InsaneJournal

Tweak says, "It's a Gundam!!"

She should be focusing on the art heist, but she couldn’t bring herself to care about it. Something was wrong, something was very wrong, and she was starting to believe she wasn’t Alicia Shaw. There was a pain in her heart when she thought about her older and younger brothers, well, friends, well brothers… It was confusing.

But she’d been through something similar to this with Breckentale. It was different, though, and at least this time, she wasn’t in love with anyone, although part of her wondered if Marcus Flint would pop up out of nowhere. The thought bothered her, but what bothered her more was figuring out who and who wasn’t awake. It was clear Jack and Liam didn’t know. She hadn’t tried everyone she was close to, but with everyone on the planet Edenia, it made sense that people were spread out, and getting to everyone was different.

Alicia was walking along the side of one of the many perfectly crystal-clear lakes when she spotted someone she knew or someone she felt like she knew better than others, mostly because they’d opened up to each other while stuck playing stupid field day games.

“It seems kind of Strange, doesn’t it?” Alicia said, watching him carefully to see how he reacted to his last name. “Almost seems like this would be a good setting for human ring toss competitions, yeah?” It felt pointed enough that if he were himself, he’d pick up on the clue, she added carefully, “Unless, of course, if you were looking for a bad joke competition instead, not the best setting for that.”



The nights were the strangest.

Head on the pillow, Stephen would dream, and it was as if long talons of ice sliced through him, a cold dread that left his bones feeling brittle, his breaths coming in shallow gasps. These dreams weren’t his, that Stephen knew, but they were fragile, melting into nothingness once his eyes were open, just a dull ache in the center of his chest that was too persistent to ignore but too distant to really remember as the minutes ticked by and the gentle sunrise scattered those feelings like shadows in the light.

And Stephen looked at Natasha, and he felt there was more, something he’d forgotten, something important, but that, too, slipped away. The tighter he reached for those fleeting memories, the more they crumbled in his hands.

Sitting on a bench, the warmth of the midday sun washing over him, Stephen stared down at his hands, the gentle trembling, and he tried to remember. Flashes of an accident, the rumbling crack of thunder, the cold rush of the Hudson as it flooded into the car. Kathmandu. Kaecilius. Magic.

“What?” Lifting his gaze, Stephen felt those memories collide with long days at the Metropolitan, backpacking through Europe, a life that felt too good to be true. One he was suddenly struggling to believe.

As he looked at her, Stephen remembered. “As long as no one turns me into a cat,” he replied, studying her reaction just as she had been keenly watching his own.



Sagging with relief, Alicia didn’t care if he wasn’t the hugging sort. She walked right up to him and dropped onto the bench next to him, giving him a tight but quick hug. It was mostly because she needed to feel that he was real and that she wasn’t going utterly mad. Even though she knew she wasn’t, she still felt like she was, in some way, going completely mad.

“You do still make a cute cat,” she offered with perhaps an easier smile than she’d had in. Well, she wasn’t sure how long. It felt like a long time.

“Is this your first time with a world of fake memories?” Probably, she should have started asking him if he was okay or if he had any theories, but she felt like that was a worthwhile question instead. She wanted to know if he’d had an experience like this before.



The man Stephen used to be hadn't been the kind of man to hug or even show any kind of affection, not because he thought it was beneath him but because he hadn't known how. His life had been very cold, frozen like the water that had stolen his sister away, ice in his veins and around his heart. Time had slowly allowed that to thaw, and it meant that when Alicia threw her arms around him, nearly strangling the breath out of him, he could smile softly and squeeze her back.

And if she was going crazy, he was too, but it was better to feel like that with a friend.

Laughing, Stephen settled back against the bench, shooting her an incredulous look. "I'll try to remember that." It was something the sorcerer hoped he wouldn't have to relive, but at the moment, he'd take that over forgetting who he was.

With a slow nod, Stephen stared ahead, watching the wind as it moved through the leaves. "It is. I heard about an incident like this back home. A whole town under a spell, but I wasn't one of the people trapped it in. I'd only heard about it after the spell was broken. I," but his voice cut out, and he sighed. "I don't want to believe the same person is behind it."



Nodding, okay, he hadn’t experienced, but he was aware of situations like it. That gave her a leg up on how to explain what was happening, or at least that it wasn’t the first time that something like this had happened. Alicia was having a hard to thinking about all of that, the different memories of both her life in whatever this world was and her own life.

“Something similar happened in Atlantis, but we were all stuck in a ski town, I was even married to a bloke I’m pretty sure has tried to murder me back home once or twice,” she paused. “Okay not murder, murder, well, maybe, but let’s just say we aren’t exactly mates.” She sighed.

“Wait, what do you mean the same person behind this as what happened in your home world? What exactly happened?” Why she didn’t ask that question first was only due to her trying to balance both of the worlds in her head.



"I remember you said something about that. Barnes had too," Stephen replied thoughtfully. He remembered both conversations, and back after Westview, he'd looked into that too, read anything that came out after the town had been released. It seemed like it had been hard on everyone involved, and Stephen knew he should have reached out to Wanda once it was all said and done, but he hadn't and now all he had were regrets. Having suffered alone for years, Stephen knew he would have sunk far lower if he hadn't had the people around him to pull him out of that all-consuming darkness. Had anyone ever reached out to Wanda?

In the years after the War, when the planet was just beginning to recover, cities just starting to relearn how to support its citizens, millions of people displaced, lost, confused, people had needed friendship and compassion and he wondered how many had slipped through the cracks.

Stephen had never considered himself an Avenger, and after all that happened, didn't want to, so he had drifted away but he was thinking that maybe he shouldn't have. But maybes and should haves didn't change anything, so he just sighed and tried to keep his head above water.

Furrowing his brow, he glanced over at Alicia. "A ski town? I would have preferred that," Stephen commented with a wry chuckle. "I had to learn how to ski in high school. I've never been a cruise guy." Making jokes seemed almost ridiculous, but it was easier. "Hopefully they didn't marry you to the guy this time."

With another heavy sigh, Stephen folded his hands in front of him. "Back home it... was someone I knew. From work, you could say. I don't really know how it started, but a whole town was put under a hex, living out lives right out of old sitcoms."



“You know, I got two really good things out of that one, sort of miss both,” she admitted but didn’t elaborate on what they were. She had a slightly wistful expression on her face as she pictured a few moments where things felt a lot calmer, where life made a lot more sense. Well, pretty much any time was less confusing than right this second. She was lost in those thoughts as she heard Stephan speaking again. “Yeah, a ski town owned a wine bar,” she laughed softly. “To be truthful, I’d take a ski town over a cruise any day of the week, and Flint isn’t here,” she said with a mixed sigh.

“The ski town was caused by a mix of too many different magics that were used to try and get rid of someone, it didn’t work, but that device was destroyed in Atlantis, I’m not sure it could come back here, but I guess..” she paused. “You never know.”

Raising an eyebrow, she tilted her head. She felt like he was being cagey about it. She understood it, though, and there were still a lot of mixed feelings, emotions, and memories running around in her brain that she didn’t fully trust her own knowledge, which didn’t make her comfortable at all.

Alicia sighed a little bit before speaking. “Someone from work, okay.” Normally, she’d be more pushy. Hell, even as Detective Shaw, she’d usually be more pushy, but something felt, well, something felt off. “I don’t know a lot about sitcoms. Those are the ones with the laugh tracks, right? What else do you remember about it?”



With a quiet hum, Stephen mulled that statement over in his head as he watched the sunlight slip through the boughs of the trees. Not about her, necessarily, but about the fact that there was a part of himself---a pretty big part, if he was being honest---that wished he hadn't woken up. For all the pain even this dream version of himself lived with, there were things he didn't want to lose, people and memories that he wished he could hold onto. His wedding immediately resurfaced in his mind, the crisp air of that late November, the warm colors of the leaves that had turned for the fall, and how it had complimented her features, soft and warm, the bright green of her eyes and the beautiful curls that framed her face. "I think I know how you feel," Stephen finally replied, though he didn't share any more.

"That doesn't sound like a bad gig, honestly." Stephen hadn't been upset by the life he'd been given here either, the places he'd seen, the music he'd played. He had to remind himself that none of that was real, and it sat on his chest like a weight he couldn't rid himself of, forcing the air out of his lungs. "I won't say I hope we don't get a cruise next time, to avoid this happening again, but, well," and he let his words drift off, still trying to find the humor in this when he felt like everything was slipping through his fingers. "What kind of device," he asked instead, trying to refocus his thoughts. If it was possible something else was behind this, he wanted to believe it, simply because he didn't want her to be responsible.

Stephen continued to dance around saying her name, still hopeful that he was wrong. He really wanted to be wrong.

“Yeah,” was all he said, not wanting to accuse anyone before he had proof. That was the least he could do. “Some of them. The older ones had live audiences.” Having always been more a fan of music than television, he didn’t know much more than that. “All I know was that the person behind it hadn’t intended for that hex to take over the town. The magic involved isn’t any that I practice and I never got the chance to ask more about it.”



"Yeah?" Alicia asked, tilting her head, but she wasn't going to push him for details; it wasn't like she was sharing the things she missed from her experience as Charlie Givens. So, while she was curious, she wasn't in the pushing mood, and truthfully, they had more significant issues to figure out right now than what from these different lives they wanted to keep.

"Yeah, you know, in another world, I could see myself owning a wine bar," she paused and laughed. "I mean, as me, not as well, whatever this situation makes us. Or this kind of situation, I'm going to stop." She chuckled softly.

"I was one of the last to wake up from that situation, but from my understanding, it came from a town called Mystic Falls, and one of their witches, Regina, and a few others were trying to use it to lock away bad bloke called Kai, it backfired, we ended up in Breckentale, but it was destroyed, it was something from a coven there, Gemini I think, designed to lock people away." She sighed. "I wish I knew more, but I was involved with that."

"I'd ask, what do they mean they didn't intend it to happen, but if that person is here, could it be something similar? Something where they didn't mean for it to happen. Do you know what triggered it?" Alicia frowned. "Mate, whoever it is, if they are here doing this by accident or if COS is using them in some way, we might need to find them to figure it out."