avo: just something chill to take my mind off other things, although I think the content may contradict 'chill', but you know, there's something strangely terrifying and strangely romantic about Konoha in all its silent, rabbit-sure stabbing and politics and children running along rooftops like cats. also, I live in australia so I put 'u's in some words and use metric measurement and celsius. sometimes.

and finally, present tense is actually pretty fun. some of the mood (or perhaps more accurately, the moodiness) of this is largely inspired by Of the River and the Sea by Aleycat4eva, but ye that's about the extent of that.

so! expect many 'welcome to night vale' or 'the secret history' quotes as pre-contextual openings hur hur. and I think I might need a beta too.

SOME THINGS ARE TOO TERRIBLE TO GRASP AT ONCE

The story begins with something like this:

Long summer. Short night. She is six months old and wakes up melting. Her room is too hot, too dry and the occasional night breeze from her window is not enough. She wriggles out from the blankets and finds solace in pressing her tiny legs to the half-cool railings of her crib. Some nights she could fall asleep to the electrical humming downstairs in the freezer section of their grocery store, but other nights, her thoughts are heavier than her eyelids.

Konoha feels like that one summer she spent on her grandparents' farm (one very, very distant lifetime ago) – the cicadas chirp so sweetly and the starry void is far better company than traffic and blinking artificial lights and how the city-glow is evident a hundred miles away. But the village also smells like dust – like dirt after rain. It is old and rotting (like a root) and lives deep in the past. Its vast and systematic history with its architectures and its fire-shadows, the horrors of its mythologies and the heat of its summers, its rain and its rivers, its algebra and its fire, its theological and metaphysical controversies, are awful. Everything reeks of an odd, sideways-tilting militaristic authoritarian state, but she supposes she sort of doesn't mind it (she doesn't mind it?). More pressingly, she feels like she doesn't belong, and that may not be completely untrue. She thinks she has been reborn.

Suiren Hyōzan is born in the middle of winter where all the dairy and dairy by-products in their store starts to curd halfway through the day. She starts out chill and simple, pulling hair and crapping her pants on good days. When she is a little older, her mother takes her on mid-morning strolls down the main street and she snatches at the foggy tendrils her breath leaves. Her parents start to read to her around the same time and she picks up the language like she's always spoken it (like it's always been bubbling at the back of her tongue and once remembered it all gushes out). The names of the four Almighty Hokages and their legends and songs resound in her head, and for a while she doesn't get it, what kind of a majestic, all-shining, omnipresent, invincible and near-immortal leader calls themselves the fire-shadow?

She grows a little older- she grows a little older and then-

All of sudden-

Suiren sat on her mother's lap at the cashier one afternoon and she could name the customers before they so much as talk to her mother.

(She knows things.)

That observation alone terrifies her, but then she thinks back further and further and she starts to remember. The girl can recite the whole known and unknown history of her world, and she has been four and twenty-four once and has known an entirely different history of rise and fall. She can speak a tongue not spoken in any of the streets, and then there's the whole– and then there's the whole chakra concept and she can feel it burning and cooling, mint-fresh like torrential rain and thunder if she tries hard enough oh-

Sleep doesn't help much. Suiren stays up late at night (all night) and swallows books whole to forget things. She reads what she can get (her parents don't have anything decent on medical texts or fuinjutsu but she is almost one and she has time, she thinks). Sometimes the girl can even hear the sound a two-tailed cat makes deep into the night as she studies (and she is studying hard). She mistakes it for the creaking of her mother's footsteps down the hallway and dives under her covers to fake-sleep with the book buried under her pillow. Her mother probably knows anyway, but Suiren is drowning texts impossible for her age and some of the ninja have eyes where there shouldn't be eyes and Suiren is wary. Sometimes.

One day, she is fourteen months old and so many children run down the main road to the ACADEMY early in the morning to learn how to kill, starting with their bare hands. (The fastest way to a man's heart is a bilateral dissection on the upper left region of the sternum, unless they're going at it from behind where they have to twist around the spinal cord and that gets tricky.) The kids all have red hands and bruises afterwards and Suiren knows this because she watches them every afternoon. She can even spot someone she remembers some days (grocery stores are popular among everyone, including ninjas, and she always – alwaysalwaysalways – watches her mother at the cash register. Suiren likes to examine each customer's face carefully and once she even meets young Itachi Uchiha who is four years older than her but he looks twenty and his eyes are hollow and his knuckles are raw.)

At the turning of the New Year (where old gods tread new paths to her house), the girl is one and pays her respects to the only temple in Konoha and the Stone. She calls it the Stone because her father calls it the Stone and 'The Memorial Stone for Konohagakure's Heroes' is too long and a shitty name. She feels like she should be surprised when her father (in his dark yukata and frowny face) names over half of his friends on the Stone, but she isn't really surprised because nothing can freak her out anymore after being reborn.

Her father's head dips and eyes drop close. She copies. When he opens his nautical grey eyes again, he whispers something in her ear:

Some things are monstrous.

She wants to know if he's talking about foxes.

Her father is a strange man with three strings of six pearls dangling off each ear. He walks like someone trained in the shinobi arts, but he isn't because he's told her he isn't. They haven't spent much time together as father and daughter, but she believes him.

Suiren is one and whispers to herself, "I am not disappearing."

Sometimes, there are these 'especially bad nights' where she likes to trace invisible lines on the wall, as if mapping out long lost worlds. She thinks she is forgetting something (again) and it is something important. She isn't sure what and she hates it. Hates it - hatesithatesit. She doesn't feel like a child then, and everything is like a dream (past, present and future), especially the distant image of a foreign woman with cimmerian-dark eye bags and embarrassing moments of forgetting about her stethoscope and walking down to Starbucks from her college. But none of those ancient, resurfacing memories of another lifetime is really important anymore because there is something on Suiren's shoulders and it's called the weight of the whole world. (She knows things.)

Although there are good nights too, and on good nights, the girl is just Suiren. On good nights, she is just a one-year-old kid living above HYO'S GROCERY MART with dark hair and darker eyes and it's hard to be angry when she can't even remember why.

It's Tuesday late afternoon; the sun hangs low and weary and the rice cooker is slowly melting. At the sound of footsteps leading to his house, Itachi's head snaps up from the living room table, "They're here okaasan."

A brief moment passes before his mother replies from down in the kitchen, "Can you get it please?" He sets down his book. The door opens just as his mother's guest is about to knock.

"Good afternoon, Hyōzan-san," he greets respectfully.

"Hello Itachi-kun," the lady smiles and light illuminates the hollows of her cheekbones.

A gift bag is promptly shoved in his face.

Itachi's nearly neck snaps back before he smoothly accepts the housewarming gift. He cradles the bag to one side and spies a dully familiar girl, barely brushing past his elbows. The mother smiles and places a hand on the top of her daughter's head.

"How are you today, Itachi-kun?" The boy steps aside into the genkan and sets down two pairs of slippers. The lady follows and guides her daughter in by the shoulders.

"I am well, thank you. My mother's in the kitchen and she'll be with you shortly."

"Senka!" His mother suddenly bursts from the living room entrance, mittens on her hands and glee the likes of which Itachi has never seen before (excluding that one time she accidentally shoved her feet into his father's face on the lounge).

"Mikoto!" Senka squeals and flies forward. The two women excitedly hug and shoot rapid-fire sentences at each other (mostly about the recent influx of rare Dragon-Lobsters from Land of Water, Itachi notes dimly). It doesn't take very long for him to notice Hyōzan's daughter staring at him (although it may more accurate to say gaping open mouthed with a vacant expression, in a way that implies 'a want to possess his body').

He meets her awkward stare and offers a simple, "Can I help you, Hyōzan-san?"

Suiren stiffens (her spine groaning like an old man's) and she corrects him, words tumbling from her mouth, "Oh just call me Suiren! Or Sui-chan! Or- or even Sui-Sui! I don't mind!"

Itachi regards at her with chill distaste.

Her toes curl in embarrassment but she clears her throat, "How's your baby brother? And can I um-" her hands gesture wildly, "Uh- see, or like meet your uh- brother? Sasuke? Bro?"

"Sasuke," he begins tersely, "is asleep."

"Oh-" Suiren blinks. "But I'll be like, really quiet. I swear. I promise. On my heart." She points to a spot just a little to the left of her sternum with the accuracy of a cardiothoracic surgeon. There is a tiny resigned sigh from him that sends a flush flooding her face. He turns around and leads her on a slow walk to his brother's nursery. They pass several shoji doors with the warm, afternoon light still flicking through the seams. Then he stops at the end of the hallway, and presses a finger to his mouth, before sliding the door open. Suiren slips in after him. A breath escapes her.

"Oh," she exhales, "he's adorable."

Something warm and gooey (like milk and honey and shrill summer birds) overcomes Itachi's whole face in agreement – everything from his cheeks to the right corner of his lip is lit up with love. (She thinks it's adoration for a moment and it takes her a little longer of staring and blinking to realize it is more than just simple adoration. It is love like she has never seen before.

Oh, she finally understands. He must really love his brother.)

Her mind snaps back into business like an elastic band. "How old is he?" She asks, a hand resting on Sasuke's crib.

"Five weeks," Itachi replies quietly, one finger sneakily grabbed by his little brother's outstretched hand. Her eyebrows scrunch up. Five weeks! Something wet trails down her cheek fleetingly and she doesn't even realize it before Itachi stares at her. Real staring this time—not just looking.

"Sorry," Suiren whispers and rubs her face. He stills. "Oh don't worry," she waves a hand casually, "I'm nearly two – it's okay." She's nearly two and it doesn't make any of this okay. "Itachi- can I call you Itachi? I'm going to call you Itachi – sometimes, there are these decisions you can make, and you're going to think they're great. You're going to think that it's the best decision and that everything will work out perfectly, because you're Itachi and all, but it's not going to work out perfectly. It's not. I know I'm only one – nearly two—but please, please, please, please: if there ever comes a time where you have to choose a very difficult decision, remember that there are more ways than one to go about things. Always."

He's giving her a weird mix of pensiveness and perplexity and Suiren's not sure whether that's a good thing or not. It's hard to get a read on Itachi.

"Alright well maybe you might get it later, or maybe it won't even come to that," there is a stupid, hopeful quirk on her lips and it's choking her on the inside. "But I think-" a deep, shuddering breath resonates in her lungs, "I think that people shouldn't take all the responsibility and pressure onto themselves." Her eyes snap to Sasuke gurgling at her hair. "And that not everyone will behave exactly to your image of them. People change."

Itachi retrieves his finger from Sasuke and looks at her, long and hard, "Thank you, Hyōzan-san." He is unreadable as ever. "I appreciate your concern."

'Oh,' Suiren deflates, 'That's really not it.'

But then her mother is calling her from the other end of the house. The sun is setting and Fugaku Uchiha is back. Suiren spends the rest of evening at Itachi's house with her mother and meets the head of the Uchiha clan. He is tall and brooding and sombre like a watchful eagle, and piece-by-piece, Suiren thinks she can link the similarities between Sasuke and his father.

(Fugaku thinks Senka Hyōzan is an idiot. Her child is walking and talking like someone who isn't a child and that woman isn't even bothering trying to hide it. Some jounin would snatch that girl up in an instant, apprentice or Academy wise, especially with those dark hair and dark eyes. She's got fire in her blood and that always burns brighter in the dark.)

extra: Okkkay if you're not the type to read author's notes, then you can skip this I guess. I usually don't read a/ns either (unless I was confused as fuck reading a chapter) but here are some things you should know:

1. suiren's like twenty months old here (a year and eight months) and I get that it's really weird for us to see kids reading texts, but honestly i'd imagine this kind of a thing to be pretty normal in naruto-verse. we have seven year olds on the battle field i think we can have a toddler hiding medical texts under her pillow. but what fugaku means in that last paragraph is that the hyozans aren't even shinobi, and in all honesty if suiren was a normal civilian kid, she wouldn't even be considered for the academy. but konoha is built on militarism and remember that sob-story about that aburame kid getting picked up by danzo before he's even in the academy? ye. so ye.

2. :)))) we all know what's appearing next chapter! haha! fun! (pls go along with me and if you actually do know or think you know, omg thank y)

3. I'm dropping heaps of hints on suiren and if anyone can picks those up you're amazing $$$