A/N: This was something that I got the idea for a while ago, but only just decided to write. Enjoy!

He felt himself kneeling, saw leaves swirling about in the breeze around him,

But

In his mind's eye he saw

Ashes

He sensed, somehow, that in these ashes, there was once a great house of memories.

Blue fire had danced around his mind, that was the last thing he remembered,

And the one door he saw with his mind's eye.

Then, through the trees around him, came a blur of

Pink

A person, he thought, a girl. One he had never seen before, but looked achingly familiar.

Slower, more solemnly, grimly, two others came up.

One of them was a boy on the cusp of teenagehood, the other an old man.

The one in a pink sweater (who looked a lot like the boy, now that he thought) put on his head

A hat, a fez.

Why this hat? Why did it all seem so… similar, familiar?

In the ashes of his mind, he looked desperately for something to understand,

But only found speech.

While he had been looking, the girl had spoken, to him, it seemed.

About how he 'did it', that it was 'amazing'. And what was a 'grunkle'?

In his mind, the one-second memory door opened.

Cyan flame danced, twirled, leaped, bent on turning something to ashes.

But what?

Something in his mind pulled, just a bit, and he thought that perhaps it was this kingdom.

Oh, yes, the girl.

He called her 'kiddo'; the name came from the same source as the thought about the flames.

With his mind's eye he saw

The ashes, being held in his hand- two specks, one for the flames and one for the girl.

She called him 'grunkle Stan' again. Well, at the very least Stan wasn't a bad name.

Then she went to cry with the boy. The old man came and called him a hero and hugged him.

But he wasn't a hero.

The thought came to him.

In his hands in his mind, there were a load more ashes, and a couple shards.

He planted the shards in his Mindscape, staking them in the ground wherever it seemed they should be.

He trusted his hunches.

Then to a shack, falling apart at the seams.

Familiar, like everything else.

He sat in the yellow chair, discovering a few more interesting looking ashes in his mind.

The girl in pink climbed on his lap, and opened a

Scrapbook, pink and plush.

A pig hopped on his lap.

In his mind, another shard- decently big, this one.

The pig was called Waddles.

Simple enough.

He called it that.

Everyone was much happier, telling the girl, Mabel, a shard told him, where to turn.

The big man said something about a boss-employee relationship.

Another two shards- one told him the man's name was Soos, the other that he was an amnesiac.

(He didn't know that? No wonder people used to call him the dumb twin.)

(Oh, wait, another two shards- he had a twin, and people called him the dumb one.)

As Mabel read from her scrapbook and Stan gathered the shards of his memories in the Mindscape

He felt as though his purpose was fulfilled, and it felt… nice.

Everything would be alright.

A/N: Well, that was fun! This was something to work through a bit of writer's block- I said in another fic of mine that I was writing a first chapter of a different thing, but this… isn't it. I've hit a roadblock with it, and I need to do some heavy revising. Also, feel free to interpret how this gets less and less poetry style as it goes as you please.