Transposition

By: I.K.A. Valian

A – B: One Ends

NARUTO © Masashi Kishimoto.

It took me nine months, three weeks, and six days to figure out that what I was experiencing was most certainly not a hallucination, dream, nightmare, Hell, or Purgatory. I hope I can be forgiven for this lapse in judgment. After all, I had been re-born into a whole new life. But perhaps it might be better to begin my tale from the end of my last life. For it is important to believe that I had a previous life in order for anything I tell you about my current living arrangements to make sense.

At the end, I was terrified. I suppose a lot of people would say that if they could. I don't know of any others who've experienced what I have and 'lived' to talk about it. Suffice to say, staring down the barrel of a .45 hand cannon wasn't the way I expected to go. Who robs banks with ski masks and guns that big in 2034, anyway?

"Give me all your money," was what they said. I remember it clear as day. "Give me all your money and don't do anything stupid!"

I looked the gunman up and down. Unlike the others around me, who were also clearly terrified, I had not raised my hands into the air like some obedient little child. Call me an obstinate old man, but after five decades and a Mini World War in the Middle East, I wasn't going to bow to the demands of some punk ass kid who mistook his mama's stockings for a Halloween costume.

It was a rather small bank, a branch office. I guess the kids figured that because this was so far out in the country, the cops wouldn't be fast enough to get here to stop them. I bet they were also counting on all of those 'country folk' being stupid or weak enough to be steamrolled by 'badass boyz from the hood'.

I remember laughing in the face of the guy with the .45 on me as that thought went through my head. It was clear these idiots weren't even African American, despite their clear attempt to talk like them. The morons probably got the idea from the recently hot television drama about the gangs that used to infest Chicago a decade past.

"Shut the fuck up, Old Man, and fork over your cash!" shouted the idiot in front of me.

"Listen son," I said, "I don't give a shit who you are, or how big a hand cannon you point at me, you aren't getting my money. Understand?"

"First," the idiot said, as he got right in my face and shoved the gun up under my throat. The metal painfully dug into the soft skin of my neck, but I didn't give the little moron the gratification of seeing my flinch, and instead stared straight back into his face. Facing down an army of agitated Arabs was easily more terrifying that his little punk, any day. "You ain't my fucking dad," the punk said. "Second, if you don't give me your money right now, I will paint your fucking brains across the ceiling. Got it, asshole?" The punk shoved the cold metal of the .45 hard against my throat to emphasis his point.

I sighed. Sometimes, you have to work to give people what they deserve. I inclined my head and diverted my eyes over the guys shoulders. "Don't play hero," I said.

I watched with morbid fascination as the idiot in front of me took the bait and turned to look over his shoulder. At the same time, I brought my hand up and shoved the gun he was holding from under my chin to under his. The moment the idiot felt the gun moving, he squeezed his finger down on the trigger.

The thing about a .45 caliber gun is that it isn't meant for leaving neat, clean holes in people or objects, or anything at all, for that matter. Actually, the amount of force behind such a large projectile pretty much guarantees whatever is shot by this size gun that isn't an inch thick plate of steel is turned into mulch or hamburger. Two guesses what happened to this guy's face after the gun went off.

The sight of blood, gore, and brain matter flying through the air made my insides roil. What felt like a lead weight settled into my gut, but I didn't stop once the shot rang out. I dove to the ground, grabbing the hand cannon out of the now dead or dying kid's hands in an attempt to bring it to bear on the other idiot shaking down the tellers.

I had just pointed it at the kid when the second shot rang out. I jolted when I felt the .45 caliber round pass through my intestines like a blowtorch through butter. I was surprised that it didn't hurt as much as I thought it would. Maybe it was my training kicking in, or a traumatic experience from the war resurfacing, but I was somehow able to push the pain, more of a dull ache, to the back of my mind. With my mind clear, I aimed the gun at the flabbergasted kid, who was probably wondering how the hell I was still moving after being shot, and pulled the trigger.

Stupid kid probably thought that people die after a single shot with a big enough gun, just like in those stupid nerfed down video games. He'll have plenty of time to think about his stupidity in Hell, because my shot wasn't as low as his. At least, I'm pretty sure he's going to die, unless a point blank shot from a .45 hand cannon to the heart doesn't kill people like it used to.

The two robbers dead, I dropped the gun from my bloody hand and tried to breath. It was at this point that I looked down and realized why it was so hard to do that. The blow to my gut hadn't just liquidated my intestines, but it had severed my whole body in half. As the life faded with every weakening pump of my heart, I idly wondered what awaited me on the other side.

Just as the darkness swallowed my mind, light erupted around me. I don't know why, or how, but it quickly became apparent that I was not quite dead yet. At the time, I thought that this must be what Hell was like, because I couldn't move very much, all I could do was scream, and giants manhandled me all over the place. And that was in just the first few minutes.

The eyesight of an infant isn't that great. In fact, it doesn't really completely finish developing for years. Ears, on the other hand, are near fully developed by time an infant is born. That said, most bodies have an adjustment period of several years to adjust to the strength of sound around them. So at the moment I was re-born, I was overwhelmed not just by the blurry images and the terrifying sensation of being held by hands larger that my body, but by the insanely, to my new ears, loud sounds from everywhere around me.

I had fully expected to go to Hell. After everything I had done in my previous life, I certainly deserved torment. I tried to remain moral, but war seems to bring out the worst in people. Morally, I knew I had done wrong, but it was what needed to be done. I was lauded as a hero, even though I felt like a schmuck. So this terrifying experience of loud noise, blurry images, the inability to move in any capacity, being grabbed and moved about by being much larger than me, and smelling something horrible the whole time was as close to what I felt I deserved as I could imagine.

I didn't change my opinion that this was Hell until I was a little under ten months old in this new world. After that, I was certain that it was worse.

Throughout my first year, I was probably the most unbearable infant possible. I was finicky, cried a lot, screamed a lot, threw up on a moments notice, crapped at the most inopportune times, and took joy in spewing bodily fluids out of whatever orifice I could use. The way I figured it, if I was in Hell, I couldn't really get into any more trouble for being unruly and destructive. It was kind of liberating, in a way, to be free of expectations of behavior.

Over the weeks of that year, my sight improved steadily. My hearing, which was surprisingly already quite strong, began differentiating and tuning out the extremely loud noise all around me. With the improvement in sight and hearing came an improvement in my sense of balance, so I didn't feel like I was being thrown around all over the place. My sense of smell was still horrid, or perhaps it was good but I was surrounded by fermenting sewage.

These changes were subtle. So subtle that when I woke up one day and could clearly make out the facial features of this green haired beauty picking me up out of my crib, I was struck speechless. She had soft looking skin, shiny brown eyes that almost seemed too large, a small nose, and a curving set of what looked like naturally ruby red lips. She was beautiful, even with the odd green hair. Of course, she immediately smiled at my silent nature and launched into a joy filled rant of some kind. I could only pick up bits and pieces of what she was saying, because whatever language these giants were speaking in, it sounded surprisingly like Japanese. At the very least, she sounded like she was excited. Maybe she was a cosplayer? It would explain the Japanese. And the green hair.

I curse my stupidity for what I did next. Instead of bursting into tears and screaming my head off, like I normally did when confronted by my hellish tormentors, I started laughing and giggling. Later, I'd conclude that the torment was getting to me if I was starting to enjoy it. At that moment though, I was filled with such an uncontrollable wave of joy that it burst forth like a dam being blown or a balloon popping. It's hard to describe the complete happiness that possessed me at that moment.

That was probably the beginning of my doubts about my situation. I continued to actively be a little pain in the ass after that, but with my improved eye sight and increasing understanding of what was being said around me, I began to notice that I was not actually being tortured. Rather, my 'parents' were caring for me, an 'infant', as best they could.

I couldn't see any obvious signs of wealth. If I were to be honest, from what I could observe, the house was a dirt hovel and my family was one mired in abject poverty. As I sought out more clues to prove or disprove that I was in Hell, I easily discovered that that my parents were not happy with their predicament. My 'father' and 'mother' were constantly somber. The only time they appeared happy at all was when they were interacting with me. When I realized that my doubts about my situation doubled and I also began regretting my behavior up to this point.

My new family appeared to be a young, hard working couple. When I got my first chance to study him with my improved eye sight, I found my 'father' to be a large, muscular man. His hair was dark, almost black, but it was fairly easy to distinguish the blue running through his wild mane and beard. Even his arm hair was blue-ish. In fact, he was so hairy and so large that he was easily comparable to a large blue bear, and hairy enough to make the comparison work. He had what I would call an epic beard. His face was hard and angular, his skin course, but his normally hard and flinty eyes were kind and gentle when looking at me.

It appeared to be a hard life, but my family was persevering. Father left everyday dressed as some kind of construction worker, top hat and everything, while mother minded me and the house. When he returned, she left in some kind of costume that made her look like a shrine maiden or something. It had a long flowing red skirt tied with a bow at her waist and a white shirt tucked into the skirt. They followed this pattern every day without fail. After I was weaned, which as a man I admit might have made last longer than necessary, I was fed in the morning by Mother and then in the evening by Father.

The final nail in the coffin, so to speak, that convinced me that I was not actually dead took place on that day. The one, fateful day that everyone who ever knew anything about Naruto knows by heart. October tenth. That was the day I learned where I was. That was the day I learned I wasn't dreaming, or dead. That was the day my world was, once again, turned upside down.

The cause of all these things was a several story tall glowing red fox-like beast with nine tails. I admit, at first, the only thing I could focus on was the terrifying presence that the Nine-tails chakra induced. It was literally causing me to wet myself. Being an infant, it wasn't all that unexpected of me.

The fox attacked at night. So it was my father who died trying to save me. I remember watching through my terror induced haze a look of resignation overcoming his strong facial features. At the time I had no honest idea what was happening, just that there was some thing in the air that was trying to suffocate me combined with an all consuming terror from deep inside my soul. My father found the fortitude within himself to pick me up, crib and all, and threw me out the nearest window just as a giant, red hand slammed down to the earth. I didn't even hear a crunch or anything of the like. One minute my father was staring at me and the next both he and the whole house was just gone.

I don't know how or by what miracle, but the Nine-tails did not step on me after that. I was a trifle too terrified to pay much attention, but it wasn't too long after that when the great beasts presence completely vanished. I think I was lying on the ground without anyone finding me for several hours. I screamed for a while. That turned into whimpers before I settled for focusing on breathing alone.

Eventually, someone found me and I wound up in a room full of other babies crying. I was forced to enduring staying in that room for several days, being fed and changed by what I assume were very haggard nurses who wore strange metal plates on their heads, before Mother appeared. She wasn't the same woman who'd left the night of the attack. She had sunken eyes, her skin was pale, and she bore a thousand yard stare that I'd only ever seen on front-line combatants.

I noticed her before she noticed me. She was going through the room with a look of complete hopelessness. When she finally saw me she stopped and stared at me, as if she couldn't believe it was me. I think I teared up and reached out to her a little. Whatever I did, the spell over her broke and she immediately snatched me up, calling out "Moriko! Moriko!" as she hugged my little body to her bosom. The nurse guiding her through the room smiled at us and patted my weeping mother on her shoulder.

It was only after several hours of paper work, as we were leaving the building that I now recognized as a hospital, that everything that had happened came together. I was being held close to Mother's chest as she walked down the street when I saw people zipping back and forth over the roofs. The Nine-tails, the metal plate wearing nurses, the people running around; I was in the world of Naruto, the world of Shinobi. I was almost a year old and I was in a world where stories tall monsters existed. A world where shadows and blood ruled. A world, if possible, more terrifying than the one I died in.

And if that wasn't enough, it clicked in my head that Mother had called me Moriko. Wasn't that a girl's name?

A/N: I'm not entirely sure what i was thinking when I wrote this. In any event, here is the first and only chapter of Transposition. I wonder what I was thinking of when I came up with it... If only I could remember.

Thanks for reading.

~I.K.A. Valian