Winter. Sundown. The shadow of the Three Wolves cast all who dwell behind it in darkness. The sky is thick with roiling clouds and jagged sleet caught in an endless cycle of rising and falling by frigid, merciless, gale-force winds. Trees encroach by the legion from all sides, dressed in imperial white, each a spear angled threateningly at the coming storm.
Two children dance alone at the edge of the forest, cold steel in their hands and eyes. They dance with the fury of the flame, the freedom of the wind, the cruelty of the storm. They dance with all the vigor of life – because they know how easily it can be taken from them. And still, they dance.
The elder of the two, almost a man grown, no longer a child still, hisses a single word. There is a clap like booming thunder and a flash like burning lightning, and an arc of electric, mystical force erupts from his sword. A tree goes up in flame; the storm douses it with ease.
The younger stops. She speaks. "Onii-san? What was that?"
"Chakra," he grunts in reply. He doesn't stop his dance, doesn't see the flare of comprehension set alight in his companion's eyes. "S'what separates us from the peasants, otōto."
"...Aa." The child, no older than three, lifts the sword and returns to dancing in silence. She begins imagining what she will use this skill for, in the future, but fails to muster an emotional response. She hums. "Thank you, Mifune-nii."
"No problem, Jiraiya-kun."
Lightning Never Strikes Twice
(Naruto SI: You Are Sannin no Jiraiya, Toad Sage)
Sara's shinai sings through the air, flying through kenjutsu kata that would have been impossible for her in another world, another life.
She was impressed with herself. One world-shattering revolution was usually enough to utterly destroy her month, but she was just dealt several and hadn't so much as flinched. Maybe they hadn't sunk in yet?
Then again, she thought wryly, metal shinai still whirring through forms, I've known all of this subconsciously for well over three years now. I've just finally developed mentally enough to consciously realize it. Thank the Sage.
Random crying jags weren't considered socially acceptable behavior in Tetsu no Kuni, after all. Especially not for samurai, child or otherwise. Even if there was a damn good reason, or reasons, to have a breakdown.
I should really be more worried about being reborn into a death world.
Truth was, she wasn't worried at all. All of her reasons for living were on Earth, and she wasn't naive enough to believe she could somehow find a way back there. There was always the option of making new reasons for living in this world, but Sara had always been of the belief that people couldn't love others without first loving themselves. And, considering the body her soul was currently inhabiting...
Sara shuddered in revulsion. That, unfortunately, definitely did have the chance to sink in.
"You alright, otōto?" Mifune asked, showing uncharacteristic concern.
She smiled up at him in response, a strained, sickly smile but a smile nevertheless, and silently returned to her endless repetitions of the only four kenjutsu kata she knew. He just shrugged, his trademark self-absorption and accidental callousness driving him to return to practicing his clan's iaido and chakra-flow.
Sara didn't want to think about this newer, distinctly masculine body she was inhabiting. She was used to it already – she'd been wearing it for over three years, after all, even if all the puzzle pieces in her head had only now just 'clicked' and made her realize how goddamn weird this situation was – but that didn't make the problem any easier to grin and bear.
Tracking down a skilled iryō-nin to answer some very embarrassing questions was immediately placed on the top of her to-do list. If it turned out this ass-backwards world didn't have the biological knowledge to fix her problem, then she'd just have to revolutionize medicine herself. Not like she had anything better to do with her time.
Problem was, she was a tetchy three-year-old brat with a lisp and no finances stuck in the middle of Tetsu no Kuni. For all that samurai were arguably more civilized than shinobi, she wasn't going to give one of them a scalpel and orders to try their best. For the moment, all she could do was wait.
What she needed was a distraction; if she thought about this any more, her childish hormones would probably spark an embarrassing tantrum. She could have a good cry when she got back to her bedroom at the Inn, then she'd be psychologically set to handle life for another three or four months.
Looking around out of the corner of one chocolate brown eye, her focus was promptly placed on her adoptive brother with a sort of quiet desperation.
Mifune was intriguing. He would one day become the samurai general of Tetsu no Kuni, and then the Fifth Division General of the Allied Shinobi Forces; he would be powerful enough to call Salamander Hanzō a rival, intelligent enough to lead thousands of ninja against a superior foe, and trusted enough to moderate the Kage Summit.
He was also described as calm, loyal, disciplined, humble, kind, trustworthy, and the kind of man who would sacrifice himself to save the lives of his comrades. He had always been one of her favorite characters, back when he was just a drawing in a manga.
The child she was looking at showed none of those characteristics, despite looking exactly like how she imagined he would have as a fifteen-year-old kid. His slate grey hair was pulled back in a tight ponytail, his dark eyes were narrowed in concentration, and his harsh features were tightened in aggression; the only thing missing would be his goatee, but if the thin, wispy hairs she could just barely see were any indication, it wasn't for a lack of trying.
No, what struck her as different wasn't his appearance: it was his personality. Her more recent three-odd years of memory depicted him as her blood brother's stereotypical dropout friend, as he was always asking for money, showing up late to meet-ups, and going off on how he would be the strongest samurai ever. He never cared about other people's problems, preferring to wax poetic about his own, and he seemed to think everything in life would go his way if he only asked enough times.
It was an understandable enough reaction to his experiences, however. From what she'd been able to glean after three years of the kid living under her roof, he was from one of the more powerful samurai clans: the Ryūshi clan. Even more impressively, he was the son of the clan leader, and a prodigy of the blade.
Problem was, he wasn't the first son of the clan leader, but the second. His elder brother, a genius but sadly no prodigy by the name of Shinra, was set to inherit the clan when their father retired. Perhaps understandably, said clan leader didn't want his people to divide against one another when the time came to pass along headship – but who should lead? The elder of the two sons, or the more talented?
As it turns out, the clan leader, Ryūshi Arashi, valued tradition over competency. Fearing that Mifune would revolt and challenge his brother for the rank, Arashi wrote up an apprenticeship contract with Sara's father, Kasai Fumiya, and Mifune was all-but kicked out of his own home the next day. He hasn't returned in seven years.
While understandable, it was still harsh. From Mifune's perspective, he just 'wasn't good enough' for the Ryūshi. He works himself into the ground every day, and when his father never shows up to take him back, he decides to work himself even harder. To Sara's eyes, she could almost see the kid build a larger and larger inferiority complex.
Sara could only wonder in morbid fascination what kind of horrible trauma would have to happen to transform this train wreck into somebody as respectable as Mifune-taishō, the most respected samurai in the world. Then she remembered that said train wreck was her elder brother's closest friend and has been all-but adopted by her parents, and she started to realize just what kind of 'horrible trauma' he might soon be afflicted by.
Try as she might, Sara could not recall a single instance of her canon self being mentioned before his graduation from Konoha's Ninja Academy at the age of six and his subsequent placement on Team Seven. Which was understandable, from a literary standpoint – there were a lot of characters, and she certainly didn't remember this part of onii-san's past being printed in the manga. It was also incredibly worrying, from a holy-shit-I'm-Jiraiya perspective.
Sara knew two things – she was a three-year-old trainee samurai in the depths of Tetsu no Kuni, and if canon events played true, she would then become a six-year-old Konoha Genin in the heart of Hi no Kuni. So, pray tell, how and why would she travel across half of the goddamn continent in the next year or two, abandon her samurai clan and career, and sign herself up to be a child assassin?
Considering the world she lived in, she could think of one pretty good reason. It also neatly explained why her elder brother and parents never got a mention in the manga, why Mifune turned around and become a respectable human being, and why her canon self grew up so obsessed with world peace.
That just left one question – how in the nine rings of hell would she stop her family from being murdered? She couldn't honestly say she loved them, but they were all she had.
She didn't know.
"Onii-san? Can you show me that chakra thing?"
It wouldn't be enough – her father, mother, and brother were all trained samurai; if they couldn't survive what would happen this coming year, then the odds of her making a difference were akin to the Tsuchikage naming his firstborn after Namikaze Minato. But, well...
It was a start. All she had was time.
I-I; We Are The Music Makers
She practiced long into the night, by which Sara meant she passed out after thirty minutes of trying and failing to illuminate her hand like some kind of mutant lampfish. She did, however, manage to successfully electrocute herself, which would have been impressive if that was what she had been actually trying to do. Her failure was made all the more pathetic by her front-row seat to Mifune's casual destruction of the local landscape.
Which was to be expected, really. She was a three-year-old child who has just learned that magic was totally a thing, now, while Mifune was a prodigy of the blade who has been practicing every day for a dozen years. That he so easily outclassed her was par for the course. It was just annoying, as she distinctly recalled being a six-foot-tall adult; Mifune looked like one of the kids she used to babysit for cash, to her, and not a samurai four times her age.
Sara drooped. By the time she could claim adulthood again and not be called a liar, her pride will have been thoroughly mauled.
"Hey, chin up, otōto," Mifune awkwardly encouraged, dropping a water canteen onto her lap. Why was he even teaching her? That duty usually fell to Tatsuya, or Aoi when he was busy. "Nobody gets it on their first try."
"Aa," Sara agreed, more out of habit then actual acceptance. She knew better than to get frustrated, as such strong irritation would only disrupt her focus and slow her down, but she was disappointed; she honestly expected better from herself. She didn't have the time to waste on turning herself into a human glow-stick, she needed to advance. "I'll practice tomorrow. Any advice, sensei?"
Mifune preened at his new moniker, looking distinctly proud for all that half his 'tutelage' contradicted that of Tatsuya's and Aoi's. "Oh, nothing much," he said, waving a hand in obviously fake humility. "Just that you should train and rest on-again off-again every five minutes, as it'll stretch your tiny chakra coils faster and let you practice longer."
Sara twitched; that's the kind of advice I would've liked to have heard before I started training, idiot!
"One more thing: you should practice chakra control before your kata repetitions and physical training; you'll have more chakra to mess around with that way, and the exercise will have a better effect."
A dark aura began to surround her, as she unconsciously figured out how to project Killing Intent. Mifune didn't notice.
"Oh!" he added, snapping his fingers as a metaphorical light-bulb flickered on above his head. "Also, never, ever train until you drop – that means you have chakra exhaustion, which can be fatal."
Sara's hands began to inch towards the shinai on her lap.
I-I; We Are The Music Makers
"Taatsuyaa~! Your little brother hit me!" Mifune whined the very moment they returned to the Raging Wind Inn. "He picked up his shinai and hit me with it! Right across the face! My beautiful face!"
Kasai Tatsuya looked up from the ruined kanji for storm that he had been drawing in his calligraphy notebook, now with a slash of ink right across the center. A dark aura began to surround him, leaking Killing Intent like a faucet – or his little sister not half an hour ago. "That's funny," he whispered, his white hair hanging in front of his dark eyes menacingly, his dark red clan markings giving the impression of blood splatter on his face. "I'm not sure why you're worried; it's not like your face can get any uglier."
After reflexively checking the Inn for any sign of her mother, father, or uncle, and relaxing when she saw they were alone, Sara smiled wryly up at Tatsuya. The guy was completely insane, but he was generally the functional kind of insane.
"Excuse us, otōto, Mifune seems to have forgotten an important lesson." His aura of Killing Intent increased, directly proportional to Mifune's increasingly worried look of fear. "There is no shouting in the Raging Wind Inn."
Sara wanted to stay and watch; this kind of entertainment was totally worth the risk. Had it been any other day, she probably would have. However, she required a couple minutes alone to quietly gather herself from the painful revelations she had earlier today, muted by age they may have been. She was an incredibly introverted person by nature, and social contact even with people she genuinely liked wore at her zen like waves on a cliff-side; she needed to, for lack of a better term, lie down next to an abandoned wall and recharge.
The ten-minute walk from the edge of the forest to the Raging Wind Inn at the heart of Kazeharan-gai had not been nearly peaceful enough. The beautiful white-washed landscape would've soothed her half to sleep on any other day, but Mifune's endless complaining had given her a headache to go with her rising frustration. Whatever catharsis she had achieved with her atypical violence had not been worth the trouble. It had taken all of her restraint not to draw her shinai a second time and hide his body in the nearest alleyway.
So she just nodded to Tatsuya, letting her smile fall after she dashed across the Inn's ground floor, weaving through hand-carved wooden tables, warm, plush chairs, and the bright fireplace embedded in the center of the room, which lit up the Inn with warm reds and oranges completely at odds with her brother's dark rage.
Sara flew up the staircase, taking them two at a time despite her short stature. She raced past the eight guest bedrooms reserved for customers, the rooms for Tatsuya, Mifune, and her parents, and almost past her own room and into the wall before she caught herself.
She just... stood there, the crown of her head resting against her cherry-wood door, breathing in and out for a long minute. She was beginning to panic, and that was the absolute last thing she needed right now.
It had been – easier, when Mifune was standing next to her. He was loud, brash, and annoying, and probably half of what her canon-self from the manga had modeled his behavior off of, and a day didn't go by where she didn't want to smash her shinai into his face, but he was soothing. Warm. She couldn't be sad, when he was around. That was what she had needed, when she realized that-
Sara shuddered in disgust for a second time in the last hour.
Dwelling on it would only cause her problems, she knew, but it couldn't be helped. Her mind would pick the problem apart and put it back together again literally thousands of times, until she knew all the connotations backwards and forwards and any emotional response was muted through sheer exposure. It was a character flaw born through social awkwardness and far too much time spent alone doing nothing but think, but there wasn't much she could do about it.
And what did that say about her, that she cared more for the sex of her body than the stark knowledge that she would never see her family, her country, her world, again? She didn't know. She didn't care, either. The enormity of how long she was going to be stuck in this wrongwrongwrong body – the rest of her life, or until she completely revolutionizes medical science – had struck her suddenly and painfully.
If she had stayed behind and heard Tatsuya or Mifune call her "otōto" one more fucking time, she was going to beat Itachi's record as youngest clan slayer by a decade.
Sara sighed. There was nothing for it. She could only do her best to ignore it for now, though, so she could focus on the much more pressing matter of how she was going to survive in this new and significantly shoddier world.
And wasn't that a weird thought, having to eke out every last drop of strength and cunning just to survive to old age? Back in her day, no one had cause to worry about their imminent mortality unless they had a sickness or worked in the military. Of course, back in her day, there weren't mercenary assassins running about casually bending the elements, ignoring gravity, and toppling governments. It was hardly a fair comparison.
Sara would learn the ninja arts, she knew. Even if she accomplished the impossible and somehow stopped whatever-it-was that caused her canon self from being drafted into Konoha's military forces as a toddler, she would still inevitably learn. The samurai were ages behind post-Tsunade Konoha when it came to medicine, as her memories of her new mother's dubious herbal cure-all tea recipes told her. They probably wouldn't throw their iryōjutsu library at a foreign samurai just because she asked politely, but that was a riddle for hypothetical future-her to solve.
She had to figure out how to survive to become said hypothetical future-her, after all.
That was probably an internal monologue best had inside of her bedroom, though, and not dramatically brooding against the door. Satisfied with her sufficiently complicated and important issue to distract herself with, she opened the door and slipped inside.
Her bedroom was starkly different than it had been in her past life. Outside of her western style bed, wooden desk, and closet, it looked positively spartan. The white walls and utter lack of decoration, Sara pointedly not counting the crimson fanged x clan insignia on nearly every surface as decoration, gave off a very lifeless aura. She thought about sprucing it up a bit with some paintings in cool shades of green or gold, but the thought of how her father would react to such a frivolous waste of ink or something stopped her cold.
Or, Sara thought, eying the sleeping figure with a wild mane of dark hair rolling around in her obviously-mussed bedsheets, that was my mother's demonic presence.
Which wasn't a fair thought to have at all, Sara admitted to herself a moment later, though she didn't feel guilty for having it. If Kasai Aoi was any type of demon, she'd be some sort of unholy cross between an imp and a cait sidhe. She was overly affectionate to seemingly random people, sarcastically insolent even to the most powerful samurai clan leaders in Tetsu no Kuni, and had an utter disdain for propriety that earned her the scornful looks of every women in the village older than approximately twenty-five years of age. Aoi was also a sadist of the highest order, more than a little mentally unhinged, and liked to stand over Sara's bed while she slept and not move for hours at a time.
Sara would have thought her a personal hero if she wasn't desperate to find a lock that could keep the infernal woman out. Considering she was half-sure that Aoi had been a shinobi at some point (and wasn't that a story she would like to hear), her prospects were looking bleaker by the day.
Still, completely understandable terror or no, this woman was still her mother. Sara had gone and gotten herself emotionally attached to the ex-shinobi while her higher thought processes had taken an unscheduled sabbatical after her unintended death and even more unintended rebirth.
Sighing to herself and clinically postponing her cry for a future date, she clutched her shinai tightly to her chest and crawled into the bed. Aoi's embrace would still soothe some of her anxieties, even if Sara would be too frightened to touch the woman without her sword in the other hand.
She told herself it was because the woman was warm and the Inn was cold, and not because she needed comfort. Not at all.
I-I; We Are The Music Makers
Sara woke an indeterminate time later to a most horrifying sight.
"So cute!" Aoi squealed, her bright, baby-blue eyes crinkled in happiness. Her deceptively fragile bone structure and chubby cheeks would have made her strangely adorable for a forty-year-old woman, were it not for the wicked scar splitting her face in half. "I gave you the best genetics!"
Sara was then brought sharply to lucidity as her possibly insane mother decided to scoop an awkwardly placed forearm underneath her, and then fling her into the air with a carefree whoop. Sara squealed in surprise and instinctive fear, desperately hoping Tatsuya would come and save her from this madness.
Predictably, he didn't, and Sara spared a moment to curse out the coward in the safety of her mind as she came crashing back down to earth – or so it seemed from her three-year-old body's relative size to everything else.
Her mother caught her without any problems, but being in her arms was somehow more terrifying than her unintended flight. The dark-haired woman didn't seem to notice her fear – she never did – and just clutched Sara to her chest with far too much force. Because clearly she hadn't suffocated yet, Aoi then decided to complete the horrible start to her morning by rolling around in the bed some more, neatly crushing her under her heavily muscled bulk.
"Is that- pancakes?" Aoi suddenly breathed, and the scent of buttery syrup was the most amazing thing Sara had every smelled, not in the least because it drove her mother to leap from the bed and race out the door without even a goodbye. Sara wasn't at all hurt to be abandoned without care for pancakes that she had been the one to teach Tatsuya how to make in the first place, as she was far too busy being hurt from being crushed underneath two hundred pounds of hardened kunoichi.
She took a moment to just breathe and reflect on the absurdity of that statement. Had it not been for her chakra and the humans' of this world's vastly improved physiology, she might have been seriously hurt right then.
That would have been an incredibly pathetic way to die. She had no intentions of kicking the bucket any time soon, especially not from a particularly enthusiastic hug.
Sara had plans. She had dreams she wanted to make reality, ambitions she wanted to realize. They were mostly self-serving in nature and didn't incorporate her potential to improve this world with the knowledge locked away in her skull, but that was okay. She had never been the messianic type; that would require actually talking to people.
The most pressing matter had been how she was going to act for the rest of her time in Tetsu no Kuni, however long that may be. There were definite advantages and disadvantages to having prodigious comprehension skills and intellect or being middle-of-the-ling average. She had found herself leaning towards the second, seemingly safer option at first, but had realized that was never going to actually work partway through the night.
Lying to the entire world about her mental maturity would require skills she simply didn't have. For one, she would need to be able to convincingly fake ignorance if asked questions she shouldn't know the answers to. For two, she would need to be able to know what questions she shouldn't know the answers to in the first place. This wasn't her lying to her parents about finishing her homework, this was her hiding fifty-odd years of precognition from disciplined samurai and cunning shinobi.
Then there was the issue of her being able to commit to a deception that would span decades, her having already shown downright amazing comprehension skills – considering her physical age, anyways – to her family that would ruin any attempt to fake ignorance from the start, and whether she even wanted to in the first place.
Her first concern was of ROOT or Orochimaru wanting prodigies to train into loyal little monsters, but there are unexpected silver linings to being born so early in the timeline: the former likely hasn't been created yet and the latter isn't any older than Sara herself. She's not even in Konoha, so it'd be a moot point either way. Besides, Itachi or Kakashi had never been scooped up in their toddler-hood despite possessing the Sharingan and White Chakra respectively, and being far smarter than her to boot. There were benefits to having powerful family.
Her second concern was of the responsibilities placed on genii by clans that expect far too much. She saw how that turned out for Itachi in canon, and wanted no part of it. Unlike the Uchiha, however, the Kasai were something like eight or nine samurai strong, so the odds of her blending into the woodwork were nil. Furthermore, the Kasai were equal opportunity sadists, and would train her into the ground despite her aptitude for kenjutsu or coordination training, so the competence she showed really only determined how much she would get out of the work. They also didn't deploy children to the battlefield.
Pretending to be an average three-year-old was both beyond her abilities and likely to hilariously cripple her strength in the long run. Even if it went against her instincts, she decided not to trip on the staircase on her way down and begin babbling about the tooth fairy, or whatever it is toddlers do.
This decision was made despite the risks, foremost of which was that Sara actually wasn't any kind of prodigy or genius at all. When it came to speed of thought and tactics, she was comfortably above average, but she was dragged back down to mediocrity by her utter lack of natural talent for pretty much everything else intellectual. Geniuses like Hyūga Neji and Nara Shikamaru as well as prodigies like Uchiha Itachi and Hatake Kakashi weren't remarkable simply because they were precocious, but because they continued to excel over their peers well into adulthood and beyond.
Sara likened it to old racing games she used to play with her uncle at the arcade. They would pick the very same car with the very same upgrades, but Sara would always immediately take the lead by hitting her nitro button at the very start. She'd get to preen and trash talk, but her uncle would inevitably hit his nitro button as well and catch up, so it hardly mattered, in the end. If she were an actual prodigy, it'd be akin to inputting a cheat code and being given a dozen uses of that damn nitro button right from the car-selection screen, putting her way ahead of the competition despite how horribly she drove.
It'd be like if Naruto had hit his growth spurt before his Academy peers – just because he became taller, earlier, doesn't mean he won't still be the midget of the class when graduation rolled around.
Outside her dubious foreknowledge, the only things separating her from everyone else normal would be her adult comprehension skills, background knowledge, and general education. None of these things will be denied her future peers, and it'll be suspicious as fuck when her mental maturity remains frozen in time for two more decades while everyone else is growing up. Had she been pretty much anyone else in Kazeharan-gai, she'd accuse "spy!" quicker than Mifune could draw his katana.
Even had Tetsu no Kuni been a utopia of medical knowledge, she wouldn't be staying for too much longer. Whether or not she somehow manages to foil the mysterious fate set out for her clan that would apparently see her to Konoha without a family or last name in a year or two, she'll be making her exodus eventually. The only question was when.
I-I; We Are The Music Makers
After smothering the odd desire to take a morning shower – they didn't exist in Tetsu no Kuni, after all – she scrubbed herself down with her eyes all-but welded closed, wore the closest clothing she had in appearance to a sundress, and eventually trekked down to the Inn's dining hall.
Sara was pathetically grateful that the Raging Wind Inn never actually got any overnight customers, outside the odd messenger sent on cross-country errands and the yearly gathering of samurai clan leaders. She had managed to gain some of her mental equilibrium and thus push back her inevitable breakdown by another couple of months, but being forced to interact with strangers on top of her volatile father and uncle would probably crash all of that self-control inside an hour.
The thought actually made her blink and halt on the bottom step. Would her family notice any difference in her? Mifune hadn't, but he was a narcissistic asshole redeemed only by his occasional flashes of concern. Tatsuya and Aoi hadn't, either, but she hadn't actually spoken to either one of them.
Sara was essentially the same person now as she had been yesterday, she just finally managed to make the obvious-in-hindsight connections between disparate nuggets of information in her head, after Mifune's show of magic broke through her willing self-delusion. Of course, she was now incredibly weighed down by her worries about her future, her family, and her body, and she knew how much stress could change people.
But. What could she do? She lacked the personality to just shrug it all off, and hiding from her family would work for all of twenty minutes until Aoi started feeling affectionate again.
Sara sighed. She was a passable enough deceiver, when the person she was lying to wasn't shinobi trained or an order of magnitude more world-wise than she was. The best she could do was be honest about everything relatively minor plaguing her, so her family wouldn't become suspicious enough to dig and inevitably find out about the more major issues.
The idea was like setting up a lemonade shop in her front lawn so nobody would question the freshly buried corpse in the back. Hiding in plain sight, as it were. It reminded her of her old biology teacher who figured out her nervous tells, causing Sara to admit to forgetting her homework so the teacher wouldn't notice the much more pressing issue of how she totally cheated on the last test.
Of course, if Sara was lucky, her family wouldn't be paying any attention to her at all this morning. Shouldn't be too hard to set her father and uncle off on another morality argument.
Doing her best to shrug off her worries, Sara jumped off the final stair she had been frozen on and plodded into the mixed lobby, dining hall, and bar. She immediately spotted Tatsuya flipping half-completed pancakes, already in his black samurai bodysuit, but wearing a very domestic baking apron instead of his iconic Tetsu no Kuni white plate armor. Behind him and on the other side of the polished counter reclined Aoi half-dressed and with a horrible bedhead, lazing around, loudly complaining about how hungry she was, and generally making a nuisance of herself in an attempt to annoy her eldest son into feeding her faster. A safe distance away of approximately four bar-stools, Mifune, dressed in similar wear to Tatsuya, absently picked bloodstains out of his misericorde's threaded hilt and tried to pretend he wasn't stifling snickers at his best friend's increasingly murderous scowl.
Aoi's brother, Rin, would appear the moment his personal, extra-large plate was filled, as if summoned by magic (specifically necromancy), and her father Fumiya would only come down after everyone else has. They would also have to wait until he took the first bite and deemed it clean of poison before they could eat themselves. Sara secretly thought he had made up that rule so he could eat first, considering the two obvious shinobi among them were likely far more qualified to notice subtle poisons than the samurai who thought such a thing to be honor-less and crude, but she wasn't about to give such an idea voice.
Maybe she would, when she was much, much stronger. Speaking of...
"Okā-san," Sara asked with all the seriousness she could muster, having walked across the hall and began tentatively tugging on her mother's over-skirt. "What's chakra?"
Like hell she was going to rely on Mifune's horribly insufficient 'lesson.' She could've died from chakra exhaustion yesterday! She'll be giving the kid the evil eye for weeks, until she forgets or he drops to his hands and knees and begs for forgiveness.
Not that she'd forgive him, but it would be amusing enough that she might let it slide.
Contrary to expectations but not really a surprise when it came to the dangerous woman, Aoi responded with a narrowing of her eyes and unleashed Killing Intent, which is probably where Tatsuya and herself get the habit. "Oh?" she merely said after a long moment. "And who told you that word, Raiya-chan?"
Sara didn't hesitate to wave her hand towards Mifune. For all his annoying personality, she would still fight the Kage themselves to protect him, but Aoi was just a little scarier than even them. When she was on the warpath, it was every samurai for themselves.
"Oh, Mifune-chyaaan~" Aoi crooned, and Sara could see Mifune's face whiten in fear. Was it just his fate to piss off everyone in the Kasai clan? It was actually kind of impressive. "I wanted to teach Raiya-chan all about chakra! You took that from me." Her aura darkened further, for all that her face had split into a happy and open smile. "Do you know what I do to people that take things from me?"
This was probably an overreaction on Aoi's part – Sara had asked what chakra is, after all, so for all the likely ex-shinobi knew, Mifune had only mentioned the word in passing and nothing else. Sara wasn't going to cut in and tell her this, however. That'd just be stupid.
Besides, it was kinda funny. Mifune hurt himself in an average training session far more than the Kasai ever did, so it wasn't like he was being abused.
Not paying the high-pitched squeals and cackles of mad laughter any mind, Sara turned towards Tatsuya, who was nonchalantly still flipping pancakes and also ignoring the cries for help from his best friend. She noticed that they were far closer to finished, now, but figured she had enough time for an answer. "Aniue?"
"Saa," he answered, not bothering to turn around. "It's more of a shinobi thing, really. They can do all kinds of things with it – cast illusions, conjure elements, ignore gravity, casually break space and time." He shrugged. "I can't tell you what chakra is, because the answer is 'no one knows.' I can't tell you what it can do, either, because the answer is 'pretty much everything.' Our clan use all of ours to make us faster and stronger, so that's really all I know, and unless okā-san chooses to teach you more, its all you'll know, too."
"Aa. Thank you." It wasn't anything she didn't already know, but it was nice to have an in-character reason for having this knowledge. If father or someone asks her down the line why she's doing a human lampfish impression or even knew what chakra was in the first place, she can just point them at Tatsuya instead of telling them "I read about it in a manga in my last life," or whatever excuse she can manage to come up with on short notice. "Pancake?"
Tatsuya smirked, carving off a thin slice from the largest pancake on the strange pseudo-skillet thing. He speared it with a two-pronged fork with one hand and dexterously smeared butter on it with the other, before flicking it in her direction with an amused huff. She managed to catch it but almost fell off her bar-stool in the attempt.
Hearing Rin's strangely loud footsteps coming down the staircase, she quickly stuffed the entire piece in her mouth and swallowed. It was soft and warm and all kinds of delicious, but she didn't have much of an opportunity to enjoy it; she didn't want Rin to see her eating before Fumiya could. He was even harder to predict than Aoi, sometimes. Would he wink and grab a piece for himself, building camaraderie? Would he immediately mention it to Fumiya when he came down, ensuring she got punished for breaking one of the rules? She's lived with the man for over three years and he was just as much a puzzle now as he was then.
Of course, Sara thought to herself, eying Tatsuya stacking six pancakes onto a single plate with a long-suffering sigh, one thing is obvious about him: his timing is impeccable.
Kind of like a ninja, actually. She was almost completely certain that Aoi and Rin had been shinobi at one point, though neither had ever mentioned it. If it weren't for her manga-derived background knowledge, Tatsuya's implication that Aoi knows more about chakra than a Kasai samurai should, and her and Rin's obviously foreign features and coloring, Sara would have thought them really weird samurai. Really violent, unhinged, sadistic, psychopathic samurai, but samurai nevertheless.
Though the 'how' would forever elude her, Rin stepped into the dining hall the very moment the sixth pancake was placed on his plate. He ignored Aoi still chasing Mifune as they weaved through tables, instead choosing to hone in on the plate with his name cheekily written on it in butter. He gave Tatsuya a reluctantly approving nod, snagged the three juiciest sausage links in between his grubby fingers, and made off towards the table with a girlish little giggle of delight.
Sara could only wonder what kind of blackmail Rin was holding over Tatsuya's head; he always had the prissiest bitch-face when the elder man did this, but he never tried to stop him. It had to be something good, considering this little ritual of theirs happened every week without fail.
Rin was an interesting man. He looked like a masculine version of Aoi, with the same wild, dark hair and baby-blue eyes, delicate, almost noble bone structure and chubby cheeks. He could've been her twin if he didn't act like a perverted old man, his creepy smiles adding twenty years to his age. That he wore soft, casual and brightly-colored kimono that looked reminiscent of pajamas made her think he belonged in one of those elderly care homes, where he can perv on the nurses and bet cigarettes on the bingo matches.
He reminded her a lot of her canon counterpart, actually. Despite being a scrawny five-foot with the completely wrong coloring, his attitude and hair style was a dead-ringer for onsen-spying, smut-writing fifty-year-old Sannin no Jiraiya, Toad Sage. She half-expected the man to whip out an orange-covered book and giggle lewdly, right there at the breakfast table.
Those orange-covered books will never exist, thank the Sage. Jiraiya or not, Sara will never write them. She maintained a healthy amount of perversion at all times, but it took a special kind of shameless to be so blatant about it, a trait that she didn't have. Future-Kakashi would just have to survive without Icha Icha.
With most of the family gathered, the others migrated towards the breakfast table with Rin. Tatsuya displayed an impressive level of dexterity carrying four plates of still-steaming pancakes and the tray of sausages, weaving gracefully through the smaller tables and chairs arranged randomly throughout the hall. Mifune barrel rolled over the counter and snatched the container of orange juice out of the icebox, quickly raising it high above his head as if to protect him from Aoi's wrath. Her mother pouted petulantly but stopped chasing him around, not wanting to threaten her morning juice.
Sara just smiled from her half-slouch against the counter, thoroughly adoring her family just being themselves on this utterly mundane Tuesday. Fuck 'the Plot;' if it meant abandoning her family, then she wasn't going to follow the timeline detailed in her head. The world would be fine without Jiraiya of the Sannin. She didn't owe mankind anything.
I-I; We Are The Music Makers
"I have an announcement to make," Kasai Fumiya spoke, his deep, gravelly voice perfectly matching the bear-like man's massive stature. It was hard to imagine a man like this being the father of Tatsuya, who was the archetypical bishōnen, but if it weren't for his harsh facial features, he'd be a dead ringer for Sara's future manga self.
Fumiya had come down three or four minutes after the rest of their family had gathered at the table, and were staring at their plates of delicious pancakes mournfully. Tatsuya's eyes were narrowed in that calculative way of his, obviously trying to figure out the odds of him being able to eat a pancake without word getting back to his father. Mifune's thoughts were on similar lines, but with far less confidence of success. Aoi had blatantly poured a shot of whiskey into her orange juice and was staring into it with an increasingly violent twitch in her eye. Rin... Sara couldn't tell, actually. The man didn't make sense.
Luckily, Fumiya arrived before his dysfunctional family could erupt into violence over pancakes. His presence immediately caught all of their attention, and not because of his regal air or obvious strength; they were used to that, by now, even Sara herself, who came from a culture where the idea of a samurai winning a fist-fight with a mountain was patently absurd. No, it was the obvious preoccupation in his bearing that snagged their attention. Usually, he would have made his entire family feel ashamed about their various shortcomings by now with a single, judging sweep of his dark gaze, but he didn't seem to so-much as notice them. Idly, Sara noted Rin flex his fingers in an arcane hand-seal and mutter "Kai."
"The Kasai clan have been granted a boon by Susanoo-no-Mikoto himself," he continued absently, spearing his uppermost pancake with his two-pronged fork and swallowing it whole. "Tatsuya, Jiraiya, your little brother Kyōya will be born in approximately nine months."
Everyone else at the table froze. Fumiya placidly ate his second, third, and fourth pancakes with equally large bites, before chugging the rest of the orange juice in the container. He rose and casually walked out of the Raging Wind Inn without paying his family any more notice; the entire scene had taken no more than twenty seconds.
"What the hell?" Mifune screamed the moment the door closed behind Fumiya. He leapt to his feet, knocking his chair over with the motion. "Who delivers news like that? Why?! Shouldn't he ask Aoi-sama before naming the kid? How does he even know it'll be male? Is that some kind of secret clan art? Is he going to disappear me for figuring it out? He's totally going to disappear me, I know it, always knew he was-"
With a casual motion, Tatsuya shoved the rapidly-pacing Mifune with the hand not holding his fork. Mifune tumbled and tripped over his fallen chair, smashing face-first into the wooden floor with a muffled keen. "Idiot," Tatsuya sneered, carving his pancakes into thirds and eating with violent enthusiasm. "Kasai have always had sons, and always will. You'd know this if you paid attention during your lessons. Idiot."
"Very interesting," Rin added in an appropriately bland tone, obviously caring more about the pancakes he was enjoying than the subject matter. Or, maybe he was just hiding his fear at the thought of his sister going through another pregnancy. Sara could almost imagine; Aoi was scary enough as-is, how terrifying will she be for the next nine months?
She glanced over towards the woman in question, and her eyes widened. Aoi was pulling literally dozens of knives – kunai, she noticed warily – out of who-knows-where and burying them hilt-deep in the table. Judging from the relative positioning of each blade, she was creating a three-dimensional model of an adult figure holding its head in its hands.
Sara was surprised, thought not by the violence of the image or art medium. Aoi has been trying to get impregnated again for months; it's all she ever talks about, and Sara can hear her screaming long into the night. She expected... she didn't know, really. Some happiness? Why was she even sleeping in Sara's room last night, anyways?
She opened her mouth to ask, but clicked it shut after a sharp glance from Tatsuya. She laughed sheepishly. Approaching Aoi will have to wait until she's less murderous looking.
"More pancakes?" she offered nervously, hoping her family will stop being so weird if she plied them with enough food.
It didn't work.
Mostly Relevant Author's Note
A main theme in this story will be gender dysphoria. Sara is female and will forever remain female, male body or not. Please don't start an argument about LGBT rights in the comment section.
This takes place in an AU - Sara thinks herself the divergence point from manga canon. She is incorrect. Her arrival in this world is a direct consequence of the butterfly effect. What exactly is different will probably not be made clear for quite a while yet. Why she appeared will also be explained.
Sara does not and will never acquire an active bloodline ability, god-like skills, or revival techniques. She will still probably become an S-Rank kunoichi, but more through virtue of skill than power, and only so she doesn't get roflstomped by everyone remotely interesting. Progression will be slow.
I will attempt to avoid Mary Sue-ism. Please warn me if I show any symptoms. I will seek out a doctor immediately.
I have difficulties differentiating between fanon and canon. Please point out any fanon tropes I may have accidentally used.
This will not be a canon rehash. She may or may not be placed on Team Sannin. Orochimaru will be a vital character either way.
As I have begun forcing myself to write 2k words every day to ensure I don't go on another unexpected half-year hiatus, expect this to be updated within a week.
Cheers.