Inside Out reImagined

Forgotten Together

To say that Sadness didn't expect to be hugged would be to say the very least. At first, she didn't even feel all that good, what with discomfort from both Bing Bong's weight and her comms tablet, lodged somewhere. For the first few seconds, she did everything she could to squirm out of the embrace, to be a free and lonely soul in Riley's mind once again.

Yet, the more time he spent hugging her, the less she squirmed. No one had made her feel this before — not even Joy — and until now, she had nothing to compare the feeling to. Perhaps, she came to realize during the hug, she wasn't exactly treated the best up until now.

Maybe that was an exaggeration. Of course she had been hugged before — as was Riley, allowing the emotions to share the experience. But if either of those happened, it was a long time ago, and since everything in the mind, up to and including the emotions, changed so fast, Sadness could be forgiven for forgetting something that happened years ago — or even so long ago, this might as well be the first hug in her lifetime.

Finally, Bing Bong released Sadness, before starting to jump in excitement, another sentiment that the blue emotion needed to get used to. "You remembered me! I can't believe it! Someone remembers me after all!" he shouted, paying little attention to whether he was causing a commotion. In return, a few Mind Workers gave him weird glances, but nothing beyond simply drawing attention.

"It's nothing..." Sadness muttered, wanting nothing more than to sit down and recover from everything.

"What do ya mean, it's nothing?" Bing Bong asked, as though Sadness had just suggested to blow the entire mind up. "It's... everything! It's quite literally everything! All this wandering, all this searching for a purpose, with no one around me even recognizing who I am... and then, someone finally does! I'm on the right track again!"

"You are?" Sadness gave him a weak glance, before returning to stare into the distance. "I mean, it must have been awful for you, and I'm happy that you're happy... glad to help, really... but..." She sighed deeply, unable to even complete her thought.

"Why so glum?" Bing Bong asked, stretching his arm out as if to pat Sadness. "The way you've been acting, it's almost as if you've been left behind too... that can't be right, can it?"

The sole thought made Sadness look back to her time in Headquarters. There was nothing happy about the time, and she merely looked down — only to realize that her comms tablet, caught in the middle of the hug, had now unceremoniously dropped by her feet, without anyone even bothering to call her attention to it. Sighing once again, she leaned to pick it up, before stowing it away in her purse.

Did Bing Bong even know what that thing was, given how long he had been out of the picture? Did it give away her identity as an emotion to him, and all the consequences thereof? How did Bing Bong see emotions, anyway? These were the questions Sadness definitely didn't want answered, and she only hoped that he hadn't noticed the thing at all.

"What? Cat got your tongue? Or was it the elephant? No, the dolphin!" Realizing Sadness had stopped talking, Bing Bong once again tried to get her attention.

"Wait... the dolphin?" An almost random assortment of named animals made Sadness think, and she didn't take long to realize that her attention was being called to Bing Bong's form — which had the obvious cat tail and elephant trunk, but no dolphin attributes.

"Yeah! You should know, right? How much do you remember?" Bing Bong asked, seeing how much common ground he and Sadness had.

"How much do I remember?" Without realizing it, Sadness almost reached out for the comms tablet, as if to recall a processed memory of the interactions between him and Riley — not immediately realizing even from the events of yesterday that deep Imagination involvement, like in the case of Daydreams, didn't leave memories behind at all — before realizing her goof: at Headquarters, the word "remember" didn't have quite the same connotations as those the imaginary friend was alluding to.