Chapter Text
The muffled sound of voices, footsteps and cars driving nearby slowly woke you up. Grumbling quietly to yourself you kept your eyes closed in the vain hope to fall back asleep. You didn’t want to get up. Your alarm clock hadn’t even announced itself yet, so that it probably was still way too early to be awake. But unfortunately the city noise disturbing your slumber was too loud and distracting to go back to sleep. Why was it so loud anyway? Did you forget to close your window last night?
With a frustrated groan you turned on your side, but paused when you finally noticed that the surface you were lying on wasn’t soft like your bed but hard and unforgiving instead. That finally woke you up fully. Confused you quickly opened your eyes, before blinking a couple of times to get rid of your still bleary vision.
The sight that greeted you was even more confusing and concerning at the same time. Your were lying on the ground in an alleyway next to a big dumpster. You only noticed in passing that the dumpster thankfully didn’t smell. Why were you sleeping in a random alleyway? How did you even get here?
Frowning you tried to remember what you did yesterday that could have landed you here, only to come up empty. There was nothing where there should be memories of your life. Panic started to set in when you realized that you couldn’t remember anything. Not your name, your age, your address, your parents, your friends or your job. Nothing!
When your breathing quickened and it got slightly harder to breath you shook your head vehemently and tried to force yourself to calm down. Maybe you just hit your head and the memory loss was temporary! That had to be it! You couldn’t really have amnesia, right? There had to be something you could still recall!
Staring blankly at the dirty wall of one of the buildings in the alleyway you wrecked your brain for any remaining memories. The only thing you could come up with were useless, trivial facts and story lines of different books, films and games that you once must have consumed. Great. You still couldn’t recall anything about your personal life, but trivia about various media seemed to have been more important for your brain to retain than actual helpful information.
Okay, fine, whatever! You supposed you should start with looking around the area. Maybe you would see something that could jog your memory. With a plan in mind you carefully stood up, but paused once more when you noticed how small your hands and body were. Looking down at yourself you noticed the dirty, tattered hoodie and long trousers covering you, that looked and felt too big for your small, thin frame. This was definitely a child’s body. For some reason you had thought that you were an adult. Apparently not. Very strange.
Trying not to think more about it you turned towards the end of the alley and slowly walked out on the lively pavement. People were rushing by, not even giving you a second glance as they sidestepped your small form standing there, for all eyes seemingly lost.
You looked around and couldn’t help but to feel disappointed when nothing immediately jogged your memory. No matter, it was too soon to give up. So you started walking aimlessly along the sidewalk, while taking in your new surroundings. From what you could see the city looked nice and mostly clean. You got distracted when you walked past a shop window and your reflection in the glass caught your attention. You couldn’t help but stare. A dirty, sickly looking child was staring back at you. You couldn’t remember what you were supposed to look like, but for some reason you were sure that this wasn’t it.
The first thing you noticed was that you had heterochromia. While your left eye was yellow – almost golden in the right light – the right eye had a blue color. You had chin-long, curly, bright red hair. The form of some of the curls looked like little, cute hearts. The next thing that caught your eye were a pair of small white horns on your head, they sat unassumingly just above your hairline. Were those real? Surely not. They seemed to be part of the hairband you were wearing, like a very peculiar fashion statement.
Just to make sure you grabbed one of the horns and pulled hard. You flinched and immediately let go again when the action caused brief pain to shoot through your head. The horn had felt hard to the touch, like you assumed bone would feel like and it hadn’t even budged an inch. So those things were real horns attached to your head and not part of the hairband like you had first assumed. You weren’t sure how you should feel about that. That wasn’t normal, right? Or was this some common feature that you couldn’t remember? You quickly glanced at the people passing by and like you had already assumed you couldn’t see horns or anything resembling horns on the heads of any of them. So, horns were definitely not normal. Did that mean you weren’t human? Or was this some kind of freak mutation?
Frowning slightly you looked back at your reflection. Were you a girl or a boy? While your facial features almost looked angelic you still couldn’t tell what gender you were supposed to be. You looked androgynous. This time the discovery wasn’t accompanied with a feeling that told you what should have been. You supposed you would just use they/them going forward.
Left yellow eye, blue right eye, red curly hair and two white horns. You looked like some teenager’s made-up OC or something. You looked ridiculous. Sighing deeply you looked away and resumed your walk. There was nothing you could do about it. You could only accept your new looks and work with what you had.
First thing on the agenda was to explore the city and to hopefully find something that looked or felt familiar. One hour of aimlessly wandering around only left you with more disappointment. Nothing had jogged your memory so far.
Feeling helpless you sat on a bench in a small park, wondering what you should do now. Did you have any parents? Judging by the state of your clothes they were either really neglectful or you were homeless. You weren’t sure what option you would prefer.
You looked down at your belly when the thing suddenly growled loudly at you. You were really hungry! When was the last time you ate something? Did you have to steal something to get some food? You didn’t like the thought of that. Stealing felt wrong and what if you got caught? You didn’t want to be punished. Maybe you could try begging first and when that didn’t get you anywhere then you could fall back on stealing food. Your survival was more important than your unfounded moral dilemma after all.
Nodding to yourself you jumped off the bench and quietly left the park. You should probably start asking people for a bit of money or food who looked approachable. Squinting your eyes you observed the different faces of the busy people around you. They all looked intimidating in their own way.
You were still trying to find the courage to approach someone when sudden loud, angry shouting could be heard. Startled you looked in the direction from where the sound was coming from. A crowd had formed around some kind of commotion. Curious you took a few steps closer in the attempt to see what was going on. You could make out a person sitting on the ground with another person, presumably a young woman, standing protectively in front of them. The person defending the one sitting on the ground was having a shouting match with a drunken looking man. You probably shouldn’t get involved. It seemed to you like the young woman had the situation handled. Besides, what could you, a literal child, do to help anyway?
So you stood a few paces away from the crowd and watched silently how the drunken man shouted one final insult at the pair in front of him before storming off. Good riddance. With that situation solved you turned away to resume your goal of finding some food. You barely took a few steps when someone from the scattered crowd bumped into you harshly, causing you to loose your balance.
You stumbled back and fell down on the street. You froze like a deer in headlights as the sound of a loud horn, quickly followed by the sound of squeaking tires reached your ears from a car that was speeding right at you. Even an emergency stop from the driver wouldn’t be enough to stop the car from running you over. It was too late for that. You didn’t want to die!
A choked cry left your lips when a black gloved and clawed hand suddenly grabbed the back of your hoodie and yanked you off the street. You didn’t have time to comprehend what just happened when another smaller and softer pair of hands grabbed your shoulders and turned you around, so that you ended up facing a panicked and worried looking young woman kneeling in front of you.
“Are you alright? You’re not hurt, are you?”, the woman asked you frantically as she looked you up and down.
You barely registered the question as you stared at the man, who was standing behind the woman. He was very tall and was wearing a red costume that resembled some kind of clown or jester. He had long white hair, yellow eyes and a mask was hiding his true face. A pink band-aid on his cheek was covering a bloody scratch on the mask. You also noticed that somehow the mask was still capable in showing the man’s emotions just fine. The tall man was staring directly at you like he had seen a ghost.
More importantly you realized that you knew that man. That was Pierrot from The Freak Circus, a game that you could faintly recall having played once before. A game, meaning that the clown standing in front of you should be a fictional character and not a real person.
What the hell was going on?!