Dreaming
"The world is in your palm, now, take a breath and calm down. 'Cause you have been selected, you've been selected."
When you realize that you have a second chance at life, there are a lot of thoughts that go through your mind. You think about everything that you did in your past life- all your joys and all your regrets. You think about things you wanted that you never got, and of the people you spent your days with. It's a very introspective moment, or at least it was for me. I had died so young in my first life. I had wanted to do so much more.
There was a large amount of fear too. The good news was that I was alive. I knew that before of course, but things were a tad clearer now. I was alive, but I wasn't in a familiar place. I would never see my family again, and a lot of the things that I wanted to have and do before simply didn't exist here. I was going to have to learn a new language, a new culture, and rework everything I thought I knew about myself.
What's more, my new family was probably in mortal danger. Not immediately, of course, but I knew enough about Naruto to know most of their fates. Looking around, I was practically living in a walking graveyard.
When you read a story, there's always a certain level of security regarding the main characters. In a book, the protagonist is almost never the one who dies. I never read the end of Naruto- it didn't finish up before I passed. But I can say with reasonable certainty that Naruto, Sakura, even Sasuke, probably all live. That's just how these things work. Everyone else though- they're vulnerable. People love the minor characters. They make the world a lot more interesting, but to an extent they're disposable. If Kiba, for example, died in the first 200 chapters of the manga, would Naruto still save the world? Probably.
What happens now though? There are no main characters in real life. There's just people. And these people who were taking care of me didn't feel like minor characters. They didn't seem expendable. I thought of a world without them for just a moment, feeling my little heart grow tight in my chest. If they were gone, I'd be alone here. I had loved my old family so much. They had been my world before, and loosing them made everything feel impossible. Somebody out there had given me a new one though. Hiruzen, Biwako, Asuma, and the other older boy whose name I didn't know yet. They cared about me. When I fussed in the middle of the night, they were the ones who came. Without them, well, there wouldn't be anything left.
I didn't want to loose everything, not again.
That led to so many other questions. Let's start with the elephant in the room- who was I? In the following weeks, I would realize that Tsunade appeared to be my cousin, but I don't remember her having any other family mentioned outside Nawaki and the first Hokage. Where did I fit into this story? There were two options that I figured lay here. One was significantly more attractive than the other. See, the first option was that I was never supposed to be here, that my very presence is going to disturb the balance of the universe. For all I knew, the manga itself was wrong. Maybe I could be the hero of this story and save everyone from a lot of grief. Sounds like a good deal doesn't it?
Now let's look at the other option. See, it's equally possible that the reason I don't remember Hiruzen taking care of a little girl is because I don't live long enough to make any difference at all. Wouldn't that be the cherry on top of the cake huh? I get a second chance at life, just to have it snuffed out before I could even scratch the surface of this new world.
If that was the way of things though, then there was nothing that I could do now to change things. I had to just hope for the best and pray that my life wasn't pointless. So there you have it. I made a decision back then, in the beginning, that I was going to believe I could make a difference. Naruto's always talking about protecting people, after all. Hell, the entire series never stops harping on loyalty and love. I could get behind that.
I would do my best to live by Naruto's words. His way would be my way. I would try my best to protect my new family. Else, I would die an unfortunately early death trying.
Time passed on, and I threw myself back into the world. I wouldn't be this fussy baby forever. I had a life to live, and to live it, I had to learn to be a member of my new society. My first obstacles- learning to walk and talk again.
From that day forward, I listened to the jabber of my family with a newfound fever. I needed to understand their words. I couldn't participate in society without the language, after all. The first words that I started to get were names. I could pick out Asuma's name whenever Biwako was yelling at him, and I could tell who the older boy, Isamu, was yelling for when he came home from the academy in the afternoon. I could even tell when people were talking to me. Natsuki. It wasn't much like my old name, but I could get used to it I suppose. It had a pretty ring to it when Biwako cooed at me in the morning. I wasn't the old me anymore, I was Natsuki. Natsuki Senju.
After I learned people's names, it was easier to extrapolate the rest of what they were saying. It wasn't exactly a walk in the park, but I started to learn, gradually. In my past life, I wasn't athletic. Academics had always been my turf. This was almost like an accelerated mandatory language training course. It consumed all of my time, every minute, of every day. It's really not all that surprising that I learned fast.
Interestingly enough, Asuma was the most helpful Sarutobi around the house when it came to my little learning regimen. He was older than me, but not by too much. By the time I had grounded myself in my new world, Asuma was babbling and even starting to toddle- probably almost a year old. Because he had such a limited vocabulary himself though, Asuma's diction was the easiest for me to follow. He was a pretty loud kid, quick to throw a tantrum when something wasn't quite how he wanted it. Dinner, for example, was a nightly battle with him. I learned all of my food groups by listening to him argue with Biwako about which vegetables he didn't want to eat and which treats he did.
Asuma was good to me though. See, he seemed to have gotten it in his head that I was his little sister. Well, I guess he wasn't wrong. But anyhow, once I had stopped being such a useless whiney baby, he took quite the interest in me. He was the first person to acknowledge that there was a mind and a person in my little body. There was a specific day, when we were sitting in Biwako's living room, surrounded by a pile of baby toys that it seemed to connect with him. He had been playing with a little monkey figurine while I watched. I was probably around five months old now, and had just recently mastered the art of sitting up on my own.
He looked up and caught my eye with a sudden interest. "Nat," he said, then held up his toy. "This is my monkey."
I blinked a few times, while I digested his sentence. Like I said, I was still getting used to the language, but I got what he was saying. From that day on, Asuma was like my own personal teacher. We were constantly together, being the two babies in the family, and he seemed to understand all my little gestures in ways that the others didn't. I would make sounds until I got Asuma's attention and pat things. Then he'd name them for me. It was like a little game that we played.
We amused Biwako I think, who didn't play along with me the way that Asuma would. "Are you talking to Natsuki again?" she'd ask as Asuma chattered away to me on the floor.
"No mom, I'm teaching her," Asuma corrected.
"Oh, excuse me," Biwako smiled softly. "That's very nice of you."
By the time I was six months old, I said my first words in a very deliberate fashion. It was dinner time, on a rare night that Biwako had managed to wrangle all of the boys, including Hiruzen, into having a nice family meal. Asuma was always much more dramatic when his father was home, and I could see the tantrum welling in his little baby lungs from a mile away. Biwako was trying to get him to eat fish for dinner, after all, and he hated pink foods. I had been babbling for a few weeks and decided that it was about time I put some of my sounds together.
"Asuma!" I called out just as he was balling his little hands into defiant fists. "Fish!"
Just like that, any concern that the boy had about dinner had vanished, and he was looking at me very excitedly. "Nat! Say it again," he demanded exuberantly.
"Asuma," I grinned.
Isamu breathed a laugh and rolled his eyes. "Of course she'd say your name first," he said.
Hiruzen let out a gritty chuckle as well. "Better watch out Asuma, Natsuki is going to be chasing you around the house soon," he said.
Biwako was quiet, but her eyes were on me, watching. That really wasn't so unusual, of course. Biwako was always watching. Honestly, if someone told me the woman was descended from hawks, I wouldn't be so surprised. Every time one of us even thought of causing trouble, she was there almost instantaneously. Still, something about her gaze made me feel a little squeamish inside. I wasn't used to being the one under scrutiny in the house. Usually Asuma was the one she was keeping an eye on all the time.
Did she know? Could she tell that I was more than everybody thought?
I had thought about telling them all about me, once I was able to of course. But part of me wondered. Why would they believe me? Or worse, what would happen if they did? I trusted Hiruzen. He was a good man. I could tell just from watching him in his everyday life with his kids and the village. But there were other people to think about too. See, being so close to Hiruzen, we ran into a lot of other rather important villagers.
Orochimaru and Danzo included.
I'll never forget the first time I saw them both. The first time I met Orochimaru was brief and rather uneventful. The only reason I remembered it at all was because I had just been so surprised by his visit in the first place. He had been paying his sensei a house call, for something that was probably important. Hiruzen answered the door with me bobbing in his arms.
"Orochimaru," Hiruzen greeted him, surprised.
"Sensei," the pale man had nodded in return. He seemed more serious than I expected. His tone was all business, and he didn't seem to be particularly enthused to be visiting. If I hadn't known better, I wouldn't have thought anything of him. He would've just been another village ninja. Albiet one of the weirder looking ones, what with the snake eyes.
"You're back early," Hiruzen commented, his eyes peering beyond Orochimaru towards the street. "Come in."
Orochimaru followed wordlessly, shutting the door as he stepped into the living room. He didn't look at me properly until we had made it all the way into the living room, and even when he did, it was with a sort of bored duty. Like he knew Hiruzen would expect him to ask about me.
"This is Tsunade's new brat?" Orochimaru raised an eyebrow.
"Mm, my brat now," Hiruzen confirmed. "Natsuki, this is Orochimaru-senpai. He's good friends with your Tsunade-nee."
"Hi Orochimaru-senpai," I said carefully, balling part of Hiruzen's shirt in my fists. The words felt so strange. Orochimaru-senpai. If somebody had told me I'd be calling the Orochimaru senpai fifteen years ago when I had first gotten into the Naruto series, I would have called them crazy. That's life though. Or at least, that was my life.
"How cute," Orochimaru commented, though he didn't seem to really mean it. "Would you like to be debriefed sensei?"
"Yes, I suppose so," Hiruzen sighed, putting me down. "Isamu! Could you come into the living room and look after Natsuki for a bit!"
"One second!" Isamu's voice drifted in from the other room.
Twenty minutes later I was throwing a ball at the back of Asuma's head, while Hiruzen had some sort of business meeting with the man that would kill him one day. I didn't get a wink of sleep that night, my mind was moving too fast for me. In the end though, I guess I shouldn't have expected much else from that moment. I was going to have met Orochimaru eventually. That day was as good as any. At least he hadn't shown any weird interest in me.
The same couldn't be said about Danzo.
The first time I met Danzo, Hiruzen wasn't actually present. See, as I mentioned earlier I was related to Tsunade somehow, through an Uncle or something. Because of this, Tsunade visited me pretty frequently. Most of the times, she would just pop in for dinner randomly with her brother Nawaki. Other times, Nawaki would come without her. Then, on some rare special occasions, she would be able to escape the hospital for a whole day and she would take me to the park.
Isamu and Asuma would usually come with us on those days as well, but I always got special attention from my cousins. Nawaki would hoist me up on his shoulders and I'd get to see the world from almost an adult height on the way over there. Asuma would get jealous occasionally on these trips. But Isamu was always ready to swoop in and stop any crises in their tracks, putting his little brother on his shoulders so that nobody felt left out.
That day we were going to a new park on the other side of the village. It was the first time that I was leaving the Sarutobi clan's land while also having my wits about me. "Look up there Natsuki, Asuma," Nawaki said pointing up towards the Hokage mountain. I stared at the monument with wide eyes. The manga hadn't done this justice. Maybe it was just because I was so small, but the Hokage faces were ginormous. Of course, there were only three faces carved into the cliff face at the moment, but the three men were fixed up there like watchful pillars.
"That's Dad!" Asuma squeaked. "Isamu-nii, that's Dad!"
"Mmhmm," Isamu nodded with a proud look in his eye. He always stood a little taller when people talked about Hiruzen's position in the village.
"Do you know whose next to Sarutobi-Sensei?" Tsunade asked me curiously.
"Second Hokage," I answered.
"Yes," she nodded, seeming unusually solemn. This was weird for Tsunade. Typically she was more apt to let us kids zoom around wildly while she supervised. Occasionally she'd always cut in with a fond sarcastic quip when she thought we needed to calm down. But she was still always pretty quiet, just happy to be present. It looked like I was going to get a lesson today though. "He's your great-grandpa too. Like what the Saru Oji-sama is to Isamu and Asuma."
"Me?" I blinked looking up at the second Hokage. I don't know what I had thought before. I knew I was related to Tsunade, and therefore I had to somehow be connected to the first two Hokage. Hell, I even had the white hair growing in right now in wild puffs. It just never really clicked though. The Senju were supposed to have been a great clan once upon a time. I had quite a legacy to live up to.
"And the first Hokage's our grandpa!" Nawaki chimed in. "I'm going to be Hokage just like him one day Natsuki-chan. My face is going to go right there." He pointed towards the empty space beside Hiruzen's bust.
"You've got to graduate first," Tsunade rolled her eyes dramatically. She flicked her brother in the shoulder. Asuma giggled, but I couldn't find it in me to find their banter amusing. Nawaki was eight years old right now, not yet graduated from the academy. I still had time to enjoy his involvement in my life. Nonetheless, I knew where his dream was going to lead him.
"Taken up baby-sitting Tsunade-chan?" a deep cold voice cut in on our left. Nawaki wheeled around, startled, spinning me with him on his shoulders. A few feet behind us was a dark haired man with a cross shaped scar on his chin. He looked like he had just stepped out of the hospital. The entire right side of his head was wrapped in bandages, and he had a few patches on his neck and hands. i recognized him immediately.
"Danzo-sama, how nice to see you out," Tsunade said. She sounded murderous. "I thought Aina-senpai had told you-"
"Yes, I know what she told me," Danzo said.
"Then I'm going to have to insist that you return to the hospital. You should be resting." This was a side of Tsunade that I had not seen in real life. The scary half.
"Resting is not going to regrow my eye girl," Danzo practically spat. He had a fire in his face that rivaled Tsunade, and it scared me. The man was furious, that much was plain. It dawned on me that I had never seen an angry ninja before. Hiruzen, Biwako, and Tsunade were really the only ones I was ever around, and they never really had their ninja faces on when talking with me. This was something new and different to me all together.
"This is not the time or the place for this conversation," Tsunade retorted. His eye cut towards us like a dagger, passing over Asuma, Isamu, Nawaki, and then finally landing for a moment on me. Then, just like that, he swallowed his anger whole, and settled into a cold stoney mask.
"Of course not," he said. "I hadn't realized you were with the Hokage-sama's family."
"It's fine. I'm sure you're still very upset about your eye Danzo-sama. Your judgement must be a little cloudy," Tsunade said deliberately. For a moment I thought Danzo was going to slap her or something, but he didn't. Instead his eyes flickered back to me. I didn't like that.
"This is the child Hiruzen took in?" he asked. "Kojirama's daughter?"
"Her name is Natsuki," Tsunade said gritting her teeth. I shrunk a little on Nawaki's shoulders. Danzo's gaze was piercing, like he could see something in me that I didn't even know was there. I glanced over looking for support from someone or something. Asuma looked blatantly confused though, and Isamu was staring at Danzo looking startled.
"If she ever needs help," Danzo went on, as if he hadn't heard her. "Let me know."
With that, Danzo wheeled around and stalked off. Nawaki's shoulders sagged a little the instant he was gone, and I let out a breath I hadn't even known I was holding.
"Who's that?" Asuma asked immediately. He sounded like he might cry. I was actually impressed that he hadn't started already. Asuma was still only a little over one year old. Most toddlers would have cried after seeing that sort of hostility out of a man like Danzo.
"One of Sarutobi-sensei's advisors," Tsunade said. "They were genin together, a long time ago, underneath the second Hokage."
"I've met him before," Isamu murmured quietly. "He's usually not so... so..."
"Danzo-sama is just upset. We had a disagreement earlier... about an injury from his last mission" Tsunade cut Isamu off. She had calmed down a little, but I could almost feel her anger lingering there, just under the surface. Whatever that was, it wasn't really a spontaneous outburst from either of them. Tsunade was mad at Danzo for a lot more than she was letting on.
"He offered me help," I said, blinking. I still felt like I was in shock. What did that mean? I think- although I'm not entirely certain about this- that Danzo had just blatantly offered to place me in his Root division to train me.
"Yeah, that was weird," Nawaki agreed.
"The second Hokage was Danzo-sama's sensei, just like he was for Sarutobi-sensei," Tsunade said. Yes, I suppose that made sense. If I was Danzo, and I was given any sort of opportunity to train Tobirama's great-grandaughter in any capacity, I'd probably take it. "Listen to me though Natsuki, you be careful around him okay? He means well for the village, but he doesn't always see eye to eye with Sarutobi-sensei."
I nodded. Tsunade didn't have to worry about me going to Danzo. I was going to stay the hell away from that man at all costs. I wanted to become a ninja, but not like that. Konoha was so different from my old home. There were things that people thought were acceptable here that would never have been remotely okay where I came from. I was never going to be able to accept a man like Danzo.
I was finally getting used to things here. Danzo would not be the one to screw it all up for me.
Arc Title and Chapter Quote from song Dreaming by Smallpools
A/N Hello. It's been quite a while since I updated (whoops). I don't really have a good excuse, other than life is busy, and I had some writers block. Something gave me the writing bug again this week though, so here I am again. Hope you liked this new chapter, and hope the next one doesn't take so long to come out, haha.
Remember to review :).
Until next time.
