Mono no Aware
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What if a destiny was stolen?
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A/N: Now we're getting started. Hope you don't mind my ramblings. All constructive comments welcome – negative ones will only fuel my writing. It's like throwing petrol onto a bonfire – you gone and fucked up. Also, I have re-edited my first chapter - I was working on very little sleep over a three day period when I wrote and submitted that, so I have consequently gone back, edited the shit out of it and resubmitted it. Please re-read the first chapter if you read it before!
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Disclaimer: I wish I owned Naruto – I would have a great deal more money if I did.
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If you aren't in the moment, you're either looking forward to uncertainty, or back to pain and regret. – Jim Carrey
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Chapter One
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Once upon a time, I was born.
I was not aware enough to understand it at the time, thank god, and it wouldn't be until I was about twelve that the realisation that I was created by another pair of human beings doing the do hit me full force; that I came from inside another human being took another three hours to digest, and a great deal of denial afterwards to cope with it.
I couldn't look Mum squarely in the eye for a solid day and a half, and thereafter pulled a face any time the topic was mentioned – after all that was Mum. One does not simply think about the mechanics of one's mother's vagina. It's just not on, or done, frankly. It's weird, and uncomfortable, and it was bad enough when I walked into the bathroom to go about my morning business and ended up with a much fuller picture of the maternal figure in my life than I ever truly intended to as it was.
The downsides of living with a mother who sleeps in the nude are varied and very, very real. That's fine and dandy and your lifestyle choice, but I don't really want it anywhere near me. Or in my line of vision.
Fortunately (for me), or unfortunately (as was the case for my mother's stomach muscles), the first time around I was delivered via a Caesarean. I was also a newborn baby with the collective intelligence of a dead gnat at the time, so life was the best it had ever been, I suppose. No complaints.
The second time around, not so much; I may sound inherently blasé about the whole shebang now, but at the time it was a mess of sensation, horror and the reaction to a completely new body.
It was not mine. This was not the body of an eighteen-year-old. This was not the body I was decidedly attached to. This was not the body I grew up in, went about day-to-day life in and bemoaned about the state of. This was not the body I bled in, I sweat from and I stubbed my toe all the time with. This was not mine. This was a brand new model, still with its original red paint, in need of a wipe down and with problematic wiring.
It's an odd sensation to know how to do something and yet not at the same time. It's all very well and good from a mental standpoint – logically you know how to do this – after all you've done it before. You do movement A, and B occurs, you do movement C and all is well – but unless there's muscle memory there you are well and truly fucked. I was. This of course – paired with the collective intelligence and experience of an eighteen-year-old failure that just burnt to death on the 22nd floor of a hotel, and was then offered another hypothetical chance for life by an frankly odd man in said hotel room – did not bode well.
The best way I know to describe it is saying that it was vaguely like surfacing from the deep end of a pool, only my nerve endings were on fire and responding wrong, the pool was made of assorted bodily fluids and attempted to squash me like a grape while holding the consistency of custard, and any and all sense I retained from the whole experience went out the metaphorical window. There was a lot of screaming involved - Rightly so, in my opinion.
It was truly, truly horrific.
The mental and fairly logical need to breathe is a frighteningly strong reflex – understandable given the amount of time spent doing it while alive – and being squeezed like play dough in a vice doesn't help matters; the breach from between two burning thighs and the cold sensation of the air hitting me for the first time haunts me – it was too exposed and too vulnerable and entirely mortifying. This was a woman's vagina I was emerging from – it still makes me cringe and want to become part of nearby furniture every single time the memory floats by.
It was unbearably claustrophobic, like being wrapped the wrong way in a blanket with your limbs trapped. I couldn't move, I couldn't breathe, I couldn't see and I felt like gravity had suddenly decided it didn't like me. I was so very fragile, limbs shaking and intolerably heavy; twisting and twitching violently in the wrong direction every time I tried to move anything and sometimes just didn't react at all, merely jerking on the spot pathetically.
My head felt like fog was weaving in and out; the hospital staff sounded like they were operating through static. My neck tingled and my skull felt elastic, my eyes simultaneously dry and full of tears, prickling in their sockets, and my jaw stiff like it had been clenched for too long.
I don't advise the whole rebirth thing, to be honest. Trying to logically accept what you have known for most of your life to be impossible while experiencing it is quite overwhelming, aside from all the blood and gore and emerging from vaginas. I cannot stress how dreadful the experience was. Just never do it.
I knew that new-borns skulls weren't fused at the top, given the need to go slightly oval whilst passing through the birth canal – yet at the time, my thoughts were mainly featuring the horror at the idea of being able to reach up and feel a gap in my skull, not basking in awe at the evolutionary ingeniousness.
I knew that the body needed stimulation in order to learn the reflex to breathe, but it didn't mean that my lungs, despite their inexperience in the whole matter, didn't burn in need of oxygen and that I wasn't seizing up in panic because I suddenly didn't know how to get that oxygen howdoIbreathe.
I knew that I had, looking back, obviously been reborn, but the idea of there actually being life after death, that there was actually an after, truly fucked me up. That being said, I wasn't sure whether it truly was death, or merely a dying fantasy to ease the ending, to let the last thoughts be of something positive.
I wasn't sure whether, if it truly were life after death, whether I would keep my memories, or whether they would be taken from me or fade over time. Was that why no one remembered his, her or their early, early life? Was this actually life? Did it count as life if it was after death? And by that count, what constitutes as death? Because instead of this inherently final thing of existing no more, it was beginning to look like merely an ending of one and then beginning of another. It felt like a cheat, somehow. Was it a one off situation? Did the man from the hotel have something to do with it?
What am I saying, of course he did. Did everyone see him? Was I supposed to recognise him? Was he a god? Was he the God? Or was he something else? Was he like me, dead – oh lordy there's a thought – but had taken up a position of greeting other, newly dead people? Was there a system? Was there a whole plane of non-physical beings? Was that what death constituted as – the lack of a body? But then how does that work, because the spirit or whatever wouldn't have a brain to think with, nor nerve endings to feel with, not hormones to create emotional responses?
I would like to say that I had been reincarnated, but I feel as though that might be treading on toes somewhat.
I was alive.
Emily probably wasn't.
Oh god, Emily had been trapped there in the fire. Emily had been left there – I was going in after her. I was the only one who could get her out. I was the one that left her in the fire – I failed and not only did I die, most probably burning to death which I can belatedly only imagine did wonders for her mental state, but I most likely condemned her to death in the same manner.
I left her.
Oh god not Ems. Not my sister. Not that little shit that kicked me in the back and whined and screeched. Not her. Please not her. Not my Emsy. Not my baby girl, who smiled every time she saw me and cheered every time I gave her a bit of my chocolate and who laughed at my stupid jokes, and grassed me up whenever I did anything and chastised me in the way only a young child can for saying God as if it were a swear word.
Not her, please.
Please.
Not Emily.
If could just go back – I could help her. I could do something – I'd watch out for the ceiling, I wouldn't hesitate because I knew where she was. I wouldn't have gone to the hotel in the first place, we would be alive and happy and whole and she wouldn't be dead.
Death, reflecting on it, can be both a blessing and a curse. It could take you from whatever horrible circumstances of life you found yourself in and end it – while you had no more life left, you couldn't be hurt by it and you would no longer suffer, and while it might be a pity, it could be on your own terms.
Yet at the same time, it could be all that stands between you and the person you need to help. The person you need to be with. The action that could change yours or another's life – that one moment you needed.
It was the last problem of life – the ending of it. It was the last precipice before nothing. It quite simply was running out of time.
I couldn't go back.
When that man asked if I would live again, he didn't mean as me. He didn't mean my life and my family. He didn't give me a second chance; he gave me a new one. He gave me just as much an opportunity to fuck up this one as I did my first life. He wasn't some benevolent soul who offered to help – that was a tormentor. That bastard screwed me over.
I don't recommend dying.
You get all these grand tales and noble deeds of dying for another, for a loved one or a friend, but living for one, I find, is both irrevocably harder, but worth all the more for the time it uses. And yet you never realise until it's too late. The irony is bitter, no doubt about it. In my case, tasted like blood and what quite possibly was shit – reflexes on the birthing table were basic at best, and usually never spoken of afterwards either. For the best, trust me.
From what I understand, I managed to greet the world in just under two hours, which is actually a very quick labour, thank god, and then didn't stop crying for a solid two weeks, which was how long mother – not Mum, never Mum, but she was undeniably also still my mother – was in the hospital for.
Understandably, I had a great deal to come to terms with; namely the realisation of no longer being in the fire, which actually made me vomit with relief and shame; the realisation of being in an entirely new body and actually accepting it, which made me shit in alarm, and dealing with the awareness that there was no going back. Whether I liked it or not, I had been thrust into a new life, a new opportunity. I was given no time to understand, nor accept the true gravity of the situation beforehand and now I was stuck in a mobile incubator, twitching while people in white coats looked up my mothers hospital gown, and I could do fuck all about it.
It was a clean, if rather bland room of whites with richly coloured wooden panelling lining the walls, but was obnoxiously boring to be in when the focus devoted to working out how your limbs worked waned and nothing else happened.
And when anything did happen, it was in another language.
Bit of a party pooper that one. It was the rain on my parade, the unexpected stop that halted my train in its tracks and threw any progress I had been making out the very literal window on the right side of the room.
You see, the problem was when I was alive originally; I was very… bad, at learning different languages. I could learn to understand them fairly easily, but speaking or writing in them was like attempting to get a tan from natural light in an underground bunker.
It didn't go well.
I got the occasional word or phrase down, like 'pull the cord in an emergency', which was a fast ramble of words that I could only recognise by the motion the nurse did each time, and what the toilet was called, as my mother would tell me each time she was going so I didn't worry – which was fair enough, as the first five/six times she needed a pee, I screeched the ward down around me.
Sue me, she was warm and comforting and the only person I knew in this worryingly large world, and I was emotionally, mentally and physically fragile. I needed hugs and contact and emotional reciprocation, and she was leaving and I didn't know whether she was coming back. I suppose that helped me attach myself to her as easily as I did – she fulfilled the expectations I had from 'mother' and let me vomit and drool and cry and snot all over her with nothing more than tired amusement or weariness. I felt horrible every time, but she smiled at me with her big brown eyes and warm smile and I melted, trying to convince myself that I would have better control over my bodily reactions before long, and that I wouldn't put her through this torment much longer.
A big fat lie. I was awful as a new-born. I vomited and hiccupped and cried all the time – I felt raw and I couldn't help it. My emotions were more volatile and angry, just waiting for the slightest opportunity to strike. Someone was too loud, someone wasn't doing something fast enough, someone breathed in my direction, a leaf twitched two miles away – you get the picture.
But in amongst all this, I learnt something very important. I learnt my name. In amongst all the tears and the shit and the apathetic nurse who prodded and poked at me with his stupidly large hands, I learnt that my mother had graced me with the name Nāmaka. Well, Senju Nāmaka. It was family name first apparently, and she explained very eagerly to my obviously bemused 13-day old face that it was because you were part of a family before you were you, and so I was always going to be connected to her and all those who came before through our shared name.
I thought that was both very deep and insightful, and also full of romanticised shit.
From what I remembered it was because of something to do with the ways the speech was structured, and how Romanisation of the west spread the language and they used 'de' between names or some shit like that and that was why I was used to Forename then Surname and not Family name then Given. It was a vague memory at best from a one off context lesson we did for my Classical Civilisations A-Level, but the point still stands.
However, I enjoyed the sentiment, and while I had trepidations about belonging to family again, because look what happened last time, I went with it. So two weeks of crying and snotting and vomiting all over the place, Senju Nāmaka and Heng-Chia returned home with a bag of drugs and a list of important phone numbers.
Oh dear lordy.
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A/N: I'm blown away by the positive response I've had from this story! Thank you all for reading, which is a very odd thing to type because it implies I have readers, but that you anyway, you random citizens you. I appreciate any feedback, and I'm more than happy to answer questions, so drop me a message if you have any.
Also - a big Thank You to Enbi (whom I'm a big fan of) who was my first reviewer. Means a lot, bro.
Tea