Sunshine

z e r o .

Her brother was a bright little thing. With blond hair that resembled a sunflower's petals and eyes so blue, they reminded her of the midday sky. For him, she stayed calm and docile even when the other children pulled her hair or threw food at her. Even when the matriarch scolded her for things she couldn't possibly have done. For him, she would be an anchor of peace in the turbulent ocean they had been thrust into.

For him, she would be his home.

She couldn't remember having a bed to herself in this place. Thankfully, she usually shared her sleeping quarters with her brother. None of the caretakers liked putting other children with him. She didn't mind sleeping with the energetic boy —not that she had any real say in the matter— because he was always warm, which contrasted against her always cold self.

A symptom of death she would joke later on in life when people touched her and shivered. They'd laugh, of course, but they would never understand as she did.

She wasn't a very active child, much preferring to sit by the blocks and stack them with only a small amount of interest. Her brain was muddled with memories of her past life, memories her tiny brain couldn't handle. She remembered things in short bursts, like the taste of strawberries and the feeling of hot beach sand between her toes.

(The feeling of fear pulsed in her gut as she held onto the steering wheel. The windshield had cracked, and water was pooling in; Holly was unconscious beside her, and she could feel the cold grip of water pooling up past her ankles and rising fast.

She coughed, wincing at the pain that burned through her chest. She was sure she had broken her ribs during the impact of their fall, and now they were going to drown. They were supposed to graduate in a week.

She didn't want to die.)

When she turned three, she remembered the more important aspects of who she used to be. The shows she had watched and the books she read—her views of her past world and how she felt about things. But the most important memory came to her out of the blue.

She had been playing with her brother, throwing rubber toys shaped as odd weapons at him while he shrieked and cheered when on hit him on the face, and he toppled over. She had laughed, threatening to throw another before he shouted at her, "That hurt, you know!"

("My name is Uzumaki Naruto, and I never go back on my word! That's my nindo, my ninja way!"

She knocked her shoulder with the red-haired boy beside her, "What's your nindo?"

The boy laughed, and the television screen was paused, "Why do you ask?"

"I'm curious is all, and I guess I want to know what's important enough to you that you'd make a vow about it."

"Well, my nindo would be to live life to the fullest with the person I love."

"And who is it that you love?"

"I love—")

She doesn't know why she remembered then. When their eyes met, and the rubber toy, the rubber kunai, slipped from her grasp, and it dawned on her that she was looking Naruto Uzumaki in the eyes. She didn't think Naruto really noticed her sudden switch in her mood because he was distracted by something across the yard.

Her brain was going a mile a minute as she tried to understand the information that had just been dumped onto her. Naruto Uzumaki was her brother, which fine. She could deal with that. But that meant she was the daughter of Minato Namikaze and Kushina Uzumaki. One of them had the Kyuubi sealed within them. The only problem was that she wasn't sure which one of them had the demon. She wanted to say she was content, not knowing, that it made it easier if she didn't know.