Disclaimer: I don't own KHR.

Yet Another Reincarnation Story

I. Starting Anew

Reborn [Re-born]

1. brought back to life or activity.

Rebirth [Re-birth]

1. the process of being reincarnated or born again.

So maybe I mucked the wording up a bit but super dramatic and awe-inspiring intro aside, you get the idea. I was born again. I was a baby and would be taken care of and coddled, be able to experience childhood again and get away with things thanks to the ultimate power of the little kid eyes. Yay, right?

Not. Even. Close.

Being reborn wasn't really all it was cracked up to be. For one thing, almost as soon as I was born, I was dying again.

Dying the first time was already an unpleasant experience. You try getting run over by some moron in a Honda and see how you feel about the whole stupid affair. What's more it was an experience ruled, not by numbness, but absolutely agonizing, fiery pain. I was a few months into my residency, but I'd seen my share of accident victims being wheeled in. You felt sympathy for those people, felt the pain of their families and cried for them. That felt so shallow, now. Because no one could ever understand the amount of pain they suffered.

Imagine being acutely aware of every bone in your body breaking, hearing the snap tear crunch. Imagine feeling your organs rupture, the sensation of broken ribs breaking skin, sinking through one lung and narrowly missing your heart. Imagine feeling every nerve scream, the pain so overwhelming that you can't think of anything but the agony that your body is going through and the reality of your situation. Imagine a torture so terrible that you begin to beg, wish, and curse at the fact that bone couldn't have moved just an inch more to the side and popped your heart like a fucking bubble. Imagine lying there in a pool of your own blood, begging death to come take you and hating the people trying to help because they're only making all the suffering worse and you know that their efforts are useless. You know for a fact that it's over, that you're through.

I still have nightmares.

But the second time was… somehow even worse.

I think it was the feeling of helplessness; the reluctant acknowledgement of the fact that I could do absolutely nothing to help my situation. Knowing that, despite being given a second chance at life, I was going to die again. It was like holding onto the edge of a cliff. You have just climbed up this cliff all the way from the bottom, a place so deep that you can't even see the bottom from where you're hanging anymore. You had just stood up on the edge but the ground gave out and now you're clinging to it in complete desperation. You feel your fingers slipping, and you know that no one's going to come save you because this is real life and there was never anyone waiting for you at the top of that cliff to begin with. You know. You know. But you are still so stubbornly clinging to hope because if you lose that, you lose everything.

And I had already just lost everything. I had just been died and I was going to die again? Hell no. I had just been born! It had to be some kind of big cosmic joke. This situation might have seemed like the most unbelievable thing, but it was all I had. I didn't want to go down, but if it was going to happen anyway I would rather not give death the satisfaction of having me go willingly twice.

But on the edge of that metaphorical cliff, someone took my hand and pulled.

I gasped, coughed for air and then burst into big, uncontrollable sobs. I couldn't tell if I was just super scared or super relieved but whatever the case I held onto that hand like my life depended on it (which, it just so happened, it did). And when I opened my new, limited field of vision, baby eyes the first thing I saw was not the woman who'd been nursing me but the brother born before me. He had ink-colored hair and dark, dark eyes and he seemed as distressed and relieved as I was, reaching towards me with the other hand that wasn't already grasping mine and wailing at such a volume that it put my cries to shame.

It was the first time Kyoya saved me from the precipice of death, but it wouldn't be the last. He was the tree rooting me to a world that had just tried –and would, for the next few years, continue to try- to erase me. It was the beginnings of a relationship that would span the entirety of my lifetime in this new and strange world. But it wasn't like I knew that. I was just happy to be alive. Either way I had absolutely no qualms with throwing my infant arms, with their absolutely terrible motor control, over my new baby brother and holding onto him as tightly as my nonexistent strength would allow.

So near death experiences aside life as a baby was good, right?

Um, no, no, and no.

Try imagining going from fully functioning, mobile adult with full responsibility for their life going to unable-to-do-anything-for-themselves-without-the-assistance-of-an-adult infant. Having to go to the bathroom in your underwear, wailing at the top of your lungs for dinner, waiting for someone to come burp you, having to be carried everywhere- well, no, being carried everywhere was kind of nice. Who doesn't like free transportation? But it was the principle of the thing!

Nursing wasn't bad just… really awkward if I put too much thought into it. Thankfully the desire for food and the utter tranquility of baby-mommy bonding kind of overrode that thought process until I was back in my crib again. Whereupon I could, of course, contemplate the absolute humiliation of my situation in relative peace.

Oh and then there was the boredom.

Oh heavens the boredom.

If I had to guess, I think those days spent with nothing to do were my motivation for becoming the most hyperactive Hibari to 'grace' this world with my presence (and as a side note, becoming the most annoying and loving sister to ever give Kyoya a sizeable headache. But that's a story for another day.)

And don't even get me started on the language barrier.

I'm not stupid. I plowed through med school with a fairly acclaimed record of excellent test scores, assignments completed and enough time in the labs to last me until I was a hundred. But I was not a language person.

Math? Fine.

Sciences? I blazed a trail of destruction and wounded egos through my classmates.

English? Apparently all those medical textbooks were good for something other than their intended field.

Japanese? Ha!

I studied Spanish for my second language, and my pronunciation and grasp of the language was tentative at best. I was hardly fit to be a foreign dignitary or something like that. The only reason I put myself through that kind of torture was because I adored the career I was going for and wouldn't let anything, not even a language credit, get in my way. Those were long, caffeine-filled, sleepless nights let me tell you. But I persevered and practiced my newly acquired bilingualism with fervor so that I'd never have to go through that kind of suffering again. And then… and then I died and was born a Japanese person.

Do you see how this just adds to the 'life as a baby was not that awesome' thing?

I'm almost positive that my saving grace came in the form of my child's brain and even, of all things, the language I had studied prior. Even though I was always a step behind my twin in grasping my new native tongue, it still came much easier than it had compared to my relentless study in Spanish. It helped that I was very motivated to find something to alleviate my boredom (and eventually pain, teething is terrible). I was very insistent on learning to read and being read to, much to the exasperation of my dear brother who, among other things, took naps and treasured sleep the way a child was generally supposed to zealously guard a chocolate chip cookie.

Oh but I didn't mention, did I? Kyoya and I were basically inseparable.

It wasn't so much a twin thing as a necessity, he was what rooted me and allowed me to survive, and my new parents seemed to understand that. In the rare moments when our mother wasn't watching over us, the maids were instructed to keep us together at all times. We bathed, ate, and slept together. There was never more space than an average sized room between us. As a result, on the occasions we were allowed to toddle around the house, Kyoya was always dragged around by my decidedly far more energetic self. He complained -who wouldn't when their nap was disturbed?- but he never made any effort to distance himself from me. And it wasn't out of obedience towards our parents, but understanding that, for some strange, incomprehensible reason, I needed him.

My first word was not 'okaa-san' or 'oto-san' but 'Kyoya'. It was a very long time until I called him my brother, I was still very attached to the one in my life before, but as I understood it just calling him by first name alone bore far more significance than the honorifics the Japanese were so fond of. And for our simple, small life, that was enough.

So boredom. Super annoying, ever present, always there, right?

Not exactly.

I mean my life as a baby was really not entertaining in any way but that didn't mean that it was dull and monotonous all the time. In fact, almost immediately after my birth, I was seriously wishing that people would leave me alone and just let me sleep and mourn in peace. But I would be lying if I said I didn't really get into the culture that belonged to my new home. Even considering that my parents were pretty heavy on the traditions, I was actually genuinely interested in what was going on. The first significant event of my new life was seven days, in the evening. I wasn't very happy with that initially. After my near death experience seven days prior I was tired. But when I saw the amount of people flooding into our hospital room, my interest grew. It was our Oshichiya Meimeishiki, our naming ceremony, and the family had arrived.

What I remember most is how similar they all were. Black hair and steel gray- just like my parents. There were a few exceptions here and there, variations in eye color, skin tone, but the hair was always the same. Mind you, the only reason I knew any of this was because they came close enough for me to see in my limited field of vision, otherwise they were just big blobs with absolutely no form. Did I mention my depth perception was shot? No? Well it was.

The biggest, and virtually the only difference of significance among all these strangers were two boys. At the time, the only reason I took note was because they looked a little different from the others in the room. One was a baby that couldn't have been much older than a few months. He seemed about as fascinated with me as I was with him (which is to say, not at all), but being one of the only babies in the room aside from myself and Hibari, I took note of him. The other couldn't have been more than two at best, but what struck me were his eyes.

Except it wasn't the color -an astoundingly warm shade of brown if you must know- but the fact that those eyes were different than what a child his age should look like. At the time I couldn't place my finger on it. I was disoriented, unused to this baby life style, and still struggling to settle into my new body and feeling as overwhelmed as I was intrigued with these new, almost oddly similar looking people. It would take time, stray comments, and a passing look at a mirror for me to realize.

Those eyes weren't the eyes of a child. They were the eyes of an adult.

It was my first meeting with the baby-but-not, and it certainly wouldn't be the last.