Work Text:
Somewhere between getting off the ship and having to adjust to a planet that is only vaguely familiar, he takes some comfort in looking at his face. It isn’t vanity, he just likes to look at himself, like if he can study and memorize all the little details the world will make sense.
“My name is Doug Eiffel,” he says one day, when reality feels specifically fake. “Whatever that’s supposed to mean.”
He figures he’ll either figure it out or lose his mind. Well, bi means both.
This is how it starts: he’s living with Renee and Hera and Renee’s husband (though technically they aren’t married anymore because they were apparently declared dead and that’s how his life is going. Of course it is) and he starts having nightmares.
Night terrors, actually. He doesn’t remember the “trauma.” It’s not that he doesn’t believe Renee and Hera (and Nik, the maybe husband and reason they have groceries) have serious trauma, because they definitely do. The stories they’ll tell late at night, or the brief images in Hera’s voice when she panics or the things Renee shouts in her sleep all hint at something really, really bad. (Sue him, he doesn’t have a ton of words that fit this level of seriousness.) But it doesn’t seem like something he lived through. He’s building a life, not rebuilding. Hera has panic attacks and Renee has nightmares and just spends days Not Here, just drifting. But he’s fine. Or at least, his issues are around personhood. Different shit.
The first six months are alright. Isabel and Daniel are around for the first two weeks after they all move in with Nik, and they do most of the work in setting up Hera. He understands why Isabel is capable of this, because she can do basically anything if she glares at it long enough. Daniel is the wild card, he’ll sit and watch and roll his eyes, and then he’ll do that dissociate-y thing (yes he knows its a real scientific word to describe the experience but these are the only people he knows and trusts and it feels wrong to treat them like a cold calculating scientist) and then he goes somewhere, comes back a few hours later and knows how to solve the problem.
“Maxwell doesn’t know everything,” Isabel says one time, after Daniel takes five minutes to fix a problem with the wiring she’s been stuck on for two days.
“Alana is smarter than all of us dead,” Daniel replies.
“You can’t rely on her laptop forever,” Isabel says back.
“Yeah, and who’s fault is that?” Daniel goes from pissed off to angry in the span of a second, Nik and Renee get between them before he basically shuts down.
Which is how Doug learnt not everyone made it back from space.
In the third week, Hera wakes up, latches onto him, and Daniel and Lovelace don’t know what to do with themselves. They go to Disneyland, then rent a van and start driving south. Renee gets postcards.
The first few months after that are, hard. He wakes up sometimes to Renee standing over him, watching. She tries to take his pulse when he’s sleeping once, and he punches her in his panic. They both feel awful, and Hera downloads some medical textbooks and the best technology in biomedical monitoring and can tell Renee if something looks off. Doug finds he doesn’t mind unless he thinks about it, but doesn’t want to hear any of the words. Nik says that the way to make it the most fair is if all three of them are able to check in on each others stats, because “it takes away the power imbalance,” Renee goes white, but then agrees. He decides he’ll find out if it’s important.
Also, they heal. At first, it looks like tons of physical contact, they watch Lord of the Rings, a lot of documentaries, Harry Potter, and the Officially Released Hamilton OBC recording, which Renee has feelings about both the quality of and the political statement of it all and Doug does not get it, but he is just happy to see her happy. Also, everyone in it is hot and talented. So. There’s that.
Doug feels weird about not doing anything, and two months in gets a job delivering pizzas. It’s nice. He gets to drive around, and they program Hera into the car so he has company. He likes being on the radio and he likes seeing people happy.
Three months in, Renee doesn’t sleep for nearly four days, and starts seeing people who aren’t alive anymore (which is how he learns the names Kepler and Hilbert), which is scary and hard, and she gets into pretty intensive therapy after Nik helps them draft a truly impressive NDA. Nik offers the same thing for Doug, since it would basically be the same document. No trouble if Doug wanted someone to talk to.
“I’m doing great!” He says. Here's the thing: he means it. This is the best he’s ever felt. (Quick, no one mention that he has no memories of ever doing better or worse.) He isn’t losing it like everyone else. He likes his normalcy.
Four months coming back to earth they have to get flu shots.
“You don’t have to,” says Renee, as he starts hyperventilating.
“I’m fine,” he says.
Nik replies, “You clearly are not.”
“You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do,” asserts Renee.
“But it might be worse in the long run if you actually get the flu,” says Hera.
They look at each other for a second.
“I can get a flu shot,” Doug says.
“It’s your decision,” says Hera, somehow knowing the right thing to say to sooth his brain, “No one will do anything to you don’t want, and if you say stop or no, the nurse will.”
That reassurance sits heavy in his chest and gets him through the door, through the consent forms, through the brief wait, and then the tightened band wraps around him and the smell of an alcohol wipe and-
He passes out before the needle even makes contact, freaking out everyone but the precocious nurse who gives him an apple juice when he comes to with Renee’s jacket under his head.
So it turns out they might have to go through some of the stuff that happened to him in space.
Renee and Hera give him a brief highlight reel of the shit he went through. Renee more or less drifts half a foot to the left, disconnecting enough to talk about it. Hera apologises a lot. He gets the picture. Alright. He can google exposure therapy and start working on some issues with needles. People use hypnotism to deal with needles. It won’t be bad.
He’s had a few night terrors, waking himself up screaming, but it had been pretty consistent of one every few weeks.
After they start telling him things, he has three nights in a row.
Hera wakes him up on the fourth night before he starts screaming, having learnt the pattern.
“Doug, wake up, you’re on Earth, you’re safe-”
“No, Hera, Hilbert, he’s, Hera you gotta protect me-”
“Doug, what going on?”
After taking a few minutes remembering how to breathe without thinking about it, Hera asks, “You where talking about Hilbert, when I woke you up.”
“Who is that again?”
Things they know:
- Doug doesn’t have conscious memories
- Doug is showing symptoms of PTSD, which is based around memories
The first year psychology lectures Hera accesses (illegally) talk about memories, and how none of Doug’s frontal lobe structures are damaged, probably, since he still has his personality, and maybe that means his memories exist, but the connections are faulty
So, 3) Doug still has unconscious memories, somewhere. Whatever Pryce did ruined the connections , which they can probably rebuild. If he feels like suffering
Isabel and Daniel are back.Which is great.
“Do you want them back?” asks Isabel.
He has a lot of answers, from “I don’t know” to “What if it just makes it worse?” He feels like he’s standing on the edge of the cliff of insanity, and maybe at the bottom there is a chance of being Doug Eiffel Again, but Renee and Lovelace and Hera are the strongest people he’s ever met, and they can barely handle what’s been done to them. What if he can’t take it?
“Why would you want to remember?” asks Daniel, one night, when they are sitting on the front porch. Daniel is lighting candles and melting the wax in little circles on the wood steps. He’s drinking hot chocolate. Doug is wrapped in a blanket, because he gets cold faster than everyone else.
“That bad?” he asks.
“Yeah,” says Daniel. “It was bad, and it was pointless most of the time.”
“Oh?” he asks. There’s a long silence.
“It was risky and it was hard, and we saved the world, but well, there isn’t much here for me,” says Daniel at long last. “Not a lot of work for a guy like me, and not a lot of people wanting to stick around when they find out the job.”
“I’m a pizza delivery man,” says Doug, and Daniel actually laughs so hard he almost lights Renee and Nik’s house on fire, which is extra rude since him and Isabel just, live there now.
“The question is, who is Doug Eiffel?” Daniel says after he’s recovered himself.
He has a dream and he knows where he is, which should be a good thing, supporting Hera’s theory about memory and all that, except it’s the USS Horrible Unending Nightmare and he remembers being scared and exhausted and he knows what’s supposed to happen but there’s nothing, there’s nothing and he’s going to die here and he knows it and his body is failing him (and with a certain sense of irony he knows why he needs to wear a blanket when Daniel just needs a leather jacket to stay warm) and he can feel how much his fingernail beds sting and his body aches and he feels so horrifyingly and deeply alone-
He wakes up crying this time, which is a nice change in pace, Hera surrounding him by the speakers in his walls, which is almost comforting, but maybe to similar to the tin can that kept trying to kill him.
What if he doesn’t want to remember?
“Who is Doug Eiffel?” he asks Renee, Hera, and Isabel.
“My best friend,” says Renee.
“A good guy, “says Hera, “You are a good guy.”
“Doug Eiffel is whatever you make him to be,” says Isabel, who is so far the most helpful. She gives a whole spiel when he corners her with the good coffee Renee tucks out of Daniels reach. “Personhood is more vague than we want it to be. You are who you say you are, and you are what you do, and you are who your experiences make you to be. You’re Doug Eiffel because you say so.”
Doug looks at her. “And if I’m Doug Eiffel with no memories and PTSD?”
“Then you’ll be Doug Eiffel,” she says.
He looks at her, not sure what he’s expecting. She seems relatively calm. “And if I’m Doug Eiffel with all of his memories, my memories, whatever, and worse PTSD?”
“Then you’ll be Doug Eiffel with a slightly different set of pieces,” she looks at him pointedly, and he ruins the effect by yawning.
“Go to sleep, Doug” she says.
He gets a brief flash of something behind his eyes and without any sense of it, he says “Will do Captain.” He doesn’t really registar what a weird and loaded sentence that is, and gets up to go to bed. He’s been averaging four hours of sleep for the last week.
She looks at the doorway a long time.
He has more nightmares, and sometimes he says things that don’t make sense to him but make Renee and Isabel look like he’s punched them in a gut.
He gets trapped in the bathroom after his shower and it’s so small and it’s full of steam and he can’t quite breathe and then Daniel is picking him up off the floor but he’s only half there, the other half is somewhere else, the air is the same but dead and there’s someone else standing sentry over Daniel’s shoulder and-
He’s in the car getting groceries with Nik and some classical sound comes on and he loses the entire rest of the day to just emptiness.
“Okay,” he says to Hera. “I don’t think there’s any harm in knowing what my hellbrain wants to use to kill me.” He takes a few deep, measured breathes. Hera goes over local therapists and neurologists and helps him set up a few cursory appointments.
They realize pretty early on, is that he can access memories easily enough, he just needs to be upset enough. The issue is getting them to stick around. It’s repetitive and shitty and he almost stops sleeping entirely, taking a leave from delivering pizzas. Nik helps him get it approved as disability leave and he spends his waking hours reading and meditating and napping in the sun.
(There is no sun in space.)
He wakes up from an afternoon nap to Renee teaching Hera to make paninis (or rather to operate the panini press) and asks the room: “Did we have a plant monster running around our space ship at some point?”
Daniel is driving them for some late night Chinese food pickup (because they don’t need their credit card and address linked), and there’s a way about the light hits him and Doug asks, “There was two of you?”
Daniel almost crashes the car.
One night he looks around the dinner table, because Nik is the only one who can cook and demands they all eat green things once a day, and Doug blurts out, “Did I officially come out to you? I know we all know but I don’t remember the conversation-” and before he can finish the thought Daniel is grinning and Isabel looks like she wants to roll her eyes into oblivion.
He looks in the mirror every morning, just looking at his face, searching. It’s a little frustrating, but sometimes he can see flashes of himself, and sometimes has a sense of who’s looking back.
“My name is Doug Eiffel,” he says. “I decide what that means.”
There’s events he has full memory of, and some that are shaky, and some that are more trouble than they’re worth, but he has a sense of people.
Renee and Isabel tell him about Hilbert in greater detail, and they take pauses in the middles of sentences and sometimes he just fills in the gaps. Daniel is supposed to do the same for Maxwell and Kepler, but instead he gets drunk and tell stories Doug would have no reason to know.
(It only took him halfway through the second story to realize what was going on, since he definitely had never been to Uruguay, he remembered Mexico with his family and Palm Springs for his romantic getaway.)
He doesn’t know if this is necessarily good for Daniel, and he almost called him Jacobi, which is odd but right on his tongue, even if it sends Daniel shuddering.
He’s not entirely sure if he’s better for it, but he understands Doug Eiffel, which is someone who he is but will never be the same way.
That said, he remembers some of the good things. Doug remembers the inside jokes. Doug remembers pranks and the long days and the view that made space almost worthwhile.
He is happier, on a new level.
He falls asleep holding onto a cell phone Hera can talk quietly to him to, like they’re little kids under the blankets at a sleepover. They don’t stay up very late, and yet, he does not dream.