Log: Nick and Catseye
Apr. 24th, 2014 10:20 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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xp_logsSometimes the thing that people thought would hurt you, is just what you needed.
Nicholas Gleason slammed the side of his head against the pillow of his makeshift room for what seemed to be the thousandth time that night. With a groan, he fought against his stinging eyes to pry open his own eyelids and look at the digital clock displaying the numbers "3:03". As he let out a sigh he couldn't help but think about the cruel fact that tomorrow he would not only have to fight against his own memory problems, but against the effects of tonight's insomnia.
He flung himself onto his back and looked up at the ceiling. Once again he tried to force back the memories of graduation back into his mind. Even though the therapists at Muir had warned him against the symptoms of traumatic re-experiencing from his PTSD, he had to try, as he was due to testify in the case against Donald Pierce in the morning. But the memories continued to elude him, as they remained with just flashes that he couldn't put together. The only image that remained the same was the last one. The purple-hair in the crowd, and the blackness. The same purple hair that he saw in his dreams almost every night.
With another sigh, he swung his feet over the edge of his bed, and found the cool carpeting. Maybe if he got a drink of water, he'd be able to finally get some sleep. But as soon as he forced himself up on his feet, his eyes crossed the window to the room, and instantly he found himself staggering back against the wall in a reflex. What he saw in the window was something that took his breath away. It was the same color purple that had lived in his dreams for months. The same color purple that was the only memory he had left from his days before his accident.
Uh oh! When she realized she'd been spotted, the small purple cat jumped down from the window, hoping maybe Nick would just think he'd been dreaming or seeing things that had never been there. She'd just wanted to see him again! She hadn't intended for him to get up while she was at the window and see her! Badbadbadbadbad, she thought to herself as she took the dive off the window. But she hadn't been window-hopping in a very long time, and she hadn't realized the shrubbery around the mansion had gotten so big, so she misjudged her landing and ended up in the brush, letting out a yowl of surprise when she got tangled up in the branches. Great. So much for being sneaky! she thought to herself ruefully as she struggled to free herself.
As soon as the purple flash disappeared from the window, Nick rushed forward, his hand outstretched. "No.... Wait!" It took him all of two seconds to wrestle the window open and even less time to swing his leg over the outside of the sill. As he swung down, and grabbed onto the edge of the window his mind was stuck on one image, the purple flash that he could remember from his memory. The same flash that he had focused on almost nightly for the past few months. Nick did his best to remember his few brief days living on the streets of New York, that he actually had to scale a few windows, but in the combination of his excitement and flood of emotions, he missed the next row of windows with his hands, and landed with a thud on his ankle. Pain shot through his body, but he didn't care as he limped forward towards the cat in the bushes. As he looked down at her struggling, his mind had another memory flash. A name formed first in his head, and then on his lips, and he spoke it for the first time in over a year. "Cats?"
Catseye stopped struggling when she heard Nick say her name, shocked into immobility. He remembered her?! Or had he just called out 'cat' to her, since she was a cat? Had she misheard him? She looked over and saw him limping. He looked like he'd hurt himself, which would have worried her whether he remembered her or not, so she shifted back into girlform at once (forgetting in the heat of the moment that she was naked) and grabbed his shoulders to try and help him take his weight off the foot he was limping on. "Ohmygawd, are you okay? Why did you jump out the window?! What a silly thing to do!" she cried out, punching him in the arm.
Nick stumbled backwards as the girl shifted, as he was hit with something more powerful than a blow or a fall from a window. A memory of him waiting at a bus stop and a carefree girl shifting from a cat to a nude girl directly in front of him. And suddenly his mind seemed like a damn that had been broken. The picnic in the woods with the mini-squid. Her surprising him with their first kiss after watching 10 Things I Hate About You. The play at the Salem Center. Their prom together. And suddenly the face blurry face from his dreams became clear, and it was standing in front of him. He felt the tears come to his eyes but he didn't care. "Cats, please tell me that's really you." He didn't wait for an answer as he let himself collapse forward, wrapping his arms around her.
"Of course it's- oof!" His sudden collapse into the hug caught her off guard and she staggered a little. For a moment she just stood there, wondering what she was should do. She wasn't even supposed to be here! She was supposed to stay away so she didn't trigger any PTSD-related pain! But he didn't seem to be in pain. Well, at least, there didn't seem to be pain in his head. Maybe his foot was another story, but his brain seemed alright, didn't it? So maybe it was okay that she'd seen him? Maybe everything was going to be okay?
Still wrestling with her conscience, she caught a whiff of his familiar scent. Despite having tried so hard to forget about her relationship with Nick, lest she cause him pain, her own memories of their time together pushed their way to the forefront of her thoughts. She remembered how happy she'd always been with him, what they'd always meant to each other, and figured to hell with the warnings to stay away. Her arms wrapped around him to return the hug and she pressed her cheek against his. "It's really me," she answered with a grin. "Nick, please tell me your brain isn't going to explode," she added with a grin, mimicking his tone.
He couldn't help the tears as they continued to flow down his cheeks. "No, my brain's not going to explode. I promise." He followed with a small chuckle. But to be honest he wasn't sure. He wasn't sure that this wasn't some kind of weird extension to his dream, which forced him to hold tight to the girl, wanting to make sure that she didn't disappear back into his head, where she had been trapped for over two years. "As long as you don't disappear again." He was sure that he might need to explain that to her in the near future, but that didn't matter. It didn't matter that his ankle was throbbing in his ears. It didn't matter that he had to testify in an attempted murder trial in the morning. What matter was that she was there, and that he remembered her. "Please, just tell me you won't disappear again."
"I won't disappear again," she promised him, nuzzling his cheek again. "I promise. I... I didn't want to disappear at all," she told him with a wry chuckle. "They told me I had to, because it would hurt you if I didn't stay away. And then when more and more time passed and you didn't get better, I thought it would hurt me if I didn't stay away," she confessed, "if I didn't disappear. I thought that for a long time. That you were building a new life for yourself, without me, so I had to do the same.
"But then when you came back here, I felt like I had to see you, even though I knew you couldn't see me. Maybe to convince myself I was over you and happy with my life now. But then you jumped out of a freaking window for me," she chuckled, squeezing her arms more tightly around him. "You're such a SillyKitten. Now you've gone and hurt yourself, and you should be asleep because you have to testify tomorrow!"
He tried to pry himself away from her several times. Tried to look at her face that he had only seen in his dreams over the past few months. But he never could. He kept thinking for whatever reason that if he pulled himself away that she would suddenly disappear, along with the memories that were slowly becoming sharper and sharper in his head. "I thought it might hurt me to stay around here too, but honestly it's like you were the key to my memories all along cats." Another tear came to his eye as he finally pulled back just enough to be able to look at her. "It's like I didn't want to remember anything if I didn't remember you."
He hobbled forward, keeping his hand around her. "And to be honest, I didn't really care about having to testify. I didn't care if you had a life without me. I didn't care if I hurt myself jumping out of the window, I just had to see you again. Even if it was one more time. And I would do it again and again." He limped slightly to the side. "But to be honest, maybe I would have taken the stairs until the window next time."
Catseye laughed brightly, a laugh she hadn't really displayed in a very long time. "Wow, your brain's making me feel all special, being the key to your memories and all that. And taking the stairs next time is probably a good plan," she nodded, helping him limp along. "Of course, there doesn't need to be a next time, y'know," she reminded him, poking him in the ribs playfully. "Unless you're giving yourself a head injury and forgetting me again and going back to Muir and then coming back here again. Except now that I know how to fix your brain, I don't know if I'm going to let that happen," she pointed out with a grin. "I'd probably just stick you in a room with posters of me all over and leave you there until you remember again. So yeah, probably no more window-jumping necessary. So what have you been up to on Muir?" she asked in one of her typical rapid-fire conversation topic shifts, her tone casual, as if they had just seen each other a couple days ago and were catching up on gossip.
Even though he was in pain, Nick couldn't help but smile as he listened to the girl next to him. It was a very odd feeling to be next to someone that was just a photograph a few seconds earlier, but was almost instantaneously all of the memories that he had lost. But it was a feeling that he wasn't going to give up. "Trust me Cats, I don't plan on ever giving up this memory if I can help it." He meant the reunion, but he suddenly realized that she was still very much naked as she supported him. He tried to hide his blushing as he tried to answer her questions. "Muir was.... different...." His eyebrows furrowed as he tried to find the words to explain his time rehabing on the island. "It was like I was surrounded by people that I wanted to help, but at the same time I couldn't help myself." He paused for just a minute. "It's like if you were hunting a mouse that was always just a step in front of you, but there were all these other hungry cats around you, and you felt bad for hunting because they couldn't hunt for themselves."
"Why did you feel bad for hunting?" she asked, his analogy putting her in a feline mentality. "You should never feel bad for hunting. You need to eat. And why weren't there enough mice for everybody?" What the heck were these Muir people trying to do, anyway? She didn't think she liked them very much. Of course, he wasn't talking about real mice, she reminded herself. But still. "There are more than enough mice for everyone here, so it's good you came back. I don't want you starving," she smiled, confident that the crew at the mansion could take much better care of Nick than those Muir people. "Speaking of starving, how about a midnight snack? Or a three-am snack, I guess? I can get a head start on baking the cookies for the restaurant tomorrow if you want a cookie!"
Nick's grin grew even wider as he limped towards the door. He didn't know if it was Cats unique turn of phrase, or the fact that he remembered her dialogue for the first time in years. "If you're baking, I'm in the kitchen." He squeezed her in tight to his side for more than just support. "I lost you for way too long to let you go for a very long time."
She cocked her head at him as she opened the door for him. "So... does that mean after you testify you're staying here? No more Muir? Because, if you don't want to let me go, you probably have to stay here. I can't really go to Muir to be with you," she said apologetically. "Not with my restaurant being here. Ooo, I can't wait to show you my restaurant! Maybe you can work there if you need a job. But you probably don't need a job," she realized aloud. "You used to be a paramedic when you were John, right? Are you going to be a paramedic again?"
Nick laughed at the questions, seeming to find his smile for the first time in years. "If you're here Cats, if I have to be a garbage collector, I'm not going back to Muir. I'm staying right here with you."
Nicholas Gleason slammed the side of his head against the pillow of his makeshift room for what seemed to be the thousandth time that night. With a groan, he fought against his stinging eyes to pry open his own eyelids and look at the digital clock displaying the numbers "3:03". As he let out a sigh he couldn't help but think about the cruel fact that tomorrow he would not only have to fight against his own memory problems, but against the effects of tonight's insomnia.
He flung himself onto his back and looked up at the ceiling. Once again he tried to force back the memories of graduation back into his mind. Even though the therapists at Muir had warned him against the symptoms of traumatic re-experiencing from his PTSD, he had to try, as he was due to testify in the case against Donald Pierce in the morning. But the memories continued to elude him, as they remained with just flashes that he couldn't put together. The only image that remained the same was the last one. The purple-hair in the crowd, and the blackness. The same purple hair that he saw in his dreams almost every night.
With another sigh, he swung his feet over the edge of his bed, and found the cool carpeting. Maybe if he got a drink of water, he'd be able to finally get some sleep. But as soon as he forced himself up on his feet, his eyes crossed the window to the room, and instantly he found himself staggering back against the wall in a reflex. What he saw in the window was something that took his breath away. It was the same color purple that had lived in his dreams for months. The same color purple that was the only memory he had left from his days before his accident.
Uh oh! When she realized she'd been spotted, the small purple cat jumped down from the window, hoping maybe Nick would just think he'd been dreaming or seeing things that had never been there. She'd just wanted to see him again! She hadn't intended for him to get up while she was at the window and see her! Badbadbadbadbad, she thought to herself as she took the dive off the window. But she hadn't been window-hopping in a very long time, and she hadn't realized the shrubbery around the mansion had gotten so big, so she misjudged her landing and ended up in the brush, letting out a yowl of surprise when she got tangled up in the branches. Great. So much for being sneaky! she thought to herself ruefully as she struggled to free herself.
As soon as the purple flash disappeared from the window, Nick rushed forward, his hand outstretched. "No.... Wait!" It took him all of two seconds to wrestle the window open and even less time to swing his leg over the outside of the sill. As he swung down, and grabbed onto the edge of the window his mind was stuck on one image, the purple flash that he could remember from his memory. The same flash that he had focused on almost nightly for the past few months. Nick did his best to remember his few brief days living on the streets of New York, that he actually had to scale a few windows, but in the combination of his excitement and flood of emotions, he missed the next row of windows with his hands, and landed with a thud on his ankle. Pain shot through his body, but he didn't care as he limped forward towards the cat in the bushes. As he looked down at her struggling, his mind had another memory flash. A name formed first in his head, and then on his lips, and he spoke it for the first time in over a year. "Cats?"
Catseye stopped struggling when she heard Nick say her name, shocked into immobility. He remembered her?! Or had he just called out 'cat' to her, since she was a cat? Had she misheard him? She looked over and saw him limping. He looked like he'd hurt himself, which would have worried her whether he remembered her or not, so she shifted back into girlform at once (forgetting in the heat of the moment that she was naked) and grabbed his shoulders to try and help him take his weight off the foot he was limping on. "Ohmygawd, are you okay? Why did you jump out the window?! What a silly thing to do!" she cried out, punching him in the arm.
Nick stumbled backwards as the girl shifted, as he was hit with something more powerful than a blow or a fall from a window. A memory of him waiting at a bus stop and a carefree girl shifting from a cat to a nude girl directly in front of him. And suddenly his mind seemed like a damn that had been broken. The picnic in the woods with the mini-squid. Her surprising him with their first kiss after watching 10 Things I Hate About You. The play at the Salem Center. Their prom together. And suddenly the face blurry face from his dreams became clear, and it was standing in front of him. He felt the tears come to his eyes but he didn't care. "Cats, please tell me that's really you." He didn't wait for an answer as he let himself collapse forward, wrapping his arms around her.
"Of course it's- oof!" His sudden collapse into the hug caught her off guard and she staggered a little. For a moment she just stood there, wondering what she was should do. She wasn't even supposed to be here! She was supposed to stay away so she didn't trigger any PTSD-related pain! But he didn't seem to be in pain. Well, at least, there didn't seem to be pain in his head. Maybe his foot was another story, but his brain seemed alright, didn't it? So maybe it was okay that she'd seen him? Maybe everything was going to be okay?
Still wrestling with her conscience, she caught a whiff of his familiar scent. Despite having tried so hard to forget about her relationship with Nick, lest she cause him pain, her own memories of their time together pushed their way to the forefront of her thoughts. She remembered how happy she'd always been with him, what they'd always meant to each other, and figured to hell with the warnings to stay away. Her arms wrapped around him to return the hug and she pressed her cheek against his. "It's really me," she answered with a grin. "Nick, please tell me your brain isn't going to explode," she added with a grin, mimicking his tone.
He couldn't help the tears as they continued to flow down his cheeks. "No, my brain's not going to explode. I promise." He followed with a small chuckle. But to be honest he wasn't sure. He wasn't sure that this wasn't some kind of weird extension to his dream, which forced him to hold tight to the girl, wanting to make sure that she didn't disappear back into his head, where she had been trapped for over two years. "As long as you don't disappear again." He was sure that he might need to explain that to her in the near future, but that didn't matter. It didn't matter that his ankle was throbbing in his ears. It didn't matter that he had to testify in an attempted murder trial in the morning. What matter was that she was there, and that he remembered her. "Please, just tell me you won't disappear again."
"I won't disappear again," she promised him, nuzzling his cheek again. "I promise. I... I didn't want to disappear at all," she told him with a wry chuckle. "They told me I had to, because it would hurt you if I didn't stay away. And then when more and more time passed and you didn't get better, I thought it would hurt me if I didn't stay away," she confessed, "if I didn't disappear. I thought that for a long time. That you were building a new life for yourself, without me, so I had to do the same.
"But then when you came back here, I felt like I had to see you, even though I knew you couldn't see me. Maybe to convince myself I was over you and happy with my life now. But then you jumped out of a freaking window for me," she chuckled, squeezing her arms more tightly around him. "You're such a SillyKitten. Now you've gone and hurt yourself, and you should be asleep because you have to testify tomorrow!"
He tried to pry himself away from her several times. Tried to look at her face that he had only seen in his dreams over the past few months. But he never could. He kept thinking for whatever reason that if he pulled himself away that she would suddenly disappear, along with the memories that were slowly becoming sharper and sharper in his head. "I thought it might hurt me to stay around here too, but honestly it's like you were the key to my memories all along cats." Another tear came to his eye as he finally pulled back just enough to be able to look at her. "It's like I didn't want to remember anything if I didn't remember you."
He hobbled forward, keeping his hand around her. "And to be honest, I didn't really care about having to testify. I didn't care if you had a life without me. I didn't care if I hurt myself jumping out of the window, I just had to see you again. Even if it was one more time. And I would do it again and again." He limped slightly to the side. "But to be honest, maybe I would have taken the stairs until the window next time."
Catseye laughed brightly, a laugh she hadn't really displayed in a very long time. "Wow, your brain's making me feel all special, being the key to your memories and all that. And taking the stairs next time is probably a good plan," she nodded, helping him limp along. "Of course, there doesn't need to be a next time, y'know," she reminded him, poking him in the ribs playfully. "Unless you're giving yourself a head injury and forgetting me again and going back to Muir and then coming back here again. Except now that I know how to fix your brain, I don't know if I'm going to let that happen," she pointed out with a grin. "I'd probably just stick you in a room with posters of me all over and leave you there until you remember again. So yeah, probably no more window-jumping necessary. So what have you been up to on Muir?" she asked in one of her typical rapid-fire conversation topic shifts, her tone casual, as if they had just seen each other a couple days ago and were catching up on gossip.
Even though he was in pain, Nick couldn't help but smile as he listened to the girl next to him. It was a very odd feeling to be next to someone that was just a photograph a few seconds earlier, but was almost instantaneously all of the memories that he had lost. But it was a feeling that he wasn't going to give up. "Trust me Cats, I don't plan on ever giving up this memory if I can help it." He meant the reunion, but he suddenly realized that she was still very much naked as she supported him. He tried to hide his blushing as he tried to answer her questions. "Muir was.... different...." His eyebrows furrowed as he tried to find the words to explain his time rehabing on the island. "It was like I was surrounded by people that I wanted to help, but at the same time I couldn't help myself." He paused for just a minute. "It's like if you were hunting a mouse that was always just a step in front of you, but there were all these other hungry cats around you, and you felt bad for hunting because they couldn't hunt for themselves."
"Why did you feel bad for hunting?" she asked, his analogy putting her in a feline mentality. "You should never feel bad for hunting. You need to eat. And why weren't there enough mice for everybody?" What the heck were these Muir people trying to do, anyway? She didn't think she liked them very much. Of course, he wasn't talking about real mice, she reminded herself. But still. "There are more than enough mice for everyone here, so it's good you came back. I don't want you starving," she smiled, confident that the crew at the mansion could take much better care of Nick than those Muir people. "Speaking of starving, how about a midnight snack? Or a three-am snack, I guess? I can get a head start on baking the cookies for the restaurant tomorrow if you want a cookie!"
Nick's grin grew even wider as he limped towards the door. He didn't know if it was Cats unique turn of phrase, or the fact that he remembered her dialogue for the first time in years. "If you're baking, I'm in the kitchen." He squeezed her in tight to his side for more than just support. "I lost you for way too long to let you go for a very long time."
She cocked her head at him as she opened the door for him. "So... does that mean after you testify you're staying here? No more Muir? Because, if you don't want to let me go, you probably have to stay here. I can't really go to Muir to be with you," she said apologetically. "Not with my restaurant being here. Ooo, I can't wait to show you my restaurant! Maybe you can work there if you need a job. But you probably don't need a job," she realized aloud. "You used to be a paramedic when you were John, right? Are you going to be a paramedic again?"
Nick laughed at the questions, seeming to find his smile for the first time in years. "If you're here Cats, if I have to be a garbage collector, I'm not going back to Muir. I'm staying right here with you."
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