The One Time and Death Forgot
A/N: this is my first fanfiction anything, and is just a plot bunny that I really really wanted to try. This will probably be long, as to what it is... an OC insert not really SI because I can?
Disclaimer: I own nothing, I make no money off this, and being a lowly fanfic writer I am most definitely not an expert on Norse Mythology and will be mucking up the plot outline because I can.
Enjoy?
Dying is a funny thing I suppose… before I actually had died I always envisioned it much like falling asleep... More bluntly put, I expected nothing. No afterlife, no 'white light', and definitely no rebirth. Fate however, seems to delight in blasting apart any preconceived notions you have about anything really, then rubbing them in your face as if to say 'see? What do you get when you assume?' Or at least that's what it felt like.
I had been a simple college student, kinda young to die if you ask me (which nobody did). I had been heading home from an off campus party with a friend, yeah the kinda where you get wasted to bad music because hey, what else do we have to do? And the next thing I know there were gunshots and screaming and then… nothing. Not to say it was ACTUALLY nothing, because I was AWARE there was nothing… does that make sense? Probably not… but it was as if I was sleeping, and was aware I was doing so.
And it was the worst experience of my life. Like a kind of purgatory I guess, maybe if I had to describe it I mean. I couldn't touch taste or smell anything, and I couldn't see anything but black, if it was even black and not just my mind trying to put a descriptor on something that I had no name for. Night and day, simply did not exist, nor time, nor anything really. I was alone in the void, trapped with no conceivable way to end my torture. The human mind wasn't ment to be left alone; by nature we are pack animals, not cut out for prolonged periods of isolation. But that's what this was, it was just me here, and I didn't even have the ability to scream.
And so I drifted. Millennia, time and space passed me by as I was stuck in perpetual darkness. And so I thought, about everything and anything I could scrounge up in my mind, which was my only escape from the nothing surrounding me. The mind is a wondrous place, it holds so much more potential than the average and even above average human will ever use or be able to utilize it for. But what did I have to lose? My mind became my playground, a virtual kingdom in which I reigned supreme and it bent to my will.
I can't tell you what exactly I achieved, the best I could describe it is as a mastery of the mind I suppose. There were not secrets between my mind and I, it ran efficiently, and allowed for superior everything, it was like the murkiest or mud puddles had become a clear pool for perusal. I know not how long it took me to achieve this, but I could honestly say probably longer that a human had any right to live. But it didn't matter, nothing mattered.
All I did was think, and think and think. Anything any everything, I had ever though seen or remembered was analyzed, torn apart, put back together, and repeat. What was life? What was death? What was living? Was I alive? I pondered everything for what seemed to be an eternity. Discovering answers, creating new questions and solving them too. I forgot what not knowing was because to me, it felt like I knew the answers to so much more than any questions another human could throw at me. I was infinite and at the same time I was finite. I was everything and yet nothing. And I knew for certain I was not sane any longer.
This continued, the hollow existence of whatever I was. It seemed like an eternity as I drifted in this nowhere place. All I had was my mind, and we were still only two. I needed to end this, somehow, I needed this to stop, and for what seemed like the longest time that wish was just a fevered thought in my already desperate psyche.
But suddenly the strangest thing happened, I began to feel warm. I cannot describe the joy I felt at this sensation in mere words, they are not adequate to capture the true feelings of hope, joy, and delirious happiness that I derived from this simple sensation. This ment I had a BODY, I was a being, you can't feel what isn't there. And after the longest time, I felt an appendage… I believe a foot? Kick out and strike something solid, again and again I repeated this, validating my existence, I was here, I existed. The sounds came next, muffled, but there nonetheless. I noticed they come more if I kicked, and continued to do so. This carried on for a small while, however is wasn't long before something started to happen.
The muffled noises were loud and I was feeling a rather uncomfortable sensation over what I must assume was my body. I felt… squished for lack of a better word, and it continued to increase until I felt the most curious thing. I was moving? Yes, like I was being pushed out.
My –head? - Yes head, finally breached something, the rest of me following quickly after.
And suddenly there was light/color/sound and for the first time in a very long time my real lungs inhaled a shaky breath
"Ragna."
I screamed.
I lived.