Stone Fruits (not the title - you'll see why I put this down)

"Stone fruits are typically quite sweet. But don't bite too far - the pits contain cyanide."

Most kids tended to play in playgrounds and whine and smile and cry and babble and go through life without a care in the world, soaking up their parents' love and attention. Hirai Momoka fit into this category of "average" and "not-really-special-but-loved-anyway." Momoka (or just "Momo" as you will) did all these things and more, enjoying the last few years of forced innocence before she'd really have to start interacting with mature adults in school and such.

By the age of five, she was twenty-four. Ignoring the nineteen years she had on the rest of her peer group, life was teetering between ridiculously boring and fun. But was, for the most part, halfway decent.

She didn't want to fit the bill as a prodigy once she realized where she had ended up after her death (a fictional universe, surprise surprise!), so she played life by ear.

After all, life had to be more troublesome in Iwagakure, especially if her foreknowledge of this world had barely any mention to this region.

...

On her fourth birthday, her parents (a loving couple, Hirai Nashi and Hirai Umeko née Suika) had asked if she wanted to join the ninja academy when she turned six. Before Momoka could really think, a vehement "no!" had come out of her lips. A hasty explanation that was dumbed down to kid level quickly came about, but Momoka's heart had been racing so hard that day she feared for a heart attack to come early in life. She wanted nothing to do with the military ruling of the Elemental Nations in general, so becoming a ninja was a definite no-no. Living in a somewhat nice, bureaucratic country that listened to its people and welcomed change for the first nineteen years of her life still stuck with the girl. She simply could not imagine living while directly under the control of a military dictator. Not that she wasn't already, being a citizen of this city, but still. The guise as a normal civilian meant that she could live her life in relative peace and not be constantly checked up on by fire-breathing, physics-defying freaks of nature.

On her fifth birthday, Momoka reminisced on her past five years of life in Iwa and decided for it to be not half-bad. Her parents owned a small bookstore that luckily was built as part of large popular indoor mall (because the weather in the north was too fickle for there to be a permanent outdoor shopping area) that most merchants and civilians visited. Her family wasn't rolling in profits, but they weren't in poverty and that was always a plus in her books. Especially considering how her first set of parents were teachers struggling to get by with hungry mouths to feed and piling loans. The twenty four turned five year old had playground friends that she considered herself close enough to have birthday parties with and not get attacked by bullies.

Her pouring into her family's books was the main reason why she wasn't dead from boredom already. The new language muddled her brain while learning, but now she was confident in her basic fluency to extort the knowledge from history books and language books.

The history section was woefully lacking, only dating back to the fiftieth year of the Warring Clans era, and the level of Japanese she could understand was still in the kids section (teen, actually), and since Iwa wasn't known for their great information recording, Momoka discovered that the entire section below adult level (accessible to civilians, anyway) shared more similarities to fairy tales and off-the-wagon legends. So really only the first thirty years had reliable information, and even that was securely edited.

After all, Iwa didn't want to rub it in the future generation's faces that they were a bunch of sore losers of pretty much every war ever.

That was another reason besides the whole military dictator thing Momoka didn't want to join the ninja forces. Losers turned out bitter and ruthless, and showing the smallest amount of prodigal level over her peers...

Well. She wasn't joining anyway.

...

The kindergarten for the sector she lived in was located five minutes away while walking slowly. Ten minutes if Momo wanted to walk extremely slow, and two minutes if she ran. At five and one month, she wondered if she was even allowed to walk by herself.

Her father managed the bookstore all day long (apparently people went through books really fast), so her mother was usually the one to help Momoka with anything. However, the economic decline that started at the end of the third shinobi war, when the Kannabi bridge exploded, continued on to today. In the few years, Iwa seemed unable to stabilize the economy. Thus, prices went up. Suddenly a shift in the village's bank occurred and housing prices skyrocketed. No longer could the small Hirai family live in their two-bedroom apartment in the half-decent neighborhood in sector number eight. The solution? Hirai Nashi fired his single employee (a nice young man that came over for dinner sometimes... Ayato? Ayano?) to work full-time with all pay, and Hirai Umeko worked as a bakery hand in sector two - an hour walk from where they lived.

The bakery opened at five in the morning, so Momoka's mother had to leave home at three-thirty am, while the bookstore opened at six.

The kindergarten started at nine and ended at three, and six hours of staying in one place was going to be complete torture for some of the hyperactive kids out there. Momoka furtively wished she would not have to share a table with one of those kids.

In five minutes exactly, the little girl with the mind of an adult's arrived in front of the two-story tall kindergarten building for kids who lived in Iwagakure's sectors five through seven.

Most, if not all, buildings in the village were of similar grey hues and building shapes. The village was located smack dab in the middle of a mountain chain, so the surrounding features helped ward off the worst of the winds and storms, but the first architects prioritized security and safety over expensive innovations. The drab darker colors all had the same stones and were short. The tallest building in the entire village being a whopping six-stories was the Tsuchikage tower everyone could see from the streets (cobblestone, but of course).

"Emerald Academy for Young Children," Momoka read the sign engraved into the front of the building. She absent-mindedly checked her backpack for all the necessary school supplies then entered the building.

Quite a few kids were also parent-less, so she quietly drifted into the orphan's group, not wanting to stand alone during the school orientation. A loner, if they were a boy, was found attractive. Some lone-wolf badass stereotype or whatever. If the person who stood alone was a girl... she'd get picked on. Momoka aimed for normal. A completely average girl with some not-bad neighbor friends. However, her playground buddies were of varying ages, so they wouldn't be in any of her classes...

With Iwa, at least, shinobi academy started during the spring when kids were six to seven years old. So any schooling prior was optional. Most ninja kids just went to a normal kindergarten or a variation of nursery school then didn't join the next step that was primary civilian school. Technically, all schooling was optional, since knowing how to read or write wasn't a requirement of the state.

The Hirai parents believed in education, though, so were willing to cut into retirement funds to pay for the expensive schooling that wasn't mandatory.

Momoka was ever so grateful for that.

The class register was posted on the wall in front of the office, and the orphanage matron escorting the group of kids Momoka easily mingled with called out very clearly all the names. Her name was near the top, so she simply eased out of the group and found her class on the first floor.

"Wow, I'm excited!" Squealed a pigtailed brunette to Momoka's left.

She smiled, too. "Hi, my name is Momoka. Are you in class one-three-eight?"

"Yep! I'm Naomi. Hey, wanna be friends?"

And so they sat next to each other. In the front row, of course, because the back row attracted the delinquents and Momo didn't want the teacher to immediately sort her with the "troubled students."

She resolved earlier that morning to get all the answers right on tests, because then she could get extra work and learn more about her world. Speaking of knowledge, a kid sat to her right side whose face trickled at her memories. He looked vaguely familiar, in the way a friend's-friend's-older sister's-boyfriend did.

The pseudo young girl hadn't made it a necessity to write down all the important information relevant to the 'Naruto fictional universe' because she wasn't planning on changing anything as she wanted nothing to do with the ninja business, but his distant familiarity made her jog her memory back a little more than five years ago.

His hair was a bit long for a boy and blond. Paired with bright blue eyes and slightly tanned skin, his coloring was rather poorly matched with Iwa's hatred of the Yellow Flash who had died about three years ago.

He caught her looking at him and glared right into her soul. "What you lookin' at, yeah?"

Momoka forced a small smile. "Oh, no, nothing! It's just that your hair is really pretty."

The blond boy with admittedly nice hair fingered a strand behind an ear and expressed confusion. "Uh, thanks?"

Already, she could see just a cute orphan kid who got picked on about his coloring and never received a compliment for it. A part of her heart melted at the sight of his bewilderment (surrounded by cute five year olds, yes!), but she knew that in about a week she'd hate every last one of them for being so annoying.

Whatever.

Nervous chatter flitted through the air and Naomi whispered conspiratorially into her ear, "I heard the sensei is a demon who eats children. My nee-chan told me that he comes to ea-eat kids!"

Momoka frowned. "Naomi," she chided. "You're five years old. Scary stories are for four year olds. They're like babies."

"Uh-uh. I'm no baby," Naomi shook her head, pigtails bobbing.

The sensei showed up at exactly nine o'clock - that orange haired lady who gave the second speech during the eight am orientation.

"Good morning class. My name is Higurashi Junko and I will be your sensei this year," she said, her faced scrunched up in a stern manner. "I will call attendance now. When I call your name, stand up and say 'Here.' First, Aya Jun..."

Hirai Momoka was fourth on the list, because the majority of the kids in her class were from the seventh sector - more popularly known as the Red Light district, where most kids weren't given surnames. The family name-less kids were last on the lists because they screwed the alphabetical order up.

"Deidara," Higurashi sensei intoned, and her brain stopped working.

The blond haired blue eyed kid to her right stood up. Momo couldn't hear him speak because her heart was pounding so loudly she couldn't breathe, couldn't think, couldn't move.

Deidara... A name she remembered. Someone important.

The girl gave him a second glance and the five years old information flooded through her.

Deidara. S-Class Missing-nin. Iwa. Akatsuki. A terrorist bomber who single-handedly defeated the fuckin' Sanbi - a monster made entirely of chakra. A demon. He had been only a little older than Naruto himself, nineteen during shippuden...

She didn't throw up, faint, or start crying.

No, she was better than that.

She was an adult, he was a child. It was as simple as that, but Momoka found herself gripping her pencil so hard a crack formed along the side during the class activities.

The noon lunch break lasted forty-five minutes, and she bolted from her seat, telling Naomi that she had to pee (eyes not even straying to peek at the five year old future bomber) and ran.

On the toilet seat, pretending to take a piss, she gathered her face into her small child hands and tried to think.

Think!, she screamed in her mind.

Two minutes later (an acceptable bathroom speed), she situated herself back to the table and stared at her bento. Naomi was gone.

Of course the brunette disappeared for other friends, Momoka thought bitterly. No five-year old would wait for some flighty not-really-friend. Two minutes was a lot in a child's mind.

In a sounder thought process, Momoka would've just sat up and found Naomi on the other side of the classroom, apologizing to her and her new friends for being late-ish, but Momoka wasn't of a sound mind at the moment.

A curious blond child stared.

"You've also got nice hair."

She near jumped at his words, then rationalized that he was just a child, definitely not even able to blow things up yet.

Yet.

She turned to face him, not wanting to ignore him and have her be an enemy. Nobody just bullied future S-ranks. "You really think so?" She asked, voice going soft. Because that really was a nice thing to say.

He nodded. "Yeah, yeah! It's like nighttime, except like waaay darker. Like black. Black, yeah."

With black hair and light brown eyes, she didn't stick out like a sore thumb the way he did in Iwa.

So they engaged in a simple conversation while eating. His bento was a lot emptier and uglier than hers because he was a random orphan who probably had to fight for a packed lunch in the orphanage.

She learned his favorite color was green (a rarity in the rocky Iwa), he liked long-sleeve shirts because it was always so cold and windy, and that he threw up last night because the mixed rice in the orphan's dinner tasted so bad.

Careful not to mention any specific places and haunts (Deidara bombed Iwa right before he defecting, right? no reason to give any locations for plant ideas), Momoka told him she liked the color pink because it was pretty (surprisingly, he didn't squirm at the girlishness), she liked reading, and her favorite food was eel. ("you've had fish before? Wow!") She'd actually never eaten fish or seafood in this lifetime because imported items like those were considered luxury goods and her parents' food budget wasn't that high, but she'd always lived within fifty kilometers of the ocean in her first life. The lack of seafood in Iwa was beginning to grate on her nerves because she didn't want to be that one kid who never experimented with different tastes and only stuck with the same old.

Near the end of the lunch break, she had relaxed considerably after reassuring herself mentally that she'd never see him again after kindergarten anyway, since he was dead-set on becoming a ninja.

"Why don't you wanna become a ninja, yeah? They're really cool and strong..."

Every other kid was obsessed with ninja, and Deidara was no different. In fact, he seemed to be just a normal kid. A normal kid with Tourette's but that was besides the point. She supposed that he was some prodigy, but had real drive. Well, not real-real since he was literally five, but a healthy conviction to being strong for some reason.

Momoka realized she liked talking to Deidara. Kid-Deidara wasn't that scarily strong ninja quite yet and being a civilian still made him fall under Momoka's "average" radar. A radar she appreciated being under.

The next day she sat with Deidara again, and wasn't entirely depressed when Naomi left the table for her other friends.

It was okay. Momoka was only five. She had time in kindergarten to make new friends once Deidara left for the ninja academy.

...

Later that day, right after she had walked back home (an uphill journey), she took her school supplies out of her backpack and counted the number of notebooks. Three - one meant as a planner and the other two meant for notes.

Well. Momoka didn't think she needed to write that many notes since she wasn't going to be studying anyway.

With a trembling hand (no stop that you're a fucking adult) the girl-woman began to write. Her English handwriting sucked ass, but she persevered, stowed away memories coming to the surface. It was a mental thing, always keeping your mother tongue with you.

She wrote clumsily, not caring about saving space (it wasn't like she could remember that much anyway) to transcribe all the information down before they flew out of mind.

"Hello," Momoka practices in English. Her voice wobbles and an indescribable amount of emotion floods through her. When was the last time she had spoken to someone (not just in English) not dumbed down? Her worrying lack of close peers was beginning to sketch itself into stone that she'd be unable to act like a normal kid.

Ninja could tell when things were different, right?

Deidara was a ninja. He was smart. At fifteen he became an S-Ranked Ninja and was able to leave his military dictator right after blowing up its shitty regime.

Could he be a peer? Someone who understood?

She wanted to talk about the future, but that would change things. Uncomfortably change things. The only people she could talk to using proper language skills would be... her parents (but they'd freak out), her class (she didn't speak yesterday, so they didn't know if she was just average or not), or...

Nope.

If Deidara knew about shippuden, then he might be able to engineer around certain plot points and kill off members of Team Seven.

Weren't Team Seven the most important characters in the whole universe or something? Didn't they save the world from some crazy rabbit-lady?

Momoka banged her head against the wall.