Footfalls Echo in the Memory by inside-the-disarray

Official Description: For the Love of Jasper Contest O/S entry. Alice finds a man on a deserted Moroccan street; he doesn’t know his own name, but for some reason he hears muffled footsteps in his mind. Back in Boston Bella waits for the man she loves, but will he return?
Word Count: 8,741

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Footfalls Echo in the Memory was written for the Love of Jasper Contest and my first reaction after my heart was done breaking was WOW.

There are three characters in this O/S: Jasper, Bella and Alice; however, this is not a poly story.

Jasper is a man that Alice watches pass out near her home in Morocco. For no apparent reason when Jasper wakes up he can’t remember anything about his life before. Alice makes sure to nurse him and then help him try to find his memories. They never really come back to him. He has a “B” tattooed on his arm, and they come up with the name Ben for him.

Ben and Alice fall in love, even though he feels like he can’t give away his heart completely to her. He just doesn’t know why he can’t. While this is going on we see snippets of Bella who is waiting for her fiancé to come home from a dangerous job. He doesn’t call when he is supposed to, and eventfully he is assumed dead. Alice seems to know her time with Ben is limited as he tries to find out his past. I wasn’t sure if I wanted Jasper to never remember, or for Bella to get her fiancé back.

inside-the-disarray keeps you on the edge of your seat with a box of Kleenex close by with lines like this:

I can’t understand my fixation with remembering. It’s been two years since she found me. Anything I had in the past is long gone by now, I’m sure. I’m happy with my life. I have a home, a fiancée, a family. But I find myself still lying in bed awake at night, wondering what it is that’s missing. I love Alice with as much of myself that I can possibly give, but there is something, some small place in my heart that I can’t give her. It eats me alive, it makes me feel like a terrible person, but more than anything, it terrifies me to think of what used to fill that space.

Want to know how it ends? Go read it and leave some love when you’re done. You won’t regret it.

Normally I wouldn’t have read something labeled Jasper/Bella/Alice, even with the promise that it wasn’t a threesome. But this month I’ve decided that I’m going to use my time with The Fictionators as a way to expand my horizons. Footfalls Echo in the Memory did not disappoint.

This is a beautiful oneshot, filled with love, confusion, and just the right amount of angst. Which characters your loyalties lie with determines how you will feel about the ending. For me, I’m left needing– no wanting, the rest of the story.

Who wouldn’t want more of this?

For Alice, seconds dragged on. She stood frozen in place as the noise of the busy city sidewalk faded into oblivion. Her every sense was focused on the man beside her as he stared hopelessly back at the brown-haired girl. Something in his eyes changed and time stood still.

Alice knew that the next words out of his mouth would change her life forever. She held her breath, waiting for the girl’s name to fall from his lips. Flashes of their time together twirled through her mind like she was watching though a kaleidoscope. Their future, their lives together, the diamond ring on her third finger—none of it mattered anymore. She just knew.

A man awakens in an alley. He doesn’t know where he is, where he came from, or how he got there. He cannot even remember his name.

Elsewhere, Bella feels her heart shatter into a million pieces with each day that passes without word from her fiancé. She cannot bring herself to give up on him…not until she receives that phone call.

Alice, the girl who found the man, helps him, and little by little, he learns things about himself. His blond hair and blue eyes, coupled with a slight Southern twang in his voice, indicate that he is most certainly not Moroccan, but why is he there? He can speak French and Arabic. He can read and write, yet all the details about his life and preferences are gone. And then there is something else; something he can’t quite get a handle on, but deep in the darkest corners of his soul, he knows something – or someone – is missing, and he believes that if he could just unlock that one memory, everything else would fall to place.

Everything in this story is a mystery, but the way inside-the-disarray unravels the details, the readers understand what has happened, and your heart is torn in two directions. By skipping from “Ben”‘s life to Bella’s and then to journal entries our lost man makes over the two year span, readers are sucked into a heavy emotional climate, full of longing, fear, and memories.

This is one of my favorite one-shots, (also a For the Love of Jasper contest Hosts’ Mention), and in my opinion, it has never received the attention it deserves. If you’re looking for something original and edge-of-your-seat, you will love this.

I would never have read this if Dulci hadn’t insisted. And now, I am so, so glad that she did, because I would seriously be missing out on what is one of the best one-shots ever.

The other reviewers did an amazing job telling you what’s going on in the story, so I’ll just mention certain moments that really stuck out to me and will stay with me forever. Like when Alice traces over “Ben”‘s “B” tattoo, hoping that it stands for his name, picturing Jasper pouring over a crossword puzzle, like he had been doing his whole life with Bella, and Bella sitting on the shore with a letter she’d drafted to her lost love.

I do not know how in the heck inside-the-disarray got all of this packed into a one-shot. The history of the all three characters, the depth of their emotions, the longing that Jasper/Ben feels to know his past as well as the apprehension that looms over him at what will change if/when he ever does remember…this is absolutely amazing. The way she has intricately woven details together, like when he says “Bono” when trying to come up with a “B” name for himself, only for us to later find out that he’s not a U2-fan. I could feel the pain and just everything as Bella fell to her knees as she received the call from Jasper’s mother. The snippets from the past we got, including Jasper’s proposal to Bella–how could *I* love a fic so much that only mentions Edward Cullen one time, and in passing? I don’t know, but I do. This should seriously be a movie.

This story has everything you want: passion, love, an amazing plot, moments that make you laugh and cry and think. It has quickly become one of my favorites, and it definitely should not be missed.