Enough people have warned Samir about the winters here in Colorado that he has thought himself prepared. But he also thinks that folks in Colorado exaggerate. The weather has been just as lopsided as anywhere else in the world now that the climate is changing and he has been keeping track of the storm advisories.
Warnings about what it's going to be doing outside aren't just for conversation fodder. He lives outside now. The antiquated Airstream he calls home is insulated but keeping the temperature up enough that he won't freeze to death is going to require some serious maintenance. Which means he has a program running to keep the temperature inside the trailer warm enough that he die of hypothermia in his sleep.
It's not the greatest way to live but it's teaching him a lot about the difference between machines and humans. The computers will survive with frost on them. He won't.
Darker than hell and he's so far outside the city limits that he can't see the light pollution butting up against the clouded sky as he stands on the steps leading inside the trailer. Door shut behind him and watching the snow pile up on the ground and considering maybe this wasn't the smartest idea he's had recently. He can't tell the difference between cigarette smoke and his breath.
wind
The problem with blizzards isn't so much the snow as it is the wind that carries it. Hard gusts fling even small amounts of snow around so fast it's like looking at nature's version of television static. As the night has deepened, the snow is changing from a thick, slushy mess to something a little lighter, easier to throw around. There will be ice underneath big, soft drifts once all is said and done.
But all is not.
The wind picks up, and stabs at Samir's face. It feels malicious, almost. As if wind could have hatred toward somebody. He can't see the light pollution from where he's at, but it's turning brighter. The sky, not so much differently colored than the ground anymore. Are you sure you want to finish that cigarette, Sam?
Maybe he does. The cold hasn't quite the same grip as a nicotine habit.
Either way, the wind doesn't care. It makes the trailer tilt under the brunt of a gust that makes metal scrape against metal somewhere. A groaning noise arises from within, as if the trailer is audibly voicing its disapproval of the situation.
Samir
Standing out in wind like this gives a young man time to reevaluate his priorities. To really appreciate the way the wind can knock water right out of his eyes. It isn't cold enough to freeze the insides of his nostrils but he's heard cold can do that. If it ever got that cold in Vancouver he was too young to remember it.
So the wind picks up and it stabs at him and the priority he has to consider now is whether he wants to keep standing out here in a peacoat and ski cap watching the world bury him.
No. No he does not. That groaning noise confirms it.
He can always air this thing out in the springtime. He grabs the trailer door and gives it a tug half expecting the wind to try and tear it out of his hands.
wind
As soon as his hand grabs that trailer door, something changes. A buzzing sound from the trailer begins, like that of a fan with something stuck between the blades.
There is something in the trailer. Samir knows this not by any perceptive ability, no clues lead him to believe this (that buzzing noise could just be the wind vibrating an errant piece of plastic) and yet, there is something in the trailer. He knows, in the same way he knows that if he doesn't perform his rituals, something horrible will happen.
Just because there is no evidence of a thing, doesn't make it any less terrifying.
Samir
Every time something like this happens the thought occurs to him that he's about to lose his mind. When he botches an effect hard enough that reality forms a fucked-up bubble around him the moment that the bubble closes is one he can't remember later on.
Outside episodes of Quiet he does not suffer from auditory hallucinations or paranoia. When the condition he has not yet named gets a good hold of him he goes through a muscle memory of some behavior he never. Only with effort can he convince himself that this is a strange thing to think.
The whole point of being out here is to expand his consciousness and stop thinking things that are not true. Exposure therapy. Doesn't matter if the thought that something is in there makes the insides of his gloves go humid with the sweat burst out of his palms.
If he stays out here all night because there might be something in the trailer he's going to die of exposure.
Chances are about equal that there is nothing in there and he's just being a madman again or that there is something in there and it's going to bite his fucking face off soon as he steps in.
He grits his teeth and yanks open the door.
wind
The yanking of the door coincides with a gust of wind that tilts the trailer again, and... perhaps the strange premonition wasn't quite so off after all?
From inside, Samir hears a dull thud and the hiss of a "Shit!"
Strangely, it doesn't sound like a burglar. That 'shit' wasn't the invective of someone who's upset at having been caught. In fact, it's followed up by a mutter that Sam can't hear over the whistling of the wind.
Samir
Shit!
Well that's never happened before.
The curse startles Samir. He shouts and nearly leaps out of the trailer and back into the savagery that passes for weather out in the mountains. Then that mutter. Then that realization that there's someone in his trailer.
This is not a large trailer. Two people could live in it. Hypothetically. He wouldn't know.
"Ah..." Samir steps all the way inside and shuts the door. Okay now he can hear better. "Eh... Excuse me? Person I don't know?"
wind
Over in the corner, there's some movement, and an arm appears from behind a box.
"Uhh... Yes?" comes a wary voice from the floor.
Then, the owner of that voice stands up and brushes himself off. "I guess the storm's pretty bad, huh? You need a place to..."
The man's voice trails off about the same time he meets eyes with Samir, and the reason is pretty obvious. Standing in Samir's trailer, wearing the same clothes Samir was wearing when he stepped outside for a cigarette, is someone who looks exactly like him.
The other man looks as though he can't believe what he's seeing. "Who are you?"
Samir
That whoas him so hard Samir takes a step back and the door collides with his spine. Denial first. Denial is one of the earliest reflexes humans learn. There's no such thing as the unknowable. It's just that some of the unknowable things in the universe could shatter a man's mind like a plate made out of eggshell. There's got to be some sort of explanation for this.
Who are you?
He shows the other man his palms. Just because he isn't armed doesn't mean he doesn't have a weapon on him but it's a universal sign of bearing no ill will anyway.
"My name's--" His heart is trying to spoon his larynx. He swallows. Go away, heart. "My name's Samir Lakhani. I..." A beat. "... you... live here?"
wind
The other Samir raises his palms too. No ill will between either of them, really. Just stark disbelief.
Neither of them seem to know what the fuck is going on.
"Uhh... I'm sorry, what? I'm Samir Lakhani."
The other one's palm traces a path over his face, as if to slick away sweat, and his eyes dart away outside, like he'd rather be in the snow than deal with this right now.
Samir
"Ah..."
He doesn't want to pollute the air inside just in case this actually is the other guy's trailer and he'd just lost his damned mind before he walked through the door. If this is a hallucination it's the least threatening one he's had yet. Maybe he's starting to get over what happened in Los Angeles.
He actually can't remember what he was doing right before he walked through the door. For all he knows he's in a Mindscape. He doesn't want to be rude.
"This is... there's this British TV show where this girl wakes up one day and she runs into her clone, and it turns out there's..." He clears his throat and puts his hands into his pockets. "It's... actually kind of complicated. What's the last thing you remember?"
wind
"I... was thinking, maybe, you know, this wasn't the best idea ever? Trailer in a blizzard..." There's a nervous laugh from Other Samir. "And then, the trailer tipped and I went with it."
And you showed up, ruining this guy's whole night, man.
"And yeah, I know... Orphan Black," Other Samir says, and nods slowly, as if to a child. "I mean... You should probably, uh... Get out of my trailer?"
Not speaking with the voice of someone who's used to giving commands, really.
"I'm sorry. It's just, this is really freaking me out."
Samir
"Yeah, I know, I'm really freaked out too, but if..."
Yeah see trailer in a blizzard. Keyword: blizzard. That's not the angle he goes with.
"What if I step outside again, and the same thing happens, and there's three of us. I don't know about you, but I'm gonna freak right out."
wind
"I know, but..." the Other Samir straightens himself out, trying for some backbone. "Look, you just... stand more of a chance out there than in here. I freak out, and I don't know what I'll do..."
Threatening. But it's no empty threat. The other man clutches at his face, rubs his eyes, and breathes heavily like he's losing a battle at calming himself, and then points at the door.
"Please. JUST LEAVE!"
Samir
Later he will have to remind himself that just because Event B follows Event A doesn't mean Event A caused Event B. So he went through the trailer door without pacing it four times even though he knew something was inside doesn't mean going through the trailer door without pacing four times caused this exchange to happen.
That's if he remembers this later. He still isn't convinced he isn't in Quiet.
Excepting that if he were in Quiet he wouldn't have the presence of mind to ask the question in the first place.
Unless the very act of questioning is a sign of being in Quiet in which case--
Samir doesn't want to kick the other guy right into a panic attack. He takes a deep breath and focuses. He understands. Other guy is right. He can just put a super covert heat shield around himself and wander back to the road and hope his continuing to exist isn't going to bring about the Resonance Cascade or something.
"Leaving," he says. Pops open the trailer door again. "Leaving," he says. Shuts the door behind him.
wind
The emotions that cross the other man's face go from abject fear, to profound relief, once Samir states that he is leaving. It's as if now, once the problem walks out the door, it can be safely ignored. He can convince himself this never happened.
Only problem is, once the real Samir (is he real?) walks out the door and shuts it, he'll note that the road might be a bit difficult to find -- that is, if he didn't bring his phone with, with its almost-magical maps and GPS.
The snow has changed texture again. The air is colder, turning soft flakes into icy spikes that the piercing wind drives into exposed flesh with a stinging sensation. The sky and the ground are all but indistinguishable now, the same dull shade of whitish gloom.
The only landmarks to see are Samir himself and the trailer, which if he leaves behind will soon be swallowed up by blown snow.
Samir
The problem inherent in just walking away is that there are now two of them. Either one of them isn't real in which case holy shit he has a moral obligation to figure out which one of them it is to prevent the two of them creating a temporal paradox or a wave function collapse or fuck his life why didn't he pay more attention to physical sciences when he still had a tutor--
Or there are two of them. In which case there's an even bigger problem.
Having lost his damned mind is a substate of Condition A. He hasn't ruled it out yet.
Samir stands out in the snow and considers how face it turns to frozen needles. How the knit cap he wears over his head isn't designed for this weather and the peacoat is going to be soaked in a few minutes. How he thinks he knows how the other guy feels excepting that he never gets violent or starts to worry about losing control of himself.
Think about it though he does he can't bring himself to just leave the poor bastard out here. Maybe he'll calm down enough to talk this through like a couple of rational figments of each others' imagination.
He counts twenty-three gusts of wind before turning around and knocking as polite-but-firm as he can considering the wind wants to eat the sensation in his extremities.
wind
Samir hears a whisper in his ear, odd, since the wind threatens to drown out even his knocking on the door. "I know who you are."
"Stay away from my trailer!" comes a voice inside the trailer, definitely not a whisper. A yell, less angry than scared.
Meanwhile, the wind chips away at his warmth. The outside world hurts.
The other Samir may not be the one he knows himself to be, but there are parallels, aren't there? An isolated person, stuck in a highly controlled environment, refusing to let others in unless they are in danger too. And they don't get to stay.
Someone might get hurt.
Samir
The parallel isn't lost on him. It isn't in the forefront of his consciousness but having had a close friend accuse him of locking himself in a tower before he can now appreciate how shitty it is to try and help someone and to have that someone shove him out.
And then that whisper.
That doesn't startle him the way walking into what he thought was his trailer and seeing a double of himself had. He frowns and he focuses but he doesn't fly off the icing-over metal step.
He turns to see if he can make out the source of the voice. The statement has him frowning but it also has his attention. Samir steps down off the trailer step.
"Are you sure?"
If he can light a cigarette in this weather he can take his "deck" out of his jacket and get a visual of the area. The road isn't that far away but with the wind and the drifts he doesn't trust the route he would take in rainy weather.
wind
He pulls out his phone, tries to find the right direction to head in this storm. Something's wrong with the map though. There is no road anywhere near that he can recognize. There are roads, many of them, but they aren't laid out in straight lines, and they seem to go everywhere, like a tangle of tree-shapes.
There's that metallic, buzzing noise again. Seems as though the wind hits the trailer at just the right angle and speed, and some sort of harmonic resonance vibrates a weak spot. "Are you?"
"Why won't you go away!?" says the voice from within the trailer.
Samir
A combination of the readout on his handheld computer and the question hurled back at him and that weird noise where the wind hits the trailer begets this response:
"... the fuck?"
That vibration catches his attention but the anger and the fact that Other Samir knows he's still out here are enough to push him along. The worst thing he can think of other than freezing to death out there in a snowstorm is to not pick a road and stay here and get the shit kicked out of him by Other Samir.
He can't help himself.
Like he would if he were learning a new labyrinthine map Samir strikes off in a general righthand direction.
wind
The whisper in his ear laughs at his response, but doesn't say any more.
As he walks, if he checks his progress on the map, Samir will find yet another strange thing: he isn't moving. Or, he is, and the 'roads' are moving with him. Every step he takes doesn't get him anywhere, except farther from the trailer, which can't be seen anymore through the curtains of snow. Even his footprints are quickly erased.
He is alone.
He is cold.
The only other thing here is the wind and the white.
Samir
"Great."
He wonders what will happen if he turns around and goes back to the junction that led him to this point. Wonders just as hard what will happen if he keeps walking. Probably nothing will change in either direction.
There's an app for that. He doesn't like using the app. Randomness has never set well with him. Look where a random choice has landed him. No-fucking-where. Samir applies an Entropy filter to the map in part for the sake of broadening his horizons and in part for the sake of keeping his thumbs moving. Live, you bastards.
"What," he asks a voice he doesn't expect to respond, "you don't have any more brilliant observations you wanna share with me before I freeze to death?"
wind
Samir doesn't quite understand how to deal with the "outside" very well. It's a confusing mess of paths he can't seem to actually take, no matter how he tries. When he does try, it leads no-fucking-where.
Inside, the only safe place he has carved away for himself, within tightly controlled walls, he still can't seem to deal. The safe place keeps getting rocked, the foundation shifts, he falls, he is afraid. Of what exactly? Or who?
The good thing is that all this is enough to make him angry.
It doesn't make him stop.
His attempts to apply some order to the chaos of this situation? Well, a dotted line. Footprints on the map. That which was wrestled away by the wind shows up. There's a problem again, though. Those footprints don't follow a road. Upon examination, it is a loop. He has walked in a tight circle.
When he asks the voice in his head a question, it responds: "You should find yourself."
Samir
Okay. That isn't working. He's going to have to try something different. That's fine. If he wanted to sit in the dark and do the same thing over and over until he died of boredom he'd still be in Los Angeles. Or that crappy apartment over the laundromat performing vulgar magick getting the universe to conform to what he wanted it to be like.
This isn't working. The screen shows him a bazillion options but using it to find a path isn't getting him anywhere.
You should find yourself.
He puts the deck back in a deep coat pocket and blows out a breath like the fog poured out of his lungs is a weather vane. The voice isn't wrong. That was the point of moving out into the middle of nowhere. It ought to have been easy to find himself with no one else around. The wind is all he's got to go by now.
"What am I, a set of car keys?"
wind
The whisper in his ear laughs again, but as before, there is no response to this latest identification.
At least, not in whispers.
"No. N..no. Where did... Car keys?"
The voice, Samir's voice, comes from behind him.
"You are me. I... I realized that. After you left. I couldn't let you go. I couldn't."
Should he turn around to face that voice, he'll find that Other Samir standing there. He's dressed the same, and the wind whips around his exterior as if it were a mirror, and yet...
This is no sane man. His eyes open too wide. His arms hug himself inside his coat, trying to keep warm or trying to conceal as much as possible. His gaze is unfocused and he shakes with something that isn't a shiver.
Samir
Now he's out in the middle of nowhere with himself and that's what he wanted. If he got away from the city he could make sense of the things that drove him mad. He might've thought about doing that before a huge blizzard came barreling through the plains states but he's not an oracle.
Of course he turns around. Maybe he ought to start running. If TV taught him anything it's that doppelgängers are nothing but trouble but this isn't a doppelgänger. It's the madness he came out here to make sense of.
Best day ever.
"Hey, man, I get it. I'd have been wigged too if I was minding my own business and then I turned around and saw me coming through the door."
Though he has no way of knowing without asking Samir wonders quick if this is what his friends saw when he was having one of his episodes. If they saw him as Other Samir. Quick because all he can see out here is white.
"... are you coming with me, or am I going with you?"
Or is he going to kick his ass and leave him here and return to Denver all doppelgänger-y and no one will be able to tell the difference. Better not put ideas in his head.
wind
"You were coming to... to get rid of me. Replace me with... whatever you are." says the Other one. He shakes his head. "Not going to happen. No. I won't let you."
Apparently, the Other Samir was thinking more Invasion of the Body Snatchers than Orphan Black? How does it feel to be considered the counterfeit?
"You won't stop, will you? Trying to get me to go away? No," he says, and shakes his head again. "No. I am coming with you, and... And you are going with me."
He steps closer, passing through more of the stinging snow. The two of them are alone in the white, alone with the wind.
"Don't you get it? I am you."
Samir
If it weren't for his intrusive thoughts Samir never would have learned how to immerse himself in research not as a distraction technique but as a way of expanding his mind so when the thoughts jangled around they didn't knock over everything else. That he engages in compulsive behaviors stems from the fact that he has a brain wired for mathematics. He isn't the most flexible person in the world but he can change. He has changed.
Other Samir is right to worry. Samir isn't going to claim he hasn't had days where he's doubted his own sanity. Maybe he ought to just throw concepts like 'sane' and 'insane' out of his vocabulary but that way lies Quiet. Getting mistaken for a mad scientist is one thing but actually going Mad. That's what he'd like to avoid.
"That's why I came out here," he says. Like he needs to put Other Samir's mind at ease. Maybe Other Samir gets the sense he's gotten through to him. Samir is Other Samir to Other Samir. "I don't want to get rid of you. I..." Heh. "... I've never taken the time to get to know you, but... I do get it, now."
wind
"What do you 'get'?"
A whispered question, as if a voice from inside didn't already know, right?
Samir
That he can't move forward until he accepts himself.
That he hasn't had a sense of direction because he hasn't ever had to go out on his own.
That's not what he thinks he gets. He's already accepted himself and gone out on his own. They wouldn't be here if he wasn't already changing. Change can consume a person though. Marauders tend to have Dynamic Essences.
"This is who I am," he says to the whispered question. To his double: "I don't try to get rid of you, you don't try to get rid of me."
wind
The Other Samir rears back when that whispered question reaches Samir's ears. He doesn't respond. Probably too used to hearing voices and trying not to pay them any mind.
But he does take up a position side by side with Samir, not touching or looking at him. It's likely that one day again soon, his Quiet side will take him by the hand and lead him off down into the darkness again, but it isn't. Not right now.
A truce has been called.
It's not one that the Other Samir is going to shake on. He hasn't been given license to take over. They've made a pact -- don't obliterate each other, but be aware of the other.
"This is who I am. I could never leave you alone. I... I tried to kick you out, but... I couldn't. Not strong enough. You drag me with you."
The wind is relentless in the unsheltered outdoors. It slams into them both, seeming to pierce not just their exposed skin, but their very being, changing them, and blowing them into the sky -- together. It feels, for a time, like riding the freezing wind. Like becoming something too immense and infinite to be contained inside a body -- until Samir wakes up, unlit cigarette in hand, on the floor of his trailer.
There's some evidence of what happened. The wind outside is pretty strong, and it shakes the place from time to time in its fury. Things have fallen off of shelves. Samir has fallen on the floor. His head hurts.
He also feels fuller, somehow. For a moment, too much to fit inside a small, human shell. Change can be like that. Power can be like that.
He's got the distinct sense that he has, indeed, made a pact with himself -- or at least that part of himself that regularly trips over to the side of Madness. There may be consequences to the promise he's made. But for right now? It seems like a good choice.
The emotions that cross the other man's face go from abject fear, to profound relief, once Samir states that he is leaving. It's as if now, once the problem walks out the door, it can be safely ignored. He can convince himself this never happened.
Only problem is, once the real Samir (is he real?) walks out the door and shuts it, he'll note that the road might be a bit difficult to find -- that is, if he didn't bring his phone with, with its almost-magical maps and GPS.
The snow has changed texture again. The air is colder, turning soft flakes into icy spikes that the piercing wind drives into exposed flesh with a stinging sensation. The sky and the ground are all but indistinguishable now, the same dull shade of whitish gloom.
The only landmarks to see are Samir himself and the trailer, which if he leaves behind will soon be swallowed up by blown snow.
Samir
The problem inherent in just walking away is that there are now two of them. Either one of them isn't real in which case holy shit he has a moral obligation to figure out which one of them it is to prevent the two of them creating a temporal paradox or a wave function collapse or fuck his life why didn't he pay more attention to physical sciences when he still had a tutor--
Or there are two of them. In which case there's an even bigger problem.
Having lost his damned mind is a substate of Condition A. He hasn't ruled it out yet.
Samir stands out in the snow and considers how face it turns to frozen needles. How the knit cap he wears over his head isn't designed for this weather and the peacoat is going to be soaked in a few minutes. How he thinks he knows how the other guy feels excepting that he never gets violent or starts to worry about losing control of himself.
Think about it though he does he can't bring himself to just leave the poor bastard out here. Maybe he'll calm down enough to talk this through like a couple of rational figments of each others' imagination.
He counts twenty-three gusts of wind before turning around and knocking as polite-but-firm as he can considering the wind wants to eat the sensation in his extremities.
wind
Samir hears a whisper in his ear, odd, since the wind threatens to drown out even his knocking on the door. "I know who you are."
"Stay away from my trailer!" comes a voice inside the trailer, definitely not a whisper. A yell, less angry than scared.
Meanwhile, the wind chips away at his warmth. The outside world hurts.
The other Samir may not be the one he knows himself to be, but there are parallels, aren't there? An isolated person, stuck in a highly controlled environment, refusing to let others in unless they are in danger too. And they don't get to stay.
Someone might get hurt.
Samir
The parallel isn't lost on him. It isn't in the forefront of his consciousness but having had a close friend accuse him of locking himself in a tower before he can now appreciate how shitty it is to try and help someone and to have that someone shove him out.
And then that whisper.
That doesn't startle him the way walking into what he thought was his trailer and seeing a double of himself had. He frowns and he focuses but he doesn't fly off the icing-over metal step.
He turns to see if he can make out the source of the voice. The statement has him frowning but it also has his attention. Samir steps down off the trailer step.
"Are you sure?"
If he can light a cigarette in this weather he can take his "deck" out of his jacket and get a visual of the area. The road isn't that far away but with the wind and the drifts he doesn't trust the route he would take in rainy weather.
wind
He pulls out his phone, tries to find the right direction to head in this storm. Something's wrong with the map though. There is no road anywhere near that he can recognize. There are roads, many of them, but they aren't laid out in straight lines, and they seem to go everywhere, like a tangle of tree-shapes.
There's that metallic, buzzing noise again. Seems as though the wind hits the trailer at just the right angle and speed, and some sort of harmonic resonance vibrates a weak spot. "Are you?"
"Why won't you go away!?" says the voice from within the trailer.
Samir
A combination of the readout on his handheld computer and the question hurled back at him and that weird noise where the wind hits the trailer begets this response:
"... the fuck?"
That vibration catches his attention but the anger and the fact that Other Samir knows he's still out here are enough to push him along. The worst thing he can think of other than freezing to death out there in a snowstorm is to not pick a road and stay here and get the shit kicked out of him by Other Samir.
He can't help himself.
Like he would if he were learning a new labyrinthine map Samir strikes off in a general righthand direction.
wind
The whisper in his ear laughs at his response, but doesn't say any more.
As he walks, if he checks his progress on the map, Samir will find yet another strange thing: he isn't moving. Or, he is, and the 'roads' are moving with him. Every step he takes doesn't get him anywhere, except farther from the trailer, which can't be seen anymore through the curtains of snow. Even his footprints are quickly erased.
He is alone.
He is cold.
The only other thing here is the wind and the white.
Samir
"Great."
He wonders what will happen if he turns around and goes back to the junction that led him to this point. Wonders just as hard what will happen if he keeps walking. Probably nothing will change in either direction.
There's an app for that. He doesn't like using the app. Randomness has never set well with him. Look where a random choice has landed him. No-fucking-where. Samir applies an Entropy filter to the map in part for the sake of broadening his horizons and in part for the sake of keeping his thumbs moving. Live, you bastards.
"What," he asks a voice he doesn't expect to respond, "you don't have any more brilliant observations you wanna share with me before I freeze to death?"
wind
Samir doesn't quite understand how to deal with the "outside" very well. It's a confusing mess of paths he can't seem to actually take, no matter how he tries. When he does try, it leads no-fucking-where.
Inside, the only safe place he has carved away for himself, within tightly controlled walls, he still can't seem to deal. The safe place keeps getting rocked, the foundation shifts, he falls, he is afraid. Of what exactly? Or who?
The good thing is that all this is enough to make him angry.
It doesn't make him stop.
His attempts to apply some order to the chaos of this situation? Well, a dotted line. Footprints on the map. That which was wrestled away by the wind shows up. There's a problem again, though. Those footprints don't follow a road. Upon examination, it is a loop. He has walked in a tight circle.
When he asks the voice in his head a question, it responds: "You should find yourself."
Samir
Okay. That isn't working. He's going to have to try something different. That's fine. If he wanted to sit in the dark and do the same thing over and over until he died of boredom he'd still be in Los Angeles. Or that crappy apartment over the laundromat performing vulgar magick getting the universe to conform to what he wanted it to be like.
This isn't working. The screen shows him a bazillion options but using it to find a path isn't getting him anywhere.
You should find yourself.
He puts the deck back in a deep coat pocket and blows out a breath like the fog poured out of his lungs is a weather vane. The voice isn't wrong. That was the point of moving out into the middle of nowhere. It ought to have been easy to find himself with no one else around. The wind is all he's got to go by now.
"What am I, a set of car keys?"
wind
The whisper in his ear laughs again, but as before, there is no response to this latest identification.
At least, not in whispers.
"No. N..no. Where did... Car keys?"
The voice, Samir's voice, comes from behind him.
"You are me. I... I realized that. After you left. I couldn't let you go. I couldn't."
Should he turn around to face that voice, he'll find that Other Samir standing there. He's dressed the same, and the wind whips around his exterior as if it were a mirror, and yet...
This is no sane man. His eyes open too wide. His arms hug himself inside his coat, trying to keep warm or trying to conceal as much as possible. His gaze is unfocused and he shakes with something that isn't a shiver.
Samir
Now he's out in the middle of nowhere with himself and that's what he wanted. If he got away from the city he could make sense of the things that drove him mad. He might've thought about doing that before a huge blizzard came barreling through the plains states but he's not an oracle.
Of course he turns around. Maybe he ought to start running. If TV taught him anything it's that doppelgängers are nothing but trouble but this isn't a doppelgänger. It's the madness he came out here to make sense of.
Best day ever.
"Hey, man, I get it. I'd have been wigged too if I was minding my own business and then I turned around and saw me coming through the door."
Though he has no way of knowing without asking Samir wonders quick if this is what his friends saw when he was having one of his episodes. If they saw him as Other Samir. Quick because all he can see out here is white.
"... are you coming with me, or am I going with you?"
Or is he going to kick his ass and leave him here and return to Denver all doppelgänger-y and no one will be able to tell the difference. Better not put ideas in his head.
wind
"You were coming to... to get rid of me. Replace me with... whatever you are." says the Other one. He shakes his head. "Not going to happen. No. I won't let you."
Apparently, the Other Samir was thinking more Invasion of the Body Snatchers than Orphan Black? How does it feel to be considered the counterfeit?
"You won't stop, will you? Trying to get me to go away? No," he says, and shakes his head again. "No. I am coming with you, and... And you are going with me."
He steps closer, passing through more of the stinging snow. The two of them are alone in the white, alone with the wind.
"Don't you get it? I am you."
Samir
If it weren't for his intrusive thoughts Samir never would have learned how to immerse himself in research not as a distraction technique but as a way of expanding his mind so when the thoughts jangled around they didn't knock over everything else. That he engages in compulsive behaviors stems from the fact that he has a brain wired for mathematics. He isn't the most flexible person in the world but he can change. He has changed.
Other Samir is right to worry. Samir isn't going to claim he hasn't had days where he's doubted his own sanity. Maybe he ought to just throw concepts like 'sane' and 'insane' out of his vocabulary but that way lies Quiet. Getting mistaken for a mad scientist is one thing but actually going Mad. That's what he'd like to avoid.
"That's why I came out here," he says. Like he needs to put Other Samir's mind at ease. Maybe Other Samir gets the sense he's gotten through to him. Samir is Other Samir to Other Samir. "I don't want to get rid of you. I..." Heh. "... I've never taken the time to get to know you, but... I do get it, now."
wind
"What do you 'get'?"
A whispered question, as if a voice from inside didn't already know, right?
Samir
That he can't move forward until he accepts himself.
That he hasn't had a sense of direction because he hasn't ever had to go out on his own.
That's not what he thinks he gets. He's already accepted himself and gone out on his own. They wouldn't be here if he wasn't already changing. Change can consume a person though. Marauders tend to have Dynamic Essences.
"This is who I am," he says to the whispered question. To his double: "I don't try to get rid of you, you don't try to get rid of me."
wind
The Other Samir rears back when that whispered question reaches Samir's ears. He doesn't respond. Probably too used to hearing voices and trying not to pay them any mind.
But he does take up a position side by side with Samir, not touching or looking at him. It's likely that one day again soon, his Quiet side will take him by the hand and lead him off down into the darkness again, but it isn't. Not right now.
A truce has been called.
It's not one that the Other Samir is going to shake on. He hasn't been given license to take over. They've made a pact -- don't obliterate each other, but be aware of the other.
"This is who I am. I could never leave you alone. I... I tried to kick you out, but... I couldn't. Not strong enough. You drag me with you."
The wind is relentless in the unsheltered outdoors. It slams into them both, seeming to pierce not just their exposed skin, but their very being, changing them, and blowing them into the sky -- together. It feels, for a time, like riding the freezing wind. Like becoming something too immense and infinite to be contained inside a body -- until Samir wakes up, unlit cigarette in hand, on the floor of his trailer.
There's some evidence of what happened. The wind outside is pretty strong, and it shakes the place from time to time in its fury. Things have fallen off of shelves. Samir has fallen on the floor. His head hurts.
He also feels fuller, somehow. For a moment, too much to fit inside a small, human shell. Change can be like that. Power can be like that.
He's got the distinct sense that he has, indeed, made a pact with himself -- or at least that part of himself that regularly trips over to the side of Madness. There may be consequences to the promise he's made. But for right now? It seems like a good choice.
No comments:
Post a Comment