[Original Fiction] Forget-Me-Nots

[masterofmidgets]

Title: Forget-Me-Nots
Rating: PG-13 to R ish?
Warnings: stalking, manipulation/questionable consent
Wordcount: 5135
Summary: On the dangers of buying flowers from pretty girls
Notes: I was going to post an exercise I wrote this week about Fox and Jamie, and then I realized no one would know who they were because I never posted the original Fox and Jamie story. So! I wrote this for my final for Intro Fiction last year. I wanted to write a story about someone who has a strong fantasy life being confronted with a fantastic reality, and backing away from it, and I got almost halfway through this before I realized that the Jamie in this story is the same Jamie in Jake-and-Shane, even though none of the other characters show up here. I'm reasonably happy with how it turned out.

 

In the winter it rained every day in the city, a cold drizzle like a mist of tears that pooled stagnant in the sewer grates and seeped under umbrellas and coat collars to trickle down the backs of people’s necks. It leeched all the color away from the city, until it looked like the frame of a silent film – the lighter gray of the sidewalks, the overhanging clouds, the damp and chilling air; the darker gray of the asphalt, the quicksilver mirrored glass coating the skyscrapers, the men’s coats as they scurried for the shelter of overhangs and office lobbies.

The girl on the corner was a gash of color as vivid as spilled ink. Her raincoat was yellow and her boots were green and her hair was red and the flowers spilling out of the boxes at her feet were better than a butterfly garden for color. It drew Jamie’s eye, and though he was already late for work, he found himself drifting toward her.

“Buy a flower?” she asked when he stopped in front of her. “It’s for a good cause. Every dollar goes to raising awareness on HIV and AIDS.”

She cracked her gum loudly as he inspected the contents of the boxes, lavender and lily and love-lies-bleeding but mostly flowers he didn’t recognize at all. He remembered the florist’s shop he’d been in, last Valentine’s, and wondered where she could have gotten them.

“No roses?” he asked, bewildered.

“Roses are for people with no imagination and no sense of smell,” she said with a wicked grin. When his hand lingered over a red flower opening like a trumpet, she swatted it away. “That one’s not for you. Let me think for a second.”

He watched as she sifted through the boxes, holding up flowers and eying him speculatively before she shook her head and tossed them aside again.

“Ginger for sight and artemisia for dreams, everlasting-pea is a meeting and rowan is a hero, heather will make your dreams come true…none of these are right!” she huffed irritably. “But what about – aha.”

She held out a cluster of flowers on a narrow stem, pale-blue and star-shaped. “Nightshade will ensorcel you, but it’ll show you the truth too, whether you want to know it or not. And it goes with your eyes. Just don’t eat it, it’ll make you think you’re flying.”

She smiled while she tucked it into his breast pocket, and while he fumbled in his pocket for a crumpled bill, and while he stammered his thanks and walked away, shoulders hunched with embarrassment. It was the smile, like she knew his secrets, like she knew him, that had him cast her as the sorceress to his knight when he rewrote the encounter as he walked.

It was the smile he remembered.

 

At 5, when Mitch and David walked by, Jamie had already been ready to leave for an hour.  There was nothing for him to do; with the boss gone on a long weekend, the front desk where he worked had been unusually quiet. There had been no meetings to schedule, and since 3 o’clock not a single phone call. But he couldn’t leave while he was still on the clock, so Jamie had instead settled in for a profitable afternoon of checking his email and sketching in the notebook he kept hidden in his desk drawer.

It had only been a few months since Jamie had started working at the company, but he’d already settled into his desk like a second home.  The stack of lurid-backed books and comics he kept the same drawer as his notebook, where his boss couldn’t find it and accuse him of slacking. The screen of his computer was obscured by a cluster of post-it notes with reminders, shopping lists, story ideas and quotations scribbled on them in heavy ball-point. His keyboard was surrounded by a cluster of photographs in cheap plastic frames, mostly of him and his girlfriend: their first date, their anniversary, their trip to the coast the summer before, her in a broad floppy hat and him with his face peeling from sunburn. The backside of the desk and the wall behind him were papered with sketches, heavy-inked warriors brandishing swords and axes, mages with white beards and gnarled staffs, dark-cowled vigilantes fighting masked villains on the city’s rooftops.

He didn’t know Mitch and David that well, really. He didn’t know anyone at the company that well; most of them were older than him by several years, and the ones that weren’t didn’t have much time for a quiet kid who walked around with his mind miles off and blushed if he was spoken to. So it wasn’t like Mitch and David were his friends. It was just that they were standing right in front of him, putting on their coats, while they talked about meeting a few of the other guys for drinks, and he saw the looks on their faces the moment they noticed that he was listening.

“Hey, kid, you doing anything tonight? You should come with us to the bar. You know, get out of the house for once,” Mitch said. Or maybe it was David. Either way he could see in his eyes that he was only being polite, that he didn’t really want him to come along. Which was probably why he said yes.

An hour later, he was sorely regretting the decision. It wasn’t that he didn’t like going out – just because he skipped the clubs and bars most Friday nights didn’t mean he didn’t have a social life – it was just awkward, sitting at a table with half a dozen men who, when they weren’t making badly failed passes at women, were teasing him and calling him Johnny.  After the fifth-odd time someone asked him if he knew what to do with a girl who wasn’t two-dimensional, Jamie muttered an excuse about buying more drinks and shoved his chair away from the table.

Sitting on a barstool, sipping a warm beer and drawing squiggles in the grime on the bar, was painfully boring, and Jamie had just decided to give up and go home when someone slid into the seat beside him and a warm voice asked if he could buy him a drink.

“Not gay,” he answered automatically, but he could feel his face burning. The man smirking at him wasn’t handsome, exactly, but he was striking, with his narrow pointed face, swept-back ginger hair, and unnervingly bright hazel eyes. Jamie found himself staring, which only made him blush harder in embarrassment.

“But I can still say hello,” the stranger replied. “And ask you where you got that flower. It really is quite unusual – I don’t think I’ve seen anything like it.”

“I think the girl who sold it to me was a witch,” Jamie said. “She said it would put a spell on me, and make me see the truth. And I think the truth is you’re hitting on me.”

The man threw back his head and laughed, and Jamie couldn’t help thinking it was an odd laugh, barking and hoarse, at odds with his smooth demeanor.

“Aren’t you the clever one? Oh, I’m going to have fun with you,” he purred. “The name’s Fox – and I will be seeing you again.”

He leaned forward and kissed Jamie, just the barest brush of lips against his own, but before Jamie could react he stood with a flourish and vanished back into the crowd.

While he shivered outside waiting for a taxi, Jamie thought he could still feel the pressure of Fox’s kiss on his mouth, and he couldn’t decide if he regretted it or not.

 

Jamie woke at 6.30 to a sour taste in his mouth and the incessant blare of a car alarm from the street below his apartment. He’d lived in the city long enough to ignore alarms, sirens, the rumble of garbage trucks, even the sound of shots, but it had been the nightmare that jolted him out of sleep, the same nightmare he’d been having for months. The one where he walked down his block, a canyon of identical high-rises distinguishable only by the names over the doors, and realized that he couldn’t tell his building from any of the others; the one where he hammered frantically on doors he would sworn were his, only to be turned away by furious, faceless strangers, until he was sobbing in fear and despair. It always left him shaken and anxious, checking and rechecking to reassure himself that his Blue Beetle poster was over the bed and his college textbooks were on the bookcase and the computer on the desk had his Torchwood screensaver. That the room was really his.

He was still shaking off the pall the dream had left over him while he showered and dug a mostly-clean t-shirt and jeans from the bottom of his hamper, and while he walked to the subway station at the end of the block, and so he thought at first, when he didn’t recognize any of the shops around him, that he’d gotten off at the wrong station in his daze. But Saturdays had been Jamie’s set in stone errand days for as long as he’d had an office job; the first weekend, he’d sat down with a map and marked out the best route that would take him everywhere from the organic grocery that sold his favorite soy chips to the cheap laundromat to the electronics store and the comic book store, and he’d had the way memorized within a week. He’d walked it while he was half-asleep, while he was hung-over, and while he was reading Final Crisis, and he’d never gotten lost.

But he kept passing stores he’d never heard of before, and even the streets looked wrong – the sidewalks in that part of town were plain concrete all the way past the science museum on 5^th Street, but now he was walking on battered red brick, pitted and uneven beneath his feet – so he turned back the way he’d come and kept walking until he saw the glass walls around the subway entrance before him. This time he made doubly certain that he’d read the street sign correctly and that he was heading in the right direction.

The second time he realized he didn’t know where he was, he stopped full in the middle of the sidewalk and swore loudly enough that several passers-by stared at him. He knew – he was absolutely positive – that he hadn’t missed any corners or made any wrong turns, but where there should have been a McDonald’s and a toy store there was a Chinese herbalist’s shop and an antique dealer’s. When he reached the intersection, the sign was for Exchange Alley, which he would have sworn was impossible; all the streets in the district were numbered, not named. It was hard to ignore the nagging suspicion that he’d wandered into another time, or another city.

The third time he found himself lost, even after he’d counted every step from the subway station, he nearly began to cry, biting down on his lip hard enough to make it throb to stop himself.

He had stopped walking this time beside a coffee shop, not a Starbucks but some single store franchise whose gimmick, to judge by the wrought-iron railings and the yellowing playbills in the windows, was Paris in the 1930s. There was a bell over the door that tinkled merrily when he shouldered it open, determined to find out where he was and what was going on.

“Excuse me, can you help me out?” Jamie said to the barista, whose back was to him as he did something complicated and painful sounding with an espresso machine. “I’m really lost, and –”

Fox smiled at him over the counter. “Isn’t this a pleasant surprise? You know, I don’t think you ever told me your name last night.”

“Jamie,” he answered reflexively. “But you – what – this was never here before.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Jamie,” Fox said lightly. “We’ve always been here. I’m surprised you’ve never noticed us before. Do you live nearby?”

Jamie ran a hand wearily through his hair. “I’m not telling you that. And I know this neighborhood like the back of my hand and I’ve never seen this café before. But I just – I want to go home. Can you tell me how to get out of here?”

“Well, that depends. I can’t just go telling people anything they like. Even people as pretty as you. Could get me into trouble.”

“Do you want me to pay you? I don’t have a lot of cash on me, just my grocery money for the week, but…”

“I don’t need your money, Jamie.” Fox leered at him. “I’ll tell you for a kiss, though.”

Jamie refused to think about what it said about him, that he only hesitated for a moment before he leaned across the counter and kissed Fox. It was a deeper kiss than the night before, Fox’s tongue licking into his mouth and Fox’s hand twisting in his hair, and when they parted Jamie was panting.

“When you walk out the door, close your eyes and turn around three times, and the way will be clear to you,” Fox whispered into his ear, the soft warmth of his breath making Jamie shudder.

Jamie did as he was told. It only took him a few minutes to reach the subway station again, and the streets stayed what they should have been all the way back to his apartment, where he fell into bed, hoping that when he woke up again, none of this would have happened.

When he woke in the afternoon, with the achy, too-hot confusion of having slept through the day, there was a voicemail on his phone, Maura calling to remind him of their date that night.

He’d never set out to date Maura. A year ago she had just been the friend of a friend of a friend whom he’d taken to the movies as a favor when her date stood her up. But she had been surprisingly easy to talk to, and he’d her if she’d like to have dinner with him without thinking of the consequences if she said yes. The relationship that followed hadn’t been a whirlwind of romance, and no one was swept off their feet, but it was comfortable, and easy, and he knew all their friends and his parents were expecting them to get married sooner or later. Even he suspected a proposal was inevitable, as much as the idea terrified him. At least it wasn’t going to happen tonight.

 

“You’re late,” Maura said as he dropped into his seat, gasping for breath after his jog from the subway. “I had to order for you so the waiter would stop giving me looks.”

“I was asleep!” Jamie protested. “I’m sorry, it’s been a really weird day.”

She rolled her eyes. “It’s always something with you. Why can’t you just admit that you forgot about our date and get it over with?”

“But I didn’t –” Jamie sighed. “Can we not have this argument? You’re not going to believe me anyway.”

Luckily he was spared her reply by the arrival of the waiter with their food, and for the next few minutes they were too focused on their meals to speak.

“So aside from weird, how has your day been?” Maura asked him finally, taking a delicate sip from her wineglass and absently twirling a strand of pasta on her fork.

“…weird,” he said. “Do – do you know anything about flowers?”

“Only the kind you get in a bouquet. Why?”

“I bought a flower from this girl yesterday morning, one of those college kids raising money for something. She said it was nightshade. And I think it’s doing something weird to me.”

“Oh geez – nightshade is poisonous, you idiot. That’s fantastic, absolutely fantastic, my boyfriend is such a moron he let some college punk poison him with a flower. I am not spending the rest of the night with you in the ER, just so you know.” She glared at him, but he could see the smile twitching at the corner of her lips.

“Maura! That’s not what I meant. I’m fine. I mean, I’m not poisoned. I –” Jamie shook his head miserably. “Maybe I’m just being ridiculous about this. But when I went shopping this morning all the streets were wrong. Nothing was where it was supposed to be. It was like the whole city turned into a maze on me, and then Fox…”

“Wait, Fox?” Maura asked. “You don’t know anyone named Fox. Is he some new guy at the company?”

 “Um,” he said, stalling. She raised an eyebrow.

“He’s…a guy. Who hit on me. Um. Not my fault?” But he couldn’t quite meet her eyes, and he knew his face was turning scarlet as she stared at him suspiciously.

“For some guy you’ve never met before, you’re getting pretty worked up. And when were you going to mention this to me?”

“I was going to mention it now! Nothing happened, anyway. He’s just some weird guy who hit on me in the bar. And then again in this coffee shop I’ve never seen before. Can we concentrate on the part where there are stores popping into existence spontaneously?”

“Don’t be absurd, Jamie. You can’t possibly think that I’m stupid enough to be distracted by something that sounds like it comes out of those mindless comics you obsess over.” Maura pursed her lips and glared at him hard enough he could almost feel his skin start to bubble. “I cannot believe you. I really and honestly cannot believe you. You’re into this guy!”

“I – what? I barely even know this guy, Maura, come on!”

“Well, fine, then. Tell me about him.”

“I – I – he’s a guy. He walked up to me at the bar last night and started hitting on me, and then I ran him into him today at a coffee shop and he was still hitting on me. He wears really tight pants and a leather jacket. It doesn’t matter, Maura, I’m trying to tell you something that’s actually important!”

“No, Jamie, you aren’t,” she said coldly. “You’re trying to keep from talking about this, and you know what, I don’t even care why. If you’re so determined to lie to me, just do it.”

“Maura, come on, this is ridiculous –”

“Oh, so now you want to talk ridiculous, after you tried to cover up whatever you were doing with that jerk by telling me that city blocks were moving around you?  You know what? Just fuck it. Fuck you. I can't believe I ever started dating you in the first place. It's not like it was my idea.”

The silence was stunning; even Maura looked taken aback by what she’d just said, face flushed, eyes wide.

“I – I’m sorry Jamie, I didn’t mean to say that, you know I love you, I…” she trailed off dejectedly.

Jamie pushed him stiffly to his feet. He could feel his hands shaking. “Don’t. Don’t apologize. One of us had to say it. Sooner or later. It’s been good, but.” He smiled, but it felt painful, like his face was about to crack in two. “I’ll see you around, Maura.”

He didn’t remember walking out of the restaurant, or getting back on the subway; he came back to himself, a little, when he heard the conductor announce his station. His face was wet, and he thought he must have been crying, but he couldn’t remember that either. He staggered up the stairs to the street, and the rush of cold air in his face cleared his head a little more, enough to locate the familiar graffiti-ed streetlamp at the corner of his block.

He couldn’t find his apartment.

At first he was sure he’d missed it in the dark, even as he knew that was impossible. He went back to the end of the block and counted every building. The high-rise to his left was there, as was the one to his right, but in between – a narrow alley. A few garbage cans. Someone’s old cardboard boxes. Nothing else. So he went back and around the next corner, in case he’d gone down the wrong street. Nothing. Nothing around the next corner, and nothing when he went all the way around and came the other way, and nothing when he went back to the subway station and started over.

“No, no, no, no, no,” he moaned when stood once again in front of a barren alley where his apartment should have been. “This cannot be happening to me.”

Desperate, he remembered Fox’s words that morning. It had broken the spell once, restored things to how they should have been; why not again?

Jamie screwed his eyes shut and spun in place, keeping count in his head – one, two, three.

When he cracked them open again, Fox was standing before him, face solemn.

“Nothing ever works twice, kid,” he said. “Especially not magic. You should have known that.”

“You son of a bitch,” Jamie shouted. “What did you do? I know you’re doing this – the streets, and Maura, and – and my apartment, you bastard, how are you doing this?”

Fox spread his hands calmly; he still wasn’t smiling. “I’m not doing anything, Jamie. It’s not my fault if you’ve chosen to place your faith in shadows and specters. I can’t be blamed if you’ve never seen the truth before.”

“What are you talking about?” Jamie inquired plaintively. “I don’t – I just want to go home. Can’t you fix this?”

He sagged against the wall, the jagged surface of the bricks digging into his skin, and buried his face in his hands. As if from a great distance, he heard Fox walk toward him, and then there was the comforting weight of an arm wrapped around him, holding him to a warm, solid chest.

“Please fix this,” he whispered.

 

When Jamie woke up he didn’t know where he was. It clearly wasn’t his apartment, unless in the middle of the night someone had redecorated his room in austere black wooden furniture and delicately tinted prints of cherry blossoms and golden carp. And unless someone had stolen his bed and replaced it with one twice as wide and…oh.

He couldn’t find his clothes – didn’t even want to think about where they might be – but the clothes in the dresser looked like they’d fit him well enough. All he could think, as he jammed his legs into the tight jeans and yanked a t-shirt over his head, was that he had to get out of the apartment now, immediately, as soon as possible, because he didn’t think his plausible deniability of what a monumental mistake he’d made could hold up to seeing Fox again.

His cellphone was on the nightstand, next to his wallet, and when he flipped it open the screen showed a voicemail waiting for him.

“I – look, I’m sorry about last night.” Maura’s voice was tinny and flat in his ear. “I overreacted, and it was stupid of me. Just – call me so we can talk, okay?”

The kitchen, when he crept out of the bedroom, was disquietingly empty and still, as was the living room. His feeling of unease only deepened as he left the apartment; there was no one in the elevator, and when he reached the ground floor no one in the lobby. The building felt like a museum, or a library – silent, over-large, and abandoned, the echo of his footsteps on the marble floor making him jump.

Jamie told himself that everything would be fine once he left. He would go home – and it would be there, it would – and call Maura, apologize for being a jerk and beg for her forgiveness and make no mention of last night ever again. If he could just get home, everything would be fine.

When he shoved the wide glass doors open and the sun fell warm on his face, he felt like he was breaking out of a tomb and into a perfectly ordinary Sunday morning. The sidewalks were clotted with people: old women in their best dresses and hats for church, yuppie parents out with their toddlers, twenty-something singles on their way to meet up with friends, teenagers stomping out the rhythm of the music on their iPods. It made him want to laugh, half-delighted, half-hysterical.

The first person he saw walking faceless down the sidewalk he dismissed as a trick of the light. And the second, and the third. But then he ran headlong into a man, an old and stooped, pot-bellied man, dressed in a shabby black suit, and recoiled in horror; where his face should have been was only a pale, blemish-less expanse of flesh. Everywhere he turned he could see more of them, ordinary people, people he could have known, twisted and blank and wrong.

When he heard someone behind him shout his name, he broke into a blind run, careening through the crowd, shoving his way past empty-faced mothers and suits and street vendors. His heel caught on the curb and he sprawled to the ground, but he scrambled up breathless and frantic, palms stinging, and kept running.

When the concrete abruptly turned to grass beneath his feet, he fell again, and this time he couldn’t move. He buried his face in the cool, damp grass until his heart stopped pounding and he was no longer sucking air in lung-aching gasps, and when he looked up once more, Fox was standing in front of him.

“Why did you run?” Fox asked, leaning back against a tree with his arms crossed over his chest.

“Why did I – did you not see those things? They didn’t have faces!” Jamie exclaimed.

“They’re just shades,” he said, arching one narrow brow. “They wouldn’t have hurt you. They can’t. Do you have any idea how many you walk past in a day – blank people, people with nothing behind the mask? It’s a little sad, really. But what can you do?”

Jamie’s laugh was high-pitched, more than a bit hysterical. “You seem to think I’ll take all this much better than I am. It’s just a normal part of living in the city, is that right? Or are you just going to keep leading me in circles until I don’t know what to do but follow you?”

“Jamie –”

“– No, no ‘Jamie’, no cryptic glances, no leading me on until I can’t remember what I was talking about. No seducing me.  I want you to tell me what’s happening to me – I want you to tell me why!”

In three days, Jamie had seen many expressions on Fox’s face –curious to leering, mocking to pitying, even the dark intensity as he left open-mouthed kisses on Jamie’s chest down to his hips in his dim bedroom.  But none of that had prepared him for the wearily wry look that flashed across his features as he dropped into a crouch, rocking back on his heels and pushing his hair back with one hand.

“I played this hand badly,” he said with a bitter laugh. “And I raised the stakes higher than I should have. I ought to have known better.”

Jamie’s eyes widened. “My life isn’t a gamble – it isn’t a game,” he said.

“Not to you, perhaps,” Fox said. “But when you live as long as I have, you might find yourself seeking new ways to fill the days as well. After a certain number of centuries, the mundane does get tedious.”

The revelation should have surprised Jamie, but it was easy to believe there was something about Fox that wasn’t quite human. If nothing else, it explained his grin with a hint of a snarl behind it, his eyes slitted like a cat’s and looking for something just out of sight. It just didn’t explain anything else.

“So was the game getting me to sleep with you?” he asked finally. “Or to throw horrors at me until I broke? Either way I think you’ve won.”

Fox shook his head slowly. “When you took the nightshade, I knew you weren’t like most mortals. They’re all so dully, damnably blind – even when the truth’s right under their noses they don’t want to see it. But you…I thought, if you could only open your eyes, I could make you want all this. And I could give it to you.”

“Why would I want this?” Jamie demanded. “Why would I want a city where streets won’t stay in place and my apartment doesn’t exist and my girlfriend hates me and none of the people have faces? I’ve had nothing but trouble since I met you!”

“But you did want this,” Fox said softly. He reached into one of the many pockets on his leather jacket and drew up a precisely folded sheet of paper, pressed it into Jamie’s hands. As he unfolded it and smoothed the creases out, Jamie recognized his own rough pencil lines, though he didn’t remember the sketch. A city street in the rain, the buildings on either side leaning toward each other like the gleaming walls of a prison. A crowd of people in suits and overcoats, all alike. A young man, not quite him but not quite not, breaking free of the crowd – rising above it in a flurry of white-feathered wings.

“You dropped it in the bar,” Fox said to his inquiring expression. “And I was…intrigued.”

“It’s not real,” Jamie said. “All those drawings, my stories – they’re just dreams. Make-believe, you know. They’re not real.”

“But they could be,” Fox said, lips twisting into the first honest smile Jamie had seen him give. “As real as the grass beneath your feet. There are things in the city you couldn’t conceive of – monsters lurking in the darkness, waiting to be slain; treasures to be discovered; secrets to be exposed – with the two of us together, it would be fantastic. You know it would.”

Fox stepped closer to him, traced a line down the curve of his cheek with a slender finger before he cupped his chin in his hand.  “Say yes,” he whispered. “Say you’ll come with me.”

Jamie closed his eyes and kissed Fox, faint and brief and final.

“I can’t,” he said, low and broken. “I wish I could. But I can’t.”

When he opened his eyes again, Fox was gone.

 

When Jamie got to work on Monday, on time for once, there was a vase on his desk with a single spray of flowers in it, a cluster of rounded sky-blue blossoms.

Forget-me-not, the note said simply, and Jamie folded it carefully and slipped it into his pocket.