Kawato Hagane did not go into the forest expecting to die, which takes a special sort of arrogance for a shinobi that, had they lived, might've propelled them to any number of great heights. But they didn't, and it didn't, and that's really the end of that story, as far as that particular soul is concerned.

But the body, on the other hand.

If dying is, as people describe it, like falling asleep at the end of a long day, then living again is being yanked awake by a siren at four AM—unpleasant, unnecessary, and altogether unexpected.

I woke up face-down in a pool of my own blood, and screamed. This is a pretty reasonable response to waking up face-down in a pool of your own blood. Or what you think is your own blood—and it has to be your blood, because it's not like there's anyone else around whose blood it could be, its not like you make a habit of stealing peoples' blood and trekking ten miles out into the wilderness so you can lie down and wallow in it like a starving leech. But it can't be your blood, because this isn't your body, and—

Realization starts, surprisingly, with the little things. Your fingers are slightly too long; your knees a little too knobbly; the sound of your own breath as it fogs out into the air a little too low. Your teeth, a little too sharp. I stopped screaming long enough to bite my tongue, and yelped as a jolt of pain broke through the haze. My head cleared enough to process one thought.

This body? Was wrong.

I had always been soft, uncertain; blunted at the edges like a butter knife. This me was brittle; sharp; pulled taut in all the wrong directions like a poorly-strung bow. I jerked upright, gasping—

And that was when I realized just how much everything hurt.

Every muscle ached like a bad day at the gym; every breath was a knife in my gut. I keeled over, gritting my teeth hard enough to hear the rumble of blood in my ears, sucking in increments of air until I found one that didn't make me want to vomit from pain.

Slowly, I worked myself back upright, leaning against the rough trunk of—

A tree?

A tree. Solid; blissfully ordinary.

I sucked in one tentative breath; then another, letting birdsong and the soft rustle of wind in the canopy fill my ears. It was a beautiful day in the woods.

It was a beautiful day, and I felt like I'd been assaulted by a freight train, and no amount of sunlight streaming poetically through the treetops was going to make me feel better about that. I gingerly peeled back my blood-soaked shirt to reveal a web of fresh pink scar tissue crawling across my stomach and up towards my chest. The skin around it was thick with mottled bruises.

I looked like I'd been assaulted by a freight train.

"Fuck," I hissed, and the forest blurred behind a sudden well of angry tears. The hands I used to rub them away were spidery and bruised, and my sleeves slid back, revealing arms pockmarked with scabs and scars. I slowly ran my hands—mine, I told myself, they're mine—over them, almost reassured. Whatever—whoever—I was was real. Could be cut, could be hurt.

Could be killed.

I was pretty sure I hadn't died. But dreams didn't hurt this much.

"Okay," I said slowly, wincing with every syllable. "Okay, this is—" I picked absentmindedly at a scab on the inside of my wrist. "This is—"

I punctured skin; jerked away. "Shit."

I had no fucking clue what this was.

It hurt. That was one thing. It hurt and I hated it, that was two. Panic coiled in my chest like a serpent, poised to strike—this, at least, was a familiar sensation, and one I knew how to control. I had to stay calm; take stock. Breathing exercises were out for the count, so I dug my fingers into the earth and focused on the way it felt against my skin, on the jab of a loose stone digging into my palm. This was real.

This was real.

Unfortunately.

I wasn't, as far as I could tell, in any immediate danger, unless the a branch decided to spontaneously collapse on top of me. Whoever attacked me—and there had to have been someone, people didn't go spewing blood everywhere on a whim—must be long gone by now. So the general run of things amounted to the following: two (2) hands, covered in dirt and dried blood, but in working condition; two (2) arms in a similar state, if slightly longer than what I was accustomed to; other organs and extremities, present and account for, except—

"Where is my eye."

The injury was not new. But it was only once I realize it was there that I noticed how much smaller the world seemed; how much flatter. Loss of peripheral vision and depth perception will do that for you.

Hopefully neither of those turned out to be too important in the long run.

I lasted approximately five seconds before poking a finger into the hole and regretting everything forever because that shit hurt.

God, it's almost like I deserved death.

See, though, I was still pretty sure I wasn't dead, because first off, I felt like that was the sort of thing you'd remember. If not the precise moment, then at least the ones leading up to it. The only thing in my mind was a blur; vague recollections of what it meant to be a person forcing their way through a fog of pain and panic. I knew I wasn't who I should've been, or where I should've been.

But I didn't really know what the alternative was. I had—flashes. A face. A name. A room stuffed with books; a shelf full of bones; a positively visceral hated for corn—

Yeah, that seemed about right.

And second, if this was what the universe tried to pass off as Heaven, it needed to get its shit together. Heaven didn't poke you full of holes and then make it hurt when you poked them some more. Heaven would have had the decency to leave me a decent pair of shoes, instead of abandoning me ass-barefoot in the middle of the woods.

At least, I managed to think, the rest of the outfit was nice. Rough linen, all blues and blacks, covering a layer of light chainmail. Practical. (Bloody.)

And uncomfortably familiar.

It was the pouch that did it—strapped to my left leg within arms' reach. I slid out the single kunai and dangled it on one finger like a fishing lure, horrifically transfixed.

"You've got to be kidding me."

Maybe I was dreaming. (Maybe Heaven had a sick sense of humor.)

The hole in my head where my eye should've been let out a throb, and I was struck with the uncomfortable thought that somewhere out there, somebody else might be running around with my eyeball crammed into their skull, because that's the way these things always went. Nobody ever lost an eye by accident. There was always some act of sacrifice or thievery in play. It was amateur surgeon hour 24/7 with these bad boys.

All at once, my sense of urgency tripled. I had to know who I was, and I had to know now.

I gritted my teeth and started sorting through my shit.

To start: at least twenty paper bombs were sewn into the lining of my jacket, within easy reach. I made a mental note to learn how to set them off them later, right after learning how to do—well, literally anything else. And god, wasn't that a thought: having to teach myself jutsu—

—but hey, haven't you secretly always wanted this; a system to pick apart at the seams until it's spread out in front of you like a dismantled skeleton, a way to dig into the things that went unexplained and learn how many of your theories were right—

—but that would come later. If at all.

"Please tell me I wasn't part of a suicide bombing squad," I muttered. A failed one, at any rate, since I appeared to be happily undetonated.

I dug through my pockets next—more paper bombs, three pencils, a small folding knife—then pouches, spreading out the contents in the dirt. Most was standard equipment: kunai, shuriken, a set of scrolls and a bottle of ink, three small bags of what I assumed were ration pills or medicines. I fumbled out a pill from each and lined them up in my hand. They were all about the same size; black in color, pea-shaped.

There had to be at least one painkiller in there. I swallowed them in quick succession.

The effects hit almost immediately. Chakra buzzed anxiously to life under my skin. It made my palms itch, and I desperately scrubbed them against the ground, trying to rid myself of the sensation. Did shinobi live with this all the time? Hopefully it was only a side effect of the medicine.

More importantly, the pain subsided to a dull ache everywhere but my stomach, which twinged whenever I breathed too deeply. But it was better than the alternative. The third pill did nothing, or had effects too subtle or slow-acting to be noticeable.

I went back to rifling through my things. The rest of the equipment was less than standard: a glass vial half-full of what looked like blood; dried herbs wrapped up in twine; a leather-bound notebook full to bursting, colored tabs and loose papers spilling from between the pages. I quickly scanned the contents: notes in an untidy, almost unreadable scrawl; diagrams of plants, muscular structures, human figures covered in a web of spidery lines.

One paper in particular caught my eye—crisp and official, letters printed instead of lobbed like a poorly-constructed spitball. There was a portrait in the corner. The genin staring back at me was pale, scruffy, and blonde, squinting lopsidedly at the world through their one good eye. According to the inscription: Hagane Kawato, aged twenty. A genin from the Mist, present in Konohagakure for the purpose of taking part in—

"Oh, fuck."

Hagane Kawato, present in Konoha for the purpose of taking part in the chunin exams.

I was so royally boned.

AN: so this is blatant self-insertion, but expect lots of poor life choices cuz I'm an idiot who likes to think they know better (I do not). sort of a reincarnation fic, sort of a body-swap, 100% me not having the patience to write 5000 words of Ninja Infancy. I'm here for th infodumps and Mad Science nd I'm gonna get it.