Puzzle Pieces

Even as she heard his footsteps moving quickly over to her, she couldn’t look up. Trinity actually flinched a little when he got close, her instincts telling her that anyone rushing up to her so quickly was usually a sign that she was about to get sorely beaten. He probably wouldn’t miss the way she shrank back and lifted her hands up in front of her face like she expected he was going to hurt her. Since Ehoron had never done anything to make her feel that way about him, he could likely surmise that the behavior had been picked up long before they’d met one another.

The young woman was a bit surprised when she felt the weight of his jacket on her shoulders. Her crying dwindled down to a confused sniffle and his voice drew her attention to look up at him. He was smiling at her, which was just about the last expression she’d expected to see on his face after all this. Gratitude washed over her, and with it a whole new slew of tears. Trinity threw her arms around his shoulders and buried herself against him, holding him tightly like she was afraid he’d disappear or change his mind if she let go. Her grip was uncomfortably strong for a woman as petite as she was, and he’d probably have to physically pry her off of him to get her to move anywhere. The promise of food helped. She looked up at him with big hopeful eyes and yet another rumble to her stomach.

Soon, he was able to convince her to head out. Trinity made only a brief stop to go back under the docks and grab her small pack that she had left down there. It wouldn’t take long for them to find a place that would serve them food and give them shelter for the night. She felt bad that Ehoron was paying for just about everything, but she was so hungry that she couldn’t bring herself to have any pride about it. She’d find a way to pay him back, assuming that she didn’t wind up wandering off again.

“One room or two?” the innkeeper asked, looking back and forth between the two of them rather than making any assumptions. Trinity’s reaction was to clutch onto Ehoron’s arm tightly in a mild panic, making it clear in not so many words that she didn’t want to have to stay in a room by herself. “...One room, then,” the man said with a slightly perplexed expression, having never had his question answered in quite that fashion before. He gave them a choice of a room with one bed or two smaller ones, which Trinity didn’t really seem to care about one way or another so she let Ehoron make the choice there, and within a few minutes they were upstairs with dinner being brought to their room.

Food had never tasted so good, though she felt that way nearly every time she was able to eat after she’d been starving. The woman barely stopped to taste the meal at all, practically inhaling it straight down her throat like she thought it might get taken from her if she didn’t eat it quickly enough. From their previous interactions he’d have noticed that she tended to eat a bit quickly, though not with as much gusto as she currently was displaying. By the time she finished eating, not a single crumb had been left on the plate.

She was somewhat dried off by then, though her clothes and hair were both still damp and clung to her limply. The garments were going to be uncomfortable sooner rather than later, but for now her mind wasn’t on that. Now that her stomach was finally full, her thoughts could return to more pressing matters. Trinity sat there with her head hung, looking a bit meek and forlorn. She was twisting her iLac in her hands nervously, trying to decide what to say or where to begin. Pulling open the application on the item that she used to type out messages to communicate, she told him, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to leave. I don’t know what happened. I tried to find you, but I didn’t know where I was or how to get back.”

Well, he didn’t seem too upset with her. She should have been assured by the fact that he’d gotten them a room and bought her food and pulled her out of the rain without question, but a part of her -- the part that was deeply scarred -- was still afraid that he would change his mind at any minute and decide he was better off without her around. There was a bit of sorrow to his smile as he explained to her that it was fine, that he hadn’t stuck around for too long after she’d gone missing as there had been plenty of others before her who had done the same.

While it wasn’t his intent, it made her feel guilty. She bit her lip a little in shame, short legs dangling uselessly off the edge of her chair. Trinity wasn’t exactly great with reading people, so she wasn’t really able to deduce that he’d had a harder time of it with her disappearing. However, she could see that his life had been full of people abandoning him, and that he’d been heavily affected by that. Though Ehoron probably wouldn’t feel the same way, Trinity felt he deserved an explanation. She wanted to remove all doubt from his mind that she had just up and left for no reason before randomly deciding to come back.

Getting up momentarily from the chair, she scooched it over right next to his and sat back down. Taking the phone back, she erased her previous message and began to type again, this time from an angle where he could see everything she was writing as she was putting it down. “I have some kind of memory loss problem. Ever since I can remember, I’ve had these moments where I black out,” she explained, typing slowly so she could think of her words carefully before putting them down.

“I will wake up in places and not know how I got there. Sometimes I’ll be in different clothes, or my clothes will be ruined. A lot of times covered in blood.” Trinity paused there for a moment, her thumbs hovering over the keys as she let that comment sit for a second or two for him to process. “I’ve woken up surrounded by strangers and by myself. I’ve acquired things I don’t know how I got. Like this iLac. I don’t remember getting it, but the security on it is biometrically sealed to me so I know it’s mine. Sometimes I’ll even come to or lose track of myself in the middle of other things that are going on. There was one time I was running away from someone, and the last thing I remember is the running… and then suddenly I was someplace else entirely, and several days had passed me by that I don’t remember.”

In truth, Trinity’s problems were much more than memory loss but there was no way for her to know that. She had not spent any significant amount of time with anyone that could observe the truth and relay it to her, or at least anyone who cared. The people that used to own her in Bellum knew what was wrong with her, but they had never bothered to inform the poor woman. So all she knew was that she blacked out randomly, sometimes for days at a time.

And it was terrifying.

She looked up at him for a moment with an unreadable expression. There was an understanding in her discolored eyes, and she glanced back down to type out, “You’re not the only one who has lost control and hurt people without meaning to.” That one sentiment was the reason why she had stopped to help Ehoron while he was down outside that village, why she had stuck with him when everyone else condemned him. Trinity had recognized that he hadn’t meant to hurt any villagers that day. He’d been trying to protect them, but something with his power had gotten away from him. She had seen it in his eyes when she had approached him, covering him from the rain… it was a feeling she could empathize with, because she herself had been in very similar situations multiple times in the past. The only difference was that she couldn’t remember the times she’d hurt anyone, though there had often been more than enough evidence around to incriminate herself.

“I can’t say it won’t happen again. I know it will. Sometimes it takes a while, but it always happens again eventually. I just don’t want you to think that I’m leaving because I want to go my own way. If it was up to me, I never would have left in the first place.”

The awful truth of the matter was that while Trinity had never really shown any immediately recognizable signs of such harsh trauma in her life, the biggest and most obvious evidence was always staring him and everyone else who met her in the face: She never talked, even though Ehoron now knew that she was capable of speaking. And Trinity could speak. She knew how to string words together into sentences to communicate, as was clear by her ability to type without any issue, and she was as fluent with language as every other human being.

But she never spoke. She was always too afraid. Speaking brought attention, and attention drew pain and humiliation. So she just learned not to talk.

Thankfully the awful truth didn’t seem to scare him away. If anything, he seemed… happier to know what had happened. Not happy that it was something she struggled with, of course, but content to know that it wasn’t anything he had done. Trinity had never told anyone about this part of her life before, mostly because she’d never really been able to keep a friend long enough to do so. Ehoron reached an arm around and gave her a hug, and she didn’t hesitate to return it, burying her face against him and wrapping both her limb around him.

He promised he would find her again if she ever disappeared, and that he wouldn’t let her be by herself anymore. She wasn’t sure why, but his words really struck a chord in her. Trinity squeezed him a little tighter, fighting back tears that she wasn’t really sure where they were coming from. It was just nice to have an actual friend, someone that knew what was happening with her and wasn’t scared off by it, that cared for her and wanted her around for more than just what she could be worth financially at the end of the day.

She didn’t stop him from pulling away and gathering up the dishes, setting them outside the door. Lifting a hand to her face she gently wiped away a bit of the moisture that had built up in her eyes. His smile was returning with a grateful one of her own, but that washed away the second he turned with the intent of going to get a second room for himself.

Trinity leapt out of her chair so fast that she didn’t even take the time to set her iLac down, letting it fall off her lap and clatter to the floor. She hooked one of his arms with both of hers and tried to stop him, shaking her head emphatically. There was no mistaking the fear in her eyes; more than anything she didn’t want to be by herself, apparently even to sleep. The truth was that she was afraid she was going to wake up again in some strange place and not know how to get back to him. If she was alone it was more likely to happen. If he was with her, well… maybe he could find a way to actually help her during those frightful lapses in consciousness and keep them from happening.

Or at least make sure she didn’t get involved in anything dangerous when it did happen.