So uh, I came to the conclusion that this fic needs to be rewritten. And some of it is. Mostly, things will be staying the same but I've rearranged some stuff, trimmed some fat, and fleshed things out. But nothing is changing enough that if you're a returning reader you can't just skip to chapter 20.

If you want more details on my reasoning, feel free to ask.

Before I go on though, please know that chapter length is what it is. I won't be responding to any reviews or messages complaining about it anymore, sorry.

Every 500 reviews I get, the 500th/1000th/whatever will be given a special prize. The first one went to lizyeh2000. And if I get to 1000 that person will get a prize as well! If they don't want it, it will go on to 1001, or 1002, and so on and so forth.

If there's a particular little scene you wanna see I also do omake's. Small ones. Like, 500 words tops, usually less than that.

I started this in high school, almost five years ago. As it is now I actually really hate writing first person, but it's a good writing exercise so here's this.

We began, as most things do, small.

Small and together, under the watchful eyes of our masked guardians. They came, switching posts each day. Usually there was only one to watch us two. Each was different.

Bear was a slight man with plan brown hair that was usually tied down to fall around his ears. He spoke seldom and when he did it was with a strange sort of accent, like his tongue didn't fit quite right in his mouth. He was nice enough, though he was mostly contented to watch us play with foam blocks or make up games that didn't have real rules.

He was fond of us, I like to think. He taught us to read and how write our names in finger paint, and he never did shy away from picking one of us up. He was just quiet.

There was something about him that seemed sad.

We were children, and I was a real child then. I miss it, sometimes. The blissful ignorance that I had before the truth woke up inside of me. I miss being young and free and filled with joy at each new thing.

The first butterfly to land on the window sill was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen. The breeze through an open window tasted like rain and joy and sweet April showers. We were children of the autumn. Our hair reflect it, mine the scarlet of the dying leave and my brothers the gold of the dying sunsets.

Oh, the sun! The sun that fell through the windows and spilled across my skin was a blessing and I loved it fiercely and coveted the daylight hours with it.

It was dog, with her long violet hair tied right behind her head, that allotted us the most time to simple look out the windows and dream. Dream of the children that ran and laughed bellow our window and the parents that chatted and watched with Careful eyes. The sun kissed their skin and lifted our spirits.

Children are foolish.

I didn't understand, before the Awakening, as I have taken to calling it, that the sun mocks us.

It almost always shines, cheerful and never fading over this land of fire. The only glares that it receives are from the seldom and few here, from those that hold lighter complexion or the rare pale eyes, who it threatens and burns and blinds.

The sun is not the only thing that mocks us. There are children too, adults, even select animals will jeer and taunt.

I truly, honestly hate this place.

Not always, not then, not on that day in May when the world was blooming with new life. It was one of the days when Bear was our guardian.

When the accident occurred.

Back then, it was normal for me. I didn't know that regular children were not beholden to masked elites every day, I had no idea that two young children didn't always share an apartment. I had only ever had my beloved brother and the ANBU to watch over us. At least as far as I knew.

In retrospect, it's comical.

Increasingly, powerful ninja couldn't even properly watch over two little kids, neither one older than five.

Bear was there that day, and Dog as well. We almost never had both.

They were the ones who were there when my bliss was destroyed.

It was really something that shouldn't have happened, something that could have easily been prevented. If ninja knew shit about child care. Mainly the part of child care that involved no pointy edges or being left alone. Ever.

Someone had had the foolish idea to let me sit on top of the counter while lunch was being made, whether it was the Bear or the Dog I don't particularly recall. I just know that the Dog was the one who was in the living room with my brother, playing what amounted to patty-cake, just without the words.

My legs had been swinging and I had been chatting up half a storm with Bear when Dog had called him into the other room for what I still do not know. He had left, leaving me with instructions to keep the soup stirring. I did so, watching the broth form a whirlpool as noodles swept around, poking out and bobbing. Then I heard my brother start to cry and I leapt from the counter without a second though.

Alas I was four, and so my coordination was nonexistent and my head was just high enough to make sharp contact with the corner of the table. It hit me right in the temple, and that was end of my childhood.

Everything faded with a skull splitting pain and the loudness of white noise filling every crevice in my brain.

I didn't know what had happened for certain, I've done a lot of research and come up with a lot of theories, none of which would be confirmed or denied for many, many years.

It is difficult to truly explain what sort of a place I found myself in. It was neither the world I was in, nor the one that I had come from, and I was neither herself nor the girl I had been. Instead, I was Between.

There was nothing under my feet, but still i stood. There was no atmosphere, but wind still tousled my short hair, some strange mix of blonde and red in this world where nothing was. I pushed my fly away hair away from my eyes, making a face, and opened them to look around. Where only whiteness had been before the wind struck, now images swirled around me.

There wasn't a pattern, there was no rhyme or reason. All there was was flashes. A school, an apartment, a sunny day, a dog park. People talking, so much talking, the sound closed in on me in a wall of pressure and noise and I thought I was going to drown.

I clapped my hands over my ears and screamed, trying to block it all out with my own small voice.

Tiny hands that were also full size lashed out, knocking into an image that got a little too close.

The whiteness vanished and the noise was replaced. Crickets chirped in the distance. A bullfrog croaked outside the window. The girl sat on a bed, legs crossed with piles of picture books in front of her. Manga, she understood. The sheets were purple, with white trim. It was a clean, big room. There was a desk with picture ofmyfriends, Chelsea and Monique and Travis. A bookcase with her school texts and psychology books. The walls had been decorated with posters of boy bands and glow in the dark solar systems decorated the ceiling.

She looked out the window, into the darkness and saw a lightning bug flash in front of her eyes.

I jumped, pulling hands back and the scene vanished, returning me to where I had come from before.

Now, there was a little less noise. No more crickets or bullfrogs or turning pages.

I licked my lips and reached for another image flying past me in the tornado.

She found herself sitting on cold metal, a heavy letter jacket draped over her shoulders. Lights bore down on a green field in front of her. White lines raced over it, criss crossing with boys her age running down the field. Half were dressed in purple and gold, half were dressed in blue in white.

"Let's go Benwick, let's go!" she chanted, stamping her feet. She wanted the purple and gold to win. They were the snapping turtles, and they would snap your neck!

People pressed in on either side of her, screaming their lungs out. Chilly night air nipped around her ears and chilled the tip of her nose. Their team threw into the infield and she roared with the crowd.

She pulled back, more of the noise had dissipated. What was this place?

Who was I?

One of the images launched itself out of the vortex and smashed into me. It felt like my head was splitting open, and this one was no brief scene. It was long, drawn out, and it flashed by so fast i almost didn't understand what was happening to me in the rapid run over months.

It was death. It was my death. And it was horrible.

I couldn't make out what all of them were, but I saw myself, saw my new self, my brother. My sister, or who had been my sister.

My death.

It wasn't pretty, or fast, or heroic.

It was cancer.

A mixture of bad genes and too much time in the sun had led to Melanoma, and it went downhill from there. It had been wrong from the beginning, skipping over the nodes completely and taking hold before doctors even thought to look for what was causing the strange patches on my skin and the constant fatigue. By the time they found it it was already too late.

Treatments were tried but all failed, my hair was lost, then my vision, replaced by hallucinations. Eventually I couldn't take it anymore. A bottle of whiskey washed down unidentifiable pills and it was over.

The video that skimmed over of my end cut short and I was left standing, or felt like I was standing, in the middle of a vortex. Faster than I could process they flew, blurs in a whirlwind around me, dizzying and impossible in speed and existence.

None of it made sense. That girl that had died was me but it wasn't, I knew it was me, I recognized myself, but I was too young for that to be me, my hair wasn't that color, those weren't my eyes. But they were.

If I had a head, as I am yet unsure if I was aware of a physical body of that time yet, these thoughts would have surely made it hurt.

As it was I had come to hold a detached sense of reality, pulling me away from the confusion and allowing analysis. I knew that that was me, but I also knew that I was not that person. Could it have been that I was not that person any longer? That at one point I was that person but now I wasn't? If so, how was it possible?

As if summoned by my thoughts another clip jumped from the fray and in front of my, playing out. This time my sense of sound returned.

There was a man in the front of the room with hair only on his chin, a marker swiping across the board on the wall and spelling out quick, sharp letters. A name was spelled out. Voltaire.

"Voltaire," the man spoke, hand still working, "Was a French writer and philosopher in the Age of Enlightenment. You might know some of his work, chances are you don't. We'll be reading some of it in class this week, but for today get out your notebooks and a pencil for notes."

There was shuffling around them and the view tilted down, passing a singular desk with a chair attached and moving to show a pair of hands open up a back patterned with flowers. A key chain jingled at being jostled, a smiling strawberry charm hanging from it. The spiral notebook of paper was pulled out, LIT. marking the green cover in thick, looping letters and a pencil was brought into light as well. As the perspective turned walls lined with posters were revealed, most of them holding bulky men in uniforms.

The board and the bald men came back into view with more writing now.

"Voltaire believed in and wrote in favor of civil liberties, freedom of trade and freedom of religion. Keep in mind this was during the time that the Catholic Church was basically in charge of all of Europe. He wrote thousands of books, plays, poems, pamphlets, essays and letters in his life, attracting a lot of negative attention and controversy. Unlike Newton and Locke he didn't bring in any groundbreaking theories, but instead helped to spread those theories to the general public.

The major ones were Political, Social, and Religious reforms.

As far as religion goes Voltaire was very outspoken when it came to keeping the church and the state separate. He himself believed in a religious perspective called Deism, not so common anymore but gaining popularity during the Enlightenment period, especially in France, England and Germany. Deism is, to put it simply, the belief in a singular creator of everything, usually God, and the rejection of supposed miracles and supernatural events. He also believed in reincarnation," the man turned to the room and the view shifted to reveal the back and sides of the heads of dozens of teenagers in brightly colored clothes and dull colored hair.

"Who knows what Reincarnation is?"

There was silent for several moments before a hand went up slowly from a dark skinned boy five seats to the right and two back.

"Jackson?"

'Jackson' began to speak uncertainly. "It's like, when you die you don't die forever? Kind of, uh, you go back to being a baby?"

The bald man nodded. "That's about right. Reincarnation is the belief that when one life ends, another begins. If you die in a car accident you'll wake up as an infant. Your soul, if you believe in that thing, leaves your old body and is put in a brand new one. Make sense?"

There was a quiet murmur through the room and the bald man turned back to the board.

Reincarnation.

That had to be it, I decided as the clip faded away, leaving me in the tornado again, silence returned. So I had once been someone else. And the fall had forced me to remember. I did remember too, the knowledge was creeping into the crevices of grey matter even as I watched in wonder as the specific memories past me by, too quick to catch.

I remembered the basics. Name, age, birthday, family, friends, language and home. Everything else, I knew, I would have to relive. I would have to pull the memories and the knowledge from the vortex.

So I did.

Memory after memory, truth after truth, scene after scene I watched that life play before my eyes. Minutes, hours, days I spent reliving parts of the life I had lost.

I stayed far away from the last five years.

Then something else caught my attention. A word at the end of a memory of my sister. The name of my brother.

Naruto.

Scenes jumped suddenly, many of them, slamming into me from all sides and darting back into the multicolored hurricane, like they were trying to get me to follow them or choose which one to see first. My hand reached out, revealing to me then that I did have a form, long limbed and partially transparent as it was, and brushed the corner of a square of memory.

Inside a small screen were two boys and a girl, accompanied by a man. They were walking along a path in relative silence, the scene flitting around them. They were in a TV.

The boy on the furthest left side from the front had straight dark hair, pale skin and a close-eyed smile on his face. There was a sword strapped over one shoulder, his black shirt cut to expose his stomach and his pants and matching shade.

In the middle was a blond, a frown on his whisker marked face, his eyes also closed and his hands in the pocket of his orange and black jacket, matching his pants.

The only girl was dressed differently, watching the boys as they walked. Short pink hair, bright green eyes and light skin. Her shirt was red, her skirt not really a skirt with shorts under it and a large pack strapped to her middle.

The last was a man with brown hair, black eyes and a face plate, a green vest on over a blue shirt and blue pants.

The memory was short and vanished but I knew that face, even older and two dimensional. That had been my brother.

Cold fingers gripped my heart and I looked around at the world around me. My brother was in my memories, but not as he should have been. I was struck by fear. I needed to get out of there, to return to the real world, but I didn't know how. I didn't even understand how I'd gotten there to begin with.

Terror held its claws around my throat and I choked, frightened and confused. I reach out and another memory snapped into place.

Naruto and a boy with dark hair, spiky instead of straight, were there, younger than before. Naruto was in the air and light enveloped the other boys hand, the one not holding the blond up by his neck. A dark smile passed the other boys lips, strange tattoos creeping across his face. His hand shot forwards, straight through the orange clad boys chest. Blood fell into the water below.

The memory ended. Tears had begun to prick in my eyes, which by then had truly revealed themselves to exist. I was physically there, or a physical manifestation of me was. A scared, panicking one. I thought Naruto had died, but of course that couldn't be the case. He had been older in the other clip. So he must have survived. With shaking hand I reached out again.

A swing.

Another.

A forest, a giant snake, the same dark haired boy begging for life.

Another.

Giant frogs.

Another.

Orange hair, dark piercings, Naruto on his stomach with long bars of metal pinning him down.

I was almost crying as I found another.

Wide open spaces of light, bright colors. A woman with long red hair, a white shirt and a green apron that went almost to her ankles. She was hugging the older Naruto, a warm smile on her face. She was his mother.

More and more passed by, some interrupted, some not. I did start crying before long. I kept going, watching my brothers life pass in front of me, scenes playing at complete random in confusing schemes and no distinct pattern.

I couldn't stand it anymore, everything was too much. I screamed for it all to stop already.

Shockingly enough, it did. The vortex froze, the images inside did too. I could see them clearly now, like photographs creating an igloo around my and shielding the outside world. Stunned by the obedience I could only stare for a long time before I spoke again.

"Naruto," I called quietly. From the walls floated down hundreds of the little rectangles, no longer screaming through the air but floating to stack on top of themselves.

Curious I spoke again. "Oldest?" I asked, watching them start to rearrange themselves in the air in front of me into a straight line in chronological order. I took a deep breath, steeled myself, and dove back into things. They weren't in complete order, as I had apparently not watched all of the show in direct order. It started with a red head, in fact, one I would not meet again for years. It ended in black and white and apparent anger. It wasn't just videos either. It was also pictures in books or on the screen of a computer, sometimes it was lists and walls of text.

There was one thing I realized watching everything. One horrible, horrible thing.

I wasn't there. I wasn't supposed to exist.

It hurt and it was confusing. That made me cry more than anything else had that entire time. My heart hurt and I couldn't understand why I wasn't there. I let out a shaky breath, lowering my head and willing the memories back into their places as I had learned to do.

"I want to go back," I whispered quietly.

And the world dropped out from under me.