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These Memories:
A Series About Friendship and Forgetfulness

: Before all things / I had a name / I think it left me long ago / Why can't I remember / Today I have another chance / to step out / I will not rest / until I know / what it all means / I will not give in / until I have you back / where you belong / I will not stop / because this is who I am / Maybe in time / these memories will fade away :

To Step Out
Stepping out can sometimes do more harm than good.
These Memories; Part VI

Today they'd left the prison for the first time. He, being last in number, was last in line. He wasn't too surprised when their captors had shackled their hands to their hands along a big running line. He was rather too tired to care.

He hadn't known their "prison" (that was the best way to refer to it) was in the center of a town: no noise filtered through the thick fortress walls. If he glanced back he'd see the building his captors called "home" rising up as a stern backdrop, with its walls of stone and iron gates that before today had never seemed to open.

The townsfolk amazingly didn't stare at them. He couldn't understand why—they probably all looked a sorry sight. Bone-thin, covered in dirt and grime, their clothes pitiful rags about them. Maybe the townsfolk were used to this.

Some instinct deep down kept him from meekly plodding forwards like the rest of his twenty-seven companions. His eyes restlessly shifted through the crowd, their surroundings, looking for anything out of the ordinary—and, some inner part of him prompted urgently, some way to escape.

It was during this restless scanning that his eyes landed on three people, about which the mass of people seemed to simply flow around. He saw them in a sort of clear haze as their captive line stumbled forwards on the opposite side of the street. His world narrowed only to them, and he halted for a moment, the chain on his hands jerking him forwards another half step before the person in front of him stopped, too.

He didn't notice, because the strangers—they had to be strangers in this town—had noticed them, and his three-person view narrowed to one as the boy on the end, a boy with a bag of chips in hand and two tufts of hair and twin swirls on his plump cheeks, stopped short to stare at him in disbelief.

The name snapped into his head like lightning, and he cried it out desperately.

"Chouji!"

There was a vague pulse behind his ear and suddenly his one-person world was a mass of electricity and excruciating pain.

Chouji and the girl next to him had moved forwards, their lips moving in a four-syllable cry as the taller man grabbed them and held them back. He couldn't hear them. Sparks danced on the edge of his vision as some vague part of him connected that with the smell of burning flesh and told him he was being electrocuted.

The world went black.