Chapter 2 Meeting Your Infancy, Sorta

AN-I don't own Naruto. Also, looking for a beta.

____________________________________________________

Ryuishi was an odd baby and a nightmare for her mother.

At eight months she seems to have slept her life away.

(She is waking up, and it is hard after being nothing for so long. Her senses are dulled, but it still seems like too much. Every sensation on her smooth skin is overwhelming. Every sight and sound seems multiplied by a thousand by her standards. If she had to compare it to anything, she would say that being alive again after spending time in the void is like dropping LSD and ecstasy right before going to your very first rave. So, she copes by sleeping a fuck ton. )

At nine months she is crawling.

(When she wasn't sleeping she was lying there, subtly flexing her muscles. Whether it was in her crib or on the floor. A twitch here, a flex there. She can't do much more than that because her whole body seems to be made of lumpy mashed potatoes masquerading as flesh. It makes her kinda angry. She remembers being able to scrabble up rock walls with only her hands and she can recall kicking the caps off of friends' heads. Now she has trouble lifting her head. But the anger motivates her. This is her body and she will exert an astounding amount of control over it, just like always. Her mind knows how it feels, it simply needs the body to follow.)

At a year she is gibbering away, mimicking strings of syllables with her heavy infant tongue, either the first or last sounds Keiko makes.

(The tongue is a muscle too, and one that will help form her greatest tools, words. That being said, this language is tricky. Not as tricky as mandarin, but still pretty tough. She finally appreciates parrots though. Having a stiff, inflexible tongue is a huge setback, no matter how much she comprehends, and the birds she once made fun of now have her grudging respect. )

At eighteen months she is walking and running, and potty trained.

(The toilets are fucking weird here, she decides. Her nursery is super boring, and she needs to explore. She doesn't mind being doted on or being cared for. What she does mind is the complete and utter lack of mental stimulation. So when she finally finds her way to her feet she leaves the boring-ass room as fast as possible. It is then she discovers she lives in a brothel, which is strange, but she isn't here to judge.)

At two, she is sloppily painting her first characters and speaking in full sentences.

(Only hiragana, because none of the girls knows any kanji of romaji. Also, fuck calligraphy brushes, that shit is nonsense. She wanted pens, dammit, pens. Hell, the chalk would be better than this painting nonsense. As for speaking... it is way easier to learn a language when you have absolutely no other option. Do or die. Practice or sound mentally impotent forever. Total immersion type shit.)

At three she can speak with surprising eloquence, but most of the time Keiko has trouble getting her to not speak like a thug. She is reading slowly, but her characters are still sloppy.

(There are too many curse words and too little time. Also, seriously, fuck those brushes. They make her so angry with their stupid wooden handles and furry bristles. She must have snapped, like, at least six in her attempts to paint those shitty words. The Okiya Mother is not happy about that, and the woman takes over her lessons herself. She is a strict, unbending woman who reminds her of Professor McGonagall from Harry Potter. Well, if McGonagall had been a Slytherin instead of a Gryffindor.)

Like she said, her daughter was weird. Watanabe Keiko knew weird, too. It was kind of hard to miss as a whore.

She did not lament the fact that she sold herself for money, oh gods no, that was stupid. Men paid money to wiggle around on top of her for a little while, and she got to live in a nice house with adequate food and access to medicine. She even got some spending money after the matron and the guards to their cut. This was much better than living on the streets, especially in a shinobi village. Especially a starving, economically crushed shinobi village.

She did lament the fact that her daughter stood out so much from the other children.

Keiko had thought that she knew strange but this was a new type of weird that she was not entirely familiar with. Her beautiful girl was an anomaly to her, and to all who lived in the Okiya. Ryuishi was by turns much too smart and at the same time utterly stupid. She picked up crawling so fast she was almost a prodigy, and the walking even faster, but still her words came out slow and forcibly enunciated. And her manners! Keiko may have been a whore, but she was a polite whore at least. Ryuishi on the other hand was blunt and loud and oftentimes communicated more like a grunting, hissing animal than a human being.

It was not an uncommon sight to see Ryuishi stretching in the small courtyard of the building they lived in, mumbling things to herself in the fog. The younger girls would often gather to watch her when she was a toddler, cooing at the cute faces she made. Keiko simply had to follow the trail of baby noises to find her daughter. The toddler also liked to languidly stretch herself out on the window seals, her dark slanted eyes observing them with calm curiosity.

Unfortunately, it was not out of place to find her daughter carefully eyeing the customers as well, watching them with too intelligent eyes and searching their faces before approaching them. It was always after they had finished with the girls that Ryuishi would corner them, batting her eyelashes and pouting her lips, a rejuvenating cup of tea in her hand for her carefully selected target. It was never the rude ones, her mother noticed, or the ones that would become rough with the girls. Her daughter chose the clients that were nervous or seemingly unsure, new or one time only customers, careful to stay away from those who would react badly to living evidence that couplings did not always end without consequence.

Lies would drip from the little girl's mouth like nectar and the unassuming males would fall for her innocent guise. The raven-haired toddler would coo nonsense at the patrons, flooding them with compliments and ego-boosting words, all of which seemed innocent from the mouth of a child, but laden with heavy innuendo. Keiko had been concerned that her daughter had been listening to too many of her 'onee-chans' pillow talks before she began to see the little trophies Ryuishi kept from the exchanges. Bits of ninja wire and pieces of rope, wire mesh and sharp little hooks, small candies that were never eaten and a few small coins here and there for her services as the innocent little ego stoker. What the girl was collecting the for, she was unsure. What she was sure of was that her daughter had a manipulative streak a mile wide.

And that mark! The disfigurement was usually hidden behind robes, but it was there, a seal of some sorts twisting in between her baby's chubby little shoulders and twisting down her spine. The mother had taken one peek at it after the birth and headed straight for the almanacks. Days later she had come out of her room and declared it a most auspicious sign from the heavens, a sign that her baby was to lead the brothel to riches. Looking at her child's beautiful coal coloured, almond-shaped eyes, full black hair, and sand-coloured skin, Keiko knew exactly how Mother thought she would lead them to riches.

(Consequently, Ryuishi learned some things that day. Turns out tattoos are forever. Like, forever, all your lives and afterlives. She also learned that whores are the most superstitious people you will ever fucking meet. The mother had a whole room dedicated to about a billion scrolls on astrology and horoscopes and omens and shit. Mother also took all signs of her rapid progress as more signs of fortune.)

Keiko prayed that this would not be the case, and she would be able to earn her place in the Okiya for both of them until her baby could make her way in life. Keiko held out hope because Ryuishi was a strong child, strong and healthy. It was more than most could say under the reign of the Fourth Mizukage.

Ryuishi was firmly convinced that this was the absolute craziest shit since whoever invented meth, invented meth.

In her old life, Ryuishi had been a jack of all trades, a master of very few. It turned out she would need probably every single one of those skills to survive. She thanked and cursed her prior knowledge in turns. Thanked because she had been born into the Naruto world, and even living in Kirigakure was safer than any one of the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros, or any Marvel dimension, or Psycho-Pass or about a million others. Thanked because she knew what to expect, and most of her some of her skills would serve her very well in this new plane of existence.

She cursed it because it was not her world, with her family. Who would lead them now? Who would make sure mom and dad weren't at each other's throats? Who would keep her house clean? Would her friends be able to afford it without her income? Who would watch her little sister (herbabyherbabyherbaby-), talk with her, make her smile, and make sure she was okay? Who would run her out to fast food joints at three AM and make sure her hair always looked her best? How was she, was she alright? What if she was sick, or pushing herself too hard in sports?

(herbabyherbabyherbaby-). She cursed because she was now in a world ruled by martial law at the best of times, and chaos under the worse.

(The epiphany about her current universe had been fairly simple actually. When she had hit eighteen months she had woken up with the sickening feeling of pressure right under her skin. It had felt like her whole body wanted to throw up through her pores. Crying and afraid, she had gone to the nearest woman, who had been the Matron, who had snickered at the snivelling child and informed her that the feeling was not a sign that she was going to become deathly ill, but was simply her chakra making itself known.

This meant that somewhere, somehow, something had decided to give Cat Frank, now known as

Watanabe Ryuishi, power.

Which was dumb of them.)

Anyway…

Her survival skills from her doomsday father would probably serve her very, very well. She could fish, forage, hunt and trap with the best of them assuming that not too many of the natural fauna differentiated from her past. She could point out animal paths and edible greens and tubers already from her window.

She also points out starving children in the streets. This would need to be rectified.

Her social skills were nonexistent. Honestly, she had dutifully learned the etiquette of her new world and then immediately tossed it out. Cat Frank had been rude, blunt, oftentimes too passionate and much too duplicitous for her good, and Ryuishi would probably be the same. The change took effort, something she could not seem to give. Changing, she figured, sounded exhausting. Besides, she had spent years fostering that personality and she refused to throw the result of previous efforts out. So, she may not know how to interact with people or make meaningful connections, but damn if she didn't know how to twist words and manipulate situations to her benefit.

Physical skills were also a benefit because for some reason she had maintained her body, just not her age. (Fuck if she knew how, because the statistics behind that were probably so astronomically small it was incomprehensible.) That meant she knew just exactly how athletic she could be. She would never be fast or long-lasting, she would be ungodly flexible and unusually strong. In her old life, she had taken gymnastics and dabbled in Mui Thai, wrestling, and eskrima. Though her body may have forgotten the moves, she had not. That had to count for something, right?

Finally, not to toot her own horn or anything, she was clever. Not wise though, and believe her, those were two entirely different breeds of thing. Clever meant that she could make a trebuchet out of twigs and string. Without the wisdom though, she would use that same trebuchet to launch palm-sized stones inside the brothel, flinging them straight through the paper screens that vivisected the place until they finally found their way through a window.

(She had never been spanked so hard in her previous life. The Okiya Mother had the world's boniest hands, she swore to God.)

She would live because she was smart, her strength and ability to survive would help, but ultimately she knew that she had to use her brain. There would be no surviving the Academy if she was stupid, and yes she was going to the Academy, bloody graduation exam or not because she was in this world now and she accepted that wholly and totally. It meant she had a say about what would happen now, and she could change it, plot be damned. Because frankly, amazing as the plot was, too many kids had experienced far too much. She had been a good sister to one, and she would try to do so for many more.

She would never know what it was like to hold a demon inside of her, watch her family die, or what it was like to be a child soldier. What she did know was how it was like to live far below the poverty line, to go to bed hungry, belly aching and hollow, cramping just below her skin. She did know what it was like to be cold, alone and lost. She wasn't stupid enough to believe that she could fix everybody or even that all her extensive study in psychology could heal the wounds these people held.

Ryuishi did believe though that life was meant to be lived in the present, and that every stranger deserved wholehearted love until they showed that they didn't. She believed that there were things that she could do, that she would do, starting here and now, because everyone deserved a choice, and everyone needed a chance. Even murders and thieves and maniacs.

So she didn't have kunai, good monetary funding, or mental stability. She would improvise. She would adapt. Most of all, she would overcome.

...Or, maybe should do nothing, because now that she thought about it, it sounded like a lot of work.