Failing To Forget; We Happy Few (not quite AU?)

[not_mephistopheles]

The day began so extraordinarily typical. Erik woke up and put on his mask just like every other respectable citizen of Wellington Wells. And alike to every cheery neighbor, he never neglected his morning dose of Joy. From there he washed, dressed well, and followed the rainbow painted road to work, like he has as far back as he can remember.

Which isn't actually that long at all, but that’s the comforting bit. Everyone in Wellington Wells has something to forget, which makes the Joy go down easy. Comfortable, blank blanket happiness.

When he arrives, it’s obnoxiously sunny and the vivid blooms upon the windowsill bask in beautiful appreciation. The birds sing lyrically and the air is laced thickly with the calming perfume of flowers and lavender. Coworkers chat pleasantly and hover around the tray of fancy sandwiches, which smell like fresh crusty bread, crisp veggies, and roasted chicken.

So his senses report. Those who fail to take their Joy see true gritty rotting reality of things; who on earth would ever want to experience something like that?

Every face that turns to greet him on his way to the auditorium is smiling broadly beneath a white mask exactly like his own, and it feels especially safe for reasons that are fuzzy behind Erik’s blotted out memory. Oh, well. It’s not like anyone else remembers anything. He’s just one of many in this cheery little town.

Erik has a Very Important Job at The Center for Musical Censorship; it is his task to judge what music is of sufficient quality to be allowed exposure to the civilized masses of Wellington Wells. All manners of musical things pass beneath his scrutiny; he reads sheet music, listens to records, and even judges live performances. Not a bird sings in town without Erik’s cheery nod of approval.

Which isn’t always won. So sorry, your music is not sufficiently Happy, and insights some unpleasant emotions; and as we all know, emotions are the enemy of happiness. Only elated music is allowed public exposure.

Erik spends the morning inside the greenhouse off the main building with a set of headphones and a modernized record player; he’s judging the quality and appropriateness of the music he meticulously inspects. The happy, cheery, peppy music make it into the neatly stacked Pass pile, while the others are broken into pieces and discarded like trash. No need for depressing music here.

It’s pure coincidence that a very particular aria passes beneath his meticulous attention. The melody molds around his mind and whispers of wonderful, terrible forgotten things. The voice of the songstress seems so irrevocably wrong-- like this music was never meant for her. So then who exactly would it be meant for?

Erik twines his spidery fingers around the headphones and yanks them off with a sharp jerk; he fails to place them down with grace. His heart is hammering, and his face aches behind his mask as though fighting the smile it forced upon it. When was the last time he wanted to do anything but smile?

The wisdom of the masses in this precarious situation?

When life annoys, pop a Joy!

From the discrete pocket inside his coat, Erik’s fine fingers fetch a small smooth wooden box. The compact container can pass easily as a sewing kit, but that isn’t the cheery truth. Unlike most civilians, he doesn’t carry a dandy pill bottle.

He carries a syringe and a small glass bottle of specially made liquid Joy.

Popping a pill is just impossible, when his mask keeps mouth sealed into a silent smile. Other citizens don’t have that particular freedom revoked, but Erik is a rather unique case. Huge portions of his memory are numbed and obscured by a blessed blanket of warm fuzzy Joy, and something in the back of his mind still yearns the comfort of forgetting; the Doctors that oversaw his ‘welcome’ to The Village were not overly informative, but they had made sure he remembered one thing.

His voice is a curse. It wrecks the comfort and bliss of Joy’s effects on anyone that hears it, and no one that is here, Erik included, wants that. No one wants remember a what they came here to escape.

He fills the syringe with motions both mechanical and graceful, and glances around briefly before peeling back his sleeve. Speckled pinprick bruises scatter along the inside of his grimly grey slender forearm. They cluster at the inside of his elbow around a thick bluish vein visible beneath his thin pallid skin. The tip of the needle ghosts down his arm in an eerily tender caress as the medically inclined man pinpoints the precisely perfect spot.

But a butterfly that may or may not even exist floats beneath his gaze and for whatever reason he follows its graceful path all the way to a stunningly beautiful woman perched upon the garden’s cobblestone path. Some indescribable pain knifes him between the eyes and through his chest; memories crashing and churning just beneath the too thin veil of chemically induced amnesia.

It’s really too bad that a tiny devious tremor takes the syringe from his fingers and it shatters on the stoney path. He… he knows her, doesn’t he? And something about her sparks a reckless masochistic need to remember.

And it terrifies him. It terrifies him that he doesn’t remember her name, and how badly he needs to. For the first time in far too long he tries to speak, before remembering his bondage to silence. He swallows thickly, finally managing to tear his eyes away and hastily seek his forgotten stash box.

But he can still feel her standing there; her presence floods his veins with each manic hammering heartbeat.

Comments

[lethermindwander]

Vaguely, Christine remembers that she has somewhere to be, an appointment to keep...a job perhaps? She can’t keep it straight in her head. She has always been the type of woman to have her head up in the clouds, not that she can remember anything beyond her quaint little life in this idyllic little town.

And why would she want to? With bright rays of sunshine draping over everything to illuminate just how perfect it all is, she can’t imagine anything ever being better than this.

True, these perceptions might be a direct result of all that Joy but that matters little. Everyone takes it, Christine is more than content to live on in a vivid fantasy rather than even contemplate an alternative.

If she could remember, she’d know that reality has never really been her strong suit.

She bounces down the garden path, her long, dark braid swishing behind her with every step. As much as she has tried to tame her hair, it still escapes and frames her masked face with wild, curly tendrils. To anyone watching her, she is quite literally the perfect embodiment of delirious joy; The poster girl for why the drug is so important. An angel, heaven sent to compound the chemically-induced euphoria with the natural pureness of her voice. She sings to the flowers along the path, fully improvising a silly little melody with silly little words.

But at a bush full of white roses, she stops dead in her tracks. Their beauty throws her off kilter for a moment; their petals seem to have an iridescent shimmer and it takes her breath away for reasons she can’t explain.

White roses are important to her, she can’t remember why, only that they are and how strange it is to forget something so simple about herself. She moves on from the thought rather quickly and reaches out to pick one of the blooms. She tucks it into her hair and decides that she needs another. By the fourth flower, it looks like she wears a crown of roses. When she too eagerly reaches for the fifth, she tears her finger on a thorn. Christine pulls her hand back at the pain with a surprised squeak. Her finger slides between her lips as she soothes the small wound with her tongue. With the blood wiped away, she examines the little cut. Hardly anything at all.

She looks back to her roses and something seizes her chest. Blood, dripped onto one of the flowers, painting the white petals. A white rose turned red. Her heart sputters and Christine remembers.

There’s someone that she loves. Someone she misses with every fiber of her being, a missing piece of her soul. It strikes her with such force that she nearly falls backwards. Oh, this love! What a thing to be celebrated...if she could remember who exactly it is that holds such a claim to her heart. She tries to concentrate, searching her mind for a name, a face, a voice...but there’s nothing.

She steps away from the bush, patting down her pockets in search of the little pill bottle that will bring her solace from this revelation. With shaking hands, she pulls out the bottle and fumbles with the top. If only she could manage to take her Joy, the strangely unpleasant revelation of a missing lover would dissipate.

Instead, she winds up dropping the pills on the ground. The pink capsules scatter across the cobblestones. Christine drops to her knees and picks each of them up, one by one. As she places them back in their bottle, she notices that her finger has not quite stopped bleeding yet. She mutters under her breath in frustration, wrapping her sleeve around her hand before resuming her pill pick up.

She still hasn’t noticed the mysterious stranger looming nearby.

[not_mephistopheles]

He knows her, he knows her, he knows her. The revelation spins around his head like a dizzy murder of crows. He’s trapped in a smile as the details file in; that lush dark hair, that carefree bounce in her step, her eyes, those roses. Erik spends a few moments still as his mind rushes blind through a labyrinth of medicated amnesia. This reckless need to remember is dangerous; it could undo all the safe sunny happiness he has cultivated since his arrival at Wellington Wells. And that is terrifying-- but so are the seconds that pass when he can’t place her name.

Erik gazes glazed at the small spatter of glass upon the path, habit nagging him for the absence of his comfy vice. He needs to take it, but his processing feels stunted with too many things struggling through at once. He feels winded beyond the seizing pain in his chest as his heart kicks, his muscles seeming to remember what his mind cannot. Suddenly the sunshine seems so wrong, like he (they?) should only ever be cloaked in darkness. Like there should be water and candles, smoke and ink splatter and eerily trailing echoes...

Suddenly he’s haunted, thin gloved hand trembling very faintly as he presses his palm to his sealed mouth. He wants to ask her name-- he wants to say a thousand things he can’t even remember. It’s a simple problem really, all he has to do it pick up his handy dandy stash box, and load up another syringe. Find the spot, poke the dot, the colors will come flooding back.

So why doesn’t he?

Erik finds himself standing slowly, leaving his injection kit impatient upon the bench. With stiff slow movements he drifts towards the distressed songstress like a smartly dressed shade. His mask matches hers, painting him handsome and smiling-- politely adding a nose. His smile is mandatory, but the look in his eyes betrays him. In a world where anything less than delirious happiness can have killer consequences, wearing the wrong expression is practically treason. But for a few stray moments, his eyes behind the mask look so forlorn. So lost. So heartbroken.

The poster expression for a Downer.

Erik turns his face away as the sunlight seems (to him) to fade and flicker; for half a moment, the colors of everything seem to wither and fade, and the psychedelic butterflies that float over the flowers turn into flies buzzing over rotting withered branches.

He wades uncertain through the eerie moments until they pass, and finds himself lowering to his knees next to his forgotten songbird. Skeletal fingers in clean white gloves begin to meticulously fetch the little pink pills from the creases between the stones of the path. He keeps his gaze down, willing the agitation to leave him before it is sensed by the wrong Wellie. Why does he feel… so protective of these dangerous emotions?

With a tiny cluster of pink capsules captured in his palm, the misty minded man feels his gaze drawn back to the ‘stranger’ as if by inescapable gravity. She’s so beautiful that he feels like he could shatter into a million pieces.

Like a broken mirror.

He smiles at her, not that he has much of a choice. A polite little nod, as his free hand floats to his fashionably acceptable bowler hat, which he lifts very slightly by way of greeting; his hair beneath is thin and greying black. He can’t stop looking at her, and a few too many moments pass before he realizes he is staring rather uncouthly. The crown of roses in her hair presents a purity that tempts him in all the wrong ways. Why… why would he want to taint that? Why does such flawlessness taunt and call out to him?

With a smothered small cough, Erik breaks his unblinking stare and holds out the rescued pills by way of silent offering. Just a friendly fellow Wellie, helping out a perfect stranger. That’s what it’s supposed to be, even if it’s not.

Wait-- his eyes, aren't they a little strange looking? The left is unevenly colored, and the right iris spreads over the black of his pupil like a tattered spider web. Is it a trick of the light? Surely Joy blots out anything unpleasant to behold-- any difference, any especially unique trait that may cause offense. It’s why townsfolk start to all look the same, why the senses produce the same image of Doctors and Bobbies and anything else that can be cheerily chemically masked.

His eyes are just like everyone else’s.

Aren't they?

[lethermindwander]

Not expecting any help, Christine gasps when she sees the stranger’s knee out of the corner of her eye.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she stammers, “I’m so clumsy, you don’t have to help me, it was my own fault that I dropped my Joy, I-I’m such a silly girl, I was distracted by the flowers, you see, they’re very beautiful today. B-But you don’t have to help me, I appreciate the gesture but I-”

She doesn’t catch the look of utter heartbreak in his eyes. Her own eyes are so focused on the ground. Her hands shake and the pills she picks up keep falling out of her grasp again. Her heart won’t stop racing. It won’t stop hurting. She can barely breathe, struggling to make her sluggish lungs cooperate.

She loves someone. So, so much. Her heart is broken, the feeling being magnified by just how sudden it overtook her. She wants to reach out and find this person, hold them close and never let go ever again. The fact that she can’t is suffocating her; she doesn’t even know who they are…

Her eyes go glassy and her vision blurs as she fights the feeling of profound loss. She shakes her head and blinks, knowing that if this stranger saw her face completely, she could be in danger. She’s a good person, a good, compliant citizen, she’ll take her Joy once it’s all safe and tucked back into the bottle, this state is only temporary as long as this man doesn’t notice how she’s about to fall apart.

As he lifts his hat and holds out the gathered pills, Christine looks up at him. Her eyes dart from his hand, to the hat to his mask and back down to his hand again.

“Thank you,” she says, just barely managing to keep her voice steady, “You didn’t have to help me but you did. So thank you.” She takes the pile of pills out of his hand and pours them back in their bottle. She pops the lid back on and it doesn’t occur to her that she should just pop a pill between her lips before she puts them back in her pocket.

Because her eyes finally meet his.

They’re normal, the brightest blue she has ever seen. Then she blinks and they shift; she sees his eyes as they really are. Uneven and mismatched. Another blink, normal. One more and they’re different again. It’s as if her mind can’t figure out which option is unpleasant and which is beautiful.

And then she’s reliving a long forgotten memory.

The day turns to night. All the colors around her have faded to shades of black and white except for the intense glow of those eyes. The hat is different; a wide-brimmed fedora, the mask is different; white and made of silk. His clothes are from a different century, his gloves are black and made of leather… Yet his hand is stretched out to her, warm and inviting and comforting, if only she can be brave enough to take it. So she does. Christine reaches out and places her hand in his. The memory freezes, unable to move forward. The sunshine comes back, followed by the vibrant colors of the flowers and the town.

She looks down and sees that her hand is desperately clutched around this stranger’s. Christine swallows hard and bites her lip, embarrassed that she could get so caught up in a dream.

“Thank you for everything, ” she says again and shakes his hand to cover her own indiscretion. In her panic, she probably shakes a little too hard and somehow, she also forgets to let go.

“I’m Christine, and you are…?”