A/N: Hello hello! Thanks to my followers, favoriters, reviewrers, and lurkers! You keep this engine running. Here is the latest update. Keep in mind that everything here is Sunari's POV, so if it sounds like it contradicts something else already given in the story, that is why.

There's about a 2-year time gap between the last-last chapter and this one, so Sunari is 3, Takuma is 7, etc.

Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto.

Peace. Calm. Quiet.

In… out… in… out… imagine yourself breathing in positivity from the world… and breathing out the negativity.

In… out… in—

"Gah!" Sunari ducked as she fell out of her meditative stance on the alcove and landed headfirst onto the warm clay floor. A thin metallic needle jutted out from the wall underneath the circular window.

Rubbing her head tenderly, she pulled her body up and glared around the room for the culprit, knowing he was close by. Now where was he…?

Found him.

She stood to pull the senbon out from where it landed at the back of the alcove—her living space god damn it—and threw it at the second bed in the right-side row. A hand shot up from behind the scratchy blue comforter to catch the needle between two fingers.

A mop of maroon followed it, and a blank ass face that Sunari got extremely tired of seeing. She scowled, berating the boy, "Takuma! How many times do I have to tell you to stop interrupting my meditation sessions!?"

The seven-year-old stood silently, shrugging, "More times than I cared to count."

Sunari threw her hands up in frustration, praying to no god in particular to give her the patience to deal with a little boy with access to too many senbon needles and too much free time.

"You know Michi-sama has been working hard to help me control my emotions. That's why I have to do all this meditation stuff," she lectured, "I don't… don't want a repeat of what happened before…"

Takuma walked toward her, senbon in hand. He squatted slightly so that he was eye-level with her, and stared at her so that his amber eyes looked into her onyx.

Then he poked her in the nose with the needle.

She swatted his hand away, needle flying toward the wall. "What the fuck? Stop doing that to me!"

"Stop being so dramatic. You need to always be aware of your surroundings too," he stated blankly before smirking, "since you've failed to stop any of my strikes for the past three years."

Sunari opened her mouth to spew something witty in return, but Takuma had turned around and started walking away.

"Hey! Get back here, I'm not done with you!" she started chasing after him.

Though he kept walking toward the entrance to the stairway, he moved his hand behind him so that it was facing Sunari, and made quick movements with his fingers.

Sunari's eyes widened, realizing what was going to happen, and shouted, "Ah fuc—"

—And tripped flat on her face.

By the time she got up to scowl at the boy and declare vengeance on him one last time, he was already gone.

"God damn it, that chakra thread wieldin' asshole," Sunari muttered as she dusted off the sand from the floor and made her way back to her alcove, now covered with padding, sheets, and an assortment of pillows since outgrowing her wooden crate "bed."

Sitting back down, she closed her eyes and attempted to re-center herself. It wouldn't do to meditate on an agitated mind, after all.

Breathing evenly again, she resumed her meditations.

Imagine the breath bringing oxygen into your body, invigorating it and giving it life… now imagine that energy flowing gracefully through your veins…

Reflecting on the words of the meditation, Sunari wasn't sure "gracefully" was the right term to describe how her "veins" had been feeling. "Dante's ninth circle of hell encased in a small three-year-old body" was more like it. Honestly, if she had known chakra was going to be this much of a bitch, she would have elected to be reborn as a civilian.

Not that she had much choice in the matter anyway.

It was endurable for the first few months. There were always the aching and uncomfortable sensations, but she learned she could forget about them if she had other things to do (like picking up an entire language). In fact, it was actually pretty convenient to have a chakra sense, because with it she could literally know where every single person was in the house without having to move. Made it easier to snack on sweets when Michi wasn't looking…

But after that day, things went downhill. Real bad.

Sunari knew that Gaara's birth caused a lot of difficulties in Sunagakure. So many, in fact, that his dad felt the need to assassinate him six different times.

But… what the hell happened on that day to make her pass out?

Michi said she talked to her ninja friend, who supposedly diagnosed it as "hypersensitivity," a concept that Sunari recognized from her old world after a bit of description.

Essentially, a chakra hypersensitive was a person who was so sensitive to chakra that the mere presence of it caused their body to be overwhelmed by the vast sensory input. The individual would have exceptional sensory abilities, yes, but at a cost. And that was just on the outside.

Inside the body, the cells were just as sensitive, if not more. It often got to the point where chakra was registered not as a natural part of one's body, but as a foreign substance. In most documented cases, the body of a chakra hypersensitive rejected the normally life-sustaining matter, rendering the individual ill for the remainder of their lives.

Which, in the Naruto world, was the equivalent of a chronic autoimmune disorder. With some consolatory super sensory skills added in the mix. But, as Michi's friend dictated, it was an incredibly rare disorder that usually only impacted civilians, because their bloodlines had yet to adapt to chakra.

That's pretty convenient, isn't it? Sunari had ruminated cynically. Dropping a former civilian into a world of ninja, where said civilian who had potential to be a ninja was plagued by a chakra disorder because of her former existence as a civilian?

She knew hypersensitivity to chakra was a relatively common thing among reincarnations, but she never really thought about why. And god flippin' shit she never imagined it would feel anything like it did with her body.

But in terms of that day in question, Michi hypothesized that her hypersensitivity had a major reaction to the circumstances surrounding Gaara's birth. She had described his chakra as being demonic, since it was linked to that of Shukaku, the "living spirit of an angry Suna priest." (That was just plain false, Sunari snubbed internally but rolled with anyway.)

And it was dangerous, so very dangerous that even shinobi might piss their pants when encountering it.

So when Gaara was born, it was likely that Shukaku, the "priest" (bijuu) sealed in the boy during his mother's pregnancy—and wasn't that a sad fact of life, knowing your baby was going to be born with someone else's monster chakra—released his anger into the world. That anger manifested as something called "Killing Intent," which is literally just a physical embodiment of someone's intent to kill.

Killing Intent wasn't something to be seen but to be felt, as Michi depicted, in every fiber of your being, deep beyond the physical and into the psyche. It made children throw up their lunches, and adults run for their lives.

Fantastic.

So pair that feeling with a chakra hypersensitive… and you get Sunari. A sucker who passed out on the living room couch after overdosing on chakra.

Sunari thought Michi's breakdown of the technicalities was unusually detailed for someone just retelling a description. She made a remark about that to Michi, who put on a (very delicate) smile and disclosed that she must have just had a pretty good memory. Sunari mirrored the smile, and asked no further questions.

Well, that all made enough sense. Sunari could get by with that explanation and try to understand the physics of chakra more thoroughly.

But that hypersensitivity business… didn't really explain the additional pain she felt after Gaara's birth.

Like everyone else in the vicinity of Suna that day, she was hit by the chakra surge filled with "Killing Intent." And of course, being a hypersensitive, she'd pass out from the engulfing sensory input. But it had left behind something… something that she carried with her to this day.

She couldn't put it in any way other than that her body just felt like it… gained something that day. And it pushed against her skin and her veins and her organs and everything.

Afterward when she woke up, her whole body felt like it was on pins and needles - everywhere, all the time. Like in her old world, where she'd sit on her ass too long and start feeling prickly after a while, but if she stood up and walked around it'd go away. Except… here, it wasn't just her ass, and it didn't go away unless she put her mind to focusing on something else entirely.

She started to think her body actually received some kind of long-term hyper-hypersensitivity from the chakra surge, like a traumatic wound or some shit like that, because the pain didn't recede. Logically, she'd expect that "major" instances like that would hit hard, but their effects would disappear after enough time had passed.

They didn't.

If she were to put it on some kind of gradient, her daily pain from before Gaara's birth was like a 4 or 5—mild irritation, but nothing she couldn't handle with a few activities to take her mind off it. After Gaara's birth, her pain jumped up to 7 or 8 on the same scale—on a daily basis.

She really hoped her body would grow used to chakra soon.

Michi's meditation lessons helped. A lot, actually. She originally prescribed them to help Sunari "control her emotions," but in actuality they served a dual purpose—they helped her control her pain too. Being able to breathe consciously and be mindful of her surroundings was… surprisingly an excellent way to mitigate the pain. Meditation improved focus and concentration, because it was, in its essence, focus and concentration.

The orphanage mother said she had more things to teach in the future, but for now the meditation would do. And so, Sunari, being the good little orphan she was who didn't want to make trouble for an already stressed mum, but also being the little brat who wanted to stop feeling shitty every day, started meditating daily. Multiple times a day, in fact.

It had taken a couple of years for Sunari, and they weren't easy by any standard. She had gone days at a time without moving from her little crate, simply because it hurt slightly less to stay in the position she woke up in than to turn around and greet someone like Michi or Takuma.

On days like those, the only time she ever moved was when Michi took her outside at night. Picking out the stars at night, trying to play connect-the-dot with her eyes as the pen and her imagination as the canvas, that was one of the few things that she could do to bring the pain down to a bearable level.

That, and reading. A shit ton. On the days when she could actually pick herself up from bed, she meditated, but the rest of her energy was devoted to reading scrolls, memorandums, novels, pamphlets, newspapers, children's books, anything and everything Michi could get her. Her mind was fairly active on those days, and she absorbed as much information as she could.

By this point, she could tell you about a whole range of topics that were considered reading material in Suna, from which battlefields Chiyo infected with her deadly poisons in the Second and Third Shinobi World Wars, to what happened to the little shinobi boy who cried coyote. (The answer: he died, because he lied about there actually being a desert coyote eating the local possums until a real coyote showed up, beat his ninja-less ass, and ate him.)

And so, after about two years of practicing meditation, taking up hella reading, and doing some other simple concentration exercises assigned by Michi, Sunari managed to adjust her pain scale. Not eradicate, no, because the pain would never disappear. But she was able to shift her 7 and 8 days to 4's and 5's. On "5" days, the pain, though still registering as pins and needles in her body, was perceived in her mind as niggling tingles. Basically, she acclimated.

Thank kami when that happened.

But… the young toddler still didn't fully get what her orphanage mother meant when she first suggested teaching her "emotional control." In fact, she thought she had a fairly good grasp on her emotional state, being that she was planning to be a therapist prior to falling here and all.

Buuuuut then Michi reminded her of the time that stupid-looking man strutted his way into the orphanage and subsequently ran the fuck out within seconds of meeting her. And…

Yeah, fair point.

Sunari couldn't complain though - meditation really was a multipurpose tool. She didn't get huge surges of emotion anymore because of it (as Michi intended), and even when she did feel one coming on, she pulled from her practices and got herself back on track. Using the same focus that she used to regulate her pain, she used meditation to bring her attention to her breathing or her thoughts instead of her emotions. It worked brilliantly.

But of course, nothing in life came quite so easily.

Her emotions and pain and all were fine in the daytime, on the most part. She managed.

But nighttime was a completely different story. Whatever progress she made with acclimating to pain or emotional instability was completely negated once the sun went down. Her pain levels would spike so monstrously that she lost count of how many times she bit her tongue to stop herself from howling with misery. Or she'd get irritated at the smallest thing, like a grain of sand in her bed, and would nearly rage at the nearest child in unreasonable fury.

She'd find herself lying awake deep into the night, pins and needles spiking her body all throughout it. Oh, she had been up countless nights in her past life, doing frivolous things like procrastinating on assignments or reading manga, but somehow doing it here in such an unpleasant fashion… didn't bring as much nostalgia as she might have liked.

Michi, bless her soul, found that glorious solution by simply changing the girl's locations from indoors to outdoors.

Well, it wasn't a perfect one, and not always feasible in the windy desert climate. But lying peacefully in Michi's arms while admiring the pinpricks of light spotting the darkness of the universe was… centering. Somehow, it was enough to help Sunari tolerate her pain, at least enough to fall asleep.

When that still wasn't enough, well, there was always a stack of books and a candle waiting for her in the living room. Which she unfortunately had to employ, very often.

And so, to Sunari, Michi almost felt like… a real mom. Despite all the woman's secrecy, behavioral conditioning, and thinly veiled smiles, Sunari felt like she could overlook those flaws, simply because Michi taught her valuable things and pulled all-nighters with her and loved her. Even though Sunari had lost her mom upon arriving in Suna and was abandoned by her second one, Michi was there for her as though she had given birth to her herself.

Sunari wouldn't realize it until much later, but that unconditional, undying love was something she would suffer through torture for to protect.

Takuma, on the other hand, that grade-A piece of trash… eh, maybe. He was like the annoying older brother who pranked her for no good reason. Thinking himself all high and mighty, he would so graciously teach her "ninja" lessons to pair with Michi's emotional control ones. She was starting to think he was full of some bullshit, because he totally lied about teaching her how to be a ninja.

Sunari asked Michi about it a little while after recovering from her blackout that day, and the woman just laughed. Sunari thought it was a little mocking. But then Michi saw her expression, and grinned.

"I wouldn't be too sure about that… most of the shinobi children I see in the village don't start learning until they're 4 or 5."

It was then that Sunari decided Takuma was a lying bag of garbage who needed to be taken outside.

But Michi reassured her, saying that he probably had the best intentions in mind, he just didn't realize that he couldn't teach her stuff yet, he was excited, blah blah blah…

Quite frankly, she couldn't see the boy as being excited about anything. His stoic face did not belong anywhere on a child, and she wanted to smack it off him.

Too bad she could never get close enough to do it.

Regardless, to say the least she had a bunch of problems. A hyper-hypersensitive chakra system with more downsides than upsides, an emotionally unstable mind that somehow made weak men shiver all the way home, and a still-developing body that couldn't yet build chakra.

Truly, what an entrance to the Naruto world.

Sunari opened her eyes, feeling like the meditation was hopeless at this point. She'd gotten distracted, and this session just felt like a rambling jumble of her misplaced thoughts. She always struggled to re-align herself every time that happened.

Sighing, she got up from her cushion and plopped her feet onto the floor.

Her stomach growled, and she frowned. Meditation made her hungry sometimes.

Or maybe it was just that at her age, she was always hungry.

She decided to go downstairs to the kitchen to forage for a snack. She started walking to the door to the stairway, but a group of orphans were crowded around the entrance, blocking her path. They turned their heads sharply to face her as they noticed her coming closer, and rapidly backed away to make room for her.

She frowned, passing through two rows of frightened children that resembled Moses's parted seas but acted like they were parting for the devil rather than a godlike prophet. She muttered a quiet thank you before moving forward to the stairs.

They are still… Sunari thought with bitter melancholy.

She gritted her teeth. When she had tried to gather insight from Michi about why all the other orphans (barring Takuma) acted as they did, Michi gave her an answer that wasn't really an answer.

"Sunari-chan my love… it's not so easy a question to answer. You are just a special little minashigo, and you have something others don't have. That something is just… a scary something, when others aren't used to it."

"So you and Takuma-kun are used to it?"

"…You could say that."

Sunari nodded. "But what is that 'something' though, Michi-sama?"

Michi returned with a perfectly porcelain smile, "A gift, one that you will appreciate when the time comes."

She gave no further explanation after that. As usual, Michi was vague when it came to the questions that mattered the most. Sunari supposed that was just how adults in this world taught things to children.

Annoying. But the woman is my stand-in okaa-san, so I'll just have to make do around it, Sunari decided.

At the bottom of the stairs, Sunari made her way to the left side of the large living room (again through a parted sea of orphans), and walked through an opened door into a modest-sized kitchen.

The orphanage kitchen wasn't glamorous by any means, but it certainly wasn't small either. It was just big enough for thirty to forty (depending on the adoption season) orphans to shuffle through in a semi-organized fashion during meal times, during which they would cycle in and out of each "station" buffet-style.

The walls, like every other room in the orphanage, had faded paint streaking across their surfaces. However, it had faded so much that the original sandy color of the adobe walls was visible across large patches.

To the left of the entrance was a long adobe counter that was used to hold the plates of food during mealtimes. Next to it was an impressively large off-white fridge (how much did that cost?), and another counter running to the right of it ending at the back wall, with a stove and oven intersecting in the middle. All along the left wall, cabinets and drawers lined the upper and lower sections of the counters.

Along the right side of the room was nearly the same set-up, except there was no fridge, and instead were three rice cookers and a couple of hot water boilers lining the back counter.

Looking up through her growing brown bangs, Sunari reached to open the refrigerator door. And there was…

Nothing.

Sunari sweat-dropped. Whenever Michi was out of the orphanage, the other caretakers would often forget to restock on food until it was right before a meal time. That meant… the other kids probably snagged whatever was left over from lunch, making her the "late bird" that missed the worm.

She closed the door, and sighed. It didn't go unnoticed by Sunari that Michi's absences were happening more and more frequently. The woman said they were due to her brother's illness, and given that he was becoming unable to care for himself, she being his sole family member had to care for him.

Just how much stress did that woman have to take on for everyone she cared about in her life?

After checking every cabinet, drawer, and even the oven for any scraps, Sunari walked out of the kitchen even hungrier than she had been in the morning. She made her way to the green scratchy couch, and laid facedown lengthwise, mock-shouting flatly into the old cushions.

If Sunari didn't understand exactly what kind of delicate financial situation Michi and the orphanage was in, she would have called this "child abuse." However, given that they barely had enough to remain standing, she was a little more forgiving. Like everyone else, she just had to suck it up and go hungry until mum came home.

Her stomach growled again.

She sat up into a normal sitting position, rubbing her sad empty belly. The pins and needles threatened to loom again too, which she discovered would conveniently emerge whenever any component of her health took a dip, even simple things like hunger and thirst.

A beam of sunlight hit her face, temporarily blinding her.

"Gah! Damn everything…"

When it passed, Sunari found herself looking outside the glass windows that revealed the bustling street in front of their building.

It's right around the busiest marketplace hours, isn't it…

Sunari took a quick glance around the living room. Any of the orphans who were in the room with her had already fled the instant she entered, and the caretakers were upstairs, according to her chakra sense. Takuma was taking a nap, judging by the rise and fall of his sturdy chakra a few rooms away.

She looked back to the door.

Putting her hand to her chin to enter a thinking pose, she considered what would happen if she took a short little trip outside to look for a snack. No one was around to tell her no… and Michi wasn't home. It wasn't even clear when she'd be back.

But… Michi did tell her to never go outside without the orphanage mother monitoring her. That was fair, given that she was only three and the threats out there in a ninja village could literally kill her.

Sunari's stomach rumbled yet again, more deeply and angrily than before.

Doesn't matter. We're going out today.

Determined in her decision, she got to her feet and strolled over to the door. She paused, a slight sense of nerves stopping her in her tracks.

She'd only ever gone outside with Michi by her side, and even then at night in the safety of the orphanage backyard. Who knew what was out there beyond the refuge of home?

Ah, I'll have to do it eventually. Might as well be now when I can follow my own itinerary.

She reached up to grab the doorknob, and turned it to pull open the clay-based door to the street. Daylight burst through the open entrance, and warmed her from head to toe.

Sunari beamed with a smile as bright as the sun. It's time to explore Sunagakure.

A/N: So I had a really hard time making this chapter flow logically, and I'm not sure if my points came across the way I wanted them to. There are obviously some things that I'm leaving for later chapters to uncover, but if nothing really makes sense in this chapter, drop a line and I'll add a summary into this A/N.

Sorry y'all if it seems this story is moving really slowly... there's just a lot I want to cover before the next stop on the Plot station. Not much about Suna is shown in canon, so what that stop is should be fairly obvious. Heh.

Thanks for reading! As always, leave a message if something bugs you. Or if you just want to leave a happy review! See you in the next chapter, for Sunari's adventure on the streets of Suna!