Learning To See (Patreon)

I remember fragments...distorted pieces of things I may or may not have imagined, but there's this yawning black void that I can't really touch mentally because every time I try, the painfeels as though it's splitting my head open.  After many years I've learned how to explicitly 'not think about it,' out of self-preservation, if nothing else.  Other than that, I can't really explain what went on between the seconds...

...days?

...months?

…years?

...between the moment when I closed my eyes and the moment when I opened them again, for the first time.

And that, that one precious moment, might just beat out a sudden and terrifying death for the most memorable sight of either of my lives.  In hindsight, I'm glad she'd held me close enough for me to focus on her face, which had to be near-point-blank for my infantile eyes to properly see her.  Tired as she was, sweaty-faced with matted blonde hair and weakly shining gray eyes, she was still...beautiful, and that's not a word I use lightly.  Well, maybe 'radiant' would be a better word?

In any event, that would prove to be my one and only memory of her.

My mother.

You may have already realized that this story, or at least this particular part of the story, doesn't have a very happy ending.  Even as she made soft cooing sounds at me, softly brushing my still-wet forehead, my body blinked vacantly at her while I tried vainly to force my newborn eyes to focus.  A long string of nonsense-sounding words flowed into my underdeveloped ears, though I managed to seize on a few words I'd picked up from Gaellic during my...past life?  Around us, people were starting to speak urgently in yet another language and I think I caught...

Taskutte?

No, taskette...and that's...Japanese?

...okay, panic attack later, focus now.

My...mother?...was staring intently at me, smiling.  “Namae-wa Blathnaid desu. Aishiteru, Aislinge-chan.  Aishiteru.”

Her breath hitched and, distantly, I realized what was happening.  Even as the voices around us grew in their urgency, rising in volume, the woman who had just given birth to me was still smiling gently.  I wanted to scream, to rage at the contented repose she had fallen into, but I barely even managed to gurgle and raise my hand in protest.  The woman raised her own hand, letting me feebly wrap my fingers around a single one of hers.  Tiredly, she leaned forward to press a kiss to my forehead and then laid back, holding me closely.

At some point, I'm not really sure, the light faded from her eyes.

And she was dead.

I only started crying after someone took me from her arms, lifting my infantile body to rest in a crib as shadowy figures blurred out of my miniscule range of vision and leaving me to my equally miniscule range of my own devices.  The combination of emotional disturbance, because whoever the woman had been, whether or not I'd ever consider her my mother, I'd just watched her dieafter giving birth to me.  But, taken in conjunction with that fact was the simple notion that I had no earthly idea what had just happened to me and my stunted child-sized brain simply wasn't developed enough to really contemplate the confusing mess of events while the warmsoftcomfortthingmotherhad just been taken away.

Now, years after the fact, I'll admit I was pretty messed up.

It's possible I was even driven a little mad by the experience.

…

My sense of time being distorted into mere day-night cycles that might only be artificial, I can't reasonably conclude exactly how long it took me to notice that I was crying, or more exactly that it was 'me,' the infant who was still crying and I was listening to my body basically conduct itself on autopilot.  When this observation was made, I noticed that beyond the mere psychological discomfort of being ripped from everything I'd ever known in a terror-filled semi-death and thrust back, naked and screaming into a very different world without any apparent.

So, yes, despite all of that discomfort, I wasn't crying because of mental agony.

I was crying because it hurt.

...what was 'it,' you ask?

Everything.

From the tips of my fingers and toes to the tip of my head, every inch of my body- inside and out-hurt in a slow and steady ache that didn't burn so much as throbin time with my heartbeat.  So, again, I was treated to an observation that shattered all of my previous beliefs about the nature of, well, everything.

And, just to be clear about this, when I say 'everything hurt,' I don't mean that a combination of my arms, legs, back and assorted muscles in between combined to give the illusion that my entire body was shrouded in a low-level ache; no, I mean that I could feel muscles which shouldn't have proper nerve endings or sensory input, but not only was I able to accurately assess that my internal organs each, individually, hurt, I could give each a name given enough time to recall my high school biology classes.

The fact that my stomach hurt was easy enough to account for.  This was, comparatively speaking, something that I could come to terms with.  Similarly, I also had intestinal pains, which I had suffered from intermittently during adolescence; these were almost comfortingly familiar in comparison to what came next.

When one describes a heart attack, it is generally pain and tightness 'in the chest.'  I'm not sure if I was ever correct in my reasoning, but I had always considered this to be because the heart itself doesn't have pain receptors and the musculature of the organ is involuntary, therefore there is no real 'need' for the brain to interpret pain from the organ.  What all of this means is that, despite the fact that it was biologically impossible barring bizarre extenuating circumstances, I shouldn't be able to feel pain inside of my heart.

But I did.

And my kidneys.

And my lungs.

And my liver.

And my spleen.

Let me repeat this for posterity: my spleen hurt.  Having only a vague concept of exactly what a spleen was and the purpose it served, I could barely identify the organ in question, yet I understood that there was a specific pain within that area.  So, when I say that the whole of my body was in throbbing and screaming pain, it is not exaggeration or a hysterical plea.  The whole of my body, from my still-pinkish skin to the blood in my veins and the marrow in my bones, was stuffed to bursting with the sensation of 'pain.'

What I was later informed of was 'Chakra Hypersensitivity' has always been, to me, an eternity of unending agony.

This is another reason for which I, from time to time, doubt my sanity.

Perhaps none of this happened?  Perhaps the bullet slammed through my brain, but left me alive enough to put of life support and this entire frightening, insane mess has merely been some bizarre feverish coma-dream.

I'm not sure which possibility scares me more:

That this is all real.

Or that it might not be.

…

Eventually, I became so familiar with the sensation of pain within the whole of my body that I ceased to 'feel' it save when my attention was drawn to it.  Again, I wasn't aware of how much time had passed by this point, but using my best estimations and semi-accurate hindsight I can estimate that the time-gap between my birth and any 'real' awareness on my part was about six months.

The pain was ever-present, but now manageable enough for me to sensibly observe the world around me with meaningful intent.

My first thought was:

Oh shit.

You have to understand, the moment I saw a Konoha hitae-ate, was the moment I knew that my life had changed forever.  Whether comatose and delusional or...or reincarnated, I could never go back to my former life; until that point I had entertained some vain hope of growing up to the point where I could overcome what I had seen as a debilitating birth defect and possibly contact the family and friends I had left behind, maybe even resume the life I had left behind someday.

The fact that my 'mother' spoke a dialect of Gaelic which I'd heard before even bolstered my spirits, but...

No, the glimpse of metal on black cloth tied about the head of the...med-nin?  Iryou-nin?  And, boy, will that take some getting used to.

Ninja.

Real, honest-to-god Technicolor Ninja.

Who were actual child soldiers in a continent-wide shadow war.

...was I really that bad of a person in my former life?

I know I was lazy, slothful even.  I'd committed wrath a few times.  Let's see, I wasn't really greedy or gluttonous or lustful...much.  Envy...yeah, I could see.  Pride...not so much.  Then again, those were Catholic sins derived from a Medieval thesis written on...anyway, Catholicism wasn't big on reincarnation.  This meant that the majority of mainstream Christian religions, which had discounted the possibility of reincarnation were either wrong or there were 'exceptions' to the rule.

Again, I'm not sure which scares me more.

Hmm...I'm somewhat glad I was never of the zealous religious sort or else this might have sent me into a spiraling psycho-emotional breakdown.

Or...more of one.

So, yes, at any rate, I've been thrown into a world of shadow wars, stealth privatized military pseudo-states that ran on a vaguely independent basis from the actual political infrastructure.  The world of Naruto was dark, savage, brutal, and possessed individuals who posed the same threat as many types of WMD's in my original 'world.'  Of course, that presupposed I was in the 'canon' anime or manga...

I distinctly remembered feeling a deathly shiver up my spine as I contemplated the many worlds of 'fanon' which I'd read about over the years.

Canon was terrifying enough without having to deal with Kyuubi-possessed Naruto, extra-dimensional eldritch abominations made of living, sentient energy, or perhaps the worst...

High School AUs.

Another shiver.

...best-case scenario, then?

Well, I suppose that depended on what, exactly, I wanted out of this 'new life' I'd (good or bad) lucked into.  Did I want to be a passive citizen and get the hellout of Konoha as soon as possible, preferably the Elemental Nations?  If I hadn't been born into a clan, that remained a viable possibility.  If I hadbeen born into a ninja clan, that basically cemented my destiny as a ruthless semi-amoral killer.

Of course, the fact that my 'mother' had spoken to me in Gaellic still didn't make sense.

Putting aside the doubtlessly interesting backstory of my new life, the 'ninja life' did bear some amount of consideration.  On the downside, ruthless semi-amoral killer status.  On the upside?  Chakra.

Let me say it again, chakra.

That, my friends, is the sound of seduction.

For those of you who don't understand: chakra, the energy used to amplify a ninja's abilities to superhuman extents, was essentially a superpower.

And, like any nerd, geek, or otaku, I couldn't just disregard the chance to do something unimaginably awesome and interesting with my life...with superpowers.  The question was whether or not the sacrifice of my moral...

Nope, sorry, can't say that with a straight face, even without complete facial muscle control.

At least theoretically, I don't really have a problem with 'murder,' if the situation should call for it and, baring a Naruto-scale persuasive miracle which I knew I didn't have the charisma for, the Elemental Nations weren't going to stop using a system which, for the most part, worked.  Well, 'worked' in that it hadn't collapsed their economy, society, or military systems in the last two-hundred years.

Again, presupposing I was in the canon timeline-

-which I really hoped I was, because, realistically it gave me at least something of an advantage over the powerhouses which ruled this world-

-one had to at least hypothetically accept a horrendous death-toll as part of the 'Naruto' experience.  And, if I was going to be a ninja, I had to accept that I was going to contribute to that death toll, one way or another.

Functionally, the occupational choice of 'ninja' offered substantial rewards, but also substantial risks...like slow and painful death by torture and interrogation.  This, in turn, meant that if I was going to be a ninja, I would have to commit at least eighty or ninety percent of my life to learning the tricks of the trade.

Leaving aside a minimum time for eating, sleeping, and bodily functions, of course.

And ninja status was something I couldn't exactly 'back out of' like a normal job or lifestyle.  The entire occupation was essentially a black-ops level military position with further, more secretive levels possible later.  And 'leaving' the life would mean a life cut off from friends, family, and being hunted constantly by assassination teams with a bounty on your head.

Then there was the fact that what I had considered a 'birth defect' might be just that, only chakra-related.  Over the few weeks since the revelation of my new world, the strange omnipresent pain throughout my body had taken on new meaning.  I'd describe it as some manner of electrical sensation, but it wasn't quitethat.  Honestly, it was most akin to learning that one had a new type of limb which you'd never been conscious of until that moment.

Still, the 'energy' was flexible, bent to my will, and responded to my mental 'touch.'

But oh God...

The Pain.

I could feel every metaphorical, metaphysical 'drop' of chakra flowing parallel to my veins and arteries, leaking slowly into each and every one of my internal and external organs.  So, yes, there was probably some level of advantage to be gained from that awareness and I'm genre savvy enough to make use of it as much as possible, but with every nerve ending (and some I should have, but do anyway) screaming in pain when I try to 'play' with my chakra, it's going to be a long road to building up my pain tolerance to where I can do anything really 'useful.'

But I had time.

Lots of it.

I was a six month old infant with absolutely no personal responsibilities beyond the consumption of information, learning how to speak, and refining my motor control.  I mean, it wasn't like there was a pressing need to actually decide anything at this point in time, given that I probably had the better part of a decade before anyone expected me to voice an opinion on the matter...

If I had a say, that is.

My 'mother' was dead, true, but my 'father' was probably alive and well waiting for his 'son' to be released from the hospital.  So, largely, any decision I was going to be making depended on outside factors that I couldn't really anticipate.

Which left me...what options, really?

…

I'm gonna get soooo bored, I realized darkly.

…

Learning To See

…

Well, there is good news and bad news.

Quite a bit of both, actually.

I've managed to stay mostly sane over the past months, met my family, learned a good bit about my chakra, and have begun to understand the current dialect of Japanese from a combination of total language immersion, years of subbed anime, and a few high school and college level Japanese courses.  A corollary to this would be, of course, the identities of my...well, I suppose 'guardians' would be the best term right now.  Despite my somewhat darkly optimistic idea of having a living 'father,' I've gathered that my father died several months ago as an active ninja.

So I'm an orphan.

I'm...not sure how I feel about that.

Afraid...to a certain extent.  It's just beginning to sink in that I'm going to be stuck in a level of utter helplessnessfor quite some time and completely dependent on my caregivers.  This, it turned out, was one of the reasons I was in the hospital for so long; who knew Konoha had such an intricate bureaucracy?  Well, it took a while to determine exactly whomy guardians are, especially because they aren't even in the 'show.'  Technically.  The only reason I recognized them was because of my new adoptive 'sister,' who was previously (and remains) my biological cousin.

Tenten.

And, for those of you who are curious...if anyone ever reads this, that is: yes, Tenten's family are blacksmiths.  Well, weapon-and armor-smiths, I suppose.  On the one hand, I'm overcome with cliché-rage at the incredibly overused idea of Tenten being an 'heir' to a smith as the only possibleexplanation for her apparent obsession with weaponry.  Hell, I was the son of a pair of office workers and I was obsessed with knives, swords, etc... all my (relatively short) life.

Oh, yeah.

'was the son of-'

Was.

I'm actually embarrassed that it took me this long to remember/notice it, but...my name is a girl's name.  Oh, where are my manners?  I haven't introduced myself yet:

Hajimemashite.  Iketana Aislinge desu.  Douzo Yoroushiku Onigaishimasu.

So, beyond having a female Irish name, which makes no sense at all with what I know of the setting, I'm also Iketana Tenten's little sister.

Yeah...not so sure how I feel about that either.

But...I mentioned I was torn between anger at Tenten being a walking fandom cliché?  Yeah, that's counterbalanced by the fact that she, and by association, I live in a fully stocked ninja weapons cache.  This means I have ready access to all things sharp, shiny, and pointy.  And, with a burgeoning familial pride, I have to note that, while not masterwork, many of the blades are of extremely high quality, especially compared to some of the mass-production crap I'd gotten stuck with over the course of years of online orders.

I'm fairly sure they found my unconscious grasping at the stabby implements of death either very amusing or extremely disturbing.

Given the world I'd be (re)born into, I'd go with the former, rather than the latter.

My older sister, on the other hand, is...interesting.

Tenten is barely recognizable as the individual featured in the manga or anime, having been pressed into absolutely adorable outfits by her mother.  I regret to acknowledge that, yes, I have been forced into such clothing as well.  It seems my 'aunt,' adoptive mother, or whoever she is, is rather attached to the idea of 'her little girls,' and the ensuing frilly dresses and such that come with femininity.  On the one hand, my only prior experience with a female parent was so wholly different than this that it is a somewhat interesting experience, but...

It would be kind of sad, if it weren't so funny.

Although, this does shed some light on Tenten's underlying psychological issues.  Completely understandable psychological issues, by the way.  I mean, speaking as a man, I'd really like to go roll around in the mud right now to reaffirm my masculinity...or stab something, or do anything that doesn't revolve around baby talk, cutsey outfits, or stuffed animals.

Especially since I've already attained a fair mastery of the Japanese language.

Oh, and because of tendency of native Japanese speakers to pronounce their 'L's' as 'R's' to some degree, my name 'Aislinge' has been shortened to 'Ai.'  For those of you who don't know, that roughly translates as 'love.'  At this point, not only has my humiliation become complete, but