Disclaimer: I own nothing but the general plot and the OCs
So in the note that I posted I wrote that I'd put a chapter up in the next few days and then delete the note, so even though the word count would go up, the chapter numbers would stay the same.
I know for a lot of readers, particularly those in the US where the bulk comes from, it's the same day as the note, but for me, technically it's the next day. And I'm super tired. But I wrote this instead of job hunting... so enjoy I guess.
I also wrote in the last chapter that I would introduce time skips on in this chapter. I sort of have. The whole chapter is a little bit of a time skip to be honest. And also kind of not. I don't knows.
I know some of the things Subaru is doing is a lot earlier than most babies, but I looked up the earliest known ages for these things and then subtracted a little more time to make up for the fact that she's a heck of a lot more determined, she has few distractions a lot of time, and she's in a world where the people are physically made of sterner stuff, partially thanks to the influence of chakra.
Finally please do let me know what works for you or what you don't like as much, or just generally what you think. I get a lot of ideas and inspiration from reviews and have previously made immense changes to the direction of a story thanks to suggestions from reviewers.
Chapter 5 - I Stand Alone
My life settled into a largely predictable routine very quickly. The exciting adventures of baby Subaru it was not.
DFB had me fed and dressed by what I guessed to be around 6am or 7am, and took me straight to day care every day.
I noticed within the first week that all of the women working there that I met, had the ability to use chakra, and many of the babies dropped off were by parents dressed for shinobi work. I took that to mean that I was in a day care that catered for shinobi parents, run by shinobi women.
It made sense when I thought about it. After all, even though DFB had shown to want as little as possible to do with me, it didn't necessarily mean he didn't give a shit about me. Putting me in a day care run by civilians when I had zero ability to defend myself was asking for a kidnapping if anyone ever found out our connection.
One of the things that I noticed very quickly about shinobi baby day care, was that it did it's best to foster a high level of independence right from the start. From as early as possible children were taught to go to the toilet by themselves, dress themselves, clean their own teeth, brush their own hair, and problem solve without the input of an adult giving them answers.
It was a little strange at first, to see adults so hands off in the caring of young children, but then I realised that encouraging dependence at any point, when in about ten years many of them would be off potentially fighting to the death, was not what the system would be looking for.
Whilst it wasn't exactly how I would raise children, I realised that it was probably the smartest move considering the structure of the society I was fairly certain I had been born into.
Of course, being largely left to my own devices suited me perfectly well. I wasn't interested in children's toys, no matter how smart they were compared to children's toys for babies from my first life. I certainly wasn't interested in the other babies my age, who did little but lie on their backs, wriggle, cry, piss, shit, sleep and eat.
The women came by like clockwork to feed me and the others my age, as well as change our cloth tortures whether we had used them or not.
One of the things I was incredibly relieved about was the fact that DFB had told them of my warning system for needing the toilet, and for feeding. Whilst the feeding warning was unnecessary, because the women fed us when they fed us and not a minute before or later, they listened to my toilet warning system every time.
Had they not, I probably would have spent all day every day I was with them holding my breath until I passed out, just to get away from the reality of sitting in my own - ugh.
For such an efficient and relatively hands off system, I was pleasantly surprised by the personal and humane handling of each baby. Each woman in charge of the youngest ones seemed to be assigned to three babies around my age, and we would each be held and interacted with for up to four hours a day.
I didn't really give a shit if she interacted with me, but I was glad for the other babies, that their emotional development was considered as well. In fact, the women seemed to pick up on my desires within a few days, and stopped trying to get me to fiddle around with and gum toys that I had no interest in whatsoever.
They continued to quietly chat to me, which I didn't pay any attention to- having chosen to aim for my walking and talking goals one at a time, and instead I focussed purely on movement.
The women were incredibly accommodating, and if I didn't find them so annoying for the way they spoke to me in irritating baby voices, I would have been very grateful. As it was I was mostly just frustrated at my slow progress.
All day every day, when I wasn't sleeping or eating or needing the toilet- which seemed to take up and unfairly large amount of time- I was clenching and unclenching the chubby little hands, touching forefinger to thumb and then every subsequent finger after that, as well as touching forefinger to the tip of the little nose with each hand over and over again.
When I was on my back, I would grab the closest thing and lift it, then put it back down gently within reach, I would kick and wriggle and wave the arms, turn the head from left to right and attempt to lift it as far off the ground as possible to look at the baby tummy.
When I was on my front I would wriggle and try to roll, moving the arms and legs about from underneath the little torso to stretched out, in attempt to get the limbs used to carrying the weight of this body.
It was exhausting work, and at first I could only sustain the movements for a few minutes, however I quickly worked my way up to ten minutes and then twenty, and then twenty five. I often fell fast asleep in the middle of exercising without realising it, and by the time the evening came around for DFB to pick me up and take me back to the room that I was so familiar with, I was so tired I could barely think straight.
The stupid body did nothing but ache from the exertion constantly as I pushed it and pushed it, but the adults around me assumed that it was just my natural baby progress and so did nothing to stop me.
Time seemed to blur together thanks to the sleep cycle that I was unused to, but I managed to keep track of the days and nights. It was three slow, grinding, infuriating weeks of monotony with little break through, beyond the lessening ache of the tiny body, and the finer control of the strength and direction the limbs moved in. I sometimes wondered if I was pushing the body too hard, but I couldn't make myself slow down or stop, because there was just nothing else I could do that wouldn't drive me mad.
Despite the fact that I had essentially brushed off the women at day care as an unimportant part of my new life, not worth paying too much attention to, they apparently hadn't felt the same about me. Perhaps they liked my clear determination to move, perhaps they worried that by myself I would get hurt, or perhaps it was just another aspect of helping me toward independence, I didn't know and wasn't interested in finding out. Either way, by week three, they began to help me.
It started with them helping me to roll over, and moved on to holding the head up with one arm, and pulling on the arms with the other, in order to help me sit up, and then lying me back down and starting over again. They would lie me down, propped up with a small pillow, and have me push against their hands with sock clad feet, one after the other, and then do the same with my hands. They also expanded on my picking and dropping exercise, by giving me heavier objects.
Progress was still too slow for my tastes, however it was obviously quicker. By the start of the fifth week, I could hold the head up by myself, and before the end of the second month, I was pulling myself into a sitting position alone.
Within that time I had the embarrassment of wetting myself three times, however I would be eternally thankful that... the other thing never happened again.
Each woman tried to get me interested in other things at certain points over those first two months; playing with toys, playing baby games with her, listening to her talk to me, and a few times interacting with the other babies my age.
I completely ignored the first three attempts, and by the time they tried the last one, I had already learned to roll, and simply rolled myself away from the other drooling stinker.
I generally thought of myself as, if not a nice person, at least someone who made an effort to be kind most of the time. However, when it came to the day care women, despite all the help they had given me, they were key presences during a time in which I largely felt nothing but dissatisfaction and frustration. Inadvertently, my perception of them became coloured by the same brush. I barely tolerated them, for all their dedication.
I didn't go out of my way to be rude or dismissive, and it didn't come across much because frankly I couldn't talk, but I never bothered to put on a smile for them, and didn't bother learning their names.
Once they were out of sight, they were mostly out of mind, and besides the two who had brightly coloured purple and blue hair, if I met them on the street, I probably wouldn't recognise them. I used them, plain and simple. And I didn't feel bad about it, because in my opinion that was what they were there for. Nevertheless... I probably could have been a little more gracious toward them.
By the end of the second month in this life, I had mastered easily pulling myself up using the things around me as supports, into a sitting position. After that, unless the women were feeding me, changing cloth tortures, getting me to the toilet, or helping me walk, I ignored them completely.
It was around this time that I began to mostly sleep through the night, and so what little interaction I had with DFB went right down. I was attached to him, certainly, but only insofar as I would be attached to anyone who provided me with stability. Beyond the fact that he provided me with somewhere warm to sleep, and he helped me go to the bathroom, after I stopped needing nightly feeds, that was all he did for me.
He never held me unless it was to transport me from point A to point B, and he didn't even wash the body I was in, since the women at day care did that for him. I noticed, though, that they didn't tend to do that for the other babies, and wondered what he'd told them to make me the exception.
I was usually the first to arrive at day care, and the last to leave. He rarely spoke to me, and by the second month I had given up on the faint idea I'd had on us being anything but cohabiters forced together by what I was fairly certain was DNA.
The moment I got back to the room we slept in, by which point I was too physically exhausted to do anything, he went straight back to reading his book, sometimes filling out paperwork, or sharpening blades, or patching up small tears in his clothes.
I assumed he did everything else he needed to do when I wasn't around, because the sheets were mostly always clean, and so were his clothes. Additionally, I'd come to realise that like a completely fucking dysfunctional bachelor, the one room we stayed in was literally all he had.
The bathroom that we used was supposed to be a communal bathroom, from the joint male and female sign on the door, and happened to be directly across from his room in the hallway, but for whatever reason, I never saw a sign of someone else using it.
It was dull and monotonous (lonely) and all I had to keep me going was my determination to walk.
I didn't bother trying to crawl, when walking would probably take long enough, so I got straight on it. Each day, I pulled the weak body up into a sitting position, and did my best to get it on it's feet. And then inevitably it tilted over either onto it's back or face. Over and over and over again.
There was a shit load of face planting going on during those weeks, and the women's occasional giggles at my sincere efforts, whilst not malicious, made me dislike them. A lot. It took almost three weeks of trying every day until I was too tired to, in order to get the pathetic fucking body on it's feet.
It was gruelling, and trying, and even when I got there- like all the other checkpoints I had reached so far -it wasn't enough for me. It was too unstable on it's feet, needing something to hold onto to stay upright, and the moment I tried to shift it's weight onto one foot in order to walk, it toppled over.
At this point, the body's stamina had increased significantly, thanks to my continued pushing, and I spent two thirds of the time I was in dare care trying to walk, which meant I spent the rest of the time mostly sleeping or eating.
There was no excitement involved, barely any hope. I just felt a low level grim determination. I didn't think about what I would do when I had mastered walking. I didn't think about how much I disliked this new life, I didn't think about how lonely I was, or how half way through my third month despite having almost never been left alone in a room, I had made no connections.
I just pulled myself up onto my feet, sometimes with the help of the women, and sometimes without, and tried to walk.
I succeeded walking without support three months and just over a week into my second life. I felt little to no satisfaction, as the women clapped for me. I just toddled until I fell over, then got back up and did it all over again.
Despite reaching these milestones and more each week at day care, I shared none of them with DFB. I was too tired by the time he arrived, and I cared too little.
When he came to get me, and then lay me on my corner of the bed, I would simply lie there, staring at the ceiling, or the wall, and drift off into my daydreams, reminiscing with a painful wistfulness over my last life (my real life) and missing everything with such fervour that at times I almost cried. Although I never did.
There was so much about my last life, that although I missed, I hadn't been too attached to. But I missed my sisters (My reasons for living My hope My support My compassion My most important people) so much that my heart and chest hurt when I thought about them both (Gone forever). And so, much of the time I chose not to think of them at all.
Throughout the next month, as I got better and better at walking by myself, until I could do a wobbly run for a few seconds, as long as there was something for me to hold myself up with at the end, I went from wandering about small sections of the room relatively aimlessly, to actively avoiding the others.
I didn't need the women to help me walk anymore, I didn't want them telling me where to walk, or who to interact with. All I needed from them was to supervise me going to the toilet and gradually, I even stopped needing them to help me hold a bottle, as I learned how to hold and tilt it whilst I reclined at an angle, in order to make it easier.
As I breached the fourth month of my new life, relatively settled at the speed with which I could move for now, I turned my thoughts toward speaking. As soon as I considered it, I realised two things that immediately discouraged me; it would require further interaction, likely on a much more personal level, with the women at day care, and secondly, I had little to nothing to say.
The idea of putting all that effort into learning a language when I basically had nothing I wanted to say to anyone, and potentially if I did find something my opinion would largely be invalid due to my perceived age, completely put me off. Learning the language would be opening myself up to understanding the cringeworthy patronising way most adults spoke to children.
My parents had never spoken to me like that, and so it had been an unpleasant shock when I had first entered school as an actual child. To have a team of adult women teaching me, and patronising me, and thinking genuine opinions and concerns and ideas that I had put thought into were dismissible, sometimes cute and sometimes precocious, I found incredibly revolting at the time.
I didn't have the patience for it as an adult. I would probably have a fucking rage attack. And then be written off as having had a tantrum. And then try to stab a bitch.
And although I was sure DFB would be far less inclined to completely patronise me, that would require him to actually talk to me, and spend time with me. Yeah, no.
Having nixed the idea of learning to talk, I chose instead to learn to read. My eyesight had improved significantly over time, and although it wasn't quite as good I had had in my last life, I was sure it would get there eventually.
I walked, still a little wobbly, up to the closest book I could find - slightly roughed up and dirtied, but still workable - carefully sat on my butt, grabbed the book, and shuffled my way to an unoccupied corner of the room, that was largely out of sight.
I sat there, holding the unopened book, with a picture of a smiling mother and father holding their happy baby, and a dog sitting by their feet. I was hit, suddenly, with a moment of realisation, that anyone looking into my new life would think that I was a four month old baby, abandoned at day care everyday, hidden in a corner away from everyone else, trying to teach herself to read. For some reason, the thought made me incredibly sad, and as I ran some fingers over the front of the book, I couldn't bring myself to open it and fulfil that image.
It wasn't like it mattered anyway. Learning to read now, or later.
So instead, I sat silently in my corner, staring at the cover of the children's book, blanked my mind until I felt something almost approaching peace, and thought of nothing, with an occasional interrupted break of reminiscing thoughts about my old life.
I had learned to walk, and it hadn't given me even a flicker of satisfaction. I was done for now. I just wanted to rest.
Throughout the fourth month I began to teeth, which was a fucking miserable experience. However, I wasn't particularly interested in making my discomfort known to a bunch of annoying adults who would fuss over me and check in on me beyond what they had to.
I simply grabbed DFB's finger when he got close enough for me to do so, and with a slightly disgusted mental grimace, put it into my mouth and gummed on it so that he could feel the teeth coming through. He wasn't exactly pleased by the saliva covering his finger. But then I wasn't exactly giving a shit.
I must have gotten my message across though, because he had a conversation with the women at day care, which hadn't happened in a while, and came back that evening with a rubber shuriken (seriously?) for me to chew on. It was the only baby item I had ever shown a real interest in using throughout that entire time. I gummed the fuck out of that thing until my jaw ached.
When I entered the fifth month, the same book still unopened in my lap, still spending my days either improving my hand eye coordination, my balance and my manoeuvrability, or otherwise in my corner daydreaming, I realised I was probably on my way to having a problem.
The issue was that I just didn't give a fuck. There was absolutely no point in doing anything else, and I had no desire to add anything new to my daily habits.
During the fifth and sixth months, my diet was changed, as bit by bit, the women added blended fruits and rice and vegetables and other flavours that I didn't recognise at all one by one, attempting to find out what I liked and didn't like. Unfortunately for them I couldn't bring myself to care a single fucking bit about what I was eating, and how these new taste buds I had registered different foods.
I approached the discoveries with zero enthusiasm, blank faced and mechanically allowing each mouthful, with no purpose other than to stop myself from starving.
The seventh month passed and my next lot of teeth came in, my sleep schedule changed slightly, I didn't open the book, I practiced moving and balance and dexterity, I tried new foods with a blank face, and sat and daydreamed during the day and lay there and day dreamed in the room with DFB nearby in the evening. He finally trusted me not to wet myself, and removed the cloth tortures entirely from my wardrobe - the next day he dressed me in a pair of underwear, and I didn't bother wondering where he had gotten such a tiny size from.
That deep, dull resignation that had plagued me almost since the start grew more poignant day by day, and smothered me, until it lay like a heavy blanket over my chest and stomach. It was as though there was a thick pane of glass between my mind and reality, to the point where sometimes I wondered if it was all just a simulation - just a virtual reality game, where the people weren't really people and the world wasn't really there. If it was just me and my thoughts, and when I died everything would shut down and cease existing too.
The eighth and ninth month passed similarly, and I lived and breathed an all encompassing sadness. I woke up disappointed that I had woken up at all, passing my days in a forgettable haze, and went to sleep glad that I could find a little bit of solace in the stories that awaited me.
In my tenth month, I transitioned to one nap in the afternoon, sleeping through the night and largely eating normal food, with some milk still. I was able to use the child sized toilets at day care with only minimal help and supervision. I practiced and got better at moving around, reacting in time to things, dexterity, and flexibility with no enthusiasm. At this point it was just something to do to burn the young energy I was filled with.
By the eleventh month I was wondering why I was still doing this to myself. I felt the approaching anniversary of my arrival here with defeat, and realised I couldn't do this for another year. I had chosen to give this life a go out of consideration for DFB's shitty past experience with family. But it had been almost a year and I barely even knew him. So why was allowing myself to continue on this miserable existence for someone I felt next to nothing for? I was so numb and sad these days that I had no room to feel anything for anyone.
I realised it might just be better in the long run, if this was all that was waiting for me, if I just ended it as early as possible. I spent the vast majority of my time with other children my physical age, and although I was sure long term memory wasn't a thing yet at that age, I didn't want to risk it, in case chakra changed shit. I didn't want to traumatise other children if I could help it.
So I made up my mind to wait and take advantage of the first opportunity that occurred to me outside of day care, aware that it may be a while. In the mean time I continued on as I had been, but with a semblance of contentment and peace now that there was an end in sight.
And then the twelfth month came around, DFB moved us unexpectedly into a flat with more than one room, and everything went a bit tits up.
So for those who found it unclear, yes Subaru is super depressed right now. She's lost everything, and despite having come to terms with that a little, she's still quite fucked up about it. Not only that, but she basically accidentally on purpose isolated herself which, whilst understandable, ain't healthy. Especially when she has no established support system in place for her mental health.
For all that she's convincing herself she's basically just doing anything she can for a scrap of independence, she's also allowing herself no social interaction, which after a year, is gonna lead to some mental not okayness. She's too deep in depression to see that logically though.