denkiselectricshock
She used to count the worlds. She'd lost track somewhere past twelve, the way you lose track of anythin you've stopped believing matters. Survival had been instinct, once - blind, stubborn, animalistic. But instinct only carries a person so far before it starts to feel like punishment instead of a gift.
Demon Slayer was her last real attempt at anything. Ten years of training. A decade spent choosing, deliberately, to let someone in - her teacher, her dearest friend - instead of staying small and untouchable the way she always had before. She thought, foolishly, that wanting something enough might be allowed to matter.
It wasn't. The story took what it always takes. She dies exactly the way it had always intended, with someone else's scream as the last sound she ever heard.
So when she wakes again - smaller, younger, blinking up at a sky from a season of an anime she never finished watching - she doesn't reach for hope. She doesn't object. She doesn't fight the plot creeping toward her like weather she can't outrun. She just waits, quiet and unremarkeable, for whatever this world has already decided to do to her.
It finds her anyway. It always does.
What she doesn't expect is a boy who decides, without being asked, that a girl who's stopped trying is still worth showing up for.