Many thanks to the couple of people who reviewed and those of you who followed/faved! Seriously, thank you! Still in the early stages here, but more interesting things to come, I promise! Fair warning, this story is going to have blood and gore in it at a later point, but for the moment there is some vague and not so vague references to car crashes. I personally don't think they're too bad but I've never been in one. Just so you know.

Give it a read and lemme know what you think!

Edit: Once again, changing format, sorry!

Chapter Two: Lessons in Weird

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Hikari and Mugen worry about their daughter during the early stages of her life. Raika isn't like their friends children. Not as smiley, or as playful. She's barely verbal and she has a stare that can rival the head of Konoha's torture and interrogation division for intensity.

They are nice enough that they never mention it, but everyone knows. Even her. Especially her.

Raika is a weird kid.

She was always going to be a weird kid though. There's no way a person could -

Fingers clenched, knuckles white on the steering wheel like bars of ivory, eyes wide as the back of the car spins sideways, out of control

-Well she's an adult mind crammed into a infants body. Raika figures that's bound to fuck something up.

On the positive side; she knows everything already. Crawling, walking, talking, been there and done that. Reading, writing, geography and history, all mastered many years ago. She's studied mathematics and the sciences at university level and then gone on to get a job in engineering.

Yet despite all these positives there is only one negative, but it's a big one. All the things she knows, all the things she's learned don't mean a thing in this world.

Sure, she knows that eventually the maths and science will come back into play, things can't be that much different here despite the fact that here includes ninja and monsters. Addition is still addition, gravity is still a thing, people still do a lot of dumb shit and for the most part things are the same.

Although Raika concedes that the physics of the world are at least a little squiffy, what with all the crazy space-time ninjutsu and elemental techniques the shinobi of the Naruto-verse can throw around. That's certainly intriguing, something she wants a chance to take a look at - but there are other more pressing things first, like getting out of diapers.

Geography is a complete write-off. She might as well scrub all knowledge of that from her mind, along with the thousand odd years of history she had been forced to learn in school. Useless now, and more than likely to get muddled with whatever she learns here and thoroughly embarrass her at a later point in time. Not that she's ever needed help embarrassing herself before now.

The worst part, however, is the talking, or lack there of.

Raika has never been good at languages. Shit, really.

A handful of garbled French and just enough Spanish for la cuenta por favor, which is only a little less helpful here than it had been at home.

She's always hated submersive learning, where you either understood or spent the entire lesson staring blankly at the teacher while wondering what the hell is going on.

And now it's her life.

If not for the success Raika has shown with potty training Mugen and Hikari might have thought she had learning difficulties – but while she might not have shown any talent with speaking Japanese, Raika could happily say she is the youngest child in Konoha history to master wiping their own ass.

Not necessarily the most prestigious achievement to boast about, but the two older Tsugaya's are going to have to learn to take what they can get when it comes to their progeny.

As it is it takes almost a year and a half before Raika can understand what is being said to her, struggling at first because the adult part of her brain is always trying to equate the Japanese to it's English counterpart. Of course the sentences are structured differently, and isn't that a pain in the ass? But even though she's aware of that fact it's endlessly frustrating to not be able to grasp it, even more so when it limits the way she interacts with the outside world.

The headaches don't really help either.

Eventually she realises she can let the English (and now irrelevant) speaking part of her brain take a back seat while her infant mind does it's thing and puzzles out the whole mess for her. It takes a while but finally something clicks and her baby brain begins soaking up the world around it like a pulsating grey sponge. Raika is just past two before she actually says her first intentionally coherent word in Japanese – much to the collective joy (and relief) of her new parents.

Another worry for her new parents are the long periods of silence Raika goes though, that aren't related to her lack of conversational skills. It takes a lot of energy for her to actively switch between the part of her that runs on instinct and the part of her that is constantly thinking and analysing. She hopes that at some point the two halves can become one, but at the moment she has to pick between the two; reflex or control. The child in her is better at learning, at adapting and improvising. The adult knows already, makes decisions based on experience and not impulsive desire.

The adult also has a bit of a swearing problem that needs to be kept under wraps - Raika isn't sure what effect a two year old who stubs their toe on a table leg and then proceeds to curse a blue streak at the offending furniture will have on whoever witnesses it, but she doesn't think it will be good. Hilarious probably, but not good.

Sometimes she can be both, but only for a short while. Raika guesses the older she gets the easier it will become, as her body catches up with the mind inhabiting it, but in truth she doesn't know.

The headaches are never ending in her first and second years, but are finally starting to fade off after she passes thirty months. Though they return with a vengeance whenever she thinks about overly complicated matters or tries to keep both parts of her brain active at the same time.

She sometimes sits for hours just picking idly at the fabric of her clothes while sifting through her thoughts, trying to keep everything in order. Other times she does it because there are a lot of loose threads on one of her dresses and it's damn annoying. Still -poorly stitched garments aside - memories are the hardest to get her head around.

Raika remembers most things without trouble. Her schooling for one is easily accessible, at the forefront of her mind and in her opinion a large chunk of why her head hurts so much all the damn time. Thirty years of experience stuffed into a box only fit to hold two and a half years worth is always going to cause trouble. A kid doesn't need to be able to recite Pi to a hundred decimal places or know how to correctly predict the trajectory of a object based on it's speed and weight - yet pointlessly, she can.

Everyday tasks like dressing herself and how to brush her teeth are still there, along with less useful information like the words to every Fall Out Boy song she's ever heard, the recollection of an unhealthy number of memes and the plot to an old anime she used to – oh wait. Never mind. That one is probably going to come in handy at some point...

More personal memories however are harder.

Anything about the family she had left behind or of how she had -

Tyres screeching, trying to gain traction on the ice slicked road. The sickening crunch of metal on metal

-It's hard to think about much as it is, so she just doesn't. Very carefully avoids the thoughts that leave her empty. She can't control them. Doesn't know when they will strike or what -other than general thoughts of before – will trigger them. They just drag at her and hold for a few mind numbing seconds before the world rushes back in with an overwhelming roar of sound and colour.

She loses time. Mostly only for a few seconds. Half a breath and she's back, blinking the darkness out of her eyes. Occasionally though it takes longer to return to herself; half a minute, a minute, two, three. Sometimes people notice - her parents mostly - and sometimes they don't. She tries to just carry on with her day, like it's normal to freeze in place for a few seconds before jerking back to life like a malfunctioning robot. Just a kid, doing kid stuff. Nothing to see here folks.

So Raika is understandably strange -though only understandable to her- and she has a childhood that reflects that.

Once she starts to get a handle on the native tongue she drifts between talking constantly – a stream of endless babble that trips itself up on the way out of her mouth - and losing herself in thought. Very careful thought otherwise -

Weightlessness for one second, two seconds. The song on the radio mixing in dissident harmony with a terrified scream cut short when

-And running.

God she loves running.

It has taken far longer than she'd have liked to get her stubby limbs to bare her weight and she's had to suffer through the arduous process of crawling before she can walk, and walking before she can attempt a stumbling run. But she does it. Movement is independence. Not needing to be carried, not having your destination dictated by someone else. It's freedom and she grabs onto it with both her pudgy little hands with no intention of letting go.

But freedom comes at a price, and that price is badly scraped knees and palms from too many slips and trips. Balance is hard and maybe she pushes a little too hard, a little too fast. Always wanting more.

The other children she interacts with -and interacts is probably too strong a word to use, more spends time in the general vicinity of- are more wobbly on their feet, they don't want to run as fast or as far. They don't like falling over. Don't want to get too far from their parents. They don't keep up.

And she isn't interested in them.

Instead Raika spends most of her early years playing with the kittens Hotaru brings with him.

He's a summons, as she later finds out -though she's had her suspicions ever since the first time she heard him speak - and a grumpy one at that. He complains loudly whenever he's bought forth to find Raika's grinning face instead of an actual mission, though he probably considers her much more taxing. She's not sure he's wrong.

So he brings the kittens as a distraction, and Raika is unashamed to say it works very well.

She's always liked cats. These ones don't have names and can't speak yet, but they are fast and soft and warm and they don't care that her pronunciation is a little off, that her accent is a little peculiar, or her sentences a little mixed up. They remind her of two little fuzzballs that used to sleep on the end of her bed for -

An air bag deployed too late. Pressure across her chest, the snap of a whip

-They mewl around her ankles and chase her round the gardens of the Tsugaya house, falling and tripping as much as she does but always springing back up. The child in her delights at their play and even the adult is okay with it because who doesn't like kittens?

They keep her moving, and to her that is more of a blessing than the mental stimulation she could have received from other children. As far as Raika is concerned there's enough going on in her head as it is.

...

It is some time after her third birthday that Raika awakes to the most horrible sensation she has felt to date, aside from being re-born and -

Glass shattering, scraping skin, splintering into flesh and burrowing deep, deeper. The echoing crash and jolt before

- Her skin tingles. Her bones itch. There is a strange pressing feeling in her chest that has never been there before, like a weight pushing down, only from the inside out. She scratches everywhere she can reach and still the feeling persists.

Thoroughly perplexed and a little weirded out she seeks the presence of her father, who is showing off by doing one handed push ups in the courtyard at the centre of the Tsugaya house. His breath stirring the dirt on the ground each time he dips down, counting.

Hikari is off on an escort mission, from what Raika has been able to tell from her eavesdropping – which is annoying, since her mother gives better explanations than her father does – more patronising explanations but still better.

"Dada," She calls, getting his attention instantly, "I feel funny."

"What's wrong kit?" Mugen asks, a frown on his face as he pushes to his feet and comes over to where she is standing on the wooden walkway that surrounds the courtyard.

"Itchy." Raika tells him simply, knowing she doesn't have the vocabulary necessary to accurately describe what she is experiencing. She scratches her forearm in demonstration and continues to frown. How does one put into words the feeling of a hundred bees travelling under the surface of their skin, if the bees are actually tiny lightning bolts that have been marinated in red bull and set on fire? Hmm.

Mugen squats down in front of her and takes her arm to examine it, turning it this way and that to try and spot the cause of her irritation. There are no bites or lumps on her skin to explain the itch, just the four red marks Raika's nails have made after she's scraped them across her forearm. After a second he lets out a huff and presses a hand to her childish pot-belly, releasing a swirl of his own chakra against her skin which causes her to squirm and make her teeth bounce against each other.

Then he sits back on his heels with a small smile on his lips. "It's chakra, kit," He tells her with a chuckle "Your chakra coils are opening."

"Don't like it." Raika says, wriggling her shoulders to try and get rid of the sensation of something crawling down her back, grimacing as she does so.

'Don't like it' is an understatement. It feels unnatural. Like the time she had seen that picture of a mouse with a human ear growing on it's back in science class, except this time Raika is the mouse and the ear is a thousand fire ants tunnelling through her nervous system.

Mugen laughs. He stands up, hooking his hands under Raika's arm pits as he does so, then swings her up into the air and settles her on his hip. "Don't worry, it won't last long," He assures her as he starts off across the courtyard, hopping silently back onto the walkway to enter the kitchen. "Here, how about I make you some breakfast to take your mind off it?"

Privately Raika thinks that a little cereal isn't likely to pacify the prickling of her veins but she keeps that opinion to herself and hums an affirmative as her father deposits her at the table. Cereal can't hurt the situation. Her stomach rumbles in agreement, "What's chakra?"

"What's chakra? Well, it's a little hard to explain," Mugen tells her honestly, but carries on regardless. "I think the simplest way to to put it would be to say that chakra is something that lives inside your body and helps to keep you alive."

"Why?" She asks curiously.

From what Raika can remember from the anime, chakra is the life force of all things, a combination of spiritual and physical energy. Everyone has it, though not everyone can use it to it's fullest capacity, hence the division between ninja and civilian. It makes all the impossible things ninja do possible. Naruto's is blue while the Kyuubi's is orange and bubbly. Chakra exhaustion is bad, having lots is good, blah, blah, blah.

Oh, and that whole mess with the Rabbit Goddess. Can't forget that.

"It's.. uh, it's like blood. Remember when you cut your leg?" Mugen ventures, waving a hand as he tries to find an example she will understand. Raika nods, absently running her fingers over the spot on her knee she had cut open on the corner of a paving stone some months back. "Well your blood runs all through your body, it keeps it working and chakra does the same. Some people have more than others and they can become shinobi."

Raika nods again as if that all makes sense to her young mind – which it definitely wouldn't have if she hadn't already had a working knowledge of the human body and at least a basic grasp on chakra. Handy. "How for more?" She asks, then scrunches up her face because even she knows that's wrong.

"How for..," Mugen trails off, blinking in confusion. "Do you mean how come some people have more than others?"

Raika nods. Close enough.

"Chakra reserves grow naturally the older you get, but it can be increased with practice – the same as everything else," He informs Raika, setting a bowl down in front of her then dropping down into the space opposite. "Training your mind and body can increase the amount of chakra you have, understand?"

Raika nods again.

"But chakra can also be inherited. Since your mother and I are both ninja, we have higher levels of chakra than a civilian, and so your natural chakra reserves will be larger than that of a civilian childs." He tells her, then smiles because he doesn't think she is taking any of it in.

And why should he?

She can barely string a sentence together and here he is explaining the ins and outs of the mystical energy flowing through her body.

"Well it's probably a little early for you to be thinking about all that," Mugen says a moment later, confirming her thoughts. "Eat up."

Raika does as she's told, tucking into the cereal with gusto while her mind whirs with possibilities for the future.

There are two options.

The first is to simply let things play out the way they're supposed to. Ignore the pushing and pulling current of chakra running alongside her veins and settle herself into a civilian life. The technology of the Naruto-verse is murky at best, some nations more advanced than others, but with her knowledge she can develop all kinds of things and live a comfortable life. And by comfortable she means filthy stinking rich. It's the easiest thing to do. The safest thing to do.

She'd lived all her life safe, right up until the moment -

Lying broken, half in and half out of the car. Cold earth against her cheek, warm blood dripping steadily down her face. The bite of glass and twisted metal around her stomach

-Or option two. Become a ninja.

Her knowledge of the world before Naruto's birth is convoluted at best and the timelines never did really seem to add up. Still, the Yondaime's face has yet to be carved into the Hokage monument – which puts her somewhere in the area of the Third Great Shinobi war. Not the most desirable place in time to find yourself reborn, but Raika would have to work with what she had - which was very little, unfortunately.

Being a ninja will really up the chances of that thing she purposely doesn't think about happening, doubly so when you throw in a war that even Genin have to participate in. Konoha has a lot of shit coming it's way, and maybe Raika won't live long enough to see it – but if she does – if by some miracle she survives, can she afford to be defenceless?

And who is she kidding – she wants to be a ninja. The ability to make walls of earth burst up out of the ground on command? The power to walk on water and move at impossible speeds? That would be awesome, amazing really.

But she's already experienced dyi-

Breath coming out in ragged wet gasps, little clouds of air dissipating as they leave her blood stained lips.

-"That must be some interesting cereal," Mugen concludes, the sound of his voice snapping Raika out of her thoughts and back to the present. Her father gives her a warm smile though his eyes are tight with worry. "Though it's probably soggy now, you've been staring at it for so long. Everything okay, kit?"

"Mmhm," Raika nods, pushing the bowl away from herself. He's right, the cereal has fused itself into one mushy lump in the bowl and looks a lot less appetizing now. "Chakra isn't nice."

"I know, but it will fade in a couple of days. Your body needs a bit of time to get used to it," Her father tells her as he gets to his feet and takes her partially eaten breakfast over to the sink. He returns and plants his hands on his hips, looking down at her with a slightly forced grin. "How about we go to the park? We haven't been there in a while, what do you say?"

She wants to say no.

The park is always full of kids. Kids that are younger than her yet can speak better. Kids that are older than her who question her strange pronunciation. Parents who notice both and point it out – because 'isn't that curious?' And 'where did she pick that up?'Or 'shouldn't she be speaking properly by now?'

It's easiest to ignore them if she isn't around them. Still, Mugen desperately wants her to be a normal kid, and normal kids go to the park. They don't spend five minutes sitting in silence whilst trying to see the future in their quickly congealing breakfast cereal.

"Okay," She says, forcing a reluctant smile onto her face as she stands up. "Will you push me on the swing?"

…..

It is months after her chakra coils open that Raika decides to try her hand at manipulating the strange new energy circulating through her body. She's wanted to test it out before, but it seemed dangerous to try and use something so new and unknown. With her luck she'd probably end up opening the fourth circle of hell, or something equally as unpleasant.

But if she wants to be a ninja -which is becoming more and more appealing- then chakra control is something she'll need and since her attempts at learning to read are going disastrously – there is a dizzying amount of Kana and Kanji – she needs something else to occupy her time.

She racks her brains for chakra control exercises she had seen in the series that might be a good starting point – however the only things she can clearly recall are the tree climbing and water walking exercises team seven started during their stint in Wave.

While it might be fun to try climbing the walls like something out of The Exorcist, Raika is positive she doesn't have enough chakra in her body to even attempt it. So instead of sticking herself to something, she decides to try sticking something to herself instead.

The problem is what to stick, and to where? How does it work? She knows she has to try and direct chakra to the part of her body she wants to stick, but does she need to account for the weight of the object? The surface area? Starting small is obvious, but how small? A piece of paper, a leaf, a feather? Will the feather be easier than the leaf, because it's lighter? Or will the leaf be easier because it's more the more substantial?

In the end she picks neither, settling on a blade of grass. Lightweight, easy to come by and small enough that it won't kill her if it turns out she has even less chakra than she thinks she does. Easy, in theory.

Or, not so easy. Raika spends a good few days just attempting to move the chakra to her fingertips.

It's like trying to direct the flow of water, except she has nothing to channel it with and it doesn't care about gravity like normal water does. Whenever she pushes it the chakra seems to shoot off down a dozen different pathways at once, going all over the place like a kid squeezing a tube of paint with reckless abandon. Everywhere except where she wants it to go. Shockingly.

After a week of frustrated napping -even though she hasn't been able to get the chakra to go in the right direction it's still an exhausting process - Raika finally realises the problem.

She keeps trying to pull chakra directly from her centre, where her reserves seem to be situated, only to lose most of it on the way to her fingers as it spirals out through her body. But Mugen had said the chakra system was similar to blood vessels and she knows a little about the chakra pathways and tenketsu points thanks to the animes explanation of the Hyuga's abilities – which means it's already circulating around her body. There is no need to push it all the way from her core to her extremities if it's already going there on it's own.

With this in mind she tries focusing her will on the chakra already flowing to her fingers, pushing it experimentally to the tips till they began to feel fuzzy, like pins and needles. She touches her pointer finger eagerly to the pre-picked blade of grass on her knee - knowing she has it this time- and lifts it.

The grass stays where it is.

Raika frowns at it and curses under her breath, tries again, fails again. Curses a little louder. Tries again. Fails again.

After the fifth attempt she starts to feel light headed and resolves to try again tomorrow before dragging herself up and back into the house to demand someone read to her.

It takes a further six days before Raika manages to chakra-glue the grass blade to her finger. She does it a second time, just to make sure it isn't a fluke and confidently moves on to harder parts of the body. The back of her hand, her feet, her elbows, her chest. She steers clear of her head for the time being - that's already a mess, no need to go swirling chakra around in there and risk further fuck ups.

Within a month she is working on multiple blades of grass, each one sticking to a different point on her body, making her look like a ridiculous green hedgehog. Twenty blades is her current record but she is cautious of pulling up too much of the greenery around the tree she has made her practice spot. The lawn is already looking a little bald from all her failed attempts.

She practices daily, moving from grass to leaves, then leaves to paper. Eventually Raika can stick a myriad of objects to herself; buttons, rocks, cutlery and various toys of all shapes and sizes. Cautiously she tries glueing a kitten to her chest, but that only results in one angry kitten and an impressive collection of scratches. Raika decides she isn't quite strong enough for that just yet anyway.

Mugen and Hikari are at least a little aware of their daughters endeavours in chakra control, if only because they worry over the amount of time she spends sleeping off her exhaustion.

They watch to make sure she doesn't push too hard but otherwise let her figure it out for herself. Which Raika is thankful for. Chakra is new to her in ways the rest of the world isn't. It's different. Strange. Unknown. She wants to experience it for herself, to see how much she can figure out alone and unaided.

Chakra manipulation – no matter how small – is a welcome change from the challenge of learning to read and write. It leaves her with a small sense of victory whenever she manages to unravel some of it's workings, something that she has power over when everything else is beyond her control. It's exciting!

Her chakra control exercises leave her tired physically, while working on hiragana, katakana and kanji leave her mentally drained. Together they wear Raika out enough that she doesn't have time to dwell on other thoughts during her waking hours.

Her sleeping hours are a different story though.

Raika always dreams.

Sometimes of nonsensical things that the child in her creates. Fantastical creatures, amazingly unrealistic landscapes, combinations of both her worlds merging seamlessly into one, obscure, often odd but fun.

Occasionally she has pleasant dreams of things from before. A hand held in hers, fingers locked together with whispered promises of never letting go. Holidays to warm and distant sands, adventures big and small. Familiar voices bickering around a dinner table, laughter, family.

Those are the nights she prays for. The innocent dreams of a child or the soft reminders of home without the paralysing interruptions that ambush her in the day.

Other nights she wakes sweating, little hands clawing the sheets that have twisted round her in the night. Her parents worried faces peering down at her from either side of the bed, like fretting shadows.

Those nights are the ones Raika hopes the chakra training will have exhausted her for. Those are the dreams she tries to blot out as she stuffs the cryptic Japanese writing system into a head already fit to burst.

Too vivid. Too real. Too much.

She would rather not dream at all.

Second chapter down! We're still learning a bit about Raika and her brain troubles here. My intention is to update weekly but I'm also working on the new chapter of ISOAQ so we'll see how it goes. Hope you guys liked it, please review/favourite/follow as you see fit. Much love!