He had been two years older than his sibling. A sibling time had long erased the face and voice and name of, but a sibling none the less, no matter how blurred and static they appeared in his memory. He knew that he and the faceless child were close, closer than his mind could recreate. But whatever bond associated with the sibling was corrupted, just like all the other strings of memories coiled in his skull like a fraying ball of yarn. When he tried to imagine a face to call family, he saw fire licking at wheat as his people were smoked from safety straight into the burning jaws of a mob. When he tried to believe they had spent their youthful days wandering vague forests and teasing each other like he had observed outside families do, he saw blood leaking from a crack in the nameless child's face, head pressed close to Beck's chest as he frantically tried to keep him awake with rambling anecdotes and questions. Sometimes a few memories slipped through whatever blockade was protecting his psyche, brief glimpses of a grinning dimple and tanned skin a stark contrast to his pallid tone. Beck wanted to ensnare them and lock them away for his selfish needs of identity, but they always arrived at the slightest signals and slipped through his grasp when he lurched for them. When he tried to claim he had a family who had loved him in life, he saw his brother dead in his own ash-caked arms. It was his fault, he shouldn't have run for cover, he should have saved him -- and in an instant, Beck was struggling to remember his thoughts, regressing back to his amnesiac state. He supposed it was for the better; having no identity to fall back on meant he had no responsibilities, right? Beck was merely the commander of Tanglewood, and that was his only purpose left in the world.

    Sometimes, he couldn't help but wonder what it would've been like to reunite with his family. To have been welcomed into the dead's paradise instead of refused at the pearly gates, to have been embraced by loving arms. But he never saw them again, if that wasn't obvious. Snorting at the thought, Beck's scarred features darkened, slouching against the trunk of a swamp tupelo and glaring out over the murky waters from the soggy banks. Not even God liked us, Becky. If there even was a God. Beck had seen enough progress in the world to grasp the firmly-planted laws of science, for the sake of explaining his existence, and the abstract thought of a higher being controlling every minute detail was laughable to him. The afterlife was probably something his deranged mind invented to fill in the truthful void of nothingness after death. But, then how did that explain the shackles around his wrists? It seemed like nothing could saw through them, much less scratch them no matter what he tried -- and according to his post-mortem fantasy, they were forged by hellfire itself. Why wasn't Beck hanging with the Devil then? So many questions, and nothing to answer him. As he pouted to himself over his enigmatic existence, his frigid paw fell to his side, patting around until he brushed against a flat stone. Even if his mental memory failed him, muscle memory didn't. With a bored toss, the stone was flicked out over the water in an imperfect skipping arch, an old trick he learned through the ages of haunting woodlands. A couple more smooth rocks were skipped over the duckweed-infested waters, until he ran out of the convenient pebble supply. Visibly gnawing on his tongue in unprecedented frustration, the poltergeist shifted from his lazy slump against the tupelo's roots, sulking off to gather more. Maybe he could try to hit birds or something instead of just skipping with the next rocks he found.

    Instead of finding ammunition, he found a creature rustling the overcrowded foliage, ears perking at the faint footsteps from the direction of the border. Curiosity dimming into agitation, Beck squinted at the dense undergrowth with a sour look twisting his freckled face. A trespasser? No, not a trespasser. Whoever was behind those bushes would have been closer if they were inside territory. Rolling his bony shoulders, the mangy feline advanced anyways, slinking through buttonbush shrubs as nonchalantly as he could manage, unable to disguise the irritation curling his bloodless lips into a trembling snarl. Farsighted eyes flitted over the lynx and his bizarre features; something about the glowing ring-thing and stumbs sent his demonic instinct on edge, and rightfully so. Tilting his gaze upward to look the familiar stranger in the eye, Beck was quick to rasp out, "Ya know, loiterin' ain't allowed here -- who exactly are ya?" He wasn't sure what else to stay, unable to formulate sentences to tease about the flimsy fluff jutting from his shoulder blades or how there was something unspoken he couldn't just quite place.

      If he could realize how unsettling he was towards the peculiar lynx, then Beck would have been bragging for days on end. Who could believe it, a poltergeist that actually managed to scare someone in this decade. His whole existence orbited around terrorizing unwitting creatures; he would be terribly pathetic if he couldn't at least manage that every once in a while. The faint twinge of pride in his chest aside, his honey-brown eyes narrowed into a suspicious squint to counter the warm glint in Marco's olivine gaze.

    Yet the instant Marco opened his mouth, all spite and settled blood drained from his freckled features. Beck hadn't heard his native tongue in years, and here this stranger was, speaking fluently. "Woah, woah, woah -- slow down," the boy stammered, voice empty of emotion as he was taken offguard by the onslaught of forgotten words. There was a reason Beck pointedly erased the language he had been raised by from his mind -- too many memories were attached. Plus his accent stuck out like a sore thumb. Gnawing on the inside of his only cheek and trying to ignore the strands of electric-blue drool beading at the edges of his burnt maw, the poltergeist glared at the ground in an attempt to decipher Marco's words by replaying his sentences over and over in his head. 'I beg your... pardon -- I don't understand? My name is... Marco. Something in Beck's mind clicked, the single name a bullet piercing straight through his hippocampus and the barricade holding back memories. The faceless brother from his memories now had a name. "Marco? Is that --" Beck started in disbelief, taking a wary step forward before recoiling with his ears pinned flat against his skull. No, it wasn't. Marco died in his arms as a child, not the grizzled adult the lynx appeared to be. Jaw muscles clenched taut, face returning to the constant scowl as he concentrated on stringing together a response. "Nu-mi... uh, am -- amintesc prea mult, but yeah, I mean -- dar da? Yeah, dar da." More muttering under his breath than anything else, his prominent accent began to slip through his phony drawl, creating an odd warped filter his words were caught in. "Sunt, um, Beck. De ce ... de ce ești aici?" Awkward phrasing aside, it wasn't too shabby for someone who hadn't spoken in Romanian for years. Then again, it was his first language. Some things never left you no matter how hard you fought to forget them.

    If only he shared the same relief as Marco when their native tongue fell upon his ears. While his language didn't sound quite so odd coming from his own mouth, he hadn't heard another talk back to his foreign babbling since he was only a little kid. He didn't like stirring old memories, much less being thrown back into them. But it couldn't have been him, he was supposed to be dead, in fact, they were both supposed to be. For the sake of his fragile psyche, Marco's language, name, and arrival was nothing more than an eerie coincidence that reminded him too much of the brother who fell limp and assumedly lifeless in his arms. The poltergeist slouched to thoughtlessly stare at the mud with a glaze over his eyes, an uncertain huff breaking his silence.

    He perked from his hunched stance at his name being parroted back at him, scarred brow creasing at the hushed tone coming from the lynx. His maw parted slightly to interrupt with a rude quip, irritation quickly overwhelming any previous feelings of doubt. Then his name was uttered a third time, a label stuck at the end for no apparent reason -- Beck froze in place as realization more or less whacked him over the head. Fisher, that was really his last name? It sounded so plain and at the same time so precious to him. It was the missing half of his identity, a surname stolen from him by time and neglect. The mental barricade withholding his decaying memory was breached with only two syllables, leaking blurred feelings and colors of the past back into his lifeless brain and successfully dumbfounding him. A numb expression had been plastered over his face, unable to recover quick enough from his stunned state before Marco's mouth was running again. How did he know who he was? What was he supposed to do?

    His frigid apparition gave an unstable ripple as he struggled to process everything, bobbing his head up and down in a daze before frantically nodding along to his brother's rambling, yet his luminous eyes remained unfocused still. He plopped back onto his haunches, disfigured snout twitching as if searching for words to use with no luck. Did that mean he had been wrong about his brother's premature end for five centuries? His bony frame sagged at the thought of if he hadn't been so quick to abandon his corpse; he wouldn't have had to scrounge around in the streets, he wouldn't have had to kill anybody, he wouldn't have died. A bloodless lip trembled in shock, refusing to believe that an avoidable mistake sentenced him to death. "But -- but you died, I thought you died --" he stammered and trailed off into wheezy sniffles, failing to switch back to the language Marco could understand. But his entire world had just crumpled, an existential crisis was a far higher priority than switching in and out of languages on accident, or even registering the familiar dog watching from the bushes despite his ears swiveling out of reflex to pinpoint their voice.