Chapter Text
She floated in warm darkness. Everything was calm and comfortable. There was no pain. She finally, blessedly, free of pain. About damn time. Honestly, she just had the shittest luck. Looked both ways before crossing the street and everything, no cars around at all, so she crossed the street and got hit by a car that came outta nowhere. Such unbelievable bullshit.
Then, the bastard didn’t even have the decency to stop or call her an ambulance. He did a hit-and-run. What an asshole. She lay on the cold ground for way too fucking long before she finally died. It had been agonizing, struggling to breath through a ribcage that would no longer expand, panicking as she drowned in her own blood. Unconsciousness had been a blessing from the heavens.
Speaking of which, is that where she was? It definitely lacked the puffy clouds and singing angels that she had pictured, but it was comfortable and dark and warm, so she wasn’t exactly complaining. She’d been raised a Christian, and while she hadn’t gone to church as much as she probably should’ve, and probably liked swearing way too much, she didn’t think she’d done anything to deserve damnation forever.
Was this purgatory, then? Maybe. It certainly wasn’t paradise, but it also definitely wasn’t hell, either. Hmmm, whatever, no use angsting about it now. For once her anxiety was blissfully silent. No pounding in her chest or buzzing in her mind telling her to move, move, move! She went back to sleep. She idly wondered if she’d ever wake back up again. She let the thought go. It didn’t matter.
When she woke up again, it was still dark and warm, but now it felt confining. Something was yelling at her to thrash and move, but she shoved the feeling down. It was probably just her anxiety acting up again. Even in death she couldn’t escape it, huh? That felt like some bullshit, but if she was actually in purgatory like she thought, then she supposed some bad things had to happen to her to balance out the nice quiet she’d had earlier, right?
Honestly, though, why was she freaking out about being in a confined space? She didn’t have claustrophobia, she had the opposite, she had agoraphobia, which was the fear of wide open spaces. Being gently pressed in on like this should have felt comforting, and to part of her, it totally was.
There was just this little voiceless voice telling her that she couldn’t stay here, she had to move and thrash and escape.
The more she tried to ignore it, the louder and more insistent it got.
Jeez, okay, fucking fine stupid voice, I’ll do it already, just shut the fuck up!
She thrashed as much as she could, and then realized that she still had limbs. How she hadn’t noticed before now, she didn’t know. She could be super selectively observant sometimes.
Like, she noticed a slight water puddle no bigger than a quarter on the floor of her apartment near the corner of her fridge once, which had actually been a super leaky water line for the icemaker and it had almost caused some serious water damage, luckily she’d caught it in time, but then she’d failed to notice that her parents had painted the previously dark brown ceiling a bright white, for like, a week.
She felt like this was one of those times. She tried to move her limbs around as much as she could, but they felt off, like, really off. They were way too fucking short for one, and also pathetically weak.
Oh, please no. Nononono, this had better not be what she thought it was! She’d throw a fit if it was! She’d channel the bitchiest inner Karen she could! She’d demand to speak to the manager and everything! While she had always tried her hardest to avoid being the stereotypical entitled white girl, she’d make the biggest fucking exception for this, if she was right.
She threw all her energy into flailing around, trying to stand up, punching at the walls, everything. The punching actually seemed to be doing something, so she did more of that. A few frantic punches in, and she broke through the wall and tumbled out, ass over teakettle, onto the cold, hard floor. Ow.
She tried to inhale, and promptly choked on mucus. She coughed out a couple of times and tried not to panic about how similar this whole thing felt to when she had been lying on the cold, hard pavement, choking on her own blood and dying in a gutter like a stray dog.
Her airways soon cleared though, and she shivered and sucked in as much air as she could. Something was wrong. Very, very wrong. People do not breathe in through their sides!
Whatthefuckwhatthefuck!
She tried to pull herself to her feet, and she almost ate shit by falling directly onto her face. She was way too top heavy! It felt like being what she imagined being a bobblehead felt like. She stumbled but managed to stay upright.
I mean, I was sorta stacked before, but this feels like all the weight’s on top of my head, not my chest!
She brought her hands up to feel her face and started screaming internally, because she couldn’t actually make any noise with her mouth, probably due to her not having one anymore.
She sucked more panicked breaths through her sides, before ruthlessly clamping down on her rising panic. She didn’t have her rescue meds with her, she could not afford to pass out right now!
Okay, distractions!
Priorities, priorities are good!
Numero uno: Find out what the fuck was wrong with her body.
Number two: Find out where the fuck she was.
Number three: Find out why the fuck this was happening or whoever the bastard was that had done this to her, and kick him right in the balls, or wherever would hurt most if they weren’t a dude.
Okay, okay, weird side breathing now under control, find a reflective surface, or lacking that, a self exploration with her tiny hands. She looked around, eventually turning around and finding what it was she had escaped from. It was a giant, shiny, black egg.
Yep, definitely bitching to the manager. Full-entitled-white-person-style.
She’d clearly died and been isekai’d off to places unknown. Such bullshit. Well, hopefully it was a place where she had some insider knowledge she could totally use to cheat with. Fuck playing by the rules, this was her life now, and if whatever ROB son of a bitch that did this to her didn’t like it, then they should’ve performed a memory-wipe beforehand, men-in-black style.
In the game of life, if you weren’t winning, you clearly weren’t cheating hard enough. The world had rules, why not use those rules to your advantage, malicious-compliance style?
That was the policy she lived her life by, and she wasn’t about to stop now.
Right, reflections.
The egg seemed pretty shiny on the outside, maybe she could use that?
She walked around behind it, trying not to fall over, and when she finally got a good look at her new body, she mentally swore a blue streak that would have made her sailor dad proud.
A roundish white mask, two relatively large, straight horns with a prong on the inside, like a beetle’s mandibles. She knew those horns, intimately.
She had been isekai’d as the Hollow Knight, the Pure Vessel.
FFFFUUUUUU….!!