Hello, this is my first story in this fandom and it was born from my love of SI on one hand and my love of Japanese language and culture on the other hand. I tried to give a new spin to the SI trope, while also focusing on what happens on the other side.

This is unbeta-ed and English is not my first language so corrections are welcomed. Thank you for reading. J

First Loop

A shinobi gets more than he bargained for when he chooses the perfect pawn.

Beppu Onsen village and hot springs resort, June K3 (three years after the founding of Konoha)

My head throbs and my eyes are gritty but I sit patiently next to the window and keep watch on my target. His schedule is quite erratic, showing weakness of character if I'm to be frank, or a certain spontaneity if I wish to be charitable. He should get out from the onsen around now, red and laughing with the others. Despite his erratic behaviour some things are constant: his love of baths and good food. I can see his close knit group, all of them belonging to one another, all their energy fields pulsing differently and yet harmoniously. I could always see who belongs and who doesn't. I made a great profit off it, sniffing out traitors and spies. It has made me lots of enemies as well.

`It would be so easy if this was an assassination`, I thought, absently fingering a kunai. I need to sharpen it soon. It would be only too easy to slip something in his food and then wait. But the client had insisted he was not to be harmed. He just wanted information from certain documents. What's the point, if you're going to kill him by cutting away his fortune. Better to kill him and his family might still get some fortune off him. Oh wait, his client was family. The kunai stopped twirling.

There goes the grocer's wife, and here is the weapon smith's son, going to his pretty lady friend and hoping to woo her with his poetry. Too bad he's a peasant, he would be quite famous were he better connected. And suddenly, I see her. Air seems to warp around her energy field, seemingly loath to touch her. I blink and try to assess her without interference.

She is older than 25, although with a childish air that makes her appear younger. Brown short hair, limp and plastered to her head by sweat, brown eyes, light skin that gets rapidly red from the sun. Quite tall for a female. Body has slightly different proportions than usual. The small head fits into the beauty standard but the double lidded eyes are slightly too big, marking her as a foreigner. Eyebrows are natural and too thick. Mouth is small, with the prized rosebud shape. Face structure also slightly different than usual. My gaze drops to her chest. Average there. Her body shape would make her look bigger in a kimono, but the foreign style she's wearing flatters her. A foreigner. But from where? Taken separately, no feature is extraordinary or strange, except for the double eyelid.

There was an air though, a sense of not belonging. That and the painfully obvious body language that screamed 'I have no idea where I am and this is all so strange, but I'm trying to look purposeful so that people would leave me alone and not try to con me'. Too bad the face looked naïve and innocent. An easy target. A cute little animal that either gets smothered with love by a master or it's killed by a predator immediately in the wild.

Her eyes were flitting around and she seems torn between amazement, some giddy feeling and creeping horror. Her hesitation shows she has no idea where she's going, although she seems to have enough brains to pretend she's looking for something in particular. Oh, now that I see her better, the clothes are different as well, even for a foreigner. The fabric, and the cut have some subtle differences that mark her as an outsider even among the outsiders themselves. Even if trade is much better now, she shouldn't be here. Definitely not alone. Thanks to the new village of Konohagakure making some semblance of order in the fire daimyo's territory, there is enough traffic for people not to blink twice at strangers, but this also makes them more prone to close their eyes to someone's misfortune.

My target goes out, laughing with his friends I sharpen my focus on him. I get up, my joints popping, prepared to shadow him. The girl seems dazed by the sun, or by the place. Like a lone tree in a fallow field. The horror must have won. She sways slightly and the breeze picks at her long skirt and makes it flutter like shining wings, an aborted and futile attempt at flying. My target's eyes follow the movement and rest to her figure. He seems interested, not repelled. He goes down the street, and enters a clothes shop.

I think quickly and decide: she will be part of my plans. Until now I was unable to move forward as fast as I would have liked, despite posing as an aspiring young merchant, but with her as a catalyst, things will change. And I'll get my money, go back to my family and live well for a while.

On the street, I approach her at first as an old lady, bent with age. I greet her. She seems dazed, but she responds quickly enough. Her speech is surprisingly correct, both in vocabulary and pronunciation. She uses cultured language, like a noble, and bows politely, with the assurance of somebody that only does it to be courteous. She is absolutely open with baasan-me. I pat her hand and give her an orange. She laughs, surprised, and thanks me politely and sincerely. She offers to help me carry my bags. I thank her and tell my nephew will take care of it. I start walking down the street and she follows me like a lost puppy. She's so painfully eager. I ask her where she's from and she stops and looks blankly for a while and then shrugs and says `probably far away'. She seems uncomfortable. I ask her if she has any relations here and she seems close to crying. She smiles and mumbles something about things working out somehow. So, she is optimistic and quite dumb. Or in denial. This can help you to survive or it can kill you.

I wish her luck and enter a shop. I go back to my target. He is eating at his favourite restaurant. Seafood again. So easy to kill him with something bad. Seafood can get bad so quickly here, inland.

I send a bunshin henged like a young messenger kid. He will take care of her, steer her away from potentially disastrous situations and most importantly, he will make sure she has little to no contact with other people. That could derail my plans. She seems like she likes children and she won't be on her guard around him. He might get more information than an old granny.

After some hours of work as an errand-boy and spying from the shadows on my target's meeting at the teahouse, I go look for her again. My target's happiness and ease around his friends made me despise him and any good will I might have felt towards him had evaporated faster than morning dew in Suna. I discreetly signal my bunshin to leave and he makes an excuse to leave and soon dissipates, filling me with information about her. She told him quite a lot. I hurry to get to her before others can, slipping into the long shadows of the evening. My chakra reserves have dropped alarmingly and I have two blackouts on the way, but I must continue on despite the exhaustion. Soon it will be over.

She is now in the marketplace, next to the grocer's stall. She seems to be helping the grocer pack the remaining vegetables. The woman observes her like a hawk, but the girl does not seem inclined to steal anything despite being obviously hungry. She gives her some money in the end, and tells her to buy something warm to eat and a futon for the night. She thanks her so effusively the grocer is embarrassed and shoos her away. I frown and prepare to act despite my chakra reserves being too low for all this work. The plan needs to be adjusted, unfortunately.

I shift to a dirty teenager with strawberry hair, run and bump into her and steal her money. I duck into an alley, change into an older man, a farmer with a kind and honest face, and watch her reaction. She seems bewildered and too tired to be truly angry. The twilight makes her loneliness even more obvious. Her shoulders slump in fatigue and defeat.

I go to her, put on a concerned air and tell her I saw what happened. I advise her to look smart and find a place to hunker down for the night because even if this place is quite safe, it isn't for her, a pretty young girl with no connections. She thanks me but she seems guarded. She turns her body slightly so that she does not face me directly. She does not look into my eyes. I am not threatening. I'm not too tall, or bulky: rather and old man that still has some strength left, but not too much. Too old to be interested in girls. I start chatting about my nephews to put her at ease about my intentions. She gradually relaxes and even starts smiling a little in my direction. I tell her I'll pay for her meal and a place to stay for one night because I couldn't live with myself if I don't help someone who reminds me of my dead niece who would be her age now. `How old are you, by the way?`, I ask. She seems touched and answers readily. Naïve and trusting quickly, I see. Judging by her hands, she has not passed through difficult times.

During the meal, I find out too much about her. Her likes and dislikes, her favourite foods, I hear about her education, her friends and her family. She talks too much about her personal life, as if nobody would take advantage of it. I encourage her to talk, and soon I know almost everything about her, even things she hasn't said. With the right circumstances and stimuli, she will be easy to manipulate.

I personally escort her to a safe location, help her make arrangements with the ōkami and then leave, telling her I'll send my nephew, an up-and-coming merchant who might help her with her predicament. She thanks me profusely. I stress she must not leave until he gets there. He looks like a younger version of me, I say, only more good looking. She smiles politely but is quite tired. Assured nothing will happen to her until morning, I go back to my target. He sits on the veranda, watching the rising moon. Next to him he has a cup of sake and his brushes. He looks idiotically at the shiny satellite and starts writing. He finishes with a flourish and reads it aloud. I must admit it is better than expected, although a bit too influenced by Ōno Rinka for my taste.

Shinwara no

Enza ni tsuki no

Kyaku to naru.

Sitting on a round mat from new straw,

I become moon's guest.*

After he goes to sleep, I keep vigil in a nearby tree, in the dark, and watch the silver moon as well, fighting to keep awake and alert. My traitorous mind conjures a foggy memory from my distant past, and I find myself reciting a poem by Kobayashi Issai, accompanied by the phantom voices of my older brother and sister.

Hitonami ni

Tatami no ue no

Tsukimi kana.

Like everybody else,

I lay on the tatami

And watch the moon.

My heart feels empty and I vow to myself I will finish this job as quickly as possible and go back home.

The next morning, after confirming my target's schedule, I change to the character of the old man's nephew, the only common character for both my targets, and go to find the girl. I find her waiting in the front of the inn. I greet her and in the first phrases I manage to slip that I'm married, madly in love with my wife and that we have 3 daughters I'm proud of. My praises to my wife and daughters disarm her and she shyly thanks me for helping her despite my busy schedule. I tell her sadly that I will leave soon and am unable to help her further but I can introduce her to someone who can and might. We go to my official appointment with my target and introduce them, her as a distant relative that has to look for work.

He definitely remembers her, and is quite taken with her, finds her charming. Her sincerity seems to win him over. Finding she is learned, and to his delight, finding she knows quite a lot of poems, he agrees to give her work as a clerk for a trial period. I took care of my target's clerk, making sure the position would be open and no others available.

She is a model female: cultured, modest, quiet and genuinely interested in what others have to say, not to mention compassionate. Soon he will eat from the palm of her hand because he knows she will not take advantage of it. Too bad he does not know who moves her. Before leaving, following the actual merchant's schedule I am impersonating, I drop some hints to make her doubt her benefactor's honesty. I tell her she should look for some documents and tell her in two weeks' time I would be able to find her again. Thinking she will help some poor soul who is taken advantage of, she will do her best and she will succeed. The target is too smitten by her wide innocent eyes, but she can also sense it, and will use it to her advantage.

She gets the documents, and it's been a week and a half. We meet behind the now closed grocer stall. The light from the setting sun is lovely, all brilliant reds with beautiful murasaki clouds my niece loved to paint. I need to buy her supplies before I leave town.

Today the target apparently subtly proposed to her with a lovely poem, but she played dumb, tittered like an idiot and suddenly started behaving like a girl who tries to be flirty but is too stupid to do it. She tells me this, nervously, not knowing I watched them all day. She will need to be extracted quickly since she seems she won't be able to keep up the act much longer.

I briefly toy with the idea of taking the documents and leaving her, but that would make my target suspicious, and she will definitely start blabbing quickly. Silencing her permanently does have some appeal but again, the target would be too interested and my involvement might become known.

I start to tell her I also have a confession to make and she blanches. In a fit of madness, I tell her the truth. That all her so-called independence, all her encounters were a lie. The words taste bitter. It's not entirely a lie. I feel better in more skins. I can belong then, just a little.

She watches me, eyes wide, body tense. She is scared. During my little confession, oh so different from the love confession she must have expected, I become me. I am no longer disguised to lull her into a sense of security or not hurt her sensibilities. She sees my real height, my real bulk, my real face. She blanches. Must be the scars. Or the expression. Or everything I am. I tell her she can either become the merchant's mistress and have a brief respite, or she can follow me and maybe survive longer. I ignore her babbling about not really having anything with her (much better that she didn't seem to wish to leave), and start walking out of the town. The day has started to darken into night.

Hesitantly, she follows me. We go towards the Ishigaki village, my meeting point with my contact. I will leave the documents there. If I were by myself, I would get there in about eight days. With her it might take twice as much, maybe more.

I look back and try to calculate her pace. She had started admiring the stars and almost falls into a ditch. I grab her before she tumbles down and breaks her neck. She is surprised and I see it, the moment she starts trusting me again. She only needs a small kindness to do so. She relaxes and the silence becomes more companionable.

After three days, we are on the road, much behind my schedule. We walk at a snail pace. She is not used to walking long distances, but fortunately she does not complain. Everything is new for her and she is enthusiastic, like on an adventure. Sometimes she sings and her voice cracks a lot and is quite thin, but once in a while she breathes properly and sings beautifully. She loves cooking and insists to buy some seasoning from a small farm and tries to season the food. We scrape and eat a lot of burnt rice before she gets the hang of cooking over a campfire. Sometimes her combinations are strange. She is undaunted and laughs. She still doesn't take this seriously. She tells me about her life, even more things now, since she knows the `the real me`. It's uncomfortable, knowing so much about someone.

After five days I start teaching her some basic self-defence moves when we stop, just to make her shut up. She starts enthusiastically, if clumsily at first. Her body, bigger than an average female gives her an advantage, but her spatial awareness is execrable. I have to show her the kata and their applications in a real fight again and again and she keeps forgetting them. She needs explanations. She wants to know why and how. I tell her to shut up and do it until she does not think anymore. She frowns but does it and performs abysmally.

We start practicing actual throws and hits she might use on bigger opponents. She is not afraid to press her body against mine. This shows she hasn't been in a real fight. She trusts I won't actually hurt her. I throw her down and tie her up with her hands behind her back, her arms bent with the elbows facing straight down. I am also tempted to hit her, to show her how it would really feel in a real fight, but she is so weak this will become a liability later on the road. We still need to walk all day tomorrow. She will move awkwardly tomorrow anyway, from the ropes.

She is bewildered at first. Asks me why tied her up. When things become uncomfortable, she politely asks to be untied. When I ignore her she asks again, louder. She begs, she screams, she waits silently, she almost wrenches her shoulders out of their sockets. She will have a nasty rope burn. When she is too exhausted to move, I go to her and turn her on her back so she can breathe easier. She is silent but her eyes beg me to untie her. I ignore her all night.

In the morning I untie her and she thanks me coldly. Her joints are stiff and must hurt a lot. It takes a while to make them move again. She frequently gasps in pain. Her wrists and upper arms have rope burns, with places where the skin had peeled off. She will need treatment before they get infected.

The next day she is silent and attacks the exercises with great concentration despite her injuries. She soon improves immensely by actually focusing, but her psychological balance is shot. She is furious with me. It helps her now but it will come back to bite her later down the road. She does not get close to me anymore. When we train now, she tries to throw me as far as possible. She's learning.

I hoped it will pass quickly, but after another week on the road it becomes apparent she can hold a grudge indefinitely and it only seems to get stronger. I realize she has also observed me and learnt a lot about me during our trip. She starts with subtle jabs, comments that she knows will get under my skin. Her tongue is her weapon and I underestimated it. My chest starts hurting somewhere I can't pinpoint. I wish she would stop sulking. She doesn't sing anymore. She cooks better but stops seasoning the food. Eating becomes again only something done for survival, not pleasure.

The rainy season starts while we are one day from my meeting point and week away from the village of Konoha. While being soaked by rain, I tell her it's a new village that accepts shinobi from everywhere. A place where you can begin anew as a civilian as well. It would be prudent to disappear there for a while, a new adventure. She nods and continues being polite, distant, frosty.

Of course she gets a bad head cold because she got wet in the rain. We are forced to stop two more days at Ishigaki, the meeting point, but my attempts at nursing her back to full health do not have any success. By the time we get close to Konoha we both are even more miserable. We are not even walking together anymore. She is about two hours ahead of me, trying to get to a satellite settlement of Konoha where she hopes she will get more medicine. I, who had despised the slow pace we had to adopt from her lack of endurance, am now the one dragging my feet. They feel like dead weights. I will stay in Konoha for a little while and then go home, I repeat again and again in my head. I look up to the horizon and I see with surprise the day is almost over. This kind of carelessness could have gotten me killed. It's good the Konohans keep their borders quite safe. I pick up the pace, thinking to tell her there's a summer festival starting soon, and that we can rest and even have some fun there.

I arrive one hour after her, to smoking buildings, rubble, some bodies littering the streets. Most of them are moaning in pain, from burns or deep cuts. She is among them. She lays on the ground, body contorting in pain. Half her face is burned to the bone. Her right arm looks like melted wax. Fat has burned and her clothes are fused to the skin in places where the burn is not that severe. A wind jutsu cut her torso to ribbons. It must hurt to breathe, to live. There's nobody next to her, everybody is clustered around their own tragedies. Close to her is a boy. She must have tried to save him and stupidly got into the line of fire. The boy she had tried to save is already dead. The victim's mother sobs next to her child.

I force myself to go past without stopping, to make myself just another passerby. She will suffer and die alone. Later, I go to the teahouse. The topic is of course, the fight and the tragedies. She is only a footnote in their speech. They are more interested in the building's damage. Shadows dance in front of my vision, in the corner of my eyes. I hear one say loudly that Uchiha are to blame. Some inter-clan training that got a bit out of hand. Apparently the clan heads responsible will personally come here tomorrow to apologise and make repairs. They are being diplomatic and showing their good-will. They try to change their image, from thugs to benefactors.

The next day I am a shadowed presence at the public apology from the clan heads. They express their regrets about the farmer's son's death and the injured villagers and promise to make sure this kind of incidents do not happen anymore. She is never mentioned.

After a bit of careful listening around I find out who was there that day. Which Uchiha is responsible for that jutsu. Although they are ostensibly allies, the animosity still runs deep. The village is too young. Finding an informed Senju and making an offhand remark was all it took for him to go on a rant about those good-for-nothing Uchihas.

I go for him the next evening. He has received some absurdly light penalty and has to patrol quite a bit strip of forest alone, probably to meditate on what he has done. I will make sure he pays for it in full.

He is a prodigy but I am calm, like an iced lake. I know I will win. I go and see him stumbling around the forest, dazed. He is also different, he does not fit neatly into this world either, despite having an Uchiha face. I waste no time. I attack and ask him why he killed someone who was like him, the coward. He breaks down completely, grips my hands and sobs `I'm sorry, I'm sorry`, but I cut his throat. His eyes were crimson at last. I would have liked for him to have struggled more.

The Uchiha will probably try to hunt me down, but they don't know about me. They have no one with a motive. The victim's family isn't rich enough to pay for such a service. No one has made the connection to the civilian caught in a crossfire and an unaffiliated shinobi. I didn't use any jutsu. Only cold steel.

I risk returning for her body. She was dumped as an afterthought, so nobody will miss her. She is past the stiff stage. She is bloated and meat sloughs off her no matter how carefully I try to move her. Flesh flies and carrion beetles thrived on her. It stinks. I put her in a scroll and finally leave for home.

If she and the Uchiha boy were both strangers, there is a possibility there are others. Maybe I will meet her again, in another body, with another face. Or maybe I'll meet someone else, someone who has known her.

I burn the scroll, take her ashes and put them next to my family's. My older brother with his lovely wife and three daughters. My grandparents who always gave me sticky mochi and mikan. My youngest brother. My older sister who made the best red miso paste. They wait for her. They have already met through me, except for my nieces and my sister-in-law. But I'm sure there won't be any problem there. They are similar, she and my sister-in-law, and she loves kids.

And after I rest with them for a while, I will go and search, and hope. I see them, the strangers that do not quite fit into this world, no matter how much they are disguised in bodies that conform to ours. Maybe I am the same.