zero. my fantasy of you and i (and what we could have been)
TW: Allusion to drunk driving, mentions of a panic attack.
Notes: I decided to post this after months of it sitting in our drafts. This story is connected to File One however it isn't necessary to read that story to understand this one.
Enjoy!
—
She coughed water onto the ground and stared at the white knuckles of her clenched hands. She could feel the cold sting of the stone against her bare skin. Her party dress was drenched in water and it stuck to her body uncomfortably.
She was sure she had just died. That she had just drowned while holding her best friend's hand in her own, apologies fallen from her lips like the saccharine liquor she'd been drinking only an hour before. She had choked on the cold water as it had flooded her lungs and washed away any hint of the alcohol that lingered on her lips, and she—
Her body felt heavy, unreal even as she pushed herself onto her feet. Water dripped from her figure and splattered against the stone. The sound echoed through the area, and she shivered as a cold draft rattled her bones. She crossed her arms over her chest, rubbing at them in a futile attempt to keep warm.
She was cold and tired and wet and, most importantly, she was dead.
She moved through the room, her feet scraping against the uneven stone beneath her feet. There was nothing but pitch black surrounding her for miles and, despite not being able to see anything, she knew she was going the correct way. Her fingers curled into her arms as she walked through the dark.
She wanted to cry, to scream, to do anything but walk on forever.
Was this is her punishment for causing her friend's death? To walk the abyss forevermore thinking only of what she had done.
She wanted to go home.
A rumble rolled through the area, and a light shone through a small crack that formed on a wall that she was sure hadn't been there before. She wasn't one to look a gift horse in the mouth, though, so she jogged over to the area and ignored the cold sting on her feet.
She kneeled down in front of the crack and pushed her hand through, watching as the light engulfed. Then she crawled through, closing her eyes against the blinding light and flinching at the sound of baritone laughter that echoed around her.
She wanted to go home.
—
Kittens don't open their eyes until seven to ten days after they are born. That was something she had read when preparing to welcome her family's new kitten into the family. (Smores had been a delight to have around. It was terrifying that the kitten she had raised from birth and expected to mourn, had outlived her.)
When she woke up for the first time since she had died, it had been a few days after her initial rebirth. She had woken up screaming. The hospital had been unfamiliar with its white walls and the pungent smell of antiseptic. It wasn't home, and it scared her far more than she would like to admit.
Later, much later, she would be told that she had been labelled comatose for the first four days of her life, and the medics had blamed it on early exposure to malicious chakra. In another timeline, this body would've died when it was exposed to the Kyuubi's chakra, and she would've never existed. As it is, she had been stuck into this body, and she wanted to live, and so, she lived.
A few months after waking up, she was deemed stable and taken out of the hospital and sent to an orphanage. But it would be a couple more months before she truly realized where she was. It was crowded and loud, and the rooms smelt awful, but she had met the one human being in this place that would keep her from losing her cool. Her brother.
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.
She couldn't say that truthfully though, so she kept her mouth shut and helped her older brother try and catch the butterfly he was enamoured with.
—
At age five, she found out that she and her brother would be going to the Academy for Aspiring Shinobi and Kunoichi. Or AASK, as she had told Naruto when he struggled to say the entire sentence.
In other words, the orphanage forced them into the life of shinobi without asking what they wanted to do with their lives. No, not the orphanage, more like the Hokage himself. She wasn't shocked; the old bat came to visit them time and time again. Always telling stories of all the adventures he'd gone on as a young shinobi. He left a lot of the death and gored out. She noticed that right away. He made it seem like a fun sort of game. It was like he was holding up a banner; Come put your lives on the line because it's fun! We want you to be apart of our friendly ranks of war-scarred shinobi, you pack of scrubs!
She wondered if he felt bad for doing such a thing. If he ever looked at them and saw Minato and Kushina instead of Naruto and Kumiko. Sometimes, on the days he visited and left believing the lies that the orphanage matriarch spouted, she hoped that when he looked at them, he felt the crippling sadness of knowing that he had been too late to help their parents.
She hoped that every time Naruto smiled at him, that every time she showed him a new book she was reading, he saw Minato and Kushina.
Their treatment at the orphanage started to go downhill too, meals became scarce, and the different pranks and problems that arose were blamed on them. Though she wouldn't be surprised if Naruto had been the cause of a fair few of those pranks.
As the months went on, their treatment grew worse. They received blatant abuse and neglect from the caretakers because their skulls were apparently, 'too thick for words to get through to them.'
Demons don't understand anything but pain, in their opinions.
The children followed in suit, acting as the adults did. She refused to allow Naruto to go through such treatment, even if he was physically older than she was. She took the beatings in stride and refused to allow them to even touch her brother.
He was hers to protect and love, and she was his home.
Every night was spent with bruises covered with hot cloths and black eyes with ice packs. The only good thing to come from their treatment was that she had no hard feelings about beating up children who were mentally younger than she was. She had learnt Taekwondo in her past life. Even if her muscle memory was non-existent, she could still remember the lessons she had received.
She found peace in the way she broke the older kid's noses when they picked on her.
She tried to give Naruto some normalcy in his life. The poor boy was five and didn't deserve this treatment, so it was only fair she tried to make him feel like a normal kid. So she played with him and sung him songs she had learned in her past life. She danced with him and showed him how to climb a tree. She did her best to give him a childhood that wasn't filled with rocks and bruises and incredibly mean words. In all honesty, the time spent in the orphanage would have been something akin to spending time in hell.
And maybe that's what it was, her own personal hell disguised as another world that she had once been familiar with.
They were two months away from the start of the Academy when the orphanage kicked them out.
(Her fists are raised, and she spits her blood at the matriarch's shoes, "I'll show ya' what a monster is."
Nana-san, the matriarch, sneers down at her, and Kumiko pretends that the heat nestled between the spaces in her ribs is a sign of bravery instead of rage. Naruto is thrown out with their belongings in two bags, and she is leaning heavily on him. She has a black eye and a broken nose, but the matriarch has a bite mark on her arm that will be infected if not treated and a fractured wrist.
The feeling in her heart is pride.)
They went to the Hokage, and she planned to tattle until she went hoarse, but Naruto pleaded for her not to tell Hiruzen what the orphanage had done. He didn't want to pitied or something like that. She had rolled her eyes but allowed him to spin the story. Naruto, she realized with only a small amount of surprise, was quite the convincing storyteller when he wanted to be. If she hadn't known she'd just been kicked out, she might've even believed that they both wanted to be responsible and live on our own.
When the Hokage asks about her face before they leave the excuse of bullies falls from her lips without a thought.
Hiruzen looks at her with pity, and the burning between her ribs is back. She rolls her shoulders and straightens her back. She does not need pity from an old man who cannot say no to his bastard of a friend—a man who has condemned herself and her brother to a life of misery.
The Hokage sends a couple of shinobi off to find them an apartment. They sit in his office for three hours before a new shinobi comes in with an offer on his lips and a tired look in his eye.
His name is Hoshitari Yuuma. He's a tokubetsu-jonin who works as a medic during the weekdays and a bar owner on the weekends. He was a field medic when required, but after an accident that left him with a missing eye, he spent most of his time in Konoha General Hospital rather than outside the gates.
He was younger than most shinobi, he explained as they walked with him to their new lodgings, twenty-three and famous in the bingo-books for his chakra scalpel technique. His hitai is tilted in a way that is reminiscent of Hatake Kakashi. His tired eye that takes in the world is a dulled bottle green, and it held intelligence and a foreign kindness that she hadn't seen in years.
Naruto loved him within seconds.
It was adorable, really. Watching a trained soldier in his late twenties get mauled by an over-excited five-year-old? Cute as anything, it made her wish she had a camera to capture the moment.
She decided that she liked Yuuma as well. He was a man that had his life straight, or as straight as it could get in the shinobi world. Yuuma liked his two jobs. He liked running his bar. He liked helping people up at the hospital, even if his bedside manner was terrible.
He liked the occasional adventure and the smell of fresh whiskey as he popped it open in the bar. He liked what he did, and not many people could say that, not in her past world nor in this one. In fact, she was sure the only thing Yuuma wasn't happy with in his life was where his residence was located but other than that, he liked his life to a healthy degree.
It was admirable and, for her in this world, impossible to strive for.
For the most part, Yuuma tolerated them. He woke them up in the morning and made sure they were fed and cleaned, and then he left them alone. She couldn't ask for much more from the war-ridden man. He was obviously uncomfortable that he had to be in their presence, either because they were children or one of them was a jinchuriki or even for both those reasons. He was kind though, distant and unsure but kind.
A few weeks later, they all sat comfortably in the small family room of Yuuma's apartment and talked about their futures that Naruto realized what exactly Yuuma was capable of. Yuuma spoke of how he wanted nothing more than to protect his friends, and because he had such good chakra control, he utilized it.
"Most people think being a medical ninja is for a woman, but it's for everyone," He paused as he manipulated his chakra into a scalpal, "And what you learn can be used in combat situations should the need arise."
Naruto grinned and clapped his hands together, "That's it! I'm gonna be a medic just like you, Yuuma-San. Then I can heal my sister when she does somethin' dumb to protect other people!"
"I don't do dumb things!"
Laughter filtered through the house, and even though the feeling of anxiety was thick in her stomach, she kept smiling. Naruto wasn't striving to be the best ninja ever, and that spelt trouble for this world.
Part of her felt like ignoring it all and walking away. Turning her back on Konoha was easy because no one but her brother mattered, and he would be a medic. He would be fine.
But the uncomfortable twist in her stomach and the lump of guilt in her throat made her reconsider. If, or rather when, Pein came to collect Kurama, was she really not going to anything? Would she truly leave her brother to his mercy knowing that she'd be dooming everyone when she could've saved them? Will she allow Sasuke, who is not so much older than her brother, to face the massacre alone? Face Orochimaru alone? Will she allow Itachi to be condemned to a fate he does not want?
That night she woke up restless and forced herself into the bathroom. The girl staring back is not who she wants to be, not who she remembers, but she stares anyway. She does not want to dream of pretty boys with curly hair and missing eyes or handsome men with straight long hair and sickening coughs.
She does not want to dream of the shadows that lurk in the corners of Konoha. She does not want to think about the future that she can't prevent.
She doesn't want to think of the spilt blood she might be able to prevent.
("What's your nindo?"
"My nindo? I don't know, I never really thought about it."
"Well, what's the most important thing to you?"
She hummed, "The most important thing? Well, based on that, then I guess my nindo is—)
She gripped the porcelain sink and glared at herself in the mirror. She was stronger than this, she wanted to say, stronger than one future.
Nothing is set in stone; her mother had told her that you can change anything if you try hard enough after she divorced her father.
"My name is Uzumaki Kumiko, and my nindo, my ninja way, is to change and protect the future of my precious people."
A crow caws outside the bathroom window, and Kumiko falls asleep in the bathtub.
This isn't home to her, not yet, but she is trying, and that's all that matters.