I knew, but not enough for it to matter. I'm pretty sure everyone on the planet knew enough to recognize the name 'Naruto' when mentioned in conversation. In this way I knew; but didn't. I knew the story about as vaguely as one might the distance between the Earth and the Sun. I knew it would come to war and carnage and that maybe I could do something about it; but not really. At the end of the day I had a home to go back to. A warm bed to sleep in. A family that got on my nerves just enough for me to know they loved me. My life was boring, mundane, and downright normal. There was nothing to leave me wanting, no 'but could there be more?' and my version of 'what if' was based solely on whether this man twenty years my senior was trying to sleep with the body I inhabited. I mean, they were ninja, right? Those guys stooped to pretty low levels in their line of work.
But just like I wasn't moving to stop the coming events, I wasn't really trying to prostitute my vessel to strange – incredibly attractive – men. In fact, I wasn't doing anything.
I came and went as I pleased. I had no name to speak of, at least not in Ninja Land – because what else do I call it? – no home, no family; my first memories were of breaking my way out of some dilapidated basement. The rubble of what could have been a bunker did a good job concealing the entrance. Whatever it was had been abandoned long ago, and I spent my first days wandering its ruins.
After a week of exploring, I moved on, albeit slowly. Everyday I'd work a little further away from my place and wander curiously through dense undergrowth and around trees. As wet behind the ears as I was, even I knew to keep a precise location on my spawn point. Wouldn't want to get totally lost, especially when mom was planning spaghetti night.
At some point I reached a creek, and as I followed it East – I think – I realized it wasn't a creek, but a river. By the second week I'd made it all the way to where it split the land to rage and roil over a cliff. It took another day before I was brave enough to sit down and scoot my butt along the algae-grown rocks to peer at the waterfall beyond.
I was a pretty long drop.
A small pool waited below, along with more trees and unfamiliar terrain of the same kind behind me. I thought I was pretty bold, but there's no way I was climbing down a cliff-face for that. I could hardly make it a quarter of the way up the stupid ropes in gym. As if.
According to the calendar I marked at home, it'd been two months since discovering my personal pocket universe and I'd managed to scope a wide range of territory from my Gate. The waterfall was probably my favorite place to sit and daydream, but that's as far as it ever got. Until I saw them. It wasn't the appearance of other humans that was a big deal, if anything it was kind of cool, knowing I wasn't alone out here. No, it was the part where one of them decided to strip down and walk out across the water like Jesus incarnate. He did some weird dance before suddenly dropping below the surface and I couldn't help but cry out. How the hell did he do that!? From my spot on the cliffs edge I noted the other party's head jerk up as I yelled, and at the time it never occurred to me these people could be bad guys. They weren't, but that's not the point.
And so, my first encounter with the native peoples of the land was, maybe, just a bit crude. But to be fair, I'd been there first.
The water-walker turned out to be a guy called Yamato – san, sempai, whatever – who was rather fond of being naked whenever he had the chance. Apparently, it was supposed to be a secret and I was subsequently sworn to silence. Whatever, guy, no big deal. His buddy might as well have been made from the same paper he was always doodling on, Yamato called him Sai. Sai wasn't very good at people, or feelings, or anything requiring social etiquette really. Again, no big deal, I had a quiz tomorrow and probably should have been studying at least a little bit. I told them as much, and the two of them ninja'd back down the cliff – holy shit – and I went home.
That was enough excitement for one day, and if I'd been one of them, a ninja, I might have realized the whole encounter was off. With training I might have understood better that as literal spies it was in their job description to play evasive and manipulate. I didn't have the frame of reference to look back and consider how forthcoming they'd been, or worry about the quiet, calculating looks they shared. All that mattered was the smell of fresh baked French bread and hamburger when I slipped down from the attic that night.
In a weird stroke of luck, I didn't go back for several months. Now I don't know why that was lucky, or even weird. I just got busy at school with my finals project is all. Started the college application process and got my resume put together all nice like. That kind of crap is a lot more time-consuming than the commercials make it sound, where's my app for that? It wasn't until I was climbing my way out of the now-familiar basement, holding my headphones in my mouth, that I realized why I'd been lucky.
Where once lush forest had stood was now a swath of dead land. Trees had been uprooted, burned, purged. The earth itself was marked deep with smoking wounds that still smoldered if the light hit them right. It all looked terribly recent, but distant enough that new grass was trying to grow out of the ashes. Well then, I really hope I passed that psychology exam. The ruins of the bunker had been shifted in the chaos of whatever happened, but the hidden entrance was largely still intact. I guess it wasn't a bunker for nothing. The first thing I did was plug in my headphones and head off in the direction of my waterfall. The damage was vast, stretching far beyond my line of sight before tapering off to the North. But even then, the verdant green of the forest was dulled, and everything looked so brittle.
The river was gone. The waterfall was gone, and I suddenly felt as if I was looking down on a cemetery for all the tension in my spine. Maybe I was. Whose to say there weren't people buried under the dirt out there, didn't I meet some the last time I was here? I tried, but couldn't remember their names, only that one skimmed the water like a wide-eyed Jesus, and the other one liked to paint. Maybe somewhere out there their bones were being mistaken for sticks against the ashen landscape.
I don't know how long I sat there, but I know it was the longest I'd ever dared to stay. The air was thick and heavy, and if I had to put a name to it, I'd call it grief. The music in my ears did little to quell the nerves in my gut, and eventually I just turned it off. A part of my logical mind tried, and failed, to put together the why and how of what could've happened. Hollywood said bombs made a different kind of impact than the one shown here. This damage was long, in-congruent, as if something had ripped up an entire forest digging. It made me think of claws.
And you know what? I was sad.
In the last five months I'd come to think of this place as my private Utopia, my own personal Wonderland, except I wasn't stuck with no way out. Somehow that made it worse. I chose to come here because it was beautiful and strange, and though I hadn't been sure at first; the air was clearer, easier to breathe. I'll admit that had taken a minute to get used to, but once my lungs quit straining under the purity of this world's atmosphere, it was an addiction. I'd latched onto the whole experience with the wonderment of a five-year-old that didn't know any better – except I should have – and that childish attachment now ached, like it shouldn't have. I was going to head back home shortly, like I always did, and pretend it was perfectly normal for a teenager to walk through inter-dimensional cracks in space and time. Because at this point that's all I had that made the most sense.
The next time I fought my way out of the basement, I was irritated. Because I had to fight my way to the surface, battling against loose rock and fallen concrete. Coming up for air looking worse for wear even though I'd just showered before leaving. That was only half of it though, because as soon as I had tugged the rest of my leg through the opening I'd forcefully created, the ground shook something fierce. Earthquakes weren't exactly uncommon in California, but this wasn't an earthquake, it felt wrong. The whole thing only lasted a handful of seconds and once it was finished, I could only gape down at the space I'd just crawled through. The space that was very firmly blocked by sectioned concrete slabs.
And you know I couldn't even be angry, yet. The whole thing was just too shocking.
At some point I'd taken a seat on one of the slabs, reveling at the overall absurdity of the situation. This was my place, my spawn point, my gate. It was my ticket to there-and-back again. Until it wasn't, and I'd promised mom to help with the cookies for my brother's school bake sale. I'd received my first invitation for a campus walk-thru and finally paid off the rest of my graduation package. Finally, was an understatement. A month of back to back double-shifts really did a number on a person; all for that diploma though, right? Speaking of shifts, Tamara was a reasonable woman, she'd understand if I took a short vacation, right? At least until I dug my way back. If all else failed, there had to be another spot to slip through, right? The probability of there being one and only one crack in the universe had to be pretty low…
Right?
It was dark and cold, but I hardly felt it. I should have, I really should have, and some small, miniscule part of my brain tried to remember what the symptoms of shock were. Probably this. This is nice though, another part of me thought, and I laughed. I should find something to cover up with, something warm to help control the trembling. Somehow, I don't think they had emergency first-aid stations for me to break the glass on around here. If I'd been bothered, I might have remembered the lighter in my pocket, the one I carried in case of emergencies. But I didn't, and had it been anything else it's weight would have burned a hole in my pocket. Instead I choked on a sad, stilted laugh and slid from my perch to the ground.
God, it's cold.
NOTE: Welcome to my nice story; it's full of violence, realism, canon-divergence, character death, and other unsavory topics. I guess it has romance to, so not a complete lost cause? It will read more like one-shots, which they technically are, rather than full chapters, and their general length will reflect this. But I can't get the over-all plotline out of my head, so it is a chapter-fic in the end. As a reminder, all my stories are mature and have the potential for explicit material, read at your own discretion.
Also, it's not an SI. Just some chick I came up with on the fly that fit the bill for what I wanted. Thanks!