PAGE: characters:harry:journal:021_in_transit
Entry — In transit
Ten of us.
I've been counting them on this train, which is something I haven't done in years — run through the full list, all ten, the way you used to be able to recite them in order without thinking. It took me longer than it should have. Some of them I had to reach for.
We had numbers before we had anything else. Before we had the training or the missions or the particular shape of what each of us became, we had a sequence. An order. I used to think the numbers were neutral — administrative, practical, a way of managing a large household without confusion. I don't think that anymore. A number is a position. A position implies a hierarchy. A hierarchy implies that some positions are better than others, and children are very good at working out which ones those are.
I was [NUMBER]. I am still [NUMBER], I suppose, in whatever accounting system that house runs on. It never stops being yours once it's given.
What I remember about being [NUMBER] specifically — what that position felt like, what it communicated about where I stood in the sequence — is something I've been sitting with since the letter arrived. Whether it was a good number or a bad one. Whether the father chose deliberately or whether the sequence was just the order in which he found us, assembled us, decided we were ready to be assigned a place in the line.
I don't know. I've never known. I'm not sure it matters now in the way it mattered then, when everything about the household communicated something and you were always reading for signals.
Ten of us on a train, theoretically. Ten of us converging on a house that made us and broke most of us and is now offering something — the will, the inheritance, the thing only one of us can ultimately claim. Ten people with history and damage and seven years of separate lives between them and a shared wound that none of us have ever fully named out loud.
I keep arriving at myself in this count and not knowing what to write. The others I can do — I have observations, memories, seven years of thinking about them from a distance. For myself I just have the number, and the name I chose, and this journal, and whatever I am now that the house is done with me.
[NUMBER]. Harrison Hargreaves. Twenty-four years old and on a train back to the place that made me.
That'll have to be enough to start with.