I was eight years old the first time I died.
Technically, I was in second grade. Practically, I was somewhere in the woods behind my cousin's house, staring at the underside of a fallen log and trying very hard not to throw up at the sight of my own blood.
There was a lot of it.
"Okay," I whispered, because no one else was there to say it. "This is… not great."
The day had started normally enough: bored adults, a backyard cookout, and my cousin daring me to follow him into the trees because only babies stayed near the house. I wasn't a baby, so I went. Obviously.
The plan had not included the part where the old, half-rotten plank bridge over the creek decided to retire the second I stepped on it. Wood splintered. I fell. Something sharp tore into my leg on the way down.
Then there was mud and pain and the realization that I'd landed on something jagged enough to make the world go white around the edges.
By the time I dragged myself out of the water, my left leg looked like special effects from a horror movie. My cousin was gone—either he hadn't noticed I'd fallen, or he'd panicked and run back without me. Neither option made me feel better.
I tried to shout. My voice came out small and thin and got swallowed by the trees.
So I did what any sensible person in a small body would do: I crawled for a while, then collapsed next to a log and decided to take a quick break from existence.
The air smelled like wet dirt and leaves. The sky between the branches was bright and uncaring. My leg throbbed in time with my heartbeat, except the beats were getting slower, like someone was turning a volume knob down.
This is bad, I thought, with a dry, detached clarity. Like… capital-B Bad.
I knew enough to realize that losing a lot of blood in the middle of nowhere wasn't something you just walked off. I wondered how long it would take someone to notice I was missing. An hour? Two? By then…
My fingers were going numb. That seemed rude.
I stared at my hand, fascinated by how distant it looked. Pale, smeared with red, a little too thin. It didn't feel like it belonged to me. Honestly, most of my body felt like that on a good day—like I'd been issued the wrong model by mistake—but today the disconnect was literal.
The edges of everything blurred.
Somewhere far away, someone might have been calling my name. The sound wobbled, stretched, then snapped.
For a second, there was just… drifting. No forest, no log, no weight. Just the sense of falling without moving, like when you miss a step in a dream and your stomach drops out—but stretched into forever.
Colors smeared together. Green, gray, something gold. I caught quick, disjointed flashes as if somebody was flipping through channels on a TV: a stone cliff with massive faces carved into it; paper slips with squiggly writing fluttering in the wind; a spiral symbol, simple and bold, like a doodle in the margin of a notebook.
Then pain slammed back in.
Not the sharp, tearing pain from before. This was hot and buzzing, spreading from my chest out through limbs I hadn't realized I'd gotten back. My heart hammered hard enough to hurt. Air scraped into lungs that felt wrong and right at the same time.
Voices crashed over me.
"—still alive, somehow."
"Energy response is stabilizing. Keep pressure on the wound."
"Poor kid. No ID, no guardian… another stray, just what we needed."
A bright light cut into my eyes. I squinted, tried to flinch away, found I couldn't move much. Everything felt heavy. My leg hurt in a way that said "stitched" instead of "open," which was an improvement, but the rest of me buzzed with leftover terror and something else—like my skin didn't quite fit.
I blinked up at a ceiling made of clean white plaster, not peeling farmhouse paint. The air smelled like antiseptic and herbs, not damp leaves.
A shape leaned over me—someone in a green vest over dark clothes, with a cloth band tied across their forehead. On the metal plate in the center of that band was a carving: a stylized leaf, spiraling inward.
"Hey," the person said. Their voice was calm, but their eyes were tired. "You're awake. Try not to move too much."
Their features were sharp, their hair pulled back. A mask hung loose around their neck.
"Where…?" My voice came out croaky, like a frog who'd smoked half a pack.
"You're in Konoha Hospital," the stranger said. "You were found near the village border. Badly injured, severe blood loss. Lucky for you, a patrol was passing by."
Konoha?
The word meant nothing to me. It sounded Japanese, maybe? But the architecture outside the window didn't look like any city I knew.
My chest tightened. For a second, I thought I might be having a panic attack. Or another heart attack. Or both.
Brain damage, I reasoned, desperate for logic. Oxygen deprivation. I'm hallucinating.
The person—a doctor? A soldier?—checked a clipboard, then frowned slightly.
"We still don't have a name for your file," they said. "Do you remember it?"
That caught me.
I knew my name. My old name. It sat heavy on my tongue, wrong in a way I'd never had words for but had learned to live with. But saying it here, in this strange place that smelled like herbs and ozone, felt like dragging that wrongness over the edge with me.
The nurse looked down and started writing something, muttering under her breath, "She appears to have some issues with memory recall..."
She? I thought. She...?
My gaze drifted, unfocused, to the window beside the bed.
Beyond the glass, over the rooftops of a village that looked half-traditional and half-industrial, a massive mountain loomed. Carved into the rock face were four gigantic heads. Stern, stoic men staring down at the streets below.
It looked like Mount Rushmore, if Mount Rushmore had been carved by someone who really liked anime.
My heart did something weird and complicated. It wasn't fear. It was... possibility.
I swallowed.
"…Sylvie," I said, before I could overthink it. The name slid out smooth, like it had been waiting in the back of my throat this whole time. "My… my name is Sylvie."
The medic blinked, then wrote it down without comment.
"Well then. Welcome to Konoha..." The nurse fumbled with the sounds of the name, as if it didn't quite fit their tongue. "Sylvie."
They moved on to check something by my bedside. I stared at my hands.
They were small. Smaller than I remembered. The skin was paler, smoother. The angles… different. The proportions of my wrists, the way my fingers tapered. My arms disappeared into a hospital gown that hung off me like a sheet, but I could feel the shape of my body underneath it in a way that made my brain stutter.
Girl, a part of me whispered, with a stunned, quiet certainty.
I should have freaked out about that. Another day, another life, I probably would have. But I'd already bled out in a forest and woken up in a place where people carved giant heads into mountains. The usual hierarchy of concerns had been thoroughly scrambled.
So I did what I always did when reality got too big: I shoved the feeling into a labeled mental box—Deal With This Later—and slammed the lid.
Something cramped low in my chest anyway, a knot of nerves and… relief? I ignored it as best I could.
"Any headaches? Dizziness?" the medic asked.
"Uh. All of the above," I said. My voice sounded higher than I remembered, too. Of course it did.
They made a face that said "standard" and "problem" at the same time, then gave me the usual instructions: rest, don't try to get up alone, someone will bring food, blah blah, if you see double call for help. Then they left, closing the door softly behind them.
The room went quiet.
I lay there, listening to the faint sounds of the hospital—footsteps, distant voices, the clink of metal. Underneath it all was something subtler, like static on a radio just off-station. A sense of… pressure. Presence. As if the air itself was crowded.
Maybe that was just blood loss and panic. Maybe it was the medication. I didn't have a manual for "you have woken up in a foreign country with a new body."
My eyelids drooped.
The door to my room banged open.
"Hey, hey, you can't just—"
"I just wanna see—!"
A nurse's protest cut off as a small shape darted past her and skidded to a halt beside my bed.
He was shorter than me by a little, all sharp angles and messy blond hair, blue eyes too big for his face. His clothes were scuffed. Band-Aids crisscrossed his cheeks like he collected minor injuries as a hobby. A pair of ragged goggles hung around his neck.
For some reason, just having him that close made the air feel louder. Not sound—something else. Like standing near a generator you couldn't quite hear, only feel buzzing in your bones. It made the hair on my arms stand up.
"Whoa," he said, eyes wide. "You're the new kid they found! They said you almost died. That's so cool!"
I stared at him.
Cool?
"I—" My voice cracked. I coughed, tried again. "I almost died. That part wasn't the cool bit."
He grinned, unbothered. He had weird markings on his cheeks—three on each side. Like whiskers.
"I'm Uzumaki Naruto!" he declared, too loud for the tiny room. "Believe it!"
The nurse groaned like she'd heard that line a hundred times already.
Despite everything—the pain, the terror, the confusion of waking up in a place that shouldn't exist—I felt a laugh try to climb up my throat. It came out as a broken little huff, but it was something.
"I'm Sylvie," I managed. My voice shook, but I met his eyes. "Nice to meet you."
His grin somehow got brighter. For a split second, the exhausted, empty parts of me warmed under it, like someone had cracked a window in a stuffy room and let real air in.
I looked past him, out the window, at the strange stone faces watching over the village.
I had died in the wrong forest. Somehow, I'd ended up... here. Wherever here was.
And looking at this loud, strange kid with the buzzing energy, I had the terrible, exhilarating feeling that things were only going to get more complicated from here.
Several years would go by and the orphanage was… fine.
It was a building. It had beds, food, chores, and rules. It was better than bleeding out in the woods, but worse than having actual freedom.
The kids here moved like they were waiting to be yelled at. Flinch first, talk second. I recognized the posture; I'd grown up in it. It was a universal language.
If this was the "good" outcome for a stray kid in this weird military-run village, I wondered what the bad outcome looked like. I didn't have any illusions left about finding a loving family, but maybe, just maybe, I could make sure I wasn't the only one surviving it alone.