Reishi was born in a winter night, which would have been considered important, if Konoha wasn't in a perpetual summer.

This is unexpected.

Not because her mother, a bony-faced woman with hard eyes and languid hair called Fuhaku, hadn't been aware – God forbid – of her own pregnancy. Or because she had been born earlier than she should.

No, the surprised party is, in fact, Reishi.

You see, when you die, the last thing you expect is to open your eyes again; that's not what people do normally. Or at least that's what she used to think.

The first days of her new life had pass by in a blur, quite literally; as it turns out, babies can't see very well right after being born. She spends those days laying in what she supposes is a crib, slipping in and out of a deep sleep by some unknown criteria.

She will still have to wait another week to meet her father.

Ryouji is a kind man, don't get her wrong, her mother is kind too, just not as warm. However, the thing that strikes her the most is the big, shiny and very real Hitai-ate that her father is sporting on his forehead.

Now, Reishi hadn't been the biggest fan of the Naruto series, to be honest, but she could recognize that chunk of metal anywhere. Not to mention that he is also wearing the standard flak jacket and the blue sandals.

At first, she thinks that her new father is a hardcore cosplayer, after all, the standard ninja uniform isn't the most difficult cosplay she could think of; but her dreams of being a normal girl – as normal as you can get when you've died and reincarnated – are crushed the day her parents decide to take her for a stroll around town. If this isn't Konoha she will eat her diapers.

There are many ninjas roaming around, one of them even starts to walk on the wall to avoid a group of loud children that comes barrelling down the street. She also spots a weapon store, sitting innocently between a book shop and a tea shop, as if selling kunais is a normal thing to do.

Maybe another person would have taken this opportunity to live the dream of being a shonen protagonist, or they would have attempted to 'fix the timeline' and save their beloved characters from their future disgraces. Reishi isn't this kind of person.

Her plan is to avoid the main events like the plague, maybe even defect from Konoha and go live a peaceful life as a hermit in the mountains. Naruto is going to save the day anyways, so who cares? Not Reishi.

She isn't a hero or a knight in shining armour, and these people certainly doesn't need either, they can fight their own battles. It's not that Reishi hates violence, in fact, she doesn't mind getting into a fight if it is for a good reason, this just isn't her problem that's all. And hell will freeze over before she starts taking orders blindly from a man she neither knows nor respects.

The first problem she encounters in her new life, aside from the rather obvious dissonance between her mind and body, is chakra itself.

She's barely one year old when the pinpricks start, like thousands of ants running under her skin. She doesn't panic, instead she frowns, drops the book she has been trying to read and calmly walks to her father to explain the situation. Apparently, those are the chakra coils forming inside her – the core itself was made in the uterus along with the rest of the body but the coils wouldn't start developing until much later, when the chakra reserves were a little higher – this makes enough sense, so she drops the subject and comes back to her book, trying not to think about the alien sensation.

It soon becomes apparent to her that she won't make any progress in reading unless she asks for help and her mother is happy to oblige. The two of them start spending at least one hour a day in this project, sometimes joined by Ryouji. It almost feels like they're a normal family. Almost.

Reading doesn't come so easy to her as talking did. She had always been good at memorizing sounds and associating meanings to them in her past life – or so she thinks she remembers, the memories are there but she can't quite reach them; like trying to remember a dream after waking up, and she can only see brief flashbacks when something triggers them – but the kanji are proving to be worthy opponents.

At least this gives her something to do, life as a toddler is incredibly dull and she refuses to play along with the other kids 'her age', so she desperately needs something to occupy her mind with, or else she will go crazy. It is an odd feeling, to be trapped inside one's body. Extremely frustrating, too.

This is a source of worry to her parents, who seem to think that her lack of a social life and her obsession with learning the language aren't exactly normal behaviour for a little kid. The possibility hadn't crossed her mind before but her parents probably think that she's some kind of genius.

This would have been a fatal error on her part if they had been just a little more eager to get her into the ninja academy, but as it is, they want her there as much as she does. Granted, they probably are planning to 'enlist' her in there at a later date, like most little kids with at least one ninja progenitor, but for now she is safe. (She carefully avoids to linger in the fact that she barely has any fucks to give; her state is balanced between apathy and a state of constant stress).

Her father, however, seems to think that this is a golden opportunity to start teaching her early.

She isn't thrilled by this, but in the end, she has to admit that she will need at least a modicum of self-defense skills in a world like this, so she begrudgingly starts paying attention and learning some basic ninja skills.

Thankfully she's still too young to be learning how to throw kunai or shuriken and her father knows better than to let her play with such dangerous weapons, but she is old enough for some chakra control exercises.

Her favourite part though, is learning how to walk silent as a cat. By her second birthday, she has assimilated it like a second nature and can walk as silent as a shadow almost without thinking, startling the ever-loving shit of her parents – though she has to be actively trying to catch her father unprepared – and any non-ninja visitor.

Chakra is a world on its own, waiting to be explored, as she hasn't tapped into it since her coils started forming. Lately, she has been trying to locate her parents at all times via sensing their chakra signatures, memorizing them and trying to follow their movements when they leave the house. The first time she tries to follow her father, she almost has a panic attack – she tries it with him because he's easier to locate due to his bigger chakra reserves, apparently her mother is a civilian –, as all the chakra signatures of the people surrounding them in the neighbourhood start to overwhelm her. She can feel every one of them, see them as tiny stars in her mind's eye. There's suddenly a whole universe around her and it is engulfing her, collapsing her senses and preventing her from feeling anything else.

Deprived from her five basic senses, all she has is her own mind and the brush of foreign chakra signatures against it. She has a sensation like free falling, like floating away and lucid dreaming. Of losing herself.

She is brought back by her mother shaking her by the shoulders. Luckily, she's there with her when it happens, and she is quick to take her to the hospital, where they confirm that she is just a very good sensor and that this isn't uncommon or unheard of. She gets instructions to meditate regularly and to expand her radius of chakra-awareness slowly. She's also supposed to come back for check ups. She refuses to those, throwing the only tantrum Fuhaku will ever experience from her child.

That night her parents have their first fight.

After that her mother starts forcing her to go to the park to play with other children no matter how many times she tells her she doesn't want to. It's a pain in the ass. The other children are perfectly capable of sensing that she doesn't want to be there though, so at least they tend to leave her alone.

As a side note, if her mother hadn't been so damn stubborn, she would have never met Obito.

Reishi is sulking while sitting in a swing when she notices him playing alone in the sand. He is small and adorable and she wouldn't touch that plot clusterfuck with a ten-meter pole thank you very much. So the dread she feels when they make eye-contact is completely understandable.

It is a very awkward moment, really; first she looks at Obito, then she notices that Fuhaku has noticed, and then she knows that if she doesn't go to 'play' with the boy right now she will never hear the end of it.

Honestly, Ryouji is cool as a parent but Fuhaku could be so annoying sometimes. Reishi could be their mother, she doesn't need them bossing her around all the time. She is a damn adult. She had grandchildren, for fuck's sake. Maybe. Her memories aren't the most reliable thing.

Back to Obito, it is almost painful how his face lights up when he realizes that she's walking towards him, only to turn into a darker expression of worry half a second later. He must think that she is going to bully him, which is sad on many levels, but mostly because she's two and a half years old and she couldn't bully anyone even if she wanted.

The moment she considers she is near enough she plops down in the sand in front of him. She must've looked downright weird, with her head cocked to the side while observing this seemingly innocent child, more so taking into account that the blank expression she is sporting hardly matches her tiny body. Finally, she decides that the best way to approach a kid is to be blunt and that she doesn't want to make a lasting friendship anyways – just get Fuhaku off her tail – so whether she makes a good first impression or not doesn't matter. In the end she settles for 'curt and to the point'.

"Hi, do you want to make a sand castle?" Kids do that right? She's pretty sure that sand castles are a thing, probably.

"Y-yeah, sure!" Obito either doesn't care about her obvious social ineptitude or he is that desperate for company – seriously though, this village has a problem with 'socially starved orphans', they should fix that –, whichever it is, they end up making a pretty decent sand castle, even if they lack the proper tools to do so.

Reishi doesn't talk much, mostly because she doesn't think Obito would understand or even like any of her preferred topics. The boy, on the other hand, seems to have no problem with filling the void she has left. He has a surprisingly good diction for a boy his age – he's what, four? Six maybe? – and she blames his incessant blabbering for this; he has to get good at it if only due to all this practice.

By the time Fuhaku decides it has been enough socializing for the day, Reishi knows all about Obito's old neighbour and what flowers she likes – because of course Obito would go with her to buy flowers if she asked nicely enough – and what food she cooks better and how many cats does she have. Reishi politely nods and answers with monosyllables whenever he stops and looks at her expectantly.

On the topic of his eyes, she was taken aback by just how black they are. She expected them to be a very dark brown at least, or maybe a very dark something, but not plain black. They do seem to take a reddish hue when the sun hits them just right, but that might be just her imagination.

The rest of him is pretty normal, by comparison, a perfectly normal kid. That is, if she completely ignores what she knows will happen to him in the future and that he's going to be an S-class ninja.

She bids him goodbye when Fuhaku picks her up – literally, she scoops her up without her permission – and feels a pang of guilt upon noticing that he is the last kid in the park and that nobody is going to come for him.

She smothers the thought, refusing to care for the tiny child in front of her. He is just a trouble hazard, nothing more.

Fuhaku, on her part, gives her a solemn nod of approval after her first 'successful friendship' and Reishi is very tempted to answer with her own serious 'The deed is done boss'. She refrains, knowing that Fuhaku won't get the joke and it will only be a waste of saliva. Instead, she nods back, making a small smile tug at the corners of her mother's mouth.

It's odd for her to smile nowadays. She had done so a lot, at first, when Reishi was still little and it wasn't apparent yet that she wasn't a normal child. She has never tried to hide that from her 'parents'. Why would she? She could try and seem even a little attached to them, but what for? In the end, they will realize themselves that it has all been a farce, or they will just think that as she grew up she stopped loving them and that would only make them more miserable in the long run.

It's better if she is honest with them from the beginning, like tugging an arrow free with a swift motion. At least, that's what she wants to think. It's better than to keep tossing and turning at night thinking about how she has robbed them of having a perfectly normal loving child just by existing.

She doesn't love them as a normal daughter would, that much is true, but she admittedly loves them, even if just a little. She does worry about Ryouji every time he lefts the village to do a mission – knowing very well that the third shinobi war started not long before she turned two, it isn't a full blown war yet, they are in that period in which the involved parties subtly push their boundaries and wait for the others to snap so they can blame the first attack on each other like quarrelling children – wondering if this is finally the time when he doesn't come back, and she also worries about the growing shadows under Fuhaku's eyes.

While Ryouji has adapted to Reishi's overall weirdness and abandoned his expectations about raising a normal little girl, Fuhaku seems to be having problems letting go. She had been so happy when she had seen her baby girl for the first time, thinking of dolls and dresses and fake tea parties… and instead she got a freak with dead eyes that seemed to peer into your soul when you make eye contact. It's hardly fair, Reishi is aware of this, but she doesn't like the situation more than Fuhaku does.

As Fuhaku's mood turns sourer and sourer, Ryouji's mood improves, that is, because as Reishi grows older he can teach her more and more of his ninja repertoire.

Much to Fuhaku's demise, he decides that, at three years old, Reishi is old enough to practice with at least one throwing weapon. He lets her practice with shuriken, kunai and senbon to see which one she likes better and she choses senbon, for the mere reason of them not having multiple edges with which she could – and probably would – cut herself. They are pointy, but pricking herself in a finger strikes her as less harmful than a cut, that and she might have harboured the secret hope that she would be so bad at throwing senbon – they seem to her like the most difficult projectiles – that Ryouji would just give up on training her already (he had also started a training regime to better her endurance and she wasn't thrilled about it).

Maybe just to spite her, fate decides to provide Ryouji with an infinite amount of patience, though she is as bad a she had expected at throwing senbon. Not only do the oversized needles never hit the target, but they doesn't even reach half the distance they should. Ryouji assures her that with practice she will get better. She doubts it.

Fuhaku, on the other side, decides that if Ryouji can double his efforts to drag her daughter into the ninja world, so can she regarding her social life. So she resolves to bring Reishi to that same playground in hopes that she will make more friends, or at least find the one she had made that one time.

It had been pretty out of character for her daughter to take notice in any other child. Granted, it wasn't the first time she stared at someone with an undecipherable expression, only to huff and pointedly ignore their existence a moment later. Fuhaku liked to think that she has grown accustomed to her daughter's… eccentricity over the years, so she decided to ignore that and instead let the child know that she approved of her decision to approach the lone boy. However, her daughter detests any form of physical affection – she swears she has heard her hiss – and though she tolerates Fuhaku and Ryouji, she much prefers to be left alone. So she decided to give her a curt nod, which Reishi returned, and buy her a new book.

The first two days of coming back to the playground don't bear any fruit, but to her luck, the third's a charm, and the third day the boy is there.

Her daughter purses her lips with a sour expression – she does this everytime she finds something displeasing and Fuhaku wonders if she's aware of this, probably not –, like seeing the boy isn't exactly something she wants to do today (or ever), but Fuhaku gently pushes her in his direction and gives her a pointed look.

She can't run away from this.

Reishi sighs, resigned to her fate, and plops down in front of the boy like the last time. Even though they have only played one time and it has been months since that, they easily fall back on their routine, with Obito chatting her ears away and Reishi politely nodding along. That is, until the boy falls silent.

It takes Reishi a moment to register the lack of chatter, but after a moment she looks at him questioningly and realizes that he has been observing her.

"Is there something wrong?" She asks, hesitant. She didn't expect to see the boy with a pensive expression. Ever. She feels the sudden need to squish his cheeks to make him stop looking like that, but in a magnificent show of self-restriction she refrains.

"Nee, why's it that the other kids don't like you?" Because when they look my way I do my best to scare the shit out of them via glare, she is tempted to say, or Because they can feel that I'm not like them, you're either too stupid to realize that or you don't care. Instead she settles for shrugging. When it's apparent that she doesn't plan on giving him any explanations, he continues. "That's okay, I will be your friend." He says with a face splitting grin as bright as the sun, as if reassuring her.

That is the moment when Reishi realizes that she has fucked up somewhere along the line and that there is no way her dreams of reclusion in a far-away mountain will come true now. Because this is Obito, and if he has decided that she is his friend, he will just go looking for her and talk her ear out until she comes back, she just knows it.

She considers the possibility of never coming back to that playground again, cutting all contact with Obito and hoping that he will forget about her; but something tells her that Fuhaku will never allow that and she will drag Reishi to the park everyday if she has to. You don't get many choices when you're three, even if you're a creepy weird kid.

The next year and a half will be a constant battle between Fuhaku and Ryouji to push her into Obito's friendship and ninjahood respectively.

This game of tug will end abruptly upon Ryouji's death, Fuhaku being dragged into a spiral of depression, rendered unresponsive to the efforts of her sisters or Reishi herself.

A month after her fifth birthday, Reishi will decide to enter the academy.