Disclaimer: I am not Masashi Kishimoto and as such I do not own Naruto or Naruto Shippuuden, nor do I make any sort of monetary profit by writing and posting fanfiction. If this ever changes, I will let you know.

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.

A|N: (Of course it got rid of my line breaks. Of course it did. I think it's fixed now.)

,

Two clear paths stretched out in front of me. Well, three, if you count the one I had just come from. But I didn't really want to go back there. You see, that was how I had ended up here. Obviously.

I had an idea of which way I wanted to go, but my muscles were content to stay exactly where I was despite my brain's desperate screaming to get up and get the fuck out of here. Endurance had never been my thing and I cursed my past self for not focusing on it more. And the idiot behind me who had exploded a bottle of smoke and glitter and pelted everyone in sight with what looked like metallic pick-up sticks.

"Your needles must be finely honed so you do not break the weave of your fabric." This statement was the hallmark of a master seamstress, and a concept easily transferred to the usage of certain shinobi weapons. The pieces of steel piercing various points in my body were bigger and sharper than the quilting needles I had known and thinner and sturdier than even the thinnest knitting needle, adhering perfectly to the concept. These were senbon, and if the poison they were laced in didn't kill me first, then it would be either the blood loss or the angry fellows behind me using the blood trail to find me. I was a neutral party who had been dropped into a revolution. I knew I'd be killed on sight, an unfortunate collateral casualty.

Which led me to my next concern: Why hadn't I actually died yet?

I had seen these senbon kill people twice my size in a quarter of the time. Most had died quickly due to the poison, and the ones who had resisted eventually succumbed to blood loss and the revolutionaries who came after the initial explosion to make sure Nobody Survived. To my knowledge, I was the only one to have gotten away. I alone, with my thin frame and constitution that was more suited for a ragdoll than a human, had managed to escape.

Lying there with my bloody face in the dirt, I had collapsed as soon as I had arrived at the fork. I couldn't even really bring myself to wince as the senbon buried themselves deeper into my flesh. I was sure I had internal bleeding in several places. One had punctured my lung, stealing from my already terrible stamina.

And yet I had made it this far. Surely I could manage to get just a few feet down that one path? I heard the metallic clanking of fighting fast approaching and my tiny spark of resolve turned to urgency as I pushed myself to my feet. But the poison must have finally reached my sense of balance and I found myself unable to stand up straight and somersaulting forward, further serving to make sure the senbon found permanent homes in my dying body and I found myself unable to move at all now. I doubted I could even speak now.

Well this sucks.

At least now I would be able to see my killer.

No, wait nevermind. Apparently it was time for my eyes to go because everything was blurring together and was that a unicorn standing over me?

"Sorry for the wait, little miss. Technical difficulties... had to yell at these knuckleheads to ... but anyway the respawning mech-"

I gazed up at the unicorn glassily as more and more gibberish poured out its mouth like runny globs of botched sunny-side-up eggs mixed with snotty mucus. Respawning? Ha. I had already respawned once, and I had been thrown into it without fanfare. If the mooks and apathetic superheroes working the respawning mechanisms in wherever-the-heck-they-worked had only just gotten the transitional programming to work after fourteen years, I wondered if I'd have to do it all over again or if I'd be left with a useless briefing and told to carry on. Or worse, wipe my memory ex post facto and leave me to carry on as I was. I wasn't sure how this respawning thing was supposed to work.

I guess it didn't matter. I was dying anyway.

My lips tightened in the corners, and I gave what could be described as half cough, half laugh, half splutter of blood. I saw a spark of light trail into my vision before ramifying into a million paths, rudely shattering my vision and my reality and everything I might have once held dear. At least it was fuzzy, and warm, and I knew if I gave in to it I'd have to face another potentially messy reincarnation.

Maybe this time I'd respawn as a unicorn princess with no more obligation than to make lots of pony friends.

Yeah. That'd be nice.

,

MANY YEARS PRIOR

For four years I lived in a series of back-to-back dreams that only started resembling coherence and making sense about a year and some months ago, and by that point I had had to toilet train myself, had become practically immune to the cold, had learned an entirely new language, was sufficiently ripped, and knew several different ways to kill people.

I'm also pretty sure I died at some point early on, because I definitely wasn't in Florida anymore and I don't remember leaving. I might have been in Kansas. I had never been to Kansas before, so I didn't really know what it looked like or what it was like to live there. Is Kansas known for eternal winter, folks who can accomplish superhuman feats, gratuitous Japanese, and a rather interesting take on music? No? Only the last of the four? Interesting.

So, probably not Kansas.

Dying also explained why I had this totally foreign, tiny body and why I had spent the first of the past four years figuring out how to move beyond useless flailing and wiggling and not poop all over myself. The eighteen-or-so months following were spent on language acquisition and physical conditioning. As a two-and-a-half-year-old, I was already stronger than I had been in my previous life, and I was already developing my own superpowers. In a way, it seemed only natural that I be thrown in, against mine and my parents' will, with a bunch of miniature future killers.

That's right. Ninja academy. At less-than-three years old. But I'll get to that in a second.

That is, of course, if I really had died. I certainly didn't remember dying. Or being reborn. Yet here I was, a twenty-something inside the body of a three-year-old (judging by the pudginess of my hands and flatter-than-before chest). And apart from eternal damnation, purgatory, and lying in a coma in a hospital room somewhere in Orlando while someone slipped LSD into my IV drip, I didn't have any other theories. Besides, in my dreams I never had such a foreign body as this one.

I didn't know whether or not to assume that they knew about my apparent reincarnation, and given everyone else's superhuman talents, I couldn't see why I would be so different that they would give me so much special treatment (aside from my two caretakers). If anything, my differences made me less deserving of that treatment than the rest - I had an accent and an awkward rhythm to my speech that wasn't normal even for a kid, but aside from that I had basically taught myself everything that takes most kids years to master as soon as I had the physical coordination and sensory development to do them. I was reading and writing as soon as I could see the characters with my crappy infant vision and could grasp the pencil with my pudgy hands, and I practically toilet-trained myself the moment I could get myself onto the toilet without falling in. I had even apparently gained some semblance of chakra control while manipulating what I originally thought was simply that extra imaginary "limb" I sometimes had in my dreams.

As a former-adult, I made for quite the self-sufficient toddler. Prodigious, even, if you looked at it that way. Even so, it was surprisingly easy to forget that I was still not-quite-three. I was just a disadvantaged, displaced twenty-something. No wonder they thought I needed so much attention.

Still. It was annoying.

I remember being in class with my "peers", a bunch of bratty five and six-year-olds who decided that, because I was half their age, they had to prove that they were somehow better than me.

"Look what I can do," one would say before drop kicking me into the next room.

I walked out a minute later, nursing my bruises while they laughed. That really hurt. I had learned how to take it though. Egging them on meant dragging the fight into a shouting match about superiority, so showing them I didn't care was my best option. That also pissed them off, of course, but they would eventually leave me alone for the rest of the day when they realized they weren't going to get a rise out of me.

It wasn't like I could tell the instructors, though: they didn't actually want to make sure that a three-year-old (that, need I remind you, was surrendered into the program against the parents' will) was capable of holding her own against the developmentally more advanced six-year-olds that dominated the academy. Naomi-kaa-san raised hell after I came home every day for a month straight covered in bruises. Fortunately Naomi-kaa-san's training and treatments kept me from being seriously injured.

I'd come home, and Naomi-kaa-san would sigh and mutter curses while healing me and shoring up my chakra coils, opening them so I could heal more efficiently I guess. The next day I'd show up at school again, clean of injuries, ready to repeat the whole thing.

Maybe it was at least a little bit good for me. It did increase my pain tolerance, and in my quest to avoid the daily beatings I came up with ideas for jutsu that I'd have to pursue later, when I knew about jutsu creation. Mostly it was bad. Having to heal all the time meant there was no time for homework and other training, and it may have also stunted my growth a little (God I hoped not).

Naomi-kaa-san was of course livid. She stormed up to the academy headmaster's office one day, in full combat gear, and raised hell. I was left in the hallway outside the door, but I could still hear.

"You know, I like to think I've been reasonable in meeting you fuckers' demands," she started out. "But sending my child, who's too young to be in your program anyway, sending her home beaten to within an inch of her life every single day. How do you figure that builds strong shinobi?"

"If she's too weak to fight back, that's her problem," they said. "She should adapt and get stronger like everyone else."

"You're a dumb motherfucker if you think it's that simple."

"But it is, especially since she's a prodigy. And don't forget that you are refugees in this country. You owe us your lives and your children. She must grow stronger and serve our country and village with all of her talent."

"Fuck you. She's three," Naomi-kaa-san spat. Or, at least, I imagined her spitting. "Kizuna needs time to grow up first. Throwing her in with a bunch of children with ego problems and her having almost no formal training is fucking asinine. And if you expect me to supplement her training at home, well, how the fuck am I supposed to do that when I'm always so fucking busy putting her back together?"

"If she can't handle the training, then it's your fault."

"Fuck you. She's not developmentally ready for this. I'm taking her home since you seem to have no fucking concern for your students' well-being. Besides, Yuki no Kuni isn't involved in the war. It's not like there's a shortage of Yuki-nin right now."

"Well of course you wouldn't understand. You're an outsider. You all are, you couldn't possibly understand village loyalty."

"And you aren't? I seem to remember seeing your profile in a Konoha bingo book saying you originated in Kumogakure, motherfucker."

"I'll get started on your withdrawal paperwork right away, Hamauzu-san."

SLAM. "Good!" A few seconds later the door flew open and Naomi-kaa-san quietly stormed out, took me by the arm, and led me home with a sage "Come on sweetie, let's go."

Well okay. Add that to my list of things to avoid: pissing off Naomi-kaa-san. That woman can be scary.

Naomi-kaa-san won that battle, but the war was far from over, as evidenced by the butthurt village officials who came by the next day to complete my withdrawal paperwork. In the five seconds I saw them and some of my more fanatical former instructors who knew of my abilities, I got the "I'm watching you" sign language - two fingers pointing at their eyes and then at me. The message was clear: "You'll be back." The paperwork gave me a short buffer of protection, but I suspected there was an appeals process, and I could only hope the bureaucracy here was as slow and inefficient as it was in my original country. Unfortunately, ninja are known for efficiency, so I didn't hope for much.

Imanara Bunshirou-tou-san spent most of the hours in his days working at some technology firm, so Naomi-kaa-san took it upon herself to train me at home. She became what my academy should have been, splitting up my training into easier, more age-appropriate modules while simultaneously trying to cram every bit of Hamauzu knowledge and techniques into my tiny brain and body.

The Hamauzu style taijutsu was floaty and dancelike, requiring me to always move fluidly. From what I gathered, it was a style more geared toward energy redirection, not unlike what I could remember of airbending techniques from the Avatar series in my old life. Circles and spirals were integral, and if you didn't master the technique while very young, your body would simply lose the ability to move that way.

Also, being young meant I was more easily bribed with mochi, and that would leave a sizable dent in Tou-san's paycheck, but that's not important now.

Taijutsu was important in case the appeals process took less time than expected and so I could come home with fewer bruises, and maybe inflict some of my own.

The other thing the Hamauzu had down pat was chakra control, and this went well beyond what I remembered in the anime. See, the Hamauzu had this theory of meridians, which were central lines that channeled energy to and from the limbs like winding rivers of chakra, and within those rivers were dams that could be opened and closed, for the most part at will. Knowing which dams to open and close and half-open at a given time and in what order was integral to chakra control as well as the form and nature that the jutsu would take. Most shinobi winged this process through either hand signs or trial and error (though the Hyuga, I suspected, had more control than most due to their Byakugan and juuken) but the Hamauzu had put emphasis into studying how to manipulate the dams consciously within themselves and within others with or without the use of hand signs, making their other jutsu that much more potent.

What Naomi-kaa-san had been doing to me before I had left the academy was to configure the dams in my network such that the iryo-ninjutsu she used would most strongly saturate into my damaged tissue no matter where she physically applied her mystical palm technique. But the technique could be used for all sorts of things.

Yin release, as it turned out, was a prime example. The main meridians complimented each other - for every yin there was a yang and vice versa, which was expected. Through guided meditation I learned I could grasp at the entrance to all of the yang meridians and close them all simultaneously, like closing one fist, and at the same time let go with the other and pull from the open yin meridians, and manifest a strong yin release, taking my imagination with it.

It was spiritually liberating, almost like being on ecstasy (not that I had ever tried ecstasy in either life). I could see possibilities. I wanted to reach out and grab one, but remembering that one fanfiction Dreaming of Sunshine from that other life and seeing Shikako go completely numb warned me away from that. Maybe when I was much, much older.

It was also emotionally draining and it left me with a headache if I used it for too long. At that point we would stop that for the day, have a bite of mochi, and we'd refocus to calligraphy.

But really. It was easy. Even if it did give me headaches.

What nearly-four-year-old gets to learn the spiritual release? It was like that one time I astral projected in another dream, though at least these were more favorable circumstances and I wasn't trying to separate my entire consciousness from my body, only my spiritual energy. I suppose I should have thanked my earlier death and previous life experiences for supplying my spiritual energy. But again. What nearly-four-year-old can accomplish yin release and think it's easy?

Me, that's who.

Why?

Because I was a dumb prodigy, of course.

I know I know, thinking I was somehow special in a world full of specials was conceited. Although to be fair, I don't think any of my fellow three-year-olds had a lifetime of memories at their disposal, among which included a detailed map and history (or perhaps it was a forecast, I hadn't quite narrowed down my place in the timeline just yet) of their world. I supposed that was exploitable, but then the only reason to keep me locked away at this point would be because Bunshirou-tou-san and Naomi-kaa-san knew that I had these memories, and while I was clearly an odd child who picked up concepts seemingly faster than her peers, I had made sure not to let that particular detail slip. I wondered how they would have worked it out.

Maybe it was my candid dislike of learning such efficient ways to kill people, which manifested as a preference for pretend play and drawing and writing during my downtime (and may have also contributed to my mochi addiction). Maybe it was how I was writing in my native language before I was writing in theirs. Or the spoken accent. They'd've had to have been idiots not to notice that something was off about me.

The academy instructors had definitely noticed.

Both of my parents were home that day in February when they came for me with nasty grins and official notices that I was to report back to the Yukigakure ninja academy immediately, by order of the Snow Village leader and the liaison to the daimyo. To say my parents were displeased would be an understatement of epic proportions. I got to see Naomi-kaa-san's hair float around her dangerously like freaking tails even though I was clear that she did not possess a biju. Bunshirou-tou-san quickly ushered me away and into my room, but my four-year-old curiosity led me to hide in the hallway after he left. I had missed the opening lines but it was easy to pick up where the conversation had come from.

"You can't have her."

"Somebody is coming with us."

"Get your hands off of my wife."

The atmosphere suddenly filled with… something. It was tense before, but now it was like someone was dismantling an atomic bomb and the countdown had just unexpectedly jumped from ten minutes to ten seconds. I couldn't move, overpowered by the crushing antipathy and heartlessness. But I couldn't crumble to the ground either, strangely buoyant. Or was it static? My body was jelly in a rigid frame.

Whatever it was, it made time stand still and controlled my thoughts such that I could only really contemplate my impending death. I was going to die. I was going to die. I was going to die a bLoOdY pAiNfuL-

The sound of things breaking brought me back to reality. (How long had I been frozen?) I whipped around the corner and found two ninja, the head instructor with a swollen and freshly burnt cheek, on top of Kaa-san, one pressing a kunai to the back of her neck while the second tied up her wrists behind her back, Kaa-san looking practically drained. Tou-san was nearby, attempting to strangle a third with his bare hands. There was fresh blood on the carpet that was puddled and hadn't had time to soak in, and shards of broken trinkets and a few discarded kunai.

Kaa-san's golden eyes locked with mine and she howled. The man in Tou-san's hands crumpled to the ground, unconscious or maybe dead, and he glared murderously at the two on top of Kaa-san. The pinkette shook her head, earning a couple of cuts on the back of her neck by the ninja handling the kunai.

Tou-san whipped around and saw me just as Naomi-kaa-san's pleas echoed.

"Get her out of here! Don't let them have Kizuna! Don't worry about me - just go!"

"Kaa-san!" I wailed.

"Like we'll let that happen," spat one of the ninja, but with the fight Naomi-kaa-san was giving the two of them and their third member being down for the count, they couldn't do anything in the moment.

"We'll be back for you soon," said the second, eyeing me as he finished tying up my mother and began to drag her out the door.

I didn't hear whatever dialogue was exchanged afterwards as my world dimmed and focused on the door through which she was being dragged as a hostage, staining the floors with a trail of blood, glaring at me with wide, fearful golden eyes, her clothes tearing where the ninja wire had cut and the frayed ends catching on the doorframe, pink hair a tangled mess, yelling what I was sure were obscenities. The head instructor with the burnt and bruising face glared at me and then Tou-san on the floor in front of me (when and how did he get there?), shot him a warning message as he gathered his fallen comrade, and left.

The door slammed shut, and the silence that followed was deafening.

After a minute or two of utter blankness, the first instinct that returned to me was to curl up on the couch with a blanket and something small and rectangular, preferably an electronic device with Google Docs, but my calligraphy practice booklet would have been just as good. Unfortunately, Tou-san was still on the ground, and now he was crying (stop that, dammit, you're making me cry too), so First Instinct was discarded in favor of Second Instinct - help him up.

"Tou-san, get up," I chided, trying not to let my sympathetic crying affect the resolve and force I was trying to insert into my shaky, squeaky, four-year-old voice. Didn't work. I nudged him with my bare foot.

If I weren't such a dense child I would've noticed right away his anguish. Not just for the loss of the woman who had spent four years taking care of me and doubtlessly longer being his other half through whatever their lives had thrown at them. I had noticed and catalogued that, having had a similar reaction after discovering my short salmon pink tresses and subsequently seeing myself in the mirror for the first time with grey-purple eyes and realizing that I was a completely different person, and would probably never see my parents and friends and cats from my past life ever again.

But later that night as I lay awake in the snow, hours after the ordeal, replaying how I had simply laid on top of the man who was my father, willing him to stop, stop it, please stop crying until I finally fell asleep, with all our important belongings sealed away in scrolls by the time I woke up an hour later, an onigiri and some mochi shoved in my hands before I was forced to lace up my boots and find my thickest haori and we walked out of the house together for what would be the last time. We were miles away now.

That was when I noticed.

Tou-san wasn't strong enough.

I wasn't strong enough.

That was when four years of back-to-back dreams ended, and a lifetime of nightmares began.

A|N: I have committed the cardinal sin of fanfiction: a self-insert. Truth be told, this isn't my only SI (the main OC in Readon counts as far as I'm concerned, despite the lack of reincarnation). And I've had a million different SI ideas for the Narutoverse including one I'm actively working on with my best friend who is a fellow writer here. (I wasn't going to do it but then it came up in conversation about two weeks ago and she thought it was a good idea so we decided to run with it.)

Anyway. I have a small buffer and some crazy ideas for this fic. I'm hoping to have updates occur on or before the first of each month. Given my history….

Nah. GlidingOne is totally going to keep me on track. (LIES, she says!)