Rebirth.

WARNING: CONTAINS OCS AND EVENTUAL MANGA SPOILERS! READ AT CAUTION!

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Cover Image Art By: Solkeera . deviantart . com

. . .

"I read once that water is a symbol for emotions. And for a while now, I've thought maybe I drowned in both."

I was born in the same moment I died, like a flash of lightning in the night. I was alive for a single moment of bright electricity, crackling in your eardrums and shattering the ground, and then I was gone.

I remember seeing my own body, as if looking at it from high above. At first, I thought I was looking down upon my twin sister... But then I realized I wasn't. It was me, bobbing up and down amongst the reeds near the shoreline, dead. Blood had seeped through my shirt and jeans, pooling around me like paint drips in a glass of murky tap water. The lake water had been cold, I remembered, cold enough to make me shiver before I drowned. One of my arms had been askew, suspended above my head as if I had been reaching for help, the skin and muscle peeled away so that I could see streaks of ivory bone. My ordinarily dark skin had faded into a horrible, ghostly white, making me look more like a ghoul from a low-budget horror film than a corpse. My eyes were closed, as if I was sleeping, but I knew otherwise.

Dead.

I had watched my chest to search for breathing, expecting to see the familiar rise and fall of my ribcage as I breathed. I saw nothing. My chest was as still and frozen as a block of ice. The familiar thump of my heart had slowed to a stop, the melody of life that had thrummed through me my entire life cut short in a single, bitter twist of fate.

No. No. No. Please, no. I don't want to die!

I screamed, expecting to be greeted with the familiar site of smoky fog as my breath came into contact with the frigid air. My breath should smoke.

It doesn't.

I stared down at my wrist, the one that had been untouched by blood and gore, and pinched as hard as I could.

I didn't feel a thing.

I'd had nightmares before- falling nightmares, drowning nightmares, giving-a-speech-without-knowing-the-words nightmares- but I had always been able to open my eyes and lift my head from the pillow, forcing the horror movie that had been playing behind my closed eyelids to stop completely.

This is different.

I can't make it stop, no matter how hard I try.

The impending darkness comes all too soon, swallowing me up and clogging my lungs with putrid, heavy air. I gasp, choking on nothing at all. I can taste something burnt at the back of my throat, as if my very being is on fire, but I am powerless to stop it. My body is no longer under my control, and that is the most terrifying feeling of all- being able to see but unable to move, to save yourself from the pain.

It is then that I feel truly dead.

There is nothing.

I was alive again in the next second. This life was a flash of dark, steady fog and emptiness, swallowing my soul. I felt strangely cold, as if I had been plunged head first into a bucket of icy water but then jerked back out. I shook as chills wracked my body, feeling completely and utterly exposed.

I'm in a bed, I had thought. Sheets and blankets were tucked around me, cocooning my limbs against my body with an almost comforting level of tightness. There was no light in this room except for a faint, almost tentative yellow glow that hovered directly above me and a dark, chilling gleam that seemed to have settled over the entire room, darkening it with malice.

Where am I?

I did not know those sheets, that room, that bed.

I looked down at myself with blurry, clouded eyes, seeing soft fabric wrapped around me from neck to my knees. My feet were bare, my toes wriggling with bizarre energy underneath the constraints of the fabric. Nothing felt frayed or broken. No pain.

There were dark shapes all around me.

People?

My eyes couldn't focus in on them, if they were there at all. I couldn't see anything except fuzzy, blocky shapes and clumsily moving figures. My first thought was blindness, brain damage. The word 'vegetable' came to mind, and a faint note of fear rang out in my mind. But... something wasn't right. My toes moved, and so did my fingers if I tried hard enough. My head was oddly heavy, too heavy to raise on my own. I blinked, feeling my eyelashes brush against my cheeks. Touch. Movement. I wasn't... broken. I felt strangely whole, as if I had spiraled through the vortex between life and death and came out with a few extra limbs. I felt heavy, not hurt like I should have felt.

Hell, I should be dead right now. What am I complaining about?! I had thought, silently thanking whatever power had saved my life. If I could just get out of these damn blankets, I could go back to my life. I could go back to living just the way I had before and pretend nothing had happened.

The dark shapes above me moved, shifting until one stood directly above me. Something wrapped around my body, what felt like a giant set of rough, masculine hands, and heaved me upwards.

I screamed.

The sensation of being cradled in someone's arms when you are well aware of your height being far too much for them to handle is... disconcerting, to say the least. All my life, I had been above average in height and lanky, stretched thin over a carefully sculpted, boyish physique. Being able to be picked up so easily was a truly terrifying experience to the unprepared, especially when I was unable to see much of anything at all.

What had happened to me?!

Had my death somehow ruined me so greatly that I was in fact missing parts of my body, yet didn't know it? That had sounded reasonable, but logic threatened to tell me otherwise. I could move my fingers and toes, albeit slightly, blink, and wiggle of my own accord. This meant my spinal column was intact. If I could feel both hands, legs, and other major appendages, then why did I feel so small?!

I wailed again, attempting to bat way the hands that held me, but could hardly even lift my arms inside the fabric. I wiggled my fingers again just to make sure my limbs were moving at all, but couldn't do much aside from that. I couldn't even tell the blurry figure to put me down. My vocal chords seemed almost unable to form words at all. I wasn't much of a talker to begin with, but that was a choice. This wasn't, and it terrified me.

A breathy "hush" came from the large, blurry figure that held me. The voice sounded male, far too low for a woman. I suppose the man intended to be comforting, but the noise only confused me further. What kind of response was that, speaking to a fully functioning teenager as if they were-

... a baby?!

Am I... a baby?

The idea sounded so utterly ridiculous and intangible that I would have dismissed it right away if not for the fact that it made sense. My poor vision, the strange weakness in my limbs, the tightly wrapped swaddling cloth- all of these things were familiar to me. I hadn't realized exactly why before, but now, everything was becoming clear. I knew these things, I honestly did. I had five siblings once. I knew babies well enough to realize-

I was a baby.

Somehow, this didn't terrify me as much as the idea of being picked up. Once I had made sense of the strange occurrence, I was no longer afraid. I had always sort of believed in spirits, and reincarnation didn't seem horribly far fetched. The idea of being reborn in another body, in another life, had existed since the beginning of time, in the earliest of religions. The idea of slipping between this world and the next, and somehow out of both of them entirely was truly enchanting, like something out of one of my childhood fairy tales. It was almost appealing, being allowed the chance to rewind and start over every time you failed.

I had really died back then, I just knew it. I had felt the air leave my body, and could vividly remember the feeling of choking on nothing but saltwater until I simply gave up. I suppose I had decided that dying in peace was better than fighting against imbalanced odds, but I couldn't be sure. The memory of the last few seconds of my life were blurred, skewed beyond the points of reality as the world erupted into stars. Those stars I had seen hadn't been in the night sky, no, they had been signs of my death and the seconds that I had left. I had counted them.

5-4-3-2-1

And then there was blackness.

There was simply no other explanation for these events- waking up in the body of an infant with the mind and memories of an adult. It was a physiological anomaly, I decided. I'm abnormal.

I had been given a rare chance to redo it all, and I decided I would take advantage of this to the fullest. I hadn't done much of anything in my past life except simply exist, and certainly not anything noteworthy. To me, this new life seemed like a chance to start over, and to do it right. In my past life, I had been great at only one thing- making mistakes. I had never experienced the heavily sought-after "perfect" life, or completed any of my major goals. I had lived, died, and wasted away. I would have ended up dead anyway, I mused, why not expedite the process?

I decided that things would be different this time around. I would live my life right. I would wait for others to make their moves. I would make my own. I'd lived once, and I had more mental experience than anyone else at this age would have had. There was so much I could do...

But I hadn't known then what had truly happened to me, or where I was. I wouldn't know for quite some time. And by then, it was already too late.

In that moment, I was at peace, as foolish as it was. I should have savored the taste of freedom then, for I wouldn't experience it again for quite some time, if ever. But I did not. I chose that moment to drift off to sleep, lulled by the beat of the stranger's heart. It was not like my own had been- a jittery, frantic faintness that never seemed to catch up with the speed of my mind. This heartbeat was solid and strong, humming against my right ear like the pounding of a drum. If you thought about it, it almost sounded like waves crashing against the seashore in a never-ending cycle.

"Kasumi," Someone whispered, voice soft and breathy.

Kasumi... It was a pretty name- it was nothing more than a whisper, a sighing sound like a breeze blowing across the vast lonesomeness of the sea.

Who's name is that? I had wanted to ask, but my tongue wouldn't move.

I opened a single eye, searching for the source of the voice, but I couldn't locate the speaker. The entire room was nothing but a blocky swirl of darkness combated by weak splotches of light. Sighing, I turned inwards against the hard chest that cradled me, feeling oddly comforted by the beat of the stranger's heart. I closed my eyes yet again, releasing my grip on reality and allowing myself to drift off to sleep yet again.

I opened my eyes one more time, in a quick sort of blink, puzzled by the strange energy that seemed to flow through my body in an almost regulated pattern. It felt as if someone had injected lightning into my veins and allowed it to travel throughout my body, running amok inside my nerves and muscles. I didn't know what it was or why such a strange energy had settled within me. At the time, I probably blamed medication or the weather- I'm not sure which. The possibility of this energy being anything more than just a figment of my imagination was too ludicrous to consider, and at the time I had dismissed it entirely.

Looking back on it, I should have paid it far more attention.

During those days, when I was fresh and new to the world one again, I hadn't done much of anything at all. I had slept most of the time, curled into a tight ball underneath piles of blankets until it was time for me to eat. The idea of a bottle disgusted me at first, but I soon learned to deal with it when I realized there was no other way for me to eat. My head was too heavy to hold up on my own, as most babies' are, and I couldn't walk, so I had very little to do for the first six months of my "life." I simply did what all babies do- nothing.

I didn't get a good look at my new "mother" until I was at least two weeks old. My eyes finally had begun to clear up, allowing in more light and color than before. At first, it had been strangely overwhelming, but I had gradually grown used to "proper" vision again. My mother had come into view, padding along quietly in what looked like a royal blue yukata. She had messy, dark hair and strange, greyish blue skin. Whenever I looked at her, I couldn't help but wonder if she had some sort of chemical deficiency or perhaps some sort of skin disease that made her flesh look so blue. It couldn't have been healthy, so I hoped she was okay. Somehow, she managed to look well-put together despite the fact that she had strange facial tattoos- they looked like gills, of all things- and was wearing a bathrobe. Clearly, I thought, someone is into heavy metal. I couldn't think of any other reason- besides gang markings, that is- for those horrible tattoos.

My "father" looked rather similar to her in a weird way, as if they were related but just barely. He had the same messy mane of hair as my mother, but his was far more blue than her's was and stood up in a strange way that suggested he spent a lot of time in front of a mirror. His eyes were the same shade of dark, empty black, but possessed a strange warmth that you wouldn't have expected to find there. He was heavy set, as was my mother, but both of them were built solidly, like tanks. Vaguely, I wondered if he was some sort of professional fighter. He dressed like a martial artist, in a bizarre looking jacket and horribly unattractive pinstriped leg warmers. His cheeks were tattooed as well, his baring the same gill-like design as my mother. Weird, I decided, Both of them were weird.

They weren't bad parents- far from it, in fact, but they were both very strange. My father would disappear randomly for long stretches of time and then come back in the dead of night, looking either thoroughly worn out or rather bored- but never in-between. I had no idea what he did for a living, but it didn't look like he worked an office job. He never seemed to wear any normal clothes, either. He only shifted between his jacket and leg warmer ensemble and a loose haori over a yukata, much like the one my mother wore around the house.

It wasn't hard to figure out that we were in Japan. It was relieving to be surrounded by such familiar elements and a language I understood. I had grown up speaking it with my father before we had finally relocated to Akita prefecture. It seemed that the laws of reincarnation stuck you in the same country, which I found relieving. The country my family had lived in before Japan had been destroyed by communism, and we had been lucky to have gotten out at all. I didn't want to ever go back there, childhood be damned.

Some things just aren't worth the risk.

These people were strange and not at all my parents- even if they were, in every sense of the word, my parents- but they were... safe. I could trust them, even if I hadn't known their names for the first several months of my life.

My mother, I learned, was called Hama. I had seen it inscribed on a piece of calligraphy paper that she kept in a frame- Hama: The Seashore. The kanji for her name had been written above it in crisp black ink, in a much heavier hand than her name meaning.

"Look, Kasumi," She had murmured, pointing to the crisp kanji with the tip of her index finger. "That's Mommy's name! Can you say it?"

I squinted at the kanji, having a hard time understanding the meaning. I hadn't read in Japanese since my new life had begun, and my reading had been rusty. Finally, I placed the kanji meaning with the sound it was supposed to make.

"Ha..." I tried, "...Ma."

The word came out half broken, half slurred. Ordinarily, I would have spoken without issue, albeit a little quietly. Here, things were different. I was a child, even if I was an adult mentally, and my body was still far behind my mind in terms of maturity. I had chubby, weak legs that hadn't allowed for much other than scooting across the floor and poor hand-eye-coordination. I had poked my father in the eye multiple times when I had meant to pat him, proving that my hands were out of sync with the rest of me.

It was horribly limiting, being stuck like that. I wanted to move much more than I was able to, and it was humiliating to be regressed to the physical state of a toddler whereas I had once been extremely mature for my age. I distinctly remember hearing my original mother once tell me that I had spoken full sentences at the age of six months old, but had walked much later. Here, it was just the opposite. My fine motor skills came before my words, as if I was destined for athletics rather than schoolwork. It was an admittedly strange twist, and I can honestly say I would have preferred it the opposite way. I missed being able to articulate my thoughts and string out long, wordy sentences. Now, I was limited to a few basic words and most of them were simple- like "Mommy," "hungry," and "no." I could say very little else, and it was one of the worst feelings I had ever experienced (dying included). I couldn't stand it.

I tried harder than I probably should have to get my point across, but even then I was usually forced to result to tears and screaming fits until my mother gave into my whims. It seemed my dreadful temper had transcended from my previous life into this one, which was far from a good thing.

I can't say I was a well behaved child- I just wasn't- but I probably had more thoughts pass through my mind in a matter of minutes than any child my age would have. That's hardly something to brag about, but for me, it was enough. I had little else on which to stake my claim to greatness- which honestly wasn't all that great.

My parents thought the world of me, regardless of my frequent tantrums, and put up with a lot more than they probably should have. I was a messy, annoying baby, but they were great. They didn't quite fill the void my previous parents had left, but I had grown to love them more with each passing day. They may have been strange and blue, but I loved them all the same.

And sometimes love is blind.

"Kasumi, do you want to play outside?" My mother asked one day, when I had just finished playing with every toy I was physically aware of being within this building- for today, anyway.

I nodded. I hadn't been outside before, as far as I knew, in this life. My parents had kept me inside while I was relearning how to grab things and walk around properly. I supposed they had been protecting me, but I hadn't then known how dangerous the world outside truly was. To me, the outside had been only one thing- outside. I hadn't been afraid in the slightest. I should have been.

But I wasn't.

I had followed my mother outside without a hint of fear, excited to finally be allowed outdoors for the first time in this life. I wanted to run and roll around in the dirt like I had in my previous childhood, tiring myself out so greatly that I'd drop into a comatose like state of sleep before I was even able to make it back inside. That was the sort of childhood I'd had- exhausting and enjoyable. My life had been good before it had gone bad. This was seemed almost perfect in comparison, or so I thought.

The darkness would rear its ugly head soon.

"Play!" I said, bouncing in place and clapping my hands.

My mother unlocked the front door, pushing the heavy, cast-iron door open with a single hand. The skyline came into view, a long stretch of water-logged, boggy grown and sparse trees. The air was thick with fog that seemed to latch onto us as soon as we opened the door, clinging to my skin and hair with the strength of heavy-duty superglue.

"Yucky!" I whined, attempting to wipe some of the strange, moist fog off of me and onto my tee-shirt.

"I know," My mother agreed, nodding sympathetically, "The mist is yucky."

Mist? The word reminded me of something, but I couldn't remember what. I scratched my head in confusion, pushing my sticky bangs away from my forehead with a chubby fist.

And then it hit me.

I did know this place. The architecture had looked familiar, and so had the skyline, but I had never known why. I had never lived within close proximity to a swamp or large bodies water before, so I knew it wasn't a childhood memory or some sort of late-onset déjà vu.

This place looked almost exactly like Kirigakure, a village I had once read about in my favorite manga, Naruto. Vaguely, I wondered if this was the area Kishimoto had based Kirigakure's design off of, but dismissed that idea entirely when I saw the building off to my far right. If I squinted, I could see the giant kanji for "Mizukage" inscribed on the brick wall.

Mizukage wasn't a real word. I was positive it wasn't a real word. Kishimoto, Naruto's creator, had created those positions entirely on his own. In the real world, the title of "Mizukage" was about as valuable as the term "human". It wouldn't have been of any importance.

Here, it looked like a big deal. The building was in the center of a horribly familiar looking village, surrounded by strange, cylindrical buildings and craggy mountains. I only knew of a few mountains that could be found within Japan, and all of the ones I could name were capped with snow. These mountains were strangely shaped, as if they had been made entirely from haphazardly molded modeling clay and then thrown into the real world.

I swallowed, biting my inner cheek to hold back a scream. This could not be happening. It couldn't. There was no way in hell that I had somehow traveled through the innerworkings of the universe and had come out in Naruto, of all things. There was simply no way...!

"So," My mother said, "How do you like your first proper look at Kirigakure?"

I screamed.

Author's Note:

浜 is the kanji for Hama's name.

水影 is Mizukage.

This story is dedicated to Otaku Neko Ninja Miko Tenshi, Aleycat4eva, and Silver Queen, three awesome ladies who really inspire me!

I got a message saying that I couldn't do it, that I couldn't write this story and make it decent. You've read my profile, haven't you? ;) That just makes me want to do it more. I can't promise that I will be able to do this well, but I'll try as hard as I possibly can. My beginnings have always been utter crap, so do wait for the next chapter for this to actually become decent.

This story will be nowhere near my top priority, so DON'T WORRY! Chinatsu is of utmost importance here, and she will be until I have at least gotten here through the Academy and onto life as a genin. I love writing her too much to abandon her now. Anyhow, this is a self-insert, by far one of the worst ideas I've ever had. It will be set in Kirigakure because I honestly can't see a reason not to (and it's the Village the coincides the best with my personal likes and abilities) and I am quite biased in Kiri's favor as it is.

Critique always welcome!

-MSM-