Chapter Text
Riley becomes aware of the fact that something is not quite right a few months before her second birthday.
Her cheek is pressed against something hard but warm, and she has the distinct impression of being carried. Her hand, when she brings it in front of her face, is small, with pudgy, uncoordinated fingers and tiny, short nails. But beyond that, beyond the wrongness of the size of her body and the leaden feeling to her limbs, is the fact that there’s noise in her head and she can’t get away from it.
And once she ‘becomes aware’ of all these things, she reacts in the only way she can at that point: she cries.
She’s aware of being carried, but the hold is all wrong; instead of soft, careful arms and a steady heartbeat by her ear, or the smaller, no less gentle albeit far bonier arms her brain supplies her with vague memories of, her head is cradled on an arm wider than her torso, the chest against her cheek flat and hard.
But worst of all is something that feels like an ocean raging right in her head, and it’s aggravating a sense that she doesn’t know how to describe, can’t remember ever experiencing before. It’s not tangible, but it’s in her head, and the pounding headache she feels building in her temples makes tears spring to her eyes.
She tries to call for the softer arms, for her usual carer, clumsy lips trying to shape unfamiliar sounds and ending up with something that comes closer to a warbled maaamaaa than the ‘kaa-san’ her brain aims for. She’s crying all the while, her lungs struggling to draw breath, her headache making her head feel like it’s being squeezed by a vice and she can feel the ocean by her ear become even more agitated, the waves choppier, rougher, and it only worsens the pounding in her brain.
She’s vaguely aware of being transferred to softer arms, her temple meeting a plush chest instead of hard muscle, and she tries to burrow into the softness, but then becomes aware of something else attacking that new not-sense, only this feels like a summer breeze in a meadow, wildflowers and blades of grass blowing in the wind, but the ocean is still there, and coupled with the meadow she feels nauseous, her head spinning.
She cries harder.
By the time soft-arms checks her nappy, puts her down in her bed, tries to feed her – which only results in Riley giving in to the nausea and throwing up all over her presumed-mother’s shoulder – her voice has grown hoarse, and the weird not-sense has noticed a third presence, like a still lake in the middle of a forest. It would’ve calmed her if it had been the only presence in the room, but in combination with the ocean, the meadow, and the newness of the not-sense, it brings her straight into the territory of full sensory-overload.
Then, hard-chest takes her again and she’s aware of a real breeze on her face and warmth on her small body, and everything suddenly gets a hundred times worse. There are dozens of sensations all around her, ranging from tiny sparklers to swamps and narrow rivers and thunderstorms and forest-fires and – and – and-!
She’s no longer crying. Instead, she’s almost catatonic, eyes screwed shut and tiny hands pressed desperately to her ears, but it does nothing to block out the noise.
Then, suddenly, everything’s cut away.
Her chest feels hollow, like somebody has carved something out of her, but the noise stops.
Blissful, peaceful, blessed silence.
She passes out.
“Congratulations.” Inojou watches the doctor say, his daughter, motionless, in one of the cribs on the paediatric ward, and he’d have panicked if not for the steady rise and fall of her tiny chest. “There’s nothing wrong with your daughter.”
“Then what-?” his wife starts to say, Inoichi clutching worriedly at her sleeve, but the doctor cuts her off, though not impolitely.
“She’s a sensor.” He tells them simply, and Inojou blinks. “The episode was a reaction to the sensory overload of being in a shinobi Village.”
“We haven’t unlocked her chakra coils yet.” Satsuki murmurs, shooting Inojou a worried look, and the doctor cocks his head, though, to his favour, he doesn’t shrug.
“It happens, sometimes. Children discovering their chakra without guidance is not exactly common but neither is it unheard of.” The doctor flips through the file clipped to his board and hums. “I’d recommend keeping her chakra sealed fully until her birthday, or unsealing only in mostly remote locations to avoid the overload she experienced today. Afterwards, you can start to train her, if you so wish.”
“Train a two-year-old child?!” Satsuki demands, and Inoichi shrinks back from her side and scrambles to hide behind his dad instead, prompting Inojou to lay a calming hand on his son’s shoulder and shoot a look at his wife.
This time, the doctor does shrug.
“If you wish.” He merely repeats. “Though if you want her to be able to function in a shinobi Village, then training her in her chakra sense sooner rather than later would only benefit her in the long run.”
“Thank you for your counsel, sensei.” Inojou intones, and bends down to scoop Inoichi into his arms as Satsuki bends to retrieve Tamaki from the crib.
They have some decisions to make.
In the next few weeks, Tamaki (Riley!) goes about orienting herself in her new surroundings. As much as she can, anyway, when she’s unable to read, write, understand or speak much of the language she’s suddenly surrounded by.
But she understands enough to know that she’s alive, somehow, and a toddler again, even though if she concentrates, she remembers snippets of a Before, of different faces and different-shaped eyes and technology and cars and a different language. She remembers up to twenty-four candles on a birthday cake, then bright lights and the screech of tires before everything went dark and she came to awareness a few weeks back.
She still doesn’t understand what, exactly, the double memories mean.
She understands that something happened, though, because since becoming aware of her new surroundings and waking up feeling like she’d had a panic attack, her new-father has been spending more time with her. Taking her out of the house, just the two of them, once or twice a week, to the fields and meadows around their house – compound? – and whenever they’re alone, he touches her stomach and suddenly, that weird not-sense is back. She can hear the ocean when she looks at her new-father, can taste salt on her tongue even though all she ate for breakfast was rice and some puree. She can feel a deer in the forest before she sees it approach, and even when she stands still, it feels like the world around them is breathing.
With just her father, it is not quite so overwhelming as the first time she became aware of the not-sense.
So she runs around the meadows, chases butterflies and pets the long-suffering deer with uncoordinated but gentle hands, does her level-best to get the stumble out of her step as she’s set on the ground, and then when she tires herself out, she climbs onto her new-father’s chest if he’s lying down, or clambers into his lap if he’s sitting, and allows herself to fall asleep with her ear pressed to his hardflat chest and the smell of the ocean in her nostrils.
Occasionally, another man joins them, and all Tamaki (Riley!) can think of when she looks at him is steady. Steady and unmoving like mountains, like the very foundations of the earth. This man is tall, tanned, and dark-eyed and haired, and he lies down next to her new-dad and watches clouds or talks quietly, and Tamaki takes to counting the words she understands like she used to count sheep before her medication kicked in.
She understands that there’s something she doesn’t fully grasp, though.
More importantly, though, she understands that her new-mother’s name is Satsuki, and that she is kind, and tall, and capable, with light green eyes and pale blond hair. Her mother sings her lullabies and reads her books when she can’t fall asleep, and she guides Tamaki’s (Riley’s!) chubby finger over the words as she reads them.
She understands that her new-father is called Inojou, and that he is quiet and steadfast, and even though he’s rarely home for long, she knows he loves his family. His eyes are like the clear summer sky and his hair a fine golden-blond he shares with her brother.
And her brother. Older, yes, but not by much – three, four years max, she thinks. He’s cheerful and gentle and always hugs her when he gets home from playing with the other children, and his pupil-less seafoam green eyes light up when she calls him ‘Ino-nii’ and his smiles tell her without words that she is precious.
Tamak (Riley!) thinks that she would kill for him. (will kill for him)
But it is not until her second birthday that she hears her brother’s full name.
“Inoichi-kun, go let Shikatema-oji in, would you?”
Inoichi.
Her brother’s name is Inoichi.
Suddenly, the last puzzle-piece that she has been missing for the last few months slots into place.
She passes out.
Tamaki (Riley) doesn’t really process the news so much as she…pushes it aside.
(You’re in Denial. A voice in her head whispers. It reminds her of perpetually-amused dark eyes, tweed blazers and stale coffee, of nights in libraries, and thick textbooks with more diagrams than words. Hurry up and get through Anger, that’ll be more interesting.)
She learns the language spoken around her, slowly, then all at once, though she still doesn’t really speak much. She still goes to the meadow with her father, and when he’s not there, her mother takes her once her brother leaves to play with his friends. She notices that they get closer and closer to the house every time they go out, and every time, her not-sense picks up some more sensations – a bonfire here, a hurricane there, a rainy morning elsewhere.
When she finds wooden knives scattered around the floor of the living room, with long handles and rings on the ends almost the size of her wrist, she shakes off the stupor and inside her, something rages. (Anger greets her with open arms. It’s always come to her the easiest.)
The next time she goes to the field with her father – and it barely counts as a field anymore, they’re basically in their back garden, hidden from the house by a hedge and nothing more – and the moment her father touches her stomach and she feels oceansaltcalm with her not-sense, she scowls.
She makes eye-contact with her father, and, with deliberate slowness, she reaches for the edges of the ‘bubble’ her not-sense feels like and begins pulling it back. Inwards. Towards the place it seems to come from, which is directly under the part of her stomach her father always touches when they’re out like this. Her father twitches and his eyes widen, but he doesn’t stop her.
She keeps pulling on the bubble until she can’t feel the squirrel in the forest, until she can’t feel her brother and mother in the house, until she no longer hears the ocean when she looks at her father.
She’s panting, and there’s sweat running down her face and dripping salt into her eyes, but she doesn’t blink, doesn’t break eye-contact.
Her head is blissfully silent.
Then, her father reaches out, and with a glancing touch to her forehead, Tamaki’s (Riley’s) world goes dark.
When she wakes up, it’s to sharp words said in quiet voices.
“-instinctive grasp on her chakra…-the seal is harming more than helping!”
“-are not turning our daughter into cannon fodder! Inoichi is your heir and you’ve let him be a child!”
“Tou-san,” Tamaki (Riley?) pads into the kitchen, where her mother and father stand facing each other, whatever meal mother had been cooking abandoned on the stove. Both adults freeze and turn to look at her, because while she’s not mute, they can count on the fingers of one hand the amount of times she started a conversation, “why do you feel like the ocean?”
Her mother makes a despairing sound and turns back to the food, and Tamaki (Riley?) wonders if she’s imagining the tears that run down the woman’s cheeks.
Her father takes her back into the sitting room and launches into a lecture about natures and energy and sensitivity.
Tamaki (Riley…?) enters the Bargaining stage, and can’t help but wonder whether having the hallucination confirm what she’s already realised makes the hallucination more or less real.
For the most part, she skips over Depression. Yes, she died, but a hit and run was depressingly common where she’d lived, and at least she doesn’t remember the moment most of her bones must’ve broken during the collision.
Her father doesn’t bother with the seal on her stomach anymore; instead, she’s carefully coached through how to keep her sensory bubble to a manageable size at home, limiting it to the familiar forest lake of her brother, summer breeze of her mother, and endless ocean of her father. And when they go back to the fields, her father teaches her how to expand her bubble. How to feel not just him, and the squirrels, and their house and Clan lands, but the Nara lands some hundred metres east, and the deer and the people meandering about. He guides her through how to scan that information and discard it, how to not let it overwhelm her, how to brush through it with a fine-toothed comb to find a specific person or being she’s looking for.
She’s thrown straight into Acceptance a week before her third birthday, when her brother comes home with an official-looking piece of paper and a blinding grin, and tells her and their parents with no extra fanfare:
“I’m starting the Academy next month!”
Tamaki blinks.
Smiles.
Throws herself at her brother and grins when he immediately drops the fancy-looking paper to catch her and spin her around.
“Congratulations, nii-san!”
Inoichi laughs happily, smacks a kiss to her cheek, and launches into a tale of how he’ll be a real ninja now, and he’ll be able to protect her and carry on the Yamanaka name with pride.
Tamaki listens, and she feels her smile become less and less genuine the longer her brother talks, though she keeps it carefully stuck to her face.
The chances of this world being a hallucination are…slim.
She’s died, been reborn, and ended up in the Naruto world as a sensor some twenty-odd years before the protagonist was even born.
And her brother will be the Head of the Clan of mind-readers.
…Fuck.
“’Maki-chan! Try the cake kaa-san made!” Inoichi calls to her some time later, and when she looks at him, he’s holding out a finger with some buttercream icing, and, well.
Tamaki dutifully pads over, stops right in front of her brother, licks the sweet cream right off his finger, and delights in his laughter and mock-disgusted crows.
From what she remembers of a story from long-ago, there will be war, and death, and suffering.
But here, in this moment, her brother is a child excited about playing an adult, her parents are alive, and the Third Shinobi War has yet to start.
Yamanaka Tamaki is three years old when she resigns herself to the life of a killer if it means she’ll be able to protect her brother’s smile.