Archive of Our Own ^beta

There were only five stops left until his - and he’s hellbent on making it there awake this time. The energy drink he’d slammed back like a shot and half a sandwich he’d devoured following it at lunchtime some seven hours ago have better ideas for him, as his sleep-deprived brain often does on late night train rides like these.

This time it involves no illegal substances as it would in days where he was a young reporter with nothing to his name but a point of view and a bag of dope, but it does involve a strange turn of events all the same.

Those events being that his eyes are glazed over from sheer exhaustion, strange and sudden dreams flashing behind his closed eyelids every two to three seconds before he jerks awake, startled and no more alert than before, and then. 

Then he’s suddenly out cold, head pillowed on something warm and comfortable. What it is, he doesn’t know for the many blissful minutes his mind is dark and quiet, sleeping at last. No dreams come to him, then, not the strange and vivid flickers of dreams from before where beautiful angels cry tears of blood before they part from each other, or a scene from a  violent and bloody play where he cannot discern the plot other than “intense and deeply gothic and haunting” and the usual nonsense falling dreams or the ones where he comes into the office but cannot find his specific cubicle no matter how hard he looks or how long he walks because he doesn’t actually work there, he has never worked there, and is he sure he’s really a journalist at all?

The train jerks around a sharp turn and it wakes him suddenly. With the awareness of sleep draining away from him fast, he realizes all at once that the warm and comfortable pillow he’d found earlier is actually an imam’s broad shoulder, covered by a smart black overcoat that covers what looks to be an exquisitely done white kurta embroidered with gold, probably more expensive than anything Daniel’s ever owned in his entire life. He feels disgusting, terribly insignificant and like he just assaulted someone important by falling asleep on them like that.

“I am so sorry, I didn’t mean to-” Daniel starts to say, feeling like the waterfall of words trip over themselves in his rush to apologize to this man.

Then his words are extinguished altogether when he looks at the imam’s warm brown face, his even warmer amber eyes, soft, sincere smile and dark head of curls mostly tucked away into a white turban as the man says, “It’s no problem at all, please don’t apologize. Seems you needed a rest.”

Daniel nods and finds himself smiling back in earnest at the stranger as he softly agrees, “Seems I did. Thanks.”

It’s stranger still that they keep looking at each other, Daniel’s clear blue eyes wrapped in crow’s feet and wrinkled laugh lines transfixed by the stranger’s honeyed amber ones, large and unblinking like a cat hypnotized by a sun beam. They’re deeply unusual, an unnatural shade of brown compared to his smooth brown skin in the half-light of the train, but even this simple fact isn’t the strangest turn of the night.

Because the strangest part of this encounter is what he finds later, long after he’s disembarked the train, left the platform completely and settled in at home for the night: a note left in his own coat pocket, with no idea how it got there. The note reads “I hope you find the rest you seek” along with a phone number just beneath it and the name Armand .

So of course Armand becomes an endless loop running through his head in the coming days until he’s near mad with fascination over the possibilities of the combined name and phone number. In the end, it leaves him with only two real choices, the two singular choices his life always comes down to: turn it into a piece of writing that gets it out of his brain once and for all or make the damn phone call, Molloy.

Heart hammering in the empty cathedral of his ribs, the same heart that gave up on the possibility of rest or comfort being real or something he even remotely deserved sometime in the golden, drugged-out haze of his youth, he holds his breath as the phone rings three times, thinks of beautiful angels crying tears of blood, and waits for an answer.