Title: nine point eight

Rating: T

Summary: Uchiha Itachi chose his village over his clan, steeled his heart and chose peace over his own blood. Izumi did not. (By the natural order of things, one day a young girl would willingly lay down her life for her love, and along with it, the lives of all her kinsmen. But I was not that girl; I was not that Izumi.) [SI/OC, Uchiha!OC, AU]

Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto.

Warnings: Violence, gore, etc. (Also very, very likely to contain high levels of angst, if you didn't already catch the implication in the summary. Aside from that –welcome to the story.)

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nine point eight

"00: dreamer, drifting"

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There is a truth that never changes and that truth is this:

Doing the right thing is hard. It's even harder to find the right thing to do. But what's harder still is striving do the right thing without even knowing for certain if what you're doing is right or not. Because in the end, what's "right" for you isn't necessarily "right" for me; what's "right" for one person might not be "right" for another, so in the end there's no real way of making everyone happy aside from compromising, and, let's face it–

No one is ever really happy making compromises.

Because the fact of the matter is, to compromise is to make concessions. Concessions that, depending on the situation, may or may not prove to be a bitter pill to swallow.

(Pick your poison, as they say.)

When Uchiha Hazuki fell in love with Kobayashi Ichiru, the chuunin gave up her status as a clan kunoichi to marry the handsome young jounin. She gave up her Uchiha name for the sake of love, the day she put her foot down and rejected the marriage arranged for her at birth, resulting in a tumultuous, heated argument that culminated in her fierce declaration that she would sooner slit her own throat here and now than marry the distant cousin who was a decade her senior.

Her loyalty forever and would always remain in the hands of the clan, she said. Her loyalty, but not her love life.

Hazuki had always been rather rebellious and outspoken as a teenager, borderline inappropriately so for an Uchiha. Her mother didn't think too much of it, calling it a phase, this teenage rebellion, and often calmed her traditionalist husband's fraying temper with soothing words of she's just a child and not worth getting worked up over.

Well. So much for 'just a phase.'

The young woman had desired love, had desired it so strongly that she actively chose to pursue love rather than quietly acquiesce to her family and her clan's wishes. It was not unheard of for Uchiha clansmen to marry outside of the clan, but for them to do as Uchiha Hazuki had done, to so brazenly disregard her original marriage contract, it was–

It wasn't so surprising, then, that Uchiha Hazuki became simply Hazuki, before she took on the name Kobayashi Hazuki. Perhaps the situation wouldn't have gone so far as to officially strip her of her clan's name if her marriage contract had been of less importance, perhaps there would've been more technicalities involved if Hazuki had activated her clan's bloodline further than the single tomoe she did. As it was, though, Hazuki moved to a corner of the Uchiha district with her jounin husband, no longer officially a Uchiha kunoichi herself but an Uchiha all the same in her bittersweet victory. Her children would still be Uchiha, given her bloodline, but she herself would never be an Uchiha the same way again.

The results from the debacle of Hazuki's marriage was something that no one was completely satisfied over, and the whispers that followed Hazuki in the initial months following her marriage to Kobayashi Ichiru were full of comments like ungrateful girl and for shame and her poor parents, raising a child like that.

But Hazuki loved Ichiru and Ichiru loved Hazuki, so even though things were rough and rocky in the beginning, they managed to get by, time smoothing over the edges and their relations with the rest of Hazuki's family.

Because family is family; blood runs thicker than water. Her parents, angry as they had been at the time of her marriage, still loved and cared for their daughter at the end of the day, regardless of the bickering and the arguments. And for all that the clan had been genuinely upset at Hazuki's brazen, irreverent, reckless actions, for all that the clan had deemed her punishment necessary, Hazuki was still a beloved daughter of the clan. That she no longer bore the Uchiha name on official documents had no bearing on the fact that Uchiha blood still ran in her veins.

The point of this entire spiel being:

It's hard to say whether Hazuki did the right thing or not, breaking her marriage contract the way she did. It took years before her parents were able to fix the relations of their family's branch with the other branch that the marriage contract had been arranged with, and it would not be entirely inaccurate to say that Hazuki's selfishness was a significant burden on her branch of the family after she departed for love. But at the same time, to take her future into her own hands as she had, to be brave enough to openly pursue love in a clan that emphasized tradition and obedience as strongly as the Uchiha did…

It takes a certain amount of courage to do something like that, I think. And Hazuki did indeed find her happiness with Kobayashi Ichiru, so it's all worked out well anyways.

… I suppose you can see this story as one of the many examples where it's hard to determine and do what's "right." You can also see it as the reason why my name is not Kobayashi Izumi and instead Uchiha Izumi.

Sounds familiar, maybe?

Uchiha Izumi.

Uchiha Izumi.

I hadn't even spared a thought in that particular direction until I was roughly four years old and had finally stopped blinking in and out of awareness in an alarmingly disconcerting manner. Patches of memories from whole months would seemingly disappear from my mind for no good reason and instead be replaced by eclectic visions of strange metal buildings and box-like vehicles on wheels and foreign sounds ringing in my ears. Of course, now I know them to be skyscrapers and cars and Korean, but you'll excuse me if I believe that I had a very good reason to be highly distressed at the time.

As a direct result of that, I had been easily prone to bursting into tears or crying at random both as an infant and in my early months as a toddler… or so I've been told. To be quite honest, I don't exactly remember the crying all that well –only the sheer panic, and inevitable memory-blackout afterwards, which only gave rise to more panic, and–

And I don't even remember the exact details of dying, of how I actually died, which is… probably for the best. Hooray for small mercies, and all that, or else I would've been a lot more messed up in the head than I already was. Probably.

Reincarnation is said to be a gift.

… Now, I don't mean to sound ungrateful, but I can't help but wonder what it means to be reincarnated into a world of glorified murderers and celebrated assassins. Maybe I'm being a little too harsh with it, but it is true, isn't it?

This world, the Naruto-verse.

When I'd first realized what sort of world I had been re-born into, my first reaction had been denial. Being reborn in a different world after dying like those harem protagonists from trashy light novels was already insane; being reborn in a fictional universe was a different level of insanity altogether.

(… Then again, putting things into perspective… being reborn with your memories intact is pretty insane already. So what's another level of insanity on top of that?)

It didn't occur to me for the longest time that I was the Uchiha Izumi, even after I'd figured out that I had somehow been reborn in the Naruto-verse, crazy enough as it sounded. Why would it? For starters, the very fact that this was a ninja world, militaristic and ruthless at its very core despite the themes of friendship and never-give-up in the Naruto storyline, was enough to send me into a mindless, dizzying panic.

Prior to my death, I hadn't been anyone special. I worked, I ate, I hung out with friends, I slept. Simple and monotonous, maybe, but there was a certain charm to it. It was a good life, fairly happy and content if not perfect, which was all I'd ever even really wanted. This whole being thrown headfirst into a fictional-not fictional world with the very real, very likely possibility of having to go out and fight?

Fight? Who, me?

You've got to be joking.

… I wasn't too clear on the precise details of the story, faded as it was in my mind and a good several years since I'd last cracked open any of the Naruto books, but I knew enough of the general plot to recognize the name Uchiha as that clan of pinwheel-eyed fighters. And by the time it dawned on me that I had been born into a family of assassins who took pride in fighting and killing other people, I realized that the toy knives I'd been given to play with by my parents were actual fucking knives and not toys.

My parents, both of whom were ninjas.

Kobayashi Ichiru and former-Uchiha now-Kobayashi Hazuki.

… What kind of parents gave their toddler kids steel knives to play with?!

(I would come to discover several years later that it was my distinctly un-childlike behavior that had aroused their suspicions at the time, that the whole 'let's see how our daughter fares with knives' thing was actually carefully monitored and controlled under their supervision. Jumbled as my mind had been at the time, I hadn't really understood the magnitude of what it had meant to play with the 'strange shiny toys' that my parents pressed into my hands and curled my fingers around… and by the time I'd finally recognized the shiny toys as kunai and shuriken it was a bit too late for second thoughts on the matter.)

All apprehensions about fighting, about the prospect of killing aside… I… don't deny that there was a part of me that was highly curious about these esoteric shinobi arts. Dangerous in nature and deadly as they were, ninjas were also cool, which… is the stupidest reason to sign up for the shinobi life if there ever was one. But my mind vaguely recalled superhuman feats of spitting dragon flames and summoning lightning, and if there is one vice that I've always had trouble reigning in, it is and had always been:

Curiosity.

… Maybe I can try to learn just a little bit? Just a tiny bit? I mean, genin from the series usually just run around the village doing random chores and errands… Naruto's team and the Wave mission aside, but he's the protagonist; crazy things always happen to the protagonist…

Being reborn into a child's body didn't necessarily mean that I mentally regressed to the level of a child, but it did mean that I was a heck of a whole lot more susceptible to childish whims and easily distracted, and once something caught my interest, it was damn hard to shift my focus onto something else. And unfortunately, the newness and curiosity I held towards shinobi was something that was very hard for my child-self to turn away from.

Both of my parents being ninjas who actively encouraged the 'unmistakable' signs of what they saw to be a budding mini-ninja in the works was not exactly helping things any.

… But that's all a little neither here nor there. The brief inner struggle I had over curbing my curiosity towards anything and everything ninja-related in favor of securing a civilian future promptly died a cruel, brutal death the day I saw Uchiha Itachi.

Yes, you heard me right.

Uchiha. Fucking. Itachi.

…

So here's the thing: Back when I'd initially figured out that I'd been reborn in the Naruto-verse… first, I'd panicked. What is this how is it even possible oh my god it's a village of murderers fuck I'm doomed I'm so doomed I don't want to die not again–

Upon finally managing to calm down, I'd then set upon a very important task: Find out where the heck in the timeline I'd been born. It wasn't too hard to find out who the current Hokage was –our newly-instated Yondaime Hokage, Namikaze Minato, the Yellow Flash; the hero of the Iwa war front– and so that gave me a general idea of where I stood in the grand scheme of things. Older than the main cast in the Naruto storyline, but not so old that I had enough time to properly prepare before things went to hell in a handbasket.

The next step in the plan, then, was to keep an eye out for canon characters. At this point, I had finally progressed past the initial stage of believing this to be a fictional world –and even if this world was fake, to my current mind and body everything was as good as real, so why continue to dismiss everything as fake?– but given the very fact that this was a "real world," then it only stood to reason that anything was possible. There was no guarantee that what was canon in the Naruto storyline I knew would also apply here: I myself was perfect evidence of that, wasn't I?

So, canon characters. See if they were different, see if they even existed, and then start making more plans for the future from there.

… Given that I was barely five years old at this point in time, this was actually quite hard to accomplish. It wasn't as if I could wander around the village on my own, and both of my parents rarely left the Uchiha district unless it was for a mission. From the few fellow Uchiha clansmen I'd met so far, though, none of them rang any bells with what little I'd managed to remember from Kishimoto's manga…

Maybe this is some sort of AU world of the canon Naruto-verse? … Where things aren't so bloody, maybe?

'Uchiha' is a name that automatically brings up two things: Sharingan, and massacre. Quite understandably, the madness-inducing aspect to the Sharingan bloodline aside, the 'massacre' part of it was a serious cause for concern. Because I sure as hell did not want to die again. But maybe, maybe if this was some altered Naruto-world where Namikaze Minato was reigning Hokage, surely there was no need for such worry? Surely it was entirely possible for everything to be fine…

Surely…

…

This fragile hope lasted until the day my mother Hazuki took me to the Academy.

And no, it wasn't for the first day of class.

We weren't the only people heading towards the Academy. There were so many people who strode to the Academy with us –or us with them– on that bright, sunny day, warm and cloudless in all its perfection. So many fellow clansmen whom I didn't recognize, so many people.

"Kaa-san, where are we going?" I gently tugged on her sleeve, "Why are there so many of us?"

"We're heading to the Academy, Izumi-chan." A soft smile from the ebon-haired woman, pale-skinned and beautiful, graceful and deadly the way all Uchiha kunoichi are raised to be. "There's a very special event happening today that we're all very proud and happy for, so we've come to show our support."

… Huh?

Some of the confusion must've come across on my face, because the beautiful lady who was my mother simply laughed.

"Our Clan Head's son is graduating the Academy today at the top of his class, Izumi-chan. It's a wonderful occasion!"

There words themselves were innocent, innocuous. Something about it unsettled me nonetheless, though I couldn't quite pin it down at the time… and it wasn't until we'd finally reached the Academy, until we were seated on the wooden benches in a section along with all the rest of the Uchiha clansmen who came, that it finally, finally occurred to me just what I was witnessing.

"We would like to give a special mention to the Rookie of the Year, Uchiha Itachi. Despite his young age, his performance in class has always been nothing less than perfect, and his work ethic is most impressive amongst all students in his year. It was a pleasure to have him as a student and watch him grow. Graduating at seven years of age, I believe we will be able to expect great things from him in the future as a splendid shinobi of Konoha. Congratulations, Uchiha Itachi-kun."

And I saw him, across a sea of proud parents and family friends, the boy who stood in front of all his classmates on the raised platform as the Rookie of the Year. Ebon-haired and pale-skinned just like any other Uchiha, only a mere seven young years of age, there was nothing about him that even remotely suggested…

… But no.

Uchiha Itachi. Uchiha Itachi.

This was the man who singlehandedly ensured the downfall of the Uchiha Clan, who killed every last clansmen… save for his precious little brother.

…

What were the chances? What were the chances that this was a world where nothing would go wrong, that this child would never have to grow up to choose between his village and his clan? Dare I think of betting on chance when it came to something like this?

What were the chances?

Seven years old, and already an Academy graduate. Didn't he have a meteoric rise through the shinobi ranks? Genin, chuunin, jounin, ANBU…

… S-class criminal…

"Izumi-chan?"

How can I stop this? What can I do? If he goes and kills off all the Uchiha again, I… I…

I DON'T WANT TO DIE.

"Izumi-chan, are you feeling alright? You're looking a little pale. Too much excitement for one day?"

"S-sorry, kaa-san." Barely aware of the words leaving my mouth, mechanically shaking my head. Uchiha Itachi is here he exists what if he kills everyone again? "I-I'm fine."

No I'm not fine to hell with being fine he's here what if he–

Just a child, nothing guaranteeing he'll be a mass-murderer–

But it's possible isn't it all the signs match: genius child, pacifist–

No, not the exact same world nothing says the story will turn out the same way–

But you can't say that for certain!

Maybe–

Maybe–

…

"… I'm fine."

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Hi.

Hi, my name is Uchiha Izumi. I'm not exactly familiar with this ninja business –in fact, I'm not familiar with any of this at all; I don't really know anything about how to fight, how to kill, and if it were up to me, I'd really much rather just do my very best to stay away from anything that has any semblance to do with the Plot, but unfortunately–

Unfortunately, my name is Uchiha Izumi.

Uchiha, as in the name of the clan massacred down to only one single child.

Uchiha Izumi, as in the name of the girl Itachi was supposed to fall in love with, the first person he killed on the night he brutally slaughtered his own family. A minor throwaway character who was, in a likelihood, only created on an afterthought solely for the sake of satisfying Itachi's manga fans in one of the many spin-off light novels than to be of any importance whatsoever.

…

… I don't particularly want to throw myself into life-or-death situations, I don't really want to learn how to kill–

But I don't want to die, either.

I don't want to die. Not–

Okay.

Okay, okay. I… I know that death comes to all living creatures, that life and death is the way of the world. All living things die eventually; nothing is eternal.

One day, I will be ready to die, but… not now. Not yet. Not today.

And it's precisely because I've died once already, that, more than anything I know what I want and I–

I want to live.

…

… In order to do that, it seems that there is no choice but to become a ninja, because I can't think of any other way to stand a snowball's chance in hell of surviving in this world. Not that becoming a ninja would somehow automatically, miraculously ensure that I would be able to survive, considering everything that the very act of becoming a ninja entailed, but–

But second chances don't come easily, and only a fool would waste a second chance to live again.

(I have no intentions of sitting around on my hands and waiting to die.)

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…

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Author's Notes:

Hello! Welcome to nine point eight, the latest in a long string of wild plot bunnies. Here's to hoping that this one stays in the garden for a little while longer until I finish the second chapter, I guess…?

Rambly prologue chapter thing here, will edit for mistakes later. I know I said I wouldn't be updating for the foreseeable future until exams are over, but this plot bunny wouldn't leave me alone to study in peace so…

… So! Basically, was trawling through more fanfics during my study breaks and this is the result of reading too many Uchiha!OC fics, I guess. Not sure if I want to keep the canon Itachi/Izumi thing (or not-so-canon now I guess, since it's an OC!Izumi?), so just sticking that in as a warning here so people don't get their hopes up too high. I guess we'll see how it goes? If it happens then it happens, but I won't be specifically building up to that…

The goal of this fic will mostly be to explore the concept of loyalty and what sort of importance/significance it has in the Naruto-verse, because it was random musings on the scariness of Shisui and Itachi's loyalty to the village trumping over their own family that got me started on this whole thing. Ninjas in the Naruto-verse basically started as mercenaries-for-hire; pay the coins and they'll do any job, so in a world where basically everyone looked down on them as the lowest of the low in the Warring Clans Era, there must've been a strong emphasis on loyalty to the family, right? And yet fast-forward several good decades into the future, and you have ninjas willing to sacrifice family for the sake of the village. That's an interesting transition to poke at, isn't it?

So ta-da: Here we have a foil to that in the form of OC!Izumi, who, instead of bowing to the greater good and siding with the village, chooses her own family. I will attempt to go about writing this in a semi-realistic way, so we'll see how deep this rabbit hole goes. Right now we're just starting off with Izumi just being determined to save her own hide, though. Which means there will be CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT! Fun stuff, that. :D

Please note that this story is AU! AU! I will be taking liberties to twist the Naruto-verse as I want, so this won't exactly all go down the same as canon.

… Lemme know if you find this chapter interesting? Cuz I dunno, if people actually like this rambling then I'll actually try to ramble more in the story instead of ramble here to myself like a crazy person. xD

Actually, I'll put that in a question here hang on:

QUESTION: Say 'aye' if you're on board with this plot bunny and would totally be down with seeing more of Izumi! Or just share your thoughts on this plot bunny in general: Stuff you'd like to see, suggestions, etc. Because not much has been planned for certain at this point.

… Um. Yeah.

Till next time!

-XxZuiliu