...

If you had your gun

Would you shoot it at the sky? Why?

To see where your bullet would fall?

Oh, will you come down at all?

Bastille – Laura Palmer


I woke from a good dream straight into a nightmare, shoved into a dingy little orphanage practically before I'd even had time to cry over what I'd lost.

Five years in a blur of weird emotions, weird learning, weird people. Five years of loving and being loved by people who actually wanted the best for me. Five years of getting to just be a kid, be a kid in a way that felt better than whatever my mind told me it should've.

Five years of connection, safety, validation, pride, kindness. Of Mom's hugs, of Dad's winks when he let me get away with something, of cuddling up with warm bodies, waking up from bad dreams and always being able to stumble into another room and sleep better in my parents' arms. Dad's weird experimental cooking that always seemed to come out pretty good, Mom's reading me stories about heroes and villains and old fables before bedtime.

Five years of feeling alive, and the world ripped it all away, just like that.

Nobody even bothered to tell me how they died.


After that day, something broke inside of me, something fundamental and vital. My heart, I guess, or my mind. Both. The older I've gotten, the less reason I have to think there's any real difference between them.

I wasn't used to the kind of despair I felt. Loneliness was familiar, though I'd never had reason to feel it. Boredom, exhaustion, depression. But this... this wasn't anything I could process. Loss is a bitch, and you don't know the meaning of it until you've lost everything in the world and had no choice but to keep on living.

"It's too late" is the worst impotence in the world. It really is.

And what made it even worse was knowing they had pretty much definitely died for no special reason at all. Mom and Dad weren't especially powerful or talented; they were the type of low-end chuunin who hit their peak at the upper echelons of mediocrity. Useful tools for the village, but no one who'd be at the center of something.

Rank and talent tend to affect mission assignment. Whatever mission they died on could not, by definition, have been genuinely worth dying for, at least in my opinion. The person or people who killed them didn't do it for any special reason either, and I'd never even know that person's name or face. If I'd wanted anything like revenge... well, by the time I could possibly be old enough to search for it, the trail would have been cold for longer than I'd currently been alive, and their killers would probably have died on their own anyway.

It was my own deepest fear, projected onto the only people in the world who mattered. Unimportance. A life and death with no value or significance whatsoever.

... They had been valuable to me. At least nothing could change that.


I was in a dark place, mentally, for a really, really long time. I guess that's not exactly shocking. There was no extended family to take me in, so my stay at the orphanage wasn't going to just magically end. I didn't get to keep almost any of my belongings apart from some clothes and the coin Dad had given me a long time ago to cling to like an unlucky charm.

I'd lie awake at night on thin blankets laid over hard concrete, surrounded by other children of dead soldiers, staring at the ceiling, just... thinking of good memories. Thinking of bad memories. Weird memories. But all of them memories, all of them probably doomed to fade away someday.

Sometimes I found myself wondering if I'd be okay again when I grew up, if I'd 'get over it', if mourning would ever end. I hoped I wouldn't. Feeling better felt like it would be a betrayal.

One thing I took a little bit of comfort from was knowing everyone else here was broken, too. No one had a home anymore. No one was happy. And thank god for that. Thank god other people had to suffer too. If I'd been around people who weren't also at rock bottom I think I would have ended up hurting them for it.

... Well. I did end up hurting other kids there. But at least it was in mostly in self-defense. And defense of my ego.

I didn't want friends. Didn't need friends. I was smarter than them, I was wiser than them, my hurt was more real than theirs. The humans who mattered were gone; why the fuck would I try to replace them with anything else? And it's not like anyone was chomping at the bit for my companionship. I was moody, temperamental, confrontational, off-putting, had a weird accent, was resentful of anyone who wanted to like me.

And then, not long after I'd arrived, someday from the orphanage heard a rumor about me that sealed my fate for good. How did it even happen? We were cut loose most mornings and not allowed back inside until nightfall, no one really caring if we bothered to come back on time except to punish us for the sake of keeping up appearances, and some of us managed to connect with kids who had happy lives. That had to be it. Through sheer coincidence, someone who had known me - or at least, known of me - told another orphan that my family was from Kiri.

I still remember the first time it happened.


Everybody had come in for the night earlier than we were used to; it was winter now, and while it doesn't snow much or often in Konoha, it gets cold. Little kids are fantastic at dying in winter, so curfew was rolled back by a lot.

Unfortunately, that gave us all more time to interact, and nowhere at all to run.

I was sitting up against a wall, wishing I still had free access to books to read. The concrete was cold underneath me and cold against my back, coarse and unrelentingly ambivalent to my existence, just like everything else. I was barely aware of anyone else's presence until a girl who looked a year or two older than me was suddenly standing over me.

"I heard you're not from Konoha," she said, because of course that was going to happen, why had I ever thought it wouldn't?

"That's funny. I hadn't heard you were an idiot. Thanks for letting me know." I didn't even bother meeting her eyes. She was nothing to me. Nothing to anyone.

"You're from Kiri. You don't belong here." She said this like it would matter - like it would hurt me. Like I hadn't heard it before.

"No I'm not." God, I was tired. I didn't want to argue with a child. I mean, I was a child too, but I didn't feel like one, especially not after losing everything. Five year olds could totally be honorary adults by way of trauma, in my opinion, unless they weren't me.

"Do you wanna know something, you little piece of Kiri trash?" She sounded more heated, excitable in an angry way; she obviously felt like she was building to something.

"No, I don't. Get lost. Bother somebody else."

The girl leaned down to get a closer look. I finally bothered to look at her myself. Just another useless, cruel child. Nothing worth remembering. Hair, eyes, features... everything about her was boring.

"My parents were killed by Kiri ninja. Your people murdered my family, you foreign bitch."

... Time seemed to slow to a crawl.

A lot of thoughts lanced through my head at once, painful and jumbled. I didn't have anthing to do with that. This is aggression transference. I'm sorry for your loss, but it's seriously not my fault.

But it only took an instant for diplomatic urges to boil away, because I was boiling. How dare she? How fucking dare she blame me for that, when my parents died for this village, threw their lives away protecting a place that generated children like her? This fucking village, this fucking country, this fucking girl, all of it pulsing with barely-masked cruelty.

I grinned at her, as wide as I could manage.

"Good. I'm sure the world's better off without them."

Somebody nearby gasped, I think, or maybe I was just imagining it because I wanted to think I hit as hard as possible. The girl blinked. I guess she'd expected me to take it lying down.

Then she grabbed me by the shirt, probably meaning to haul me up toward her and threaten me, I didn't know, it didn't matter. All I knew was that fucking garbage was touching my clothes and I didn't want it there.

I sounded like an animal, apparently; I overheard staff talking about it later, and that's verbatim. I sounded like an animal as I snarled and leapt up, bowling her over onto the floor.

By the time they dragged me off her she had a broken nose and a missing tooth, and there was blood on my fists, blood on my face in drips and splotches bisected by blurry lines of tears, and I was laughing, shrill hate-wracked peals of sobbing laughter that echoed eerily off the orphanage walls.

I fell asleep that night with a smile on my face.


Managing my mood swings became almost impossible, and they got a lot worse. It's not that I had episodes more often or for longer, but the nature of them wasn't quite what it had been. I was used to experiencing a mostly positive side to mania; inconvenient but actually sort of fun. Depressive episodes had been the bad ones.

Now it was both, because I didn't have much in the way of happiness to get swept up in my energy. It was a dull, bitter force. It ached and screamed from inside my head, poison with a wordless voice. Nothing could satisfy it, and it was hellish. When it struck, I ran around in circles in the woods to wear myself out, hoping I'd crash. I swung sticks around like makeshift swords until my arms burned. I got in fight after fight, and at least half of them were probably avoidable.

I wasn't good at fighting, but I made up for it with pure viciousness. I didn't throw reasonable punches. I lashed out at throats, faces, crotches, anything to cause at much pain as possible. If I got the advantage I pressed it with no regard to my own safety. I kicked people when they were down. When I won, I often had to be restrained. When I lost, I didn't even mind. The pain was proof that I could still feel.

Bruises lined my limbs. Black eyes became constant companions. I went through my days with blood caked under my fingernails, and I didn't know or care whose it was.

How stupid. I'd planned on "meaning something," and of course it had come to this, an empty cycle of slow-fast-slow-fast, back and forth, in and out, always pointless, always boring, always hollow, waves smashing the shore under dull skies without a hint of beauty to them.

I couldn't fathom what the fuck had made me think I could do better than this. Something buried deep inside me knew I was great at wasting opportunities and second chances.

Waste was the only thing somebody like me was capable of.


The thing about being an orphan in a hidden village is that it erases nearly every possible path your future can take. Nobody's going to educate you well enough to hope for a civilian career as pretty much anything but a laborer. I heard almost certainly legitimate whispers that a lot of the older girls went on to be prostitutes. Some of the boys did, too.

But there was one obvious career choice. One that everybody had probably considered anyway. Propped up and exalted by the village as ideal, vital, essential, heroic. A choice that appealed to kids with nowhere to go and nothing to live for, full of anger and resentment, easily molded.

An awful lot of orphans try to become shinobi. Some of them even pull it off.

I couldn't help but think this was intentional. We were nearly prosperous as far as hidden villages went, and there could've been more decent institutions for handling the populace's uncomfortably large pool of children with dead families. But you can't exactly recruit lots of low-potential shinobi to fail their tests and help populate the Genin Corps as cannon fodder if you let your orphans have options, now can you?

By the time I was six, old enough to apply for the Academy - and that was something the government was happy to help with - I hated Konohagakure. This place devoured lives. It killed parents, killed relatives, ground up children and spat them out as soldiers so they could die too, all in the name of the village, in the name of glory. It groomed patriots.

It didn't matter whose hands were literally stained with Mom and Dad's blood. The guilt lay with our village for being a cog in the many-faced machine that was the shinobi lifestyle. They gave their lives for this fucking place and it wasn't even willing to be kind to their child in exchange.

To be totally honest with you, I really hated everything, but the core of that hatred was directed at two things: myself, and the entire world of shinobi.

Somewhere in the world, madmen I had never met were already toiling to bring an end to war, to create a world with no need of ninja whatsoever, and if the prices they were eager to pay for those ambitions hadn't been so high I might have considered trying to help.

But that's what a cycle of violence is. It's almost impossible to break without ruthlessness and well-intentioned evil. I knew that as instinctively as I knew anything. And I... I didn't want to be that. I was selfish, I was cold, I was angry, and if I became a ninja and I killed, I knew I'd end up making orphans too... but that was still better than the tidal waves of blood necessary to change the world.

I could accept small evils. I was prepared for them, or so I thought. So nothing had really changed about my future, had it? I'd still become a shinobi. I'd kill in the name of this village that I despised so deeply. I'd grow and train. And someday, I'd be important enough to make a difference. I would change the world, even if only in a small way. If I happened to become a madwoman along the way, so what? At least I wouldn't have to care anymore.

Either way, my life would have meaning. So I signed up for the academy the instant I was legally able.

That was how the monster inside of me sold Otsuka Namiko's soul.


Roughly one year after I was orphaned, the night before my first day at the Academy, I dreamed of the sea.

That wasn't unusual. Actually, it had become unusual not to. But normally I dreamed I was drowning, or that my parents were drowning. Sometimes I'd see faces under the water's surface before it swallowed me whole, all of them people I had never met. Their eyes would stay locked onto mine until I submerged, and then they'd be gone.

But this was different.

I was standing on the shoreline of a beach on a dark night blanketed with felt-black clouds. As I watched the tide rolling in and out, I realized I could see reflections of the tucked-away stars and moon on its surface. Overheard the clouds churned, writhed in strange and alien ways, flickering with thunder, but even as the storm's explosive booms shook the air, I couldn't see a single bolt of lightning reaching down anywhere.

For some reason that made me angry. A storm is supposed to rage, isn't it? That's what storms are for. They lash at the ground, blind and burn, let their anger flow down into the world below, uncontrollable and mighty. It was wrong for that hateful golden light to just - stay there in the clouds, penned in by invisible forces, boiling with righteous fury that saw no release.

I screamed at the sky, taunted it as if it could hear me, waited for the lightning to strike and turn me into charcoal, but it didn't happen.

Eventually I gave up, looking back to the ocean, which I suddenly realized was much too calm for a storm like this. It seemed to call out to me, hypnotize me with the glitter and glow of those falsely reflected heavenly bodies.

As I walked into the sea, knowing I would drown, not caring at all anymore, I began to disappear. Instead of being submerged, my body just slowly melted into the waves, and by the time I was waist-deep I had no legs to walk with. I let the tide carry me away.

Only once the water claimed my mouth and ears and eyes did I realize that I wasn't gone at all. I wasn't being erased or dispersed by the sea. I was becoming it. I moved along the currents according to my own will, and the waves moved at my command.

I was powerful. I was omnipresent. And I felt... almost content.

When I woke up, I was actually surprised that I was myself again. Surprised, and a little bit disappointed.


The school looked nice enough. Not too imposing; somewhat inviting, even. It definitely didn't look like a factory for child soldiers. I wondered how many of the teachers there actually thought what they were doing was a good thing. I hoped it was none, that they were just terrible people, but that was unrealistically optimistic.

I sat through their inspiring little opening ceremony, watched the Third as he droned his way through a stupid rehearsed speech about togetherness and friendship and that precious Will of Fire bullshit. What a nice sentiment. How proactive in promoting togetherness and unity and loyalty to the cause above all else.

After that, the big group of stupid, doomed kids, myself included, were split up into several classes. I stood there in a sea of bodies and I felt... distant, weird, dissociative. There was so much happening, so many voices, so much movement, and nowhere to go. Packed like sardines, no direction meaning anything, the air heavy and oppressive for apparently me and no one else. The day felt impossibly humid. Can someone choke on other people?

I sank my teeth into my lip until I could taste copper, shut my eyes, and waited for my name to be called. Some names I knew might have been in my class, and they might not have; I only had the energy to listen for one set of syllables.

"... Otsuka Namiko," a teacher finally called out, and I felt a flare of static beneath my skin. I shuffled my way into the cluster of students I was going to need to start learning to hate, and then something stopped me. There was something familiar, here. No, someone familiar.

My teacher. That's what it was. I knew this guy, knew his face, knew the scar across his nose. And I knew his name, too. Umino Iruka. A well-intentioned person, all things considered. Important mostly because he played a role in the lives of certain others who were pivotal in wars yet to come.

It was the first time I had recognized an impossible stranger in person before seeing or hearing of them somewhere else.

That didn't bode well for the world's future.


Here I was, at ninja school. It all felt so anti-climactic, but then, didn't everything? Why was I surprised? While my class filed in, I took a deep breath, tried to center myself, and then booked it across the classroom to claim a corner seat all the way in the back.

It took a while for Iruka to get things sorted out, hand out materials and schedules and all that. I knew I needed to be paying more attention, but some part of my mind was still cataloguing the bits of information that seemed relevant to me, dropping them into the bottomless monochrome well of my memory, so whatever. I didn't have the best memory, honestly, but it was good enough. It had been better when I felt motivated to care.

No one took the empty seat next to me. I wondered what I looked like to the other students, this tense little ball of seething nihilism, yellow eyes glaring at everything and nothing from beneath badly cared for bluish-black hair. That was another thing I felt at least a little stupid about, although I wasn't the only student who stood out. Even six years into my life I wasn't used to looking like this. I never shook the feeling that I hadn't been meant to have this face. That I should've had tamer hair, different eyes.

Years before, I had thought about ways to keep from looking edgy. I probably had ideas that I'd already thrown away and forgotten. Now, though, all I could think was fuck it. I was an edgy little shit. Why not just let it show?

Time went by fast; we were all six on our first day, and even the Academy had to take that into account. Lunch break hit. In a better time I'd assumed I would be going to school with some of Dad's 'bento' experiments on me. A surprise in every box. Talk about naivete; now I was just glad to have limited access to anything better than orphanage food.

I ate alone, sitting far away from the other students, and I grudgingly accepted that I felt a little better with my stomach full. I finished fast enough to leave myself plenty of time to stare down at the grass, and then... I did something weird.

Quietly, gracelessly, I sang a song I didn't recognize in a language I had never spoken and hardly even thought in anymore. It was reassuring and frightening at the same time; I couldn't help but think I was asserting some alien part of myself that might have been better repressed, but it felt... good. It felt nostalgic.

After a minute or so, I might have started to sing a little bit louder. It was hard to say for sure.

I knew this song by title. I didn't know who 'Laura Palmer' was; it didn't sound like any name I'd heard in my life, but I was confident that it was. It was a woman's name. There were a lot of impossible songs hidden away in my head, and I could put titles to most of them, too. They had gotten stuck in my head a lot when I was very small, but as the years went on, I buried them out of a vague sense of self-preservation.

"... eh, hello?"

Damn, I was stalling out a little, what came next? More of the chorus? I still hadn't gotten to my favorite part of the song. Somehow I really, really wanted to. The lyrics made me feel... well, something other than dull misery, and anything was better than that.

"Can you... hear me? Hello? Nee-chan?"

I snapped my head up so hard I wondered if I'd just given myself whiplash. Huh, a blonde kid. Weird, I didn't see very many blondes around here. Welp. It was probably time to find out what would happen if I attacked another student during lunch.

Wait. That was – oh shit, could that actually be – it had taken me a second to register, because he just looked so different when he was real instead of fuzzy in my mind, not to mention he was so much younger than I had pictured him. This was an Important Person, a keystone to the future.

... But then again, why should I even care? I barely knew why I was here now anyway. My dedication to my vague ambitions waxed and waned all the time. If anything, seeing someone who I knew for a fact wasn't meaningless was aggravating.

Well... I was pretty sure he was a nice person. I'd at least... I'd at least try not to maul the boy who didn't know how not to dream.

"What do you want?"

He winced, looked away for a few seconds, and I almost felt guilty.

"Can I sit and eat with you?"

I blinked.

"... Why would you want to do that?"

Somehow that made him bolder, if not by much. Maybe he was just stoked that I didn't reject him in a single sentence. Even if he probably could've trashed me, that wouldn't have stopped me from fighting, but... ugh, no, I could get through one conversation without it ending in violence, right?

The boy I already "knew" gave me a tired, nervous little smile.

"You just looked really lonely," he said, and something somewhere deep inside of me shifted, the water pressure weakening just a little bit around a heart sunken painfully deep below an icy, dead sea.

I swallowed. He smiled just a little bit wider, and suddenly it hit me: I'd fucked up so badly that he had seen me and felt sorry for me. The village's ultimate outcast thought I came off as pathetic. I laughed. I just couldn't help it. I covered my mouth with my hand and giggled like someone who was one straw away from going insane, which was probably exactly what I was.

"Sorry," I said, and the word felt weirdly thick on my tongue. It might have been a very long time since I'd had a reason to say it. "Yeah, I guess."

His awkward smile turned into a grin. Just looking at it hurt. He sat down with his own little bento, fidgeting like he had no idea what to do next. I knew I sure as hell didn't have a clue.

"My name's Naruto," he said, as if I didn't already know, and shot a quick glance my way. I wondered if he was waiting for me to recognize the name and tell him to get away from me, but I had nothing to say. Not yet. "Uzumaki Naruto."

"... Otsuka Namiko," I mumbled, and he laughed, which earned him a glare that was... well, a lot less vicious than my usual version. "What's so funny?"

"Hehe, sorry. It's just, Naruto and Namiko, y'know?"

I snorted. There was a little bit of a ring to it. That was worth a vaguely friendly bonus shrug. You better appreciate that, kid,I thought, and abruptly felt like absolute garbage for being cynical and snarky about another six year old orphan's need for affection. Wow. Had I really... changed that much? I had probably always had some temper, for sure, and I had felt like cynicism was an old friend before I could even walk, but...

Somewhere in the last year, I had completely lost track of the person I was, and I wasn't sure whether I wanted to try to find her again, build another whole new me, or tell him to fuck off and go back to hating everything.

"I heard you singing," he said, scratching his head. "It was pretty cool. I couldn't really understand the words, though."

Oh god, of course he had. That was just my luck. My cheeks were on fire. No, that was too mild. My cheeks were volcanic. I was probably an awful singer, especially in a language I never spoke out lout, with a little girl's underused throat. Maybe I should've attacked him after all.

You just looked really lonely, he had said, and he'd know, wouldn't he? He'd know better than I did, as miserable as I was letting myself be.

"I'm awful at it, but... thanks?"

"Nuh-uh! You sing totally weird, but I still like it, Nami-chan!"

The crushing weight of the water receded partway with another weird slosh inside my chest, then drained away even further as the weight of that nickname sank in, and I could almost hear myself finally, finally break through the surface and suck in air.

... I probably should have tried to get rid of him. I didn't. No, I couldn't. At some point in my life I'd wanted to be a good person, and even if I had definitely given up on that, there were some people who just did not deserve to deal with me when I was being an asshole. I could be magnanimous just this one time.

It had nothing to do with how lonely and starved for any positive interaction I was, naturally. Not a chance. That would be ridiculous.

"So, um, how come you're sitting by yourself and stuff?" He sounded like he honestly couldn't guess at it. Maybe he couldn't. To him, the whole world must have seemed less alone than he was. Why would someone who wasn't him ever be ostracized or choose to avoid people?

"Because I hate everyone." Might as well be honest. I couldn't see any point in pretending to be nicer than I was. "I'd rather be alone forever than have anything to do with them."

Naruto stared. That must have been so far beyond alien to him, especially now, when he hadn't grown to anywhere near the admittedly low level of social awareness that he was going to have later in his life.

God, what a weird thought. Why did I know that? What... what was I? Was this what it felt like to be a prophet or a seer or something? It was so fucked up to feel like I halfway knew someone I had only just met. To have already seen truly horrible things happen to him, even.

"... Why do you hate everybody?" He was still just - staring, wide-eyed, like a foot away from my face. I turned away, examined some kids playing aroung in the distance, plucked a blade of grass from the ground and started methodically shredding it.

"They're all stupid. They have stupid opinions and stupid dreams and - and parents who pack them lunches, and - ugh. I don't know. I guess I'm just that kind of person." That was a lot more than I'd meant to say, but... now that I was talking to a real actual human being, things that I'd never expressed before obviously wanted an outlet.

"Don't you have parents?" Come on, really? Read the room. Why would I resent other people for having parents if I had ones of my fucking own? Other children were so dumb.

"No. They died. Do you?" He actually flinched at that, and I felt a little stab of remorse. That was uncalled for when I already knew the answer. He looked so downtrodden, suddenly, like a lightbulb somewhere in him was dimming.

I didn't like that. I was used to laughing when other people were upset, because I wanted them to be and they deserved it. This was different. It reminded me a little bit of seeing Mom or Dad be sad about something. It hurt me just to be close to it.

"... Nah. So... if you hate everybody, does that mean you hate me too?" How could he sound so worried about that? Even if he was friendless, why would he give a shit about someone he didn't even know?

For whatever stupid reason, that worry cut like a knife. Blame it on empathy or something. Fuck empathy, really. It never leads to anything good.

"I guess not," I admitted, sighing and looking up at the sky because the sky didn't have humans in it. "You... have your own problems, obviously. So you get a chance." After a moment's thought, practically feeling his relief without even seeing him, I added, "One chance."

There was no way that actually did anything to dampen his enthusiasm, but I had to say it anyway, give myself options for an out later. Like, even if this was the mysterious phenomenon of friendship, I wasn't sure I wanted it. What if I got attached? Everything I clung to was eventually stolen from me, not to mention someday the shit would hit the fan with this kid at the center of a lot of it, and I did not intend to get killed for knowing important people before I had a chance to become an important person.

I kind of expected him to literally jump for joy, or yell something embarrassing, but he didn't. That reflexive excitable persona clearly hadn't developed yet. The seeds of it were there, but it hadn't fully bloomed, or whatever. Plant metaphors, etcetera.

"I won't mess it up," he said, surprisingly calmly. I half-expected to hear 'believe it' afterward, but no, that schtick wasn't around yet either. Thank god for that.

"Why do you want to be friends with somebody like me? Don't you have anything better to do?" Even if I knew the answer to that question, it would be better to hear it from him. I figured I should start learning more tricks to hiding my weird seer-like knowledge early in life. That would not be a good thing to screw up later.

"Not really. Nobody ever wants to play with me or talk to me." It stung to hear it from his own mouth, and I finally looked back at him. He had a weird, sad smile on his face that no six-year-old should be capable of, not in any fair universe.

"How come?" He couldn't know the answer to that yet, but I wasn't supposed to know the answer either. I'd have to stop prying soon, but right then it was helpful.

"Who knows? It's gotta be somethin', because sometimes people's moms and dads look at me all weird too." That was surprisingly insightful. Then again, he must have seen a lot of disapproving faces already.

It... also hit a little closer to home than I expected. I already knew how it felt for someone to hate me because their parents told them to.

"... People's parents have said bad things about me, too," I mumbled. I'm not sure if I meant to say it; it just kind of fell out of my mouth.

"What? Really? Why?" He scooted closer to me out of childish interest and I wriggled farther away. I was a big fan of not having anybody in my personal space.

I opened my mouth... and then I closed it again, because... sure, he was six years old, but he loved this village. Naruto was going to become an idealist, the kind of person who'd probably want to reform awful things if he ever actually noticed them, but right now he wasn't. He was a little boy clinging to one of the only things he was able to belong in even slightly.

If this fucking kid judged me for my blood, I'd... I didn't even know what I'd be, but it would be really, really bad.

"... they think I'm from Kiri. And I'm - I'm not! I'm... my grandparents were, I guess. But even my Mom and Dad were born here. It's stupid, right? Isn't that stupid?" Please say yes. Please, please don't bail on me over this. I wouldn't be able to take it, not after I let myself be a little bit vulnerable for the first time in a year.

"That's TOTALLY stupid!" I flinched away as he half-yelled it, because wow, okay, never mind, this was definitely Uzumaki Naruto, but also... also it felt good. "Who cares where some old people came from? You live here, so you're not from somewhere else."

He said it like it was so obvious. And maybe it was. I hadn't thought this through, had I? Sure, he loved Konoha, but he didn't have anybody around to teach him that pride in his village and his country meant he was supposed to despise the other ones.

There had never been a chance of him rejecting me, had there?

"... thanks," I said quietly, trying not to smiling and probably failing at it. It felt - it felt like when Mom had told me we belonged here, kind of. Maybe Naruto wasn't important to me personally, but he was a person of importance, so... I guess it made sense for it to mean something if he didn't think I was a traitor or whatever. "I - I don't... I don't want to not be from my own home."

"Well, you're not," Naruto said. "'Cause that would be dumb."

"Yeah, I guess it would."

I was about to try to think of something else to say, but the conversation was cut short by the school bell ringing. He'd only been talking to me for a little while, so I must have lost a lot more time to bitter thoughts and fake songs than I realized.

"C'mon, let's go!" He sounded so genuinely happy to be here, leaping to his feet instantly. It honestly made me jealous.

He stretched out his hand. I stared at him, completely lost, and then suddenly I remembered what that simple gesture meant. It had been so long since anyone had offered me a hand that it was hard to parse the intent.

I took it, hauling myself to my feet, and he sprinted off toward the classroom without actually letting go, pulling me along in his wake.

... We had just become friends, hadn't we? That's what this was. My first-ever friend was a future disaster magnet with an unimaginably powerful demon sealed in his body.

God, I was totally fucked.


The rest of the school day was mostly physical education, because of course it was. It would be bizarre for a shinobi academy to have a school day where the students weren't pushed to their limits. There was a lot of ground to cover in terms of strength, endurance, reflexes, and so on.

And damn did we ever start covering it. Running laps - thank god I already ran all the time on my own - running through obstacles, playing some intense dodgeball knock-off, working out, lots of other shit. That's the word, really. It was a lot. I thought of myself as somebody who had done a pretty respectable amount of physical activity, and that probably wasn't entirely wrong, but this was still rough as hell.

It made sense. Obviously the minimum required from a tiny ninja-in-training would be more than anybody expected of even the toughest civilian of the same age. It was important, even.

That didn't help me keep up. I was a lot of things, but I wasn't exactly strong. Being kind of book smart and really mean-spirited in a fight was all I had going for me. A depressing amount of students left me in the dust in almost every way while I struggled for air and tried to ignore every goddamned muscle in my body screaming at me to stop murdering myself.

It would've at least been a decent time to go manic, so naturally I didn't. That would probably happen as soon as I went back home to the orphanage and tried to sleep.

... Actually, considering what my "home" was, maybe I didn't mind being worked into an early grave. If Iruka-sensei asked me to eat bugs and dirt in exchange for not going back for more time I probably would've done it without hesitation and thanked him for the opportunity.

Throughout all of this, Naruto never once seemed to actually get tired, or at least not for more than a few seconds. I already knew he had a near-limitless amount of energy, but it still served as a pretty harsh contrast to myself; I wasn't at the bottom of the class by any means, but if everybody actually got graded on their performance out here I'd probably be just a little bit below the middle. The middle for girls, specifically. If you included the fucking boys, then I'm sure I'd come out of it looking even worse.

I'd never thought about how annoying it would be to not automatically be good at something related to education. None of this was shit I could coast through on using my weird brain, and that was really the only thing I'd ever had going for me.


Eventually we were released into the wild, where most of the students got swept up by happy parents and whisked away back to their happy homes, like the lucky fucking goblins they were. There were a few stragglers, but those ran off in various directions pretty quick; I guess nobody from mediocre circumstances wanted to see kids who had living and loving relatives. I sure didn't.

Almost before I knew it, the only people left loitering in front of the school were Naruto and I.

... Oh, god. I really didn't want to go home, did I? I felt like if I went home, all the decent things that had happened today would just evaporate, that I'd suddenly wake up and find out it was just a dream and my first day at the academy still hadn't happened, and then the real thing would be way shittier.

I didn't want to go somewhere I wouldn't be able to talk to a person who didn't hate and/or fear me.

This must have been why people liked the whole friendship thing.

Shit. Shit. I didn't want to be dependent on other people for happiness again. Other people existed to abandon and betray. I couldn't explain how I knew that so clearly; it wasn't just about Mom and Dad, because betrayal was never part of my life. But I could feel it just the same. People die. People walk away. People turn on you. People hate you. People hurt you. That's the way of the world.

I didn't want to leave. I didn't want to leave. I didn't want anyone to leave. I had a taste of something that wasn't ash and I suddenly felt like I'd die if it disappeared for a single second.

Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck -

"Well... see you tomorrow, Nami-chan!" Naruto grinned as he said it, too, and I could see in his eyes that he was so hopeful. As if there was even the slightest chance that I wouldn't want to talk to another human being again, that I'd decide 'nope, screw that, I love being utterly alone and miserable.' Yeah, right. I wasn't in a place to lie to myself about that, not right then.

"Yeah. Definitely." I tried to keep any tremors out of my voice. Tried not to cry. How dumb was that, wanting to cry over spending half a day in the general vicinity of someone who was kind of like a friend? "S-see you tomorrow."

He started to turn away, then stopped himself.

"Hey, um... sorry for being dumb, but are we friends now?"

"Yes, you fucking idiot," I blurted out before I had a chance to even think about it. Whoops. I hadn't really meant to curse around anybody. That kind of behavior was generally frowned on coming from six year old girls.

Naruto didn't care. Instead, he did something I had completely forgotten people could do.

He hugged me.

Then he left.


Somehow I managed to walk halfway back to the orphanage before I cracked. Then I hid in a bush and cried like the wreck I was.

I'm not even sure which thing I was crying about. Everything at once, probably. Happiness and sadness, hope and fear, loneliness and companionship, loss and gain. It was so much more than I could handle.

So I cried and cried until I was sick to my stomach from it and the sun was beginning to set, stretching out shadows, making silhouettes of trees.

That night, curled up under a thin, ragged blanket, I didn't dream about the ocean at all. I dreamed about my parents. Not even them drowning, it wasn't a nightmare. Just... about them. It wasn't anything specific. Maybe it was a random memory, from long, long ago, and maybe it wasn't. The details weren't important.

What was important was the feelings it contained. Safety. Happiness. Importance. Something adjacent to wholeness.

I woke up with tears in my eyes and Dad's coin clutched in my fist.