Chapter Text
Her car was spinning, skidding off the road. The sound of gravel on tire rang through her ears, echoing in her head. She would cover her ears if her hands weren’t busy gripping the wheel in her hands, white-knuckled to the point of looking lifeless. She didn't make a sound, her pursed lips at odds with the screaming in her mind. All she could feel was fear. She was silent, but the radio continued blaring hard rock beneath the sounds of her car skidding off the roads. She didn’t notice, frantically trying to regain control of the vehicle before- before-
She heard the glass shatter, the groan of metal.
Pain shot through her body.
And then nothing.
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She felt as if she were floating beneath the surface of a frozen lake, dark and cold. She didn't bother to think, to feel. She just was. She felt cold and alone. She doesn't know how long she floated there, weightless and motionless in the frozen lake, but she does know that it didn’t stay frozen forever. Like the seasons changing, eventually heat leeched into it and it warmed up. It was slow enough that she almost didn’t register it, but slowly the lake went from ice-cold to warm to the touch. The lake also seemed to close in on her as it warmed up, going from a vast expanse of nothingness to more of a pocket. It was comfortable, and she wouldn’t mind spending eternity here. As if sensing her growing complacency, around when the water around her reached perfect temperature, it decided to get its revenge.
Pain.
She was being squished, squeezed, pulled. She was forced out of her pocket of safety with no regard for her own safety and health. She barely managed to hold in screams as her bodily functions were slowly returned to her along with the pain. If she had the space in her mind for wondering, she would be wondering exactly how badly she had to have been drugged to have been so comfortable before this horrible experience. As it is, she only had room for one thought.
Pain.
Fully yanked from safety she was prodded and poked, the new sensations burning like acid on her still-wet skin. She wasn’t used to this. She didn’t like it at all. She barely registered tears flowing from her eyes, keeping the screams down with nothing but subconscious willpower and habit. She whimpered. She whined. But no more sounds came forth. She wouldn’t let them.
Pain.
She was dunked into water, but could no longer breathe in it, and so she choked and sputtered and coughed it out as best she could. She was then lifted out of the water, forced to stop choking on her own air. Slowly the pain faded away. Slowly the touches receded. She registered something below her, and it smelled nice, comfortable. She had a brief moment of flashing back to her warm pocket of nothingness, and finally had room for one additional thought.
Tired.
And so everything went to black.
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The days went by in a daze of colour, and she learned to feel the world around her in other ways. She craved the warmth of a human body more than ever, and would often squirm over towards anyone who entered her vicinity. How did she know someone entered her vicinity? She couldn’t see them and often couldn’t even hear them. She just… did. She didn’t bother to wonder why, too busy with her endless cycle of ‘hungry, eat, tired, wiggle for attention.’ Soon her vision started to clear up, to the point where she could even see and identify the people around her. Her most frequent visitors were a tall woman with very bright silver-blonde hair, deep grey eyes, and pale skin. The woman made her feel like a planet sucked into the orbit of the sun. She felt like this woman must be her everything. Although, something about her tallness bothered her. It didn’t feel right to have to look so far up to see her. She brushed it aside, barely having enough brainpower to even look at the woman for too long. She was tired.
Her second most common visitor was a loud toddler, looking to be about four years old. He had darker brown hair, and matching eyes. His skin was a dark tan. He was also big compared to her, and that bothered her too, so she took to silently crying in his presence. She revelled in his panic.
There was another toddler that visited as well, this one seeming to be between one and two. He was never within sight, but he visited just as much as the other one.
Aside from them, she had many other guests, but none that visited near as much as those three. Given the gift of sight, and a slightly improved brain capacity, everything about the situation seemed to strike her as wrong. There was even an itching under her skin, no doubt urging her to move around and explore. She quickly learned how to sit up, and later how to crawl, eventually working her way up to walking with all the determination of a madman.
She officially showed her mother, kaa-san, as the woman insisted she call her from what little she could catch and understand of what she said (kaa-san had then of course been her first word, anything to make the woman happy). After that she was quickly removed from her cage and swept off to be shown to all the people she had seen and felt before. It was here that she finally caught a full glimpse of her one to two year old stalker (although he looked to be leaning closer in age to two now).
White hair, red eyes, pale skin, a horrible peeling sunburn on most of it. And, of course, three distinct red markings on his face.
Oh.
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Author’s Note: I like to think that the default state of human beings is cold and weightless, for no other reason than the fact that that’s how people usually are in dreams and death experiences, as far as I’ve heard. I headcanon that the warmth shows up as she regains her nerves, but don’t know nearly enough about the development of a fetus in the womb to even begin to guess if it could be canon to the story or not. I could always look it up, but knowing me I would then end up in a rabbithole trying to learn as much as I can about all aspects of bodily development and then I wouldn’t get anything done. So I refrained. Also, yes, my favourite temperature is in fact very close to body temperature, coming in at 100 degrees fahrenheit.
This chapter is short, I know. I'm kind of testing the waters here, so this is kind of like the toe I'm dipping in. I will most definitely rewrite this chapter eventually, because frankly I kind of hate it. But I know that if I don't post something then I'll never post anything. So here you are.