Chapter Text
He heads out to the fields that morning, prepared for a full morning of weeding before it really gets warm and he has to feed the animals.
There’s someone sitting out in the fields — a woman, relatively young. If he had to guess, she’s around his age, not that he really knows what that is.
“What are you doing here?” he asks as he approaches. He then notices that in spite of the fact that she’s clearly sitting on top of several plants, none of the plants look crushed. What?
“I’m pretty sure I’m a ghost,” she answers, which — well, that tracks, actually. “I remember dying.”
He feels a lot like a ghost some days — an empty vessel without knowledge of the person he was.
Just goes to show it can always be worse, he supposes.
“Where am I?” she asks.
“You’re in a small town called Craggy Dale,” he answers. Tit for tat. “It’s a farm town.”
She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath, which she probably doesn’t need considering that she’s a ghost. “I suppose I should tell you who I am, then. I’m Claire.”
“Wish I had a name to give you back,” he responds. It’s been…it’s been around eight years since he turned up here, washed up by the river. He almost reaches for a handshake before realising that hey — she’s a ghost, she can’t shake his hand. “I don’t remember it anymore, let alone the first…I don’t even know how many…years of my life. First thing I remember is getting pulled out of the river by Firth, who’s never asked me for my name. He just calls me ‘young man’.”
“I don’t know…exactly how, but I feel as though I’ve heard about you,” she says. “Tell you what — I’ll think about it some more, and if anything comes up, I’ll tell you about it.”
“I think I’d remember meeting someone like you,” he quips, but…well…meh.
“You forgot your own name,” she replies dryly, fiddling with her glasses in a way that pings some sort of recognition in him, like he used to do that. But that’s silly. His eyesight is fine. “Oh. I suppose dying gave me my glasses back.”
“I…think I used to wear glasses, before,” he says. “They were probably broken when…whatever caused me to end up in the river…happened. I don’t know why I’d wear fake glasses, though. My eyesight’s fine.”
She shrugs. “Why would I know? Remember — we’re strangers.”
“How exactly did you die in the first place?” he asks, getting started. “I have to do some weeding here before it gets too hot, so you can tell me all about it.”
“It’s probably going to sound like something out of a storybook to you,” she says. “I used to be a scientist.” He fully takes in her appearance now — she’s dressed fairly casually in a denim jacket and pink scarf. “I died during an experiment.”
“You don’t dress like you were in a lab,” he points out.
“No,” she concedes, “but it’s complicated. I worked with a lab in time travel.”
“Time travel?” he asks. “There’s no way that’s real.”
She laughs. “Unfortunately, it is.”
He pulls a weed up from the earth. “Okay. Sure. I’ll bite.”
“The time machine exploded,” she continues. “But I was the test subject, and I ended up in the future for a little bit. But I was always destined to return back to the explosion — they found my body. I was always supposed to die.” She sighs. “There was…one of my old coworkers. He tried to save me, but he was never going to succeed.”
“That…sounds awful,” he says. He remembers something, but it’s a hazy nightmare more than anything else. The sensation of falling, of hitting the water. Someone reaches out for him. He tries to grab on, but there’s nothing there for him to hold on to.
He isn’t sure whether it’s a real memory or not.
“I don’t really know what happened to me,” he says. “Floated down here on a river, got washed up here.” He rips out another plant. “Sometimes I have this nightmare, though, where I’m falling. It might be a memory, but some parts of it are missing.”
“Alright,” Claire says. “A…friend…of mine told me this once — every puzzle has an answer. So surely yours does too.”
Every puzzle has an answer. Why does that sound so…familiar?
“In that framework, so does yours,” he says. “Why are you here, when you very clearly died somewhere else? And why am I allowed to see you?”
Claire furrows her brows. “I haven’t encountered anyone else. This village is fairly small, after all.”
“You can follow me back when I’m done, and see if anyone else will see you,” he suggests.
“I’m…”
“No one keeps track of news from the city. How long ago did you die, anyways?” he asks.
“I was twenty-seven,” she says. “Time travel’s messed up my sense of timing. He was…he was a decade older, and I didn’t get to see it.”
“Who are you talking about?” he asks.
She shakes her head. “It doesn’t matter. I’m willing to bet that some amount of time, at the very least, has passed since I died and ended up here.”
“I’m sure we can find a newspaper for you,” he says. “We have a local one. That’ll at least tell you what year it is.”
She nods. “That…sounds adequate.” He pulls up a few more weeds before mentally deciding that what he’s done is good enough.
“Alright, Claire,” he says. “I’m going to feed the animals. You wanna come?”
“What do you keep?” she asks. “I’ve never been on a farm before.”
“City girl,” he teases, reaching to bump his shoulder into hers, and oh yeah, she’s a ghost. He tries not to lose his balance.
“Are you alright?” she asks.
“I…okay, this is going to sound ridiculous, but I forgot you were a ghost,” he admits. “It just kinda felt right to try to touch you.”
“Hold on,” Claire says. She closes her eyes. Her form becomes a little less hazy. “Try it now?”
He pulls her into a hug instead of anything else. It feels less warm than any other hug he’s had before, but not that much less solid. “Whoa.”
“I didn’t think I’d be able to do that,” she admits, fading back into her previous state. “I don’t know how this all works. One moment, the explosion happened, and the next — well, I was here.”
“Well, let’s get the animals fed, and then I can see about getting you that newspaper.” He steps back.
The chickens are first. Claire looks on as Randall fills up the feed bucket with the appropriate feed.
“I’ve never seen them up close like this before,” she admits. "They’re like little dinosaurs."
“I’ve found a few fossils around here,” he says. “Or at least I think they’re fossils. I like looking for stuff like that. I don’t know why. Firth always thinks I have my head in the dirt too much.”
“Reminds me of someone else I knew,” she says with a sigh.
“The cows and horses are mostly pastured, so I don't need to feed them right now,” he says. “Shall we?”
She nods firmly.
“I…suppose that makes sense,” she says, looking at the newspaper he’s set on the table. “It’s been a few weeks since I died, which is…about the amount of time that I spent ten years in the future.”
“Alright,” he says. “I guess the next question would be how you ended up here.”
“You were right about me being from the city,” Claire comments. “I worked in London.”
“That’s pretty far,” he points out. “A couple hours of driving.”
“I don’t know why exactly I would have ended up here,” she admits, “unless it has something to do with who you are.”
He shrugs. “Your guess is as good as mine.”
Claire’s good company, but no one else can see her, so he’s pretty sure that Firth thinks he’s hallucinating. He might be hallucinating, but it doesn’t really make sense if he is. Why would he hallucinate a woman that he’s supposedly never met, that’s walked straight out of a sci-fi novel to participate in his idyllic farm life?
Sometimes she leaves for London. He doesn’t know what exactly is there that she keeps going back for, but there’s clearly something. He can tell that she’s bored.
“You know, there’s a big city about a half hour or so from here,” he says. “It’s closer than London, not that I think physical location is any object to you.”
“A big city?” she asks.
“A lot of people are starting to move out there,” he remarks. “Mostly people my age or younger, leaving the small town of their parents for greener pastures.”
“Why don’t you?” she asks. He shoots her a withering look — what is he supposed to do without an identity?
“Not knowing my own name makes it pretty hard to find housing,” he says. “City is called Monte d’Or. A lot of people came through to get there when it was first being built. Search parties. Apparently they were looking for someone. I don’t know. I spend most of my time working on the farm. Firth isn’t getting any younger.”
“You care about him a lot,” she points out.
“Of course I do,” he says. “I owe him everything. He’s practically my father. I’ve been here for the last ten years or so. He’s all I’ve known.”
He doesn’t really remember his childhood. He knows they’d probably call him a child when he turned up, but he certainly wasn’t a baby, and he doesn’t remember the first…half or so of his life.
That makes it sound worse than it really is. He’s a little curious — he’d like his name back, for one — but not curious to go on a big identity search. He wouldn’t even know where to start.
“I might want to check it out one day,” she admits, “but I don’t think there’s anything there for me. There are…multiple people in London. I tried to go see my…my boyfriend.”
“He couldn’t see you,” he says, already predicting where this is going.
“He isn’t supposed to, anyways,” she says. “Time travel. I saw him again in the future. I didn’t think I would ever get to see him become the person that he was all those years later. Will become, I suppose. He still had the gift I gave him on the afternoon I died all those years later.”
“Wow,” he says. “Must have really loved you.” A vague memory tugs at him, but he can't see a face — all he remembers is the phantom sensation of touch, of sitting shoulder to shoulder together.
“I…I am grateful I got to give him a proper goodbye,” she admits. “Even if it won’t happen for…almost nine years. I’ve gotten closure, but it will take him all those years to get the same thing.”
“Time travel just makes life confusing,” he says. “I like being a farmer. Don't have to deal with any of that.”
“Well, I certainly know the consequences of messing with time now,” she admits. "Enough of that. I was always going to go to the future and die for it. No meddling was going to change my fate from the moment I stepped into that machine."
“I’m sorry,” he says, because he really doesn’t know anything else he can say to a declaration like that. “I am glad to have you here, but I think I’d prefer hanging out with you if you were alive.”
“Wouldn’t we all," she responds dryly.
“I was wondering,” he tells Claire as he picks the crops ready for harvest, “why have you stuck around? You could have just fucked off and haunted your boyfriend until he met you again. But you always come back, even when I think you aren’t.”
“You’re the only one I can interact with,” she says. “It is rather lonely to see life going by and to know that I am not in it.”
Huh. Sure. Everyone gets lonely. Since Claire arrived, though, he’s been feeling it less. It’s nice to know she doesn’t think he’s annoying.
It’s been a long time since she arrived. Sometimes she’ll disappear for a few weeks, but she always comes back.
“Did you know there was an archeological site rather close?” she asks. “I suspect my boyfriend would enjoy it. He’s a professor in the subject.”
“An…archeological site?” Why does that sound so familiar?
“Yes,” she says. “I was wandering a bit when I found it. It seems even now they’re still excavating the site.”
“Where is it?”
“Just outside the city,” she answers, waving in the direction of Monte d’Or. Huh.
“Tell me more about your boyfriend,” he says.
Claire seems a bit confused, but obliges. “Well, I already told you that he was a professor in archeology — he works at a university in London. I don’t have it anymore, but one of the best gifts he gave me was a pocketwatch — it ended up saving his life.”
“Wow,” he says. “That’s a lucky coincidence.”
She places a hand in one of her pockets. “I’m honestly surprised that I don’t have it now. I got my glasses back, even though they broke in the explosion.”
He shrugs. “Beats me.”
“He was sweet. Polite. A true gentleman through and through.” She sighs.
“You miss him, don’t you?” he asks.
She nods. “Every day.”
He receives the first letter around seven years after Claire’s arrival.
“Letter for you,” Firth says, “cause it certainly ain’t for me.”
He frowns. The penmanship on the envelope addresses the letter to a person named Randall Ascot. He goes back to his room to open it.
“A letter?” Claire asks, hovering over his shoulder. “Who’s it from?”
“Dunno,” he answers. “Address is just a P.O. box.”
Dear Mr. Ascot,
I have managed to ascertain your true identity. I suspect you will wish to know as well, so allow me to tell you.
Your name is Randall Ascot, and you fell into an underground river seventeen years ago.
Something cracks in his mind. He remembers. He puts down the letter.
“Are you alright?” Claire asks.
“I…I remember now,” he says. “My name is Randall.”
“That’s amazing!” she says.
I’m sure you must be interested in learning what your friends have been up to since you’ve been gone. I have all the information.
Meet me at the south edge of town in two days’ time.
I hope to see you there.
“That…sounds rather suspect,” she says, peering over his shoulder. “This person didn’t even leave their identity anywhere in this.”
“It’s…the truth, at least the part about what I remember,” he says. “I grew up in Stansbury. I fell into a pit looking for treasure. That’s how I ended up here.”
“Hmm,” she says. “I was hoping that knowing who you were might help me figure out why I ended up here, but…perhaps there is no connection.”
“Does there need to be?” Randall asks.
"I don’t know. Your name sounds familiar, vaguely, but I can’t quite recall where I’ve heard it before," she admits.
“I have to go,” he says. “I need to know what they’re doing. Henry, Hershel…and Angela.”
Angela. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, right?
“Did you say…” Claire trails off. “Never mind.” She walks off without another word.
Does she have some sort of connection to one of them?
“Who are you?” Randall asks the cloaked stranger.
“My name is Jean Descole,” the stranger answers. “But who I am doesn’t matter. Do you know who you are?”
“You told me,” he says, “and I remembered.”
“Yes…the poor little lost lamb of Stansbury,” Descole says, getting closer to Randall. He backs away. “Your parents worked oh-so-hard to find you, you know. Your poor little daddy died never knowing you were still alive.”
Randall freezes. No. What? He always hated his father, but…
“And guess who decided to steal it all from them?” Descole whispers. “Who did what you could not?”
Randall pushes Descole away. “Who?”
“Henry stole your Angela,” Descole answers, “and Hershel stole your career. He’s found the Golden Garden, you know. Got all his fame from that discovery.”
Randall flips through his mental dictionary for the Golden Garden. “There’s no way. He never…”
“He’s a professor of archeology now,” Descole says, presenting a newspaper article. The picture doesn’t look anything like the Hershel Randall knew. “The youngest ever at Gressenheller. It could have been you. It should have been you.”
Randall can picture it, almost. The idea of him as a professor is a little weird — he never wanted to be a teacher, but he can see the appeal. It would truly allow him to do what he wanted in the archeology field — private expeditions are hard to get off the ground.
“What did you say about Angela?” he asks, trying to regain the ground that he’s just been pushed off of.
“Oh, she and Henry got married while you were away,” Descole says. Randall tries to imagine it — would she ever have before? What would it be like? He tries to reconcile the idea of the people they were before his fall with the people that are being presented to him, and he can hardly imagine it. “They run the city now, you know. Monte d’Or, an insult to your legacy. They built it off the backs of gold they found in those ruins — gold that you had supposedly died for.”
“No,” Randall says. There’s no way they could ever betray him like that.
“Yes,” Descole says. “I can help you plot your revenge. You need only say the word, Randall.”
“I…don’t know,” he says. “I need time.”
“I will be here whenever you are prepared. You need only call, and I will answer,” Descole says, placing some sort of device in Randall’s hand. “Adieu, my dear friend.”
Claire hasn’t come back. He wonders what she’s thinking — he’s never going to know for sure. Is this the time when she leaves and never comes back?
She usually comes back. He takes solace in that, at least.
The more he thinks about it — how Henry stole his life’s work, his discovery, his future — the more he wants revenge. And Hershel…Hershel just left all of them behind. Just like he failed Randall in the ruins.
He looks at the device.
Every puzzle has an answer. That’s what he used to say. (That’s what Claire told him, when they first met — where would she have picked it up?)
The puzzle here is simple enough. There’s another letter in the centre.
I knew in time you’d choose this, it says. After all, there are a great many people who have wronged you. I’ve told you about them all already, of course. Mr. and Mrs. Ledore, I’d imagine, are especially happy right now.
The thought of it sends something like rage (or perhaps jealousy) through him. They could have been Mr. and Mrs. Ascot, if only he had climbed out of the ruins, if only he had said something, if only…
If only he hadn’t gone in the first place.
Remember the Mask of Chaos? Monte d’Or claims it brings them their luck. You will make it their downfall.
Is nothing sacred to Henry? That traitor.
When he puts on the mask, he feels more powerful than he ever has before. It’s not like the mask actually has any power, but he feels powerful.
He’s prepared. It’s time for this city to get what’s coming to it — to see its first dark miracle.