Area Woman Has "Grossly Optimistic" Retirement Plan [1]

[fascinationex]

Content: Maria arrives in the elemental nations just in time to be very sure she doesn't want to live there.

Notes: I actually deleted 2000 words of intro for this fic because I'm 99% sure it works without it. Content includes references to suicide (although the character does not dwell on it), alcohol, various unhealthy coping mechanisms

Crossposted to AO3 here

I woke up from a nightmare about dying.

In the nightmare, I’d died in a stark, bleach-scented hospital room, after being told that nobody would approve a transplant for a patient with my history so I’d have to live -- or die, as it happened -- with my mistakes. Apparently there were levels of toxins that not even well-stocked, well-funded, fully-staffed modern hospitals could fix before your liver gave it up.

My next of kin was on the other side of the planet, visiting a friend in Sacramento, and there wasn’t anybody else. So I’d been alone, and I’d lain there marinating in the crushing knowledge that death was coming for me. My own snide voice had come echoing in my head: what did you expect?  Isn’t this what you wanted?

I don’t know, I thought helplessly.

But my blood wouldn’t clot anymore and my skin had changed colour and it was increasingly obvious that it was too late by then -- and the rest, then, was a wash of pain and confusion, remembered only hazily. The medical staff were unsympathetic. So I died alone.

And then I woke up, sweating and shaking with my heart thundering wildly in my chest. I sat up, pulled my knees up and buried my face in the blanket over them. Wow. Okay. What a fucked up dream.

My face hurt. My eyes hurt. My whole body hurt. Tension, probably.

I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Another. And again. My heart rate dropped much faster than I expected. After a few minutes of concentrated breathing -- out, out, out, slow and steady, concentrate, Maria -- I still felt peculiar and wrong, but not like I was about to succumb to blind panic.

Clearly, I was not dying. (Every time I had ever thought 'clearly, I am not dying’ to myself, a part of me whispered: are you sure? But second-guessing would drive me mad. I was reasonably sure, and I made the conscious choice to accept that as good enough.)

I didn’t feel any of the pain or weird hazy confusion and anxiety of the dream. From what I knew, my only sister was still over in the States, although I hadn’t spoken to her in several months.

Everything else about the dream was bullshit.

I leaned back, away from the hump of my legs beneath their blanket, and looked blearily around.

I could see... everything.

That was weird, I thought. Had I fallen asleep with my glasses on? I reached up to pull them off but where I expected metal frames I felt only thick, soft hair. I smooshed my hand over my eye. Nope. No lens.

The room was neither blurry nor familiar. And my eye sight was --

If I blinked toward the closet I could see every crack in the wood. I would...

I got up, stumbled -- once, twice, fuck, was I drunk? I couldn’t remember any drinking, but that didn’t mean much. Everything was the wrong distance away and despite how crystal clear my vision seemed, my limbs wouldn’t coordinate with my brain.

I wrenched open the window and braced myself on its sill, weaving giddly back and forth on my unreliable legs. Fuck, I could see everything. I could see the leaves on the trees, whose long shadows I should not have even been able to pick out in the dark. I could discern the individual feathers on birds asleep in their branches and see the texture of fur on a ragged, dark cat slinking along a fence.

The cat’s tail twitched. I saw the coil of his muscles and the shift in his joints and I knew where he’d land -- clearly, so clearly, like I had already seen it -- before he even made the jump.

I shut my eyes, dizzy. I swallowed. I opened my eyes and shut the window and turned back around, leaning against the wall. The room, in all its absurd detail, was simple but practical. Wooden furniture, mats underfoot, I was --

I was not me, I thought, looking at a pair of trousers laid out. I’d never fit into them. They were tiny. I flexed my fingers and looked, properly, at my hands.

No. Not mine.

I was not me. So I’d dreamed of dying, and then I’d woken up in a strange house with a new body and superpowers. And...

Well. It was the middle of the night. Maybe I was....

I went back to the bed, climbed in and pulled up the blankets. Maybe I would wake up from this, too.

So...

So... I, you know...

...I rolled over and went back to sleep.

Fuck dreams, anyway.

---

I woke up hungover. Unpleasant but not weird. The headache and hot warning queasiness in my belly could pretty much have been anything, but my mouth tasted like the smell of the dead rat I’d once found beneath my fridge, and when I rolled over, everything went for a subtle but horrifying wobble that I felt right behind my eyes.

I rolled away from the light source anyway, squeezed my eyes shut, and held very still. Getting drunk all alone was one thing; getting so drunk all alone that I vomited on myself was completely different and so much worse.

After a few long moments my stomach settled, leaving behind only the sense that the world was twirling crazily around me. I cracked my eyes open again, still not quite ready to trust the feeling.

The sheets were white. That was weird. Most of mine were printed, owing to my regrettable but absolutely unchallenged habit of drinking coffee in bed. Actually, it didn’t smell quite right here, either. It smelled pleasantly like recent laundry, which was in my house what you’d call not fucking likely. But I also did not recognise the detergent... or... any of the ambient sounds, actually, now that I was paying attention.

I exhaled long and hard. If I was clever, I’d have left myself some water within easy pawing distance. Or, given that I wasn’t terribly predisposed to cleverness: if I’d dumped my bag on my bed after returning from work, I might have slept with it and there may, reasonably, be a bottle of water in there, which --

It was all horribly moot, since any of the above would require me to move. I made a sad animal noise in between my teeth, because I lived alone and keeping quiet didn’t matter in the slightest. I knew I could whine and moan to my heart’s content and nobody would come to either help or investigate.

I clenched my jaw and squirmed into a sitting position, against which half of my anatomy seemed to revolt. Once upright, I stilled. The nausea passed after a few seconds of tense, perfect stilless. The mounting anxiety about my circumstances absolutely did not.

There was plain wooden furniture, a low roof and one large window. The whole room was sparse, clean and completely unfamiliar.

I didn’t know where the fuck I was.

And far from sleeping with my handbag, it was nowhere to be seen.

Okay. I would... I wouldn’t have thought I was that drunk, but I was pretty seedy feeling this morning and I had no idea where I was, so, like - I guessed circumstances like that didn’t lie, did they?

I closed my eyes against another roll of nausea. My head felt disgusting. Okay. I needed an action plan. I’d feel better once I’d figured out where to go from here.

Step one: water. Step two: figure out where I was. Step three: find my stuff (please let my wallet and keys be somewhere nearby. Please). Step four: go home!

(Step five: go back to bed.)

This plan seemed reasonable and nearly foolproof until I staggered to my feet unsteadily and realised three important things:

One: my body was not tall enough. Because it was some other body.

Two: I recognised the view out the window, with a flash of memory that floated up from the murk of last night with photographic clarity.

Three: I did remember something, which I had previously written off as a series of bizarre dreams, but which in light of point one --

Well.

This was the same room I’d woken to during the previous night and, far from being some weird dream, I was actually experiencing that strange body-hopping horror, and --

Oh. That meant...

Ah.

I had a few dithering and unpleasant moments of trying to assess the likely reality of that hospital room.

It was a linear, clear memory, right until the end where it became choppy and full of strange blanks. It was hard to feel really firm about reality right at that moment, but I thought that... the hospital, and the -- the overdose -- that had probably been real, too.

I blinked. Slowly.

Alright. Well. That was... a thing.

That was happening.

I shoved open the cupboards until I found one with a mirror inside. It was a short, flat one, designed to show only the face, and it was enough: I was short, young -- very young -- with a thin face, dark hair, dark eyes, and a mouth that looked angry.

“Fuck,” I said. The voice wasn’t right.

I closed the door and turned away, unsteady on my strange new legs.

I wondered if I should leave the room. God knew what was waiting outside it. However, despite all of this, step one still had not logically changed. I was hung over and I needed water.

I went to find the water.

The house I was inhabiting was small, neat and drab, much like the room I’d woken in. There was an oddly comprehensive collection of historical weaponry around, the kind that made me wonder if the people who lived here were re-enactors, or maybe LARPers or something. But it became rapidly apparent to me that even if someone else had lived here at some point, it was a one person dwelling now.

There was another bedroom, but it was so dusty and untouched that it couldn’t have seen proper use for -- oh, the better part of a year, surely. And there was one cup, one bowl, one toothbrush. One pair of sandals by the door. No, this was not a place for a whole family, or even roommates.

I leaned heavily on the side of the kitchen sink. Then I shoved my face under the faucet and drank in great ugly gulps. I paused and let the cold spray fall past my face and into the drain when I stopped to breathe. Then I went right back to gulping it down.

It didn’t help.

I was beginning to wonder if my nausea was actually a problem of being, like, physically maladapted to the body I was inhabiting. Changes like growing were usually gradual, but now I was using a body that was wiry and spindly and shorter by nearly a foot. Its feet and joints were not stiff or badly formed or worn, its eyes worked better, and it had feeling in all of its fingers. I had no proof, but I suspected I may not have been drunk at all last night -- any sickness was instead something much more profound than a hangover.

I continued guzzling at the water anyway. Whatever was wrong, being hydrated could not possibly make it worse.

Unless the tap water isn’t potable here! I thought. I decided this was a thought I was going to ignore.

I leaned against the sink for a while -- minutes, at least, although I could not have said how many -- breathing hard. I wiped water off my face with my skinny, prepubescent wrist.  

Okay. Water. What next?

Then I went through the house haphazardly, looking at things as I thought of them. There were broad spoons, chopsticks and cooks’ knives in the drawers, and a rice cooker in the cupboard. Whoever lived here bought rice in ten kilogram bags.

There was mail, unopened, addressed to ‘Mariko’ and mail, opened, addressed to ‘Akiko’. On the fridge, a letter from the Central Clan Tithing Fund in partnership with the Konoha Orphans’ Association and Regulatory Body.

I licked my teeth. That explained the mixed messages I’d gotten about who lived here.

Or did it? I squinted at the word ‘Konoha’.

...LARPers, then, and the letter was, like. fake?

Or else maybe a place with coincidentally the same name as a fictional village? I couldn’t tell.

I moved into the area with the low table and rattled around in the drawers until I found what I was looking for -- albums. I tossed them onto the table and sprawled next to it, glad to stop tottering around on my stupid traitor legs.

The photographs -- helpfully labelled and dated by some very organised person with habits not unlike my grandparents -- in conjunction with the mail indicated that I was probably the one called ‘Akiko’. The dates didn’t make a lot of sense to me, but I guessed I was maybe, like, ten or so -- and that for some reason that was old enough to leave a kid on thir own here.

I wasn’t complaining because living with a caretaker would have made this morning so, so much worse, but -- ten? Really?

“Akiko,” someone was yelling, suddenly, and it took me a second to remember that that was meant to be me, after which I flinched and accidentally knocked over a bunch of the photos I’d pulled out, scattering them across the wooden floor.

“Uh,” I called back, panicking, and then I wondered if I should even have called out at all. Maybe I could have pretended not to be here.

I heard my visitor let himself in and kick his shoes off in he doorway.

He had short fluffy air and an easy smile, which he did not hesitate to turn on me. “Are you going to school?” he asked -- not accusingly, but neutrally, as though it was just a question.

It made sense that someone this age would be expected to be in school, and I guessed it was sort of a relief -- they weren’t actually just turning ten year olds out to run around unsupervised entirely. Nice to know... for someone else.

“Hmm,” said the boy, who could not himself have been much more than thirteen. “Photos, huh?” he seemed to take my confused and frozen silence as assent because he tugged the one I was looking at out from beneath my limp fingers.

“Your mum sure looked pretty back then, huh?” he mused.

It was one of the ‘Mariko’ pictures, so that was, you know, useful information. Sort of.

“Or were you jut admiring yourself?” he went on slyly, flicking a glance at me from under his eyelashes, which were very long. “You were so cute back then!” A pause. “I don’t know what happened.”

I snorted softly despite myself. I still had no idea where I was or, actually, who I was, but at last the company was well-equipped to entertain himself.

Still, maybe this whole waking-up-somewhere thing was actually normal -- or, if not normal, at least heard of. And this guy seemed...

Well, okay, he was thirteen, maybe fourteen, at a stretch, but he’d at least know who to talk to. Probably. Maybe.

“Uh,” I said haltingly, “so this is kind of weird, but I’m not actually ‘Akiko’? I just, er, I think I just woke up like this. I mean, I had,” I paused. “I’m not explaining this right. I had a totally different life,” I said more carefully, “and then I woke up here and this,” I pointed at my chest, “isn’t me at all. Is this, like, a thing that happens here?” Or, I thought wildly, do I seem absolutely nuts?

The boy turned to look at me. His expression was devoid of his sly teasing now, dark eyes narrowed, lips a flat line.

“Not typically,” he said slowly.

And then -- holy fuck, and then -- his eyes went from their placid coal black to a burning, apocalyptic red. I twitched back from him, but he had my arm in his grip before I even thought to get away.

“Easy,” he said, still in that slow and careful voice. “It’s fine. It’s fine, I’m just looking--”

His pupils split and whirled. Did he have the fucking sharingan? What kind of LARPers were these?

My heart raced inside the cage of my ribs. I could hear myself breathing again, feel the nausea that had been receding swim to the surface, swamping me.

“You look like Akiko,” he said, “and there’s no weird chakra in your head or anything.”

“Um,” I said, “okay?”

His eyes did not dim. He did not let go of my arm. “But you’re not,” he said, looking me up and down in a way which might have seemed conspicuous and unsettling from a man on the street, but which here seemed absolutely terrifying with his eyes glowing that unholy red. “Your body language isn’t right, and neither is your syntax.”

“I... am sure that’s true,” I said. My voice came out all shaky because I was a coward. “Uh, I don’t, you know, I don’t actually want to be Akiko, either, you know? No offence, but I’m sure you want your Akiko, proper Akiko, back, and --”

“Yes,” he said, “I’m not saying you’re wrong. There are... several possibilities.” The way he said it made me feel as though none of these were good possibilities. His expression just made it feel even more ominous. “There’s a clan who specialise in,” he paused, and then said, “in stuff like this.”

“Stuff like this,” I repeated, tugging gently on my arm. He did not give it up. Well. Alright then.

“Yes,” he said, offering no further elaboration on that point. Someone, somewhere, specialised in waking up in other people’s bodies. Who was I to argue? His eyes were still spinning. “One of them is someone to whom I report. We’ll ask him.”

I nodded emphatically. “Great! Just to be, like, totally clear here, I have no interest in being part of some Asenath Waite body snatching deal okay?”

He gave me a long and unreadable look. “I believe you believe that,” he said after a second. Then, “Ne, Akiko. Look at me.”

“Huh?” I glanced up to his eyes, past his curved lips. This was a split second before I remembered that in Narutoland there was never a good reason to look directly at anyone’s sharingan if you could possibly help it.

I blinked once, slowly, and the ceiling before me was painted white and covered with black squiggles and I was slumped over on a medical bed of some kind -- sterile-smelling, padded, with a weird paper sheet tossed over it to be discarded after a new patient.

“Um,” I said, dazzled by how disoriented I felt.

Was this another dream?

I didn’t feel as hungover now, but what did that even mean anymore? The only thing I was certain of was that I would want a goddamn drink after whatever today was.

I sat up slowly.

“--ometimes,” someone was saying, through the cracked door -- a man’s voice, confident, assured, but tired, “people react to trauma in unpredictable ways. In this case, Akiko is grieving in an... unorthodox, but not unprecedented, way.”

“She seemed like a whole new person,” said another person, and this seemed vaguely but nebulously familiar. I squinted at nothing. Who was that?

“In a way she is. She has disassociated herself profoundly from the person who experienced those losses -- she may not even be able to identify ‘herself’ as Akiko.”

A pause. “But she’s not a plant?”

“Definitely not. She’s deeply confused and I am not completely convinced she’s competent to live on her own --”

Were they talking about me? Hey!

“-- but she’s not dangerous to anyone else. I wouldn’t recommend keeping her under observation in T&I, either.”

“You’re that sure?”

“Shisui-kun,” the voice said gently but, yes, still tiredly, and with an edge of mounting impatience, “you brought your cousin here because you knew we would be able to confirm whether or not she was dangerous, yes?”

A long pause. Finally, “Yes.”

“And do you have faith in my work?”

A shorter pause. “...Yes.”

“I’m so glad.” Definitely impatient now.

Another silence. “So will she... remember?”

“She may,” hedged the older, wearier voice. “She’ll certainly have some semantic and procedural memory, but whether she remembers her personal experiences and history will be hit and miss.”

“Can the hospital...?”

The voice laughed. “She’s healthy, Shisui, she just thinks she’s someone else. You can’t give someone medicine specific enough for that, and I wouldn’t recommend it even if you could -- if she remembers, she will do so naturally, with time. You can take her home. Are you pretending to be asleep, Akiko?”

After several seconds of silence a blond man stuck his head into the room. His eyes were the blue of a summer sky, which I noticed immediately because he didn’t seem to actually have pupils, and that’s the kind of defect that gets a person’s attention. How did he see? What hole did the light go in? Was he blind?

“Akiko?” he prompted, pushing the door open wide and coming in.

Hey, I was Akiko. Right! And I couldn’t remember the question. “...No?” His mouth moved on its own, although I couldn‘t read his expression. He didn‘t look particularly unfriendly, so that was good. “So... Am I really Akiko?” I asked.

“Yes, you’re really Akiko.”

That was weird, because I remembered being an awful lot older. And also a hospital room. And I had no idea how this weird guy with no pupils had assessed my identity thoroughly enough to be this sure when a) I was not very sure at all, and b) I didn’t remember any of the intervening period.

The other person from outside the room slunk in too. It was the boy from earlier, early teens, messy hair, dark e--

Dark eyes. They’d been red, hadn’t they? They’d been sharingan.

“Shisui, right?” I said slowly. “Uchiha Shisui?”

He blinked. Then smiled. I was uncertain and unhappy, but it was a smile. “Yes.”

I looked over to the blond -- really looked at him. His hair was thrown back in a jaunty, high ponytail, which trailed over a long charcoal-coloured coat, and he had -- yeah. He had a Konoha forehead protector stuck to his arm (where, please note, it was by no means protecting his forehead).

“Um... Yamanaka?” I suggested weakly. As weird and embarrassing as it’d be to get this wrong, I’d have kind of liked for everyone to drop everything and go ‘HAHA YOU’RE ON TELEVISION,’ and reveal a hidden camera somewhere. I wasn’t really the sort of person you pranked like that, though -- everyone with the patience to spend time with me was painfully aware that I didn’t respond well to pranks, shocks, or indeed even mild or pleasant surprises.

“Which one?” asked the man, and I blinked.

Which one? Was I meant to know him? “I’m sorry, I have no idea?”

He gave a smug smile. “Yes, that’s what I expected. You know which clan is which, but you haven’t the faintest clue if you’ve met us, have you?”

“What,” I repeated.

This was, apparently, the cue for him to begin talking. He’d conjectured a lot while I’d been -- well, during the blank spot in my recent memory -- and despite how tired he looked he was evidently pleased to have a captive audience to whom he could expound.

Somewhere some kind of machinery was humming, but other than that and the sound of Yamanaka’s voice, I could hear nothing louder than my own breathing. Shisui was a silent, blank-faced ghost beside him.

I rubbed my face. My glasses did not get in the way because I did not, apparently, wear glasses. “I don’t know who Akiko is,” I said flatly, interrupting one of his points, “and I don’t really want to be her.”

“I know,” said Yamanaka, with an infuriating smile, “If you’d wanted to be her, this wouldn’t have happened. But you are, all the same.”