"Please allow me to introduce myself
I'm a man of wealth and taste
I've been around for a long, long year
Stole many a man's soul and faith"
---
It was dark
That was all that he knew at first. It was dark, and he was in pain. Hurting all over, flesh cut and bruised and bleeding. His head felt like it was split in half. The air was thick and clogged with smoke, threatening to smother him with ash before he could take enough into his damaged chest to live. A hacking cough struggled and tore from his throat.
It was a while before a thought crossed his fractured mind. Wearily he struggled to sit up and found that something was laying across his chest, further compressing it. With a groan he pushed it off of his body, the effort almost causing him to pass out again. When the world stopped spinning he looked around at it with dull ruby eyes.
Wherever he was, it was on fire. Antennae pressed flat against his skull as a reflex to the intense heat, even though the nearest fire was several feet away. There were broken chunks of wall and bits of thick cables lying around. One such piece of wall was what had been laying on him. There was one wall still half-standing, a weird pattern on it being slowly consumed by flames. Far above twinkled the cold stars of the night sky.
He groaned again, bending his head forward and almost touching his legs with wilted antennae. His head felt like it was about to split open. Dimly he thought that this made sense, as there appeared to have been an explosion. He was probably lucky to be alive.
So why couldn't he remember being in an explosion?
His breath caught in his throat for a heartbeat, then sped up until he was almost hyperventilating. The thick air caught in his throat again to form a choking sob, and his eyes snapped all the way open.
He couldn't remember anything.
There was nothing, nothing at all, before the moments where he had woken up. Not a name, not a place, no clue to where or who he was. No reason as to why he was laying in the burning hull of a building. Nothing.
A part of his mind tried to deny the truth. His dry mouth opened, and his throat worked a few times to clear away the smoke and ash clogging it.
"I am-" he started, the words harshly whispered by his damaged throat. There was something that came next, something he could very nearly remember being declared. A simple statement of self that he worked furiously to recall. An odd whimper escaped his still open mouth as he came to the realization. He could not remember his own name.
He might have sat like that, a figure of dejection half buried in rubble, until the fire burned him alive. However, this was not to be. His sensitive antennae picked up the sound of coughing coming from somewhere other then himself. Someone else was in the building with him. Someone that might know him.
With a weird cry he lurched to his feet, collapsing back onto the ground as his right leg refused to support his weight. A quick inspection of it told him why; it was broken. Whimpering at this new agony layered upon existing agonies, he was forced to crawl across the wreckage. A part of him that remembered a former sense of self was embarrassed at the action he was taking, but he replied that a sense of self was useless without a self to defend. So it was crawling that he went across the floor, whimpering whenever his right leg was scraped over anything. The going was slow, and his abused body protested the action. Indeed, he was about to pass out again when he discovered the other body.
Gasping, choking on the smoke-clogged air, he inspected the person laying in font of him. They had two arms and two legs and a head and a torso, just like him. However, it was different, too. Self-consciously he inspected the exposed skin of his right hand where his glove had torn; green compared to peach. The hand raised to rub the smooth skin between his eyes and on one side of his head where the other had a fleshy nub and a flap of skin. Still, there was no one else for him to compare to lying around in the rubble. This person would just have to do.
One antenna cocked as he titled his head, eyes half-shutting in exhaustion and pain. He felt as though he was about to collapse. One hand drifted over the other's face absently and came back coated in something sticky. He inspected the dark red goo curiously, then the body it came from. The other was bleeding.
A part of his mind panicked at the thought. What he remembered was limited, basic, but he knew bleeding was bad. The other might even bleed to death, leaving his questions unasked and unanswered. Responding to the unconscious request, a mechanical arm slid out of the metal thing on his back. The arm was holding several rolls of bandages.
He blinked, but took the bandages anyway. As soon as the sat roll was in his hand, the arm withdrew with a snap. He jumped, but when nothing more happened he shrugged and began trying to wrap the injured body lying in front of him. A part of him, the part that was beginning to call itself an ego, found this action repulsive, but he could not remember why. That part of his memory was wiped blank, just like the rest of his mind. Still, it meant that this person was familiar to him, which meant that they probably knew who he was.
Green claws ceased moving for a moment, a bandage gripped in one. He gave the unconscious other a somber, almost mournful look as he glanced over their body. Tired ruby eyes half closed, he spoke in a strained, pitiful half-whisper.
"Who am I?"
This fic has been brought to you by the letter 8 and the number pork. The song "Sympathy for the Devil" belongs to the Rolling Stones, no matter how many bad covers of it are out there. Seriously, if you know where I can download a free copy done by the Stones, I will love you.
Heavily inspired by the fic You and Me by Dancing Feather. If you can't tell, this is Zim we're talking about here. The description in this chapter was influenced by chapter 9 of Finale by Marie and a flashback in chapter 5 of Glass Wings by MistressMoonDemon.
Let's see, it's a multi-chapter, not sure on anything under the heading of romance, and I have no clue where it ends. But hey, what do you expect when I came up with it less than a week ago?
Because rain is too overused and fire is nice.
