Hey there, first story I'm publishing on here, hope you guys like it.

Story inspired by Darkpetal16's Sakura.

I don't own anything.

The first time she woke up it had been disorienting, as it would have been for anyone in her situation. For a long time she had laid still, the familiar sights, sounds, and scents of a hospital invading her frighteningly dull sense as she stared upwards into light that should have been painfully bright. That had been the third clue that the body she was in was not her own.

The first had been the metal pole that, some time ago, had seen fit to stick itself through her abdomen and destroy several internal organs while the ceiling of the subways crumbled around her, earth shaking and people screaming.

The second had been the warm, welcoming light that had enveloped her as she stepped through the gates of the graveyard beside her brother, leaving behind a tomb stone engraved with her name and a crowd of weeping friends and family.

Off to her side the heart rate monitor called out the time of a pulse that should not have existed. The girl took a deep breath to test her lungs, extra oxygen pumped in through the breathing tubes that had been wrapped around her face.

Beats were counted in her mind and she tried to raise an arm. The mental order was obeyed, and a short, thin limb appeared in her vision. It was certainly not her own. For one it lacked the ink that had marked the inside of the forearms for most of her thirty one years. The small hand that responded when she told it to twist was without the lines that age brought, no longer tough with scars and callouses built out of years of work. The smooth, pale skin confirmed her suspicions and the girl closed her eyes. It would figure that this had happened to her.

She closed her eyes and breathed deeply, calming the immediate panic and fear for the future. She let her arm drop and slowly relaxed. She wasn't surprised, not really, not in the core of it. Her people had a belief that when they died and at last found their way to the afterlife they would be reborn into the stories of old and lived there instead.

It would appear that her new life started a few years in.

Well, She thought as the door opened, let's see how much trouble I can cause.

When her people spoke of joining the Great Tales she doubted that those who did were supposed to remember so vividly all they knew of them from beforehand. One more abnormality to add to her ever growing list of them.

It might have helped if she hadn't near-feinted when she caught the green eyed reflection in the glasses of her doctor, but the discovery of who she now was had her head reeling in a very unpleasant manner. She hoped that it had just been the glasses playing tricks on her, but was well aware it might not have been.

The girl turned her head to the side, catching the reflection of a child in the screen of her monitors. A grimace appeared. She was right.

Parents were a foreign concept to the girl. Certainly she knew what they were, had had figures that mimicked them in her past life. She was even aware through old, faded memories that there had been a time, when she was very young, where she lived with her own. That had been long, long ago.

The couple that rushed into her room not five minutes after the doctors left were nothing like those distant figures she remembered, yet the warmth in their eyes was the exact same. The same as she had received from her adoptive family.

It made her heart hurt to remember that it wasn't directed at her, but at the daughter that she had taken the place of.

The man took one look at her and burst into tears, brown eyes hiding behind his sleeve as his wife completely bypasses him, appearing at the girls side with almost abnormal speed. There was a flurry of words bombarding her, questions to her health, her head. It was a relief that they were spoke in a language she actually understood or things might have been more difficult than she was sure that they were already going to be.

The sight of the two parents also put out any doubt that may have still been lingering the corners of her mind in regards to her current possession.

Against the doctors orders Catherine tried to sit up, wincing when the world around her spun into a blur and a dull throbbing made itself known on the side of her head. The woman slid forwards, wrapping an arm around her now-small shoulders and helping her to sit up. The world slowly slid back into focus, blurry outlines coming to clarity that was both lower in quality for her eyes and higher in visibility for the lighting, further messing up her mental perception.

"Sakura, are you alright?" the mother asked, hand still placed firmly between her daughters shoulder blades. She stared blankly for a moment before remembering that that was who she was now. Sakura.

Information was the first thing she would need to manage her current situation, what better way to get it than to ask?

"What happened?" the girl asked, reaching up to touch the painfully area behind her ear, above the Parietal and Temporal bones. It was far too sensitive to be undamaged, and bit of probing revealed there to be a series of stitches that crossed the suture. That kind of injury could be damaging for mental functions, hit hard enough it might be fatal. Is that why she was here and not a newborn, lacking in memory or motor functions? If so what had happened that would land a child, voice high and hair soft, in a hospital with that kind of damage?

From the pain in her head she was guessing concussion. From the concern being displayed and the doctor's surprise at her waking she guessed that it had had consciousness away for some time, at least a day.

"You don't remember?" the man asked, making his way to the girl, Sakura's, side. Her head shook and she immediately regretting the decision, paling as a sudden wave of vertigo hit. It was all she could do not to throw up.

"You fell," the blonde woman explained quietly, "You hit your head on a rock in the park. You've been asleep for three weeks."

Three weeks. That was how long it had taken them to excavate the fallen tunnels and retrieve her body, those of several others, and bury them in the quake churned earth. She wondered idly if Sakura's heart had stopped and that was what had drawn her to the new form.

Strong arms wrapped around her and the girl started, looking up to see the face of Sakura's father as he held her against his chest tentatively, as if one wrong move and she would break.

"We didn't know if you were going to wake up," he sniffed, and girl smiled, patting his arm in a gesture of comfort. She couldn't more much thanks to the various tubes and wires attached to her arms.

In child-like innocence she spoke. "I couldn't sleep forever," she told him. The parents smiled at her but it wasn't fooling her. She read their expressions better than any children could, recognizing the feelings that were poorly hidden, especially for people with the training she knew that they had. Fear, sadness, bitterness and relief all shone down at her.

A thought occurred as the girl remembered something about Sakura from her previous knowledge. "Uhm…" the two smiled when she made it clear she wished to speak.

"Yes dear?" the mother asked.

"What about school?"

The father started to laugh.

"I would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that some thinking, feeling, remembering part of me will continue. But as much as I want to believe that, and despite the ancient and worldwide cultural traditions that assert an afterlife, I know of nothing to suggest that it is more than wishful thinking."
― Carl Sagan, Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium