I don't own Naruto. I won't repeat myself every time, so that's a blanket statement for this whole fic.

This is an SI/OC insert, and will be somewhat AU as it diverges from the main storyline due to Shiori's actions. This is not an insta-God-mode! fic. Shiori will work hard for everything she accomplishes.

I made a deal with the devil.

Some intelligent, likely malevolent being was using me for its own amusement, granting my wish in a twisted sort of way. Nonsensical as it seemed, it was the only explanation I could draw from the situation. I had been going through what psychologists in my old world had called the "bargaining" stage of grief.

My brother, who was a little bit my best friend and a little bit my own child all at the same time, was dying of cancer. Horrible, abhorrent disease. It took his strength and his life from him in tiny bits, and he wasted away over the course of months. I visited him every day in the hospital, putting the rest of my life aside, because I'm smart enough to know what's important in a situation like that. We laughed and joked and made plans for the future like the eventuality of him getting better was never in question, though we both knew better.

I sat beside him in what I knew were his last moments, pleading silently to anything out there that possessed the power to save him. I wanted nothing more than to trade my life for his, and die in his place. And I meant it. Because he was family, and I loved him, and he was still only a child that deserved to live. It's not that I wanted to die of cancer, don't get me wrong. But I wanted him to live, more.

I don't think anything comes without a cost, and so I didn't wish for him to get better, but to take his sickness onto myself.

And as I sat there clutching his unresponsive, chilly hand, pain boiled out from my insides, literally pushing at me from the inside. I would have screamed, but I couldn't breath. It was terrifying and confusing, and I squeezed my brother's hand mindlessly, enough that it might have hurt, if he was awake.

Then his eyes opened, clear as they had not been for weeks, and he took a deep breath past the BiPap mask that was supposed to be helping him breath. He tugged slightly away from my hand, frowning at the pain, and sat up with the struggle of muscles weak with disuse, but not the debilitating pain of cancer-ridden, failing organs. The machines attached to him beeped wildly as his heart rate and brainwaves crested beautifully.

I pride myself on my intelligence, and keeping a cool head in the face of a crisis, and yet I'd always had that smidgeon of belief that there was some power beyond what humans could explain with science thus far in our development as a species. It didn't take more than a few seconds for me to understand what had happened.

I smiled blindingly at him, reached up my other hand, and squeezed his between both of mine. Unfortunately, without the benefit of all the drugs and life support they had him on, it also didn't take more than a few seconds for me to die.

I have no idea how long I was "out of it." When I first regained consciousness, I almost didn't even notice. I couldn't think properly. If you've ever been sleeping and tried to wake up, but been so utterly exhausted that you couldn't force yourself out of oblivion, that's what it was like. My mind couldn't handle it, so I fell back asleep.

Gradually, I pushed farther and farther through that fog, though my consciousness only seemed to grasp reality for stretches of a few seconds, and I had no way of tracking the greater passage of time. I wasn't frightened, because I didn't have the energy to be.

I began to wiggle around sometimes when I woke, pushing my limbs against my snug surroundings, and I heard garbled, muffled sounds that didn't mean anything to me. After some time of this, something happened, and the walls, such as they were, began to close in around me. Over the course of a few traumatic hours, I was squeezed through a warm tunnel into blindingly bright light and cold air. It was like the times I'd crawled head first into a sleeping bag as a child, then tried to turn around and wriggle my way out blindly while the thick fabric restricted airflow. Except painful and about a hundred times more frightening.

Voices were gibbering excitedly all around me, but I was too busy screaming from the pain, fear, and overstimulation, and then from the way they manhandled me while cleaning me up. But soon, I was clean and dry and wrapped in a warm blanket, and snuggled up against a warmth that smelled soothing and spoke to me in familiar tones. Something popped into my mouth, and I started sucking, completely involuntarily. Warm liquid filled my stomach quickly, and I fell asleep.

The next few days were much of the same. There was a barrier that prevented me from being fully aware, and in the meantime my body's instincts took over. I urinated and defecated without control, cried when I was uncomfortable, and sucked on whatever was put in my mouth, only to fall asleep again, exhausted and with a seemingly constant headache from the effort of trying to think through the haze. I was hungry all the time.

There were two huge people caring for me. One was soft with a voice to match, and had a soothing smell. That one also fed me. The other was bigger and harder, and didn't feed me. It took me a few days—embarrassingly long, I admit—to understand what was going on.

They weren't huge, I was just tiny. I wasn't drugged or injured. I was a baby, with a baby's mental and physical limitations. In my defense, my eyes weren't working properly, and neither were the rest of my senses. These things needed time to develop and mature, forging pathways in my infant brain.

I cried, then. It seemed this body's reaction to anything was crying.

When I woke, which was often because I was hungry all the time, I tried to think, to work through the implications of my discovery. My mental faculties improved rapidly, but the barrier between myself and any large thoughts was frustrating, as were the headaches trying to force myself brought on. Which, of course, caused me to cry even more.

The woman, this body's mother, I realized, would rock and sing to me, in Japanese. I didn't know the language, but I understood enough of it to recognize the sounds, and a few words and phrases. In my previous body, I had been interested in the language after discovering manga and anime as a child, and had done some self-study.

My vision and ability to concentrate improved rapidly, and it was only a few more days before I could make out the slightly blurry symbol on the jacket arm of this body's father. I found it in other places around the house, and it was obviously some kind of identifying mark of pride. It looked somewhat familiar, a circle surrounding wavy horizontal lines and short vertical ones, but I couldn't place it.

Something felt off about the whole situation, beyond the fact that I seemed to have been reborn in the body of a baby, to Japanese parents. I didn't figure it out until one early evening when this body's mother and father were playing with me in the living room. While the father bounced me up and down, the mother made some weird movement with her hands that caught my eye, the fingers twisting together.

Her shadow, which was already stretching long in the light of the setting sun coming in through the window, stretched unnaturally outward and crept up the wall.

She watched me carefully, and seemed to be amused at the expression on my face. The father said something, and she nodded the affirmative, and then began to speak. I couldn't understand her words, but the cadence told me she was telling a story. As did the shadow-puppetry she was controlling on the far wall.

I was entranced for a minute or two, my tiny mind blown. Then, I understood what it meant.

I had asked to trade my life for my brother's and something had taken me up on it. Something with a sick sense of humor. Because this body's mother had just performed the Shadow Imitation jutsu, and the symbol I'd seen around the house was the Nara Clan symbol. I recognized them from one of the manga turned anime my brother and I had discovered together.

I was a baby in the "Naruto" universe.

I started crying again, this time purposefully using my powerful little lungs to scream for all I was worth.

I screamed until I exhausted myself, while this body's parents frantically tried everything they could think of to calm me down.

Reincarnation I could deal with. At least it was a possibility I'd considered. Reincarnation in a fictional universe? That was crazy. Or maybe it was one of those quantum physics things, that basically said somewhere out there, in the infinite universes, everything we could imagine existed. Which meant I could have woken up as a clown-fish with a stutter, or a newborn lion being held up over the animals of Africa by a monkey.

And if I'd traded with my brother, did that mean this was supposed to be his next life? He probably would have been ecstatic, if he remembered the previous life enough to know what was going on. I'd gotten him a high-quality—but harmless—practice sword for a birthday during his most hardcore "Naruto" phase, and he'd used it until it fell apart, and begged me for shuriken.

It made me wonder if I'd really "saved" him with my sacrifice, after all. Or maybe, like I thought before, some powerful force was just having a laugh at my expense. Because I shouldn't have remembered my past life.

It took me two days to think all that through, though my ability to concentrate and stay awake was much better. My body's parents were frantic at the almost ceaseless crying. Then I calmed down, and realized I needed to adapt, and make a plan. I'd miss my family, but I had the rest of my new life to grieve.

First thing, I needed to learn the language. I was lucky. Most babies have no idea what the heck is going on. Everything is new to them. But based on my previous experience, I didn't have to learn to understand the world from the beginning. I just needed to learn to talk. And to regain my motor control.

To that end, I started trying to parrot anything either of my two caregivers said to me. They were surprised and delighted. The first time, this body's mother, or Okaa-san, as I'd decided to call her so I had a simpler way of differentiating her from my own mother, yelled out excitedly for Otou-san. "Ryouta! She's trying to talk! Get in here!"

He rushed into the room, still holding a sugar-pot from whatever he'd been doing in the kitchen.

They talked back and forth for a few seconds, and then Okaa-san looked back down to me and said something. "Can you show your Otou-san what you did?"

I could tell it was a question, but I didn't know what she'd said. I did my best to repeat it to her, but I failed miserably. Babies are severely lacking in motor skills, remember? My tongue was an unruly piece of flapping muscle in my mouth, only really good for sucking.

But they didn't care. Okaa-san had turned away from the baby futon I was laying on and was laughing out loud with her shoulders thrown back and her hand over her mouth in that semi-creepy, smug way women sometimes did in animes. "She's a genius! Take that, Sis. Yoshino-nee is going to be so jealous. My spawn will be smarter than her spawn!"

Otou-san dropped the pot on the floor, spilling sugar everywhere. They exclaimed over me together, talking too fast for me to catch anything.

"Do you think she understands us?"

"Probably not. But she's if she's smart enough to start speech mimicry this early, it won't be long before she does."

"Okay, okay, I want to talk to her this time."

Then it was Otou-san's turn. He spoke, and I repeated him, and the process repeated all over, with them jumping around in joy and then returning to my futon. I tried to reach out a hand to pick up some of the sugar, but my motor skills weren't up to par, and Otou-san noticed and cleaned up the mess he'd made before I could get a taste.

My attempts to speak entertained all three of us until I fell asleep, and continued to do so for the next few days. Once again, I had an advantage, because I knew how their mouths were making the sounds, and just needed to train my own to do the same.

My parents began to teach me vocabulary at that point, which I was thankful for, though of course the first thing they did was fight back and forth to get me to say Otou-san or Okaa-san before the other. I laughed to myself at their antics, because Otou-san was obvious in his efforts, while Okaa-san sneakily tried to teach me to call her that when her husband wasn't around, and acted nonchalant when he was.

I stymied them both by saying their names right after each other during one of the rare moments they were both in the room and not paying attention to me. That set off another round of excitement. I'll admit, despite the frustration of my situation, I was having fun, and already coming to love this body's parents.

Also, I learned that my name was Shiori.

I moved my body as much as possible, trying to build up my muscles and motor skills. Because being what amounted to an invalid was not fun. The movement also seemed to help distract me from the itching, burning feeling inside, which started around the stomach area and spread from there. I'd gained a bit more control over my automatic cry reaction, but I could understand why kids would have colic in this world. The development of the chakra system—what else could it be—was freaking uncomfortable. Actually, the discomfort worried me a bit. I hoped it was just one of those normal painful things like teeth coming in for the first time, and not an indication that something was wrong with my body. Wouldn't it be just my luck to have deformed chakra coils or something?

After a few more weeks of practice, my tongue responded with only slight clumsiness. It wasn't perfect, but the sounds I made were mostly intelligible, and I'd already learned a bit more vocabulary. I could stay awake for longer periods, though I still needed multiple naps every day.

I did my best to seem like everything was new to me, but when you put the mind and memories of a person in their twenties into an infant, even if that infant brain can't really think on the same level, there's no way I wouldn't have been considered a genius. I guess it's good that I was reborn into the Nara clan, then. They were used to geniuses. If I was a bit beyond even that, well, hopefully at least they wouldn't be suspicious.

My concern at the moment was where I was in the timeline. I wasn't a die-hard fan of the show like my brother, so if I was in one of the pre-Naruto generations, I'd have very little relevant plotline foreknowledge. If I was after the show's timeline, I was even more screwed. But as a baby with an extremely limited vocabulary, and no ability to leave my own house, I had no way to figure it out.

No matter what, though, I lived in a blatantly dangerous world, and was the daughter of two shinobi. I entertained no foolish thoughts about living a peaceful civilian life. Shinobi may live in constant danger, but at least they had some power to affect change and protect the things they cared about. Civilians just got stomped on and turned into human-pancake fodder.

Plus, in a way, I was excited. I now lived in a world with magic, basically. Chakra could do things we hadn't even come close to with science, yet. And as an individual, I could affect change, because shinobi could become more powerful than hundreds of civilians put together. And if "Naruto" was to be believed, I really could do anything I set my mind to, with enough work.

4/15/16: I'm writing this story as a bit of an experiment, and a bit of a low-pressure shift from the second-in-series novel I'm writing right now. (Gods of Blood and Bone is the first, Google it if you're curious.) Basically, this is just for fun. I don't have much of anything plotted ahead of time, which is a strange feeling for me, though I've got a few ideas for events I want to happen.

If you like the story, or even if you don't, leave me a review! I love to hear from my readers.