#i will get to those sometime. maybe even a proper hippocampus drawing

[theunconcernedembalmer]

🔫₍^. ̫.^₎ the greenhouse doodle toko we need it

Love,

Nez

This is the one thats been rotting on my ipad. Ever since I rediscovered my laptop I've been doodling more (including my brand of nonsense) so stay tuned for those

If anyone wants to colour this please feel free XD

[wellamarke]

all that remains

humans challenge, week 3, day 3: leotilda/first ‘i love you’

There is a girl in his room, but her hair is too dark to be Niska, and too light to be Mia. She faces him, and he sees that her eyes are brown, not green. She is human, like he was. Like most of him still is.

“Hello,” he says. He tries to sound friendly. Either she is a nurse, or she’s someone he ought to know, and either way he should be kind, even if he feels like being sullen. This is something Max taught him. He wonders just how sullen he was, before this happened, for Max to have to say that.

“Hello,” says the girl. A woman really, but young. Just a little younger than his body is. He isn’t sure how old his mind thinks it is at the moment. It’s been chopping and changing to whatever takes its fancy. “How are we today?”

“Fine,” he says. “The bits of me that are here, anyway.” He gives her a rueful look, somewhere just below a smile. “Have I seen you before?”

“I came yesterday. We had a good chat.”

He nods. “Sometimes I forget things.”

“I know. It’s okay.”

They regard one another; him curious, her sad. “Why do you keep coming?” he asks suddenly. “It can’t be fun for you, when I don’t even remember your name. And it’s not…”

He doesn’t want to say, it’s not helping me either, but in a way perhaps she ought to know. There’s no need for her to torture herself on his account. Whether she’s here or not, his brain gives and takes what it chooses.

“I don’t always do things because they’re fun,” she says, enigmatically. “Besides, if you were going to say it makes no difference to you, we don’t actually know that yet. Doctor Morrow’s been running tests. She says there’s still some activity in the hippocampus, so there’s still a chance we could trigger something.”

He sniffs. He hadn’t known. “Nobody tells me anything.”

“Sometimes we do, it’s just…”

He leans forward a little. “Am I going to die?” he asks, bluntly. “Is that why everyone’s being so careful?”

Her eyes widen. “What? No. You’re healthy. Actually you’re better than ever, because Athena made you a proper charging port.” She gestures at his side, hidden by the bedsheets. He doesn’t glance down. He knows it’s there. It sits in his skin, sealed and smug, as if it’s always been part of him. Interesting, then, to know that it hasn’t.

“No more infections in that big open… gash-thing,” she continues. “And you’ll be up and about soon. If people are careful around you…” She trails off, then comes back to herself. “Maybe they’re just scared of making it harder on you. We kind of— me and Max have this thing where we vent to each other, so none of it gets to you. Which,” she raises her eyebrows, “I realise that I��m kind of breaking by telling you there’s a thing, but, y'know. Don’t want you sitting there thinking you’re on death row.”

He’s oddly touched. “Thank you,” he says, somewhat gruffly.

She shrugs. “S'alright. Max has a great joke about the word hippocampus, by the way. You should let him tell you it.”

“I’ll try and remember.” A joke of his own. She smiles in acknowledgement.

“Have you thought about writing stuff down?” she asks. She shifts, pulls a bag from her shoulder, and unzips a compartment on the side. “At least you’d know what you’ve known on other days, even if you don’t know it all at once.” She takes out a slim, black notebook, with a pen clipped over the cover, and holds it out to him, looking suddenly self-conscious. “Thought it might give you some practice with your motor skills, too.”

He takes it from her, runs his fingers over it. She’s right, they’re clumsy, and will appreciate the workout. “Again. Thank you.”

She just gives a short nod. Her eyes have clouded.

“You’re good to me,” he says. “The person I was before, he…must have meant something to you.”

“You do,” she says, soberly.

He notes the change of pronoun, wonders if he’ll remember to try and refer to both his selves as the same person when she’s around, in future. He hopes so. He’s not out to hurt her.

He’s not out to hurt anyone. But he manages to, again and again, every time one of them comes to see him. He doesn’t always remember the specifics from day to day, but the general impression remains. A heaviness on his heart. He is pain, to all of them. It’s tiring.

He leans back onto his pillows. “Will you let me say I’m sorry, and not say ‘it’s not your fault’?” He addresses the ceiling, because it’s easier than her face. “It doesn’t make it any better.”

“Okay,” she says.

And so he says, “I’m sorry,” and hears his voice crack, and closes his eyes. She doesn’t shift. If she moves at all, he doesn’t hear. Eventually, sleep takes him.

*****

Mattie waits there for a while, then wanders out into the corridor. She speaks to a few of the new synths as she goes, giving Alice a high-five when she raises her hand. Toby’s taught all of them to do that by now, but some of them are more into it than others.

She walks along to the room where she left Sophie, and finds her little sister curled up in the book corner with Sam and Angel, one of those huge teacher’s-copy picture books spread across their three laps. Sam is reading to the two girls, over-expressing every word as if to make up for lost time.

Mattie waits for a page-turn. “Five more minutes, Soph,” she says.

Sophie looks up, immediately plaintive. “Oh! That’s not enough to finish the story. Can I have…” She looks at the pages left. “Twenty?”

Mattie sighs. “You’re terrible at haggling, titch. You can have ten, but only ‘cause I’m nice.”

Sophie switches her attention back to the book, satisfied.

“You’re welcome,” Mattie murmurs, and drifts from the doorway. She carries on to the charging room, finds Frankie and Tabitha there, sitting side-by-side on a bench. Both are connected to chargers, and they’ve gone into standby mode with their arms around each other, Frankie’s head on her girlfriend’s shoulder. Mattie smiles. She’s just about to leave when Victor arrives, and tells her a riddle about six identical synths on an island. Victor thinks riddles are the same as saying hello, and nobody has the heart to tell him otherwise.

She admits that she has no idea how to tell which synth weighs more than the others, and Victor smiles and says, “Me neither,” which is another thing nobody’s told him about riddles.

Mattie continues along the corridor, giving waves and high-fives as she goes. There’s never a quiet moment here, which is good, because if there was, she’d end up thinking about Leo again, and she doesn’t want to do anything as stupid as that before she’s safe at home in her bedroom, texting Max in the dark. The thought reminds her that she hasn’t seen him around today, and she fishes in her bag for her phone, just to ask how the talks at Hester’s factory went.

She can’t feel it in there, and she takes her bag off her shoulder to look properly. No sign of her phone. Damn. Had it come out with the notebook she’d given Leo? She doesn’t think so. But she hasn’t used it anywhere since she arrived, and she’s barely touched her bag other than that. She steels herself to return to his room.

She finds him still sleeping - or rather, sleeping again. He must have been awake for some of the time between, even just for a few moments, because the notebook isn’t next to him anymore. It’s lying open, but face down, on top of his chest and arm. The pen is further down the bed, uncapped, drawing a tiny black line across the white bedsheets.

Her phone is also there, on the floor next to where she’d been sitting. She puts it in her bag, making sure it falls to the bottom this time. Then Mattie picks up the pen, and retrieves the lid. She leaves it on his bedside cabinet.

Then she goes for the door.

She almost makes it.

She tries to fight against the temptation. She didn’t give him the notebook as a way to spy on him. It’s supposed to help him. It’s a gross offence against his privacy, if she reads what he wrote for his own eyes only. He’d been asleep, anyway - so it was probably a dream. Either he’s written some gibberish that doesn’t even matter, or it’s something personal, and either way she ought to keep moving.

She takes another step towards the door.

Then she hears the creak of the bedsprings as he half-rolls over. The book falls to the floor with a thump, and most of the pages stay together. Only the cover flaps slightly open, bent near the spine where he’d opened it too fiercely.

She approaches slowly, like it’s a wild animal she might scare away. If he wakes up while she’s looking, it could… ruin any trust she’s reestablished here. It had been hard enough the first time around, and she doesn’t want to chance her luck a third time.

When she’s near enough, she bends and picks it up, planning just to return it to the cabinet, neatly. But the temptation overwhelms her, and she moves the cover just slightly aside.

Nothing. The page is completely blank.

She exhales, only realising now how much she’d built up her hopes. She puts the book down, next to the pen. Standing back from it, she notices that the cover isn’t the only thing that sits slightly apart from the rest - there’s a dent a few pages in. Maybe he hadn’t been too fussy about where he started writing. Half-asleep, it would make sense.

She’s come this far. She might as well. She’ll never speak of it to him, whatever it says, she decides.

She opens to the right place, sees five words scrawled there. His handwriting is scratchy and irregular, but she reads it like it’s fine calligraphy.

Mattie, it says.

Her name is Mattie.