AN: Now, the pragmatism: here's where all that joy starts to come down. I'll bet you can hardly wait (I know I couldn't; the first chapters were murderous to write, so... cheerful. I don't do 'cheerful')
Expressing Consuelo's displacement was the absolute highlight of writing this. I loved toying with her uniquely-human weaknesses, stretched and pummeled as she will be in this new world- especially the illiteracy. Hurry up and enjoy!
"Picture yourself in a boat on a river, with tangerine trees, and marmalade skies-"
I could have believed in marmalade skies; but the endless firmament opened before me like a rose when I awoke one morning (I have no idea how long I'd been sleeping on Naruto's floor, or if I had been buried in that other life, if my coffin was closing just as I opened my eyes here-). It was a watercolor nebulae of cherry sunlight, gently beckoning. Soon it's zenith would scorch the earth and give way to the moon; but I had never seen such a cloudless sky, a morning that could have been painted by some celestial artist while I slept, stagnated.
I stared out of that window for a long time, speechless; I hadn't spoken much yet. Naruto brought me the cup of tea he'd diligently make every morning, and I would wait until he'd left to meet his team before raising it to my lips. I couldn't stay here, but just getting up seemed more impossible than leaping through worlds.
But I had, and I did get up; I wiped the grime from my face on that day, beneath the bunting of a dawning morning, and walked around until I found the Academy school yard. I couldn't have died, just to die again without even trying, the sky had taught me that morning.
Things got better after that.
My strength came back in days, as I put myself to doing whatever it was that the Academy teachers needed. It was kind of like the job I had had in the children's library: menial tasks, especially organizing, hand-copying papers, and grading written tests. It made no sense the first few times it happened, but I could have believed in anything from the moment I looked up and saw the streets of Konoha.
Remember that Disney movie, Pocahontas? My dad ruined that movie for me by pointing out that Pocahontas couldn't have possibly understood John Smith's English. But I have to confirm now that language is just a front for expressing things humans know within their bones, and we are innately meant to understand one another: I didn't think I was 'listening with my heart'- I sure as hell wasn't as brave as Pocahontas- and yet what I said in English (and sometimes Spanish) was, somehow, translated in midair. I understood the people of this world, and the understood me. I don't know if language doesn't exist as a dimension in this world (heck, animals can talk here, too), or if the hearts of the people here are somehow more receptive, that they still carry some innocence that allows them to connect with the soul even in the face of their violent society- I really don't know.
They say that writing carries some of the character and emotion of the writer, but not enough, apparently: I was functionally illiterate in the ninja world. Even the shortest messages confounded me; I had to learn Japanese just to read delivery addresses and grocery lists, which someone could just read aloud to me and I would entirely understand. This worked backwards, too: my writing, in the script of English and Spanish, was unintelligible to my friends. As far as I figured, everything of the past was written in Japanese, with it's heavy ideograms and intense, zealous beauty; statues, signs at the temple, even the names of stores were penned in grand characters. But perhaps because the average Shinobi was too busy learning to dodge danger to memorize over five-thousand stroke combinations to spell out a minimal vocabulary, most prose was written in the phonetic hiragana, with nouns being represented in katakana. The last Shinobi war had produced a generation that barely had time to grow up before they were thrown onto the battlefield, and who were nearly illiterate in the timeless kanji writing of their fathers. So their loss of a language was a sad boon for me: I only had to learn one hundred and four letters of alphabet and various Japanese words before I could read… It was kind of like learning Hebrew to read English messages.
And yet, as they did in everything, the Shinobi managed to thrive. Exposure was the best teacher, and I even learned, by the end of my life, to read a good many of the old kanji. What the future of the Shinobi world will be written in, I can't even imagine.
But they continued; I continued, and I learned their ways. I swore them to my heart after that morning that I had awoken to that hopeful sky; the easiest thing to do was to put Consuela away and just be Kon-chan, to simply live for now.
I started hounding Naruto to teach me as soon as I felt able. I was scared to know anything about the state of my chakra nodes- who knew if I even had any?-, but I would steal books from the children's library and translate, sometimes with Iruka's help, how to summon this energy. One day I felt ready, and went for broke: placed my fingers into a glass of water until all was still, and then tried to radiate energy from my fingers. I was on the verge of tears, thinking I could never become a Shinobi without it (I was no Rock Lee); what happened was that not only did I produce chakra from my fingers, but the glass exploded from the pressure that I poured into it. I never let that happen again; I was always working on expulsion and keeping chakra in one place; when I couldn't sleep, I would practice moving it to my different limbs, focusing on the dark ceiling. With a few sleepless nights, I could form chakra with the most basic ninja-ed class. It was, too me, an unprecedented wonder.
I learned Henge in a day; for some reason holding another form simply made sense to me, like writing had, and I stuck with it. By the end of the afternoon I passed out from chakra exhaustion, but Naruto could call out everything he could think of, from a flowervase to the Hokage, and I could mimic it. It was the push I needed; I told him to teach me to make Shadow Clones. The Jounin-level technique was a ridiculous goal, and I never quite got the hang of it. I'm glad nobody told me that it was such an impossible technique; otherwise I might not have worked and trained as hard as I did.
My body, of course, was in no condition to fight or train, after fifteen flabby years of sitting behind a desk; I didn't have half of the average Genin's stamina at first. But in a world where my old passions suddenly had no fruit, my strength came in throwing myself entirely into whatever it was that passed my fancy. I was no genius, but I would practice and practice; I even found myself making hand seals in my sleep, once. Becoming a Shinobi consumed my whole mind, ebbing away the pain and fear I felt. I made up chants to sing while I filed papers; and I'd run home every night to throw some warm food together for Naruto, in the hopes that he'd teach me something new. Three months, we spent, throwing kunai at pictures of Sasuke and eating cold leftovers (my cooking, however, failed to improve). For three months I would flip the low table against the wall at night so I could lay down my old, stinky bedding and wait for the next day. For three months I practiced chakra control by making deathly leaps towards the second-floor window (lots of strange bruises), until the next rotation of genin 'seniors' could present before the Academy teachers and receive their headbands.
When they called my name, I didn't care- my triumph was walking across the ceiling, rather than the floor, and popping down in front of Iruka-sensei's delighted face. All of the little kids, who had teased me in their juvenile way, laughed with joy; and they learned to walk on walls faster because I showed them how even someone born to never know the Shinobi arts could make it.
Maybe I did have a little Lee in me, after all…
The headband didn't mean that I got to stop; in fact, having a hitate-ate meant that I now had status as a Konoha Shinobi, and that I qualified for my own small apartment; my job was gone, and I now had all day to train. I didn't want to move out; Naruto didn't want me to either, though he pretended to be sick of me. He came over so often, in fact, that it hardly seemed like I had moved out at all. We pooled our D-rank mission money to buy groceries, talked about how Sasuke couldn't be headed for anything good, and of course practiced shruiken. I never knew how much those hours meant to Naruto; he was very good at concealing what my company meant to him. I would only know one day about five years later, when he was leaving the village with one of the Sannin, when he told me he had thought of me as a sister and Sasuke as his brother. I wasn't allowed to bring it up again; he was too embarrassed.
I'd become a part of a family, by the time that the Chuunin Exams rolled around. My world was about to soar open like that sky- and I'd finally have my chance to inspire, just as it had.