Chapter Text
Dying, by far, is not the worst thing that can happen to a person - mostly because you live through those things, and then you have to live with them. Death by itself, no matter how slow or painful or terrifying, is a single event after which it no longer matters. Regardless of belief system, once the meat suit has been evacuated, the experience of death is the least of anyone's problem aside from the people left behind.
Birth is a bit worse because it's slow and traumatizing, and then you live through it.
At least, most of the time.
To be fair, most people wouldn't know it - babies aren't actually sapient. They have reflexes, and instincts maybe. It takes time for the neurons to make connections and allow thought. Humans aren't born with knowledge - each one has to reinvent the wheel, to a certain extent: create their own foundations and tools with which to understand the world. A lot of that is helped by the fact that humans are also a teaching species. They share knowledge. Not just by allowing younglings to watch and copy, but actively passing knowledge on.
Of course, some younglings still require experimentation. A kid can be told not to touch the stove because it's hot, and some of them will still have to touch it to drive the point home.
And then there she was: originally a child who obeyed, she'd slowly figured out that some rules are made by liars. So maybe she wouldn't touch the stove, but she'd put her hand near it just to verify what was meant by 'hot.'
Could have done without finding out just how traumatizing birth can be for the conscious mind. Especially a difficult birth. Her spirit must have inhabited the baby's body for more than long enough to form the capacity for thought, even if she wasn't really conscious until the birthing process began.
How disorienting is waking up? Even more so, being startled awake? She transitions from non-thought to non-thought, but this time with terror. Something is trying to kill her. It is less that she doesn't want to die, and more that her body kicks into a panic, struggling to survive on sheer instinct.
There is no concept of how long it goes on, but it seems likely that if not for the umbilical cord, she'd have died regardless of her struggling.
This doesn't happen because they give up on having her pass through the birth canal and just cut her out of her mother. She is plunged into the horribly bright, awful, cold world through a gash in someone's body.
Later, she'll think this is pretty appropriate, as rebirth scenarios go.
Currently, even though being covered in slime and smacked isn't as terrible as what preceded it, she is affronted enough that she shrieks and doesn't stop shrieking until she can't. It really doesn't take long considering she has just been through hours of terror thanks to thinking she was being squeezed to death. There just isn't a lot of energy left in her tiny, exhausted body.
Then she is washed off and handed over to some rough hands. It isn't really surprising that she can't see very well - nothing more than weird blurs of shadow and light and color, but even so, she can tell that something has bumped into her chest. Warm-and-cool. Warm-and-cool. Is that breathing?
Whatever. She is honestly too tired to care, or otherwise she would still be screaming. She actually gives it a go once or twice, but it's been a horrible time over these last several hours, and so it's no great surprise when she finally passes out from the sheer outrageous indignity of this whole mess.
-0-
Her passing out seems to have insulted her new parents because she wakes up when she gets thrown to the wolves.
Alright, well honestly it's difficult to really know what's happening at the time. She doesn't understand anything said, she can't really see shit, and sleeping hasn't really helped her regain any strength.
The most she can do is cry about how miserable she is - both physically, and emotionally. It's incredibly stressful to not be able to understand anything about her environment. She can't understand what is being said to her, so the fact that the man and woman who put her down are talking over her doesn't help at all.
Tentatively, she comes to the realization that she's been put into a dog bed with a mother dog and pups. She discovers that even though they're still at the whiny stage that can't even bark yet and might not even have their eyes open, they're easily as big as she is.
She clenches her fists into their fur and warmth, as well as the shaggy fur of their mother, and whimpers along with them. She gets licked in the face for it by a broad, slimy tongue. She feels cold and miserable and weak.
Overhead, the woman seems to lose her temper, and then leaves. The man might as well. She can't tell. She keeps whimpering.
And then the mother dog talks.
The idea that dogs don't talk shocks her out of her misery enough for her to realize that she's a helpless baby. This is the point at which she shifts from reacting , overwhelmed and distressed and exhausted, to thinking. Yes, she had realized she was a baby before the talking dog, but now she also realizes that she shouldn't be.
She listens in shock as the mother dog speaks in a tone clearly meant to soothe. The voice itself is a bit growly, as one might expect of a talking dog, but it's also pleasantly evenly tempered and knowledgeable. Apparently the man hasn't left after all, because the dog isn't talking to soothe her.
The pups whine and shuffle around her, and latch on to nurse, which eventually brings her attention back around to her own situation - mainly, that she's a baby who isn't even a day old yet. She has just been born. She remembers being an adult with her own life and soul-sucking job and acquaintances, but dogs hadn't talked beyond the basic 'no' and 'I love you' noises that they could be trained to mimic.
This mother dog's vocabulary is far beyond what could even be expected out of a parrot.
She still can't understand what the dog is saying.
This isn't really a surprise, talking dog and all. Out of circumstance, she was monolingual in her past life, able to recognize a handful of languages thanks to random exposure but incapable of structuring a sentence in anything but her native tongue.
Now listening to the back and forth between the mother dog and the man, she tentatively determines this language is East Asian - specifically Japanese, but one step to the left. Like hummingbirds compared to hummingbird moths.
Perhaps it's a good thing she's a baby, although given her failing strength and how cold she is, and the fact that she's a newborn… she's probably going to die soon. Her parents are a failure, she thinks. It's just her awful luck that she dies, and gets reborn only to have the utmost negligent parents who let her starve to death after that exhausting horror show that is birth. How amazing.
She's really too tired to even scream about it, honestly. Apparently babies don't have a lot of oomph of their own after being separated from the umbilical cord.
And then Angry Mom arrives back, plucks her up - accidentally pulling Mama Dog's fur, thanks infant grasp reflex! - and shoves something unpleasant in her mouth while bitching all the time. Out of sheer fright, she manages to protest this, even if she can't push that nasty thing out of her mouth, and then - it hits her tongue. Pure ambrosia.
-0-
The next few weeks are equally baffling as they are infuriating. First of all, she gets her food out of some kind of primitive baby bottle. Whatever it is still tastes like delicious ambrosia. It's definitely some kind of milk, but it's far from just milk - yeast, she thinks, and honey, and something a little metallic or umami.
The other thing is, her body develops startlingly fast. Her eyesight clears up in a matter of days, which is how she discovers that she'd been incredibly rash to call the male a 'man.' He's a teenager. He can't be older than eighteen, but by her estimates he's probably more likely sixteen. There isn't even stubble on his face, although that might just be his genetics. That's… probably her older brother.
As for the woman, while she's definitely involved in the situation and definitely a woman, that's - probably not her mother, if she remembers correctly about being delivered by cesarean. The hypothesis of her mother still being in the hospital has already been disproven now that it's been so long, really, which is… well, she never knew her, so she's not exactly sad about it. Given the feeding apparatus they use, she figures it's not so surprising that a safe cesarean isn't something that exists.
Also: talking dogs.
Mama Dog and pups aside, both her older brother and the person she has pinned as her mother's sister have dogs of their own, even though only her aunt's talks. She's a handsome, massive beast with incredibly thick brindle fur and a pair of black, watchful eyes. Her paws are massive, and her voice is a deep, snarly rumble. A dog meant for fighting bears, she thought in awe the first time she had realized the scale of her.
Her brother on the other hand has a pair of dogs much smaller than her Aunt's. Their fur is also thick, but in a different way - long- ish, but more or less a double coat, with big paws and narrow but charming faces. Two perky ears, although one flops on one of them. They're very good at following her around and corralling her as her increasingly capable body moves from crawling to toddling away from where her brother leaves her.
He does most of the childrearing in this family, apparently. Her aunt is gone a lot. Sometimes she comes back and she stinks like medicine. Blood.
The smell of the milk mixture has really started to stick to her brother. She wonders where her other parent is, given that she's already figured out what happened to her mother.
Well, it's definitely a different world. Who knows? Given how her Aunt effortlessly bosses her brother around, maybe this world is built by women and her father was nothing more than a sperm donor. In that case, she's glad to have been born a girl again.
The only thing that she struggles to go along with is that the wetnurses have four legs. Oh well, when in Rome, make like Romulus and Remus.