A/N: wow here's one thing i told myself i'd never ever write. original character fics can get, uhh, fairly mixed receptions. but i'm bored and this wouldn't leave me alone. hopefully the characters don't make ppl wanna poke their eyes out lmao.

"Open your eyes, Rin, and save them all."

First: It's raining. As her last moments play over and over and over again behind her closed eyelids, each raindrop causes her to flinch as though struck.

Second: there is a stiffness to her chest and an ache in her bones but she's breathing and can't feel the stingburnthrob of how she died.

She cracks open her eyes and shifts her heavy head to look around.

Third: there is an unconscious boy lay on his side just a couple of feet away from her.

And four: there is something in her head, something raging and furious, and it isn't her own voice that is too busy screaming hysterics that this is wrongwrongwrong.

She tries to piece things together, but she finds she has started shaking. She is shaking and shaking and shaking and she feels wrong in this body; it's too small, too muscular, with angles that aren't hers and she should be dead—

The boy has silver hair, is wearing dark, durable clothing that has seen better days, and has a metal plate on a band across his head. In her silent, shaking hysteria, she dimly registers that she knows where she is, and when she is, and who she is.

Two sets of memories war in her head, and a choked sob catches in her throat and turns to a retch as she remembers knives and cruel hands, and lightning piercing through her heart.

Rin — that's not my name that's not m — vomits blood and whatever sheRinshe had eaten earlier.

There is a part of her that desperately wants to go to the boy, wake him up and heal him with abilities that should not exist and she should not know, but there is another part of her that screams that this isn't possible, she should be dead and not— not—

Not in a dumb show she watched with her little brother.

(But she doesn't have a brother, or an older sister, not here, not in this war-torn, cruel country or anywhere in this world, she doesn't even have parents, she lives in her own ratty apartment with no one but her sensei, his wife and her two — one only one but wait shouldn't there be another — friends to keep the loneliness at bay.)

She aches. The scarring across her chest is tight and uncomfortable and sets a throbbing in her shoulder and an exhaustion in her bones like nothing she has ever felt except in her last days as— as— what was her name?

She is, somehow, impossibly, Nohara Rin, and as she drags herself over to the prone body of Hatake Kakashi, a sob works its way up her throat and chokes out of her mouth. She reaches out, fists a hand in his shirt and stumbles over the name of a person that shouldn't exist. "K—Kakashi…"

The feel of a real, warm body beneath her hand makes this all the more terrifying, and she buries her face in his side and squeezes her eyes shut, but that just makes the darkness and the pain and the terror of Before flash before her and she has to open them again and face this terrible reality so that she doesn't go insane.

There are bodies all around them — Enemy Kiri — and blood watered down by the rain. Beneath her, Kakashi flinches, and she is dimly aware of something warm and crackling in her periphery senses, like ozone in the air or on her tongue, or a hum of a generator in her ears and one set of memories tells her that she's crazy and another says that she's just sensing Kakashi's chakra as he wakes up.

"Rin…?" A grey eye blinks blearily up at her as though Kakashi was doubting he was awake at all. And then it goes wide, one hand reaching up to pull the headband — hitai-ate — over the scarred eye and the other grasping at her flak jacket. "Rin— How—?"

How how how she doesn't know. She wonders what she must look like, clothes torn and soaking wet with water and blood and tears and vomit and decides that she must look too much like however they will find her body in Before, and another bubble of hysteria works its way up her throat. She can't stop shaking.

Kakashi takes her shoulders and pulls her close, desperately, and she thinks he might be shaking too, although that could just be because she must be rattling his bones with how severely she is trembling. She tries to relax into the hold, because she knows Kakashi doesn't she? Doesn't she?

(The thought that no, she doesn't, she doesn't know or have anyone in this world she's just an imposter who should have died in the body of a girl who shouldn't exist and who also should have fucking diedis lonely, and leaves her feeling cold.)

"Rin— The seal— The bijuu—"

She flinches, because right. Nohara Rin. She is Nohara Rin. The girl who died a hero to save her village from a rampaging bijuu. Except that she didn't, because she's here, Rin is alive and she's her and there is absolutely a beast in the back of her head and somewhere deeper inside her than her atheist background would have let her believe possible Before.

"It— It's gone. Th—The seal," and god she can't stop trembling, "The— The bijuu is— It's there— It's there—" She has to stop, because her voice is wavering and she's ready to start screaming and crying and rocking back and forth until men in white jackets just come and take her already, because as horrifyingly real as this all seems she can't quite fathom that she is here, in a place that she knows only from fiction, and alive and breathing.

"I—" Kakashi clears his throat, letting go of her to reach for something in his kunai pouch. He pulls out a three-pronged kunai with sealing she doesn't understand inscribed on it. Hiraishin. "Sensei, he— He'll know what to do. We should get out of the open," Kakashi says, sounding surer and surer of himself as he grips the kunai tight in one hand and takes her arm in the other. He staggers upright, pulling her with him.

She stands and it feels wrong. She is too short and slender; she feels as though a change in the wind would knock her over, but Kakashi slings her arm around him, and then they jump and she infuses chakra into it because this is war and her instincts are honed even as inside her head she screams at the wrongness of it all, and they land safely in the cover of trees. Kakashi cleanly throws the kunai over his shoulder and into a nearby branch without even looking, his attention entirely on her and on settling her down against the trunk.

There is a yellow flash, and she thinks safety and also this man is going to die.

Blue eyes that should be filled with kindness and not the harrowed weariness of war scope the area, and then fall on Kakashi, and on her. Minato Namikaze, Minato-sensei, Kushina's husband, Naruto's father, Yondaime, Yellow Flash. This man is going to die. This man is going to die. It aches, it aches fiercely and she wants to scream and deny it because this is just a show or some delusion, but after the feel of Kakashi's very real hands she is left with an awful terror of everything in this world that is so war-torn and violent and no place for her. (This man is going to die.)

"—hear me? Rin? Kakashi, she's going into shock, how much blood did she lose?"

"I—I can't say— The Chidori was all I could manage before losing consciousness."

Her ears are ringing with the roars of a bijuu and the rain in the trees.

"—back to Konoha."

Hands on her, around her shoulders and under her knees, she's flinching violently at the contact, she's rising, lifted. Eyes like a summer sky and a halo of blonde hair is the last she sees.

Why am I alive?

Why did Nohara Rin survive?

As soon as she comes to she knows she's in a hospital; she's spent too much time on placement to not recognise the sounds bustling activity and scent of disinfectant. The room is bright when she opens her eyes; it's daytime, and beyond that distinct hospital smell is that of a warm summer sun on trees. She's in Konoha.

The bijuu is silent in her head, but as she shifts a hand over her stomach she can feel some kind of residual chakra there — sea salt and waves Kushina did this — and knows it isn't gone.

"Rin?"

The name that is hers and isn't. She flicks her eyes over to Kakashi, who is waking from what must have been a very uncomfortable doze in that chair beside her bed. He leans forwards slightly, hesitant, and after running his eyes over her features and vitals he averts his gaze completely.

"I…thought I'd killed you."

But you didn't. Someone else did. You should have killed this body, this girl, but somehow you didn't.

"I'm alive," she says, Rin says, her voice hoarse. She wonders if she screamed while they fixed the seal on the bijuu.

Kakashi clears his throat after a beat. "The bijuu healed you. Your heart was completely reformed but it left you exhausted and you went into shock. Kushina-san and Minato-sensei fixed your seal." He stands abruptly, makes to say something more, but stops himself. Kakashi leaves without another word.

She wants to call out for him, ask him to stay. She doesn't. She can't when all she can see is Kakashi's horror-struck face juxtaposing with his satisfied smirk, a hand crackling with electricity and clean through her chest, and a knife, cold and unforgiving, in the exact same position.

I'm alive.

Minato knocks on the door sometime later, holding a bag of takeaway in one hand and a gift basket in the other and a smile on his face. She tries to smile, because she knows him through both memory and the medium of a television screen and knows that he is a kind, good man, but she can't quite manage it.

"I thought I'd take the liberty of getting you some ramen; I've had plenty of unfortunate experiences with the food here, so I thought you might appreciate something less…lumpy," he says with a bright smile, placing the paper bag on her bedside table. The gift basket is offered out to her. "Kushina-san put this together for you, too."

She — RinRinRin — takes it with hands that shake. A yellow rabbit with a green Konoha leaf stitched on the foot, a couple of medical journals she hasn't read, a potted aloe vera, and a card wishing her well signed by Kushina, Minato and Kakashi (except, she notes, that it's Minato's handwriting and not Kakashi's for his own name). Tears prick her eyes. She appreciates it. She does. But— But she doesn't know what to say, how to react, because yes she is Rin and Rin is her but— but she isn't just that anymore.

She is Rin, she is a name she can't seem to grasp, she's a jinchuuriki, she's a fourteen year old medic and a twenty year old student nurse. She's died two violent deaths that she can't stop replaying behind her eyes. She is in a world that should only exist in fantasy, fighting a war that is all too real. Her best friend tried to kill her and should have succeeded. She's torn between remembering the ache of losing her other best friend, and the knowledge that he's actually still alive but thinks she's dead and is on a path that will lead to the death and destruction of both himself and countless others.

Rin. It sits right, it feels right, but that's not all she is.

It leaves a sour taste in her mouth and a heavy feeling in her heart, but Rin will have to do until she can figure out where to go from here.

"How…How are you feeling, Rin-chan?" Sensei asks, leaning forwards with his elbows on his knees. "Kushina-san and I fixed up your seal, but are you experiencing any discomfort? Anything out of the ordinary?"

She shakes her head jerkily. "N—No. It — the, uh, the bijuu — is quiet now."

Minato pauses, but there's a hard look in his eyes. "I need you to tell me everything you can remember about what Kiri did to you."

Rin will try, but everything is muddled and dark. She has everything confused, different experiences crossing between lives, memories overlapping. The only way she can really distinguish between the two is gleaming hitai-ate and kunai, as opposed to a familiar smile and a kitchen knife.

"It—It's not very clear, sensei," Rin admits.

"Try anyway," Minato presses. "I have to be out on the frontlines again in a couple of days, so we need to submit our reports soon."

Right. Missions and reports. Frontlines. Real life now this is real life now. "I don't remember being captured." Madara. Uchiha Madara. "It was night, and they used a genjutsu I think. The Kiri-nin tort— Um," she stops, not quite willing to use the word she should because it makes it scarily real. "They questioned me, but I didn't tell them anything. I don't remember the sealing or the curse mark on my heart or anything, I just know that it hurt and then I— All I wanted was to run here and—and destroy. Kakashi rescued me, and the Kiri-nin found us." Lightning flashes and a thousand birds. "I— Kakashi went to use his chidori. I knew that if we reached Konoha—" Home. Home. Home. "—it would be a disaster. I'd already asked him to kill me, but he refused. I took the chidori." Stepped right in front of it. To save home, to save Konoha. And died, and woke up with two of me in one body. Too much life in a single person. "I couldn't think of another way to stop myself from running towards Konoha. I—Sensei, I died. I did, I felt it, I died— I died—" She grasps at her arms and squeezes, hard.

Hands that are gentle and not cruel go to take her own, but she jerks away, presses herself to the other side of the bed and stares with wide eyes while berating herself. It's just Minato-sensei. Whether character or teacher, he wouldn't hurt me. But hands.

Minato looks at her with understanding, and it makes her feel ill and unclean. He shouldn't have to look at her that way. He leans away with his hands in the air, placating. "Okay, it's okay, Rin." No chan, she thinks, and the familiarity, the closeness of it makes her feel…not better, but more assured in herself and in Minato. "You saved countless lives with what you did, and no one will forget that. The trauma to your sternum was…severe. The bijuu healed you but exhausted itself. It certainly made the sealing easier."

Rin wonders if she should thank the bijuu, the Sanbi, Isobu, but knows that she isn't the main character of this show and that she's more likely to be a jinchuuriki like Kushina than Naruto. A jailer to an undeserving prisoner, not a friend.

Her first night alone in her apartment is spent with the lights on in every room, a kunai in her hand, and reciting her times tables. When she can no longer multiply such awkward numbers, she moves onto medicine. Bones in the body, infections and treatments, different cancers. She goes on and on and on and eventually begins listing poisons.

And on she goes, until dawn.

Rin stands, showers and avoids mirrors as she dresses.

Then she leaves to wander the village, and returns in the evening and repeats.

And on she goes.

Rin wakes with a knife or a chidori in her chest and a scream caught in her throat, and then neither of them are real so she rolls over and pretends she can't feel her ANBU guard watching her.

This is her fifth day of living, and her first time sleeping.

In every shadow there is a man in a dark hooded jacket that watches her, and around every corner is a hand waiting to grab her and drag her back into hell.

Though she has always been Rin, she used to be someone else too, a lifetime and two weeks ago.

Nohara Rin is her name.

She once had another.