Chapter Text
Loud, cold, wet. Bright.
Too much.
Hot breaths were panted into the fabric covering his knees. Bare toes curled into wet not-quite-softness. The fabric at his back was unfamiliarly coarse. He couldn’t remember how he’d gotten here.
Something damp and plush thudded against his calf.
Fur; not fabric.
He jolted, skittering back, and had to bite off a cry at the unexpected pain the motion brought.
The heavy-dense-softness had stayed pressed against his legs; distracting him from the harsh, tugged ache at his lower back that he wasn’t able to process. Looking past the dull grey fabric covering his knees - he didn’t have any clothes that colour, just what? - he could see a fox’s brush awkwardly twisted under his pale leg, the damp and twisted fur the same silver shade as his hair. It twitched and Gin felt the motion in his spine. Nausea gripped him.
Hunched on his hands and knees, dry-retching in tandem with every flicker of motion from the tail hanging behind his legs and lashing agitatedly at the ground, unable to open his eyes against the brightness, the flutter of somethings shifting his hair, sounds suddenly muffled a fraction, and shivering from the cold and soaked-through unfamiliar yukata, with no memory of how he’d gotten here; it felt like hours had passed before Gin found a semblance of his composure. It was still too bright and cold, the sounds of wind and birds and people in the far-off distance were still far too loud. He aches all over, but his chest felt like someone had taken a sword and carved it open --
-- Oh.
Gin was glad he hadn’t tried to stand yet.
His chest burned in agony with the hot flash of memory. There’d been a sword cutting through him, blood gushing out as he’d dropped like a stone. His hand couldn’t find the wound though. It was hard to know if that was better or worse.
A wound like that should have killed him. Had to have.
He was dead.
He was dead, and somehow waking up with a tail in a grassy ditch was the afterlife.
Gin tries to stand, but his balance is off and he crumples before he gets even halfway, landing on the damned tail and suffering a brutal spike of pain, laughing even as the world span in a too-bright haze. He immediately regrets it as his everything rebels and he’s forced to dry-heave again. So afterwards he just sits, eyes shut and breaths deep; fingers twisting and pulling up strands of grass, wondering when was the last time he’d had the chance to just sit in the grass and studiously ignoring the waves of dysphoria every twitch of the tail or the unsettling somethings on his head inspired. The destructive motions helped a little.
I died. The thought still drags a streak of phantom pain across his torso. He takes another few breaths.
Does i’ really matter? Easier, somehow. He hadn’t particularly liked what he’d been doing with his life before. Hated it, in fact. His chest might hurt, but there’s no longer a yoke made of desperation slung about his shoulders with the weight of a future he never wanted. Realising that causes a welcome paradigm shift. It doesn’t even matter that he’s not sure if he lived past his eleventh birthday or not.
The silver tail swishes, and Gin is reminded of beautiful sculptures of foxes decorating shrines in Kyoto. Inari Ōkami. People had quipped that he looked like one of their pale foxes before with his narrow face and silken silver hair, but this all seems a little too comical.
There’s no pain accompanying his laughter this time.