Hello everyone. Sensitive topics may be breached!


You know how all of these stories work? You die, you get stuck in some crazy anime world, you get some awesome powers, you change the storyline, you interact with the main protagonist, all that fun stuff. Fight for justice, save the world, etc, etc. Never once do they mention more than two seconds of your previous life.

I'm envious of them. Getting over your entire life like snap! Oh, look, anime, who gives a shit about my family!

I… can't do that. Having all your friends, your family, you life achievements, no matter how small they might be, taken away in a blink. That's it. No getting it back. It's like my whole existence has just been erased. Nobody knows you, and you don't know anyone else. It hurts.

Maybe there was a reason reincarnation usually didn't leave you with memories. Maybe there's a reason why you never could remember anything.

Not that I'll ever know. I hate this. This life, this world, this face of mine.

It's so fake. I want to shatter it, break it, because it's all just a cheap imitation of my real life.

The one that I want and need.


...

Death. Truly an all encompassing force, unable to be beaten by human forces. Aided by time, it destroys all, even worlds.

Even lives.

Humans are just... so trivial. So easy to kill. One accident, one mistake, and you're gone. One trick, one little trickle of time. Everything is gone. Just dead. It won't restart. Not really.

Then, there's the afterlife. People always wonder what's going to happen. There are whole beliefs based on it, too. Of higher powers, of higher places. Like Heaven… Like Hell.

Purgatory, Underworld, Paradise, Nirvana. There's always a different name, but it's always essentially the same concept. You die, then you go somewhere. If you've been good, you're rewarded, if you messed up sometime, you're punished. Either way, there's a cause and effect. You still have proof of your existence, because you must have done something to get that 'effect'. Maybe once you're punishment has been carried out you can go see your loved ones, if you had them. Or perhaps it will never end? Who knows. I certainly don't.

In comparison, Life. A blank slate, able to be turned into millions of things. Something fresh and clean and wonderful, don't you think? To breathe, to think, to hold your own thoughts, to be different. To be special, unique, someone else than the person next to you. To be able to learn from other's mistakes, to cry and laugh and just feel.

Again, it's not always that easy, is it? People have expectations, problems, other's that place burdens upon your shoulders from day one. Others become mindless and addled sheep, brainless in thoughts of grandeur, losing whatever kindness they may have held. People lose the drive, lose the hope, from outside influences or maybe, just yourself. For better, or for worse, though, we're all just living, breathing, thinking, feeling. We're human. We affect others and ourselves with every breath we've ever taken, and will take. Our 'life' is reflected by the change in the life of others. Our whole existence is defined by what you do, the choices you've made, the path you've built.

I honestly don't know what I expected out of it all, though. Sure, life is all fun and good, but at the same time, possibilities are limited. It's a once-in-a-million chance to find something new, something that hasn't been done. At the same time, it's still better than death... the unknown, the scary, intimidating to even think about. Did whatever that was 'After" even exist? And if so, would I get one? I was firmly an Atheist in life (and death), however agnostic I was. What did that mean for someone like me? Eternal floating through a dark void? Feeling the rot eat away at my dead body for as long as I have meat on my bones? Becoming some kind of vengeful spirit, like in horror movies? I never tried to think about it, pessimistic person I was not. Still, the question ate away in the subconscious corner of my mind, making me wonder in dreary, darker days.

I only really found my answer the day my reality collapsed and everything turned into a

nightmare.

"Congratulations, it's a girl!"

Words? Muffled. Cold. Blurry. Hands. Sticky, wet. She tried not to cry, but her face scrunched up reflexively, confusion and fear and panic welling up in her brain. As she drew in shuddering sobs, she tried to think back to her last memory, disoriented and half blind as she wailed.

Fire. Fire, the one thing she had feared, and apparently rightly so. The smoke, thick and nauseating, blocking her sight, her exit. Huddling in the corner as the roof fell in, unable to get out.

The thought only served to instill more fear, perhaps even anger, because it didn't help and she was so, so useless. The cold hands suddenly passed her to someone else, someone unfamiliar, a stranger, breathing heavily and exuding an air of weariness. Forcing her eyes open, (When had they been closed?) she saw a head of red and another of black, with some bluish-green blurs off to the side.

Red?

That told her practically nothing! She thought hysterically through her tears, still confused and dazed and frankly, so terrified she could barely even breath. She could only hear things in a half-blocked sound, making her cry even harder. What had happened? Where was she?

Why couldn't she move?

As she screamed, flailing pathetically in someone's grasp, the red one seemed to gently rock her back and forth, holding her gently against their chest, muttering comforts that she couldn't even understand and barely even make out into her ears. Almost against her will, she calmed down, the influence feeling so very relaxing, warm.

But it wasn't right.

Gasping as she drew in breath, forgotten in her little terror tantrum, she forced herself to stop crying long enough to register where she was. Pushing down the panic, she made herself look around, focus.

She could feel arms, nestling her against someone's bosom. It was warm and chilly at once, and smelled just slightly like antiseptic, like hospitals and doctors. There were two large figures hovering at the edge of her vision. A pack of moving green.

She was small. She was a child. A newborn infant.

Feeling somewhat sick, She forced her hand to come into view. Small, pudgy, slightly wrinkled. Like a child. Hard to move at all. Helpless.

Well, I should be glad I'm still a girl. She thought dryly, a numbingly empty feeling welling up inside.

So sick and alone and I want my parents.

The rest of a trip was a daze, staring off into space as she tried to sleep, tried to relax, tried to calm down that agonizing dread in her stomach.

Where was home?

She was forced to wait a long, boring six months as her hearing and sight finally developed enough to make head or heels of the where she was. Her new "Mom" and her new "Dad" seemed almost... familiar, in a sense. Someone she had seen her previous life? Maybe she could go back. Maybe she could go home. Maybe, maybe, maybe. Until then, she could work around the dysphoria that hung around her, homesickness at it's highest, the wrong name. Nori, they said. She'd bear it, if it meant she could go back.

How utterly, crushingly wrong that thought would turn out to be.

Waiting, waiting, waiting. An infant's life was ever the dull one. The constant need to sleep, the inability to lift your head, the general lack of coordination, size, strength… She could go on and on. In the meantime, she thought. She thought, and sometimes, dreamed. About before, about herself, about what she had been. What she was.

Her name was not Nori. Her name was Jeanmarie Jiao Yan. She had lived in America, in the state of Oregon. She lived in the suburbs with a sibling, who never really shut up and was also a bit too cheerful. Her mother was strict and was a skilled cook. Her father was extremely athletic and loved dragging them all on hiking trips. She had two friends, Lily and Charlotte. She loved drawing, and enjoyed writing as a side-project. She hated maths and science. She did well in school. People called her Marie. Others still called her 'Yam', because Lily had misspelled it when they first got their phones. She liked video games and any kind of music. She enjoyed anime to a small extent. She tried playing the flute, but gave up after a year.

She had died at the tender age of fifteen.

One problem, she realized early on, was the language. Japanese, to be specific. Babies were definitely much more adaptable than a full grown adult, especially in the speech section.

Unfortunately, she was a fifteen year old inside an infant's body, and while she was better off than, say, her mother, but she had only so much knowledge of Japanese from random videos and animes and that one half-hearted class in school. She was a native English speaker, and could speak and read (not write) Mandarin to some extent, but Hiragana and Katakana? Not at all.

She tried to learn, tried to pick it up, but it never settled in. It felt awkward and clumsy on her tongue, and never came out just right. She could only recognize that the character looked 'kind of familiar' but not read it. She had a thick accent, and it was terrible because it wasn't English or Chinese and she missed hearing, deep down to her soul.

(Maybe she really didn't try too hard, because with every word she managed to understand, she hated herself more, for ignoring what was right and learning what was wrong.)

It's not a problem for a while, since she's forced to wailing her head off for a year, but as soon as she hits the 18 month mark, she's sent off to a speech therapist for help. The dull sessions make something dark and bitter curl up in her stomach. She had skilled with words that came easily before, the highest grades in her record. Still, it helped, although she carried an accent until the end of her days. She liked it that way. It was a reminder of herself, her reality, not this fake life.

Not this fake body of hers.

Nowadays, her hair was a light orange-russet, a glaring comparison to her original black. Thankfully, her eyes were still their dark brown, practically black, but that was about it. Tan skin turned pale. Narrowed eyes widened. Small nose became sharper and larger. (From a spitting image of her father to a spitting image of the mother) The differences were glaring.

She hated them all.

To be honest, it took her a pitifully long time to recognize where she even was. Two years, to be exact. First, there were the small clues. People who nobody else saw, a strange man with a striped hat. The new family name, a word that had been repeated over and over. Orange hair. Masaki. Black hair. Isshin. Karakura.

Coincidence, coincidence, coincidence. Always nothing but a coincidence.

Until it wasn't.

A boy, they said. Ichigo, they said.

Ichigo Kurosaki.

Her mouth moved soundlessly, tripping over unsteady feet. Pulling herself up, and then being carried by strong arms. Looking over the edge of the bed to see a sleeping infant.

An anime character. An anime character.

That was a new level of mental mindfuckery that she hadn't considered yet.

She was Nori Kurosaki, mistake with memories she shouldn't have, in a world that shouldn't exist.

It wasn't even a storyline she knew that well.

Her first breakdown was a few days after they took the baby home. After a few hours of staring at the main goddamn protagonist sitting in a baby crib, night fell, and the sickening knot that had permeated her chest loosened.

Everything was gone. Everything was dead and gone and gonegonegone. Replaced with this poor excuse of a universe. One where she shouldn't, by all accounts, even be breathing. A mistake of a mistake. She was just the acne of creation, wasn't she? This place was a story, with set lines and she was not one of them.

Still, she comforted herself with happier thoughts, because Nori (Jeanmarie, not Nori, never) was not one to give up easily. She could have kickass shinigami powers, right? Carefully, she cared for "her" sibling, making sure that they would grow into the central protagonist he was destined to be, carefully making sure her interference would not, say, destroy the world. She'd write down everything she knew about the place, hide it away.

She took care of him for a while, patient and quiet. It hurt. They were so similar to her own brother. Jeanmarie was never violent, nor loud, nor insulting. The perfect sister.

(The perfect stranger.)

This wasn't her brother. Just ink on paper, one she was somehow living with. Days wore on, pretending that this could actually work, that these people were her family, that this wasn't just a dream. That she wasn't a mistake, wasn't a imposter in a fairy tale.

"Look at your grades this year!" Her mother's horrified voice came to hearing range. Slowly breathing out a sigh from her nose, she steeled herself to a long and torturous rant on her school life. She preferred talking to her friends, not caring about this grading system that her parents put weight into.

"Look at your grades this year! You're just a little progeny, aren't you!" Masaki smiled at her (No, she smiled at Nori, not her) and Jeanmarie grinned back painfully. At least, she reflected, she didn't actually have to sit through all of elementary. No, she just skipped two grades and went straight to third, and even then it was all boring. The only challenge was her reading and language grade. The dark and bitter feeling in her stomach grew. To her eyes, her classmates were so awfully underdeveloped, so utterly immature and idiotic. She had been the same, not too long ago, and she wondered how she herself could have stood it at all.

She started writing her memories down.

Tapping her pencil on her desk, she sighed, wracking her brain for information. She had only ever read the manga, and really, she didn't pay too much attention to much of it. It was much too long and eventually got boring, with random power ups at every turn.

Things I remember:

-Ichigo was fifteen when it happened. Hollow busts into house, Rukia stabs him.

-Chains and hollows?

-Keigo can see spirits, Orihime uses hair barrettes, Chad has some kind of power for his arms, Ishida is a Quincy, Tatsuki can see, Yuzu can see, Karin can see, Isshin was a shinigami, Masaki is a Quincy.

-Ichigo has way too much energy. Can't control it, huge zanpakuto thing, no magic.

-Rukia get's kidnapped, wish stones, Urahara is a banished guy for something, Yoruichi was banished with him, Byakuya is a bit of a prick, Hisana dies, Renji is some guy in love with Rukia, something about Ichigo and hollows. Executions, fire chicken/phoenix. Ukitake, Someone with a pink kimono with games.

-Something happens and Arrancar ranked 10 and up comes from Huenco Mundo. Gin is a double traitor, Rukia get's stabbed or something to get the wish stone, Aizen is a traitor, Yamamoto get's his arm stabbed off, Hinamori is brainwashed. Something about a weirdo obsessed with justice and least bloodshed with a dog-guy.

-Mugetsu and losing his powers, year-skip, Fullbrings, some guy and memories. Ywach and stealing sword-powers. Ishida pulls some double-double stabbing. They fight a lot of stuff.

-People I know names of but not anything else: Hitsugaya (Ice?), Matsumoto, Kenpachi, Unohana, Ikakku.

She chewed on the eraser, trying to pick through her blurry memories, berating herself for not paying enough attention. She was confident she could recognize them if she saw them, but she didn't dare draw picture. If someone read this… She didn't need pictures.

"Couldn't I just... Tell them?" Jeanmarie sighed, setting her pencil down, "Wouldn't it be so, so much easier?"

It would. But when she thought about it...

She was already next to the person the whole world practically revolved around. It wasn't far fetched at all that Soul Society would hear about her. And Aizen, as well as Ywach, could easily hear about her. Urahara? Better, but...

"No... I have to remove myself from this place. Only then I'll be able to be safe, and find a way to go home."

It went on. Painful reminders of her family, pretending not to be an intruder, hoping that nobody would discover that she was nothing but a mistake that really shouldn't be here.

Then again, what did it matter? These people weren't even real.

Things really started moving when the twins were born, snapping her out of her repetitive daze at age eight.

Jeanmarie kicked her feet awkwardly in the hard, uncomfortable hospital waiting chair. Masaki was currently having kids. Probably the twins, since she really, really doubted that her involvement in anything would change the process in which they did... things like that. Still, she was better off than Isshin and the kid currently sobbing next to her. Isshin was pacing and almost wearing a hole in the floor. You'd expect that after two times, he'd be more used to the thing, she snorted.

Hours and hours and dull hours later, they were finally let in. She walked in slowly as the other two dashed in, scared and excited in a place where she knew what would happen. She stopped at the doorway, while the other two practically rushed in sobbing.

Such a perfect family scene. Masaki seemed tired, but greeted them with a small smile. Isshin was already hovering around them, flustering around. Ichigo was still crying, except he was next to his mother. She hung back until Masaki noticed, "Come see your new sisters!" An encouraging smile, and she slowly obliged, feeling like such an intruder, because she really wasn't who they thought she was.

Karin.

Yuzu.

Staring into the eyes of the two little girls, They looked up, so small and innocent in a way that jarred her awake from her petty dreams. This life would never be like before. It was finally just too different to salvage at all, wasn't it? She was just an intruder, a stranger in an unknown family. She smiled up at her legal guardian, asking for their names.

But she already knew.


In which I try something new. This won't be your usual SI-OC (Technically not, but eh) No, this will be experiment number 401, where I delve into the psycological effects of being removed from a familiar enviroment.

Also, this story may have some triggers in the future, like depression, alcoholism, drug use, and similar. Please refrain from reading if you are sensitive towards such subjects. Thank you!

Please R&R!

I'm looking for a Beta reader, too!