The Lost

Before

I don't remember anything from before I met him. Sometimes I think I do— I have daydreams about weird-looking trees or shivers when I hear a voice I think I know— but it's always nothing in the end. The trembles could just be because I haven't eaten in hours. The dreams are just that, dreams. I've tried to remember things and I never can.

What I do remember is always blurry, like looking at your reflection in a shattered mirror. Just glimpses. When I think too hard about it, I get this terrible headache. Trying to remember things makes my head throb and eyes go tingly. So I've stopped.

What else is there to do? I've asked him a hundred times and he always has the same answer: I don't know. Isn't it ridiculous for me to keep trying to recall the past? It's not that I've given up, I just... there's just no point. What does it even matter? Maybe I wouldn't like the past if I actually did manage to remember it. I suppose that some things aren't worth remembering.

But one thing I can remember is the water.

———

There was a lot of water that day, surges of the stuff, and it was cold, silver in the moonlight. Spray stung my eyes, streams flowed into my mouth, my nose. I remember kicking and gasping for breath, fighting with everything I had just to stay afloat. Then the moon went away and the sky... the sky went dark. It went dark like how it does in the nighttime. Everything was overcast, giving the illusion of midnight when I'm sure that it was actually the middle of the day. And the rain, there was so much rain. It was pouring buckets on me, great drops splattering onto my head and forcing me back down into the swirl though I was trying so desperately to stay buoyant. I know it now and I knew it then; I was drowning.

I know that I was. Lucius insisted it a thousand times over the next few days, but I knew before his input. The feel of icy water burning your skin and choking you from inside out is a feeling you don't forget.
I was drowning in a fast-moving stream, unable to keep myself up amidst the churned currents around me. It was exhausting, I was exhausted, and yet there was that fear that somehow made my arms keep going. Maybe a sort of refusal to die that caused my legs to kick more, yet it still wasn't enough. There was water in my eyes, my mouth, my stomach, my chest, everywhere.

Drowning had been concrete in my mind from the very second I woke up after that ordeal. Coughing up that disgusting, ashy water was proof that it hadn't been a dream. However, the next part had been... difficult for me to make sense of.
At the time, I was panicked and confused. Rightfully so. I have no idea how I got myself stuck in the water, nor why I was on my own in the first place. That's the part I can't remember.
At the time, I knew that I was drowning... and yet there was no river to drown in.

The sky was black, exactly like the ground below me. A road of tarmac, gritty and saturated in the storm. And I could see it ahead of me despite the mistiness of my eyes; a gaping, inky hole that threatened to swallow me up.
The humans call it a drain. It empties rainwater from places when they get too wet, sweeps it into these pipes underground. I didn't know exactly what it was at the time, but the gurgling of the drain frightened me more than the water I was in.
I couldn't allow myself to get swept into it, I couldn't. The thing looked evil. But no matter how hard I swam against the current, I remained stuck. The hole was approaching fast, and I was going to disappear into it, lost in the tides of the thunderstorm. I was dead- going to die- deader than dead, and I knew it. So I shut my eyes.

And I was saved.

I didn't understand what had happened. I was far too busy coughing and spluttering. All I knew was that I was no longer in the stream- instead I was ascending high up over it. Honestly, I thought that I had died. I was a spirit rising up to the stars, a sad little soul that got lost in the rain. That was before I came to my senses and blinked in the glare of the lighting.

Fat splatters of rain pounded against my little body, each of them bruising and making me wince. I sat up, feeling a floor beneath me and seeing the greyness of a road far below. Great metal machines called cars loomed around me, some unmoving and set against the curb while others zoomed past with a flash of rain and that rancid stench of fuel. I looked down to see the raging river I had fought so valiantly against.
Beside the incline of walking path in the corner of the road, there was the thin trail of water where I had been drowning. It was pathetically small compared to the huge benches and vehicles around it.

Small.

I was aware of the new floor beneath me. Still wet, but no longer cold or gritty. I looked down at it.
Below was no longer the dirt of the road, but a dip that was somehow full of crevasses and pooling with rainwater. A pair of hands, cupped together.

I wouldn't have cared, except they were huge hands, bigger than my entire body. Oh.
Somehow, I knew right then and there what had happened. I wasn't dead, not at all; a human had saved me. And somewhere inside me, some part of my body screamed out with fear.
I turned to the sound of thunder overhead and a raindrop hit my face. A cold bolt of lightning flashed and lit up a horrific sight in front of me. Above me. That exact moment is why I remember that night so clearly.

A huge face loomed, skin soaked and eyes wide, blinking in the heavy rain and focused on my body. A boy. A human boy, holding me between his hands and staring down at what he had pulled from the gutter stream. He didn't say a single word, just looked at me with a silent amazement. There were others around us, other humans, but they didn't seem to notice us in their hurry to get out of the rain. None of them were as small as the boy holding me though. He was a child. Like me.
I didn't scream or cry, maybe I was frozen with the terror. I actually don't think I even moved until he folded his fingers over me. Then I was trapped in a suffocating darkness, soaked through and shivering with the sound of rain pattering on the flesh above me.

What happened next, I don't really know. I was practically mad with confusion, cold, still coughing, but above all else, absolute fear. I remember that I was maybe weeping, but I was so wet that I didn't notice. How, I still don't know to this day, but as held me prisoner in his fists, I knew deep in my soul that I needed to get away. I just knew that humans were terrible, terrible creatures. They may have looked like me, but they were not the same, not at all. But no matter what I thought, I was too afraid, too weak to even attempt an escape.

Lucius.