Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto.
A gentle breeze wafted through the placid air of Sunagakure. It was just past sunset, and darkness began to overtake the outlines of still life in the village. The ninja were beginning to settle in, their chakra signatures tucking in at the end of a long day.
Sunari woke with a jolt. Her breathing was ragged, and her mind was racing a million miles a second.
Just another bad dream, she thought to herself, nothing a little water can't fix. It's over now.
She reached over to her bedside table with her left hand, where she knew her water bottle would be waiting. Except...there was no bedside table. And she couldn't move her left arm. And she couldn't. See.
Her mind sped even faster. What in the fuck was going on?
She tried to move her entire body, finding that she could only wiggle, if even at all. The ground was sandy and cold beneath her, and the air felt clammy. She screamed for help, but all that came out was babbling and gibberish. Confused out of her mind, she kept trying to shout for assistance in English, and attempted switching to Cantonese when she found herself in the same predicament. Nothing escaped her lips but wah's and mah's.
Sunari realized in that moment that she was in a fuck ton of trouble, and there was possibly no way out.
Maybe it's just a bad dream, she thought to herself as she tried to feel her body. She had difficulty controlling her limbs, which she thought was maybe because of sleep paralysis or some other odd thing. Or maybe she was still in a dream-
That dream...one in which she watched the last vestiges of life leave her body from an omniscient perspective. She couldn't remember what had happened or how it happened, but she recalled enough to know that it did happen.
She had blinked away tears in that dream, for she hadn't had a chance to say goodbye to her family and friends, and opened her eyes to find herself in her current predicament.
An uncomfortable thought was crawling in the back of her mind that there was an uncanny relationship between these two events.
And the sensations throughout her body! It was like she consumed a thousand chiles and her navel was on fire. Then it felt like a hurricane was storming through her veins and gusted past her pores into the air around her. It took what felt like hours, countless painful hours, for that sensation to leave her body and for her entire being to finally slump like a stone, heavy and emptied of some unnatural burden that didn't belong in her body.
Her cries were softer now. The initial shock being over, she tried to calmly sift through the information she had available to her and figure out what the hell was going on.
Language, movement, and sensory functions incapacitated. An odd sensation of something foreign in her body. Death in a dream, waking to an inability to interact with the surrounding world.
Fuck no…
Almost immediately, Sunari sensed a presence approaching. She didn't know how she was capable of such nonsense when she lost all sensory capabilities, but she felt it walking toward her, almost warily.
Yet it felt...comforting. If she was a fire that turned into a hurricane, the presence was a warm light that sheltered you from the darkness of the world.
That was good, right?
The presence picked her up and carried her in her arms. It craned Sunari's head over what she assumed to be its shoulder, placing one hand on her bottom to support her weight and one hand on her back to rub calmingly.
It whispered words in a foreign language, one that Sunari recognized with a dawning fear to be some form of Japanese. But though she couldn't understand the meaning of the words, she could grasp their intentions.
Hush little baby, don't say a word. Mama's gonna buy you the whole wide world.
Well, maybe not those exact words, but that presence might as well have said them, the way it was intoning softly and sweetly for Sunari to calm down. Its voice sounded like that of a woman, someone who had a lot of experience with crying children.
Then the presence shifted, and started walking. To where or what purpose, she did not know.
All Sunari knew was that she was reborn a baby again. Whether she was in the same time period she had lived in or not, she didn't know. An unnatural but powerful force flowed through her veins, and she didn't think it had any place in the world she came from. Maybe they spoke Japanese in this new one, but she had doubts that she was in the Japan she knew.
She didn't know who she was in this world, how she came to become a newborn baby cast away in a lonely cold place, or why the universe gave her a second chance. All she knew was that her old life was gone, and she either had to find her way back to it, or settle into this one. She had to begin anew.
Tears slid down her face as she wept softly, mourning her former life that was no more.
Michi knew something was wrong the moment she felt that chakra flare in the alleyway up ahead. Ruffling her long sandy blonde hair and reaching her hand back to tug impulsively at the knot of her Suna headband, she narrowed her lavender eyes.
She was just returning from reporting the results of her latest mission to the Kazekage-successful even at age 33, thank you very much-and was walking home when suddenly it burst into life.
It was suffocating. The Killing Intent was so unfiltered, so unadulterated, so pure, and it was steps away from the Kazekage's doorstep.
Her slender frame shivered, but years of training as a kunoichi saved her from freezing up entirely as she shook aside her fear.
She moved swiftly toward the source of the threat, and leapt into the alleyway, throwing all caution out the door.
What she found was nothing short of surprising.
A tiny baby, one that couldn't have been born more than a week ago. And it was exuding Killing Intent like it was a demon from the depths of Hell.
The alleyway felt like it was in flames. A not-so-unreasonable amount of fear crept along her body like tendrils, and she froze in place.
Then it was like a gust of wind had blown through the alley, clearing out that fire and raging torrentially at everything in its path. Dust flicked up from the ground, and debris flew around uncontrollably in the air. The dumpster to the side of the child clanged in protest, and as Michi looked toward the child with chocolate brown hair, she saw in its black unseeing eyes devastation and destruction.
Suddenly, the hurricane stopped cold in its tracks. Michi felt a heavy, oppressive weight fall over her surroundings, before it slowly trickled out of life.
The child was so small, so fragile. It began to lose steam in its agitations, and its chakra coils were slowly shutting down, one by one. Almost as quickly as it erupted, the child's chakra had simmered, and it looked no different from any other newborn, bundled tightly in blankets and tuckered out from a wild fit.
She approached the child cautiously.
Her fear left her body with every step. She knew what followed a baby's crying fit - the newborn wouldn't be making any ruckus anymore.
She reached out for the child with her hands, and gingerly carried it on her front. She cradled its small head over her shoulder, and began to soothe it in the way that she as a longtime orphanage mother knew how.
"Hush little baby, don't say a word. Michi's gonna buy you the whole wide world," she sung softly.
The baby grew calmer by the second. Michi couldn't help but feel warmth growing in her heart for this little demon child. Even though she knew-saw with her own two eyes even-how dangerous this child could be, she wanted to love it.
She did already love it.
(Plus, having a child she could train to defend her home and orphanage family wouldn't hurt anybody.)
She inspected the baby and its blankets for identifying information, in an attempt to confirm that the baby she held in her arms was indeed an orphan she could claim as one of her own. She found nothing but an odd marking on its left hip, and a hospital wristband that read, "Name: Sunari, Sex: Female, Date Of Birth: July 14, Weight: 2.8 kilos, Parentage: Unknown."
Michi knew nothing of how this child came to be in Sunagakure.
She knew nothing of how Rasa, the man she spoke to not minutes before, ordered the child's kidnapping for the sake of his village and his family.
She knew not how the child tormented its Suna caretakers within four days of becoming the container for the One-Tailed Beast, and how its originally asserted compatibility was pronounced a failure.
She knew not how Chiyo went to great lengths, nearly at the cost of her own life, to re-extract Shukaku from the infant and seal it into Karura's belly, into the Kazekage's third child.
She knew nothing of Rasa's severe dismay at the passage of these events, and of how he nearly killed the girl she held in her arms out of spite and anger.
She knew not of Rasa's subsequent mercy for the child, and of his pained regret as he rested it gently in the alleyway by his tower to let it die in peace, as was the fate of all jinchuuriki separated from their bijuu.
She knew nothing of how this child should have been long past dead, how the soul within it slipped through a gateway between universes and gave life to a form that should have been still, had been still for a split second as the original spirit took its exit and another was granted entrance.
Michi knew very little, but she knew that this child was special, so very, very special. She decided then that her Kazekage didn't need to know about this one; Sunari was hers, all hers.
She smiled, and looked down at the child she found nestled in the sand with affection in her gaze. She turned, and started walking in the direction of her orphanage at the other end of the village by the gate.
"Sunari it is. I will keep you safe, and you will keep us safe."