❄︎ KokuDouma oneshots ❄︎

Reincarnation

Alternative Universe - Reincarnation
Warnings - death, swearing, canon-typical violence, poisons, graphic descriptions of Douma's canon death, direct references to Douma's backstory (goes into slight detail recalling what happens in it)
Genre - Angst

THE first time Douma dies, he feels nothing.

Physically, he feels something. The poison courses through his veins, and were he not so focused on attempting to prevent his untimely demise, he would have commended the butterfly girl on her ability to create a poison that would go unnoticed by him for so long.
His skin is melting off of him like burnt plastic, and the girl is fast approaching, coming straight for the kill.

When she cuts his head off with help from the boar boy, he faintly registers that his head and body have gone their separate ways, but still, his mind is focused on the fact that he is almost certainly going to die. It is a fact that he desperately attempts to deny, even though it's already plain as day somewhere in his brain, an irrefutable statement.

He feels no panic. No regret, no sense of determination to regenerate, no agonized last thoughts of 'This can't be how it ends!'.

He passes on with something he won't call acceptance, but a feeling not dissimilar. Resignation, perhaps?

He is resigned when the last of him crumbles away and everything goes black.

He had just never expected to wake back up.

In his first life, he grew up idolized, worshipped, relied upon. Shoved beneath a spotlight because of an eye color. Put on a pedestal because of a hair shade. All kinds of expectations placed upon a child.

His mother had killed his father and then herself.

In this life, he grows up mostly healthy—mentally, at least. Doted upon, loved, comforted. Two loving parents, a cat.

Feelings are all he had ever imagined them to be. Full, and constant and all consuming, they cloud judgement but it's so easy to get swept away in joy just as it is difficult to stand back up after being knocked down by sorrow. He enjoys them, both the good and the bad.

His environment makes it easier, in the first decade of his life, to cope with the recurring dreams of a bygone era with a narrative from someone who looks and sounds just like him but older, who did things he would never, could never do.

(He's always been intelligent: he figures out these dreams are memories of a past life when he is 11).

It all would have been perfect had it not been for his illness. Pertaining, perhaps, to his Blood Demon Art in his last life, he is afflicted with constant shivering. Temperatures which feel below freezing at nearly all hours of the day, like a never-ending fever. A weak body, so he rarely leaves the house.

The world does not know Douma exists until he is 12 years old.

So, Douma is 12 years old when he meets Kokushibo.

His parents are well off, so they have servants. One day, one of them brings her son with her.

It is surprising to Douma how familiar a face can look when he's never seen them before.

He registers quickly that this must have been someone he'd known in the past past, someone he must have cared about immensely, or at least as much as his hollow older counterpart could care about anything at all, because his chest aches at the sight of him.