#retrograde amnesia

[liebgotts-lovergirl]

Fire On Fire: Chapter 18

(Ch. 17) ... (Ch. 1)

II Gallery II Symbol Guide II

Summary: New visitors share old memories and Alix finds out just how much it cost Joe to be there when she needed him.

A/N: One thing about Alix Martinelli is that she will fight everything + everyone tooth & nail, even her own feelings lol

Taglist: @latibvles @softguarnere @brassknucklespeirs @mccall-muffin @lieutenant-speirs @emmythespacecowgirl @sleepisforcowards @hxad-ovxr-hxart @holdingforgeneralhugs @parajumpboots @indigo-luvers @chaosklutz

Contemporary: October 22nd, 1944. Zetten-Andelot, Netherlands.

It'd been just about a month since she'd last heard from Joe and though she would never admit it out loud, Alix was worried.

In spite of her outwardly prickly demeanor, she had hoped he would at least send a letter or maybe a note...

Technically, she wasn't supposed to read for another two weeks to ensure her concussion was fully healed but for Joe, she would have made an exception.

Gio had always said that no news was good news but that pertained mainly to letters from home while they were away at school, not updates from… from friends during a war. 

That’s what we are, Alix thought, trying to force the phrase to stick in her brain. We’re just friends. 

But nonetheless, for reasons she couldn't explain, Alix found herself craning her neck till it ached every time she heard the screeching tires of arriving ambulances, praying desperately that it wouldn't be Joe she'd see laying bloody and broken on a stretcher.

Fortunately, it never was but the bittersweet relief she felt each time made her heart heavy with guilt.

These were someone's sons, brothers, boyfriends, husbands, she thought to herself as she listened to the gutwrenching agony of the wounded. Their lives mattered too.

Yes, they were people she hardly knew, but so was Joe…Wasn’t he?

Why did she care so much about a man she barely knew?

Why did her heart race at the very thought of him?

Why did the memory of his arms around her bring a rush of heat to her cheeks?

Why did her head automatically swivel when she swore she'd heard his voice?

She couldn't say but it was driving her insane.

She hated herself for it but ever since their last meeting, the paratrooper had been occupying her thoughts more and more, though she would continue to chalk it up to the wandering thoughts of an idle mind.

She couldn't afford it being anything else, not now.

Not during a war.

This was no time for romance.

Besides, she reasoned, it's not like she had anything else to do except let her thoughts run wild. They were products of her boredom, nothing more.

The doctor had been very clear: Due to the severity of her concussion, there would be no reading, no writing, no planning or executing missions and no training or physical exertion allowed for at least the next two weeks as a further precaution to ensure that it was healed properly.

Until then, she was more or less confined to her cot in a cramped, chaotic room, constantly surrounded by the misery of the dead and dying.

It might as well have been prison.

One of her only distractions from the monotony was the radio.

Stolen Owned by a paratrooper from the 82nd a few rows down from her, it was only ever set on one channel but it constantly buzzed with lively swing music, interspersed with regular so-called "updates" from a well-known Nazi propagandist. 

Her predictably defeatist statements were irritating to listen to but listening to actual music from home almost made them worth suffering through.

"Good evening, Yankees," an alluring alto voice purred over the grainy air waves, causing a temporary hush around the aid station.

"Axis Sally here, sending you a warm welcome from Radio Berlin."

"This that Jerry bitch again?" Someone snorted loudly from across the room and Alix stifled a giggle.

Apparently Nazi propaganda wasn't working as well as the enemy would have hoped.

"At the sound of the chime, it will be exactly 21:00 Eastern War Time on October the 22nd, 1944."

1944?

Alix stiffened.

Ever since her head injury, hearing the year out loud sent shockwaves rippling through her system as her brain struggled to fill in the blanks.

When she had first come to, she would have bet her entire inheritance that it was still 1943, that she still had a year left to train, that she still had a year left before she would have to take a life for the first time.

But that was a comforting delusion, not reality.

She had been wounded in the field during a mission, so she'd been told.  With a thirty-foot drop like that onto cobblestone, it was a miracle she hadn't broken her neck.

But why had she fallen in the first place? Surely, she wasn't that clumsy.

Or had she jumped? But why would she take that kind of risk?

She could have been killed.

Alix had far more questions than answers, a fact that only made her head ache worse with every blaring trumpet.

Her case officer, Lieutenant...Well, Captain Nixon now, stood against the brick wall on her right side, supervising her recovery like a silent spectre.

He would pop in every few days to check on her but he rarely spoke and Alix got the feeling that he was trying to keep himself distracted, though from what, she couldn't be sure.

More a shadow than a man, Nixon stood out of the way of the nurses as he nonchalantly skimmed fresh intel reports like the evening paper.

"Mind if I-?" Alix started, reaching a hand out to pluck a file from the bunch but before she could, the sight of two fast-approaching paratroopers caught her attention. 

One seemed to be calling something out in her direction as he approached and the other was waving his arms enthusiastically as though signaling a plane.

“Hey Pyro, we thought that might be you!” 

The speaker had a face dusted with freckles, decidedly auburn hair that was sticking to his forehead, and an exhausted but upbeat smile that faded to a frown as he approached. 

“Jesus, you look like shit.” 

His companion, a trooper about a head shorter with a mop of dirty blond hair and startlingly golden eyes, smacked him in the arm.

“Nice going, Don,” he quipped, shaking his head with a bemused chuckle. “Why get off on the right foot when you can shove it straight in your mouth instead, huh?”

“Well, he’s not wrong,” Alix interjected, taking the pair by surprise and the redhead– Don– made an emphatic gesture with an arm. 

“See, even she admits it!” 

“Don’t encourage him, Pyro,” the blond one scolded in an exaggerated stage-whisper, laughter twinkling in his amber eyes.

“I’m trying to teach him some manners here.” 

“Oh get lost,” the redhead– Don, Alix corrected herself– scoffed, jostling his friend’s arm jokingly.

“Man gets a fiancée and suddenly thinks he knows all about women!”

“I know they generally don’t like being told they look like shit, Mal,” was the dry reply.

“But you don’t exactly have to be Dick fucking Tracy to figure that one out.” 

“Hi, sorry, um,” Alix interrupted, waving a hand to get their attention. “Hate to put a damper on things but do I know you...? And why do you keep calling me…Wait, what did you call me?” 

“Shit,” the redhaired one-- Don-- breathed as his brows knit with concern. “So it is true.” 

“What’s true?” she inquired, already feeling even more out of the loop than before.

“You really can’t remember. Lieb said so but I didn’t think–”

The spy’s head perked up instantly. 

Lieb…As in Liebgott? As in Joe Liebgott?

He was alive?

“Joe’s okay?” she asked, a note of hope ringing out clear in her voice and the blond paratrooper exchanged an amused glance with his friend. 

“Well wouldja look at that, Mal.” He put a teasing hand to his heart as though swooning, cracking a playful grin. “As the great poet, Larry Clinton and his orchestra once said: ‘Love really does live on’.”  

“‘Love’, my ass,” Alix retorted unceremoniously with a roll of her eyes. “I asked if he’s okay, not if he’d marry me.”

She hated how her heart seemed to skip a beat at the notion.

“Bet he’d say yes if you did ask though,” Don hooted and his blond friend snorted in agreement. 

“Are you two done yet?” the agent asked dryly, pretending to inspect an invisible watch on her wrist with impatience.

With a shake of his head and a grin so infectious that Alix couldn’t help but grin too, the blond paratrooper plopped down at the foot of her bed, causing the frame to groan its complaint.

“Oh we’re just getting started!” he piped up proudly, his amber eyes twinkling with warmth. “We’ve got a lot to catch you up on!” 

∆∆━━━━∆∆━━━∆∆━━━∆∆

“And then, wham!" 

Don swung his fist out in a dramatic slow-motion display.

"You slugged him right in the kisser!" 

The blond trooper, whose name was Skip– pretended to fall back onto the bed with a high-pitched "Nyahh" reminiscent of the Three Stooges and Alix couldn’t help but giggle at the ridiculousness of his performance. 

“Somehow I doubt it went exactly like that,” she commented wryly but Don shrugged amicably. 

“No, it was basically like that,” he corrected with a chuckle. “Except with a lot more swearing. And blood, way too much blood.”

"It was a real show!" the blond– Skip– agreed, sitting up and swinging his legs back and forth over the bed's edge like an excitable child. 

"Like watching Sugar Ray in the ring…Y'know, if Sugar Ray was a short Philly Italian with martial arts training and anger management issues!"

"And that's why everybody calls you Pyro,” Don informed Alix with a proud smile. “Like pyrotechnics. Y'know, firecrackers! Bull came up with it!” 

Now she was lost again. 

“Sorry, who?” she asked, trying to keep the rising frustration out of her voice. 

After all, it wasn’t their fault she couldn’t remember.

“Bull Randleman,” Nixon answered from beside her, barely looking up from the report he was reading.

“He’s an NCO. You’ll meet him when you get back. Great soldier–” 

“And a swell guy too!” Skip added happily. “Say, that reminds me! How long're you in for?" 

Glancing surreptitiously at Nixon to be sure he wasn't listening, Alix leaned over to her newfound friends, lowering her voice.

"Nurses say about two more weeks but I'll be damned if I stay here that long. I'm going out of my mind." 

"Well hopefully it'll be sooner than that," Don said, putting his hands in his pockets. "'Cause we all miss you."

Skip waggled his eyebrows. 

"Especially a certain Corporal Liebgott," he sing-songed and Alix rolled her eyes. 

"If that was true, he'd be here," the spy countered but to her right, Nixon gave a skeptical snort. 

"What?" Alix snapped, rounding on her handler.

"You think he hasn't tried?" The captain barked out a laugh. 

"Liebgott's been bugging the hell out of any officer he can get his hands on, trying to get us to cut him loose so he can come here. If we didn't need him interrogating prisoners, I would've let him go myself just to get him to shut up already." 

Alix blinked in shock. 

"Wait, really?" 

"No, I'm just lying to inflate your ego." Nixon said sarcastically. "Of course really. Kid must have it bad too because that stunt he pulled last time, staying here overnight when he should've been back, cost him his promotion." 

The spy balked. 

“It what?!” 

“Just what I said. Liebgott might be a scrawny, hot-tempered, snarky little shit but he's also a damn fine interrogator and one hell of a machine gunner." 

He shifted the dossier he had been skimming to his other arm and then continued.

"Not to mention, for some reason, he's still only a T/5 at 25 years old. Dick was filling out the paperwork to get him promo'd to T/4 when he heard about the whole 'Lieb going AWOL' thing and…" 

Nixon grimaced with a helpless shrug. 

"Well, you can imagine how that went." 

Joe had lost his promotion…Because of her?

Tugging her thin, medical issue blanket around her shoulders, Alix's thoughts were moving at warp-speed. 

This was not what she had wanted, not at all. 

If she had known that Joe would get in trouble for staying, she never would have asked him to.

She had been through flashbacks and panic attacks before; as awful as they were, they were nothing new. She had become a distraction to him and him to her. 

This needed to stop.

But the steely edge of Nixon's voice cut through her thoughts like a knife.

“And don’t go beating yourself up for it, alright, because I know you are.” 

Her case officer crossed his arms before continuing. 

“Lieb made his choice– he put his personal feelings before the job. That is not your fault.”

The young agent sank back in her cot with a sigh of defeat as she watched the never-ending crush of patients being rushed in like commuters from 30th Street Station.

Joe had put his job on the line for her…However complex her feelings about him were, Alix couldn’t allow them to continue, for Joe’s sake. 

Turning to Skip and Don, who were engrossed in their own conversation, she decided to make one thing crystal clear. 

“Don’t you two go risking your careers for me too, you got that?” 

The redhead dug a hand into his pocket with a chuckle.

 

“Don’t worry,” he said breezily, pulling out a crumpled carton of iodine swabs and some hastily-wound gauze for her inspection.

“We’re here on official business.” 

“Volunteered for a supply run while there’s a lull,” Skip explained with an infectious grin, revealing a couple pilfered tourniquets stuffed into his jacket.

"We wanted to check up on you and Spina's already starting to run low on some stuff so we figured two birds, one stone, ya know?" 

Alix couldn’t help but grin with him, already feeling at-ease in their presence. 

“You guys are the best.”

“We know,” Don quipped, jostling her shoulder lightly. “But what are friends for?” 

“It really blows that you can’t come back with us, Pyro.” Skip’s seemingly ever-present smile started to slip slightly. 

“Just doesn’t feel right without you. We’re missing our third man…Well, woman. But you get what I mean.” 

It was then that an idea struck Alix like a bolt of lightning, an idea so risky that for a second, she wondered if it was even worth mentioning. 

But she had to try...She couldn't spend another week cooped up at the aid station, bedridden and bored to tears while thousands of others were risking their lives, she just couldn't. 

The field was where she belonged, where she had fought so hard to be.

Besides, her most serious injury-- her concussion-- was almost healed and she had been assured that her memory would return in time.

With her cover as a combat nurse still intact, Alix knew she could just as easily let her wrist and ankle heal after she made it back to Joe--

To Easy, she corrected herself. After she made it back to Easy Company.

So it was decided then.

She knew what she had to do.

Gesturing surreptitiously for her new friends to move closer, Alix whispered, "Say, how'd you guys like to help me bust out of here?"

[kazik-izakk]

Chapter 26!

Nikolay's back! He good boi! :3c Give headpats!

[drafty-castle]

i saw your story about trying to reassure someone they are not pregnant and i am just so curious about that situation and how you asked for advice is this something your worried will happen again?

i feel like there is only so many ways to reality check that should feel really obvious to you but so long as you stay calm and kind just reassuring the person those facts as simply as you can is really the best thing to do, so it seemed like you did everything right.

Hi. I’m gonna trauma dump a little, so be warned.

So, my wife has some sort of intermittent amnesia issue that no one knows how to diagnose. Two neurologist, a neuropsych, and a bevy of therapists have all poked around in her head (imaging and therapy) with no results.

It presented first as purely syncope (hello 100+ concussions in a year and the brain damage that incurs), then became syncope plus coming too with some sort of disassociation manafesting as age-regressive/retrograde amnesia that would only end with another syncopal attack, then added in non-epileptic seizures/full body convulsions in among the mess and confusion.

The amnesia is not static - she has presented as any age from four, fourteen, twenty-four, thirty-four, and everything in between. She remembers everything in her life up to the time/age she is currently embodying. It’s like time travel. The amnesia can last from minutes to hours to days. It’s all dependent on when the next syncopal attack happens. It’s like hitting the breakers on a building to reset the system (have you tried turning it off and back on again?)

Or, as I normally tell her: “Think of your mind as a palace, with hundreds of doors inside. Behind each door is a single memory. Normally, you have access to all memories, through all doors, from your earliest childhood up to [now]. However, all the doors from [presenting age] to [now] are closed and locked. They are still there, they are still in your head. You just can’t access them at the moment. When you get your memory back, you will get the key and all of the doors will fly open and all of your memories will return.”

When she regains her memories, she remembers nothing of the incident. It’s just like a black-out for her. A great blank and a chunk of missing time in her life. And if she ever returns to that age again, she never remembers having “time travelled” before so we always have to start the process all over.

Note, this is her “normal” dissociative amnesia. The kind that happened yesterday is the much more rare and far more jarring my wife just woke from a convulsion and she doesn’t know her own name, age, what a cat is, what a TV is, where babies come from, what is/is not real etc.

She was bloated so she was convinced she was pregnant. She didn’t know where babies came from so she thought I got her pregnant. No protestations to the contrary would convince her otherwise. I mistakenly called our cats “the children” (because that’s how we to refer them in the day to day) and suddenly she was convinced she was pregnant with a cat and had given birth to the other cats as well. The physical and biological impossibility of this did not compute for her at this time -> she was pregnant and the cats were our children ergo she was pregnant with a cat.

I’m fine with and have a system for dealing with her normal amnesia, no matter what age she thinks she is. I’ve read her a fairy tale and put her to bed with her thinking I was her foster mother while mentally 7, I’ve made plans for outings with a mentally 10 year old adult, I’ve kept a distraught teen calm and focused while waiting for another syncope to hit the reset button in her brain, I’ve argued with a 23 year old about needing to blend her foundation then washed all twenty layers off my wife’s face when she returned to herself and was horrified by 2010s makeup trends. I know what to do, normally.

Last night wasn’t normal.

And I can’t get any real help from anybody. No support network, no instructions from medical professionals, nothing. The neurologist said she should do therapy about it. Only, she’s been in therapy. For years. Years and years. Long before this shit started happening!

And yet it’s just. Getting. Worse.

Like, spending more time amnesiac than not, worse. Happening every day worse. Lasting for longer worse.

I’m afraid that whatever is wrong is something that science and medicine just hasn’t figured out yet. That she is the equivalent of somebody living in the 1600’s with tuberculosis and no concept of germ theory. That somebody will end up writing a break-through paper on her condition but by then it will be too late for her.

Both Mayo Clinic’s website and the neurologist keeps saying it’s oddly presenting non-epileptic seizures due to stress and she needs therapy except she’s 100% less stressed now than she ever has been in her life, this shit started within a month of getting Covid, it’s getting worse and evolving new symptoms, and I am a single person left alone to try to keep her alive.

She’s not a system in the traditional since, but I lurk on DID pages sometimes trying to glean hints on how to cope or manage when she has completely lost the plot, like last night.

… Because if I hadn’t gotten to her in time and rubbed her stomach until the bloating went down, I’m afraid she would have tried to “cut out” the “baby”, that’s how scared and in pain she was.

[realitybitesyouknowit]

Chapters: 13/13 Fandom: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Marvel Cinematic Universe, Iron Man (Movies) Rating: Mature Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Harry Potter/Tony Stark Characters: Harry Potter, Tony Stark, Natasha Romanov (Marvel), Pepper Potts, Phil Coulson Additional Tags: Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Implied/Referenced Blow Jobs Summary:

Tony gains a soulmate not long after his tenth birthday. The name of Harry James Potter scrawled across his ribs.

Harry is born with a soulmark (he assumes) but by the time he can remember, the name has been seared from his skin by his loving relatives.

Will they ever find each other? What will they have to go through before they can find their other half?

[anya-chalotra]

HEAD & HEART & HANDS: putting the head in headache, the heart in heartbreak, and the hand in handsome (insp)

[bunjivu]

[sapphosewrites]

I'm so spoiled by writing for fantasy and science fiction fandoms. How are you supposed to give a character amnesia in a universe without magic or technobabble?

[total-drama-brainrot]

we as a fandom don't talk enough about how alejandro literally hypnotised owen. i know it was sort of ignored post ex-files but it was. a thing that happened.

[shentunans]

“Xiao Ge? Xiao Ge! It’s me, Wu Xie, don’t you remember me?” The Lost Tomb 2 Episodes 36 & 37

[57sfinest]

i think it’s interesting that, despite how unique each skill portrait is, conceptualization’s and viscal’s portraits both share that little black box with the white point in the center, and they both have this flowy billowing quality to the art. it makes me think of the swallow and the pale and about the common theory (practically canon) that harry is a magpie.

like. viscal is all about reconstructing the past. the viscal portrait puts the little box (pale) right where the brain would be, and it’s not just one of them- there are several of them stuttered across the head, almost like a glitch effect, breaking up the flow of whatever it is that’s going into or coming from viscal’s head (memory? specifically, harry’s memory?) but there’s something emanating from the central pale point that viscal seems to be eating, for lack of a better term. viscal might easily represent harry’s connection to the past and to pale; it’s likely that pale/swallow exposure had something to do with his amnesia, but it’s also given him an incredibly sensitive connection to pale & its messages. the pale took his past from him and, in return, allows him to connect with the past of others- enter viscal’s ability to vividly reconstruct things that happened in the past.

conceptualization is more related to the CCP -> novelty concept. it’s meant to construct new things and ideas from the input it receives- that is quite literally the role of a magpie in the production of pale. and in conceptualization’s portrait, rather than having the little pale box disrupting it, conceptualization is holding it in a hand like it had been studying it, with something flowing out of the box. to me it’s a representation of that whole flowchart- the magpie, deciphering the ccp, and in the process producing pale.

viscal and conceptualization are his biggest/most obvious magpie skills, and what make him a great detective. he can reach into the past and he can construct futures. but something the flowchart doesn’t cover is *where* or *how much* pale is created for each time a magpie converts CCP. did harry’s amnesia ultimately come about from him unknowingly eating holes in his own brain with pale from CCP conversion? 

[lamentationsofasinner]

'ceilings' by lizzie mcalpine is such a real song because i too love to project my feelings of emotional dependency and a need for romantic love onto things (really good hinny/jily fanfics binge read at 3am) even though i have never been in a relationship and i can't recall the last time i was kissed. she's so real for this omg

also if you need any hinny/jily fics to project your emotional dependency on check out 'An Alliance' (which is actually effie and fleamont potter, sorry!) and 'In Love and War' by Icepen (lmk if Icepen has a tumblr). also 'retrograde' by @mppmaraudergirl is absolutely fucking amazing (all on a03) oh and ofc 'The Path From You' by @takearisk-ao3, and her hinny amnesia fic who's title i can't remember for the life of me (sorry hannah!!!!!!!!!) i love it tho, especially how she handled harry's emotional response to ginny's amnesia, and how hinny had an explosive fight after ginny crashed her broom and then harry broke down and hugged her sm and my little heart broke omggg it makes me feral

[mppmaraudergirl]

letting @thegobletofweasleys kick my ass into gear so I’d finish this chapter of my amnesia fic for jily week 2022

chapter 4 on AO3

The Homecoming

It is after one before Lily is ready to leave the cozy familiarity of the Three Broomsticks. Her voice is soft as she agrees to side along apparate with him and he is reminded that not only does she not remember Godric’s Hollow, but as far as she remembers she has never apparated in her life.

These thoughts, however, are not enough to distract James from the way he feels touching her again. It is the first time recently that she hasn’t flinched at his reach, that she hasn’t thrown herself away from his touch. 

He takes advantage of the opportunity to slide his fingers through hers, to tug her close to his side, and revel in the warmth that has been missing. After the years they have spent together, he expects the touch to be like a Pensieve—to take him back to the last memory of them together, to remind him of the everyday love they share in the life they have built.

Instead, he feels his skin sizzling at the touch as though he could harness the power of a lightning bolt by simply flexing his fingers.

Read on AO3 || Start at the beginning

[kravicle]

i am usually quite adept at understanding van helsing's descriptions of events (usually....), but genuinely what the fuck is today's entry. does anyone have an annotated copy of dracula for a poor lost soul like me?

[archer3-13]

I've seen the argument float around a bit, mostly from edelstans but ive seen it crop up elsewhere, that people who dont like edelgard have been saying edelgard deserves what happens in AG in becoming a mental child.

Now, i have not seen any such argument actually be seriously made in that regard. If someone could link to anything that supports the above claim id be happy to see it, but in terms of areas of 'traffic' where you would expect to see such an assertion made again

i have not seen anything that remotely falls into that line of thinking

which brings me to a more general statement i feel is important to make, and its that what happens to edelgard in AG is indeed intellectually unsettling in its implications in many ways. However, its also not something I, and indeed some others, can feel particularly sympathetic towards edelgard on outside of the intellectual implications of it. That is because the narrative of hopes does not treat what happens to edelgard with the gravitas such a concept would require to work and actually be emotionally unsettling with, instead it is used as a mechanical narrative device in hopes story to expediate edelgard from narrative consequences of her actions by removing responsibility from her person.

in other words, its not that edelgard deserves to become a mental child. the issue is that edelgard should be facing actual narrative consequences for her actions, but instead she is being removed from them through someones infantilization kink.

[keenerkey]

Seven Lines

I was tagged by @sarah-sandwich-writes to share seven lines from my (currently) unnamed WIP. Thanks for the tag! <3

Harley pressed his palm against his head, closing his eyes trying to stop its relentless ache. How did he get here? Mama and Abbie must be worried, he thought.

He patted his pockets, not finding anything but taking notice of a nice looking watch on his wrist. Harley wasn’t really sure where he got this, but he shook the thought out of his head, adding it up to a gift Tony sent him that his headache isn’t letting him remember.

Tagging anyone who wants to! <3

[anxiously-going]

Maybe I'm not actually real.