Using the extractor’s ability to grab and hold memory, I spent my afternoons gently untangling the knots in her head and doing my best to straighten things back out.
Jay’s head, unfortunately, was an entirely different ballgame.
He had strangers’ memories stitched into his own like some sort of grotesque, violent tapestry of frayed neurons.
Seeing the insanely gruesome war scenes he’d been forced to endure play out before me on the projector made me so inconsolablyangrythatmy hands often began to shake.
I needed to take frequent breaks when working on Jay, because it just gutted me so badly to know that I’d left him alone to deal with all that fortwo years.
After several weeks of doing my best to stitch them both back together, I was starting to realize that while I was pretty confident I would beable to get my mother more or less back to normal, Jay would never be one hundred percent himself again.
I’d been able to extract a large portion of the invasive memories from his mind, but they’d somehow melded many of his core memories with the violent ones—to the point where they were so intertwined I couldn’t remove one without irrevocably damaging the other.
Doing so could do permanent damage to Jay’s entire personality, and I wasn’t willing to risk that.
“It’s okay,” he assured me one day as he put a pot of water on the stove to make us some tea. “It’s already better than it was.”
“But… I don’t want you to have to sufferat all.”I sighed, sliding my arms around his waist and burying my face into his back.
He stiffened slightly as he always did when I offered him any sort of casual touch. Once his body allowed him to confirm the touch didn’t hurt, he relaxed and continued stirring the loose tea in the simmering pot.
“See?That.I don’t want you to be afraid every time I touch you that I’m going to hurt you.”
“I’m not afraid you’re going to hurt me,” he said in that flat voice that now seemed to be his everyday voice.
The happy, upbeat lilt in his tone that he used to have when he rambled away to me on our morning walks to NeuroWell was another thing I was worried might be lost forever.
Though I didn’t mind this dry, mellow version of him either. I only worried because I wasn’t sure if he was like this because he was unhappy, or if this was just his status quo now.
He took the tea off the stove and turned in my arms, leaning back against the counter and looking down at me with that always-serious look on his gorgeous face.
“It’s just… still a surprise when you touch me. I’m not used to being touched at all, and every time I was touched, it was… not a good time. But I… I like it when you touch me, Milo. It’s all I’ve ever wanted. Please don’t stop. Not because it’s… taking me a while to get used to it.”
Tears stung the back of my eyes as I looked up at him, and though his expression remained blank, he cocked his head to the side.
“Why do you look like you’re going to cry?” he asked, and I buried my nose in his chest, hugging him close and inhaling his woodsy scent.
“I just love you so much, sometimes it makes me emotional.” I sniffed, and he wrapped his arms around my shoulders, dropping a soft kiss on the top of my head.
“I love you too, Milo. I’m sorry I’m so fucked up.”
“You’re not fucked up.”
He let out a soft huff, shaking his head slightly.
“I am. It’s okay to admit it. If I weren’t, you wouldn’t need to be digging around in my head every morning trying to piece me back together.”
I sighed, burrowing deeper into his arms and resisting the urge to stamp my foot in frustration at the fact that he was right.
“Fine. Maybe you’re a little fucked up. But it doesn’t matter. I love you fucked up.”
He let out a low chuckle, and I silently celebrated that small display of emotion.
“I believe you,” he replied, and those words, more than anything, made me feel better than I had in days.
“Come on…” I muttered to myself as I passed the extractor across Jay’s temple. I’d spent the last few days modifying the tech to work closer to how I’d rigged up the NeuroManipulator before I’d lost my memories.
It now sort of worked as a hybrid of sorts. I’d used it in the early stages of Jay’s recovery to remove a lot of the invasive memories Luke and Dr. Grey had implanted, but now I was more interested in untangling as many of the ones that seemed to have been fused together in a weird way.
