This Heart that I Misplaced [narrative for ataraxion]

[savethebullshit]

It’s all fine.

Just forget about it.

Murphy is going to be fine.

He just forgot to let her know he’s going to be late. He’s just off somewhere.

Of course, these methods of denial only worked for a few hours at best. They tied her over until she fell into a fitful sleep and wakes now with fists clenched early in the morning, only to roll over and see his bed empty. Now, after an entire night has gone by without him, she is starting to realize the utter ridiculousness of her coping techniques. She checked to see if he was in the med bay the night before, in case he’s injured too much to contact her. Now, there’s nothing to do. No small way to somehow justify his absence. Anne’s communicator is on the desk. She moves over to it now, climbing clumsily from the bed in her pajamas. Taking it into her hands, she sends Murphy a short text. Somehow, ending it with I love you seems to make everything momentarily better. If it’s the last thing he hears from her…

It won’t be. Don’t think like that.

The text goes through. It doesn’t get returned to her. Murphy is still on the Tranquility. He hasn’t gone home. That just twists her stomach into knots. She knows how things work here. She knows how things are. The damning sound of the text actually sending, going through to Murphy’s inbox, makes her throat tighten.

"So do the same for me, okay? Don't be one of the people I have to bury."

God dammit, Murphy.

Crossing the room, Anne doesn’t bother getting dressed. Slowly, in a rather hideous display of childishness, she sits down on Murphy’s bed for a moment and clutches the blanket in her fists. She can’t stand to see it empty, made, can’t stand to see his head not poking out from under the covers. She crawls under them instead. The space between the blanket and sheets smells like Murphy. It’s easy to close her eyes and pretend he’s there next to her, but when she opens her eyes, he isn’t. There’s only emptiness, and it’s as maddening as it is heartbreaking. Curling into a ball in the warm fortress inside the blankets, Anne lets a dry sob escape. Twenty years ago, maybe more, she used to crawl into the same sort of safe haven to escape the possibility of the monsters in her closet. Now, she’s hiding from a threat far more daunting.

---------


Initially, it had been just a little worry, tugging at the back of her mind, like a worm burrowing there. She’d pushed it out, pushed it away, pretended not to notice it, but it was there. And it’s there still, as Anne stands near the grav couches, hand pressed flat against the wall. The hard surface is cool under her hand, offering a soothing chill against her palm, and she focuses on that instead of on the reality of the situation at hand. She’s known it for a while now, but it’s now impossible to ignore. It’s boring into her consciousness, and no matter how much she tries to fight it, no matter how many times she goes out looking, no matter how many people offer to help look for him with boundless hope that everything is going to be alright, no matter how many times Heather tells her not to assume the worst, it’s still there. And by the moment, as she stands here now at the edge of some turning point, the moments before the moment when there’s no hope left at all, it’s a nagging shout in the back of her head. It sends warning stabs of worry down to her heart.

Murphy is dead.

It’s not as though she has no hope left. Though it’s a nagging impulse burned as deeply into the back of her mind as the thought that she might never see Murphy again, Anne isn’t at that point of simply giving up. Of just slumping to the floor and giving in to the temptation to go to pieces and let herself waste away. If she had no hope, she’d still be slumped in his bed, waiting for it all to be over. Instead, she’s here. In a way, she’s still waiting for it all to be over; the jump is happening soon. If Murphy isn’t dead now, he will be then, and so will she. As much as she knows he would hate the idea, as much as she knows everyone who cares about her would hate the idea, it’s a decision she made a few days ago. When she remembered the jump was coming up.

She’ll wait here. She’ll wait here for Murphy, and if by some miracle he shows up in time, then she’ll get into the safety of her pod. If not, then it’ll just be effective proof that he’s dead. Which is just something she can’t live with. It would have sounded ridiculous and pathetic even to herself up until this past year or so, but a world without Murphy is one she doesn’t even want to exist in. It’s become apparent to her, in ways she can’t even describe, during these long and pointless days of searching and waiting and hoping against all odds that she’ll see him again.

Murphy is something she can’t live without

There’s a crushing sense of helplessness in the fact that she’s done all the searching for Murphy she can, spread the word and gotten people to help and still all she can do is stand here and wait for a conclusion. Anne has shed a lot of tears this week, done a lot of moping and missing him and just being absolutely sick thinking that the last time she spoke to him, the last time she kissed him, really might have been the last time. Thinking back on it now, it feels like wasted time. It feels like taking him for granted. A quick kiss on their way out the door, to their separate jobs and activities. Endlessly briefer than it would have been, if she’d known how the rest of the week was going to play out. If she’d had any idea, she would have bypassed work altogether, would have kept him right where he was and possibly just thrown him down on her bed and distracted him effectively. Made good use of this constant closeness and told him, showed him the things she has no way to convey now.

That’s the sick part of it all, she muses as she stands there, presses her back heavily against the wall and sighs with every ounce of energy left in her being, a heavy sigh that she swears rattles the very air around her. If she’d known it wouldn’t have happened in the first place. She and Murphy would already be in their pods, completely unaware of their monthlong unconsciousness until they woke up sick and sticky and sore after the jump like they always do. But then there’s no way she could have known. There’s no way to somehow blame herself, to turn the hurt into something cold and bitter and ugly and easier to deal with than this heavy and painful grief. For the first time in their long and complicated friendship-turned-romance, Anne understands completely why Murphy functions the way he does. Why he turns things around and pins them on himself, takes it all out on himself. Lets his pain bleed out in the form of guilt and self-loathing until she pushes back, reminds him to let go of it.

It’s because the alternative is sometimes too disgusting.

She doesn’t want to hate Murphy for disappearing. She doesn’t want to hate Murphy for not being right here, right now.

It’s ironic, finally coming to understand those dark and complicated parts of Murphy now, when he’s dead or will be soon, when she will be soon. At the end of a long and treacherous road is that almost comforting truth, that measure of understanding. All at once, none of this seems quite so bitter. It seems like the end of something, the inevitable conclusion that she’s been heading toward for a long time. The road is ending, cut off at the edge of some sheer drop-off that she can’t swerve to avoid, not now.

And now, when she can almost physically feel the impending closeness of the jump approaching, when she can practically smell death coming for her, she closes her eyes and lets the back of her head rest against the coolness of the wall behind her. For a moment, there is absolute stillness, absolute silence. Everything is eerily clear, like she’s looking at the world through a completely new set of eyes. There’s a strange sense of peace in just letting go, in letting the inevitable sink in. As she stands in the stillness of the med bay, a strange thing happens. There is a calm here, the stillness before the storm. Oddly, a tiny smile makes its way over her face.

”Guess I’ll be seeing you soon, dad.”