MEMORY SHARE ※ 1

[wildestmods]

MEMORY SHARE

It's during a pause in their day. A nap. An idle moment looking out from the gardens at the landscape passing by below. Taking a moment to catch their breath after a jog in one of the castle's larger magic rooms.

The squad is suddenly connected. Mental pathways locking together, they're forced into one another's innermost beings. Thrust into one another's memory palaces where the mind collects and stores everything that makes them who they are. The core of their beings are only a few steps away and no one can prevent the link.

To make matters worse, it comes with no explanation or no ability to pull out and stop. Once they're through the first memory, perhaps they can find a way out, but they're already witnessing some event from their host's past. And, if they left, who knows whether or not they'd end up accidentally invading another memory palace?

And if they were there, who was in theirs?

[ooc: So, how this works: the memories can either be viewed in spectator mode or the guest can be experiencing everything themselves. The person whose memories are being shown, the host, can watch as their current self or take the form they had of their past self. They can also be invisible until the memory is finished. They can talk about the memory with the "guest" that's visiting.

They cannot control the first memory shown, the player decides that, but they can sometimes control any other memories they'd like to show people after. Of course, there's also always the option of an extreme emotional reaction bringing up other memories unbidden.]

Comments

[tr1xx]

You’d think, she teases, and though the cheeky glint in her eye isn’t as strong as it usually is, it’s not completely absent, either.

She watches the lesson in the memory for a moment, as she thinks. Giggles a genuine, if quiet little giggle when past her does something to tease Kazu again and he reacts with the same, ridiculous looking angry bunny ears of her sign name. Big tough Kazu, such a dork really. Regular big softy, not that he’d hear it.

Never told him how ridiculous he looked. He would’ve stopped. She takes a big, steadying breath and wipes at her eyes. Yeah. Yeah I can show you some more. Let me just get my head on straight.

[hallelujahjunction]

Take your time.

Dan suspects that if this is like the Rig, he could wrest control of the memories and replace Cammie's on display with some of his own - but he worries about the content of his, of bringing it down when the mood is so tentatively, tenderly warm right now.

Some folks are at their best when they don't realize how they look.

[tr1xx]

For a moment, Cammie closes her eyes, just to think. To try and pin down a memory, not let her mind wander towards those that she doesn't want to relive. She only really knew Kazu for a year but there's so many memories, anyway, because the team spent all of their time together and so much of that time literally in each other's heads.

She aims for something small, first. Mundane but memorable. Kazu being a little shit at her the way she was always a little shit at him. Something older, too, distant from recent events. The room around them doesn't change, though objects move around and so do people; Cammie is visible asleep in her bunk, whilst Kazu is sat up on the bunk above his actual bed, level with her. Valentina, is gently shaking Cammie awake whilst Yaz mills about.

"Moya Zaika," Valentina says, firm but gentle, "sleepy head."

Past Cammie just rolls over, grumbling in her half-awake state, seemingly determined to go back to sleep. Kazu... has other ideas.

"This one goes out to all you late night gaming addicts out there," he teases, speaking Japanese.

Electric guitar fills the room and Valentina covers her ears, glaring up at him, meanwhile Cammie—without her ears, and thus only barely able to hear the guitar at all—just grumbles and flips him off with a V sign.

"Leave me aloooone," she whines, as present Cammie snickers softly to herself, seemingly not finding these antics to be annoying at all, looking back on it. Or, perhaps more accurately, appreciating the annoying antics for what they are, anyway.

"Only Yaz and Valentina could even really hear 'im. Talk about ineffective methods of torment."

[hallelujahjunction]

Kazu reminds Dan of his little brother, Eli, the first to die, or his sister, Tab. Joking, grabbing attention, buoying people's moods with irrelevance and drawing their focus from the stress around them. It's an underrated talent, a vital one. Dan's family unit fell apart without it.

Did you let him in on the secret that you can't hear worth shit? Dan asks, grinning, staring fondly at this kid that he never met. He's glad that these are the memories Cammie can conjure of him.

[tr1xx]

Eventually. Her nose scrunches a little with her laughter. The Cammie in the memory dramatically rolls out of bed—literally rolls off the top bunk—after Yaz tells her to hurry, and Kazu ruffles her hair whilst she bats at his hand groggily. He was a bit slow on the draw, sometimes. And ‘cause he only spoke Japanese, my lenses translated. So I could always tell what he was saying even if I didn’t have my ears. So like—

The memory shifts again. She’s pretty in touch with her memories, thanks to the nature of her work, the nature of mindshare. Got used to picking out specific memories she wanted to show the others.

Now they’re in a mess hall, and memory Cammie is sat at a table, earless because she’s futzing around with them, trying to fix a problem. Software issue, it was. Needed a rollback. She can’t hear, of course, so when Kazu strides up behind her, calling her name and asking what’s up, she doesn’t notice at first, her lenses catch it but by then he’s already clapping a hand over her shoulder and she jumps out of her skin.

“Mac na galla!” she curses, turning to see Kazu wide-eyed and holding his hands up as if in surrender. “Holy shite, Kazu, you scared the bejesus out of me! Did no one ever teach you not to sneak up on someone?”

Kazu blinked. “I called out to you when I came over. Didn’t you hear?”

“Of course I didn’t hear you, you daft—” Cammie starts, only to cut herself off as realisation swept over her. “Ah, piss. I never specifically told any of you, did I? The others put it together, but—”

“Told us what?”

Cammie groans, covering her face with her hands. When she raises her head again, Kazu is still looking at her quizzically, one eyebrow raised.

“Siddown,” she says, gesturing at the seat across from her. “And gimme a sec to get my ears back on.”

Kazu does as she tells him to and sits down opposite her. All she has to do is reboot them and fasten them back around her ponytail. Immediately, they twitch back to life and orient themselves facing directly at Kazu.

“There. That’s better,” she says. “I really shoulda wrote my own code for the emoting function, relying on someone else’s is always a recipe for disaster.”

Kazu doesn’t look any less confused than he did a minute prior. “I don’t understand.”

“I’m Deaf, ye eejit. Not totally, mind, but close enough to matter. These aren’t just about the aesthetic, y’know,” Cammie says, wiggling the rabbit ears to draw his eye. “They’re basically hearin’ aids. Designed ‘em myself, they’re a lot more fun than my plain old back-up set.”

Kazu blinks. The loading bar in his brain is almost visible.

“You cannae tell me you never noticed I don’t respond when you try and get my attention whenever I take these things off at night,” Cammie carries on, cocking her head. “Did you just think I was ignoring you?”

“You ignore us sometimes with the ears on.”

“…okay, you got me there,” she says, and Kazu smirks. “Shut up. Not my point. You blasted guitar at me the other day and I barely flinched! Valentina was coverin’ her ears like the drums were gonna burst!”

Kazu shrugs. “Teenagers play their music loud. I should know, I was one of them.”

“Oh so that’s why you’re tone deaf as a donkey’s arse,” Cammie says, shit-eating grin on her face. Kazu doesn’t rise to the bait, just chuckles. “Y’know, I’d call you dense but that ain’t true, because you have something between your ears whether you admit it or not, but you sure aren’t observant. ‘Least I have an excuse when I don’t listen to somethin’.”

“I have an excuse,” Kazu said. “Just not a very good one.”

Memory Cammie deadpans, her ears lopsided. “Riiiight, you only listen when you want to.”

“Exactly.” Kazu grins.

Real Cammie rolls her eyes, but it’s fond. He was a regular rebel. Never met an authority he couldn’t piss off. Liked to say he didn't fight just 'cause someone told him to. That suited us just fine, though, 'cause in the end he wanted to fight for what's right. Wanted to fight with us, wanted to fight for us, protect us, y'know.

[hallelujahjunction]

Dan smiles through this memory, even though that smile saddens as he thinks simultaneously of the fact that this jocular friend of Cammie's is dead and the way Cammie's team reminds him so much of his family - also dead, at least, dead to Dan.

He remembers living in that van with them, all these kids stacked on top of each other, how it became harder year after year, death after death, to keep joking. What a gift it was to have any humor at all, any irreverence, and how special it is to see Kazu and Cammie find that in the midst of a war.

Cammie's so special for keeping it now, in spite of everything.

I reckon me and him might could have liked each other. I don't like being told what to do none either. As Dan gets more fluent in BSL, his grammar has started to shift away from proper sign structure in a way that approximates his natural dialect, imperfect as the translation between two different language formats is.

[tr1xx]

I think you woulda got on, aye. He’d probably try find the right way to thank you for looking out for me, too. Without me hearing. Big softy, he was.

He was always looking out for the rest of them in his own way, which was always more about actions than words. A moment like that is what Cammie tries to move the memories toward next, and at first they do stay in the mess hall, her whole team appearing around the table. Kazu hands out bowls of food to them all that he’s clearly made himself, but the conversation at hand is one about what happened on that first mission of hers.

They may even catch some of what’s being said (“You shouldn't have to hack your code to feel better. The rest of us have fought before. We can help if you let us.” / “Just 'cause you don't take physical damage doesn't mean you're not affected.”) but the problem is, it doesn’t take a lot to make Cammie’s mind latch onto things she doesn’t want it to.

The environment around them changes, first to a dark street in Dallas, to Nemesis and Cammie’s ear-piercing scream, but at the sight of Nemesis himself it’s like she can’t even hold onto that thought for long, the space around them ping-ponging through battlefield after battlefield with the one constant being Nemesii all around until it starts to stabilise on one smokey, barren valley, to a scream that isn’t Cammie’s. To the moment where Cammie realises what that scream, what Yaz’s scream, means, and her rabbit-like Holon skates across the battlefield to find— to find—

(He died protecting Yaz. He died protecting one of them because he always protected them, because that was how he knew how to show he cared and—)

Through all this Cammie’s trying to wrestle it back another way, but by the time they get here, she’s grabbing at her head and frantically mumbling, “Nononono—”

[hallelujahjunction]

"Cammie!"

Dan was afraid of this, trying to keep from being too on-edge despite knowing how slippery the memories here are, how pleasant ones can so quickly dovetail into nightmares. He grabs Cammie and pulls her into an embrace, petting her hair and keeping her face to his shoulder so she doesn't have to see, so she has something to absorb her tears and screams.

"Close your eyes. It's in the past. I've got you." Dan's undergone some variation of these memory shares frequently enough that he has an intuitive sense of how to grab for control of the setting, even if he can't determine what they see. He's worried that he's seen enough gruesome and horrific death and grief in his life, both personally and in his line of dangerous, lethal work, that he'll just compound Cammie's trauma, but he focuses on trying to dredge up something happy, anything-

-and feels a chill and a wave of sadness as they find themselves in waist-high yellow grass in the middle of the night under a half-moon and the sorts of bright constellations that only exist when there's minimal light pollution. Dan knows by smell and sound what memory he's in, the crispness of the warm night air, the smell of horses and sage and hay and oak, and the sound of a pre-teen girl giggling.

"This is so cool," the girl says, a gangly kid with dark hair bundled into a ponytail with a braid along the side, wearing a Nirvana t-shirt and jeans so battered they're practically netting. "Can I ride bareback?"

That version of Dan's flashlight slips between clumps of grass onto a pad-locked barn. He emerges from the grass and crouches in front of the lock, pulling lockpicks out of his jacket and switching his flashlight to sitting between his neck and shoulder. "On your first try? Not a chance."

"Well, can I ride by myself?" The girl peers over at him while he works, then takes the flashlight so she can hold it for him. "Go slower, I want to learn how you do this."

"Alright, see how I'm holding the tension wrench? That keeps the pressure on so I got room to get the rake in and pop the pins on the inside. Now I just got to listen for four little pops while I work it in and...there we go," Dan says, pulling the lockpicks from the lock and popping it open. "Voila."

The girl takes the lock and examines it. "I want to practice when we're done here tonight. So, can I ride a horse by myself?"

"I got some locks in the car we can work you on. Now come on." Dan opens the door. "Let's pick you a horse to ride, and no, ain't a bat's chance in hell I'm letting you start off alone on a strange horse."

Beaming, the girl follows him into the barn, where she can be faintly heard whispering that one, the black one...

Dan winces, giving Cammie a squeeze.

[tr1xx]

By now accepting Dan's comfort is familiar enough that, despite her panicked state, there's no fight when she feels him draw her in. She lets him, she lets him pull her into a hug and try to shield her from the mess her own memories are making around them. She lets him and she clings as she muffles her sobs and curses in his shoulder, trying desperately to clear her mind and failing, because she's never been any good at letting a thought go, and— and—

And then the memory shifts, and it's not her doing.

The sting of acrid smoke is replaced by all those less familiar, more natural smells, smells that aren't an inherent reminder of the death, destruction and pain of a battlefield in a dying world. Fresh air against her skin, the tickle of the grass around them. No, this couldn't be a memory of hers. She's not sure her world has this kind of life left in it.

The panic eases quickly. Not completely, but enough that she isn't consumed by it, enough that her ears twitch curiously, turning outwards to listen to the conversation happening, and she draws in a surprised breath she doesn't quite manage to suppress.

Is that...?

She takes an extra second to dare turning her head itself, just enough to look, not pull away entirely. Just enough to get a look at the young girl with dark hair, to watch the way the Dan in the memory interacts with her.

"...oh," she breathes, as if she's only realising now as Dan squeezes her.

His daughter. Young enough here that Cammie's once-a-big-sibling heart twinges a little, in a weird way. Knowing she's gone. That there's a horse back in the real world named for her. That Dan lost her, sometime beyond this so far sweet memory, another nice moment that hides all the grief that came after.

...she squeezes Dan right back.

[hallelujahjunction]

"It's okay," Dan says, although he sounds lightheaded and detached. His memories throw his daughter at him constantly; he thinks, between dreams and how vivid his flashbacks are, that he sees her dead almost as much as he ever did alive. He's been braced for this. He can shoulder the weight of it if it keeps them from having to look at Kazu's dead form, Nemesis encroaching. "That's...that's Ellie."

In the memory, there's some rummaging around in the barn, and Dan leads a black horse out with a saddle on its back. He keeps the reins and helps Ellie up. "How's that feel?"

"Like I have to do the splits to stay on. Horses are big," she says, as if that's occurring to her for the first time. "Can we gallop?"

"Let's try a trot first."

"Oh my God, you're so overprotective," she says. Her faint accent, so different from his, and her dark skin suggest that they might not be blood-related. "What if the owner comes out and sees us riding his horse and we have to make a daring escape? Can we gallop then?"

It's too dark to see that Dan's expression, but the affectionate warmth is evident in his ragged voice. "We'll just have to hope it ain't come to that."

To Cammie, this Dan says "ain't nothing harsh about this memory. We can probably stay in this one a while. It's safe. Peaceful."

Painful in its own way for its tranquility, as is the next one that emerges, the magic sewing their memories together unwilling to settle too long in any one place. They're still someplace warm, only instead of night it's sunset, somewhere outdoors at a lookout point that oversees the ocean. Dan and Ellie are sitting on a bleached-out bench, and Dan has a battered guitar in hands. In his constricted, atonal voice, he's singing to her: "I can take you higher..."

"You're so tone-deaf!" Ellie, the same age as before, is laughing.

"If I were tone-deaf, I wouldn't be able to tune this here guitar," Dan says, laughing back as he lights a cigarette and then strums a chord.

"You should just let me sing. You're scaring the birds." Ellie stands up and looks over the ocean, shoulders back and back straight as if she were singing in a choir. She's no great singer, but compared to Dan, she sounds like a superstar. "I can take you higher, ooh, ooh, oh, I'm on fire."

Dan accompanies her on guitar, clumsier on this instrument than he is on keyboards but unbothered, more at ease than Cammie's ever seen the Dan she knows.

[tr1xx]

Ellie. Her name was Ellie.

(It's silly but it makes her think of her family, for a second. There was this weird little tradition, almost; names or nicknames that ended in 'ie'. Grandma Elsie, her mam Billie, Maisie, Fergie... Cammie, of course.)

(The little connections your mind can't help but make. She shuts it down quickly, though. The last thing they need is to end up in her memories again so soon.)

She can't help but smile, watching them, bittersweet as she knows this peacefulness really is. Can't help but find some relief in seeing a Dan that's so comparatively at ease, seeing the way he so clearly cares for the young girl, seeing them have fun...

The good times matter, she does try to cling to that, as tough as it's been lately. The good times matter because they happened and in the moment, things were as okay as they ever could be, and those good times still happened even if they won't ever happen again.

"...she looks happy, with you." He looks happy with her.

There's no doubt in Cammie's mind that there's far more to their situation than meets the eye. It isn't lost on her, the way Dan's taken so to the teens like her who have so much more going on than many of them will often admit. Teens with messy, complicated lives full of hurt. She wonders just how full of hurt Ellie's life was, too, because it seems almost inevitable.

But she doesn't want to stick to that thought, too long. She doesn't want to ask, she doesn't want to break the peacefulness of it all. (She doesn't want to pry, thinks of how she kept unwittingly overstepping boundaries back home, doesn't want to do it again.)

[hallelujahjunction]

"As happy as she ever was," Dan says softly. He knows that, at least. In a dark and sad life full of pain and fear, Eliora had a good five years knowing she was protected and supported in Dan's care. He couldn't provide creature comforts to her, but he could provide the unconditional love she had never had before.

In the memory, Ellie says okay, let's do "Tomorrow, Wendy" and Dan says pick a more morbid song, will you and she says it's not morbid, it's poetic while Dan picks out a dreamy riff in E flat.

He opens his mouth to tell Cammie what happened to Ellie, but the words she killed herself die in his throat, so he takes a moment and breathes through it. Then he wants to say that it feels like Ellie died yesterday, like she died ten minutes ago, like he's never gotten past feeling like it's happened so recently he hasn't even embarked on the awful task of processing it all, but how can he say that to a teenage girl who's just starting on a fresh new grieving process of her own?

Every child in his care has died, and he worries all the time that he'll someday have to add Cammie, Stacia, Elle, Ange, all of them to the graveyard in his heart.

"She was- she was a ghost haunting a car I bought, back home. I had a magician sever her tether to the car so she could be a flesh and blood girl again, but she weren't never going to age a day, and that...she took that hard." Ellie never got over the horror and tragedy that she would never grow up, only die or live forever as a child. Dan shrugs. He doesn't know what else he can say. "Even so, having her in my life was the happiest I been since I was a kid-"

He chokes up and runs his hands over his face.

[tr1xx]

Cammie's ears splay out, flattening backwards. She can't even imagine, not just knowing you'll never grow older, but dying not once but twice, in the end, to start as a ghost and be gone again now. She can't imagine taking in a kid like that, being so happy to have her in your life and losing her anyway.

She renews the strength of her arms around Dan, turns it into a proper hug where distraction had made it lax. She wishes she wasn't so bad at words, wishes she could say something of value here, but all she's got is a quiet but sincere, "I'm so sorry, Dan... m'sorry she's gone... at least you did good by her whilst you could..."

She doesn't know how to rationalise the way pain and loss seems to not just cling to some people, but pursue them. The way grief hasn't let go of her life since she was nine years old, the way Dan's been having nightmares longer than she's even been alive and lost at least Ellie in the same time... for all that they've both talked of the loss of their whole families in implication more than anything, she's still aware of it. Always.

Maybe there is no rationalising it. Maybe it really is all just chance and life's just that unfair. Maybe she doesn't know if that's a comforting answer or not, but... maybe it's more comforting than the alternative, than to think it's all by some kind of design.

(She thinks of the way Gaia talked about a Story, about Stories having power, especially here. Wonders if that's why she was sent home, because the Story being told required her to be more broken than she already was. Hopes with all her heart that they don't need more from her, that the feeling of inevitability in losing someone else is just the grief clinging to her like shadowy tendrils trying to keep her down.)

[hallelujahjunction]

Dan hugs Cammie back. He closes his eyes, but it does no good when he can still hear the memory, the way Ellie finishes singing and chipperly strategizes with Dan about where they're going to busk on the pier tomorrow, stating her desires for the motel room they'll get with their yet-unearned money over languid arpeggios.

"If I ever get- I know I get over-anxious sometimes. If I ever get overprotective of you, please be patient with me."

Dan usually withdraws rather than gets overbearing, so afraid of losing and grieving that he tends to just burn bridges preemptively, but he's trying to break that habit. It isn't fair to anyone for him to form bonds with people only to torch them the instant he gets scared. But he doesn't know how to cope with the amount of fear that he feels all of the time, the way he wants to take these kids that he's so terrified for and put them in bubble wrap and shield them from every struggle they might ever encounter. They've already struggled enough.

He lets Cammie go, grateful that at least this memory has a beautiful sunset to look at so he doesn't have to look straight at the daughter he misses so deeply or at the version of himself who knew loss, but didn't know that type of loss.

[tr1xx]

After he lets her go, Cammie watches Ellie and the Dan of the past for a moment longer before she turns to face the same way he does, to look out at the sunset. She watches him in her periphery, for a moment, one ear angled his way, before she takes a deep breath and answers:

"...I think— I think I can manage that. Just— just know if I screw up an' seem like I wanna push back, sometimes, it's not... it's not you."

The instinct to rail against people 'coddling' her is so strong, but she's trying to focus on the fact that sometimes it isn't patronisation, it's just people caring. Yaz... Yaz cares, Yaz cares so fucking much, but time and time again they clash over how she shows it. Time and time again Yaz hits her buttons. Last time, Yaz all but called her an impressionable child to her face in an attempt to get something through to her, and it was all over a misunderstanding but— but it still makes her hackles raise, even now.

"I just— I dinnae want people to see me as some helpless wee babe, about to run into traffic if you dinnae put a damn child leash on me or— somethin'." Some of it's the same words she used when biting back at Yaz, some of it's not. All of it's calmer than she ever was, then. "I know you don't. So. I— I can be patient."

[hallelujahjunction]

"I figured it weren't me." Dan does manage a smile at that. He picked up early on that Cammie didn't take well to feeling infantilized, probably was used to being treated as helpless and found it chafing. He does his best to treat her like a peer.

He doesn't know when it became that most of his peers were children. It's not that he's regressed. It's that they've been catapulted into responsibilities they shouldn't have to worry about, thrust into wars and adventures, loaded up with burdens. Dan finds anger slippery, hard to hold, and yet he'd slap Gaia in the face if she came too close to him with her justifications for sweeping up youngsters to do her dirty work.

"I don't think you're some helpless wee babe. You're more competent than most of the adults I met in my life, and I been everywhere and met folks of all different stripes. Ain't no weakness in you." He laces his fingers back and forth over each other in a little fidgety gesture. "The weakness is in me. I can't- I can't handle grief easy anymore. I can't even handle the thought of it. Even when it ain't even likely to happen I anticipate it happening like I'm already in the thick of it, and..."

He shrugs again. It's too easy, in this journey full of ringwraiths and nightrenders, to imagine awful things happening to the people he cares about here.

"I trust you on this little adventure we're on. I got a lot of faith in you. I just been burned before."

[tr1xx]

She believes him. She believes every word, because he puts it in words, because he puts it in words without laying her own lost childhood at her feet like there's anything that can be done about it. She believes every word because she feels her own kind of anticipation of loss, not quite the same and yet similar enough.

(She's sure it's what Yaz feels too, if she lets herself think about it. The fear of losing the only people you have left when you've already lost so much.)

"I get it. I keep— I feel—" She groans, rubs her hands over her face and tries again: "The others, sometimes they'd say how they wished I coulda just been a kid. An'— I get it, hell I'm sure you feel the same, but they always said it like... like it wasn't already too late."

Like the ship hadn't sailed. Like she wasn't already fighting in a war. Like her age wasn't already irrelevant to the reality of her situation. Like none of them had started fighting as early as she did, even though she knows Val and Yaz did too.

Like it hadn't been too late when the twins died when she was barely nine and her mam left for the rigs again because she couldn't take it, as if Cammie and her dad weren't enough to stop the house feeling haunted. Like it hadn't been too late when her mam died and her dad followed so soon after it felt like it was losing her that did it, as if Cammie wasn't enough to keep fighting for.

Like it hadn't already been far too late by the time she saw the disappointment in her Gran's face when she was arrested for her hacking work, two years after she became the last MacCloud.

"But I get it. All of it. You lose enough people an'—" She bites her lip, holds her opposite elbow with one hand and looks at the ground like it's the most interesting thing in the world. "It's like I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop. Like I'm gonna lose someone else if I dinnae do... do everything right. Even when I was a kid it felt like that, sometimes. I dunno. I dunno what my point is, just— I get it. I do get it. An' I'm glad you've got faith in me. That does mean a lot."

[hallelujahjunction]

He hates that she knows the way this feels. He hates that anyone feels this way - he would move heaven and earth if he knew that no one, adult or child, good or bad, ever had to feel this way again - and he hates it all the more when it's someone good-hearted and kind and energetic like Cammie.

"I don't reckon it comes as any comfort to know that even if you do everything right, that don't protect you." Dan forgave himself a long time ago for being unable to save his siblings. He did his best. It wasn't enough. It was never going to be enough. "Don't think if I ever panic on your behalf that it's because you ain't doing things right."

People promise Dan all the time that they'll be careful, that they know what they're doing, that he doesn't need to worry, and it's almost funny, the idea that the fear that's so deep-rooted in him could be dispelled by such a small reassurance. And he can't tell Cammie that fear ever goes away.

In the background, Dan picks out another Concrete Blonde song on the guitar for Ellie to sing over and smokes another cigarette.

The real Dan sighs and puts his arm around Cammie's shoulder. "I'd rather don't no one know about Ellie who don't already, if that's alright. It just hurts to talk about her with folks I don't know well."

It's only in the last year that he's been able to talk about Ellie at all, just in snatches here or there.

[tr1xx]

Cammie sags into the arm around her and rests her head against him, sighing softly and closing her eyes with a nod. The words aren't exactly a comfort, no, but they're not a discomfort either; maybe if she could internalise it, the idea that there was nothing she could have done to save the people she'd lost, it would at least be better than the alternative.

Maybe one day she will. Maybe if the thought sits and stews in her head long enough, it'll settle in. Until then, the illogical guilt will stay.

For a moment she listens to the music, then she breathes in deep and answers, firm with the weight of a promise:

"I won't tell a soul." She crosses her heart, zips her lips, then opens her eyes to look up at him without actually inclining her head. "Real good at secrets, me. Especially ones weird memory-sharin'-shite thrusts at you."

Yes, he mentioned Ellie before, but not like this, so it counts, and she is very used to one part of all of this, at least. With how many memories that bled through thanks to endless mindshares, there was an agreement between the team to always tell someone else if you got a memory of theirs and to always keep them private besides that.

She can keep what she knows about Ellie between them.

[hallelujahjunction]

"Reckoned I could trust you," he says, smiling and giving her an affectionate jostle. Cammie, more than anyone here, is fluent in the particular nuances of privacy around sharing memories and thoughts. He hopes that made it easier for her to adjust to it when it first happened at the Rig, first started happening again here.

Fucking unfair for it to keep happening here. How are any of them ever supposed to move forward with their lives if they keep getting shoved back into the past?

"I don't reckon it'll be easy to sleep tonight with all this unearthed for everyone. If you want company, I can all but guarantee I'll be awake." Probably drunk, but awake. "Might could spend some time in that room with the instruments practicing piano."

It's an invitation for Cammie to join him if she finds herself restless with Kazu's death fresh again in her mind.

[tr1xx]

There’s the quietest little giggle as he jostles her. It has been easier to adjust than it is for most, she thinks. Most of the time the memories they get at home are first person, like they’re yours, but when you share them on purpose it’s a lot like this just with the owner’s emotions coming through as clear as anything else. Except, of course, those you can stop at any time.

“…think I might come by, aye. Castle’s put me in with Stacia an’ it works out pretty well, really,” since they both get the nightmare thing, and all, “but— god, yeah, doubt I’m gonna wanna sleep in the first place.”

Her nightmares have already taken on new details. Started involving Kazu, in dreams where previously she was all alone. Now sometimes he’s there and it’s him Nemesis goes for, not her. Or he goes for her and Kazu saves her.

She hates it. Fuck, she hates it.

[hallelujahjunction]

As predicted, Dan doesn't sleep. It seems like most of the castle doesn't, but despite the fact that a lot of people are awake, the energy is muted and dour, so many people having revisited the saddest parts of their lives, so many people reflective about how far they have - or haven't - come since those pivotal moments. Dan, for his part, paces around the room he shares with Bunny until he becomes too self-conscious about potentially waking Bunny up, and then, as promised, he heads to the music room.

He wishes he could go ride Concrete Blonde right now, but the castle's in motion. Dan worries that if he takes her out of the stable and rides her, he might get too far from the rest of the group and teleport back to the castle sans horse, and he doesn't want to risk leaving such a beloved asset alone in the wilderness.

So instead he can't see anything better to do than marinate in liquor and memories. He learned to play piano when he was very young. His father, a man who loved to build and make things and considered providing gifts one of his primary methods of conveying affection, built his mother an upright piano before he was born, and during winters when he and his family were bunkered down, music was one of the primary means of entertaining the whole family. Dan's played professionally before, not just busking but at bars before in-house piano-playing gave way to piped-in streaming music, and he has such a familiarity with the instrument that it seems he could play it in his sleep.

He's playing that same pillowy riff from "Tomorrow, Wendy" that he was picking out on the guitar with Ellie in that memory. Tomorrow, Wendy, you're going to die. Ellie's favorite song. He interrupts himself from that repeating figure occasionally to take a drink from his flask or light another of those hand-rolled cigarettes he found tucked into the castle pantry, running through a stash he really should be saving, ducking out his left hand from the song rhythmically to facilitate his smoking.

He startles when Cammie comes in, nearly dropping his cigarette. "Sorry. Got caught up. You want to join me?"

If she's had nightmares, she probably doesn't want to immediately be asked about him. He sure doesn't.

[tr1xx]

She's barely slept.

She didn't want to go to sleep at all, because she knew what would happen. Of course, once she drifted off anyway out of pure exhaustion, that's exactly what did happen: nightmares, same as always, predictably of the 'Kazu dies in front of her' flavour. The only saving grace is it's one of the rare nights she didn't wake up screaming, so she hasn't woken Stacia, and... here she is. Like she said she probably would be.

Her ears are drooping with something between emotional and physical exhaustion. She's using a dress she acquired in Rivendell as a nightie—they need to make use of what they've got and it feels better suited for that than it is for running around fighting and such in.

She nods, a wordless affirmative, "Mmhm," mumbled as she comes over to him, stretching to wake herself up a bit more as she walks.

She recognises the music from earlier. They've both got memories under their skin tonight, not that it's any surprise. She wonders if playing it is a comfort, or if it's more of an itch that needs scratching for some kind of relief, or even something even more complicated than that. Feelings are stupid and messy, after all.

(She wonders if Val will play that song he knows from Kazu in the same way. The same familiar tune over and over, that first thing he learned from Kazu in that first mindshare. She wonders if he'll never play the guitar again.)

When she reaches Dan, she sighs and says, "Sleep's overrated."

[hallelujahjunction]

"I always dread going to sleep at the end of the day. Well, in the morning. I don't never sleep before two in the morning." And even that's generally pretty early on Dan's timetable. He scoots over to the side in case she wants to join him on the piano bench, not missing a beat in his mournful, airy pseudo-improv. "Been a night owl since I came out of the womb."

He takes his hands from the keys so he can light another cigarette, but the notes from his last chord hang in the air, suspended by the sustain pedal.

"Sorry, I know it's rude to smoke indoors, it's just, you know." He shrugs. "Reckon after the day we had, anything goes for creature comforts. You got any song requests?"

They can dance around talking about nightmares and deaths and things they can't change. Dan's always been a believer in indulgence as a balm to stress. He realizes that he doesn't really know what Cammie does to unwind aside from using her computer, which isn't an option here, and that strikes him with a pang of worry. That isn't an option out here.

"You know, the worst part about living in a car was that I couldn't have a piano in there with me. This is the most relaxing thing I know."

Besides alcohol, obviously, but the ever-so-slight lilt of his voice betrays that he's been helping himself to that a little bit tonight too.

[tr1xx]

She plops herself down on the bench next to him, careful not to knock him enough to disturb the rhythm of the music. She rubs her eyes and wipes more of the lingering sleep away.

"S'fine, Kazu did it sometimes. When we could get hold of cigarettes, anyway."

Not that they've been able to all that often lately, shortages and all. He wasn't enough of a smoker to ask her to code an approximation into the mindscape, not the same way he and Val had her program in the ability to get digital drunk. Mostly Val, actually—'I don't know why I fight sober, anymore'. So the little lilt to Dan's voice isn't entirely unfamiliar, really; even if she wasn't aware of his flask, she might connect the dots. Everyone at home had their coping methods.

(Sometimes she can't help but see parts of the other people she loves like family in Dan; even though he's not quite like any of them, not really, there's all these little things. Familiar things.)

"Not sure you'd know most songs I know. Future music for you, an' all. S'kinda more interesting to hear the older stuff, anyway." She tucks her knees up as best she can on the bench, arms around them. "Good thing this room exists, huh? Nice place to come and relax a bit."

All of the ways she's used to relaxing are still out of reach here, it's true. The Ether's been all but dead for months now, back home, but she still always had her work. There was always more things to code, to fix, to design. Not here. The sewing is something she can do to keep her busy, sometimes, but there's only so much to be done.