Whirlpool Trilogy

Book One: Ren of the Uzumaki Clan

By I.K.A. Valian

Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto.

Chapter One: Being Reborn

~ Awakening… ~

I was dead. It is important that one pays attention to the past tense in which I say that. I say that I was dead, because I am not dead any longer. It was, to say the least, as jarring an experience as dying was in the first place.

My first thoughts, after the long, long, long sleep in the darkness reflected my confusion. Why, I thought, was I feeling pain? Pain was a sensation I'd left behind when I died. I was sure I was dead. The freak accident involving an eighteen wheeled truck losing its cargo of massive, twelve foot high cement sewage pipes on the interstate hadn't left my mind even in death. In fact, as I came to consciousness once again, the image of those massive round cement tubes rolling down the freeway toward my car was the first thing I saw flash before my eyes. So then, since I am most certainly dead, where was this pain coming from?

It felt like something was squishing me. I remember that when I was alive I was slightly claustrophobic. It was not anything debilitating, but it was there. Now, here, in this weird place, I was reacting rather mellow to the squishing. I knew it was getting harder to breathe, or rather, it was getting harder to not breath in my mostly dead state, but it didn't really bother me that I was being squished. It felt more like I was being tucked into bed, with my covers tightly wound around me. It felt warm and safe.

I don't know how long I was in the restricting cocoon of warmth, but eventually it had to end. The suffocating feeling grew worse and eventually a light appeared in the darkness. I tried to move toward it, but my arms felt weak and I could barely move my legs. And then the darkness that had surrounded me for what felt like an eternity heaved, and I was thrust toward the light.

~ Adjusting ~

"You were born today, one year ago, on the eighteenth of February, in the fortieth year of the common era," I was informed by my new mother, Shiina, when I turned one year old. She cracked a grin at me and added, "Happy birthday, Ren-chan." I must have inherited some super-human genes or something to have picked up the language that was being spoken here so fast. I wasn't able to speak, of course, but I could understand what was being said and react accordingly.

My mother was a woman of striking beauty. Her eyes, whenever she was looking at me, were like emeralds aglow with warmth. It was easy to tell from the way she looked at me that she loved me a lot. I may have retained my memories of my past life, but I just couldn't find it in my heart to deny this woman her position as mother. We shared the same connection I recalled feeling with my past mother, and I wasn't really all that upset about it. I was severely out of my depth, starting a new life in this new place. It was far more comforting than I'll ever admit to know that there was someone as pretty and loving as Shiina that would always be there for me in this life.

Life over my first year was not all shits and giggles, though. There was plenty of that, what with having an infant's body, but there was also the struggle to learn what the hell was being spoken around me. That took up a great deal of my waking time, which was sparse. Babies sleep, eat, and excrete foul smelling substances. Time is allocated to those different activities in that order of importance. It would have been really frustrating, especially to an infant with an adult mind inside of their heads, had it not been for Shiina.

Whenever I would get frustrated trying to understand, or trying to keep my eyes open longer than a couple of hours at a time, Shiina would appear and envelope me in her arms. She would distract me with her smile while tickling me her long, dark crimson red hair. I'd usually forget my frustrations when that happened and fall right asleep. The woman seemed to have some kind of sixth sense for when I was in those moods because I was never really frustrated with my lack of advancement for very long before I was swept up into her arms.

I'm pretty sure she knows I'm smarter than an infant should be. Aside from being my mother, she's observed me reacting to her words as if I understand them. I also am not very finicky for a baby, which is something she seems rather worried about. Maybe all of her friends with children had to deal with babies that would cry at weird times or were just unruly. Not that babies can help it when they don't understand anything that's going on around them and can only concern themselves with their own needs. I don't have that problem with my advanced adult mind. I know I could have been a greater pain in the ass than I was, but I remained a calm baby, if for nothing else than because Shiina had quickly grown important to me.

My mother swooped down and picked me up, having informed me that today was my birthday. "Today," she said, "we are going to the park. Won't that be fun?" I nodded as best I could. I loved going outside. I hadn't been taken anywhere beyond our home's enclosed yard, but it was always warm with a salty sea-breeze blowing through. I wasn't sure where in the world I'd been reborn, but hell if it didn't appear like a paradise from what I'd seen of it so far.

Being carried down the street was an eye opener. I didn't just live by the sea, I lived on a tropical island. Maybe I was reborn into the asian-pacific? It would explain the different language, thought not the setting. I've never seen anyone with a fridge that didn't have air conditioning. Both machines used the same concept, but apparently they didn't believe in AC here. I re-affirmed this observation about my new home when I was carried through the neighborhood and noted that none of the homes had any form of air conditioning. It was rather mind boggling.

The park wasn't that large as far as my adult mind's perspective understood it. From my infant's point of view, it was like a huge new adventure waiting to happen. I tried crawling away as soon as Shiina put me down, but she laughed and swooped me back into her arms. It wasn't long before I was deposited into the sand box. I may have the mind of an adult, and at first it was rather demeaning to be sat in a box of sand so that I couldn't escape and get into trouble, but after a good ten minutes I began to 'play' in the sand by digging around in it with my hands. I enjoyed the feeling of the warm, dry top sand in contrast with the cool, damp sand beneath.

There were other kids at the park, and I saw Shiina talking with the other mothers and even a couple fathers as well. Most of the other kids were older, much older, and were either seen running around playing some kind of game that looked like tag, but with wooden knives and what looked like wooden stars being thrown about. There were also a good number of kids my own age of one year old, but most of those kids were being held or watched after by their parents directly. Only two were in the sand box with me, digging around or playing baby games with the small shovels that sat around in here.

This was the point at which I realized something was either really wrong with me or exceptionally wrong with the new world I found myself born into. Everyone around me. Every. Single. Person. They all had blood red hair.

I've never seen so many red-heads in one place before. It was rather ridiculous, to my adult point of view, considering that red hair was supposed to be pretty rare, unless you were from somewhere like Ireland or Scotland. Neither of those places spoke the language I was learning here.

I think I was staring a bit too long at all of the red because it wasn't too long after that when Shiina swooped me up into her lovingly warm embrace. I don't know how much time had passed over the course of the day as we apparently went into the main part of the village that we lived. I think it was a village. The houses and stores were rather modern looking, if oriental in design. Most of the places we went into were stores, where my mother decided that I needed new clothes. Being turned into a living dress-up doll wasn't fun in the least.

At least the day ended well. Shiina treated me to what I believe was a few bites of her anmitsu. I'd never had it in my previous life, so I wasn't sure, but when Shiina was cooing at me, that's what she called it. It was really sweet and I found that I rather like it.

Thus ended my birthday, when I fell asleep not long after. My first year alive again was rather uneventful. I learned to understand a new language, though I made up for mis-understanding words by following the context of what was being said. And I learned that, the woman who is now my mother is perhaps the most important person I know right now, without exception.

~Revival~

It was February eighteenth, in the eighty-fifth year of the Common Era, which began the day that Konohagakure was founded. I was now turning fifteen and gained from Mother Nature the lovely gift of puberty. It was a bit mind boggling considering that I should be going on forty-five, but considering the circumstances that I had found myself embroiled in the last few years, it wasn't surprising.

Being a guy, such things are much simpler for me than for girls. I count my blessings every day, having gone through this once, that I wasn't reborn as a member of the opposite sex. At least I have a point of reference for all the urges that most would only be able to get under control after a decade of acting like a… well, I hate to say it, but hormonal teenager is a very apt description.

The irony that I was walking through the gates of the very village that established the new calendar was not lost on me. But I was here with a mission, and I really wasn't spending much time on frivolous thoughts. The village seemed to be rather lively, festive even. It reminded me greatly of Uzushio, back before the invasion.

I gained entrance to the village easily enough, despite my cloaked nature. It's strange, I would have thought that there would been more security. In either case, as I walked down the main thoroughfare toward the Hokage Tower, I picked up on several conversations that filled in some of the blanks.

"Did you hear?" asked one particularly excited brunette while searching a fruit stand for the perfect specimen of melon. "Uchiha-sama made it to the final round of the Chunin Exams!"

"Oh?" responded the blond woman standing next to her. "I didn't know that the second round had ended yet. How did you find out?"

"My brother's one of the chunin helping to proctor the exam," the first woman explained as she continued to pick up fruit and check them over before putting them back to continue her search. "The second test finished earlier this morning after a preliminary round. Apparently there were too many participants this year."

"Wow," said the blond as she lifted her own melon and, finding it satisfactory, put it to the side and began digging through her bag for her money purse. "I don't remember the last time I heard about them needing to run a preliminary round. Must have been years ago. Did you hear who else made it?"

"Oh, yes," the brunette said as she finally settled on the melon she'd gone over twice already and pulled out her money. "Aside from Uchiha-sama, there were several others from the big clans, such as the Nara, Aburame, and the Hyuuga. I also heard that Uzumaki Demon Brat made it, but I can't be sure because when my brother tried talking about it, he started laughing and saying something about passing gas. Honestly, my brother can be a bit of an idiot sometimes."

I didn't pause or slow my pace as I continued forward. The gossip that I'd picked up led me to conclude that there was a Chunin Exam being hosted here and that the final round would be held here in a month. The one thing that piqued my interest, though, were the several mentions of a supposed 'Demon' Uzumaki that was supposed to be participating. It didn't take a genius of a re-incarnation to realize that they were referring to my younger cousin, Naruto.

Instead of continuing toward the Hokage Tower, I instead turned down the path indicated as leading toward the hospital by the ever helpful 'leaf'-shaped arrow signs. If I wasn't mistaken, I would run into Naruto there. Unless my memories of the story I'd read a lifetime ago were completely inaccurate, Naruto would need a trainer for the next month. In my increasingly foggy memory, this was when the character Jiraiya was introduced, though it wasn't until much later that the viewers learned he was actually Naruto's Godfather. But as I walked down the road, a plan began to form in my head. Who better than his own clansmen to give guidance and what better way to re-introduce the glorious Uzumaki Clan onto the world stage than by having an Uzumaki blow out the International Chunin Selection Examination?

~Naruto~

After asking Sakura-chan where Kakashi-sensei was, I learn he had left to check on Sasuke at the hospital. Leave it to the Bastard Uchiha to pass out and need Sensei to skip out on the rest of the team just to watch after him. Getting out of the Forest of Death was a heck of a lot easier than getting in, because apparently there was a tunnel that ran under the ground from the fortress in the center of the forest to a small building just outside of the border fence.

"It sure would have been nice to know about this tunnel before we jumped into that death trap," I muttered as the sun welcomed me back above ground. I raced passed all of the chunin still milling about after the second test and made my way as fast as possible toward the village. I don't remember the hospital very well, having only been there a couple times before I got my own apartment, but I do remember it was just a block away from the Hokage Tower.

I grinned as I poured on the speed. I'd been putting in some heavy duty training since coming back from the mission to the Land of Waves. I never wanted anyone to ever have to sacrifice themselves to save me again, let alone that Bastard Uchiha. And then there was the fact that I had to watch Haku nearly die. In fact, I thought he had died when Kakashi-sensei lopped his arm off. I watched the ice using boy's blood was spray all over Old Man Tazuna's bridge. But then Haku's body had vanished sometime before the battle had ended, so he must have been well enough to move under his own power and escape.

Too bad the same couldn't be said about Zabuza. That guy, at least, went out with a bang when he carved a bloody path through Gato's thugs and cut the midget bastard's head clean off. And he did it with a Kunai. Held in his mouth. Zabuza may have died in the process, but he was a total badass while doing it.

As soon as I arrived into the center of the village, I leaped up to the rooftops to speed up my travel in the direction of the Hokage Tower. I'd made it halfway across the village when I caught sight of what I thought was the hospital and then re-adjusted my path to make a bee-line toward the building. I was just about to clear the last of the gaps between roofs before I had to drop down to street level again when something caught my leg with a snap.

"Ack!" I squeaked as I was sucked down into the shadows of the back alley. Whoever had tripped me up grabbed me before I could smash into the ground and pushed me up against the wall. I tried to use the wall to bounce back and punch whoever this cloaked guy was, but I found myself stuck fast to the wall with my arms and legs stretched out. "Who the hell are you?!" I shouted into the guy's face. "What the hell are you doing, you jerk?! Let me go-ttebayo!"

"Hmph, you're definitely the one. No one else has a verbal tic like that. So you picked it up too, did you?" asked the stranger. "And Tomato-chan was so adamant about never letting her kids inherit it."

"I don't know what the heck you're talking about, pal!" I growled. I pushed as hard as I could against the… I looked, and found myself straining, quite uselessly, against what looked like golden glowing yellow chains wrapped around my arms, legs, and torso. "What the hell! Where did these chains come from?!" I grunted as I tried to pull against the chains, but it was no use, they wouldn't budge even a centimeter. "Stupid chains! Let me go!"

The stranger tilted his head to the side and I caught sight of some red hair falling into the light. So whoever this guy was, he had red hair. And it most certainly was a guy. I'd never heard a girl with a deep voice like that before. He was also kind of tall. "Damnit!" I shouted. "Why is everyone taller than I am?!"

"You do realize that you could have used a replacement to escape the moment I tripped you," the stranger stated as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. "Right?"

There was silence between us as I thought back over the exact series of events. I scowled when I realized he was right. But, for some reason, right now I couldn't do anything with my chakra. It was like it had all been pushed back down inside my body, which was a strange feeling because I'd never felt my chakra doing anything but bursting at the seams to get out. Even when that creepy guy with the snakes hit me in the stomach, it didn't stop. Now that I thought about it, that part of my belly still felt rather sore.

"It would be useless to try now, since I'm suppressing your chakra with my Adamantine Chakra Chains," the man said. "Not even your Biju could fight against these. They are the perfect weapon for fighting any of them."

I felt the blood draining from my face as the implications of what the man just said set in. Not only did this guy know about the fox, but he was actively suppressing both my own and the fox's power. And, just on impulse, I tried searching for that hazy, grating rage deep down but I couldn't find it. Even if I had no idea how to pull it out like I did that one time on Tazuna's bridge, I could recognize it for what it was ever since. But now it was just gone, and it terrified me.

This guy had beaten me in one move. And it wasn't just that he'd stopped me as a human, he stopped my biju as well. Plus, it's not as if I am a normal host either, since the Nine-tails was supposed to be the strongest of them all. And this guy had just appeared out of nowhere and stopped me cold. I couldn't budge at all.

"I hear you passed the second stage of the Chunin Exams," the stranger said. "Congratulations."

"Uh…" I said. I wasn't entirely sure what this guy was getting at. But still, he was the first one to congratulate me, aside from the Old Man doing it just before they drew numbers to learn who faced who in the final round. But the Hokage had congratulated all of the winners of the preliminaries, not just me. "Thanks. Look, pal, I'm not sure exactly what you want here. And I need to get to the Hospital so I can ask my Sensei for training. So if you let me go, I'll just forget this ever happened and we can both go our own way, alright?"

"Oh, it's training you want, now, is it?" the stranger asked, a mirthful lilt to his voice. "So why would you want training from your sensei when you could ask me?"

"Y-you?!" I sputtered. "Why would I ask the guy who trapped me and stuck me to a wall?! It's not like you can teach me these chain things, after all." I looked at the man as he leaned back and laughed. It wasn't a loud laugh, more of a chuckle really. Still, why was he laughing? "You can't, right?"

"Well, to answer your first question, yes, me. Us Uzumaki have to stick together, ya know!" The man reached up and pulled the hood of his cloak back, revealing a face practically chiseled from stone, blue on green eyes, and a veritable lion's mane of deep blood red hair. "And as for your second question, these chains are inherited from my grandmother. She is also your great-grandmother. So yes, you can use them. But you and I are the only ones left with this particular branch of our blood line."

~Ren~

I watched as Naruto's eyes went wide and his jaw fell slack. I watched, chuckling to myself, as he tried several times to pull himself together. After a good long while, I frowned when Naruto was still unable to come back to himself. Maybe I was being overdramatic again and broke him? Kushina learned to put up with my quirks after a while, but I recall she reacted a little like this the first few times.

Frowning, I turned to the side and muttered, "I'm not that shocking, am I?"

"Wh-who are you?" Naruto asked, his voice wavering. I turned back and saw Naruto's eyes were shimmering with unshed tears. Perhaps this really was a bit too much to dump on him all at once. "How… how can you just, show up! Out of nowhere?! And how… how can you claim to be an Uzumaki?! There's… There's no such thing as an Uzumaki Clan! This… This is just… too cruel. Even if you hate the fox, that doesn't mean you have to do something like this to me! You… You…. YOU BASTARD!"

I sighed and lowered my face into my palm as Naruto tried to get free again, once more proving that my chains were impervious to his efforts to break free. All the time he was cursing up a storm and I quickly began to wonder where exactly he'd learned his vocabulary. It was certainly vulgar enough. The old story didn't really give any specifics on how bad Naruto's life was before the opening chapter, only showing that he was lonely and became a loud brat to compensate.

Finally tiring of the incessant noise Naruto was generating, I felt a vein pop on the top of my head. Before I even realized I'd moved, I smacked him upside the head and shouted, "Would you shut up, you little brat! Dattebaka!"

A hush settled over the alley as Naruto stared at me. I scowled and muttered a quiet "shit" when I realized what I'd said. Suddenly the alley was filled with bubbling laughter.

"Hehehe, you said Dattebaka!" Naruto goaded. "I thought Dattebayo was bad, but you got it even worse! Haha!"

Still scowling, I muttered, "At least you don't insult others when you say yours! Even your mom didn't have that problem." Growling, I sneered as I crossed my arms and silently steamed while waiting for my younger cousin to finally settle down. It took a while, too, as Naruto seemed to get a never-ending kick out of what my own verbal tic was. "Tch. You're a real brat, you know that?"

"Nyeh!" Naruto stuck his tongue out at me.

I smirked and grabbed the offending appendage. Naruto's eyes widened as he tried to pull his tongue back into his mouth, but I held on fast using chakra. With an ever widening smile, I said, slowly, "Well now, what's wrong? Cat got your tongue?"

Naruto settled for glaring at me. I grinned.

"Oh, whoops, look's like I'm the one holding onto it." I smiled as Naruto continued to try and glare at me. He made some grunts and groans, trying to say something, but it was all unintelligible. "Look, you stop insulting me and I let your tongue go. Deal?"

Naruto narrowed his eyes before he nodded. I quickly let go of his tongue and took a step back as Naruto proceeded to spit the flavor of my fingers out. Finally, Naruto looked up at me though his blond bangs and watched me, this time, some what hesitantly.

"Are… are we really related?" Naruto asked, almost too quietly for me to hear.

"Yes," I confirmed. "First cousins, once removed. My name is Uzumaki Ren."

Naruto was silent for a long while. Finally, he asked, "Why?"

"Why what?" I asked.

"Why," he repeated. "Why didn't you come before? Did… Did you not want me? Was it because of the fox? Why… did you leave me all alone?"

"I was born forty-five years ago," I explain. This earned a strange, though clearly confused look from the boy. "However, I only turned fifteen today. The answer to 'how' is time travel."

"Time travel?" I think I may have lost the kid with that one.

"Yes," I said. "There's a whole convoluted explanation I could give, but basically, I traveled thirty years into the future. There was an invasion of our clan's home in the Land of Whirlpools. I've since come to learn that it was the battle that started the second shinobi world war. In order to save the remaining survivors, I sent all of us that remained into the future. I was actually only aiming for ten years, not thirty. I think it's obvious that I messed up my technique somewhere along the way when casting it."

"Heh," Naruto chuckled, but it was rather mirthless. "Yeah… just a little. So… you really didn't even know about me then? How did you track me down? I wasn't born until thirteen years ago."

I smiled. "How about this. I explain what happened after we get to the training field."

Naruto blinked, clearly processing what I'd said. Finally, he asked, "You really mean that you want to train me? But… wouldn't you have other things to do? Why would you want to waste your time on me? You wouldn't know this, but I'm the dead last of my class. I got nearly no talent at anything and even if I did get into the finals of the Chunin Exam, it's probably just dumb luck."

I frowned and placed my hand onto Naruto's head, splaying my fingers through his wild blond hair. The color may be different, but it had the same rough texture that Kushina's had. The chains slowly retracted, sliding back into the wall after looping around Naruto several times. When they were all gone I grabbed Naruto's shoulder and said, "You are an Uzumaki. It doesn't surprise me that without being taught in the ways of our clan, you didn't do very well. We had to come up with our own way of teaching and learning because our chakra is just too wild and large to be trained in the traditional way. Over the next month, I'm going to fix that. I also don't believe you have no talent at anything." Naruto looked up at me through his bangs, his eyes full of disbelief. "In fact, I believe you are one of the few Uzumaki who will eventually reach heights that will leave the rest of us behind. You are your mother's son, after all. And she was a little ball of energy, the last time I saw her, but that was thirty years ago. Anyway, you don't have to worry about things like class ranking or even luck. When I'm done with you, you'll not only win the final round of the competition, you'll blow every single one of the competitors away."

"Do… do you really mean all that?" Naruto asked. "You're not just saying that?"

"Pfff, please," I said, giving him a playful shove, "I would have trained you if for no other reason than because you're family. Before your mom moved here to Konoha, I was training her too, ya know."

"You were?" Naruto asked. I nodded. "What… um… What was mom, like? What was her name? Did she like ramen?"

I laughed and started leading Naruto out of the alley toward one of the training grounds. I'd left a shadow clone searching through the grounds available and it had found a good one before dispelling. After pulling my hood up, I began telling Naruto everything I could remember of his mother when she was just four years old. Naruto paid closer attention to me than I think he paid anything else in his life. Though, it was clear from the shallow smile that never left his face that he was quite happy.

~Training Ground Fifteen~

"So, so, so," I asked excitedly. "What are we going to train in first, Ren-sensei? Is it going to be a kick ass Clan Taijutsu? Or is it Uzumaki Ninjutsu! Those Chains! Is there a super, secret Uzumaki Ramen Recipe-"

I had to stop talking when my cousin –HOLY CRAP I HAVE FAMILY!- slapped his hand over my mouth. Instead of looking angry that I was basically talking without breathing, a skill I'd picked up from how Iruka-sensei could speak in class for hours without a break, I found my cousin was looking back and forth across the rather remote clearing in the forest of Training Ground Fifteen with a subtle look of panic. After several seconds though, he seemed to calm down.

"Naruto, there is one thing as an Uzumaki that you should never, ever, under absolutely any circumstances mention in any way, shape, or form," my cousin said. He looked quite serious. Whatever it was, must have been one of those things that no one, but Uzumaki Clan members could know. Maybe not even the Hokage, or married people from outside the clan could know. But… damn it, this suspense is killing me.

"W-what is it, Sensei?" I asked, my voice barely a whisper in an unconscious reflection of my reverence of whatever ancient Uzumaki Clan wisdom was about to be shared.

"Never, under any circumstances, ever mention that the Clan has a," my cousin paused and looked back and forth, re-assuring himself that we were alone, then he continued, "secret Ramen recipe. Understand? Not ever. As far as the rest of the world is concerned, it doesn't exist."

I felt my jaw drop open. I swear I could feel the grass tickling my chin. All of that build up over a Ramen recipe? It took several seconds for the significance of what my cousin said to sink in. My family has a secret Ramen recipe! A secret Ramen recipe so secret that no one knows about it!

"Best! Clan! Ever!" I shouted, punching my fist into the air.

And when I looked at my cousin, I knew right away that we were definitely related. He was grinning at me with practically the same grin I had when I looked into a mirror. Not only do I have a clan with a secret Ramen recipe, but I have a cousin who I can share things with. But now, all this talk about ramen had my stomach rumbling. The clearing was rather silent until the loud gurgling broke it. I blushed and rubbed the back of my head in an effort to brush off my embarrassment.

The next thing I knew, I was seated on a log that had not been there before, and had a bowl of piping hot ramen in one hand with a pair of chopsticks in the other. My cousin sat next to me, already eating his own bowl. I blinked a couple times before my hunger overtook me and I started eating.

The ramen was, for lack of a better description, divine. It was even better than Ichiraku Ramen with the special fishcakes I got on my birthday. It was, hands down, the best ramen I have ever eaten. Each noodle was a symphony of flavor across my tongue. Every drop of broth was an explosion of sensation in my brain. The heat of the bowl spread into and through my body, somehow enhancing the flavor ten-fold. This bowl of ramen was fit for the gods to eat, only somehow it had fallen into my hands.

Before I knew what happened, the bowl was up to my face and I was slurping down the excess broth. When it was all gone, I slowly lowered the bowl and stared at it. For some reason, that one bowl had filled me completely. It was the single most filling meal I'd ever eaten, even though the bowl itself was slightly smaller than the large ones at Ichiraku. I could put away over ten of those things in one sitting.

The sound of soft drips drew my attention back to the bowl where I saw drops of water falling to land on the porcelain surface. I blinked, finally feeling the itch in my eyes. I was crying, I realized.

"What?" I croaked as I reached up and wiped the stream of tears from my face. "Tears?"

"Don't worry too much," my cousin said, drawing my attention. He too was looking down into his empty bowl, looking rather sad, but he didn't have any tears. "This is ramen made by my mother, and she was an especially good ramen cook. Before she left on her mission, she went on a ramen cooking spree. I've got quite a few bowls saved up." A sad looking smile flew across my cousin's face. "These are some of her bowls even. I'm… sad that she's gone now, but I am grateful to the powers that be that she died before the invasion. She caught a lung disease on that mission. It was to the Land of Water and there was no cure at the time. I have since learned that the cure was found during the Third War. Even if it's too late to save her, I'm glad that no one else has to die in similar manner."

I looked back down at my bowl.-No, my aunt's bowl. It's so weird thinking like that. It will probably take a while before I get used to having a family. –The idea struck me that perhaps the reason that I reacted to this ramen as I did was because it was made with all of the love of a mother for her son. I could feel tears spring anew to my eyes as I wondered if my own mother would have been able to make Ramen just as delicious as this, especially if it was for me.

Shaking my head to try and physically get rid of the heavy emotions flooding my head, I clapped my hands together and gave a small prayer of thanks, to the Ramen gods and to my aunt. With that complete, I remembered that I had a few questions that my cousin said he would answer once we got here. Turning to him, I asked, "So, so, you never told me how you found me!"

My cousin grinned. I was immediately on edge when I saw that grin, because I recognized it from my own face when I was about to prank someone. I swallowed and accepted that I would probably be getting a pie to the face or something when my cousin pointed behind me. I turned and felt the ground fall out from beneath me.

"Haku!"

A/N: So as you can tell, another self insert attempt. This one based on my fascination with all things Uzumaki. Let's face it, Kishimoto screwed that clan over six ways to Sunday. I'm pretty sure, with how much Uchiha-wank was going on in the Manga, that Kishimoto was an Uchihatard. I mean, all that emphasis on their 'special' eyes and how special the Uchiha are and how much more powerful than everyone else they are and how much smarter and so on and so forth… well, the Uzumaki Clan required 3 of the 5 Great Hidden Villages to band together along with several minor villages to invade a single, minor island village which couldn't have had more than five thousand forces at any one time to defend it from invasion. An invasion attempt of that size would likely have in it over fifty thousand forces total from all the participating villages. It took ten times the number of people to kill the entirety of Uzushiogakure and it took one thirteen year old boy to kill off the Uchiha Clan. Comparatively speaking, the Uzumaki clan and whoever else lived in and defended Uzu at the time, were 10 times more badass than the average ninja and 100 times more hardcore than the Uchiha.

The reason for this can be traced back to Fuinjutsu, large chakra reserves, and super-charged life force. It doesn't matter how 'special' your eyes are if you can't avoid stepping into a Fuinjutsu array that sucks all of the chakra from your body. So you can create a giant made out of chakra and ride around in it like a swanky, diamond encrusted limousine? A well placed seal can transport your 'giant' into another dimension! So you can summon Meteors from the sky? Fuinjutsu can reverse gravity. You wanna get into a Ninjutsu battle? Fine, Uzumaki can go all day with B and A Rank Ninjutsu, how long can you shoot those things out? Oh, you say you want to try a Taijutsu battle? Well, your 'special' eyes may give you an advantage, but your stamina sucks and you can't survive having your organs crushed or your spine broken.

Needless to say, I am not an Uchiha wanker. Quite the opposite, in my honest opinion. However, it is not my opinions I'm interested in now, but yours! Let me know what they are in a review!

~I.K.A. Valian