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He remembers the feeling of sore feet from running barefoot across the field. He remembers the pebbles that stuck to his toes, the mud that clung to his soles. He remembers when the cold started to feel blistering, when it became too much, and he ran back home while shouting “Ow!” with all of the force in his chest.
He had to have been about 6 or 7, but he remembers that he took that as an important lesson. He never walked on the yard barefoot after that, inspiring his sister to call him ‘prissy’ when he insisted on putting on his boots before going out. It was a funny trait- he was so bold about everything else, but he insisted on that one rule. He was fine to get mud all over himself when he wrestled his sister, or when he jumped in the puddles that the hose would make beside the swimming pool, but the memory of sore feet stayed with him.
Crow remembers it often. He has no context for it, no way to piece it together, but he remembers it.
Often, Crow’s memory feels as though it’s been twice-processed, fed through something and mixed around before being handed back to him. He takes it, he takes all of it as desperately as he can. He grabs as much as he can hold in his shaking hands and he holds it close to his heart.
He remembers a fight. He remembers a lot of fights, but this one sears his mind when he remembers it. It felt like a different lifetime entirely from his other memories, and indeed, he knows that it might be. Being an Awoken and a Lightbearer split his mind into two. Two lifetimes before this one that he’s now found himself thrust into.
He tries to orient himself again as he remembers more, but sometimes it catches him off guard. It catches him when he’s alone, or when he’s not busying himself with work. It invades his thoughts like a worm, writhing into his brain. It feels almost parasitic.
Crow is consumed.
The Spider notices when he’s hit by these moments. He notices the change in Crow’s demeanor, or the change in his speech when he does talk. He’ll become more guarded, or his voice will shake, and he hates that it’s so noticeable.
Crow tries to remind himself that these memories are both important, but worthless. He can no longer quantify his age in numbers, and he’s not sure where he’d even begin the count anymore; thus, remembering throwing a fire truck toy at his sister when he was 5 means both everything and nothing to him. It’s a sliver of humanity that he lost before he lost himself again , before he was born again with nothing but shards sticking out of the white matter of his brain.
He remembers the fight again. Again, it feels like a hot iron stuck directly in the center of his face. He can’t help but grasp at it, trying desperately to decode it. It feels like a bullet between the eyes. It feels like his body being dragged out of there. It feels like something he shouldn’t be able to remember, something that came from an outside source, but he can’t help it.
Crow tries to busy himself with work for The Spider, putting them out of his head as best as he can. The memories will still haunt him, daily, nightly, hourly. They will still doggedly follow him like twisted bodyguards. They will consume him. They will consume him, and there will be no coming back a third time.