The first time he was aware of anything at all, it lasted three seconds. There was no light, no sound he could name, only a strange pressure and a warmth.
It happened again a week later. This time it lasted longer, maybe ten seconds, maybe twenty— he had no way to measure it, no frame of reference for time at all. He simply existed.
Over the following weeks, the moments grew. Ten seconds became a minute. A minute became several. He didn't know he was becoming aware— he had no concept of "awareness," no language...
By the fifth month, he could stay awake for what might have been an hour, the dim, muffled rhythm of his mother's heartbeat his only company.
Pain.
He didn't even know what it was called.
It arrived without warning. It was the first thing his young brain had ever felt, and with it, something else was awakened — something old and powerful, something he would later call "magic."
And like a homeless person a minute from freezing to death, he pulled it towards himself like a blanket, to soothe his pain.
~~~
Adam never would have imagined that he would ever be so lucky, he was a realistic kind of guy and never believed he was some kind of chosen one or a protagonist who was destined for great things. Ever since he was young, he was prepared to face misery, just in case life decided to throw a disaster or some incurable disease at him that would take his life.
Expecting the worst has served him well thus far, everything bad that happened to him, from his parents' divorce to breaking his leg on twelve different occasions, wasn't the worst thing that could happen. In his opinion, he was only thankful for all the other times his leg didn't break...
And it comes as no surprise that he wasn't frustrated when he learned that his wife got pregnant with a child way too soon, there was always the possibility of them having octuplets...
Both of them were only children, and both had always wanted kids of their own— just maybe not quite this soon, not while they were still in their early twenties and had just got their BDS a year ago. But for them, it was still a happy surprise
Adam was also a gamer, and whenever he felt stressed, he liked to keep himself busy playing his favorite game, FINAL FANTASY II.
Jean sat across from him in the armchair, one hand resting on her stomach. She'd spent the better part of the evening listening to the looping battle music of the NES console Adam had picked up from some garage a couple of days ago, a strange, secondhand thing with no box, or manual. He treated it like some family heirloom.
Normally, she didn't mind it. She'd long since made peace with the looping music, the occasional triumphant shout when he beat something particularly difficult— it was background noise by now, Tonight, though, every note of it seemed to land directly behind her eyes. She'd been irritable all evening for no reason her patience worn down to nothing at all — and the same tinny melody that usually barely registered was, tonight, unbearable.
"Adam." Her voice was flat, worn out.
"One second."
"You always say one second."
"I just need to—"
She reached over and gently tugged the game free from the console— the kind of small, half-apologetic gesture of someone who just wants five minutes of quiet before bed.
The screen went to static.
"Hey," Adam said
"Sorry," Jean said, not sounding all that sorry.
For a moment, nothing happened. The television made static noise. Adam reached for the cartridge, already halfway into a sentence about save files and how much work he had lost.
Then Jean flinched, faintly.
Something faint and warm crawled up through her palm, through her wrist, gone before she could react properly.
She didn't give it much thought, she thought it was static electricity or something.
Neither of them noticed the console's label had changed, just for a second— the faded marker letters flickering into something that wasn't English.
Two hours later, Jean pressed a hand to her stomach and murmured, half to herself, "Little guy's kicking a lot tonight."
~~~The Fetus POV~~~
While the fetus was clinging to dear life, in the only way he knew how, his heart beating in his chest erratically, while he was in the middle of his struggle, something struck him, and it would have passed harmlessly if not for the potential it held, his small bouts of accidental magic he managed to achieve clung to it, disassembling it, only taking what it needs.
The warmth he'd pulled toward himself didn't stay a blanket for long. It sank inward, chasing the pain to wherever it lived, and everywhere it went, it left some of it behind, using the potential it took like a shell holding his essence together. While it did its job, it rebuilt him from the inside.
Small, invisible hands were at work in him, thread by thread, mending something that had been on the verge of unraveling entirely. Where there had been a frantic heartbeat, there was now a steady rhythm.
For hi it didn't feel gentle, but it felt soothing, in the way that setting a broken bone feels correct even as it hurts, defects were being mended, imperfections were getting corrected, something was being written down, something only he could see.
'Status'
[ na_e: ???? ]
[???]
[ st_ ]
[ __]
He didn't know that his instinct and his inherited magic and a dead man's clever, forgotten enchantment, built so he could play his game back in some distant castle, had saved his life, he didn't know that somewhere above him, in a world he hadn't been born into yet, his mother had just felt him move and smiled.
Her motherly instinct and her incomprehensible irrationality had finally been laid to rest.
~~~
Jean grew rounder, more tired, more prone to strange, fleeting aches she couldn't explain, since nothing ever showed up on a scan. The doctor said the fetus was smaller than usual, but no test showed any more reason for concern. That made the couple tense for some time, but because everything else was stable, they soon relaxed. Adam, for his part, never did get his console working again. He tried, on and off, for weeks, before giving up and tossing it in a drawer, muttering about garage-sale junk and wasted money.
Neither of them noticed that their son had gone more and more peaceful— thankfully the good kind of peaceful, not the dead kind.
_____________________________________________________________________________
TO BE CONTINUED
~~~
What do you think? If you like my story, leave a stone, if you hate my story, throw a stone, maybe it would hit my head. You never know...
ps: I am aware FF2 isn't supposed to be released until a decade later, let alone enter the UK but...