As Of Late Because You Don't Remember All The Strings Attached To Home - Tumblr Posts
Based off of the headcanon that @thecoolsquirrel made about Yuu losing their memory of their homeworld the longer they're in Twisted Wonderland!
Link to the OG post here!
◈◆◈◆◈◆◈◆◈
"Oh, yeah, didn't your friend Ṡ̷̢̫̞̻͈͋͛̓̅͜͜͜͠͠͠a҉͖̟̜̞̂̃̑̽͢͢͠͡r҉̵҉̛̠̩̥̋ͦ̆͆͟͞͡͞͠a҉͖̟̜̞̂̃̑̽͢͢͠͡h̷̶̘̘̬ͭ̏͞͡ do something like that once?" Ace chuckled, looking over to you.
You glanced over to him after taking a massive chunk out of your sandwich- Ace always did have the talent of asking you questions as soon as you had something in your mouth (something that, yes, he joked about quite often). Chewing thoughtfully, you tried to recall what he had said. Something about a friend of yours? But recalling the name made it sound almost...blurry...in your mind. As if there was a heavy static noise playing over it, teasingly dangling it just out of reach. You heard Ace say it out loud, but thinking about it...huh. Nothing but an itch that it was something you were supposed to know.
"Mmm, mmhm," you agreed, mouth still full. Although you couldn't quite remember what he said 100%, it wasn't that big of a deal, right? Ace had a tendency to get ahead of himself while talking, and as a result, slurred words or babbling slang came out instead. Maybe this was one of those times, where he messed up on his wording and just continued talking like normal, leaving your unfocused self to not hear what he had meant to say.
Nonetheless, your muffled agreement was enough to satisfy Ace, and he, Deuce, and Grim carried on their conversation eagerly, discussing everything from Spelldrive tournaments to school gossip- which was their usual brand of conversations at the cafeteria during lunchtime. You propped your elbows up on the table, only slightly bothered by the odd blank in your mind that the unknown word left behind.
----
There were a few more instances of this happening, and every time, you tried to shrug it off. But it got harder and harder to make up excuses for yourself as time went on.
Kalim was asking you about a favorite dish you had mentioned in your world. You couldn't recall the exact name of it, instead feeling that same static-y blank where you knew the name lie. It was stuck in your memory somewhere, no big whoop. You'd remember it later! Getting put on the spot like this was one way to forget anything- like being forced to do Icebreakers in classes.
Jack wanted to know more about the muscle-enhancing drugs that people took back at your home world, especially the people that overdid it. He was curious to know why someone would do such a thing to their bodies for such a temporary satisfaction. Of course, he was inquiring about all of this while he himself was working out, so perhaps it was just a question to validate his own hard work and make him feel better about himself. Either way, when trying to recall a specific instance of a professional football player who took steroids, you couldn't recall the player's name...nor what happened to him, in the end.
While studying plants in the gardening area for extra credit, Jade approached you with a question that had been going through his mind for a while: how did the flora differentiate between the two worlds? Were these plants similar to yours? Did they share characteristics? Or were these entirely different plant species? You just laughed it off, claiming that you were never one to pay attention to plants back at home. You didn't mention that you were lying, of course, that you often went on short walks to pick flowers and climb trees. That you were quite a curious kid long ago who asked questions about anything you could, especially with the plants.
Late at night, when Grim woke up with a nightmare and curled up next to you in bed, asking for you to tell him a story in that pitiful way of his, you scrunched up your eyebrows and closed your eyes in an attempt to think. You couldn't recall any folklore from your home, probably because you were just tired, right? That fizzy feeling in your head was just because you were exhausted from a day of running errands for students and the headmage, alongside mountains of homework, right? The story you told Grim ended up being your own, from the moment you came to Twisted Wonderland, to the overblots and tough trials you and he faced in the time you've spent together.
But it all finally clicked when you were in Crowley's office the week after all of these events. Of course, you were there to deliver important papers from one of the professors, but he had forced you to stay so that he could update you on his progress on getting you home....and so he could give you a list of things he needed done.
"So the Dark Mirror has been of no help whatsoever," he stated, as he did every time he started a conversation about getting you home. The Mirror never was helpful in the least, despite it being the one to drag you here in the first place "I must make a trip to a country inland nearby in the next month or so, and they happen to have an extensive library, full of books dating back to the time of the gods. If there's any knowledge about your world, it shall be there. Now, what information can you give me about your world? Cultures, lands, religions, wars, anything you think might be helpful?" He tilted his head at you as he looked up, his pen hovering above a notepad as he awaited your response.
You shrugged your shoulders, glad to be able to talk about your world, even if it was just to Crowley for research purposes. Despite some students asking you specific questions, not very many seemed to be too keen on you wistfully talking about your world and how homesick you were. How long had it even been since you arrived here? At least seven months, right? Maybe six, but somewhere in that ballpark, for sure. But when you opened your mouth to speak, it clamped shut just as fast.
Trying to think about something, anything, from your world...it only brought up that static-y feeling again.
"Well, there was a world....war....that was fought because, uh...." the facts and dates to the 'world war', which had been drilled into your head since some...some class in middle school, were slipping away as you tried to remember them. Like a trick of light in the corner of your peripheral vision that darted away as soon as you looked directly at it.
"But there was also a-" a what? "religion-" what sort of religion? How many gods? One god? Two gods? Red fish? Blue fish? Wait, what?
Crowley frowned at you, his posture straightening a bit "If it's too difficult for you to think about, you have a month until I leave- or you can simply write it all down instead of saying it out loud."
"No, no, it's not-" You stopped, plopping yourself down in one of the ornate chairs in front of Crowley's desk. Your hand gripped at the gilded armrest, sliding up and down the cool surface. How could you explain to him that yes, you were feeling rough about it all, of course, but it wasn't so painful to think about that you couldn't say anything out loud? How could you tell him that you wanted to talk about your home, but every time you tried to hold a memory, it slipped out of your hands like running water? How could you tell him that-
"I....can't remember."
◈◆◈◆◈◆◈◆◈