For I Have Loved the Stars
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"There is no death, only a change in worlds."
-Chief Seattle
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Chapter One
There is, she mused, nothing graceful about being removed from a uterus. Before she could even take a fresh gulp of air, something is shoved down her throat, and pulls.
It's easy to say that spending months stuck in liquid meant that she was bound to have some eased into her orifices and that the too-big people were taking it out so she could breathe.
Hindsight is 20/20 after all, so she felt she could be excused for wailing the moment the suction left her mouth. Of course, her own screaming set off even more panicked thinking she thought she was already prepared for, like, say the lack of teeth in her mouth and her naked body on display- please, just wrap her in a blanket already!
She didn't know how many minutes passed before her throat began to ache from crying at these newfound revelations. She opened her eyes and wanted to cry again. Why do I already need glasses?
Sounds around her began to quiet down and she was settled into what must have been her new mother's arms. All around her, there was laughter and chatter, and if she weren't already aware of what was happening, the nipple being pushed into her mouth would have done it.
She automatically began to suck, to her utter horror. Her eyes were free to roam around, and they landed on the dark eyes above her, almost too close for comfort.
Dark hair, dark eyes, and brown skin…if this is the woman who birthed me, maybe that's what I'll look like.
The entire situation wasn't the worst thing in the world really (it was certainly better than burning in hell, frankly). The jabbering around her was almost familiar. English, her mind substituted. It's been years since she heard her native tongue. She was 100% sure she'd never hear it again once she left home all those years ago.
Not that home is home anymore if this is my rebirth.
Was she immediately reborn? This certainly wasn't her mother staring down at her. Maybe I was reborn where I died. After all, wasn't there a woman just down the street expecting soon?
No, they'd be speaking Russian if she were reborn in the same town she died in…
Maybe, maybe, maybe. There were so many possibilities to think about, considering she just took her first breath in a long time. Her eyes was beginning to feel heavy…
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The next few years were a blur of diapers and loud arguments from her new parents. She was very, very careful to not show fast development, as it seemed if she showed anything too advanced or too childish, one parent would blame the other.
If I had my mind properly blanked and wasn't so aware of my surroundings, I'd probably be happier. Though if she were a proper baby, she'd probably be socially stunted later on from all the attention she got from her new parents.
She knew adding a child to the family was a big thing, but these people didn't even try. She'd have to sit, humiliated, in a soiled diaper for hours, trying not to cry and irritate them, which would start a fight between them as usual. It was probably borderline abuse how often she went hungry because her mother couldn't be bothered by her.
If it weren't for the fact they got their act together when they had a friend over, she wouldn't even know her own name.
Valerie.
The first time she heard it was from a coo from the woman's friend when she was roughly a year old. Her parents were much more affectionate when people were over, freely dropping kisses on her head and swinging her around.
She even heard a friend joke that if she stayed this cute 'you'll be beating men off with a stick!' while her father laughed and agreed.
(She lived for the days there were people over. To watch her parents transform sometimes made her cry in relief.)
It was lonely, growing up again without siblings. With parents who had a bad habit of ignoring her when they were in a bad mood. With no television or books around, there were very little stimuli, and her parents rarely took her out.
She had a few baby toys but what the hell was she supposed to do with those?
It didn't take long to get tired of the quiet that filled the house when one parent was absent. It would ring in her ears and her tongue would ache with the need to make noise, to sing, to whistle-
She hated the silence. She longed for the days of just sitting in a room with a piano and playing bad renditions of pop songs. She missed sitting in her sister's car and arguing about her good for nothing boyfriend. She wanted to hear her first mother's voice on the phone berating her for wearing sandals in the winter. She craved emoji filled text messages from her best friend with explicit details about what happened at Friday night's party after she got blackout drunk.
I can't wait to be enrolled in school, even if it'll be filled with shitty, loud kids, she often thought.
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When she was four, she was woken by her mother who had a finger pressed to her lips for silence.
"Valerie," she said lowly, "I'm going to be leaving for a while, alright?" she visibly swallowed, and her lips were pressed tightly together for a moment.
Valerie (she had get used to it eventually, even if she rarely heard it) just stared at her. Her mother rarely spoke to her outside brief commands- like stop humming or wear the shorts today, it's going to be hot- little things and rarely more than a few times a day, and never so early. The sun wasn't even up.
She watched her mother swallow at her silence. "I'm…very sorry I haven't been a very good mother. I know you don't know any different but…this sort of life isn't for me. I never wanted to be a mother. I feel trapped on this island so I'm leaving," she said with a sort of finality in her voice.
Island? And what parent tells their kid they regret their existence?
When it was clear Valerie wasn't going to speak, her mother stood up, shoulders back with her chin up, and headed to the door, pausing for one last sentence, "Your father can't cook, so when you get hungry, go on and walk over to Nitin-san's house. He could use company anyway," and closed the door behind her with a click.
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The only reaction her father had to her mother's disappearance was a hole in the kitchen wall and a fresh bottle of what she knew was alcohol, though it was never a brand she recognized.
Valerie wasn't present for the first, but he didn't speak to her about it when he left for work (whatever it was he did) so she was thankful for that small mercy.
At lunch, she went to the neighbor's, Nitinsan, a 40-something man that made a living on selling honey. His house was a few minutes away by foot (she'd yet to see a car!), presumably so the honeybees didn't leave the property. He lived alone, as far as she knew, and was uncomfortably buff for a man of his age and occupation.
Her mother sometimes would go over with her to buy honey and converse about anything from their 'travels' (presumably together), her husband (often negative), or even Valerie herself (often impersonal comments like 'she grows so fast' or 'she enjoys sleeping late'). Valerie and her mother probably interacted more with Nitinsan than each other.
His house was decently sized, though she'd only ever been in the front room. His front yard was neater than anybody's in the neighborhood, filled with healthy flowers, bushes that encircled his house, and a fountain of all things. A small one, but it left an impression that he had money.
She knocked on the front door with little trepidation. It's not like anybody would turn away a hungry neighbor, a child, at that.
The door opened and there was a long moment of embarrassment on her part where he looked around and squinted at the street for a few seconds before she spoke, "Um."
His eyes darted down in clear surprise, "Oh! Hello, Valerie. Where are your parents?"
Rather than ask how he remembered her from over a year ago, she spoke with a child's ease, "Mom told me to come here if I get hungry because dad can't cook."
The door opened more as he stepped aside, inviting her inside with a beck of a hand.
"It's a little odd that your mother would send you here alone," he told her as he directed her to the kitchen table once they had passed the front room and down a hall.
"She told me this morning she was leaving because she was trapped," Valerie said, and turned in her seat to see his reaction. "Dad wasn't happy when he woke up. I don't think she told him like me." There was probably a note though for him though, for him to be as angry as he was when he left the bedroom.
He paused from where he was pulling a pan out of a cupboard to turn around to stare at her in surprise.
"She left? Did she say where?" he asked after a few seconds passed.
"Off the island," she said, because that was honestly all she knew. Speaking of, "Nitinsan, what's an island?" because she was a child and realistically, if Valerie wasn't who she used to be, she'd be oblivious to the world for all her mother ever explained anything.
"An island is a piece of land surrounded by a body of water," he said, and began to brown rice on the pan. "We live on an island."
"If we're surrounded by water, how would mom leave?" she asked.
There was a longer pause, "Well, ships come by pretty often so she must have got on one."
Nitinsan was clearly trying to find a way to ease into telling her that her mother wasn't returning. She didn't much care for the woman who would leave a child to begin another life entirely and not take responsibility for the girl she already half-heartedly raised. Especially because she had left Valerie to he mercies of her alcoholic father and neighbor, a man who held no real responsibility for her.
(For all she was a bit indifferent, if a tad bitter, towards the woman, she was the person she knew most in her new life.)
"Why would ships come here?" It's been a while since she'd an actual child, so she was a little forgetful in how they make leaps in their logic. She remembered her nephew had a little concept of towns to countries and believed you could only be in named one place at a time.
"Well, we have plenty of agricultural produce-" Nitinsan paused, "We have a lot of fruits and vegetables we grow to sell to other islands," he corrected with a patient smile over his shoulder and she very carefully smiled back and didn't scowl.
Being a child was not for the prideful.
"Where are the other islands?" This was a slow going process, honestly.
"There are islands all over the world. The island we live on is called Balect," he said. Valerie watched as he began seasoning whatever was in the pan with salt. "We live on the ocean known as South Blue," he said cheerfully, and lowered the heat to allow the food to simmer. He turned to pull out a chair and sat in front of her, resting his hands on the table.
"…South Blue?" Valerie asked incredulously. "Like a compass?" she added before he could continue.
"Mm. There are five oceans in the world. Possibly six, though I think you'd have to break the Red Line to form that one, which is all kinds of illegal-" at her wide eyes he froze, "Uh, five is this many," he held up his hand and spread out his fingers, "and six is this many," he held up his other hand to accompany the other with his pointed finger up.
This time she couldn't stop herself from scowling, "I know how many five and six is!"
What I don't know is where to fucking begin…
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Author's Notes:
So this is my first fanfic ever. Please leave feedback so I know what I did wrong or right…