AN: So my laptop randomly decided to delete most of Eight Prison Doors and my life is enough of a mess for me to give zero shits about starting a bunch of low-consequence things I probably won't be able to finish with my rampantly annoying health issues. And so somehow this happens. (This is just pure wish-fulfillment trash, with a side of introversion. Or maybe the other way around.)

I don't own Naruto.

Prologue

I'm aware stranger things have happened. According to historical record, most of the forests around Fire Country were jutsu'd into existence by a rambunctious Senju whose lover's spat with a crazy-eyed megalomaniac carved out a massive trench now called the Valley of the End. Said Senju's brother thought it'd be a neat idea to create a forbidden technique to pull a departed soul from the Pure World into a living person, because necromancy is a thing that happens for reasons. The Yondaime supposedly called upon the Death God itself to defeat a giant angry chakra monster—while atop an equally-giant warrior-toad wielding a sword bigger than the Hokage Tower—because kami forbid the legendary Yellow Flash go out in any less spectacular and convoluted a manner.

In a world in which gods could be shackled to mortals, souls were quantifiable things that could be manipulated with enough seals and creativity, and everybody was somebody's tragic hero—

Reincarnation wasn't the weirdest thing out there. It might be odd to suddenly wake up with the memories of another life, but it's no stranger than giant summon animals giving misleading prophecies to overpowered perverts, women pushing fifty punching mountains into dust on an off day, or evil purple eyes that could tell reality to go cry in a corner until someone ripped them out of their sockets.

Then again, I might just be trying to make sense of the nonsensical. Because according to these memories, I was once a neurotic twenty-something civilian academic from a world in which there were large, cylindrical exploding tags that could blow up cities the size of small countries, people thought spending a large part of their nation's economy planting a flag on the moon was a neat idea, and the most powerful country in the world armed their untrained civilians with a ludicrous degree of firepower because of some mad political experiment in which daimyos were elected and were also the Kage-in-chief, whatever that meant.

Not to mention that there was some idiot prophet called "Kishimoto" who thought detailing the combat capabilities and dirty secrets of some of the most terrifying shinobi on the continent was something he could actually survive—because, again, evil purple eyes that could apparently jump between dimensions.

Anyways.

Whether these memories really did once belong to some foreigner from a different world, or whether I'd snapped and somehow constructed an eerily accurate and elaborate fantasy for myself in my head—

It didn't make much of a difference.

I was fairly sure I was insane, either way.

Because my name was Uzumaki Rin, and according to these memories, I wasn't supposed to exist.

My first memory, from this life, is of the pitter-patter of familiar chakra sputtering out of existence, leaving me alone with my twin and his tenant, which felt not at all like a demon and more like something I'd spent ten long months beside.

Naruto, of course, doesn't remember a thing. Other than his whisker-marked cheeks and his impossible energy, to me, he was a normal kid. His formative years were a blur for him, and I was the one known constant in his life. I was his first memory; he didn't care much about the details.

I, on the other hand, knew more than I should even before the knowledge of a past life slammed into my head. I knew that there was a pale-faced brunette woman that would visit us some nights at the orphanage, who felt like cold ash and argued with the matron over our care. I knew that my brother and I were watched, every night and every day, whether by the caretaker or by masked men in white armor that lurked in the shadows of the Hashirama trees. I started walking months before my brother; reading and writing years before my peers; I felt too small in my body, as if my bones had been built wrong. I could feel what I thought was my blood pump in my veins; only later, in the Academy, would I find out that it was my chakra.

In a way, reincarnation made more sense than anything did.

And in a way, it didn't make sense at all. I could literally feel the weight of my own existence in my body, like a river digging a long wound into the earth. Hunger pangs were more constant than friendships, what with the matron constantly punishing my brother and the much more reasonable fear that the other kids had of me. Just as I remembered being a woman who thought no more or less of dying than of living, I remembered holding Naruto close as he cried our first night living by ourselves, never even learning about the word suicide and being baffled when I did. Survival was paramount; why would I ever want to leave my brother alone?

In these foreign memories, Rin was just the name of a girl that threw herself into the path of her teammate's assassination jutsu. Said teammate was the son of the White Fang, who had committed seppuku after failing a mission and thus lighting the match that would start the Third Shinobi War. Both children were the students of the Yondaime, who'd left his kid (singular, son) alone in the world with half a bijū sealed up inside him, to forever fight the other half in the stomach of the Shinigami. Naruto wasn't just the name of a boy, but the hero of a story in which nobody who died stayed dead forever, who saved the very world that once damned him to a miserable childhood.

And for a while, I thought that believing in these new memories would be a kind of suicide. It would be denying my own existence despite all the evidence to the contrary. It would mean that I never really mattered; never should have mattered; Uzumaki Rin should never have been born.

A week later, I thought, fuck that, and came back home to my baby brother.

I'm sure I got over the revelation sooner than was entirely healthy. Not that I have anyone to compare myself to; I couldn't really go around asking strangers if they suffered delusions of having lived in another reality. That was just asking for the Sandaime to lock me up in the hospital again—which, not so coincidentally, was something that happened for a week after I woke up screaming my throat out and babbling incoherently (in a mix of English and very poor Korean, two languages that just did not exist in my current reality). I'd barely avoided being suspended from the Academy for some quality time with a Yamanaka like that Uchiha boy who had his whole family massacred not that long ago. Considering what I now knew of the matter, being mind-walked by a Konoha shinobi was a fate I desperately wanted to avoid.

It wasn't everyday that a seven-year-old girl was told she shouldn't actually exist; that her twin brother, who couldn't take care of himself if his life depended on it (which it did) was supposed to have lived alone after he got kicked out of the orphanage; was supposed to have raised himself without anyone to stand up for him against the grocer that jacked up his prices, or the civilian family that spat at him as they moved out from next door, or—the countless other civilians and shinobi alike that treated us like trash.

Maybe, if Naruto and I had a better childhood—had the respect of our village and a budget beyond the Academy allowance for orphaned legacies, or hell, had an adult that we could trust to do all the worrying for us—I'd have had more of an existential crisis. Reality, of course, intervened pretty quickly; I was busy practicing the henge so that I could afford to pick up groceries for the week, and making sure Naruto cleaned up after getting mud all over himself during a fight with some bullies from the Academy. I'd spent a week in a hospital bed worrying about myself already, and with a trouble-magnet of a brother to take care of along with my own studies, I just—didn't have the time to be so distracted.

So what if my brother was a jinchūriki? He was still an idiot that couldn't wash the dishes properly, or cook anything with rice without getting bored and boiling a cup of instant ramen instead. He was still the only person I really cared for in this world; he could literally want to burn down the village, and I'd happily pass him a scroll with a decent fire jutsu. I wasn't the kind of girl that felt the need to save everyone she could, just because some distant relative with delusions of grandeur might, in less than a decade, flatten most of Konoha in a fit. I was the kind of girl that would make sure she and her brother got the hell out of Fire Country before something like that could happen, and maybe scavenge for supplies in the ruins to support her new life as an unaffiliated ninja.

One day, I might hitch a ride with whoever ended up with the magic purple-eyes to the world the woman in my memories had come from; find and track down the seer that dared profit off my brother's suffering, and make use of what I'd learned during the Academy's introductory T&I unit—like a good little kunoichi should.

Until then?

It was my brother and I against the world—and I needed to even the odds.