Chương 387: A Lack of Wisdom by Aethelar (Naruto)

Latest Update:COMPLETE

Summary: It's a self insert fic. You know the drill.

Featuring a grumpy protagonist who wants mochi, clean socks, and to maintain possession of their life and eyeballs in that order, a troll-dad sensei who's genuinely trying to understand the pint sized weirdos he's been saddled with but isn't sure where to start, and two team mates who are honest to god twelve year olds who canonically didn't mature until after the handy dandy time skip.

Where, please, is the unsubscribe button, because I'd like to request a different afterlife.

Link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23532889/chapters/56442703

Word count:312k

Chapters:50

Chapter 1: First arc: I

Chapter Text

It's a self insert fic. You know the drill: it starts when I die.

For me, that death was drowning. I won't bore you with the details - it was stupid, it was avoidable, it was a waste, it was fucking unpleasant and panic inducing, that's all you need to know. My chest burned, I held my breath until my body rebelled and breathed for me and then my throat burned, I choked, I think I screamed, my head swam -

When it stopped, I was in an empty place. Dark, but a strange kind of grey-dark, as though everything was visible even though there was no light. Too quiet. You know how normal quietness still has noise? No, I didn't know either, not until it was taken away. I couldn't even hear the faint rushing of blood in my ears, the huffs of my breath, that annoying ringing that always seems to crop up when there are no other sounds.

Just… quiet. Quiet and not-dark.

I don't know how long I spent there waiting for something to happen. When nothing did, I started walking, and I don't know how long I spent doing that either. Sorry; it's not the best start to a fic when the protagonist just wanders aimlessly and tries to work out if she's gone mad, but it's what I've got. A whole boatload of empty and a lot of walking.

The crying, when I heard it, was so out of place that it took me a while to recognise it.

"Hello?" I called, half expecting my voice not to work. I got no response, so maybe it didn't, but the crying was louder now, and clearer.

I turned and followed it. My feet started clicking against the floor - stones, like an old street, and I was wearing unfamiliar blocky sandals. "Hello? Are you ok?" I tried again.

The street started getting clearer - I can't describe how; it wasn't like a fog was lifting, or like it was getting easier to see. Just… There hadn't been a street, and now there was a vague impression of a street. A few more steps, and the vague impression became an outline, shadows marking where windows and gaps between houses were, the tentative beginnings of street-smells, a pain starting in my chest.

I stopped. When I pressed a hand to my chest I felt nothing there, but the pain wouldn't go away. Also, I was wearing - a dressing gown? A robe?

"If you're there, could you say something? Please?"

The person kept crying. I grit my teeth; I could go back, into the grey and the silence where I wasn't drowning, but they sounded like a child. I kept going.

The shadowy street had resolved itself into an archaic looking suburb, lit by a disturbingly red moon and liberally strewn with blood - though, thankfully, no bodies - by the time I found them. At least, I assumed it was a suburb; there were houses, gardens, areas of packed dirt and stone that marked paths. No cars, and the architecture was clearly foreign, but there were flowers in some of the windows, even a couple of houses with colourful awnings and signs out the front that I assumed were shops.

The child was in the doorway to one of the larger houses, silhouetted against the light from inside. He huddled against the door frame, arms around his knees, and stared into the room as though he couldn't tear his eyes away.

I pushed aside the pain in my chest. Which was stupid. Pain is important and ignoring it leads to more pain. I know this now.

But I pushed it aside, and knelt down next to him. "Hey," I said. I glanced inside the room, but other than a spattered puddle of more blood in the centre it seemed empty. "Hey, what's wrong?"

He ignored me. I hesitated, chewing on my lip, then reached out a tentative hand and touched his shoulder. "Hey, c'mon kid -"

He swung round to stare at me with wide, red eyes, and that pain in my chest? The one I'd ignored like the idiot I was? Yeah, that exploded. Literally. Into a fucking sword sticking out my sternum.

The boy sobbed something, hands scrabbling desperately at my dressing-gown-robe, and when I opened my mouth to say something I choked on my own blood, my lungs flooded with red from the stab wound, and I drowned.

Delightful.

He screamed, I screamed, and suddenly the sword was gone and my lungs were filled with air again. "What the hell -"

"Otouto," a voice said behind me. The boy flinched; I looked back just in time to see another creepy kid with red eyes - though admittedly, this one was older than the tiny scrap crying in my arms - before he put a hand on my shoulder to hold me still and stabbed me again.

I choked. I drowned. The smaller kid and I screamed.

"Otouto," the older kid said, and the whole thing started again.

What the hell.

Now, I know what you're thinking. Actually that's a lie; I haven't a clue what you're thinking, but if I were reading this fic I'd be thinking: that's Uchiha Itachi, this is Tsukuyomi, and the little kid is Sasuke. Obvious, right? Probably because it's tagged up there in the tagging bit. Well, bully for you. What I was thinking was more along the lines of: how many damn times can a girl die before it stops hurting, and the answer to that was always at least once more you miserable sod.

"Make it stop," the littler kid sobbed for the god knows how many-th time.

"Wish I could," I gurgled through a wet cough. I'd tried standing up, but the combination of one child holding onto me with a death grip and the other continually skewering me with a sword was a tricky one to get out of. Neither seemed keen on letting me go, so. More stabby times. Joy.

"I want to go," he continued, hiccoughing his way through the words, and the already short threads of my temper broke.

"Then go," I snapped. I pushed him away from me, again, and tried to turn him to face down the street, but it was like pushing a concrete wall. "Go down the street. It's quiet. No one stabs you. You can -" I had to break off there for the obligatory hacking-choking-bloody disgustingness of a sword in my lungs, and as much as it hurt it just annoyed me so much that I turned on the emotionless preteen behind me and spat the blood in his face.

"Can you not?" I snarled.

There was a pause. For the first time, the boy focussed his red eyes on me. "Why?"

"Are you kidding me," I hissed out. He stared at me, unblinking, so no, apparently not. "Your brother wants to leave," I said instead. I felt like I was at my grandma's house, asking if my little cousin could get down from the dinner table. "Will you let him go?"

His gaze slid past me to land on his brother, and I swear, he glitched and reset. The hand was back on my shoulder. I was facing forward again - I hadn't turned back, hadn't moved, I just was, and the sword was resting against my back.

"Otouto," he said, same inflection, a recording on repeat. The littler kid turned to me with wide, desperate eyes.

"Get out of here," I said, pushing him again, and this time, thank fucking god, he went. The first two steps were stumbled, hovering and unsure, then the sword appeared in my chest and he flinched and ran.

Finally, I thought. The house started destabilising as he got further away, the street fluctuating in and out of real. My lungs filled with blood, my scream stuck in my throat, I choked, the boy disappeared over the grey horizon and the last remains of the house collapsed in on me as I drowned -

"Otouto," Itachi said, and I huddled in the door and cried as he put a hand on my mother's shoulder and ran her through with his sword.

"You are not worth killing," he said, my big brother, the one I loved more than anything in the world. "When you have the same eyes as I do, come and stand before me."

And yeah, maybe at this point I should have realised what was going on, but hey. I didn't have the tags. Do me a favour and let me know if there's any major character death coming up in my future? Other than baby Sasuke, who I'm now pretty sure I sent off into the great unknown to die in my place.

And, you know, all those other people who canonically died in the Naruto series.

Ah, shit. I just killed Itachi's baby brother. The baby brother he murdered an entire clan for. In a roundabout, extremely fucked up logic kind of way, but still. That there is a mass murderer and the one person he had left to care about has just shuffled his merry way off this mortal coil and it's my fault.

Shit.

But, I'm getting ahead of myself. It took… several repetitions of the illusion, plus an extremely alarming wake up in a hospital room for me to cotton on to what had happened. Not that I actually understand it - though most self insert fics have a pretty tenuous explanation for how the main character ends up in their fictional world of choice, so. Par for the course, I guess.

What I did know was this: when Sasuke left, his memories didn't. Neither, thankfully, did the basic skills he'd picked up; I could speak, I could read, I could walk in this pathetically tiny body - I mean, seriously? I know Uchihas were meant to be delicate and everything, but Sasuke's a twig. A shrimpy twig. He's a splinter.

I'm a splinter. I need to get used to this; the shrimpy twig body with the pale skin and the - oh god - penis attached to it is my shrimpy twig body.

In case you were wondering, I am pretending the penis doesn't exist, and stubbornly sitting down to pee. You probably were not wondering. I apologise for sharing, and shall go back to being traumatised by my male body parts in the privacy of my own head.

"Uchiha-kun?" the nurse asked, tilting his head in concern at my strangled whimper. "Are you ok?"

I frantically shoved thoughts of gender dysphoria and reality dysphoria out my head and cast around for something plausible to say. "My parents are dead," I said. It was true, after all - I even had Sasuke's emotional attachment to them, though it was muted and not as strong as the feelings for - for my -

"My parents," I repeated hollowly. "All the cousins. Granny."

It hit me. I was dead. I said I wouldn't talk about my life before, it's not important to the fic and it doesn't matter, but I hadn't realised how much that didn't stop it mattering to me. Everyone I knew, everyone I loved - I'd never see them again. I was dead.

"They are," the nurse said, pragmatic to a fault. I made a punched-out, wounded sound. "But they'll be watching over you from the pure lands, so you best make them proud, ne?" He smiled and handed me a chocolate pudding.

I took it on autopilot, then a second later the spoon he put in my hand as well. "But they're gone," I protested, still trying to wrap my head around the enormity of what I'd lost. Me-me and Sasuke-me. I wanted, desperately, to run to my big brother and for him to say something to make the world right again.

Not you are not worth killing. Something better than that. Like, here's some dango, don't tell Tou-san or, do you want me to show you how to throw a shuriken, or, just, you know, silly Otouto, it'll be ok.

Except I couldn't. Because he'd killed the clan and dragged me out of the afterlife I was meant to be in and taken himself off to be an S rank missing nin. Like an idiot.

"They're gone," the nurse allowed, "But you aren't, Uchiha-kun. Eat your pudding, and then we can see about getting you home again."

In the face of his extreme practicality I bowed to the inevitable and ate my pudding.

Link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23532889/chapters/56442703