Chapter Text
For the first time in a long time, I open my eyes.
A woman’s face stares down at me, her lips turned up in a smile as she makes baby talk.
Why is she talking to me like that? And why is she speaking Chinese?
I open my mouth to ask, but my mouth feels uncoordinated and wrong, and all that comes out is a tiny squeak. I try to raise a hand, but find that I can't raise my limb far enough to even see it.
The next thing I notice is that this woman is holding me in her arms. Her very large arms.
Almost against my will, the gears start to turn in my head.
I’m tiny, I can’t talk or lift my limbs, and a woman is holding me, speaking what is very clearly parentese in my direction.
Oh, god. I'm a baby, aren't I?!
For the first time in years, the warm blanket of dissociation wraps around me, and I let it.
I’m distantly aware of conversations happening around me, but I'm underwater, behind a bubble, watching from a safe distance.
Then I wake up again, mind clear from the fuzz-- she must’ve put me to bed.
I curse myself-- wasn't I done with that coping mechanism? Wasn't I better now?
Then again, I am in a new body. A new life.
On that note, I have to come to terms with reincarnation being a thing.
I’d considered it before, but that was because of how much I'd loved self insert fanfiction as a teen, not any actual belief in the concept!
I must make a noise, because the woman (my mother? No, she isn’t my mother, she isn't) is above me again, pulling me into her arms. Something brushes against my cheek, and my head turns despite myself, and I start to suck on something. Rich, warm fluid rushes into my mouth, and I almost spit it out when I realize.
Oh.
That's milk, and I have a tit in my mouth.
I dissociate again.
When I next come to, I’m alone in my bed.
…Is this going to be my new reality? Unable to move, speak, or, I come to realize with a sinking feeling at the wetness between my legs, control my own bodily functions?
I start to wail uncontrollably, this being the straw that breaks the camel’s back, and the woman, my new mother (no) comes running immediately, making shushing noises and soothing baby talk.
Embarrassment takes over immediately, and I go silent, trying to distract myself by looking at the woman who birthed me. She has a delicate face and brown, almond-shaped eyes.
At least I get to keep my eye color.
I’m sufficiently distracted as she cleans me, until I feel her wipe something that definitely should not be there.
I can’t lift my head to look down, but now that i've noticed it, I can’t unnotice it, the weight between my legs.
I don’t realize that I've stopped breathing until she makes a concerned noise, almost frantic, and I quickly start breathing again, my little baby head light with lack of oxygen.
I don’t cry or wail.
Instead, I lose myself again, like taking a step back and to the left out of my body, the sensations far away, held away from myself at a safe distance.
This becomes the new normal, my new reality, for I-don’t-even-know how long. Periods of lucidity interspersed by periods of dissociative fugue at varying levels of intensity until the woman puts me down for a nap, and I wake up fresh as a daisy.
I learn my name is Ping, surname Lu, judging by what the other women living here call the woman taking care of me.
And that brings me to another thing-- where I'm living.
I’m living in a whorehouse.
My mother is with me all day but leaves frequently at night to work, and the sounds the sex workers make as they work are frankly disturbing, so I dissociate every night to escape the noise. I can do it at will now, just like I could as a teen in my last life, and while I’m frustrated at the backslide in my recovery and I know it's not healthy, I need to do it to survive.
Something like this is how I’d learned to dissociate in my last life, after all.
By the time I’ve started to learn words in my new language, I’ve realized that something is off about the brothel I’m staying in. I don’t know much about Chinese sex workers, or China in general aside from what I’d learned through osmosis reading Dianxia novels, but I was pretty sure they didn’t still wear what I was pretty sure were hanfu, burn incense, or lug in water to bathe.
I passed it off as some weird cult, or a group similar to the Amish in the United States, not using electricity or central heating. Or some sort of place that catered to people with a specific fetish for ancient China.
Those places existed, right?
(I really couldn't stand to consider the alternative).
The whole place looks old-timey, like the setting of one of the Dianxia novels I mentioned reading. Hell, the shoes even look right.
These people really went all out!
This theory is dashed almost immediately upon being brought outside.
Gazing around, I note the lack of artificial structure that isn't made of roughly hewn wood, the lack of wifi towers in the distance, the lack of exhaust fumes or planes in the sky.
I’ve barely even begun to come to terms with when I've ended up when I'm forced to come to terms with where I've ended up.
As in, not the location, but the universe.
This is heralded, entirely by chance, by the front row seat I receive of people flying in the sky, streaking over my head like a formation of fighter jets at a football game.
On swords.
I don’t dissociate; this time, I wail.
Because those people I saw? Were wearing purple.
Dread curdles in my gut, and nothing that Lu-gunaing does will console me as I wail my head off.
Because I’m in a danmei novel, and nothing will make me feel better about that.