Being reborn was a very humbling experience.

Rather, being a newborn was a humbling experience; it was only through these memories in my head that I was aware of that. Memories of a different life. One where I was older; one where I could speak and listen; one where I could see.

I took my senses for granted and it wasn't until I had them ripped from me, brutally and abruptly, that I realized how much I needed them. To go from seeing and smelling and hearing and everything to experiencing almost nothing… It was the single most terrifying experience I have ever undergone.

My arms and legs would not respond and my voice – once capable of forming actual words – was raw and untrained. My eyes could only make out blurry shapes and I was sure they were nothing but maleficent. Sometimes, faces would even appear close to my eyes, long enough for me to focus on them and then vanish again.

I could do nothing.

I didn't toss around words like helpless very often, but that's exactly the state in which I found myself. The only sense I knew I retained was my ability to sense warmth. And that didn't help at all because all that told me was that it was cold.

So very, very cold.

Confused, scared and helpless, I did the only thing I could in this state of being: I screamed. I cried, I wailed, I fussed, until eventually my throat was so raw that I could not make any sound at all. I was in a senseless – literally – state of panic and nothing could calm me. That, of course, only caused the blurry, anonymous shapes to hover around me more often.

It was never ending!

Which in turn set me off again – a very destructive cycle.

Later, hours or days – I did not know – when I regained some semblance of rational thought and came to terms with the fact that I was useless, I realized just what had happened.

I was a baby.

It was impossible. Impossible. I had memories in my head of streets and cars and walking and talking and it was impossible!

Somewhere in the back of my mind I recognized the panic attack for what it was.

All I cared about, though, was the fact that I could not breathe and I would not have that taken from me too!

The blurry shapes swooped in again – my breath became even shorter – and I was lost to unconsciousness in short order.

When I woke later I tried to stay calm. I did not know how old I was or why I was here or where here was-

'This was not staying calm!'

I took in a deep breath, now intimately aware of just how much damage I had done to my throat. I was also very much aware of the fact that I could only focus my vision on objects immediately in front of me and how that limited my world and how my body would not move like I wanted.

It was all so frustrating!

I had memories of moving, of walking! I knew I could do it but this body- this useless, senseless, helpless body-

Another deep breath.

Calm down.

Calm…

It occurred to me then that I now knew why babies cried all the time. Even with all my mental advantages, the physical limitations of my body left me with a volatile temper.

Right. So sight was out. Movement was out. I could hear… but I could not understand. Because of course it wouldn't be English. I didn't need my sight or my sense of smell or touch or anything so why should the language-

This time I cut off the tantrum before it had a chance to even make me breathe heavier. No sense in losing my head over something I could not change. I still held out hope that this was just a really realistic, extremely terrifying dream. I would wake up in my bed once it was over and forget about it within a few days. No, this was not real. This couldn't be real. It was some obscure language I heard in a movie somewhere that they were speaking; I couldn't make out any details of the room because I hadn't seen the inside of a hospital in years, not because my sight was bad-

A face!

One of the blurs – humans, they were humans and of course they were humans! – was in my face and I could focus!

I know my eyes went wide, surprised as I was, but I was too interested in this woman's face to care. Apparently my mind wanted to go the extra mile now, if it started making up actual features for these things to have.

The woman made a noise, drawing me from my thoughts. It was… it sounded almost like she was babbling something. Cooing, maybe? Yes, that was a good word for it - she was cooing something at me – baby-talk, I guess… that was demeaning – and doing something with my hand…

Oh, her finger.

It was more reflex than anything, grabbing the digit. The action was strangely calming. This nightmare robbed me of almost everything about my body that I took for granted and being able to control it again, even if it was just a small part of it, flooded me with a profound sense of relief.

The woman's tone raised in pitch and I thought I saw a smile on her face – it was still hard to work out finer details. She sounded happy now – apparently I had done something right. I thought her eyebrows weren't furrowed anymore too.

'Is this my mother?'

Well, I was a baby in this place. A dream-mother, maybe? I was startling aware that this was a dream though – was that even possible inside a dream? Could you know you were… I didn't think so but it must be true because my memories told me I already had a mother! This wasn't- It couldn't be! No!

My breathing hitched and her face grew panicked – her reaction was actually what clued me in. I was able to calm myself because of it.

Immediately she looked relieved and I had an odd thought of how much fun it was seeing emotions passing over her face at my slightest provocation. People were normally more guarded…

She looked away from me then, brown hair loose about her shoulders, and said something to another blur – human – behind her. Her face withdrew but thankfully let me hold on to her finger, it was still relieving to control my body. Especially when my legs would not respond-

Oh, another face.

A man this time.

'Ah, I understand. Time to meet the parents.'

I was probably a strange child, growing up.

After the first year of my life, I gave up on all of this being some crazy dream brought on by just the right combination of food or alcohol or whatever the hell I did to switch my brain into crazy-dreams-mode. It was a depressing realization to come to; that my past life was over. Or perhaps it had never even happened? Maybe this was some kind of crazy after life?

In the end it didn't matter – I was here now, for better or for worse. This was my life. All of my memories, the people I'd known, my skills, the things I'd done… none of it mattered anymore.

I was alone.

That knowledge left me with a rather gloomy outlook on life as a child. I was probably much quieter than I should have been and I knew I was far too introspective. I possessed the mind of an adult and I was stuck in the body of a child… How could I not be strange with two lives in my head?

The lion's share of that time lost in thought, the time I spent silent and thinking, was geared toward trying to figure out where I was. Early on, I had thought myself reborn into my own world. A different country or region of course, given the language barrier but certainly still on Earth. This after-life or whatever it was, I naively figured, could only happen on the same place I lived originally. I never even considered that I was on another world.

I was rudely disavowed of that assumption when I left the house one day in my mother's arms, just in time to see someone with cat ears on the top of their head walk by.

Not on Earth, then.

Eventually, I reasoned out that I could do nothing about the where or why bits of my being here, wherever here was. It was a sobering realization and served to force me into giving up on ever seeing Earth again. I was moody for days but the only thing I could think to do was end my life and see if I wound up back on Earth. I didn't have the courage to do the deed though and, admittedly, I was curious about this world. So instead, I made the decision to stay here and decided to focus on my physical skills.

It was incredibly, horribly, indescribably annoying to know how to move around and still not be capable of it.

In the end, I re-learned how to roll over, crawl, walk and run pretty quickly. It put me months ahead of the children that other parents would bring over to play with me but I didn't care. Not being able to move independently was horrible. I used the fact that I remembered how to move already to my advantage and so the only remaining part was then to teach my body what my brain already knew.

Originally, I was worried that I would learn the native language slower than my peers but those worries turned out to be unfounded. I was never ahead of anyone but I was never behind either. My vocal chords were untrained in this dialect – in all dialects – and this time I did not have any knowledge to speed up the learning curve either.

In addition to being quiet and introspective, I knew I was just as curious as any other developing child. Perhaps even more so. My curiosity, unlike other children, sprouted from the fact that I was in a different world and somehow, someway, I had memories of an old one.

What was different here? Was I on another planet? In another solar system?

Maybe a different dimension, crazy as it sounded, was the answer. There were humans here, after all. The chances of humans evolving on another planet, the exact same way they had on Earth, must have been infinitesimally small.

Unless they weren't human at all, just similar enough to fool me. I did see people do impossible things, like jumping from rooftops and healing cuts in seconds… In the end, whether or not these were humans was just as unimportant as why I was here; I was stuck here, with these maybe-humans, for better or for worse.

Their technology was another interesting point for me. Their tools were similar in purpose to their counterparts in my memories but oh so different in the details. The cars, the trains, the… airships – all of them were generally similar to what I remember from Earth but all of them were incredibly different too. The fuel, in particular, struck me as odd.

Dust.

How did dust power vehicles?

Ideas like that reminded me of just how far away from home I was.

Or rather, what I used to think of as home. This place – Vale – had rapidly become home to me. What else could it be? I gave up on all this being a crazy dream, on returning to Earth. This was my home now…

I wasn't sure how I felt about that, yet.

Age 3

Children were cruel creatures.

Maybe I was unaware the first time around but with an adult mindset it was depressingly obvious. They would alienate anyone they saw as different or strange with a ferocity that left me stunned.

Case in point: Faiche.

It was lunch at my daycare. The kids separated into their social groups and went about messily destroying the food in front of them. All except for me, of course. I, as per usual, sat a ways off from the other children. I was accepted into their groups, for the most part, but I was not explicitly invited.

It was good that way, I figured. I could sit back and observe so I knew what I needed to do to fool the caretakers into believing I was just another child. Things like what activities I should be participating in and what skills I should be showing.

I found it stressful, imitating my peers, and the daycare attendants found it worrying. They would come and talk to me every so often, usually a couple times a day, and I would be forced to take part in some meaningless game for the following half hour.

Well, not forced, but if I outright refused them then they would just grow more attentive. For now I think they just believed me shy and withdrawn; I did not want to give them a reason to suspect anything more.

"My mom says you're just an animal," a boy said. His name was Liitu and he was standing over Faiche as the faunus – a human with animal characteristics, as best I could tell – hunched over his food, trying to draw less attention to himself.

"Yeah, an animal!" That one was Arbel, often he would act as Liitu's second hand whenever they bullied Faiche.

Of course, I very much doubt they saw it as bullying. It was likely just their parents' attitudes toward the faunus rubbing off on them. They were too young still to truly form any opinions of their own and impressionable enough to imitate what they saw adults doing.

Still, I didn't know any better either. Maybe the adults were right? I couldn't see any differences between the faunus and the humans – excluding the obvious physical traits, of course – which led me to believe that it was just baseless discrimination to which the faunus were subjected. I couldn't confirm that though and I didn't care enough to try. My life was hard enough already, associating with the faunus would only make it harder.

It was sad, certainly, that they were treated this way, but in the end it didn't affect me. Perhaps even more depressing was the fact that the attendants did nothing to stop it.

So, I turned back to my food, annoyed but otherwise unconcerned.

Children were cruel creatures.

Age 4

My parents died when I was four.

We were in Forever Fall Forest, a place filled to the brim with beautiful red, flowering trees. Beacon Academy, a place where I knew 'hunters' and 'huntresses' – some sort of army, maybe? – were trained, was conducting a training exercise deeper in the forest.

Many residents of the city proper used the yearly occurrence to venture into the otherwise somewhat dangerous forest. Just what made the forest dangerous was unknown to me. I figured it was just the wildlife because my parents wouldn't tell me and I couldn't ask too specific a question without it looking strange. I wasn't exactly supposed to know the forest was dangerous based upon the fact that city residents would only venture into it when Beacon held their exercises.

At any rate, we were in the forest. I was sitting under the shade of a large tree, watching my parents set out the picnic blanket and trying to figure out what the weird pressure in my head was.

It – the pressure – had been around a lot lately. I was always much more aware of it when I stopped to think on it though, almost like it was… responding to my interest. I likened it to recalling a memory that just would not quite come. An almost physical presence that would either make me feel completely revitalized or utterly exhausted when I managed to make 'contact' with it.

It frightened me, were I honest with myself.

In my old life I never had a presence in my head. It was strange. It was different. But most of all, it was an unknown. I did not know what it was or what it could do to me. All I knew was that it felt like something exerting pressure on my head, like a headache but without the pain. For all I knew it could be some kind of volatile mental illness.

But still, my curiosity recklessly drove me forward.

"Enten!"

I flinched, startled. Belatedly I realized my father was calling my name and apparently had been for a while.

"Sorry dad," I called as I scrambled to my feet and ran over to the food.

I still had trouble responding to my given name in this world. I had well over two decades' worth of experience responding to a different one in my old life; three years would not make that habit die completely.

My mother laughed when I jumped on the picnic blanket and landed on my knees. I for one was still ecstatic that I could do things like that and not have to deal with sore knees for the rest of the day.

Sometimes, being a kid was great!

We ate then, mostly in silence. My father was an electrician, as far as I could understand anyway. I did not know how electronics worked in Vale so he could have a completely different job title, I just likened it to an electrician from Earth.

Regardless of the name, though, his profession made it easier for some of my quirks to be explained away. I was a programmer in my past life and that left me with a very objective mindset. I strived to be unbiased and still do, subjective thoughts were suppressed to the point where I had almost no strong opinions on any topic.

It made me a pretty boring conversationalist. Sitting in front of a computer day in and day out did not help either.

Thankfully, though, my father was somewhat similar. Otherwise all the time I spent observing people and generally not moving at all would be much more difficult to explain away.

It was something I did a lot now, observing people. Usually I would watch other children to see just how much knowledge I should be displaying in class or forethought when presented with learning problems. Other times I would watch adults to discern more about Vale and this world – the faunus were of a particular interest to me for a time-

"Kiddoooooo!"

"Huh," I said around a mouthful of my peanut butter and jelly sandwich – at least that was the same!

"Whatcha thinking about," dad said, the crow's feet around his eyes crinkling as he smiled.

"Uhh," I started. Kid thoughts! I wrote a list of questions about Vale that I could use in these situations, things that would be obvious to adults but still unknown to me.

'Like why the airships had four wings instead of two.'

Perfect!

I opened my mouth to ask just that but stopped short when I saw an odd looking creature a small distance out into the forest.

"What's that," I said, pointing. My previous question was forgotten entirely in the face of this new being. It sort of looked like a warthog from Earth, but a little larger. It had white plates covering its face and spine; it looked generally menacing.

'A Grimm?'

My parents would try to scare me with stories of them from time to time, usually as a bogeyman-esque warning. Like the bogeyman, I had thought the 'Grimm' were fiction.

This thing looked like what my parents described-

"Honey," my father said as he got to his feet, the food completely forgotten. "Get Enten out of here!"

And then, my mother was hurriedly gathering me up in her arms.

"What," I tried to ask, confused. I could sense there was danger, the fear on my parents' faces told me that much. But the creature was only half as tall as they were. It could hurt certainly, the wicked looking tusks told me that, but surely it would scare when presented with something so much bigger than it was.

But it did not scare. Instead it curled itself into a ball and, like some kind of demented hedgehog, threw itself at my father.

A horrified scream ripped itself from my throat when I saw him go flying by my mother and me. He impacted a tree somewhere behind me with a wet thud, then mom screamed.

I reflexively shut my eyes and covered my ears, my adult mind understood danger much better than a four year old mind would have. I knew now, with utter certainty, that we were in trouble; just like I knew the amount of blood on the ground was deadly to a human.

And then, I was flying through the air.

My mother made a horrible choking sound as she hit the ground followed seconds later by a garbled attempt to say my name. It sounded like she was gargling water.

'Blood,' my mind realized even as panic set in.

The Grimm was charging me now and I don't want to die!

I was defenseless and frozen. No one else was here.

Getupgetupgetupgetup!

I obeyed but ended up having to dive out of the Grimm's path at the last second. One of its tusks clipped me, tearing a bloody gash down my right forearm. The air rushed out of my body in a forced gasp and I landed on my back but I knew I needed to get up! because that thing was-

I scrambled to the left and avoided it this time, getting my feet under me just as it circled around and charged me again.

Desperately, I threw my hands out in front of me. Intellectually I knew it would do nothing to stop death from coming for me but-

The presence!

A content feeling flooded my mind immediately followed by a warm, powerful sensation. Gooseflesh covered my arms and the hair on the back of my neck stood on end. Time started to slow down around me; picking out every detail on the Grimm's body was so simple now. I could see every scar, every rune that glowed an angry red. Every blood stain and drop of blood that was thrown from it as it spun…

My parents!

My arms grew incredibly hot for a split second before the heat fled just as fast as it appeared.

The Grimm, only a few scant feet in front of me, buckled under a nearly translucent blue wave of force.

It was violently forced out of its self-induced roll and tossed, boneless, away from me.

I wavered on my feet, exhausted and certain I was about to fall unconscious. I didn't want to though. I needed to get help. I needed to figure out what just happened. I needed… A thud attracted my attention and I turned my failing vision toward it just in time to see the Grimm fall back to the ground and collapse, unmoving.

'Not a fairytale after all…'

A/N: Revised (03/19/2016) Figured it was time I went over this – it needed a brush up. Thanks for reading to this point! If you enjoy a story that intentionally tries to avoid most of the common fanfiction tropes, then I think you might find mine to your liking… No instant affection or conflict-less friendships. Realism is what I'm going for. Yeah, it's an OC/SI, but in my completely, utterly, honestly unbiased opinion… it's pretty awesome!

But, whether or not you keep reading, thanks for giving this a shot!

-Phailen