Kidnapping

The difference between the worlds becomes more obvious with each passing second.

In wartime, orphan children would end up under the protection of still-living relatives or other clan members. Living proof is right here, standing next to Madara.

In current Konoha times it is still common for children to become orphans, but this time they are dragged off to orphanages until they are six or seven years old, then let loose on the streets like insignificant animals. If Madara thought too much about this in specific, he would probably have some problem with high blood pressure, because going from his family traditions to this was... too radical.

But here things are different, very different. Ren is an orphan, in some way; there are no relatives in this place, he wasn't just born in another city or country, he was born in another world. After the police arrived, the crowd surrounded the car that had two colored lanterns on top, one red and one blue (Sasuke and Madara had not seen this model in the days they had been here, the curious way the vehicle let out a noise that made them jump brought them out of their melancholy thoughts about their sins and their punishments), saying how the baby had suddenly appeared, wrapped in beige cloth, just 'puff', and he was there.

"Perhaps a teleportation quirk?" someone suggests, and the hearts of others squirm.

"Such a rare quirk and being used to abandon a baby... a newborn baby!"

And that makes Madara and Sasuke slap their own foreheads, thinking about how the idiot had turned into a baby all by himself.

The way to the police station is awkward in many ways, some of them bigger than others, but still bearable. The policeman holding the small, crying Ren is... strange, to say the least, Sasuke is very curious about his dog head, was it a beagle? He is holding him very carefully as if the child was made of porcelain, he stretches his face and lets his muzzle close enough so that it can be touched by the tiny little hand that runs away from the beige cloth and looks for somewhere to grab, his lips move carefully as he speaks so as not to frighten the child, and he calms him down while answering the policeman who drives and talks into the small radio stuck in his chest pocket.

Another strange thing newly discovered was about the demarcation that showed the maximum limit they could reach. About fifteen meters and their bodies would start to flicker, their limbs starting to look transparent; another two meters and they would become even more transparent and their images unstable; another three meters and they would reach the limit, touching the demarcated area, their bodies looking like a hologram that had a bad signal and their bodies being pulled by the rope attached to the center so they wouldn't fall off this edge, not letting them get lost or run away, in this case, the center was Ren. It's strange because they don't actually feel pulled, their feet don't stumble forward and force them to run after the damn shiny, noisy car, instead, their feet slide, as if they were on slippery ice, there is no imbalance in this either, and they both manage to go left and right while being pulled by the rope attached to the center.

But the strangest thing was, without a doubt, the police announced that a baby had been abandoned to the townspeople, sending out an alert and starting a search, whoever had abandoned the child in that state should be arrested and the help of civilians would be welcome to find such a monster.

Again, Madara and Sasuke felt their brains melting from knowing the truth.

"In Konoha he would just be taken to the orphanage," Sasuke comments, watching the other policemen gathering to see little Ren, "But here they will even start a search..."

The older Uchiha says nothing about it, but his bad mood is evident.

A woman in a white lab coat opens the door and puts half of her body out, gesturing for them to come in, the dog-headed policeman was still holding Ren while the others gave him room to pass, some following him into the next room, others staying where they were, going to do their own jobs.

It's a search for information that ends unsuccessfully, and tests that show the child never had his birth registered before they finally took him to the orphanage, some toys beside the crib while the dog-head sniffled and whimpered. The police in this place are so emotional...

• • •

In his past life, Ren did not know many fantastic stories. The few he read or heard were mostly fables told at school or something created by his classmates which he listened to without permission while pretending to scribble in his notebook.

Ren has never read about a rebirth story, if he had, he would be feeling very wronged right now.

In his first days as a newborn baby, the whole world seemed like a grayscale blur before his eyes, some shadows passed by, that came closer and made cute and meaningless sounds to his mind.

People walked and carried him like real giants. His hands and legs seemed to have a will of their own, moving and tapping against his own face, the tips of his tiny fingers had a soft touch, too soft to satisfy the world's curiosity, too weak to hold anything firmly.

But Ren could handle it, what he couldn't handle were his memories, disappearing and reappearing over and over again.

Being a baby is like being in a dream you don't control, it's a dream you don't know you're in, far, far away, unaware of your own existence. It is being a spectator inside your own body, squeezing your eyes shut and trying to understand the blurs, screaming and crying through essential instincts, of remaining ignorant of everything that happens, because no words make sense and nothing seems real at all.

And then, in the middle of this dream, there are moments of lucidity. They are shallow moments when Ren notices his own existence inside that tiny body when the words he hears make sense. What happened? Did the plan go wrong? Did the file do this?

The first time this happened he was only two weeks old, everything was still blurry, it was a strange blur, and his hands were still very uncontrolled. In the midst of this, he opened his panel, made a new backup and put it back in his files, three minutes later, his lucidity disappears.

At eight weeks of age, the blurbs begin to take form. There is a woman who takes care of him every day, she goes to him whenever she hears his tearless cries, she gives him a bottle, changes his diapers, and puts him to sleep, his face is the first thing that seems more defined, his features getting firmer and his gaze carrying tiredness that never goes away, his hair is caught in a short ponytail, she also does not lower her face enough for Ren to touch his cheeks, but the little boy recognizes her just the same because it is her face that is there every day.

At this same period, Ren laughs as he sees a strange figure turn back and forth as if searching for something that has disappeared right before his eyes. It's Madara, but he doesn't know it. Sasuke has disappeared without a trace, but he doesn't know.

At two months of age Ren has his second moment of lucidity, he looks around and the world is no longer a total blur. There is a toy next to him in his crib, it is a teddy bear smiling silly in his direction, he can see its silhouette better, he can see the two round ears, the colors are still grayish, but it is something like brown. He goes into his panel before anything else, takes the backup of his memories and implants it back into his file, then creates a new one to make sure. He takes another look around, two blurs are sitting next to the cradle, they are relatively far away, out of the range that his vision can recognize the silhouettes better, but he is pretty sure it is Madara, now Sasuke is here again.

In his third month, Ren has his most lucid moment yet. He prepares his backup as usual and has plenty of time to get to know the world around him. His vision is not yet perfect, things in the distance are still blurry and colors are faint, but they are still there. There is no depth to what his sight reaches, he realizes, it is as if everything is just an ever-moving drawing. Children are running around the room, some of them peeking into the cribs of their younger classmates, one of them has green skin and another has three eyes, some with colored hair, and there is the same tired-looking woman just beside him, feeding another baby while asking the other children to stop messing up.

Ren doesn't like this, of not having control over his body, he wants to say something, but the sounds from his mouth are so strange that it makes him prefer to stay as quiet as possible. Madara and Sasuke are still here, the younger one bringing his fist and unleashing a quick punch, but the man deflects with a light movement of his legs as if he were dancing instead of fighting.

"Posture, I see more than ten mistakes there," he says, and Sasuke grits his teeth, but continues, paying more attention to his movements. There are quick blows between them that makes Ren's vision a mess, but his mind can keep up, so Sasuke sets up a kick and a child appears right on cue, and suddenly he almost lets his heart out of his mouth as he stumbles and Madara creeps up on his other leg, not bothering to cross the child he had stood in the way of earlier, "Heh, you still don't get used to it, kid?"

Sasuke lets out a pained whimper, still sprawled on the ground, he looks almost dead from exhaustion. Ren enjoys the fight of the two, despite the shameful defeat suffered by the younger man, he feels the need to clap, but when he tries to sit up to do this, his body topples backward, anyway, he claps while lying on his back, laughing in the direction of the Uchihas.

"You need to rest now," says the man, still with his arms crossed, "Or you'll pass out like last time."

"Ugh...I'll take that, this time...," grumbles the boy, sitting down on the probably icy floor and massaging the spot that was kicked.

Ren likes this, he remembers that both of them are ninjas, that both of them have knives that are called kunais, and that he brought them here by accident... well, the last part was a headache, but hey, it's still cool, ok?

So Ren tries to speak, they are sounds coming out of his mouth and sounds he doesn't like, there is the idea of only trying this when his vocal cords are fully developed and ready to support words properly, but he really wants to get the attention of both of them now, so he continues. First, it comes out just an 'M', then just an 'A', minutes later a hard-earned 'Sa'. And in the end, after almost twenty minutes...

"Ma... da... ra...," it's drawn out, so much so that they hardly seem like a full name, but it works, Madara is looking at him, next to him is also Sasuke, both of them look surprised as Ren smiles victoriously, a silly smile for outsiders, and repeats the name that seems so difficult in his tongue, "Mada... ra..."

"Auntie! Auntie! He said the first thing!" a sheriff's child pointed out, running up to the woman and tugging at the hem of her dress.

"He remembered? Did he really remember?! Holy Christ!", Sasuke stood up in a jump, almost falling back from forgetting how sore and weakened his legs were from training.

"...," Madara approached the crib, narrowing his eyes at the baby who didn't seem the least bit intimidated by the red Sharingan. The man didn't know how to feel about that...

Izuna had a soft heart for children, always had, and when Madara teased him about it the younger man just pouted, but never denied it.

Madara also has a soft heart for children, but he won't admit that even if he has a knife to his throat.

"Sas... ke... Sasu...ke..."

"Uff, I thought he had lost all his memories...," said Sasuke, sighing in relief as he looked at the woman next to him going to the crib as well.

Soon after, Ren returned to his dreams.

• • •

By the time Ren turns three years old, his mind is more lucid and the feeling of being in a dream is almost gone, his vision is sharp and the world has gained its much-loved depth, no longer just that moving drawing. His brain is still in constant progress, cells dying and recycling themselves, giving place to new ones, expanding into new neural connections growing and forming, erasing old memories to form new ones, but being replaced by backups.

At three years old, Ren is seen as a genius in this small orphanage. He "learned" to read at nine months, "learned" to speak fluently (and with his odd language, the tired woman will never understand how the child was able to say some difficult words when no one else around was speaking them) at nine months, "learned" to write at ten months... well, actually Ren didn't learn any of these things, he just remembered how to do them.

This orphanage is not a loving place, the children run wild and the only one who really cares for them is that woman (and that must explain a lot about her always tired look), there is a man at the reception who spends all his time on his cell phone, and another woman, a younger one, who locks herself in the small room under the stairs and sleeps on a pile of blankets most of the day.

There is not much money circulating in this place either, there are leaks in the ceiling, clothes are passed from the older children to the younger ones as if it were a tradition, and there was one time that the older ones had to go all day without eating so that the younger ones wouldn't be hungry and cry.

But it is a peaceful life nonetheless if you ignored the children who already had their quirks and were making a mess or picking fights in the backyard.

"I'm tired of this!" says Ren finally, throwing himself on the grass while looking up at the azure sky, "We've been here for years! I want to get out of this place!"

"Tsk, he's talking to himself again...," one of the children whispers to the other, both of them turning and leaving the place.

"Me too, this place is making me sick," Sasuke comments sitting right next to it, silently contemplating the fence that separates him from the rest of the world, it's so easy to jump over, yet he has to remain trapped in here, ".... Why don't you try to get out?"

"Oh, yes, that's an idea!" he replied so quickly that it even amazed Sasuke, "I've wanted to do that for a while, you know? But I needed a little encouragement!"

"And you can skip that?" asks Madara, raising an eyebrow suspiciously.

"I will try, even if I break a leg!"

"That was not encouraging at all!" the younger Uchiha mutters.

For a three-year-old, that fence was tall, over his head by an inch, and had sharp edges, but there were also several places to grab hold of between the boards. Ren grabbed the teddy bear that had been with him for three years and climbed with determination, using all the strength his skinny little arms had to pull himself up.

"Why are you carrying this?" the man points to the teddy, "You can hardly climb with your free hands and you want to carry baggage?"

"It's... something... strategic!", Ren refutes, reaching the top of the fence and throwing the bear to the sidewalk, he jumps and the teddy cushions his fall, which causes a victorious smile to spread across his face, as if he had just won the hundred-year war, "See?"

"You can't jump from that height without hurting your legs?", but Madara doesn't seem the least bit impressed, in fact, he seems more bothered by the fact that the boy needs a teddy bear to fall off that tiny fence, "You really need to practice, kid."

"I will! Believe me, but later!"

And happy, he ran free through the streets for the first time in years, almost forgetting to pick up the dusty teddy bear.

• • •

"I'm pretty sure that is the answer!" the child chatters, walking bouncily down the busy sidewalk.

"If you end up as a baby again...," Madara begins, more of a threat than anything else, "I swear I'll find a way to kick your ass, got it?

"But of course! I won't miss it, I'll stay away from resetting! Just collecting information..."

There was a very interesting document that remained within each character file, including his own. Ren snooped around for a long time, he found many things, and he was getting the hang of it, but what really caught his attention was in the last lines, almost at the end of the document.

It was a series of names... names of his diseases.

"Respiratory system problems == True"

"Vitiligo == True"

"Schizophrenia == True"

Ren feels his fingers itch to mess with those cursed lines, he thinks about changing the 'True' to 'False', thinks about it a dozen times and then exits, spying the Uchiha out of the corner of his eye.

But in the end, his will overcomes him and he tests his ideas anyway.

"Vitiligo == False"

It takes a few seconds, the loading screen opening and filling up as fast as lightning, well... it seems that the problem that has plagued him all his life is not something that takes up much space in this 1MB.

"How do I look?!" the boy practically yells, spinning to the two in a jump, "How? How? Are the spots gone?!"

"Uh? What have you done now!?!", Sasuke asks worriedly, looking around and waiting for the world to blink like it did last time.

This will be a trauma in his life.

"They're gone," Madara says, having to close his eyes for a few moments so as not to be blinded by the glow the little boy has begun to emit, but what the hell?!

"Oh my, it worked! IT REALLY WORKED!!!"

The people around looked strangely at the screaming child among them, there was a mutual feeling between the Uchihas, who was silently thankful that they were invisible right now, being a ghost isn't always so bad, you know?

"Stop screaming! Oi! Why are you running, brat?"

"I want to test something!"

"Respiratory system problems == False"

And Ren took a deep breath of air from the park, the smell of the flowers in the flowerbeds and the perfume of the lady he had just passed filled his nose, and he ran and ran, and ran all the way around the park and almost ran over another child, but his lungs remained strong, not making him gasp and suffer from lack of oxygen.

It was amazing.

"Hey! You!", a shrill, childish voice came from his back, "Go away, no one called you here!"

"Oh?", Ren turned to look.

There seemed to be a small commotion going on in the rectangle of sand in the park, four children were standing side by side, one of them, apparently the leader, who was one step ahead, made a movement with her hands to chase away the fifth, who had her little hands clenched tightly and an offended look on his face.

"But that's my toy!"

"Who said that?"

"Tch... no matter where we run to, there will always be kids screaming and making trouble...", Madara had a soft heart for kids, but after spending three years inside that orphanage his vitality is being sucked away in an inhuman way.

"Must be our incredible luck," and sarcasm drips from Sasuke's every word.

"... Does he have a bird's head?"

"Why are you surprised by that? The policeman who carried you had a dog's hea-"

"Ouuuch!"

The intimidated child held tightly onto the wrist of the leader who was holding her toy then bit it (or pecked it, or actually bit it), the little girl immediately let go of the toy and the bird-headed little boy grabbed it and ran out of the sand rectangle.

"Shall we follow him?"

"Tsk, let's not waste our time!"

"... That was amazingly fast!" comments Ren.

The little bird-headed boy hid behind one of the little brick squares that held the tree roots together, he sat cross-legged on the ground and hugged his toy tightly, an angry look covered his face, but as Ren walked bouncing toward him, his eyes got wetter and wetter and his mouth (his beak) began to twitch.

The poor little creature was holding back from crying.

A pale little hand dropped straight down on top of its head, the little fingers fiddling with the black fluff without any fear or shame.

"How soft!"

The other child's brain stopped working. Oh... what's happening? One... two... three...

"AAAH!", and its skin nearly peeled away from the flesh with the startled jump it let out.

"By the Nine-Tails, Ren! What's you doing? This is not how you should introduce yourself to the other children!" he scolded, almost falling backward in disgust.

"Oh, I am sorry...," and it is impossible to tell if he was apologizing to Madara or the other child.

"H-hm... it's okay, you just scared me...," the other child said, sniffling once more and standing up, "Who are you? I've never seen you in this park before."

"Oh, my name is Ren, and it's common that you've never seen me here since I never leave from inside the orphanage," he explained with a big smile, reaching out and taking the child's hand and swinging it up and down in a very energetic greeting.

"Orpha... nage?", the words sounded strange in his beak.

"Yes! In reality, I was here three years ago," Sasuke almost fainted, "B-but I was just a baby, you should be one too, so you won't remember me."

"Oh... at least he knows how to lie about something...," the younger Uchiha said, pulling the air that escaped his lungs. Could it be that the breathing problems had passed for him?

"I see... I guess," said the little boy, who finally had his hand released from the warm greeting, "By the way, my name is Fumikage."

"Pleasure, but what's your last name?"

"Why do you want to know his last name?"

"Ah... it's Toko... Tokoyi... Toko...", Fumikage tried a dozen times, and the grimace on his face became even more marked under his feathers, "I... I think I'll ask mommy... just to make sure..."

"Ah! It's okay, it's just that I have the custom of calling people by name only after considering them friends," Madara and Sasuke almost rolled their eyes, but what kind of custom is that? For adults it's ok, but for children? Wait... Didn't Ren call them by their first name from the first day? "In that case, I'll consider you a friend from now on and call you Fumikage, okay?"

"Y-yes!" he agreed, his little eyes filling with a blinding glow, 'friend...', he repeated softly, 'a real friend...'

"'Now that you are my friend...", Fumikage raised his gaze, seeing Ren's outstretched hand.

'What's that?', he thought to himself, frozen in place, was it to hand over his All Might toy to him?

"Ren, you're being confusing even for me, imagine for this little boy," Sasuke commented, massaging his temples.

"You're a little boy too, so what are you talking about, brat?", Madara teases full of sarcasm, receiving an offended and annoyed look that didn't intimidate him one bit.

"You don't understand either," he accused, and Madara just coughed and pretended to be distracted by a falling leaf, oh, leaves fall charmingly sometimes, don't they? Oh! They even look like they're dancing, look, look, look... Sasuke is almost choking with anger.

"It's for you hold my hand," Ren explains, letting out a chuckle as he sees his friend coming out of his frozen pose to blink and widen his eyes.

"Of course! I hadn't thought of that!" he confesses, holding Ren's hand, which begins to pull him away from the root square.

"Why were those over there bothering you?"

"Because of my head...," he says looking down, kicking a pebble that was in his way, "They say it's weird to have a bird's head."

"It is weird, yes," Fumikage squinted with his saliva.

"Holy Christ, Ren!!!"

"But not in a bad way! Your feathers are fluffy and soft, I like that!" he counters contentedly, ignoring the chaos he caused last second with a divine mastery, "See you're weird in a good way, unlike me."

"N-nothing weird about you," he says after he stops coughing.

"Not now! But minutes ago, I had vitiligo and breathing problems!", Fumikage's head tilts to the side and the Uchihas are rethinking their life choices, "True! But I got rid of them, by a lot of luck! It was very hard to live so many years with all that stuff..."

"You... got rid of them," he repeated, thinking of something.

"Yes, but hey! Don't you dare try to get rid of your bird-head, I would never forgive you if you took something so amazing away from yourself! Where's your mommy?"

"Hm... she went to buy ice cream for me."

"Uuuh, how cool! Tell me, would she let you play with your new friend if she were around?"

"Yes, she always does!", and the word 'always' seems like an exaggeration, for Fumikage wasn't exactly popular with the kids, there were playmates who didn't swarm him, but he never found a small group to band together and play with every time.

"Great!", Ren celebrates, "For I want to test something, hold on a second."

"Test?"

"Ren!", Madara begins, the Sharingan glowing in his eyes, "What are you doing? Ren! Don't ignore me!"

Sasuke trembled from head to toe, looking up at the fluffy white clouds in the sky.

"I feel like something terrible is going to happen..."

The whole world goes white for a split second, so fast it's almost unnoticed, then a new location enters the field of vision. Before anything else, Madara and Sasuke looked around wildly, and the relief they felt at seeing that Ren had not turned into a baby again was something that could not be expressed in words...

The place where they landed seemed to be another park, this one with much more greenery, but completely empty. Where their little feet landed was a stone path, where some moss and weeds grew between the cracks, the trees did not have their roots stuck inside the brick squares, but grew tall through the surrounding grass, their tops were filled with green or yellow leaves, but without blocking all the sun that illuminated the path meekly, some of them laden with red or even green apples. A fence was in the distance, covering the exit from the park, it was high and with barbed wire on top, some bright orange cones, and a sign that, because its writing was facing the other way, didn't allow any of the newcomers to see it.

"Wow!", Fumikage jumps up and almost falls backward, holding tightly to his toy and Ren's hand, he looks around with his beak open in surprise, a small squirrel runs away in panic, he was just inches away from Ren's feet when the two just appeared there, humans these days are getting crazier and crazier, man! "That... that's amazing! Do you have a teleportation quirk? That's so rare! You're four years old?!"

"Eh? No, I'm three, at least in this body... quirk...?", Ren ponders this, and to his luck, Fumikage is too impressed looking at his surroundings to hear 'at least in this body' and understand, "Yes! I'll accept that as my quirk, even if it's not a real one!"

"Incredible! Incredible!" the child celebrates, still oblivious to the Uchihas with a severe headache right next door, "But... what's the name of this place?"

"What?"

"Where are we?"

Ren stewed his chest, a charming smile on his lips and perfectly bright stars appearing in his eyes as he declared, loud and clear:

"I have no idea!"

".... Eh?"

• • •

"Fumikage! Fumikage! Your ice cream is going to melt!!! Geez, what has he gotten himself into..."

• • •

"Come! Come! Don't worry about that kind of thing now, let's go exploring!"

"B-b-but..."

"Look! Oh my, it's a tulip path!"

Ren half-pulls and half-drags poor Fumikage beside him, who comes out of his state of shock that they are in an unfamiliar place (and without his mommy around) and appreciates the path they were passing.

The lawn there was the greenest of all the greens ever seen, the tulips, just as Ren had pointed out, were growing on both sides along with the leaves of the messy bushes, they stretched tall and swayed along with the gentle wind, the glow of the sun gently hitting their petals, they were colorful dots, sloppy and playful brushstrokes on what could very well be a painting, yellow, orange, red, pink, white...

"But how beautiful! I don't know what this place is, but I'm glad we landed here, it's the best place for the first outing among friends, isn't it? Fumikage? Fumikage?? Why are you crying?!"

"This is not a 'first outing among friends', you idiot!", Sasuke says angrily, "We're kidnapping a child on the first day you leave the orphanage and you call it an outing! What the hell?!"

"I-it's tears of happiness," Fumikage explains, using his now free hand to wipe his watery little eyes, "It's just... this place is s-so beautiful... I've never seen anything like it...."

"I see! This place is beautiful enough to cry, just like what you said and- Hello!"

Ren waves energetically to the blond child who was peering at them from behind the tree, he gives a startle and slips off his rocky mossy path, almost falling forward, but manages to brace himself against the tree at the last second and runs off without answering.

"W-what was that?"

"Nothing much, I think he was shy," the boy lets out a heavy sigh, "If he hadn't run away, we could have called him to join us, how sad..."

"Sad? He's more than right to run away before you kidnap him too!", Madara says angrily, gesturing accusingly in Ren's direction.

Great! Just great! Today, the Uchihas learned that they are not only stuck with an idiot, but also with a child kidnapper! And no! Ren being a child doesn't nullify this kidnapping either! What the hell is this place here anyway? It all looks abandoned!

And why is there a creature that climbed the tree and is spying on these two children?

Forget about life on the battlefield, this is the new haven for all their stress problems, they will know who to blame if they die early because of this.