Prompt: "What if Break was reincarnated as a Chain" (from Fluffy)
Rating: K+
Warnings: Mentions of character death. He got better (or something).
This drabble spawned a whole verse on my blog including one of my absolute favorite threads I have going right now.
This isn't how it was supposed to go, not how legends and stories old and unsourceable explained it; this isn't anything he could have expected and it isn't anything he could have prepared for, because no matter what the unchangeable, terrible truth of the matter is that he was dead, that he died in their arms, that though he did not wish to die—though he was not finished with that world—he was never going to open his eye again.
Yet here he is, here is this familiar darkness in his vision—he is alive, though he is sure that it is only in the strictest sense.
He is not breathing, precisely, and his body does not feel the same (as what?)—it is light, void of pain, and though it moves like he remembers there is something hollow about how his joints flow against one another, something surreal about how his feet do not always touch the ground but regardless he walks, floats, shambles (or whatever this is) along. Though his body seems so empty his mind is anything but, thoughts of unclear origin sprouting up at every turn—these are instincts, he realizes, the inbuilt knowledge of his being, the things he must know in order to exist in this way—or at least, many of them are—
—these others, these memories, are surely the stranger ones.
Ah, but they are his, are they not? That human life is his all the same, and that death as well—those memories are what shape him, give him a form so near to the one they properly belonged to. He is and he is not the same, but his is the sort of being conceived of beloved memories and a fragmented soul, of still-warm flesh and dark black energy. So then, if there is no need to reject this shape or these thoughts, then it cannot be wrong to wonder of that past, to echo these desires—
—so first, he must find her, if he is to try to keep his word—
—but he also must seek some way to see the other side, for he must know what it is he left behind, if that future was able to become reality; he cannot rest, no, not until he is sure that he has done all that he could.
( whether that is as that human, or as this chain. )