Simply Wrong

Summary: Being reborn into a world of assassins is really not the best of situations, especially when your feet have been set on this path ever since your birth was expected. OC Self Insert, inspired by Dreaming of Sunshine.

Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto.

Chapter 1: Rebirth

Slipping off the balcony has to be one of the most idiotic ways to die. Really, what kind of fool dies because there was no railing to lean upon when peering outside? At least all I had to endure was the long fall with wind whipping into my face, my heart in my throat. The impact was sudden and jarring. No pain at all. I was immensely grateful for that small mercy. My brains were probably littering the sidewalk at this instant, but I felt nothing if not peaceful. Drifting around as a cloud of nothingness does that to you. Death was far more pleasant than I had been expecting it to be and it wasn't as if I were leaving anyone important behind. I could only hope that the afterlife would be as kind.

Or maybe not.

See that's the thing with being reborn. Its messy, icky and being able to see and feel it, and most importantly, remember it all? No! Just no. Not that I had been good at remembering stuff before I did the whole cloud of nothingness deal. But this new body of mine possessed the abhorrent: eidetic memory. There's something to be said for eidetic memory, but as for remembering that as your first anything, completely etched in your brain... Ugh. So excuse me for not wanting to speak of it. Ever.

The only glowing segment of the whole experience were the blurry but deliriously happy faces peering down amongst the excited jabber. I was clearly a well awaited delight to these people. Being nearly blind isn't that big a deal with such love directed at you. So I ignored the unfamiliar smallness of my body, the powerlessness of it all,the fact the reincarnation process had probably stuffed up as I really shouldn't be able to remember my previous life, the ridiculousness of an undeveloped brain being able to comprehend said previous life and basked in the warmth surrounding me.

Even so, living as a baby is...unpleasant. Being plagued by all these needs you have and not being able to do a thing but bawl your eyes out. Being completely dependent on that man and woman who took care of you but who couldn't understand you at all. Add having an eidetic memory to the whole thing and... Yeah, unpleasant is a mild description.

It was a relief when I could finally understand them. The woman with the long black hair and kind eyes is ka-san and the man with the stern features which softened only for me is oto-san. The language is Japanese from what I could recognise, which is not much but a few scattered phrases. So I presumed I was reborn in Japan in some older time, one with no skyscrapers and let it go at that.

I settled into a routine of lying around with ka-san for company, her voice a constant soothing presence beside me. She kept talking to me, not in that sickly sweet baby voice adults use around kids my supposed age but like I were a normal person who understood everything she said. I think I loved her just a little more for that.

She also kept repeating one word over and over and it was not long before I realized it was my name: Itachi. As in Itachi from the Naruto anime I used to watch when I was a kid. I recall dismissing it back then, because reincarnation in a fictional world was just ridiculous. Not to mention I hadn't seen a single hitai-ate around either of my parents or the other rare black haired visitors. Cousins most likely. It was nice being born into a huge family when I once was an only child, even if my parents rarely allowed me in their care for long.

I was nearly a year old when something truly shocking happened in the form of a black haired black eyed ball of energy. What was shocking was not that I was meeting my very first kid in this new life. It was the fact that this kid was very familiar.

"Say hello to your big brother Obito, Itachi-chan!" Ka-san spoke cheerfully, inviting the kid into my play pen. "He's going to be your playmate today."

I froze from where I was idly fiddling with a toy block of my game and turned slowly. It couldn't be.

Obito bounced into the room wearing blue and orange tracks, over sized orange goggles and a huge grin on his face, and I didn't notice his greeting, didn't notice ka-san's gentle goodbye. If I had frozen before, I now turned completely still, staring at him as if he were an oncoming car and I a foolish little deer caught in his glare.

I stared at him for the longest time, uncomprehending, searching frantically for something, anything to deny this terrible suspicion. And then the stillness ate at me like the void itself because there on his head was a hitai-ate, shaped with the swirling form of the leaf.

"Itachi-chan?" a worried voice shook me. I raised dazed eyes and stared at Obito, a single thought running through my mind. All the little things I had missed, all the things that should have been obvious to me: the way my parents never made a sound as they walked, the inverted pokemon like ball symbol on our clothes, the way they kept me inside the house at all times, almost as if they did not trust me being safe outside. It crashed down on me all at once: I was in the Naruto world. In a world where there were killers around every corner and some of those were mere children. And I was to be one of them. One of the best and the worst of them all. I was Uchiha Itachi.

"Itachi-chan talk to me!" Hands shook me and I snapped my eyes to a frantic Obito. The same Obito who would bring about the worst tragedies in this world, who was one of the main antagonists of the whole series and who was peering at me looking quite akin to a confused puppy, and I burst out laughing. This was too absurd. Simply unreal! If there was a tinge of hysteria my laughter, then had to be the only one to notice.

"Eh that wasn't funny Itachi-chan. You really scared me, staring off like that," Obito said, pouting. That confused puppy look lingered, then disappeared like it had never been, replaced by a blindingly bright smile, a finger reaching over to poke me on the forehead. "Mikoto-obasan is right! You are really cute!"

I stared at him, stunned. Then I scrunched my nose in annoyance. How dare he poke me like that! I reached up to retaliate with a sharp poke of my own right in his stomach, and he yelped, jumping up.

"Hey don't do that Itachi-chan! I'm really ticklish."

I gave him a smug look and turned to return to my blocks. For a supposed killer ninja, he really wasn't that scary. I stashed away my impending breakdown in a corner of my mind, one which was growing larger by the moment filled with all the things I just didn't want to think about and focused on the present.

"What are you building," Obito asked curiously, prodding at my blocks. I slapped his hand away and straightened them.

"Its a tower," I said. I was able to talk in clear sentences by the tender age of one. Was that normal? Obito didn't seem to think it odd that I could talk so I didn't care. It was just as well that I could make myself understood.

My little hands shook as I attempted to place a few blocks on the very top. I had to be careful if I didn't want it to fall.

"I can do that Itachi-chan." Obito reached over to pluck the blocks from my hand and placed them with a careless clatter on the very top. Too harsh a clatter really. I felt my eye twitch in irritation. The twitch got worse as my carefully built tower, one which I had been making for well over an hour slowly toppled over in a shower of blocks.

Obito jumped up, looking sheepish, hands held out towards me like a shield. "Eh sorry! I really didn't mean to!"

I gave him an evil look, one I had been practicing for a while, and he blinked at me. "Aw so adorable!" He reached forward and plucked me into the air, swinging me around as if I were a toy! And that's when I snapped.

I jumped at him and started to mercilessly poke him in all the ticklish spots I could find. This was revenge. Really, what was he thinking. I'd meant to have him squirming not cooing like some silly girl over cuteness. I was a boy and I was definitely not cute!

That is how the day ended, with ka-san finding us in a tangle on the floor, a 10 year old and a 1 year old child playfully tickling the hell out of each other, even if I was losing badly. I had fun watching ka-san give Obito a lecture on how it wasn't nice breaking the blocks of a child. From that moment, Obito became a regular at my house when ka-san was away and I concentrated very hard on the present, determined to ignore my great realization, of where exactly I had been born and of who it was that I had ended up replacing.

Of course, those times were too good to last.