Of the Forest

Chapter 1

Disclaimer: I own nothing of Naruto

She wakes to the sound of screaming; the piercing, shrieking wails of a new-born, fresh faced and afraid of the new world. She wants to comfort the child, this tiny baby born helpless into the cold, but it's hard. Her body feels oddly sluggish and her brain seems to be having trouble computing, and even opening her eyes takes a disproportionate amount of effort. What greets her when she opens them is even stranger. The world is a kaleidoscopic mess of colours; it blurs and fuzzes around the edges and large distorted shapes move in and out of her vision in mismatched lumps.

She is briefly terrified that she is going blind.

But for some reason her mind can't seem to cling onto the thought and the accompanying worry, batting aside like an insect. In some part of her brain she finds this absently disturbing, but that too is swiftly dismissed.

The baby is still crying in the background, the screams softening to distressed blubbers and it gladdens her, she has always hated the sound of children crying. She cannot see it though, in the odd mixture of large, coloured blobs, there isn't one she can identify as a baby. Not that she can identify anything at all.

She feels cold, there is a stark chill in the air where it hits her naked skin, which is a shock and concerns her for a moment that she should be unclothed but once again, the worry vanishes. She tries to move her leaden limbs, the hope being that movement will warm her up, but she can't seem to manage more than a slight squirm which does nothing for her situation. Suddenly though, there is something warm and firm fitting around her body, the rough-smooth texture feeling oddly comforting against her skin. She feels herself be lifted, the distant blobs growing closer and is absently aware of being cradled. And isn't that strange? She hasn't been held in such a fashion since she was a babe herself but the hands (for she assumes they are hands) are so warm that she finds little complaint.

The crying has stopped now and is instead replaced by the faint murmuring babbles of voices. She can't hear them very well; the sounds are strangely loud and the language is nothing she can understand. The sounds are slightly more…bitty than she's used to, shorter and little harsher but with a distinct rhythm that is so very foreign.

The hands place her down and new hands reach to cradle her against something warm and soft. There is a part of her that is utterly paralysed with fear by the apparent size of the hands against herself and their ability to manhandle her when she has no way of fighting back, but all that evaporates as she is hugged close to the warm, soft thing. There is a steady thump-thump underneath her, like an ancient, primal drum beat. It's vibrates through her whole being with an inexplicable sense of warm and safe and home and she feels herself become docile and sleepy. Her mind drifts further, enveloped by the softness next to her and the safeness that seems to come with it; it's a curious thing, familiar and strange all at once, but wonderful all the same. She closes her eyes as something warm and vaguely pink looking is pressed up against her mouth and by some strange instinct she latches on. The world narrows down around her around until only the comforting feel of being completely home exists and the part of her mind that is conscious slowly drifts away.

But before that one last thought finds its way to the surface of her mind…

…Something is really wrong.

~~~*8*~~~

Her name is Josephine Baker and she is utterly normal.

She has a mother (Karen), a father (William) and two older brothers (Adam and Henry) and she loves them all dearly. She is one of the lucky few on planet Earth, gifted with a comfortable life through accident of birth and like most in her situation, barely even recognises the gift she has been given. She lives as most do: not too good and not too bad and barely making a mark on the fabric of things, just sort of living.

But Josephine is a dreamer.

She is born to a middle-class family who live in a housing estate on the outer edges of a large town. Her father has a decent job in the City and her mother is a part-time office worker for a car showroom ten minutes from where they live (although she assures everyone that she only does it out of boredom, it's not like they need the money or anything). She grows up comfortable and happy with her stable nuclear family and her neatly ordered world.

But Josephine has always wanted…more.

Her world is one of raindrop-splattered concrete and dull 1960s buildings pulled up in the post-war building boom. The sky is grey more-often-than-not, a dull monochrome that is not quite bright enough to be silver and it rains nine days out of ten. She grows up playing on the tarmac cul-de-sac outside her house with her brothers and the neighbourhood kids and starts school at the local Primary down the road. It's peaceful, it's content and it's boring.

She makes friends at her school, the kind of friendships all small children make: bonding over shared lunches and shared giggles, how gross boys are and how good they all are at skipping. Her days are filled with whimsical children's games, cotton-candy bright laughter and the endless optimism in a child's heart that bursts star-bright into the grey world around them.

She eats up Disney movies with a voracious hunger, their words and messages shaping her as she watches tales of love and magic and happy endings and she wants. She looks at the screen and sees everything she dreams of in life: to be kind yet strong like her favourite princesses and to marry a handsome prince who will take her hand and lead her to her very own happy ever after (Mulan will always be her favourite though, she's beautiful and gentle but kicks butt too and still gets her prince in the end).

Josephine grows up and grows older and her teachers will tell her parents that she is such an imaginative child; would be brilliant if she only pushed herself and her parents will half-heartedly try before life gets in the way. She wants more, but is ultimately content.

Disney becomes Harry Potter, becomes Lord of the Rings, becomes Star Wars. Her heroes change but the dream does not, now though she no longer wishes to be just the princess, she wants to be the protagonist of her own story. She wants to lead rebellions and slay dragons, she wants to dance among the stars and weave magic as easy as breathing. She tells herself that if she lived the lives of the characters she would do things differently: take advantage of an entire school of magic or dump the stupid vampire ponce and run off with his infinitely better brother.

Maybe it's a little selfish that she spends so much time living in imaginary worlds, whether her own or another's creation, and maybe it's a little self-centred -this desire to be the hero, but like everyone else living their dull cookie cutter lives she can't help but dream.

She studies hard at school, both Primary and Secondary and does well on her exams. Her brothers move on to university before her and her dad gets promoted. She travels and grows together with her family who have always been, and will always be, the most important people in her life and things are well.

Josephine makes friends, close, dear friends. Erica with her life and fire and strength, Molly, quiet and shy but with the filthiest sense of humour and Danielle who dreams as big as she does. They're a group, a unit and they promise to be together forever. While at school with them she has her first kiss, her first love and first heartbreak (looking back on it though, Alex was rather immature, and she did always hate the amount of gel he used on that stupid hairstyle) and while she knows she will never conquer castles or be a ninja or Shinigami like her favourite characters, she decides that she wants to make a mark on her own world in some way.

She goes to university to study politics; she figures that maybe she'll be able to make a difference someday, maybe one day it'll be her ideas that change the world (she hasn't worked out what those'll be yet, but it'll come). She studies and parties and has fun. Makes friends, gets stressed, gets a job, gets really stressed but things go fine. She still dreams, idly, in her spare time, still reads books, watches anime and lives adventure through the eyes of the characters.

But Josephine lives in the real world now, she has a flat with friends, a steady boyfriend, a graduate job at a swanky company in London and plans to enter the political field. She has days out her mum, discusses work with her dad and tells embarrassing stories at Adam's wedding.

Josephine's life may not be all that exiting, her world is still raindrop-splattered concrete and dull 1960s buildings but it's her world. She's not a fanciful child anymore, full of stories with warrior maidens and handsome knights, but she's okay with that. She has ambitions (somewhat realistic ones now) and plans to make it work and the future stretches out ahead of her: bright and glimmering and unknown.

But one night, one drizzly night, sometime in November, but it could also easily be December, Josephine gets in the car to drive back from her Grandparents house in the country. The night is dark and roads are narrow and Josephine's head is filled with a thousand tiny concerns.

And she never sees that other car coming.

(High above the wreckage on that lonely country lane, a silent God sits and watches uncaring. It sees poor Josephine Baker, her life and dreams all the way back to when she was a squalling baby and thinks, yes, let's do something different.)

~~~*8*~~~

She spends the next unknowable amount of time slipping in and out of consciousness. The world is still blurry around her and she still can't move, but things slowly become clearer. The strange pinkish blobs that drift in and out of her vision solidify slightly into the vague outlines of people and the noises become more distinguishable as words.

But that presents a whole new series of problems.

Like what!? Giant people!? What the hell? Had she somehow shrunk after the accident? Is she in a coma? Is that what this is? And why are they all speaking a different language? Surely even if this was a weird coma dream, the people in her subconscious would speak English, it's not like she knows any other language apart from GCSE German. And that doesn't even begin to explain why her brain can't seem to focus or why sometimes she's conscious and other times her sense of self seems curiously absent.

The whole thing is scary and terrifying in a million different ways, a feeling of helplessness overwhelms her every time she tries to move but can't, every time she tries to speak but all that comes out are strange indistinguishable noises. Sometimes it feels like she can't breathe from the strength of her fear but then something in her mind whites out and she loses consciousness again.

The other thing she stresses over (besides pretty much this entire situation) is the strange crawling feeling that writhes under her skin. It feels like a hundred tiny bolts of electricity are slithering through her veins and thrumming like a hummingbird's heartbeat. It's like a persistent itch that she can't seem to scratch. It's not painful or anything, sometimes it's even pleasant, and sometimes when the giant people-blobs pick her up she can feel something in them too, humming just under the skin.

She wears herself out worrying most of the time, between the not moving, her brain's seemingly inability to function for longer than a few minutes, the giant people and the crawling feeling it's a wonder she's not a blubbering mess (that's not to say she isn't one, hooked up and drooling in some hospital bed). She also worries about her family, her boyfriend and her friends. Where are they in this mess? Had she been kidnapped or something?

(Are they all crowding around a hospital bed watching her unresponsive body struggling for every breath while she dreams a strange dream.)

She spends what feels to be a good deal of time cycling through this unhealthy spiral of despair, fading in and out, fixating on everything from her weak heavy body to the absence of anybody she knows. It creates a spiralling feeling, a whirling twist of stress that tightens like a noose the more she thinks on it. There is no distraction from what's inside her head, she can't move or see all that clearly and the lack of sensory information is slowly driving her mad. But the human brain can only spend so much time constantly stressed and alert before something gives, and so she settles into a weird state of placid acceptance. Her mind can't take all this fretting anymore and so just gives up; instead she begins to take note of what's going on around her with a sort of distant curiosity.

The first thing she notices are the people. There are two: a man and a woman, though others come and go. Both have long dark that the woman wears loose but the man has in a high bun on the top of his head, it reminds her a little of samurai films and some of the more fanciful anime she's watched (which is strange, but hardly the strangest thing). Their hair looks luscious and silky and feels incredibly smooth when it tickles her skin. The woman has grey eyes, a fierce, wintery silver that's liquid and soft and the man deep chestnut, the colour of wet earth and tree bark. Their skin is a healthy tan colour, what looks to be a mixture of natural pigmentation and hours in the sun and their eyes are a distinctly Asian almond shape.

They're a couple, that's obvious from the way they interact with each other. They move around each other like orbiting planets and their eyes are filled with a deep, infinite affection: constant and flowing as the sea. They remind of her parents, of Adam and his wife Melanie and her heart squeezes in yearning, hoping that someday someone will look at her like that.

(Probably not soon though, she muses in the depths of her mind, her and Rajesh have been clashing for a while now and it's clear to anyone watching that their relationship is on its way out.)

The next thing she notices are the words. Most of them are pretty much gibberish to her, but as she listens more it becomes clearer and clearer that some of the words are familiar. It doesn't take long before she has a sudden epiphany and realises the language the man and woman are speaking is Japanese, there's only so many times she can listen to them greet each other with ohayo and okaeri before figuring it out. This makes absolutely no sense though, because she knows only the bare minimum of Japanese, just words she's picked up here and there from anime she's watched, so how would the people in her coma dream speak fluent Japanese?

But from listening to the couple carefully when she can, she's managed to work out their names: the man is Hiroto and the woman, Aiko, although the other name they mention a lot (and strangely, usually in her direction) is Moriko, as to who this 'Moriko' is, she has no idea, but she seems pretty important.

Her surroundings are also somewhat fascinating. She's not in a hospital, that's for sure, if anything it looks more like somebody's house -probably Hiroto and Aiko's all things considered- and it's a rather curious one too. The house itself, from what's she's seen when one of the couple picks her up and takes her places, appears to be an odd mixture of traditional Japanese and modern Western. The doors are sliding shoji doors made of an elegant dark wood and the floors are covered in tatami mats. The walls are lighter shade of wood than the doors but are decorated with tasteful pieces of Asian style art and calligraphy. By contrast however, the beds are average western beds and the kitchen looks fairly modern too.

Though there is this odd symbol that pops up in just about every room of the house, it has a kind of glancing familiarity, like she knows what it is right in the corner of her mind but every time she comes close to figuring it out she forgets. It's a long horizontal line intersected in the middle by a shorter, vertical one with two c-shaped curves facing outwards, a smaller one inside a larger one, at either end.

It frustrates her a great deal that she can't seem to work out where she's seen that same symbol before, the last thing she wants on top of this mess is to lose her memory too. That would be devastating on a whole other level, so her mind carefully avoids that train of thought out of pure self-preservation.

In the end, she has come to regard her entire situation with a detached sort of apathy, treating the whole thing as a kind of temporary fantasy the universe has deemed it necessary she put up with for however long it wants to torture her for. No one has hurt her and she isn't in any pain, the sparking under her skin continues to be mildly unnerving but it's hardly the greatest of her worries. So, for the time being, she exists in a state of flux, forcing herself to take the whole situation in rationally until, hopefully, she wakes.

It doesn't take long for her carefully constructed calm to shatter.

~~~*8*~~~

It begins as most moments do in this strange new reality: with the ceiling.

After what could anything from a second to a day, she claws her way back to consciousness and opens her eyes to stare up above her. Blinkingly slowly, she sighs internally as she is greeted by the blurry slats of Hiroto and Aiko's wooden ceiling. It's nothing special, just a bland, flat brown but it always evokes a confusing twist of emotions within her. There's confusion, fear and a soul aching tiredness, because the ceiling means that she's still here, but also comfort because at least no one moved her while she was absent.

Recently, she's been using the ceiling as a sort of measure for how her eyes are progressing, in the beginning the best she could do was recognise that it was there: no colours, no depth perception, nothing. Now, after some unquantifiable amount of time, she can tell it's a mahogany coloured and a good several metres above her, frustratingly though, she still can't make out the individual boards.

Her vision is returning slowly but surely and she has regained the ability to focus on objects close to her. It had been the most terrifying thing waking up that second time and realising that she was, for all intents and purposes, blind. She'd never known how much she'd relied on sight until that moment. The world had just been a dizzying array of swirling colours and movement, not a single spec of clarity amongst the blur. It reassures her more than anything to know that she will eventually be able to see clearly again.

After noting little to no change in the blurry mass of brown that is the ceiling, she begins the next part of the little routine she's established for herself: movement.

Unfortunately, progress on that front had been slower going. Her limbs are heavy and weak and when she tries to move her head, she can feel every metric tonne of atmosphere pressing down on it. After what feels like an eternity of trying every time she wakes, she can only just about twist it from side to side, which is completely useless when her vision is so impaired. As for other types of movement, she can clench her fists, wriggle her toes and just about move her limbs a little. But all that pales in comparison to what she wants to achieve.

She's so very tired of lying on her back like an invalid, or being carried around in the arms of strangers whom she can barely understand; it's ridiculous, disturbing and more than a little demeaning. She's never been the most active of people, but even she needs to move sometimes.

Biting back another sigh at the thought of this newest failure, she scrunches her face in effort and tries to lift her head. Predictably, she is met with little success when all at once her skull is made of lead and she grunts in pure frustration when she can't even manage a centimetre off the mattress. Growling under her breath, she feels even more irritated when all that comes out is a pitiful little whine (because yeah, she's got no teeth too and hadn't that been fun to agonise over when she'd worked that one out?) and she clenches her weak fists in anger, slamming them against the bed with as much force as she can muster. It isn't much all things considered, but she delights rather too much in what little movement she can manage. She scowls up at the stupid ceiling, it's pathetic.

Regrettably though, the muted thump of her fists hitting the mattress and her all her groaning had attracted the attention of Aiko, who'd been sitting in the corner of the room, just outside her limited range of vision.

She jolts in shock when the women's large, smiling face enters her vision and feels a burst of annoyance at realising that her movement time is over. She never attempts to move more when anyone ese is around, for all she knows, the giant people are only nice to her because they don't know she's aware.

The woman's silken locks of her hair spill down onto the bed to rest either side of her head and she can just make out the bright gleam of her grey eyes as she smiles. The woman peers down at her with so much unadulterated love and affection in her steely depths that she feels a little uncomfortable at being on the receiving end of it. The only people who've ever looked at her like that are her family and Aiko is definitely not one of them.

"Moriko-chan! Kesa wa dōdeshita ka?" Aiko asks down in her soft, sing-song voice, reaching to pick her up.

She squirms futilely to try and avoid Aiko's reaching arms, but her immobile body is useless and the giant woman lifts her up with ease. She feels like screaming when her head lolls back pathetically under its own weight; her face must have changed to reflect her displeasure because Aiko chuffs a laugh and knocks her cheek with a finger affectionately, "Genkidzukeru," she murmurs with a smile, switching to cradle her vulnerable body like a baby and support her heavy head with one arm.

She glares mutinously up at the woman, all at once resentful of the situation and Aiko by extension, but the woman merely smiles sweetly at her and moves to walk out the room.

Aiko carries her through the house humming under her breath and the area around her becomes a messy blur of brown. Occasionally, she catches a hazy glimpse of the strangely familiar symbol in amongst the earthen tones, but her eyes are too weak to tell. Messy smudges of light and colour tell her when they pass a window and the slight change in shades and depth when they pass a door. From where Aiko supports her head she has a slightly better view of the world around her than she would have if she were to support herself so she stubbornly tries to take everything in, as much as she dislikes being carried.

She catches something on the wall out of the corner of her eye and her whole body freezes.

No.

Aiko must have noticed because she stops suddenly, "Nani?" she asks quietly and peers down curiously, her eyes following hers to find what has caught her attention. But she is too enthralled and terrified by the weak image to notice as she strains to make it out, her mind rushing forward at a million miles an hour.

Aiko sees what she's looking at and lets out a pleased hum that she can feel vibrating next to her ear, "Sore wa kagamidesu, Moriko-chan, sore wa anata no hansha o shimesu," she says, bouncing her a little in her arms, "Sore wa okāsandesu, sore wa anatadesu," she adds, nodding as she walks closer to the thing on the wall.

Right in front of it now, she can make out exactly what the thing is and she struggles to contain the blind panic threading through her limbs.

No, nononono! This cannot be happening!

There, on the wall, is a fuzzy image of a woman holding a baby. The woman is relatively tall with long, brunette hair and shining silver eyes while the baby in her arms is a small, scrunched thing with dark eyes that are almost its entire face. The baby's skin has the slightest of olive tints to it and on its head, is a faint dusting of chestnut hair falling tightly over its head like downy fur. Its tiny body is dressed in little green baby clothes decorated with tiny leaves and on its feet, are cutsey baby socks.

But that's not the scary thing, that's not the thing that causes faint shivers to wrack her weak form and the dancing-itching thing under her skin to writhe in agitation.

No.

What causes that is the look of fear and recognition in the baby's dark eyes, the odd glint of intelligence shining within infant irises. What causes that is how when Aiko bounces her, the woman in the image bounces the baby too; when Aiko steps closer to the image, the image steps closer too.

No, this isn't real! This isn't real!

She blinks, the baby blinks.

She summons up all the strength she can in her arms and reaches out a feeble limb, the baby in the image slowly raises a tiny arm to reach out an equally small hand, complete with five little fingers.

Oh my god, she thinks.

Before promptly passing out.