Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto.
Breathe
Chapter One: Rebirth
Rebirth felt like falling.
I could not breathe. The wind rushed past my body, rippled over my cheeks and through my curling hair. Memories and faces swung by, voices and words indiscernible. Color bled from my skin and from beneath my clenched eyes, the pigment drying like tears in the rushing air. I felt nothing. I felt everything. All that I was and am and would have been whirled. I could not open my eyes. I could not breathe. The world felt as if it were shrinking in on itself. A bitter cold numbed me. A darkness caressed me. Buffered by the unrelenting wind, I fell.
I was dead.
Had been. Will be.
I could not breathe.
When the scorching heat of a sun suddenly washed over me, I burned. Something enveloped me, something foreign, pushing into my pores. It was vibrant. It was alive. And it searched. When I was found wanting, it delved deep and I tumbled, spiraling out of control. I gasped, and the air, like water in its constancy, drowned me with its vigor. Over my tongue, through my throat, into my lungs; air turned to blood, reached my heart, my brain. My eyes flew open and I shuddered, hanging helplessly in the open sky. What burnt from the outside, burnt inside now too.
I saw blue. Blue like the robin's egg, but unspeckled, untarnished. Beneath me, waves of gold shifted like the moving tide. And I drowned. Dying all over again because I could not breathe.
I hit the ground in an explosion of dust and my body broke apart, the impact like the insistent slap of a doctor's hand against a new babes' back. Breathe.
Wispy vapor, dry like the world around it, coalesced into form. Air rushed into my new lungs. And I screamed so loud in unknown terror, my ears rang with the sound. Pale alabaster hands clawed at the burning sand. Thin legs dug. I writhed. Something was happening, an insistent happening; a necessary happening.
But I didn't know this.
All I knew was that the breath that had once given me life had betrayed me, a dead thing, as it had once done before. I knew that this heat, this steady thrum I felt in my blood, beneath me in the ground and within the air that I so desperately tried to gasp, stunned me with a pain unlike any I had ever felt in life.
Everything was wrong.
Confused and panicked, I closed my eyes against the sight of my arms flickering in and out of solidity, plunging, uncaring, into the black.
He had no experience with children. The routine patrol was long and tedious, with very little but sand and heat between him and home. That he found the child was pure happenstance. Any longer, and the shinobi was sure she would have died. Black, dried blood flaked down her chin and neck from her mouth, nose and ears. A colorless blue eye stared when he lifted its lid, pink pupil blown beneath sand dotted lashes. He was careful when he pulled her up, her paper white skin peeled, red and raw with sunburns. Spring board curls fell in a ratty wave against her bare back as he shifted her awkwardly in his arms, struggling to wrap her with the sweat stained cloth from his own head. The nameless shinobi paused then, thinking of leaving her to the desert, but such an offering stirred something sour in his mouth. He felt the gentle rise and fall of her breath against his own, the flutter of her heartbeat.
Then he ran.