Chapter Text
"Don't wait for me, 'cause I'm not coming back soon,
Don't swim 'cause I drown, don't fly because I fall from the sky,
I can't float on the clouds like you.
You won't understand that I don't know how to fly,
I know nothing anymore."
Canção pra não voltar – A Banda Mais Bonita da Cidade
Prologue
He remembers one thing. It’s the only memory he’s got for the past… year or so. Christmas. He can tell because everything is red and green, smells like pine, sugar and maple, sounds nice, even though he can’t tell how those facts put together determine what season it is.
Even though it’s Christmas, there’s no snow, which is kind of frustrating, for some unknown reason. The sun is shining outside and when he goes out, he can smell the ocean, the tepid air tells him a story he doesn’t exactly hear.
He also doesn’t listen to the woman calling him, though he knows she is calling and he knows he will turn around. She’s beautiful, with blonde hair and blue eyes and she smiles to him so lovely, so caring. He loves her, he knows that much. But why? He doesn’t know who she is.
It’s Christmas and he is sitting alone on a stool outside a candy store. He’s got the money, but he can’t go inside. No place for street kids, they said, even though he has a house (hidden in the middle of the woods) and he has a home (somewhere. Probably). It’s snowing and at least he’s got this blue parka that is too big for him covering most of his body.
The parka is important, he doesn’t know why. It just is. Now it only smells like him, but when he “woke up” (with the quotation marks, because it didn’t feel like he was awake at all, his mind was too foggy for this to be real life), it smelled like ice and cologne. Not that ice had a smell, he knew that much, but that was what the parka told him, kind of. Cologne, and ice.
He doesn’t know why the lack of snow had bothered him so much in his memory, there was nothing to it, now that he is seeing it live, now that it is biting his skin.
To his left, he can see the Smoke Mountains. They are far, but they are the reason why he came. Why was another question he doesn’t know how to answer. Because. Maybe. There is something about big mountains with snow on top, and a cold river coming down between them, a frozen lake on the bottom. Perhaps it was another mountain he had seen, not those. But those felt close enough.
A year, and he still isn’t even close. Of the ocean breeze, or the beautiful woman, or the mountain top.
A year, and he still doesn’t know.
The boy looks through the glass of the candy shop one more time, but all he could see is him: cheeks red pierced by the cold, blue eyes, dark curled hair under the hood.
He should go back to Gideon, now, she must’ve be worried. Gideon is the only one with a name in his life, though she isn’t a person. She is just a half-broken British A.I. with a lot of sass. She thinks she knew him, but it was probably in another lifetime.
Like him, she can’t remember. All she can do is to take care of him, as much as she can, and take him to the places he want. He couldn’t carry her out of the house, though. The house is a jump ship, and along with the memory and the parka, it is the only thing he has.
He sighs, his right thumb rubbing the dollars in his pocket. Money is an useless thing when you are (what? Twelve? Maybe thirteen?) alone and you only have one change of clothes that are beginning to be too short.
That was why he looked for the mountains, because he was certain they were a tip to point him in the right direction.
They aren’t.
Those probably are the wrong mountains.
He gets up and starts to walk again, towards the woods where his jump ship was hidden, his house for the past eleven months, nineteen days and seven hours. What else could he do?
“Welcome back Mr. Saint,” greets Gideon when he forces the door open. He needs to fix the identity authorization, but he still hasn’t figured out how. “Did you find what you were looking for?”
“Barely,” he answers. Saint isn’t his name, but it was how some kids called him once in Gotham City, and he liked the familiarity it brought, so ever since, he asked Gideon to call him that. It was better than just ‘boy’, the way she was calling him in the beginning.
He empties his pockets, revealing all kinds of small pieces and some tools, all with which he planned on continue on fixing Gideon’s hard drive, and the ship. It’s been a slow progress, but he is good at it, for some reason. Besides, he couldn’t shake the feeling that to fix the ship is his only chance to know who he is.
We all gotta believe in something in order to survive, a male voice spoke in his head. He loves that voice as much as he loves the blonde woman, though he couldn’t give it a face. Even if it’s just in ourselves, we gotta believe.
To believe was all he could do.