A/N: I've always wanted to try my hand at a self-insert. This is a somewhat darker fic, somewhat graphic. There will be a somewhat morbid underlying theme throughout the fic, but there will also be spots of levity. Please enjoy!

Warnings: somewhat dark, mentions of suicide

XxX

I never really intended for it to happen. Well, I guess most people never really intend for it to happen. One minute, I was jogging across the street, struggling to keep my backpack from bouncing too much and hoping I wouldn't be late to my exam. The next, there was a blunt force, a painful and loud crack, and a whirl of pavement and gray sky. My backpack yanked at my back and my limbs, finally pulling me to a painful stop on my side. Dimly, I heard screams and alarmed shouts, and after a bit, the wailing of a siren.

I never really intended to die. I never really intended for what happened next to occur either. But that's the thing with life, you know? You never really intend for things to happen. They just do.

XxX

It was strange. I remember ice cold air, the inability to breath, and panic. I remember being held by, I'd assumed, hands, and I remember sounds, a rush of noise and voices speaking words I could not understand. I was scared, so, so scared. I remember flailing, trying to fend off this unknown terror. I remember something rough scraping along my skin, but the touch itself was gentle. I remember being enfolded in a swaddle of something soft, restricted in a terrifyingly deceptive manner, and I gasped as sheer horror stole over me, and I was left screaming and shaking.

The whole event was traumatizing. Only later would I finally understand what had happened, and when I finally did, well, it wasn't so surprising I thought I was insane, was it?

XxX

When I had finally calmed down, warm and comfortable but still restricted (I couldn't move let me move), cradled carefully, with only soft murmurs piercing the silence. My vision was poor, blurry in the dim light, but my ears picked up several masculine voices. My body rocked slowly, as if in a swing, and my eyes closed unwillingly, the events I'd been through during the past hour (was it an hour, a day, a year?) taking its toll on me and dragging me into sleep.

When I woke up to soft sunlight, it took a while to remember where I was. I wasn't going to class anymore, couldn't go to class anymore. There would be no sleeping in while I skipped Physics, no lunch with my friends with Subway in one hand and backpack on the other shoulder, no more practicing in the frankly crappy practice rooms in our music building.

Why? Because I'd died. It was hard to deny the fact that I'd died amidst a screech of tires and burnt rubber, with ribs breaking and arms twisting and my fingers were bloodied, probably could never play the piano again…!

I screamed and cried again. Where was I? Why was I so helpless? It was almost as if I'd become a…baby…

My wails intensified.

XxX

I didn't adjust to my new situation for a while, not until my vision cleared and I could start recognizing faces. It was hard to deny that I was a baby when I couldn't even walk, and my hands smacked me in the face clumsily whenever I tried to exercise control over my limbs. Even then, I never adjusted, merely ignored.

It was hard to get over the fact that I'd died. I could still remember indescribable fire racing along my sides and the complete shattering of my fingers. They are one of the most sensitive parts of your body, the sensations felt along your fingertips disproportionately numerous when compared to skin on the thigh, and when I could feel bones piercing my fingertips, slim from piano practice, it was pure agony. Of course, there wasn't really any more agony when I'd blacked out. It'd been my reprieve from my hurt.

I often wondered if this was all a dream. Was I actually dead, and this was the afterlife? What kind of afterlife was this? I was indignant if this was what people spoke of when they mentioned heaven. Perhaps hell, but the place I was at didn't resemble hell much either. Perhaps a coma? An elaborate dream conjured by my mind because I couldn't cope with the near-death experience. Was I certifiably insane?

I'd entertained the possibility of reincarnation. It was, by all means, the most improbable of all the conclusions I'd made. I was never religious, but I could accept an afterlife. Who knew what happened after death? Certainly nobody lived to tell the tale. An afterlife, I could accept the existence of, but when applied to my situation? Impossible.

First, my baby brain shouldn't even have had the mental functions to deal with the sort of thinking I was doing at the moment. Babies had to learn everything from scratch, from how to move to how to speak. Their brains were essentially uncooked cookie dough, with no form and incredibly impressionable. They were underdeveloped. There was no way my baby brain could process everything that I was processing, it simply shouldn't have been possible. Mature thinking just didn't occur until the uncooked cookie dough was baked.

Second, out of the millions who had died before, I'd most probably been the only one reincarnated with my memories. This was, although possible, also highly illogical. If I was the first, there must have been a reason why I was the first, but I was utterly normal before I'd died. Even my death was normal. Arrogant jaywalker thought she could cross a street right when the traffic light turned green, a car in a rush needed to get somewhere, and bam! Instant strawberry jam, asphalt-style. I was completely normal, one in a billion.

And third, well, I didn't believe in souls, and the only reason my memories would be in a newborn would be if souls existed. The idea that there was a ball of energy, the essence of our personalities and self, was ludicrous to me. I was a science girl. Every decision we make, everything we think is all due to neurochemical reactions within our brain, hormones and neurotransmitters firing rapid-fire from cell to cell, controlling everything we did. So unless souls really existed, then there was no way my memories could have instantly transplanted themselves into another body. One could not just remove a brain and transplant it into another body. There was most probably no DNA from my old body in this new one. And from the sounds of the language being spoken around me, I wasn't even home in America. No, if I focused hard, the language sounded European. So unless reincarnation was actually a thing, and the Hinduists and Islamists actually had the right idea going, I was not reborn with my memories.

Then what the hell was I?

XxX

Death isn't an easy concept to accept. If close-death experiences could give soldiers PTSD, what would actual death do? Probably worse.

I could confirm, though, that death was horrible. I'd died, for heaven's sake. I had watched as my blood flowed from my skin pierced by white bone, pain racing up my torso, make it stop!

I didn't remember my moments of hysterical fits often. No doubt, my caretakers thought I was an unusually feisty baby, crying about nothing after I'd been fed and had my diaper changed. They didn't know the havoc that swirled in my brain, because I'd died, and what was the point of my life? I'd survived high school and college until my junior year, and it was all for naught, because I'd died.

I didn't know how long it took for me to get my thoughts in order. I didn't know how I got my thoughts in order. I just knew that, somehow, I'd shoved everything away, into a neat little box that I proceeded to chain and lock, so that I couldn't think about it again. I refused to open this box full of madness and despair, because I couldn't function if it wasn't all locked away.

XxX

The first person who really made an impression on me was a young boy with tanned skin and curious green eyes. I didn't know how long I'd been in my baby body, but a typical baby could recognize faces within their first four months, so it must have been around then.

(Then again, I wasn't really a typical baby, was I?)

The boy asked something, and a woman, perhaps his mother, answered. This brought a smile onto the boy's lips, and he held out a finger tauntingly towards my face. I scrunched my nose and swatted it away. I may have been a baby in body, but my mind was that of a twenty year old adult. I admit that twenty years wasn't enough for me to totally mature and become a responsible, productive member of society, but I was no child easily entertained.

The boy laughed and grabbed my hand gently, rubbing his coarser skin over my soft palm. He muttered again, and the woman hummed and answered gently.

Finally, the boy pointed at himself and he said, clearly and slowly, "Giorgio. Giorgio Fava."

I narrowed my eyes. This was obviously his name, and obligingly, I repeated, "Nonio Awa."

Okay. First thing was to recover fine motor skills as well as speech skills.

The boy laughed delightedly and he pointed to me. "Matteo Fava."

Ah. This boy was my brother then. What a curious name though, for a girl.

"Mato Awa."

The boy exclaimed, and with my limited French knowledge, I translated it to mean, "Good!" Romantic languages tended to share many trends and similar words. Wherever I was, it definitely wasn't France, and I didn't recognize the seductive trills of Spain either. Somewhere more Central Europe then. The only other conclusion I could draw was Italian. I most certainly was not an expert on languages, but I had the vague impression that I was in Italy.

I'd never taken Italian, and the limited knowledge extended to musical terms and pastas. If I wanted to interact with this world, I would have to learn Italian.

But why did I want to interact with this world? If this was all my imagination, then if I killed myself, would I wake up in my real body?

It was a morbid question and not one I wanted to consider at the moment. Never say I wasn't good at running away from my problems.

The woman spoke again, and the boy frowned but waved at me and chirped what I assumed a goodbye.

XxX

Learning a new language was another puzzle that kept me occupied for a while. Learning simple words was easy. It was making my mouth form the words, contorting my tongue and lips into the shape I wanted, that was hard.

A baby typically learned their language as they grew. They had a mental barrier that fell as the baby matured, and their fine motor skills would improve with practice as they babbled and screamed.

I had the added advantage that my mental barriers seemed to not exist at all, although I had the brain of a baby. This was something I simply could not understand or wrap my mind around. Babies just simply should not have been able to do what I was doing, understanding the world with such clarity. I was an abnormality.

To be honest, I scared myself sometimes, but my freakishness was usually all shoved into the box, kept under lock and key with the rest of my morbid thoughts (what were they again? I didn't remember, but I knew that if I opened it and examined everything again, I wouldn't survive).

Language somehow came easy to me. As people grew older, their ability to learn new languages decreased. This is what made a baby's ability to learn a new language remarkable. They grasped the concept of language within their first year of life and could string whole sentences together before they were two. It was a miracle that, with their limited capacity to understand the world around them, to intelligently discern what words meant what, they could learn a language.

I wondered if this was my baby brain working for me. In addition to my previous knowledge of French and my matured mind, my undeveloped brain was absorbing the language like a sponge. The fact that I was literally immersed in an Italian environment helped.

Italian came more easily than French had when I was learning the latter in school, and soon, I thought in a mix of Italian and English. It's funny, what growing up in a new environment, totally surrounded by a different culture, can do to a person.

Speaking was not as easy, but when I wasn't sleeping or eating, I'd quietly coo to myself, babble and exercise my muscles. I couldn't work too strenuously, since my body was still growing and developing and straining it would do no good, but I did what I could.

This took my mind off of that box in the back of my mind. I wasn't going to poke at it with a stick unless I was incredibly depressed or desperate, and as of yet, I wasn't. I needed distractions, something to keep that panic that always crept at the edge of my sanity away.

XxX

Some people wish for second chances, a second life. People need escapes, a place to run away from duty a little while. There were those who escaped from reality by running into a bottle, and there were those who play video games, for example. My escape, when being a music and psychology major as well as a pre-med became too much, was my imagination.

I always wanted a second chance, usually after failing a test. I can do better, I used to think, if I'd gone back in time. Maybe if I'd paid attention in class, maybe if I'd gone to class, I could have done better.

I had this chance right in my fingers right now. This, whatever this was, was my second chance. But instead of elated like I thought I would have been, I was frightened and unnerved. This wasn't supposed to happen! Nothing like this was supposed to happen.

Before, my world had been logical, it followed the rules of physics, biology, and chemistry. Anything that could deal with souls, so unscientific, such an irrational concept, was baffling. Things that would happen in fantasy or sci-fi novels just didn't happen in reality. But here I was, in this new world (most likely a construct of my mind).

I just…I couldn't get over this concept. Was this all in my mind? If I killed myself, would I wake up? Because as much as I enjoyed the second chance, of taking it easy instead of all-nighters spent at the library, I knew it wasn't reality. What was I in this world? Who was I?

Months passed, slowly, as I pondered my existence. I'd never quite had an existential crisis before. This was a first for me.

If I died in this world like I did in my last world, would I wake up from a coma? If I killed myself, right now, brained myself on the edge of my crib, climbed the bars and fell to death on the cold floor, would I be returned to my normal, college life, with my parents beside me and friends to welcome me back? It would be so easy, to kill myself. A baby was fragile. One clumsy move, one knife in the wrong place or blunt object in another, and there would be one very dead sack of meat on the ground. Would I be reborn with my memories? Or would there just be an expanse of black, with no consciousness, extending beyond my vision? A wide gaping maw, vision gone as it swallowed my very existence, sweeping the last vestiges of life from my body, cold terrifying empty abyss…!

I tossed this into my box too.

XxX

While I was trapped in my own mind, practicing my speaking and moving my clumsy body parts with more accuracy and control, Giorgio visited me more often.

He was five years older than me, I found out. The lady that came with him sometimes was not, in fact, our mother but rather a maid. She occasionally took care of me. I could tell he'd grow into a handsome man. He loved me and as he spent more time with me, I felt more of a connection to him as well.

He was dangerous.

This dream, this coma-induced illusion that I was most probably in, I couldn't let it affect me. When I woke up, I'd lose everything here, everything in my dream, and I didn't want that. If there was one thing I was scared of, it was a loss of companionship and abandonment.

I'd always been a touchy-feely person. I bonded to others through skinship, by hugs and, as my friends sometimes affectionately called it, a leech-like clinging. I exasperated them when I latched onto their torsos and refused to let go. My personality was affectionate, and I demanded constant attention.

I was, essentially, a very selfish person. I kept my friends close and was scared of losing them. Loneliness was the bane of my existence.

So in this world, where I had no friends and nobody to love, Giorgio was a perfect candidate. But if I ever grew attached to him, I wouldn't want to let him go. And when I eventually woke up, I'd have to.

There was no way I was going to let any kind of attachment even form. So when he visited, I remained silent, gauging his personality, remaining to myself.

If he'd left it at that, I'd been fine. But he didn't. He was persistent, bringing toys and picture books (which I'd shown a preference for), reading them for me slowly and carefully. He was more of a caretaker than any of the maids in the house was.

I couldn't grow attached, but it was so, so hard not to. I was a person who kept several close friends and shied away from strangers. And in this world with nothing for me, he was there, ready to offer his companionship.

It was hard not to fall in love with him.

As I grew older and older, with my first, second, and third birthdays passing, I loved him. He was my older brother, the older brother I'd never had before. And here, I was stuck with a dilemma. To wake up and lose the closest person I'd ever grown to, the one person who cared for me more than any of my friends in my reality never had, or to go back to reality, which I should have tried my hardest to do, because this wasn't my world, and I couldn't abandon my responsibilities in the real world forever.

He was my escape, and he represented so, so much. A distraction from that dark corner, a shining, gentle light that made the darkness creep away.

XxX

The day I found out about my switch in gender was a day that was, from an outsider's perspective, quite humorous. Even I found it amusing after I'd gotten over the shock.

See, I'd just thought that my parents had had a very humorous taste in naming me. After all, I'd had a female friend named Austin and a male friend named Taylor. Names that I used to think were gender exclusive weren't, so perhaps my parents had expected a boy and, when they received a girl, they were too lazy to think of a new name.

I'd been learning words while my brother was teaching me slowly, and he'd pointed to a picture of two children who were clearly related.

"Fratello," he jabbed at one brother and drew an imaginary line between the two characters. He then used the same hand to gesture towards me. "Fratello."

I'd nodded. I pointed to him and enunciated slowly, "Fratello."

He grinned and pointed to me. "You are my fratello. My little brother."

And I'd froze.

You see, I didn't have the bodily functions to control my bladder yet. My mental age was way higher than my physical age, and, to my supreme mortification, my control was still lacking. Thus, diapers. I didn't change my own diapers, so I'd never quite had a good look at downstairs before. I never needed to.

Before now.

"What," I deadpanned, staring into his bewildered eyes.

"You're my little brother," he said slowly. "Didn't you know?"

I nodded before I promptly freaked out.

I was a boy. I was a boy.

What the hell.

Well, I mean, this was a rather pleasant surprise. I'd always been envious of the fact that males didn't have, er, menstrual cycles or have to bear babies. It wasn't something I was looking forwards to in my future. But, after twenty years of living in a female body, it was rather hard to grasp the concept that I was now a guy. Someone with a…a…

I couldn't even think the word in relation to me before I hit a mental block.

I had a (dare I say it) dick. I had a dick. A penis. A member. A thing sticking onto my crotch where there used to only be…well, nothing.

…huh.

Well, as surprising as this development was, I was the flexible sort. I could adapt. It could even be fun!

Let it be known that I had a somewhat perverted sense of humor. No, I was not ashamed.

XxX

And thus, my first years of my life passed like this.

Any dark, disturbing thoughts (of…what? I didn't remember anymore) were shoved into a box in the corner of my mind.

I applied everything I learned before I'd died to the life I was living now. It turned out that there was still plenty to learn, tons of new culture to absorb, and it was a wonderful experience, living in Italy.

My brother entertained me, and I fell into such a deep, all-encompassing love with him. He was my anchor, the one I'd grown closest to in this new world.

And memories of the past fading away, blown away by the wind, gently. Faces faded from my mind, and I began to forget what I used to look like. Asian, short, with glasses were all I remembered. I let my past go and looked forwards to the future.

Perhaps I could live like this. Perhaps I would grow to love this world.

XxX

A/N: So unlike Of Paper, Hair, and Gods and Tsuna's Fantastical Pokemon Adventure, I actually have a plotline planned for this fic! *gasps* But whether I have the patience to write it out is another thing entirely. However, I will endeavor to continue.

Sincerely yours,

haplessgrapefrut