As Hermes promised, Greece is full of sunshine. It is warm, very breezy, and it smells a billion universes away from the mountains in Colorado.

John squints at the sky, ... palely, to put it charitably. It's not that he avoids the sun. But it's also true that prolonged exposure, sans sunblock, tends to end up with reddening and then peeling which then reveals another layer of Definitely White Guy underneath. It's a good thing he's not Australian, honestly.

"Are those statues what I think they are?"

So if, hypothetically, Helena and John were wandering the streets, occasionally subtly defacing public property with nearly hidden graffiti -- which of course they would not do because they are upstanding citizens and their parents and guardians respectively are government employees -- drawn with a sharpie, it only stands to reason that it would rain.

This time of the year, it's not of the bone-chilling variety, though neither is it quite warm enough to classify as spring rains. John's mouth takes on an irritated, almost defensive set; he caps his sharpie (that he was not using to draw on the underside of the back of a parkbench) and takes Helena's hand firmly, as if daring (her? An onlooker?) to protest otherwise, and looks around for appropriate shelter.

Family life has always been a sort of careful chorus of revolutions for the Sherman-Townshends; each little satellite has wandered within the range of each others' fields, and now gravity forms a shaky ring for them. Bright and tenuous, the kind they don't even have anymore on carousels, but then that's just as well. None of them are the type to go leaning out into space for that kind of insanity. They just keep on circling, arms outstretched and hands barely touching, their backs to a blackening sun.

His first instinct is to keep his mouth shut: contrary to tales those surnamed Drake, given name Robert might tell (as he remembers? He doesn't quite remember, but the picture seems familiar), it usually is, because talking is talking, it isn't action. Say what you mean (when the time is appropriate, he learns just by watching Erik, whom he doesn't quite remember, and of whom there are no pictures), say it clearly, that's what communication is about. Some things don't require, or don't seem to require on the surface, any talking, but rather action. He thinks Helena (smartmouthed, curving smiling mouth, hair swishing forward like a curtain, the first new shiny thing in his new shiny memory) would call that caveman thinking. He cannot go to Helena's universe and find her with the magic of hormonal attraction. He can barely think of anything to say to the Liz that isn't his Liz.

There is little to be done, but it is not a direct channel to prehistoric skies for atavistic answers that tells him: yes there is. It's an instinct waking up, something dingy and sharp beneath the dust, a horrible suspicion, the moment before the story ends when the impossible becomes reality. The disappearing act.

He must make the girl reappear. This doesn't happen by punching people, but rather, by saying the magic words (and perhaps having punched people earlier, or conveniently hidden behind a mirror). John pages through his sparsely worded journal. If the journal had been all he had to figure out the kind of person he was, ... there isn't even enough material to finish that sentence. But he knows well enough by now: angrier, more prone to setting things on fire, actively hating or at least strongly disliking more people and types of people, etc. etc. (In the mirror, he glances only out of the corner of his eye when possible, or else a monologue springs to life of its own accord: John "Walking Cliché" Allerdyce, unshaven pyrokinetic vagrant who apparently speaks in monosyllables ...)

Rain made Helena upset once. He'd noted it down, and mentioned a drowned policeman. And that was it. No reason why, and an entire library of unsaid implications that he thought he would always know, but it is not for him anymore that remembering would be best. It is for something entirely separate. It is for something entirely new.

One useless new/old memory John can't shake: small, hating the squeaky tiles in the grocery store as his mom, a woman with a soft voice but a firm grip on his wrist, leads him towards the exit. Near the door is a wide yellow bowl, plastic, funnel-like. She lets him drop a dime near the edge. The tiny coin spirals inward faster and faster until it all the sounds stop, and it's gone. He bites his lip so hard it surprises him. It's for the children's miracle network, she tells him, and he can barely hear her. Want to put another in? He can't hear her at all.

Even now, he hardly can. He doesn't want to remember. You don't need to see the future to feel gravity.

'Sore throat' seems to've been sufficient explanation for why John hasn't been doing a lot of talking lately, though he thinks that Liz gave him a weird look. Then again, she seemed to be accustomed to giving him weird looks. Not for the first time, John seriously wonders about the life of John Allerdyce hitherto suddenly not being able to remember anything.

Also not for the first time, he considers the possibility that he isn't actually John Allerdyce, and has just somehow been inserted into the poor guy's life.

In any case, it's been enough days that if he says anything now, it's going to be really weird. And even if he doesn't know the people he's staying with very well, he's observed the silent smoking sessions on the porch and can only envision the fiasco of admitting he can't remember anything:

"Liz?"

"What, John?"

"I -- uh, I can't remember who I used to be."

Cue violins and angstophone. ... No. No, he'll just figure this out on his own, fix it, and hopefully they won't have noticed anything. Sometimes he remembers things, although they're not useful. For instance, he'd suddenly remembered that he'd had the book on Indian mythology checked out for three months. Why the hell he'd wanted anything to do with Indian mythology is beyond him, but he did manage to return it.

According to his ... journal? ... he seemed to have had some fixation on Agni, the fire god.

Below the last set of notes, he writes:

Liz: brown hair, yellow (!) eyes, smokes a lot, depressed

Henry: brown hair, hazel eyes, really mild-mannered (is secretly Superman?)

Warren: black hair, brown eyes, weird, dating a "JP" and/or a "Peter", not actually brother ???

Helena: black hair, brown eyes, I think the word is "spunky", really hard to say no to

As in, "no, I might be sick, don't come over". He's pretty sure she's the one most likely to figure out he's completely confused about his family situation here, and, well, he's a little afraid of that coming out so soon. Henry's mentioned the Bureau to him a few times, and he knows where it is; some digging around on the government website gave him a scant amount more of information, but John is thinking they could possibly help him. They seem to deal with strange things like that. And why the fuck he wanted to work for them is just another mystery he'll have to figure out.

John is not home, not because he is unaware he has one -- a quick perusal of his wallet yielded an address, after all -- but because he doesn't like all this. Namely, the not knowing shit ... shit. Perhaps in a day or two he will venture back to Colorado, or whenever he figures out how to use the pinpoint again. Which currently, he still thinks is just a cellphone.

His wallet has some money in it, and a picture of a girl with black hair. She's cute.

He found a lighter in his pocket, but no cigarettes. This is a shame, because he thinks he'd like to have one. Maybe. Possibly.

Or a drink, but it's not a good idea to compromise his already shaky perception of the world in general, even if he'd like to forget all the disturbing, bizarre people he'd inexplicably found himself among. He's forgotten enough, or at least, he assumes he's forgotten something. You don't just get plopped down among random weirdos to start existence, right?

Huh.

He's wearing a ring on a chain. And clothes, but nothing informative, it's not a uniform or anything. Just clothes. This is good, John feels. He is John Allerdyce, Normal Guy. Okay, Normal Guy with Memory Problems, but it's cool, he has an idea of where to start investigating all this. And hopefully the girl in the picture is not his sister or something, because that would be really weird.

In Delirium's realm, the second to second existence is real, but nothing else is. Spending time there (time that won't have passed outside of its peculiar wall-lessness) is like being swallowed. Sometimes, John needs that feeling of reduction and irrelevance; sometimes, he needs a silent way of return to the person he used to be. He'd been aimless but so much stronger. Now he feels too often diffused, and ashamed, and sorry that he isn't sorry. It's stupid but he says he's left the past behind, and he has, he meant to, but there's a clinical part of him that's standing aside and quietly noting all ambiguities. He means well, he's almost sure of that. And he could still fuck up so much, if he isn't vigilant every second of the day.

Those seconds don't exist here, though. So in a sense, he'll never leave, and nobody will ever know that he hasn't. He'll fill this world with fire, and never pass out. He'll burn everything pure before he has a chance to fuck this up, too.

Poll #788306 Is there a handy clocktower nearby the mansion?
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 14

Okay, what the HELL was John keeping on his nightstand at Xavier's??

Pee Ess: thank you to Jeri for buyin' me iconspace :3 I will strive to entertain with my excellent selection.