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An Amazing Digital Circus Fanfic
Memory in the circus was a complicated thing. In his more lucid moments, Kinger suggested that it was impossible to compress an entire person into a few gigabytes of data, so something had to give. It made sense, and the circus was different enough that, beyond the first few moment of panic at losing so much, it became easy enough to live without the memories.
They just weren’t expecting it to be permanent.
It starts with the first aid kit.
Her dad put it together for them after they escaped, which was nice since neither of them remembered enough about medicine to do it themselves.
The only problem is the labels.
It’s been too long since he read, he decides. There wasn’t much reading to be done in the circus, and whenever there was, it was always in giant, easy-to-read letters.
These words blur together into tiny lines, like ants marching around the bottle, and he has to squint to make them stop.
He puts up with it for a while, until one day the headache gets so bad he can’t read them at all and he can’t find the one for pain.
She helps him, of course.
(She always does, when he needs it, and he needs to get better about just asking.)
But enough is enough, so he grabs a pad of sticky notes and a marker and writes Pain in big block letters before sticking it to the front of the bottle.
She leans over the back of his chair, watching as he writes Throwing Up next, and stops him.
“Do nausea instead. If I see the words “throwing up” when I’m already sick, it’ll just make me feel worse.”
He’s about to snap something about that being a her problem, but bites his tongue. She’s going through the same stuff he is. She, at least, is not going to judge him for this.
It doesn’t make it easier to admit, though.
“I don’t–I don’t remember how to spell that.”
She stares at him for a minute, and he starts to wonder if he was wrong. Then she says, “now that you mention it, I don’t either. Huh.”
She looks it up, rattling off the spelling a minute later, and he writes it down.
It’s the interview that first gets to her.
They both got the first jobs they could find, but even with their combined paychecks, they’re barely making ends meet, so she searches for positions as an accountant, hoping for something like she used to do.
She applies and applies and applies, but with the gap in her resume, employers aren’t exactly hoping to hire her.
She gets a phone interview, and she’s trying so hard to sound confident, to sound mature (everyone tells her she still sounds like a kid over the phone), and she’s hoping maybe, maybe this will work out, when the recruiter asks her name, and she–
She can’t remember.
It was one of the first things she looked for when she got out, and she’s written it on who knows how many applications, but there are just too many things she’s supposed to remember and it doesn’t feel like her anymore.
It’s on her driver’s license. She can just go get it and problem solved.
Except that’ll take too long, and people don’t just forget their name, and they’ll think she’s lying, and she’ll never get the job, and what if they tell other companies she interviews with later–
A post-it note appears directly in her line of vision, a name scrawled in thick, sharp lines. She reads it off, then her gaze follows the arm holding it up to the worried eyes staring down at her. She smiles gratefully, and he sticks the note up on the fridge next to the one with their address.
The pain meds don’t help with the headaches.
He doesn’t know why. He vaguely remembers it helping before. Of course, he’s pretty sure he didn’t have headaches this often back then.
He tries sleeping it off, but with his head pounding this much, he can’t relax enough.
“Can I get you anything?” she asks when she gets home, and even without looking, he can hear the worried look on her face. “A snack? Water?”
He’s about to say no, when it suddenly clicks, and he sits up.
“You okay?”
“Water,” he mutters, and it comes out scratchy. Okay, that really should have been a clue. “I haven’t had water.”
Honestly, he’s not sure when he drank some last. It . . . might have been yesterday.
He drinks three glasses, his brain suddenly remembering what being thirsty feels like after the first sip, and the pain eventually recedes.
Drink Water joins the sticky notes on the cabinets.
It’s just a stupid mistake.
She never used to be clumsy, so she doesn’t even think to pay attention to the cracks littered through the sidewalk. She trips, and pain comes rushing in like an annoyingly familiar acquaintance.
It’s worse than in the circus, though, making her head swim and her knee buckle when she tries to push through it like she’s used to.
He finds her lying on the grass, waiting for the dizziness to pass so she can get herself inside.
“Why didn’t you call?" he snaps, and she doesn’t complain because she knows he’s just worried.
He carries her inside, and she squeezes the object in her hand as the jostling triggers another wave of nausea. Oh. She’s holding her phone.
He gets her some pain medicine, and she falls asleep on the couch, grateful she doesn’t have to go to work today.
The next morning is much better. Her foot aches, sure, but with the medicine, it’s not unbearable to push through it. It starts feeling tight and numb at one point, but she loosens up her shoelaces around the swelling, and the blood starts flowing again.
The pain doesn’t really go away, but it’s been so long since she had an injury Caine couldn’t fix that she can’t remember if that’s normal or not.
Eventually, though, she gets used to it, and it becomes easier to stop thinking about it.
“What is wrong with your foot?”
“Oh, I think it’s broken,” she says without looking up from her work. Her coworker doesn’t walk away, though, so she looks up, wondering if there’s something they need.
She doesn’t know why they look so sick.
At least, not until she gets dragged to the hospital and the doctor performs an X-Ray. She sees it then. It might have been a clean break to start with, but she’s shattered her bone, putting pressure on it when she shouldn’t have.
“Didn’t it hurt?”
All she can do is shrug, because it did, but– “I’m used to it.”