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Official Records
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...welcome to British intelligence files, agent #1142, request ?...

...request accepted, bringing up file of Calixte Von...

Name: Calixte Von
Age: 22
Occupation: Bodyguard
Background: Family have been bodyguards to the Ambrose family for generations. Trained in almost every art possible, Calixte is highly skilled in everything from fighting to cooking, and is almost entirely impossible to read, expression wise. His strange appearance comes from a curse applied to him when he foiled an assassin intended for his charge. Despite his mask having no apparent visibility, he misses almost nothing. Strangely unexpressive and with a unique dialect, Calixte has little records in the justice system - unsuprising, as most of his family are very secretive - and any records that do appear of crimes are swiftly erased. Despite being every bit as dangerous as his ancestors, perhaps even more so, Calixte is not an international threat due to his single-minded determination to proctect his chosen charge.
Danger Level: Minimal, unless you threaten his charge. In that case, consider yourself dead.


..logging off acknowledged. Thankyou for using our services, agent....

-STATIC-

"Calixte, did you write that journal?"
"Ambrose?"
"You don't have to."
"I...I have written it."
"Can I see?"
"Of course, Ambers."

Name: Calixte Vontruas
Age: Physically twenty-one, Mental fuctions may be a little lower - ask Ambers to test? Chronologically untraceable due to position.

"Lix! This reads like a formal report!"
"....it was challenging at first."

Occupation: Memory Keeper's Blade. Soon to be parent?

"Lix....is that a smiley face?"
"I have no idea what you are talking about Ambers."
"It is, isn't it."
"Sir, may I ask you to shut up."
"Snerk."

Background:

"That...is quite a few crossed out lines."
"It was difficult - but I kept thinking about you and it helped."
"....That was the single most sappy-"
"I REPEAT SHUT UP."

Do you ever feel like you’ve forgotten something?

Not consistently, of course.
But a fleeting sense of sorrow at someone, or something that you don’t know, have never seen. A prickle in your eyes at a sight that shouldn’t upset you. Wet eyes at night for no reason you can discern?

That’s probably my fault.
Sorry.

Maybe you were lost as a child – an hour, maybe two – when your parents couldn’t find you, and when they did you were asleep, and they woke you up and you said you had the most magnificent time – and they said, what were you dreaming about, and you said – it wasn’t a dream! And they said, what?

And you’d find yourself speechless, and they would take you home and scold you for disappearing, but all the time holding your hand as if you might slip away again. And you want to pull your hand out and run, because whatever the not-dream was, you want to stay.

Or perhaps, if you’re an adult now, a teenager, you don’t remember anything like that – but you did something inexplicable once. Might be small – pressing two switches at once when the distance between them is too large, and someone says – how did you do that? And when you try again, you can’t – it’s impossible – and your parent looks at you, laughs – but there’s a tightness beneath it.

Maybe you ask them if they were, or you were lost once as a child – and there’s a flicker in their expression. They laugh it off, say no – but afterwards a swift question:

“Why, do you have some kind of repressed memory?”

And you roll your eyes. Say of course not, you were just curious.
But it niggles you all the same – you won’t call them out as a liar (even though that was untrue, you know it), because the reaction to that question was panic, fear.

I’m better now. Catch the child before they use the magic again, so I don't have to wipe the parents too.

Maybe your memories are fuzzy from childhood. Your family ask questions you can’t answer – you don’t remember, so you grin, laugh, say you were too young – or lie, say yes, of course – when you don’t, because I wiped those too, lifting the tangled web of memory threads too fast, or they were too deep, I pulled loose strings.

There are many of you, out there.
People who came here, and then forgot.
Everywhere.

Adults now, who work in science, laugh at the supernatural, but sometimes look at the shadows and frown.
Teenagers with ghosts in their heads, who are deemed weird by their peers – but for some reason they’re jealous too.
Children who have imaginary friends that move things they swear they didn’t touch – no proof, never any proof – but the parents are angry, afraid.
A teasing sibling that tells you about monsters in the shadows – and you don’t believe them but there’s something in their eyes that makes you shudder.

Dogs p***k their ears up. Stare at you.
Cats sometimes follow you, wind round your legs, look at you with something you can’t decipher, can’t understand.
But you half-feel you used to.
A squirrel touches you.
A bird lands near you, too near, and you move and it startles, as if expecting something else.

It probably hurts.
For that, again, I am sorry.
But the boundaries must be kept.

You can’t remember, and if it feels better, neither can those on the other side.

My name is Calixte – I am the Memory Keeper’s Blade.

I devoted my life to him since my birth and his.
It was not of my choice, not of my making – but I do not regret, what’s done is done – and this must be done. If not – if not, you would not be thinking.
Not be feeling.
You would be torn and tattered, dust on the winds of time.
We were born of the first and last couples of mixed sides, before the time shifts came.
When they discovered what was happening, the devastation, they used our two souls to close the gap – the first and last infants, tied with the blood-soaked string of fate.
My parents are distant memories to me – but he can see his, I know. The memories of those who died to stop this.

I wonder sometimes if he has the harder job.
I take the memories of those who wander, take them home.
Watch the magic fade from them.
Watch their other die.
It is hard. When I started I would cry, sob, and he would comfort me, child’s hand on another child’s head – we grew alone, drawn only at first by a purposeful feeling, then guided by each other and by that same pull.
He was the strong one, always.
And then I discovered the horrible truth.
I only felt that death once.

Amberson kept the memories for all time.
He keeps the memories that I extract, takes them from me, stores them.
A thousand thousands of those who passed over and had to be forced back.
A thousand thousand other halves, a thousand thousand joined existences.
And he remembers them, always.

He was strong for me.
Now I had to be strong for him.
I trained and trained.
Now the process is quick.
Painless.
And every time I return and watch his apprehension (so readable now we’re no longer children, now we’ve watched ages come and go, now we know each other as well as ourselves) turn to gratitude, I know.

It’s worth it, being like this, taking on this shape, absorbing some of the memories, taking the pain and the fear.

He is the Memory Keeper.
I am his Blade.

Together, we cut the bridging strings between dimensions.
Together we keep back the dissonances.
Together we can face anything.


“You want to what!?”

All my composure flies out the window, and my mouth parts a tiny bit beneath my mask.

Amberson delicately places his teacup down, eyes crinkling at the edges as he represses his laughter. It doesn’t make me feel any better that he’s hiding it more than usual, a tiny, almost imperceptible crinkle. Reasserting myself, my nose twitches lightly as I study his tiny expressions as he watches me, reading the tiny movements impervious to others – to others we are expressionless – Amberson tells me that it is because we have lived together so long, (He uses the word aeons, a word he is particularly fond of nowadays, his current fascination with British accents from the 21st century), our expressions have become microscopical, indescernable. For some reason, lately, he has been making us practice cultures from that period too, as well as ridiculously over-exaggurated expressions (He tells me they are natural, and my response was the slightest twitch of an eyebrow) only he has made me practice a strange, neutral voice – one completely without accent, unplacable, unnatural for that time.

Of course, now it all makes sense.
He wants to settle in one dimension.

Of all things – he wants to adopt children!
But not normal children, no.

He wishes to settle in a off-split dimension called Gaia.

Off-split dimensions (there are a few) are created from the splinters from when the two dimensions were separated. Less rigid in their rules than the two main dimensions, they often have little-to-no rules of life and species, created from the dreams in the main dimensions – therefore, everchanging.

Gaia is the middle-ground dreams – a mixture of fantastical and normal, nightmares and fantasies.

He has been out more than normal lately true – but for this?
He tells me he has found a place.

It is called TGPS.
It creates children.

And there is such honest yearning in his expression….how can I refuse that?

He has given me all I wanted ever since we were children – he is my benefactor, my charge.

He has never once requested anything, though I have learned to anticipate his needs and pre-empt them.

How can I deny his one request?

And so, we prepare. Slip our lives into the timestream, create ourselves a home, a history – he will be a British Lord, emigrating to the streets of the city where TGPS resides after a dispute over land and titles. I will be his silent guardian, his vigilant protector from the shadows. He has planned everything down to the last detail – allowing for my hesitant nature, my inability to express.

And so I find myself here, in front of the shop window, staring at all the things and hopes we need to begin this new adventure, children, and underneath my porcelain mask, hidden in the shadows of the rafters, I smile. He opens the door, a silver bell jingles.

I slip in unseen, but some creature cocks an ear at my passing, then flicks it, unconcerned.

He leads us upstairs, to an interview, and I fade out the shadows.
We face questions of all kinds – I am prepared for anything, but I am not needed to say much – for this is Amberson’s child, is it not, and he deftly covers any lapse I accidentally drop with my minute facial expressions and confusing dialect. The interviewer acts tough, but he is as expressive as the rest of this world – immensely in other words – and it is easy to tell that Amberson’s desperate desire gets to him.

We return a few days later, and there sits a box on the counter. Silent, beautiful tears spill from Amberson’s lids, and I stand in front of him, take the box from his shaking hands and open it deftly. My wrists brush his in our usual gesture of affection.

As I slip open the lid, however, my face too creases in surprise.

…Two?
The baker - Hikari, I remember his name was, appears, hands Amberson a tissue, smiles at me, gaze eerily accurate through my porcelain mask.

“There are two of you, and my partner thinks that you too wish for a child.”

I start to speak, the denial begins to form on my lips- Me? I don’t wish for anything. I am content if Amberson is content – he is my everythi- except he places the pocky stick in my hands, and I am silent before it exits, and despite everything, the tears fall from my eyes too, dripping from the bottom of the mask.

Inside it I can feel the pulse of life – it reaches out to me unconsciously, and I can honestly thank for the first time the parents I never knew, because despite everything I went through, the feeling of a life reaching out to me like this is more beautiful than anything – a supernova, creation, dreams – this moment is worth everything.

And somehow my hand clings to Amberson’s sleeve the way it did when we were children, and he takes my hand like he did then and smiles.

Even now, it appears, we are bound together by fate.

Only this time, I can’t bring myself to be sad about it.


"Ambers? I didn't mean to upset you. If it's that bad, I can change it."
"Happy tears, Lix. Happy tears."

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