Sometimes the sun felt grey in Neo Neo Neo; not for any sort of melodrama or analogy of deeper thought; but the light that came down t the skin was just darker than it looked in a past life. Everyone here was running from something; they had picked up a new life yet could never really shake the old one. Or the new ones.

Maybe it was for melodrama.

Torch was struggling, her arms tired from gripping on to a set of leather reigns. Her heart was beating in a panic that set her stomach upside down on itself. A storm none the likes she'd never seen raged in a fury that cut her eyes like paper. For several long moments she was blinded, alone with her thoughts and the storm.

She leaned to vomit over the edge of a building ,only to find that she wasn't standing at all but hovering startling heights above the ground on the back of a dragon. Her head spun with nausea but she managed to bite it back as the rain drenched her to the bone.

On the ground below a young man leveled crossbow a her chest. Even through the downpour and a pair of fogged glasses, the disdain in the man's face was obvious. Before her, the mammoth neck of the beast strained against the storm, struggling to maintain their height as the wind beat down on them. Torch reached her hand forward to steady the creature only to snatch it right back with a gasp.

Her gloves were gone and the scars on her knuckles had all disappeared. She glanced down at her hands in horror. They are rough, with longer, more delicate fingers than her own.

No. She realized with a start.

Not her. Him.

Before Torch has a moment to react that she was no longer in her own female body, a quick movement stirred her attention.

Down below, several people emerged from the shadows; one was holding a semi automatic rifle and the other held what looked to be a net and an over sized cell phone. The beast below him grumbled, its wings snapping at the air like a flag in a storm. They were cornered.

Suddenly the dragon darted straight into the clouds; barely giving Torch — or whoever he was now — a chance to yell as the wind battered icicles into their faces. "Matthias!" Torch screamed; barely aware of her new abilities as he readjusted his hand grips one by one in an attempt to hang on. "We can't go up there!"

Another part of her dually noted that her voice was now suddenly a steep baritone.

She wasn't Torch anymore, but —

The dragon bellowed in agony as his grip grew weak. He couldn't hold on.  "Both of us can't make it out of here." His voice was snatched immediately in the wind, but somehow he knew that his dragon heard it. It was like the words were rehearsed, echoing through a predetermined pinpoint of space and time.

 Matthias growled and continued pounding his wings. Torch's fingers were growing weak as the storm spat an ocean of water in their faces. "Matthias," he whispered again; he tugged at his riding gear with all the strength he had. "Find my brother and go."

The dragon's hum of protest shook Torch to the core.

"You can't stop me and my dumb decisions." His hands were slicked with ice and he could feel his fingers going numb. On a normal day with only a moderate downpour, they both could have made it out, but for once the storm wasn't on their side. Oh what bitter irony.

A cold draft came down on them suddenly from above and Torch struggle to hold on.

His arms were growing weak and feeble, as was his entire body. "I love you Matthias," he whispered and pressed his eyes closed, wishing silently that he could press his face into his dragon's snout just one last time. "But you have to let me go."

And with that his fingers slipped and he was falling. No wings to help him this time as he plunged to the ground where the others were waiting for him. They would catch him, but they would never catch his dragon. And with that thought, he smiled, a sickening sadistic sort of smile. The type that would later be written off as insanity or hysteria, but the type that knew that he somehow would still triumph.

Only a few seconds passed before he hit the ground, but by god it was probably the longest few seconds of his life.

Okay, David. You win this one.

. . .

Torch. Torch. Torch –

Torch sat bolt upright, choking on a large gasp as the dream faded from her consciousness. It took her a second to take in the scene around her. Everything felt unfamiliar from the carpet under her feet to the rain that she could still feel running down her back. 

No. No rain there wasn't any rain.

She was panicked and would have immediately leapt to her feet if someone hadn't grabbed her hands.

She blinked hard and tried to remember the bright pink eyes staring back at her in concern; she didn't calm down. "Saida?" She asked fearfully.

The girl tilted her head to one side. "Is your memory really that bad? My name is K—"

"Kayda," Torch finished with a deep sigh and wrung her eyes out aggressively. "Right, right. I'm sorry it's just. I can't keep all this —"

What was she supposed say? It was all so very new to her. 

As a product of the Underground, she had always been told that people who reappeared back into the world in way shape or form were demons – or at least not human enough to really matter. 

It was no secret that Neo Neo Neo and it's surrounding cities were the trash heap of the foreseeable and perceived universe. It was a void created by the gods to dust out the cache of space and time. It was a place people went to hide or realize true self, and it was not exactly known for the most stellar selection of persons. Some people came with the intent of ending up nowhere, but others...others, they just appeared when the sky portals opened.

It was rumored that the entire populace of the dimension came from somewhere...somewhere else — but in the Underground, they were knowledgeable on a wide a assortment of all things. Neo Neo Neo was old, but only a few remembered the days before the portals opened in the sky and people just started appearing. Those few grew resentful and assembled what was now the modern day church mafia that was the Underground.

Torch had always believed that the city should belong to the people born of the world. Everyone else who just appeared when the portals opened were not to be trusted. They were all aliens after all; people thrown away from their home worlds and dimensions. People who ran. They were trash before; so what made them worthy of living new lives now?

 It was a wide eyed and doughy sentiment she was ashamed to have held for so long. 

She had never thought much about it to be honest, until the world shook and she started to remember – and just like that she was just like everyone else the Underground hunted. A person reborn. A person with a million pasts and futures already lived. Most of the Underground's crew was unaware how deep the problem ran and just how prone everyone was to reliving the moments of strangers from another place and another time— strangers memories that were every bit as real as what you had for breakfast that morning. Her existence in Neo Neo Neo was just lifetime in the band of at a dozen or so — and one day she would pass again.

Each story of an old life tainted her memories like poison, spreading through her brain until she couldn't tell the difference between what was real and what was false. What happened to her in this lifetime and what was something else altogether; all of it was crushed and blended like a million lifetime soups. She couldn't tell the difference between dreams and flashbacks anymore and it was even making her forget who she was now, much less who she was before.

Hell, she wasn't even always a she.

"Are you good?" Kayda asked with the slow deliberateness of someone who was speaking to the mentally handicapped.

"Yeah." Torch took a deep breath and looked down to realize that Kayda still was holding her hands. She shrugged them away and stretched as much as she could in the small space. Kayda rubbed the back of her neck nervously as if she didn't know what to do with her hands and she looked away.

"You don't look good," she said at last.

"That bad, huh?" Torch laughed and looked out the window. The sun was hanging high in the sky: she hadn't been asleep that long. Neither of them had been. "God, how the hell do you do this all the time?" She twirled her index finger in circles near her ear. "All of this is so convoluted." She took a deep breath. 

"My head is a mess," she admitted quietly.

Kayda clenched and unclenched her fists as if wondering what to say. Her lips parted tentatively, and she looked down at her hands before speaking. "I wish I could say it gets easier with time, but I really have no idea about that."

"So, I'll never be able to keep all this straight?" Torch groaned.

"It's not that." Kayda crossed her legs and leaned back against the wall. "I've always remembered something. This is the first lifetime, I think, where I completely reset myself into a new person. Like – I've always been Mya up until now and Mya was always good at handling all of this. She could keep a million lifetimes straight without losing herself in the years that passed." She smiled to herself. "She was special like that."

"I mean, you're her." Torch pointed out. "What makes you any different than the two or three Mya's you were before?"

Kayda pursed her lips. "I... don't know – but I do know what makes you and me different."

Torch raised her eyebrows so that they disappeared under her hair. "You're used to it?"

"Hardly," she laughed and leaned her head back against the wall behind her. Beneath them the gentle hum of voices in the shop sounded like the whispers of ghosts. It was both unnerving and undeniably like home. "It what puts me aside from most people who've lived lives like this. I've always remembered; maybe that makes it easier for me, but each part of me is separated by lifetimes and I can't connect them back to each other."

She reached a hand out gently and Torch backed away from her as far as the bookshelf would allow. Kayda faltered and dropped it hand back into her lap. "You. You are every person you've ever been," she whispered. "For me, I have lived each life like it was a story I acted in, but never lived. None of my lives have ever felt real. Being Kayda is the only real life I have."

"I wish I could say the same," Torch muttered under her breath. She folded her jacket over her arms carefully, but it did nothing to keep out the cold. She shot a sideways glance at the cape her companion always wore, now lying haphazardly on the floor between them. Suddenly the heavy piece of fabric didn't seem like all a bad idea.

"Who were you?" Kayda asked, a nervous smile stretched across her lips.

"Eh..." Now Torch was the one running her hand through her hair.

"What's the harm? We can't leave until nightfall anyway." Torch pursed her lips, trying to think of one lifetime to talk about; Kayda took it as contemplation and shrugged her shoulders nonchalantly. "Or we could, ya know, talk about the weather. Those clouds that never really go away are quite exhilarating."

Torch laughed and nodded. "You wouldn't believe this, but I was a priest once."

"What?" Kayda asked loudly, prompting Torch to hush her.

"Yeah," she continued with a grin. "It was in the 60's on Earth and I preformed exorcisms and preached for the hippies. Gods knows what version of Earth this was."

"No kidding." There was a wide grin on her friend's face.

"Yeah," Torch grinned back. "I can speak Latin, now, it takes some time to remember what I'm saying but man, is it cool."

"That's awesome. What else? What else?" Kayda's eyes were bright with relief.

Torch thought for a moment before speaking, and when she did her words were slow and deliberate, like she couldn't believe she was saying them out loud. "I...had a dragon."

Kayda's eyes grew to the size of saucers, and she leaned forward, almost without noticing so. "You...what?"

"I had a dragon," Torch repeated. "I had a dragon...and I did some things, that... I can't wrap my head around."

Kayda was silent for a moment as she took that in. "What was your name?"

Torch thought for a long moment. For all the long hard memories of that lifetime she had, she barely even knew her own name. She had to search deep into the folds of her brain, wracking between dreams and flashbacks and something else altogether. "Hilan was my last name," she said carefully. "I was a guy – and I went by a pseudonym –" she forced back a haughty laugh. "Kinda like I do now."

There was a pause.

"And that is?"

"Tern."

"We are really jumping this with the bird thing aren't we?'

A/N

Well this was the hardest thing in the world to edit. Everything from here was written really fast so much editing to be done. WELCOME TO MY THERAPY BOOK.

Also this was so hard to POV you have no idea.