Disclaimer: I don't own the Naruto series.
For the second time in this short life span, Sunari woke up with a start. She was still agitated, but considerably more at ease than she was the last time she was conscious.
Her vision was blurry, but she could at least see vague shapes and colors now. That was a grand improvement from the day before. Even sounds and smell were beginning to flood her senses.
The sloshing of something wet and clumpy being poured into a bowl, and the inviting smell of congee mixed with green onions and eggs registered in her mind.
Congee.
Sure, Sunari was distraught about being reincarnated and shit, and she could definitely feel an existential crisis or two on the way, but she could give that up for a few minutes to enjoy a familiar dish that reminded her of home.
Home…
She shoved that depressing thought in the deepest crevice of her mind, and instead focused all her energy on the food she knew was heading her way. She loved food very much.
She sensed the comforting woman-presence coming closer with the congee, and started to salivate in anticipation.
And wow if it isn't that weird sensation coming in hot again. She didn't notice it at first, but now after becoming fully awake, she could feel it literally coursing through her veins. She couldn't figure out if she was hopped up on adrenaline or if that strange woman pushed some kind of drug into her system, but she would investigate as soon as she—
The smell wafted closer, and Sunari's mind grew blank at the recognition of it. Not right now, she thought, now was dinner time.
Or breakfast, or lunch. She didn't know, or care.
Sunari babbled and tried to figure out where she was in relation to the food. The sky blue padding beneath her was soft, and she could just barely make out what looked like wooden bars in a rectangular formation around her.
A crib. I'm in a crib, she thought sourly, of course I'm in a damn crib. I'm a baby.
She tried sitting up, but failed embarrassingly. She had to think hard about what muscles were required for motion, having taken those automatic movements for granted in her past life. It was a push up with her arms behind her, a flexing of the abdominal muscles to pull her upward, and a grounding in the legs laying flat to keep her from pushing too far forward and flopping on her face. A three-step process, not too complicated. She could do this.
One, two, three!
After seven failed attempts, Sunari finally found herself sitting upright and was practically glowing with pride.
Great job, you sat up, the pessimist in her snarked.
At least you finally did something! the optimist shot back in defense, your body isn't a useless sack of dough after all.
Sunari came out of her thoughts when she smelled the congee above her and the presence hovering to her left.
"Hello, Sunari-chan," the woman hummed slowly in Japanese. Sunari blinked, and understood only because of the bare simplicity of the greeting.
Sunari? Is that my name here?
She saw pale blonde topping the head of the person before her, flowing down in light waves to the middle of her back. A black kitchen apron covered the front of a simple cream frock dress that looked like it covered her arms and nearly touched the ground.
"My name is Michi," the voice continued in the language Sunari presumed to be Japanese.
Michi! The woman had a name!
It's too bad that the only Japanese Sunari took from her past life was literally only greetings and random bits from anime, because Michi started saying a bunch of other things in Japanese that she really had no ability nor interest to decipher. Sunari was starting to grow impatient, so she picked up her sausage arms and waved them in the air, hoping to convey her desire.
Michi laughed, and Sunari saw in the next moment a spoon perched in front of her face. She opened her mouth hungrily and leaned forward to gobble the congee, not even waiting for Michi to feed her.
If she had the dexterity to feed herself, she would have gestured for Michi to drop that bowl of congee in the crib right then and there. But of course, she probably had no such ability and couldn't be expected to do much but be fed.
Speaking of which...she was also wondering exactly who Michi was. Michi had blonde hair and didn't look that old... Was she supposed to be someone Sunari called "mother," or was this just some random stranger? Sunari did wake up on some sandy cold ground, after all, and had no recollection of the birthing process.
But maybe that was for the best.
After the bowl of congee was finished (and Sunari's belly subsequently full), she sought to answer her questions.
She attempted conversation, which was really a poor choice considering that the languages she knew might not even exist in this world, and that more importantly she was a fucking baby.
After rotating through countless sounds and warbles, she managed out two important syllables that she knew would be recognized anywhere: "ma ma?"
Sunari could feel Michi—or rather, whatever it was in Michi's body that made her seem like an illuminating ray of comfort—jump in surprise. Then she watched through her blurred vision as Michi's internal framework filled with some mixture of happiness and sadness at the same time. Michi picked her by her sides and carried her out of the crib, walking around what Sunari presumed to be Michi's house.
Michi started saying some more incomprehensible things, but by the tone of her voice Sunari could tell that Michi was denying that proclamation.
Guess not, Sunari sighed in her head.
Michi indeed took her around the house, and Sunari came to find that Michi's house was huge. Or was she just small? Either way, there were a lot of rooms and a lot of little cribs and beds. There were at least two stories—no, just two stories—and a large open room that the staircase opened to on the bottom floor. The walls varied in color, but the shades weren't as vibrant as she would have expected.
(Because in this odd world that Sunari was beginning to suspect was not the one she came from, she was able to detect color as a newborn and not clarity.)
Some of the beds looked like they were worn and torn too, some bunked, some single. None of them appeared to be larger than a twin. What looked like small toys and stuffed animals littered the floors.
Sunari could detect faint traces of movement at Michi's waist level in every room they entered, and Sunari assumed they must be children.
Well, someone got busy.
As Michi covered more and more parts of the house, Sunari quashed that thought. As a matter of fact, there was no way they were Michi's blood children, because there were too many damn kids in this house for her to have birthed all of them. Maybe she adopted them all or something, but even that was a wild notion because literally, the number of kids in the place could have filled a small school. Plus, Michi had confessed to not being her birth mother anyway, so why would they have been for the rest of them?
They were all so loud and whiny. Sunari heard each of them before she felt their presence. They weren't like Michi's warm light; some of them were burning like the fire in her own navel, others were sharp as a knife, and some she realized were tainted by the darkness of abandonment.
That gloomy feeling...this place...
There was one child in particular who Michi had stopped to speak to, and who stood out among the rest. This little human presence, who couldn't have been older than four, was steadfast like a pillar, and Sunari could practically see the firmness of its will in its stance. She had to squint her eyes to ascertain its physical appearance (a small difficulty in itself, since muscle control was still not something she had mastered in her two days of consciousness), but she made out maroon spikes of short hair parted to the left, crowning a khaki beige face with amber eyes and a scowl on its lips.
He was different from the other kids, somehow. It was the fiery winds gusting in her veins; he had that too. Everyone did. Even Michi had a bunch, though Sunari could tell she was trying to hide it. Maybe she thought Sunari would be afraid of it?
But this boy... well, to put it simply, his was like an unmoving mountain range that moved for no one. If she focused hard enough, it felt almost like... like gravity was pushing an unwanted strain on his body, and he had to carry it without complaint every day.
Sunari understood to be his name to be Takuma, as his face alight with recognition upon utterance of that word. She heard her own name passed in conversation, and the boy Takuma in front of her grunted in acceptance. She supposed Michi invoked something like an introduction was made between Sunari and Takuma.
Then Michi gently passed Sunari to Takuma to hold, and what the hell? She was going to trust this four-year-old kid to carry Sunari safely?
Sunari felt waves of nervousness leaking from the boy, and she found herself awkwardly held in the air by Takuma's stiff-ass hands under her armpits.
Sunari shook her body in protest, letting both Takuma and Michi know that this wasn't okay. Takuma, in shock and confusion, then reacted by doing the worst possible thing one could do while holding a newborn baby.
He let go.
Fuck, already? Sunari lamented, well, too bad I couldn't have—
In an incredible feat of speed and agility that a normal person shouldn't have possessed, Michi snatched Sunari from midair and placed her back on her front where she belonged. Sunari's eyes widened, and from the corner of her periphery she saw Takuma mutter a guilty, wide-eyed apology before turning around to run swiftly away.
Well, at least he was somewhat sorry. Sunari could have died.
Again.
Michi patted Sunari on her back and cradled her back and forth, as though she might have been distressed by the fall. It makes sense. A normal baby would have been terrified.
She wasn't sure how to feel about that near-death experience actually, because she distinctly recalled a misplaced feeling of indifference toward the loss of her life in the milliseconds she was free falling to the ground. But really, all she was feeling now was a tiny bit of adrenaline (shooting parallel to those flames flowing through her body, of all places), and maybe that she might need to burp soon. Shit, should she be crying?!
What a great way to start life.
But right around then, a feeling of sleepiness and exhaustion filled her small, slightly shaken frame. Michi's ministrations weren't helping that; in fact, they were lulling her straight into that relaxed and dreamlike state.
Sunari's consciousness slowly crept away, and her eyelids fluttered closed. Once more, she was encased by darkness.
The next few months had been oddly...pedestrian. In fact, the most exciting thing that had happened in Sunari's entire life thus far was that little episode she had with Takuma. Sunari's introduction to Michi's home and family had felt like an eternity, but Sunari knew that was only because her new sense of time was relative to the number of days, yes days, she had lived in this world. She put off trying to figure out where she was for the time being, because her profound interest in consciously experiencing what it felt like to be a baby had overtaken any guilt she had from essentially losing her loved ones and any sadness from entering an unknown world without any bearing on reality.
It also made passing those long ass days much, much easier.
As those days passed, Sunari came to an unspoken understanding of what kind of role Michi played in this society. Michi was someone who cared for children without parents of their own, that much Sunari knew for sure. She also learned that Michi fed the children in something like a factory line fashion, indicating that there was something systematic about the way she cared for them.
She even noticed (through that ever-present sensation constricting the inner workings of her body) that every now and then, one or two of the kids would leave after a stranger entered their home, and never return. She knew this because of how when these things happened, afterward she couldn't feel Kato-san and his babbling brook, or Sayuri-chan's floral petals drifting in the wind anymore.
Sunari figured out, without speaking the language or seeing the children, that she was in an orphanage and that Michi was their caretaker.
What a way to begin, she had joked heartlessly to herself.
More importantly though, she was floored with how quickly she picked up the Japanese language. With her already developed understanding of language functions and the flexibility of learning that being a baby offered her, she found herself rattling off partial sentences by month three.
(Not that she was all that accurate about time. It wasn't like she was etching marks in one of the walls outside her crib with Michi's pen when they weren't looking or anything like that.)
She wished they spoke more languages here, because damn she was soaking up the vocabulary and the grammar like a sponge. Rosetta Stone, her ass. Her broken Cantonese could have improved so much with this rebirth!
Sunari talked with her peers. Well, with the older kids, not really with the other babies. Every time one of them passed by her crib, she pst'ed at them to catch their attention, then asked them to let her out of the crib. Their eyes widened at the confusion of hearing a baby speak, as marginally comprehensible as that speech ended up being, and then darted out as though fearing retribution for having heard it in the first place. They left her, and made extremely concerted efforts to avoid the crib as much as possible.
"Oi, oi! Yeah you. Help please? Stuck crib, want to walk, but Michi-san not let me. Can you help, take me out of...wait no, come back!"
The orphan boy ran like the floor caught on flames.
Sunari sat on her ass and pouted.
She saw some of Takuma sometimes, too. She figured that he was something like a role model to the other orphans, because they started coming back only after he came around to say hello.
Well, all he really did was check in to make sure she didn't choke on her own spit when Michi couldn't. But it was the thought that counts.
Speaking of which, Sunari also "conversed" with Michi whenever she got a chance, and honestly the orphanage mother was a godsend. No matter what Sunari said to her, Michi never showed surprise or concern on their face. If anything, it was pride that flooded her being.
Sunari could tell, because every time she held a decent conversation with Michi, that light inside her quasi-mother burned brighter.
A decent conversation for Sunari, by the way, consisted of at least five or more lines of speech from her before Michi sheepishly tousled the back of her head and left to "take care of the other kids."
...Okay yeah, maybe Michi was getting weirded out by her too.
But nevertheless, Michi started reading to her, and Sunari began to pick up the written language too. At least, whatever she could pull from the countless children's books that she was given.
By month four, she was pulling off simple, actual conversations with Michi and the older kids who had gotten used to her strangeness. Michi let her copy characters with a pen and some random scraps of newspaper, and had some of the other orphans continue to speak with her too. Even better, they actually liked hanging around her.
(At some point, Sunari realized that at their age, enticing the kids with extra snacks guilted away from Michi was the best way to earn their trust.)
All in all, Sunari was pretty pleased with her progress by the end of that month. She understood most of what the children and Michi were saying, even if she couldn't always reciprocate, and she was content with the way her new life was going. She didn't even feel the fiery gusty feeling in her veins that much anymore. She could get pretty far here, wherever she was. She didn't even think once about what her old life had been like.
At month five, when Sunari gained her full vision, all of those good vibes capsized like a sailboat caught in a tsunami.
A/N: Thanks to everyone who has followed and/or favorited so far! This is my first fanfic, so reviews or PMs about what's good and what isn't would be super appreciated! Hopefully this has been interesting for y'all to read and makes sense so far. First few chapters will be introduction to the main players of Sunari's early life, first (second?) appearance of canon characters coming shortly thereafter.