@ofmemcries cont’d from [x]
“You know I aim to please.” The witty repartee came to him easily - always had, with Irma - but today it sounded automatic, distracted, as if he were performing a script by rote. He’d wanted to see her, spend a little time with an old friend that was really his, remind himself that there were parts of him that the old Nick had had nothing to do with, but now that he was here all the tension of the last few days seemed to have melted away into a weary malaise he didn’t know what to do with.
“They like to stick around and skimp on rent - guess you’d know that better than most.” He tried for a smile, but only met her eyes for a moment - he could see the concern there, and he couldn’t say what he wanted said and look at her at the same time. Turned out that if you dedicated enough of your life to taking care of other people, you started to forget how to ask for support yourself. “Sorry, Irma. Didn’t mean to come by and be bad company - been a rough couple of days.” He sighed, and the fakeness of it - usually nothing but a background irritation these days - grated on him more than it should have. He didn’t need to breathe, but he couldn’t stop faking it. Energy wasted on something he didn’t need, trying to be more like something he wasn’t.
“Started going over the old Winter files again.” He’d promised to stop, maybe more than once, but he could never seem to stay away. “One of my contacts got back to me on the holotapes - only new one he managed to track down ended up in Quincy. Would need a damned army to get in there, now. If I’d known a little sooner-” He pressed the pads of his fingers to his temple, as if hoping to rub away a migraine, then laughed - an unpleasant sound, bitter and weary. “Should’ve known MacDowell would manage to thwart me one more time, the fat prick.” And there was the problem: he could feel the old Nick’s memories starting to leak into his own daily experiences again. Watching Vadim Bobrov talk with his mouth full and thinking of the corrupt, pissant “detective” his counterpart had had to work with two hundred years ago - seeing his quiet, reasonable partner instead of Yefim. His friends, taking on faces of a past that wasn’t really his.
“Same old story. Trying to figure out how much of me is me - if any of it is.”
