"What hurts the most is not the blade between my ribs, but the knowledge that the world has moved on without me."

Light. Pure, blinding, white light. It attacks his overly sensitive eyes and sends waves of agony through his skull. His lips fails to make any sound of protest, produce no vocalisation of his pain. They do not bare his dazzling grin, nor do they display his feral smirk.

He can recall nothing. He cannot remember his days in fields, nor his runs through the city. He cannot see the faces of his brethren or the glimmer of gold in his hands. All he can recollect is the names and voices, words that seem foreign on the tip of his silver tongue.

He blinks, unackowledged tears rolling down his soft cheeks as his soul mourns for his memories. He would wish for them back if he knew what he's lost, if his mind didn't forget to connect to his heart.

"You're awake."

He turns his head to the gentle voice, expression blank of emotion and caution. His eyes glint with longing.

The voice belongs to kind faced woman, her red hair pulled back behind her head. Her shoulders don a white coat that flows down to her knees, but beneath she wears strangely green attire. Large glasses rest on the bridge of her nose, enlarging her chillingly blue eyes. 

He flinches slightly upon noticing the shade of her eyes. Alarm arises within him, but it subsides swiftly as she sits in a chair beside him. There's nothing threatening about her at all, so why had he flinched?

"How are you feeling?"

A common question in such a bizarre situation. He blinks.

The woman sighs softly, glancing down at the paper pinned to the wood board in her hands. Apparently not the response she was hoping for.

"Can you tell me anything about yourself?" she quirks a slim brow at his lack of reply. "What about your name?"

His lips press into a frown and he drags his eyes away from her to stare at the strange ceiling. He remembers his name, but thinks it to be misplaced and a mouthful. And yet there are other titles rattling within his mind.

"Tyler Reynolds," he starts, hardly withholding a grimace at the sound of it, "I think."

She makes a soft sound of approval and scratches something down with her small quill. "Anything else that you know? Age? Home address?"

His mind spins like lightning, ideas crackling like thunder. "Just that I'm seventeen. I... don't really know anything, I'm afraid."

The woman mumbles to herself but smiles kindly at him, reminding him of someone he once knew, though he knows not who. "That's good enough, I should think. Especially for someone who's been hit by a car."

His brows furrow, and confusion is clear on his face. What on this good Earth is a car?

"You suffered head trauma, and I suspect that you're suffering from amnesia as a result," she concludes, regarding him with a gentle glance up. "Get some rest, I'll see what I can find about your history."

As she stands, he offers a tight smile, his first one as far as he can remember, and although it's more of a grimace, she smiles back. Her hand waves a farewell and he watches as she disappears through the doorway.

His smile falls immediately. He knows nothing, but he wants to know everything. It feels like he should know everything. And yet the knowledge remains tucked away in an unreachable corner of his mind, locked up with chains of iron.

Something's so wrong with this. It's so foreign and cruel. Why take away everything from someone with their whole life ahead of them? Why lock up one's entire identity?

He shakes his head ever so slightly, returning to reality with a hard glare in his amber eyes. It's going to take a lot more than a little memory loss to keep him from digging his nose in matters that don't concern him. Even if those matters threaten him in ways he can't imagine.

What alarms him, however, is how natural the altruistic thought feels. 

It's almost as though the instinctual behaviour is ingrained in his soul, awaiting discovery. Maybe not everything has been lost, maybe just the surface memories are gone. He might find what he's missing if he searches hard enough.

The recollections of his moment in the woods crawls into his mind's eye, scrawling images of rotting leaves and gnarled branches in his imagination. Old rags covered his lean frame, brown against blue, and yellowed bandages wrapping his hands in place of gloves. Whispers had filled his ears, ancient in sound and astonished in tone. Only magic could have produced such a noise in an empty forest, but magic does not exist.

He snorts silently at his conclusion and his lips draw back in disgust. Why does it feel so sinful to laugh at the thought?

Perhaps he'll have to wait for his answers, but that doesn't mean he'll sit on his rear and await their arrival. He'll do some digging in whatever time he's offered.