collects_strays | (no subject)

Graham was occasionally mistaken as personable. Those who took this view of him weren't charmed by his infrequent eye contact or reclusive demeanor, but were rather taken by the sense of familiarity that crept in as they spoke to him. A conversation with Graham was like catching up with an old friend they couldn't quite place. These were the sort of people who wouldn't pick themselves out of a funhouse mirror. They mistook the way Graham spoke as they did, picking up their gestures and the shifts in their stance, as the signs of a fellow or ally.

It put Jack Crawford on edge. Graham knows this because Jack had, at one point, asked him straight about it. Whether it was something he did to put others at ease, or make them uncomfortable, depending on how self-aware they were. But it wasn't a choice or strategy on Graham's part. People reached out to him, clawed at him, whether they meant to or not. He avoided their eyes so as not to take theirs as his own. Being "sociable" was like walking into the surf at high tide. Other people seemed to keep their minds in tidy little boxes, neatly demarcating where they ended and others began.

He doesn't know how they do it. He only has anchors that keep him from veering too far off course. Picking apart engines, weaving fly lures.

Graham tried not to think on how, when he sank too deeply into this work, he'd hear the growl of the motor, smell salt water and feel the tug of fishing line on his fingers and sting of sunlight in his eyes. It was, after all, meant to be a way to keep anyone else from creeping in. If these hobbies were his father reaching out through him, making his hands smell like diesel and lifting his mood with the rare sense of satisfaction that only repairing something broken could bring, he didn't want to acknowledge it. Something, somewhere in him, had to be his own.

(The dogs, at least, he could be sure were his own. His father would scare off anything that approached him by choice. It had helped them get along when he was younger, but now, Graham was relieved to find he really needed company. And that unlike with humans, he could always know what they wanted from him.)

In the last few weeks, though, even these anchors were becoming unmoored. There was a distant but steady drumbeat in his mind that he should tell someone else, tell Jack, about his lost time. Jack, who was supposed to be his "bedrock." Graham trusted Dr. Lecter, but he didn't feel like bedrock. Or a therapist, for that matter. He felt like a particularly strong current, guiding him forward, rushing alongside him, but doing nothing to steady him. Maybe it was time they ran aground.

But Jack didn't really feel like bedrock either. And the truth was, Graham had stopped trusting him at all.

In this time, the engine pieces on his carpet began to go untouched, the flies on his desk ignored. Instead, when he came home, he fed the dogs (the very first thing, in case he'd forget), and then sat at his kitchen table and made a list of everything he did during the day. He even sketched clock faces, despite being alone, but somehow he seemed to lose track of those quickly. He glanced at the clocks on his walls constantly, whispered the date and his name to himself. I know where, I know when, I know who I am.

He put chairs in front of the doors of the house to try to stop himself from sleepwalking out. At night, when he let the dogs out, he'd want to go out with them, walk through the field and look back at the house in the night, light from its windows shimmering in the air and making it look like a small ship in a black sea. But he was afraid to wander out, afraid that somehow if he left the house he'd slip further, like the walls around him could keep him whole. He stayed inside, and after calling the dogs back, he'd lock himself in. Locked up and locked in, as though keeping himself physically confined would help him hold his mind together.

(Later, Graham would remember this tactic, over and over, on a loop in his mind, whenever he needed to steel himself with ruthless anger. This would be his bedrock.)