Chapter Text
Awareness came to him at a snail's pace as it always did, whenever he was woken without completing his sleep cycle. His sleep cycle was erratic to say the least. As it was, he could sleep whenever he wanted. Waking up was where the trouble came up. He didn't nap. He rarely ever had in his so far young life.
It was something he had adapted himself to and based his life around. If he had to wake up at 6:00, the alarm needed to be set for 5:00, that too with it repeating itself every five minutes.
He had never been a light sleeper and could not prop himself awake at the sound of the Alarm clock and thus needed to hear it repeatedly to pull himself from the dreamland a ring at a time. His natural laziness was also a proponent of that.
The ringing sound of a bell during the last few minutes was doing a good job of pulling him to wakefulness, but the ring was not something he recognised. That was what caused him to shed the cloying tendrils of sleep and pull his eyelids apart.
The ceiling that greeted him was not something he recognised either. It was a contributing factor to the building pit in his stomach. The wooden beams that acted as a support to the wooden ceiling was not something present in his house. It was also not something he would find in the home of those he trusted enough to sleep in.
His eyes darted around the room to find himself in an unfamiliar environment and the pit in his stomach frothed with bile, leading him to bite down, lest he vomit.
The wooden beams had replaced the drywalls of his room. The room was alight with the morning light of the sun filtering through the paper screen, instead of the curtains he had hung himself. The room seemed built for someone twice his size. The ceiling was far too high, the space too large.
His breath came in short, sharp gasps as his hand shot to his chest, but the heartbeat beneath his palm felt wrong. It came too fast, too weak, contained in a ribcage three sizes too small, that couldn't possibly be his.
He tried to sit up and nearly toppled sideways. His arms were too short. His center of gravity was somehow completely off.
When he looked down at his hands. They were small, delicate and child-sized hands. The scream building in his throat came out as a high-pitched whimper.
This is not real. This could not be. I am surely dreaming.
His mind scrambled for purchase against the wrongness of everything. The breathing technique his school counselor had taught him. Breathe.
Four counts in.
Hold for seven.
Eight counts out.
His lungs felt too small, constricted, they couldn't hold enough air in. The panic spread from his chest to his limbs, making his fingers tingle and his vision darken at the edges.
He moved on from the breathing technique and clutched on to the second method he had been taught. The grounding technique was to be used in case the breathing technique could not help him hold his panic.
Five things you can see.
His clenched fists loosened as he started the count with his fingers. He extended his index finger, focusing on the wooden floor. It was polished but worn, the brown wood shining in some places and dull in others. The middle finger followed as his fingers pulled taut and made a 'V' sign. The veins became clear in his small wrists.
The paper screen of the window had a small tear in the right corner. He was the one sleeping closest to the window.
There were other children sleeping on futons placed on the wooden floor, to his right. How he'd missed them in his panic, he couldn't fathom. There were 10 others in the room if he hadn't fumbled the number.
A shelf on the far wall with most of the lower racks filled with clothes and assortment that a child would need to entertain himself with. There were toys, crayons, colors, children's books, wooden pencils.
His hands were so small, but so was his body and that had been the reason for him being off balance, his body had been almost twice the height and thrice the size than it was now.
His five extended fingers confirmed he'd completed the count. The bile in his stomach had calmed down to manageable levels but his breath still came short and his fingers still tingled. His vision had stabilized though and that was an indication of progress.
Four things you can hear.
He closed his eyes while still trying to calm his breath. He didn't need to count on his fingers anymore.
The ringing that had caused him to awaken abruptly had gone silent as most of the children were in the various stages of awakening. The sounds they made were the most prevalent in the room. Tuning that out he concentrated on what most people considered background noise.
A bird was chirping outside the window, the call was not something he recognised. It was of a species unknown to him.
The sound of utensils clinking somewhere to his left but not far left, there were also sounds coming that he would associate with a kitchen coming from that direction, the hissing of something boiling, the pitter-patter of feet moving on the wooden floor. So, wherever he was, there was a kitchen to his left.
Three things you can touch.
The rough fabric of his yukata against skin registering sensation. The wooden floor, cool and smooth under his palms. The futon beneath him, thin padding over the harder floor.
Two things you can smell.
The faint smell of cooked rice, miso and something unfamiliar coming from the direction he had assumed the kitchen to be. Wood smoke, faint, distant as if someone had lit a morning fire somewhere in the distance.
A thing you can taste.
The only taste on his tongue was of bile.
His breaths were still shallow but they were not gasps, his stomach had settled but the pit was still there. His vision had cleared and he could now focus on his surroundings without feeling it darken.
The exercise had done the job in calming him down but it was also supposed to anchor him to reality. But if this was reality, it was not his reality. Instead each of his senses had confirmed that he was confined to this nightmare independently.
This was not his room. This was not his house. The most damning of all, This was not his body.
Where am I?
When am I?
Whose body is this?
What has happened to me?
This couldn't be real. There had to be another explanation, something rational, something that didn't require accepting the impossible.
A coma, maybe. That had to be it. He'd fallen asleep and something had happened. An aneurysm, a stroke, carbon monoxide poisoning...
His real body was in a hospital bed somewhere, hooked up to machines, and this was just his brain's desperate attempt to construct a reality while his neurons misfired. The too-small body, the unfamiliar room. Vivid, yes, but that's what comas did. They trapped you in elaborate fantasies that felt real until you woke up.
The rough fabric against his skin hurt in small, specific ways. The wooden floor was cold and hard under his palms. The taste of bile was acrid and real. Every sense fed him information that was too detailed, too consistent, too grounded to be a dying brain's fever dream.
Schizophrenia could cause elaborate hallucinations, whole constructed realities that felt indistinguishable from truth. He'd been stressed, depressed. Maybe his mind had finally cracked under the pressure, retreated into a fantasy where he could start over, where he had an excuse for all his failures because this wasn't even his body.
But, psychosis wasn't this coherent. There would be gaps in logic, impossible physics, reality shifting when he wasn't looking. This was terrifyingly consistent. The morning routine of an orphanage, the other children moving with practiced efficiency, the sounds from the kitchen following predictable patterns of meal preparation.
There has to be an explanation.
Every alternative he constructed collapsed under the weight of evidence. Every rational explanation had a fatal flaw. The grounding technique had confirmed it, this was not a hallucination his mind could dismiss. The sensory consistency proved it wasn't a dream.
"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."
He'd eliminated every impossible explanation. What remained was so improbable it made his head hurt. But it was the only thing that fit all the evidence. The wrong body. The persistence of this new reality despite his desperate attempts to explain it away.
He was in a different body. And there was no waking up from this.
He had to accept his reality, however improbable, and, whatever kind of fool he had been, he had not been foolish enough to deny the reality without evidence to the contrary.
Where is my family?
Where are my siblings?
His little sister, Rina, twelve years old, always with her sketchbook, always showing him her latest drawing of whatever anime character she was obsessed with that week.
His baby brother, Takeshi, only seven, who collected rocks and could name twenty different dinosaur species by heart. Who still sometimes crawled into Kenji's bed after nightmares, even though he insisted he was too old for that.
They are gone. Or am I?
What had happened from their perspective? Had he just disappeared from his bed? Was his grandmother calling hospitals right now, filing a missing person report? Were his siblings crying, asking where their big brother had gone? Was his lifeless body still in his room? Growing cold?
He prayed to whatever deity would listen that perhaps that the original consciousness still remained in his body and he was just a clone.
The grief tried to drown him, but the tears wouldn't come. It felt as if his tear ducts had dried out, that they had been cried out and the body still had not formed enough of them to shed ever again. The body felt hollow and wrung out as if the previous occupant had already cried out every drop of moisture it had.
The previous occupant.
The thought itself was a lifetime worth of psychological horror and existential dilemma.
It crystallized into existential horror that made his earlier panic seem trivial by comparison.
Whose body was this? Had there been someone here before him? Had there been a child, a child with thoughts and feelings and a life, whose consciousness he'd somehow displaced when he arrived?
I'm a Killer. A body thief.
A parasite wearing stolen skin.
The mechanics didn't matter. Murder wasn't less evil because the weapon was metaphysical. If his arrival had erased someone else's existence.
The nausea returned with renewed force, but he swallowed it down because throwing up wouldn't change what he'd done, wouldn't bring back whoever he'd destroyed by simply existing in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Unless the body had been empty. Unless the original soul departed naturally, death, maybe, or some other trauma that had left the flesh viable but vacant.
Was that better? Was he a scavenger rather than a murderer, moving into an abandoned home rather than forcing out the current resident? The rationalization felt thin, desperate, the kind of moral gymnastics people performed to sleep at night after doing unconscionable things.
He didn't know what had happened. He couldn't know. He would probably never know. And that uncertainty would follow him like a shadow.
The pragmatic part of his mind whispered that it didn't matter. He was here. It was not his fault, he had not wanted this. He wanted to go back, go back to his home, his siblings, his grandma, his family.
Self-flagellation wouldn't undo whatever had been done. All he could control was what happened next. Whether he wasted this second chance, unwanted and unearned as it was, or used it to do something meaningful.
The choice felt impossibly heavy. But, guilt was a luxury he couldn't afford. Not yet...
"Kenji, you okay?"
Kenji's head snapped up. An older boy, maybe eight or nine, was sitting up on his futon two spaces away, watching him with concern. The boy's appearance was overlooked by him in favour of what he'd heard.
The boy had spoken in Japanese, but Kenji had understood perfectly without the mental translation step that should have been necessary for someone who had lived in the States since before his birth.
How did he understand Japanese and that too spoken in a dialect different from any he'd heard? He'd studied it casually for a few months, could maybe read hiragana if he concentrated, but fluent comprehension? That shouldn't be possible.
It was good that he could understand what was being said, whatever the reason for it may be.
The boy was still watching him, waiting for an answer. Kenji nodded, not trusting his voice. The boy studied him for another moment, then suddenly stood with a kip.
"Then whatever are you waiting for. Let's go."
The boy looked over his shoulder and motioned with his hands for Kenji to follow him.
The room had emptied of all the children and the silence pressed on him sharply. There didn't seem to be any other choice than to follow him, as he did not want to stand out before he could further his knowledge of his situation.