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John will take the little globe he made her and hand it back to her.

"This will keep the shadows away. I want you to keep it."

He reaches out and takes her hand, then strokes her arm. "I'll stay with you," he promises.

She takes the globe and then wraps her arms fully around Jedao. "I don't want to be like this anymore. I want to be this person you love."

"We love the person you are now," John says, with full confidence, "but we want you to have all the memories to make the world real for you again."

"He's right," Jedao murmurs, and strokes her hair. He feels an odd ache, and catches John's eyes for a moment. Neither of them are the people who lost their memories before them, but he doesn't feel like he's lying.

This Justine could become someone else, but she hasn't yet. It serves absolutely nobody for Jedao to quibble about whether they both deserve to live. That's not how floods work.

"You're just...disconnected from yourself, for a little while. And it's easy to feel terrible when, when you have nothing in yourself to fill up the time with. So we must fill it up with something else. I think you would enjoy making art, something with brightness and color. Will you try it with me?"

Art. It takes her a moment to conjure up what that might be. Colors and brushes and canvases and pencils and needles and thread appear one at a time in her mind like flash cards, and she struggles to hold any of them.

"Yes," she answers, because she wants to know. There is, at her core, an insatiable thirst for knowledge.

John looks around the room to see if there's anything easily accessible to hand her, knitting or sketching or something else. He spots her sketchbook and some colored pencils on her desk and turns a hand to beckon them over to hold out to the both of them.

"Here you go. To get you started."

"You can make anything that - comes to you." He thinks, later, Justine will treasure having some pure expression of this state, even if it's rattled her more than her last memory loss. And even if she doesn't, he'll appreciate it.

"Thank you, John."

He takes a few of the darker pencils, purples and deep blues, and sets the sketchbook open on the floor, so they can lie next to each other and each work on one page. She won't be judged for knowing how to do it; they're doing it together.

She settles onto the floor, mirroring his pose, regardless of actual comfort. She keeps a seafoam green pencil in hand and absently fidgets with it as she stares at the blank paper.

When she finally puts pencil to paper, she doesn't draw shapes as much as she draws forms. Amorphous blobs of colors that blend together and black lines that outline where they meet and merge, rather than highlight the colors themselves. She's fascinated by the blending, and her eyes grow wide as she uses her hand to smudge the colors.

"Does she draw with you?" she asks both John and Jedao.

John nods.

"Usually we draw our own pieces, but we make art together all of the time. Sometimes, I inspire her to make things."

"You two make art more often than I do. Sometimes I'll work on something just to - be with you. And then I'm always grateful that you give me an excuse."

Jedao, for his part, is doing little circles, chains and spirals of tiny circles shifting from one color to the next.

"Inspire," she repeats and tucks the page out of the way so she can start with a fresh sheet. This, she reaches over Jedao for the darker colors and digs deep, indents following the pressure of the blacks and blues. With more confidence in her eyes and her hands, she sits up to work more intently.

"What does inspiration mean to you?"

She looks to the other page, to Jedao's steady hand of circles, and starts to fill her own page with darkness. "And why do you need an excuse?"

"It means to give her a feeling or an idea that she wants to express in song or poem or picture or dance. Usually, it's because she's got so much emotion that it has to go somewhere. I try to make sure it's joy, but sometimes it isn't. If it isn't, it's to help give her a place to put them or a way to use them so they don't sit inside and eat at her."

"Because I'm not so brave as you, I suppose," Jedao muses. "I'm tenuously part of a...group, that has an ancient rivalry with a group of artists. So for me to do it, even though I enjoy it, always feels a bit like I'm getting away with something I shouldn't be doing."

She likes the thought of having an outlet for emotions. She's already experienced feeling despair and fear so much that she doesn't know what to do with it. She uses it here, now, on this page, but once it's filled with black, she takes her nail and scratches shapes into the thick colors.

"I wish I could - remember that," she tells Jedao. "I want my memories back. So I can - invite you to do this with me more."

"I'll make sure to remind you of that later," he assures her before looking to Jedao, offering a smile of his own. "I'd love to see your art, Jedao."

"You can invite me now, too," he points out. "If your memories don't come back on their own in the next few days, I'll ask the Admiral for help restoring them. Has John told you anything about the Admiral?" Jedao glances between them.

She shakes her head. "No. Is he a god?" she wonders, because she understands that concept well enough. At least, she understands some version of it.

She, too, wants to see Jedao's art, but she wants to see it in the context of what she knows about him.

Days without her memories.

She starts to cry.

Without a pause, John will slide a hand gently along her back to try and comfort her, feed reassurance and affection, warmth, to fill some of the emptiness. He can't fill it with memories, but he can give her this, at least. Something to sustain her.

"He's something like a god. But he can do many things that wouldn't be possible otherwise." A pause. "You don't have to be afraid of him."

He tears out the page he was working on, and flips it over for a clean side, abandoning the meditative meticulous circles for big sweeps of a rough sketch, Justine's face all in magenta, loose evocative lines, her hair jagging and frizzing into abstraction, a halo of wild possibility.

"He decides what is possible and what is impossible here, for the most part. Right now, there are...perturbations he has always claimed he does not control, and I personally believe him. When they pass, I think he should be able to make your restoration possible."

He tucks the pencil behind his ear, and reaches out to brush a few of her tears away.

"One thing I know about you, that I believe is still true, is that you have always loved new experiences. I know it must seem a long time. But what if we made a game of it, to try as many lovely things as we can, while they are still all new again?"

She reaches up to cover her face, letting him brush those tears, letting John soothe her with his touch.

She wants to sit here and despair. She wants to cry and cry and cry. She wants to - to learn more about art. Ad she wants to see new colors. She wants to try and read the poems in her notebooks.

"Alright," she finally decides, wiping her face and looking between the both of them.

"Princess..." he says, how dear she is clear in his tone. He kisses her hair gently, keeps rubbing her back.

"Would you like me to play some music for you?"

"And snacks. There's so many different snacks, Justine."

He was so annoyed about it, until he could finally enjoy them for himself.

Music. And snacks. They're such small things, but she wants to know them. Experience them all for the first time.

She brushes the rest of her tears away. "Alright," she says in a shaky voice. Shaky but brave. "I'd like music. And - snacks."

Snacks are easy. He always keeps a certain amount of them on hand. His jacket provides a small tupperware with cookies as fresh as the day he made them. He'll hand that to Jedao. Then he'll kiss her hair as he slips away to stand. The violin comes to him just as easily.

And he will play a song of her, of the Justine he knows. Something beautiful and a little off course, something delicately rich and dizzyingly complex, filled with contradictions. Joyful minor keys and sorroful majors, sweeping in a dance.

A gift, for her. To hear herself in a way that she never would be able to otherwise.

Re: near end of shoe flood

deuceoftears - 2025-03-04 17:54 (UTC) - Expand