EDIT(7/23/2014) - THIS IS MOSTLY THE SAME AS THE ORIGINAL, BUT STILL DIFFERENT ENOUGH THAT IT SHOULD BE READ AGAIN FOR THE REST OF THE STORY TO MAKE SENSE.

A/N: Okay, okay. I realize I haven't updated NLOL, but I have a good feeling about this one! This is a similar idea (with the whole reincarnation thing) but will be a more serious take on your average SI/OC-insert.

Anyway, this was inspired by all those fics where an OC-insert takes the place of a main character. I thought I'd do my own version with a more obscure (yet still important) character.

Enjoy!

"Ouch, mom! That hurt!" Karin cradled her stinging digits to her chest and scowled at her mother.

"Good. Maybe next time you'll think twice before you try to get into the food before dinner," the woman griped irritably. The wooden spoon she'd used to smack Karin's reaching fingers slid back into her apron's front pocket.

Karin spared a glare for the bulge in the white fabric that was her mother's favorite weapon before looking up with wide, imploring eyes. "But mom," she said innocently, "I was going to eat everything I touched!"

"That's not the point I was trying to make and you know it," Chiaki scolded. "When dinner is done and your father gets home we'll eat, but not until then." Her face softened at Karin's pout. "You can play with Luka in the meantime, I'm sure he wants to wish you a happy birthday."

Karin heaved a dramatic sigh, "Fine. Just don't let dad eat all the strawberries before I get back." Her mother nodded absently and turned back to the sink to rinse the vegetables. Karin, satisfied that her strawberries were safe, darted out of the kitchen to find her shoes. She didn't much enjoy wearing them when the weather was so warm, but her mother could be downright scary when it came to manners and hygiene. Apparently, running around barefoot was neither polite nor sanitary.

Once the dreadful things were on Karin paused to focus before smiling and running for the copse of trees behind her home. She jumped over roots and dodged branches until she reached the small clearing that separated the crescent-shaped thicket from the rest of the woods.

"Luka!" When there was no answer she huffed a laugh and ran over to the wooden structure at the center of the clearing. "Luka! I know you're there, come out already!"

There was a muffled shuffling noise and a little boy's head popped up in the small window before he ducked back down, giggling. "Hey!" Karin yelled. "I saw you!" There was no answer, only more laughter coming from the miniature house. "Luka! I can hear you!"

"No you can't!"

Karin rolled her eyes at his ridiculousness and walked over to the tiny building. Ever so slowly she leaned over the windowsill to stare down at the boy crouched beneath it. His eyes were closed and he had his arms over his head, as if that would prevent her from seeing him. Karin sucked in a deep breath and leaned even closer, "BOO!"

She had to jerk back quickly to avoid having her nose broken, but she deemed it worth the shrill scream that escaped him. She took one look at Luka's wide eyes and frantic breathing and promptly cracked up. "You - you..." she gasped, "you screamed just like a little girl!"

"I did not!" His indignation was clear on his face and Karin toned down her amusement so as not to push him too far. The last thing she wanted to deal with was a tantrum on her birthday.

Once certain she wouldn't break out into hysterical laughter anymore, Karin wiped a stray tear discretely and gave her friend a smile. "Sure, sure, you gave a very manly shout," she assured, "I was only teasing."

Appeased at last, Luka returned her smile before rushing to the flimsy door to the left of the window and flung it open. Karin shifted her feet and bent slightly just in time to avoid toppling when he threw his arms around her. "Happy birthday Karin!" He grinned widely, showing off an adorable set of dimples - at least according to Karin's mother. "We're finally the same age!"

"Yup! Oh, I forgot," Karin pulled her sleeve back to show off her wrist. "Thanks for the birthday gift - it's really great!"

Luka stepped closer. "Oh good! I was hoping Lisa dropped it off this morning." He pointed to the top of her wrist. "Dad helped me with this part. He took a knife and cut two lines in the leather so we could braid it, but I carved the beads on the end. I only added one on each end of the tie so that every year I can give you a new one!"

Karin blinked in surprise. "Wow! That's a really good idea Luka, I like it even more now!"

"I knew you would, I'm an awesome gift-giver," he boasted.

"I don't know," Karin mused. "Your dad's the one who built our play-house for your birthday last year." She motioned to the miniature, two-story house less than three feet away. "I think that's just a teeny, tiny bit more awesome than your awesome present."

Luka pouted. "Okay, okay," he admitted, "My dad is a great gift-giver. But I bet I'll be an even better one when I grow up! It's just gonna take some time is all."

Karin nodded her agreement. "You're probably right. Now let's play! I've been working on my doggy bark and it's my birthday so I say we pretend that we're a pack of wild dogs this time."

"Okay!" Luka's face lit up in a smile, "How about we pretend that we're hunting dinner when a storm comes so we have to look for shelter - "

"And the play-house can be an abandoned cabin in the woods that we find - "

"Oh! Oh! How about the house is haunted! With - with - "

"With the ghost of a man who died of a broken heart when his brother ran off with his wife!" Karin interjected excitedly. Admittedly, she'd gotten that from something she'd heard her mother talking about with the baker's wife, but it worked as well as anything else.

"Yeah! And so he's really angry all the time and tries to scare us away. Then we have to fight back in a huge battle with all our other animal friends and send him to the afterlife!"

"Uh-huh. Only, instead of sending him to the afterlife - how about we make him realize how silly he's been when we defeat him and he goes peacefully!"

Luka adopted a thoughtful look before nodding. "Works for me!"

Soon they were running around on all fours, laughing and barking at nothing and everything. They took turns playing the ghost so that whoever was still a wild dog could fake beat him up with cool moves and crazy sound-effects. It was the same thing Karin and Luka always did when they played together. While the situations were always changing, the games were always exciting and fast paced. They got a little too excited when they got to the fight with the ghost and ended up defeating him too quickly. Not wanting to go home just yet, Karin convinced Luka to be the prince in a new game where he had to protect his country from a mighty red dragon.

"Rawr! I've come to steal your princess," Karin growled. "Hand her over or I'll eat you!"

"Never!" cried Luka as he took of running for his 'castle'. Karin pursued him at a steady pace, giving Luka enough time to run inside and climb the steps to the second floor. He leaned out the window to call down to her, "You'll never get in! I've locked the gate!"

Karin, with flushed cheeks and bright eyes shouted back, "Nothing can stop me! I'm a dragon and I can fly!" With that said she started scaling the little building, using the windowsill on the first floor as a step. She reached up to the second floor window and pulled herself up slowly, having trouble finding traction against the smooth walls with her muddy shoes.

Luka was still shouting about how she'd never get him when she finally managed to swing a leg over and into the playhouse. The two play fought with imaginary swords and claws, laughing all the while. It wasn't until Karin tried to stand in the window that things started to go wrong.

She'd been crouched on the sill with her hands braced on the frame when the mud from her shoes sent her left foot sliding back and into the air. She let out a startled gasp and released the window frame in an attempt to reach forward and steady herself. Unfortunately, Karin's panic had her moving too abruptly and her right foot slid off the sill in her haste to lean forward. Her chest slammed hard into the sill and knocked the breath from her lungs. Karin only had time to briefly lock wide eyes with Luka before she was falling back.

Her heels hit the ground first, before her momentum took over and the rest of her body followed. She tried to twist around and catch herself, but there simply wasn't enough time. Her left arm ended up twisted beneath her as her torso hit the ground with a surprisingly quiet thud.

Karin blinked in shock for a moment before pain flooded her senses and made her see white. She tried to draw in breath but found herself incapable of inhaling. Suddenly she was sitting up -crushed- as smoke billowed in. There was a flash of color -orange- in the corner of her eye and strange sounds pounding at her eardrums. She couldn't breathe -no air- and tasted blood in her mouth.

She screamed.

What a curious place, Karin thought to herself. Barely a moment ago she'd be lying on the ground, in pain, yet suddenly she was sitting in one of the largest oak trees she'd ever seen. There was lush green grass surrounding the base of the tree and a dense forest surrounding it on all sides. Despite this, the forest floor was brightly lit with sunshine.

Karin carefully made her way down to the ground and stood at the base of the oak. "Hello? Is anyone there?" She noted the eerie silence and raised her voice, "Mom? Dad?"

When she received no response Karin shivered and wrapped her arms around herself, feeling less wonder and more fear towards her surroundings. Sniffling pathetically she made to sit down and cry when a flash of orange distracted her. It reminded her of what she'd seen just before passing out.

She stepped closer to examine the ground, forgetting to be upset in the face of her new discovery. There, in the grass, was a sparkling sphere - one so tiny she was surprised she'd glimpsed it. Karin was just about to reach out and touch it when she realized she could already feel it. Similar to the way she could feel her parents and Luka and all the other people she knew, yet also dissimilar.

When she felt the sphere she didn't immediately think - person - but simultaneously she couldn't identify it as anything else. The feeling she got was insubstantial, like what she imagined a spirit would feel like to her senses, a person without a body. The feeling was also strangely familiar, as if she'd felt it many times before.

Leaning closer, Karin realized that what she'd thought was a tiny sphere was actually a minuscule drop of water. She reached out to touch it, only to jerk back when she felt as though someone had blown on the back of her neck. After casting a wary glance behind her Karin reached towards the drop of water again. This time, there was no strange feeling to accompany her touch.

Feeling a little bit silly, Karin was about to forget all about the water droplet when she noticed something wasn't quite right. Her finger had sunk all the way to the knuckle! Now, at four years old Karin was aware that she didn't know everything, but she was fairly sure that things weren't supposed to bigger on the inside than they were on the outside.

Enthralled, she reached deeper. From what she could tell, there was a pool of water beneath the soil - the droplet being the only hint as to its existence. Karin began to dig around the droplet with her fingers a little frantically. Almost in a trance, Karin dug, and dug, and dug until she was kneeling before a small pool.

Strange, she thought. She didn't quite understand how that had worked, but pushed the thought aside in favor of rinsing the dirt from her hands. The spring she'd created rippled as she once more disrupted its surface, flashing orange periodically. Curious now, Karin stilled her movements and leaned over so that her face hovered above the water.

The ripples steadily faded, leaving behind a glassy, mirror-like surface. Karin stared uncomprehendingly for a moment before realizing what was so wrong with the image before her. There was no reflection. Rather, there was, the pool just lacked her reflection. She could see the trees and blue sky reflected from above, but none of the tell-tale red hair she was known for. Karin leaned closer until the tip of her nose was nearly touching the liquid. 'Where am I?'

A split second later Karin was flailing, having overestimated her balance. She tipped forward and into the pool, scrunching her eyes shut just before hitting the water.

'Brrinng. Brrinng.' Michaela gripped the steering wheel tighter in an effort to ignore her phone. She wasn't going to tempt fate by answering while she drove. Having her license for only a year was not a good enough reason to attempt talking and driving.

'Brrinng!' She groaned aloud. "Please, please stop calling me already!" A beat of silence followed her desperate plea and she grinned smugly – only to have her lips twitch back into a frown when it sounded again.

Determined to ignore it, Michaela turned up the radio and focused on searching for her exit. Luckily, she caught a glimpse of a sign proclaiming 34B was only six miles up. A moment later her phone stopped its incessant buzzing and beeping.

Relieved, Michaela spent the next five minutes or so humming quietly along to some song she'd never heard before slowing down to take the curving exit.

Just as she made it halfway around she was able to make out a smoking car stopped on the road ahead of her. There was no space on either side of the car – just two low barriers and trees on either side of the road beyond them. The trees were the reason why Michaela hadn't seen the other car sooner.

Slamming her brakes and hissing curses Michaela realized she wasn't going to stop in time. The man standing beside the car dropped his cell phone and scrambled back towards the smoking vehicle, his mouth moving in what she assumed was a shout. As her car screeched closer she noticed there were scared faces in the back seat of the stopped car. "Oh, no… please no…"

Swallowing her panic she swerved to the left in an attempt to avoid killing both the children and herself. Her car, released from the tight turn it had been in, slammed into the concrete barrier before flipping over it altogether. The vehicle ended up flipping twice, leaving it upright when it finally came to a halt against a large tree.

This time smoke was billowing from her car's engine, nearly obscuring the small fire in front of her. A gurgled moan sounded and Michaela realized it was her own. It was as if all her senses had been shut off and restarted and all she could do was suffer through it. Her glasses were miraculously intact, if a bit skewed, and she could tell it was a low hanging tree branch causing the searing pain from the center of her forehead to her right temple.

The front end of her car was smashed in more heavily on the left side and it was with mounting horror that Michaela looked down. She let out a strangled sound when she saw her left leg. Her foot was hidden from view but her knee and shin looked disgustingly flat and bloody beneath the twisted mix of metal and plastic. Through some miracle she couldn't feel it, but that by no means meant she wasn't in pain – far from it, in fact.

Aside from the shattered glass embedded in every visible inch of skin she could see; the door had crumpled so completely that the left side of her rib cage was pinned against the seat. Michaela could tell something was wrong with her lung. She struggled to inhale, choking on blood as she did so. She distractedly noticed the airbag had partially deployed. She doubted it would have helped her even if it had been working correctly.

'Brrinng! Brrinng!' A hysterical laugh bubbled up and turned into painful sobbing at the sound of her ringing cell. I don't think I'm going to be able to answer that anytime soon.

"Hey! Miss! Can you hear me?" Michaela heard the voice above the ringing in her ears and turned her head. Or rather, she tried to. The branch that had broken through the windshield dug a little deeper when she tried to move her head to the left so she settled for cutting her eyes towards the voice.

It was a little hard to see clearly but Michaela managed to make out the man's violently orange hair through the blood and smoke obscuring her vision. It was the same man whose car had been blocking the exit. She even caught a glimpse of his two children a little ways away.

"It's going to be okay." His voice was strained and Michaela knew without a doubt he was lying. There was a certain amount of desperation to his voice that left no room for doubt. "I've called an ambulance – they'll fix you up. You're going to be fine."

Trying her utmost to focus while her vision faded in and out, Michaela struggled to remain conscious. Suddenly she was so, so afraid. I'm going to die, she thought with startling clarity. I'm only seventeen and I'm going to die today.

"…Hey! Hey! Stay with me!" She found herself back in the car, no longer lost to that horrible void. She locked eyes with the man again. He had reached through the broken window and across her body to rest his hand on her uninjured shoulder. "My name's Jason. Can you tell me yours?"

"Mi… chaela…" she rasped shallowly; trying to ignore the rising fluid in her lungs. She brought her right hand up to grip Jason's hand on her shoulder, clinging to it. Michaela was sobbing pitifully while simultaneously struggling to breathe. "It… hurts," she choked out.

The best she could do to describe her pain was to say it was unbearable. Michaela kept shifting between the excruciating agony of her injuries and the periods of blackness that signified her lapses in consciousness. The time spent in a stupor only made the pain all the more awful when she returned to it.

Vaguely she realized the man was sobbing right along with her. "Dad? Dad?!" It was one of the children from the car. With a monumental effort Michaela focused on the two little girls, one of whom had her dad's bright orange hair. They were clutching each other under a tree a little ways away and the older one – with the orange hair – had a cell phone to her ear. She was holding back the younger girl.

Both were crying pitifully. The brunette couldn't have been older than seven while the other looked to be about twelve or so.

"Stay back girls! It's not safe!" Jason only turned long enough to make sure they were listening before once again focusing on Michaela. He went back to choking out reassurances and platitudes. "…Dammit! Where's the ambulance?!"

"They say it's really close!" His daughter called out through her tears. Michaela jerked her eyes open and used every last bit of her strength to cling to the hand still gripping her shoulder. The pain was fading, becoming more distant and focusing on staying awake became even harder.

The panic she had felt at being unable to breathe started to fade away along with the pain. Is this it? Michaela's right eye was completely obscured with blood now and each breath she took was wet and left her choking. The fire at the front of her car looked like it was steadily dying and she could hear the telltale buzzing of her phone coming from the floor on the passenger side. Even fainter were the sounds of horns and shouts coming from the road.

"…Michaela! Breathe with me! You're going to be just fine. Can you hear it? The ambulance is close. You can hear the sirens if you focus…" But Michaela couldn't focus – not with the way her mind was drifting. She could no longer speak through the fluid in her airways but she tried to mouth the words she wanted to say to this man. Thank you for staying with me. Thank you. It's okay. I'm dying, I'm scared, but it's okay. Thank you.

And then Jason was gone. Michaela had no clue whether she was dead or merely unconscious; she only knew that oblivion wasn't so bad compared to the pain she'd been in before.

She lost all sense of self. There was only peace, but no conscious thought to disrupt her rest. No sense of time invaded her existence in the void until it was all unexpectedly ripped from her.

She felt as though she was being strangled by a snake. Whatever surrounded her weak and feeble body had it in a vice grip. A cacophony of sounds pounded at her eardrums but she ignored it in favor of the other sensations overwhelming her body. She could feel fluid in her mouth and it brought her unwillingly back to the accident. She lost herself in panic as she frantically spit and coughed until she was free to breath, to gasp, to scream –

And then suddenly the rest of her body was free and she felt as though she was falling through the air. She supposed she wasn't actually falling – she never hit the ground – but she felt the same level of exposure. The air stung her sensitive skin and she felt pressure in odd places, like she was hitting things on the way down.

Then her head was cradled in something large, yet not unyielding. What felt like a massive rag rubbed roughly at her eyes and nose, clearing them of disgusting fluids. Michaela tried to flail even as she continued wailing and screaming at the top of her lungs. Unfortunately her flailing was put to a halt when some sort of fabric bound her body – encasing her.

It was horrible.

The feelings of helplessness, fatigue, fear, and whatever else she was feeling and couldn't put a finger to were drowning her, much like the fluids had earlier. Soon even her wailing had to end when she realized how short of breath she was.

None of the resignation to her fate from earlier remained. Before, she had been eager to escape the pain; now, she fought to live. She couldn't feel any of the injuries she'd sustained in the accident – she reveled in that fact even whilst she struggled against her restraints.

Unexpectedly, she felt movement again. Even with her eyes open she couldn't make out more than blurs and an excessive amount of white. The sensation of movement came to an abrupt end when she was transferred to another strange, moving surface.

Her sniffles and whimpers – all that was left of her earsplitting shrieks – died down a bit in her exhaustion. Michaela realized belatedly her adrenalin rush had run its course and settled for sleeping it off in the hopes that when she woke up, things would make sense.

And so she slept.