A Pre-Birth Report by Lyra, Age: Technically Not Yet Existing
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Okay.
Before we get into everything — the generals, the apocalypse, the very exhausting series of events that somehow ended with me being born into the middle of all of it — I need to explain something.
I did not ask for this.
I want that on record.
I, personally, submitted no application. I filled out no forms. Nobody handed me a brochure that said "Interested in a second life? Come be a baby in a post-apocalyptic warzone!" and I said yes, perfect, sign me up.
I was retired.
I was done.
My last life? Incredible. Smooth. A masterpiece, honestly, if I do say so myself. I spent approximately eighty-three years moving people around like chess pieces and not one of them ever figured it out. Merchants, nobles, politicians, generals — it didn't matter. I smiled, I positioned, I nudged, and everything went exactly where I needed it to go.
Nobody suspected the quiet one in the corner.
Nobody ever does.
I died peacefully, in a comfortable chair, with a cup of tea, at a very reasonable age, and I thought: that's it. I'm done. Retirement. Finally.
And then.
THEN.
Whatever force runs the universe looked at my file, looked at my very reasonable request for permanent rest, and said —
"Lol, no."
And now I'm here.
Let's talk about why.
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PART ONE: THE MEET-CUTE THAT STARTED ALL MY PROBLEMS
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My parents met during what historians would later call "The Restructuring" and what everyone who lived through it called "the absolute worst Tuesday in human history."
The world had ended. People had gotten powers. Society was reorganizing itself the way society always reorganizes after a collapse — loudly, messily, and with a lot of unnecessary violence about who was in charge.
My mother, Sora, was twenty-two.
She had a combat ability that let her move with terrifying precision. Fast, clean, efficient. She didn't waste energy. She didn't waste words. She showed up, solved the problem, and left.
She was, by all accounts, extremely cool.
My father, Caen, was twenty-four.
He had a sensory ability — he could read spaces, track movements, feel the shape of a situation before it happened. Tactical genius. Very calm. Very composed. The kind of man who walked into a room and immediately knew seventeen things about everyone in it.
He noticed my mother the moment she walked in.
She did not notice him.
This is important.
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The first time they met properly, it was a planning session for a joint operation. My mother had been assigned to lead the strike team. My father had been assigned to advise.
He advised.
She ignored the advice.
The operation succeeded anyway, because she was that good.
He was, by his own later admission, completely gone at that point.
"You ignored everything I said," he told her afterward.
"It worked," she said.
"I know. That's the problem."
My mother looked at him for approximately three seconds, decided he was either very smart or very annoying, and walked away to write her report.
He watched her go.
He was smiling.
This is how my father fell in love: a woman ignored his expertise and was right about it, and he thought, yes, that one, forever, absolutely.
Romantic. Bizarre. Very him.
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PART TWO: THE COURTSHIP, WHICH WAS MOSTLY THEM ARGUING
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Here is what nobody tells you about two highly capable, deeply stubborn people falling in love:
They fight about everything.
Not bad fighting. Not mean fighting. Just — two people who are both usually right, discovering that sometimes they are right about different things, and neither of them knows how to lose gracefully.
My father liked plans. Long plans. Detailed plans. Plans with contingencies and sub-contingencies and little notes in the margins.
My mother liked to look at a plan, understand it completely, and then improvise the moment something changed.
My father found this maddening.
My mother found his finding-it-maddening maddening.
This is basically their entire relationship summarized.
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The punch almost happened six months in.
There was a mission. There was a plan — my father's plan, very good plan, he spent three days on it. And then halfway through, my mother made a different call, and the mission succeeded faster than projected, and my father, instead of just being happy about it, said —
"You deviated."
"We won," my mother said.
"You deviated from the plan."
"Faster. With fewer injuries. We won."
"That's not the—"
"Caen."
"—point, the point is that if you had just—"
"Caen."
"—followed the established parameters then we would have—"
She turned around.
She looked at him.
Her fist came up.
He stopped talking.
Her fist stopped about three centimetres from his nose.
They stared at each other.
"...You're right," he said, very quietly. "We won."
She lowered her fist.
"Thank you."
"You're very scary," he said.
"I know."
"I think I love you."
"I know that too," she said, and walked off.
He stood there for a moment.
Then he smiled so wide that two nearby soldiers pretended not to see it out of respect for his dignity.
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PART THREE: THE PART WHERE THINGS GOT HARD AND THEY GOT BETTER
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Here's the thing about love in a broken world:
It doesn't get to be soft for very long.
Things got harder. Resources got scarce. Factions started competing. The people who had power — real power, ability power — started being sorted into ranks, and rank meant responsibility, and responsibility meant that my parents stopped having time for anything that wasn't survival.
They fought less about small things.
The world started providing much bigger things to fight about.
There was a period — about eight months, from what I've gathered — where they barely saw each other. Different assignments. Different sectors. Messages passed through aides because there was no time for anything else.
My father sent reports.
He put a small extra line at the bottom of each one. Nothing much. Sector quiet tonight. Ate something that used to be a potato. Thought of you.
My mother saved every one.
She never told him that. He found out later, when he went looking for something in her desk and found a whole stack of them, folded, in order, tied with a strip of cloth.
He never told her he'd found them.
Some things you keep because they're too good to make into a conversation.
When they were finally on the same assignment again, it was for a large-scale operation that neither of them was supposed to survive statistically.
They survived.
They also got promoted.
Afterwards, standing in the wreckage of something that used to be a building, covered in dust and what had hopefully been mud, my father looked at my mother and said —
"I've been thinking."
"Oh no," said my mother.
"About us."
"Caen—"
"I want—"
"If you propose to me in a pile of rubble—"
"I just—"
"—I will finish what I started six months ago regarding your nose—"
"SORA."
She stopped.
"I want to keep surviving with you specifically," he said. "That's all. I just wanted to say that."
She looked at him for a long moment.
"Yeah," she said. "Okay."
That was it.
That was the whole proposal.
They were both promoted to General within the year — her for field excellence, him for strategic command. Different divisions. Same side. They built something real in the middle of something broken and they kept building it, argument by argument, mission by mission, small paper note by small paper note.
It was, objectively, a great love story.
I'm not saying that because they're my parents.
I'm saying that because I have seen a lot of love stories across multiple lifetimes and most of them were very mediocre. This one was good. Irritating in its goodness.
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PART FOUR: THE EXPLOSION
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And then.
The world settled slightly. Not fully — the world never fully settles, trust me, I know, I've tried to make it settle several times across several lives, it's not possible — but enough. Enough that two generals in a fortified settlement could breathe for a moment.
Enough for my mother to look at my father one evening and say:
"I want a family."
My father, who had been mid-sentence about supply allocation, stopped completely.
"Now?"
"Not now-now. Generally now."
"That's—" He set down his papers. "Yes. Okay. Yes."
"You don't have to—"
"Sora." He looked at her with the expression of a man who had been waiting for this conversation for approximately three years. "Yes. Obviously yes."
She threw a pillow at him.
He caught it.
They were both smiling.
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And that love — all of it, the fights and the reports and the rubble proposal and the saved paper notes and the almost-punch and the surviving-together — reached the absolute peak of its bar, filled it completely, hit the final pixel, and—
POP.
Me.
Hi.
I arrived.
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PART FIVE: THE PART WHERE I EXPLAIN MYSELF
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Right. So.
In my previous life, I was — how to put this professionally — a consultant.
Unofficial. Unacknowledged. Extraordinarily effective.
The kind of person who sits in the background of important rooms and makes sure the important rooms produce the correct outcomes. Gently. Quietly. Without anyone ever looking directly at me, because I made sure they didn't.
Was it manipulation?
Technically yes.
Was anyone harmed?
Define harmed.
The point is: I was very good at it. Generationally good. Historically good, possibly, if history had noticed, which it didn't, because I made sure it didn't.
I moved people. I redirected situations. I turned small possibilities into specific outcomes through patience and timing and the simple fact that nobody ever thinks the quiet one is doing anything.
I did this for eighty-three years.
I was tired.
I retired.
And then I woke up here. New life. New world. No memory of the old one — just the skills, somehow, baked in, like muscle memory except the muscle is my entire strategic mind and the memory is how to run probability calculations before I can walk.
Which is deeply inconvenient, by the way.
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Here I am. Born to two generals. Surrounded by danger. In a world where everyone has a power and mine is the kind that could either fix everything or break everything depending on the day.
I wanted a quiet life this time.
Peaceful. Uneventful. Maybe something simple. A garden. A small house. Nobody trying to assassinate anyone.
But I looked at my parents — my stubborn, brilliant, rubble-proposing, pillow-throwing, note-saving parents — and I understood immediately that I had been placed, with great cosmic precision, exactly where I was going to be the most necessary and the least restful.
I sighed.
Internally. I couldn't sigh externally yet. I was three days old.
Fine, I thought. One more round.
But I'm keeping score.
And this time?
This time I want the garden at the end.
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— End of Chapter Zero —
Chapter One: In which I am six months old, a traitor enters my house, and I get back to work. Again.
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REALISTIC CHARACTERS?
PAPA CAEL
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MAMA SORA
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MC ( LYRA ) BABY
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FAMILY PHOTO
(*≧∀≦*)
AHHHHHHH!