Chapter Text
“A title is not a title; it is the first line.” -Marianne Moore
He wasn’t quite sure how he’d missed it. Traveler 3326 had always had an eye for detail- he still wasn’t quite sure how Philip Pearson had managed to change that.
Sighing, he stared down at the hypodermic needle at his forearm and quickly averted his eyes as his vision began to shake. That wasn’t true. He knew exactly how this had happened.
Furrowing his brow and inhaling sharply, he looked down at the veins bulging from the crook of his elbow once more. The elastic band was drawn taut, hiked up over his bicep and under the rolled cuff of his sleeve. He took a quick inventory of the track marks, noting which were most susceptible to infection, where he shouldn’t be injecting to avoid collapsing a vein again because goddamn had last time ever been a bitch, and where he’d managed to bruise himself shooting up in a hurry the other day when the junk sickness had come knocking early.
Gritting his teeth, Philip drew the syringe under the skin, pulled back the plunger ever so slightly and slammed it home.
He needed to get the fuck over this thing about needles, and fast. It didn’t help that he still got shaky when he flipped the lid to that little metal box. At least he’d stopped seeing black spots after the first few times.
His fingers were numb with the first bits of that creeping honey-soft warmth as he undid the tourniquet and fell back into the mess of sheets he hadn’t bothered tidying that morning, or the one before, or the one before. The ceilings folded in on him, and his spine turned liquid as he forgot the bruise on his back or the paper cuts on his fingers from those paper archives they called books and the familiar pull and sting of the bullet wound that still hadn’t healed yet, or was he just not thinking linearly?
His pupils yawned and stretched along the lines and cracks of the concrete, magnified by fluorescent lighting and the dim glow of the screens outside his room. He breathed deep, his lungs straining away from his sternum to kiss his ribs as his lids fluttered shut.
Nostrils flaring, he let the smell of stale coffee creep into his nose before the rising tide of metal at the back of his throat drowned it.
And again, as always,
He remembers.
][][][][][][
Addiction carves its own hole out in your life.
It burrows deeper into the space between your ears until there’s only space in the hollow it’s torn out of you for it to fill anymore. It’s a coup d’état; a little at a time until it’s all at once.
Philip was short-sighted in falling for the promise of easy transition offered by the Director in selecting this host.
Young, isolated, estranged.
His digital footprint spoke to a quiet existence with less impact than a kid half his age, and he’d had one friend; the roommate. And that issue was resolved almost as quickly as he’d arrived. Even the family had been a non-issue-- their communication with their son had taken place almost entirely through a rotating door of lawyers after the age of eighteen.
There would be little accommodation for 3326 to make to not raise any red flags in the 21st. From the outside, an ideal and optimal choice. The most seamless of arrivals, if only because Philip Pearson had been more mystery than matter as far as the rest of the world was concerned. And he’d trusted in the Director, had let himself be sling-shotted back in time into the brain of a host about to die from heroin overdose.
No plan ever survives contact with the past.
He’d learned that the hard way, as had the rest of his team.
Things were barely what they appeared to be according to the average host’s Facebook feed, and they’d had to suffer the consequences of their shoddy preparation. They’d overlooked the details, and they were still paying for it.
The blood he’d shed over his own burden was still staining the inside of his long-sleeved shirt from that morning.
He’d been staring at the writing on the wall for about twenty minutes before he blinked, realizing he’d given himself a headache tracing the names and dates over and over with his eyes while his lips moved in unison. He needed a break from the op. If he didn’t get some space between him and the garage, he was going to start doing more stupid shit.
Handling both the stress of his inherited addiction and the subsequent fallout of the mental breakdown that it initiated in him had taken every spare moment of thought he’d been able to set aside. His senses were simultaneously overwhelmed and muted by his experience in this time so far. The sights and sounds were enough to make a man weep from joy, not to even mention the food.
The day Philip found out that both pizza and delivery were not only available but common, he did cry. He’d never had cheese before.
But then, there was heroin.
He’d never felt such trembling ecstasy, shaking and writhing sweaty beneath blankets as his body melted into sugar beneath his tongue.
It was also the worst fucking thing in the world.
He was useless for about half an hour after a shot but needed it if he was going to keep his hands steady. After, his experiences were filtered, through damp air and opioids. His nerves sang for the first hour, but then punished him by carefully rationing their ability to process for the rest of his day.
And god help him if he didn’t have one every eighteen hours.
He shuddered, thinking back to the other day. The point was, he needed out from their hidey hole if he was going to keep himself from either shooting everything he had left in that metal box, or calling in that morning’s host candidates and their T. E. L. L.s in to the FBI again.
You know, like an idiot.
He shot off a text to Marcy, and after a moment’s thought, to Trevor too.
Going out for coffee. Dinner’s in the fridge. Love, mom.
Snagging a jacket and shoving his laptop into a messenger bag, he headed east, working his way through the back alleys of Seattle until he came across a café not too far from his host’s previous apartment.
It was in ideal spot, away from the bustle of the main streets but only a five-minute commute to the college nearby. He was feeling a bit nostalgic for the future, and this was the closest he could come to his own past. That, and maybe he still felt bad about the roommate.
He’d watched the life leave his eyes as they’d turned empty and rolled up into his skull, he could almost taste that last breath from across the room as his lips parted and-
“Can I get you anything today?”
The barista wasn’t making eye contact, instead staring at the screen of her register, and was clearly near the end of her shift. Her tone said as much, as did the impatient tapping of her fingernails against the counter.
“Sorry, um.. Can I have a coffee? Two sugars… do you guys do soy milk?”
He still couldn’t wrap his head around the way cow’s milk tasted, and was never quite able to get past the film it left on his tongue.
“Yeah, you want that as a large?” She looked him over once, probably noting the shadows beneath his eyes and the faint quiver in his fingers. It had been a trying morning.
She was looking him in the eye now, with something almost resembling recognition. He coughed and nodded as his throat went dry. It was hard to reconcile other people having known Philip Pearson from before.
Passing her the appropriate change, he went to drop off his things at an empty table before returning to collect his mug from the counter. She frowned as he did, sliding him a plate with a pastry on it. There was something he couldn’t quite place in her expression.
“On the house. Sorry to hear about your friend.”
It clicked. Pity.
He mumbled a thanks, staring at the toes of his boots as he collected his drink and food to bring it back to where he’d set up his computer. He slumped into the armchair, relaxing into it for just a moment before he sat straight and got to work on tracking a shipment of firearms that had been pinged on the deep web as a red flag in an upcoming mission.
The coffee was decent, not that they’d even had the stuff in the future. They’d run out of that, and cocoa about four hundred years before 3326 had been born. But this one didn’t sting the back of his throat with bitterness the way that instant crap Trevor had brought by the other week, and it didn’t have that watery feeling that the corner store by the garage did.
Philip focused on the task before him, pinging servers through proxies halfway across the world to avoid being traced back to his IP address again. He wouldn’t make the same mistake twice.
He was about two sips away from the end of his drink with the free cookie little more now than crumbs on his collar, when she walked through the door, the bell tinkling as she did. He didn’t look up from his work. People had been filtering in and out of the place for the past hour since he’d sat down, and he’d moved on to creating identification for their next excursion.
It had been ten hours, twenty-two minutes since his last shot.
He was going to need another coffee. Draining the last few dregs in his mug, he was about to get up to order a refill when he ice cubes and sixteen ounces of cold, cold liquid spill down his back and over his head.
“You FUCKING ASSHOLE!”
Spitting out a whole lot of cream and sugar as he surged to his feet, he swivelled around to face his assaulter.
“What the hell?” he hissed, squinting past the stickiness in his eyelashes. “What is your problem?”
The girl in front of him spat in his face.
“That’s my line, you pathetic piece of shit!” she growled, her lips curled back into a sneer. They were painted a deep burgundy that was beginning to fade at the seams. Her short black hair whipped around her face as she started to poke her finger into his chest.
“Not only has no one heard a word from you in weeks, which, by the way, great fucking timing on that, I almost failed the entire class, you inconsiderate prick, but you LET STEPHEN FUCKING DIE!”
She couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds, and he doubted she was much taller than five feet, but she was driving him back against that chair with the same power you’d find behind a rottweiler straining against a chain. It didn’t exactly help that he was at a total loss for words.
“You showed up at the funeral too, but you managed to even fuck that up too! You made his whole goddamn family cry when you showed up high to your BEST FRIEND’S FUNERAL! Do you have brain damage or something? Because I don’t know who the fuck you think you are!”
At this point, the entire café is staring unabashedly, and he thinks he’d love for it if the paisley carpeting would swallow him whole in that moment. Even the barista, who’d been shooting him sad, pathetic smiles, was looking on in total shock and dismay.
“What the fuck do you have to say for yourself?”
Clearing his throat, he looked down at this seething volcano of a woman and saw her for the first time. He took in the short bob, whose roots were showing a deep brown from his vantage point above her, and she looked like she was drowning in a sea of sheepskin jacket and cable-knit. Her eyes were heavy from the blue circles beneath them, and rapidly turning red and glassy. Her thin, pale fingers trembled as they strained to keep her empty cup steady, and he could taste the bitter and heavy disappointment she was experiencing as surely as he remembered the smell of recycled air.
“Could we maybe move this outside?”
She opened her mouth again to tell him that no, they can do this right fucking here, when he raised an open palm and reminded her, “I understand that you’re angry, and I’m more than happy to let you tell me exactly how mad you are, but I’d rather not ruin everyone else’s day any more than I already have”.
Pausing, her eyes hardened, before she closed her mouth, nodding, and gestured to his coat and bag.
“Grab your shit. But this is happening today, and this is happening now. You’re not going to keep dodging my calls. You’re dealing with this outside.”
Her tone was terse, and Philip realized that she had a raspy voice when she wasn’t shouting. It reminded him of the way his fingers twitched when he got annoyed, as if they were looking for something.
He shoveled his laptop and equipment back into his bag, reached into his jacket pocket and yanked out a rumpled hundred and dropped it at the cash, muttering an apology for the chair.
The girl was standing rigid, with her arms crossed tightly around her chest. She followed him as he left, two steps behind him as he pushed the café door open and walked out into the dusk.
][][][][][][
“You know, now I’m really regretting my order. If I hadn’t gone for a cold brew, maybe that would’ve given you something to remember your fucking mistakes by! Nothing else in your life seems to leave a friggin’ impression on you, you fucking human garbage fire!”
Moving to the curb didn’t improve her diplomacy, that was for sure.
“I’m sorry”, Philip began, wiping dripping coffee from his forehead. “I’m just having some trouble remembering what it is I’m supposed to have done.”
He winced as he registered her hand connect with his cheek.
“Jesus Christ, lady!” he shouted, the sting of the impact settling along his right cheekbone. He gingerly raised a hand to it, groaning as his index made contact and came away red. She was wearing a dozen rings, stacked intermittently along her fingers.
His mind scrambled for a blanket lie, for a fail-safe to get him out from under this mess. It was clear that she wouldn’t stop until he gave her an answer. He just hoped that it was the right one.
“I don’t remember!” he blurted, dabbing at his face with the back of his hand.
“I-I don’t remember.”
And in a moment, the pieces fell into place. As the words tumbled out of his mouth, he hated himself just a bit more every time he moved his lips.
“I was there that night, that-that’s true”, Philip said, his voice cracking at the end. “I was there when he OD’ed, and I didn’t call the cops. I got spooked, and I’d shot too, right before h-he nodded off. I freaked out and left the apartment to get help, and I.. I don’t remember what happened… I woke up in a hospital two days later, and-and the doctors told me I was lucky to be alive.”
The girl stepped back, her features twisting from rage to grief, and confusion. Her brow furrowed, and she squinted up at him.
“What did you call me just now?”
Her voice was curious, and hesitant.
He realized he needed a bigger blanket, or he’d blow his cover. Thankfully, this was a card that he could play more than once in this hand.
“Look, I-I’m sorry if we knew each other before… they told me that I had a stroke while I was high that night”, he continued. “I’m missing… chunks of what I should remember, things have been kind of hazy.”
Her face fell for a second. Then she moved on to settle on worry, and stepped closer slowly, palms turned upward.
“Fuck, I’m so sorry, I-fuck…”, she mumbled, digging through her pockets and pulling out a Kleenex and using it to mop at Philip’s face. Tears were shining in the corners of her eyes. “I’d heard you got arrested after Stephen…” She sobbed, shaking her head. “I must look li-like a total fucking asshole right now.”
She paused, pushing her hand onto his chest.
“You really did leave me up a creek with no goddamn paddle, Phil. And I’m fucking pissed as all hell that you were doing stupid shit with Stephen. This time, you really screwed it all up. You need to get some fucking help!”
He breathed deep, her small hand warm against his collarbone. “I am.”
She sobbed again, and shook her head, moving to turn away. He reached out to grab her shoulder before relaxing his fingers, letting them rest there when she turned back to face him.
“I’m seeing a doctor every day… sort of a live-in sober companion meets drug test with a parking permit. She monitors me, makes sure I’m clean”, he half-lied, leaving out the way they’ve chosen to wean him from drugs.
They had considered methadone, or suboxone, but paired with both their inoculations and his historian regimen, there were too many interactions to consider. Heroin had been the easiest solution, though he knew it wasn’t sustainable in any sense of the imagination.
She nods, but there’s still tears in her eyes, about to break free and run wild down her cheeks. She continued to look at him with a heartbroken expression, sniffling quietly and staring at the collar of his shirt, as if she couldn’t bear to meet his gaze. Her hand remained where it was, delicate and warm.
Philip cleared his throat. “Uh, sorry, but I didn’t quite catch your name? I’m missing a lot if I’m being honest, and that seems to be… a part of all that..”
He trailed off as she reached out and gathered him and all of the fabric of her coat between her arms, clinging desperately around his chest and pressing her cheek against his shirt. She stayed there, quiet for a minute. Philip could feel the warmth of her tears through the cotton, which turned cold as she wrestled her head away to look up into his eyes.
“I-I’m Ramona. Mona, actually, you used to-“, she paused, trying to calm her breathing.
She inhaled. “You used to say that I wasn’t nearly punk enough to be named after a punk band.” Her laugh was watery, and shook more than the uneven staccato of her breaths.
“You and Steve, you used to joke about how my parents must have hated me just a bit, because kids are mean and sex is fucking hilarious when you’re five. All that bullshit about ‘moan-A’… you were just jealous that your name sucks ass and any idiot on the street could have that in common with you.”
Philip’s arms, which had been glued to his sides throughout this exchange, rose to cover her too, to wrap her even closer to his chest. He was unsure of why he’d given in to the impulse, but the second that they settled around the tops of Mona’s shoulders and his hand cradled the back of her head, he felt something click into place deep beneath his ribs.
He wasn’t sure how much of Philip Pearson was left in this host, but if anything, the memory of their touch must have been so habitual, so common, that it felt as if he’d been missing something up until now. He took a moment, accidentally inhaling the sweet jasmine of her shampoo and old smoke clinging to her clothes, pausing to catalogue how her features had softened and turned almost beautiful now that she wasn’t screaming or crying.
“I mean, it is fucking hilarious… still not quite as good as being named after a king, though.”
Mona scowled, frowning up at him. “I knew that nothing could ever wipe that shit-eating grin off of your face, not even brain damage.”
She smiled sadly, pressing her head back to where she’d first laid it, beneath his collarbone. 3326 realized that he’d been smirking, the corners of his lips uneven and turned up just enough. He relaxed into it, his shoulders unwinding and his fingers twining into her hair. He took another beat there, comfortable for the first time since he’d dosed that morning.
“D’you… d’you wanna maybe go sit somewhere? Just for a bit? I know this whole thing has been a mess… but I feel like I haven’t been fair to you, and I’d like to hear what’s been going on with you”, she murmured.
He hesitated, unsure of what he’d be telling her at all, if anything. He’d be scrambling the whole time to spin a thread he wasn’t sure he could follow.
“I just… I just want to know if you’re safe.”
Her voice was small now, in sharp contrast to all of the shouting she’d been doing earlier. His chest twinged, and he held back a wince. He’d just be digging himself deeper. But on the other hand, clearly Mona was a part of his Protocol 5- a part wholly unaccounted for by the Director and for which he was consequently completely unprepared. If Marcy could manage, then he would have to do the same.
“Okay… where did you want to go?”
][][][][][][][
They found themselves in a park, still in the heart of the city and more concrete than green. Mona had escorted him to a bench facing a statue of some founder or another mounted on horseback. There was graffiti around the plaque, in thick white paint near impossible to scrape from the dark granite base of the copper-cast monument. It read “FUCKHEAD”.
Reaching deep into the pockets of her large jacket, she drew out a small bag the size of her palm. As she did so, a dozen pigeons flocked to their spot, jostling each other to get closer.
“Greedy little beasts. I wish they were stupid enough to forget that I always carry birdseed.”
She ripped the top of the bag open and began to scatter it about, the pigeons stirring each other into a frenzy as they fed. Philip hadn’t quite expected that, but smiled all the same. It was almost endearing, how she cooed at the birds, dropping seeds until the bag was finished.
“Steve loved to feed the birds.”
His spine turned rigid as he turned his head to face her, his mouth a grim line. She continued to watch the pigeons, one of which had moved to her boots to peck at the laces. Mona shook her foot slightly, pushing it away to scrounge for the last of the food on the asphalt.
“We all used to come out to this park to go for a smoke, or sit out in the sun a bit if it wasn’t raining. Then he started bringing bread, until you told him that it was the equivalent of feeding a diabetic sugar cubes”, she reminisced, rummaging through her pockets once more.
Pulling out a mostly-empty packet of Marlboros and a small yellow Bic lighter, she shook out a cigarette and placed it in the right corner of her mouth. Her fingers tried to light the flame, but the butane wouldn’t catch. Sighing, she cast him an inquisitive look. “Got a light?”
Philip nodded absently, finding his zippo and lifting it to her face. “Thanks”, she added, exhaling smoke through her nose. It had a wide bridge, and looked like it had been broken once or twice at some point.
“After that, Steve would show up with birdseed so often that he would get flocked every time he walked anywhere near this spot. I picked up the habit after a while, but you never quite got into it. You still sat with us, though.” Mona breathed out, tilting her head up to face the sky and closing her eyes. The smoke floated up to melt into the humid evening.
It would rain soon, he could feel it against his skin. He wasn’t quite sure what to say at this point. They let the silence lapse into another moment before a thought occurred to him.
“Was I supposed to do something, or be somewhere recently? You said something about a class, but everything’s been kind of… hazy lately”, Philip said quietly. “I… I think I’d like to make it up to you, if that’s okay…”
At that, Mona’s wistful eyes crinkled at the corners. “We were in a history class together. We decided to pair up for the final project, but after the whole incident with Steve…”, she paused, gathering her thoughts. “You never showed up again. You didn’t answer my calls, or my texts… I figured you’d either skipped town or got a new burner and didn’t bother programming in my number before you switched.”
“I got stuck having to scramble to finish the whole thing, but the prof was nice enough to give me an extension because he’d heard what had happened. Still haven’t finished the exam though, so I’m not sure how I did yet”, she continued, still facing the sky.
“It was… a challenge, to say the least. The last few weeks have been… hard. It was bad enough that Steve was gone, but you…”
Her breathing became shaky once again, and she raised the cigarette back to her lips. The filter was stained the colour of dried blood, and her lipstick had further deteriorated.
“I don’t know what I would do if I lost you too.”
His throat was tight- Philip wasn’t sure he could even manage to suck in a breath, let alone speak. Instead, he raised left arm to carefully, cautiously rest around her shoulders. She’d hugged him before, right? He just felt terrible leaving her to mourn a boy who had lost his life alongside her other friend weeks ago.
She laughed, short and loud, startling him. Instead of drawing away, she leaned into his arm.
“If I’m being entirely honestly, I didn’t really want to see you for a bit. Not after what I thought happened- if you’d actually left Steve there alone to die…” His teeth were clenched hard around his tongue, willing the truth to step back from his lips and burrow back into the box of things he didn’t like to think about, deep in the far corner of his mind.
“I mean, we were kind of all you had left... I don’t think you’d heard from your parents in almost eight months before this whole shit-show went down”, Mona continued. “Steve’s family is still… fragile over the whole thing, but they never knew you quite as well as we did.”
Her lips quirked upward slightly at that, and she pulled on her cigarette again. As she did, she pulled out the pack again, and shook it near his lap.
“Sorry, forgot my manners. You want one?”
“I don’t smoke, but thank you”, Philip replied, as his eyes remained glued to the box. They tracked it closely, and his fingers twitched again. Mona shot him a look of disbelief.
“You never smoked a ton, but, Phil… you always went for one when you were upset. Said it helped you calm down- something about breathing?”
His hand moved of its own volition, making an aborted trail to the packet.
“You might not remember all that much right now, but I know you, Philip Pearson. And I can see how hard this conversation is for you. Take one.”
The box was shaken once again, and he relaxed into it, letting the cigarette settle between his index and middle finger. It found a home in the right corner of his mouth, and the zippo was produced once more, but Mona shook her head.
“Save the butane. Do the dirty”, she quipped, grinning past the tear tracks on her cheeks. She lifted her own up, the lit end pressed to his. “Pull.”
Inhaling, the tobacco and paper caught, and smoke rushed into his lungs. He coughed, his eyes stinging as the smoke slipped out of his nose to irritate them. As he recovered, he wheezed out a groan.
“You-you’re sure that I actually used to smoke? Because this doesn’t feel right”, he gasped.
She was giving him that same, strange look when he met her eyes, before she blinked and rolled her eyes. “You’re not doing it right. Inhale into your mouth and hold it for a second, then inhale a second time through your nose to carry it through your chest. You can’t just puff on it like you’re hitting a blunt- you don’t smoke nearly often enough to get away with that shit.”
He followed her instructions cautiously, as she mimed each action with far too much exaggeration. Like he was a child being taught how to read the hands of a clock. Nicotine buzzed at the tips of his fingers as his head turned slightly floaty. His anxiety at being faced with a confrontation from his host’s past had all but abated, and he found himself able to string words together again.
“This whole mess really did do a number on your head, huh?” Her voice had become fragile again, small as the hand resting on his forearm. The corners of her eyes were wet again, and she was using the other to flick ash away distractedly, fiddling with the hem of her sweater.
“They said something about… retrograde amnesia? About missing bits and pieces”, he threw out, taking another drag to steady his nerves. “Might come back. Might not.”
She sat in silence for another moment, throwing the butt of her smoke out by her feet and grinding it into the ground with the heel of her boot.
“And… and your-your… problem? How… have you been able to manage?”
She was so hesitant in bringing up this question that she once again was unable to meet his gaze. Philip got the impression that his drug use had been a point of contention, obviously, as she seemed sober enough.
“Like I said… I have a doctor checking in on me regularly. Everything is… as good as it can be, considering…” Mona nodded firmly, burrowing deeper into his side.
“I’m glad you’re getting help.”
“Me too”, he said, drawing his arm tighter, avoiding a wince as the skin of his inner elbow stretched through track marks, the pull of the bullet wound of his hip making his breath catch. He stared straight ahead, looking out at Stephen’s pigeons.
“Me too.”