#24 (Levihan) cause I love those fics with one of them having amnesia. /Laughs in angst/
#24) “What do you remember?”
This is inspired by a Filipino mythology of a deity named Alunsina who is stripped of her memories before getting sent to the human world. She eventually falls for a mortal.
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Hange is reminded, once again, of distance, vis-à-vis the push and pull of time against this moment. What it means to count days, now minutes, to measure how far apart exactly do people seem on both sides of the rails.
His name escapes her; this way Hange tells herself, You are not here, and so, I have forgotten. This rain reminds her that she's supposed to be with someone, recreates a memory like a story she has once heard of, or thinks she has belonged to. A river, perhaps, and a body she has saved. Then again, it's difficult to be reminded of what she no longer knows.
She proceeds to ask the man beside her how long it takes to get to their destination. He doesn’t have time for this conversation, she presumes; not enough to spend an eternity in a minute. Yet he answers: an hour.
Half an hour, if you’re lucky, he adds. The clock decides they won’t be. When she talks about destinations, people think of places and the time to arrive, and Hange dreams of spaces not reaching each other instead.
But the stranger looks at her like he knows her, like they’ve known each other in another lifetime.
Mister, she starts, would you please make room, just a little bit more? I am not fond of touch. This contact of flesh against metal bars, the slight dapple of cheek against fabric, then: unfamiliar fingers, suddenly, more sweat.
It’s me, Hange, the stranger says, Don’t you know me?
People shift gazes in this tunnel faster than they move. They feign calmness as they wait for their turn to board. What they don’t know: they have taught her how to understand movements. Under these roofs where she's safe from heavy skies – the thought of water against skin is petrifying because memory serves and fails. Something retracts itself the minute she intends to articulate that feeling, a name, perhaps, now what of water, then.
He then asks her, What do you remember? In the silence the answer remains.
But even the rain does not apologize for falling.
This journey suspends operations. It is more afraid of collision than she is of returning. Should she also be unwanting of it. These days she can only be lucky with her own safety. Later, the isolation is a prelude to freedom. The rain hitting the roof of this train. This train, hiding from it, too.
Outside: ghostly cities. Inside, a permission to see reflections. Mere faces of the undead. Something tells her she is starting to act like them. This ride teaches her how to be familiar with strangers, how to be familiar with herself.
