Something in Common.
With the temperature not even sixty degrees and a good northerly breeze, Izzy didn't even contemplate her normal ocean swim and settled instead for a jog along the streets of old town instead. The witch consoled herself that if she were still in Chicago this time of year she'd be dressed like a mummy in multiple layers rather than a windbreaker and running pants. Sounds of Sympathy for the Devil leaked through her earbuds as she jogged along to the Rolling Stones on her iPhone.
Connor had taken to riding his motorcycle around the island before it got dark, familiarizing himself with landmarks and street names for the purposes of getting around. Navigation wasn't that much different than tracking, but he wanted to replace his alter's memories with his own just in case. And the traffic was much lighter here and easier to deal with. The Destroyer rounded the corner, leaning with the turn as he headed towards Old Town. He could get a quick sandwich and then head back home. The holiday break was almost over, which meant he'd have to see about this school thing. He couldn't wait to see how that went.
"Izzy, hey!" The witch was just jogging past, and he raised his voice a little so he could be heard over the music she was listening to. "Is winter exercise a new thing, or from before?" Connor's voice was heard above Mick signing about how he couldn't get no satisfaction, and Izzy glanced over at the man on the motorcycle. "Connor, hey!"
The witch reached into the pocket of her windbreaker and killed the music. She had a good sweat worked up, having been at this for at least twenty minutes, but kept jogging along next to Connor. "I used to do it in my first dimension, and had a gym membership in Chicago. There's no way in Hell you'd have caught me exercising outside in Chicago in January." A shrug as she kept moving beside him, "Actually this time around I've been exercising aquatically, but its too damn cold for that right now. Maybe I'll start up again in March."
"Out for a Sunday drive?"
"Mapping things out." Connor shut off the Honda's engine, climbed off of the bike. "Was just about to find something to eat, then head back. You're welcome to come join me if you want. How are you coping with...everything?"
He tucked the helmet out of sight into one of the saddlebags, pulled out his wallet to check his money. At least he had a job here. so his cash wasn't going to run out. "It's almost three," he said, giving his watch a glance. "Have you eaten?"
"Let me cool down a few minutes before we go and I'm game." The witch responded. She had a small money clip with her ID, debit card and a couple twenties stuffed into the pocket of her windbreaker so she was all set there.
Izzy put one hand against a nearby palm tree and brought a foot up to stretch the leg with her free hand. "I'm coping, but it hasn't been easy at times. You heard about my family, right?" She figured Rhiannon would have kept her boyfriend up to date with the details of the other transplants from 2014.
"You said this has happened before, sort of, that you've been relocated from someplace else? That must help a little." It was almost a question, and Connor absently adjusted his denim jacket on his shoulders before adding, "I think that's why I've been less thrown by it. This isn't my first...world...life either. Not that it was expected, but the coping comes easier if it's happened before."
He fell silent for a few moments, then said, "Rhiannon said a couple of things, but not much. She figures it'd be your story to tell, I guess."
"I have, but not like this," Izzy commented, bending to touch her toes a few times. "I mean, last time I was working on how to make permanent portals from one spot to another, and the next thing I know I'm in Michaela's backyard with a gun to my head after they spat me out from my home dimension. Nobody knew me there, I still had my original body and no new memories. This was completely different."
She straightened and put her arms behind her head, one hand touching between her shoulder blades and the other pulling on her elbow. "Here my family is alive, mom had married again when I was still crawling so I have a stepfather, and the family is loaded. My brother is a lawyer and just got busted for cocaine, so yeah, really different."
"It could still be worse. You could have died and come back."
Connor touched the thin scar on his throat, the one he could barely see anymore. He wasn't trying to make light of her situation, but if anyone could win a gripefest about being suddenly yanked out of your own life and put into someone else's, it was him. He looked up and down the street, studying the signs of the eating establishments to choose a place for lunch. "Sandwiches or something else?"
"I'm not complaining," Izzy said a bit defensively. "Not much anyway. At least they're alive in this dimension. That's better than they were in my first one. I was too chicken to look them up when I was in Chicago. What really honks me off was the me from this dimension before I got here."
She finished her stretching and looked back at Connor. "Sandwiches are fine, but not from someplace with a drive through." She wanted to actually be able to sit down and relax while she ate, and a fast food joint didn't count in her opinion. Fortunately Key West was very laid back when it came to dress code in restaurants. She could get into almost any dining establishment in town with what she had on.
"Okay, cool. There's at least one place along here that has a patio where we can eat outside if you want. Might not be warm enough to swim, but eating outdoors is okay."
Connor worked on smoothing his hair back into place as he started retracing his steps back up the street. "So what about your other self?" he asked as he spied the place in question. "Were you really that bad?"
"She wasn't bad, in the sense of being evil or anything." Izzy clarified after agreeing on what sort of place to go eat. She couldn't really think of the old Isabelle as herself, they were so different in her mind as to be unrecognizable aside from being physically the same. "More like she was very shallow and superficial. She was an airhead, Connor. Never challenged to expand horizons or intellectually curious enough to try on her own. How she even managed to hold down a job long enough for me to take over is something of mystery." A snort. "Don't even get me started on her fiance."
Once she'd actually spent time with Mark and realized that he'd expected to make all her decisions for her that had pretty much killed any idea of romance.
Privately Connor felt that there were worse things Izzy could have discovered about herself, but then again he could try to offer some fresh perspective if she acted interested. He climbed the four steps up the the door of the sandwich shop, held it open for her. There were only two or three other customers inside, and the greeter led them to the patio exit, where tables with umbrellas had been set up.
"I turned out to be a computer geek of sorts," he said as he sat down. "I've apparently been taking game design courses at the community college. I have to speak to my advisor once the holiday break ends, see if I can do anything to change majors."
"You don't want to be a computer geek?" Izzy didn't think that sounded so bad. The witch sat down opposite Connor and picked up the menu. "That at least takes brains and some education, either self taught or through college."
"You said you'd been through this before?" She really didn't know that much about Connor, but remembered being told the basics about his parentage and how that had given him demonic strength and healing. "What was it like for you?"
"It was..."
He opened the menu while leaving it lying on the table, studied the selections. "I suppose in a way it was the only thing to be done. Because I had become insane. Broken to the point where no one could fix me. So my father arranged it that I could have a fresh start, but only if I remembered nothing of what had happened before and didn't know he was my dad. Drastic times call for drastic measures."
Connor related all of this calmly, most of the sting long since drawn out of it. "And then I wake up one day and I find out it was all a lie. That the person I thought I was was based on someone else's wish for a perfect life." His shoulders lifted in a shrug, returned to their original position. "All things considered, I took the news surprisingly well."
"Wow..." Izzy knew that was an inadequate response to what she'd just been so calmly told, but it was the only thing she could think of to say. The witch scraped her jaw off the table and closed her mouth. Obviously this had happened some time ago for him to be so matter of fact about it, but it was still a stunning tale. What would she have done if she'd found out everything she knew was a lie? Izzy couldn't begin to wrap her mind around that.
Suddenly finding out that her other self had been an air-headed bimbo and that was the version of her everyone else knew? It didn't seem so bad compared to that. She still hated it, but compared to Connor's first experience she'd gotten off easy.
"You seem to have gotten your head around it, yeah." She finally managed, and decided to study the menu for a minute so she wouldn't keep staring at him like he'd grown a second head.
"It's been a while," Connor said with a faint smile. "I learned to integrate what I knew of my 'old' self into the new, to keep what was good and what I needed and cast aside what I didn't. I had nice parents, a happy childhood, a good future ahead of me. I took part of that away with me and applied it to the other. I figure maybe I deserve to be a little fucked-up, but it's a balancing act. It's just easier to maintain now."
He decided on the ham on rye bread and a soda, flipped the menu shut. "I don't know if you want advice, but just in case you do? Give it some time. She's probably not all bad, even if she's no brain surgeon. You might find something valuable in her before you know it."
"I'm not saying she's all bad," Izzy huffed. "It's just that she has/had the same DNA as me, but she was just this dumb blonde. A very nice, happy go lucky dumb blonde, but no ambition or drive in her. I don't understand how I could turn out like that."
"Ego, much?" Connor bumped Izzy's foot under the table to show he was joking, and when the server appeared he placed his order while fiddling with the salt shaker. The day, although a little cool, was bright, the sun perching above a small bank of clouds in the direction of the ocean. Even in California, he'd never lived at the beach itself. It was something he'd decided he enjoyed.
"So what about your...her...parents? What are they like?"
Izzy ordered a chicken salad wrap and a bottled water, then shrugged in response to his question. "You can call them mine I guess, I have some memories of them. My mother isn't the same, but I didn't know her really well in my original dimension. She was too busy working to keep us fed, clothed and housed and I was spent all my time studying to make sure I kept my grades up enough that I wouldn't lose my scholarship." She paused and fiddled with the edge of her windbreaker. "Here, she's alive and happy, seems to love my stepfather."
"My stepfather..." Izzy sighed. "He's a very old fashioned kind of guy I guess. Very successful and used to getting his own way too, I'm not sure I ever told him 'no' before Christmas. My brother and he don't get along at all."
"It didn't go over well?" Connor was looking at the blonde shrewdly, one eyebrow lifting. "You think he might not like it if you start showing some personality?" He looked down at the empty spot on the table where the menu had been, wondering if he wasn't stepping over the line a little. "Did your other self always toe the line before?"
"I don't think it ever occurred to her to go against his wishes on something," Izzy confessed. "When I stood up to him over Christmas over how he was treating my brother Bobby he was flabbergasted. I didn't want to hurt his feelings but at the same time it wasn't right how he was being an ass to Bobby." The brief look of hurt that had flashed across his face wasn't something Izzy would forget soon.
"He raised my other self along with my mother from the time I started walking, so they were very close. My brother seems to think I could do no wrong in daddy's eyes."
"Maybe he isn't wrong."
The Destroyer fell silent after making the brief statement, then looked over at the clouds the sun had disappeared behind. It didn't smell like rain, but it might not give as much warning this close to the water. "My parents - my other parents - were good people, and I felt in my heart that they loved me, even when I knew I wasn't really their son. I had a lifetime's worth of memories telling me that my connection with them was as real as anything else, no matter how it got to be that way, or even why." He touched the spot over his ribcage where his heart lay protected by the bones beneath his flesh.
"But at some point, I realized that I needed to know who I was too. That was mostly in here." He touched his left temple. "Sometimes our heads say we have to leave even when our hearts want us to stay. You might be discovering little pieces of that right now."
"It's a little different for me," Izzy mused. "Biologically, at least, my mother is my mother. I never really knew my biological father back home, so my stepfather is the only one I've ever known. I don't want to break all ties to them, but I don't want to pretend to be something I'm not either."
"Well, then the question becomes, will your stepdad let you not pretend?" He tried to phrase the question as gently as possible, but it still made him wince a little. Partly for her, and partly for his own ineptitude when it came to saying something that might actually help. "I don't know the guy, so I can't say what he will or won't do. If he's willing to be fair, that's one thing. If not..."
He stopped talking, spread his hands out. "It's his choice, but it'll be yours too."
Izzy nodded thoughtfully as their food arrived. She chewed on her wrap quietly and watched seagulls gliding and diving into the water for their own food, mulling over Connor's words.
"I don't know if he will or not. I'm sure Mark's told him that I've called off the wedding since he works with him, I'm a little surprised I haven't gotten a phone call from my parents trying to figure out what's going on all the sudden."
She looked down at her plate. "If ties are broken, it won't be because I didn't try to make things work."
"Well, give it time," Connor suggested. "Some things you have to be patient with. Family is usually at the top of the list. No matter what kind of family it is." He picked up his own sandwich and studied the thick slice of ham between the pieces of bread before taking a bite, then chewed slowly.
Once he'd cleared his mouth, he added, "If you ever want to talk, give me a call. Sometimes a fresh perspective helps."
Izzy forced a smile. The subject had put her down in the dumps a bit but she appreciated his trying to help talk through the issue. "Thanks Connor, I'll probably take you up on that at some point. Rhiannon is a lucky woman."
Connor's cheeks pinkened, but he didn't look down and he didn't look away. "Thanks, but most of the time I think I'm the one who's lucky. I probably wouldn't be as whole as I am without her. I hope that I'm as good for her as she is for me."
He took another bite of the sandwich, chewed slowly. Chances were, he'd just made a new friend, even if it was only so he and Izzy could gripe together. Still, that wasn't so bad, and bonus for him if he could really help. His advice might not be perfect, but he had been there. The Destroyer picked up his soda glass, lifted it in a toast.