Anyone with a functional pair of eyes and a more than two brain cells to knock together can tell that Uzumaki Natsuki is a strange baby. Unlike her brother who relishes physical contact and cries when he doesn't get his fill, she is a silent child who spends her time absently gazing at the room around her. She hasn't yet gotten to the point where her eyes can properly see things yet the nurses and even a few doctors are stunned when she seems to display an uncanny awareness of the people around her. Her eyes vaguely follow them around the room while they work and remain on them up until they leave.

[To Natsuki the world is a blur of colour. She can't tell what her nurses look like but she can tell each of them apart by their distinct hues whenever they come nearer to feed the other children or to make note of something on the walls around them.]

She abhors all her nurses save one and even then she seems to give in to her feeding and changing times with a heavy reluctance that has no place in a baby. It unnerves the nurse how well Natsuki seems to be able to recognize her even though a newborn really shouldn't be able to and any attempts at handing the picky child off to another caretaker is met with stubborn refusal to eat or even be handled. Once she manages to go an entire day without eating after which the nurse never hands her off to anyone else again.

[Natsuki considers this a victory. She only wants this nurse to touch her because she has a similar sort of warmth to the gold she was first introduced to when brought into this world and, unlike the other nurses, this one isn't tinged with darkness whenever she comes close. She'll keep this one until she's no longer needed.]

She raises unholy hell in the nursery if she's separated from her brother for too long. So much so that the nurses eventually end up leaving the twins together at all times just to keep her quiet.

[She might not even know his name yet – her stupid ears are too sensitive and everything sounds like gibberish to her anyway – but she knows what her brother feelslike and she wants him close at all times. He's the only thing familiar even though he's not even all that familiar at all. After all, the last time around she never had any siblings.]

She's left mostly on her own. They both are. Most people are too unsettled by the girl to stay in the room with either child for long.

Their first few months are lonely but Natsuki spends most of the time in her head, trying to make sense of what little she knows and trying to organize the few fragments of memories she can remember, and the time goes by.

-\|/-

At 6 months Natsuki learns her brother's name.

Naruto.

At first she thinks it's a joke but the name keeps being repeated and repeated and repeated until she can no longer deny the fact that her new baby brother is somehow Naruto Uzumaki.

[She learns, also, that her name is Natsuki but that seems less important when faced with the fact that she's somehow been reborn into a fucking manga series. She'd like off this ship now. Like right now.]

She cries a lot during this time. Largely out of frustration and pure 'why the fuck did this have to happen to me?'. She gets over it eventually. Well, not really but she learns that there's not much else she can do but roll over and accept it when she's born into another world and forced to roll with it.

[She'd like to say now that the universe owes her so much karma for putting her in this situation while fully cognizant. She would have much rather liked to be an ignorant little baby like her brother instead of a paranoid twenty something year old panicking about a future involving destroyed villages and mercenaries hunting down her only other living family member.]

She's only six month old but Natsuki knows she's fucked.

The one thing keeping her gripped to reality is the fact that now she has something to base her odd sixth sense on. Since her birth, Natsuki has seen the world in colour. Now that she knows exactly where she is [even if she's not too sure about the why] she realizes that the 'colour' she's so used to sensing must be chakra.

Once she realizes this, she does her best to work on the sense that will no doubt become invaluable to her in the future.

It exhausts her, and Natsuki spends even more time asleep now than she did before, but it's worth it when she realizes she can sense her brother from two rooms away whenever they're separated for their check-ups.

She slates this as her first victory and continues to work while slowly beginning to plot.

-\|/-

At the age of 9 months Natsuki thinks it's high time for her to take her first steps.

The supervising nurse doesn't believe her eyes at first when Natsuki scoots away from her brother to deliberate her feet intensely for a moment before huffing loudly and setting her palms on the ground. With a grunt she pushes up with both her feet and arms and is erect almost immediately.

The nurse waits with baited breath, watching as Natsuki sways in place for a moment or two before settling. A few feet away, her brother stops chewing on his toes and stares at his sister in awe. He's been crawling around a lot faster lately but seems nowhere near inclined to attempt the same feat of standing that his sister seems so determined to master.

For her part, Natsuki is simply trying her best not to fall over. She's so used to being in full control of her body that these last few months spent in a body less capable of supporting its own weight than a fucking worm is driving her crazy. She sets her eyes forward on her crib a few feet away and takes a few tentative steps.

This may be her first time walking but she's been practicing in bed. Slowly flexing the necessary muscles and training them in the necessary movements so that when she's finally vertical they'll know what to do.

She makes it halfway to the crib before her legs, unused to carrying her weight, give out on her and she lands flat on her butt. Pleased that she even managed to make it that far, she scoots back to her brother and decides that practice makes perfect and soon she'll be right where she needs to be.

The supervising nurse simply gapes while the two babies play and pinches herself to make sure she's not under a genjutsu of some sort.

She's not.

She shuts her jaw with a click and resolves to watch the twins more closely from now on.

-\|/-

The rate at which the twins develop is startling. Natsuki learns to walk, run and climb months before Naruto can even stand on shaky legs.

She's potty trained, well co-ordinated and her eyes are sharp as a tack. It's hard to slip things by her without her raising some sort of fuss. She also expresses a decided interest in books a lot earlier than her brother. Often times, if she wasn't playing with Naruto, Natsuki could be found with a book in hand glaring at the characters as though willing them to make sense.

Naruto on the other hand, while not progressing anywhere near as fast as his sister, is still a bit ahead of other babies at his age. He reaches his physical milestones a while after his sister however he has her beat in the talking department. Naruto makes full use of his newly developing vocabulary while Natsuki struggles with pronounciation and recognizing hiragana and kanji. More often than not Natsuki simply chooses to remain silent. Naruto does more than enough talking for both of them anyway.

[Natsuki is struggling to reconcile having to learn an entirely new language while still attempting to maintain her grasp on English and Spanish. She absolutely refuses to let either one of the languages die but, as a result, the varying rules of grammar and syntax which had been pounded into her head previously ends up confusing her as she tries to learn Japanese.]

When the twins turn two they're moved into an orphanage. It's smaller and more efficiently run than most but it's still an orphanage and there's an abundance of children who poke and pry at them when they first arrive.

Naruto thrives under the initial attention whereas his sister retreats. He runs around and mingles while she stays inside, laboring through book after book while she forces herself to learn an entirely new language.

[But really though. Fuck Kanji.]

She forces herself to be better than she needs to be, not because she seeks praise, but because she knows this is literally the only time she will have head start she will have over the rest of her generation. Aside from geniuses like Shikamaru or prodigies like Sasuke or even powerhouses like Naruto and Kiba, Natsuki knows she doesn't have much to offer.

Naruto is a junchuuriki and, in the previous Story [Capital 'S' because it deserved it] managed to get by on pure dumb luck and moxy for his early years but Natsuki knows she's not bringing much to the table. Aside from being his twin and probably having a glowing target on her back for simply being alive, she knows she doesn't have much to work with. Maybe she'll win the genetic lottery and some of Kushina and Minato's bad assery will be passed on to her but for now her sole advantage is the fact that she was born with foreknowledge of events to come and she plans on milking that cow for everything its worth.

She's not sure how she feels about the others involved in the Story, but Naruto is her brother and her immediate concern and she'd very much like it if he had an easier life than he did previously. It's not that she doesn't care about the others (there were quite a few members of Rookie 9 that she'd liked even more than Naruto even) but she simply doesn't have the time or energy to waste worrying about them. She reasons if this world wanted a different Story for anyone else then she would have been born as their twin but she's not. She's Naruto's and Naruto is her's which means he is her priority first and foremost.

Natsuki is still unsure as to how she feels about the idea of being a ninja but she knows that she has little other options by way of careers if she truly wants to effect change in Naruto's future. Surprisingly enough she's not worried about the fact that she's going to have to get her hands dirty. She was already fairly lacking in solid morals in her previous life and it seems to have transitioned to this one as well. She'll do what she has to keep her brother safe. If she manages to keep it legal then that's all fine and good, if not, well no harm no foul. She just can't get caught.

She whispers that mantra to herself at night, just before they fall asleep. 'Don't get caught, don't get caught, don't get caught.'

She knows she's already garnered a lot of attention with her accelerated learning curve but that can't be helped. She needs to learn things in order to be able to take control of the world around her. It's a necessary evil that, during the process, she's somehow been given the tentative label of 'genius'.

She's only three. She doesn't need that sort of pressure on her.

She's learned as much as she needs to for now at least. There are no life changing events to avoid in Naruto's formative years so she thinks she can relax a little for now. The storm is coming but all she can do for now is hunker down and wait. The rest of her preparations can be done quietly but will have to wait.


*Background exposition exposits*

As always. I'm always open to suggestions. Or just say if you liked it.

-Rayne