Fanfic #169 Making Lemonade by Meeceisme(Naruto)

This fanfic is an self insert into Naruto as an Original Character. I really like this fic because it has a very interesting and fun to read to read mc, I also like the side characters because you can't help but get attached to them a little bit. I also like the art.

Synopsis: Waking up after dying to a whole new life in a brand new body is a little outside his frame of reference. But he'll do his best to make the best of this weird as hell situation. Worse comes to worse he'll grab all his favourite people and run the hell away from this mad place.

Rated: M

words: 44k

https://archiveofourown.org/works/31750765/chapters/78590497

Here's the first chapter(it's just the first part, it was too long):

It takes him a long time to realise what's going on.

His last coherent memory is the taste of blood filling his mouth, of terror and pain and desperation and a knife finally slipping home between his ribs, of a jeering face above him and the hot, sick-sour scent of the face's breath across his cheek.

His last memory is of dying in agony under enemy hands.

So waking again is not something he expects.

Waking in warmth, subjected only to gentle touches and soft, incomprehensible murmuring initially has him thinking he's in some kind of afterlife. That maybe, despite all the wrong he's done, despite all the blood on his hands, all the people he's failed – god, his team, his team – he's been somehow found worthy of peace after death.

He's never been a religious man. Never put paid to the padre's sermons and promises of redemption and forgiveness on the proviso it be received on your knees. He's never liked being on his knees. They hurt and isn't a defensible position.

It takes a long time before his eyes adjust enough to see more than blurry outlines, before his ears begin to understand the noises around him. Begins to understand that, no, he isn't in some weird, gentle heaven.

There's a woman with tired yet achingly kind pale grey eyes that's almost constantly around him, carrying him, feeding him, keeping him warm and safe in the cradle of her arms. The smile on her face never leaves, sometimes small and quiet, sometimes wide and delighted, but never gone.

It takes him a stupidly long time to realise that this woman isn't a giant caring for his useless, weirdly unresponsive body.

No.

He's the one that's changed.

He's in the body of a newborn infant.

His hands are pudgy and stubby and tiny. It takes so much concentration just to get his fingers to curl around the woman's finger when she wiggles it in his palm. It takes so much effort to do anything beyond eat and shit and stare at the unfamiliar world around him.

The language isn't his native tongue.

From listening to the woman – his mother? - speak he's fairly certain he's in Japan. The dialect is weird from his more formal, military skewed education on the language and she doesn't exactly look traditionally Japanese with the shape of her pale eyes and the light brown of her hair but there's plenty of immigrants in every country.

Just the knowing, the gathering of information to assess his situation is comforting, helps him relax into the bewildering state he's found himself.

Beats choking to death on his own blood with a knife in his lungs.

In light of that, this weird...reincarnation? Is a welcome reprieve from the horror of his old life, no matter how temporary.

Only...weeks pass, months pass and it looks more and more likely that this situation might be a little more permanent.

It's been a wonderful balm on his nerves, on his rampant PTSD and all the trauma that haunts his dreams.

His new mother is always so gentle with him. Hands soft and sure as she swaddles him, as she feeds him, burps him and changes his diapers (he's spent far too many stints in hospital too injured and weak to feel any lingering embarrassment about someone cleaning his ass for him). She sings to him sometimes, words strange but mostly recognisable, barely able to hold a tune but he loves it all the same.

And...he loves her.

Loves the smiles on her face, the warmth in her pretty eyes, the shape of her face, not quite pretty but comely, the cleverness of her fingers, the scent of her.

Loves that she is always there to comfort him after nightmares – growing steadily less and less the longer he stays here, basking in the warmth of her easy love – kisses away his tears and laughs, delightedly when he smiles back at her, the helpless laughter she draws from him when she blows ticklish raspberries against his belly.

The parents in his old life were nothing like this. Or maybe they were once but he'd been too young to remember. He'd been more likely to collect a fist to the cheek than a kiss, screaming derision to giggling nonsense songs. He'd been five years old when social services finally took him away from them, taking him from one hell to toss him straight into another in a long slew of foster families and group homes.

It seems so easy to love now. To look up into his new mother's eyes and know that she wants nothing but to love and protect him and want to do the same for her.

He sinks into this rare, wonderful kind of happiness with gratitude so strong his chest aches from it. Savours each smile and laugh like a starving man in a desert.

Hordes each precious memory of her.

One thing he's beginning to notice about this new body (did he boot the original life out of it or was he stuffed inside this tiny frame from the beginning? Regardless, he'll fight tooth and nail to stay here, he's too selfish a man to give up this love) is that his senses are dialled up to eleven.

His eyes are sniper sharp and prone to tracking the tiniest gnat darting around the room, his hearing is exceptionally well tuned, so much so that he can track his mother's heartbeat and breathing even when she's outside the nursery and his nose.

He's never felt more sorry for dogs before in his life.

The scents around him are almost overwhelming. So many smells swirling around, mingling old and new, from the stale bread in the kitchen to the frog in the backyard to his mother's honeysuckle shampoo. It's enough to make him want to claw his own nose off.

Too much information to process and his mother has had to collect his tiny hands in hers to keep him from scratching desperately at his nose, unconsciously trying to stifle the scents around him.

It's an adjustment period.

Eventually, he learns to filter the scents around him. Learns to manage the information into something useful, or at least, stop it from overwhelming him.

And by then, he's become distracted by a new sense he's never encountered before.

Maybe sense isn't the best descriptor because it's so strange. More an awareness.

Like living stars orbiting around him, these lights seem to be people. His mother has her own, shining a pale blue warm-honey-autumn leaves to his senses and its almost like a scent but different. It isn't visual but at the same time it is or at least is how his brain interprets it. An amalgamation of the two, of vision and scent combining to create a whole new sense.

It extends even further than his sensitive nose. Outside his tiny world of mother, he can pinpoint the location of the neighbour who frequently stops by to check in and foist containers of food off on them, her rippling yellow cotton-feathers steady and muted (maybe asleep?). There are half a dozen other lives sparking in this other sense, further away in various states of motion.

If he concentrates, he can feel more stars beyond the ones that quickly become familiar to him but the more he pushes, the quicker he tires.

It takes him another stupidly long time to think to turn that sense on himself.

There's a well inside of him.

Sitting in the depths of his belly with channels through his limbs and chest and head. It is tiny and fragile and tastes like salt and ozone on the back of his tongue. It feels like the expectant stillness before a lightning storm, like hanging on the peak of a wave the moment before it crashes down.

It feels like infinite potential and warm like his mother's hugs.

It takes him months before he figures out how to move it, how to control it and push it through the channels in his body, to shape it into something usable, something useful.

It is an exhausting process. Half the time it feels like he's barely moved this salt-ozone substance through his body before he's too weary to lift his head. Nap time is extending longer and longer the more he works at it. He figures it's like working a muscle. The more he works at it, the stronger it will get and the more he'll be able to do with it.

After a lot of thought, he decides its a kind of magic.

The fact that everyone has the same living star feel about them seems to indicate that this isn't a one off. This is the norm and the idea is incredible to him. A people capable of magic. Even though he has yet to see it being used. Which makes him wonder just where in the world he is. Because magic is nothing but a fanciful imaginary idea to fill children's books and card tricks.

He'll have to get his hands on some books a little heavier than the colourful picture books his mother reads to him.

She, of course, notices his excessive sleeping and his first outing is a trip to the local clinic.

The doctor that sees them feels like moss-chalk-damp and smells like ink and medicine cabinet. He doesn't like the smell, buries his face into mum's neck to drown out the unpleasant astringent assault on his sinuses, surrounds himself in her familiar honeysuckle and vanilla scent.

"I'm sorry," she says over his head, hand stroking through his hair. "He's got a very sensitive nose."

"An Inuzuka relation?" the doctor asks, sounding bored and smelling tired.

"Maybe on his father's side," she shrugs delicately and he perks up at that, having wondered about the absent father figure in their little family.

"Hmm. You said he's sleeping excessively?" an unfamiliar hand that reeks of ink reaches out to touch his cheek, feeling for fever.

"Almost every other hour of the day," she coaxes his face away from her neck so the doctor can check his mouth and throat. He reluctantly submits to the man's ministrations, though flinches sharply when the otoscope enters his ear.

"He's perfectly healthy," the doctor announces while he tries to scrub the man's unpleasant scent off his skin by rubbing his face against mum's shirt. "Given the likelihood of a clan relation, I'd say the sleeping is due to tapping into his chakra," so it's not called magic here? Interesting. "A little young for it but it isn't unheard of. And starting this young, he'll likely have good reserves later on. You'd do well to take him to Konoha. The medical staff there will likely have better resources to help him. I can write you a referral if you like."

"Konoha," she murmurs, hands clutching him just a little tighter to her chest, heart rate increasing and the tang of fear alarming. Why is she scared of that place? "Thank you, doctor."

What is Konoha? What has that place done to his mother?

Or was her fear for him?

The written form of this slightly off version of Japanese is largely the same as what he'd been taught. There is no Romanji, no English letters at all and some words are a little different but the Kanji is the same and he's grateful for that. Learning Kanji the first time around had been a nightmare.

So he reacquaints himself with reading in this language through the books mum reads him and the newspaper she tends to leave spread across the kitchen table.

He bullies his tiny, useless little body into crawling, then walking, then running as quickly as he can, marvels at his flexibility and promptly deciding that he utterly refuses to lose this edge and stretches religiously to the point where he can tie himself into knots, much to his mother's bemused amusement.

Talking is harder because it takes him so damn long to get used to his own voice.

Gone is the silky baritone his teammates had been disgustingly jealous of. Used to tease him about his 'sex operator' voice and glared daggers at him when he won his various hook ups with a terrible pick up line and a crooked grin.

Now it is high pitched and squeaky and still startles him. Has to learn to regulate his voice because what's loud to his ears is whisper quiet to everyone except his mother (likely where he inherited the sensitive ears).

His first words to his mother make her weep even as she smiles so brightly at him.

"I love you, mum," he squeaks at her and promptly becomes the subject of much jealousy from the other mothers in the little circle of friends she has.

It doesn't help that she brags about it endlessly. Brags and boasts and laughs at his obvious embarrassment but doesn't stop.

"Lighten up, squeaker," she giggles and squishes his cheeks between her warm palms. "I've got the sweetest, cleverest little son and I'm going to make sure everyoneknows it."

He scowls back until she presses their noses together in an Eskimo kiss and he can't help but laugh along with her.

He's nearing his second birthday when he nearly kills himself.

Channelling the 'chakra' (which he still thinks of as magic) through his body has long since become easy, almost perfected and he decides to attempt something a little more daring.

If he's got an internal well of magic and a lifetime of movie plots and fantasy novels, it seems the logical next step to try and summon a ball of fire or light. Something that would be a simple spell in the fantasy books.

Given the salt-ozone feel of his own chakra, he figures he should maybe try and summon a ball of water. Lightning seems a little risky if he loses control. With water, the worst that will happen is he gets wet.

It never occurs to him that he should have started off with playing with existing water before trying to draw it out of thin air. His logic suggests that the air is humid enough and he should be able to draw plenty to make a palm full of water.

He focuses, digs deep into the well in his belly, larger now than when he first discovered it and channels it into his left palm. Visualises the water molecules in the air condensing together in his palm, shaping into a suspended ball with enough surface tension to keep it from spilling everywhere.

He sees the water begin to form, a ball no bigger than his thumbnail slowly swelling bigger.

Until his heart gives a terrifyingly painful lurch and he loses his concentration.

The water immediately collapses over his hands and puddling on the floor but he's too busy gasping for breath, tiny body shaking and sweating like he's ran a fucking marathon.

He's collapsed onto the wet floor, fingers clawing desperately at his chest to try and alleviate the pain with black spots beginning to bloom in his vision when his mother slams open the door, eyes wild with fear.

The stink of their mingled terror is the last thing he knows before he falls into unconsciousness.

He wakes for brief periods.

Only on two occasions does he not wake with the sound of his mother's heartbeat under his ear, clutched close and tight either by arms or some kind of carry harness.

The first time is to feeling her fingers carding through his hair as she pours water over it, the sharp chemical smell of dye making his nose scrunch in distaste.

"I know, sweetie, I know. I'm sorry," she apologises gently over him while she apparently works on dying his hair. "But hopefully this will keep you safe."

He's dragged back under before he can ask what he needs to be kept safe from.

The second time is to the scent of rock dust, burning wood and blood. The sound of screaming and something roaring muffled and seems so distant even as something that feels like a supernova to his other sense blasts him with rage-hate-malice overlaying heat-flame-ancient from far too close.

For a moment, there's a horrible disjoint. Memory overlap and he can't tell if he's back in his old body fighting another war, where's his team? Where's his rifle? Where's his dog?

He calls out for his faithful war dog, Max when the too high pitched squeak of his voice registers.

And the disjoint disappears, only to be replaced with a greater sense of fear because this body is too small, too fragile to survive a war zone. His mother isn't a combatant. She's just a civilian woman and vulnerable and…

...And she's trapped under the pile of rubble to his left.

A building has fallen on her, on them. She must have thrown him clear of the worst of it but they're still trapped beneath the threatening groan of settling wood and brick. The pile above their heads could collapse in at any moment.

He needs to get her out.

Crawling forward on shaky limbs, he follows his nose and has to dig through the broken brickwork to find her hand. Then even more frantic digging to expose her head.

His little hands freeze the moment his too sharp eyes sees her bloodied face.

The ground shakes beneath him, the muffled booms of explosions rippling through and the roof of rubble over his head drops dust and debris down around him.

He doesn't notice.

Just cards his tiny fingers through bloodied light brown hair, smoothing it down from its wild disarray. Closes sightless pale grey eyes, leaving dirty smears on her eyelids. Tries to clean the blood and dirt off her face with the corner of his sleeve but only really succeeds in smearing it across her cold skin.

He feels hollowed out and shaky, the salt-ozone in his belly barely a flicker, a fraction of what it usually is. It seems fitting with how he feels overall.

Tiny and useless and unable to protect the most important person in his life.

He bows his head over his mother's face and kisses her closed eyelids.

"I love you, mum," he whispers while the world outside burns and shakes and screams rise up alongside the furious roars. "Thank you for everything."

He's had two wonderful, healing years of love and care thanks to this beautiful woman.

It's more than he ever thought he'd get, more than he really deserves.

He's not a good man. A selfish killer with too much blood on his hands and not enough conscience to regret most of it.

But he is grateful, so terribly, achingly grateful to have known this woman's tireless love. Her gentle touch and wild laughter gifts he can never hope to repay.

He presses his forehead against hers, heedless of the blood, can still smell the lingering honeysuckle beneath the blood and dust.

He touches her hair and weeps until he passes out again.