Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto.

The shack was still far, a whole open field away. I despaired when I saw the total lack of cover spanning the distance between safety and me.

I didn't dare to look back again. I was the hunted in this sick game of chase, and I was losing. They outranked me on a complete different plane, and I teetered on the verge of the forest, still hesitating, then a cold wind whooshed past my back, bringing with it a streak of pain. I swallowed a yelp, and stumbled out of the bushes, into the cold grey light of the full moon.

It started out a lot more peacefully.

Haiko. Grey child. That is my name, and though once upon a time it was vastly different, I can't remember that first name now.

When the woman I only remembered as a blur of warmth and love and 'Mother' gave me that name, my world was black and white and grey.

Such a fitting name.

I would not refer to my birth as a 'birth'. I do not remember it, and for that I am grateful. The most I could recall was the sensation of resurfacing from unfathomable depths, of blinking open sleep-crusted eyes only to see nothing more than grey. The colors came much, much later, but came anyway.

When I regained consciousness, the first thing I registered was that I did not know where I was nor how I came to be here. Vague memories of a colorful life past flashed through my mind's eye, and when the initial buzz of consciousness fell away and I realized I was supposed to be much bigger than this little bundle of blankets, a headache roared, slamming into me with the force of a sledgehammer. I felt my head to be too small, too full, and my brain pounded against its confines like a savage.

I then did what babies do when they're in pain: I wailed, loud and shrill.

When I could bear to think again, I realized this wasn't right. From the way I viewed the world to the very feeling that was me, it was all wrong.

I had the memories of another life, of a world fueled by mechanics and technology, a world full of color, a world brimming with life.

A world that didn't seem to be this one.

But I did not mention it to Mother, nor did I like referring to those memories as my 'past life'. I chose not to think of them as much as possible, only focusing on the present. At any rate, my mind processed the vast array of information, and like a computer after churning out an answer to horrifically complex math equation, spluttered and went to sleep.

Mother was pretty in a very oriental way: black hair, sharp chin, slim lips and almond eyes. The only exceptional feature she had was her eyes.

Her eyes were beautiful. There was no other word. They weren't beautiful because of their shape, though it played a role. Her eyes were a distinct shade of grey. Not light grey, not dark grey, just grey. No difference between iris and pupil, only a faint outline hinting at the differentiation between iris and sclera. She also had a tattoo of sorts, graceful looping lines in the vague imitation of butterfly wings, surrounding her grey eyes, accentuating them.

Do I have them too? How would it look on me?

I was born at home, secluded. I do not recall seeing any wall that resembled the white tiles of a hospital.

Being reborn, as I came to realise, was not fun. It was like accidentally wiping all records in a video game that was one level away from completion, then forced to go through everything again, tutorial included.

The first year of my new life was filled with desperate attempts to regain mobility and control over my own body and relearn communication. Making a fist and swinging it like a club was instinctual, moving individual fingers were another issue. I must have made a strange sight, barely fourth months and already sitting upright, unsupported, for hours on end, staring at her hands, whose fingers twitched sporadically, sometimes individually, sometimes altogether.

Lucky for me, Mother seemed all for my accelerated growth and unnatural awareness.

Walking, after half a year, was relatively easier, partly because I cheated by using the walls all the time, partly because Mother would help me. When I could walk independently after a month of practice, I was filled with childish delight, Mother equally so.

For all her adult maturity, that day when I could walk, presumably half a year ahead of normal child schedule, that woman celebrated by doing a crazy little jig that included several pirouettes and mid-air kicks, grinning like a maniac.

I knew better, but I still say she was showing off her superior leg muscles.

My silence as a babe didn't seem to perturb her. It encouraged her to talk ever the more, if anything else.

As I didn't like baby talk, or the sounds a baby voice box made, at all, nothing much could make me make sounds, but thanks to Mother's efforts, I gradually had the vocabulary for just about everything in the cottage and the surrounding areas and more.

My first birthday was sometime at the beginning of summer, and Mother began to teach me to talk. Teach, as in like a teacher to a student, the vowels and sentence construction and grammar and such.

Our language is a bizarre, chopped language. ("Aa, ii, u, e, o," Mother pronounced, slowly, clearly, and even though those vowels were foreign to me, I was half-sure I've heard them somewhere before. Maybe, a familiar language meant a familiar world, just displaced in time.) More willing to speak now that I know what I'm saying, or sort of, I begin to use my new voice.

The root syllables were short, hard, stiff, yet when stringed into a sentence it had an exotic elegance. I learned with the desperation of a starved man, and with a fresh brain, I learned exponentially. Sometimes, in moments of epiphany, I would ponder a normal child's learning curve and how I've just scrapped decades of research, but due to my still-recovering brain, those moments were fleeting and far between.

Mostly I learned because I could, relishing in the déja vù quality of the process.

By the time half my second year was over, I could talk with some measure of fluency, and Mother began to tell me stories.

Wild stories, they were, filled with heroes and magic and Disney deaths. Deadly swamps were also a highlight, and Mother seemed especially fascinated with gruesome deaths. Almost none of her protagonists, never named, survives to the end.

Once, as she gleefully recounted a set death de lux, inclusive of main dish decapitation and side-dish porcupine imitation of external quills (throwing knives), I clapped my hands over my ears and squeaked, "Mother, censorship!"

On my second birthday, Mother surprised me by gifting me a set of brush and ink, and started to teach me how to write what she called 'kanji'. There was an indisputable likeness to the Mandarin characters I knew, once upon a time, so learning them came easy to me, but their meanings not much.

For example, 'it's alright' was apparently written, in kanji, with the Mandarin meaning of 'first husband'.

But calligraphy was fun, and I loved to learn.

I wasted lots of ink in those beginning months, Mother laughing herself silly at my wobbly lines that looked more like caricatures of lego blocks than words that seeped through the rice paper onto the wooden table.

It was hard, forcing my fingers to get used to an alien grip (a grip which I recognized, but due to my previous heritage never learnt) but when I did manage to write words that were acceptable to look at, I puffed with accomplishment and pride.

Other than calligraphy, she also taught me to draw ink art. She's jumping the gun, and we both knew. "Just so you have a basic understanding of the beauty of ink and paper, Haii-chan," she smiled.

Perhaps she wanted to console me on my color blindness, by introducing something whose beauty lies in the fact that it sports no color?

There's something magical, I believed, regardless of her intention, in the way ink flowed from brush and turned mere lines into art.

Mother owned an entire set of wooden instruments for drawing. Besides narrating disturbing stories, drawing was another thing Mother loved.

"Kitsune no Yomeiri," and a picture of a sun-shower around our small cottage would spring to the paper with a swish of her brush, and if I looked carefully, there would be several fox snouts poking out from the bamboo, several wispy fox tails disappearing among the bamboo stalks.

I was never allowed out of the house, and it was through paintings that I learnt how the cottage looked like.

I suspected Mother made it more picturesque, but the outlay of the house matched the interior.

There was the hay-thatched roof which leaked water whenever it rained too hard; the porch that ran around the entire house, extending several feet from the interior; the elevated floor, to combat possible flooding and high temperature in summer; the wood windows with paper panes, the bottom half empty so that I could look out and air can circulate; the bamboo forest outside; a hint of the vegetable garden at the back.

"Uzumaki," she had said, as she led me through her art room, pointing to an abstract landscape with pools and spiraled buildings. Then, "Konoha." she said fondly, gesturing to another similar painting, also a landscape but with angular architecture and haphazard piping. The second one was more detailed, likely drawn with drier ink and smaller brushes.

It puzzled me. Why were nouns drawn as pronouns?

Then she explained. Those were two villages to the east, two villages that she lived in and loved.

She even taught me the kanji of those two words. Maelstrom, the first meant. Leaf, the other.

The warning bells in the back of my head rang that entire day.

"What delightful piles of timber," a voice murmured in the back of my head. "Not somewhere I want to be in case of a fire."

A month after my second birthday, I saw my first color. It was also then that Mother stopped looking at me in the eye. Behind my head, on my nose, not at me at all, she avoided eye contact at all costs.

It distressed me greatly, but not as much as the origin of the color I was seeing.

There was a wisp-like substance that floated around the house, outside the house, all around. It wasn't tangible, because when I tried catching it in my hands. It slipped through my fingers and it was like trying to catch mist. It was green.

Attempts to directly interact with them always left me fatigued.

It was like seeing wind currents, or the flow of latte in a coffee just stirred.

Trying to navigate myself with my vision clogged with green was a hard task, as they sometimes obstructed my line of sight. I would trip over flat ground while walking, or reach for something that was still quite a distance off.

The cottage wasn't very diverse on color either. The shades weren't very different in the first place, which made walking all the harder.

Mother noticed, but said nothing.

Eventually I asked, and Mother pondered. After what seemed like an internal debate, she told me that what I was seeing was a type of energy inherent to the world. She left it at that.

A week later, she left the cottage for a while, a first, leaving me several scrolls to read. She returned by nightfall.

I had believed, as all children were prone to, that I was safe, without a doubt. That confidence didn't last.

It was the end of my third spring.

Summer was coming, I could see it. Not in the plants or the animals, but in the shade of green in the air. It had turned slightly shimmery, as it was prone to at the changing of seasons.

Mother made dinner, yukata sleeves rolled up, telling me culinary tips, though I was not yet tall enough to reach the tabletop without standing on stacked stools. There was something strange with our counter, I long decided, it was significantly taller than normal ones.

For one, even Mother used a stool when cooking, and she's tall. For two, even when Mother took the knives out to use, and I heard the chopping, I could never see them clearly. I hear the her, I see her arms moving, and I know she's using them, but that was it.

In fact, it was a peculiar trait in house: it had no reflective surfaces. Absolutely none. No mirrors, no bronze mirrors, no glass window panes, not even polished wooden surfaces. My hair was left to grow and Mother would brush it occasionally. The same went for her long straight locks.

Not that I minded, it just bothered me a little. Two years old, going onto three, and I don't know my own face.

I was finishing the soup (it had some type of herb and it made me cringe) when Mother suddenly tensed up.

She was alert at once, more than I had ever seen her. She shifted to face the back of the house ever so slightly, and after she served dinner, she walked out to the backyard.

As she turned and left, I noticed the markings around her eyes expanding, intricate lines crawling into two large butterfly wings, one for each eye. On her snow-white skin, it looked strikingly like ink.

The green in the house shivered uncharacteristically.

A few minutes later she returned, the lines crawling back into their original design. She was a little paler than before, which said volumes given her normal complexion of paper white. She smiled at me, a little tight, and said, "Haii-chan, eat quickly." Then she exited the kitchen.

I did as I was told, and was cleaning up the cutlery when Mother returned.

Her usual yukata had been exchanged for a flak jacket. I don't know what a flak jacket actually meant, neither in my previous existence nor this one, but naming the ash grey sleeveless jacket with the many chest pockets to be a flak jacket seemed right. (What was it used for again...child soldiers? not quite, was it—ouch, fuck, never mind forget it.) She had a black undershirt with a bright grey swirl on its shoulder, and dark grey pants wrapped in bandages near the ankles, where she tucked it all into open-toed sandals.

I swallowed. The warning bells returned, more shrill than ever.

Mother had on her arm one of those sling backpacks, and she held out a hand to me.

Hesitantly, I walked to her.

She ruffled my hair, and passed me the backpack. I slipped it on, and looked at her quizzically.

"We're going away," she said, her smile turning her eye into pleasant crescents. "I don't know whether we'll be back. Just stick with me, okay?"

She knelt, and presented her back to me.

I nodded, then climbed onto her back.

As we exited the house, her footsteps were quieter than a cat's. Once we slipped out of the house, she whispered to me, "Keep low and hold on tight, Haii-chan."

It was like flooring the engine. There was the long, suspended moment of inertia when the engine whirrs up, and then the car is streaking down the road. This is exactly how Mother ran. I could feel her muscles tensing, quivering like a taunt bowstring, below me as we stood on the porch, then (vrroom!) she's off! There were no branches in a bamboo forest, so Mother was playing the ultimate obstacle race with nature as she raced through the forest with me on her back.

And not a moment too late.

Just a mere beat after we took off, there was a roar and an explosion deafened me.

I turned to look, and was met with a blaze of grey that reached into the heavens. The explosion had been a fireball, which hit the house and everything within a two-meter radius, sending them flaring into flame. Grey flames roared and devoured the bamboos, which in turn crackled and snapped. The fire seemed alive, chasing us, the heat pressuring us to go faster, faster. Mother sped up, but it seemed to me that the flames were slowly but surely catching up, I could almost see devilish fingers grasping blindly for me within the flames and I pulled close to Mother with a cry of fear but it still licked Mother's feet no not a burn a burn will slow us down and then we're dead—Mother spun around, holding me securely on her back and away from the hungry flames, worked her mouth, then spit, hard, and what came out wasn't a glob of saliva but a giant bubble of water, growing and growing within seconds like a gum bubble and then it detached from Mother's mouth and kind of plopped onto the flames, bursting apart and dousing all flames within a meter with a nasty hiss.

I saw Mothers's lips curve into a quick smile, then in the same motion spun back on track and kept running.

That was the last of the pursuit, at least for now.

We cleared the bamboo and emerged to see a stream, gurgling pleasantly. With a barely concealed sigh, Mother dropped into the water with a splash, soaking her blistered leg. She turned to smile at me, "Sorry, kaa-san has to let you down for a bit. Don't wander, okay?"

I nodded, and slipped off myself into the stream, starting to help Mother role up her burned leggings to expose the burn.

"Lucky for me it's so small," she said, and I winced for her when she gripped the fabric that's stuck to the burn and ripped. She did a quick motion with her hands (…handseal? oh dear gods it's real) and a green glow surrounded them. She placed her hands on the burn area, and within a few seconds the blisters faded.

Before she could complete the healing (the skin was still raw and darker than the surrounding area) her head snapped up, and I followed, a beat late.

I strained my ears, but heard nothing.

She hurriedly picked me up. "On, quickly, Haii-chan."

I bit my lip, and clung on tight as we once again ran, significantly slower.

We followed the river, the bamboo forest peeling away behind us. Once we reached the edges of a real forest, Mother began to engage in some form of ariel acrobatics. Up and down branches she went, winding around trunks and splashing into puddles and doubling back from routes. I couldn't tell how fast we were going by sight, since everything was simply a grey blur, but Mother's pace was evident to me, who sat on her back.

Dawn soon came, black giving way to wisps of lighter and lighter grey as the sun rose, and on we ran.

"Kaa-san," I said at length, resting my head on her hair. "Shouldn't we stop to rest? You must be tired."

She laughed softly and a tad bit out of breath.

"Kaa-san's not tired. She just hasn't done anything similar for a while. We'll make it, Haiko, don't worry."

After that I swore her arms, which had been holding me up on her back all this while, began to shake.

The sun was a quarter up the sky (ten o'clock…?) when finally Mother stumbled to a stop atop a tree, breathing slightly labored.

The hand that she used to brace herself against the trunk clenched into a fist. After a brief pause and a deep breath, she pushed off again.

This time we settled into a rhythm. No more slowing down, no more speeding up, no more acrobatics. Although the overall pace wasn't as fast or desperate as it was last night, it was steady, and Mother's breathing evened out after a while.

There was a spark of hope that we're both going to survive this, whatever this was.

It was with gritted teeth that Mother dropped from the branches into the thicket of trees a while later.

She set me down on the forest floor and smoothed back my long black hair. She started to murmur words I've never heard before, hands clutched tight on my head. Even I could see it now: the butterfly lines were spreading, steadily, crawling all across her face.

"Kaa-san?" I voiced, grasping her hand tight when it circumvented my head and came to rest on my cheek.

Mother seemed to deflate. All the tension melted out of her shoulders and the frown lines disappeared, but she straightened suddenly and rummaged in her pockets, drawing out a scroll. She placed it in my backpack, and said, "Hold onto this. You'll meet someone who knows what to do with it. The provisions in the pack would last you a week, maybe more. Go towards the sun, east, if you will, until you come to a house. Stay there and open the door to no one, okay?"

I nodded, and swallowing the lump in my throat. (Go east.)

She embraced me with an air of finality. "Stay alert, stay safe," she said, placing a kiss on the top of my head. "People are after me, but they don't know about you. You're smart, Haii-chan, you'll survive." And she smiled brilliantly.

"Can't kaa-san come with me?" I asked, not wanting to let go of her hand but she took it away gently, nonetheless.

Her smile turned bitter, and her mouth opened to say something, but I never got to hear it, because she suddenly turned back to face the way we've come and at a sound I must've missed, gave me a rough shove, "Go, Haiko!"

I turned, then looked back, hesitating. The sun's rays wasn't very clear on the forest floor, but if I looked up, I easily saw which side of the canopy was brighter.

"What are you waiting for?" Mother hissed viciously, suddenly whipping her head back to me. "Run!" Her head was inclined downwards, eyes still looking over her shoulder, but for the first and last time in my life, I saw her eyes.

There was a horrible moment when I thought Mother's green eyes was going to swivel around and find mine. What is that color? (Isn't the green energy in the air?)

Her pupils and iris had seemingly merged into one: a bright, startling green, the exact same shade as the currents flowing in the air. The black lines normally only around her eyes had fanned out down the sides of her face, extending down until her neck, larger than the last time I saw them.

Then she blinked and the color was gone, flickered back to white as the lines collapsed back into their usual pattern. She still wouldn't meet my eyes, but she knelt and enveloped me in one last hug.

"I know you deserve a better life, Haii-chan, and kaa-san wishes so much to explain everything to you, but we just don't have the time," she whispered, fast and low, burying her face in my shoulder. "I know this is strange and frightening, but please, just trust your kaa-san one last time: run to that house, as fast as you can. It's metal, like the picture of Konoha in our art study. Then grow up safely, become a strong lady, like in kaa-san's stories. You remember them, don't you?"

She drew back, and I saw she was smiling through her tears. I swallowed the lump in my throat, and nodded, then thought fit to add,

"The ones who killed the protagonists?"

She laughed, watery and soft. "You're a smart one," she patted my cheek, "I just know you'll survive and learn about everything in the world, won't you? Now, please, go."

The green that used to swirl around me lazily suddenly tightened, like a snake coiled to strike, and Mother's voice became more urgent as she pushed my shoulder gently. "Haii-chan? Please. Now."

I looked up, determined where I should go, and ran. While I pushed through the underbrush, trying to be fast and quiet at the same time, I heard Mother's whisper echo from the green that surrounded me.

"I love you, baby girl."

AN: Here we are, at the end of a checkpoint in her life. Will she survive? Or will she die? Press the next chapter to keep reading! Please review if you liked it! Review even if you didn't, actually. Of course, feel free to tell me where to improve as well, anything's welcome except for flames. If anything is unclear, review and tell me as well, since this is already, like, the fifth version of the introduction.

If anyone is confused to why Haiko's mother seemed to be running from nothing, the way I think of it, ninja don't make sounds when they travel. Even if they do, it'll take a veteran ninja to hear them, not a two-year-old kid.

I don't own Naruto, as much as I want to. I can't even draw to save my life.

I also desperately need a beta for this story, if anyone's interested, please do drop a PM or review.

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