The rain was the first thing she noticed, soft, steady, and endless. It tapped against old wooden shutters with the rhythm of a memory she couldn't place. For a moment, she thought she was back in that cramped clinic bed, her lungs tight and body aching, waiting for morning or the morphine to kick in—whichever came first. But the air here was different. No disinfectant. No sour bile or bleach. Just the faint scent of damp wood, stale herbs, and something sweet... rice porridge maybe. Her eyes fluttered open to a dim room. She wasn't home.
She tried to sit up, her limbs weak but not unfamiliar. Her body trembled, more from disuse than illness. A fuzzy headache throbbed behind her eyes, and her thoughts swam—fragments of sensation, sounds, and blurry faces she didn't recognize tangled with the echo of a world that felt too far away. She wasn't sure who she was supposed to be. Not yet.
The creak of a door snapped her out of the haze.
"Hikari…?" A woman's voice—older, cautious, wrapped in concern.
The door opened fully, letting in the scent of miso and ginger, and a hunched figure stepped in, carrying a small tray. Her silver-streaked hair was pinned in a tight bun, her layered robes worn but clean. Her face was lined with age and discipline, but her eyes softened when they met hers—no, mine, Hikari thought distantly, like it wasn't quite true yet.
"You're awake," the woman whispered, almost dropping the tray. She set it down quickly and knelt at the futon's side, reaching to feel her forehead. "The fever's broken. Thank the heavens."
Hikari blinked at her, vision still a little blurred. The warmth of the woman's hand against her head sparked something deep and raw. A memory. A voice from another time.
"You'll rot from the inside if you keep skipping meals, girl."
A sharp clatter echoed in her mind—metal bowls, pale pills, an unlit burner. Her heart skipped. She didn't know where she was, but she remembered pain. Hunger. Cold. Dying slowly and pretending it didn't scare her.
"I…" Her voice cracked. "Where…?"
"Hush now," the woman said gently, brushing damp hair from her forehead. "You're safe, little light. You just rest. Yumiko's here."
Yumiko. Hikari didn't know the name, but her chest ached as if it had always been waiting to hear it.
---
Sleep pulled at her like the tide—unforgiving, relentless. Her body was light, too light, but not in the way she remembered from her final days. This wasn't weakness from organ failure or malnutrition. It was something else. The kind of fatigue that came from being used up by something external—a fever, she remembered Yumiko saying.
Her eyelids fluttered closed again, and the warmth of the futon, the weight of the blanket, the steady rhythm of the rain lulled her back under.
---
She wasn't sure how much time passed.
Minutes. Hours. A day?
When she next woke, the room was dark.
She lay still, blinking slowly, breath shallow but steady. It was quiet—no humming machines, no street noise, no flickering TV light. Only the sound of rain, louder now, beating heavily against the roof and window.
A small oil lamp flickered on a nearby table, its flame low and golden. It cast long, stretching shadows across the floor, walls, and ceiling. The light barely reached the far end of the room, where the corners bled into darkness. But what it did show was… worn.
Old plaster peeled in cracked lines along the wall near the window, revealing a rougher surface beneath. One patch was water-stained, a pale brown shape like a spreading bruise. The window curtains had been left half-open, and the storm outside made them sway slightly with each gust. Every few seconds, a flash of distant lightning would momentarily flood the room with a cold, white glow.
The floor creaked softly as she shifted in the futon.
She glanced down.
The futon's blanket was patchy, stitched over in places with mismatched thread. The wooden floor beneath her had scuff marks and uneven boards—places where time and footsteps had worn it down to its splinters.
This wasn't a hospital.
This wasn't Earth.
And despite the flicker of fear curling in her gut, she felt startlingly calm.
She let her head fall back against the pillow, eyes trailing the ceiling where cobwebs stretched into corners no one had cleaned in a while. It was clear this place had once been cared for—maybe even beautiful—but those days were gone.
A storm outside. A house slowly falling apart. An unfamiliar body that wasn't hers, yet didn't hurt.
Where… am I? she thought again, but not with panic. Just a bone-deep curiosity. Because now, for the first time in years, she had time to figure it out.
---
She set the rice soup back down gently and turned her attention to the desk.
It looked barely functional, but something about its crooked drawers tugged at her curiosity. She knelt beside it, shifting the chair out of the way so it wouldn't scrape against the floor.
With careful fingers, she pulled at the top drawer.
Creeeeaaak.
The sound was loud enough to make her flinch. It dragged through the quiet like a knife on glass. She froze, heart hammering for no reason she could name—just an old habit from a life where being caught touching the wrong thing could get you kicked out. Or worse.
After a moment of silence, she exhaled slowly and tried again, this time easing the drawer open inch by inch.
The wood groaned again, but not as sharply.
Inside, bundled in a linen wrap, was a photograph—the kind printed on thick, slightly faded paper. Hikari's breath caught as she unfolded it and brought it closer to the lamp.
It was a family.
A man with dark purple eyes, dressed plainly but smiling wide. A woman with black hair pinned back with a comb, her expression serene but tired. And between them—balanced on the woman's lap—a small toddler with chubby cheeks and a big, curious stare.
The child looked maybe one year old. The parents… they looked happy. Or at least like they'd tried to be.
She blinked at the photo for a long moment. It felt familiar, but only distantly—like trying to recognize a song from the melody alone.
"Me," she whispered to the room. "That's me."
But it didn't feel like her.
Not yet.
She gently set the photo aside and looked deeper into the drawer. Beneath it were papers—birth certificates, marked in precise, vertical script she could barely read yet somehow understood. Another was a property permit, stamped with a faded ink seal that must've once meant authority.
She paused at that.
These weren't just important. They were everything. Proof of ownership. Proof of identity. In her old world, documents like these would've been locked in safes or hidden away. Not left in a rickety drawer on a desk held together by rust and prayer.
Why would someone leave these out?
She ran her fingers along the edge of the drawer—and then paused.
There, just beneath the lip, she felt the rough groove of a small broken latch. She leaned in closer and saw it: a tiny metal lock, cracked clean through. The wood around it had warped from age, the mechanism long rusted.
It was locked, she realized. I just… broke it open.
Not by force. Just by trying.
She stared at her hand in the lamplight. Small. Thin. Innocent-looking.
But apparently not so normal after all.
---
The storm outside cracked the sky in two, and Hikari flinched at the flash—but it wasn't fear. It was memory.
She sat cross-legged in front of a low table. Her fingers were small, messy with ink, and shaking just enough to ruin her lines.
"Again," her father said, voice flat but not unkind. "Seal formulas aren't magic, Hikari. They're rules. You follow them, they work. You don't, they blow up."
She'd pouted, smearing a bit of ink on her cheek. "Then why do yours always explode?"
That rare smirk tugged at the edge of his lips, the one he only showed when Mom wasn't around. "Because I'm ambitious."
He wasn't much of a ninja—he'd said that often. He could fight if he had to, but sealing scrolls? That was his craft. His bread and butter. It was why her mother's family let him marry in.
For security. Stability. Things they thought he could offer.
The love didn't come until later.
Not between them, anyway.
But they both loved her. That was real.
He had shown her how to handle a brush. How to channel just enough chakra to make a tag light up. How to keep a storage seal stable even if the scroll got rained on.
And now, years—no, lifetimes—later, that knowledge was still in her hands.
She looked down at her fingers in the lamplight, flexing them slowly.
"If I can make the food last longer… I don't need to fight. Just survive. And sell."
---
Yumiko returned quietly not long after, carrying a small ceramic pot and an extra blanket. She paused when she saw Hikari seated by the desk, the photo resting beside her, the drawer still open. Her mouth parted like she might scold—but her expression softened instead.
"You should be resting," she said, setting the pot down and adjusting the lamp. "But… it's good to see you moving."
Hikari glanced up, hesitant. "Is this… my family?"
Yumiko looked at the photo, her eyes distant. "Yes. Your mother, Miss Kaede. And your father… he wasn't popular in the clan, but he loved you with everything he had."
A beat passed.
"The shop's still yours, you know," Yumiko added. "Though it needs some work."
---
Later, after Yumiko left and the thunder softened into steady rain, Hikari couldn't sleep. She sat by the desk with a blank scrap of parchment, thinking.
The merchant clan was gone. Her parents were gone. The shop was dusty, but still standing.
She thought of the rice soup.
Of how sealing could keep food fresh.
Of people who were hungry.
And she wrote on the paper with slow, unsteady hands:
This time, I won't starve.
This time, I will own the rain.