Chapter Text
Jessie wakes up after dying in a car accident.
What the fuck is her first thought. Followed by ow , because dying via road accident hurt a lot more than she assumed it would. Honestly, she thought that she’d at least stop feeling pain after the initial impact, but apparently feelings carried over death.
Her next thought is that she really wants to cry. Not that Jessie was a particularly big crybaby, but dying was probably reason enough to cry.
Without her permission, her mouth opens and lets out a loud wail.
God. That was a lot louder than she expected. She thought she had better control than that, but the simultaneous sensation of burning lights and heavy pressure pushing against her skin seemed to have activated some sort of automated crying response within her.
The next thing she knows, Jessie is being picked up and held gently against a warm body.
Hush , the warm body says. Or some variant of it.
What the fuck Jessie thinks again what the fucking fuck is happening. Is this Death?
The body she’s being cradled against is really very warm. And the soothing rocking of her own body is lulling her into a drowse. Slowly, her cries taper off.
This is probably whatever the afterlife is Jessie thinks Hell, who cares. Today was already so goddamn weird.
She allows herself to be rocked into a doze, to fall asleep. It feels remarkably like falling into the cold grasp of death.
______
When Jessie wakes up again, she wants to hit herself for being so stupid. This was some sort of dumb reincarnation thing, wasn’t it? She’d been reborn, and there was even that stupid trope of dying from being hit by a car. Was she even supposed to remember being Jessie? Babies didn’t usually remember their past lives, did they?
She starts to cry again. Stupid baby body.
Like before, Jessie is gently picked up and held against a warm body. Her… mother? Father? Whoever took care of her was holding her close to their body.
She tries to calm herself down - to ease her heaving chest where tiny lungs were hard at work. God that was weird to think about. But her limbs, her face - it all felt disconnected from the rest of her mind.
Again, the gentle rocking begins to soften her cries, settling her into a doze. Why did babies fall asleep so easily? And again, Jessie is lulled into the peaceful state of sleep.
______
Over the next… however long it happened for, Jessie does the same thing over and over. She wakes up, she cries, other human bodily functions happen (slightly embarassing to have someone help do), and falls asleep again.
During this time, Jessie also learns a few things, with the astoundingly brilliant deductions she makes in the 6 hours a day she’s awake..
First of all, she has a mother. Not a very impressive deduction, but she’d been the one rocking her to sleep. The name directed at herself was Cassie - or Cassidy. Which she supposed was a nice enough name. Thankfully she hadn’t ended up with Kylee or Aleysha or something, because the last Kylee she knew was a prick, and Aleysha was just stupid.
Her mother spoke English - thank god it was a language she knew - and was kept incredibly busy on account of the baby and apparently working a time intensive job. She must have been, well, living for longer than she remembered, because maternity leave was a thing, right? Regardless, her mother was her main caretaker now.
Her father, on the other hand, was not in the picture at all. In fact, if you had to describe how out of the picture he was, it was like he was cropped out of a selfie for being a total deadbeat ass. Of course, he might be dead, and Jessie (Cassidy? Cassie) might just be insulting a dead guy for something he had no control over.
If he was alive, she hoped that he was at least paying child support.
The second discovery that she made during this miraculous period of 6 hour waking periods, limited body control and strange baby food combinations - since being a baby was all about learning new things - was a conclusion made with meticulous precision and complicated theory. Putting it simply:
Being a baby was fucking boring.
Sure, the initial what the fuck is going on was pretty shocking, but after that came a cycle of… nothing. There were no bills to pay, no job to do, and essentially, she wasn’t expected to do anything. It was kind of like living in an all-expenses paid hotel if it was run on the labour of underpaid mothers. Which was probably what rich people felt like all the time. Was this why they were so weird? Jessie - Cassie would probably go insane too at this rate.
At times when Cassie was too bored, she would cry. It was probably a little immature of her to stress her mother out like this, but fuck it. Cassie was a baby. She didn’t remember anything of warm motherly love as baby-Jessie, so she was going to be selfish and get it as baby-Cassie.
When she cried, her mother - who she should probably find out the name of - would pick her up and hold her against her chest in a warm embrace. Though sometimes, she’d be ignored, and was left to cry for minutes, or hours. Not exactly the perfect picture of motherhood, but understandable. It may or may not have been Cassie’s fault for probably being a harder than average baby to take care of, so with surprising more difficulty than someone would expect, Cassie would try to tone down her cries.
Another thing she noticed, once she finally got a good look at her mother, was how startlingly similar she looked to her-as-Jessie. Not just because of the same dark colouring of their hair and eyes, but the slope of her nose and curve of her eyes were the same as in her previous life. Which made her wonder what she looked like now.
Would she have the same face as her last life? Eventually the same body? Or would she look completely different to her mother in this life? These may have seemed like boring and basic questions, but it wasn’t like she had anything better to do. Vainly speculating over her own appearance wasn’t as much of a sin as people thought anyways.
Despite her… somewhat unconventional situation, Cassie felt that she had a handle on the situation pretty well.
So she had died, whatever. She was living now, starting off in a completely different life from the one she had previously. She could deal with that. Just live now and take herself in whatever direction that fate might lead.
Looking back at those scant few… months? Year? As a crying newborn, Cassie wished she stayed that ignorant forever. Feeling bored? It was whatever! She would endure the monotonous boredom for the rest of her babyhood, but apparently , some people didn’t get the meaning of a routine life.
Because Cassie isn’t stupid. She knows how to put clues together. And she knows because she’s read it before, that her life will turn into absolute chaos as soon as her age goes into the double digits.
Here’s what happened.
Cassie is crying. Again. Her mother was pretty frugal with her spendings, working as a nurse, and only bought the bare minimum for a baby’s needs. Not that Cassie blamed her, she had already guessed that they were not very rich, but she knew that babies needed a lot of love and entertainment to grow up as functional human beings. She got enough love - in the form of hugs and sleeping - but boredom was sadly a frequent emotion in her life. She wondered if this would count as neglect if Cassie was an actual baby.
So Cassie is crying. Her mother must have gotten off a long shift or something, because she had gone to bed and not woken up even after a few minutes of her wails, even in the same room.
Cassie is bawling, sobbing, whatever, and her mother is lying on the bed next to her crib, dead asleep. That was when hands, hands that definitely did not belong to her sleeping mother, gently scooped up her tiny body. Cassie thinks What the heck (being a baby maybe softened her language a bit) Who the hell is this and the confusion quiets her down.
“There,” a voice in a soft, lilting voice says to her, “it will not serve you to be so loud.”
The man that the voice belongs to stares down at Cassie. He seems radiant compared to the shabby apartment, almost otherworldly, and his eyes gleam ethereally with amusement. Cassie blinks at him, scanning his features - light hair, light eyes and thin smile.
Somehow, despite the differences in their appearances, she knows instinctively that this is her father.
“That’s better,” he says when she doesn’t start crying again, “I hope you don’t continue doing this. My children usually cry a lot less.”
Cassie wants to tell this man exactly where he could shove his children - was he cheating or something? - despite being a baby who could barely form sounds at this moment. She’s tried talking, when her mother wasn’t in the room, but all she could get out were some vaguely word sounding noises. Would teeth help her to talk better?
The man rocks her gently, just like her mother would do. “It’s unlikely that I will be able to visit more,” he says, “You will probably see me next at camp.”
The feeling of dread that Cassie has been suppressing creeps its way up. She wants to use her nonexistent voice to ask what are you talking about before spotting a small, shadowed figure sitting up on the bed - her mother.
“You,” her mother hisses, “what are you doing here. Put my child down.”
“Alexandra,” was that her mother’s name? “This is my child too - Cassidy, was it?”
Her mother hadn’t even looked this mad the last time Cassie cried for two hours straight. “Maybe you would know,” she says viciously, “If you hadn’t abandoned me the first chance you got. Put her down.”
Her father, this presumptuous man, only looked at her pityingly. “I told you the risks,” he says, “you accepted them when you had her.”
Her mother - Alexandra - rolled her eyes. “I wasn’t exactly planning to get pregnant,” she shoots back. Wow, she was never telling her mother that she remembered this , “and how was I supposed to take a half-god to an abortion clinic?” A half-what? Please tell her this wasn’t what she thought it was.
The man frowns. “You shouldn’t say these things so carelessly.”
Her mother just looks at him. “I shouldn’t say the truth so carelessly? Cassie’s half a god, and she gets that from you.” God Cassie thinks fuck. Her mother continues. “I mean, that Greek mythology course in uni could have been a little more useful. I didn’t even know - you didn’t tell me until after I was pregnant.”
Fuck Cassie thinks again no, no, calm down. Maybe it's not-
“There’ll be a place for her,” the man responds, “she’ll be safe at Camp Half-Blood.”
Goddamn fucking shit Cassie wants to cry its Percy Jackson. I’m in a novel and its Percy fucking Jackson.