Cascade
Disclaimer: One Piece and Katekyo Hitman Reborn! are not mine, sadly.
Chapter 1
Summary: Another one of those original character self-inserts that involve being reborn as Luffy's twin sister. Although KHR is mentioned in the disclaimer, Dying Will Flames will only be used in the loosest term of the word. It also wont be mentioned much by the Main story line or main characters. It'll be more of a.. The members of the Underworld/mafia label Espers by these labels. "Users" of the Dying Will Flames will most likely use it mostly internally, and or in an extremely weakened form. Also I don't want to mention the Vindice, because it'll lead to the Arcobaleno. And the whole 'or else the world will fall apart' thing. I would like to thank Vixen_Tail for inspiring me with her fic Russian Roulette.
I'm dead, apparently. I mean there's an entire life that I remember before my current one.. So it's safe to say that dying is something I've done already, at least once before.
Although I have absolutely no memories of dying. Or death. Or of the after life. Or of my re-birth. Which is a boon in its own light.
Death and rebirth. There's no other explanation for what I'm doing here, wearing someone else's skin. Living someone else's life. And once I realized where I was reincarnated, it was a life that shouldn't have even existed in the first place.
I don't remember much of being a baby - I guess that was a blessing in it's own way. What I do remmeber of it as pretty much just a jumble of images, smells, and vague impressions. And a predisposition for learning langauges, coming from growing up in a multilingual culture.
However, one day when I was playing in the dirt.. I just knew. Memories of another life, of an older psyche, suddenly cascaded through my mind. I remembered who I used to be. My old dreams, my regrets, my fears; the memories of my loved ones followed me here into this second life.
It was with a growing horror that I turn my head towards one of my worst hypothetical nightmares.
A little boy with black hair and brown eyes.
Absentee parents, a small, quiet town with nothing but windmills and cows, unnatural hair colors, an even tempered bar tender named Makino, a crazy, aloha-shirt wearing grandfather whose taller than humanly possible...
A twin brother named Monkey D. Luffy.. Who's currently playing in the dirt...
I've been reborn into the One Piece world. A world that plays along the lines of Murphy's Law. A world where the collective government is the definition of corruption. A world where common sense is thrown out the window where the genetics of humans and humanoids are concerned. Heck! It's a world where people can be weapons of mass destruction. I.. I live in a crazy and chaotic world- Where I'm just as likely to die in the country I was born in as any other country in the world.
Being faced with the reality of my own very delicate mortality was like a smack to the face. Never mind the fact that I don't remember my first death, death isn't something I want to experience again. The thought was terrifying and yet all at the same time perversely lurid.
I could feel the dirt underneath my nails, I could see the backwards water town all around me, I could hear and understand the local language, I could still smell the cows in the distance, and I could even taste what I ate for lunch on my breath.
It couldn't have even been a dream, because I could breath. No matter how realistic or long a dream has been before; I would always wake up when I realized that I couldn't technically pull in air. Dreams weren't this detailed; they were more disjointed. Everything was just too real for this to be a dream.
Just looking into the face of my twin was evidence enough. Although he was adorable, just past the age of toddlerhood. You could already see the man he would one day grow up to be. Physically, I mean, not personality wise. It was the summer of our fourth year, and his default mood was petulant. Adorable, but not exactly charismatic yet.
Where was I going with this again? Oh, yes. A description of how my new brother looked like. What was his ethnicity supposed to be? Oda had stated somewhere about Luffy being Brazilian, right?
If you asked me, however, Luffy had the whole ethnically ambiguous thing going on. With his tanned skin and the shape of his face, he wouldn't have been out of place in the crowds of Brazil. Or anywhere in the Americas really. Personally though the way his skin tanned, the way it tinted, gave off the feeling of someone of East Asian ancestry, Japanese maybe. The bent of his nose and the shape of his eyes were really vague in the terms of placing his ethnicity. Especially the eyes.. Which wouldn't look out of place in the face of someone from the Mediterranean, the Middle East, the Baltics, or even Southeastern Europe. You know what? I'm going to stick with ethnically ambiguous. He could just be one of those rare people. Like the Asian that looked Hispanic, or the Hispanic that looked Asian. Or the mixed person that frankly looked like neither parent ethnicity.
Although now that I think about it, why am I pondering this? The whole concept of a whole new world, and the grand line; there's no countries to go with the thoughts I'm thinking of. No America, no Asia, no anything that I used to know.
Taking a gander at the memories of the past year of my life, multiple languages have been spoken by the townspeople. The two most spoken languages were not surprisingly English and Japanese, but Spanish, Italian and a language that sounded German, but I was sure wasn't. There included the people who passed through the town briefly, adding to the mix of languages a dash of every other European language too. Not that I know how to speak them or anything, but now that I think about it maybe I do?
Who I used to be only spoke English, and maybe understood another tongue. But over the length of my very short second life, I've picked up a few words here and there.. I was certainly bilingual now, because I was fluent in Japanese. Or at least as fluent as any four year old was going to be speaking their mother tongue.
My head felt weird, like it was filled with cotton. And I had to wrack my head as to why. I hadn't really noticed this before, but I'm currently thinking in a mix of English, Japanese and Spanish. I guess who I was before remembering was a child who had yet to distinguish the fact that there were differing languages. So I guess I'm multilingual now. Sorting all of my thoughts out based on the English language was certainly headache inducing exercise.
Looking for a reflective surface, and finding it in a storefront's window. I try to see the person who I'm supposed to be. Observing the child that I am, gave me a distaste for what I see. The very picture of a sullen child looking back at me..
Black and brown eyes, that's where the similarity ends with how I used to look like...
Anyway comparing my new looks to Luffy's; we shared hair and eye color, and vaguely our face shape. However, what drew me first was the way my hair spiked, and honestly how short it was cut. I never had hair short enough to elicit this response from my hair in my past life, and even if I had done so. It likely would have been more straight like Luffy's was now, but in this life I couldn't add straight hair to the list of things people would call beautiful about me. Lowering my focus.. Sharp, dark eyes were what greeted me, intense was what stared back. I now had long, thick eyelashes that did nothing but make me look even more like a boy from the Mediterranean.
I looked down at my own hand. Although it wasn't exactly paler than Luffy's own shade, the dusky skin tone at a glance could have been of someone either from the Mediterranean or the Middle East. But then again I could have just as easily been someone from South America or Southeastern Asia. Frankly with the eyes and skin, I looked more like our father than I did our grandfather. It seemed the only thing I got from Garp were the spikes in my hair, and the slight widow's peak. I kind of liked the widow's peak actually, it felt like the only thing to have followed me into this life.
Luffy though.. Other than gaining most of Garp's boyishness looks, must have took after our mother or grandmother.
I've yet to met the man, but from what I remember of the manga.. I seemed to be very much our father's daughter...
It was daughter, right? Taking another gander at the store's reflective surface and... yeah, that wasn't helping.
Honestly thinking about it, I couldn't remember if I was a boy or not. None of my thoughts from the current me screamed either boy or girl in any concrete terms.
But holy baloney.. I do remember using either Ore and Boku when I spoke in Japanese. Those are gender specific masculine pronouns, right?
I should go to the bathroom now.
...
In the end I found out that I can't pee standing up, and that I am indeed a girl in this life too. I'm just going to be very.. handsome when I grow up.
I don't know why that upset me so much. The concept of reincarnation, and trying out life as a guy almost seems tempting, at times. But in the end I don't want to want to be a guy, either.
I wonder why no one corrected my speech every time I used Boku or Ore? I'm pretty sure that I was copying Luffy's mode of speech.
"Lommy, hey."
It was pretty weird that I knew how to navigate Partys Bar without really thinking about it, though. Muscle memory? Or not. I didn't really think about where I needed to go, I just knew where to go.
I wonder what else it was that I would just know. It was weird recognizing people on the street that I technically wasn't aware enough for the meeting. It was weird that everything I saw, both people and places gave off a feeling of familiarity, like I had grown up here. In a way I did grow up here- I still am, really.
"Hey! Are you pretending to be deaf or something!?"
"I'm gonna leave you here if you don't answer me.."
"Lommy! You dummy!"
"Yes?" Huh? Did I space out? Dark eyes slid to a pouty face. "Luffy."
"It's dinnertime. If we don't hurry up, Makino, might not wanna give me any desert."
It was dinner time already? It felt like just a moment ago that it was lunch time. Lommy looked up at the sky, the sun was already set for setting. Where did all that time go?
"Why didn't you just go on ahead of me?"
"Because Makino would just make me go back for you, Lommy.. You know that!"
Thinking about it for a moment and finding it true, Lommy answered. "Huh. You're right. Sorry."
As they went through the entrance of the bar, a thought tickled her mind. Even as Luffy zeroed in on the food on the bar, Lommy absently dragged him by hand past the bar to the small restroom behind it. She knew that Makino always told them to wash their hands before they ate, and recently it had come to be Lommy that kept them both germ free.
Luffy washed his hands first, shaking his hands to dry instead of wiping them. Luffy ended up wiping his hands on his shirt anyway, essentially dirtying them again. What was the point of washing his hands just to get them dirty? It caused Lommy to cringe at the thought, they had rolled around in the dirt earlier.
AN: Happy Human Holidays!
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