I own nothing.

At first, she clings to memory the way a man adrift in the ocean clings to the wreckage of his ship. Lin can't remember her own true name, the once she ought to be answering to, but she still holds fast to the specter of her past.

Lin lived in a large city on the cusp of widespread industrialization. The name of the city escapes her almost immediately (I lived… I lived… I don't know where I lived; will you pass the teapot?) as well as what she did for a living. All that remains of either is the smell of smoke and cooking fish. Lin draws her own conclusions from this before it dissolves into the mist as well.

She had parents, or at least so she supposes; the faces escape her. Things remain for nearly a year—the smell of some overdone perfume, a booming laugh, small, callused hands that Lin knows can't be her own when she looks at her long fingers and her huge, almost masculine palms.

These are the things she holds on to: lanterns swinging in a buzzing summer breeze, the smell of salt air and footsteps on the floor upstairs.

But it can't last. Memory can't stay.

Give it a year, and Lin remembers nothing.

Her past is lost to her, and she is Yubaba's in truth.