A/N, May 22, 2018: This has been rewritten from humor to not-so-humor, oops.
She has never not known.
Her last memory was after the Kyūbi was extracted and her body weakened considerably. She remembers how Kushina held her hand in hers, the girl's violet eyes shining with unshed tears. She remembers how the little girl wept and asked for her to stay. She remembers closing her eyes.
And then…? And then what?
And then she wakes up, unable to see anything but colorful blobs and light. Mito finds herself alive and she cries her lungs out.
For the first year, after she's stopped screaming, Mito does nothing but take stock of her situation. She is an infant with zero motor skills to speak of, nor does she have the right teeth to enunciate her words. And besides, what is there to say to the couple who take care of her and feed her? 'I'm sorry, but I'm not your daughter'? Yes, that will surely go over well.
So Mito does nothing but look around the rectangular room she's been placed in. It's pale pink, like the shades of a rose quartz, with a window on the far left wall that lets the sunlight in. She's been placed into a crib because her parents, whoever they are, have enough sense to know that she might attempt to roll onto her stomach even though she's not the most active baby.
She actively avoids thinking about the questions she has, specifically the ones that start with how.
Sometimes, Mito tries to sense the chakra around her. She is a sensor first and foremost and it works to some extent. She can no longer sense people more than a five feet radius, but she can do it, so it's fine. She has time to improve, it's all she has.
It's all she has.
She familiarizes herself with… her mother's chakra and the way it projects a sense of calmness yet could turn sharp and cutting in a matter of seconds. The woman must have a wind affinity, or maybe she has water. In contrast, Mito's new father has chakra like a furnace beneath his skin, like the fires on cold winter nights. It was comforting but it was weak, unused and untrained; her new father is a civilian.
She learns many things as she grows up. She learns that her name is Haruno Sakura, she was born on the 28th of March, her parents are named Haruno Mebuki and Haruno Kizashi, and they are a clanless civilian couple. Learning these things are both enlightening as it is crushing. Mito doesn't want to live as a civilian. She doesn't want to be named Sakura either, and though she's perfectly aware of how petty it is, she makes it known to her parents as soon as she's expected to start talking.
"Ma-ma," Mebuki pronounces in a tone meant for a child.
"Mama," Mito rolls her eyes. It unnerves her mother.
"Sa-ku-ra," Mebuki says, points a finger at Mito's face.
Mito squints and tries to bite it. Mebuki pulls it away before Mito can try. Mulish, Mito says, "Mi-to," and never ever says Sakura despite her parents' protests. She's named after a flower, a pink flower, and Mito won't stand for it. They can take away the Uzumaki and even the Senju from her new legal documents, but she won't stand for something like Sakura.
It doesn't fit much for a name, anyway. Mito has fresh-blood hair, it seems she always will despite whichever life she lives, and Mito embraces the fact.
Her not-quite-parents don't give up so easily. They're puzzled, of course, about where she heard Mito from, but they don't ask more than they try and try to get her to say Sakura. But Mito is stubborn, half of the iron-will to Hashirama and his softness while the other half is Tobirama, and she doesn't answer to the petal-pink name.
"Sakura, come on sweetie, say your name."
"Mito."
"Sa-ku-ra."
"Mi-to."
"Okay, alright, let's try my name, okay, Sakura? Say mama's name: Me-bu-ki. Come on, sweetie."
"Me-bu-ki."
"Good! Now, again: Sakura."
" Mito."
Finally, Mebuki throws her hands up and says, "Eat your carrots, Mito." And it's the best day Mito has had since not-dying.
The couple doesn't change Mito's birth certificate as a final act of resistance, but Mito just takes joy in knowing that they eventually will if – when – Mito starts school and keeps filling out Haruno Mito on her tests and assignments.
She learns how to walk before she learns how to crawl. It's a backwards progression, but who really cares? Definitely not Mito, that's who.
When she can toddle around without falling flat on her face, she makes it her personal mission to roam the house of the couple who care for her. Everything is so much larger as a child. It's a strange feeling to be smaller than a table, smaller than the tall potted plant by the side of the door, especially when she knows that she was so much taller a lifetime ago. Even stranger is the way her bones don't crackle and pop with every movement. She has been an old woman for a long time, she realizes.
She basks in the outside world, content to stay beneath the tree in the backyard until her parents call for her. Mito works on her sensory abilities; at two years old, she can sense up to twenty meters away. She feels life all around her, but most of all, she feels Hashirama. She can feel Hashirama's chakra brimming with life in the trees around the area. That is when Mito realizes that she's been born into Konoha, the very same village she died in, and the irony isn't lost on her.
Sometimes she thinks her husband just screwed natural order and became a tree instead of dying. It's a funny thought.
Mito learns that her new father does have a clan, though. But they're still a civilian clan, a merchant clan in the Land of Iron. It finally occurs to Mito why the surname Haruno sounds so familiar. She's older than dirt, probably, but she remembers being in her forties and being invited, along with Tobirama, to a distant cousin named Uzumaki Rui's wedding to a the clan head of a civilian merchant clan. She remembers getting drunk and commiserating with Tobirama about dead lovers and siblings. It ended with Mito punching someone in the face but she's not sure who it was even now.
So in some really, really roundabout way, it can be said that she's still an Uzumaki. It's a weak thought.
At some point, she wonders why she's here, alive while everyone who she ever loved has died. At some point, she thinks that it's pointless; she's just existing without a cause. There is nothing to fight for, nothing that matters—she has lost everyone.
But then Mebuki comes and reprimands her for doodling seals – though Mebuki doesn't realize that they're seals – over the grocery list, hands on her hips and facial expression stern yet adoring, and Mito's stubborn little child mind thinks that she can live on for this woman. She thinks she can love and fight for this woman and her husband.
It's the most she can do, a compensation for not being the daughter that she knows they wished they had.
It makes her feel better.
It occurs to her, over time, how she hasn't thought of how this is possible. She was too busy avoiding thinking about it that she really didn't think about it until she was forced to realize how strange her whole situation is.
She hasn't stopped or considered how she's still alive despite the vivid memory of dying until she's three years old and staring at the glossy cover of a book detailing Konoha's founding. It's from her father's book collection on the low shelf that she can reach. It's hilarious how one of Hashirama's quoted speeches about a life well lived is the thing that spirals her into an unwanted introspective state.
Reincarnation, she thinks, is a concept that she doesn't quite believe in. As a shinobi, the only thing she truly put stock in was the truth that everyone dies eventually. It never occurred to her that she might live again. Perhaps that's why she's so thrown into a loop. It never occurred to her.
It never occurred to her.
But now that it has, what if she isn't alone? Is she the only one who remembers a life long lived or are there others? Once the train of thought leaves the station, Mito finds herself subjected to almost sleepless nights. She finds herself hoping that she isn't alone in a Konoha changed by time. She doesn't even know how long it has been since she died. The constant state of not knowing makes rage bubble up in her chest, threatening to burst like a dam.
One day, it does.
"Kaa-sama," she begins, poking the vegetables on her plate with her chopsticks, but shuts her mouth a moment later. What is she supposed to say? How is she supposed to breach this subject? She didn't think this through. But it's too late now. Her parents are looking expectant, watching her from across the table. She takes a breath, "Hypothetically, if you died and, like, found yourself alive again in a different body with the distinct knowledge that everyone you've loved has died, what will you do?"
In hindsight, her question was too articulate for a little girl of three years old. Her parents' wide eyes say as much. Mito resolutely stares back, never one to back down from anything.
It takes Mebuki a long time to answer, but when she does, it surprises Mito to say the least. "I guess I'll cry about it," Mebuki muses, sounding rueful, not even questioning what might have happened to make her daughter ask such a question. Her eyes turn steely when she looks at Mito, "Then, of course, I'll make the most of it."
Mito blinks. "The most of it?" She repeats dumbly.
"Life is life; I'm not going to throw it away no matter how unexpected or unwanted," and here, Mebuki tilts her head at Mito. "If I truly have lost everything, then I'll cry, but there isn't much use in crying forever, so I'll find a reason to go onwards and just carry on."
Kizashi is looking at the two of them like they've simultaneously grown two extra heads, but Mito is watching her mother, her new mother, as the woman resumes eating her steamed vegetables. A reason to move forward, and hasn't she already said to herself that she'll live on for this civilian woman and her husband? It's a start, isn't it?
It's a start. It's all she needs.
"Eat your food, Mito," Mebuki says, sounding exasperated.
Mito grins at the plate, pink and flower-patterned, and eats her vegetables.
She doesn't get out much. She doesn't get out at all until she's four years old and her parents are sticking protectively to her side, each of her hands in one of theirs. Mito never really wondered why, too lost in herself and her nonlinear stream of consciousness for the past four years, that when she finally leaves the house for the first time, it's almost a completely foreign experience, as if she hasn't walked the dirt roads of Konoha before. As Sakura, she hasn't. As Mito, she has. But she isn't Sakura, is she? Whatever. Whoever.
She doesn't even want to think too much about it.
Everything is so big, Mito thinks again, and she sacrifices her dignity halfway into the trip by raising her arms in a pick me up motion that her father complies with. Mito looks at the faces of the children she sees and the brand new structures that she can't recall being there before, and she wonders. Most of all, she sees the Hokage Mountain, sees the fourth addition to the monuments, and she thinks: is Hiruzen still alive?
Don't think about it, Mito.
But she can't quite stop herself. She wasn't particularly close with Tobirama's student despite her favoritism in Utatane and all their interactions revolved around Tsunade's progress under his tutelage or politics, because Mito had been part of his council, albeit briefly, and—
Mito blames him, partly, for failing Uzushio in war. Uzushio sent a missive, a call for help long before Kumo and Kiri's forces reached the village, but all Hiruzen had done was inform the Uzukage how Konoha was understaffed and the fastest help would arrive at a week's time after five days since he received the message . A week while it only takes two days to reach the village at a jōnin's speed, and the assailants were three days away—
It's one of the last things she ever heard of before the Kyūbi was extracted, one of the last tragedies she heard of in her old age. It's one of the last things she's ever yelled at him for, her rasping voice rising in decibels it hasn't reached since Nawaki came back dead from his mission, the first of her grandchildren to die before she did.
Come to think of it, she yelled at him for Nawaki, too, even though there's nothing he could possibly do about it.
The deed was done.
The deed was done.
Thinking about Hiruzen makes her feel sick, makes her want to summon her chains and suffocate something.
She hates him. She hates him, she hates him, she hates him—
She doesn't cause death by asphyxiation, though, but she does bury her face into her father's shoulder, clenching a hand through the soft material of his clothing.
"Mito?" Her father asks softly, stopping in his tracks. She can sense her mother's chakra spike in worry a few steps behind her.
"Who's the fourth?" She whispers, adding hastily, "On the mountain, I mean. He isn't in the books at home."
"Namikaze Minato," her mother pipes up, voice low, "He was the Fourth Hokage."
"Was?" Mito's heart shudders.
"He died four years ago. Konoha was attacked," Mebuki says with finality without telling Mito who attacked the village, then adds, as if expecting Mito's next question, "The Third Hokage is in charge of protecting the village again because there's nobody else to do it."
She thinks that maybe she should be concerned that the village she once loved was attacked by some unknown force, one strong enough to kill a Kage.
But all Mito hears is Hiruzen is still alive. She's going to wring his neck, Uzushio fresh in her mind, consequences be damned. And what does Mebuki mean by nobody else to do it? Where is Mito's granddaughter's pervert of a teammate? She knows that boy is a force to be reckoned with despite all his inhibitions. And what about Orochimaru? That boy was brilliance and a half. Where are they? Where are they?
They better not have died or Mito is going to set fire to the Hokage's residence.
"I'm going to get a book on recent events," she mutters, removing her face from her father's shoulder.
A/N: I initially posted an outline of this where Sakura more or less gradually remembered being Mito, and this is much more different. For one, Mito knows she's Mito. This is still a mess, but, well.
Anyhow, thanks for reading, and maybe tell me what you think? Yeah, bye.
