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“Well, clearly,” Vivi announces, sitting back against the wall of the van, “this ghost or whatever had to nerf me ‘cause I’m too powerful. That’s why I can’t remember anything. If they left me alone, then my raw powers of insight would’ve blown this plot wide open. We would’ve found-“ She stops, and her eyes abruptly glaze over.
“Lewis,” Arthur reminds her, ignoring the sick tug in his gut every time this happens.
“Yeah. Him.” It’s shaken her, he can tell, but she shoulders on bravely. “We would’ve wrapped this shit up in like a week.”
“Vivi Yukino, MVP.”
“Hell yeah.”
Arthur grins and drops another tag onto the map. The location feels significant, although he can’t quite pin down why. Vivi got the brunt of the memory issues, but he’s not unscathed either. It’s why he spent the time to painstakingly make these little Lewis-tags, tracing his friend’s face in his bootleg copy of Illustrator to make a little vector Lewis that he can add to his map. It helps, on the mornings when they both wake up and can’t remember why the fuck, precisely, they’re running out their savings on this shitty exhausting road trip.
Also, they’re adorable, and he’s pretty sure Lewis would appreciate that.
Pretty sure.
Well, he’ll confirm it when they find him.
Vivi sits up and shuffles over to rustle around in Arthur’s little 12-volt cooler. She’s been trying to convince him to put a solar panel on the roof to help power it, but they drive around so much that so far it’s been sufficient to just hook up a second battery to the engine and charge it up as they drive. Vivi has a lot of grand #vanlife ideas, and while Arthur appreciates the aesthetic, a lot of the modifications she’s suggested are kind of out of his budget.
She emerges with two sandwiches. One, she bites into right away. The other one goes on a paper towel, and then on Arthur’s lap next to the laptop. When he doesn’t immediately pick it up, she jabs him in the side.
“Eat something, dammit,” she says. “You can’t actually subsist on coffee and determination, you know.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“You’re never hungry. That’s why I’m here. You need to sleep at some point too. Those bags under your eyes are getting big enough to put groceries in.”
Arthur gives her a look. She raises an eyebrow, unrepentant, and puts a bottle of water next to him too.
He turns back to his laptop, but he takes a bite of the sandwich. It’s good, he has to admit. Vivi’s not much of a cook, but she can assemble a mean sandwich. He doesn’t have to look at her to feel her satisfaction radiating.
That’s how it goes. Arthur is the ideas guy, since he’s the one who can actually hold their objectives in his head, and Vivi badgers him into eating and sleeping and taking his meds. It’s a reversal of their normal roles, where Vivi finds the jobs and makes the plans and Arthur deals with transportation and supplies and the other minutiae. (Lewis…what did Lewis do? He had a role, but Arthur can only grasp at it in the negative, when he expects something to be there and then it isn’t, probing at it like a missing tooth.)
It’s uncomfortable for both of them. Being in charge is sending his nerves into overdrive, making him even worse at taking care of himself than normal. Vivi hates not knowing what’s going on. Arthur has lost track of how many times he’s explained what they’re doing, where they’re going, who they’re looking for.
The map is synced to his phone, and the phone is what Arthur uses for a GPS. He’s got a mount for it that sticks to his windshield, but he prefers to avoid it if he can. If he hasn’t plotted out a route himself, or at least pored over it beforehand, his anxiety goes through the roof.
It’s getting dark, but they’ve got a ways to go before they hit the next marker on his map, so after Arthur finishes tinkering with it, he closes his laptop and gets back into the driver’s seat. Technically, they don’t have a schedule, but something in Arthur’s gut screams at him that he can’t rest. Lewis is gone. Lewis is gone, and he’s left a void in Vivi’s head, and whenever Arthur tries to think back to the last time he saw him, his entire being shies away from it. What were they doing? Where were they when it happened, when Lewis disappeared? He was with them and then he wasn’t.
All that Arthur has is that they’d been planning to explore a cave. It’s not that he lost time, precisely, he’s pretty sure they’d gone there as planned, but the whole thing is a blur. Something bad happened there. He can’t pin it down further than that. They went into that cave with Lewis, and now Lewis is gone and Arthur has a prosthetic arm and Vivi has some kind of laser-focused ghost dementia, and Arthur can’t look at Vivi’s dog without a stab of terror (and when did Mystery become Vivi’s dog? Arthur likes Mystery, Mystery is a good dog, he’s never been afraid of dogs before this—)
Arthur slumps against the steering wheel and groans. He’s so tired. It’s been ages since the last time he slept. The combination of anxiety and urging, pressing guilt make it impossible to drift off, and even when he does, his sleep is filled with formless nightmares that he can’t remember.
Or, well. Used to be. Ever since that weird, terrifying encounter with the ghost mansion (he looked familiar, why did he look familiar), his nightmares have become very vivid indeed.
He turns the key in the ignition and drives until he can’t keep his eyes open.
Vivi wakes up when Arthur crawls into the back of the van beside her.
The air mattress is only big enough for one person, and he always insists that she takes it. She thinks that’s bullshit, but she can’t outlast him. Vivi is pretty useless on less than eight hours, and although she can nudge her internal clock to be nocturnal with a good enough reason (such as ghosts), the process has to be deliberate and premeditated. Otherwise she starts nodding off around 11 whether she wants to or not.
She sits up blearily, shoving Mystery off her legs (he wakes up enough to whine at her, but goes; she pretends not to notice how Arthur stiffens and clutches at his metal arm at the sound). Arthur seems to realize what she’s doing when she gets up on her knees with her glasses and stuffed turtle bundled in one arm. He’s halfway through rolling out the Yoga Mat of Disappointment, which is what they’ve dubbed the other sleeping option in the van after the second air mattress popped three weeks ago (except they’ve had the Yoga Mat of Disappointment for longer than those three weeks, and she can’t figure out why they even had it with two air mattresses; the answer slips away from her like water whenever she tries to grasp it).
“Go back to sleep,” he whispers, squinting at her.
“You first,” she responds, and tries to bat his hands away from the foam. It’s clumsy. She’s still mostly asleep.
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Doesn’t have to. Why are we whispering? Get on the fucking mattress.”
“Vivi—”
She clambers onto the yoga mat and shoves Arthur. He squeaks and topples onto the mattress, still warm from her body heat. She would very much like to be there still, to be honest, but she can’t remember the last time she saw Arthur sleep properly. She grabs his feet and heaves those onto the mattress too. He’s still wearing his jeans, for some reason, but at least his shoes are off. He stares at her, stunned.
She finishes rolling out the mat. Her blanket and pillow are still on the mattress, so she grabs Arthur’s out of their bin and plops down.
“You don’t have to,” Arthur whispers, but his eyes are already closing. The shadows around them are bruise-dark. His shirt is riding up a little, a strip of pale skin in the moonlight, and it looks oddly vulnerable. He’s very thin.
“Go th’ fuck to sleep,” she tells him, garbled, and immediately follows her own advice.
He’s still asleep when she wakes up, which is a minor miracle. She’s a little achy. The Yoga Mat of Disappointment is aptly named. She doesn’t get up right away, though. It’s so vanishingly rare that she gets to see him like this. His expression is slack, but he’s still frowning a little. His upper lip is rough and dark with stubble. At some point during the night he got under the blanket, but his bare feet are still sticking out.
She loves him. That’s not in question. The only thing is that sometimes she can’t quite pin down what kind of love it is, if she just loves him like a friend or if she’s maybe in love with him a little bit too. It manifests in the way she wants to reach out and smooth the little worry line between his eyebrows with her thumb, wants to rasp her knuckles along his jaw until she understands what part of his mysteriously bi-colored stubble is orange like his sideburns or black like his goatee. She might want to kiss him, just a little.
She won’t, though. Something is stopping her, something she can’t quite put a name to, guilt or grief or something like fear. Too much is happening right now. There’s a reason they’re on the road and not at home in their own real beds, and she can’t fucking place it, and it’s maddening.
What she can do is take care of things, as quietly as she can, while Arthur sleeps. She gets up and lets Mystery out. (She wouldn’t worry about it at home, but as freakishly smart as her dog is, you do need opposable thumbs to open the back of the van and do it quietly.) The van is parked on the side of the road, somewhere in the middle of nowhere. It’s remarkably peaceful. She stretches out the soreness from basically sleeping on the floor while Mystery runs around, then makes PB&J’s for both of them. Probably, technically, she should be feeding Mystery dog food, but he always eats human food at home, and he’s older than she is. Aside from a handful of toxic-to-dogs foods, she just feeds him the same thing she eats and he seems happy.
Vivi is in the middle of smearing strawberry jam (not grape, for Mystery’s sake) onto a piece of bread for a third sandwich when Arthur’s breath starts to catch. Wincing, she carefully puts the sandwich down and shuffles over to his side.
“Arthur?” she says, and reaches over to shake him.
Clearly this is not her lucky day, because Arthur jolts awake from his nightmare by flailing and smacking the glasses off her face. He catches her pretty good in the process. She yelps and jerks back to sit on her heels, rubbing her nose. It’s not bleeding, but it stings.
“Wuh,” Arthur says. She squints at him through her watering eyes.
He still looks like shit, frankly. His breath is coming fast and shaky, and he scrambles up to a sitting position, blinking with bloodshot eyes. There are pillow creases on one side of his face (which, if she’s being honest, are kind of adorable).
“Nice shot,” she tells him.
Arthur’s eyes widen as he notices her crooked glasses. “Shit, sorry,” he rasps, sleep-rough.
She waves him off. “Mystery does worse than this like half the time, you’re fine. He’s little but he’s really great at stealing your pillows and then kicking you in the face in the middle of the night.”
He laughs shakily and starts to lean back. “Fuck, ow, ow,” he hisses, prosthetic arm buckling underneath him. “Ow, shit.” He rubs at his shoulder, wincing, probing at the connection points where his fancy robotic arm is strapped to his stump. “Geez. Remind me to not sleep in this thing.”
Vivi raises an arch eyebrow. “I will when you actually go to sleep at a halfway decent hour, mister. What time was it last night? Like 3am?”
He rolls his eyes. “It was only like 1:30, give me a break.” Vivi raises the other eyebrow at him, and he deflates. “Look, what time is it now? 7-something? That’s like six whole hours.”
“Six whole hours!”
“Shut the fuck up.” Arthur gingerly tests the range of motion in his prosthetic and hisses again. “Ow, god dammit. I gotta take this off. Can you…”
She turns back to her sandwich-making to give him some privacy. Behind her, she can hear him wriggling out of his shirt, undoing the various clasps and straps and clamps that keep his prosthetic attached to the tiny nub that’s all that remains of his left arm. She’s not sure which he’s shier about, taking his shirt off or letting her see the stump. (She’s seen both before. She was one of the people taking care of him in the hospital whenever his Uncle Lance couldn’t make it, and they’ve also been stuck in this van for weeks at this point. He’s probably gotten an eyeful of her tits at some point too.)
By the time he’s gotten back into a clean shirt, left sleeve hanging empty for now, she’s made a sandwich for him, and a second one for her too. She passes his sandwich to him, and he takes it without complaining, although he does also pull out an energy drink out of the cooler to go along with it. She makes a face at him for that.
“Shut up,” he says again, pointing at her with the can. “Caffeine in the morning is legal.”
“Yeah, yeah,” she mutters, waving him off. They’ve had this argument before.
She finds his meds for him while he eats, twists off the fussy little prescription caps since he’s down an arm right now. It’s routine by now, almost comfortable. She brushes her teeth out back of the van while he takes them. It’s a nice morning, Texas sunshine and a brisk breeze. Mystery is nosing at a scrubby little bush beside the road. She sighs and leans against the van. She wishes this was just a normal road trip, for fun, instead of…whatever it is they’re doing.
Arthur climbs out of the van a few minutes later, wearing a different pair of jeans and with the empty sleeve of his t-shirt tucked into his puffy vest. He’s awkwardly lugging his prosthetic and his toolbox (the small robotics toolbox, not the big mechanic toolbox for van maintenance) with his good hand. Vivi takes her turn changing inside while he checks over the arm carefully.
“Well, the arm’s fine,” Arthur reports as she pulls on some clean socks. “I didn’t fuck it up from lying on it, at least. But it looks like, uh…45 consecutive hours is too long without a break.”
“Wow. Yeah, no shit, Arthur. That thing’s heavy, too…”
“Yeah. I’ll be fine, though, I’m just sore.”
“Yeah.” She side-eyes Arthur. Just sore for him could mean an awful lot of things; he has a bad habit of hiding things until they get so bad he physically can’t hide them anymore. “Well, let me know if you need a hand with anything. Uh. Literally or figuratively.”
“Ha. Nah, I’m fine.” He rubs at the stump, wincing. “...actually, could you grab the ibuprofen?”
“You got it.” She opens the bottle for him and passes it to him, raising an eyebrow as he shakes out…wow, that’s a lot of painkillers. “Your liver’s going to hate you, man.”
He knocks back the pills and gives her a dry look. “Yeah, well. They won’t give me any more of the good stuff so I gotta make do.”
“That’s, like, the same amount they had me on when I got my wisdom teeth out. Shit.”
“Welcome to the American healthcare system. It sucks.” He raises his energy drink to her like a toast.
They get back on the road a few minutes later. Vivi offers to drive. Arthur prefers to drive the van himself, and he can manage well enough with just his right arm, but he still looks exhausted, and she manages to coax him into the passenger seat.
Something is wrong. She knows that. She doesn’t know where they’re going (she never knows on this trip, and every time she tries to push herself the thoughts dissolve into pink-tinged static—) but she’s got a GPS and Arthur to give her directions. Mystery perches on the seat between them. She’s got all of her boys (by which she means Arthur and Mystery, there’s no one else, there’s never been anyone else—) right beside her, and she loves them so much it hurts, and somewhere deep below it she aches with the absence of something.
Somewhere out there, there are answers. But for now, she turns on the radio, singing along until Arthur finally joins in, and the sun paints the world gold, and they drive.
It’s almost enough.