Chapter Text
First things first.
This was not their body.
They held their hands up in front of their face. The hands felt long. Elegant, even. The sort of hands that suggested a lifetime of calligraphy, aristocratic tea ceremonies, or perhaps delicately assassinating people in moonlit forests.
They paused.
Well. That was alarming.
…now where did that thought come from?
They turned them over. Flexed the fingers. Wiggled them experimentally.
Then they extended their arms. Retracted them. Shifted their weight from foot to foot.
Nope.
Definitely not their body.
Now, the unfortunate complication was that they could not, for the life of them, remember what their original body had been like.
Still, they felt confident ruling this one out. On instinct alone.
For one thing, it was far too nimble.
They tried a small step and nearly glided three feet.
Secondly, it was tall. Uncomfortably tall. And skinny in the way that suggested either monastic discipline or terminal illness. They lifted a sleeve and squinted at an arm that looked like it had been assembled from spare violin strings.
“Good lord,” they muttered faintly.
They felt anaemic just looking at themselves.
And then there was the vision problem.
They blinked. Hard.
The world remained a smeared watercolour painting. Shapes existed in the vague sense, but detail had apparently been outsourced to someone else.
They squinted once more.
No improvement.
Wonderful. They had somehow woken up in the wrong body and it came with the visual clarity of a damp potato.
“Nii-chan?”
The voice came from behind them. Small, breathy, and so suddenly present that they nearly jumped out of their borrowed skin.
They turned around, mostly because they were fairly certain the sound had been Japanese and that seemed like the sort of thing worth investigating.
A figure rushed toward them in what appeared to be a blur of dark clothing and alarming velocity.
Now, two possibilities presented themselves.
One: the approaching person was moving at approximately the speed of a cheetah.
Two: they themselves were currently about as visually competent as a concussed owl.
Given the circumstances, either seemed plausible.
The blur stopped very close to them and resolved into the vague shape of a face. Pale. Dark hair.
“Nii-chan, you’re,” the stranger breathed. “How are you still here?”
The question hung in the air.
The newly embodied individual considered it carefully.
They had woken up in a mystery body.
They could not remember who they were.
They were approximately ninety percent blind.
And apparently someone here believed they were a person named Nii-chan. Which internally translate to older brother.
…odd name.
All things considered, the honest answer seemed obvious.
“I,” they said slowly, “don’t know?”
A pause. Then, with increasing sincerity:
“Because, honestly my guy, I don’t know anything.”
As it turned out, “I don’t know anything” was in hindsight, the worst possible answer one could give.
Within the hour they had been effectively kidnapped.
It was done with brisk professionalism, suggesting these people had a great deal of experience abducting others. There had been a blur of movement, several tense whispers, and the sensation of being transported somewhere against their will by individuals who clearly believed this was the most reasonable course of action.
The next thing they knew, they were sitting in a room.
Not a pleasant room. Not even a particularly interesting room, given the blur. Just a room. They were also handcuffed. Tightly.
Still, things improved somewhat after that.
Medical people arrived.
Or at least they appeared to be medical people. It was difficult to say.
They were prodded. Poked. Had their eyes examined, which consisted largely of several individuals peering into them and muttering in tones reserved for antique dealers discovering a crack in a Ming vase.
This apparently caused great interest.
Particularly the part where they didn’t know anything.
“Fascinating,” one of them murmured.
Eventually a man with a gravelly voice stepped forward. Like it had been marinated in cigarettes, alcohol, and decades of shouting at subordinates.
“Do you know who you are?” he asked.
There had been only one solid piece of information offered to them since waking up in this suspiciously elegant skeleton.
The boy, the very intense one who had appeared earlier at approximately cheetah speed, had called them something.
They straightened, pleased to finally be able to contribute something useful to the discussion.
“Nii-chan,” they said with great certainty.
After all, the other fellow had seemed extremely confident about it.
“…Right,” muttered the gravelly voice.
They were eventually relocated.
This was encouraging, because it suggested the authorities had decided they were less of an immediate threat and more of a perplexing administrative inconvenience.
The new room was, by comparison, quite comfortable. There was a bed. A chair. Even a window, though it had bars given vague streaks of black.
They were, however, still cuffed.
Which felt unnecessarily pessimistic, given that they could barely see straight and had yet to demonstrate any abilities beyond mild confusion and answering questions badly.
The medical examinations continued.
The primary culprit this time was a woman with vividly dyed pink hair and the patience of someone who had spent many years dealing with idiots, liars, and patients who insisted their rash was “probably nothing.”
She held her hands over them, which began glowing a soft green.
This was deeply weird.
Not alarming exactly…no one else in the room seemed especially bothered, but certainly the sort of thing that would have caused a small riot back in… wherever it was they had come from.
She prodded them. Examined their eyes again. Pressed glowing fingers to various parts of their ribs and spine.
Then she asked questions.
Lots of them.
“What is your name?”
“Heck. You’re telling me it’s not niichan?”
“Do you remember your childhood?”
“Dunno.”
“Your family?”
“Honestly? I really don’t know.”
“Your village?”
“Still no.”
“Your profession?”
“Given current evidence, I’m getting nothing legal.”
The woman’s glowing hands paused mid-rib.
She looked at them.
They looked back with what they hoped was an expression of sincere cooperation, though given their eyesight it may have resembled a mildly concussed pigeon.
The questioning continued for quite some time.
Eventually, once the glowing-hands portion of the proceedings had concluded and the woman was packing away whatever mysterious medical apparatus they used, they cleared their throat politely.
“Don’t suppose,” they said hopefully, “I could have a shower?”
The woman looked at them.
Then she looked down at the restraints.
Then back at them.
“You want a shower,” she repeated.
“Well,” they said reasonably, “yes. A rinse would be nice.”
The request for a shower was met long silence and the possibility of them feigning deafness to a blind person.
Eventually however it was granted.
This was how they found themselves standing in what appeared, through the thick fog of their eyesight, to be a modest but perfectly serviceable bathroom, still cuffed, while a tall man leaned against the doorframe supervising them with the posture of someone who could probably stop an escape attempt using only mild disappointment.
The man had gravity-defying hair.
Not just untidy hair. Hair that had, through sheer apparent stubbornness or some serious styling, achieved a structural arrangement rarely seen outside of modern architecture. It pointed in several directions simultaneously, which suggested either great personal confidence or a long-standing war with combs.
His lower face was covered by a dark mask. Maybe they were sick.
“Well,” the man said in an easy, faintly amused voice, “this is a first.”
They squinted at him.
Or rather, they attempted to squint at him. Mostly they just blinked vaguely in his direction.
“Is it?” they asked.
“Most prisoners don’t ask for a shower quite so politely. Or boldly.”
“I still don’t know what I’m charged with,” they said.
The man hummed after a brief pause, one in which they attempted to orient themselves toward what they hoped was the shower.
Instead they walked directly into a wall.
They stopped.
The man behind them coughed, “…Shower’s two steps to your left.”
“Right,” they said, adjusting course with as much dignity one can muster after headbutting a wall.
Now came the more complicated issue.
They looked down at their cuffs.
Then at the shower.
Then vaguely in the direction of the spiky-haired guard.
“Logistically speaking,” they said carefully, “this is going to be challenging.”
“Yes,” the man said calmly. “I noticed.”
Another pause.
Then the man pushed off the wall and stepped forward.
“Turn around.”
They did.
Not because they were especially trusting, but because their survival strategy at this point consisted almost entirely of doing what the visually-competent guards said.
There was the faint click of a key.
One cuff came loose.
The man immediately replaced it by fastening the same cuff to a metal ring fixed discreetly to the wall beside the shower.
“There,” the man said. “One hand free.”
“Awesome,” they said.
In practice, this meant undressing took roughly three times longer than it normally would for a sighted person with full limb mobility.
They fumbled with unfamiliar clothing that appeared to consist of several layers, ties, and one particularly stubborn garment that may have been plotting against them personally.
At one point they accidentally put their arm through something that was almost certainly not meant to contain an arm.
Behind them, the man watched in silence.
Patient silence.
Very patient silence.
Eventually he sighed the sigh of someone who had clearly seen many things in life and found most of them exhausting.
“Here,” he said.
Hands reached past them and untangled the offending fabric with ease.
“Other arm.”
They complied.
There was a faint rustle of cloth as the last layer came free.
“Step forward.”
They stepped forward.
Then nearly slipped immediately because depth perception had abandoned them somewhere around the phrase mysterious resurrection.
A hand caught their elbow before gravity could finish the job.
“Careful,” the man said mildly.
“Appreciated,” they replied with heartfelt sincerity.
A moment later the water started.
They blinked as warmth hit their skin.
Which, they realized with vague surprise, felt… nice.
The man retreated back to the door.
“I’ll be right here,” he said.
They nodded, then remembered he might not see that.
They stood under the water for a moment, blinking into the blur of steam and trying very hard not to think about the fact that they were in a borrowed body, in a weird prison, supervised by a sickly masked man with gravity-defying hair.
After a thoughtful pause, they called over their shoulder:
“Out of curiosity…”
“Yes?”
“Do you happen to know if ‘Nii-chan’ is a full name, or more of a nickname situation?”
There was a beat.
Then the man behind them made a soft, helpless sound that might, under generous interpretation, have been laughter.