fandomhighdorms | The Roof; Saturday Afternoon.

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The Roof; Saturday Afternoon.

It had been an odd sort of morning, really. At least, Adah could only assume that it wasn't exactly normal to awaken and have no idea who you were, where you were, and what you were doing there, beyond waking up. In fact, she could only assume that she was even Adah. Waking up confused, the first thing she thought to do was scour through the room for signs of identification: she dove into the books, the notebooks, that she found around her for insight into who exactly she was. She could discern that, barring any odd sort of displacement, her name was Adah Price and she, thankfully, took very careful logs and journals of things, but they were so confusing. Aft first, they looked like a foreign language but, quickly enough, it became evident that, if these were in fact her notebooks, she had a bizarre obsession with writing backwards and being...generally overly nonsensical. If this was her, it only left Adah even more confused. She then decided to walk around, trying to get something, a gleam of a memory from her surroundings, and had been wandering the island all day, only to find nothing. Top to bottom, bottom to top. She was back on the top again, the roof; the air was nice up here, and she had another one of this Adah person's notebook, trying to find some sense of self within.

"Ada, of essence, the is that, broken and bent, slant it, tell, but truth! the tell!" she read outloud from the notebook cradle in her hand, frowning at it as she paced back and forth. "But what the hell does that mean?"

Perhaps nothing; perhaps everything...Adah planned to pace until she figured it out.

[[ OPEN as roofs can be! Just an OOC note (and kind of spoilerish): it gets discovered that Adah's disability is mostly all mental and can be fixed; it's only so persistent because of how she remembers being told she couldn't walk and thinking that it was impossible. Having, of course, forgotten this influence on her behaviour because of Tabula Rasa, she now walks and speaks....somewhat normally ]]

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"I haven't really been paying much attention to it, to be perfectly honest," Adah said, turning her head up toward the sky. She figured she wouldn't be able to tell if it was nice or not; it was the only weather she could remember experiencing, and had nothing to compare it to on a scale of enjoyment. Her head tilted as her attention went back to the boy. "...Should I be? Enjoying it?"

"Oh, I thought you liked being outside," Lee said, feeling the slightest bit off balance. "Before. And there's no rain so while it's nice, you can't play in puddles."

He'd go with the talking for now since she'd talked to him before just not this much.

So, apparently, she liked being outside. And playing in puddles, which struck Adah as odd. It seemed a little frivolous for the dark and twisted half-lyricist trapped in the notebook in her hands. She frowned slightly, head down as if trying to connect these new, missing facts to the current ones for a moment before considering the source. He...would know? She frowned at the boy. "You know me?" she asked him. But how could he, if she didn't?

"Uh, yeah," he said, nodding slowly. "Is this you teasing me again?"

So, not only did she, Adah or unAdah, enjoy being outdoors and jumping in puddles, she also probably enjoyed teasing this boy. Potentially plural; she would ahve to see if there was anyone else who supposedly knew her better than she did, which would be difficult at this point it seemed, to determine for certain. There was no mention of it in the notebook; perhaps she wasn't Adah after all, and Adah was the one who slept in the other bed.

"What," Adah asked, tilting her head as she turned toward the boy a little more, "would I have to tease you about?"

Such conflicted visions of Adah, between the notebook and this boy who supposedly knew her! It was....absolutely fascinating, really.

This was weird. He felt almost like he was being quizzed or something.

"Mostly about the modeling stuff," he said, shrugging a shoulder. "That's what it's been lately. Is everything all right?"

Modeling? That caused another quirk of Adah's eyebrows and, after another look, a decision that she shouldn't be so surprised by that. With a bite of her lip and an unfaltering thoughtful gaze at the boy, she was feeling like discovering Adah might be even more interesting that originally intended, which was saying something, as that notebook was almost dizzyingly fascinating.

"I woke up this morning," she told him, in a fashion that made it seem like she was merely just coming around to answering his question about the weather, "and did not know who I was. I have since then been trying to fit the pieces together. This," she said, lifting the notebook in her right hand, "has been my Rosetta Stone so far, but now you stand there claiming to know me, while I can't even claim to know if these scribblings are even my hand, although the penmanship does seem to match."

"Huh."

Realizing that that served no purpose but to make him sound like an idiot, he added, "You don't know who you are? And I'm pretty sure I know you unless I've been dreaming for the past month. Last time we talked, we were in the library and...we talked."

Best just to leave it at that for now, he though.

Her eyes, still wide as if trying to fit in the great widths of her thoughts, shifted slightly, as if searching the back of her brain for that memory. She came up with nothing, except a strange point that she could at least remember what a library was, although she could not remember ever actually being in one.

She also wondered whether it was a good dream or a bad dream if that had been the case, and noted idly that the boy seemed a bit repetitive. And that he expected her to be a bit so herself.

"I...have...built a conclusion that I might be a girl named Adah Price, who has a very considerable collection of books that she's marred with idle thoughts, as well as volumes of notebooks of a similar nature. I seem to be a bit obsessed with things being backwards, but it ticks my brain a bit to read about myself, because everything is oddly balanced. Does...any of that sound familiar to you?"

"It does," he answered, nodding. "You called me Eel at one point because it was my name backwards. And you like books. And poetry. I'd read a few things to you because it helped me understand. Uh. You liked a guy named Poe and something by someone named Wells. They're authors."

He paused and ran a hand through his hair. "Help at all?"

There was a simple nod in response. "Edgar Allan Poe and H.G. Wells. I remember them from this morning, in the bedroom in which I woke. I also recall one or two things in a notebook that had been addressed to an Eel; they confused me at the moment, but I take it it's safe to assume that it's referencing you."

Adah paused, frowning a little. Things were lining up nicely, but they were still...unbalanced in her head, because, while they were starting to form a full picture of her, it was a picture that she could only view from the outside, behind glass like in a museum with nervous curators. Look, but do not touch. Touch, but do not see. No way in between.

"You seem to know a lot about me, Eel." For some reason, although simple deduction told her that his name was Lee, it felt the right thing to call him, perhaps because of the notebooks. "We...we're friends, then?" She paused with a bit of hesitation. "...Close?"

Knowing that she'd apparently written about him made him smile a little, wonder what had been written but he didn't ask.

"I only know what you've shared," Lee responded, shrugging a shoulder. "And I think we're friends. As for close...that's hard to answer. It's different."

"Well," Adah sighed a little, dropping her shoulders and looking up as if the answer would be more clear up there, "you still know more than I do at this point. Think that we're friends. How can you uncertain on something like that?"

So many unfound pieces, so many pieces that didn't seem to quite fit just right.

He winced, frowned and looked down at his shoes for a few moments before looking back up.

"I'm not uncertain," he said, trying to catch her eyes. "It was a bad choice of words. I know that we're friends. The other thing is the hard part."

Catching Adah's eyes would not be difficult at all; intent on her thoughts, they weren't leaving the Eel. "The other thing," she said. "The close part...huh." It was a soft, lightly scornful sound. Maybe it wasn't so much that she couldn't fit the pieces together, but that she was trying to skew them because she wasn't sure if she liked the picture they were trying to make of her. But what if it was just more pieces she didn't understand in the picture? It was frustrating, being so uncertain about who you were, but, at the same time, she couldn't help also feeling like it didn't matter, because, clearly, she wasn't that person anymore. Someone had cleared off her slate, and she could write her equations back on it however she wanted.

And there certainly was something about this Eel.

"Hard...how?" she asked, even though she wasn't sure if she wanted to know at part of her.

"Because it's not an easy answer," he replied quietly. "It's like...it's like running an extremely long distance, knowing that you might never make it to the end but running anyway because he can't not try, because you might just make it."

When in doubt, go with sports metaphors. Lee could have facepalmed.

One shoulder, the left shoulder, lifting slightly, Adah's arms crossed in front of her, as well as they could with a notebook in hand and awkwardness creeping over her like millions of little spiders. "I...I see," she said softly, her intent eyes definitely falling away to the ground, closing off; she thought of a tree in the woods, and that there was something more to the thought, but she couldn't remember it. Couldn't remember anything much. But then why was she feeling so terrible? Amnesia was a strange thing. Strange, but also possibly liberating.

"So," she added after a moment, "this runner. You're saying that he keeps running because he wants to reach this goal, cross that finish line, despite the possibility that it might not even exist?"

"And maybe he likes the journey too," Lee added, tucking his hands in his pockets and staring at his shoes. They were fascinating, really. "But, yeah. Yeah, that's what I'm saying."

"I...I see," Adah said, quietly, her frown deepening as she stared at the ground. Well, that just seemed like a heap of information that she couldn't really do much with. Or perhaps didn't know what to do with, but did that make it really any different than the other things, the books, the notebooks? Either way, that girl in the notebooks was a shadow of the girl who couldn't remember her. Two separate being, with a body and a name in common. Not even experiences, making her as she stood now not a journey worth bothering with, certainly not the girl the Eel Runner was journey for, by the sounds of it, which only left her feeling a very strong swell of envy for herself. Surreal, the whole thing. Almost too much. There was a sharp twitch, a jolt of her elbow to her side, painful but only briefly, and she winced. Mostly, though, she ignored it, just trying to work sense out of this.

"I'm sorry you can't remember," Lee said and it even sounded stupid to his own ears. "That I dumped all this on you when you can't. Is there...can I do anything?"

"I'm sorry I can't remember, either," Adah commented, lifting her eyes for a moment with a small smile, an action that proved to her how much she meant it. Really sorry... "And don't apologize; you've only told me what I asked you to tell me. If anything, I should thank you. So..." She bit her lip a moment before nodding, "thank you. You've helped, I think, a lot, Eel."

And yet, he still felt like he'd done something wrong.

"Maybe you'll remember soon," Lee said, offering a smile of his own. "If not, then I'll just have to give you some new memories. Of me, at least."

Adah had to bite her lip again, to keep from grin too much; her head ducked, as if she didn't trust her teeth to do the work of hiding it. She realized that she'd been thinking that, but didn't want to say. She didn't feel it was fair to either him or the other Adah, the Adah of the Notebook.

"I...I think I'd like that," she said quietly. "I feel like I have a lot of memeories to try to catch up on..."

"There's time," he assured her, almost reaching out for -- reassurance? comfort? -- he wasn't really sure. The last time he'd touched her, she'd panicked so his hand twitched a little but he kept it to that.

"If you need anything, you can find me in room 315. Or in the library tomorrow," he told her. "If you need anything."

"The library, tomorrow," Adah nodded with a small smile. "I think I can remember that. Or, at least, I hope so. You'll have to forgive me that I can't make it a guarantee."

The Roof; Saturday Afternoon.

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