Chapter Text
Reincarnation for the Win
The measure of intelligence is the ability to change. ~ Albert Einstein
Prologue: What the Fuck is this bullshit?
She remembered dying.
Or not dying exactly, but certainly the expectation of dying.
It wasn’t a surprise, no.
With a disease ravaging the world that specifically attacked and/or affected the lungs, dying became a more potentially immediate reality than it had been previously and for good reason.
It all started when she was fourteen and became ill. Bacterial bronchitis. Only, she was away from home and had to wait several days for treatment as a result until she could be taken to an emergency clinic that handled her kind of health insurance.
Her lungs were never the same and little did she know it but that was the beginning of the end, albeit an end that wouldn’t come for another eighteen years.
Eighteen years of fighting bronchitis and lung infections every winter or early spring.
Of not having the lung capacity she used to have and seeing a sharp decline in quality of life as a result.
Add in early-onset fibromyalgia that helped to weaken her immune system due to fucked up sleep issues from the (suspected, doctors still weren’t entirely sure) neurological issues and being in constant pain, and yeah.
Dying of a lung-related issue wasn’t exactly a surprise even if previously in her more fatalistic moments she thought it would be something like pneumonia that would take her and not a global pandemic.
What she did not expect was, after what amounted to drowning in her own fluids at thirty-two years old, was instead of whatever made up the afterlife, she opened her eyes in a world both somehow familiar as well as altogether strange.
Konohagakure, Fire Country, The Elemental Nations
The first clue that it was looking like reincarnation was winning the eternal debate from the world of her first life regarding what happens after we die came when she woke from what felt like the most confusing dream sequence ever.
And considering that in her first life she was a writer who thrived on the bullshit her mind could come up with when she slept, that was really saying something.
(For example, she’d never forget the vivid dream she had of being on a raft with her biological father and under attack by dinosaurs that was a result of having to ease out of taking her sleeping medication when she lost her health insurance along with her job.)
Now it had to be said that she was no stranger to what she often called a “sleep hangover” that resulted from sleeping too much in contrast with the cranky-ass behavior that might occur if she didn’t sleep enough. This wasn’t that. Instead, it was a wash of confusion and shit that did not make sense.
She wrote shit like this happening to characters, she’d never - well, there was a daydream or two… - actually thought it could happen.
Honestly, if it weren’t for one thing in particular, she’d assume that she was having a fever dream or had slipped into a coma.
But that one thing was a reality.
Or perhaps it should be said that it was a lack of a thing that convinced her more than anything.
She wasn’t in pain.
Rather: she wasn’t in chronic pain as after she flipped the fuck out and tumbled down to the floor (that was too close, why the fuck was it so close???) then she was in pain from bumping her knees and overbalancing and slamming her forehead into the floor.
Chronic pain of certain kinds (cold that burned and nagged and ached in her joints, fire burning along her tendons and muscles, knuckles that cracked and froze and went stiff) had been her old friends for far too long for her to ever not notice when she wasn’t in pain. Pain free days happened less and less every year. They were always a surprise. And she always noticed when they came and got a little more depressed when she woke up and they were gone again, likely for months.
Anyone who’d lived any length of time at all with a chronic condition of any kind would tell you: the moment it receded you noticed and dreaded when it would return.
The second clue were hands and feet that were chubby with baby fat.
The third was strong hands picking her up and turning her to face pretty brown eyes and golden brown hair in a tanned face.
But the nail in the coffin of maybe I’m just dreaming was the blue fabric headband with a metal plate in the center and a stylized leaf engraved on it: a Konoha hitae-ate from the Naruto series.
Seriously?
What the fuck was this bullshit?
That paralyzing thought - followed immediately by panic hoping that she didn’t have pink or blue or otherwise colorful hair that branded anime characters as the dreaded protagonists - was what led to the child-like cry in far too high pitched of a little voice than anything else.
Especially when it occurred to her that she was hearing Japanese but was understanding it just fine when all she’d known in - fuck - in her first life was how to say hello, sorry, thank you, and count to ten (and that last bit was shaky at best.)
It bore to be repeated: what the fuck was this bullshit?
Where were the peaceful clouds or the endless plains or the mead-halls?
Hell, at this point she’d take a goddess weighing her heart against a feather, at least then she’d be in an afterlife and not, not, having to go through the bullshit of living all over again.
She’d always had an interesting perspective on death.
Working in health care and with the elderly for a time hadn’t changed that.
Where others struggled and clawed and shook their fists at death, she’d always thought that death was peace. Rest. A gift after life.
Dying, she’d long thought, was easy.
Living was hard.
And now she had to do it all over again.
Fuck.
Some people would think that living again, getting a second chance, whatever they wanted to call it was a gift.
A chance to do better, to experience different things than what came before.
She was half certain it was a curse.
Which, given how she’d depicted some gods and goddesses in her writing over the years, if it was she probably from their perspective had it coming.
But still: fuck.
Naruto wasn’t exactly puppy dogs and fluffy when it came to fictional worlds.
Though there were plenty of puppy dogs with the Inuzuka Clan running around, so you know, that was a win.
Living in the Naruto ‘verse would be a struggle from the first, even if she ignored the fact that the woman holding her - her mother, who looked almost nothing like her mother, her second mother? - was clearly a kunoichi so she was likely expected to be one as well.
When she met their roommate in their two bedroom apartment where she shared her room with her mother - kaa-chan, she was kaa-chan - she discovered she had a new uncle as well (that was fine, generally speaking she had a decent record with uncles) her new oji-san just as tall and broad and handsome as some of her uncles from her first life. And she’d had a lot of uncles in her first life. More than most people given that both of her parents had come from families that were abnormally large in that era.
Oji-san had blue eyes and sandy brown hair, like the uncles she remembered most fondly, and like them also towered over her kaa-chan who was only of average height.
The more things changed, she supposed, the more they stayed the same.
Her name, of course, was one of those things that changed.
She wasn’t in the United States any longer, she was in Fire Country.
And her name now was Ono Toshiko, from a clanless family of shinobi in service to the Hokage of Konohagakure, and months after she - she could only call it waking up though she suspected it was closer in line with her physical mind finally being able to cope with her...spirit’s? Memories - woke in her second life she discovered that she was only a year old.
Which led to another realization: there was no way shinobi were the same kind of humans as she was used to.
Her mental abilities she would’ve been able to brush off from her reincarnation being right fucked over.
Her physical abilities? Abilities that were in no way similar to what she remembered toddlers being capable of from walking and running early to being stronger than she expected until she got used to her new form to how quickly she healed and her pain tolerance were not normal.
Which, shinobi, new world, she had to adapt even if she thought it was fucking weird.
Whatever.
She was a writer, or she had been, she could handle a little plot twist.
Still: annoying.
Not as annoying to have to learn an entire new culture, writing system, and language in addition to every-fucking-thing else that went with being spit out from the void into Naruto-land, but not exactly a day at the spa either.
She would adapt.
She would survive and live and even thrive in this second life.
When it came down to it, she was just too stubborn and spiteful to do anything else whether that second life was a result of a blessing or a curse.
She’d been tired for a long time before she died. However she’d been granted a second life, she was never going to thank anyone for it, no matter how amazing or awful it ended up being. That said, if she ever met the reason she was sucked into the Naruto ‘verse, there would be much shin-kicking to be done.