She is standing in the kitchen, left hand holding the pan, right hand stirring the eggplant when something in her shifts. Her feet are bare on the warm wooden floor, Mr Ukki flutters his leaves in the too-warm breeze on the window sill, there is a presence behind her on the couch that is familiar to her (how does she know him?), a dog dozing by her foot that she dimly recognizes and how she knows all this, she isn't sure.
She blinks. Fingers gripping tightly on the pair of chopsticks in her hand as she tries to figure out who, where and how. The tub, she was sitting in the tub, it was winter, she had been, had been…
"Imouto?" The familiar presence has moved to behind her.
She spins around instinctively, in a movement that she knew she couldn't have done, she strikes the chopsticks downward, jugular vein or should have been had the man not caught her wrist and held her in a way that constricted her movements entirely.
"You're in Konoha, it is seven pm, eighth September. You were making dinner. Everything is fine. You are safe," he says and repeats it again and again. She tries to take a breath, her lungs are burning for air. She remembers this sensation before she died. She should be dead (dead dead dead) and this isn't even her apartment.
"Take a deep breath with me," he says. She feels his chest behind her heave a slow, long breath. She tries a few times, eventually catches it. He doesn't ask if she's okay, his motions are too practiced for this to be a new thing. Taking the chopsticks from her limp hand, he clicks the stove off.
"The eggplant is burnt," he says mournfully as he plates it out.
"B-be glad you even have eggplant!" she tosses back and chucks a cup at him that he catches from mid-air.
"But it's eggplant-" he whines.
She scoops the rice out from the cooker, setting the bowls of rice and pickles down on the dinner table. "We always eat eggplant anyway. I want yakiniku tomorrow."
He gives her a mock-betrayed look before sliding the mask off his face to eat. She freezes, her mind finally catching up with her - with the situation. "Kakashi?" she splutters. She's been bickering with a man she didn't know (how does she know his name?), not really at least. Her mind helpfully offers memories of her and nii-san and other memories of people she shouldn't (didn't) know of.
The silver haired man looks up from his food, a look of concern crosses his face. She knows this man, she knows where everything is without a conscious thought but who and why is she here?
Her name. What is her name?
She pushes from the table, staring at her hands. These weren't her hands. Hers weren't this calloused. (Pale, soft, weak hands. Sick, always sick. Always needed help.)
"Imouto?"
There is strength in her body, lithely built just like the man in front of her (nii-san), she knows she can clear the room in less than a second, tumble from the fourth floor with little (none at all) injuries. This isn't her body (yes it is), she turns her head just a fraction to catch a glimpse of her distorted reflection in the dark windows. The silver hair that sprawls down her back (just tou-san and nii-san) couldn't belong to her. She had dark brown hair, hair so dark that it was almost black like the night.
"Imouto!" Kakashi hovers near her, his unmasked face broadcasting his emotions. Now she knows why he always masked his face. (Masked? Why would she think of him masking his face?) "Hatake Fuuko! Report!" he calls out in a commanding voice, her body snaps to attention unconsciously; there is loathing in his voice that belies the blankness in his face.
Her body takes over before her mind can process the words spilling from her mouth. "At nineteen hours today, I found myself in unknown territory. Orders unknown, location unknown. Attempted to discern location and was approached by unknown… known ally. Body not... belonging…" She falters off, the rest of the words stilling in her mouth. Body not hers? A frisson of fear runs through her as she takes in the mutinous look in the man's face (nii-san, not the man).
The searing heat was grinding her organs to death. Fuuko tried to breathe. Her mouth opening and closing in an imitation of a goldfish. Her lungs burnt, her throat burnt. She was dying.
Save me.
Someone save me.
Panic clawed up her throat as she felt herself fade into nothingness.
So this is how it ends. The mighty Lightning of Konoha, in the lab of a missing-nin.
"I…" she starts in a tremulous tone. "I need air." She spins around, leaping over and out of the window. Her body already shifting itself into a perfect bounce off the opposite building and up the wall (how am I running on walls?), she leaps off the rooftops with ease and is entirely baffled how it easily it comes to her. Her body is moving so smoothly and nothing, except the cold stone in her chest, hurts.
She takes gulps of the warm night air, finally stopping at the edge of a forest, on the docks. "I am Fuuko. Hatake Fuuko," she tests the words on her tongue. The strange blend of familiarity and callowness whelms up in her throat. The longer she explores it, the stranger it feels, like she didn't belong. She really didn't belong after all. Dying in the bathtub had been her last then memory, being so sick that she rolled around in a wheelchair had been also part of her then memories. Was she a body snatcher? Had she stolen someone's body? She raised her hand against the slowly rising moon, eyes tracing out the multiple scars and callouses across her hand (a shinobi's hand), her mind offered again, knowledge that she didn't know how or where she got them from. The pool of memories that seemed to assure that it was hers (or was it the body's memories?), didn't feel like hers. How had she gotten here? If she had died and was reborn again, then why had she remembered now?
She runs a frustrated hand through her hair and sinks to the ground, her body instinctively crossing her legs into a sitting lotus style.
"I am Hatake Fuuko," she says slowly into the silence. Not even the sound of the leaves rustling could be heard. No, she's not. She's an imposter in the body of Hatake Fuuko, in a body that she's always dreamed to have. "I…" she trails off, trying to fit her mind around being in a body that isn't hers, "don't belong here." She closes her eyes, trying to calm her whirling thoughts. The memories (of the body) instruct her to reach deep inside her, past her frantic beating heart and deep inside her. A warm reassuring fluttering in her mental hands like sunlight on a cold summer's day.
(Chakra)
What is Chakra, she asks. Her body feeds her memories of chakra control exercises with nii-san and an older woman with the same spiky silver hair, playing tag across the walls and ceiling with nii-san and tou-san.
Quiet serenity fills her as she processes the memories. Hatake Fuuko was loved unlike the her before then, loved and cherished despite the choice of her profession. She opens her eyes, leaning over the water's edge, taking the first clear look of herself.
Spiky silver hair that look untamed though she knew was due to her lightning affinity, dark grey eyes, sharp cheekbones. Not traditionally pretty in the civilian way, she is pretty in her own striking way. Something nudged at her memories. As she tried to pull the memory out, she senses the presence of a person to her left, a steady, calm presence like a full moon on a winter's night very unlike the man in the apartment she ran from. Perhaps that person has been there for awhile. Probably following her since she left the place, he always have been good at hiding his presence.
"Fuuko-san," he calls out. She stands, dark hair tied at the base of his skull. Red eyes almost luminous in the dark.
"Itachi-kun," her mouth replies automatically. Uchiha Itachi that graduated at the age of seven. Uchiha Itachi. Uchiha? Her eyes shot up to the red eyes, the three black tomoe spinning lazily around the red iris. That was the Sharingan.
Fuck, she was in Narutoverse. She looked at her reflection again.
Nii-san was watching her from the bed across the room. "It's okay," he whispered and stretched out to hold her hand. "tou-san is strong. He's the White Fang of Konoha."
He raised his hand out to the ceiling in the darkness as though reaching out to something, his hand fisting. "One day I'll be strong like tou-san, then imouto will never need to worry."
Her brother is Kakashi, Hatake Kakashi.
She remembers a lifetime of reading them obsessively, dreaming of the things she could have done if she had just a smidge of their power, if the medicine in that world was anything close to the Narutoverse's world.
Itachi cups her elbow. The look in his eyes questions if she's okay. The sharingan in his eyes are gone, replaced by dark onyx eyes and furrowed eyebrows.
Well, at least it is Kakashi, it could have been worse, she tries to comfort herself. Could have been a no name in this universe, she glances at Itachi who has come to stand silently beside her, could have been an Uchiha. She winces at her thoughts.
If Itachi is still here in Konoha, then… She wonders if she should try to change it.
She remembers pottering about on her wheelchair, the helplessness as her illness worsened. She remembers terrifying fear of being useless, the fact that she knew she was nothing but a burden. Even amidst the memories of this life, she remembers the need to not be useless. Now in her hands, she could do something. She already has died once, there is nothing scary about death once you faced it.
She draws memories of Itachi. Itachi who watched her back in the squad, Itachi who shared his dango (reluctantly) with her. She draws the snark that she once wielded as an armor in her past life and wraps it tightly around her.
His lips are pursed when she finally turns to him. A weird incontinent display of emotions that she only remembers (or at least her body does) seeing on Shisui.
"I apologise," he says simply. Though his posture does not change, she senses an odd sag in his demeanor and how she can't really tell but she can see that whatever that floats in his mind, weighs him.
"There is nothing to apologise," she tells him, puzzled. Her body's memories are not bringing anything that he should be sorry for.
Itachi clenches his jaw, chin working under the weight of the things he wanted to say. "If I had gone for the mission…" he starts out, his eyes searching her face for signs that he is saying too much. "... then the events that landed you in his hands would not have happened."
(don't think about it, don't think about it)
She takes a slow breath and pats him on the shoulder. "All the things said and done, are done. Nii-san must be waiting for me."
She gives him a familiar wag of fingers and shunshins away.
A/N: Ugh, I said I wouldn't update here, but oh wells. I wrote an OC story!? That's really different. This has to be my first OC story in... a very long time. Hope you liked it or will like it.