not your muse

The last time he saw her name in print, it was etched on a tombstone over an empty grave. Standard procedure for fallen militia, presumed long gone. For better or worse, the last time he put eyes on it was seven years ago. He hasn't forgotten, could never forget if he tried. But Harvey knew Jo when she was alive; smiling, arguing, breathing -- there was no need to mar the memory by staring at an empty grave.

Except it sneaks up on him, on the dossier of FBI assets joining the city's taskforce. Joanna Larsen. Typed in Timed New fucking Roman, haunting and simultaneously cold. Surely, it's a coincidence. A common enough name in the United States, right? Harvey dismisses it for days, ignoring the knot in his stomach that tells him something different. It's impossible, and entertaining his wistful delusions is stupid. She's gone, and no amount of haunted dreams will her back to existence.

But he picks up his feet from behind his desk, flaps his collar to conceal the burn marks from his latest incident. The address is easy enough to smuggle out of the dossier, and Harvey decides he needs to know. Once and for all. His hand is rough on the door, knocking and near banging. Desperate and undone, until --

"What the fuck?" He says, throat gone dry and blue eyes ablazing. Their story was over, and in all his hopes of her return, he never expected her.

Instead, she headed into the belly of the beast, this roiling city of crime and culture, knowing what laid ahead. It was a reunion she'd never allowed herself to entertain. In the beginning, when she had first stepped back onto US soil, she hadn't remembered him. An acute brain injury left her with localized amnesia -- three years of her life wiped away. Cognative Behavorial Therapy wasn't an option, it was an order. And with time her memories emerged from the murky depths of her brain and there he was. Except the man from her past, maybe the only person she had ever, truly loved, didn't exist in the present tense. Like her, it seemed he left a part of himself out in that desert and the person who returned home was only a fragment, a broken identical twin.

But she, too, had changed. And whatever fantasies had played out in her head about reconnecting were quickly snuffed out. She couldn't stomach the heartbreak.

Despite her reservations and general sense of impending doom about being here, about having to work with him, Joanna took a small comfort in the fact that she could control the narrative, could plan out the moment they would see each other again, and she would be forced to face the past.

The sudden and rather violent banging on the door reverberated through her small downtown apartment, but still Joanna didn't consider he might be on the other side. Hubris, maybe. Or an underestimation of their shared history and of his own experience of it. By the time she got to the door, she was annoyed -- angry, even, at the audacity. So, when she finally flung open the heavy door, the expression that froze on her face was one of incense. And as her stomach dropped like a weight in a deep pit, she found herself breathless. What the fuck was right.

𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐮𝐧’𝐝 𝐛𝐞𝐞𝐧 𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐬𝐡 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 day - harsh, but romy could withstand it. she hadn’t lived in nevada so long for nothing, after all. even the kentucky heat of her childhood could be brutal, despite the lush forest canopy. on this monday afteroon she’d found a patch of shade beneath a crooked tree in the park, sitting cross-legged in the grass with a melting cherry popsicle in one hand and a copy of the national enquirer spread open in her lap. she was deep in an article about a woman who claimed to be in a committed relationship with an alien named vorlan. “hm,” she said, to no one in particular at first. then, after a moment, her eyes lifted toward someone else. “i don’t think folks are open-minded enough about interplanetary love.” her face didn’t change. no smile, no wink, like she’d been waiting all day to defend a woman from ohio and her extraterrestrial boyfriend. “reckon you’d ever date an alien?” she asked, letting the question hang there as if it were perfectly normal. “if you believe in them, i mean.” she glanced back down at the paper, thoughtful. “i drove the extraterrestrial highway once. saw the area 51 alien museum and stuff. sometimes thinkin’ about the stars is a good distraction from what’s goin’ on here on earth.”