#icarusxrising

Rules: In a text post, list ten books that have stayed with you in some way. Don’t take but a few minutes, and don’t think too hard — they don’t have to be the “right” or “great” works, just the ones that have touched you. Tag ten friends, including me, so I’ll see your list. Make sure you let your friends know you’ve tagged them!

So, in no particular order,

A Journey to the Center of the Earth - Jules Verne

Howl's Moving Castle - Diana Wynne Jones

The Harry Potter series - J. K. Rowling

The Inferno - Dante Alighieri

The Complete Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle

Good Omens - Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman

The Jurassic Park series - Michael Crichton

Dead Men Do Tell Tales - William R. Maples and Michael Browning

The Jeeves and Wooster series - P. G. Wodehouse

[ Huh, that's interesting! Mine all gradually decrease in length from the big toe to make a nice slope, until it gets to the pinky toe which suddenly is much shorter than the rest.

[Doesn't really matter if he was or wasn't he's so accustomed to things like this from Jim that regardless he leaps about a foot in the air and whips around snarling]

He leaves the PADD on his desk and ignores it for the rest of the day, choosing instead to spend his time in the neurology labs. There is was safe, there he could pretend he was working on a perplexing case of very acute memory loss (where the patient in question wasn't himself), where he can ignore the curious glances sent his direction, and where his main worry can still be Jocelyn is going to kill me for being away for so long and not official documents bearing the words euthanasia or divorce.

It's a fleeting comfort, and only ever lasts as long as he can spend pouring over reports and case logs, searching for any possible cure to this affliction. Once he steps back and stretches, all it takes are a few memories and the drop in his gut returns. The displacement, the idea that he's not in his own time and that the strangers whispering down the hall aren't actually strangers but old friends, all of this makes him dizzy and off-balance. Being on a Starship isn't helping matters.

As such, he's taken to wearing the medical whites instead choosing from the line of blue uniforms in his closet. Maybe here he earned them, but in his own head he's never once thought of Starfleet as an option. In the whites he can pretend they're a courtesy gift to a visiting country doctor rather than the second option available to the Chief Medical Officer. On first glance, he'd thought of course those clothes weren't his, anyhow, they had to be too big. But when he shrugged one on, he realized his shoulders had filled out, and he was in better shape than he remembered being down on Earth, and if that wasn't a punch in the gut he didn't know what was.

So much of his sanity currently relied on denial. No, he didn't know the Captain, no he wasn't CMO, no he's never been to San Francisco, no he doesn't remember your name, I'm sorry ma'am/sir, but you'll have to reintroduce yourself.

He still hasn't called Jo or Joce, either. Too afraid of what they might reveal, or that the picture of his daughter on his desk was accurate and he's really the man who killed his own-

No. Leo would never. Could never.

He slowly isolates himself, peels himself away from this crew and this ship, and remains immersed in his own denial.

And when he tries to sleep at night, his thoughts inevitably turn to: if this does work, if he does regain his memory, who will that make him? Who is he to these people? Who is he to himself? What kind of monster will he become?

~

They (and he's been reduced to vague pronouns considering he's not taking the time to relearn all of who they are) seem to know not to disturb him while he's working. For the most part he's left to his own devices, only having to deal with the occasional funny look when he addresses someone formally or to ask where something as common knowledge as the mess hall or the bathroom is. Today is no different, except that he's receiving technical information from another PADD on a helmet-like device, apparently the one they found their patient strapped to and the only device that could have altered the patient's mind and erased their memories of the last several years.