Chapter Text

Death Sucks

I hadn't really expected to die, at least not in the mundane, boring way that I did. Sure, I was a civilian in a civilian centered world, where all that mattered was my relative comfort, but I thought I would become more than a simpering teenager, one that obsessed far too easily, and was just as easily distracted.

After I decided to join the Army when I got out of high school, I thought I would at least live long enough to see some awesome places, or at least get through basic and become stronger and more confident. But that wasn't what happened at all.

I simply was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and had very little reason to be. I had been walking to the store on a nice sunny day, and some random stranger shouldn't have been driving, but was. That was the last thing that registered in my mind. Then I was gone.

Well, not really gone, but I suppose I lost consciousness for some amount of time, because by the time I did realize I was dead, I didn't feel much of anything. I figured hey, if I wasn't going to hell, don't know how I scored that, then I could sit in this eternity of nothing. I thought that until I realized I could actually feel something, but I wasn't really sure what it was.

It was warm and comforting, and since nothing hurt when I felt it, I figured I shouldn't be too horribly alarmed. So I resigned myself to waiting, and while yes it did seem like an eternity, there were notable changes as time passed. It seemed as if I could actually move my body, but I knew it shouldn't be the body I had before. Which led me to the conclusion that life hated me, and I was going to be born as an infant. If I got lucky, and wasn't a raccoon or something.

Alas, I noticed one other change that led me to believe I was human, and that I had a sibling. I could hear human speech, muffled and not really making sense, as well as some other warm presence that certainly wasn't the one around me that I was used to, or the one I realized was inside myself.

Since I knew all of this, I mean, I guess I had long enough to figure the situation out, when I started to feel the world around me rock and squirm uncomfortably, and I found myself being pushed and suddenly very much not warm and comforted, I knew I was being born and refused to allow myself to scream and cry like I knew babies did. Instead I must have made gurgling sounds, rather embarrassing for a nineteen year old teenager, but the contented sighs around me seemed relieved that I was fine.

My vision was blurry, and I had a very hard time staying awake, but I was able to ascertain that the language spoken from a white blob with odd green things at the end of its appendages, was speaking either Japanese or Chinese. I only knew that because I knew they said shonen, which meant boy, but I couldn't recall if that was the same in Chinese.

Until I saw my mother, I thought everything was fine, because once I was near her face, my unfocused eyes could actually register her face, the crease of worry between her eyebrows, and then the initial recognition kicked in.

Surely she was just born in Japan, there had to be many women who could happen to look like the human version of an anime character. RIght?