I woke to voices.
They were muffled, drifting through walls and sliding doors, the low cadence of adults arguing in careful tones. Not shouting—nothing that crude—but tense enough that even half-asleep I could feel the strain in every word.
For a few seconds, I didn't move.
I just listened.
Then I opened my eyes.
The ceiling above me was familiar. The beams, the way the light fell across the room, the faint scent of incense that always lingered here. I was in my parents' bedroom. Back home. Tucked into a futon that had been arranged carefully, too carefully, like someone had tried very hard not to wake me.
Safe.
The thought landed softly.
And then everything else crashed back in.
The forest.
The blindfold.
The bindings.
The voices.
The boot.
My stomach tightened violently as memory surged forward without mercy. I squeezed my eyes shut, but it didn't help. The images were already there, sharp and unavoidable.
The way my chakra threads had moved.
The way they hadn't slowed.
The way the clearing had looked afterward.
Not bodies.
Not even corpses.
Just… pieces.
I swallowed hard, my throat suddenly dry, my chest aching as panic clawed its way up again.
This is real.
The thought hit differently now.
Not as an abstract truth I nodded along to, but as something heavy and absolute that settled into my bones. This wasn't a story I was watching unfold. It wasn't a game. It wasn't an anime episode where the screen faded to black and everything reset next week.
This was my life.
And I had killed people.
The room felt too small.
I curled slightly inward, fingers tightening in the blankets as my breathing quickened. For two years—two entire years—I had lived here like I was half-asleep, treating everything like an immersive experience I could mentally distance myself from. Training, politics, danger—it had all felt real, but not real enough to hurt like this.
Some part of me had assumed there would always be a cut.
A transition.
A safety net.
There wasn't.
"Oh, fuck," the thought echoed through my mind, raw and unfiltered. "Oh, fuck, oh, fuck…"
The world I was in wasn't kind.
Naruto wasn't a hopeful story when you stripped away the music and the framing. It was a world built on child soldiers, assassins for hire, and villages held together by fear, tradition, and barely controlled violence. People died constantly. Sometimes for reasons. Often for none at all.
And if you weren't careful—if you were weak, unlucky, or simply in the wrong place—you died.
Or worse.
I thought of the men who had talked about me like I was livestock.
My hands shook.
I forced myself to breathe.
Slow.
In.
Out.
"Okay," I thought, clinging to the word like a lifeline. "Okay. Stop spiraling."
Panic wouldn't help.
It never did.
What would help was admitting something I had avoided since the day I was born into this body.
I needed to change things.
Not someday.
Now.
Training wasn't a hobby anymore. It wasn't preparation for some distant future where everything would conveniently line up with canon. It was survival.
Because there were people in this village—right now—who would be perfectly happy if I disappeared. People who saw the Hyuga bloodline as a resource. A tool. A thing to be harvested.
The fact that I was alive meant I was a target.
And according to what I remembered, it would only get worse.
Wars.
Invasions.
Conspiracies stacked on top of conspiracies.
I couldn't rely on Naruto.
Not because he was evil or useless—but because luck wasn't a plan. And if even one thing went wrong, if even one event diverged, everything could collapse.
I needed strength.
Real strength.
Not just power, but control. Awareness. The ability to act without hesitation—and without losing myself again the way I had in that forest.
I needed a plan.
The thought was steady. Grounding.
As the tension in my chest slowly eased, exhaustion crept in to take its place. My body felt heavy, every muscle sore, my mind frayed at the edges.
The voices in the other room continued, distant and indistinct.
I let my eyes close.
Just for a moment.
Planning could wait a few hours.
For now, sleep claimed me again—quietly, insistently—pulling me under before the weight of the world could finish settling on my shoulders.