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In the beginning, there isn't anything but me and my heartbeat. Thump. Thump thump. Thumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthump-

It's frail, and way too fast, but something within me tells me that it's mine. There seems to be a lot missing. As if the heartbeat isn't all that should be here.

The beating begins to steady itself and I can begin to concentrate again, as if I'd not been thinking for some time. Thinking. That's a thing a mind does, if I have one. I think I do have one, if these snatches of thought through the blackness around me indicate anything.

I suppose I should be scared, frightened even, but there's a void inside me where these things used to lie. Emotions. The mind, the thinking, supplies to me.

But only the definition. The information - but not what it describes. I am not scared in the slightest. I am not happy, nor sad, nor any emotion. None of these things come to me. That isn't the mind's job, I think. The mind's job is to do just that - think.

I have no memory of how I got here... or anything else, for that matter. My mind doesn't help me here, nor do I think it can. All I know is the box's soothing darkness. Soothing... well, not quite. There is nothing to soothe. I am not scared. I am not angry. Why should I be? I am just - I am just something. In a box. This is all I know.

Thu-thump. Thump thump. Thump.

The beating reminds my mind to menform me that I do, in fact, have a heart. My mind also reminds me that I have a mind, too, which I do not quite understand. I know I have a mind, that is why I think.

Nothing comes to me, at first - because I do not remember forgetting - but then a pressure I hadn't noticed before starts to ease off from my head, and I start to become more aware.

I am a Child of the Blue Sun.

I am a Child of the Blue Sun.

I don't really know where this information - this sentence - comes from, nor why I remember it, but it comes anyway. I almost see a symbol - a circle with lines coming from it, a sun, but it fades just as quickly as it rises.

Child of the Blue Sun...

I start to feel more conscious, though all of my senses return in the same jagged and haltering way that my heartbeat is. There's a white heat in my eyes and I can see the 'roof' of the box, the individual cracks in the wood. Feel out around it. I am confined, and the wood suddenly seems suffocating when I realize this isn't the only part of the world.

I am inside a wooden box, though that isn't the word I am looking for. Just another blank. Though as I am mulling over this, my hearing begins to return. It's muffled at first, muted, but my ears flicker and readjust.

Something like rain or soil is hitting the box rhythmically, though these words don't mean anything to me. Rain. Soil. They don't exist in here. I am still wrapping my mind around the concept of these things - weather and physical matter - that my mind haphazardly supplies to me when I become aware of something else.

I am not breathing. Something in my mind suggests this is very wrong, but I can't find it in me to be scared. My heart disagrees with my mind, and the thumping is steadying, though my airbags - lungs - are now burning again.

Again?

I blink, but things can't become clearer then what they already are. Breathing. Burning. I don't remember.

Wood. More wood. Fleshy stumps with appendages - hands - I am controlling are clumsy and unnaturally weak. But I see them, despite the lack of light in the box. Grey. Unnatural. The box seems darker at the spaces around I. Physical sensations begin to return. Not just my spatial awareness. My lungs hurt.

I still can't breathe.

I bang my hands against the wood once, twice - the wood cracks above me, or starts to. I feel something solid, and something dry and crumbly fall on one of my cheeks. My mind tells me to stop, that this isn't a good idea, the soil, and I listen. It hasn't failed me yet. Not that I'd remember if it had.

The box feels smaller by the second, though, and I need to formulate a way out before the soil finds a way in. This, I think, and I feel, is a bad idea, but I start to feel vague stirrings of panic. My heartbeat speeds up again, and I look around, looking for some sort of clue, or some sort of prompt.

There's a flash, and I remember being pushed into a small room with a boy who towered over me but had the sweetest pair of grey eyes and a sheepish grin. His hands are strong, but I feel safe.

But such idle thoughts are not going to get me out of the box. I listen out again. Things are quiet for a while. Or have been quiet for a while. I don't count how long, but I have to get out. I have to escape.

More jagged information reaches me, invisible hands ghosting my mind. I use my hands and arms to pull my clothing above my head, and my mind instructs me further. A crack has opened in the upper middle of the box from my earlier banging, and soil is starting to breach the box, and this, my mind says, is my wayout. So I use it.

Hands begin banging again, and I begin to pry the crack open further as the crack widens just enough. More soil is landing on this clothing, but my face isn't feeling it. This is good. I push at the soil coming in, move it around me and to my advantage as I breach the soil, though more keeps piling in around me and it's suffocating, even with the protection from my clothing.

I hook my fingers into the dirt and roughly start to pull myself up. My body is shaking and unused to the movements, but I feel surges of power, a sudden sense of purpose to get out. It's unexplainable, incomprehensible, but I get one leg out, and then the other, pushing myself up on the edges of the box. I reach up and, still digging up through the soil, my hand suddenly enters emptiness.

My heart jumps, thumps louder - I can hear it - and the freedom is something I savour deeply, even as I continue pulling myself up. My muscles burn. My lungs - I am still not breathing - burn.

I pull myself out into the foreign emptiness, and fear and confusion and relief are all whipping around inside of me. The void fills and overflows. The burning in my lungs finally becomes too much and I collapse down to the ground by the hole I've just made, lying in a gasping heap tangled in my clothing (which I barely remember to pull back down) and attempt to adjust to this new freedom.

Drink air into my lungs. Draw it deep, taste. The air is cold, and I feel refreshed. Free. Breath, sweet breath, is coiling around my nostrils.

I open my eyes again, though, not sure when I'd closed them, and the world isn't so jarringly bright. No, the sky,the blissful sky is a myriad of pinks and purples and golds.I am mesmerized.

I gasp, again, and the breaths I am taking don't seem like enough anymore.

I collect myself, barely, breathing coming hard and my hands grasping the dirt from where I've fallen as if the ground were about to get ripped away. Not used to this. I am not used to this.

I decide to lie there for a while, even as the pinks, purples, and golds splattered on the sky begin to fade into blue and white. There is something uncomfortable from the sun, as if the heat and light is taking something already not there away, and I just feel tired. Tired and confused and I should really get out of this sun before anything else happens, my mind tells me.

So I do, or at least I start. Pulling myself up to shaky legs, I glance around. My eyes don't lock on anything in particular, mind shakily placing labels to what it picks up on. Soil. Sky. Hole... return...

I sniff, and though I am still breathing heavily, and my body feels like it's burning and about to shut down again, I feel as if the worst is over. I am out of the box.