You Know My Name [Original - The City Adel; Pevi, Yelina, Ivahn] Title: You Know My Name Author:ivoryandhorn Fandom: Original - The City Adel Pairing/Characters: Pevi-centric, Yelina, Ivahn Rating: PG Warnings: background m/m Prompt/challenge you're answering:1 (Pevi) has amnesia -- does 3 (Yelina) try to help, or take shameless advantage of the situation? Summary: The face in the mirror is yours? That's news to you. Notes: ~5000 words. As far as I'm aware this is barely medically accurate at all. Also, I think this is like the most complete telling of Pevi's backstory that I have ever done. Weird.
The face you see is familiar, but you can’t put your finger on why. After a while you realize that it’s the same face you see reflected in the glass of water by your bed, in the TV hanging in the corner of your room. You know that human cloning doesn’t work yet, so that means this woman must be your…
You can’t remember.
“Pevi?”
You feel yourself swallow, feel like you’re suddenly standing under the stage lights, hot and on the spot. “That’s my name?” you say, and your voice sounds like scrap metal in your throat.
And then you wish you hadn’t opened your big fat stupid mouth, because you don’t know who she is but you know you never meant to make this woman cry.
*
The apartment the woman—your twin, your sister Yelina Traveyn—takes you back to looks like a stranger’s, and before you can ask she tells you that it’s not yours, it’s hers.
“I thought I’d break you in easy,” she says.
“One shock at a time,” you agree, and feel yourself smile, the expression comfortable on your face like the sneakers on your feet. For a moment the woman’s—Yelina’s—face twists with something you can’t name and she looks away. Your smile fades away.
“Sorry,” you say quietly.
“It’s not your fault,” she says, and you ignore the way her voice wavers for a moment. When she looks up her eyes are bright, but dry, and you can’t help but feel relieved, and guilty that you do. This is your sister, isn’t it? “You want to go out for dinner?”
“Yes please,” you say, and just like that the two of you leave before you’ve even set foot in the place.
“This used to be your favorite place to eat,” she tells you right outside the diner. “The doctor said—anyway, you always wanted to eat here when we met for lunch.”
“Did we do that often?” you ask.
“Once a week,” she replies, and doesn’t look at you as you open the door. You feel like you should apologize, but it’s not like it’s your fault you lost your memory, is it? Even so, you feel bad. Like you owe this woman—Yelina, her name is Yelina, get it straight—more.
The menu, like so many details of your life, is both familiar and strange. Like something you think you should know that nevertheless eludes your grasp. Story of your life now, you think.
When the food arrives, the two of you eat without saying anything, but halfway through the meal, Yelina starts talking. “If case you’re wondering, you do have parents and friends,” she says. “Quite a few, in fact; you’re a bit of a social butterfly. But I thought—well, I thought it might be better to ease you back into meeting everyone instead of throwing you to the sharks, as it were.”
You nod to show you’re listening. You need your mouth to eat your very good hamburger. You must have had excellent taste, if you ate here often.
“Plus,” she adds, “I thought you might want time to get settled. You’re a TA at Stone Mountain University, though I don’t think you can keep doing that if you can’t remember your students. You’re getting a Master’s in Music, by the way.”
“Yeah?”
“Piano. Specialty in performance.”
“Can I even play, still?”
Her smile is thin. “Probably,” she says. “Motor skills, body memory. I’m not sure I got everything the doctor said, but you should retain everything you’ve learned ‘til now. You just don’t remember any personal history anymore.”
“So we need to test that?” you ask. You remember some of what she’s talking about too, kind of. The doctor was an older woman, with short black hair streaked with grey at the temples and friendly brown eyes.
She nods and continues, looking uncomfortable, “Also…you, uh, have a roommate. You can move in with me if you want, but I thought you should know about Ivahn first and look around your old apartment before you decide.”
“Ivahn,” you say, testing out the word. The syllables are familiar, and hearing them is somehow comforting, though you don’t know why. “Okay. What about him?”
“You were best friends,” she tells you. “All high school. And then in college—“
“Boom?”
“In a manner of speaking,” she says, and her smile is less tight and unhappy this time. “Which is to say, about halfway through you started dating. I’m not sure why it took you so long, but I’ve never seen you fall for someone so hard.”
You turn this over in your head. You had a best friend, who you must have loved enough to move in with and date for… “How long have we been going out?”
“You’re twenty-three,” she tells you. “You’ve been dating since you were both twenty.”
So someone you loved enough to date for three years, and live with for… “How long have we been in—lived together?”
“Five years,” she tells you. “You dormed together, and then moved into an apartment together, and then you started dating. Like I said, it took you a while.” She goes quiet. “You were on your way to meet him for dinner when you had your accident. It was your third anniversary.”
You chew on your fries while you think. So Ivahn has to be a guy then, a guy who was your best friend and you have dated and lived with for years and who, presumably, you must have loved. The name still gives you that comforting sense, like pulling on a favorite coat when it’s cold out, but it creeps you out a little, that this man whose face and surname and voice you can’t recall has probably seen you naked and had sex with you. You can’t even remember if you liked it, though you can’t imagine sticking around with someone for three years if the sex wasn’t any good. But you don’t want to say any of this, because you must have loved this Ivahn and this Ivahn must still love you and you don’t want to hurt the guy before you’ve even seen his face. Maybe it’ll be like a fairy tale, maybe just seeing his face will bring back all the memories you lost. Yeah, right, you think.
“So am I gay?” you say instead, because this is probably something you ought to know.
Yelina shrugs. “You never really told me,” she says. “But you dated and slept with both men and women before Ivahn. In my humble opinion as your sister, you did seem to prefer guys. You liked to babble at me about your love life—especially before you started dating Ivahn.” She smiles for real this time, easy and unrestrained with a little twist at the end like you’re in on a joke with her that no one else is quite sharp enough to get. It’s a good look on her. “God, you’d call at the weirdest times to feed me the latest saga in your inability to ask him out.”
“We were that close, huh?”
Her face closes up like a clam at that and you feel bad, though you also feel like you shouldn’t, which makes you feel worse.
“Yes,” she says, and calls for the check.
*
Yelina takes you back to your apartment, the one you were sharing with Ivahn. With your best friend. With your boyfriend.
You really hope he’s not at home, because you’re not sure you can deal with meeting him.
No such luck.
Ivahn turns out to be a tall, skinny kind of guy, pale skin and black hair, blue-grey eyes under long lashes and slim, nervous fingers. He looks at you shyly, like you really are strangers and his hand is cold when you shake it. But he smiles back when you smile at him and you can see how maybe he might have caught your eye, once. You think maybe he’s catching your eye now, but you’re not sure if it’s because he really is, or you’re just imagining it because you want it to be true, for his sake and yours.
You study him as he walks into the kitchen to get you all drinks, watch the way he moves, long-limbed and awkward, brushing hair out of his eyes. His jeans sit just above his hips and you catch yourself checking out his ass and feeling guilty about it, though you don’t stop because well, it’s a very nice ass. You’re pretty sure this means you’re still into guys, though you still don’t remember the first thing about him.
He shows you around the apartment, tells you what’s yours and what isn’t. It’s all very nice, though you don’t recognize any of it, even the piano that sits in the corner of the living room.
“This is, um, your bedroom,” he tells you, opening a door.
You look inside and see a single huge bed, one half with rumpled covers, and you feel your face heat because of course, when Ivahn had said your what he’d actually meant was our, and that awkward, creeped-out feeling from the diner is coming back, though surely Ivahn must be feeling the same way, looking at you and seeing nothing of the man he’d lived and slept with for so long.
“Oh,” you say feebly, and try not to look at his face when he shows you where the study is. Afterwards, you stop by the piano and sit down. You open up one of the books piled on top of it and set it on the stand and stare blankly at the lines and dots that cover its pages. You don’t think about it, not really, but your hands are lifting out of your lap and settling on the keys and suddenly, yes, you know this, you know what this is the bass clef and that’s the treble clef and you know that the key is A minor and the song is floating out from under your fingers and into the apartment before you even realize you’re playing.
You stop abruptly when you realize they’re both staring at you. “I guess that settles that,” you say into the silence.
“Your tutoring notes are over there, on the right,” Ivahn says, and you look at them so you don’t have to turn around and look at his face.
The chickenscratch lining the notebooks is indecipherable to you—not because of how messy your writing is, but because you have no idea what the shorthand and symbols you were using to keep track of your students means. You want to laugh, but then you might cry, and you end up doing neither.
“So?” Yelina says at last, when they’re having drinks again. “Have you decided?”
“Um,” you say, to stall. “Does he know?”
“Yes,” Ivahn says. “It was, um. It was my idea, that you might—you might not want to live here anymore.”
You can hear the unspoken with me in his sentence and you wish you weren’t about to say what you were about to say.
“Then, I,” you say, and take a deep breath, pushing away your Coke. “I think—I’d rather move in with Yelina.” You hate yourself, just like you did in the hospital when you opened your big fat stupid mouth at Yelina. “I mean, it’s not that…I mean, it’s just, it’s kind of awkward and even if we weren’t to sleep together it’d just be…really awkward…” And you feel it again, like a hammer to the heart, and you know that you never wanted to see Ivahn cry either.
“I’m sorry,” he keeps saying, “I’m sorry, I knew it would happen, I’m s-sorry…”
And you wish that the crash had just killed all of Pevi Traveyn, instead of leaving you behind to deal with the mess.
*
While you’re in the middle of moving out of your old apartment and into your sister’s (and you’re pretty sure that Ivahn’s not there on purpose, but you can’t help but be relieved because you remember way too well how it felt, like a hook in your heart was twisted and then slowly wrenched out, while you sat there and watched him huddled in Yelina’s arms), she tells you that your parents want to meet you.
You stand there like a frightened rabbit and try to remember them and can’t think of a single thing.
“Don’t worry,” she tells you, and her words are quiet, and strained. “They…already know. So does Rexin.”
“Okay,” you say, taking a deep breath. “Who’s that?”
“Your brother. Well, ours. Nine years older than us. He’s a lawyer, pretty quiet and, well, stern. You never got along very well.”
“Why didn’t we?” Part of you doesn’t want any more awkward encounters with people who used to know you, but more of you is curious about this man, this Pevi, who you were before you weren’t.
“You never told me,” Yelina says with a shrug. “I have my guesses, but maybe it’s better for you not to be influenced by what essentially amounts to my personal opinion.”
You sit on the bed and try not think about how you must have had sex with Ivahn on this very mattress, beneath these very sheets; try not think of the fact you must have slept with him on it for months and now he’s sleeping on it alone and it’s all your fault and why do you care so much again? “Come on, tell me.”
She stops folding your clothes and sits beside you. “It starts with Lorin.”
“Who’s that?”
Yelina frowns at her hands. “Our other brother,” she says at last. “Five years older than us, so between you and Rexin. And, well…you loved Lorin. You really looked up to him; you’d follow him around, and I’d follow you around, so now our parents have these embarrassing home videos of us trailing after him like a pair of grey-haired ducklings. It used to make him laugh.” She shakes her head. “So…even then, I think Rexin was always kind of quiet, and he was close to Lorin, too. And then…when we were eleven…”
Yelina goes really quiet and you have a feeling you’re not going to like what she’s going to say.
“When we were eleven,” she says quietly, “there was an accident. Lorin had just earned his driver’s license but another driver ran a red light and—he said he was drunk, at the trial.”
“He died.” It’s not a question. You don’t remember, but you can see how this story’s going.
“He was in the hospital for a long time,” Yelina tells you. “In a coma. He—never woke up.”
“They pulled the plug?”
She shakes her head. “Injuries,” she tells you. “They tried to operate, but they couldn’t save him, and then some of his wounds got infected…He’s how we met Dr. Ming.”
You remember the lady from when you were in the hospital and saw Yelina for the first time. “Is that why she knew me?”
Yelina nods. “Yeah. Mom and Dad were…they were so scared, when they heard about your accident. It was so close to Lorin’s…drunk driver, head trauma, coma.”
“But I woke up,” you say. In a manner of speaking, you add silently.
“Yes,” Yelina agrees. “You did.”
You wait for her to tell you how this ties in to why you don’t like your eldest brother.
“Anyway,” she starts slowly. “After Lorin died, you were really…well, we were all grieving, but you worst of all. And Rexin too, though we were too young to really see it. You started acting out; talked back at Mom and Dad and Rexin, your grades started slipping and you leave the house and not tell anyone where you were going. And Rexin reacted becoming quieter and more and more uptight and, well…you’d fight. You’d have these huge arguments whenever he was around, which was pretty often, after Lorin died. The two of you just never really got over it.”
“That sounds kind of stupid,” you say after a while, because from what you’ve picked up from Yelina, from Pevi, is that you were a pretty easy-going kind of guy. The news that you had a loud and pointless feud with your older brother—while your parents were trying to deal with losing your brother—makes you feel really bad, and kind of wonder.
Yelina snorts. “It was,” she says. “You stopped having shouting matches but you’ve never really gotten along. Just tolerated each other.” She looks at you sharply. “Don’t go beating yourself up about it,” she says. “He knows you don’t remember any of that, and Rexin’s not going to pick fights if there’s a way to avoid screaming at you.”
“Thank you for making me feel better about myself,” you say dryly.
The next weekend you get ready to meet your parents and your big brother who you inexplicably hated. Dinner is very awkward and you try not to stare too much at the house you must have grown up in, at the man and woman who must have raised you. Your mother is short, plump and curvy, with black hair that’s not so much streaked with grey as a whole lot of shades of grey. She smiles at you but you can tell that it’s not easy, and her eyes are mixed sorrow and joy. Your father is taller and stockier, has the beginnings of a paunch and he’s gruff and doesn’t say much. It’s harder to tell how much you are hurting him and for that you are grateful. Your brother has white hair even though he can’t be far beyond thirty, comes dressed in a sharp suit that adds another decade to him, and his face reveals nothing. You can easily imagine yelling at him, if only to make that stiff face of his crack, but you don’t, because he doesn’t seem to want to fight and you don’t want to pick fights with strangers either.
You do not know why you expected Ivahn to be there and you are embarrassed that you do, but you are also glad that he is not.
Before you leave, your parents give you a photo album full of pictures of yourself and your family, and tell you that even if you don’t know them anymore, they still want to be friends with you. You can see how much it’s tearing them apart to say it and say you would like to be friends, too. It’s not a lie.
When you get home you page through the album; you watch your life go by in snapshots as if watching an old movie: complete disconnect between you and what you see.
*
Life goes on. It doesn’t have a choice, and neither do you.
You drop out of graduate school and find a job. You make new friends, and some of them were old ones. You live with Yelina and sometimes you see Ivahn around, when he hangs out with Yelina or when the itch gets too strong and you go over to play the piano that Yelina has no space for. Mostly you try not to talk to him too much and he doesn’t seem to talk to you much either and you don’t know whether to be relieved or hurt.
One day, in the middle of winter and suspiciously close to Christmas Day, Sarha, one of your new-friends-who-were-old, tells you that she’s having a party and invites you and a few of your new friends over. It is not until you arrive with Yelina that you realize that Ivahn is there too. It is the first time the two of you will have to interact for any length of time around other people. The memory of him crying is still uncomfortably sharp in your mind.
It’s a good party. You have fun drinking and flirting and dancing, and you notice someone has set up a PlayStation in the living room, and that Ivahn is playing. You tell yourself that it’s just because you’re drunk, because you haven’t seen him for a while, but you find yourself watching him. From what you hear, he’s winning whatever game they’re playing; you don’t care. He doesn’t look at all like the shy, awkward man who showed you around the apartment you used to share. The color of his sweater brings out the animation in his eyes and you find yourself staring at the pale lines of his throat, neck, jaw. He looks happier than you’ve ever seen him before, and you wonder if you’d ever made him smile like that, before.
You fetch drinks for the people gaming because you are a nice guy, not because you want to get a closer look at Ivahn when he’s closer to normal or anything.
And then Yelina comes up to you and pulls you aside and says, bluntly, “Why do you keep watching Ivahn?”
You stall for time. “Was I?”
“Yes,” she tells you. “You were. You’ve been watching him whenever you go by the living room, and then you stood there for an hour watching him kill zombies with a tire iron.”
“Technically you can’t kill zombies.”
“Don’t try to change the subject on me.”
“I am not!”
“You are,” she insists. “Fine, new question: why do you think he keeps hanging around?”
You do not have answer.
“Maybe you should ask him,” she tells you.
“I don’t remember him,” you say. You feel small and stupid and mean but you really do not want to be having this conversation right now. You suddenly need a drink, but she won’t let you go get one.
“Then why did you hand him a Coke when you were getting drinks for the people gaming?”
“He doesn’t like alcohol.”
“How did you know that?”
“He told me,” you say vaguely. “I remembered him telling someone else—“
Yelina waits for you to shut up because she knows that you’re just drunk and making stupid excuses.
“Maybe you remember more than you think,” she tells you, and lets you go.
*
It takes you a while to get up your nerve. You really are a coward, you tell yourself bitterly. You couldn’t even apologize for leaving him.
When you finally work up to the guts to go over you are relieved to see that he is home, and it is not until you are knocking on his door that you realize you know this because you know his car is the black Audi parked at the foot of his apartment block, and you can’t remember when anyone would have had to chance to tell you what color and make your boyfriend’s car was, or why anyone would have had a reason to tell you either of those things in the first place. You almost hope that you are wrong.
You are right.
“Can we talk outside?” you ask. “It’s—just, you know, I want to ask you something, and it’s less awkward out—side.”
He doesn’t ask you what you mean, just pulls on his coat and locks the door, follows you down to his car where you both sit in the chill wind, leaning against the hood of the black Audi you have no idea how you knew was his. Neither of you say anything for a while. Finally you ask what Yelina asked you: “Why do you keep hanging around?”
You wince as soon as you do, because you didn’t mean for it to sound so resentful.
Ivahn hunches over in his coat. “I don’t know,” he says awkwardly, not looking at you. You watch his profile as he speaks. “I guess—I can’t give up hope. You were my best friend before you were—you were my boyfriend and I lost both of that, with the accident. It’s stupid. I’m sorry.”
“You should move on,” you say, instead of telling him that hope isn’t anything to be sorry for. “Find someone else who isn’t a walking memory.”
“I could,” he agrees. “But it’s like—it’d feel like, like how it feels wrong to buy a puppy the day after your old dog dies. It’s not wrong, but it—it just doesn’t feel right.”
“Thank you for comparing me to a dog,” you say dryly, and when he looks at you, startled, you smile. That just makes him look away again. So you ask him, “What do you want from me?”
“I don’t know,” he mumbles, but you don’t think his cheeks are pink only because of the wind. His ears are turning a little red, too, and for some absurd reason you find this unutterably adorable. “I mean—I do, but it’s kind of…well, I don’t want to, to pressure you or anything, and I—“
“Just tell me,” you say.
“Do you want to go out with me?” he says all in a rush. “I mean—I know you’re not you, I mean, you’re not the old you, but sometimes you do something and it’s like you’re still in there, even if it’s not the same you, and I—I guess I just want to ask if you, if you want to try, I mean. If you want to date someone else that makes sense too but I just—I’d like to try, if you don’t mind. If you want to.” He blushes harder, hugging himself either against the cold or against you, and he still won’t look at you in the eye.
You look at him, study his face. You look at the curve of his lips and the bend of his neck, the line of his cheekbones and arch of his eyelashes. You loved that, once, you think. Could you love that again? You ask yourself what you want to do—not what you would have done, once upon a time and a lifetime ago, but what you want to do now.
The answer is surprisingly easy. It comes from the part of you that remembers how to ride a bike, to play the piano, to walk, talk, eat, drink, breathe. The part of you the amnesia could not touch but you cannot touch either. You want to kiss the corner of that soft mouth, kiss away the unhappiness and the loneliness and make him smile like he did at the party, as if this was a perfect moment that nothing could ever erase. You are pretty sure actually doing it would be a mistake, but you also think that Yelina was right: maybe you remember more of him than you think you do.
“I think that would be a good idea,” you say. The words feel like they are coming from very far away. “But I want to date as if—you were starting over. As if I was someone new.”
“Okay,” he says, looking at you at last. His eyes are huge and full of hope and the urge to kiss him is worse than ever. “I can do that. I mean—I want to do that.”
You are not lying when you say, “I want to do that too.”
“Would you like some dinner?” he asks shyly. “I mean—I know its short notice but if you haven’t eaten yet, I haven’t eaten yet either, so…”
“I’d like that,” you tell him. “And maybe a movie afterwards. Just to stick to the classics, you know.”
He smiles at you then, and if it’s a wobblier and less sure smile than the want you want to see, it’s a start.
*
Sometimes you wonder if maybe it’d be better, if it’d have been easier for you to just up and move away and start over—you can’t remember having ever seen your twin sister before, or even that you ever had a twin; you can’t recognize your best friend and don’t recall having ever slept with your boyfriend; you don’t even remember that you ever had parents let alone where they live and why June 6 is their special day. Maybe it’d be easier, you think, to just give up on the past and move on. Find someone who doesn’t see someone you don’t know reflected in your face, meet people who don’t know who you used to be and doesn’t care. It’s got to be easier than living with your own ghost.
But then sometimes—sometimes you get flashes. Plotting the adventures of the Fifty-first Pony Brigade against the evil Megatrons of Megasteroid 5, dodging their mega-lasers of doom. Someone big and warm hugging you in the dark while thunder booms overhead and the rain drums like armies marching over your roof. The press and slide of another body against yours and a name that’s on the tip of your tongue when you wake up soaked in sweat and aching hard.
And then you think, all these people, they know you don’t know them and don’t know if you ever will, but they’re still here. How can you give up when no one else will?
So you stick around, and you fall in love with your best friend all over again, and you relearn all your sister’s favorite restaurants and cafes and make new favorites for yourself, and you make sure to mark June 6 on your calendar and buy a present for the people who are your parents, every year.
You’re not the same person you used to be. Maybe this is as good as it’s going to get. And it’s easier than you thought it would be. Because they’re all still here, and so are you.