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Woz is around eleven, maybe ten, when he meets (finds) Tsukuyomi. She blinks at him, pretty white clothing practically unheard of in the wastes. But how could an why would a child from somewhere safe be here, alone in the wastes?
He isn’t special. Even the people who found him at practically half her age suspected a trap.
“Who are you?” Woz asks. She cocks her head.
“Who are you?”
It really is probably nothing, but she feels in an odd way… familiar. Not as though he knows her but as though he knows someone like her. It’s just another not-memory.
And yet it keeps him wary.
“I am afraid I asked first,” he responds. “What’s your name?”
The girl simply stares at him, for long moments.
“I…” she begins. “I don’t know.”
And she isn’t unique in that, Woz may have been years younger but he remembers being much the same, himself, alone and abandoned and unnamed, with no memories. But he also knows that even that is not unique, and most people found amnesiac in odd places always have some thing which they hold onto. For Woz himself, it’s some sort of book.
(He thinks it’s connected to his family, but he doesn’t know how.)
For others, it’s a concept, a name, a memory.
Basic questions to start, then.
“Where are you from?” Woz asks. The girl hmms.
“I… don’t know,” she says.
Okay enough of that.
(Woz is patient for his age, he’s been told, but he is still approximately eleven years old.)
“Well then, what do you know?” He asks.
She locks eyes with him for what must have been at least a minute, and he can’t seem to bring himself to look away. Then she blinks.
“You aren’t real,” she says.
…what? Of course he’s real, he’s right here!
She doesn’t belong in this world, the voice in his head whispers.
Suddenly, she’s in front of him, taking his hand. Something glows between their two hands.
“There,” she says. “I gave you something. It will help.”
He feels it. It feels off-center, not fully wrong on him yet not quite correct.
“And…” the girl says. She stumbles back, wrapping her arms around herself and shuddering. “Someone…”
She trails off and collapses.
Woz decides to take her back to camp.
“She’d be a burden.”
“We can’t make the trek back to a refugee camp right now.”
“She can’t even remember her own name.”
“She’s just a girl!”
Woz listens carefully to the discussion going on around him. The girl is next to him on the bench, leaning against the wall and his shoulder, still out cold. Physically fine, their smuggled and battered old medical scanner says. It’s a mild mystic backlash.
“I will take responsibility for her,” Woz says. The others turn to him.
“Woz…” Shiro says, gently. And Woz holds respect for the man who had all but adopted him three years prior, however…
“We will be fighting,” Shiro continues. “It would be dangerous for an amnesiac, untrained girl.”
“I started fighting at approximately this age,” Woz replies. “Correct?”
“To take responsibility for another, however…”
“It will be fine,” Woz says. “I’ll teach her.”
“We still need a name,” Zala points out.
Woz hmms.
Tie her name to her story , thr voice whispers.
Tsukuyomi takes to fighting. Though their group is mostly information transportation, that does occasionally take them to front line fights. She takes to her name, too. And to the various languages their group employs.
“Looks like she’s got the same language trick as you, Woz,” Sam jokes, smirking at the boy.
“Least her trick isn’t increasing colorful language,” Mai replies. Sam hmphs but let’s it go.
“It’s a useful trick,” Tsukuyomi points out. “We’re an information team, right?”
The others laugh. Woz finds himself grateful to have her on the team. To have a friend.
“I don’t believe I’m human,” Woz admits.
Tsukuyomi hmms.
“Does it matter?” She asks. “I don’t care about my past. Why should you?”
“Our hands glowed when we first touched,” Woz replies. It’s been two years since they first met. Tsukuyomi doesn’t remember their true first meeting and nor does she care.
“And I don’t know how,” Tsukuyomi says. Woz shrugs. Fair point. But really, this is just a distraction.
“I do wonder what kind of mission would worry them so,” he says. “We’ve been in plenty of dangerous situations before.”
“We are still kids,” Tsukuyomi points out. “Why do you talk so formally, anyways? It’s weird.”
Woz shrugs.
“I suppose because I enjoy the way it sounds,” he says.
“That’s kind of dumb, Woz,” Tsukuyomi points out.
Woz definitely does not pout.
A week later, he gets news that their group has been caught and presumed dead.
“We should get them out,” Tsukuyomi says. “Or at least get the information.”
Woz hmms.
“It would be against orders,” he says. “But for now… technically, I am the highest ranked.”
They’d both been raised like this, after all.
(He doesn’t let himself consider being highest rank forever.)
They succeed. Even if they… if they don’t find their team.
Congratulated with a move to the front lines.
“Do you believe it would be better to know their fates?” Woz asks, in the dark of night. On his back, he hears Tsukuyomi turn to him.
“I couldn’t say,” she says.
“I see…” Woz murmurs.
He says no more on the subject.
(He buries the memories of their bodies.)