Plurk paste

He's good for Theta, in an utterly concrete, impossible to argue way. He's useful to Theta. What he remembers is objective; it doesn't matter if Theta can remember today, he has what he's stored from the man's memory, and beyond that, if he's just next to him, let alone touching him, he knows it all over again, crisp and clear and complete.

He can help Theta, just by being himself, by doing the thing that no one else wants him to do.

What's a little harder to explain is how Theta helps him, because it means explaining his gift. And that he's not good at doing. He doesn't know how it works, how it happened, even everything it does, he suspects; he just knows it's there.

What he knows is this: Sometimes being in crowds is too much. Sometimes being that close to too many people, getting too many lives, even if he never touches them or is there long enough to get everything the way he would if they stopped, makes him feel crazy. It makes him forget his own life. Who he is starts to bleed away, because he sees pieces of it in too many people. He sees pieces of lives and patterns they make, sorting them without meaning to. Good childhoods, bad childhoods, school years, first flats, experiences of homelessness, abuses, first loves, marriages, children -- each one is a little different but they're also so very much the same that it hurts, that it scares him, that it makes his head ache trying to sort through them and figure out which is his.

(What he knows, and doesn't ever want to talk about, even long enough to unburden himself: Sometimes he passes the wrong kinds of people. People with deeds in their past that make him ill. People who have done things that make him shake. People he can't help but run away from, no matter how hard he tries to stay still. People who shouldn't be allowed on the street. People who can almost make him wish he didn't have his gift.)

And that's when he goes to Theta, because he's only met one person who doesn't mind. One person who not only tolerates it when he reminisces about things he wasn't there for, who will let him touch if he doesn't talk about what he sees, but who wants it, need it. One person who is eager to let him touch, let him see, let him stay as close as he wants to get.

He drowns himself in Theta's history, and in echoes of the people Theta never was, the people who combined to make him -- though they fluctuate, they aren't as crystal and easily counted on as Theta's own history is, sometimes there's only a few and sometimes there's so many and sometimes there's none at all. He lets it push out all the other people, the masses, the categories, because there are kinds of memories, kind of experiences, in Theta's mind that nobody else has, that breaks all his categories. Lets it drive out the sharp, piercing pain of knowing exactly what people are capable of.

He puts his hands on Theta and lets him fill even the darkest corners of his mind, and when he comes back, he can be himself again.