It's a story of too much. It's trying too hard, losing everything, and the desperation in trying to make everything okay again. It's all Eli does anymore, much as he'd like to shut down the darkest parts of his mind, just on a perpetual search for everything to be okay.

It started with his mother, young and floundering after her lifeline was cut when her parents disagreed with her choice of study. She had no working experience and the one job she did manage to find wasn't covering her living costs, let alone the price of tuition. It wasn't ideal, but she met with a lonely man who promised her the money she needed in exchange for her company. The plan worked out well enough, but the baby that resulted from their time together wasn't exactly going to make things easier. It brought her parents back into her life, and the man traded more money for her silence - he couldn't have a child out there with his sort of upstanding reputation - but a baby, so soon?

Anna managed to finish her degree by the time Eli was two years old and found work shortly after graduating. It meant they could have a home of their own instead of living in the basement of her parents' home and the renewed attention from his mother gave Eli the opportunity to flourish. He was a naturally precocious child, insatiably active and frenetically curious, but charming enough that it took longer for people to entirely lose their patience with him.

At eight, his mother met a man. A good one, this time, who was working overseas just for the experience of a new place. Things between Anna and Lee went well and then they went even better: Eli was ten when they moved back to London with him, officially adopted with a shiny new surname to round out the changes in his life. He started at school and lagged for a bit, just to be obtuse, but finally allowed the wonder of learning to reel him. He raced ahead of everyone, clamouring for every little bit of information anyone was willing to give him.

Puberty claimed what little sanity he might have ever had as a child. It seemed logical, when his parents announced he was going to have a little sister, to promptly pack up the things most important to him and leave home for an entire day. He ended up in Brighton just because the train was there and he was adult enough to take it on his own. It made sense to continue acting out from that point on, causing trouble just for the sake of it. It was all petty and juvenile, though sometimes stupider and more dangerous than others, and he more often than not ended up cuffed in the backseat of the neighbour's police car just to teach him a lesson.

He still managed to do stupidly well on his A Levels and ended up finishing college early enough that it surprised the people who thought they knew him. He was accepted into Oxford on scholarship and promptly left home because there were things to learn and people to meet and the idea of an entirely new experience to explore sent hot pinpricks of anticipation surging through his veins.

At eighteen, he met Shea, a girl who hated him from the moment they were introduced. Eli, of course, fell stupidly and madly in love with her and he would leave his part time job at the mechanic's to head straight to the pub where she tended bar. It took months for her to come around, but eventually - reluctantly - she agreed to a date. They were married a year later, riding high on lust and passion that couldn't ever hope to sustain them.

He finished his degree that same year they married and immediately applied to grad school. Not long after his twenty-first birthday, he and Shea learned that she was pregnant. It would have been good news if lust was enough to maintain a relationship, but it wasn't and they faltered, in slow and staggered steps, ever downward. Resentment turned to bitterness and bitterness to hatred. They had next to no money and fought late into the night just because it gave them something to do that felt real. It was stupid to try and fool themselves into thinking that all they had to do was wait until the baby was born and everything would be fine, but it seemed like the best answer for their problem. Just wait it out.

For a while after Eva was born, everything was fine. She was absolutely perfect, and while not a dream to deal with in the middle of the night, she was something magical they'd created together. Something beautiful. Eli fell in love with her immediately, with every part of himself, which made the night that he found her cold in her crib even more devastating. Three months. That was it, and she was gone.

That was the end of them. Shea went back to her mum's in Antrim and Eli lost himself in his grad studies. The moment they granted him his master's degree he ran, first back to the familiar sights and sounds of London and then all the way back to Seattle, just to put some distance between himself and the hurt that had turned hard and black in his heart. The city was good to him. It welcomed him back with warm, soothing nights and easy laughter that let him forget, for just a moment. But his mind wouldn't ever quiet entirely and so he busied himself with first one job and then two, working early mornings for a bakery before stumbling to a repair shop to spend another few hours trying to shut out the voices in the back of his mind going what if, sotto voce.

He made friends and alienated others with his quiet and his reluctance to share more than the bare minimum about himself. He thought about school and about finding a job in his field and then traded the bakery for a management position at a music venue. It lasted him a while before the routine of it let his mind wander too far and so he took a supervisor position in the bar of a brewing company. He found it easier to breathe for a while and he was glad for the way the permanent tension in his shoulder blades slowly loosened itself as a customer lodged yet another complaint about something he couldn't control.

Then came the phone call, early one morning: his mom had cancer and everything tumbled straight back to square one. He flew home to help where he could, to just be there, just in case. Things got better and then they got worse and he flew back to Seattle long enough to tie off his loose ends then turned around to head straight back home. There was only so much to do, to keep himself occupied with while she sat in the hospital for her treatments each day, and he found himself jotting down ideas, rearranging thoughts in his head, and finally putting together his paperwork to apply to University College London. He finally began work on his doctorate in astrophysics, half the time camped out in his mom's room while she recovered from another round of chemotherapy that seemed to make her sicker than the cancer had.

Finally, good news: Anna's cancer had gone into remission, but Eli still stuck around, careful and worried. It felt right to immerse himself in papers again, to work towards something that might offer him some level of closure as his parents set to putting their life back in order, like it maybe never happened at all. His mom was there when they presented him with his Doctorate, tears in her eyes and pride visible in the breadth of her shoulders and Eli found that he was probably more proud of her in that moment.

He's still not fully aware of how he ended up in Palo Alto. The job opportunity, maybe. He's not certain it's where he wants to end up long term, but for now, it's as good as anywhere.