Chapter Text
On an average day on the floor of an average hotel room, I died.
Nobody noticed.
I was nothing more than a tragic statistic, worth more as a number than a person. I accepted this as the truth of my life early on, when I was diagnosed with depression at the young age of six. It became the first instance of many that my life meant more to those around me when it was pressed two dimensional onto a graph.
I embraced death in a way I had never bothered with life, and I suppose someone out there has a sick sense of humor, because in the moments after I died, I was reborn.
In the most literal meaning of the word. The possibility of reincarnation had seemed possible, if naive, but the general consensus was lack of remembrance of any past lives. I wasn't sure if the idea of holding onto my memories of Before meant this was all some long term hallucination (possible), I was someone special in this rebirth (doubtful), or I was so insignificant I somehow slipped through the cosmic cracks (likely). Regardless, the end result is a highly traumatized newborn squalling in the arms of what seemed to be a giant.
It starts like this.
I'm still in the mindset of my death when I feel a pressure in what must be my head. It's tight and uncomfortable but not too overwhelming, and I'm not claustrophobic enough for this to have any true impact of 'eternal suffering'. So while I'm questioning the methods of whatever higher power is in charge of this vague torture, all of my senses return to me at once. Everything is blurry and I wonder if I've gone blind. Everything is loud and there's someone crying and my lungs feel tight. The sound is overwhelming until all at once I realize I'm the one who is crying, and I suddenly go quiet.
I'm in someone's arms and I can hear them - a soft voice, likely female - whispering to me, but I can't make out what they are saying beyond the fact that it is decidedly not English. I'm jostled around in her arms a bit before being handed off to another person. My eyesight has begun to clear and I can now see I'm being held by a tired but beautiful young woman. There is more going on around us, but I can only see her.
She smiles at me.
"Hiroka-chan," She says, and it's the first word I hear with any clarity. It's my name. My new name, in this new world, with a different language and a beautiful woman who is smiling at me.
In my twenty odd years worth of memories, I can't recall ever being smiled at like that before.
It's something warm and comforting, which is good because at this point a searing pain has started building up in my chest. I can feel it moving inside of me and it hurts. I think I'm dying.
Don't take this away from me. I want to see her smile again.
I start crying again, the pain is too much, and I see the woman - my mother, she has to be my mother - frown and hold me close. She's saying words I don't understand, but I hear my name within it.
Hiroka.
My mother says it like it's something precious, and I hold that feeling close. I allow it to comfort me even as the blinding pain evens out to a dull burning sensation, and I'm able to control my cries once more. She relaxes now that I've stopped crying, and that smile is back. I can sense others in the room, though I'm not sure yet how I know they are there, because no one is talking at the moment.
I feel like I should be freaking out more. I had wanted to die, and now that had been taken from me too. This sort of thing shouldn't be possible, it's a cliché movie, the most overused trope in media, a fantasy. It doesn't really happen.
And yet...
And yet here I am, obviously with memories of a previous (lackluster) life, and an equally disappointing death, and I've never been the type of hero material that usual ends up in these positions. I've always been angry and selfish, the type of person you want to see fail. Maybe this is just another step towards that. Maybe I'm crazier than I thought, and I'm going to wake up in a padded cell within the next few minutes.
Or maybe this is really happening. Maybe I've been reincarnated as the child of this woman, further down the line or maybe somewhere else entirely. If that's true, if this is real, I've been given a second chance. I can be someone else. Someone who isn't a disappointment, someone who is loved.
And if I'm crazy, it's not like I miss out on much by treating this as the real world, right?
I look up at my mother's smile.
And I choose to live.
My mother's name is Aiko.
I discover her name a few days after my birth, and it's just as beautiful as she is. She laughs like the sun and smiles at the other women who live with her. I think I've never met anyone as happy as Aiko.
I also learn other things about my mother.
I learn that my mother is the Okiya Mother of a high end brothel, a position she acquired shortly after my conception, making my father Aiko's last client.
Oh yeah, I learn my father was one of my mother's clients. I should probably be insulted by it all, but the letdown is actually less than I would have expected, considering how many people here seem to love me. It's a new but wonderful feeling, and I don't mind having the cliché 'my daddy is some guy who pays for sex' background story if I can get everything else with it.
Other than the love and attention, and being able to quickly pick up the language (a bastardized version of Japanese, is the best comparison I can think of), not much happens in the first few months of my new life. I'm coasting along a decent start, and I wonder if my birth parents from Before were as loving as this. I had been in foster care for as long as I could remember, and the only thing I knew about my birth parents were that they died when I was still too young to care.
This time around I plan to hold on as tight as I can to the people that love me.
This vow becomes much more desperate when I'm four months old, and I overhear some of the ladies whispering.
"... Konoha?" Reika says. I still haven't gotten the hang of the language, but that word jolts me into awareness. "...Kyuubi." She has a frown on her face and keeps glancing around like she's not supposed to be talking about this. This barely registers with me though, because I did understand at least one of the words she said. Konoha, as in the Shinobi village?
Nah, must be a coincidence.
"... Yondaime Hokage," Saki says, before everything else she replies with gets lost in translation. They continue to speak, but that's the last of it I understand. That doesn't matter though because what little I heard is still echoing in my head.
That's too much coincidence in a single conversation to overlook.
When I was younger, Before, I tried to find things that made me happy. One of those things was Anime. There were so many different ones, and once I got hooked, it became a way to survive. I would use the new episode of each week as incentive to survive, just that much longer.
One of those Anime I was so into was called Naruto, and it was, admittedly, one of my favorites.
The show started with the Yondaime Hokage sacrificing himself to save Konoha from Kyuubi.
It seems my second chance at life takes place in the world of Naruto.
Well, shit.