"Bodies, Crackerjacks, and the Edge of a Map" by gunsandpocky Amal remembered Anatomy. The day all the coloured plates in the textbooks, the charts and diagrams and models took on form and substance, assumed a reality. The strange feeling he'd got in his stomach, like when an elevator you're riding in decides to drop a couple floors fast and unexpectedly. He'd seen dead people before, when his folks had taken him and Geeta and Radhi on a duty-trip back to the Old Country, but in India, dead people were a feature of the landscape, like cows in the middle of traffic and posters of Krishna looking like a Bollywood pin-up. You stared the first time or two, and after that you just went "Huh," and forgot about it. So it wasn't that the dead guy on the table was DEAD that had given Amal the elevator-feeling, although that, and the smell - chemicals and mortality - had made his lab-partner Dave leave the room kind of fast. It was relief, as weird as that sounded. Even with the current turned off, the body electric was still flashing signs, and he was going to learn to read that code. Another big mystery made simple. That wasn't just a dead guy - that was a book, a package of Crackerjacks, a map to read. Once you knew. Yeah, weird, maybe, but that was how Amal had looked at it then. What was still kind of freaky, though, was why he was thinking about that now, here, in a crappy Eisenhower-era motor-court somewhere west of Dubuque. In a bed that dipped in the middle, with a guy he barely knew more about now than when they'd started this Harold-and-Kumar-Enter-the-Twilight-Zone road-trip. Or…not so freaky. Amal chewed his lip to keep from sighing. It was still kind of about maps and Crackerjacks, what you knew and what you didn't. It wasn't that TJ was evasive, or lying, or trying to be International Man of Mystery, but if Amal asked him anything…personal…TJ seemed either confused or like he didn't hear it right. And the answers he did give? Shit. They obviously made sense to TJ, but to Amal, the guy might as well have been speaking Klingon. In Soviet Russia, fast food eat YOU? That kind of shit. Seriously. And how the fuck did he know CHINESE? When he had time to think about it, like now, when he couldn't sleep and TJ could, it bothered him. Usually, though, TJ didn't give him that kind of time, and it was just as well. Awake, TJ absorbed energy like a fucking black hole and gave it out again in REALLY good ways, and Amal would just get sucked right back up to the mothership, over and over. And it didn't matter, right? The thing he told himself he liked best about TJ was how TJ kind of accepted him without any question, like expectations and judgment simply didn't exist in TJWorld™, and rules were reduced to jingles on the level of Step on a crack, break your mother's back. The least he could do was return the favour. Except he couldn't. Amal remembered Anatomy, the body laid out like a landscape. Talk to me. TJ made a noise like "nnnghhhurk" and turned over, clipping Amal with one elbow then settling on his side, scarecrow head burrowing into the pillow. Amal shifted closer, fitting himself along the curved ridge of TJ's spine. You could count every damn vertebra, every rib. And if you did, what would you have found out? Or if you found this…he let his hand slide down, slow and light, over TJ's hipbone, then up again, fingertips finding the narrow line of scar tissue. Even if you could tell what made it, if you added it to your chart, what had you discovered? And this? Farther up, over the countable ribs, shoulder, collarbone, the long triangle muscles of the neck - and the scars there like a cluster of stars or bees. If you tried to guess, if you could even fucking begin to imagine… You wouldn't know. That was today's lesson. There were some things you couldn't memorize because you'd rather forget them, and some places no map could take you. end