With You In My Head

CH3. (Just Like) Starting Over

Chapter Three - (Just Like) Starting Over

PREVIOUSLY ON WITH YOU IN MY HEAD: I think I was in the Fade and I had real trouble concentrating. Perhaps it was a concussion? Anyway, the spirit kept poking me and then I went to sleep. I think I died for real then.

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As I slept, I could feel the warmth return to me. I felt encompassed by the warmth from all sides. I couldn't move, and I couldn't hear, and I generally couldn't do anything at the moment, but I felt safe.

I don't know how much time passed before I could start hearing again. At the beginning there were only a few mumbles, but with time I could discern that there were two voices. One of them was feminine and the other was masculine. The masculine one laughed a lot. I liked that. I liked laughing a lot too. Usually at my expense.

The time came when I could move again. I couldn't move a lot, but I moved as much as I could, which was a nudge here and there. I moved the most whenever the masculine voice was speaking. I liked the masculine voice a lot. I couldn't understand what the two people were saying, it was like my head was under the water and the voices were lost in the translation.

An undeterminable amount of time later I suddenly felt like I was being squeezed through a tube. It was a very uncomfortable feeling, let me tell you. Then the warmth that had surrounded me ever since I fell asleep suddenly went away and in the shock of the temperature change I couldn't stop the shriek that left my mouth. I was even more surprised that instead of the cursing I was doing in my head and that I tried to vocalize with my newly working mouth, I could hear a baby crying.

"What's going on?" I tried to ask, but the baby cried again at the same time I opened my mouth to speak.

I think I was covered with a warm blanket that made the coldness of the room much more bearable and when whoever was holding me put me on something even warmer and alive, I felt even warmer. The baby stopped crying as well and I was happy with the silence. I almost went back to sleep, but the two voices that I kept hearing from that warm cocoon started cooing.

"Oh, Malcolm, look at her," the female said with a voice full of love and exhaustion.

"She's perfect," the man said, his voice all choked up as if he was crying.

I could feel warm lips on my forehead and a finger tracing my fingers. Instinctively I grabbed onto the fingers and could hear the man chuckle, "Barely a few minutes old and already she has such a strong grip."

I had a feeling that when I heard the baby cry before when I was trying to speak, but this just confirmed it. I was that baby.

To be honest, I always wondered what happened after a person died. I was agnostic, but I did believe in reincarnation. Guess what, world. I was right! I would have pumped my fist into the air triumphantly but as I was a new-born baby I didn't have the ability to do so as of yet. My mind however was crowing triumphantly at being right about something for a change.

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The years flew by in the blink of an eye.

Not really. They dragged like you wouldn't believe. I mean, I was a baby, I couldn't do much but sleep, eat and poop. I tried to be the best baby I could be, but I don't think it worked as well as I hoped it would, because I could sometimes hear my parents talking about how unlike a baby I was acting. Well, excuse me if I don't remember how I acted when I was a baby in my first life.

A few years after I was born my twin siblings were born. Their names were Carver and Bethany. Hawke.

Yes, you heard right. Carver and Bethany Hawke. As in Hawke. As in Dragon Age. Turns out the hallucination slash dream I thought I had when I died was real. I had thought that the spirits in the Fade were just a part of my overactive imagination and the fact that I was dying, but apparently it was all true. How did you know, you're probably asking yourselves. Well, it happened once upon a dream.

Yeah, lame answer - but true. Don't worry, I'll get to the full explanation soon. Hopefully.

Let's see then, whenever I went to sleep, I dreamed a lot. Even in my previous life I dreamed a lot, so I was happy to realized I could dream a lot here too. But sometimes instead of dreaming, I would appear in that sickly green area I had found myself when I was dying in the previous world. It didn't take me long to realize that it was the Fade.

And that I was apparently a mage. It was kind of a bittersweet realization. It was sweet, because I've always wanted to be a mage or a witch or any kind of interpretation of the word for a person with magic. It was bitter because Dragon Age was a world where mages were persecuted and sent to the Circles. Which meant that I was an apostate and that worried my parents even more than my weird behaviour. Apparently my Asperger's Syndrome had followed me from the previous life. I counted myself kind of lucky there, because I had no idea how to behave like a normal human being. I mean, in my previous life I was considered a bit weird, but I actually liked it. Me being diagnosed Autistic actually gave me a lot of answers that I didn't have before. I actually knew what was wrong with me and how to help myself instead of going to psychologists and psychiatrists and being diagnosed with schizophrenia or depression.

Er, I think I went off again. We were talking about my being a weird baby and then later a weird toddler and then later a weird teenager and an even weirder adult. Oh wait, we haven't gotten to the teenage and adult years yet. Just you wait.

As I was saying - the years dragged. Mainly because there was a thirty-year-old adult in a baby's body. I really did try to be the best baby ever, but as I said, I think I failed. I didn't cry a lot, started talking as soon as my mouth and vocal chords allowed it, began toddling around when I was barely a year old and my parents' acquaintances considered me a baby genius. I did nothing to persuade them differently.

It actually took me a while to realize that I was born as Marian Hawke. Leandra and Malcolm Hawke usually called themselves by dear, sweet, husband, wife, mommy, daddy, and very rarely did they call themselves by their names, so it took me a while to figure out what family I was born into. What world I was born into. At the beginning I thought I was transported into the medieval ages, but discarded that theory when my dad started using magic. I knew then that I was born into a different world altogether, but it still took me until Carver and Bethany's birth to realize that I was in the Dragon Age universe and in the body of the main character for the second Dragon Age game. I thanked my lucky stars that I could remember various tidbits from the Dragon Age lore so that I wasn't completely lost.

When I realized I was also a mage, I swore to myself to never let a demon overtake me and to work extremely hard at hiding my magic. Even from my parents. I think dad had an inkling that I was a mage, but he never said anything. Besides, I was too young to know what magic was and dad was extremely careful to not use any magic around me. The magic he did use and I saw him use was by accident when I went to drink some water in the night and I saw him use a spell wisp to read instead of using a candle. I pretended I haven't seen anything out of the ordinary when he looked at me sharply as I walked past him to the kitchen. I'm not sure if it worked because I never saw him use magic again.

It wasn't until I was twelve that my magic manifested itself, but that's for another chapter.