Chapter Text
There was a truth that Carlene learned upon her waking.
Death itself was not cruel.
She, like who she had been a lifetime ago, was aware of her own mortality. Of course, that awareness was far more intimate now than what past she would have been able to reach but she had always known how easy it would be to die.
And so it was. She died without even knowing how it came to be.
That part, she would have been able to understand.
That part, she would have been able to move on from.
That part she had been prepared for since she understood the meaning of the word 'death'. But she hadn't stayed dead. She had opened her eyes to a world much darker than the one she had left and felt nothing but despair. And since that moment she had awoken in a new body, marked by death in a way that only one who had experienced it could, with the darkness sunk deep into the marrow of her bones and the echo of nothingness reverberating through her veins with every beat of her heart.
The emptiness that had greeted her at the end of who she had been had followed her into this new life; it crept and swallowed the light in her eyes without her knowing and twisted itself around the smiles that curled her lips.
"Does everyone that looks at me know what I am?" She asked her reflection when she looked into a mirror for the first time and saw a monster wearing the skin of a little girl looking back at her. "What kind of unnatural thing are you?"
The truth Carlene learned upon her waking was that death itself was not cruel. It was a truth that would be reinforced as the years dripped away- when she survived her first week in a body that was a stranger to her, memories slowly returning to her as she laid in her unfamiliar bed, listening to parents whisper concerned from behind the corner, having the village elder visit her with herbs and medicine that he had gained from the next town over, only getting up once everyone left for the night to look into the small mirror she had tucked away to look into the eyes she doesn't recognize and want to claw them out of her head- these aren't my eyes, these aren't my eyes, THESE AREN'T MY EYES-!
Death wasn't cruel. It was quite the opposite really. Life was cruel. A part of her felt as if she had always considered that as a possibility, even far before she died, but that it was only upon her rebirth that it was cemented as truth.
And in this new life, she only had five more weeks before it would be ripped away from her along with the 127 who lived in this isolated clan, or was there less time then she thought?
It hadn't seemed like an important thing to keep in mind in her past life. How could she have known that the story from a lifetime ago would become her new reality? Carlene remembered plenty of details about the story she had been forced into. How could she not- when her most common nightmare was waking up one day to see the eyeless bodies of the people who surrounded her, their murderer's breath on her neck as she stood waiting for them to butcher her next.
The thing was- knowing what was to happen, jolting the future on one of the empty journals the original Carlene had kept to practice her Common, staring down at everything she could remember from her past life with a numbness in her chest- there was nothing she could do with the knowledge she had.
How the hell could she expect to change a thing?
She was only fifteen. Her body didn't function in the same way an adult did. She was still physically a child, how did she expect to keep her clan safe from the criminals that were nen masters in their own right?
Even if she went to the Elders and told them everything she knew, she'd be trapped in the illusion of a delusional girl. Telling people what she knew would only draw the attention of people she would much rather stay away from.
But she had to try, even if she couldn't change everything, she had to try.