Scott, Wednesday morning

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Dawn had been strangely beautiful. As he'd walked, he'd seen the sun rise behind the skyscrapers, the steadily growing light reflecting against glass and steel. Watching the city wake up had been oddly interesting as well. It had never been completely asleep, he thought; the streets had never been completely empty, wherever he'd wandered during the night. But there was something so... natural about the gradual way the streets filled up again. Shops opened their doors, trucks dropped off newspapers at newstands...

He found himself disinterested in the newspapers, which was probably strange. He ought to be figuring out what date it was, at the very least. What was going on. Hell, whether there was anything in any of them about someone who'd gone missing. But he was enjoying his walk too much. He'd stopped a couple of times during the night to rest his feet, but hadn't felt the need to nap, which made him think that he was probably used to not sleeping.

A while later, as rush hour - and it was rush hour, he realized - wore on, he stopped in front of one little shop, caught by the display of roses among the plants set outside. Red, white, a dozen shades of pink... even a pale purple that nagged at the fog in his mind, like a little hook tugging quietly. "They're beautiful," he said to the woman manning the flower stall, who smiled and nodded at him, seemingly unbothered by the fact that he wasn't buying anything. He smiled back at her a bit tentatively and then decided that it was time to move on.

He kept walking, not sure where this particular street was going to take him. Not that he'd been any more sure about any of the others. For all he knew, he was walking in circles, yet he was curiously unbothered by that. His stomach was beginning to growl, just a little - he'd turned out his pockets and found nothing, no money, no identification of any sort. Which would probably pose a problem eventually, but for now... there really was something he needed to be. He just hoped it would be obliging enough to jump out and let him know where it was when he walked by.

Idly, he started to catalogue some of the more interesting things he saw as he walked. There was a young couple kissing rather enthusiastically outside a coffeeshop. It struck him that he wasn't the type to watch things like that usually, but he found himself staring at the two of them, mostly because the girl had purple hair and there went one of those little hooks again. Eventually they moved on and so did he.

A little while later, he came across two motorists arguing about who had dented whose car. He paused, watching them for a few minutes, rather appreciating the furious invective they were hurling at each other. Parallel parking was a difficult concept to grasp, he reflected, and then blinked, wondering where that particular thought had come from.

Several blocks later, there was a motorcycle stopped at a light, and he had to stop and admire it while it was there. Gorgeous bike. Although the sound of the engine as its owner drove off suggested that it badly needed a little maintenance. And he knew about bikes, did he? Huh. He filed it away, one more piece to add to the puzzle. Eventually they'd have to add up to something that made sense, wouldn't they?

He walked past people handing out flyers on the street, a troop of performance artists who appeared to be reenacting some sort of battle scene, but with nerf bats, and a young woman applying colored chalks to the sidewalk to reproduce Renaissance art. He watched her for quite some time, before he felt guilty about not having any change to throw in her bucket and moved on. Past construction sites where the women walking by were the ones whistling at the men working, past more newspaper stands and flower stalls and odd little shops side-by-side with big chain stores. The buildings got taller and taller, and the streets grew busier and busier, and finally he decided that he needed to stop again. Just for a little bit.

There was a school right there, when he decided that, and he sat down on a bench at the edge of the playground, watching the kids shriek and chase each other and do all kinds of very unsafe things on the playground equipment. After a while, foggy head or no foggy head, he started to smile again. They seemed so happy. So carefree. He sat there and watched them, perfectly content save for a niggling sense that a coffee would be really nice right about now.

"Scott!" one of the girls yelled, chasing one of the little boys, and he nearly jumped out of his skin. "You get back here, Scott! Oooh! I'm going to beat you up so bad!"

Scott? He stared blankly at the tussling twosome. "Scott," he said aloud, thoughtfully.

It sounded right.