After she finished tying the rope to the three offshoots, Mila made sure to stand up and stretch herself out, knowing her time spent stooped over was not over. Reaching high was fine, but tilting back to crack her spine kicked off the monkey brain panic as it latched on to the knowledge that she was very high up, urging her to windmill her arms and crash down to the wood under her feet.

She did not do that, of course.

Her lizard brain did not love being high up, but was also not moronic enough to think that flailing while perching was the way to keep living. It guided her tail to wrap around the branch, even though she knew she did not need it for her stretches, leaning to her left and her right.

It did kick off the buzzing in her core self, though. The two sets of instincts did not fight each other for long, thankfully, but the period of time where they did war put out a wave of the dissonance that she could feel in her back fangs, where molars were also supposed to be.

For a brief moment, every difference between her two bodies, one left behind and one currently embodied, illuminated in high contrast. It was a lightning strike, the subtle head tilt required to see through the optical illusion, but the flash, the shift, was enough to see both rabbit and duck at the same time. At least for a little while.

The schema stuff, the two Milas of Scienceland and Fantasyland separate, was interesting to her in high concept. Stuff like that was fascinating in high concept.

But this was not some theoretical musings, and everything itched. Both the original hers had five fingers, sure, but each felt different in a subtle way she had never picked up on. Both hers were literate, but how they got there could not be more different, one thrown into a machine designed to spit out cogs and the other latching on to any scraps she could get her claws on.

Even if the central thing was shared, so much of the connective tissue around each piece was not. They cast more-or-less similar shadows, but when acknowledging it, it was clear they were more different than alike, yet were all crammed in together, to pretend to be unified because somehow they were.

She was neither duck nor rabbit, but instead some other, third thing.

Gingerly, this time, Mila did lower herself down to the bark, her tail’s grip on the branch bone-achingly right but inching around so she could sit. She knew the feeling of her jack-hammering heart, her breath getting squeezed out of her, and how the weight was trying to crush her into paste.

A panic attack was a lot, too much in the moment, but she had had them before. She needed to sit and not do anything and just let it pass. She would get her feet back under her, get back to work, save the day, go on home. Easy. Simple.

Well.

The thought occurred to her.

The duck and the rabbit had both had panic attacks before. She, the amalgamation therein, had gotten close with her run-in with Ouran, but she had never quite had one, had she? And even then, Rora had been there to pluck her out from the fire.

Rora was not here, though, not in a way that mattered. And even if she were, what would Mila say to her? That she cared for and loved Rora, but also that she, Mila, was not the person Rora had known months ago? That she was this entity that had swallowed up that Mila, digested all the parts of her that mattered and mixed them up, never to be separated, with some human from a world that might as well not exist?

Stolen novel; please report.

Just a real easy thing to hash out while her body forced her mind to feel like the end of the world was upon her. It was a real the-kobold-or-the-egg situation on whether or not the panic attack had kicked off her sudden idntities crisis, but it was not helping, would never help.

Mila’s claws ground through the dry, dead bark and pricked into the wetter wood below, oozing liquid at her nails.

Because that was the big issue for her, she knew. The rabbit was dead and gone, in its existence as a rabbit alone. Fantasyland Mila, who had always owned this body, was no longer home. Scienceland Mila getting wholesale slapped in and the two puréed together, by whatever the fuck had decided to do that, had been the end of her. She had no fucking clue about whether Scienceland Mila was still existent as the duck, in Scienceland, or if she had been blended or had been struck dead or if she had never been real at all.

And the Mila here, who was busy sitting on a branch trying to shrug off a body betraying her, had no culpability in that. She could figure out that much on her own just fine, academically. She had no clue what had happened or why, just that she was how she was, now.

And yet, dwarfing all that knowledge of such, it felt too unfair. It was too unfair. Fantasyland Mila, rabbit Mila, was gone and instead the amalgamation was in her place. Rabbit Mila had hopes and dreams and a life and it was so much more fucked up because the amalgamation now had all those instead.

And it was not just that one could never step into the same river twice.

People changed as they lived, as they learned, as they experienced. People became new people, obviously.

But when Fantasyland Mila became… her? There was no living, or learning, or experiencing. Fantasyland Mila had been here doing her thing, and then she was not, replaced by something that mimicked her closely, but was so so different.

Mila heaved, fighting back the bile as it all crashed in on her, tighter and tighter.

How the fuck was she supposed to fix what could not be fixed? Was it egotistical to think of it in those terms? Did she have a right to try to ease her conscience over a being who no longer existed as a byproduct of her own existence? Should she word-vomit all that out at the others and let them decide?

More and more ideas about what she could or might do to make things right, knowing there was no righting the core injustice, kept spilling across her mind. Each one was slippery and slimy and impossible to hold onto for more than a fragment of a thought before she had to try to grab the next.

With each passing item, the pressure just continued to build, higher and higher, each breath harder to drag in than the last, overwhelming and drowning her.

And there was a soft whisper there. The faintest thread that did not slip away, that did not break, and Mila focused on it. A small tug brought it forth enough to focus on amidst the deluge, so she did just that, sounding it out, feeling it over.

She could not bring Fantasyland Mila back, not that she knew of or had heard anything similar. But the pieces were all there. She could still see the rabbit, even if she also knew about the duck. And….

In her position, Fantasyland Mila would not be sitting on her ass. Not for those reasons, anyway. They had a job to do, and people were counting on her. People that she, both the rabbit and the illusion and, as a recent development, the duck cared deeply about.

Mila, as the gestalt, could not quite do right by the Mila who was gone as she had been. And she was not feeling up to doing right by her own self, not with what her existence meant, what it had done by its nature. But she could do right by the folks she loved, because they were worthy even when she was not.

Mila pushed herself up, the echoes of the panic attack fading, and after a moment to recenter, called out, “Chopping the first branch!” With only a little quaver in her voice. So warned, she got to work to hew the first offshoot from the main branch, the rhythm of machete meeting tree limb working its way through her body.

She had work to do, and it almost let her ignore just how brutally familiar it felt, knowing that she found herself unworthy of her own efforts.