Waking Dream
The sky was still cloudless, and the sun was still shining brightly, uncaring of the events taking place far beneath it in every sense of the world while the white noise made of leaves fluttering and running laughter. The quiet cheerfulness of the park had loudly been shattered by screams that screamed 'distressed' had taken the place of the jovial shouts that had previously warred with the typical sounds that a busy Hidden Village made, and the cause of it all had been noticed quickly by some ninja that was passing by, who was even faster at apprehending the surprisingly wild pink-haired girl.
All of that led to a very put off, squirming child being held by the scruff of her neck in front of her house as the shinobi knocked and waited politely, occasionally lightly and gently shaking the child to remind her that she was to stay put. The ninja didn't bother reprimanding her, enough of his time was already being taken away by something a bit too inane for his tastes.
When the door opened, a curious, smiling man made his first appearance: with blue eyes and pink hair dulled by age styled into the shape of a cherry blossom with his sideburns flowing into his angular mustache and a bit of stubble on his chin. He wore a dark, loose-fitting kimono-like shirt that had a green inner lining and sleeves that extended to his wrists. Burgundy-colored ¾-length pants completed the ensemble.
His expression immediately soured as his eyes took in the situation, and while another man could have been somewhat cowed at seeing a member of the military police holding his daughter, Kizashi gave proof of the spine he had by stating: "Unhand my daughter, sir."
It wasn't an order shouted in rage or a scream without reason: while respectful, the man's tone was stern as his hand quickly landed over the pink locks of his daughter to guide her behind himself. "What seems to be the problem?"
Somewhat stunned by the series of events, the child grasped the pants of her genitor, but she was hardly cowed: from behind the shield of the newly introduced adult, her green eyes glared fiercely at the Uchiha who ignored her completely. "Nothing serious sir, your daughter just came to blows with some other children."
"And that warranted an intervention from an Uchiha?" still respectful, the tone of the parent was cold while his hand softly stroked his daughter's hair.
"It's rare outside of a clan, but not unheard of that a kid instinctively unlocks chakra in a moment of great distress instead of in the Academy," the member of the military police replied without missing a beat, his impassible visage somewhat haughty under the merry shining of the sun: "In this case, we were lucky nobody got seriously hurt."
"Chakra?" the pink-haired man turned to look at his daughter, who took a step back while flexing her hands and closing them into fists, naked satisfaction clearly visible on every line of her body language as she stared into nothingness between her reddened knuckles. "She was set to begin the Academy this year..."
The girl, hearing hesitation for the first time in her father's voice, raised her head, deep green eyes staring at him from the shade cast by the doorframe cutting off the direct presence of the sun. For a moment, it almost looked like a beast ready to pounce, only for her wide smile to stretch the baby-faced edges of her mouth into cute dimples, which immediately melted the heart of her parent once again, and surprise immediately gave way to only one other emotion: pride.
With a movement almost too fast to be seen, Kizashi grabbed his daughter from beneath her armpits and raised her high into the air with a triumphant shout: "I knew that my cherry blossom was special! Just wait until I tell Mebuki!"
Non-plussed by the reaction of the other adult, the Uchiha by the door sighed somewhat loudly: "While no formal consequences will be levied at this time sir, please see to it that your daughter doesn't attack anybody else outside of the Academy."
Tucking her still bewildered child over his left hip, the man turned towards the member of the military police with a beaming smile on his face: "I must thank you profusely kind sir! Please, you have to join us for a celebratory cup of tea! Or something else, eh? Maybe something more 'joyful'!"
Backpedaling at the immense shift in behavior, the Uchiha raised his hands in a denying motion while he shook his head: "I couldn't possibly impose in such a moment, and as I am on duty, I really have to go."
Exactly as the sour Uchiha blurred away, I could see another person walking through the small yard that led to the door of what apparently was my home: she was a fair-skinned woman with shoulder-length, blonde hair with a single bang falling down into her forehead. With light green eyes, and a white qipao dress with three red circular designs at the bottom of the front, and pink, ¾-length pants along with brown sandals, she had a stern expression that immediately froze the jubilant Kizashi in place while he was still outstretching a hand to invite the now-gone Uchiha.
"Mebuki dear..."
His sudden hesitation was cut off as the woman marched into the house while taking off her sandals with a practiced, uncaring motion of her feet: "Cut it, Kizashi: why was there a Uchiha at my door?"
While the man who apparently was my father began to stutter out an explanation, something that glossed over the grittier details that would clearly explain my lightly throbbing knuckles and forehead, I was slowly coming to a realization that left me reeling. Admittedly, the beginning of my dream had been decidedly odd, if not in an entirely unpleasant way, but the consequences of those actions seemed a bit too measured to make sense in the context I thought I was in. I expected to keep fighting or to flinch into wakefulness at some point, but this...
Everything was too precise, and made too much sense. In a dream, the texture of the sky was the cool freshness of the wind and the filling of your lungs, while the ground was vaguely present as a sturdy background: it didn't give off sounds that weren't necessary for the main events commandeering my focus. Instead, the sky felt as it always did, and the ground had given off all the sounds typical of dirt when my heels had slid onto it. There was just too much detail, mundane, common detail, to everything that surrounded me.
"...I can't believe that something like that happened!" the woman's voice, Mebuki, grated against my ears while I tried to ignore it, "I explained to her just this morning how a girl is supposed to act, told her to drop the whole tomboy attitude that had her throwing mock punches in the air to celebrate like some kind of brute...
I turned off the woman while I focused fully on the here and now. It was truly odd that something so distant from the center of my focus could survive so cleanly and clearly in my dream, but I paid it no mind.
On the other hand, there was also something else that reaffirmed my belief that I was simply moving and breathing in a very lucid kind of dream, something other. I hadn't realized it existed until the Uchiha had spoken it out loud: a possibility, something that didn't do any favors to the ephemeral, distant thought that what I was experiencing was, in fact, real. It was unexplainable by anything that I had ever felt, and it was entirely different from some fuzzy, made-up feeling that I had fantasized about when awake, back when I still put reality on pause and looked into my own head instead than to the explainable, boring reality that always surrounded and was everything.
"Mebuki love, be reasonable..." Kizashi's voice brought me back in the there and then as he moved me back to the floor, my still sandal-clad feet leaving the faintest imprint of dust on the wooden surface while I brought my hands once more under my eyes and focused.
Breathe in, breathe out, and feel. There was nothing, and yet, no, it wasn't: I observed closely as the light shifted over my small, closed fists. It was less than the barest hint, less than a spark of hope that I forced myself to believe in, but it was there. Like heat coming off a candle's flame, or the rippling of smoke barely perceived in the corner of your eye.
It wasn't like water running beside my blood, not like tingling electricity rising the hair at the base of my neck: it was simply... new.
And with that, I realized that everything that had happened since I stood in the park, lashing back at those bullies, had been real, that this waking dream was so encompassing because I wasn't both creator and character, but a mere part of it. I was alive, and in the world of Naruto. Which immediately brought me to the next topic I had to face.
To ninja, or not to ninja? While I shelved the freak-out of being potentially forever cut away from my actual life, saving that for a later moment, I now had to decide whether to become a kunoichi or not. Also settling aside the pretty heavy implication that now that I had apparently 'awakened' my chakra I had no choice in the matter, I dedicated every spare scrap of mental processing power to this decision. I wouldn't be pushed into something I didn't want to take part in: that might be the natural order of things in my old world, but here, here I would lead my own life, and anyone who had a problem with it was going to get punched. Shannaro!
My right fist impacted solidly my flat left palm, letting out a meaty 'twack', and I truly thought.
Ultimately, the choice of becoming a ninja wasn't much of one: expose myself to some danger only to have a chance at survival later on, or live with the knowledge that everything I was and did could end at the whim of any child that made it through the Academy. And that was it, a chance, nothing would be certain, as of course, I wasn't reborn with any of the cheat codes or fate-fueled luck that seemed to define any truly important character to ever come out of a manga. Does this mean that I have the original Sakura's perfect chakra control?
But I wouldn't be able to ignore the chakra that I couldn't truly feel, but only guess at beyond the corner of my eye, just beneath my ribcage after my deepest breath. And I was pretty sure that only ninja were allowed to use chakra. Given the paranoid nature of these fuckers I will be casually kidnapped and tortured to ferret out anything I know. And given the scope of my metaknowledge, I would never see anything but the walls of a cell.
Of course, there was also that pesky, quickly approaching apocalypse that would need to be dealt with. Then again, Naruto and Sasuke were pretty much fate-fuelled victors, weren't they? The sheer amount of dumb luck that allowed them to triumph in the end, only to have another apocalyptic duel that was a very dragonball-esque affair...
I set aside all of my considerations, and all of the expectations I had for myself, and consciously allowed myself to ignore any orderly collection of strings of thought in order to simply feel. What do I want?
Ultimately, it came down to being able to do magic superpowered stuff, at the price of a mercenary application of violence. Now that I was in the middle of it and no longer reading it on a page, it was hard to ignore the casual peddling of murder and sabotage that every Hidden Village was built upon. I could gain the kind of impossible power that I already knew could delight me with every second of its existence, only to not be able to decide on my own what to use it for. What would I do once I was tasked to take my hard-earned magical power, and told to use it to do harm to someone that never did anything to me or mine?
I half-grimaced at the distant realization that I had actually punched and gone absolutely postal on a bunch of children that I could have probably talked into circles, and I forced myself to keep breathing in a controlled manner. Maybe I should just worry about the now, and when those orders will come, I'll choose then.
It was also somewhat impossible to truly know what I would do once the training program and the implicit culture of the Hidden Village had time to bleed into me, after all, it would take years before I became a kunoichi, right? Maybe I wouldn't care once I had a headband on my forehead. And maybe that's why I have to decide now, that I still am myself, instead of simply going with the flow.
Hand't I just decide to do what I wanted because I wanted, instead of letting the situation or someone else's expectations drive me forward? And did I also have so litte faith in myself as to believe that I would simply drop everything I was in order to joyfully skip my way into becoming an unthinking murder-machine?
"Violence can be used for something right, for something just." I came to that realization with a certainity that almost startled me. Besides the nature of Naruto's world, which was based on a feudal system of government that operated a state of magic police constantly hunting every possible threat, with tensions that rose and periodically exploded into full-out war, civilization existed in the space between walls guarded by people willing to harm.
Maybe it is that simple. I opened and closed again my fists, and on the third time, I imagined that I was closing them around the image I had of the laughing children who had begun to cry once I began to fight against Sakura's bullies. I could see clearly those smiles and that thoughtless happiness inside my right fist as in my mind's eye my knuckles turned into high walls. It was said again and again in every manga, wasn't it? Fighting to protect something.
I'm not going to do this only for them. my eyes met Mebuki's stern ones for the first time since she had entered the house, and I realized that all of my musings had run their course while my 'parents' updated each other and argued as solid couples did.
"I'm going to be strong." I decided, conscious of every word and implication. And once I am powerful, I'll do more than protect the innocent: I'd have the means to do anything that I feel is right.
Another thought poked the side of my head as Kizashi proudly grabbed me again and raised me high over his head: "Of course you are! My bright cherry blossom...!"
I grinned both to myself and in answer to the jovial man, ignoring the reprimanding words that Mebuki immediately began to sprout, when a thought poked the side of my head: Wasn't Jiraya trying to do something about world peace?
AN
I got out of the way the 'this is real' as soon as I could, along with the obvious choice of becoming a ninja.
Well, it's obvious because otherwise there'd be no point in writing a fic at all, but for the character, its anything but.
I might have tweaked the age at which Sakura and Ino first met in order to have that event happen not long before the beginning of the Academy, but this is such a minor detail that allowed me to keep going with meaningful chapters without an actual time-skip: starting a story with one doesn't really feel right, not for this fic, nor for any other.
The second part is a bit dense, and I could have diluted it with some Mebuki and Kizashi interactions, both with each other and Sakura, but it would have masked the centerpiece of the chapter, and it'd be something that as a casual reader I wouldn't really notice, but that I would angrily skip if I was someone reading fanfiction everyday.
This is the actual beginning of the story, while with the next chapter, we land in the middle of this first Arc, tentatively, this is the first layout of the entire fic:
1st arc: up to genin
2nd arc: genin to chunin exams
3rd: Suna-Oto battle in Konoha
4th: the training and some missions of the two years before shippuden
5th: I'll see when I get there