AN: I know. I should just keep to my existing stories, 'Oblige' in particular at the moment, but some minor plunnies just wouldn't fit into that story. Hence why 'One Small Step' came to be. I feel bad for coming up with all these SI/OC-inserts. Well, at least they're parody-ish works that simply take themselves too seriously...
Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto. I have a decent claim to the duPont-verse, being an early writing-circle work, albeit one on indefinite hiatus. Vivian/Alice/Talulah is mine. The 'quote' below is mine too. It, in combination with 'The End?' is actually what inspired this particular story, the latter poem one that will appear in Oblige.
Every single breathe you take
Is but one small step of the road to heaven
Yet with every single step you waste
It is yet farther beyond reach.
I'm not sure when exactly it started, but when that switch was hit, that one point where a body is ready to receive a soul, for awareness to begin...
Floating in this place, my first thought was, 'Not again'
Once upon a lifetime, I had been Vivian Blackwood. Once upon a lifetime, Vivian Blackwood had been reincarnated as Alice duPont, a girl who never forgot her past life, reborn into an infamous line of mages.
It seems that once upon a lifetime that has yet to start...
I once again remembered.
I could have expressed my rage, or the despair that I was feeling at this precise moment. This sadness, this grief of losing everything once more... Why couldn't the Lethe just have washed everything away?
I could have...
Instead my second coherent thought was a resigned, 'This is going to be a LOOOOOONG wait...'