(warnings: average cliche SI openings)

Death is messy.

Death is upsetting.

Death is, apparently, not as permanent of a state of being as she's been led to believe.

She isn't sure what she'd been expecting, if she's honest. Heaven? Hell? Some kind of afterlife, at least. Oblivion had occurred to her once or twice, she supposes, but it had never struck her as an appealing possibility. Concluding her existence by floating all alone in the void for an eternity is a little too nihilistic for her tastes. She'll pass, thanks.

Or, y'know. She would have. The funny thing about death is that it doesn't ask for your opinions on it before it whisks you away.

That being said, an eternity of nothingness probably would have been preferable to the disgusting and claustrophobic sensation of being pushed out of a complete stranger's very slimy uterus, but hey, what the hell, it beat eternal damnation.

(She really, really hoped this was not actually eternal damnation.)

When she'd said she'd rather have life after death, this was emphatically not what she'd meant.

Her first few weeks of life are hazy and difficult to decipher in both the figurative and literal senses. Infant eyesight is useless garbage and all she is able to focus on in between her spontaneous naps is whatever is being held four inches from her face. Sometimes it is a brightly shaped plastic toy; other times, a slender hand.

She likes the hand, she thinks. It comes with a nice voice that coos at her with words she does not understand. It pats her kindly.

From time to time, she is nose to nose with what she initially assumes to be some kind of extraterrestrial screaming mutant. For several long weeks, she harbors some serious concerns about what kind of world she has been reborn into because last she checked raisins had neither faces nor the inclination to yell at top volume for hours on end.

Finally, her eyesight begins to strengthen and she realizes it's not quite an alien, despite its weird shape and tendency to get damp in odd places. It's just another baby. In her defense, an infant with a head equal in size to her own isn't something she has a lot of experience dealing with. It's face is wrinkled and blotchy and it is so, so loud.

She wonders if they are siblings.

She does not want to be siblings with it, she thinks. It smells gross and its face is strange. She hopes she is cuter.

She can remember dying, from time to time. It wasn't nearly as cool a death as she'd been hoping for. She had lived to… what, seventeen? Eighteen?

She had hoped that she would last longer than that.

Her final memories are of a staircase rushing up to meet her face, she thinks. She doesn't remember the view all too well, what with all the tumbling. What she does remember is the panic that sat sharp and desperate low in her gut, a breathless scream, and a half-formed intention to strangle something.

Cause of death: cat. Miko was fat, orange, and feared neither gods nor men. In her attempts to not crush his attention-seeking paws under her feet, she'd tumbled face first down a flight of stairs and presumably broken her neck.

That was so uncool. That was actively the farthest from cool she possibly could've gotten. Her final moments had been spent flailing her arms around frantically trying to tapdance around a pudgy kitty who wanted bellyrubs.

She is kind of glad she does not have to explain that to her dead ancestors in heaven.

She does not know how long it has been since she was born again, but she is beginning to understand that it's better not to think about things like heaven or hell anymore. She's pretty sure she is some kind of glitch in the system because as far as she can recall, she was not born with memories of her past life the first time around. More importantly, dwelling on it for too long has the unfortunate side effect of giving her the headache from the fifth ring of hell.

The headaches make thinking hard. Her normal newborn circadian rhythm is absolutely no help whatsoever; she fluctuates between awake and asleep too abruptly and it spooks the shit out of her.

She's never been good with handling fear in the first place and now, when she is barely over a foot and a half in length and the whole world is bigger and stronger than her, she has more reason to be terrified than ever. The part of her that is totally content to lie quiet and be touched by all the giant people around her is waging a constant war with the pieces of her that want to scream and thrash and run, run, run. On the bad days, she has trouble parsing which is which.

Her adult brain is so beyond scared sometimes that it's hard to do anything but lie perfectly still and hope that no one sees her.

Her infant brain thinks that's bullshit. Her infant brain knows that she is safe here with the big woman and her ugly little raisin of a sibling. It wants to survive, and to survive it must kick and scream until someone notices that it is there. It refuses to be ignored.

It is easier to let her infant brain do the thinking for her, sometimes. The big woman seems happier when she does. She figures it might be a little weird to have one child that shrieks at uncomfortable volumes at most hours of the day and one that barely makes a peep until it's time for a diaper change, but the big woman manages.

She makes a concentrated effort not to slip through the cracks in her own head, but everything is just... it is so much. There is something incredibly soothing about the isolation and empty silence inside her head when her body is overloading, and she finds herself indulging in it more than she should.

In between her accidental naps and her purposeful blackouts, she begins to notice patterns in speech.

(She's pretty sure it's Japanese and its kind of galling to realize that the thing from her past life that's proving most useful so far is all the fucking anime she watched.)

Two words pop up with increasing frequency, and after a while she is able to decipher their meaning.

Her name is Tsunami. The raisin's name is Tsunayoshi. It becomes strange to hear one name without the other.

Having a sibling is... new. She hasn't decided if she likes it yet.

There is something wrong with her eyes.

Aesthetically, she means. She is still small enough that her vision isn't perfect, but she wore glasses once upon a time and she knows what astigmatism looks like. This is not that.

She and Tsunayoshi are big enough to be taken out of the house with their… with the woman who birthed them, now. They are packed in a double seated stroller with a sunroof and Tsunami is sure they make an adorable sight. People on the street stop to waggle their fingers at them and make funny faces, fishing for a laugh or a smile.

It makes her deeply uncomfortable. She feels watched all the time and the only thing she can bring herself to do is stare at them solemnly and hope her lack of reaction persuades them to stop sticking their tongues out like fucking idiots.

She starts to notice that they all stop and stare right back.

She locks gazes with wide-eyed strangers for long stretches of time and as much as she wants to be bratty and confrontational, she's always the first to look away. All the bravado she manages to summon up dissolves like cotton candy in her chest when people who know nothing about her look at her as though she is something abnormal and unsettling.

Like... yeah, she is, she's an undead freak of nature, but they don't know that. They can't know that.

Tsunayoshi is a godsend in these moments. He seems to be about as uncomfortable with the attention as Tsunami is, but unlike her, he has no understanding of the word 'self-control' and wears his emotions on his sleeves

(Her sleeves, to be specific. It's super fucking nasty and she wishes he would find a better victim.)

He cries every time. As the nearest warm body and functional meatshield, it becomes her solemn duty to be grabbed and tugged around by Tsunayoshi as he tries to yank her from her seatbelt and hug her like she is a stuffed toy. The result is all kinds of gross child fluid smeared all over her shirt and while it is absolutely one of the most disgusting sensations she has encountered (sans birth and the ongoing potty-training struggle), the noisy tears succeed in scaring off the gawkers nine times out of ten.

Tsunami does not figure out what the problem is until she catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror during bath time. She and Tsunayoshi are bathed together in the bathroom sink, which is super weird to experience but also efficient, she supposes. There is a full size tub right there, but the two of them are maybe a little too small still for that to be safe so she bears it in silence. She likes the sink better for now, anyways. It allows her to get close enough to the bathroom mirror to get a full, clear look at her new body.

It is the first time she has seen herself.

She is pleased to note that she is, like, completely fucking adorable.

Her cheeks are full and soft with baby fat and colored with a high flush from the steam. Her hair hasn't really grown in yet, but what little she has is honey brown and soft to the touch. Her mouth is cute and pink and even though this body is so, so radically different from what she is used to…

She likes it. She likes it a whole lot.

Then she sees her eyes and wonders how on earth they were not the first thing she noticed.

'What... the fuck is this,' she thinks initially, bewildered. Tsunayoshi's eyes are the same sweet shade of brown as his hair, similar to his mother's. Brown eyes were dominant, weren't they? If one of her genetic donors had brown eyes, then odds were that she would have them too.

The blazing neon orange eyes in the mirror take everything she ever learned in middle school about genetics and slam dunks it into the garbage disposal. Tsunami shifts a little closer to the mirror and— holy mother of shit, no, literally what the fuck, this wasn't normal.

Tsunami used to be a cat owner. She is intimately familiar with all the weird, creepy bullshit that cat eyes do when exposed to flash or when seen at the right angle in near-darkness.

There is no conceivable reason why her pupils should be lighting up bright fucking yellow like a cat's in the night.

She shifts back and forth slightly, watching with horrified fascination as her pupils switch from black to floodlight and back again depending on the angle she tilts her head. No fucking wonder people were staring, this was weird as hell.

They remind her of something she'd seen in an anime once. The main character could switch into knockoff super saiyan mode and fly around shitting fire out of his mittens or something bizarre like that? His eyes would change colors and he would get super serious and competent. It had been one of the weirder shows she'd seen. Her point is, when he powered up his super special giant flamethrower thing, parts of his eye would light up like someone lit a literal fire behind them. She always thought it was the coolest shit.

Now that it's on her face, she is significantly less enthralled. Tsunami hates being stared at. She hates the attention, she hates the pressure, she hates being seen. With eyes like this, there isn't a chance in hell she is ever going to be unnoticeable ever again. The realization fills her with a familiar feeling of dread.

She has never stood out before.

She is not sure that she wants to.

/muffled screaming

I am alive! This is probably going to be the shortest chapter I post.

Renascence isn't quite so much a rewrite of Story of an Undead Otaku as it is me picking up my protagonist and transplanting her into different story with the same setting. Some beginning scenes may seem familiar to a few of you, but for the most part this is brand new stuff.

I also want to go right ahead and say that I'm playing this shit fast and loose. I am writing this because writing this makes me happy. If at any point in the future you have complaints about the direction I am taking this story, you are all highly encouraged to just stop reading it because I'm doing what I want and literally nothing else.

Thanks to HeirofChairs for putting up with like nine months of whining about this stupid thing and also for proofreading it for me at 5 in the morning. You're like, the best.

Review at your own leisure and thank you for reading!

(5/11/18 edit)