Overwhelm
verb over·whelm \ˌō-vər-ˈhwelm, -ˈwelm\
: to affect (someone) very strongly : to cause (someone) to have too many things to deal with : to defeat (someone or something) completely

I. In which accepting something doesn't mean you are over it.

Shizuka wakes up in the hospital. The car had impacted the taxi on her side. Her little brother was sitting next to her, but if she is ok he must be too, has to be ok too… Except she doesn't have a little brother. And she has never travelled by automobile, never mind a taxi. She wasn't coming home from aboard. Her brother didn't pick her up at the station. She entered her house and the bodies of her parents where there… there was a lot blood on the streets. Her brother had- Itachi had- he was a traitor. No. He wasn't. Because he was ordered to do it. And she wouldn't have found out until after his death…

This is so absurd that she's skipping disbelief completely and just go directly to anger. She will also skip all the way down to acceptance but right she's just going to carry on while being very, very angry because people where very stupid and it messed up her life. And it could have messed her up very hard, if not for the bizarre reaction to the Tsukuyomi that made her remember a past life in another reality. Thank you Eli, for having been such a Naruto fan and saving Shizuka of doing all the shit Sasuke did. And now she needs to plot. She needs to plot really hard, but she needs to know how accurate what she remembers is. She needs information. She needs a concerned responsible adult who will answer questions. What is a good way to attract the attention of a concerned adult?

She thinks of her parents, she thinks of her cousins, her uncles and aunts, all the members of her clan that where loosely related to her, that she didn't know that now she would never know. She thinks of her brother who is a murderer and a martyr. She also thinks about Eli's little brother and how she will never know if he was ok, about how Eli's family lost their daughter. About all that is to come. And cries. She will mourn for a bit right now. And she will use this. She will use her pain and the memories to suit her purposes and eventually people. will. pay.

-o-

The nurse that comes is a responsible concerned adult but she won't say anything, so Shizuka cries a bit more, begs a little and eventually the nurse goes to fetch someone who can tell her answers.

-o-

The nurse comes back with the Hokage and then leaves them alone to talk.

Shizuka doesn't want to talk to the Hokage because a) he won't let anything scape he doesn't want her to know, and b) he's a person likely to notice that there's something off with her and that she knows too much– but who else was she expecting? And she is just deluding herself if she thinks it would be easy to extract information of some other ninja. And ROOT is probably watching. So she will bear it, and she will try to act as 7 years old Shizuka who witnessed something terrible but doesn't know anything, and she will learn of him as much as she cans. She will do with what she has and she will succeed.

He tells her that he's sorry for her lost and then asks her what happened. She can do this. She steels herself –she hopes that it looks like that she does it to prepare herself to recall something awful –, she wraps herself in the clueless Shizuka from before, and she tells her tale.

She apparently passes the test.

Then she asks her questions: what will happen with the bodies of her family, they will have a proper burial, right? They will be burnt, right? Will she have to organise it? To wash them and dress them as she's the only left to do it? She wants to. She does! Really! She wants to do right to her clan, it's her duty to send them off. At least can Hokage-sama see that they are tended properly? Will he promise to see to it himself? And what will happen to her? Where will she go? And her classes? What happens to her house and the houses of her family? And someone needs to do something about the pet birds trapped in their cages before they die! And to take care of the ponds and see if there isn't dogs and cats trapped in the houses… she doesn't want them to die to… and they are going to catch Itachi, right? He can't go free, they must catch him.

The Hokage does promise to see that the bodies of her clan will the treated properly –and she hopes that her half-hysterical and tearful questioning makes him feel bad and guilty enough about to he did to her and her clan to see himself the bodies and realise that some mysteriously lack eyes –, he tells her that some teams will be sent to clean and that they'll be told to round up animals and close down houses and locals and that everything will go to her. He promises that they will do everything possible catch Itachi. But about what is to happen with her…

"Even if you don't really need it you will get the same monthly allowance other orphans receive, Shizuka-chan." Oh Gods, he's not actually gonna say what she thinks he's gonna say next, right? She's a little child. He won't dare… "You will get assigned an apartment for yourself." He just did. "And you don't have to go back to the Academy until you feel ready."

It actually will make some things easier but she could have liked to believe that someone cares about the children.

"Thank you, Hokage-sama," she says in a soft voice trying to look like she's demurely lowering her eyes, and not like she is hiding her face so he doesn't see the disbelief about the callous disregard of her welfare. "I– I would like to be alone for a bit now. Would that be ok?" He goes, thanks to all eight million gods.

-o-

Once again alone she resumes her mourning –now just for herself and her family– and cries herself to sleep.

Some things I think you should know:

- I didn't actually read/watched all the manga/anime. Mostly I know things thanks to fic and people who did read/watched, and search in the wikia to fill what I don't know… so if something happens differently and I forget about it completely… think it is because the canon Naruto world is different to the one Shizuka lives in.

- I really wanted to write a self-insert and somehow I found it more engaging to write than my "serious" GW/HP crossover (serious in comparison because this is one super self-indulgent) : right now I'm writing this for camp NaNoWriMo (by the time I posted this I was already halfway of my word-count goal!) and there are already 10 chapters posted on ao3. I have planned the general plot of the story but there is still some undecided stuff.

- I should cover only the first part of Naruto, before the three years time-skip.

- In following chapters I'm trying my hand at bit of world building in the form of some kind of Shintoism derivate that ninjas follow, I'm not particularly religious nor I know Shintoism that well so let's see how I do and I hope I won't offend anyone nor their beliefs.

- I did prof read this, but not as well as I should have, so sorry about that

-Shizuka is written to mean "calm" and "excellent" –and it makes extra weird that her parents named their older kid "weasel" but oh well –

-why is ff. net so hard to upload to?

And finally:

- You have all my thanks for having read this (v)