitude.
"I look forward to talking to you when things are more settled."