Of the Forest
Chapter 2
A/N:Thanks to anyone who read the first chapter, this one is a bit introspective but it's just to set the scene and the others will have more action I promise! I wasn't panning to update so soon and it will rarely (if ever) happen again, I just got kinda carried away writing this. I apologise for any mistakes/bad grammar, I try and check it as best I can but I'm bound to miss stuff, comments and criticisms welcome!
Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto
She wakes up a little later with an impending sense of doom hanging over her head like a heavy shroud. Her mind is woozy with what she supposes is sleep (although she can never be too sure these days) and she struggles to remember what happened before her consciousness faded out again. With a tired sort of frustration, she opens her useless eyes to stare up at that bland, ever-present ceiling and feels all the reassurance/anger/irritation that comes with it until...
Fuck
It all comes back to her and her mind screeches to a sudden halt.
No.
No. Way.
She feels like screaming, like breaking something into tiny shattered pieces and setting it on fire out of anger and some confusing emotion she cannot name. This cannot be happening, she tells herself, but her traitorous mind seems to disagree and it summons up that damning image as proof that apparently, it can and she wants to hit something.
The woman with the almond eyes and the long brown hair; the baby with the small, wrinkly face and big brown (aware) eyes.
The baby had moved when she had, the woman when Aiko had.
She cannot be that baby. It makes no sense. She looks nothing like the infant she saw in what she now realises was a mirror, her hair is a ginger frazzled mess and her eyes are a watery blue, not the large doe eyes of the baby or the small tuft of brown on its head. That's not even getting into the whole she's a fully grown adult and fully grown adults don't just turn into infants.
Unfortunately though, it explains a lot: her inexplicable near blindness, the weakness in her body and the lack of any teeth, the fact she can no longer make any noises that resemble words and the strange blackouts she has. The mind of a small child is not developed enough to support the thought processes of an adult; the neurons are not fully connected and the brain is still growing. She takes a moment to offer up thanks to whatever god is listening that the blackouts have spared her much of the indignity of apparently being a baby, she hasn't been forced to drink from some woman's boob or forfeit control of her bowels. But quickly takes any gratitude back because what the hell!? A baby!?
She has no idea how this could have happened, well scratch that, she does, but the idea is just too insane to really contemplate. It's the sort of thing that only happens to story characters, the sort of crazy that only pops up in fantasy, but well, it's the only rational (ha, as if anything about this is rational) explanation that makes any sort of sense.
The last thing she remembers is the accident, the sensation of being hit by something heavy and huge and all the force that entails, of being thrown forward at startling speeds before
Blackness
The only logical explanation she can come up with to explain the entire situation is that she, well, died.
But no.
Just no.
She does not want to go down that route, that route comes with the realisation that everything she knew from before was lost, that everything she was from before was lost; her friends, her family, her sense of self, her name. It meant that Josephine Baker and all that she was, could be or will be was nothing now, nothing but a battered body, a headstone and a fading memory that would grow old and forgotten. Call her self-centred, but the idea of everything she was becoming essentially meaningless chills her to the bone. She had so many plans, so many things she wanted to do and be; but now, now, none of that matters.
She stares up at the dark ceiling and feels herself slipping. She wants out, she wants this to be a dream. She wants someone to step in and cry Gotcha! and for this all to be one massive misunderstanding. She wants to hear English in her ears and to see her face -her real face- and all its flaws staring back at her in the mirror and not some quasi-Asian imposter baby. She wants her mum, she wants her dad, she wants Adam's terrible jokes and Henry's sly wit, she wants Danielle to gush over the latest Marvel film and Erica to prattle on about her gymnastics team.
She wants the world to be normal again.
But that's impossible and with every passing moment her brain compiles more evidence to support the being dead theory and it's not fair! Why her anyway? Why did she deserve to die, what had she done to deserve a lonely, meaningless death on a bland country road somewhere in Derbyshire?
Maybe it's not that though. Maybe it's not what she had done, but what she hadn't. Maybe it's because she'd been wholly unremarkable her entire life and done absolutely nothing with the opportunities and privileges that she'd had handed to her on a plate. Her home had been so far away from all the problems in the world: cushy and sheltered; while woman out there her age had been fighting for their lives and rights she'd been overly concerned with whether or not she'd ever amount to something, her own future and her own tiny problems.
It probably wasn't any of that though, she thinks with a self-deprecating snort, that's just her own vanity kicking in. It probably had nothing to do with her, she had been utterly unimportant in the fabric of things, just a miniscule collection of atoms in a universe full of them.
So
Dead
Right, she can live (ha!) with that.
(But she can't because inside she's screamingscreamingscreaming and none of this makes any sense)
But that brings her to the next issue: being a baby.
Now she's smart enough to acknowledge that this is most likely reincarnation which oh my god she's been reincarnated! And she takes a moment to appreciate the momentousness of this, the fact that she now knows the answer to a question that has plagued humanity since the dawn of time. That her, Josephine Baker, (although that's probably not her name now, is it?) the normalest, most average person ever, now possessed the answer to one of life's greatest mysteries. The next time she sees a Hindu or a Buddhist or really anyone who subscribes to reincarnation she's going to give them a round of applause for being right all along, before punching them in the face for the same reason.
It's not all that surprising though really, that this is what happens after death. Pretty much every belief system from the ancient Celts of Europe to the ancient Chinese and beyond holds rebirth as a central part of its doctrine. What confuses her is why she remembers though, she's pretty sure the slate should've been wiped clean when she died, to avoid this exact situation. Either someone up there is having a great joke at the expense of her sanity or this is just some massive fluke in the universe, a tiny quibble in the natural order of the world.
She supposes she should be angry about this, and she will be -later- but for now she's forcefully shunting all her emotions to the side to avoid dealing with the huge wave of PANIC! threatening to overwhelm her.
The other victims in all of this, she supposes, are Hiroto and Aiko. That young, handsome couple with so much unconditional love in their eyes when they look at this strange, baby shaped lump of skin she's inhabiting. They're obviously the parents of this body and her heart goes out to them because they clearly love their young daughter, the life they've created together, but not her. They don't know her, she's a stranger in the body of their baby, a mind that doesn't belong. In some ways, she's stolen their daughter from them: stolen all the experiences and joy all parents want with their children. Her firsts won't be their firsts; she has some twenty years of life in her head before all of this.
God, they're probably not that much older than her.
They've most likely done nothing to deserve this, and yet here they are, devoting love and care to an imposter who stole their baby and probably will never see them as her parents.
Because they're not
They're not her parents.
Her parents are William and Karen Baker, accountant and part time office worker from Derbyshire, England, not Hiroto and Aiko Something from somewhere-that-seems-like-but-maybe-isn't Japan. And they will forever be her parents, the people that raised her and taught her to be who she is. The people who she will never see again.
It hits her then, with the force of a tsunami. No, not a tsunami, a fucking supernova, exploding outwards with a force of five thousand billion yottatons. All the panic and pain she's been barely holding back. The heart-rending knowledge that she'll never see her family and friends again, that they are lost to her now, that all she must be to them is a broken empty corpse.
It hurts, it hurts more than anything: more than thinking she's blind or paralysed, more than the thought of being trapped in a coma, at least there's a chance then. Now she has nothing, nothing is familiar, not even her body not even her name. She has no one to lean on here, no one to seek comfort in because all this is wrongwrongwrong and this life isn't hershershers and the walls in her mind close in on her because now she has nothing.
She has lost it all, everyone she ever cared for, everyone she ever loved, every experience she never had and the future she reached out for and wanted. It all seems futile now, eighteen years of studying and working and trying for a life she will never get to live, years and experiences wasted, plans that mean nothing now.
And she grieves.
She grieves for herself: the seventy years plus she expected to get but didn't, the life and a thousand innocent, cherished moments that won't happen now, for her friends and family, for the person they've lost and her poor parents, forced to bury their youngest. She grieves for Hiroto and Aiko who wanted a child but got a her, who lovelovelove their baby but will hate her and despise her when they realise that there isn't a baby in this skin, but an adult, fully grown and grieving that can't be their child.
And she screams, a fierce primal yell of such immeasurable pain as the world comes down around her, screams harder when all she gets is the wailing cry of a baby. She hears soft thudding footsteps as Hiroto or Aiko rush towards her (not her, their baby) but all she can do is scream.
~~*8*~~
It carries on like this for both more and less time than she knows. Every time she wakes up she screams; screams, screams, screams, so loud and violently that her infant throat becomes scratchy and painful but she doesn't care. Every time she opens her eyes and sees that bloody ceiling she screams this body's lungs out until she blacks out from the force of her emotions. She gains reprieve in the void-like depths of her psyche when that happens, but it is never long until she wakes and the cycle starts again.
It's terrible for Hiroto and Aiko, this she absently catalogues through the haze of pain and grief: Aiko's eyes are shadowed and worn and Hiroto has new crevices inked into his skin. She sees them better now, as time passes, but she can no longer bring herself to care now that she knows the cause of her blindness. Her new body's parents hover around her all the time now like anxious birds to a threatened nest, their haggard appearances and tired eyes dominating much of what she sees.
They are desperate and they grow more so as time crawls on. They try everything, they rock her and sing to her and murmur softly in rhythmic Japanese. But none of it works, of course it doesn't, it doesn't solve the problem that she's dead and this isn't her body, but a part of her distantly appreciates their efforts. They try feeding her more but no, no way is she breastfeeding and Aiko grows visibly distressed when she refuses. Instead she is brought before a parade of new faces, old and young. She thinks that these must be Hiroto and Aiko's support network, friends, family and doctors, but none of them can stop her cries.
The strange thing under her skin writhes and snaps with the force of her pain. Crashing and pulling through her body like rapids in a ravine; when the other people touch her, she feels them trying to touch the energy with a thrum of their own, trying to calm it gently before being forced out when it bites back angrily at them.
There are scores of people that try and help, that mutter around her in frantic Japanese, she understands none of what they're saying, but at least she's manages to pick out her new name: Moriko, Senju Moriko.
There is something about the name that rings alarm bells, but she is too steeped in her own mourning to pay it much thought, in her head she's still Josephine, still hasn't accepted her new life. She knows it will come though, even the deepest grief makes way for acceptance eventually, humans are nothing if not adaptable and it is inevitable that she will adapt. But for now she can't accept it, for now she clings on almost violently to the person she was before and the people she knew, grabs on rabidly to the pain and the loss because it's all she has left of the life she once lived.
She screams and she cries and she wails her grief out to the uncaring god that did this to her, to the silent universe that doesn't even have a consciousness to care. She grieves and she mourns and she pleads and she begs and the people around her grow ever more frantic at her unceasing cries. But right now, she cannot bring herself to care.
And so time passes.
~~*8*~~
It turns out it's not time and the natural grieving process that stops her from crying.
It's something darker.
Her body must be several months old now, per her rudimentary awareness of time, but it's hard to tell between the blackouts and her crying. Hiroto and Aiko certainly look like they've been through months of stress and sleepless nights, but she's hesitant to use that as a measure of time.
By now she has almost full control over her body and has even managed to become strong enough to move her head, her eyesight is much clearer and her skin doesn't feel as hypersensitive and tender. But still it doesn't make the situation any more bearable, if anything it makes it worse; there's a difference between intellectually knowing she now has a baby's body and actually feeling it grow and change, all it does is continually remind her of her new reality.
But all of that is irrelevant compared to that.
It happens at night. Months have passed since her revelation and the air feels cold and wet against her young skin. It's the kind of chilled damp that occurs in the fading warmth of autumn, hesitantly cool as winter draws closer. The air in the house smells of fragrant incense mixed in with something undeniably woodsy and the lights are dim, flickering flames.
Aiko is holding her in the candlelight, rocking her softly and humming a sweet lullaby to her as she cries, it's rather soothing actually, and if this were any other situation than what it is she would have been lulled to sleep. But unfortunately she's still a reincarnated dead person so she continues to cry her grief into the night.
Hiroto stands by the window on the other side of the room, his tired face thrown into relief by the twinkling lights outside and he runs a hand through his messy dark hair as he sighs with exhaustion. He's just about in her view as she stares with teary eyes over Aiko's shoulder, and she's struck for the umpteenth time by how tall he is. He turns his head over towards Aiko and looks at them both with such love and worry that she immediately feels incredibly guilty and ashamed of her presence in their lives.
"Kanojo ni nani ga machigatte iru to omoimasu ka?" he says to Aiko, his voice strained and eyes dark.
Aiko turns around to face him, removing him from her view, "Shiranai, watashitachiha subete o tameshite nani mo hatarakanakatta. Ishade sura shiranai," she sighs turning her head in toward her neck so she breathes in the scent of her fragrant hair.
Hiroto echoes Aiko's exhausted sigh with one of his own and turns back to face the window as she continues to cry in the background. She curses herself internally for being such an awful person, for stealing this kind couple's child and ruining their lives. But the wound inside her is so raw still, so aching and sore that she can't help the tears and screams that stream from her.
Suddenly a weight fills the air and Aiko and Hiroto freeze.
"Hiroto, Sorehanandesuka?" Aiko murmurs, her voice noticeably tightening as she feels the woman's arms tense around her.
Hiroto jerks back around to stare out the window with sharp eyes as Aiko clutches her infant body to her chest, slender fingers digging into her tiny back when:
BOOM!
A sonic explosion that she can only compare to films of atomic bombs going off rips through the air and sends her infant ears ringing. A few seconds later a shockwave of pressure tears through the open window and through the room, blowing Hiroto and Aiko's hair back and causing the woman to clutch her fiercer to her body as she braces herself again the force.
And then, a roar.
Its's loud and terrible and sends tangible vibrations through the air. There is anger in it, wild, furious anger that she can almost taste on her tongue as the sound of it shatters her ears. Fear skitters down her spine as it echoes all around them and a tiny part of her brain dormant since the days when humans were little more than upright apes kicks into gear. She feels hunted, she feels like prey. Her tiny body freezes like it's been caught in a headlight and her crying abruptly stops as terror consumes her mind. She can't think on her grief now; her brain is focused on more important matters: the instinctual urge to getawaygetawayrunrunRUN! and the irrational desire to curl herself up as small as she can so whatever the thing out there is, it can't find her.
But that's impossible as the strange pressure in the air suddenly increases tenfold and the atmosphere is flooded with a strange energy.
The energy hovers in the room with the three of them like a toxic cloud, biting and burning her skin like acid. The thrumming thing under her skin reacts immediately to the foreign force as it tries to burrow its way into her veins like a poison, snapping back frantically as it tries to flush the chemical heat from her living flesh. It rages an internal battle across the fields of her lungs, heart and liver but the energy is too strong, too Other, too much and it begins to eat away at her from the inside.
There's a malice to it, the pressure and the energy; a cruelty and malevolence that surpass anything she thought possible, a great black rage that spits acid and corrodes all it touches. The sensation of it surrounds her, makes her feel helpless and petrified, makes her want to run, to hide, to curl up and disappear. But she can't do anything because her limbs are too weak and she's too young and the force of the pressure feels like it's crushing her very soul.
Aiko runs over to the window, and if she could move against the sheer animal terror, she'd scream at her to get away because there's a monster out there that wants to kill them.
Hiroto has frozen to the spot, she can see him out of the corner of her eyes as he stands rigid and locked in position. Aiko stops in front of the window too and her body abruptly stiffens and involuntary tremors start to rock her form as she clutches her tiny body so tightly it's almost painful. "Kami-sama," she breathes, her voice small and terrified.
"Kyuubi," Hiroto replies with stricken awe.
Wait
WHAT!?
Kyuubi!? As in Naruto the anime Kyuubi, as in the great chakra monster that attacked Naruto's home village the night of his birth and was sealed inside him Kyuubi!? She doesn't know any Japanese but she knows what that means and no, no, she refuses to deal with that too, along with everything else. She refuses to believe she's been reborn into a fictional universe, refuses to believe that the monster outside that is steadily crushing and burning the life out of her is some made-up fox monster.
(But what else could it be? The only real monsters are people and people don't roar with the force of a dozen explosions)
She is jolted from her thoughts as another roar rockets through the air, this one just as cruel and wrathful as the first and it jolts Hiroto into action. He turns swiftly away from the window and grabs Aiko's arm and the woman is unresisting and terrified as Hiroto drags her through the house and swiftly down the stairs.
"Nani shiyou ka? Doko ni iku no?" Aiko cries, her voice tremulous with fear as Hiroto drags her out of the house, she can feel the woman's terror in the racing pulse next to her ear and the desperate clasp of her hands around her back.
Hiroto voice is quiet against the hundreds of horrified screams that cut through the air around her. "Yama no naka no hinansho wa, anzendearu."
Aiko stops suddenly in the middle of the street, the panicked crowds streaming all around her like a swarm as her stiff arms clutch even tighter, "Anzen? Kore wa tan'naru shinryakude wa arimasen, Hiroto!" she calls back, something in her voice edging on hysteria as she trembles against the weight in the air.
Hiroto stops and turns back to gather the two them into his arms, "Watashi wa shitte iruga, watashi wa shinjinakereba naranai," her murmurs into the top of Aiko's head, "Watashi wa kore ga owaride wa nai to shinjinakereba naranai."
"Kowaidesu," Aiko whispers into Hiroto's chest.
"Watashi modesu," he replies, kissing her head softly, "shikashi, wareware wa idō shinakereba naranai."
And with that they're off, Hiroto drags Aiko through the screaming, terrified crowds, cutting through groups of people frozen in terror as the terrible weight and rage in the air robs them of coherent thought.
She can feel that horrible energy stronger out here on the streets, the hideous, bubbling burn of it crawling further through her body and suffocating her with every breath. She can't move, she can't cry, she can barely breathe from the furious force that presses her on all sides. She can feel just how much whatever the roaring monster is wants to kill her: wants to split her delicate flesh with its claws and scorch her from the inside out. She is overwhelmed with the images that flood through her mind of her new, fragile body crushed by a massive paw, or devoured by giant slavering jaws and she doesn't want to die!
It's that one revelation that races through her head as her new parents run, shouted from every part of her brain in a screeching cacophony of survival instinct. It blocks out thoughts of the impossibility of giant monsters and unreality of a thousand voices screaming Kyuubi! as they flee. She doesn't want to die here; she doesn't want this confusing new life in this body-that-isn't-hers to end before it's really begun. She's died once already, lost everything already before, and there's no guarantee that she'll get a third chance if she falls again; she doesn't want to die a helpless baby, buried under rubble or strangled by terror.
The night around them is rife with the yells of fleeing people and the sudden crashes of destroyed buildings as they shatter. She can just about see over Aiko's shoulder as she runs, just make out the whites of the eyes of the people that cry out in fear around her. In the background, furious growls and snarls louder than a jet engine burst through the air as the heavy pounding of Aiko's runs jolts through her body.
If this were any other time, she would be almost fascinated by the world around her, she has no recollection of leaving Hiroto and Aiko's house. But now the night around her is one messy blur of darkened colours and distant fires as her new parents run towards whatever destination they have in mind.
In the distance, she hears a shuddering boom and the crushing pressure hovering in the air and the killing intent that shrouds it grows worse.
It hurts.
She feels like she's dying; the air scalds her little lungs and shrieks of the people running ring in her ears. She sees the accident, what little she remembers of it, again and again in her head and the hazy crash of solid metal mixed in with visions of being crushed and burning.
Hiroto and Aiko navigate the streets with a single-minded dogged purpose, dodging people and buildings as they swerve around corners heading what feels like deeper into the town. She peers over Aiko's shoulder in morbid, terrified awe at the chaos in the streets and through her blurred eyes sees people scramble in blind fear over each other like rabid animals to get away. The crowd behaves almost as a beast in itself and people are consumed by the rising tide of bodies and their forms chewed and spat out.
But then, through a split in the buildings, she sees it.
Oh my God.
Her vision isn't perfect so she can't see it in its entirety, but there, towering above the buildings is a monster.
Its body is a mass of orange that thrashes both solid and indistinct, the colour of hellfire and poison, as it glows with an unholy light. Behind it, nine swirling tails writhe like furious serpents in the night, smacking down buildings and wiping away entire districts with a single swipe. Its eyes are giant and bloodshot and gleam with such wrath, such rage that it would take her breath if she had any. There's a sense of age about it, a sense of ancient inhuman fury that reminds her of tales about the monsters of classical myth, godlike and eternal. She can feel its anger, can feel its bloodlust deep in her bones. Its huge and hideous, monstrous and terrible and as unavoidable as a natural disaster.
High above the town, sparks and explosions light up next to its skin like tiny fireflies next to a mountain, the efforts of people trying to fight back the creature. All they do though is make the thing more angry as it roars and swats a tail through another district, killing dozens.
Kyuubi, she thinks with terrified incredulity as she looks up at the orange tower of rage and her mind just blanks out at the sight of it. Seeing is believing as they say, and seeing the monster makes a believer out of her.
It truly is horrific. Seeing the thing on tele or in a manga just doesn't compare to the real thing, cannot come close to the true terror that looms and snarls over the shadowed roofs of coloured buildings. It's a pillar of hate and malice, a gargantuan monolith of sinister burning energy that leaks and spills for miles in every direction. Looking at it she can understand why the villagers treated Naruto like they did all those years, they had seen this, seen the destruction and felt the hate.
The fox fills the air with a poison that clogs and smothers, it blankets the area in such unbearable pressure and heat that people drop dead from pure dread and terror. It coils its energy (chakra) through the bodies of its victims and eats them from the inside.
The sight of it and knowledge of its existence in her strange new life is more terrifying than its presence because and oh God, she's been reborn into an anime! The pieces slot together in her horrified brain: the Kyuubi, the name Senju, the strange symbol in all rooms in the house, the casual use of words like shinobi and Hokage-sama from Hiroto and Aiko (something that she's been forcefully ignoring until now). It all makes sense.
A wild, crazy hysteria begins to build within her, a horrified, giddy, roundabout of emotion that becomes a swarm of insects in her veins. She almost feels like laughing, mad hysterical laughter at the insanity of all this. Not only has she been reborn with all her memories, she's been reborn into a fictional universe, where none of this is real.
There are a thousand million existential questions that come along with that realisation, each more absurd and disturbing than the last: if she's here, does that mean this world is real? Are all worlds in fiction real? Are authors and artists looking through divides in reality to other worlds in their work? Otherwise, is this place not real? Is she not real now? Was she ever real to begin with? Is her world real? What even defines realness?
The whole thing makes her brain hurt and it feels like fifty hyperactive children are banging on the walls of her mind, clamouring for attention.
But another thought hits, if she's in another world now, not only has she lost her friends, family and life, she's lost the whole world. There is absolutely no chance of seeing anything familiar ever again. Her family doesn't even exist here, will never exist here. She can never tell them, even secretly, that she's okay (which she knows in some distant part of her mind she's been hoping for the opportunity to do).
She feels manic laughter/tears build inside her as she tries fit this new information into her world view. But this is hardly the time for an existential crisis, the Kyuubi still roars in the background, choking what she now realises is Konoha(!) in its hate.
It's all rather ironic really. Hadn't this been everything she'd wanted when she was young? To live in one of the worlds she'd read about, a world of far more adventure and excitement than her own. Hadn't this been everything she'd ever dreamed of? If there is a god out there, it must be a cruel one, playing elaborate games with her sanity and giving her what she'd thought she wanted but never really did.
She takes it back, looking up at the Kyuubi, that enormous monster of fury and power, she takes all of it back: every idle daydream of living a story, every passing whimsy of being part of some great adventure, she takes it all back. She wants none of this, doesn't want to live in a world of huge, smothering chakra monsters and child soldiers, of government sanctioned mass-murder and men who can crush mountains by themselves.
She doesn't remember everything of this world and its story in total clarity -it has been several years since the series finished and she'd stopped watching- but from what she does remember, this world is a dangerous one. Its war ravaged and will be again in her new lifetime. The village, which has become her village will be destroyed multiple times, invaded and torn to the ground; people will die, monsters will rise and she will live through it all.
She feels out of control and helpless, with the Kyuubi's corrosive chakra poisoning the air around her and her weak body useless against the force. She feels more afraid than she ever has before, terrified not just of the monster that burns for her death, but of the future too. The invasions, the war, so many different ways to die and she is terrified of dying again.
She knows there is only one way to survive the coming catastrophes, one way in which she has any real chance of staying alive.
She must become a shinobi.
It seems somewhat counterintuitive at first, ninja in this world stand on the front lines and face death every day after all. But to become a civilian means to remain helpless, to remain unable to move and defend herself. It means a continuation of the same utter powerlessness and vulnerability she feels now, trapped as an adult mind in an infant's body, forced to watch the world around her in short bursts while strangers manipulate her body like a puppet.
She looks at the Kyuubi from her weak, defenceless body with useless, feeble eyes and refuses to be so helpless again.
But to become a shinobi means taking a step forward, making a giant adjustment in the way she thinks and leaving the past behind. To become a shinobi means being willing to devote herself in every way to this village, this fictional village. To be willing to give her life for this place and the people in it.
But parts of her brain still scream that this place isn't real.
How can she give her life for a place that should only exist in the pages of a book or on a TV screen? How can she protect and fight people who should be nothing more than characters? How can she face them and the village every day without seeing the secrets that both hide, without seeing the past and the future weaving around them in disjointed, half-forgotten moments? Without revealing more than she should?
(Without shrinking away in revulsion at the darkest and most terrible parts of this world, parts she knows are there, parts that reach out with poisoned talons and bloodstained jaws.)
She thinks of Doctor Who and fixed points and timelines and wonders just how she can exist here at all, if her very presence is jeopardising the fabric of this reality.
(There is a part of her though, buried beneath the fear that revels in this, in this world and the idea of being part of it. A childish, selfish part that sees this new world as the excitement that most can only ever dream of. But that part is small and quiet, buried beneath layers of heavy grief and primal terror.)
If she is to remain sane she must put the question of realness behind her. She must stop thinking of this world as fictional, of these people's lives as nothing more than parts of a story; lest she spend the rest of her days detached and cold, never truly seeing the consequences of her actions as real.
And that way leads madness. That way leads psychopathy and emptiness and everything she doesn't want to be. That way ends with playing god and twisting the strings of fate around her uncaring fingers and watching them dance.
So she must take this world as real, each and every rock and tree: every life, every event, every sunrise.
And wow, isn't that crazy?
She balks somewhat at the realities of becoming a ninja here though, of dedicating her all to that life. To be a ninja is to be a killer: is to be a thief, a seducer, an assassin. To be a ninja in this world means to submitting to a corrupt government and following orders no question. It means to killing and stealing and spying and seducing and it goes again every moral, every lesson she's ever learned.
And she doesn't know if her conscience can deal with that, doesn't know if she can take the pressures that come with ninja life.
(But she feels the Kyuubi all around her and it threads fire through her flesh and crushes her limbs and she never wants to feel so powerless again.)
And isn't that just horrifying, that to increase her own chances in life, she must learn to kill.
But she must survive.
She feels weak and cold at the thought of dying again, dying so young and wasting her chances. She is a selfish creature and doesn't want to become nothing.
(She doesn't want to feel so helpless and vulnerable again, stripped bare and feeble in front of the Kyuubi.)
She makes a promise to herself, she will become the Best Damn Ninja Ever. It will be dangerous, yes, but the more powerful she is, the more likely it is that she'll be able to survive the future coming for her, that she'll be able to take down the demons of this world and stretch her life line to its very limit.
She will immerse herself in this world, take every bit of knowledge it offers and run with it, she's always been good at absorbing information and she'll need every advantage she can get. She must belong in this world, stop seeing herself as an imposter or a fake. She must become Senju Moriko and all that it entails. A part of this reality, a citizen of this world.
She is reluctant; hesitant and scared to let go of Josephine Baker and the person she was for twenty-five years. But she has to, has to live and keep going with some sort of sanity intact.
So in that moment she looks up at the Kyuubi, the fox that inspires so much fear as it rains terror down upon Konoha, and puts Josephine Baker aside. She becomes Senju Moriko and takes her life and her name. If there was another Senju Moriko in the manga, it doesn't matter because she is Moriko now and this world is real. There are no other options and there can be no destined path, not for this world and not for her.
She adapts because it is necessary, changes because she must, but vows, in heart and soul (the soul that will always be the girl who was Josephine) to never forget where she came from.
Blessedly, this is when her brain blacks out.