Chương 36: Chapter Thirty-Six: The Keeping of Old Company

For a while after that they simply sat. The small ordinary weight of the conversation had done, up until that point, exactly what Alice suspected Nell had come here to do in the first place, besides making sure she was still alive, of course. She filled the room with something other than Alice's fear, giving her somewhere safe to put her attention that wasn't the door, or the window, or the ways in which a man who now knew she had survived could find her.

Or that in her mind, somehow, none of that mattered as much as the simple fact that she'd barely lived at all in her past life. It was easy, and most conversations with Nell were always easy, and Alice let herself sink into the ease of it longer than she probably should have, the tea going from too hot to drink to nearly cold in her hands while the room dimmed further around them, the fire's small light doing most of the work now that the last candle had finally given out.

It was Alice who broke the silence eventually, turning her cup slowly between her palms, watching what light remained catch in it.

"Can I ask you something?" she said.

"And you can tell me it's none of my business."

"You always ask that before the peculiar ones." Nell's mouth twitched with not quite a smile.

"Go on, then."

"Am I very different?" Alice kept her eyes on the cup rather than on Nell's face.

"From before. From the Alice you knew. I've wondered for a while, and I've never quite had the nerve to ask outright." The silence that followed wasn't long, but it had weight to it.

"Why ask this now?" Nell said finally. Alice pursed her lips slightly. She would be honest where she could. But there were places where she simply couldn't even pretend at honesty.

"It has been a bit more than two months now," she started.

"And I haven't remembered anything since…" she paused intentionally for a second or two, "... the attack, yet. I don't think I ever will, by now. It feels like the person I used to be before September will always be a stranger to me." Nell didn't say anything to that at first. She listened thoughtfully, the firelight catching the careful attention she was giving to every word. Not that she expected Nell to ever do something as dull as the polite half-listening of someone waiting for their turn to speak, but…

the way Nell looked now… her expression was closer to what Alice imagined a person listening to a confession they'd been quietly expecting for a long while looked like.

"I don't say that for sympathy," Alice went on, before the silence could settle too long and turn the moment into something heavier than she meant it to be.

"I say it because I think you're the only person left in this city who might actually know the difference. Between who she was, and who I am now." She made herself meet Nell's eyes properly, rather than the cup.

"I'd like to know. If you're willing to tell me." Nell set her own cup down slowly, giving herself, it seemed at least, a moment to decide how to answer.

"I am not the only person," Nell said at first.

"There are others who can tell the difference, but that is not the question you are asking me now, is it?" It wasn't, but Alice would have loved the answer to that as well, since she had little idea of who these 'others' might be. She did not interrupt, however.

"You want the honest answer, or the kind one?" Nell said.

"The honest one. Please. I'd rather know than be comforted," Alice said. There was no kind option for her, after all. She and former Alice were literally different people. It was best to know how different they were, so she could manage the perceptions of others regarding her supposed before-and-after changes better. To add to that, personally, she was deeply curious of who the previous tenant of her body was and what she had been like.

From what she understood, they were not extremely different, somewhat perhaps, but not extremely. Someone would have called her out on it by now, if they were not at all alike in manner or speech. A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation. Nell studied her for a long moment, the fire settling and popping softly behind them both, and then seemed to come to some decision.

"There's a fair bit that's the same," she said slowly.

"The way you stand when you think no one's looking at you proper, always half turned toward the door, like you're keeping an exit in mind even when there's nothing to run from. You did that–," she stopped herself and frowned, before continuing, " she did that too, near enough since I first knew her. And you've got the same trick of going quiet right before you say something sharp, like you are weighing the words before you speak." A small almost-smile appeared at the corner of her mouth.

"Gave me a fright the first few times, after, how much of her was still sitting right there in your face, even as you remembered nothing of her life." You did that. Present tense, caught and corrected almost before it left Nell's mouth. It was a small slip, the kind that comforted Alice a little for it showed that the line between her and the former had been genuinely blurred in Nell's mind.

It was, she thought, a strange thing to be almost moved by, but it was proof that whatever confusion Nell carried about her changes, it wasn't some calculated performance. It would be difficult to guard a lie carefully enough and then to still manage to get it wrong when the time was right more than two months in.

"And the differences?" Alice asked, when she didn't go on.

"You ask more questions." she said simply, turning her own cup slowly between her palms. There was little tea left.

"Some of them things that she'd have wondered over as well, probably. She hadn't been in Londinium that long, you see. It wouldn't have been strange." Alice Darling had not been a Londinium native? That was news to the current Alice. She struggled not to show her shock on her face. Nell continued, "She wasn't stupid, whatever else she was, but she'd never have asked that much out loud, not even to me. Kept things folded up tight and never once let you see what was underneath. And you're..."

She seemed to search for the right word.

"Steadier, I think. Even when you're frightened, which I don't believe she ever quite let herself be, not where anyone could see it happen. She'd sooner have bled quiet in a corner than let a single soul watch her hands shake." Her gaze dropped briefly to Alice's hands as she said it. They were still now, folded loosely around the cooling cup, giving away nothing at all.

She couldn't have known, of course, that they'd spent most of the day doing exactly what she'd just described the old Alice as refusing to do, trembling in an empty room with no one there to see them fail at staying steady. The irony of it landed somewhere quiet and trembling in Alice's chest. She was, even in this deeply unflattering way, apparently more like her predecessor than Nell would ever have reason to know.

Alice, too, wished that if her hands were to shake, that it only ever happened where nobody was watching. Was that the comparison being made here? Or did Nell somehow know or guess that Alice's own hands had shaken terribly not thirty minutes prior? Something in Alice went very still at that, though she kept her face carefully composed.

"You knew her well," she said eventually. It wasn't a question, though Alice had initially intended it as one. She seemed to have misread this relationship early on. What a terrible mistake on her part.

"Well enough." Nell's gaze didn't waver, steady in a way that made the small room feel smaller still.

"Memories make a person, I've always thought. More than the face does, more than the hands, more than the voice. You've got her eyes and her voice and half her habits worn in like a strange coat you found, but you're not my Alice. You're not, and I knew that plain as anything the very first time you looked at me on that corner and I could see you trying to work out who I was, like a stranger, instead of just knowing me the way she always had."

"Then why," Alice said, and heard the edge of genuine confusion in her own voice before she could smooth it away, "didn't you say something? When we first met again, out on the pitch. If you were so close…" Nell's expression didn't change, but something behind it did, some old caution settling back into place like a shutter drawn suddenly across a window.

"We heard the story of what happened to you, out there," she said, slower now, more careful with each word than she'd been a moment before.

"The whole street did, near enough, before the week was out. A girl found half-dead in an alley, remembering nothing at all. I wasn't about to walk up to a stranger wearing my friend's face and try to convince her to trust me, was I? What would that have got either of us? You'd have thought me mad, or worse, some woman trying to work an angle on a girl too addled to know better, and I'd have–" Nell stopped there, and didn't finish it, looking sadder than she had looked that entire conversation.

She was about to offer her some comfort when… [Mental Skill Resistance] – Passive. Alice was on her feet before she'd decided to stand. The teacup went with her, slipping from fingers that had gone numb with something closer to shock than any thought. It struck the floorboards hard enough to crack straight through, thin dark line of tea spreading out beneath it.