I had my wife and kids cremated. Besides making sure that their bodies wouldn't be desecrated by the various lunatics that inhabited this world, this also made it easy to bring the urns along on my annual October 10th walkabout.
The attack of the Nine-Tailed Fox was the biggest tragedy in Konoha's history, the Hokage didn't do anything as morbid as throw a festival on its yearly observance. He left that stuff for the Rinne Festival in December.
Instead, October 10 was a solemn day when people commemorated their lost loved ones in their own manner. If there was a higher number of traveling peddlers and longer open hours for the various locales, nobody was tone-deaf enough to mention it.
Being more of a skinflint with each year that passed, I ignored them all on the way to the empty lot where our family home had once stood. I could easily picture the place as it used to be, my ability to visualize had carried over from my last life.
Two stories, kitchen and den downstairs, one staircase leading up to the bedrooms. Master bedroom empty.
Kenzo alone in the kids' room, looking out the window just in time to see the random wind blast that bisected him and the entire second floor in the first minute of the beast's appearance. A load-bearing beam snapped and pulped my wife Ume.
My daughter, Yui, was frozen in shock. I was half-way to her when the second wind shear came, burying her under the debris that everything had suddenly become, save for the small patch of load-bearing wall that happened to be between me and the blast.
It didn't stop the roof from caving in, but at least the wall didn't fall on me too. I was 'lucky' enough to spend a day buried alive instead of dying with the others.
I reminisced about all that and more as I sat in the middle of the lot, three untouched saucers of sake between me and the urns, each with a framed picture behind them. Both my kids would be of age by now, by this world's standards.
"Did you know, son? In another world, your name would've been Vali. " I was already on my fifth drink, but I didn't even feel it.
Sake had a ridiculously low alcohol content, especially for something drunk in shots. It was sweet, though, which is the only reason I didn't stop in disgust after the first couple of sips.
I was that rare and unfortunate breed of man that began to hate the taste of spirits after the first glass. Another thing that had carried over from my previous life.
"My name was Miron. " I took a bite from one of the apricots my wife was named for.
"No equivalent for Ume or Yui in my mother tongue though. English either.
Or French. Or Latin.
Pretty sure Italian and Spanish don't have them either, though I'm admittedly spotty on those. " I considered the apricot pit in my hand and pocketed it.
Maybe this would be the lucky one that sprouted.
I used to worry about being overheard or spied on. Well, not so much worry as hope.
Unfortunately (or not?), despite being Big Brother central, ninja villages could be really up their own ass if you weren't a ninja yourself. It made it a surprisingly pleasant place to live in for civilians, but a very frustrating one for a sole survivor trying to channel your self-destructive depression into something at least potentially constructive for the world while you rambled at your children's names on the memorial stone.
Or here. In languages that didn't exist.
"I'm thinking I'll finally sell this place off. " I yawned, even though it wasn't that late in the afternoon.
Don't get much sleep in the nights leading up to this. "Gonna fund that expansion, finally.
Get that water wheel installed. " After the Kyuubi attack, property prices quite understandably crashed.
They were still low when I finally got past the worst of my depression, so I used the disaster monetary grant and the savings I'd made for the kids to get a spot with a bit of stream running through. Maybe I'll even play with piezoelectricity at some point, I certainly had the space.
"Motive forces and all, you need'em when your hobby is energy physics. For all the good that will be in this world of magic and murder.
"
I spread the offered sake on the ground, took the urns and photos back to the cart and set off back home.
As I walked, I watched the people passing by. The ninja academy always gave a day off on this date, so the streets were packed with a lot more baby shinobi than would usually be about on weekdays.
How I felt about that tended to vary depending on the day. Today, the sight of them irritated me.
As usual when I disapproved of a reality whose necessity I couldn't discount.
Konoha was a ninja village. That meant a lot of things.
For civilians it meant unparalleled security, protection from scummy business practices, no property taxes, and your family's first piece of land for free. But it also meant a long waiting list (I only got in because my long gone grandfather applied before the last war) and you only became a resident if you agreed to have no inherent right to privacy, as well as one of two things.
One: any kids you have will be signed on to the ninja academy. Or two: you contributed to the village in other ways meaningfully enough to equal the strategic benefit of one genin.
For each of the children.
For me of now, that sounded like a recipe for abuse. Credit to pre-fox me, he'd opted for the second option too.
Not because he mistrusted whatever or whoever calculated the 'strategic benefit' – he didn't, the Hokages had been fairly sane about it, at least during peacetime. It was Ume who didn't want that kind of life for her children.
Kenzo had almost finished wearing both of us down, though, when the disaster happened. And now, given what I knew of this world and its future, I wasn't sure anymore that the risk of early death wasn't....