Chapter Text
Dying felt like being ripped apart.
It felt like falling, standing still.
Euphoria and a deep well of sadness.
It felt like memories - memories of morning grass, bright sun, love-cooked meals and Christmas candles. Everything he would miss, every moment he'll never get, every person he hasn't seen, every pair of eyes he'd drown in if he chanced to say goodbye.
Death haunts his every moment. His footsteps fall with knowledge that the ground is flimsy wrapping-paper, colorful but insubstantial. Holding something precious and easily lost. Purple lights trace their way behind his eyes, and he readjusts to moving. His muscles are new, his senses are new, the weight of artificial gravity leaves him aching.
When Shiro speaks, his words scratch. His voice itself is fine, but he knows - this isn't his body. When the mind goes long enough without words or sounds or touch, it boils. He jumps at sudden sounds - living is a disturbance compared to the empty calamity of the longsleep.
In his dreams, he is dead again. His mind remembers death, freezes his body, he can't move his fingers, and he's trapped in the purple-black abyss - formless, floating.
Intimately knowing death is a burden.
Slowly, he forgets it, his memories shed like cobwebs. Small parts of him don't forget, though. Purple lights send him reeling. Standing in the Black Lion is like crouching in his own bones, his rib-cage stories high, his femur the length of a valley, his spine the ridges of a mountain. There he resides, kicking up dust from when he settled beneath the Earth, or among the stars, or wherever his once-body resides. He imagines himself rotting in an alien field, his eyes crawling with maggots. He sees the ivy that writhes around his fingers and the animals that make their home below his scapulae. A raven, or a vulture, or whatever dark-feathered, croaking creature his final resting place has, builds a nest beside his open jaw. Butterflies drink his blood, spiders catch their prey.
It's alarming, it's comforting, it's disturbing.
But he'd rather decompose on land, below a birch tree, melding with the forest floor, or amidst sand and hot wind, perhaps floating face-down in the water, rather rot on a planet than in space where he would freeze and float still, alone.
It's lonely, thinking of his body. He misses it, mourns it's loss, despite it's flaws. His new body may be healed, nearly whole, but it's not his. He doesn't know every inch of himself anymore, his eyelashes are wrong, his fingernails grow faster than they used to, his eyes are dry, he blinks more often, and he's not missing the canine tooth he lost in a bike accident when he was thirteen. He speaks differently now, around the place where the gap used to be.
Death is hard to shake.