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The world roils in a horrible moment of confusion and disorientation; there is something like a flash, or a shudder, followed by an impossible shift in perspective. What had been a vast and empty void is now contained within a physical vessel called Indou Hikaru.
Except that he's looking at Hikaru, isn't he? That soft, bright light floating above him is Hikaru's soul, departing as his body dies.
If that's Hikaru, then… Who am I? is his first conscious thought, and the last one he has for a while as his brain shuts down.
It takes a pretty long time to repair all the damage and get everything working again. Human bodies are so complicated, and he's never been inside one before. Later, he'll wonder how he knows that when he barely seems to know anything else. It does not occur to him as important at this moment. What's important is to heal all these injuries and get up and walking. There's something he needs to do.
–
It's cold.
Oh, that's his senses working again, isn't it? Temperature, that one's part of touch. Along with stuff like texture and solidity and all kinds of things! Like the wetness of the grass and mud around him, and the droplets of water dripping onto his face and dissolving into rivulets, and his clothes which his memories tell him should be soft and warm and cozy but are mostly just wet and cold right now. That's so many inputs at once, and it's all part of one sense? That's crazy.
It's all new to him, too. He now has memories of feeling things, almost two decades worth of them, but none of those are as sharp and fresh and new as what he's feeling right now. Even the cold, though similar to the cavernous frigidity inside him, is entirely novel.
And it's not just touch, either. There's rustling and dripping and plopping and chirping, and the smell of wet grass and mud, and the faint taste of blood on his tongue, and he hasn't even opened his eyes yet but there's light coming through his eyelids-
Okay. Wow. This is all so much. This is all way too much. He experiments with shutting off some of those overwhelming senses, and that helps him feel a little calmer. But now he kind of misses them, actually? So he turns them back on. Still a lot, but maybe a little more manageable. And it really is nice to sense things. It's better than the other option.
He thinks he can handle opening his eyes now, so he does. Then he closes them again, because wow! That is intense! A whole universe of colours and light and shadow and tiny movements, even sharper than anything he got from those other senses! He has a vague feeling that he could sort of see things before, but it definitely was not like this.
…Actually, what does that even mean? Before?
Still holding his eyes shut, he makes an effort to put together a coherent chain of thought for the first time.
There was a before. An endless stretch of time spent wandering this mountain, defined by nothing but the cold within him. And now there is after. He's within this body, and he can feel things and think. The cold is still there, still yearning to be filled with something.
That thought makes his insides squirm, and some of that squirming starts trying to leak out from under his eyelid. Ah, right. That's his insides. That's him, the one that's doing the thinking right now. The real him hiding inside this body.
So who is that? Who is he?
The body is Indou Hikaru, he can call up that much. Well, it was. It's Hikaru's body, and Hikaru's memories, but not Hikaru's soul. The part that actually made it Hikaru is no longer here. He is not Hikaru.
But that doesn't matter, does it? The thought drifts up with such sudden sharpness that it surprises him. It's true, too. He knows it is, because… because even if he isn't Hikaru, he has to take Hikaru's place. Because there is something he has to do, and he can only do it as Hikaru.
He opens his eyes again, and takes his very first breath, and pushes himself up onto his feet shakily like newborn animal. It's time to go home.