Chapter Text
The first thing Cody became aware of was the sound of rushing water and the rustling of leaves. The second and arguably more important fact was that his body felt like it got run over by a truck. Despite of being nearly consumed by the pain in his body, memories of a car heading directly towards him flashed through his mind, ‘Guess I really was hit by a car’. A moment later he managed to assemble the pieces of what exactly happened before he came to.
He was on his way to school, already late because his phone didn’t charge and died so his alarm didn’t wake him up. He stopped at a light, berating himself for not checking the battery before he went to sleep and impatiently waited for it to turn green so he could cross. Even if he was in a hurry, he wasn’t stupid enough to just risk crossing like the man on the other side did. ‘He’s just asking for an accident to happen at this point. It wouldn’t kill you to wait a minute before crossing.’, he thought perhaps a bit scornfully. Luckily the man wasn’t run over as he crossed and only a moment later the light turned green. ‘What am I going to tell my teacher? This is the third time I’m late this week and I don’t think she’ll accept any excuses this time. I could just wait it out until my next period, but the exam is coming up and I really need to catch up on my schoolwork if I want to pass…’.
He was just about to weigh his options when he heard a loud honk from his left and assumed that it was one of the cars waiting, so he reflexively turned towards the noise. What he saw instead was a grey streak overtaking all the other cars and heading straight for him with no signs of slowing down. ‘Do they expect me to jump out of the way or something?’, he thought to himself, but he could only stand there as his fear turned his veins to ice and he froze in place, still directly in the path of the car. As he stood there, he had just enough time to identify the car a Tesla before the impact threw him off his feet and a good distance down the road if he had to guess. He couldn’t be quite sure though because on the moment of impact his body was filled with white hot agony and suddenly he couldn’t tell up from down or left from right. The only thing he was aware of was the way his body was launched into the air and then promptly fell back down on the road, skidding for a while before finally rolling to a stop.
Cody wasn’t quite sure what happened afterwards except for being consumed by pain and feeling like he wasn’t in his own body anymore. He thought he heard someone screaming but it all sounded like it was under water and everything was soon drowned out by the darkness of unconsciousness (or death now that he thought about it) finally claiming his pain filled mind.
This explained why he was feeling so shitty but the question on why he could even still feel or hear anything at all puzzled him. Pushing the revelation that he just died to the back of his mind so he could unpack it later, Cody had to address the distinct feeling of wrongness that he felt, so taking another moment to gather himself he finally tried to open his eyes just to immediately close them because of the harsh sunlight shining directly in his face. Trying again but this time slower, to not be flashbanged again, Cody opened his eyes and the first thing he saw was that something green/turquoise ish was blocking a bit of the bottom of his vision. This was weird because no matter where he turned it always stayed the same. ‘Is this thing part of me or something?’, he thought in bewilderment. Ignoring the green blockage, Cody lifted his head slightly and began to look around him and found that he was in a clearing with a river to his right, which explained the noise of the running water he heard whilst waking up. This didn’t make any sense because the last time Cody checked he was in a city with quite a few buildings and only a few trees lining the roads but now he was in a clearing in the middle of a forest if he had to guess. Filing this information away so he could think about it later Cody continued to investigate his surroundings. ‘Why does my head feel so heavy?’. Shaking it to the best of his abilities didn’t dislodge the weight so he chose to ignore it aswell for the time being.
At this point Cody was quite weirded out and starting to feel the beginning of nervousness settling in but he pushed through and finally saw something that really confused and frightened him. As he looked down to maybe see if he still had injuries from before, he expected to see his own arms with maybe a few scratches or something more serious, but what he found instead were two very much not human arms. They had scales instead of flesh that were a matt cyan with three glowing stripes on each “arm” and continuing up to his shoulders and probably over the rest of his(?) body. Instead of hands were dragonlike talons with sharp looking white claws and webbing between the toes. Looking behind himself promptly revealed that a) his neck had more mobility than expected and b) the paws and therefore weren’t dragonlike they really were features from a dragon because he could clearly see a pair of wings on his back that were the same color of his(?) scales, two hindlegs that mirrored the front ones and also a tail.
Cody stared at this dragon’s body (that was also apparently his body???) and wasn’t quite done processing what he was seeing when he remembered that there was a river to his right. As he made to heave himself up, he became aware that he couldn’t for the life of him get his limbs to cooperate properly, so he more tumbled than walked over to the river. ‘Please let this just be a really vivid dream’, he begged internally as he was finally close enough to make out his reflection but what he saw of his head and neck matched the rest of his body to his growing horror. His entire body was a mix of cyan, green and turquoise and his previously human face was replaced with a long snout. Protruding from his head were two horns and right below them he noticed a pair of ears that kept twitching every few seconds. Though his entire body was covered in scales, his neck had a peculiar row of lines on each side but he couldn’t quite make them out, so he tried to get closer to the surface to examine them. ‘This looks familiar somehow- ‘, is the only thing he managed to think before his body betrayed him and fell into the river. Having not expected his sudden tumble and the surprising depth of the river, Cody tried to make a surprised noise that sounded vaguely like a growl before he got a mouth full of water for his troubles. He immediately closed his mouth and tried to stop his descent to the bottom of the river, but he never really was much of a swimmer even when he didn’t have the problem of being in the wrong body. ‘Okay so this is doing literally nothing. My body won’t do what I want it to do and my flailing isn’t making me get anywhere.’ Knowing that he is in the real risk of drowning, Cody looks around as he ends up on the riverbed and stops moving for a second.
He notices that his vision is clearer than it should be and that he doesn’t even feel the sting of water in his eyes and cautiously opens them wider from their pinched position. Shoving this revelation to all the other things in the back of his mind to be unpacked later, his surroundings don’t offer any solutions to his plight and he realizes that there isn’t any way to get out if the river except trying to swim again, if he could even call it that. Moving his limbs with a new wave of energy he desperately tried to coordinate them somewhat but only managed to go in every direction except up. Refusing to give up so easily, he kept trying for a while, slowly feeling himself getting weaker and weaker whilst darkness is creeping in at the edge of his vision. His flailing started to get slower and his eyes ended up half-lidded.
‘Why is this happening to me? Dying twice in the same day takes some real bad luck to happen, so what did I ever do to deserve this?’, the still conscious part of himself thought hysterically. Nearing the edge of complete unconsciousness, he stops moving entirely, closing his eyes and exhaling one more time while he waits for darkness to consume his mind once more. He distantly felt the water enter his mouth and throat, bracing for the imminent feeling of drowning but what he got instead was the ability to finally breathe. Frantically gasping for air (or water for that matter), Cody took a moment to adjust to the sudden rush of oxygen and felt the darkness retreat from the edge of his vision. Still feeling lightheaded from his near drowning, he tried to make sense of the situation and felt movement on the sides of his neck. Hesitantly reaching up with his paw whilst trying not to scratch himself, he traced the side of his neck where the weird lines he saw before he fell into the river were located and felt them briefly opening, pushing out a stream of water and closing again, seemingly in synch with his breathing pattern. He realized they were gills and promptly dropped his paw again, slightly catching on a few scales with his claws on the way down but not enough to draw blood.
‘So I got run over by a car on my way to school, woke up here in the middle of some clearing in a forest despite being in the middle of a city before, somehow got turned into a green/cyan dragon and almost drowned in a river but didn’t because this particular type of dragon can apparently breathe underwater.’ Cody thought to himself and finally tried to speak but the only thing that came out was a stream of bubbles. ‘Right, I’m still underwater of course I wouldn’t be able to hear myself.’
Suddenly something clicked into place in his mind, ‘Wait so I’m a cyan dragon obviously geared for being able to survive underwater and I have glowing spots over my entire body. My body looks familiar, but I couldn’t place it before.’ Cody couldn’t help but remember a book series he read a while ago that had a species of dragons in it that matched the description of himself perfectly and his eyes widened in realization.
‘I got run over by a tesla and turned into a Seawing from Wings of Fire.’