For my dear Nims, a.k.a. Obsidian Buterfly (sic!), Happy Birthday~! I have already wished you well, so just compile a wish list of your own and I'll sign it :) and have some more cake while you're at it.
(Okay so it would've been easier if I remembered what was and what wasn't in the movies. But I do hope you won't feel the need to complain *smiles beatifically*)
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They had forgotten about him.
This one thought, and nothing else, rang clear in his mind, clear among the frayed, muffled cacophony of notions and memories he could not even begin to discern.
This one thought he repeated to himself again and again, over and over, savouring it, revelling in it, confining it to each moment as it passed and himself to it.
They have forgotten.
(This thought he dared not speak aloud, lest it was what they were waiting for; and he was not certain he could, if he dared.)
They have forgotten I am here. For them, I am not here. For them, I am not.
Perhaps he was not. In this darkness he felt at home, and in this darkness he felt dissolved, moving in it, breathing it, a patch of shadow in blackness, without substance. Sun would disperse him, he felt, when he could recall the Sun at all, a distant, vague memory from the world above, the world he had lost and was lost for.
One last connection he had had to that world, the last piece of his past they had not taken away, out of mockery (keep your treasured trash, old beggar), even as they had stripped him from all else, and most of all the ring, the ring had been important, he had received it from – whom…? – and so beautiful, so precious he could wail… so that last connection he had given away himself, to a stranger passing through the darkness.
There had been a flicker of light, scary and hurtful, but it had not been their light, he had known at once, for it had also been wondrous.
Who are you? How long have you been here? What is your name? and he could only shake his head, feebly yet persistently pressing the map and the key into the man's hands, because it felt vital, although he did not know why, to pass them to – whom..? – not to allow them to rot away in this darkness that had already claimed him. What is this map, this key for? but he could not tell, for the map had been of the world above, outside of darkness, and in the darkness there was no need for maps or doors, only for stillness, only for silence.
Finally the stranger nodded, took his treasures and disappeared back into the shadows, leaving him with an unexplained sensation of completeness, of near relief.
(There had been a brief moment of panic in which he wanted to call the man back, to tell, to explain something essential, and he was certain all would be lost if he did not, but there was no voice in his throat and the distant glimmer of light went out, irrevocably lost-)
How long ago had it been? It was impossible to tell, in this fluid, malleable darkness, which swallowed hours and deprived days of any meaning, dissolved memory, dissolved the senses, dissolved everything except this one thought playing over and over in his mind, and never spoken.
They have forgotten about me…