evolutionary

Title: Sentiment and Shadows
Warnings: Vague
Word Count: 2344
Characters: Alan Kane. Yasmin Liat.
Notes: Takes place at the same time as Sound and Sight. Has references for Picturesque Madness, Gentle Homicide, Name and Point, and Give, as well as this thread in general. Among others, there are quotes from the Merchant of Venice and Isaiah 1:18. Perhaps this is Alan stripped bare. Perhaps this is only nothing.

You will likely not understand.

Summary: I once dreamed a dream. I thought of many things. Terrors in the night to shake me. Ah, but the shadows keep me warm, the dark keeps me safe. Please, oh, please; keep me in this place.


--Wake up.

-

You wake up. Your eyes open to white and stark. There is nothing--

No. Incorrect. There are things. Clean and chemical and clinical, and you are about to have a panic attack, about to throw things and rip things and flee, but there is a voice at your side, in your ear, a quiet murmur.

"He's conscious. He hates hospitals, he won't understand. Can you give him something to... calm him?"

The voice is female, unknown and sweet. Her voice is a crescending alto, rising silkily through the air.

The rest is dark, heavy as murk.

-

You wake up. You are in a moving car going no more than thirty-five miles per hour. You are in the passenger seat, wrapped in a blanket. You struggle momentarily, until you realize the feeling of being trapped comes from the seat belt tangled in the blanket. You breathe. Breathe. Look over to--

A women. Unknown and worried, moving to ease over the car. Her hair is the color of the earth under rotting wood, her eyes the color of leaves after falling.

She reminds you of death and you cannot say why.

"Alan?"

This may be an echo. She may have said this already. But the name spins around you and you hear it in different tones, a dark so deep it shown and--

The rest is silent, light and meaningless.

-

You are Alan Kane. You are thirty-one and thriving. You translate classical texts for a living and enjoy the solitude of your job. You are engaged to another, despite the band on your finger. You are engaged to her and--

"The ring?"

Her nose crinkles in a way that's pleasing, and she is patient as she explains.

"Alan, you've had that ring forever. We even said that you would just keep that band instead of getting a new one, since you wear it on your left finger anyway."

You are engaged to Yasmin Liat Sephardi, the descendant of Orthodox Jews. Yasmin is less formal, more interested in holidays than Shabbat. She is patient, caring, and fun--her humor engages more often than not, and you find yourself laughing.

Even as you can't remember her. Ever as you can't remember your life.

-

You wake up. It is time to get up and go about your day. You put on clothes you do not recognize and clean your face in a mirror you've never seen. This is a life that you do not know, but calling too much attention to that is something you do not want. You do not want others to focus on you too much, and so by bluff and instinct, you have made it through two days.

Two days since you apparently woke from a short coma. The cause of which being a car accident. Yasmin has sat beside you the entire time. She is beside you now.

She notices what you try to hide.

She offers a smile, small and discrete. "It's not coming back to you at all, is it?"

There is no point in hiding it. You blow out air and offer a helpless look. The smile she wears grows comforting and she reaches to touch your arm--

Instinct tells you to shy away but her care has infused your being. You relax under her touch and, after a moment, lean your head to rest against hers.

-

You might have made love to her that one night. You might have, despite having no recollection of ever having done before, but it was she who stopped you, pressed a fingertip to your lips.

"Love me when you love me," she offers, giving that small smile, half humor and half sorrow.

You wonder in a statement--you say you have loved her before.

Yasmin tilts her head back, seems to stare at something the ceiling doesn't hold. Her gaze goes past it, focuses somewhere you cannot follow. You want to reach out to her--

She looks back at you, and places a finger next to her lips. "I wonder."

She keeps her secrets and you keep nothing at all.

-

You offer her the flower from the peach tree, and she stares at it for a single moment. "Pink," she states.

You think that it suits her.

"Not white?"

Yasmin wears white often, and it resounds somewhere in your memories where other things do not. But this flower... Pink suits her, you would repeat.

She finally takes it. "Do you know that Yasmin means Gift of God." She smiles her tight smile and you wonder if you see tears. She slips her hands behind her back and spins away. "But it also means the jasmine flower. They're white, you know?"

You wait. You feel like you've been waiting here for this moment.

"But this is pink. And it suits me. Oh, Alan." She turns her head to look backward and her cheeks shine wet in the setting sun.

"I'm going to have to let you go."

-

"Maybe my father would have loved me more if he called me Yasmin instead. Maybe he would have saw me, instead of the me he wanted. Because I was fine. I was always--"

She bites her lip and you take her hand to hold. Her father didn't call her Yasmin?

"I can see why... Why you're loved, Alan."

She loves you, and you tighten your hand. She offers a weak smile. "It wasn't supposed to be this way. You weren't supposed to be so... Kind."

Someone had once called you kind, but it wasn't the woman before you.

"It was a different flower that my father called me. Alan.... You really need to let me go."

-

Then Liat?

Here she would almost laugh, and again the threat of tears show in her smile. "I don't have a middle name, Alan."

But...

"I take it Hebrew isn't one of your specialties."

You would have to admit that it isn't.

"Liat," she says to you. "'I have you.'"

-

The world that you exist in had begun to deteriorate without you realizing. You had walked amongst those with no faces, shopped for squares and spheres. It was as if the details were bleeding out, and you were only just now seeing.

Yasmin Liat. Both names she refuses now to call her own.

"It's a trap. I don't know why you aren't fighting."

You touch her face and remember something. Something older than you are, perhaps.

Sephardi, then.

She clenches her jaw and looks away. "A different type. There's three, you know. Sephardi, Ashkenazi, and Mizrahi. Does that make it clear to you, Alan?"

A girl's laughter; a promise to play once more. It called from the dark....

The dark...?

"I can't let you go," she begs, she cries. Her hands are clenched in your shirt. "It's the only thing I can not do, you have to--"

Her hands are clenched in your shirt, and your arms are around her as you kiss her; as you keep her.

-

She looks younger naked, laying on her stomach beside you. She is propped up on her elbows watching you, and you think--

I know you.

Yasmin Liat would have laughed and replied, I would hope so. This woman smiles tightly, as if she's breaking. "You knew me."

-

It is dark, whole and complete. There is a girl, a woman with hair the color of the earth under rotting wood, eyes the color of leaves after falling.

She reminds you of death and you cannot say why.

"You know me," she says, and it is a plea. A prayer. "Who am I then?"

For Yasmin Liat Sephardi never existed.

She died. You know this now, in a way you can't describe. This girl died once, for a reason, and that is why she is here. Within this darkness that you were given, once and maybe upon a time.

"You're all that's left, Alan. If you can't remember me... You know me," she is repeating herself. She is crying and she is out of arm's reach. Your chest aches; beats in an irregular pattern. Two rhythms pound within your chest, and you can only feel it now. "Who am I?"

A girl who never lived. A princess in a tower, called crippled for differences and nothing more. She breathed the same air, lived the same moments, but all of that--

All of that halted. Because of a very foolish, broken little boy.

There was blood, so much blood (was there this much blood in him?). Lips had formed a question without meaning to, and she shook her head in denial, even as blood bubbled past her lips.

For him?

"...No. For you."

-

Once upon a time you were a very foolish, broken little boy. Once upon a time-- Ah, but you can no longer remember the words. It was a different world, a different you, but it was your existence all the same. Once upon a time you tried to find a way to die.

And instead this girl took your place.

Protecting the you that wasn't, she died smiling.

And for that, you have continued to live. And for that, you are who you have become. Because of this moment.

This moment held in time.

She is crying before you, crying and staining her white dress with red. Darkness surrounds and you think about shadows. About shades.

About sharp little fingers, scraping, scraping away at anything they found. The places they filled, with plaster instead of entrails, ribbons and bows in the place of blood. A being cannot live without a heart, no? And that had went first; no, that--

There is gold in your mind, gold and dark. "To grace sensation," gold had sang, and maybe the phrase is familiar, "you only have to touch what does not exist in this reality. To touch the past," dark clarifies, "you merely have to accept that you'll be hurt, and reach into the dark. Give in to the unknown, and allow what you cannot control."

How many had said it? Who else would claim it?

In the absence of light, shadows thrive.

-

Memories.

-

Portia knelt next to him, his heart bleeding out and gone. Her lips whisper in his ear, explanations, apologies.

The quality of mercy is not strained. It drops as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath. It is twice blest: It blesses him that gives and him that takes--

For a girl that gave herself, she sheltered in a boy that might have loved her, given the chance.

And when he again was nearly lost, she intervened all the same.

Though justice is your plea, consider this, that, in the course of justice, none of us should see salvation: we do pray for mercy; and that same prayer teaches us all to render the deeds of mercy.

In the lost of brightness-- In the absence of a stunning light, both crimson and violet, darkness overwhelmed. Covered and consumed.

Protected.

Let us reason together. Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow.

-

An absence of forgetting.

-

"Who am I--"

You reach her regardless, hold her to your chest. Nothing of recent years are in your mind, but all that came before.... All that she held is yours.

Singing in your mind.

She is a flower; a friend. The cradling dark and the protecting depth. She gives absence and absolution, forgiveness and forgetting, and keeps loneliness as her own.

Her answer isn't so simple. She seeks a name and an existence, and that no longer defines her. She wishes to set you free, even as the universe wishes to keep you close. Her purpose and her will have begun to separate, and she is tearing at the seams.

She is barely there anymore. The girl who is not Yasmin Liat. If she vanishes, Yasmin will remain, and no one in her closed world will know the difference. No one will know that another inhabits her shell.

She has continued so long. So long after her death. She curled in the remains of two hearts, and protected as best as she could. Until she could no longer remember...

What she was truly protecting.

Your truth is what you tell her. She is the heart of your heart. And she sings within you, both light and dark.

Leaves fall in her eyes as the king lowers himself to rest upon the shore. The snake will follow, tear immorality and enlightenment away while he sleeps, but it no longer matters.

It's finally okay.

She smiles like a flower blooming, and you think this is the first time.

The first time you've seen her happy.

-

The darkness fades slowly, something faintly pink drifting, like soft petals falling down.

"Sleep well... Sakura."

-

It's a kind of sleep that allows little rest--the kind that medications give and hospitals only permit, where moments can pass in a thought, but you wake up worse than you were before. It was that kind of night. Kind of day. That's what he thinks, at least, as he blearily rubs dry eyes and realizes he's not anywhere close to his home. Not anywhere close to anything, really, because there is sand stuck to his skin, and salt water in his mouth, and he's choking before he puts two and two together, choking up more water than he can believe he swallowed in sleep.

He kneels on hands and knees in the sand, unforgivingly chill water lapping up against him, and he's overwhelmingly thirsty. Knows enough not to drink what his body has painstakingly expelled. Wants to collapse back down for a few more hours, rest his sore body and stiff muscles, but there's a lack of dignity there that even Alan Kane, who shrugged off his pride years prior, would have a hard time with. And more--

There are missing pieces to this puzzle, torn pages from this story, and Alan is not altogether sure how he came to this place. His memory moves in waves, shifting when he tries to reach for it, and experience has only allotted him a wariness when it comes to unanswered questions. He has things to find out, where he is not the least of them, but his mind and body aren't playing fair, and each thought and motion is a toiling effort. He--

He realizes, then, that he's been hearing singing for a while now. Tones and notes from a voice he well knows.

-

A combination of efforts. A wide expanse of sand. Shadows and sight, but not anymore.

Nothing more but singing.

But sound.