Chapter Text
They do not remember the first time they noticed it.
That strange blanket feeling of being slightly apart from everything around them.
It was as if the edges of the world had softened and they had become the only thing cut in sharper relief.
Or sometimes, the opposite.
A misalignment they could never quite name. A subtle blur in the corners of their world, like looking through a glass smudged by hands.
Everything felt slightly fuzzy at times, reminiscent of TV static.
Memories begin to flicker in and out like candlelight in wind; childhood glimpsed through a haze of innocence.
A hand pressed too hard against a doorframe. The scrape of skin on wood. Pain that should have stayed with them, but faded before they could name it.
They try to reach back, sometimes to grasp the images, and the shapes of things that are familiar, half-remembered.
Yet no matter how hard they try, the images slip through fingers that aren’t quite theirs.
There are times where they feel like a visitor in their own skin. Their limbs will fumble with a clumsy grace, like a puppet relearning its strings, tangled and unsure.
The world was a puzzle made of light and shadow.
Their eyes held questions they didn’t know how to ask, and their words would catch beneath the surface of their tongue.
A thin pale line running along the side of their palm.
Their eyebrows furrow.
A scar should be there, like a pale silver river leading to their wrist.
An accident, something tells them, at the back of their head. They didn’t catch it properly.
(Catch it? Catch what?)
But when they look, their hands are unmarked, soft, small. No roughness in the fingertips.
They remember callouses at the base of the fingers, the thickened patches along the thumb from hours gripping something heavy.
All of them gone now.
The hands in front of them look like they belong to someone who has never done a day of work.
(Of course not. They are, what, four, going on five?)
(But didn’t silver-blue-lightning graduate at—)
(… Who?)
They curl their fingers slowly, as if to coax the memory of strength back into them.
Half recollections. It makes them uneasy.
They don’t like mirrors.
The face is theirs. It has to be. It moves when they move, blinks when they blink, tilts its head with the same cautious slant.
But it isn’t right.
The shape of themselves is wrong.
Their eyes are too round, then too slanted, or not wide enough. Grey as storm clouds and flecked with amber; their eyes seem to hold the ebb and flow of the tides, the restless sea of a storm, sparking with gold like distant lightning.
Their jawline is sharper than it should be. The mouth feels borrowed. Their teeth are less crooked. Food tastes different now, too — they have new favourites.
But then, the shape of their grin is wrong too; pulling back their lips to reveal a flash of teeth, not the tug of their lips in a single gentle smile.
They touch their cheek, drag a finger over the skin.
(They feel an urgent, inexplicable need to find some paint.)
Their hair falls in familiar waves, a comforting, dark brown hue at a first glance, and yet light catches it in a russet-gold shimmer towards the tips, like sparks running along the strands.
The style is no longer the neat, straight bob they can sometimes recall tickling their shoulders; it spikes and twists, teased by some restless current.
And a flash of yellow streaks through her fringe, cutting through the brown like a bolt of lightning.
Classrooms smell of chalk dust and ink, of polished wood.
The faint warmth of sunlight winks through open windows and the room soaks it in greedily. Desks stand in rigid rows, and chairs are tucked in neatly.
Around them, children chatter.
Voices rise and fall in an endless, unintelligible hum.
Laughter. Sneezes. Footfalls. Scents; citrus, hair gel, old sweat—
Suddenly they are stumbling over the invisible edges of this world, re-learning the rules and structures.
Senseis move at the front of the classrooms, hands gesturing as their voice explain common knowledge, words washing over them like water.
They repeat the instructions to themselves, lips moving silently. Unfamiliar words falling apart and reforming in the space between thought and sound.
It never sticks for long, their focus. Their attention slips sideways, caught on the shifting sunlight through the window, the shuffle of someone’s shoes, the way a pencil rolls across a desk.
Whole sentences vanish before they can hold them, replaced by fragments of daydream and the dull hum of too many voices chattering at once.
Math blurs into meaningless numbers. History dissolves into names and dates that skitter out of reach when they try to remember them. Science becomes a wall of terms they find too boring to memorise.
It’s aggravating, every step of the way, to them as much as it is to the senseis trying to corral them into order.
Their classmates find it funny, the way they trip over instructions, repeat things silently to themselves, drift mid-explanation — laughing with a careless, bright warmth that a part of them envies.
Relief filters in like a soothing balm, that at least they are not scorned for it — a fleeting ease, that doesn’t last very long.
(Streaks of orange shines through the film of remembrance. An old brightness in the face of adversary they strive to match.)
Every lesson feels like a battlefield. The Need To Know More claws at their chest, but their own mind rebels, splintering into tangents they cannot contain.
Memorisation used to be easy, they would fiold pages of information neatly into place in a system organised within their own head. Now it slips like sand through clenched fingers, attention dwindling.
Derealisation wraps around the edges of every day life, making the world feel distant, language difficult to understand.
None of it sticks unless it is interesting enough to catch their attention. Unless it grabs them by the collar and drags them fully awake.
Everything else slips away. And yet, always, the itch to remember, to understand, to absorb, surges back, fierce and relentless, leaving them both exhausted and wanting more.
The weight of a kunai in the palm comes to mind, and they recall how terrain could be read, how to read the angles of a wall. Begin cross referencing it with the new subjects.
They step in old knowledge like sinking in molasses, tugging it out and combing through it to apply it where they can.
Pieces come in fragments, slipping through like water.
But ultimately, here, everything is different. There are new names, new borders, new rules, new systems.
It is too much to hold in a head still trying to remember what it has already lost.
Movements that should have been second nature to them feel foreign, as though their body is learning to work through them from scratch.
(Which it is.)
Working through katas only leads to others surrounding them, though, loudly shouting over each other as they clamber around during Physical Education or Break Time.
“Are you playing Heroes? I wanna play too!”
“—be All Might! You can be—“
“—a cool move, do it like this!”
“What Hero are you playing as?”
Ah, who are they playing as?
The question always snags at something within them.
Their stance tends to falter, their rhythm breaks.
These weren’t games, were never games. Maybe their movements started out that way but they were practice for survival not play.
(They weren’t playing at anything. These weren’t hero tricks. These were things they remembered. Things drilled into them until they became second nature. Katas, not games. Defense, not play. Shinobi, not hero.)
Heroes, villains— those words skated off the surface of their mind without sinking in.
They smile at the others anyway, small and awkward, because that is what is expected.
The truth is harder to name. Because none of it made sense here.
It didn’t even make sense to them.
And so the words would remain caught in their throat.
“I … don’t know yet?” they say with a soft grin, and the other kids laugh and press closer, already giving them names and quirks, already deciding for them.
Heroes.
They hear the word everywhere.
Scrawled across posters in bright letters, shouted on the playground, whispered with awe when a cape passes overhead.
Heroes smile from television screens, wide and brilliant, promising safety. They are adored. Named. Remembered.
Are shinobi heroes?
… No.
They don’t think so.
Heroes are remembered. Written into songs and textbooks, watched on TV, gilded in memory. Faces raised to the sky, names spoken with pride.
Heroes are looked up to.
Shinobi— shinobi are tools. No glory unless you were truly one of the best. Singled out by all the other geniuses as one of them.
But for most shinobi, the highest honour to be won was their name carved into the Memorial Stone.
Complete the mission. Kill for your village. Protect your comrades. Duty and sacrifice.
Shinobi were remembered, maybe, if they were strong enough or tragic enough.
Senju Nawaki in the Second Shinobi World War. Hatake Sakumo and Might Duy in the very early days of the Third Shinobi World War.
Mostly they were not.
Obito was—
Obito is dead.
At night, the dark offered reminders too.
But dreams slipped away before they could properly grasp them.
Whispers of voices, laughter, bright shapes that vanished the moment they reached for them. Faceless figures whose names were just on the top of their tongue.
Only impressions remained, etched in memory like half-remembered songs.
Colour endured.
Sunshine yellow and cerulean blue. Sunset red, and deep purple. Shocking silvers and burnt orange. Dark, rich navies and soft browns.
Green.
Every shade of green. From the gentlest moss, to deep, shadowed jade of leaves overhead.
Greens that smelled faintly of rain and stone, of mornings just begun and afternoons already fading.
Dreams such as these … they leave behind only a cold emptiness in their chest, a hollowness that curls around the ribs and makes each breath splutter, uneven, as they claw their way back to consciousness.
Even as they wake, the residue lingers: a quiet dissonance, a nudge that screams something vital has been lost.
When they try to hold on, to remember any of it, the recollections usually tend to scatter like dust in sunlight.
Because they are memories that do not belong to him, traces of a life never lived.
But they linger because she remembers them anyway.
Denki is four years old. He does not understand.
He cannot; how could you, at that age?
Rin thinks she is thirteen. Maybe. She isn’t certain. Not certain if she is she, or if she is Rin, or if the number itself even belongs to her, or if it is just another broken memory alluding to someone else’s age.
They gather themselves piece by piece, but the mosaic of jagged, misaligned memories are too sharp and uneven to put together and hold.
Rin can do nothing but guard what she can. She folds the most jagged edges, the terrible memories, the biggest secrets and most horrifying truths inward, and tucks them away out of sight.
(Wailing screams that never end, stifled cries and the exhale of an enemy-nin’s last breath. War.
A body crushed beneath a boulder, an eye pried from one socket and stitched into another. Grief.
Being taken and horror dawning slowly as the puzzle comes into place; a trap.
And you have fallen for it. Then comes the pain-pain-pain, something ancient writhing under your skin, something terrible, waiting to explode beneath your ribs, something angry in a way you’ve never been before, something howling for freedom.
The fine line of being the one thing standing between that corrosive, explosive source of power and everything else; knowing it is you or the village, it is duty-duty-duty—
And it will destroy him; you are making a choice that will break him as it broke him before; an inverse of last time but coming full circle all the same: history does not repeat itself but it often rhymes.
But you must not hesitate, you must not falter, you must—)
Rin was a medic-nin; she knows too well that no child can survive the flood of horrors she has seen and endured. So she will hold the worst of it back. From him. From her. From them.
So they wait. For the moment when they might dare to face such things whole.
Until that moment comes, she who might be Rin, he who might not be Rin, delays the inevitable.