The continuation of the first chapter, and the real moment that solidified this spin-off becoming its own story. THANK OS. — Vy


I didn't return to Nagareboshi Cafe for a while after that. I focused on training. I did my missions. I pushed myself, I tried to find as many applications for Wind Release as I could. And with a whole slew of fantasy series to pull from, I made a pretty good substitute for an airbender.

I also learned who had been watching me and what my mysterious tests over the previous months were for: ANBU. Of course, I wasn't even eight yet. So they just watched me. And if I wanted to join them, I needed to impress them.

But, until then, I went on missions with my team and Akemi-sensei. There was a Chunin Exam six months after our graduation, and while it was certainly unusual for a genin team to be entered into one that close to their graduation, well, it wasn't unheard of. And also? We were ready.

And with tensions rising between the nations, well, Konoha wanted to appear strong. So, they allowed us. Genin, fresh out of the academy, willing and able to pass the chunin exam.

My team demolished the tests. I think I unnerved some of the people, going in knowing the tricks for the written exam. I didn't get nervous. I didn't show any confusion. Just calm, quiet, patience as I waited for my team members to do the work.

I also somehow got super lucky by being placed right next to one of the plants. Guess the universe decided it was already going to be a cake walk so they just gave up.

The big free for all battle survival test in the field thing, we crushed that too. It was significantly harder than going in already knowing the trick for the written test, but well, this was about skills we already had.

It was funny, I thought, as I sat watch in another village. I knew basically nothing about them, only what I had been taught in the academy. That was at least a little interesting for me. The maladaptive parts of my brain, the ones that made me hyper aware of my surroundings, made me react to any threat before I even was consciously aware of it, they made me excel.

PTSD was a survival mechanism after all. And I was right back in the environment it had rewritten my brain to survive.

Well, at least I didn't have to worry about developing it in the field. And I'd already had two decades worth of experience coping with it, on top of learning in the ninja world. And hey, even though I'd had plenty of near death experiences in my past life, I'd actually died once, so that's one point of experience I'm not sure too many other ninja had.

But despite my thoughts and morbid humor, I came out of the experience with a nice green flak jacket. Its weight was wonderful. Super great for pressure stimming. And making my chest flat.

I may have spent more time than anyone who wasn't some middle school protagonist staring at myself in the mirror after that. Brown hair cut short and messy, brown eyes, glasses, and the standard shinobi uniform. I looked perfectly androgynous.

And then, I got stuck with paperwork. Which was perfectly fine with me. As Chunin Otoha Kuroki, I worked in the administrative building filling out forms, filing paperwork, generally navigating the maze of bureaucracy. I think they started liking me. I was always happy to do their paperwork. (Reading all those things, I learned a lot. A lot of things they probably shouldn't have let me access, but when you volunteer to do someone's paperwork they've put off for a month? Well, let's just say sometimes clearance levels don't matter.)

But with a war brewing, Konoha wouldn't let one of their brightest minds squalor away helping make sure all the triplicate forms were actually filled out in triplicate. No.

They put me to work. I went into the field. They sent shinobi — chunin — to the borders as hostilities ramped up. I knew these skirmishes and fights would eventually result in the Third Shinobi War and I tried to get as much information as I could back to Konoha in hopes maybe someone somewhere who had died in a version I wasn't there could live.

Somehow I just ended up with a reputation for knowing things. For learning things. I had an entire elaborate system for writing my notes in a code nobody could crack. (Did I mention English isn't even a language in Naruto Land?) I picked up new skills and worked on creating my own.

After all, I had plenty of things in fiction to inspire me. They'd all required some kind of magic, and well, now that I had ninja-magic-bullshit powers, I could take a stab at them.

Wind Release? As I said, I made a pretty good impression of an airbender. While I couldn't technically fly, I could definitely glide with style. At least once I recreated Aang's glider. With metal reinforcements. Temari and her fans in canon had proved the theory worked in this world. Even if she probably wouldn't be born for another few years.

It took a bit to figure out how to make it work, and the design definitely needed more work. Not being able to use my hands was kind of a big drawback. (I attempted figuring out sealless jutsu but some things you just can't work around.) But I did have one thing they probably didn't: the knowledge of how to make things fly. I'd spent a quarter of a century in a world that had long since mastered airplanes and was working on space travel. And, unlike most people, was a nerd and knew seemingly useless things, like how to make a glider.

Turns out that knowledge wasn't actually useless.

I could fly. Go me!

I pushed my wind release skills as far as I could, and both my mother and my fans helped tremendously in it. I could shield myself with wind from oncoming projectiles. I could clear smoke and fog. I could manipulate the air currents around me. And I could sharpen the tip of a senbon enough I could send it through the trunk of a tree and out the other side. Which was great, because as well as allowing me to play a game of pickup sticks, I could fit a whole lot more of them in a weapons pouch than kunai.

And that was all before war officially broke out.

When it did?

Being able to fly wasn't enough. So I picked up fuinjutsu. I made exploding tags. I made bombs. I sealed them inside scrolled and released dozens and hundreds at a time. I did my best impersonation of a cactuar with 1000 needles. I moved the ninja world into modern warfare and conducted aerial bombing (ok not really, they needed more than just a single person for that). At least the enemy didn't have anti-aircraft missiles.

I technically created a mini bag-of-holding. Well, scroll of holding. Technically it just let me store shit in seals and wasn't an endless alternate dimension but well, I still called it that. Oh? Also? They don't rip a hole in the fabric of the universe if you stick em inside each other. I had a certain Keisuke Gekkō to thank for the inspiration to create one.

But it also allowed me to do things like pick up corpses and transport them back to ANBU R&D for study. Often a lot of corpses my team and I had been sent to kill. Enemies who posed a greater threat because they possessed unique abilities.

That got me recruited into ANBU after years of being watched, which was how the owl (that's me!) ran into the snake.

That's right. I landed my ass in Orochimaru's good graces. He liked me. Eeeeee yelch.

And, to make things worse, I ended up working with him.

Otoha Kuroki, airbender impersonator, organ donor courier, Orochimaru's lab assistant.

Fortunately, Orochimaru liked me for my mind, not my body. So I was safe. Relatively. Mostly. Not really. It was fucking Orochimaru. Nobody who was anywhere near him was safe.

Well, at least the position allowed me to do one thing I knew needed to be done: bring Orochimaru down.

I knew how he worked. I knew not to trust him. I knew not to be blinded by the progress he was making and everything.

And I knew to ensure nothing happened to me, I needed to become Otoha Kuroki again. I needed to become someone who would be missed if they went missing. So, I took extra shifts in the administration building, I studied while I manned the counter at my parents' bookstore.

I braved the one thing I had avoided, inserting myself into the lives my friends from another life had established here, without me. And I wasn't even doing it because they were once my friends. It was because of the people she knew in this life.

Keisuke Gekkō. Student of Minato Namikaze. Soon to be host to Isobu if everything went as it did in the fanfiction we had written so many years ago.

I shook my head and stared at the two girls hugging each other and laughing inside Nagareboshi Cafe. They were happy. Things were better. They had made things better. And what had I done? Created a new way to kill people? Helped Orochimaru with his experiments? I was responsible for so many of the heartbreaks she was going to face. Obito would die in a few years to get captured by Madara.

She likely would have no idea who I was. What was I to say? "Hello, Keisuke Gekkō, I'm your best friend, but you don't remember me." And to Tomoko? She was created before I really became friends with Vy. "Hello, Tomoko, I know you have no idea who I am, but I was friends with Vy, a Vy who didn't die and instead read this fanfiction of a story I created with a version of Kei named Lang who didn't die."

Yeah. That would go great. Mostly because they'd want to know more. Or they'd hate me. Hate me for all the pain I'd already put them through and all the pain I knew they'd end up with in the future.

Kei swore Kishi's name when something bad happened from canon. Her entire life. I was responsible for that. I wasn't really any better than Orochimaru was. Sure, I hadn't thought the creations on a page I wrote with my best friend were real people, but they were real in my head. I was worse than Orochimaru.

I was the very god I called an asshole.

Everything happens for a reason. Yeah. And that reason is I'm a fucking dick. "It's all for the story." I was a hypocrite, that's what I was.

Well, I needed the protection of Minato Namikaze because if I was going to survive Orochimaru, I needed allies strong enough to cause a riot if I went missing.

I rolled my shoulders and stuck my hands in the pockets of my black ninja pants, running my thumb over the butt end of my fan for the tactile sensation. I clicked my teeth.

Well, if I was going to become friends with the self-insert version of my best friend in a fanfiction I wrote with her, the least I could do was bring a book.

So of course I went for another layer of "this is just so many levels of meta" and brought her a travel book for Mount Soragami, Sorayama-no-sato and the Chinatsugumi. Plus side to my parents owning a bookstore I guess. It was an old copy of mine, one I had read through a million times and written so many notes in English in the margins, desperately missing the connections from my old life.

And now, here they were, in front of me, just a few steps away, inside the building, the cafe, the Nagareboshi Cafe, the cafe where Tomoko worked. And I was avoiding actually going inside by repeatedly thinking the same thing.

Ugh. My hands wanted to hold the fan and flip them open and shut. I wanted to get lost in that sound.

So many people whose lives I wanted to be a part of but couldn't. It wasn't my place.

Maybe it would be better if I did what I had to, and let whatever happened to me happen. Aaaaand I was doing that thing again where I made my chakra functionally undetectable, pulling it back within myself. Shrinking. Hiding.

No, self. We gotta do this. Slimy snake-man is going down and you gotta be around long enough to see it happen.

Why was this scaring me more than mother-fucking Orochimaru?

Whatever my chakra was doing, well, it was certainly enough to get Kei's attention. Her own chakra laid over the area, heavy like a mist, and I shook the nerves out of my arms. Her sense was like radar, pinging off things and giving her information. Mine was more like well, sitting in a field and watching fireflies. A shark, smelling blood in the water. A ship looking for the lighthouse.

Aaaaaaaa. I was such a coward.

Yup. This was why I had spent a decade of my new life avoiding the versions of my friends that existed.

I took out a slip of paper and wrote a quick note: Hello, Keisuke Gekkō. My name is Otoha Kuroki. Come visit me at the Kuroki Bookstore.

Well, I was always better at writing things down than saying them. Slipping it into the back of the book, I determinedly walked forward.

The door is a pull. The door is a pull.

Ok, managed that. Now, for the hard part.

Tomoko and Kei sat at the piano, talking over something I couldn't quite make out. The extra noise from the music made it hard and I didn't feel like staring long enough to read their lips. Yeah, that thing I said about soul scars? Social Anxiety was still a thing. And in this life, it applied to people it hadn't in the previous one.

But really? There really isn't any protocol for walking up to a person as a complete stranger and handing them a book revealing you're a botched reincarnation as well. Like, there simply weren't enough cases for a protocol to be a thing.

Ugh. Why couldn't there be a socially acceptable script for this.

Fortify, Otoha. Fortify. You got this.

And Kei went to go get something. Ok. I could do Tomoko alone. I could do that.

I walked right up to Tomoko and I probably intimidated her a bit, or a lot. I mean, I was short and lean, but I was also a Shinobi in a green vest staring very intently at her. My deer-in-the-headlights look always came off as more a if-you-cross-me-I-will-murder-you look so yeah. Useful in the field, not so much when trying not to scare the living daylights out of a civilian pianist. Killing intent, it was killer.

"Could you please give this to Kei," I said, and shoved the book into her hands. Without another word I ninja-ran-away.

Heart beating a million miles an hour, I ended up back in my parents bookstore.

"Otoha, honey, are you ok? Is something wrong?" Haha asked as I stumbled into a shelf and knocked the display down.

"I'm fine," I called out, hands shaking, voice shaking.

What a mess I was.

"Ok, well, let me know if you need anything, I'm going to be in the back."

"Will do, mom."

At least there were unequivocally good things in this life, and a loving family was one of them.

Resetting the display was a nice distraction, and by the time I was done setting up the travel guides my nerves had calmed down. Which meant all that was left was to take advantage of my long weekend off and man the counter. Wait for Kei.

Yep. Not hard at all. I had been on tougher missions. Longer stake outs. Worse conditions.

Did I mention I was nervous?

Maybe I should have just given her a book titled: How To Tell Your Friend You're Reincarnated Too.

I pulled out my fuinjutsu supplies and started making exploding tags and smoke tags and basically anything else that let me fall into a zone of repeating the same strokes over and over and over again. At least my habit for making them when I got nervous, and getting nervous a lot, meant that I always had plenty on hand.

I was a better Tenten than Tenten. Well, except for the fact she could fight with practically any weapon and utilized wire and string. So I wasn't really her at all. I just stored a lot of senbon and exploding tags in my scroll of holding and was able to release them a whole butload at a time.

I spread out a large piece of paper over the counter top and formed a hand seal. Wind Release: Paper Cutting Jutsu. And just like that I turned the air into my scissors, cutting the paper into smaller tag sized pieces.

That had taken a while to learn. Learning to make razor wind? Easy enough. It was one of the earlier stages of my wind release stuff. But making it precise enough I could cut paper cleanly and accurately? Well, let's just say I made a lot of confetti. Which was also a pretty good thing to unseal in a burst and confuse your opponent while you escaped, or shanked them in the neck.

I was still working on making it strong enough to turn a log into splinters. Unsealing Jutsu: Splinter Confetti. That's what I was gonna call it when I unsealed all the results of my attempts to do so.

And the ability to cut people to shreds with a garbage disposal made of air? Well, that sounded pretty useful too. Probably wasn't going to store shredded people in a thing to unseal later. Although, now that I thought of it, that would probably freak some people out. Unsealing Technique: Flesh Confetti. Yeah… Might be a viable tactic. I'll have to get back to you on that.

And it was about that time that Kei walked in.

"Kuroki-san?" Kei asked.

Yeah. That's. Yeah. Nope. My mouth wasn't working. At least I didn't duck behind the counter? Yet. My chakra though? Yeah, that was doing it's best to retreat in on itself. Kei's stare. That was still the same. Chuckling nervously, I cleaned up the paper in front of me. Wouldn't do to have Kei's stare make it spontaneously catch fire.

"Kuroki-san?" she asked again.

Oh. Right. I'd never actually introduced myself to her. I'd been too busy hiding. Hehe.

"Uh," I said, desperately searching for something to say, lifting an ink stained left hand to wave. "Uh, hi, Lang Lang."

Yeah. That made Kei stare at me funny. But the wheels in her head were turning. I mean, there were only so many people who would know who the Chinatsugumi really were and who had called her Lang Lang, so that narrowed down… I hadn't actually told her who I was.

She figured it out though. "Os?"

"Yeah," I breathed out. And like that the anxiety fluttered away, replaced by happy smiling me. "Looks like I'm not in Kansas anymore." And another nervous chuckle. Heh.

"Must've been some tornado that dropped you here," Kei responded dryly.

I shrugged. "Well, you know, my tea kettle sounded like the siren so I didn't notice it." With all that out of the way, I took a deep breath, set my shoulders, and continued on with the metaphor. "Anyway, I need some help dropping a house on a wicked witch."

And what else was I supposed to say, "we represent the ANBU lab, the ANBU lab, the ANBU lab, we represent the ANBU lab and welcome you to Konoha?" I may have hummed it. And then I vaulted over the counter and squished Kei in the biggest hugs of all hugs to make up for all the time we had missed. I'm pretty sure the word "glomp" applied. And I was still short enough for her to use my head as an armrest. Lovely.

Kei smirked. "So, what took you so long to find me?"

I've been watching you since I realized I was in a timeline you existed but I avoided you because reasons? Yeah, that'd go over swimmingly. So I skipped over that and gave a different excuse, breaking off the hug to scratch the back of my head. "Oh, you know, being a ninja, becoming a chunin, becoming an airbender, joining ANBU, getting a tattoo, getting assigned to be Orochimaru's lab assistant…"

One of these is not like the other, one of these just doesn't belong.

Kei visibly paled at the mention of Orochimaru's name.

Yeah, I had expected that. Even as the famed Tidal Blade, she was still scared shitless of him. And that was a good decade off for her. Right now, she was just a girl who was really good with a sword.

And I was going to be working alongside him for the foreseeable future. Lucky me.

"Soo…" I said, "I obviously need help to not get all disappeared. And someone to give all the dirt I dig up to."

"Orochimaru," Kei said.

I nodded. "Super creepy snake guy. That Orochimaru, in case there was another one running around who also ran human experiments in an ANBU basement."

Error message 404: page not found. Kei. exe has stopped working. So I sighed, crushed her in another hug, and said, "Come on, we should let Vy know about this too. It'll be good to see her again."

"…Again?" Kei asked as I took her hand and started pulling her out of the bookstore.

"I'll be back later," I called out to my parents in the backroom as I left. "Yeah, I uh… knew her back when I was Os." We met because Lang and I wrote your story as a fanfiction and Vy was a fan. Yeah, that'd go over well.

But hey, I was a chunin. Also ANBU. I had resources.

This was like realizing I was "the adult" all over again.

Responsibilities suck.

"Hey, Kei, did you find the person who gave you the book?" Tomoko asked as we entered, her attention on the piano. But once she looked up she kind of stopped playing, and talking.

I ran forward and gave her a huge hug before any of her other reactions could happen. "I missed you two so much, I'm so sorry I took this long to say hi."

Tomoko kind of patted me on the back and waved her hand. "Uh… it's uh, good to see you too?" She had no idea who I was. Tomoko came into existence before Vy and I had become friends.

I released her, ready to tell her I was Beta and then froze. Because that'd mean telling Kei she didn't really exist. And that'd mean I was the one with future knowledge of the plot and I really didn't want to have to carry that.

"Uh, we haven't met yet," I said, fiddling with the loose fabric of my wind-sleeves. "We met after you became Tomoko. Like, an alternate timeline where Vy was still alive." Yeah. That'd work. "But you're still her and you and… yeah."

Tomoko laughed and waved it off. "That's ok. I'm just confused is all. It's nice to meet you…"

"Otoha," I finished. "Kei and I were best friends in that other timeline. You and I were too."