Chapter Text
Part 1
He opened his eyes before the sun was up, his head full of snow.
Snow like that which had been piled up in drifts on the side of the road the first time he’d opened his eyes. Slushy and brown and pitted with holes, trying its best to melt back into the concrete, only to be covered again that evening when the clouds returned.
He’d been dreaming again. Different from before but still always the same, always after a job, always the same feeling. He had nothing else to dream about, anyway. Nothing else to which his stormy mind could attach itself. The obsessive rush of a job allowed him to forget. Blood thrumming in his ears, heart pounding in his chest, air burning in his lungs, feet thumping on the ground. It made him forget he was lost, and yet he always distantly remembered every time he was running. The veil cast across his mind was at its thinnest, but also at its most frustrating, and it replayed in that dream again.
He watched all of it. From the beginning. A flurry of then to now in a matter of seconds, repeated, remembered, re-lived, falling like heavy snow.
Running after a theft. Away - he was always running away when awake, but it felt more like towards when asleep. A chase. And as he drew nearer, through an expanse he couldn’t see so much as he could feel, each time the remnants of what might have been his memories were so tantalisingly clear ahead. He tasted it as he approached, closed in. He could see there was nothing there and yet he wanted to grasp it, to pull himself forward, reach his arms out ahead and touch. But in his mind, he had no arms with which to reach out, no body with which to feel. He wanted to cry out, and call for it, but all that he could muster was an intangible plea, a silent sound that dissipated into the cold darkness, ignored.
Although he could never quite reach it, as long as he was running toward it, he was no longer alone. An echo of another presence drifted closer as he waded through the blizzard, greeting him with an avalanche of emotion. A mountainous fear that dwarfed anything he’d ever felt. A sadness that could fill a sea, and a longing that could drink it dry. An all-encompassing calidity, sometimes smouldering like a quietly banked fire, sometimes sparking red hot, a sumptuous agony popping and fizzing. It surrounded him, everywhere and nowhere all at once.
He took comfort in that feeling, in the familiar despair that assured him of something he could no longer remember. He held close to the sadness and yearning that cradled him in turn, and found a sense of completion he could not understand and did not question. But when running, he was whole.
Why was he this way?
What was he searching for?
What was he chasing?
He shook his head as if to dust it all away, stood, and approached the window. The glowing white of the snow outshone the stars so that in the sky he could see only darkness. He could feel it creep towards the answering blackness inside him, the darkness and cold. These things that blot out the stars. Nothing else of note was beyond but the wind rustling the trees, threatening to knock away their white blankets.
Within the scant warmth of the room, on the table where he’d woken sat the vodka that had called the dreams forward. And coins. His namesake. Three syllables that still tasted bitter and foreign on his tongue, like the copper of the change. His one true possession, besides the leather notebook. He never kept anything else he took. He had no real desire for money, beyond what he used to survive.
The fire had long gone out and it was frigid. His lungs may well have frosted over, tiny curlicues of ice shaping around them, but he didn’t feel like smoking right now. The whorl of want took hold of him, a swirling desire to retreat and longing, longing, longing for that which could only be partly attained when on a job or when asleep.
He felt broken and misshapen from the memories of the dream. Dirty, like he’d been a voyeur in someone else’s mind. But the nightmare was already beginning to burn around the edges, curling away from him as if it were frightened. He felt a sudden surge of frustrated confusion that he could never understand. He turned and retreated back to the couch, his mind humming a plaintive prayer against the silence of this not-home, a hymn repeated in a constant mantra: Remember
Remember.
Remember.
By morning, he would have forgotten it all again.
He lay down on the bed. Head full of snow.
And wondered when spring would arrive.