The first thing I registered was a stale, sterile smell.

Then, the sound of a ceiling fan whirring somewhere above my head.

With some effort, my eyes opened and almost immediately shut again from the sudden brightness of the room I was in. I fought the urge to close my eyes and waited for everything to come into focus.

I was in a hospital bed, which was odd because I wasn't in any pain. With a half-awake numbness, I withdrew my arms from beneath the sheets and examined them. They weren't even bandaged. Why was I here?

A hospital room...could it be?

Had everything been a dream?

The door opened to my left and my eyes darted to the nurses that were entering with an assortment of sheets and materials. When they saw I was awake, one smiled and approached my bedside.

"You're awake, Futaba-chan," she said. Futaba. So I hadn't miraculously woken up in my old life, after all. Slowly, other inconsistencies came to my attention, like the absence of a heart monitor or how small I was compared to the nurses. "How are you feeling?"

Each blink brought back memories, and within moments all the panic I'd felt from before this hospital room hit me like a brick wall. The world went out of focus. Red eyes. "Shuu!" I gasped. "Where's Shuu? Kouko?"

The nurse looked to one of her companions, alarmed.

I gritted my teeth and repeated again, "Where is Shuu? Uchiha Shuu!?" Were they slow or was I out of my mind?

An eerie silence blanketed the room after I spoke, and the two nurses closest to me blanched. They exchanged uncomfortable looks. Why?

"No," I breathed, my blood running cold. "Is he...?"

"Futaba-chan," the nurse that had spoken to me before said, putting a placating hand on my shoulder. "You see…"

Her words, sickly sweet and rehearsed, only confirmed my worst fears. I couldn't hear the rest of her sentence over the thrumming static in my ears.

"No, no, no…" My grip on my sheets went slack. "No...it's too early...how…?"

A cry next to me vaguely caught my attention. The hand that had been on my shoulder disappeared. Everything was getting warm, too warm. The whiteness of the room, the drone of the fan, it was all too—loud.

A screech that didn't sound like mine ripped from my throat as the light grew brighter, but I couldn't feel it, I couldn't feel anything—I was shaking and the world was vibrating. The static evolved into a ring that roared in my ears, and the light brightened, brightened, brightened—

It's too early, it's not possible!

It was raining. It can't be.

I'm out of my mind.

This wasn't how it was supposed to happen. What did I do?

"Yuuko-senpai, what do we do?"

"I can't see!"

"Someone put her under, before she—"

And then, as if the transmission had been cut, my world went dark again.


Over twenty years spent alive and I was never able to amount to anything more than a useless child.

My old life was one of a special sort of privilege: I'd never lost anyone before, no one of consequence, at least. I lived day-by-day in a lazy cycle, taking everything given to me for granted, from the warmth of my parents' smiles to my friends and their dumb jokes. Day by day, I let my life slip by with the faint hope that a greater purpose would find me on its own.

Then I'd had it all ripped away from me.

From then on, it was like the universe was hell-bent on punishing me for my past complacency, because all it ever did was take and take and take.

Losing mom and dad was different. There was no way I could have done anything about their fates, and I'd hardly known them. It was my first encounter with death, and it had introduced me to the fact that death wasn't a predictable force, and maybe I'd be better off treasuring what I was lucky to have.

But this was all me. This wasn't an inevitable, unpredictable death. Shuu and Kouko's fates were in my hands, and I hadn't done anything about it. I should have stopped all of this from happening. I should have stopped it.

Why couldn't I stop it?

What was the point of having these memories if I couldn't put them to use? What was I afraid of? Why didn't I do anything?

Everything burned. Every nerve ending was on fire.

I didn't want to open my eyes and face the reality that I'd failed again. I wanted to go home. I wanted to wake up in my bed in a room with windows and the sounds of traffic outside. I wanted to run away and never have to see these people again.

I wanted to go home. I wanted to cry into Imiki's lap and have Shuu jeer at me for how ugly I was when I cried.

But Shuu was gone.


The girl-turned-human-supernova started to scream again, thrashing about in the thick sheets of her bed. Through the bandages that had been sloppily applied to her body, a faint glow was starting to leak out. Yuuko worried her lip and looked over at her fellow nurses, some still massaging their closed eyes with spiteful murmurs.

"It's started again," she muttered to the nurse standing next to her, Eiko. "I've never seen anything like it. Maybe we ought to call in a medic-nin…"

Eiko considered her words, then shook her head tersely. "I don't see how it would help, Yuuko-senpai. From what we can tell, the girl is in a recoverative coma, but she keeps damaging herself over and over, and occasionally has outbursts like this…" She recoiled once the light had reached an unbearable brightness. "My best guess is that the damage is psychological, and we can't do anything about it since she's unconscious."

Yuuko sighed, wringing her hands. It was unlike anything they'd had to deal with in their line of work at the general hospital. A couple days ago, the girl had been brought here after being found unconscious in a ditch near the marketplace. She wasn't homeless, with a piece of ID listing her as Asagiri Futaba, so how had she ended up unconscious in the mud?

Stranger still, she had woken up and asked about the Uchihas. At this point, the whole village was alive with talk about the tragic incident that had occurred at the Uchiha compound. One sole survivor, she'd heard, and for the sake of this poor girl, Yuuko hoped it was the Shuu boy she'd been crying so desperately for.

Never mind that. Her job as a nurse was to make sure the girl stayed alive and didn't fizzle out like a candle at the end of all of this like she feared she would. She'd been intermittently lighting up and passing out, the light accompanied by screaming. The initial meltdown had caused a surge of light so bright that many of the nurses had been temporarily blinded, and Yuuko herself had sustained a minor burn from touching the girl's shoulder. The aftermath was severe burns on the girl's arms and face, which they fortunately could treat.

But all this sitting around was starting to drive Yuuko mad. Though there may have been an unspoken tension between the medic-nin of Konoha and the civilian health force workers, she'd put aside her pride if it meant nursing the child back to health. "I'm calling them," she informed Eiko.


The suffocating silence provided a good backdrop to my thoughts.

I'd been floating about in limbo for what felt like eons now. Maybe it really had been eons, and maybe I was dead. Maybe this was hell. Or maybe I'd never been alive at all, and this second life had been one long coma dream that I was at long last slipping away from.

It was so much easier to take in things from here. It was safe and quiet. Nothing could touch me. Everything I'd experienced, every tear shed, every laugh I'd had in this life felt so distant, almost like they'd never happened at all. The thought of all that I had experienced not being real was a comforting idea in some ways.

After all, if it wasn't real, then it couldn't be my fault, right?

This is familiar, I heard my mind whisper. Didn't I think this way after my parents of this world died? And the one to pull me out of that was—

It hurts, it hurts, another voice whimpered. I halted that train of thought and let it drift out of my grasp, but the pain persisted for an incomprehensible length of time.

Maybe it would be better if I just hid here. Forever.


"As Yuuko-san suspected, the light she emanates seems to be linked to releases of chakra," the medic-nin confirmed tonelessly. "Stopping or preventing it is likely out of our hands. However, eventually, she should naturally burn out as her chakra is used up, maybe by the end of the day or so."

"But she's been doing this for three days already," Eiko supplied grimly. "It doesn't look like it'll stop any time soon, and each time she has an episode, her burns only get worse."

The medic-nin, whose face had been the picture of stoicism up until now, suddenly looked taken aback. "Three days…she must have used up an exceptional amount of chakra. That's uncommon...especially for her age. She should have entered a comatose state long before now."

"She is comatose, for all intents and purposes," Yuuko commented. "It just seems that there's a psychological trigger for her episodes, and that trigger causes her to have these meltdowns in the midst of recovery."

"Psychological trigger?"

"The patient was asking about the Uchihas when she first woke up and immediately entered her current state after we tried to explain what had happened," Eiko continued, heading over to the supply cabinet for new bandages.

The medic's expression sobered even more, if possible. "Ah, yes. The Uchihas…it's terrible, what happened to them. Perhaps she witnessed something linked to the incident?"

"Yuuko-senpai!"

Yuuko whipped around, an action that proved unnecessary since the light emanating off of the girl's body soon filled every corner of the room. The girl began to whimper. "Here we go again," she bit out, shielding her eyes with her hand. As the whimpers escalated into cries of agony, Yuuko's hands trembled in her effort to stay put, and she stole glances at the stumped medic-nin. "Isn't there anything we can do!?"

Amidst the girl's rising screams, an unfamiliar woman strode in through the open door donning a pure white hospital gown. She breezed past the nurses as if she were a ghost, ignoring their cries of caution. Most strikingly of all, she was covered head to toe in bandages, not unlike the bedridden girl. When she was at her bedside, she merely stared into the light, and Yuuko could almost swear that she looked mournful before she placed a hand on the girl's forehead.

The spell broke, and Yuuko was back in her right mind. "Miss, don't! Her skin is extremely hot to the touch, you could sustain serious injury!" She sprang into action, rushing against the blinding light to restrain the mysterious woman, but to the collective surprise of her and her nurses, the ear-splitting shrieks stopped and the light faded.


"Hey, you! That's my swing!"

A small child stood before me. He had enough baby fat that his face was practically spherical and a bratty, nasal voice. The clothes he wore were a little too large for his frame, but he wore them proudly, chest puffed out.

"You kinda talk funny, Asagiri, but I don't mind."

The boy offered a chubby little hand to me, short fingers extended.

"Oi! Asagiri Futaba!"

He grew a few inches. He was now covered in bruises and held out a wooden sword with a challenging glint in his eyes.

"I'll become the strongest shinobi in the clan—no, the whole village, and then they won't be able to touch me!"

Another few inches taller now. He had a determined look that somehow made his coal-black eyes shine like diamonds.

"That's what friends are for!"

Now he was drenched, but even as soggy locks of dark hair fell into his eyes, he remained unwaveringly resolute in his tone and stance.

"Futaba…"

But something was wrong. Patches of blood began to appear in stains across his once-neat tunic.

"Futaba...Futaba...why didn't you…"

No. This was wrong. Panic grew in my chest as my heart grew loud enough that I could hear nothing but its jackhammering.

"Why didn't you save me…?"

A bloody hand reached out.

You're not real.

"It's all your f-fault...Futaba…"

You're not real!

"Futaba!"

My eyes flew open and I was immediately aware of a cool sensation on my forehead. It was a hand. The tips of my fingers tingled from my rapid breathing, the image of the boy covered in blood seared into the backs of my eyelids. Hesitantly, I followed the hand back to its owner and promptly balked at what I saw.

"Imiki-nee?" My throat was so raw that speaking sent waves of pain through it, but I couldn't contain my shock.

Gone were Imiki's beautiful black tresses of hair. Nearly every inch of exposed skin had been bandaged. Even her face was no different—one particularly large bandage stretched across the bridge of her. Just out of reach of the bandages' range of coverage, I could make out nasty red burns that still looked relatively fresh.

Her face communicated nothing as she placed a cool hand behind my neck—bandaged, I just realized—and helped me sit up. "Let's go home, Futaba-chan," she said flatly.

I heard the nurses break out in titters, likely in disapproval, with the nurse at the forefront taking charge and speaking directly to us. "I-I don't think that's a good idea, Nagayuu-san. You and Futaba-chan have severe burns that will require some time to heal."

Imiki didn't even turn to face the nurse in acknowledgement, urging me to my feet and holding my hand tightly as I staggered to my feet. Dizziness accosted me when I finally got up. I dimly wondered how long I'd been bedridden for. It simultaneously felt like I had been asleep for an eternity and a single night.

"Nagayuu-san!"

This time, Imiki did turn to face the small gaggle of nurses and a single medic-nin. I couldn't see her expression, but whatever it was rendered the gaggle of nurses speechless, and they no longer protested as we both slowly made our way out of the room, Imiki's hand firmly gripping mine.


sorry for the shorter chapter :(

you will be missed, shuu /3