Chapter Text
Ja’far stumbles in the door after returning from his first day in his new school. He kicks off his shoes and walks down the hallway, before correcting himself and returning to tuck them neatly beneath the bench in the entryway. He actually likes this family, and he doesn’t want to do anything that will shorten his time with them.
His foster parents will not be home from work for another couple of hours, so Ja’far drops his over-full backpack at the bottom of the stairs and ventures towards the kitchen to make himself a snack.
The day hadn’t been great, but it certainly could have been worse. There was the usual sidelong inspection of “the new kid” throughout class and a bit of attempted teasing at lunch break. Ja’far knew he was small for being in fifth grade, and it made him an easy target. He did his best to ignore it and not let go of the tight hold he was learning to keep on his temper. This school was in a much nicer neighborhood than others he had been to, and he doubted his classmates would be able to hold their own against him if he got into a fight.
Ja’far finishes making his peanut butter sandwich and tucks it hurriedly up in a napkin to retreat to his room, grabbing his backpack as he scampers up the stairs. He knows it’s silly, and he knows it is also probably not a good habit to bring food to his room, but he can’t help it. Years of scavenging and then more years in child protective services have taught him to hide his food and eat it quickly.
He crawls onto his bed and tucks himself into the corner, backpack against the wall next to him, and eats his sandwich in hurried bites. He finishes and crumples the napkin into a ball, tossing it across the room and into the wastebasket.
Ja’far is in the process of rifling through his backpack, trying to retrieve books to do his homework, when he sees something out of the corner of his eye and freezes. He darts immediately for the switchblade he has tucked carefully under his pillow and rolls quickly to his feet.
There is a man in his room, and Ja’far is not inclined to stop and question him. He goes straight for a slash across the top of his thigh, aiming for the femoral artery. The man starts and fumbles a bit, but makes no serious moves to defend himself. Ja’far strikes, slashes, and meets… nothing. He stumbles into the opposite wall of his bedroom clumsily, but recovers and spins on the balls of his feet.
He eyes the man suspiciously. Tall, strong, a confident stance. Ja’far has taken down bigger, but he still doesn’t like the look of him. He’s wearing stiff-looking robes adorned with decorative shoulder plates, has enormous golden hoops in his ears, and sports a foolish, purple ponytail nearly reaching the floor. He looks suspicious, to say the least. Ja’far whips forward again, this time aiming a bit higher for the soft flesh of the stranger’s belly.
The man doesn’t even move this time, and for a good reason, apparently. Ja’far passes right through him and bounces into the edge of his bed. He stands there shaking, knife held in front of him, and doesn’t understand what is going on.
“Christ, Ja’far! All these years keeping you alive and this is how you repay me?”
Ja’far’s suspicion only grows. How does this man know him? How did he even get in here? He forces his shaking muscles to calm and continues to glare menacingly, puffing himself up as big as he can.
“Who the fuck are you?” He spits.
Rather disproportionate eyebrows scrunch together on the man’s face, and he looks genuinely hurt for a moment before his eyes light up in elation.
“You can see me!” He steps forward and Ja’far scrambles back up onto his bed, standing with his back to the wall. “Ja’far?” The man stops. He seems to finally take full notice of Ja’far’s hostility, and his face falls. “Oh. You don’t…. You don’t remember.” He sits down hard on the rug. Ja’far thinks it should make a thump, based upon his size, but it doesn’t.
“I’m sorry I scared you. I just thought…. I don’t know what I thought. I spent all those years looking, and then I found you. You never saw me, but then you did, and I thought maybe that meant you remembered.” He drops his head in his hands, then quickly lifts it again. “Oh! I know!”
Ja’far jumps as the man in front of him suddenly starts shrinking. His clothes warp and his entire stature changes. He is much smaller now, perhaps old enough to be in his first year of high school, but no more. His eyes and face are rounded with youth, but his eyebrows are still enormous, his bizarrely violet hair obnoxiously long. It’s undoubtedly a younger version of the same person, but Ja’far still doesn’t understand.
“No?” The boy asks. “Still nothing?” He sags in disappointment. “Damn.”
Ja’far is standing and tensed on his bed, knife still in the air. This strange… person? Is sitting on his floor, apparently content to just mope there quietly. When nothing changes after about a minute, Ja’far breaks the silence.
“Forget who, what the hell are you?”
Shaggy bangs jerk as the boy starts. “Ah! Sorry, I don’t know how many centuries it’s been since I had a proper conversation. I used to be quite good with people, actually. But things have changed so much.” He waves his hands in the air. “One time I fell asleep and when I woke up all the carriages had been replaced with cars!”
Ja’far stares blankly.
“Ugh, rambling. I’ve just been alone for so long.” He straightens. “Sinbad. My name is Sinbad.”
He looks quite proud of himself. Ja’far does not think he has any reason to be proud of himself, as his question has still not been answered and the boy is still sitting in his previously established moping position on the floor. The newly-named Sinbad finally sees the expectant look on his face and stutters for a moment, fumbling for words.
“I’m a ghost, I suppose. Though it might be better to describe me as a remnant from the previous world. I didn’t get done away with, like some truly bad people were, but I also don’t come back like the rest of you.
“I’ve looked and looked, but I’ve never found you before. Lots of others, though. Some of them a couple of times. Especially Aladdin; he’s always about somewhere.” A pause. “But it’s hard, you know? Seeing all of you just how you once were, and I’m just… stuck like this. Watching.” He scratches nervously at the back of his head. “I think I, uh, messed up a bit. When I was an actual person, that is. That’s why I’m like this. But then I found you! Even earlier than last time.” He grins. “You were such a cute toddler, Ja’far! Though I’m sorry about... well, most everything in your life, actually.” He finally trails off, noticing Ja’far’s state of anxiety.
“Oh, sit down, would you? You were always so edgy, especially as a kid. This is going to take some explaining and you might as well be comfortable.”
Ja’far doesn’t move.
“Really, Ja’far. I won’t hurt you. I’ve spent millennia looking for you and the last ten years keeping you alive. Even if I did attack you, it’s not like you can touch me.”
Ja’far can’t really process this. Just when he felt like he might have finally gotten something good in his life, some eccentric... ghost comes along to ruin it.
“I’m hallucinating,” he states. “No, I’m not going to listen to this. My foster parents are good people. They take me to school and feed me regularly and let me keep my knife. I am not going to ruin this by talking to some figment of my imagination.”
Decision made, Ja’far goes back to his backpack, determined to ignore whatever new problem he has created until it goes away. He has homework to do and he wants to be finished when his parents get home so that he can help make dinner.
His hallucination gets up from the floor, circling around him and he pulls papers from his pack and sits down at his desk.
“Agh, no! I’m not a hallucination! I’m right here! I’ve always been here, since you were a little baby!” He’s pulling at his hair now, but Ja’far is determined to ignore his distress. “Please, Ja’far, please. I’ve been alone for so long….”
Ja’far just starts working through his math assignment. He’s always been smart -- at numbers, especially -- so this won’t take him too much time.
“Sinbad” is peering over his shoulder. “You were always so good with math. I’m terrible, you know. Didn’t even learn to read until I was a teenager, and never took to it as well as you. Embarrassing, that. Having to go to a kid for extra help when Rurumu left us to our assignments.”
Ja’far’s head shoots up at that. Rurumu is the name of his new foster mother. No, he thinks to himself, nothing unusual about that. He’s my hallucination after all, of course he would know her name .
Still, he can’t help but notice golden eyes brighten at Ja’far’s small attention. “Rurumu and Hinahoho! They found you again, even all this time later, and without any of my help. They’ll keep you, you know. You don’t have to worry about that. You were Rurumu’s child from the moment she laid eyes on you; always were, always will be.” He smiles and reaches to ruffle Ja’far’s hair. Ja’far jerks away from him on instinct, but it doesn’t matter anyway, because the hand just passes through his head.
Ja’far pinches his face and ignores Sinbad’s grunt of frustration, going determinedly back to his work, gripping his pencil tightly.
“Ugh, you’d think I’d get used to not being able to do anything after all these years, but one sentence from you and I’m right back where I started.” He goes to sit on Ja’far’s bed, but actually floats an inch or two above it. He looks down and snorts. “I’m used to being bigger. I’m not sure how I feel about being like this again. I’ve been just the way I looked when the world ended for all this time.” He sinks down to rest on the bed, but the covers don’t give under the weight he does not have.
Ja’far really is starting to worry about the specificity of this hallucination, especially considering he’s always been of sound mind before this, no matter what happened to him. He’s also annoyed at how much it is distracting him from his work.
“You look better like this,” Ja’far mutters quietly. “You looked like fucking Anakin Skywalker before.”
“Ah, he speaks!” The excitement in Sinbad’s voice is contagious, and Ja’far fights not to look at him except out of the corner of his eye. “And you say that like it’s a bad thing; at least I wasn’t wearing all black. And I was quite fashionable in my time!”
“It looked ridiculous.”
“You had a lot of different things to say about my outfit before.” He waggles his eyebrows suggestively, and then pulls a disgusted face. “God, I’m gross. You’re a kid now. Or again, I guess. Ugh, this is strange.”
Ja’far frowns at his desk and goes back to his assignment. It takes a bit of work, but eventually he manages to ignore the presence on his bed and work through the problems. He is on the last one when Sinbad decides to speak up again.
“You really don’t think I’m real? Maybe even just a little?”
Ja’far finishes his last problem and decides to answer. No one is home to hear him talk to himself, anyway; maybe he can sort this out before it becomes a permanent issue.
“If you were real, you’d bleed when I stabbed you.”
Sinbad winces and holds a hand to his side in remembrance of some phantom pain. “You were -- and remain -- a very… stabby… child. No doubt you’ll be a stabby adult, as well, if patterns hold. No wires this time, though; which is probably a good thing, for the general public.”
“What wires are you talking about?” Ja’far has never used wires for much of anything, aside from perhaps the odd craft project forced upon him by caretakers.
“Bararak Sei!” Sinbad bounces in excitement. “Do you remember it? Big, magicky, red, zappy wires?”
“Those aren’t even words. And ‘magic’ isn’t real.”
“Well, not any more , it isn’t. That’s what they did, you know, when they restarted the world. Supposedly, if everyone was cut off from the rukh, it would make everything more free and fair.” Sinbad crosses his arms and huffs in annoyance. “Fat lot of good that did us! Everyone killed and enslaved each other just like before! There are still millions of kids like you living in the streets, even in the best nations.
“And even I in my prime couldn’t lay waste like a nuclear bomb! Judar and Aladdin together might have struggled to do that, for heaven’s sake. Another thing! Alibaba was always going on about how governing through the market wasn’t fair, and maybe it wasn’t, but now look what’s happened. It’s just the same as before, too, only it took longer and killed more!”
Ja’far stares at the child ranting and raving in front of him. Somehow, he is dodging from childcare to nuclear warfare and throwing magic in between. He holds up a hand to stop Sinbad from going on.
“I’m even crazier than I thought.”
“Noooo, Ja’far,” Sinbad complains. “This really happened! I know you; you’re never going to believe me unless I can give you facts. But I don’t have any, other than perhaps some contradictory information to history textbooks.” He’s pacing the small bedroom now, talking more to himself than to Ja’far.
“Oh, I know! Things that no one else could know!
“You always pick the tomatoes off of your sandwiches. You hate it when Rurumu puts honey in the tea, but don’t tell her. I haven’t seen you drink coffee yet, but I bet you will only want it noxious and black.” Sinbad makes a face. “When you were six, a man on the subway kicked you and you pickpocketed him in revenge, and he had over seven hundred dollars in cash. Uh, do you still like to cook? I suppose you haven’t had much time to try yet….”
If anything is leading Ja’far to believe that Sinbad may not be a simple hallucination, it’s that nothing that came out of his head should be that dumb. “If you’re trying to convince me you’re not an imaginary friend that I made up , maybe try for something that I wouldn’t be able to recall myself.”
“Oh. Oops.” He grins sheepishly. Sinbad puts a hand to his chin and appears to think seriously for a moment. “Aha! Well, you may not want to know, anyway, but I can tell you the names of your parents.”
Ja’far is inexplicably angry. “No, you can’t; no one can. They were found dead and burned beyond recognition when I was a baby. Their identities were false. I’ve already been told this.”
“I can too! Denis and Sofya Amelin. They were Ukrainian, actually. Came here about two years before you were born, running from something I never found the identity of. There is only so much you can do when you can’t physically dig through files. Whatever it was, it caught up to them in the end, obviously. I could point you in the direction of the mercenary organization hired to kill them, but I’d rather not, seeing as you’re ten.”
Ja’far is a bit dazed by this information, but life has taught him to trust nothing and no one.
“You could have just made those names up, for all I know.”
Sinbad flops back against the wall, sinks into it an inch, and throws his hands up in the air. “Oh, come on! I was there, Ja’far! I could pick the man they bought false identities from out of a lineup! When you’re old enough to start poking around, I’ll find you their damn grocery receipts in Ukraine. Just trust me a little.” He pauses briefly and considers his own words. “You trusted me once, and far more than you should have; just give me a chance.”
He thinks for a moment and finds a glaring hole. “How did you find my ‘parents’ before I was even born? Did you know them in your ‘other world’ too?” Ja’far questions with obvious sarcasm.
“No, I didn’t. You, uh… well, they died when you were young that time too. And to answer your questions, Aladdin died again a couple of years before you were born, this time. He pointed me in their direction as he… passed through, I suppose. I think the kid felt a bit sorry for me.” He smiles in self-deprecation. “You look just like your mother, Ja’far. The passport photo of her that they gave you was very bad. Don’t look much like your father, but he was just as smart as you ever were. They loved you very much.”
Ja’far mulls this over for a moment. “So, in the end, your explanation is more ghosts and magic,” he eventually mutters.
Sinbad slumps down against the floor, and Ja’far can’t tell if his watery eyes are for show or not. “Gah! I give up. I know everything will be different from before, but I don’t really want much from you; just want someone to talk to occasionally.”
“And I just want to stay in this home for more than a few months. That doesn’t happen when you walk around talking to yourself.” Ja’far tries not to crack in his resolve to rid himself of Sinbad.
“Well, only talk to me when you’re alone, then.”
“I really just want to live a normal life. Which doesn’t involve ghosts with stupid purple ponytails.”
“What’s wrong with the ponytail? You used to like it!” Sinbad pets his hair self-consciously.
Ja’far snorts. “Probably just because I liked to see you trip over it.”
“I save your life several times -- over two different lifetimes, mind you! -- and this is the thanks I get?” Sinbad starts crying what Ja’far rather hopes are crocodile tears.
“I don’t recall any buffoon like you saving my life,” Ja’far protests. “You can’t even touch anything, and I’d definitely remember if I saw you before.”
“I can’t touch anything now , but when it reallys matters I can, sometimes; mostly just you, actually.
“Like two weeks ago! You tripped on the crosswalk and only barely avoided that van running the red light. I tripped you, you know; I’d apologize if it hadn’t saved your life.” A bit of interest flares in Ja’far at this, and Sinbad perks up in return, tears forgotten.
“Or when you were seven and that dealer went for your throat with a knife. But your knee buckled and he only hit your collarbone, and you got away.
“Lots of times when you were little, I helped. One time you actually fell off of a balcony and I grabbed your ankle. It was the longest time I’ve ever been able to touch you, though I doubt you’d remember it. I think the closer you are to death, the more I can interact with you, or something,” Sinbad shrugs. “I only wish I could have done more.”
Ja’far frowns down at the ground. He has had a lot of bizarre near-misses, now that he thinks about it. “That… that time when I was four. With the boiling water. Was that you too?”
Sinbad makes a distressed face, reaches toward Ja’far, and then stops when he realizes it doesn’t matter because he can’t touch him, anyway. “I’d hoped you didn’t remember too many details of that.”
“Of course I remember it. I still talk to Vittel and Mahad, you know. The kids who found me after I ran, and then brought me to the hospital?”
Sinbad smiles a bit sadly. “I do know. And it’s funny; as soon as I find you, everyone else also starts finding each other again.” Ja’far can’t make sense of that statement, but chooses to let Sinbad continue.
“And yes, that was me. I wasn’t fast enough, though. You were small and hungry, always crying…. I don’t know why that motherfu-- uh, I mean scumbag -- thought dunking you in boiling water would make that go away. I was trying to figure out how to get the social workers to come get you back, and I was distracted. I’m sorry.” A phantom hand brushes over blotchy scars on Ja’far’s arms. “You’ve always had scars on your arms and legs; they’re just a bit more my fault, this time around.”
Ja’far scrunches his body up on his bed, where he is now sitting, trying to make himself smaller. “Not your fault. I would have died, if you hadn’t intervened. I can deal with a few scars.”
Sinbad crawls up on the bed next to him. Ja’far feels a bit nervous, but like he had already said, it’s not as if Sinbad can do anything. He lets Sinbad scoot over until they’re almost shoulder to shoulder.
“You’ve always been much stronger than me, Ja’far.”
“Not strong, I think, just desperate.”
“And certainly more humble than me. You only think that way because you haven’t had me around to tell you otherwise.”
Ja’far unfolds slightly, letting himself relax just a bit. Maybe, just maybe, he can suspend his disbelief and give this a try.
“You can… talk to me sometimes,” Ja’far says quietly. “Only when I’m alone, though!” Sinbad’s face splits in a grin and he opens his mouth to reply, but Ja’far interrupts quickly. “And if I don’t like it, I can take that back! Consider it a trial period.”
Sinbad just keeps grinning. “Even then, I suppose I could always just pester you for eternity. I’m quite good at it, I’ve been told.”
Ja’far suspects he fails to keep the horror from his face. “Why do I think you’d do that, anyway, whether I allowed it or not?”
Sinbad just laughs and sinks through the floor. “Go help your parents make dinner. I’ll see you later.”