Disclaimer: Yes, This Is A Self Insert Reincarnation Fanfiction Set In The Naruto Universe. If you're not into that sort of thing, you likely won't be into this. If you are into that sort of thing, you still might not be into this, I don't fucken know, I'm not a mind reader. I've spent the last year and change reading fics like this and I guess if I read too much of a genre I end up writing in it. I should probably be more careful with that, actually, because now I've got thirty thousand goddamn words of fanfic written for an anime I have not actually consumed in it's entirety (I'm watching it -now- but my knowledge of the series when I started writing this was a combination of fanfiction, wiki dives, cultural osmosis, and having the storyline explained to me over the course of several years by my husband, who read and watched the whole thing in real time as it came out)

Also Disclaimer: This Will Be OC Heavy. I do not exaggerate, nor do I apologize. I just wanted to say so, in case anybody felt like complaining about all the OCs. Don't bother! This fic exists for an audience of exactly one person: me. Everything else is just watershed.

This is already too many words that aren't the story, I hate huge frontloaded author's notes, I never even read them, what am I doing. anyway enjoy

There is a theory, a science fiction theory meant to deal with time travel in purely fictional contexts, that posits certain moments, certain acts, certain outcomes, are actually fixed points in history. A pin so pivotal that even if you were to go back in time to fix it, events would fold themselves up so that it happened anyway, or perhaps even cause the disaster you sought to avoid. Moments that serve to nail down the canvas fabric of spacetime, that cannot be tampered with, at least not to anyone's satisfaction.

The truth, as I was to learn eventually, is slightly more complex.

But for this story, to all intents and purposes, we shall treat the tenth of October as one of those fixed points. Again, in reality, it's slightly more involved than that, but these are things I would not learn and concepts I would not grasp until long after that day.

The day I died.

Before the tenth I had been… myself. Self-evaluation is a difficult thing at the best of times, even here and now trying to tack down this narrative, it's hard to filter down the most salient points. Boil down myself, as it were, for entertainment consumption. I was a medical kunoichi of Konoha, I had achieved the rank of chuunin, I worked in the hospital almost exclusively at the time. At one time there had been pipe dreams of being a field medic, but my health never quite earned me the clearance.

I was only fourteen, but the lung affliction that had pushed my father into early retirement had been passed down along to me. As it had his mother before him, apparently. Some families pass down bloodline limits. Mine… mine passed down the means of my death.

I would be lying, if I said that this had not influenced my desire to become a physician. It was certainly not the only reason, but my father's health and my own provided a powerful motivator. And working at the hospital meant I was at least somewhere useful in the event I had an episode.

Limitedly useful, though, as was proved on the tenth.

I was on the late shift when the Nine Tails, the greatest of all the tailed beasts, escaped his human prison and descended upon Konoha. Bringing with him devastation on a massive scale and a miasma of corrosive chakra that smothered the city like a plague. The hospital was not quite yet in an uproar, but quietly ramping up to it, as rumors flew ahead of the truth. An invasion; a tragedy; a natural disaster. And then-

I am no chakra sensor, but I still felt it, when the Kyuubi's chakra hit the air, gasped for breath and found it burned. I was stalled in the hallway by it, my entire apparatus seized with a spasm so intense I couldn't cough, much less breathe. I saw stars, and black and red, and did not even feel the fall to the floor, where I'm told I was found in a dramatic puddle of my own coughed-up blood.

I was insensate for that part. I'm assuming. Dead is about as insensate as one can get.

Death itself was…

A great empty space, gray as morning fog and just as close. The sound of water nearby, the gentle wash as though it lapped against the shore of a lake. I could not see the water, but the sand beneath my feet was wet and hard.

I waited. It seemed as though there ought to have been someone to meet me.

A light touch fell on my shoulder, and I jerked around, no pulse to pound but startled all the same.

A girl stood there, where no one at all had been a moment ago. No- not a girl, she was older than me probably, though possibly not by much. Shorter, though. Her long black hair was wildly curly, tied half-back with a silk ribbon. She wore a bright red short kimono and thigh-length mesh armor underneath, a popular kunoichi style. But her long legs were bare, and she wore traditional wooden sandals with no socks. And that was to say nothing of the cute black cat ears, apparently genuine living cat ears, that poked out of her hair, or the long fluffy tail with the last two handspans wrapped in bandages behind her.

She looked at me with golden eyes, slit-pupiled like a cat, or possibly Orochimaru of the Sannin. And a familiar, rueful expression, like this was somehow, haplessly, her fault.

"I really should have seen this coming," she said, with an emotion identifiable as deep chagrin. I am not completely sure what sort of expression I made, but it made her wince.

"It's not your fault," I told her, gratified to hear my voice come out smooth and unbroken by a rasp or a wheeze. "I've always known I'd die coughing up a lung."

She grinned at that, sharply pointed, but paradoxically still cringing. "But haven't you always wondered, what if you didn't? What could you do, Himitsu Haruka, if you didn't come stamped with an expiration date?"

To that, naturally, I was fucking speechless.

"Yours is a soul of great potential," she went on. "Left… almost invariably untapped. Cut short at the prime of life, turned loose to go elsewhere and do it all again. Briefly. I've always wondered- I've only seen it once or twice- what would you go on to do, with a second chance?"

"Everything," I said, breathless. "I'm not terribly ambitious. Only everything."

I'd not quite been born sick, but it had always been there. My whole life, that great albatross weighing me down. A ninja's life is short, and a ninja with a respiratory disorder can expect even less time than most. I had done as much as I could with what I had- and the whole time tasted the bitter ashes of not enough.

After all, my health wasn't the only reason I'd been drawn to the medical profession. Like most doctors, though moreso surgeons, I did a little bit want to be god.

The cat-girl (bakeneko? nekomata? was her tail split in two, under that bandage) beamed, turning her eyes into crescents.

"I thought so," she said, pressing her palms together. "I can't wait to see where you go from here."

Faster than I could react, she reached out and pushed me- I found myself falling backwards through nothing, through darkness, to a voice faintly calling out, "Good luck!"

I woke up on the floor of the hospital morgue, underneath a sheet.

It wasn't actually the first time I'd ever woken up that way, but that's a story for the next time I'm drunk. It was the first time I'd woken up with a toe tag- well, a boot tag, really, they'd looped it through my laces rather than take the time to get my shoes off. I was a bit grateful for that- for being still clothed, too. Hadn't been long enough to get any autopsying or processing at all done, then.

...Oh.

Forensic autopsy was usually my responsibility at the hospital, and sometimes at the Uchiha Police Department. Of course they wouldn't have gotten around to it.

I sat up carefully, pulling down the sheet, and looked around myself. Not carefully enough, apparently- I noted that the room was full, tables and all other available surfaces laden with sheet-draped corpses, hence my place on the floor- my head spun, and I tried to list sideways without slumping into a dead body.

Another room imposed itself over the one I was looking at- and another, and another, different morgues from different perspectives, thoughts about it in languages I didn't know. I shut my eyes tight, and tried to sort through it.

As soon as my eyes closed, a vision bloomed- no, not quite. A memory. A memory I had never seen before, and yet the taste, the texture of it, it could not be anything else.

An autopsy room, lit this time by gas lamps, the yellow light giving an artificial, waxen cast to the face of the dead woman on the table in front of me. To my left, a short man with curly fair hair and round spectacles, his clothing bizarre and foreign, watching me with disapprobation. To my right- and bending down to touch the dead girl's cheek, a tan man in an ugly olive suit, nondescript except for the brilliant green of his eyes. A wisp of luminous mist streamed from his lips, and at the same time a puff of mist rose up from the corpse's lips. She gasped, and opened dead eyes to look direct at me.

I opened my eyes in the real world with a jump, a hand flying to my forehead. Oh, gods, what the fuck.

So. What was different, that I was now having vivid hallucination-level flashbacks of things that had never happened to me?

Well, I'd been dead, obviously. I'd crossed the veil, if only temporarily. Something had come back with me, then. Knowledge, someone's memories. There was more where that came from, I could feel it, swimming around the back of my head. Just waiting to attach itself to a trigger here in real life and come to the forefront like my own genuine memories.

I shivered, and pulled the sheet back towards me, wrapping it around my shoulders. It was cold in the morgue, and I was still in my hospital uniform, with only the one cardigan over it. A rather extensive bloodstain, already brown, spilled down the front of it, and down the back of my hitai-ate, where it hung around my neck. It might even be in the ends of my hair- my side-bangs felt unpleasantly crunchy. There were, in fact, more pressing issues than whatever psychic residue I'd managed to accumulate in my brief spell in the afterlife. Like not being in the morgue.

I hoped whoever they had on guard down here wasn't anybody who knew me personally. I was going to scare the shit out of them either way, but I'd prefer not to traumatize a friend or acquaintance.

Oh, hell. Had anyone told my parents, yet. What a fucking case of whiplash, if someone had.

I took a moment before I tried to move again, to fold myself up crosslegged (in the space the length and breadth of my corpse, nestled between a wall and the neat row of my fellow corpses) (ignoring as hard as I could the part where these were, inevitably, people I knew) with my hands upturned over my knees, and meditate. Centering myself, taking inventory, realigning my chakra. Gathering the strength to get up.

My chakra was not where I'd left it. Most of it, in fact, was glued to my lungs, dedicated to keeping the bellows moving. The rest was buzzing through my other internals, no doubt engaged in repairing what function I had lost by spending the night absent my body. Evidently, a magical extradimensional catgirl could throw my spirit back into my mortal shell, but could or would not fix said mortal shell in the interim. Too much to ask, I supposed. I'd never been that lucky.

Well, all the more reason to stumble out of here and seek medical attention. I was scowling when I opened my eyes, but had accumulated enough fortitude by then to get to my feet, only a little bit shakily.

I did not peek at any faces, as I stumbled through the aisle of corpses for the door. The glimpses of hair from under motionless sheets was more clue to which of my fellow shinobi lay here exanimate than I actually wanted. They died fighting, probably. No one offered to shove them back across the veil.

It felt… viscerally unfair. I'd only died choking on my own blood, why did I earn that second chance?

The door to the morgue only locked from outside; the inside was a push-bar. I heaved myself against it and burst through sloppily, and heard the yelp and a crash as the shinobi on guard stood up out of his chair suddenly. I looked up and locked eyes- lazy spinning red. Ah.

I was tense in every muscle for a moment before I recognized my former genin teammate. I looked briefly up at the paneled ceiling, asking for deliverance, because there were more tomoe spinning in his eyes than there had been the last time I'd seen them, and that hadn't been too long ago.

Uchiha Fuyu, still in his police uniform even though he'd evidently been loaned to the hospital, his head a crown of the wiry curls type of Uchiha hair, his spectacles clipped to the front of his shirt. He didn't move even when I looked back to him, except for the lazy spin of his eyes, and the sight galvanized me. I lurched forward and grabbed him by the face.

"Turn those off! You imbecile, we talked about this," I rasped at him. Fuyu gave a little gasp, and his eyes went dark, and he almost looked like what he was actually seeing was me. He gripped my wrist with one hand, the other fumbling for his spectacles. Little half-moons, the better to look over them with the Sharingan active.

"Haruka," he hiccupped, floundering. "You were dead. I saw you. How-"

"It didn't take," I said, pretending I wasn't leaning on him to stay standing up, even as I released my grip on his cheeks. He still had a rather round face, younger in appearance than his actual age. "I've been mailed back. Perhaps the postage was wrong."

His eyes flickered red again, just for a moment, and he frowned. "The hell are you doing with your chakra?" he muttered. "It's all-"

"I believe I am in need of medical attention," I said, enunciating very carefully each and every word. I paused, and gave a sniff. "And a debriefing. The last thing I remember-"

Was a world all in gray and a catgirl kunoichi who recognized my soul from another lifetime, but-

"While you were gone, the Kyuubi escaped," said Fuyu, softly, using an euphemism that I had half a mind to pinch his cheek for again. "And then was put back again, by the Yondaime. We're not- it's still pure chaos. I'd thought you were working at the hospital, the fight didn't actually make it this far, but then there you were on one of the lists-"

I put up a hand, and lurched past him to lean on the security desk, to stabilize myself while I bent down to pull the morgue tag off my boot lace.

"Hm," I said, reading it, Fuyu hovering close enough to read it too. "Pulmonary hemorrhage, yada yada, history of… hm. I drowned in my own blood. Could have happened at any time, really, the Kyuubi chakra just…"

Fuyu flinched. "You weren't the only one affected," he said. "But you might be the only non-civilian who-"

"I'm lucky like that," I said, cutting him off before he could euphemize again. Automatically my hand curled protectively over my lower ribs, pressing the spot at the bottom of my left lung that always burned the hottest. "Please take me to the nurse station," I went on, quietly. "And then, I think, to report to Yondaime-sama."

"...Ah," said Fuyu, not looking quite at me again. "About that."

A/N: these shall go at the end, from now on, I just thought I shouldn't throw people straight into it without an idea of what you're getting into.

Anyway, this is just your bog standard SI reincarnation fic, except for all the ways it isn't. Mostly, without giving too much away, I just wanted to write my take on the idea, with all of the things I like about the genre and none of the things I don't like.

Primarily, in this fanfiction you will not find contained the conceit of an adult mind reincarnated into a literal baby. No salt to people who play it like that, you do you, I've enjoyed plenty of fics that do it. But the concept gives me hives and I have no desire to write it. There's other ways to access your past life memories! We don't have to be fully sapient babies!

- Yep, that catgirl is Makoto, from The Mountain. Several thousand years of coming into her power later, but it's still her.

- I have got a fair chunk of this story written ahead of time, but not all of it. I refuse to commit to a schedule, because I know I will get impatient and fuck it up and then hit the end of my buffer and fuck it up even more.

- I do not expect feedback of any kind, I have been writing for many years in a total void of it, and at least 30k of this story is going to happen whether people want it to or not. I personally am a totally silent fanfic consumer, so I take no umbrage with people who are the same way. The stat counter lets me know you were here, and this author note lets me tell you that I love you.

Thanks for reading!