Author Note: You probably remember my old story, Red Dandelions, which is Subaru reborn as Theresia Van Astrea, Reinhard's grandmother. No, this is not the crack version (TLSSIND!).

The original version was poorly written, things were too quick. So I decided to rewrite it, here it is.

TheresiaBaru: Red Dandelions

They called me by many names, Theresia Van Asterea the Sword Saint, The Lady With Light, Master Chef and so many more. But they never knew me as Subaru.

In which Natsuki Subaru is reborn as a girl who feared weapons yet she had to become the Saintess of the blade. Is war truly the only answer? Or is love just a delusion?

=====================================================

CHAPTER 01: DAISY: I WAS REBORN

=====================================================

The daisy is the first flower a child ever learns to pick, because it grows where nothing was planted and asks nothing of the soil. In the old tongue the word meant beginning. In the older tongue it meant the eye of the day, the thing that opens when the light comes, whether it wants to or not.

—=<>=—

The controller had a crack running down the left grip, and Natsuki Subaru had been pretending not to notice it for three weeks.

He noticed it now. The plastic bit into the heel of his palm every time his thumb worked the stick, a small persistent sting that could have been solved with a strip of tape and eleven seconds of effort, and he had not solved it, because solving it would have meant admitting that he had broken it, and admitting that he had broken it would have meant remembering the night he threw it at the wall. That had been in February. It was October now. The apartment had gotten smaller in the intervening months, the way rooms do when nobody opens the windows.

On the screen, the words GAME OVER sat in the middle of a field of dead pixels, patient as a landlord.

He let the controller drop into his lap and pressed the back of his wrist against his eyes until colours bloomed behind the lids. The room smelled of old rice and warm electronics and the particular staleness of clothes that have been worn, removed and worn again without ever having been washed. Somewhere below him a neighbour was running a machine on a spin cycle, and the whole building hummed with it, a low mechanical heartbeat that had become so familiar he only heard it when he was already listening for something else.

There was a stack of mail on the desk. He had stopped opening it in August, which was the same month he stopped going to the convenience store on the corner, because the woman who worked the night shift had started asking how he was doing, and she had been kind about it, which was worse.

There were four messages on his phone from a boy called Kenta, who had been his friend since primary school and whose last three attempts had gone unanswered. Subaru had drafted a reply to every one of them. He had never sent any, because each version came out either too light or too heavy, and he could not find a register that did not sound like a person auditioning for the part of himself.

And propped between the tower of unopened mail and a cup containing three dead pens, there was a photograph in a cheap frame.

Kenichi Natsuki was making a face in that photograph, the kind of face a man makes when he wants his son to laugh and does not care what the camera thinks about it. Naoko Natsuki had her hand halfway up to cover his mouth and was laughing too hard to finish the gesture. Between them a fourteen year old boy was rolling his eyes with the theatrical disgust that only a teenager can produce, and the boy in the photograph did not know that this was the last picture the three of them would ever take together, because the boy in the photograph was an idiot, and idiots never know anything until the knowing has gone useless.

Subaru looked at them for a while.

They had gone to Ohayo for work. That was the detail that got him on the bad nights, and by then they had all become bad nights. Not the noise. Not the heat. Not the specific way the air changed pressure and shoved him sideways into a vending machine hard enough to leave a bruise the shape of a coin slot across his shoulder blade for a month. It was the word work. They had died doing paperwork in a different prefecture. They had died because a stranger with a grievance had decided that a railway concourse was an argument, and they had happened to be standing in the middle of his sentence.

He had been there too. That was the other thing, and it was the thing underneath all the other things.

Not far away. Not at home. Not asleep in a bed in another city, being telephoned by a policeman in the small hours the way it happens in films. He had been standing eleven metres from his mother when the world changed temperature, and he had not moved. His legs had made a decision that his brain was never consulted about. He had stood in the smoke with his hands open at his sides and watched people run past him in both directions, some of them shouting, one of them carrying a child upside down under her arm, and he had made no sound and taken no step, and when a paramedic finally crouched in front of him and asked whether he was hurt, he had said no, and it had been true, and it had never once stopped being the worst true thing he had ever said in his life.

Useless.

That was the word his head had selected for him and kept sharpened on the strap. He had turned it over so many times that it had gone smooth, like a coin rubbed featureless in a pocket. It was not even painful most days. It was simply the correct description of a thing, the way a chair is a chair.

And the very worst of it, the part that made him grip the broken controller until the crack bit deeper into his palm, was that eighteen months on, his thoughts about his parents still curved back around to himself. His father had been a source of money. His mother had been a source of dinner, and clean shirts, and a voice through a door at seven in the morning. Without them there was no money and no dinner and nobody to shout at him, and so the shape of his grief kept turning out to be the shape of his own inconvenience. What kind of son was that. What kind of person. He had loved them. He was almost sure he had loved them. But every time he went looking for the love, what he found instead was a boy worrying about rent, and it had begun to seem entirely possible that there had never been anything else in there in the first place.

He picked up a different controller, started a different game, and watched a loading bar without seeing it.

The headache had been present all evening, in the way headaches are present all evening, sitting politely at the back of the skull with its coat still on. Now it stood up. It walked forward. It put both hands on the inside of his forehead and pushed.

Subaru made a small noise, more surprise than pain. The loading bar finished. His vision went briefly white at the edges and then came back wrong, the colours of the room sliding half a centimetre out of register with the objects they belonged to, so that the desk had a second desk faintly behind it and the photograph had a second photograph.

He thought, with the terrible administrative calm that sometimes arrives in place of panic, that this was probably not a normal headache.

He thought about his phone, which was on the floor by the bed, which was four steps away.

He got as far as leaning forward.

Something in the left side of his head gave way. There was no sound to it, which was strange, because it felt like the kind of thing that ought to have made a sound, a wet structural failure like a mooring rope parting under load. Heat went through him from the inside outward, filling his jaw and the sockets of his eyes. The controller left his hands. The floor arrived with no journey in between.

He lay on the mat with his cheek against the weave and looked at the leg of his desk, and further up at the bottom edge of a photograph whose faces he could no longer make out, and the last complete thought he managed to assemble was not a noble one. It was not a prayer, or an apology, or a message for whoever might find him.

It was: oh. So that is it, then.

And then he was gone, and downstairs the machine finished its cycle and beeped four times, and nobody in the building noticed anything unusual at all.

—=<>=—

The dark lasted either a moment or a hundred years. He had no instrument with which to measure it. There was no body to be bored inside of and no clock to be bored by, and whatever remained of him simply hung in it like a word waiting to be said.

Then there was pressure.

It began as a suggestion and became an argument and ended as a verdict. Something was compressing him with an entirely impersonal patience, the way a machine presses metal, and it did not care that he had no lungs to scream out of, because it had already reached its own conclusions about his lungs. His skull moved. He felt the plates of it shift in a manner that plates are not supposed to shift. His spine bent in a direction it had no business bending. Everything was hot and wet and red, and it was a red that was not seen so much as suffered, a red that pulsed in time with an enormous and unfamiliar heart.

He had been wrong, earlier, on the mat beside the desk. Death itself had been nothing at all. This was considerably worse than death. This was being unmade and remade at speed, in the dark, with no explanation offered and no consent requested.

Then voices came through the red, muffled, as though shouted across water.

"I can see the head. One more, my lady. One more and it is done."

Whatever had hold of him pushed again, harder, and the world narrowed to a tube of crushing heat, and then the heat ended and the cold began, and it was so cold, so sudden and so total, that his entire new and unwilling body convulsed against it.

Air went into him for the first time. It went in like a blade.

He tried to scream, and the scream came out, but it came out wrong. It came out high and thin and animal, a wail with no words in it and no mind behind it that anybody else in the room could possibly hear. He heard it from the outside as well as the inside and understood, with a rising horror that had nowhere at all to go, that this reedy little noise was now the entirety of his voice. That everything he had ever been had been compressed into that, and nobody was ever going to know.

Light. Far too much light, orange and shivering, resolving slowly into shapes. Faces above him, enormous and blurred, leaning in. Hands. An astonishing number of hands. A woman weeping somewhere close by with the particular exhausted joy of a person who has just survived something she was not certain she would survive.

"Lord Astrea," said a voice, thick with feeling. "It is a girl. A healthy girl, my lord."

Subaru's mind, which until that moment had been fully occupied with the question of whether it still existed, came to a complete halt.

Girl.

He had no capacity to sit up. He had no capacity to look down. He had no capacity to do anything whatsoever except lie in the crook of a stranger's elbow and be wrapped in cloth by people who were talking over the top of him, and yet somewhere in the wreckage there was a small clear voice saying, very distinctly, that this was not correct, that an error had been made at an administrative level, and that somebody needed to be informed immediately.

Nobody was going to be informed. That was becoming clear as well.

He was lifted. The room swung around him. He was carried a short distance, the world tilting past in soft smears of gold and shadow, and then set into a pair of arms so much larger and steadier than the first pair that they might have belonged to a building rather than a man.

He was raised up.

He could not focus properly. What he could see was a shape above him, broad at the shoulder, with a great deal of dark red hair and a face he would go on to remember for the entire length of his second life without ever quite being able to describe it to anybody.

"Beautiful," the man said.

The voice went through the infant's chest the way a struck bell goes through a room. It was warm and low and entirely certain of itself, and underneath the warmth there was something else, something that had nothing at all to do with love, something that sounded very much like arithmetic.

"There is a great deal in you," the man went on, more quietly, and it was not at all clear that he was speaking to anybody present. "I can see the potential in you. I can feel it from here."

The infant blinked very slowly. The man's eyes were blue, and even out of focus they were the kind of blue that a person notices and then goes on noticing.

"You shall be Theresia," he said, in the tone of a man announcing a decision to a council. "Theresia Astrea."

And whatever had survived of Natsuki Subaru, whatever had crawled through the dark and the pressure and come out the other side screaming in a language it did not have, finally broke.

CHAPTER 01: DAISY: I WAS REBORN: Part 02 

The first year was a fever dream, and she was never entirely certain afterward how much of it she genuinely remembered and how much she had reconstructed later out of overheard stories and the general furniture of the house.

There was a ceiling. She spent a very great deal of time with the ceiling.

It was painted, which she found faintly offensive, because nobody paints a ceiling for the benefit of a baby. The painting was therefore for the adults, which meant that even the room she was kept in was primarily a room about somebody else. There were vines up there worked in gold leaf, and birds with their wings out, and in one corner there was a sword with a ribbon wound loosely around the blade, and she looked at that sword every day for four months without understanding a single thing about what it was eventually going to cost her.

There were chandeliers, which swung when the windows were opened, throwing light around the room in slow revolving patterns that she watched because there was nothing else to watch, and because she was frightened of what happened in her head when she stopped watching things.

There was red hair. An astounding quantity of red hair, on almost every person who came into the room, in every shade from dark wine through to a bright copper that caught the lamps and held on to them. It hung down over her whenever anybody bent to look. It got into her mouth. She spent an entire winter with the vague resentful sense of being besieged by hair.

There were the maids, who arrived without sound and worked with an efficiency that bordered on the military. They washed her, dressed her, fed her, turned her, and murmured over her in low voices about how good she was, how quiet, how composed, how she hardly cried at all. And she did not cry, or not often, and not for any of the reasons they imagined. She did not cry because crying was a humiliation. She had been nineteen years old. She had paid rent, badly, and filed a tax form once, incorrectly. She was not going to lie in a wet blanket and scream about it if there was any alternative available, and so she endured in silence, which the household took as evidence of a remarkable temperament, and which was in fact nothing but pride, the last possession she had brought across with her.

And there were the brothers.

There were four of them, and they travelled as a weather system, and not one of them had any concept of quiet.

They would crowd the edge of the crib with their heads at four different heights, blocking out the ceiling entirely, arguing over whose turn it was to hold her and whether she had just smiled or merely had wind. Thames, the eldest, took the whole business with immense seriousness and handled her the way a sapper handles a device. Karan lied continuously about how much holding he had already been allotted in order to obtain more of it, and was caught every time, and was undeterred. Casiles once attempted to teach her to strike palms at eleven weeks old and was genuinely disappointed by her failure to progress. Carlan, the youngest and the quietest, did not say very much at all, but she surfaced twice from naps to find him sitting on the floor beside the crib with a book, reading to himself, keeping her company, and he never mentioned it to anybody.

They were, she thought with a helpless and bewildered resentment, extremely nice.

She would have vastly preferred them to be awful. Awful would have been so much easier to file.

She had come into this with certain assumptions. A great house, a title, a father with arithmetic in his voice: out of those she had assembled a picture of cold corridors, of children raised entirely by staff, of a family that spoke to one another the way boards of directors speak. Every part of that picture turned out to be wrong, and its wrongness kept ambushing her at inconvenient moments, and there was nothing whatsoever she could do about it from inside a crib.

It took her perhaps three months to piece together the basic architecture of her situation, and she did it the way a prisoner maps a building, which is to say by listening and by lying still.

The language was not Japanese and was not anything else she recognised, and yet she understood it perfectly, which she decided very early on not to examine too closely for the sake of her own sanity. The house was enormous, and the corridors outside her door went on and on. There were servants who had servants. Meals arrived that had been composed rather than cooked. People spoke of the family in the plural and with weight, in the way that people speak of institutions. Men came to the house and were nervous in the hall.

So: rich. Extremely rich. Nobility of some kind, in a place that had candles instead of switches and horses instead of trains.

Which meant that the second thing she had suspected was also true, and the second thing was far worse than the first, because the second thing was that she was not in her own world at all.

She turned that over for a long time in the dark, lying on her back in a crib that smelled of cedar and clean linen, with a painted sword on the ceiling above her and a very great deal of nothing in her chest.

She had wanted this.

That was the joke. That was the part that made her want to laugh until something tore loose. There had been whole nights, dozens of them, hundreds, lying on a futon with a paperback face down on her stomach and the ceiling going grey with morning, when she had begged whatever might conceivably be listening to take her somewhere else. Anywhere else. Another world. A clean sheet of paper. A protagonist's chance at things.

And something had listened, evidently. And it had taken her parents first, and then her body, and then her name, and it had set down whatever was left in the softest and most comfortable cradle in the world and called the entire transaction a gift.

Her name was Theresia Astrea.

She turned the words over. They did not fit in her mouth yet, because her mouth did not do words, but they fitted somewhere further back, and they itched. She was almost certain she had encountered that name before. Not spoken aloud. Read, perhaps, the way a person reads a name in the corner of a page they are skimming on a train, a name belonging to somebody else's story that they were never going to finish. It sat just beneath the surface of recognition, and every single time she reached for it, it slid off.

She gave it up eventually, because there is only so long a person can think inside a crib before something in them starts to come loose, and instead she did what she had always done when the world was too much for her, which was to be as irritating as possible about small things.

Which brought her to the matter of her first words.

She had been rehearsing. This was, she felt, entirely reasonable. She had precisely one opportunity to deliver a first sentence in a new life, and she had a head full of the greatest lines in the history of animation, and somewhere in the back of it she had already drafted something suitably enormous for the occasion, a sentence that would ring down the halls of the great house and be repeated for years afterward.

What actually happened was that a maid leaned into the crib at some appalling hour before dawn to establish whether she was damp, and Theresia, who had been asleep and would have paid money for the privilege of continuing to be asleep, opened one eye and said, in the flattest voice a ten month old has ever produced:

"Lemme sleep."

The maid dropped an entire armful of linen on the floor.

Within the hour there were eleven people in the nursery. Her mother arrived with her hair still unpinned and one sleeve of her gown not properly on. Her father came from wherever fathers in that house came from at that hour, and he laughed, an enormous rolling laugh that shook the chandelier on its chain, and he picked her up and announced to the room that his daughter's first words had been an instruction, and that this boded extremely well for all of them.

Karan cried. Thames, who was nine, took notes, because Thames took notes about everything and had done since he could form letters.

Theresia lay in her father's arms with her face pushed into the shoulder of his coat, which smelled of cold air and leather and something green underneath, and thought that she had never been so comprehensively humiliated in either of her lives, and also, treacherously, that the coat smelled nice.

That was the pattern of those first two years, more or less exactly. She would arm herself with irony, and the house would simply decline to be fought. They fed her, praised her, carried her, doted on her well past the point of parody, and every single time she made up her mind to be cold about it, one of them would do something small and stupid and generous, and the coldness would fail to arrive on schedule.

She told herself she was tolerating them.

She was not tolerating them. She was, in the manner of a person who has had everything taken away and is now terrified of being given anything at all, falling entirely in love with the lot of them and pretending very hard not to.

CHAPTER 01: DAISY: I WAS REBORN: Part 03

There was one exception, and the exception was her father.

She could never get the measure of Veltol van Astrea, and the failure bothered her for years, long past the point where it could have been any use to her.

He was affectionate. That was not in question. He came up to the nursery almost every evening that he was in the house, and sat on the low chair that had been put there for him with his boots still on, and talked to her about his day at enormous length, the way some men talk to dogs, except that he waited for responses and appeared entirely satisfied by gurgling. He carried her about the corridors on one forearm like a parcel of documents. He told her she was clever before she had done anything at all to demonstrate it, and went on telling her afterward, when she had, in exactly the same tone, as though it had never been open to question.

And every so often, perhaps once a fortnight, he would stop in the middle of whatever he was saying and look at her a moment too long, and the warmth would slide off his face like water off oilcloth, and underneath it there would be the thing she had heard in his voice in the first minute of her second life.

Assessment.

He was measuring her. He was measuring her the way a man measures a beam before he builds on top of it, and he had been measuring her since before she had a name, and every time he did it she wanted to be sick.

She never worked out what he was measuring for. Not that year and not for a long while afterward. She only knew that when he did it the room got colder by a degree, and that when he came out of it he always smiled, and that the smile was genuine, and that both of those things were somehow true at once.

She held it against him. She held it against him for years, privately, the way children hold things.

She held it against him until she was seven years old and standing on a road with her mother's arms crushing her against a carriage seat and her father's back between them and something with claws, and then she stopped holding it against him for ever, and understood, far too late and in entirely the wrong order, that the arithmetic had never once been about what she might be worth.

It had been about what it was going to take to keep her alive.

—=<>=—

The mirror happened in the spring, when she was a little past a year and a half old.

It was bath day, which in that house was an event with a staff rota attached to it. She was carried down to the bathing room, which was all pale stone and standing steam, with a basin large enough to drown a horse and a folding screen in the corner painted with cranes going up out of reeds. One of the older maids undressed her with the brisk indifference of a woman who had performed the operation several thousand times, and lowered her into water that was exactly as warm as it ought to have been.

The maid's name was Miriam. She was broad and unhurried and she had a way of humming with no tune in it while she worked. She would still be complaining about Theresia's posture twenty years later, in precisely the same flat tone, to a woman with a legendary sword strapped across her back and the blood of an army dried into her boots, and neither of them would ever remark upon the fact.

Theresia let herself go loose in the water and thought about nothing at all.

That was the thing about being small. Thinking about nothing was so easy that it kept happening by accident. Whole hours went missing that way. She had begun to be frightened of it in a manner she could not have explained even if she had possessed the vocabulary, because what was left of Natsuki Subaru was a thing made entirely out of thoughts, and if the thoughts went then so did he, and nobody in either world would ever know that anyone at all had been lost.

The water rippled. Miriam turned away to fetch the soap down off the shelf.

And Theresia, idly, lifted her head and looked across the room at the great silvered mirror on the far wall.

She had been avoiding it. Not deliberately, she told herself for years afterward, although it had been entirely deliberate. In a house with that many polished surfaces, never once properly looking had taken real and sustained effort, a constant low vigilance about where her eyes went and when her head turned, and she had maintained it for a year and a half by a combination of luck, positioning and a flat refusal to cooperate at the necessary moments. The entire edifice of that refusal came down in a single second on a spring afternoon while a maid's back was turned.

There was a child in the mirror.

She was very small. She was sitting in a basin of steaming water with her hair plastered dark against her skull, and where it caught the light it was red, a deep and unmistakable red like the last of the sun on a brick wall. Her skin was pale and faintly pink from the heat. Her eyes were enormous and blue, and they were looking directly back out with an expression of dawning and absolute horror that no infant in the history of the world has ever worn.

She was a girl.

She had known that. Everybody had been telling her that since the first minute of her existence. She had heard it, and repeated it to herself, and made jokes about it in the privacy of her own head, and she had assumed, in the way that people do assume, that hearing a thing and knowing a thing were the same operation performed at different volumes.

They were not the same operation. They were not even related.

She lifted a hand, and the child in the mirror lifted a hand, and it was small and soft and pink and had never held anything heavier than a wooden rattle, and it was never going to be the hand that had gripped a cracked controller in a room that smelled of old rice, and it was never going to be the hand that had hung open at a boy's side on a tiled floor in Ohayo, and there was no version of the future in which either of those things could ever be undone, or atoned for, or even mentioned to another living person.

That boy was gone.

He had not died in Ohayo with his parents. He had not, as it turned out, entirely died on the floor of his own room either. The dying had not been the end of him. The end of him was here, in a warm stone room in a house he had never seen, in a body that had been waiting for him with its name already chosen by somebody else.

She made a sound.

It was not a word. She had plenty of words by then and not one of them was any use, so what came out was only the raw noise of a person arriving at the far end of something, and it went up into the steam and struck the stone ceiling and came back down all around her.

Miriam turned, alarmed, and came at once. She found the young lady of the house clutching the rim of the basin with both hands and weeping as though something had been stolen out of her, and she could get nothing whatever out of her, and in the end she simply lifted her out, wrapped her in a sheet that had been warming on the rail, and held her, and rocked her, and told her that it was all right, it was all right, hush now, whatever it is, hush, it is all right.

It was not all right. But the shoulder was solid and the sheet was warm and the woman smelled of soap and starch and faintly of the kitchens, and Theresia Astrea cried into all of it until there was nothing left to cry with, and fell asleep somewhere on the stairs on the way back up.

—=<>=—

She woke in the late afternoon in her own bed, with the shutters half closed and the light coming through in long amber bars across the floorboards.

For a while she lay still and let herself feel it all the way down, which was the one thing she had been refusing to do for eighteen months.

Her parents were dead. Both of them, in a country that did not exist in this world, in an event that had never happened here and never would, and there was no monument to it, and no anniversary, and no grave, and nobody would ever say their names again except her. Kenichi. Naoko. Two words that were now purely private. Two words that had become a language with exactly one living speaker.

Every person she had ever known was unborn, or unreal, or both. There was no road back. There was not even a direction in which to face while wishing for one, no ocean to look out across, no sky to point at and say, there, that way, that is where it was.

And she was not Subaru. Not any longer. Not legally, not physically, and, she suspected with a lurch that went right through her, not for very much longer in any other sense either. Because a name is a thing you answer to, and she had already begun to answer. Somebody said Theresia in a corridor and her head came up. It had been happening for weeks. She had noticed it and had chosen not to notice it.

So that was how it would go. Not all at once. By erosion. Grain by grain, answered name by answered name, until one day there would be a woman in this house who possessed a great many memories of a boy in the way that a person possesses memories of a book.

Down the corridor she could hear the muffled thud of wooden practice swords from the courtyard, and one of her brothers shouting something insulting, and another one laughing at it.

Theresia lay in the amber light and looked up at the ceiling, where the painted sword had its painted ribbon, and she made herself say it, silently and properly, in the way that a person signs a document.

All right. This is mine now.

She did not feel better afterward. That was not what it had been for. But she found, when she turned over and pushed her face into the pillow, that the weight in her chest had changed shape very slightly, from something sitting on top of her into something that she was carrying, and there is an enormous difference between those two arrangements, although it takes most people the better part of a lifetime to learn it and she had learned it at the age of one.

Outside in the courtyard the swords went on knocking against one another, patient as rain on a roof.

She did not know it yet.

But that sound was coming for her.

Join my Discord Server: https://discord.gg/X7sphRUsxJ