Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“Like a bird out of our hand, 

Like a light out of our heart, 

You are gone.”

(“Never More Will the Wind” by Hilda Doolittle)

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Dying didn't hurt

No. What hurt was knowing that she was dying.

The knowledge that she would leave without leaving a mark on the world, that no one would mourn her. That's what hurt.

She didn't even have life insurance. Where would she be buried? Who would pay? Would anyone care about her dead body?

Not knowing what would happen hurt.

The shot hurt too.

(And she didn't even understand why the assailant had shot her when she had given him all the money she had and her cell phone.)

Feeling like she was drowning in her blood… it hurt. (Did the shot hit a lung? She felt a rather morbid curiosity to know what was causing this shortness of breath and the bloody cough)

But dying. Dying was a relief.
The pain that the shot was causing, the pain because breathing was so difficult and everything hurt)

It was a relief from her pathetic life too. One she was never able to pull off on her own.

Yes.
Dying didn't hurt.

The things that killed her hurt, knowing she hadn't done anything relevant hurt, but the death itself was like falling into a sleep she wouldn't wake up from.

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Except she woke up.

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It was her mother's funeral. She never had a mother.

Her mother would take care of her with so much affection and passed on her culture with so much commitment even if sometimes she forgot words from her native language because she lived in the united states since her late teens. She never had a mother. She had never left São Paulo.

Her father was holding her as they both cried. Her father had abandoned her when she was 6 years old.

She said her speech about how her mother was a role model and that Ariana dreamed of being like her in the future. Her name wasn't Ariana.

She cried as she talked about how the accident was unfair and her mother deserved better, how young she was and her grandmother talked about how happy her mother would be to know that her daughter had survived, even though it took her so long to wake up from her sleeping beauty sleep. She didn't remember the accident.

The image of a huge, dark figure suddenly appeared in the street and her mother scream as she tried to swerve only for the figure to move and the car ...

Ariana had a headache.
Her name wasn't Ariana.

She wanted her mom. She had no mother. 

(Yes. Now she didn't have a mom.)

Everything was wrong now. Nothing made sense.

It was as if the two lives merged in her head.

And Ariana Russell walked out of the area full of people who had come to pay their respects and when she was left alone, she screamed and screamed.

Chapter Text

     Her father thought the change in her attitude was Ariana's way of experiencing grief. He was only 50% right.

       She was dealing with the loss of her mother but she was also grieving for herself, for her old life that had no real value but that had been hers and was now over, and she was also getting used to it.

        It wasn't as difficult as she thought it would be. Ariana had the memories of this lifetime as clear in her head as the last one, so it felt natural to be… her.
        Of course, she still spent hours in front of the mirror cataloging each change. Her hair was the same shade, but it was more wavy and longer whereas her old hair was so curly it seemed like it would never grow. Her skin was also the same skin tone “Café com leite”, her grandmother called it. (that tone that said she was white or Mulata when she was in Brazil, but marked her as Latina or black in the USA)

       Her eyes were lighter. Green and she thought they were beautiful.
       She was thin in a healthy way, something she had never achieved in the past because she used to stress-baking too much food and ended up eating it all so as not to waste it.

        Most of all, Ariana liked who she was and felt confident in a way she used to only pretend to be.

        Her grandmother went to live with them. Which Ariana appreciated because she hated the idea of being home alone most of the time (and now without her mom to keep her company, that's what would happen) when her dad went to work. (most of the time).

        She was doing fine.
       And went to an elite school half an hour from Arcadia. And wasn't that a funny name for a city? It looked very familiar but she couldn't place from where.

        She realized why she was so familiar when she went out with her grandmother for coffee after they bought bedding for the guest room, which was now her grandmother's room, and saw Hisirdoux Casperan. Then Ariana said that she was feeling bad and would rather go home without stopping there that day and tried to convince herself that it was just an extremely similar guy, but everything fell into place every time she left the house. She was in the TrollHunters universe.

          Everything was confirmed when a week and a half after her mother's funeral, Ariana found the amulet under her pillow. Not the Daylight Amulet. The other.
         Half futuristic, half medieval. Alien technology and magic….

        She was in the reality where Jim went back in time, wasn't she? God, she had no idea what was going to happen to Jim by changing events…..
      All the knowledge she had of the series could be useless.

      It was when she had this revelation that the first magical explosion happened.
      Ariana Russell stared at the mess in her room at that moment: Half of her books had been flung off the shelf and her hairbrush was floating in the air along with her music records.

        Rushing to catch the flying objects before her dad or grandma saw, she took a deep breath and felt like she could cry when half of her music discs hit the floor and broke.
        With nothing else floating around, she went downstairs and grabbed a broom to tidy up the room trying to ignore what had just happened.

         Ignoring that she was literally at the center of the universe and that she was going to have to ask her dad to transfer schools while pretending she hadn't just done magic.

        She wanted a taco or a brigadeiro.