Chapter 3: Rumination and Revelation
Athena is four weeks old when awareness slips through her grief-filled haze. It's similar to waking up from a coma. Groggy and disoriented, sluggish, and hypersensitive to anyone and everything.
It is during all this, however, that she realizes how wrong the situation is.
She's something. Something new, something different—reborn, if you will.
Athena's a child—a newborn infant barely a month old.
This fact, as bleak and damning as it may be, is what awakens something in her. Her vision tunnels, and then she sees.
She sees the way stray moonbeams flash through a window and how those beams cast stray shadows throughout the room, in the very same way light reflects off a mirror.
As she sees these things, she remembers not her past but this body's experiences over the past few months. They come in flashes—faces, sounds, and feelings. So fast, she's sure if it were an out-of-body experience and not something of her mind, she'd have gone blind from the repeated imagery.
But as these images flash, her thoughts wonder; an image of a face from the past comes as blinding as the sun. And with it, a blaring pain sets itself in her chest.
Sharp. The pain is so damn sharp, like a blade embedded deep in her skin.
Her lips part, her breath turning erratic as her mind went blank, the image of them, her friends, flashing again and again in an endless loop.
She tries to calm herself; truly, she does, but her body, this body, couldn't handle the toll of her emotions, and before she could placate the racing of her heart, her eyes slid shut.
*****
She feels like she's dying—not physically but mentally.
Lights dance and music plays in a traditional-themed living room as two adults chatter away.
She doesn't dare think of what happened a mere few hours ago; she doesn't delve into it; she doesn't think she can without breaking down in front of these people; she now dares to call mother and father.
She knows they're her parents, that they're bonded by blood, and that they care.
As she is their child, they are her parents. But she hasn't had anyone like that, a parent in so long that she doesn't know how to act for them or how to be what they could possibly want in a child.
She's a full-grown adult in a child's body, an adult who, by the age of thirteen, was already fending for herself in the house of her so-called parents. An adult who, by the age of thirteen, was wielding the most terrifying items the world could offer and not daring to look back.
It makes being a child seem like a more difficult challenge than it should be.
Her mother looks down at her, cooing and laughing as she converses with her husband.
Japanese, a language she knows the mere basics of, is what they speak on a day-to-day basis in their household.
She finds it somewhat ironic that her brother, her friend Nathaniel, was fluent in the language, and if he were here, would make it look as easy as if he were born to speak it.
She takes her time, however, watching, waiting, repeating, and connecting the English with the Japanese and vice versa. Until eventually she can understand the simplest of their conversations, like the one they're having now,
"Darling, we have to go back to work eventually; if not now, then when?" Her mother asks, staring at her husband.
He sighs, wrapping a hand around her waist. "Give it a few more months, love; a year or two at least. I'd like to spend some more time with our child to watch her grow."
The woman smiles a small, sad smile. "As do I, my love, but the council isn't letting up, and the 火影 has been breathing down our necks long before we had our child."
As they continue talking, the conversation escalates beyond her basic understanding.
Athena focuses on that word, 火影 It sounds familiar and important somehow, but she's not sure why.
Her thoughts—stay glued to it for the rest of the day. All she can think about is how that word and its importance seem to fix itself at the forefront of her mind.
It sticks there as she does the things she believes a child this age would do.
It sticks when she's sure she's diverted her attention from the riveting thought.
It sticks like an insistent child does to a shiny new toy, and when she finally registers why, her form shakes.
Her body seems to revel in her reaction. Her surprise overlapped with an underlying outrage.
She lies on her back alone in her crib, staring into the empty nothingness of her nursery as her mind crumbles.
She can hear it now—Nathaniel's shock, Malia's panic—how they would've felt if they had come to the same conclusion she had mere moments ago.
Her mind blanked, as if the mere realization had numbed her senses to nothingness.
The moment of dissonance ends as fast as it comes, her mind rushing back to the reason for her shaking limbs. Looking at her hands as if staring at a piece of paper, the words both in Kanji and English come to her.
火...火影...Hokage
Hokage
That phrase in her world had only ever been used to reference one thing, and as she takes in her room, the attire, and the toys, she believes she should have come to the revelation long before her straying thoughts revealed it to her.
Even her world, as shifty and terrifyingly similar as it was to this one, never instilled a sense of terror as sharp as this one did.
Athena was in a world where death was treated as both the greatest ally and the deadliest foe, and as much as her world and this one shared similarities, she knew that the people of her world would tremble at the mere embodiment of this one.
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