DISCLAIMER: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. I do not own Naruto or the materials associated with the manga/anime franchise. What I do own is this story in part or whole, the plot and set-up of the plot, and original characters that came with it.

The River Between Two Oceans
Prologue

"Do you believe in reincarnation?"

Well, I don't.

I find comfort in the idea of not being able to live through multiple lifetimes, in not living over and over and over again, and to just live within the fullest extent of a single lifetime. I want to live through one simple lie and to die from only that, never to return to live within another. I wish to enjoy the time that's given to me – limited and constricted though it may be – because I want to appreciate it better. I wish this only because I have been none the wiser during the cusp of my adulthood and now I want to be much wiser, less reckless to slip into unnecessary bouts of regrets and self-shame. And being able to live a single life is the best enough for me. I don't want to keep re-living a life full of mistakes and pain and suffering. I think once is more than enough for all that load of crap.

But this isn't the answer the man wants—definitely not what he needs to hear, too.

His life, much like that exquisite Persian rug he once stood on in his old office at the investment bank in downtown Tokyo, was pulled away from under his own two feet. Now he's homeless. He's jobless and being without a salary meant that there is no home he could maintain, no money to buy food or drinks with, or a car for him to drive his wife – now ex – around. Now he's family-less. He's lost the honour to keep his responsibilities and his wife had left him, and with his little baby boy too. He's forgotten the cheer in her smile or the face of her love, and there's no way he's ever getting them back. Now he sees them everywhere, especially in the eyes of heartless strangers who walked past him during the morning rush hour or the pitiful gaze of the helpless on a cold winter's night.

He looks at me now with empty, dark eyes—hollow, like his own life. He's an empty can, filled to the brim with nothing but bouncy particles of air – each representing a dream he once had – and every day, he could feel each of them dissipate within the can itself.

I can't tell this man the truth of my answer.

"Yes, I believe in reincarnation," so I lied and dressed it all up with a smile. "I believe we'll be given a second chance to rewrite our lives that way…"

He smiles back. A fleeting sense of relief is obvious in the twinkling glints of his black irises.

I shiver.

"That'll be nice, wouldn't it!" he chuckles on as if he could taste reincarnation in the air itself and tries to eat as much of it while he still can. "I might be richer than I am now. I'll be able to go home, kiss my wife and feed her and the kids. We'll have servants who'll run the errands for us worry for us and we'll be happy. We'll die together and die happy!"

How do I tell him that that was once possible? How do I tell him it was still possible to be happy with just trying? How can I possibly convince him that it was all his own choice?

I can't. I can't say for sure.

I am happy to live with trying to scale a mountain a thousand times the height of Everest. I am happy with not making it with the overachievers, the lucky ones who could finish the hike and make their mark on the peak, but those ones never realise nor appreciate the journey more than its destination. But I am the one who's happy with the mere trials of my journey to a destination that I couldn't even reach. I am still happy and satisfied with just that—to reach the mere contentment of my own goals. I can't convince him that he shouldn't cut his cloth to someone else's body, to wear a suit measured and made for others. I can't convince him that his own happiness in life was something he has to build for himself.

What do I know, right? I'm just a lousy 25-year-old girl who wanted nothing to do with this life. Who preferred to die now rather than living a life where I may be scarring others and scarring myself, and getting others to scar me.

But maybe that is the point of living.

Maybe we live on the edge without even knowing and the idea is to see how much we are aware of what we do and to learn how to stop doing something bad or keep doing something good. Like now.

Maybe a lie is bad or so is the truth. Maybe the truth is as equally painful as a lie, but maybe that's the something good I have to keep doing, something which he has to learn to accept as I have. It's like a dose of bitter cough syrup or that prick of an injection needle stuffed with morphine.

While I still want to, I look to the homeless man.

"But you know," I tread carefully, "Maybe life's better like this. At least you get to witness and experience first-hand the sincere kindness of others whilst the rest of humanity degrades itself. At least your presence in the world manages to allow my humanity to shine through my own prejudices. I know it's painful to be here right now, but if you're still alive there must be a reason for that… Maybe you need to build that reason for yourself and live on, not regretting what you cannot change."

I watch his face change.

From that look of delight, he was distraught—for a moment. Then he laughs. He nods. His eyes shifty. His cheeks red.

"Maybe!" he bellows.

I startle.

"Maybe we live in all the maybes in the world!"

I slowly smile.

"Maybe we're wrong, maybe we're exactly right! Maybe the sky isn't blue, maybe the sun isn't really shining!"

I laugh too.

"Maybe we're supposed to just make the best out of all the maybes," he pauses as he shifts his gaze into the distance as if he was blinded by something—probably the faces of his families, as much as his memories allow him to recall. "Maybe I saw my wife giving me food once. Maybe I saw my son in university and he handed me some change. Maybe we all knew who was then. Maybe we could've been more."

"But it might be too late, wouldn't—"

"Or maybe it isn't."

"What was it they always say about life again? That it's all about the choices you make for yourself."

He nods quietly.

"It's not as selfish as you think…"

"No, I understand it perfectly. Sometimes I wish I knew it sooner or… I just accepted it and lived with it. Instead, I keep delaying it and delaying it. I keep pushing that thought away, thinking it would weaken me or made me a more foolish man than before. But I was wrong… I should face it—take it by the horns and face it like a man."

I nod. I'm relieved somehow.

I don't regret it. I don't regret this painful reality.

"Sorry, I lied earlier," I tell him nervously. "I don't believe in reincarnation—I'm just too busy believing in now! This life and this time are all I have left to use to the best of its purpose. That's what my choices in life are trying to build: something that I can be proud of now, not before or later. I don't want to live hanging on to the belief that my second chance happens only after I die, but that it's what I make of it while I live and breathe."

The man nods. "Yes, yes. And maybe you're right, kiddo! I need to start thinking and living like that. That's the way I should be! Maybe I could… even pick myself up!"

"That's right!"

"Life hasn't given up on me… I shouldn't be giving up on it, too."

I smile again, finally satisfied with our seemingly meaningless conversation.

I glance at his supplies and once I was sure he had everything, I continue with my recce. I make sure everyone else that I bumped into had the lunchbox we prepared from homeless shelter.

Ueno Park is wonderful during this time in October. There is a mystifying beauty in its nature when the weather's just right like this, especially where the end of autumn meets the start of winter. The smell of dried leaves and cracked tree bark still lingers in the air, like cinnamon sprinkles and coffee foam blending together, and then a gush of blistering cold wind rushes in from the sea, reminding you of cold sushi take-outs. Not exactly the kind of scent combination you'd reckon for lunch or dinner, but it reminds you of where you are currently standing.

This oriental port is a grand mixture of concrete, steel and grass—a melting pot of advanced technology and graceful tradition, melded together through an almost melancholic adversity. This fragile city is the heart of Japan, its hardy people are the blood that scour through its vein-like streets and alleyways. Tokyo is indeed still bustling with people, which is not a surprise considering it was only 8 in the evening.

I still see people with paperwork and computer strains in their faces as they bark out into the streets—some diving underground to catch the train whilst most heading out to a bar or restaurant for some cold sôchu or warm beer. They may not look the same or know each other, but their destination and reason unites them. I know that feeling, that hive-minded hypnosis as if you knew from the moment you were born that you are small fish in a big school and you gather around your own kind and move along the tide in this together oneness.

I feel that way when I look at these volunteers who came with me from the shelter—they were all mostly Japanese of course, but I see a handful of foreigners. There was that guy from France, the ladies from Poland, two other guys from America and another girl, a fellow Asian like me. We're all part of an internship programme that brings its volunteers all around the world to combat poverty, hunger and homelessness. I joined it because the institution's goals and objectives meet my own, especially when it comes to this cruel but opulent world. These volunteers have all the most important and outrageously intriguing reasons for doing what they do, but I'm probably the one who's least interesting of all.

If you haven't noticed, I'm quite cynically depressing and somewhat suicidal.

My parents are happily married – in case you're wondering – but I never felt I truly belonged within the family. Long story short, I think it was a communication problem that spanned across generations and generations, and by then, it was a fire too hot to burn off with just water. Before I knew it, I was affected by the same problem and I guess I just never expressed myself well enough. Then I became isolated from my family, I was a loner at school, I started to cry myself to sleep over the littlest of shits and then there was that strange urge to burn things. My grandparents were the only ones who noticed my odd and troubling behaviour, even though they knew perhaps they had played a part in it—but what's more important was that they tried. They tried to make things better, even when it was too late, but I wasted their effort when I starting to cut myself back in high school. By then, they died.

It was my sisters who urged me to change for them, in their memory and for their sakes, and so I did. I stopped thinking about myself and began to pay enormous attention to others. Why did I choose Japan, you ask? Well, my grandmother lived through the years of Japanese occupation and spoke a little (or maybe a lot) of Japanese. That's why I'm here to help the poor, the hungry and the homeless. Because of my grandparents. For my dear grandma.

As selfish as this may sound, I started thinking more about others before I think of myself—for my own sake. It's a paradox, really. Is it selfish that I am unselfish to others for myself? It's really strange.

"Over here!" I turn at the shout.

An old man raises his hands, one held an empty lunchbox and the other was holding an orange.

"What's wrong?" I ask as I approach him.

"These oranges are really fresh," he starts and that snicker on his face was odd. Misplaced. Almost ethereal. "A friend of mine loves oranges. Say, little missy, have you got any of them left? He lives in that tunnel over there—"

I follow his finger and look to a police cordon up ahead, down the grey concrete footpath lined with sakura trees—now it was all leafless, of course. There's a yellow tape that surrounds a manhole, but it wasn't a normal manhole, obviously. It appears that there is now a sinkhole there following the row of earthquakes that's been happening before I got here in Tokyo. I catch the glance of the police officers, who seem to know that I was a volunteer, and points to the tunnel past that sinkhole where a man with a crooked back paced back and forth at the opening.

"—that tunnel, there!" the old man before me finishes.

"Ah, okay! Lemme see if I've got any—"

One. I only have a single orange in my box.

"He would love these oranges, miss," the old man prodded once again, like the soft beckoning of a maneki-neko* at the fortune teller's parlour.

"S-sure," my lips twitch as I smile. For some reason, my nerves are killing me. I feel a chill rolling down my spine as I walk past the grinning old man.

I walk fast down the footpath and get myself warned by the police officers as I almost tripped into the sinkhole, which was apparently only 12 meters deep. It was still a dangerous spot for anyone – especially homeless vagrants – to be walking and living around. So they tell me to use the long way around the park to get back to where I started. I didn't ask them why it takes so long to fill the sinkhole, but I had a bad feeling after that close call. Something was terribly off.

Maybe this was a bad idea.

But I should be fine if I had just stuck with their instructions, right?

Right.

"Excuse me," I call to the man and hold out my hand: a lunchbox with an orange on top. He still paces to and fro one end of the tunnel's mouth and another, not paying attention to my presence. "A friend of yours said you'd like an orange."

"What friend?"

I jump. He sounds surprisingly younger than most of the homeless men.

"T-the old man… from over there…" I gestured using my head.

"There's no old man there."

I'm aghast by the poison in his voice. So I turn and glance to where I was just walking from, "Look, there's that—eh? Where did he go?"

"Oh, there was an old man, alright," the man before me stops moving, standing still right in front of me. "But he ain't here no more…"

As he steps out of the tunnel and into the light, I hear the soft whirring of something in the distance. If his back wasn't crooked, he would've been as tall as 2 foot taller! His dark hair was dishevelled, pale skin filthy and dehydrated, beard and moustache like virgin forests of Borneo over his face—underneath all that mess I could tell he was young indeed. Probably slightly older than me. It makes me wonder how he ended up here.

He comes up further and snatches the food I offered before receding back into the dark like a feral cat. "The old man's dead! He died last week… in the earthquake."

I gasp.

"Wh-Who're—Wha-what're you?" sentences couldn't form in my mouth.

"You saw a ghost who died of an earthquake… It can only mean one thing."

What?

I couldn't ask him aloud. My heart is beating fast. Sweats break out from my pores. There's a strange warmth rising from the pit of my stomach like the bubbling burst of a volcano, waiting to erupt in both anger and surprise.

"There's another one coming."

His crass remark was horrifying. Even if he didn't know that I just got here, it was still uncommon for a Japanese like him. No homeless man – no matter how desolate or angry they were at the world – would ever react this way before. I want to yell in his face and tell him to go to hell, discounting all manner of decorum.

But as I was inhaling a good amount of air, the ground shook. I freeze.

I could hear sharp screams pierce into the night sky like a fabric being pulled apart from its seams and torn free.

The buildings around me swayed and my own balance is deteriorating, becoming nearly as wobbly as that jelly cake I offered to the homeless yesterday.

Lights are flickering all around me—some within the buildings whilst others in the streets.

Somehow, within this vibrating madness, there are hopeless gasps held through the motions. Then there's a vacuum that cancels out all sounds, except for the rattling of the belly of the Earth itself and before it could get any louder, the ground is indeed breaking. I hear a loud crack from underneath my feet and the concrete splits as easily as snapping twigs or a cracker biscuit. The man before me threw his food on the ground. I couldn't react.

It all happens so fast.

One second I was looking straight at him, parallel and level. Then I was looking up as he was looking down on me, hands reaching out. Can he reach? Will I catch his reach? Will he be in time?

"I've got you!"

I slam hard against the protruding soil underneath the now split open footpath. The sinkhole must've been widened by the new earthquake. I can see drain works beneath me with its waters still flowing—it was as if looking at a soldier's wound as he's been shot by a wide bullet that cuts through his skin, tissue and bone. The ground is still shaking too, now more ruthlessly than ever. My grip is slipping. So is his.

"Just hang on for a bit!"

I'm slipping.

I can't wrap my head around what was happening. I still had problems believing in it. Am I really here? In this very moment?

"I-I can't hold on!" I shout back.

The man clenches my hands harder with his nails digging into my skin. It hurts, but I don't think about it though—I was busy looking at the moon and the twinkling stars behind his head. Do they know how violent this earthquake is just by looking? What do they think about it? About our helplessness?

I wish I was there instead, in the distant galaxy far away—just for a moment, just until this earthquake passes.

"Hang in there!" he urges and tries to pull me.

But I could feel the dread as heavy as lead.

Maybe it was the magnet core, calling every iron mineral in my body into the ground, but I was just getting heavier and heavier to be hanging onto his hands. It was getting more painful for me to reach out and extend my arm like this too. I can't.

I just can't.

This was really a bad idea.

My grandma and grandpa always told me it was bad to travel at the end of the year. You've probably wondered about the Mayans as I did before—why did they pick December of all months to end a yearly calendar? Sure, it wasn't October like now, but bad things always seem to happen during the last quarter of the year. It's like Mother Earth has that time of the month when she's all cranky and crude and harsh. Or maybe we just owed her money in the form of climate change and preservation policies, and the bill comes due to every end of the financial year.

And I've picked that time of the year to travel to Japan, the country with one of the most active faults in the world.

Haha. I could laugh all about it, now. It all seems so stupid, so rash and naïve.

"O-Oy! Don't cry!"

His face blurs in my vision. Everything is blotched as if someone threw a bucket of water over a wet painting. His voice is humming in the buzz of chaos. Every sound is ringing in my popped ears.

I can't believe my fate.

I was here to help people, but now I'm being helped.

I was here to remind myself not to regret shit, but that's all I ever think of in these small moments in deathly time.

I was just hearing the story about a man who wants to die just so he could reincarnate into his second chance and relive his life so he could do it all right. I was just telling him how I don't believe in all that. That I live in the present and in making it right now. Bullshit.

Just what the hell can I do in moments like this? Would it suffice for me to die trying to make an escape? Should I just face it without regret? Have I really done enough in my life?

Will I be able to face my dead grandparents and tell them everything that I've done to avoid being a stupid little girl who was once selfish and cruel?

"I-I don't wanna—" I gasp. My breaths are just sips of air, a cross between gasping and sobbing.

"You're not gonna die!" he seethes in my face, almost spitting. His face looks red as he tries to pull me up again. But to no avail.

I heard a man telling me how his life was pulled from under his feet like a rug. Now my life is slipping from beneath my feet, too.

I feel it now.

Like a ripe fruit falling off a branch. Like an asteroid gaining speed and bursting with fire, shooting across the skies.

I slip from his hands. He topples forward.

We fall into the depths behind me.

I may've passed out. I can't tell apart if I was conscious or unconscious as we kept on falling and falling and falling.

The darkness slips in from every corner till there was nothing but—

a white light.

Bright. Hot. Blinding.

Was this death? It's not possible that it's not painless like this!

It is sudden and quick, almost as crass as the morning sun breaking through curtain fabrics or the odd spell of rain during a summer's day. Acidic—not on my body, but on my memories. Bittersweet too—as if I was saying goodbye to a dark place as I step into the light.

And then pain. Utter pain. Unadulterated pain.

Like a torrent of rogue waves. Like monsoon in a storm. Like mad, raging hurricanes.

Sharp little needles that seep into every pore and then—

Author's Notes: Hello, readers! Here I am, writing my love affair with first person POV and a self-insert! I used to be a huge Naruto fan back when I was 13 (and that was 14 years ago!) and on this account of mine, I have had several times writing a few Naturo fanfic. I decided to tone it down to a few good OCs (or SI/OCs) as an effort to polish my own writing style. :)

I was such a big fan I would dream of Naruto. One of it was Itachi dropping me off at a brothel where a biker gang was entertaining themselves - I, who was his cousin in the dream - just because he's had enough of taking me around during his Akatsuki membership years. But then Shino saved my life. He saved my life several times in my dreams, though. That poor baby! No one really pays much attention to him, right? Meanwhile, Sasuke was always that loner-boy who has a distant crush on me! I've had several dreams (continuous but spanning weeks/months of interval in between) with him always blushing and watching me from afar! Ah, the good old days! I miss those dreams!;_;

*Maneki-neko is the porcelain-made 'beckoning cat' you'll always see in Asian stores. It's been said and used to bring in luck!

Let me know in the reviews if you guys enjoyed this or ever had a Naruto dream! :)