Thirty minutes ago, Clem had woken up on concrete.

Now, passing out on sidewalks? Nothing new, in itself. The teen had grown into quite the street rat in the past few years, and getting into a fight every now and then was apart of the job. Y'know--"boys will be boys", that sort of thing. If the situation were any different, he would've guessed that a few of Rodriguez' boys had been sent after whichever one of them they could get their hands onto after last Saturday. Famous sore losers.

So he'd been in the wrong place at the wrong time, they'd caught him, and his head hit the curb too hard. That's why he couldn't remember last night. It didn't matter, his head was too screwed up for brain damage to change much.

The only problem was that when he woke up, nothing hurt. 

A half hour finds the young boy panicking. There's a lot--like, seriously, [i]a lot[/i]--wrong with the entire situation. First off, why is he wearing ugly [i]scrubs?[/i] 

Second, he has no idea where he is. Wherever this is, it sure as hell ain't in Cincinnati--heck, he doesn't think he'd find something like this in Ohio, or any of the other 49 states. Clem's been riding the metro to hell and back since age 10 and has never seen anything like the mismatched slates of mud and brick and then classy, polished steel, worthy of the World Trade Center. He's fairly certain half of these buildings are taller than the towers.

So he paces, muttering to himself with his head in his hands, and digs his fingernails so deep into his scalp that it [i]should[/i] hurt but it [i]doesn't[/i] and it's really, [i]really[/i] weird and it pisses him off. When an older woman with understanding eyes walks up, Clem runs. If she asks him why he's not in school and if he needs to borrow a phone, calls him "Dear" or something of that caliber, he'd snap and strangle her with the sleeves of his gross new threads. And since she looked really nice, he doesn't want that to happen.

He stops at a park that's so much prettier than Dempsey would ever be and it serves to make him angrier. He picks up the nearest object--a baseball that he was sure wasn't there a moment before--and chucks it at the nearest fixture--a bench--because if he doesn't get the frustration out somehow he's going to pop a blood vessel. Or maybe cry, and that'd be really embarrassing. The ball flies backwards and bounces four times before getting caught in a depression in the sidewalk where a little patch of Johnny Jump-Ups are growing. He watches it roll away and turns to kick the bench, but the pain in his foot doesn't last long enough for the swear words to leave his mouth. 

With a sharp sigh, he sits down on the arm of the bench and tries to calm down, glaring daggers at anyone who tries to get too close.