"I remember a name--Alessa--but that's all I remember. They said I'd been stuck in the bad spirit place. They said I was the only one that survived it and they'd contained it but it'd taken them years to figure out how to make it go away, so that it didn't spread over the ship."

His cheek twitches.

"...And that I'd been stuck there for years. I was older than I remembered. Maybe...maybe two years older from how I looked, but I'm not really sure. They said so many bad things had happened to me there that it had driven me crazy. So they took my memories of it away with their machines. To make it so I wasn't crazy anymore. But they said they'd had to go back farther than those two years, even into the times from home, because it was like it had infected my thoughts and was twisting back through my memories."

His gaze is fixed on the arrow tattoo on one hand, something to focus on to stay calm.

"I still remember things sometimes. A dark place, with fog. And rusting metal things, like Fire Nation tanks. And a howl on the wind that meant bad things were coming."

He shakes his head and looks up at Leon. "But it's just pictures. Mostly, there's a hole in my memories from the time me and my friends were all the Western Air Temple to when I woke up on the ship. My past lives don't even remember, either. And then I met them and spent the last few years on the ship."

That's the part that's worse to talk about, though.