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| Scene Title | The Son of Neal |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | Gracie confronts Elliot about who is safe and who isn't. |
| Date | July 4, 2021 |
Elliot manages to avoid groaning as loudly as the brakes when Katie finally comes to a complete stop. In the past two days, he’s driven more than he has in as many years. Public transportation spoils him, as well as Wright’s car and her willingness to bring him where a bus can’t.
He does sigh, a bit dramatically, as he finally levers the van into park. He takes a moment to crack his back, then turns to the passengers. “That’ll be five hundred dollars,” he says, tapping an imaginary meter. His mood seems to have improved from the previous day, or he’s doing a better job deflecting.
Rest Area Westbound · I-76
Rootstown, Ohio
July 4th, 2021
Instead of Squeaks’ typical confusion, she answers the fare with a two-arm stretch and a smirk that would be the right answer for any dad joke. She's pretty sure Elliot isn't actually expecting anyone to pay for reals anyway. After stretching out all the stiffness from sitting forever, the teen gathers up her jacket and abandons her seat.
But instead of vacating the van like the others, she climbs over the console space to drop into the passenger side front seat. “Could I see a movie now?” Squeaks tilts her head and looks up at Elliot with wide and hopeful eyes. “Just one? Please?”
"Absolutely," Wright says, paging through a Chinese food menu.
"Absolutely not," Elliot jokes, extending his hand for the link. He settles in sideways, jettisoning a current co-host who already had the option to watch movies all day. The process is painless, Squeaks has already had practice at linking in, and Elliot has been getting better at not accidentally pinging traumatic memories.
After a minute of holding her hand mostly in silence he smiles, opening the door between Squeaks's mind and Wright's. "Ping me if you want me to open up your links to the others," he says, releasing her hand now that he's confident the link won't break. "Enjoy your movie, Wright's thinking Jurassic Park."
"Open to suggestions though," Wright assures Squeaks. "Are you a dinosaur chaos kinda gal?"
From her place in the back of the van, Gracie glances up to where Elliot and Squeaks’ hands are joined. Winding the cord around her iPod, she tucks it back into her bag with care, then adds her book on top. In exchange, she takes out a gold-toned cigarette case, its surface bubbled from age and water damage.
“Absolutely not!” Hart exclaims with a flutter of laughter, moving toward the back of the van. “First, I’m going to stretch my legs! Second, I’m going to get something to eat! Third I’m not going to have nightmares about a bunch of little dinosaurs the size of house cats eating Sean Connery’s face!” She exclaims with mock exasperation.
Reaching the back doors of the van, Hart pushes them open and hops out onto the cracked asphalt of the parking lot. She stretches, two hands at the small of her back while making a mock dinosaur roar as she contorts. “You all have fun, but I’d like to get some sleep tonight.”
“Movies,” Gracie murmurs to herself, a rueful smile tugging at her lips. Pulling on her coat, she exists behind Hart, watching her back for a long moment after they part.
“That’s not even what happens!” Wright assures Squeaks as the young woman hops from the van as well.
Elliot sighs in the first moment of silence he’s had in many, many hours. He’s tempted to stay in the van (where he’s less likely to encounter anyone he has to talk to) but that involves staying in this van for even one more fucking picosecond and he can’t have that. He lurches from the driver’s side door and gets a proper stretch before slapping it closed. He tests the various connections in the network, but leaves them all in the background as he takes a moment to appreciate the open air.
Fishing a rolled smoke from the case she palmed earlier,Gracie lifts a battered Zippo to light up. She takes a pull off it, holding the smoke in her chest for a moment before exhaling the cloud in front of her with a little cough.
“Hey.” The redhead calls Elliot’s attention. “Come walk with me?”
Elliot doesn't respond immediately, taking another moment to stretch his back. Standing, he dusts off his hands and reminds himself that this woman isn't Rue. "Where the hell do you people find tobacco ten years after the apocalypse?" he asks, moving to join her regardless. As always, especially with Gracie, he stays at arm's length from her.
“It’s not tobacco,” Gracie shakes her head, a smirk playing on her lips. When he gets close enough, he can tell the difference. “Doctor Isley keeps me supplied with bud. Ms Mas, too.”
But she didn’t invite him to walk with her to talk to him about her locally sourced weed. She waits until they’ve wandered a respectable distance for their conversation not to carry, but still within view of the convoy, she slows to a stop, leaning forward against an old fence.
Bringing up her smoke, she stares ahead, looking out at the crumbling landscape, taking another drag off her smoke. There’s not even the barest flicker of a glance toward Elliot when she speaks. “Why are you such a fuckin’ liar?”
It certainly wasn't what Elliot was expecting to hear. He contorts to face her, baffled. No fear of being caught registers, there's no way she could know the truth of any of the important lies. And to this date he's cleaved close to the truth with her; when they finally sat down to speak at the bar, the lock they made by lying had been gone for hours.
"Pardon?" he asks.
“For someone who doesn’t like to be touched, and doesn’t touch in return,” Gracie shoots an accusatory look out of the corner of her eye as she flicks her thumbnail against the joint and lets the ashes get caught up in the breeze, “you sure don’t seem to have much trouble making contact with Harriet.” Squeaks is already a nickname, okay? Harriet is hardly worse.
“Could be that you’ve got a thing for redheads, but I don’t get the feeling that barely legal is your bag.” Her lip curls. “Feel free to disabuse me of that notion.”
"Jesus Christ," Elliot says as he separates his disgust from the reality of the situation. This woman isn't Rue, has no reason to trust him like her counterpart who does but shouldn't. He scratches at his brow in frustration. He double checks that the doors between himself and Squeaks are currently closed to her.
"Barely nothing," he says. "Jac is legally a child. But she's safe. And she's safe with me." The first 'safe' seemingly carries a different context than the second.
"I can touch anybody," he clarifies. "I have to psyche myself up first, assure myself that they're safe." The same kind of safe as the first. "Surprise touches are the bad ones. But sometimes I can't be sure somebody is safe and I don't touch them. Some people just aren't safe."
Gracie lifts her brows, dubious, but not at all about his assertion that he feels nothing untoward regarding Squeaks. She hadn’t honestly suspected that to be the case anyway. She’s glad her intuition was right.
She’s still and silent for a time, lips pressed together in a bloodless line. The joint is held in the vee of her fingers, burning down slowly while she mulls over what she wants to say.
“So I’m not safe,” she surmises finally.
Elliot shakes his head. “You’re a special case,” he says regretfully. “I don’t want to confuse you with my girlfriend, who—as you know—you look very much like. I would love to touch you, which is a separate problem. Whether or not you’re safe is obviously an obstacle to that, and I don’t make the rules in that regard.”
He sighs, and scratches at his temples. “This isn’t my trauma,” he admits.
Gracie’s lip is curling, her eyes rolling. It all feels like some kind of lame excuse from where she’s standing. She pulls in another lungful of smoke while she listens to all that. It’s all exhaled with a cough, a renewed look slanting is direction as she properly turns her head to look at him this time. “That doesn’t make any fucking sense.”
After all, it’s not like Elliot knows her trauma.
“Yeah,” Elliot says. He forgives her for her ignorance, she can’t be expected to understand any of this. He wonders if he cares what she thinks, reminding himself that it isn’t her trust that he’s worked so hard to cultivate. But it’s impossible to separate all the care, and this woman is in a position to poison the convoy against him if he doesn’t clear this up.
“When you stream someone else’s memories through the network,” he says, “you can make a copy for yourself. A memory of a memory. Clearer with repetition. But some memories are stronger than others.”
It begins to surface, the Bad Memory that he’s been treading above since Gates unknowingly dislodged it in the week before deployment. “When I was in the Ark, one of the first co-hosts to the network was a twelve-year-old boy. He had a panic attack when I tried to link him in. After that it was easier. I was safe. I didn’t get what it meant at the time either. I just wanted to get us all out. That was my focus.”
The look on her face says she thinks she’s starting to understand what he’s getting at. She probably doesn’t, given that she’s had even less time with the knowledge of who Elliot is and, more importantly, what he does than his Rue has. Had.
“Right, so you… have some bad memory that causes panic attacks.” She doesn’t quite understand the need to stress the noun there. “That doesn’t explain to me why they’re safe and I’m not.” If he needed contact to bring Jac into the network, then she’s not the only one.
“It isn’t rational, Gracie,” Elliot says, leaning down against the same fence as though the action will keep the Bad Memory at bay. Then it hits in a rush.
The Commonwealth Arcology
Cambridge, Massachusetts
July 4th, 2011
8:00 AM
Elliot sits on the floor of Cell 0000.1 with his back to a corner, affording him a view of the door on the opposite side of his ACTS. He pulls his knees up to his chest, wraps his arms around them, lets his head knock gently back against the wall. Feels Bastian mimic his movements in miniature in the corner of the boy’s identical Cell 0000.1.1.
“What’s the first thing you want to do when you get home?” Elliot asks softly in the cavernous quiet.
Bastian falls in on himself, implodes. His head leaves the wall to bury itself between his knees. There’s a struggle as his arms come up, wrap around the back of his head, cover his ears. Whispers, “I wanna kill my dad.”
As Bastian remembers, Elliot remembers with him. Remembers hell itself. Remembers
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Elliot roils, seethes, hairs standing on end, teeth clenched. But he feels Bastian’s sudden spike of fear, of worry he’s done something wrong, and takes control of himself. He shakes his head, tries to say something that matters in the face of all that horror. The words start as a choke, and when he begins to cry Bastian does as well. “You’ll come home with me,” Elliot says. “We’ll take you to Canada, to the Lighthouse. Lots of kids there who can’t go home.”
Bastian cries in heartbroken, pitiful earnesty. “Promise?”
“I promise.”
Ohio
“It’s all the horrors of a little boy’s life,” Elliot says, grateful that Wright can bear some of the weight of this with him. Grateful he buried so much of it already, but not all of it. He sniffles, doesn’t fight the tears because straining against them will only keep the hurt here longer. “It’s how he made sense of living in hell. And it’s all I have left of him.”
She turns back to stare ahead, right back to not getting it. “Okay,” she murmurs instead of make any further attempt to understand it. Elliot’s said it isn’t rational, and it’s something he’s holding on to. She’s not exactly going to take a crowbar to it and pry it away from him.
Gracie stubs the joint out on the fence post to save the rest for later. They may have more supply, but rationing isn’t a stupid idea either. “I’m sorry,” she says belatedly. That that had happened to him, to the boy. That she’s bitter too, maybe. She can’t help but feel it somehow. Putting the remains of the joint away gives her something to do to occupy her time, to wait and see if he’s going to just leave it at that and walk away.
“This is the part where I’d normally hug you and let you cry into my shoulder.” There’s genuine sympathy. “But.” She’s not safe.
“I didn’t say you aren’t safe,” Elliot clarifies. “I’m afraid that you might not be, and that might mean that Rue won’t be, when I get back to her. And yeah, this doesn’t make any fucking sense, and I hate it. I usually have Wright for my therapeutic hugging needs. She hugs herself in solidarity.
"I got rid of the problem before," he says. "It's been a peaceful few years, up until…" deployment, as he told her in the bar. "Unfortunately the trick I used to contain the problem last time probably isn't going to work twice.”
Gracie nods slowly. “If there’s anything I can do to help with that, just say the word.” She hunches up her shoulders a little, a defensive posture. It doesn’t seem like she expects him to give her guidance on that front. “So,” she pursues the other avenue, “help me understand what safe means to you. Because it sounds an awful lot like you think I’m poison.”
“Safe means you’re not going to hurt me,” Elliot explains, but would never explain the many kinds of hurt. “Bastian lived in constant terror. Despite the horrors of the Ark, it was probably the best months of his life.” That’s its own kind of grief.
The experiences Gracie had in the Ark versus Elliot’s — and by extension Bastian’s — were very different. Still, she gets the gist well enough. “Am I… Scary sounds like a little kid word, but I guess we’re talking about a kid, so. Am I scary to you? To him, I guess?” One corner of her mouth kicks up in a little rueful smirk. “No one’s ever told me that before. I’m usually the opposite of intimidating.
"What I'm trying to say," Elliot says, "is that I do this with everybody, not just you. Everyone I meet has that cloud over them, is potentially unsafe. Except Squeaks, obviously. And my friend Seren. Rue's paramour, as she calls them." Unexpected, that one.
Gracie lifts a brow, jaw shifting to one side as she mulls that bit of information over. “She’s cheating on—” She stops herself, the pieces fit together. “She’s polyamorous?” She lets out a breathy chuckle. “I guess I could see that. I’ve… only been in love twice. Maybe at the same time, but only after…”
She gets quiet, looks down at the broken asphalt. “So, you managed to find a way to make her safe before. Presumably others. What magic was that?” The subject change is easier than revealing more about herself.
NYC Safe Zone
June 3, 2018
Daniel Nelson lives a simple life in a broken city. His job as a construction worker was enough to get him a fixer-upper in a Safe Zone tenement, and he’s slowly putting in the work that makes the apartment his. In his off-hours he helps out around the building, gaining a reputation as the tenement’s handyman.
It feels good to have that stability, to have the trust and respect of his neighbors. Utilities are far from stable, but everyone here puts in the hours to collect water or prepare communal meals, rationing amongst themselves with a spirit of selflessness never seen in works of post-apocalyptic fiction. People are, he believes, good at the core of them. Even if they’ve made mistakes; he’s certainly made his share of those, God forgive.
In the entryway of the complex, Mrs. Raba is once again pretending not to be waiting there for him, to only be here with a bowl of curry, extra spicy, by chance. The aroma causes his mouth to water, filling the otherwise mildewy space with life. “Mrs. Raba,” Daniel says playfully, chidingly, “I might begin to think you’re stalking me.”
“Shut up, you,” the younger woman says with a laugh and a wave of her hand. The short woman speaks good, if heavily accented, English. “This one is for the sink you fixed. That tap, tap, tapping of the water would make me kill soon.” The building is far from full at this point, and she’s taken to making food with other residents, or transients, in the building’s shared spaces. Daniel just has the god-given fortune of living next door to her.
Daniel plays surprised, though it’s easy enough to buoy it with the glow of honest appreciation. “Mrs. Raba, I told you that you owe me nothing,” he says, “I am rewarded by all of us doing better together.” Some of it is borrowed, the sort of thing he’d say to a member of his congregation. Before the church was destroyed, before the house collapsed, before his flock was scattered in the wake of the war.
“Do better eat this curry!” Mrs. Raba replies jovially, brooking no argument of any kind. He will take his payment and he will like it. And he will. This may not be her specialty, but Daniel once commented on how much he loved her curry, and now she assumes it’s his favorite. He does love it, even though he’s baffled as to where she gets all these spices. Further mystified as to why her go-to meal is curry when he’s almost certain she’s Russian.
Daniel shrugs his hoodie over his shoulder so he can accept, gratefully, the gift of her meal. “Bless you,” he says with a short bow, “You’re too kind to me.”
She responds with a dismissive wave of her hand, heading up the stairs before him. “Don’t keep me up all night with that hammering,” she scolds.
“Nearly finished!” he promises her.
Daniel gives Mrs. Raba time to go up the stairs before him, and waves and praises her again as she enters her apartment. He juggles the bowl of curry from hand to hand as he goes for his keys, and laughs at the problem of having too many blessings. Despite the hardships they all face, he’s more at ease here than he’s been at any other time of his life. There are so few distractions here.
He relocks the deadbolt as more of a suggestion than an expectation. Even the transient population is very respectful, and while he doesn’t ever suppose someone will try to enter without knocking first, old habits die hard. He sets his hot bowl on the table near the door, relishing the scent, his stomach growling. If there’s meat in it he would never spoil the meal by asking what kind these days.
He takes a moment to light a candle with the last match in a book, no sense wasting gasoline on the generator. The remodeling can wait for a day with a bit more sunlight in the evening. Candle in hand, he picks up the bowl to carry it into the kitchen, where a figure sits silhouetted by the last light of dusk filtering through the windows. He stops suddenly, nearly extinguishing the candle. His eyes close as he lets his heartbeat steady. “There are vacant apartments here, friend,” he offers, "I have keys, I can let you into—”
The deadbolt was locked when I came in. He’d felt the heavy click of it.
The figure lets him stew in his realization for a moment, before saying, “I’m here for Bastian.” It's a woman’s voice, he finds that surprising for some reason.
Wait, he thinks confused, Bastian? He doesn’t know how to respond to that at first, though the woman seems comfortable with letting him take his time with it. “Well you’re looking in the wrong place, I haven’t seen Bastian in years,” he says. “How do you know my son?” He’s getting angry now. “Do you know where he is?” The questions feel out of order to him, but he stands up straighter, makes to move closer to put the woman’s face into the candle light.
But then the edges of fear set in. If this woman knows Bastian, how the hell did she find me here? He hadn’t been living within miles of the city when Bastian had vanished.
“Not that sort of here for Bastian,” the woman says, “unfortunately.”
There’s a muted crack, quickly followed by another. Daniel flinches at the sound and the faint burst of light that accompanies it, turning back toward the living room before he registers the thumping sensation in his back. He examines another figure, also shrouded in darkness, with a look of utter confusion before noticing that his back feels wet now, that something is terribly, terribly wrong.
The sound of his bowl of food clattering back onto the table startles him next, When did I drop that? He lowers himself to the floor, setting down the candle in its holder carefully before taking a seat there. When did I put this plastic sheet here? He knows he’s in severe pain, but it feels so distant. Warm in the way hypothermia feels. He coughs blood onto himself, marvels at the stark contrast it makes against the off-white tallow candle he made himself. How it runs down both sides of a ripple in the plastic.
He wants to ask these people why? But he knows why. He knows it in the lump in his throat, in the pit of his stomach, in the hollow core of his ice black heart. There’s no dissonance now, he doesn’t reach for any of his tired justifications. “Oh,” he coughs. Then again, “Oh.”
He thinks he asks if Bastian is okay, if the boy survived out there, all alone. He’d be eighteen now? Nineteen? He’s not sure if the words come out. The room seems to be getting darker, though the candle at his side still burns. Neither of the two intruders answer his question either way. He nods understandingly.
He faintly hears the soft sound of the kitchen chair being slid across linoleum on the soft beige felt pads adhered to the end of each leg. What a strange thing to be so focused on right now, he thinks. Both the woman from the kitchen and the hooded, silent figure who shot him in the back are standing over him. Daniel sees the faintest glimmer of candle light reflected in their eyes before the darkness finishes filling the room.
The man who shot Daniel Nelson can only sigh as he watches death claim him. He wishes he felt something, but this won’t bring Bastian back. He knew it never would. But what else could he do in the face of such evil living free in the city he calls home? There’s a moment to grapple with the fact that this was premeditated murder, and he isn’t sure if it bothers him. The indecision worries him more than the pulling of the trigger.
There was so much consideration put into whether or not to tell the man why. This dying thing before him wouldn’t appreciate the why even if he could be made to understand it. That the bullets in his back will bring, finally, nights free from nightmares of his own making. That the Church will be annexed, annihilated by the uncaring maw of the Switchboard and the needs of the ringing of the phone.
The woman from the kitchen leans down and holds her gloved fingers to Daniel’s neck, patiently feeling the slowing beats of his heart. Satisfied, she stands and takes her partner’s hand gently, reaching up to hold his head and kiss him softly on the temple. He nods, squeezes her hand in the way that means I love you. They get to work.
Ohio
“I hunted Bastian’s father down and shot him in the back in his living room,” Elliot says, “so he could never hurt another child again.” All these years later he doesn’t feel a shred of remorse.
“Jesus.”
The word is barely more than a breath. Her head having turned with a sharp swivel, eyes wide, but not with fear. There’s a surprise in the casual admittance of murder for those who aren’t inclined toward the same, no matter whether their first inclination is to trust or justify. The context helps. So he could never hurt another child again.
A minute passes between them where she reckons with it, breathing through it. She stopped looking at him after only a few seconds, staring off down the road and wondering if she’s too stoned for this or not stoned enough.
“So,” Gracie begins to surmise and speculate, “you’re in a new world, things are uncertain, and you… What? Can’t know if the monster exists here?”
Elliot waited patiently, and is relieved that Gracie never took the option of walking away. “The trip here kind of shook loose the bad memories,” he says. “So I’m back to square one. My friend Asi, from home, suggested I look for this world’s Bastian, but I think finding another version of his father would be more tactically useful.”
“But it’s entirely possible that this world’s Daniel Nelson wasn’t a serial child predator,” Elliot admits. “People can be wildly different. Killing a guiltless man wouldn’t be helpful to anyone, not even me. I might…”
He honestly, truly hates to admit this. “I might just need therapy as though the trauma was my own.” Or might need to take people into the Palace to fight the thing the minotaur has become since it went red with the Church. “It could also become less oppressive in time,” he continues. “The nightmares only lasted a week this time. And I can get over it in the moment when I have to set a link into the network. Chess is an absolute sweetheart, but I still have to test if she’s safe every time, compulsively. I think that need will fade too.”
Assuming the minotaur doesn’t catch him unaware again, exposing him to the full force of its fury.
“Realistically speaking,” Gracie offers up with a sort of apologetic look and a shrug, “he’s probably super fucking dead.” She lets out a slow breath. “Most people are.” A nervous smile flickers. “It’s really jarring.”
She gestures out to the wider world. “It’s… It’s fucked, right?” It’s probably partly the shock of being told that her alternate self’s boyfriend is a murderer, but there’s also clearly a part of her that still hasn’t reconciled the new world above the waves with her memories of what it all was before. A particularly worried gaze settles on the horizon of the direction they’re meant to continue to travel.
“But, hell, if you run across him, I’ll hold your metaphorical beer. Shake pom-poms or whatever you need.” Gracie rubs her face with her hands, smudging eyeliner and leaving traces of it on her palms. The make-up is a holding on to something she considers normal.
One hand stays at her face, worrying at her thumbnail with her teeth. Her eyes drift back to him. “It’s really awful,” she says in a soft voice, “dealing with all that. I’m sorry.” Her smile is weak and sympathetic. “I don’t think there are many therapists left out there. I’m probably the closest anyone’s got on this trip. So… I’m glad you at least felt comfortable enough talking to me. Offer stays open.”
“I appreciate the offer,” Elliot says, “But I’m fairly certain I’ve ruined your evening. I won’t drag you down any further. I’ll understand if you’d rather keep your distance.” He did just admit to murdering someone, which doesn’t seem like everybody’s cup of tea.
Gracie shakes her head slowly. “Always quick to push people away and make it sound like their idea, huh?” A rueful smirk and a sigh later, she pushes up from the fence. “You’ll have to throw me out of that van. Having access to the sound system is just too good.” Meaning she will not be keeping her distance. “Just don’t go all Werewolf on us, huh?”
Wincing, she raises a finger toward the sky and draws a circle in the air. “I don’t mean like transform during the full moon. It’s a… social deduction game. Don’t worry about it.” Gracie waves a dismissive hand. “I’m going to go bother Richard. I’ll see you later, okay?”
“Yeah,” Elliot says, understanding her need to decompress. “I’ll see you.” The crunch of Gracie’s footsteps over the gravel beneath the grass fade, but only to join the background noises of life coming from the direction of the vehicles. He trunks to face the camp, leaning back to sit against the fence.
There’s a chance that he can’t discount, that Gracie is going to Richard to warn him about Elliot’s admission. He can’t do anything about that now, he’ll have to trust her. He’s afraid, and it waves back and forth with the lingering emotions of the memory, but it will subside in time. He feels Wright’s solidarity even without streaming to feel it in her body.
He focuses on his breathing. Focuses on the way the room lit up like day for a split second to highlight Daniel Nelson’s body and the bowl he carried. Focuses less on the memory of getting rid of the body, and more on what the curry had tasted like. What it had felt like to wash the bowl. The way it clinked softly as he set it on the floor beside Mrs. Raba’s door.