A|N: It has come to my attention that I am doing a terrible job portraying mental illness via Uchi Naru Kizuna. Allow me to explain: it's not a split, at least not in that sense. It's not a separate being like Rayne or Dreamer. It's nothing more than one of the many possible internal narratives that Kizuna has personified, almost like an imaginary friend, and similar to Sakura's Inner Sakura, a place for her to dump her socially or situationally inappropriate comments and feelings just like Sakura did. Sakura was not confirmed to have had any mental illness except maybe some poor judgement and tunnel vision when it came to Sasuke and being all tsuntsun towards Naruto. The only difference here between Uchi Naru Sakura and Uchi Naru Kizuna is Kizuna spends far too much time introspecting.

With all that said, I present the following disclaimer, which will also be posted to chapters 1 and 4.

Disclaimer: I do not claim to know anything about mental illness aside from what Wikipedia and PsychCentral and a handful of people on Quora say, and I do not claim to be representing it in this story.


"Do you ever miss her?"

"Who?" I asked. I didn't need to ask. Though the timing of the question was a bit jarring, I knew exactly who he was talking about.

"Your mother," he replied, breaking form. I breathed an internal sigh of relief - I didn't like nage no kata, even less being the uke, where I was always being thrown around so I could learn how to land and recover properly from throws. The fact that it was distantly familiar to me from my short time in judo in the Before; I hadn't liked this kata then either. It hurt then and it hurt now.

I grunted something that would've meant "I dunno" in the Before. I didn't know if it translated directly here, but Bunshirou seemed to understand my intended response anyway.

"You were so young when she was taken away…"

"Otou-san, that was less than a year ago," I said, wiping the dirt and debris off my shoulders since practice seemed to be over.

"And yet you've forgotten all about her."

I furrowed my brow. "I haven't even had time to forget her." I didn't tend to think of her much, constantly being in training or life-threatening situations with little besides sleep in-between, but that didn't mean I'd forgotten.

He ignored me. "Do you remember everything she taught you?"

"I mean, you and I just went over basic kanji and yin release a few days ago. I know you didn't teach me any of that. And I have spent four times as much time with her as I have with you in my entire life." I held up four fingers to emphasize my point. And it wasn't a lie, no matter how you looked at it. Four years was definitely longer than one.

He stared at me for a moment and then nodded, looking away. He seemed almost disturbed and yet reluctantly accepting, from what I could see of the way his lip curled and folded against his beard, which had been allowed to grow and fill out in the past months, and the way the light reflected off his spectacles.

Come to think of it, my hair was getting pretty long now too. If I had had a proper hair-tie, I would have been putting it in a low ponytail. I wasn't any good at using what passed for a non-elastic hair-tie in the forest, so I had been letting it hang loose. I could have let it form dreads, I suppose, but the idea didn't cross my mind at the time. Plus I didn't like dreads. I couldn't imagine what it would take to take care of them. On the other hand, it would probably be useful for me to be able to fight with my hair in my face since life couldn't always be beautifully drawn anime characters whose hair is always flawless in a fight (until they started to lose confidence of course).

"What does that mean to you?" he asked.

"Hmm?" What were we talking about? ...Oh yeah, Kaa-san. "Oh, I guess that she did some stuff for me, and you've done some stuff too but she had longer than you've had so far."

"Did you ever love her?"

My eyes widened, and I screwed my face back into dispassionate submission as I addressed the red sirens going off. What kind of question was that supposed to be?! I'd struggled with that in my first life with my Mom. And Naomi-kaa-san had never been "Mom" to me despite being my mother in this life. At any rate, it was impossible not to have some sort of feeling towards someone I had spent four years in close proximity with and who attended to my every need, but I wasn't sure I'd call it love.

At the same time, telling Bunshirou "no" or "I don't know" would set off more red flags than the extended silence probably had already. A child is supposed to love their parents. And it was clear that he had loved Naomi very very much. The idea that I did not love the person with whom he had chosen to procreate me, or that said person had not communicated that to me in such a way that I could do nothing but respond in kind - that would have to be devastating to him.

Sure, I liked Naomi very much. She knew how to be a parent. She was an adequate caretaker, an effective teacher, a ferocious guardian, and her mochi making skills were second to none. Was that enough for me to love her?

I sighed internally and fed the white lie to Uchi Naru.

"Kaa-san ga daisuki desu," I said.

It wasn't a lie. "Daisuki" or 「大好き」played a similar role in Japanese as "aime" did in French, mainly that it could mean "like" or "love." More specifically, it translated into "like very much," but I was counting on Bunshirou to understand it as "love" so that we could end this conversation and never speak of it again. Didn't we have some throwing strategies to practice today? Or better yet, hand-breaking I mean iron palm techniques.

I could tell Bunshirou wasn't wholly satisfied with my answer - the terminology or the delivery I couldn't be sure - but to my relief he didn't pursue it any further.

(I distantly wondered if this was the kind of thing Sakura was referring to when she told Hinata that Naruto didn't know the difference between loving a bowl of ramen and loving another human romantically. Which I thought was total horseshit since Sakura had phrased it as "loving another human" and Naruto clearly knew how to love people, platonically at least. I made a mental note to ask Naruto about it on the off chance I ever got to meet him.)


The quiet, sometimes Disney-esque forest was annoyingly prone to bursting into explosions and deadly elemental shows immediately preceding what was sure to be a bloodbath befitting that of the two warring nations Kumogakure and Konohagakure, only to immediately return to its former serenity after the destruction had ceased. It had happened often enough by this point that I had to wonder how Yu no Kuni was so successful in upholding its tourism industry. Was there some unknown treaty we didn't know about that kept the battles away from civilian vacation areas? And if so, why didn't we live there instead?

(I wonder if it was because everybody was Kung Fu fighting.)

Regardless, our priority was to preserve our own lives and not get involved, especially with Konoha-nin for some reason. I was too young and small to have much of a fighting chance yet.

So that's how I went from being thrown around by Tou-san to being thrown around by a bunch of warring shinobi with the only warning being a brief rustling of our border traps being triggered just microseconds before everything went to chaos.

The moment I was able to put my feet below me I hightailed it due east. Tou-san had always said to run east, toward the ocean, if we got separated during a battle, and he would find me there.

Going west would've probably been a better idea that day. The fighting only got more intense as I pushed my way through, narrowly missing several explosions and stray shuriken and a few more grazing my skin and clothes. I was looking at missing training again to patch my shirt if this kept up.

I turned a corner to avoid some obstacle and found myself being knocked back on my butt. I looked up and it was a mook, a Konoha-nin, and he was looking right at me with unadulterated disgust. On second glance it wasn't quite aimed at me but that didn't really change what it was.

"Kumo sends its toddlers into battle?!"

Uh oh. I had yet to be tested in actual combat. And he thought I was from Kumo.

...And hey! Uchi Naru protested before I could stop her. I'm not a toddler! Besides, wasn't Kakashi five when he made genin? I'm five now. If I'm a toddler then so was he!

Granted, Kakashi was trained by the White Fang, who was said on several occasions throughout the series to have been a shinobi who outclassed even the Sannin. Naomi and Bunshirou were good, but they weren't Sannin material. Probably. I mean, they'd lost to the Yuki-nin.

...Fuck. I needed to get out of there. Just because I was pint sized didn't mean they wouldn't beat the shit out of me if they thought I was from Kumo. Which, why would they assume that? Even if they based it on my unfamiliar appearance, a hitai-ate was standard attire, practically required and location didn't matter so long as it was visible, for all genin from all nations and I wasn't wearing one.

Uchi Naru's interference and my subsequent loss of my train of thought cost me the opportunity to tell the mook I wasn't from Kumo. He started weaving handsigns, and I jumped back hoping to avoid the onslaught of whatever jutsu he was about to pummel me with. Little kid or not, I was a perceived enemy and therefore had to be eliminated.

His hand sparked with a flashy raiton. Well shit. How was I supposed to outrun lightning?

The lightning arced in my direction, and in a moment of why the hell not, I caught it with the first two fingers of my right hand and immediately fried myself with the energy. I was launched backward from the force of impact and was hit with a mix of self-satisfaction and dread that I wasn't dead.

Lightning redirection technique from Avatar the Last Airbender: doesn't work in the Narutoverse. At least, not without some training I didn't have.

The Konoha mook approached me fast, only for me to be launched me several feet into the air by a doton. Great, someone else had noticed me. More specifically, someone had noticed that I wasn't one of them.

"Fucking Konoha pansies," said a new voice. "Are you going to virtue us into defeat by sending your toddlers into battle? Think we won't destroy them too? You're all the same to us."

Shit. This one thought I was from Konoha.

I landed on someone's waiting foot and was promptly punted into the nearest tree.

"Oh shit," said the Konoha-nin. "The kid's not from Kumo."

I managed to stick myself to the tree instead of crumpling to the ground right away. I didn't need more injuries than I was already sustaining.

The Kumo-nin was flying toward me anyway, armed with a kunai.

This was it. Move or die.

I pushed off the tree and flung myself into her arms, under her weapon. I reached for the thankfully exposed, soft flesh of her underarm, pinched it with my needle-y five-year-old fingers, and pulled, taking flesh and nerves with me. I kneed her as hard as I could in the groin. Anything to disable and slow her down even though most of this wasn't my actual training. My back hit the tree again, having lost the weight battle when we collided, and the kunai blade dug into my back. This time I didn't stick and we tumbled down the tree, me eventually landing on top, ears ringing over her screaming and expletives. The Kumo-nin appeared to be out of commission until a medic could get to her. Good enough for me.

I got off of her and turned, only to come face-to-face with the Konoha-nin, staring at me and weaving more handsigns. Apparently I was dangerous enough that he was going to kill me regardless of the fact that I wasn't actually an enemy. And the adage of the enemy of my enemy is my friend didn't seem to apply here even though I had just single-handedly effectively decommissioned his enemy, who was twice my size and had far more training and luckily for me lacking armor in all the right places, right in front of him.

I reached around and pulled the kunai from my back, hissing. I supposed it was mine now. Fortunately it wasn't buried very deeply, and while it hurt like hell, the training I had done with Bunshirou (even though it was all blunt force) must have increased my pain tolerance, or maybe it was the adrenaline that was keeping me from passing out. I was going to need a serious nap after this was all over. And possibly some surgery.

And this Konoha mook was in my way.

I made a noise of frustration. For some reason it didn't occur to me to say, Excuse me, I just defeated your enemy for you, I'm not from Kumo and I'm not against you and I didn't even want to be in this fight or your war, so please stop trying to kill me. Or maybe it did, and it didn't occur to me that he'd listen.

My chakra was draining fast from all the fighting up to this point. Even though I hadn't used it in any particularly chakra-taxing techniques, it was currently keeping me from bleeding out of my back and, in conjunction with the adrenaline, giving me enough strength to stand and fight. I couldn't last much longer. I'd have to fight dirty with him too. Maybe I could slow him down with that new jutsu I'd been working on.

I flexed my non-kunai hand, bending my fingers at the first joint while holding the second joint rigid and straight. It was the best hand analogy I could come up with for the way I knew to mould yin chakra, and this way was faster than doing it without the handsign.

I ran towards him with the charged jutsu, narrowly missing whatever jutsu he had thrown my way in the process, and planted my flexed hand on him. Immediately his face went slack and eyes blank. I thanked God it worked and hightailed it away.

I didn't get very far before I felt him grab my standard female grab area. I guessed my technique had failed, for him to have released it so quickly. I twisted out of it only for him to grab my hair.

Now we were mad. Who was we? Why, me and Uchi Naru of course. Nobody touches the hair. (Okay, so it wasn't that important to me, but I needed something to fuel my fight against this man because I was dangerously close to chakra exhaustion.) Anyway it hurt. Everything hurt at this point. I made a fist that Tou-san would've been proud of and connected it with his jaw as I whirled around in his grasp.

Leavemealoneleavemealoneleavemealone

He dropped me finally. I stabbed him in the groin with the kunai. (Why protective cups weren't part of the standard shinobi uniform, I didn't know.) He crumpled over, and I continued to stomp on him until he stopped moving and I lost momentum on my strikes.

I stood over the mook. Now that I was right by him and we weren't twisting away from each other, I could see his face clearly. His pallor was quickly going ashen as the life slowly trickled from him (holy shit, did I do that?), but his eyes still had a spark in them. Of life. Of resolve and determination. Those black eyes fixed themselves on my purples, and suddenly the ringing in my ears got worse and I became deaf to the noises of battle around me.

Time slowed down as my eyes trailed down to his hands, weakly moving into what I realized were hand signs, then to the bloody kunai in my own hand, which suddenly weighed twenty pounds. I watched my free hand move slowly, automatically, gripping the kunai and holding it above my head, pointed toward the ground.

Toward the mook.

Toward his neck.

My senses returned to me. Was I really about to kill this man? I sank to my knees and I could feel my jaw trembling. How could I do such a thing?! Especially in this state.

The ringing became overwhelming, but I couldn't move, couldn't bring my hands to my ears. All I knew was I'm going to die, I'm going to die, I'm going to-

A pair of flashes, the scattering of some leaves, and the ringing was gone, like it never was there. All sound was gone except for breathing, shaky. My breathing. This whole time I hadn't even noticed how hard I was breathing until it became hard to breathe.

In front of me, the mook, eyes wide open and glassy, his face relaxed, not moving, and definitely not breathing.

Next to me, Bunshirou, purple eyes fiery, the lines underneath them pronounced in a way I hadn't seen in nearly a year, jaw and fists clenched. His lips moved, but my ears wouldn't work. I was underwater, drowning.

I felt like I was drowning forever, but time immediately reset to its normal rate when I felt the slap across my face. My eyes watered for the first time since the battle started, and my jaw fell as I turned back and my father held my face, fingers digging under the corners of my jawbone just underneath my ears, forcing me to look at him. He looked angry, dangerous, and yet-

Was that an ounce of fear in his countenance?

"Kizuna." He started and then stopped, and I could hear the anguish in his voice. If that was what was in his voice, then he must have come really close to losing. And then I realized that what he had nearly lost was me.

He shook his head and tried again.

"Kizuna, I don't know how you got them, but the shinobi world is not the place to deal with your personal issues."

Bunshirou let of me and shunshin'd away, leaving me to seethe and sulk, a hurting, teary, red-faced, blubbering mess.

He wasn't wrong. But not knowing how I got my personal issues?! Or at least the ones that I didn't drag over from my past life? He knew about the abuse I had undergone in the short time I had spent at shinobi academy in Yukigakure. He had to have known that I came home every day with a rainbow of bruises on my skin, even if they were clear after long treatments of iryo-ninjutsu by the time I went to bed. Let's not even start on the verbal abuse I had suffered there. Even if I was a former adult with full knowledge that those kids were full of shit, that stuff stays with a little kid like I was supposed to be. (And yet despite all that, there had never been death associated with the academy; I hadn't been in it long enough to experience desensitization. I knew that death was often an integral part of a shinobi's life, but it was still so far away, no closer than an dramatic animation on a screen.)

And then there was the attack and kidnapping of my own mother figure. There may have been death associated with that, but I was barely protected from direct exposure by the wall that separated the hallway from the living room as well as the ambiguity of her fate. Still, it was shallow to think that couldn't be traumatic. He was traumatized by it!

And he was telling me not to drag my personal issues around with me?

He couldn't see the junk I was carrying from my past life, but he knew about my past in this life, and that should have been enough for him to understand. And it wasn't.

And now I had just nearly killed two people, one of whom ended up actually dead in front of me by my father's hand. Even if I hadn't landed the killing blow, it was still more than my psyche was prepared to accommodate.

Still, he wasn't wrong. I had to concede that. As a shinobi, I was to be nothing more than a mindless tool. Hesitation meant death.

Personal issues didn't belong to me in the field, and the sooner I mastered that the more effective (read: likely to survive) I would be. They belonged to my future higher-ups. If not my boss, then my boss's boss or my clan head or daimyo or whoever was pissed off or paid enough to send me out to do the dirty work.

In other words, shinobi didn't live for themselves. That got the world nowhere.

I just wasn't sure I agreed with living for others the same way that shinobi lived for others.

But that wasn't my decision to make.

I shook my head and slowly got up, miraculously ignored up to that point, and resumed my flight east.

I shrank that day, and Uchi Naru Kizuna grew.


Despite the numerous injuries I had sustained in that fight and the week I had spent recovering afterwards, life returned to normal astonishingly quick. It always did. It wasn't uncommon for me to escape a battle with injuries from stray weapons and so the patching up of clothing was routine. The fighting had cleared by the time I caught up to Bunshirou, slightly more worn than usual. That basically meant an extra half-day of healing and sewing, and with the frequent practice I was getting good. But that would have to come later.

I was tired from the ordeal, my breath denoting itself in exhausted wheezes as I struggled to regain my air. I wanted to cry and throw myself into his arms but somehow bottling up my emotions for Uchi Naru to deal with later seemed like a better idea even though, in retrospect, crying from the pain of my wounds that I had been running on for the past however long it had been should have been plenty of enough reason to cry.

Still, Bunshirou appeared in front of me almost as soon as I reached the sandy clearing, urging me to hold still while he inspected my well-being the way I used to inspect my clarinet after someone knocked it over on its stand. When he was satisfied that I was Not Dying, I was laid on the ground while he healed the worst of my injuries in silence except for the nearby water and the whirring of his jutsu.

This time was different. I didn't want him to touch me. Even though iryo-ninjutsu didn't require physical touch, I still wanted those hands nowhere near me. Those hands that had killed what I had been content to let lie already dying, and were trying to heal me now.

But to speak up would be to alert him that something was wrong, and I was adamant that nothing was wrong.

It was life. It was shinobi life. It was the life I had been born into, and the only way out was death, and I didn't want to die. And the only way to survive was to kill. And I wasn't to have an issue with it.

After all, that would be feeling, and shinobi were expert feeling squashers.

Yet, I was sure I had only survived that battle because of feelings of fear driving me to acts of desperation.

A shinobi who used feelings to fight, feelings that she wasn't supposed to have. I was just as much a contradiction as he was.

So I let him continue. I'd get over it eventually.

He continued to stare at me oddly throughout the week, as if he knew something had shifted inside me. I wondered what he thought but I didn't dare ask. I didn't need him knowing I was having emotions and issues with what had happened. I also didn't need him knowing that I was holding onto these issues far longer than I normally would have Before. It probably had to do with the fact that he was the only other person I ever saw outside of the chaos of battle; it wasn't like I could talk to friends.

I did occasionally blurt out lines of dialogue before I remembered that the conversational partner wasn't actually there. And Uchi Naru was there to make me feel like shit every time it happened, especially when Bunshirou was around. Didn't matter that I had done that before and Before.

Clearly I was going insane.

Just because I was mostly physically healed by this point didn't mean I was mentally healed. I sure wasn't giving any evidence to the contrary.

Sometimes I just wanted to ask existential questions too mature for the likes of a five-year-old. Then again, Itachi had gotten away with it and he wasn't that far away in age. Then again, Itachi was also a genius and I was just a misplaced adult-ish spirit who had probably taken the wrong exit on her way to purgatory.

Thoughts of purgatory brought back memories of religion, something I had forgotten about in my years here. And with it came flooding the existential questions of that realm. So strong was that tide that Uchi Naru backed out, forcing me to deal with it personally.

"Otou-san," I started one day, a pot of soup on the fire.

"Yes?"

"Why am I here?"

"Where else would you be? If you were somewhere else, that place would be "here" to you there."

I groaned as he grinned. Shinobi should not be allowed to make such terrible dad jokes. Even if they were philosophical, and especially if said philosophy was convoluted and stupid. What was shinobi philosophy anyway?

"That's not what I mean and you know it."

That sobered him a little. "Where else would you be?" he asked. "If someone else were you, they might be in the same place. Fate put you here with Naomi and I. I'm doing my best to equip you for life but you have to walk the path yourself."

"Towards what though? Where is the path going? What should I do when I get there?"

"Oh Kizuna, it's not a real path-"

"I know that." I stared at the ground. "Just… why did fate put me here? What am I supposed to do here? What am I even doing here? I'm a child but I'm not having a childhood, whatever that looks like in this world. What have I given that up for?"

"I can't answer that," he said, face falling and beckoning me closer. "The circumstances you exist in shape what you've been doing, but only you can forge the rest of your life."

I moseyed toward him. "That's an awful lot of responsibility to put on a little kid like me."

"That's why I'm here," he said, wrapping his arms around me. "To give you the tools and guidance to handle it."

I took a deep breath and sank into his embrace, taking back the ground I had lost with my self-expression. Maybe I could handle being here and everything that entailed. "Thanks, Tou-san."


A|N: *cue screaming at characters to go get a life* *okay done*

This month is Camp NaNoWriMo. I'm participating - my goal for this month is to draft 30000 words (editing can come later, right now I need MEAT) for this story so I can rebuild my buffer (so I can get in some proper proofing on my chapters!) and maybe even finish this arc (hallelujah, I can get to the juice).

Chapter 7 will not be up until 18 May. Also in the future I will be updating on the 18th rather than the 1st.

Happy late Easter!