as_damaged | ☎ voicemail

Ed gestures to a table in the corner, free from a cluster of squawking nurses, and spared from the droning conversation of two over-the-hill doctors.

"Want to join me?"

He offers another smile, as he steps to the side to allow other customers to pass.

"Sure," she answers, paying for her own food and flashing the cashier a small smile, before stepping away from the counter and following his lead to the corner table.

"I hadn't realized you'd joined the staff," she muses aloud, setting her things down and slipping into a chair.

"I wouldn't say I've joined," Ed corrects, as he slides into the opposing chair. "The hospital needed volunteers, and I can handle the basics."

This isn't humility, Cameron. This is honest uncertainty, intermixed with a dash of self-deprecation. Then again, knowing Cameron, that's likely already apparent.

"Well," she begins, pulling the lid off the yogurt, "volunteering is a good way to test your comfort, without making any major commitments."

If it were a matter of false modesty she wouldn't be encouraging him. But Ed's hesitance is real, founded or not, which means Cameron's supportive.

"I'd prefer to be doing something useful," he adds, after a bite of salad, "Instead of staying at home. Reading the network, cooking."

Not to say, Ed isn't good at whittling away time; it'd be more fitting to say that he's a master of it-- how else does one cope with ten years of stasis?

"How are you?" The question involves genuine interest, not social courtesy. Really.

"Pretty well, actually." She smiles slightly. "I know the clock stopping is an ominous sign, but it's been a nice reprieve." Take that as you will; her solitary habits are hardly a secret, though she's generally disinclined to discuss the City's penalty for it. Being well-rested and therefore more well-adjusted takes a bit of the edge off.

"How have you been?"

Not enough that she won't deflect the question.

A question that measures the depths of great ravines, and the breadth of Andalusian fields: "How have you been?" Edward responds with a passive confirmation, lifting his shoulders limply and offering words too bland to escape the cipher of generality.

"I've settled into my own place, found something to occupy my time. No imminent crises," he catches the blue of her eyes, "I'm fine."

Ed takes another bite of his salad, passing over the chicken bits, then on to stabbing a pile of green lettuce and snow peas. "This place must seem completely absurd to you."

She smiles at that, as though at a private joke. "The human mind is extraordinarily resilient," she answers, then pauses for a spoon of yogurt, contemplating her answer. "Believing in any of this is a matter of expediency. But after a while, you get used to it-- to an extent, anyway." Here that little hook of a smile fades; all the things Cameron still rejects hang unspoken. Magic and destiny, the uncertain certainty of the future. "It is absurd, but it becomes familiar."

"Believing the unbelievable," he adds, with the clink of his fork against ceramic. "I'm surprisingly used to it."

Men with animal teeth, skin that chills bone to ice, hunger of flesh and rivulets running red against arched necks; a storybook couldn't recite it better than reality's exposition, than the hunger that had hammered cut time at the base of his soul.

Ed sets down the fork with another clink.

"Sometimes I wonder, but I know I'm not dreaming."

"It isn't a dream," she agrees. What's on his mind Cameron couldn't begin to guess; the way Ed speaks and acts, it's never occurred to her that his world might be so different than her own. A stubborn assumption of rationality is one of the things two years in the City haven't erased.

"We can't be sure it's real, but it's never really seemed like a dream."

Edward had mastered art of making him inaccessible, but in the same movement, barred his self off to himself. That's what happens when you carve yourself a fine corner of despair and get too settled in the shadows.

"You can only assume as much as you know," he hesitates, catching his tongue between his teeth. Asking a certain question means he may have to reciprocate. Curiosity over discretion? Secrets kept, secrets exposed, leading to the question if it ever was a secret in the first place.

"What is your world like?"

"That's a hard question to answer." Settling her forearms on the edge of the table, she thinks for a moment about the best way to explain it. "It was 2007 when I left," she begins, head tilted slightly. "It's... not very much like the City. No curses, of course; but I mean... no magic, no talking animals or anything vying for top of the food chain with humanity. No superheroes outside comic books." She smiles, a little weakly. This is where the City strains her credibility most of all. Multiple universes is fine in theory; but in practice? She can't stand it.

"You're more familiar than the rest," he says, quietly. But it's not the truth. Cameron is only familiar if Ed turns his head toward the sunset, and gazes into the past. A memory kept locked up even in the dark of the night, saved from a time when one could only imagine what the world would become. "No magic, no talking animals," he pauses, "New York City rings any bells?"

That, actually, gets a little laugh. "Strangely, geography often stays consistent, even when nothing else does. I work in New Jersey. I'm from Chicago, originally."

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