A/N (PLEASE READ)

So, here we are. Somebody's writing yet another Naruto semi-SI semi-Peggy Sue reincarnation fic. Why am I doing this? Because I have an unhealthy addiction to the genre - and it is a genre at this point, let's be real.

There are a couple things I do wanna say before this thing kicks off.

First, I want to say that I think I got what I wanted out of this first chapter, but it's a bit murky and exposition-heavy; I don't have the fortitude to write out every detail of some OC's childhood, so the first five years are covered here, through a few scenes and a lot of weird summary and introspection. This isn't actually how I usually write, so please expect the writing to be much more grounded and crisp in the future. If the first chapter's setup is a turn-off for you, that's fine. I get it. Give this a chance if you want, or don't.

Second, I really don't have an update schedule here; I'm busy working on a visual novel, and this is kind of something I'm just testing out. If I get into it properly, maybe I'll work out a schedule later.

Third, let me just extend a huge fucking thanks to the folks behind my favorite weird long-form Naruto fics: Silver Queen, ElectraSev5n, SixPerfections, SoundlessSleep. Even the concept of this story wouldn't exist without them, and I've had a ridiculously good time getting lost in their work. Y'all are legends.

I guess that's all. Let's get to it.

"No wonder we cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from the horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home."

- David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster and Other Essays

There are a lot of ways somebody can die. If you really stop to think about it, the possibilities are basically infinite – just about anything can kill you if it tries hard enough. Maybe tomorrow you get crushed by a falling rock, or maybe you trip on a dirty sock and crack your temple against the edge of a table. Someone could stab you with a screwdriver hard enough to punch a hole in your gut and lock you in a closet to let you thrash around uselessly until you bleed out. That empty vodka bottle on your desk can put a body down in more ways than anybody needs to think about.

Some of the many ways to die aren't too nightmarish; decapitation by enemy kenjutsu specialist, abrupt and severe aneurysm, lethal injection. The kind of thing you don't really have the time or faculties to feel. (Wait, is lethal injection a merciful death? I guess I'll never know.) And then some ways are definitely horrible; burning to death, slow and sadistic torture, succumbing to a really cruel disease, being forced to swallow toothpicks. It gets bad.

I can't really rank this stuff, though, despite having a morbid urge to try. See, it's hard for me to compare when I've only died once.

Well, I think I've only died once. I've been wrong about some pretty crazy shit before.

To me, drowning seemed like one of the worst ways somebody could go. Not being able to breathe is a terror beyond terror – you panic, thrash around even if you're not in water, basically just become a pathetic animal. Don't get me wrong, though. I love water, and dying in it somehow didn't manage to ruin that. A lifetime ago I spent a whole lot of time at the beach, in pools, so on and so forth. During that life, I came close to drowning at least four times, and none of that shit was enough to discourage me. Really, I think that's kind of reasonable. Nowhere you go is actually safe, right? Even civilians know that safety is a comfortable illusion. That was something I'd thought I understood.

And yet, in the end, all the scary almost-deaths left me less mentally prepared for the concept that I might not get the 'almost' prefix next time. Maybe my subconscious figured "well, something happened to save you at the last second the other four times, so that's just how this goes."

Nothing happened at the last second. Sometimes that's just how it goes.

I'm lucky enough not to remember the details, most of the time. Apparently, dying and being reborn in another universe really leaves your memories a mess, especially the ones leading up to the big moment; it took years to properly remember it happened at all. All I know for sure is that it wasn't important or even dramatic; some people's endings are just dumb. I wasn't trying to accomplish anything, I wasn't doing something heroic. It was probably my own fault.

Anyway. Reincarnation was something I was always sort of wishy-washy about. I didn't believe in it, but I didn't not believe in it, either. Call it something I hoped would be real; afterlives all sounded uncomfortably infinite, and so did, you know, the incomprehensible soul-flaying concept of just ceasing to exist. The best option I could think of went about like this: "hey, wouldn't it be sort of tolerable if a single consciousness just migrated on somehow, with maybe some kind of hub in between lives where you could remember all of them at once?"

That didn't pan out quite how I wanted, but I guess it wasn't too far off the mark.

But does any of that really matter now? I mean, that's not even the life I'm living now. Actually... the life I'm I more accustomed to living might be over too. It's... hard to tell. This might even be that void between lives I used to theorize about; maybe you just... forget it, when it's time to spin the wheel again, and that's why this is new to me. Fuck if I know.

All I know is that it's dark here, and it's cold, and I don't even think I have to breathe. Pressure is everywhere, bearing down on me, something out of my worst memories, worst nightmares: infinite drowning, forever and ever.

Except... drowning forever isn't that frightening, at least not when I'm already dead or comatose or whatever the fuck I am now, without even lungs that I can feel.

I'm not... really sure why, or how, I'm saying all of this. Am I saying anything at all? I feel like I am saying something, even if I can't justify that feeling. How do you speak without a mouth, without hands? It's just that it feels like the things I'm thinking... echo, sort of. Ripple through an endless, lightless ocean.

I don't see anything, if I even have eyes anymore, but I can't help but think I'm not alone here. That there are... other things, things that might be floating right in front of me at this very moment, mocking me for my sightlessness. Small and flittering and numerous, or massive and unfathomable, all writhing together through eternity.

Is that what you are? Some tentacled god, or hell, even just a spirit? Or are you another doomed soul like me? I know you're there. I know you're listening to me. Somehow I can just feel that there's an ear or at least a mind receiving all of this. I wish you'd say something to me... but then again, maybe it's for the best that you don't.

Maybe listening is fun for you. Maybe it's disturbing you to hear all this. Maybe you don't care.

But you're all I've got, and as far as I can tell, I have all the time in the world to kill, so buckle up. This story's long and stupid and horrible.

... I hope you do find a way to enjoy it. I think I'd feel a little better about this if something in the multiverse could.

BURIAL AT SEA

Washed Ashore, Chapter 1

Everything was dark, and wet, and I wasn't breathing, and I was being crushed from every direction at once... and then I wasn't.

It was hard to think at all, at first. I felt... half-asleep, scared and confused and empty. Where the fuck was I? I'd gone from perfect darkness to a light so brutally bright that it was agonizing, a sense of powerlessness completely different from what had been happening to me just seconds before. Everything felt - wrong. Baffling. Inexplicable. Mentally and physically.

Shouldn't I have been dead? My lungs didn't feel any less full of water... or did they? Every one of my senses was rubbed raw, somehow, and it was impossible to decode any of them.

Suddenly, something slammed into me from behind, and between the shock of it and the total insanity of the situation, it was just... too much. So I cried, or at least, I couldn't hold the urge to attempt to cry back any longer.

I was even more shocked and confused when it worked.

That didn't help much to calm me down, but even a little bit counts when you're completely losing your shit. And everything was weird, but also warm, and I was alive, and surrounded by sounds that I didn't exactly understand but were soothing and also weirdly... familiar. I could recognize that they were words even if none of them meant anything, but holding any more complicated ideas than that in my head just wasn't working.

I had been terrified just a little while ago, but for the life of me I couldn't remember why. Something scary had happened, right? Or... maybe I had just been dreaming?

Eventually I gave up on sorting it all out and tried to sleep, since I didn't seem to be in any immediate danger and I felt completely fucking wretched. I was tired, and things hurt, and it was difficult to think, but there wasn't anything to be afraid of, was there?

When I woke up again, I barely remembered that there had been anything to forget.

Somewhere in the first week or so, my mind foggy and lazy and content to just let things happen, the part of me that could still kind of think like a person realized that the creatures around me I thought might be giant people or something were... well, only giant by comparison to me, because I was small.

Very small, and not at all myself.

Somewhere in the second week it finally sank into place. I was... I was a child. A baby, probably. Or at least, I was in a baby's body. I didn't exactly feel like one, but then again, what was a baby supposed to feel? People don't remember that far back pretty much ever.

And if I was a baby, why did I feel so - what would I even call it? Smart? Knowledgeable? Because I was. I knew things I shouldn't have known. I made guesses based on information that a real baby obviously couldn't have. Some of the time, my thoughts were in actual words.

I felt so strange, like I had... come from somewhere, somehow. But... that didn't make sense.

Then again, what did make sense about the situation?

By what was probably the third week, I had processed enough fragmented thoughts to realize that the giants carrying me around and feeding and clothing me were probably... parents. My parents, except... were they really? I felt on some surreal, deep level that I had those already, and they were different somehow. For one thing, I could swear I knew their language, and whatever familiar-but-foreign words these people spoke just didn't parse at all.

After a few more weeks, or months, or something... I had mostly stopped worrying about it. I wasn't getting answers anytime soon, clearly, and maybe in a way it was kind of nice. Why something my age would have lingering stress, I couldn't imagine; if I hadn't even existed, what could have been weighing on me? Well, whatever it was, this felt like a massive reprieve, like I was being given a chance to just give up and not have to try anymore.

It's unbelievably strange, to feel like you're cheating life by being given a rest from responsibilities you don't remember and aren't entirely sure were real at all.

My mind had been drowning, or at least I felt like it had been - choked by lost responsibility, crushed by expectations, left in a state of constant fear for reasons I could no longer recall.

I wasn't drowning, anymore. I was floating on the water's surface.

The very first bit of this odd language that I learned was my name. I'm not sure if I was taught my name before I figured it out; it just wasn't hard to pick up on when the words kept showing up in reference to me. Namiko. I let that word roll through my mind every single day, hoping it would fill the strange hollow space that where I felt like a name should already have been. The strangest part, though, was how quickly it was over, how easily I adjusted.

Maybe I just had a lot of motivation. Hearing people I'd essentially imprinted on saying my name all of the time, especially when something was wrong and I was crying again... it set the associations firmly in place. This was a good thing. I could be Namiko. That much was within my miniscule power.

... I relied on that fact, honestly. In a world where I could hardly see and every attempt to speak came out as meaningless sobs, those syllables gave me something to hold onto, a foundation for an identity, a set of sounds that made things better.

A lot of things about being a baby are incredibly gross, but... I had people to take care of that, to take care of me. I think I must have loved Mom and Dad instantly, unconditionally, but the more work I realized they were putting into keeping me alive, keeping me changed, keeping me fed, the more solid the feeling became. Solid like my name. Something that nothing could twist or break or steal.

My name and my parents were all I had, and they were completely linked, opposites that fed from each other: something that was mine alone, internal, and something that chose to be mine, external.

Nami-chan, I would hear, and each time I did, I felt a little bit more of the anxiety of having to start my life from zero slip away. For whatever reason, I didn't like myself much. No, that's not true. I absolutely hated myself. But maybe I could learn to like Namiko.

It was a weird idea, but I was done caring about being weird.

A few weeks passed, and on one long, long night, out of absolutely nowhere, I drowned in a sea of blood and fire, madness and fear. Nothing I could remember or half-remember had come close. The feeling overpowered me, choked me so utterly I couldn't even scream. I was completely sure I was going to die.

It was a long fucking time before I found out what had happened, that it was a certain fox's fault, that the village I hadn't known surrounded me was struggling as one to survive a nightmare made real, that countless lives were snuffed out by that same tide of death - babies suffocating on hatred in their cribs, children and adults slaughtered by the hundreds.

All that mattered to me was that it ended and there was someone to hold me when it was over.

My life was calm again for a long while after that. I just... kept existing in a useless and tiny shell, waiting with a weird sort of dread for whatever the next big shock would inevitably be.

There was one, but it wasn't nearly as bad. That shock was finding out just where I was. By seven months old, I could actually see pretty normally again, and at eight months, my lost status as fandom trash made the truth obvious. (What did that mean? Where did those words come from? I didn't have the energy to try to figure it out.) Mom and Dad – Otsuka Izumi and Noburu – dressed awfully similar, and one random day, I finally managed to make out leaf-engraved forehead protectors.

Why did that mean something to me? Why did it shake me to my core, despite it just being shapes and colors? I knew that leaf, somehow, and more than that, I knew that it should not have existed.

When my parents heard me crying, they assumed there was a normal baby reason for it. Two minutes later I was hungry and crying again for that reason, though, so it really didn't matter.

By somewhere in my second year alive, the number of things that I Just Knew Somehow was rising rapidly. It was a cascade that just kept coming, all started by those engraved leaves. This was Konohagakure, in the Land of Fire. But that was all. I had no idea why that was important.

My parents were shinobi. That was emotionally complicated for a while, being raised by murderers, but... I guess I got used to the idea. They were kind to me, kinder than I could begin to comprehend, and the idea of killing, of a world large enough to include killing, was so abstract.

We weren't a clan, or anything remotely close to that. It was just me and my parents and a pretty modest house. Honestly, I was fine with that; I didn't want anyone else vying for attention, and I think maybe I liked having a universe that was small and easy to chart.

Maybe I should've been lonely. I wasn't. I was busy learning how to be alive, and besides, Mom and Dad were more than enough. Friends... maybe someday I'd have those; I was pretty sure they were supposed to be important. But they could wait. They had to wait, so why pine for something I only half-understood and couldn't have?

Through all of this, I was learning this language that everyone used but me. It was... Japanese, wasn't it? But what did that mean? There was no place in this world called Japan. Like so many things, I knew it without asking or being told.

Learning to speak it wasn't really that difficult; it just took a lot of time. I noticed that I actually knew a few words already; only a handful, not enough to actually help, but it was interesting.

I developed a strange tilt to my voice that I never quite got rid of, the consequence of a mind that had come with another language already installed, and that made it tougher to pronounce some words quite right even if I technically heard how. The result was that my parents worried I might have some kind of disorder. At somewhere near two and a half years old I had a pretty reasonable grip on the basics of the language and I was doing well enough not to have issues, but I still sounded kind of off. No one found a fix, but apparently nothing was wrong with me.

I think that Mom was the first to realize how much more mature parts of me were than they should have been. That started around three or so, on a random day when she walked in on me with a book that was ridiculously above my level in my hands, surrounded by various teaching aids, trying to speed-learn and wipe out my pronunciation issues at the same time. What really clued her in was that it was working. Well, the speed-learning was; that alien twist to my words just wouldn't disappear, not completely.

My intelligence was a double-edged sword. I was way smarter than I had any right to be yet; that was just a fact there was no getting around. I knew that in the world of ninja that wasn't so bizarre, but I still had to sort of... rein it in a bit. Nobody needed to get the idea that I was some kind of genius, especially since I wasn't one, or at least I didn't feel like one. All I actually had going for me was a mysterious head start.

There was a limit, though, and I was pushing it by being way too interested in everything in a way that I couldn't hide was sort of more deliberate than presumably-normal childish ultra-curiosity. They didn't know the full extent of it, but I was pretty book smart, and while none of the unlikely connections I made were massive, they were still leaps of logic that no little girl should have been able to pull off.

Dad was kind of disturbed once when I cried over a dead bird in our yard and then accidentally stopped him from trying to explain death to me by very obviously already understanding it. Mom was less affected; she was harder to shake up, staying calm through the weirdest situations, while Dad was a bit on the frantic side, prone to worry but incredibly fun to be around.

"We're shinobi, dear, and she's always reading. It isn't so strange."

"Izumi... you didn't see the way she looked at me."

Who could have known that I'd screw up over such random things? I was careful not to go overboard, but these landmines of child development were everywhere, and dodging all of them just wasn't possible. Hell, I didn't even know why it felt so important to try.

Watching my parents raise me when I understood way too well what parenting could be was so bizarre. I honestly felt sorry for them. They tried so, so hard, and the truth was that I was a real handful. Their personalities mirrored my own unexpectedly intense nature; in a lot of ways they were opposites, and it seemed that the only way I knew how to exist consisted of opposites. If Mom was a chill, laid back person, and Dad was frenetic and busy, well, I was both of those things times a billion. Okay, maybe not a billion.

I was defined by extremes. Honestly, I think I had - well, have, nothing's changed there - some form of bipolar disorder, or... well, maybe not. I didn't think my symptoms exactly fit what I felt the definition was. There was something else going on with me; something similar enough to steal some terminology, if nothing else.

Most of the time, 'calm' was exactly the right word for me; a wallflower even for a little girl with no friends, always reading or lost in deep contemplation, ready for someone else to take charge of everything. The other quarter or so of the time, I was a human pinball. I'd feel this surge of energy, not actual energy but sort of emotional energy, and it would just be too much to ignore. All I could do then was move, talk, pace in circuits through the house, swing pillows around at random, anything to discharge that feeling of too much too much too much.

Keeping track of me was a hell of a job, because that manic state – and it was a sort of mania, I was sure of that – could build from nothing to full force in half an hour sometimes. One moment I'd be deep in an inappropriately violent adventure story and the next I'd be gone and the only way to find me was to follow the trail of disarray in my wake. They'd usually find me as a pair, Mom reassuring Dad that no, I would not disappear forever, this was the second time this week that I'd run off and it was just fine before, wasn't it?

That was funny to see. Their interactions in general were just... fun to watch. They loved each other to death, loved me, and they were even a visual contrast to one another – Mom with gentle features and the tidy blue-black hair I'd inherited, Dad with his face like a twitchy human squirrel and short frazzled spikes of deeper pitch. I did end up with eyes that were more like his: amber, although mine were flecked with gold for some reason. People in this world just randomly looked cool by default so often. I didn't have any logical reason for thinking they wouldn't, but it was still a surprise.

Seeing myself was almost unbearably strange for a few years. Like with everything else, I just... adjusted. I actually liked my appearance, which felt as foreign as everything else about me; I'd have to be super careful not to end up looking emo, a concept I had no right to understand, but I was going to save so much money someday not buying hair dye, and even if it made me feel narcissistic to admit, there was something awesome about the way both my hair and my eyes could show gleams of brighter color from the right angles. The gold sparks in my eyes, the way strands of brighter blue hid in my close-to-black hair... it all made me think of the way the ocean glittered in sunlight and moonlight respectively.

I hadn't actually seen an ocean, but I could picture it more clearly than almost anything else. Calm and storm, serenity and wrath. Slivers of light refracting into darkness. I dreamed of it all the time. It felt like it was mine.

I wondered if my parents ever caught me staring into the mirror for way too long. If they did, they never said anything about it.

There came a point where I had to start properly acknowledging the ninja thing.

Chakra sure did exist - another thing I realized long before I was told. It wasn't something I was really aware of for a while, and I couldn't usually feel it unless I was deliberately practicing how. My parents seemed glad that I wanted to get in touch with it, probably because it might help me follow in their footsteps. Until I put that together, I hadn't entirely noticed that maybe I had a bit too much endurance, strength, speed, everything than I felt was right. It wasn't extreme, but once I was aware of it, it was impossible to forget, especially when I was in high-octane mode. I was just physically better than what my brain insisted was 'normal.' That was kind of awesome.

I kept catching myself thinking about how cool it was going to be to actually learn how to use chakra, then realizing... that was only going to happen if I did decide to be a shinobi, and I hadn't. Was I even okay with being a child soldier morally? Was I capable of it at all? Did I want that life for myself? I wasn't stupid. I loved my little slice of this world, but I knew what that world was: an insane nightmare of feudalism and vicious, ludicrous shinobi wars.

What a weird thing that despite all of that, I was actually considering doing it.

I'd kept myself from thinking too hard about that aspect of my future. Honestly, I'd just tried my hardest to be a kid and keep away from concepts like gaining power. I guess I couldn't keep dodging those thoughts forever.

So one day, I went out to 'play' and I didn't come back.

It's not that I didn't intend to come back; I just wanted to be alone for a while, really alone. Konohagakure was so much bigger than I had envisioned it before, and there was a lot of ground to cover, so I went and covered a bit of it that I wasn't familiar with. There was a nice little copse somewhere south of my house that was just sort of calling to me.

I hid under a canopy of leaves, feeling bark scrape at my back through my clothes, listening to the wind in the trees and the sounds of people far in the distance, and I forced myself to do what I'd been avoiding: I tried to actually decide what I wanted.

... So I knew things about the world. I felt convinced that I even knew things about its future - I couldn't prove it even to myself, but I knew things, terrible things, and it was hard not to feel some sense of responsibility. Whether I was a seer or a psychic or whatever, shouldn't I use that knowledge to try to fix things, to make life better for people? Some of them specific people who I didn't know, probably never would, but felt a connection to anyway; names and faces circling my subconscious.

This all probably had something to do with philosophies venerating selflessness, with wanting to be a good person, or just hoping I was a good person already, even though I knew I wasn't. There was something dark haunting me, things I either had done and experienced or would someday do and experience, and no one good could carry that taint.

Should I try to change the future? I sure hadn't asked for this, although I still felt a little bit... guilty, I guess, even if I hoped that was unfair to myself.

What could I do, anyway? Nothing if I decided to be a civilian, die pointlessly young as a shitty-to-mediocre ninja? I wasn't all about intrigue and secrets. I sure as hell wasn't any kind of hero. The only way I could change anything would be through some silly, completely unintentional chain reaction. Yay chaos theory, yay butterfly effect, so on and so forth. So that wasn't exactly ideal. A quote swam through my head in that odd language that only belonged to me, the words of someone who probably wasn't real: "Almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it."

Existing arbitrarily just to see how it randomly affected the people around me... yeah, I wasn't a big fan of that. It sounded fucking awful.

... Time had gotten away from me when I finally pulled myself out of my head and remembered I was a person with a body, sitting out in the forest. It was chilly now, uncomfortably chilly. I wrapped my arms tight around myself, trying not to shiver.

The day was dying. I hadn't planned this very well at all. That was more proof that I wasn't cut out for anything heroic right there; how was somebody too stupid to bring a coat on a long outing fit to change the future?

... At least the village was beautiful in the evening, and twilight was starting to hit, my favorite part of the day, balanced perfectly between the light and the dark. The shadows and silhouettes of trees, the city lights all around and in the distance... It was gorgeous, and it made me feel a little better.

I was starting to realize that maybe duality was becoming a theme with me. It made sense, kind of, when so much of me existed at odds with logic and the world I lived in.

... Ugh, I was distracting myself again. There was a reason I was out here freezing my ass off.

This life was good to me, but what would I use it for, if not to mess around with the fact that I wasn't supposed to be here? I felt an instinctive lack of worth and potential, a shroud of meaninglessness or importance. Why was I convinced I'd never make more of myself? Why did it make my chest ache, as if it were already true?

God, I desperately needed to be anything other than pointless.

I never could shake the instinct that every day would be hollow and I would be empty inside, incapable of finding the middle ground between caring too little and caring too much, flip-flopping with no rhyme or reason. But that wasn't really true, was it? Some of it was, but I had good times. I mattered to Mom and Dad, right? There was no reason to feel choked by regrets couldn't even be mine.

... Twilight was ending, now, and night was coming on proper. I wondered when I'd be found, curled up best I could against the growing cold. Something about the discomfort was useful, though. It helped keep my head clear, even though I kept slipping away into my thoughts so deeply that I'd forget anything else existed.

I had a completely fresh start - I was a new person. My world was one where things that mattered could happen in my vicinity. Some of them would probably be horrible. If the future ended up coming anywhere close to the carnage in my dreams and my vision-like memories, they would be incredibly horrible and I'd almost definitely die a nobody, helpless in any way that I actually cared about.

Otsuka Namiko. Nami-chan. The haunted, depressed thing that always clawed at the back of my mind was not her. This girl had a long lifespan and an incredibly early start on building an identity. Oh yeah, and her parents were shinobi, couldn't forget that tiny little fact.

I finally had to accept that if I was going to grow up, live an actual life – and I was, whether I wanted to or not – things would just... decay, if left alone. Time would strip whatever happiness I had down to concepts I could barely feel. Boredom and selfish angst would end up wrapping my life in a prison of melodrama. That was who I was, inviolably, I didn't doubt that at all.

But... if there was anything that could keep this life from being boring, could make it worth something, could make me become a person I was actually vaguely interested in, wouldn't it have to be trying to become a shinobi?

What a bizarre problem to have. The only way I could imagine becoming someone I was interested in was to sign up to be a child soldier. That was the level of change I was starting to think I could accept, if it gave me a chance at... understanding anything.

"There you are!"

Oh, hey. For once it was Dad winning the 'who can find our crazy daughter first' game.

"Nami-chan, your mother's been worried sick."

I couldn't help but laugh at that, and he smiled, looking as worn out as I felt. There was something hilarious about the idea that Mom would be the worried one. Then I just felt guilty, because what it really meant was that he had been freaking out. He didn't deserve that, not in exchange for me having a chance to pick through my brain in total solitude.

"... Hey, Dad? I don't know what to do."

Sighing, he sat down next to me, pointlessly running his fingers through the frizzy hair that he could never get under control. He knew that tone of voice; it meant I was going to open up about something. Four year olds probably shouldn't have had things to 'open up' about, but he was well aware that I was different somehow. There was that societal tendency, again, to just kind of accept kids who were infinitely more intelligent than they should have been.

He didn't respond; he knew I'd talk when I was ready to. Now there was another thing I loved my parents for. I loved them for a lot of reasons, but the way they managed to deal with the paradox of someone with both the emotional maturity of, well, a four year old, and the sort-of-emotional and definitely-intellectual maturity of... whatever the fuck the other part of my mind was...

How to put it into words? I guess they had found a way to keep their own balance around a binary soul.

Where to go next? How did I explain myself in a way that made sense, and how much maneuvering would it take to keep this low-stress? More than I was really capable of, realistically. Well then, there was no good reason to screw around. Blunt was always the way to go in life, if you had the chance.

"I can't decide if I want to be a shinobi like you and Mom."

I felt him twitch, and I wasn't sure what I hoped he was thinking. Knowing him, he probably wasn't sure what he wanted to hear, either. He was the worrier, and he'd know as well as anyone how long the average shinobi stayed alive. Would he want that for his own daughter?

"Part of me really wants to. It... It'd be so cool. You and Mom are awesome. But it's... scary. And I'm not really good at anything. All I know how to do is read."

Which way was up again? Where was the bottom to kick off of so I could search for air? I realized my breathing was weird and hesitant, like every time I opened my mouth I was risking letting the pressure around me force its way into my lungs.

"You know that's not true, Nami-chan. You –"

"No, it is true. And if I'm not good at this, I'll hate myself and then probably die. I really don't want to die, Dad."

I could breathe. I was talking. The atmosphere wasn't really any heavier than it had been a few seconds ago. I took a deeper breath, made myself focus on this is oxygen, this is air.

"But I don't want to be no one. I just... want to matter. I want my life to mean something."

He wrapped an arm around me and I let myself lean over and cuddle into his side. God, I was tiny, wasn't I? It was too easy to forget that. I could feel the pressure receding, the air clearing up. Touching another warm body was so much more of a relief than I'd expected, and not just because of the temperature.

"I think you need to follow your instincts. You're awfully bright, Nami-chan. Are you sure you don't already know the answer?"

"I don't," I whined, but hearing my own tone of voice made me feel like he was right. On some level, don't humans always know what we want?

"Well... I'm not you. I don't know what's right for you here, and you know that your Mom and I would never pressure you to do what we do, if you that's not the way you want to live. But you do know. Think of it this way, Namiko. Which path scares you more to think about?"

I smooshed up even closer and wished he did know what was right for me. Making big decisions would end in disaster, I felt instinctively. Couldn't I just let them decide? Couldn't I just coast either into or away from this without having to wonder if I'd been the one at blame when it all went to hell? I was sort of four, and right then I really, really felt like it.

... No. The specter of an emptiness that felt like it had already been mine was too terrible. I couldn't just coast through my life.

"... the one where I'm nobody," voice muffled by his ribcage.

That was it, then, wasn't it? Dad was so good at finding angles to approach problems from that I could never see coming. He couldn't know why that was my fear, at least, but then again I didn't fucking know either.

Well... at least my young-life crisis seemed to be over. So I was doing this. I was going to try. No huge dreams, no fancy world-saving plans, just... a life where I wouldn't be bored.

"Here's a trick I like to use to make hard choices," he said. "What I do is flip a coin and catch it, and in that moment before I see the result, part of me is suddenly afraid it'll come up a certain way, and realizing that settles the choice right there. I don't even have to look at the coin, if I don't feel like it."

"... How did you get so smart?"

Funny to hear coming from me, maybe, but I honestly meant it. Maybe being a shinobi who survived long enough to raise children just wasn't possible without acquiring actual wisdom along the way.

"I didn't," he said. "I just get lucky once in a while."

I couldn't see his face, but I was sure he was winking. He shuffled around for a second and I felt a cold, circular object slip between fingers I that were still digging into his shirt. I didn't have to look at it to guess what it was.

What the hell had ever I done to deserve a family like this?

"Okay, let's go."

Mom smiled at me from across the table, holding a sheet of chakra paper. This... was sort of exciting. I had a feeling I already knew my affinity, but maybe I was wrong, and even if I was right, that wasn't a bad thing. How could anyone be disappointed with their affinity? It wasn't like it totally locked us out of other types of elemental jutsu, and all of them were awesome in their own ways.

I wondered if there was more ceremony to this in some families, or if everyone just got called to the living room before dinner and took care of it in, like, five minutes, the day after making the choice I had. 'Clans' just screamed 'fancy bullshit' to me, so there probably was. One more reason to be glad that this was my family.

"You don't have to over-exert anything. Just try to move a tiny bit of chakra into it and that'll be more than enough, okay?"

"Dad, I'm not going to get myself hurt by chakra paper." I had to stifle a giggle. This was such a simple procedure, if you could even call it that. "Can I just do it now? I feel sort of..." hmm. I squinted and thought about it for a second; there was more than just excitement there. Oh, damn. Now that I had noticed it, I recognized that feeling. I was building towards a burst of mania. "... impatient?"

They shared a brief look. My inflection must have been enough to get the message across.

"Okay, then. Here you go!"

Mom handed me the sheet. Why did I feel like there was extra tension in the room? This wasn't meaningless, but there was no wrong outcome, so what was anybody anxious about?

I closed my eyes to help focus. Chakra was strange; it felt almost like a liquid to me, pulsing through phantom veins, with just a hint of energy there, a tiny sparkly feeling that helped me sort of grip on when I needed to, made it easier to perceive.

The paper sagged into my fingers, darkening with moisture.

No surprise, then. I let out a breath I hadn't exactly been holding, but hadn't been... not holding, either. Water was far from a common affinity around here, obviously, but I had just known my personality matched it too well for anything else. Also, my chakra felt like liquid to me. Kinda figured that would be slightly relevant.

"Are you alright, dear?"

I blinked, nodded, smiled. Looking between Mom and Dad, I realized they must have been afraid I was unhappy somehow. To be fair, I had just spent like thirty seconds staring at the paper without any expression. Too many seconds to just do nothing, honestly, and that bothered me. No need to waste time.

Now I couldn't keep myself from fidgeting. We'd finished the thing and I was more than ready to get on with my day. Their smiles wavered just a little bit. I had no idea why, but I always seemed to mess up or cause trouble when I was like this. They were well aware.

"Can I, um, can I go outside?"

I had found the cutest frog in this little pond yesterday, I could go look for it again right then. It was mid-afternoon, though. I'd need to run if I wanted to make it in time. No problem. Running could be fun.

"Of course, sweetheart, but..." they shared another look, and this one... was unique. I couldn't tell if they only seemed apprehensive because it was obvious I was about to go have an awesome time and ditch this tiny little space for a while, or if there was something else going on, but that was fine. Places to go, things to do, rocks to throw, frogs to find, branches to snap. My muscles felt like they were doing whatever the opposite of 'aching' was. Was there a word for that? I'd have to look it up later.

Dad cleared his throat and I remembered he wanted something from me or whatever. I tapped my fingers in quick, random patterns on my thighs.

"Would you humor me and try it one more time?"

That was. Weird.

"Okay, sure, can I have the paper then? I need to have the paper for this to happen."

Fingers tapped faster and faster. Dad passed me a second sheet. Wait, we had two sheets? They had planned for this. Why had they expected to need a spare? I chewed on the inside of my lip to give my jaw something to do.

It was harder to focus. Way harder. I'd actually never been able to grasp onto my chakra when I was like this, but I was definitely going to try. I tried so hard to find that ghostly liquid, but how was I supposed to do that when there were frogs in the pond and I needed to see if I could beat yesterday's personal jumping height record? I kept struggling, though, forced myself to hold my eyes shut for just a few more seconds. Sparkly feeling, where was that, that helped sometimes, I could use that to tell my chakra apart from the rest of myself, right?

I tried to find it and failed. I tried again. And again. Nothing. I growled in frustration and gave it a fourth try, and suddenly everything changed so much that I had no idea if I could fail again even if I wanted to.

My chakra was bright and strange and the sparkles were so much more intense than they normally were. It was more like my second set of veins was filled with liquified static that sort of pumped and sloshed as it kept spiking and setting off miniscule fireworks all under my skin.

My eyes came open. There was no way I could sit here any longer, I was buzzing like an old radio and I had an entire world to help me burn off this maddening, wonderful high. 'High' was a good word, I decided. This almost-cartoonish mania was like a drug and I hated it for that and I loved it for that.

"Oh," Mom said, very quietly, and I remembered what I was doing. Right, right. I glanced back at the paper, which I already knew would be saggy and wet.

"... Oh," I echoed. "Weird."

The paper, perfectly dry, was wrinkled into dozens of sharp, firm creases.

This was better discussed later though, really. My body was crackling with the need to do something, anything, everything. I didn't want to sit around and ponder mysterious stuff, that was for later and now was for action.

I didn't miss the conflicted smile on my mother's face as she ruffled my hair, but I didn't really bother trying to decode it, either; there was a front door in my way and I still had to find that goddamned frog.

There came a point somewhere around five years old when my parents were concerned enough about my lack of interest in socializing to actually pressure me to at least try. The darker, wiser part of me thought this was incredibly pointless, and the more normal little girl in me thought that having someone to run around alleyways and patches of trees with would be fun.

It... went okay at first. Social awkwardness was an eternal constant in my life, and groups of people, even kids, didn't mesh well with me. I tried. I swear to god I tried. They were just so erratic, never committing to anything properly, never following through, and then when I'd crack and kick into high gear, they couldn't keep up with me and I couldn't stand it.

Don't get me wrong, it wasn't terrible, but it didn't really encourage me much, either. So much in life was fuel for cynicism.

Then something happened that legitimately threw me, and hard.

It had been a nice day, really; enough sun to feel nice without being obnoxious, a mild breeze. Those tranquil childhood days I figured I'd look back on wistfully, someday. The group of kids from down the block who I was getting accustomed to running into had wanted me to play ball with them, and I was feeling charitable, so I did. It was good once in a while, forgetting everything else completely and just throwing shit around.

I tired out pretty fast, at least in terms of my ability to directly interact with six other children. Two of them I had never really spoken to, and that bugged me, but it wasn't too important. No one else minded my semi-absence as I went to sit on the sidelines and read. They were slowly getting used to the weird kid who was always carrying around books and sometimes taking notes on things – a habit I'd actually cultivated on purpose, because holy hell there was a lot to learn about everything, and I wanted to know as much of it as possible as fast as possible.

A stray ball thumped into my face. I lowered my book - one of many volumes on Konoha history that I buried myself in - and raised an eyebrow, kind of expecting an apology, not that I really cared too much. It was squishy and it hadn't even hurt.

But they were all staring at me uncomfortably, and the new kids were outright glaring. I was pretty sure I didn't have any enemies yet, so this made no sense, although little kids could be real jerks for no reason occasionally.

"... What's with the death stares?"

The slightly bigger and older-looking of the pair nudged the other with his elbow.

"See? She even sounds weird when she talks. I told you."

I dog-eared a page and shut my book. This was not the first time I'd heard that, and I knew I'd be hearing it constantly for a long time if not the rest of my life, so it only stung a tiny bit. What had really grabbed my attention was that having a slightly weird accent had never made anyone seem angry at me before.

"Do I know you guys from somewhere, or...?"

I trailed off and waited for them to explain themselves.

"My dad says your family doesn't belong here," he said. Well, leave it to kids to get right to the point. It still didn't make sense.

"Why would we not belong here? Where's here, anyway? This neighborhood, or..."

"This village!"

One or two of the kids who sort of knew me gasped. I actually had to take a few seconds to really understand that he had actually said that. You didn't just say things like that to other civilians in Konoha. Any hidden village took pride in the whole 'standing together' thing, and Konoha was a prime example.

"Is that really something you should be saying?" That was seriously all I could muster. This was just bizarre. Incredibly Rude Kid did not respond well to my accusation.

"It is when you say it to people from Kiri!"

... What? What the hell? Where did that come from?

"I'm not... from Kiri?"

"That's not what my dad says. He says your mom and dad are traitors and he doesn't know why we even let you stay."

Most of the kids had backed away to spots where they were equally far away from this little psycho, the brother he seemed to have mostly forced to come along with him, and me. I was... honestly speechless. This was so abrupt, not to mention vicious. Not to mention that it didn't actually line up at all with what I understood of objective reality.

I was still at a loss, not even really looking at him anymore, just... baffled. That was probably why I didn't see the rock coming.

But goddamn did I ever feel it thunk against my skull and tear open a bit of skin.

"Go back to Kiri, freak!" was the last thing I heard him say before I got up and ran home.

Mom came back from picking up flowers that I guess were to surprise Dad, and found me crying tucked into the corner of my room. At least she had missed the worst of it. I was kind of humiliated at how... bad this was making me feel. For some reason I never expected to lose it at being taunted by children. It was just...

No one wants to hear that they don't belong in their own home, especially in a hidden village and especially if they were me, and if this had been because of something that kid's dad said, then there must have been something weird going on that I hadn't ever been aware of. I was also just... scared, although I wasn't sure what of.

It's hard to stop crying when you're five years old. It's also hard when you're me. Mom sat in front of me and gave me a second to chill out.

"What's that from?", pointing at the large band-aid type thing I had stuck to my head.

"Rock," I mumbled, and lost my composure again, sort of dissolving into pathetic tears. "A boy threw a rock at me. He said, t-that we, that our f-family doesn't belong here. In, in Konoha."

A deadly, silent rage only showed on her face for a fraction of a second before she opened her arms up and let me flop over to cry on her.

"He said that his dad said we were tr... traitors, and then, he s-said go back to Kiri and threw a rock at me and I ran away."

"Sshh, it's okay," she said, threaded her fingers through my hair, gently finger-brushing down from my scalp to my shoulders. "Honey."

"Do we really not belong here?"

I felt like if I just crushed myself into her a little tighter, I might disappear. Disappearing didn't sound so bad, right then. For the first time I really wondered where we'd come from. Were there other neighbors who thought of us this way, and I had just never been exposed to them? Could we somehow have come from the Land of Water? It didn't seem likely, and if anything I would have expected the Land of Waves to go by my own name.

"Of course we do. Our family has lived in Konoha for..." she hesitated, "well, more than long enough to belong, Nami-chan."

"Are we really from Kiri? Why would he say that? He doesn't even know me."

Her hand's stroking my hair slowed for a few seconds before returning to its original rhythm. Something about that made me even more nervous, and I needed her to keep doing the whole Mom thing, really, really needed it.

"Our family line did come here from the Land of Water, but that was your grandparents, not us. You and your father and I were born right here in Konohagakure, okay?"

"Then this is home, so it's not fair to say that stuff about us."

I knew it wasn't fair. Of course I had known that already. But... I needed something more to keep myself anchored to feeling like I belonged here. I just wanted to hear the words out loud, from someone I could honestly trust.

"No, it's not fair," she agreed, and hugged me closer.

A few weeks after that, both Mom and Dad had to leave for a mission. They hired me a 'babysitter' who seemed... tolerable, but I was seriously unhappy about the situation. I knew I couldn't do anything about it, it was just... a lot of the time I was lucky enough for only one to be out on a mission, not both at the same time. It was probably a good chance to hammer in that I was going to need to be a lot more independent in the future. I still didn't give a shit. I did not want them to leave.

They did at least try to smother me with affection to soften the blow. Mom promised to take care of Dad, Dad promised to bring me a present. There wasn't any more they could do beyond that and a kiss on the forehead.

I couldn't make myself stop worrying, even though there wasn't much to worry about. Hell, one day I'd be going out to do ninja stuff and they'd be the ones pacing around anxiously at home.

My babysitter and I came to the quick understanding that if she stayed out of my way within reason, I'd stay out of hers. I tried to learn her name, I really did, but it just didn't seem important enough in the moment.

The mission was supposed to take them out of the village for two days and nights. Two days and nights, that was all I had to endure. I could do this. I could totally do this.

That first day felt like a year. I read two books of fairy tales cover to cover and tried to at least be grateful that I hadn't gone manic. Maybe I'd make it through both days that way. Keeping myself under control was... slowly getting easier, but not by much. Mostly, I'd been better at listening to what people said, as opposed to ignoring all conceivable logic and reason. That was still an improvement, and it had all been feeling a little more manageable this last month, so I hoped it would just keep getting better.

Eventually I wore out enough to hide under my blanket and worry myself to sleep.

I didn't know where I was anymore, couldn't tell which way was up or down. My eyes stung. All around me, everywhere, the water that should have been comforting and fun was starting to feel like the force of nature it really was, crushing in from all possible angles at once. I tried to find any sort of bottom, anything to use as a point of reference, and I just... couldn't. Every direction lead to more blackness and more pressure and more fear. Couldn't breathe. Couldn't breathe but I had to breathe but if I tried to breathe I'd die but I couldn't breathe had to breathe was this really happening was this really it, lost in a special world that I'd always felt like I owned, a world that was suddenly infinite in the worst possible way, was that how my stupid life ended? My vision was filling up with black stars and I had to breathe had to breathe had to BREATHE and as the water rushed in and I choked and paddled against nothing, caught flickers of faces that I realized I would never see again, and everything, all my existence, was drowning in the abyss. Drowning just like I was.

I snapped awake, gasping for air I was convinced wasn't there. It took me a solid minute after waking up to convince myself I hadn't died again, nine more to stop crying, and another fifty after that to make the shaking go away.

All I could do was keep my mind off the nightmare, off my parents. I'd pulled it off yesterday, I'd live through it once more.

I didn't quite make it through without an episode, but I did at least manage to stay close to the house and mostly within view of the babysitter, who I had a feeling was relieved that I was acting a bit less crazy than she had probably expected.

Coming down was actually kind of unfortunate, because it gave my brain room to start worrying again. God, this had been a maddening problem to have even when I wasn't five. Reading wasn't helping me at all so I took to 'doodling' in my notebook, which was actually the third I'd needed in as many months. What I was actually doing was writing in my personal language.

I tried to do that as rarely as possible for the same reason that I condensed strange songs I shouldn't have known into simple humming: if I wasn't careful, it would stand out. No one needed to know that I read, wrote, and spoke a language that I was pretty sure literally did not exist; at best I'd be even crazier, and at worst I'd go from 'sort of a prodigy' to 'that kid who somehow invented her own language by age five.' Not something I wanted to risk.

There wasn't anything special to write. I kind of just... let a stream of consciousness flow, ending up with almost complete nonsense. Maybe I'd just write down how I was feeling or something? That kind of worked.

Somehow I didn't realize until nearly bedtime that I had spent the evening chronicling my loneliness.

The same nightmare struck again. It took less time to get over it, at least, and I felt way better realizing that it was only a matter of hours before this was over and done with and I could just... get back to my life.

I spent half of that day drawing random objects until I got frustrated at how bad I was and started chronicling my excitement.

... But the clock kept ticking. The hour grew later and later. Eventually, the babysitter had me go to bed just so I'd stop bugging her about the time. It wasn't weird at all for a mission to last longer than expected. This had happened with either of them individually more than once before. It was just... a lot scarier when it was both of them.

My third morning waking up from dreaming about drowning had my recovery time down all the way to twenty minutes. Progress.

By the end of that third day, I was starting to think I was going to lose my mind from anxiety. This could not be over soon enough. What were they up to out there? Somewhere down the line I'd be inflicting this on them so maybe I was a hypocrite for wanting to yell at them to never go anywhere ever again once they got home, but I really couldn't care.

Day four was so much worse. I spent most of it just walking in tight circles in my room, making myself focus on one thought: 'they're coming back, they're coming back, they're coming back, they're coming back,' over and over and over and over again. I had to be rational. This wasn't going to be my last scare like this, and I couldn't let bizarre instinctive abandonment issues mess with my head so bad. All I could do was grit my teeth and remind myself: my parents are coming back. They're going to come back.

They didn't come back.