Death is weird, you know.
Or rather, everything afterwards is. I was always quite sure that when death finally took me, nothing would happen. Simply reverting back to the state I was in before death.
Apparently I was wrong.
I died in a manner that was fairly predictable for anyone who knew me. I was a thrill seeker, literally addicted to adrenaline. I escalated everything and it finally caught up with me, when a game of Russian Roullette did exactly what it's about. Thinking about it, quite a stupid idea, but hey, who cares?
So I was surprised, of course, when my eyes opened again.
Everything was blurry and cold and scary. A giant creature carried me around and gave to another one. It was a female giant who held me so close to her face that I could actually recognize it as a human. She had dark red hair and strange purple eyes and was looking at me like I was the greatest thing she'd ever seen.
I knew what this scenario was. I was just born, and this woman was my mother. She didn't look old enough to be a parent and yet, there was something reassuring about this woman to me. She held me to her chest and I was slowly lulled to sleep by both her gentle voice whispering to me and her heartbeat, a steady pounding even though to my newborn ears sounding slightly weak. The fact that I could hear her heartbeat so clearly was strange. In my previous life I could hardly hear a heartbeat when pressing my ear directly to someones chest. Now I was just born and I could hear her heartbeat while having her forehead gently pressed on mine.
When I deliberately stopped focusing on the heartbeat, something else became scarily loud. I could hear everything around me. The doctors speaking in hushed voices in a language I vaguely recognized as Japanese, footsteps of someone pacing outside this room, going up and down the same few meters over and over again. Everything was so loud.
It wouldn't stop and I did the only thing my tiny body was capable of.
I cried.
A few weeks passed and we were finally released from the hospital. They had tried to find out why I always seemed to be in pain, but eventually they said they couldn't find anything wrong with me. My tiny head hurt all the time, because everything was too loud and only the heartbeat of my mother could act as my focus.
I had also picked up my first bits of language. The doctors called my mother "Moeru-san" and she refers to me as Hinoko. So my name was Moeru Hinoko now.
I hadn't met my father yet and he wasn't at my new home so I assumed that my mother would raise me on her own.
A month after my rebirth, my eyesight finally started working properly. The house I was living in was small, made predominately of wood and hardly decorated. However there were swords hanging on the walls and they were obviously a point of pride for my mother, as she cleaned them quite frequently.
Something I also noticed was that the technology in this place was, well, pathetic. I already missed my car. The only thing made for transport I had seen was when mother carried me around the house and outside the window was a wagon filled with mostly linen and similar things. They were loud and I can't even imagine how much torture a car would be to my new body.
I shuddered and Mother pressed me closer to her chest, cooing gentle words into my ears. But a loud noise next to another window scared me quite considerably. A man landed in front of the window with a thud. He gently tapped the window and I flinched away from the noise.
"Hiko." He was talking to my mother and she immediately whirled around. The look on her face was … complicated. She looked like she was stuck between utter joy and distress. Tears welled up in her eyes and she gently laid me down on her bed so she could approach the unknown man. He climbed through the window and was immediately embraced by my sobbing mother.
"T-Tahito. I thought you'd d-died." She said through her sobs. Her face pressed into the man's, Tahito's, chest.
He was taller than mother and he had pitch black eyes and equally dark hair. His entire outfit finally made me realize exactly where I was. His outfit consisted of fairly simple black clothing and a vest over his shirt. It looked like a uniform and a white and red paper fan was on display on the front of his vest.
The Konoha hitai-ate around his forehead simply reinforced the idea that I was in the Naruto universe.
"I know... I know... I'm so sorry I couldn't be here for you." The man's voice was hoarse and his face was marred with scars. The most prominent one was a large slash across his nose.
They stood in their embrace for a few minutes before the broke apart. Mother came to pick me up and with a tired yet so very relieved voice, said: "She has your eyes."
The polished metal of the hitai-ate of the man, who was apparently my father, reflected my face and I saw my mother was absolutely right.
Pitch black eyes stared back at me.