Death has a strange sense of humor. I had failed in protecting my teammates, and as punishment, I am thrown back in time and into the body of my killer no less. Growing up in a family of assassins who cared more about money than kin wasn't easy, but...
"I wonder if I've been changed in the night. Let me think. Was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I'm not the same, the next question is 'Who in the world am I?' Ah, that's the great puzzle!" ― Lewis Carroll
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THE WORLD HAD TO BE TURNING MY LIFE—and now my death—into one big joke.
My life hadn't flashed before my eyes and I hadn't recalled the arms of my sister or the lips of my boyfriend or even the gruesome Shinobi war which had taken my life. It felt like minutes between the macabre destruction and violence and complete horror before I had been yanked from my own body. I felt like a marionette on a string, watching the leaking red coat my blonde and bloody corpse. Next thing I knew, I was reborn.
Not metaphorically, but actually reborn. Perhaps Shion might have said 'well at least you get to live again, you ungrateful bitch.' But no, fuck her.
I'm living the fucking dream right now. Shitting my pants. Learning how to get my chubby legs to start moving like some crippled little bitch.
But this story isn't about me literally shitting my own pants.
Now, death isn't so bad. My life had been an uneventful bore until the war had stripped it away from me. I was a medic and I graduated with no remarkable fighting skills other than being a remarkably expert medic. My Chakra control had always been exquisite, but it was the brain that truly worked wonders even if I was never a particularly talented martial artist. I couldn't perform the feats of my peers or even of my own teammates. Shion was the strongest person I had ever met, but it hadn't saved her just as medicine hadn't saved me.
Ironically, I chose Iryo-Ninjutsu because I had been afraid of death and of fighting or being hurt. It hadn't been because I was gifted with an eidetic memory or ease at science. It wasn't because I had some noble need to heal the sickness in the world or Gods forbid, help people. If it hadn't been for my sister's death, I wouldn't have even been in the ninja academy. I wasn't supposed to be here.
But I was and now I was dead.
"If you could be reincarnated," Shion had asked once over the crackling fire and Hikaru's snoring. "What would you want to be?"
"Bakery. I want to make cakes and have lots of babies," I had answered back then, greeted with silence and then Shion's haughty laughter. But those were the sorts of things I dreamed of when I had been 'Kazama Misaki'. I had wanted to sell flowers or work in a hospital and not in a fucking field, surrounded by fire and screaming. But that wasn't how a war-torn Konoha operated. They had found out about my innate ability for healing—a rarity among academy students—and thusly pushed me into the awaiting claws of Iryō-Ninjutsu.
