Lost in the Valleys
Chapter One:
(Warning Updated: 2/04/2017)
Hello, my name is Babdha, and I've decided to try my hand at the bloated monstrosity of a subgenre that is the self-insert, hopefully you'll enjoy my somewhat different take on it. This will be more of an OC insert then an actual self-insert, but there will be parts of the OC character that will resemble me (it's up to yourselves to figure out which parts are fictional and which are not). There will be several differences from the usual template as stated above, the character being born in a minor Hidden Village being one, and as deep worldbuilding as I can squeeze in as another (though there will be others so watch out for them). I accidently posted the incomplete version of this chapter, so I apologise to anyone who thought they were getting another chapter already (it's on its way I promise). As such, the opening part in italics has been replaced entirely, as well as other minor changes. With that all covered, onwards with the show!
"Is ait an mac an saol"- Old Irish Proverb
~Lost in the Valleys~
"Are you sure this is safe?" I ask, annoyed at how whiny I sound, even though it's a perfectly good question considering what my best friend has in mind. "Quit your moaning, it'll be fine you'll see. You know everyone else in town has done the Run once or twice, and no one's died from it. Besides, all the adults know about this, they won't run you over. They probably expect it by now, so it's not like you'll be in any danger, scaredy-cat." The stubborn gleam in her eyes when she says my nickname tells me that there's no way that's she's going to let me go home without doing the Run, no matter how unwilling I am. "Fine" I mutter despite the roiling fear in my gut," I'll do it."
The Run, a local tradition of the town I live in, is quite simple. A narrow, curvy tarmac backroad that is the only connection Iniscully (our town) has to the N50 motorway and it is generally deserted save for the lonely car. It is also host to a perfectly straight, hundred meter patch of road that is known locally as the Run. The reason it's picked up a name like that is unfortunate. It's here that all the teenagers in Iniscully like to try and outrun cars.
The backroad is hemmed in on both sides by low stone walls and hedges that make it easy to see cars coming from a long way away. The Run is always done with friends, and the comfort of a can or two. One always plays the part of a lookout and warns the others when a car is coming, and they are usually the ones that tell everybody to sprint like hell. Usually it's timed so that just as the car rounds the final bend that connects the Run to the rest of society, the kids are half way down it, with the aim being to reach the "end" before the car does.
All the adults in town know about this little custom, and most of them only pretend to round the corner at any real speed, making sure to never actually hit any of those running, but's it's still a rite of passage for every teenager in town, and my best friend (why can't I remember her name, why can't I-) has been demanding I do it for the past month, even though I'd really rather be at home reading Grandad's old history books or browsing the internet.
"Get your head in the game, scaredy-cat; I don't want you to end up as roadkill." I force a queasy, half-hearted smile onto to my face, not reassured by her choice of words one bit, but then, she's always been blunt (it's on the tip of my tongue, why can't I remember it?). "You'll be fine, scaredy-cat, Jesus, it's not that bad." A smug smile works its way onto to her face. "I've done this more than anyone else in the town; I should now that it isn't really dangerous."
I take a deep breath; settling my nerves, then nod at her. "You're right it'll be grand. After all, what's the worst that could happen?"
~Lost in the Valleys~
Consciousness returns in halting drifts and drabs. All-encompassing warmth cloaks me, shelters me, smothers me. I am at peace, adrift in a still void and I am raging at the Heavens that had let me die so painfully, so suddenly. I am, no I had been far too young to go, why did it have to end? I can't see anything; there is nothing but darkness, and the faint throbbing of a slow, steady beat, a comforting drum that calms me. Wherever I am there is no pain, not anymore, there is no longer a steel weight pressing down on me, endlessly, make it stop, make it stop, make it stop-, I'm thrashing and screaming, good god why won't anyone help me?
Slowly, painfully, my awareness is growing, and with it so do my confines. The space I am in is getting smaller, and soon it will crush me- don't think about it, don't think about it. I need to find a way out of this surreal limbo, I need out of here before it all happens again, and the pain comes back. I can't go through it again (I'm weak, so, so weak), and with no other options available all I can do is lash out, fear and frustration at the approaching end to this dull, timeless existence (paradise) finding a release in weak kicks that are shaking my limited world. The constant beat that has been so calming moments before is fluttering and speeding up, and it is terrifying (I'm a coward, just a weak coward). The only constant I know is changing, why is it changing?
The boundaries of the void are closing around me, and suddenly there is grey metal squeezing me against an unyielding stone wall, and I am choking and spluttering, can't breathe, can't breathe, can't breathe. Instead of being crushed however the wall in front of me bends and cold air brushes my head.I am being pushed out of this emptiness, this hell (heaven) of steady nothingness, and relief briefly overwhelms the dreadful suspicion that is winding its way around my gut. I spill out onto an abrasive fabric; the material rubbing sorely on what I'm fairly sure is sensitive skin. The world is a nightmare of blurry constructs, swarming together in a shadowy mess I can't decipher. I can only barely make out what look like giants looming over me, holding me, talking in a language that's too loud and quick, filled with foreign sounds that are making my head spin.
Everything is slowly coming together in a surreal, horrible reality that I almost can't comprehend. Even as I wail from tiny lungs, I grasp at straws, to deny that I am now a baby once more. I've been reborn, which isn't all that bad on its own, but there is one small problem that I'm having with all of this. I'd just spent my entire life (previous life), all twenty years of it, believing in what had just essentially turned out to be a lie. Goddamn it, I've just died (or maybe I'd been dead for months, it was impossible to tell, timekeeping rendered useless by my constant lapses of awareness), can't I have caught a break from all this trauma?
~Lost in the Valleys~
It takes a long while before I'm able to fully accept what has happened, the implications of all of it theologically having been pushed into a dark corner of my mind because I do not want to grapple with that kind of heavy subject right now (I don't want to deal with anything anymore). I have more important things to focus on for the moment, the most prominent of them being figuring out where the hell I am.
So far all I have to go on is that the language sounds vaguely Asian (maybe Japanese?), but my knowledge of that whole branch of languages is sorely lacking and there's no way that I can distinguish anything beyond that for now. Once my eyes finally begin to pull their weight and let me see more than a nausea-inducing blur, I'll be able to find out more, until then I'll just have to simply run with the theory that I have been reborn somewhere in Asia. Everything else, including what historical period I've been born into will be very difficult to find out. It might even take years before I have it all sussed out correctly, and a part of me worries that it'll be too late to change my situation by them.
My (new) family, from what I can gather, are definitely not wealthy, and they're (we're) certainly scrapping uncomfortably close to poverty. I am given worn, hand-me-down clothes and toys, and the blurry walls of the room I 'm kept in appear to be unadorned. The only company I have is someone who I assume is my mother, judging from her feminine tone every time she sings her eerie, haunting lullabies. Her voice is strained, and every motion she makes is slow and marked with weakness. It doesn't take a genius to realise that my birth has done quite a number on her, and I spent many of early nights in this new body praying (to what?) that her slow, weak breathes won't gutter out and leave me alone.
Things only get worse when my vision finally begins to grow stronger, as I can finally see the full extent of the damage pregnancy has done to her. As my mother's features grow clearer, I can see how pale and wane her face is, her exhausted, tired eyes are sunk deeply into her skull, while her black hair feels limp and lifeless in my pudgy hands whenever I get the chance to hold it.
It isn't often that I manage to do so however; my body seems to be far smaller then what I know an average baby should be, and my limbs feel like soft putty, barely responding to my commands and with no real strength to them when they do so. Maybe I've been born prematurely? It's a good explanation as to why I'm so small and weak (my fit must have caused this, oh god is she going to be alright? Is she going to die because of me?) So my mother and I lie together, united by frail bodies and a bond of softly crooned songs and shared happiness.
Until I begin to actually learn whatever language that she speaking, I'm going to have an incredibly difficult time understanding what is going on around me. That is going to need to change quickly, because otherwise I might drive myself made with boredom. Not to mention that there are all kinds of nasty time periods that I could have been born into, and since I needed to get ahead in life if I wanted to survive, I need to begin learning as soon as possible.
That was why I am overjoyed that after what feels like a few months my mother (the dark bags under her eyes are getting worse, it's all my fault, all my fault) decides to teach me how to speak. She begins by pointing a delicate finger at herself, before gently saying "Kaa-san", each sound stretched out slowly so that I can understand her. I try to mimic her, but my tongue feels as though it is made of lead and I can only gurgle unintelligibly. My mother laughs in her soft lilting tone that sounds so musical and light to my ears, even with ever present sickness lurking underneath. She repeats the word once she's stopped giggling, but once again I can do nothing more than burble humiliatingly. I want to sulk now, my annoyance at my body's limitations rising higher and higher with each day that passes, but my new mother's, nokaa-san's, good mood is infectious and I can't help the smile that begins to form on my face.
Unfortunately, I also can't stop the stream of happy baby talk that issues from my mouth alongside it either, though on the upside it plunges my new mother into another laughing fit, (so different from mom, I miss her) which is worth the embarrassment. She is always at her most lively when she is laughing, and the pain and stress seem to fade from her face for a while (it would never have been there if you'd been braver, if you hadn't let your fear rule you).
~Lost in the Valleys~
The first time I meet my new brothers is also the start of the rare glimpses that I will get of my father during my early childhood. He is a tall, broad man, his hair marshalled into a strict crew-cut that is a mousey light brown. Piercing grey eyes peer out from an angular, lean face, light stubble adorning his strong jawline. He looks and acts like a hard man, someone who demands respect with their very presence. Whenever he glances at mother his hard eyes will soften though, and from the tender way he treats her I can tell that he loves her dearly. That makes him alright in my book, and I focus my attention on other things the few other times he visits, content that I am in good hands.
Late one evening, four children, ranging from what look like six to three trail in cautiously behind him, their anxiety obvious. They all perk up substantially however when they see my mother and the cry of "Kaa-san" from the younger duo is quite loud and boisterous, hurting my sensitive ears. My new father begins to reprimand them in harsh tones, but a gentle touch from my mother softens his apparent anger. My grasp of the language is still practically non-existent, but I preserve on, catching the occasional snippet of a word I understand now and again in their rapid fire conversation.
After my mother dispenses several hugs to what I could only assume are my new brothers (I'd always wanted siblings, back in my old life, before the car had taken everything away-) she lifts me up so that they can get a better view of me and I of them. Slowly, in that musical, strained voice she tells me their names, once again sounding the syllables out so that I can understand them. Takeru, the eldest with vibrant black hair similar yet different to our mother's as well as the stormy eyes of our father, is eight years old. He watches me with a vicious yet oddly friendly grin that sends shivers down my spine. Meanwhile Daisuke peers at me with lazy curiosity, his brown eyes and brown hair marking him out as subtly different from the rest of us, laziness unusual in six year olds weighing down all his movements (for a moment I had thought he was also sickly, but his exaggerated efforts at moving put that fear to rest quickly).
Finally there are the two twins, Hiroshi and Gou, filled with jittery energy and life, both so identical, their mentality at two years of age shining through in their horsing around. I am thankful that they seemed to have taken after my father in health, since all of them looked like normal children (even if Takeru is scaring me, and Daisuke looks lazy as hell. In fact I'm not even sure if the twins are what I used to consider normal). If others in my family have the same problems as my mother, I'm sure that I would have given myself a heart attack worrying over them within months.
Just as I'm seriously beginning to dozing off, the current ongoing conversation going over my head, I notice something gleaming on my father's forehead, something that hadn't been there during his last visits. A gleaming metal plate, attached to a black piece of cloth that is tied round his head with a simple knot at the back. In the centre of the plate, two shallow lines form a v-like shape, and while I can't explain why, the plate sets warning bells off in my mind, I'd seen something similar somewhere dangerous in my past life, but where? There is something familiar about it, and combined with the dull grey (light blue? It's the same shade of the car- no don't think about it) flak jacket that he is wearing is leading me to some pretty dark and thankfully unlikely conclusions. I reach out a cautious, pudgy hand towards him and what I'm pessimistically calling a forehead protector (what were called again in that story, hinate or something similar?) for the moment, hoping against hope that I hadn't been reborn where I think I've been. I don't recognise the strange symbol that is etched into the metal, that can only be a good sign right?
My father notices my (morbid) fascination with his forehead protector, and with an exasperated chuckle aimed at my mother he removes it and lowers it closer to me. The next words that spill out of his mouth made me want to spew my guts out onto the floor in horror. "Tanigakure no Sato, Tsuyoshi, Tanigakure no Sato" he says in that deep, rumbling tone of his that is still rather intimidating, breaking the foreign words down so that I could comprehend. The good news is that I have finally figured out what my new name is (my mother was still teaching me about the world around me for now, and I couldn't make out a coherent word of what she said outside of those brief lessons), but the bad news attached to it sucked any joy that I should be feeling out of that minor accomplishment.
If the phrase had been said alone I probably would have discounted or ignored it, it wasn't as though Kishimoto hadn't drawn from a lot of Japanese myths and culture to build the world of Naruto. The forehead protector engraved with a vaguely artistic depiction of what I'm guessing is a valley is more of a stretch to justify, but still plausible. The fact that my father was now trying to entertain me and my brothers by climbing up the wall was unfortunately a deal breaker for any attempt to deny the truth.
I've been reborn into the world of Naruto, which was already bad enough by itself. That is unfortunately not even the worst of it, because even if I had been born somewhere like Kiri or Konoha or hell even Taki I would at least know what was coming down the tracks or have enough powerful shinobi living nearby to protect me from threats like Akatsuki or Orochimaru. The only information I know that is related to Tani from Canon is that Akatsuki has a hideout somewhere in wherever Tani is located, Kama No Kuni or something like that, which has left me with a sinking feeling that Tani is either wiped off the map around that time the base is established or the village working is with Akatsuki, neither of those options gave me a warm and fuzzy feeling.
It makes a horrible kind of sense after all, if you needed to hide in a minor country in the world of Naruto, the first step would be to either coerce, wipe out or bribe the shinobi of said country, because god knows you're not going to slip under their radar if you stand out like some members of Akatsuki do, especially if you're trying to hide in said shinobi's backyard. And since Tani's forces hadn't fought for Akatsuki in the Fourth Shinobi World War and Kakuzu was hardly going to fork over money to bribe Tani when they could destroy it and claim one of the other villages hired them to do it, things weren't look too good for Tanigakure No Sato.
Hadn't Sasori said that he'd destroyed an entire country once in the anime, could that be referring to the destruction of Tani? The worst part was still to come though, since Tani is such a minor player in world affairs the training it offers is going to be far worse than Konaha's, and there's no legendary shinobi to cosy up to for training tips, which means, depending on the time period I'm in, I could die remarkably quickly early on if I chose the career of being a shinobi. Oh god I'm completely screwed I'm going to die again oh god-
Is it any wonder that at that point I broke out into tears, much to family's bewilderment? If they thought that this little tantrum was bad, wait till I started trying (and no doubt failing) to work a way out of the predicament that was no doubt winging its way towards Tani, and by extension, myself. After a few minutes of sniffling I'm feeling a little better, and my family have just began relaxing once more, the crisis averted, when a thought came at me from out of the blue. What time period have I been born into? Was the First Shinobi World War on its way or in the past? What about the Second one or hell the Third or Fourth Shinobi World War? Hell, have I even been born near the time of the events of Canon? I begin to sob again, startling my parents and siblings, all of them evidently exasperated by my actions (not that I care). Its official, this universe hates me. What did I do in my previous life to deserve this?
.
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If there are errors please let me know, but I wanted to get this posted as quickly as possible so that I can go back to writing my original works without it constantly nagging at me. I will update this story, but they'll be somewhat slow because of my original fiction and school. I'll post what the various names and phrases mean down below:
Japanese:
Kakuzu – First kanji in name stands for kakugyō, a bishop in shōgi (A Japanese game somewhat similar to chess).
Sasori - Scorpion
Orochimaru - Circle Serpent (loose translation).
Takeru – Warrior
Daisuke – Big Help
Hiroshi – Generous
Gou – Strong
Tsuyoshi – Tough
Hitai-ate (the word Tsuyoshi was looking for) - Forehead Protector
Akatsuki – Dawn / Daybreak
Konhagakure No Sato (full form of Konha) – Village Hidden in the Leaves
Takigakure No Sato (full form of Taki) – Village Hidden by a Waterfall
Kirigakure No Sato (full form of Kiri) – Village Hidden in the Mist
Tanigakure No Sato (full form of Tani) – Village Hidden in the Valleys
Kawa No Kuni (correct name of country Tani is in): Land of Rivers
Irish:
Is ait an mac an saol – Life is a strange son (Life is strange).
I'll see you soon (I hope), read and review with constructive criticism!