Markus enjoyed that he could talk to humans here without any of them seeming the wiser about what he was. He didn’t hide it by any means, but it made simple interactions much more pleasant. Talking to a middle-aged stranger standing on her front stoop with a striking black cat in her arms, for instance. If androids had been a more common feature of this place, she probably would’ve ignored his questions about her cat, turned away and gone inside. Or much worse. But she’d sat and talked with him for some time and he’d pet the cat. His name was Jinx but he seemed more often to be called Butthead.
Humans could be delightful when they weren’t trying to kill him.
Markus had glanced towards her open window at some point and seen the electronic piano she had set up on a stand inside. From there, it had been a little nerve-wracking to ask for permission to play it. But she’d been warm and encouraging. He was still playing when he spotted Dolores passing by and he stood rather abruptly to poke his head out of the open window.
“I found a piano!” He smiled brightly down at her then frowned. “Well, an electronic one."
Dolores had spent much of the afternoon outside, wandering off into the fields past the farm to get away from it all, a habit not too unlike her routine back home. Discovering for herself the loop that kept them trapped within the town’s boundaries. she laid out in the grass, hair tangling in the blades and the light breeze. It was easy to picture herself back in Sweetwater where the land felt just as inescapably endless Her hand shielded her eyes from the brightness of the sun until it had slowly began its descent. She could guess at the time, or the phone’s lighted display could tell her with a push of a button, but it broke the illusion and brought her tumbling back into her current reality. The sun certainly kept different hours up here in Canada than back home,
Getting back to her feet to head back to the motel before anyone worried over her, she brushed off, bits of grass still clinging to her curls, green stains against her elbows and the back of her pants. It felt natural, unlike everything else in this world. Unlike herself. Dolores breathed in the air, headed past a quaint row of houses. There was music coming from somewhere, a melody she didn’t recognize but still brought a soft smile, when she heard a familiar voice. Dolores stopped in her tracks, head turning a few directions before spotting Markus in the window, giving him a friendly but confused wave. She stepped through the yard, approaching the window, not quite tall enough to see into it. “That was you playing, just then?” she asked, looking around and wanting to ask just whose home he was in, but not sure how to make it not sound like an accusation.
“That was me, yes. I was playing a song my father taught me,” Markus said. Linda, the nice cat lady, told him he should invite his friend up rather than shouting at her in the street. He apologized and thanked her before sticking his head back out the window with a little laugh.
“Sorry, that was rude. Would you like to come up?” He remembered what she’d said about her town and the unsavory types. “Mrs. Martin has been very kind. And there’s a cat.”
“Well why didn’t you say so?” Dolores removed her shoes at the door as the cat swatted at the laces, apologizing to Mrs. Martin for the mud, knowing how much her mother complained when her father would track in filth across the clean floors. And Mrs. Martin’s home looked neat and tidy, much cozier than the little motel rooms had been. With personal touches like adorable monogrammed hand towels that Dolores used at the sink to clean her hands before she dared touch anything else in the home.
She joined Markus shortly after, bemused at how he managed to get into such a situation, although she had been just as guilty of inviting him into her room the day they just met. “You make friends very easily,” she observed, tilting her head at the thing he claimed was a piano. The keys were laid out in the familiar pattern, but, “Where do all the strings go?” she asked, baffled as always how anything electronic was supposed to work.
“I could explain,” Markus smirked, “but we’d both be very bored.” He gestured at the bench space next to him instead. It was a large keyboard at least and if she could play with a partner, they’d just barely fit. “The strings, not the friends thing, that is,” he clarified. “I don’t know if I can explain the other one.. I just...talk to people. Some of them talk back.” Self-deprecating wasn’t in his programming; he’d picked that one up all on his own. He gave a soft little shrug and rested his fingers on the keys without pressing down.
“Do you have a favorite song?” he asked.
“There’s a piano in town, where I’m from,” Dolores sat beside Markus on the bench, not minding the closeness, gently running her fingers over the top of a few keys curiously. She wasn’t sure how she felt about plastic, how the new world felt so fake. Artificial. “That plays itself. I used to think that was a technological marvel.” Dolores pressed a couple keys gently, the sound it producing so unnatural despite being precisely on key.
She folded her hands back in her lap, considering his question. There were many songs she knew well, by heart, but the names of them escaped her. But there was a song. A favorite, although she wasn’t sure if it was hers. Somebody’s, and that felt significant enough. “Reverie. Debussy,” she smiled softly, “Do you know it?”
This piano likely could play itself too. Or at least record them and play it back. But Markus only smiled a little and held up a finger in the universal hold on gesture.
[Searching music catalog: Reverie by Debussy…] [Six results found… Accessing sub-file ‘piano sheet music’]
“We’re in luck. I do know that song.” It was a melancholy one, he noticed, going over the notes in his head. Lovely but haunting. “It’s a little sad. Has it been that kind of day?”
“I don’t want to talk about my day,” Dolores told him softly, wanting to hold onto the calmer mood she managed to find despite it. She had wondered if perhaps Connor told him about that morning with Lucifer, how she stabbed him, how everything went downhill from there. Not that she minded Markus knowing, but she was far too tired to go through it again. She leaned slightly against him, not as heavily as she felt, not wanting to restrict his arms from playing but to silently communicate she wasn’t trying to shut him out.
“I don’t know where I heard the song,” she admitted. “But I can always hear it. When I’m sad.”
Markus smiled sympathetically and returned the lean of her shoulder with his own. It wasn’t in his nature to press, even if he did think it might ease her mind to talk. And he was too quickly absorbed with the rest of what she said, anyway.
“You hear it when you’re sad?” It could’ve been some kind of trigger. A mood-control key or one that altered her memory. He lifted his hands off the keys with a deep frown. He didn’t want to accidentally hurt her in some unpredictable way. “Well, maybe we should try something else. Something more hopeful instead." He brightened as a second search of his memory banks came back with results. "If you’re fond of Debussy, maybe we could do The Girl with the Flaxen Hair instead?”
“Mm. Not like you’d hear anything else, but internally. Like a memory, but just sound,” she clarified, feeling a bit vulnerable talking about her faulty memory, how scrambled yet vivid everything was, hitting her at unexpected times. Her inability to separate those memories from the dreams haunting her, unable to figure out how any of it fit together.
“Even when everything else feels hopeless and I can’t understand, I can close my eyes, and-“ Why can’t I help you, Dolores? She quietly wiped the dampening corners of her eyes with the cuffed sleeve of her sweater, missing something, no, someone so deeply and unable to even recall who.
Dolores nodded in agreement that maybe another song would be better. “I don’t know that one. How does it go?”
Her explanation didn’t alleviate his concerns, but it did shift them. Maybe the song wasn’t conditioning so much as a safe haven, created by her sub-processes to give her some comfort. Markus lifted a hand to rest it against her shoulder blade and watched her for a moment while he considered his options.
“I think I understand...a little. I don’t know if this song will fill you with emotions in quite the same way, but maybe it can ease your mind for a short time.” He gave her back a gentle press and then moved both of his hands back to the keys. The song came easy, part programming and part Markus. He closed his eyes and let the song dance out from his fingertips.
She sighed into the touch, releasing the bit of tension she was holding in her shoulders, glad to indulge in the small show of comfort. It didn’t really fix anything that already happened that day, or change what she was facing tomorrow, but it did help Dolores feel a bit less alone. Less like she was losing her mind and imagining everything, trapped in a mental hell of her own making.
His presence was a nice anchor to remind her that this was here, this was now, and Dolores listened to the music, watched his fingers move elegantly over the keys, her own unconsciously rubbing the bump embedded into her arm. She caught herself, quickly stopping. Ash had suggested she see a doctor, but she hadn’t, avoided him out of guilt ever since.
The song wasn’t one she knew, although she could feel the similarities of the style, could recognize it as the same composer. “It’s nice, isn’t it, for not being... real,” she said of the piano, when Markus finished. Real didn’t seem the right word, but she didn’t know how else to explain it. “May I try?”
Playing the piano, even this one with its synthetic sound, reminded Markus of his father. They were bittersweet memories but they still gave him peace. He smiled at her and gestured towards the keyboard.
“Please. Be my guest.” Jinx jumped up on to the table next to the keyboard and then walked across the keys. Markus chuckled and took the cat into his arms. The gentle vibration of his immediate purring brought a wider smile to Markus’s face. “We’ll be your rapt audience. Well, I will. I won’t make any promises for Jinx here.” He scratched between the cat’s ears.
“I think it’s been awhile since I’ve played,” Dolores felt a weird insecurity about her scrambled sense of time, but didn’t want to dwell on it. “So I might be a bit rusty.” Certainly not as good as Markus, who seemed to just know the music so easily. Markus, who seemed good at quite anything he did, holding a stranger’s cat in his arms, in a house that didn’t belong to him. But it wasn’t fair to herself to compare. They were from very different times, from very different types of lives, and luckily he didn’t seem the sort that would judge her flaws too harshly.
She positioned her fingers on the keys, playing the first few bars of what came to mind. A simple Sonata. Anything but fucking Chopin. Her fingers faltered, couldn’t remember who’d told her that, why she hated him. But with an apologetic glance to Markus for her rough start, she switched over to the piece that came next in that exchange, Gershwin. Her fingers managed to find every key without any hesitation, a surprise to herself as she warmed up to it, pushing through the sadness the song invoked until she was playing with almost a sharp, angry edge.
He tried not to watch her too closely, keeping his eyes on the keys or the cat or closed altogether to appreciate the sound.
[Analyzing…] [Song Title: The Man I Love; Composer: George Gershwin; Published: 1927]
Markus glanced furtively over at her profile. Her very existence suggested she was either from a much later time than she thought and programmed to think otherwise, or that her world was wildly different from their own. The date of the song being later when she said she was from was clear evidence to the former, though.
“You’re very good,” he said. Jinx meowed. “Even the cat agrees. I…get the feeling this one doesn’t evoke purely positive feelings…”
Dolores offered the cat a light scratch under the chin, persuaded into a full rub of the ears as Jinx nudged insistently into her palm. It was nice to have a small distraction as she considered Markus’ observation and how to properly address it. It was difficult to hide her emotions, knew she wore everything she felt across her face, and that her feelings were far more honest with her than her memory might be. Sound reached a lot deeper into her subconscious, seemed to unlock a sense of understanding that her mind had been lying to her all along. “I told you before that my life in Sweetwater was peaceful. That I was happy.”
She rested her fingers back on the keys, beginning one of the songs she often heard in town saloon on the self-playing piano. Black Hole Sun, as unaware of the anachronism of it as her previous. It was easy to almost hear the laughing from the familiar faces that frequented the saloon, the loud chatting she could hear even from the street as she passed by, the gunfire and the windows shattering and the screaming. “But I think it was a lie I’ve been telling myself all along.” She glanced over, an apologetic frown. “I’m afraid a lot- most of my memories don’t lead anywhere positive.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Markus said. Sorry, but not surprised. Sweetwater was likely some kind of prison in hiding, carefully constructed. He frowned and glanced down at her hands.
“This song...Dolores, do you know where it came from? When it was written?” He had to ask. Hopefully testing the edges of her awareness wouldn’t cause her too much distress. Just letting her dwell in memories that apparently upset her and were likely fabricated made him feel like a worthless friend, anyway.
“No,” she answered truthfully, never wondered. It was simply a song she heard, one of many. Nothing seemed so strange about it, though she finished it early, sensing something was troubling him. She looked at Markus, almost with pity, as she cupped his face in her own hand, an attempt at comfort. “I know something isn’t right,” she told him, reassuringly, didn’t blame him for withholding anything from her when she knew it was her own mind that was resistant to whatever truth she couldn’t see. “I know you know it too. You knew since the moment you met me, and pulled away.”
She leaned in close, voice low, “But I told Connor tomorrow. Please, I just want today.”
Her response somehow both added to his concern and alleviated some of it. That she at least knew something was off was an unquestionable relief. It would make it easier for her to find her way to the truth, with or without any help. But if she was getting pulled at too much between Connor and himself, that might cause more harm than good.
Markus flashed a small smile and nodded. “Of course. As many days as you need.” He held out Jinx, who pawed gently at Dolores’s arm and climbed into her lap himself. “Let’s try this one before Linda decides to take her piano and cat back.” His fingers moved gently over the keys, playing a gentle version of Somewhere Over the Rainbow. His father would’ve snorted and scoffed but that only made him smirk to himself.
Dolores pressed her nose into the soft fur, cradling Jinx in her arms. Her father had cats on the ranch, but they were mostly to keep mice out of the barn. Not really pets that came inside, nothing that would ever really let her hold them this way. It was a bit comforting that whatever was wrong with her, the cat seemed blissfully unaware, purring just the same for her as it did Markus.
She listened to him playing, appreciated the softer mood of his song choice, much more hopeful than anything she seemed to know. As much as she wished it not to end, it did, and Dolores glanced out the window at the darkening sky. “We should head back,” she suggested, a bit regretfully. The hours of her getting to put off the truth were dwindling much faster than she wished. “Whatever tomorrow brings. Thank you for… this.”