Disclaimer: I own nothing but the general plot and OCs

Happiness again :) yay. Next chapter is a special Gai pov chap. It might take a couple days or it might be quite short depending on how difficult I find writing in his pov

Thanks to those who let me know about Sonaru's past in reply to my notes at the end of last chapter. Taking what was said into consideration and what obviously only I know of her past/it's relevance, I've decided to do a little bit of what was suggested and a little bit not.

This is one of the very few chapters intended to focus on her last life. Every other time, as suggested will be triggered by relevant circumstances throughout.

Still, one of the points of this fic is that it's almost entirely unplanned and fluid. So if you guys read something about her past you want know more about, or anything along those lines, don't hesitate to ask and I'll find a way to make it a relevant memory.

Zero editing done here, beware. English spoken words are underlined

Thank you so much for reviews, favs and follows! Let me know what's works or doesn't make work so well for you, as well as any prompts for scenes you'd like to see.

Chapter 19 - These Are The Moments

DFB and I kept the conversation light and unserious for the rest of the evening. We spoke about swearwords in my world, what they meant, when they were used, and where. I did my best to impart the great wisdom of the swearword to him, to his amusement.

We ate quietly during meal time, and soon afterward, DFB had us both quickly wash, and we were in bed. I noticed it was earlier than the usual time, with suspicions as to why, when DFB sat up against the headboard, and said to me, "I'd like to hear about your childhood."

"Which bit?" I was casual and unbothered in my response. He pondered for a moment, and then he shrugged.

"I don't know, whatever comes to mind. Start with your first memory." I smiled at him, finding myself oddly excited to explain my family and my world to someone who had been exposed to neither.

"Okay. But remember, I wasn't an objective observer and even looking back there are bits I'm sure I misinterpreted, or didn't know at all. So don't be thinking I'm an encyclopaedia of correct knowledge about my life or world. It's all just my own personal opinion."

He nudged me, "stop dilly dallying." Never should have taught him those words, he loved the way it sounded way too much.

"Fine, fine. Don't be so impatient." I took a deep breath, and looked off, casting my mind back to the earliest memory I could find. It reminded me deeply of spending my time with my mother and siblings. We saw her every other weekend, and on the four hour drive to London, we would take in turns telling her what we had done, in story form to make things more interesting. Of course, it always devolved into squabbling, and correcting each other and someone was usually crying at some point (generally me), but that method of talking about my past or my childhood never really went away.

"My earliest memory was when I was very young. From what I've heard, most people have memories starting from four, or five. Mine seems to be when I was two. It's just a snippet really. I remember my siblings and I were in my mother's room, and it was early in the morning. We lived with her at that point, and she had kicked my dad out months earlier. Her name was Kanti Ray. I didn't understand it at the time, but he had been the sole income earner, and he had owned half the house. We lived in this small village, and there were only two coloured people around- not including my middle sister and I, who were 'acceptably diluted' with our 'foreign blood'. My mother was one of them, having a coloured father and a white mother, and people in the village thought she was scum. She lived in the biggest house, with the largest garden, she was brown skinned, and she had chosen to be a single mother.

All of those things together, were completely unacceptable to them. My dad- Simeon- refused to help my mother out financially, even though he was legally supposed to, she couldn't get a job whilst looking after us, and he wouldn't let her sell the house. So the gas was shut off, and the lights stopped working, and we went hungry. It was this big drafty house. She couldn't afford more wood for the fireplaces, and it was Winter. My dad had smashed up the wooden frame of the bed before he left, so there was just a mattress on the floor.

I remember we would all sleep in her bed huddled together for warmth, and barely leave from underneath the covers all day if we could help it. We had grown out of most of our clothes, and we couldn't afford more. I had my middle sister Rue, to the left of me, and my brother Caspian- who I came to call sister when we were older- to the right of me. I was held by my mother, and we were all so hungry. But we were warm, and all of us were smiling or laughing. I felt happy."

I appreciated, as I began to talk, why DFB had moved us to the bedroom. The curtains were closed and the room was a dim grey. It was easier, lying in bed and quietly speaking, than it might have been sat upright next to him on the sofa, or across from each other at the table. My words came easier immediately, and my pauses were smaller. Sometimes we made eye contact. But mostly we both just lay on our backs and stared at the ceiling.

Filled to the brim with nostalgia, I spoke my family to life again. My words carefully painted my childhood into existence in the darkness of the room, and I took the time to lovingly flesh out the uniqueness of each person, until it felt like they could be standing in the room with me. I almost forgot DFB was even there.

The next night he asked the same of me- to tell him about my childhood. Night after night, I shared a facet of my childhood and buffed it until shined clearly for both of us. I told him of my mother's unbreakable stubbornness and fierce ability to out argue anyone she met. I shared about Rue's untameable, wild and sometimes cruel nature, as she stripped on tabletops on her first day of school, down to her underwear and belly danced. I spoke about Caspian's quiet, broken solemness that hid a world of trauma and deep thought, of his gentle protectiveness hidden underneath all of that, which my mother tried sometimes gently and sometimes with tough love to coach out of him more and more. I told him ruefully of my entitled and haughty attitude, too articulate for adults outside of my family to wrap their heads around and convinced that those outside of my immediate family were of lesser intelligence, including my dad-but always small and sweet and cute and smiley enough to get away with it.

I spoke carefully and in depth of my dad's ability to charm anyone, his charisma. He adored children and had more time for them than adults, because he had the same amount of physical energy as one. Few things pleased him more than watching us enjoy and finish a meal he had cooked, or falling asleep on the sofa with us all piled around and on top of him. He was the most playful adult I ever met, and more than happily bought us trampolines, and motor bikes, and video games, and paint ball guns and all manner of toys, to play with us. He always supported us above and beyond in our hobbies; paying for dance, swim, gymnastics, Tae Kwon Do, surfing, diving and music lessons, and instruments.

Driving us all over the place to football, rugby, badminton, hockey, drama club, art club, writing courses. He loved buying me clothes from girly dresses to boys outfits, would listen to me read my writing out loud, and critique it, he bought me a library worth of books, and my siblings a store worth of video games that he would play with them.

He was a rebel, rule breaker, adventurer, womaniser, adrenaline junky. He was a drug addict, with a violent mercurial temper. He liked to play harmful psychological games with us, knowing it would upset our mother. He brought awful people into our home to sell drugs to them, and didn't do a proper paid days work until I was eleven years old. He was obsessed with our mother, and would stalk her, harass her, hurt her. He told me once that she was the only woman he had ever loved, and he hated her for taking that from him, every woman after her was a search for what he thought he'd lost with her. He liked it when people were frightened of him. He constantly oscillated between using us as pawns against mother, regardless of us being collateral damage, and being a doting caring dad. He laughed at people's pain, and couldn't feel empathy.

I never truly understood him.

DFB lay next to me in the dark through it all, listening. He occasionally asked questions about things he didn't understand, or to clarify something. Sometimes his questions side tracked me entirely, and on multiple occasions I found myself caught up in describing the details of how my world worked; I told him what I knew of slavery, sexism, the suffragette movement and the waves of feminism, the class barriers in my country, the world wars, anti semitism, immigration and how it mixed with racism, I told him of the shift in attitudes over gay rights, it's legalisation in my country fifty years before I died, and it's progression after that to more open, varied and colourful genders and sexualities. He was fascinated by the history of religion in my country, and it was with some sheepishness that I told him what little I could remember with detail. I explained to him of the ongoing fight for black equality, global warming, globalism and pacifism.

I explained the bare basics of the country's political system, buses and planes, the internet (that was a tough one to explain properly) the population demographics that I was aware of, the education system, and the highly thought of careers.

It was in these topics that he took the most part in. He discussed and asked and debated. I found myself with an unexpectedly lively conversation partner each night that I got derailed from speaking of my life.

In turn DFB shared with me comparisons to the world I was now in, he pointed out where he thought my old world was more open minded and where it was behind in social progression. We discussed the impact that having chakra had had on the world compared to one without.

He shared little that was personal, and I skipped important memories that I didn't want to talk about yet. I knew I was probably forgetting to tell him about a lot of things and people, and I didn't go past the age of twelve for the time being. For a little while at least, I wanted to leave it at the temporary happy ending it had felt like at the time to me- of going to live with my mother once more, in a quiet road, by an excellent school, in a middle class area, with a kind somewhat airhead stepfather, and my whole life ahead of me, having escaped my dad and stepmother.

Over four months, it became something of a ritual to lie down in bed and talk for two or so hours. We had already been family, and I had thought of him as a sort of friend, but during that time, we truly became close friends.

We sometimes stayed up far too late into the night making each other laugh ourselves silly with funny anecdotes of our lives. He became used to the idea that I was an adult in a child's body- as used to it as anyone could become I thought. And then overtime he became comfortable with it too.

There were some parts of me that shocked and baffled him at first; my complete irreverence to the leaders of my country, my elders, my ancestors. My blasé attitude toward the topic of romance, sex and non traditional relationships. My sense of humour certainly was something that he was still warming up to after four months. He oddly didn't mind my foul language but I suspected that it was because I generally kept it to English only, although it took a few days for him to realise I pretty much used insults as terms of affection- generally the worse the insult the greater the affection.

He in turn painted a picture of the Konoha that he loved. I would never be loyal to the place like he was, but I could appreciate the deep affection he felt for the hidden village he had worked his whole life for. The changes he could see amongst the people and attitudes over time, that were directly a result of his hard work and others like him.

What I liked the most about DFB was that he wasn't blindly loyal. He was discerning and perceptive, and he saw the parts of Konoha that he didn't like so much. He didn't like that just the same as in other villages, the shinobi in Konoha who gave everything were always asked for more, often considered more tools than people. He didn't like the power the ignorance of the civilians wielded, and how Sandaime bent to their wishes too often, at the expense of the Shinobi. He didn't like the dark shadows that hid in Konoha, for all that he acknowledged their usefulness- he believed there was another way to go about things, though he didn't know what that would look like. He didn't like how lax the academy was, how little it truly prepared children for shinobi life, and how little it gave the children to use who would walk out of there without a hitai-ate.

He didn't like how often Konoha prisoners were tortured as a method of information extraction, as protocol, rather than more emphasis put on alternative interrogation techniques that had proven more effective. He didn't like some of the power the clans got away with abusing under clan jurisdiction.

Some of these things he didn't tell me straight out, but allowed me to read between the lines. It was his balanced view of his home, and still ardent love for it that won me over. I still didn't care much about Konoha itself, but I knew I could come to protect it out of respect for him.

Emotionally we were as fond of each other as ever, but mentally and intellectually there was certainly more of a meeting of minds. Physically it took a little time for us to become close again. He was decidedly awkward about it at first, and I didn't want to make him uncomfortable. He would run his fingers through my hair, lift me places if I needed it, and give me the odd gesture of affection, but it was like we were shuffling around each other desperately trying not to push the other too far.

Eventually I got tired of it. I liked hugs, I liked skin contact, I liked listening to people's heart beats when I relaxed, I didn't mind being picked up, held, and moved around by people bigger than me without my say so, having put up with it for a long time in my last life. In fact I quite liked it, being the lazy shit that I was. As a child I had sat in my push chair and refused to leave it to walk when we were out, until I was almost four years old when I physically couldn't fit anymore. At that point I transition to making my far too doting siblings carry me on their backs. My mother hadn't been impressed. I had never entirely outgrown that desire to be carried everywhere so that I didn't need to use my legs.

So I put my foot down, and firmly told DFB "I want a bath."

He swerved around the topic, and tried to distract me, until I finally sighed, "okay what exactly is your problem around cwtching with me? If it's because you don't know what would be appropriate and what wouldn't, then may I remind you that I was entirely aware when you were holding me up on a toilet seat and wiping me afterwards. I'm pretty sure the line to what's appropriate flew out the fucking window after that."

He gave in, and I aggressively cwtched him, mildly irritated at his reluctance, and scowling at him when he told me the sullen look was adorable on me. Eventually he relaxed, though, learning that it was okay to reciprocate when I went to him for the sort of comfortable and casual affection we had had before. Once he settled back into it, his ingrained habits kicked back in, and before I knew it he was unthinkingly carrying me again, and holding me.

He even caught himself feeding me a few times, before he realised what he was doing- and then continued at my demands that he finish what he started. Truthfully, in normal day to day life I was almost as lazy as a Nara and far more demanding for other people to cater to that than the notoriously lazy clan.

I was never too bothered when I was denied, but I always figured if I didn't ask I wouldn't get, and I had already established in childhood, that if I precociously demanded what I wanted from those who weren't complete strangers with a sweet but cheeky smile on my face, people were likely to give in.

Honestly that had still worked right up until I died. For some reason the fact that I tried this technique out on men and women even as an adult made me amusingly shameless, rather than the manipulative I might have been called if I only tried it on males.

DFB despaired slightly at my laziness but, just as my parents had discovered, he found that I was utterly stubborn about it, and soon he showed more inclination to join me once he realised he couldn't beat me in this.

I came to call him 'duhfbuh', when he wasn't some other nickname, as a slurred way of saying DFB without effort. He asked what it meant, and when I told him, feeling shy and slightly embarrassed, he showed surprisingly little reaction, easily accepting it as just another of my odd habits. Secretly, in my head it stood as another acronym as well, of what he had come to mean to me.

For all that we had accepted each other as fellow mentally grown people, there was an undeniable experience, maturity and hard edge in DFB that I lacked. I had not had an easy life, but it hadn't been the worst, and I didn't doubt that DFB had seen and experienced far more suffering than I had. It showed.

As a result, although we treated each other as mostly the same mental age, he was protective of me still, and had an authority that I had no interest in challenging him for. It wasn't restrictive, and was focussed on ensuring my wellbeing as I did and said what I wanted, rather than preventing me from doing and saying things in order to keep me safe. It still felt distinctly paternal, and as we became close friends, coming to respect each other's thoughts and opinions, it also carried a brotherly tone.

He was more like my Dad/(best)Friend/Brother than ever before, and when he did certain things, or his body language shifted slightly when we were in public, my heart ached at how strongly it reminded me of Caspian, who in many ways had been my DadSibling, for all that we had struggled to be friends until my last year alive due to the inequality between us through age- just as Rue had acted as my MumSibling.

DFB became synonymous with safe- physically, mentally, emotionally. Nothing bothered him about me for long, and now that my greatest secret was out, I felt like I could tell him anything and he wouldn't be disturbed, or judgemental, or expect anything from me but what I would give. Especially with a best friend like Gai, I could be as weird, wacky, insane, uncensored, shameless or unfeminine as I liked and he barely blinked.

Whilst I couldn't physically protect him like he could me, I felt myself becoming increasingly protective of his mental and emotional state, with every hint of vulnerability he showed me. Truthfully, I could remember few times I had ever been happier. I began to fall in love with my life, even knowing there was quite possibly trouble on the horizon if my original world accurately depicted this one at all.

I had two people who I adored, and was comfortable in the knowledge that they felt the same about me. We were the most important people in each other's lives, and I took every day as it came with a smile. For the time being, I put aside the building of my persona, and just enjoyed myself. I had never had people who allowed me to feel so free and I made sure to tell them that, and to thank them.

At the approach of my second birthday, Gai showed a complete determination to celebrate properly this year, and I watched him challenge and corral DFB along with him. To the enthusiastic man's great- if momentary -dismay, apparently my birthday had been celebrated the year before, which had been quickly cobbled together by Gai when he found out the imminent date, and I had no recollection of it.

I felt a little guilty, but admitted to them both that my memories of my first year had mostly blurred together in my depression, and very few stood out to me. If someone else had not been keeping an eye on the date, I would have no clue as the length of time I had spent depressed.

Riding the crest of my joy, I turned to DFB and told him, "I want to tell Gai the truth about my age and rebirth. I don't think he'll have a bad reaction to it, but you know him better than I do, and I don't want to ruin the effort he's put into my birthday by telling him beforehand if he's likely to get upset."

DFB peered at me over the edge of his Icha Icha, and made a contemplative, if unbothered noise.

"I don't think it will ruin anything. But I can't always predict Gai's reactions to things even if he's not upset by it, he might do something... Gai. Perhaps it's better to wait for the end of your birthday so it's not rude to leave afterward."

Translation: if Gai got too enthusiastic about it in any manner, DFB wanted to be able to beat a hasty retreat before the man tried to challenge him. Probably leaving me behind in the process to deal with the man, like a complete bastard.

I narrowed my eyes at him, and he eye smiled innocently in reply.

"If you abandon me to deal with an over emotional Gai on my birthday, I'm letting Tora sleep on your pillow," I threatened.

One day whilst DFB was nipping out to get some bento boxes for lunch, a big fluffy, gorgeous brown cat with a stupid fucking ribbon stuck in it's fur had found it's way into our home. I had carefully approached the kitty, removed the uncomfortable looking thing, and fed it a little fish and water. I loved cats, and had happily scritched it behind it's ear and petted it until it dribbled, as it flopped and rolled over my feet.

DFB had been horrified upon his return. Apparently that friendly cat was Tora, which I had honestly completely forgotten about. He clipped that -very expensive he warned me- stupid ribbon back on the poor thing and shooed it out the apartment. It decided it liked me after that, and kept coming back, much to DFBs annoyance, and despite his efforts to keep it out.

He didn't hate cats per say, he just... really really didn't like Tora. Unfortunately for him Tora seemed determined to make itself at home. It might have had something to do with the little treats I fed it when he wasn't around.

At my threat, DFB narrowed his eyes at me in return, "don't start something you won't be able to finish, Sona," his voice was stern with warning, but I heard the playful undertone.

I was guaranteed to lose if I went up against DFB in trolling and pranking, but I figured I'd enjoy myself on the way. Plus Gai would side with me. I smiled challengingly at him.

"No chakra, no weapons, no help from shinobi I've never properly met."

He nodded once and when he held his little finger out for a pinky swear, I couldn't help but laugh, "bring it, old man."

There we go. Honestly the only way they were going to get close again was either to save each other's lives a few times, which wasn't going to happen due to her size, or talk it out and get to know each other again properly. Writing that all in detail would take far too long and so I chose to summarise it mostly. I hope the faster pace of them getting along again doesn't push the reader out of the story, if that makes sense.

She's not told him everything, and so there will be things she informs him about later on. However she's obviously told Kakashi a lot that the reader now doesn't know, because it was important for her to be fairly upfront about her past after keeping it a secret.

As a result, when it becomes relevant info later, she'll let the reader know what she's told Kakashi in an explained summary. So any mentions of her past before the age of 12 now, assume Kakashi has been told, unless Subaru specifically states she didn't tell him, or is in the process of verbally letting him know.

So if everything goes to plan, Gai comes next and if the length doesnt get too long Sonaru finally gets to meet the rest of the Hatake family if you know what I mean (withhold your expectations or excitement for that because I promise it won't be the meeting probably hoped for)

How do you think Gai will react? Do you guys also want to see the prank/troll war from Gai's perspective or have it left be and be happy in the knowledge it happened?