Vodquila

Engel. That wasn't a name he'd heard from any mouth but Boomslang's in years. Decades, even. It was enough to shock him even through his drunken haze and he blinked, unsure if he'd heard Edward properly.

Yet there he was, gazing down at him, the question hanging in the air.

"Ja," he affirmed, hesitantly. "Engel, Engel Jager. How did you...?"

"We met before," he said. "It was a long time ago. I'm not sure if you remember, but we and a couple of other people ended up in the woods together. I don't remember how we got there or even where there was. I'm not even sure if we did end up learning that, though I'm pretty sure Boris was convinced it was Prussia-"

Just as the words left his mouth, he was hit by another wave of memories. And another. And another. One thing led to another, and he found himself looking around at the others in the room with wide eyes. Boris. Damascus. James. John Watson. Those were the people there. He remembered learning all of their names when Engel was trying to calm him down. Everyone was here. Years later, they were here. Damascus was on the run. James was - well, he didn't know what James was doing. Same thing with Boris. Engel had ended up becoming a Nazi.

But John wasn't here.

Wait.

(He seemed to be thinking that a lot lately.)

John Watson? That had to have been an alias. He had been too young to recognize it at the time, but John Watson was from Sherlock Holmes. He turned around and stared at the only other person in the group - who was currently staring down at her drink with a miserable expression on her face. Schadel was the only one left. Schadel, whose human name was Schadel H. Kueper. Or, rather Schadel Holmes Kueper, a fact that she had let slip out shortly after he had joined her little agency.

"Schadel," he quietly said, "what's the likelihood of you having used the name John Watson in the past?"

She looked up from her drink. From the sheepish expression that suddenly appeared on her face, the answer was that it was very, very high. "I might have used it once or twice?" she hesitantly replied. "I panicked a lot when coming up with names when I was little, and I usually had my head in a Sherlock Holmes book, so John was my typical name for a male appearance. Why are you asking?"

Edward took a deep breath.

"Does anyone here remember suddenly ending up at a campfire when you were little?" he asked. "There were only a couple of other people there. Counting yourself, there would be six people present, and one of them was an adult."

After Damascus' compliment, I was feeling very pleased with myself, and trying to muster up all the restraint that I lacked to avoid spoiling the moment by saying something arrogant and obnoxious.
Mercifully, I was interrupted before I had the chance to.

According to Edward, we had all met as children, in a forest. That was absurd, the idea that all of us, from wildly different backgrounds and climes could have all found ourselves all in the same place at the same- wait, that Edward?

Something clicked, and suddenly most everyone in the room looked more familiar. Even Damascus...had he always been a shapeshifter?
James was especially nostalgic. He was still a shy flower, with more heart than was good for him. Engel took a bit longer to register, the poor urchin looking thing he used to be, but it was impossible now not to recognize that this was he.
Having known those two as children, how innocent they once were, the new context made their later hardships feel much more cruel.

I felt a tad nervous when I looked over Edward and Damascus. Had I said something rude to them? I probably had. I'd probably said something rude to all of them. I was an insufferable brat of a whippersnapper, as a child. I hoped nobody would recall too much of that.

"You mean to tell me that, that that wash real? I'd forgotten about that dream fer, fer the longesht time now." I said, incredulous.

Had I forgotten something? I felt as though I'd forgotten something.

"And of courshe it wash Prussia, what the blesshed hell are you on about?" I said stubbornly.

The name Engel had sparked something in Damascus' memory. Engel was the name of his first human friend, a fond memory that he often recalled. And Edward had said... six people. That was the turning point that made him believe that Kratzer was the Engel he remembered. But then, that would mean that the others...

He looked around wildly, hunting each face in the bar for familiar features. Yes, there was James- James James, and Edward- of course. And then Boris- he had been the mean one. The John Watson he remembered didn't seem to be present, but then Edward seemed to know something about Schadel that was in connection to him.

With emotion making him mute, he stood abruptly. The stool that had been under him spun violently before falling still, and then was walking as briskly as he could past the other chairs.

Without hesitation, Damascus threw his arms around Engel, his eyes starting to fill with tears.

His eyes widened as he remembered. Damascus, Boris, Edward, and...Watson? He didn't have time to get much farther than that before Damascus embraced him. For a moment he was too surprised to react, but after the initial shock, his arms tightened around the demon and he closed his eyes, fighting back tears again.

Damascus squeezed Engel tight, not attempting to fight the tear that slipped down his cheek.

"You loohk mush helltheyir." He whispered against his old friend's shoulder, a chuckle riding against the lump in his throat.

"What can I say, food's a bit more available nowadays," he said with a weak laugh, tears finally breaking free and running down his face. "Glad to see you got the hang of clothes."

Damascus snorted a little at this observation and tried not to wet Engel's shoulder as the tears kept sliding down his face. Some vague part of him whispered through the fog in his mind that this hug was starting to last longer than what was socially typical, but he shushed it.

The release that the embrace gave him had softened a knot in his heart that he didn't know was there, and he was able to rest assured that it could possibly be doing the same thing for Engel.

"Tha's the leasht of it, mah friend." He answered with a bittersweet smile. "I shee tha' all of ush have new scars along wif our experiensh."

"Well, you know what zey shay - no pain, no gain," he laughed, a little bit ruefully. "I didn't zink I'd ever shee ya again..."

"Neitheh did I." He pulled back slowly to smile, his eyes shining. "It'sh been.. sheveral lieftimes."

"Ja," he said, smiling despite himself. "Ja, it sure has." He glanced around. The only person that was missing was Watson. John Watson, which, as he thought about it, had to be an alias - at the time he'd missed the reference, but now...

Schadel. She was the only one. It had to be her. It'd explain the German, that was for certain.

Were James not quickly losing his grip on everything keeping his attention on the conversation, he would've caught on much sooner. But the room was beginning to spin more and more, and he could feel his eyelids grow heavy. As his mind started to conjure up foggy images of a campfire and odd figures, he could feel himself falling forward in his seat.

The moment gravity began to pull down on him, James was decidedly passed out, and mere seconds away from falling onto the floor.

Schadel had listened to the conversation with a growing amount of confusion, trying to remember what exactly they were talking about. Edward's comment confused her the most. How was she supposed to remember him from her childhood? She had done the math. She was several years older than him, and had rarely left Blanx's house when she was little.

But then the memories came back.

Memories of pretending to be someone named John Watson because she had panicked and had just been reading Sherlock Holmes. Memories of a roaring fire. Memories of s'mores and five other kids and freaking out because she had looked like an adult and she wasn't one. Memories of fingering Adam's cross just like she was now, and noticing out of the corner of her eye that Engel had one too.

And memories of a boy who - for a brief moment - had been convinced she had done something to his mother, or had kidnapped him and brought him there. The resemblance was a bit difficult to notice now that Edward's hair was so short compared to then, and how much he had aged in the time since that first encounter, but he undoubtedly was the Edward of her memories.

And everyone else there was a part of those memories, too.

This realization made her finish off all that was left of her drink in one long gulp - not because she was embarrassed that they had known her back then, but because she just realized that if their returning memories were anything like her own, she'd have to explain that she was John Watson. She doubted most of them would remember her saying what her real name was, though Edward had definitely figured it out from the question that he had asked her.

This was not going to be fun.

And, just as she had that thought, James passed out.

Correction: this was really not going to be fun.

Wilson appeared at James's side in a sudden moment, catching him just before his face met the floor. She lifted him up with a heave.

"Oh wow, uh, he's heavier than he looks," she commented idly to herself, realizing the game was likely to be stalled in the midst of all of the confusion arising at their apparent previous meeting. She propped James up against the nearby wall, and squatted down next to him, and started gently patting his face and shaking him by the shoulders.

"Okay, c'mon James... wake up, wake up," she muttered.

Thank God Wilson caught him. Even if I had been close by James, my reflexes were not in the best of conditions. Bless his lightweight heart.
It was good to see him looking so peaceful.

"Don' you think... we should let the poor fellow resht fer awhile?" I said, trying to keep my own eyes firmly open.