(31/5/14)AN: *laughs extremely nervously* I reeeally should be working on Rising Sun, but the plotbunnies attacked and took over my brain. I'm so sorry. This fic is presented in a drabble-style format, which is more fun for me and allows me to insert cute anecdotes amidst angst and melancholy. This wasn't meant to be so sad.

(23/5/15) AN: WELCOME TO THE REVISED EDITION AHAHA! Added drabble no. 3, Trial and Error, and revised some minor issues. IT'S NOT DEAD YET, GUYS.

-o-

-0. prologue

Hypothetically, let's say there was a girl. A girl, who grew up in a modern world, with electrical conveniences and media corporations and the whole wide world waiting for her. A young girl, with friends and family and the glow of youth around her.

Hypothetically, let's say she died.

And then she found herself waking up in another world, one she'd only seen in cartoons and comics, where assassins took the stage, as a child with fire-red hair and the legacy of a dead clan on her back.

-o-

-i. heritage

Her mother is a woman with warm brown eyes and long, long black locks that she ties into braids, weaved with all of the skill that she uses in her art. With her ink-stained pale fingers she takes her brushes and makes smooth strokes on scroll paper, writing words of power, drawing circles of words.

Manami has spent hours watching her kind, gentle mother make weapons out of flimsy paper and dripping ink. A single explosive tag can blow a man's head off in a second with a splatter of blood; behind her mother's warm brown eyes lies cold, war-hardened, battle-tested steel. Those same hands take her own and press the wooden body of an adult-sized brush into child-sized hands; help her dip the horsehair tip into black ink and trace the characters of her name across faded white; Ma-na-mi.

Her mother gives her the brush, too large for her little fingers to properly wrap around, and tells her it's a promise that she'll grow into them. Manami has a lot of things she needs to grow into.

Her father is a man with a scar stretching across the smooth sloping ridges of his torso; he's shrugged off his shirt many a time to let her touch it, fascinated with the grooves worn by blades and weapons. There is a forge in the back of their little house; when okaa-san is out Manami watches her father sweep his sweat-dripping red hair out of his face with a hairband and put his scarred hands to work molding molten steel into weaponry. He carves seals into the blades when they're ready.

He teaches his daughter his art as well; slides thick gloves onto her soft hands to keep them safe and lets her help him pour liquid metal into moulds and write words into their cooling bodies.

Manami's father is a man with red hair and blue eyes. The eyes are insignificant in the face of what the locks of crimson imply for her heritage, with her own rust-red shock of hair. She's always been an honest girl, so she doesn't lie to herself when she sees this and realises the heavy burden of the remnants of a shattered clan from the surf. The burden on her shoulders now.

It's such a terrible secret for a child to bear, but for all of her years of life in this world she's never been a child.

For Manami's fourth birthday, she gets a set of calligraphy brushes of her own from her mother, fine-tipped and finely made; she receives a sheathed tanto from her father, engraved with intricate patterns and the archaic characters of her name carved into the grip.

うずまき愛海. U-zu-ma-ki Ma-nami. The first time her mother taught her words, it was her name, written big and shown to a wide-eyed little one-year old. Look here, mother said, smiling at her, the first character means love, and the second means ocean. You were born out of our love, on an island in the middle of the wide open sea, and within you there is a vast ocean of love, just waiting to find someone worthy of it. That's the history of your name, Manami. Remember it.

She hugs them both tight with her scrawny arms, barely able to fit a quarter of both of them into her hold. She's a child of Uzushio, and more importantly, the daughter of Yamamoto Chie and Uzumaki Katashi.

Manami has a lot of growing up to do.

-ii. little green town

Outside the little two-storey house that her parents have, there is a bustling town. Midoritani is settled in between rolling hills of green grass and verdant forest, a port of trade between Hi no Kuni and Tsuchi no Kuni. Travellers often pass through, usually merchantfolk, bringing with them caravans of liveliness and intrigue, bearing goods from faraway places.

Sometimes there will come salesmen with the colours of the ocean in their clothes and manners; from them, okaa-san buys books and scrolls, metal cutlery and utensils, and little bottles of water that smell like the sea. Tou-san rarely ventures outside because his hair is too noticeable and he hates to mask the pride he wears on his head, and so they compromise. (His workshop always carries a scent of saltiness on the air that matches poorly with their landlocked position.) Katashi, steelworker that he is, is often commissioned by the shop owners and townspeople to create metal objects, cutlery and furniture and weapons alike, and he has the privilege of working from home. Chie's job, on the other hand, has her working as a shop assistant at the general store, and she is well acquainted with the other people of the town.

Manami has no qualms about adding black into her hair to hide her roots, even if it pains her father to see her so. Mother whacks him upside the head and tells him growing children need sunlight and to meet new people. For all of his strength, Chie can make her husband give way with a few choice words. It's one of her many skills that Manami desires to learn.

Manami loves the village, loves the people who smile at the little girl who looks so much like her demure mother, even acts like her! The grandmothers coo over such a well-behaved child; the uncles pat her on the head and sneak her sweets when her mother pretends she isn't looking; the aunties tell her stories and reprimand her for stuffing her face with treats. It's only the children who get that something's just slightly off about her, with how she smiles sadly sometimes and gets a grown-up look in her eyes, but they welcome her into the fold anyways.

She revels in her youth, plays tag and hide and seek and jan-ken-pon with the other kids, enjoys her illicit sweets, bathes in the affection of the people for a sweet little girl. It's temporary, but childhood always is. The darkness of this new world will be coming soon, but for now, she laughs and smiles and pretends she doesn't remember dying.

-iii. trial and error

The girl bites her lip, screws her brows up. Concentrates, on that feeling of surging brightness, running through her veins and suffusing every pore of her body, pure energy borne from her being at the edges of her senses, for use at her disposal if she could only just reach out and get it-

A blue light springs forth in the tips of her fingers, and fizzles out as quickly as it came. Manami wants to scream, but that would be counterproductive and waste valuable time and energy she could be spending beating her chakra system into obedience.

As she screws her tiny face up for another try, Chie watches amusedly from the doorway. Katashi comes up behind her, the solid bulk of him a welcome presence at her back. "Having trouble?" he asks in her ear, pressing a soft kiss against her cheek, and she chuckles softly, leaning back against him.

"This is her eleventh try," she informs him. "I'll step in once she hits twenty."

"You are one brutal mother, Chie," he says, watching their daughter sit, cross-legged on the tatami mat, eyes scrunched shut and practically humming in place with her tension. "I know I never picked up chakra control this way. We have exercises for this. I can get the water dropper any time."

"Tashi. You have to understand, you were born a clan child with parents who were both shinobi and willing to sit down and teach you," she says, face bright and sharp in the daylight filtering in through the window, light pooling in the hollows of her collarbones and shimmering off her lashes. "My father would have never allowed one of his precious daughters to learn something as barbaric as shinobi arts. I had to learn the hard way. At least until I was able to convince my guard to actually show me what to do."

Katashi gives his wife a flat stare. "Chie, she's two years old."

"The early bird catches the worm, Tashi. Nami is tougher than that. She's our daughter." Her hazel eyes shimmer in the sunlight with affection and pride. "It's a learning experience, it'll be good for her. But you can get the water dropper once I step in."

They watch together as the tiny girl manages to summon a flickering spark to her fingertips, which hums and disperses as soon as she blinks. She lets out a small frustrated whine. It's rather adorable.

"I'm still maintaining the sadist part," Katashi says.

"Well it's a good thing you're an M then," Chie smiles sweetly.

Neither of them hear Manami silently choke on her spit in horror.

-iv. swimming lessons

It's a damp morning when tou-chan first whisks her out of the house into the woods. He doesn't do this often, she muses as she pads through wet grass in her sandals, the remnants of the rain the night before soaking her toes. Tou-chan doesn't always go out of the house some days, but when he does it's always straight into the woods, often times taking his little daughter with him. They've trekked often enough before, but this time she knows her father thinks it's about time she learned how to swim properly, instead of the regular doggy paddle. She was never that great a swimmer in her past life either, and she beams at him when he suggests it and jumps at the chance to learn guided by a man who grew up diving into the churning surf of Uzushiogakure.

Katashi seems to come alive in the smell of petrichor after the recent dry spell; water is his element as much as fire and steel are, and she clings to his side as they walk through the woods. He hums cheerfully, pointing out little things as they stroll: the skittish deer that roam the forest, bolting at so much as the slightest sound, with big black eyes and thin fur coats; the birds that frequent the area, painted in whites and blues and reds and every colour imaginable, a rainbow of fluttering feathers and high-pitched song above in the branches, peering curiously down on the landlubbers below; the marks of predatory animals, tracks and pawprints and claw marks on bark, and occasionally still-drying blood on the forest floor.

Manami watches her father bask in the dappled light of the morning, the morning radiance painting his red hair golden, illuminating his laughing grin even as his head brushes some leaves and scatters sparkling droplets of dew in his red-gold hair, on his scarred skin. She has never met a man quite like her father before she was reborn.

He takes her through the winding, worn path uphill through the woods, through branches and bushes until she can hear the gurgling rush of running water in the distance. When they clear their last low-hanging branch, Manami finds them standing before a waterfall, feeding into a pool connected to a river, trees surrounding the area and providing shade at the edges of the water.

Here, tou-chan strips off his shoes and shirt, placing them on a rock to warm in the sun, and grins at his daughter. "Nami-chan, come try the water!" He says this with a beaming smile, as if it isn't the morning after spring rain and the water isn't going to be colder than the Land of Snow. Evidently, her second thoughts show on her face, because he cajoles her again. "Naaami, you're gonna have to learn to swim sometime. The water's not that cold."

Reluctantly, she takes off her clothes, leaving her in her shorts, bare-chested (because she's two years old, what is there to see?), before gingerly dipping her toes in the water. She shudders. Not as cold as she thought it would be, but still uncomfortable.

Her father gently coaxes her to walk in further, down the gentle slope of rocky sand into the waves. Manami notes that the water is crystal-clear and clean as can be, staring through it at the distortions of her feet. Ripples spread as she moves, outwards, colliding with bigger waves and rebounding backwards to where they came from.

Tou-chan grins at her when the water finally reaches the hollows underneath her arms, chilling her skin. "Good, baby girl. Hold on a moment…" Warm hands hold her waist and to his chest, a safety net of sorts. "You ready, Nami?" She nods, scrunches her eyes up, and takes a deep breath. "Okay! One, two-"

Without any further fanfare, he drops to his knees, dunking both of them fully in the water.

Her pulse echoes in her skull, mixed with the sound of the water, an oddly familiar sensation. There's a few short seconds where her breath is tight in her lungs, her eyes are clamped shut, her hair is buoyed and splayed out and the cool liquid surrounds her, rolls over her skin and tickles at her and if there wasn't a warm anchor around her body she'd be adrift, floating in an endless sea; the water caresses her and it feels she could lose herself in its embrace -

With a gasp and a loud splash they break the surface, Manami inhaling sweet air, shivering slightly as the heat seeps out of her, clinging to the warm plane that is her father's torso and blinking the water out of her eyes.

Tou-chan grins at her. "See, that wasn't so bad, was it?" Her response is a shudder and a mischievous little pout as Manami brings her little hands down and up to splatter cold water into her father's face as he inhales. It's amusing to watch him attempt to sputter water and laugh amusedly at the same time. "Cheeky brat." He says fondly. "C'mon, a few more of these, then we start properly."

From there, it's all cold water and warm skin and a flame of joy burning inside her, stoked higher by her father's laughs and smiles and gentle guidance and the euphoric sensation of being surrounded by her element. As they limp onto the shore with the sun high in the sky, still giggling and grinning as katon is used to dry their wet clothes, Manami thinks privately that a man like Uzumaki Katashi is the best father she could have ever hoped for.

-v. calligraphy

In her past life, Manami was a girl who grew up with English and Mandarin Chinese as her mother tongues, with some Cantonese on the side. But that little training is insufficient for the other world that is the Japanese language.

Manami may be exceptionally good at kanji for her age, but katakana is strange and hiragana even more so, even if they're technically more straightforward than the first. Kanji is essentially a bastardized version of traditional Chinese characters, which she can easily identify the meanings of (it's really only a matter of assigning new sounds), but it's hard to pin down exactly which character is which in the other two. Her writing is like chicken scratch, and her mother sighs and gently corrects her. Bit by bit, she improves.

The days fly by; soon, she will turn four. Spring and days of swimming in the pool in the forest in the golden light of the morning are gone. The air is crisp with the first signs of autumn; the mornings are colder, the sky clear. Here, at the edge of the land of eternal summer, the cold seeps in through the cracks and chills bare skin and bare earth, but never enough to erase the heat that runs in the veins of the land, of the people.

She sits with kaa-chan in the mornings, ink and brushes and paper spread out on the table, the green of the trees outside browning and darkening and brightening into the red and gold of falling leaves, blowing on the northern wind through the shoji doors. The scrolls are held down with paperweights to keep them from joining their cousins on the breeze, and the ink words she scrawls onto the paper weigh it down further. She tries to emulate her mother's flowing script, but her childish scribbles pale in comparison to the grace of the sweeping strokes her mother makes.

She keeps trying. She'll get there someday.

It's an overcast morning. Kaa-chan's walked out to get some hot tea to combat the chill; Manami is diligently writing out a short paragraph on the kind of things she's seen in the woods. She's progressed far enough to be able to write out basic sentences, but nothing near the kind of proficiency she had in English. She taps her lip with the butt of her brush and thinks. Let's see. Lots of trees, a pool with a waterfall, the river, birds, deer, flowers, what else? She writes down what she's got anyways, small hands tracing shapes she'd practiced before-

The cawing of a crow in the distant darkening woods.

(a man named weasel with crows for friends; his brother, lightning-fingers become avenger; the clan who fanned flames, all dead in a single night save three; the world brought into ruin by a man with one red, kaleidoscope eye)

(three: traitor, avenger, griever)

She flinches.

(all: murderer)

The clean stroke veers off sharply. Manami stares in dismay at her wrecked script and feels tears well up in her eyes, childish frustration taking over her. She sniffles despite herself; there's a lump in the back of her throat. She feels an awful lot like crying, and then throwing something in the nearest river. Preferably that stupid, stupid bird.

It's at this point Chie walks in, a tray with two piping hot cups of tea in her hands, long black hair tied back in a neat bun, stray strands spilling out and contrasting against her peach skin. Dark eyes pick out the slash against the meticulously written characters, the trembling form of a little girl with red hair. She kneels down beside her daughter, sets the tea on the table, then cups her face. The skin of her palms is warm against her wet, autumn-kissed cheeks.

"Oh, Nami, what happened?" The girl sniffs again; a portion of her mind reminds her this is undignified, but the rest of her is overtaken with frustration and anger and disappointment, and she can't swallow down the thickness in the back of her throat. "You got startled?" Her mother is ever-unnerringly perceptive. Manami nods and keeps her shaking lips pressed tightly together, for fear of the voice that might come out.

Kaa-san chuckles, moves to sit behind the young girl, and with her black-spotted fingers takes her daughter's little hands in her own and guides her. Words weave together on the paper as she watches, entranced by her mother's elegant handwriting. "Nami-chan, don't look so sad," she murmurs, warm breath above her head. "Just because you mess up doesn't mean it's the end. You can try again."

Manami leans back into the warmth of her mother's body, and lets her tension seep away as her mother soothes her out of her ire. Yamamoto Chie is, by far, the best mother she could have, in any life, ever been blessed with.

-vi. protect

Manami's only three when her parents decide to give her the seals.

She's known for weeks, from hushed voices in the hallways, outside the sliding door of her room in the middle of the night, when the adults are so sure that their baby girl is asleep, dreaming of a better world than this. She pinches herself awake from the haze of sleep and listens from her futon as her parents discuss and argue and debate over the decision.

It is love that drives them to do this; love for their daughter, who they hope will be protected by the seals they plan to scrawl across her skin; love for each other, wanting nothing more than to preserve the child they had brought up together; love for their work, their art which they have poured so much energy and devotion and love and precious, precious time.

So when they take her aside one rainy morning and tell her truthfully what they wish to do, she has no objections. In fact, she welcomes it. She wants her parents' art on her skin, ink over her flesh in black and red like their hair mixed together, the proof of their love for her and for each other. She loves them, she trusts them. She tells them as much. They've known for a long time now that their daughter is mature beyond her years (though those years are quite more than what they think), so they simply nod and prepare.

(Manami's not in the habit of lying to herself; as she grows into their shoes, they will pass on and leave her to them. It will be nice to have a memoir of them that can never be lost.)

They lay down a mat in her bedroom, sit her down and make her bare her upper body. Brushes in hand and chakra ink poured into a bowl, they gently trace lines, covering her upper back first then moving on to her shoulders, running down her arms to her hands. The major seals lie over her tenketsu, kanji and swirling script glowing faintly when her father whispers "Seal," and the ink congeals and sinks into her skin.

The next morning, she traces the shapes on her skin with her bare, still-soft fingers, caressing curves and strokes and circles, written into the pale flesh of her skin. They've faded away to hide from prying eyes but the weight of it lies on her shoulders, on her back, a comforting presence. The ink wraps around her and protects her, her mother and father's fierce love.

She carries her parents' wills on her back. Wherever she may go now, they will be with her.

-vii. life lessons

Her mother uses knives, but her true weapons are paper and ink, painted words spelling doom for any who dare to cross her; the seals are woven into her clothes, inked finely into the skin of her arms, built into the foundations of their home. Some days she lets Manami touch the patterns on the skin of her back and tells her what they mean: here, this is for shielding; the curve here floods chakra there for regeneration.

Yamamoto Chie was not born a warrior, she tells her daughter. Yamamoto Chie was born into luxury, the Fire Daimyo's middle daughter, plain compared to her beautiful sisters and handsome brothers. But she was blessed with an iron will, a razor wit and a drive to become something more than what she was; and so she left the palace behind, journeyed to Uzushiogakure and found herself a master to teach her fuuinjutsu and its intricacies.

"With these hands," Kaa-san says, entangling her daughter's soft fingers with her own inkstained ones, "I have clawed my way to the top, kicking and screaming and fighting until I became worthy of the privileges I was given because of my birth. I am where I am because of my own actions, not those of others. Wherever you end up in life, Nami," she fixes her with a single look, "be there because of your own actions and choices, not those of others. Even if you think you've got no options, you're wrong. There's always another way."

Her father's weapons are more traditional: all steel and metal, clanging and cleaving with razor sharp edges. He is a forger, a blacksmith, one of Uzushio's prized ironworkers, who carves seals into steel and creates the finest weapons in the Elemental Nations; his work shows in the burn scars along his thick arms and his rough, calloused hands. Men have killed and died to perfect his art; Manami touches the scars crisscrossing the tough planes of his torso and marvels at the deep furrows wrought by those envious of her father's skills.

Uzumaki Katashi was born and bred in a village hidden in the eddies of an island to the southern shores, to a clan of fire-haired and bright-hearted people, each one in their own way radiant as a star. He chose to apprentice himself to the old master blacksmith and learn his trade, in order to make his own living and protect his family. But Uzushiogakure had far too many fearful of their power, and he was only one man. It wasn't enough to save them.

Her father takes her soft child's hands in his own blacksmith's ones and guides them to touch a jagged ridge across where his heart lies. "These scars," Tou-san tells her, "have come from many people, in many places, for many reasons. They're marks of failure. They remind me that I'm not invincible, that I'm only human, with all of a human's flaws and weaknesses. Never let yourself believe that you're anything more than mortal."

"And whatever scars you may get in future, Nami," her father crosses the gap between them and kisses her forehead, "don't ever try to hide them. No matter what, wear them with pride. Remember that you're human."

AN: I had such a rad time writing this you have no freakin' clue. Please review and tell me what you thought! We've got quite a bit ahead of us yet in this story.