The late afternoon sun was kind on Konoha.
It filtered through laundry lines and paper lanterns, caught on threads of steam rising from food stalls, warmed the backs of shopkeepers leaning on their counters. Ren walked down the familiar street with his hands tucked into his sleeves, mask resting loosely around his throat instead of over his face for once.
He liked this hour. Not quite busy, not quite quiet. Just… lived in.
"Oi, Ren-kun! Done for the day already?" the man from the dango stand called, waving a skewer like a flag.
Ren dipped his head. "For today, yeah. Smells good, Tanaka-san."
"You say that every time, but you never stop to buy any," Tanaka complained good-naturedly. "One of these days I'll tell your mother you're starving yourself."
"She'd just make you give me a discount," Ren said dryly.
Laughter chased him down the street as he moved on.
At the next corner, the old woman who sold inks and sealing scrolls was sweeping her storefront. She straightened when she saw him.
"Ren-chan," she greeted, eyes crinkling. "You're growing too fast. You're already taller than your mom and soon will pass my husband in height."
"She is smaller," he said with a small smirk, pausing to help her nudge a heavy crate back inside the shop. "However, she's terrifying when she stands on a stool to lecture me."
The old woman cackled. "That she is. Give her my regards."
"I will. Rest your back, Obaa-san."
He slipped away again, steps light on sun-warmed stone, the rhythm of his body moving through the village almost automatic after seven years.
Seven years.
The thought rose the way it always did on quiet walks—uninvited but familiar, like an old ache.
Seven years since he'd opened his eyes in this world.
Seven years since he'd opened them in this body.
He passed a trio of academy students arguing over shuriken form and realized absently that he had been their age—no, slightly older—when he first woke up as Ren Urahara.
Back then, this street had felt too bright, too sharp, too real. The weight of his hitai-ate against his forehead had been strange and heavy. His hands had been smaller. The calluses had been wrong.
Back then, he'd still half expected to wake up in his cramped old apartment with his phone buzzing and his favorite manga on the floor next to the bed.
He hadn't expected… any of this.
He turned down the narrower lane that led toward his mother's shop, breathing in the smell of starch and dye that always seemed to cling to this part of the district. Bolts of fabric were stacked in front of some storefronts, either already claimed by customers or waiting to be taken in. A few tailors nodded at him as he passed; he returned each greeting with a polite incline of his head.
They all knew him as Ren now. Ren, the quiet boy with good posture and sharp eyes, who had graduated but didn't get a jonin sensei and yet somehow made it into the Barrier Corps. Ren, whose mother mended uniforms faster than anyone else on this street. Ren, the civilian ninja.
None of them knew he wasn't the first Ren to walk these stones.
He caught himself glancing at the familiar cracks near the gutter where, according to the original's memories, he'd tripped at six and scraped both knees. His mouth twitched faintly.
The memories had layered over time, like delicate cloth stitched together.
At first, waking up had been chaos. His own life—twenty-something, overworked, underpaid, dying too abruptly to fully process it—had sat jarringly next to the childhood of Ren Urahara. The original Ren's ten years of scraped knees, cramped hands from practicing basic academy forms, quiet and poor dinners in the back of a seamstress shop yet filled with warmth… it had all flooded in at once.
And over that, colder and vast and terrifyingly precise: Kisuke Urahara's memories.
That had been the worst part.
Not because of what he'd seen—gods and kings and war and death, the weave of souls and science, the slow, meticulous art of maneuvering plots and lives—but because of the sheer weight of time behind it. The centuries of life, the sheer quantity of thoughts that passed through the man's head, faster than a normal person.
If those memories had come with their emotions intact, he was pretty sure his mind would have snapped like cheap thread.
But they hadn't.
They'd arrived like an archive. Clear. Indexed. Distant.
He'd been able to open them carefully, pick through techniques, sensations, patterns, without losing himself. Without letting Kisuke's will subsume his own, or drown out the original Ren's fragile, human fears.
He paused at the mouth of the alley leading to the back entrance of the shop and let his shoulders relax.
He still remembered the end of his other life, too.
The deal (if you could call it that) happened in a white void. He still remembered the sensation of floating and falling at the same time. No body, no lungs, but the awareness of breath all the same.
And a voice—not booming, not dramatic, just… present in its weight.
'You died', it had said. 'And did not live long enough to be interesting.'
Rude, he'd thought. Even now, the memory made a small wry smile tug at his lips.
'I will give you this,' the presence had continued. 'A chance at something else. You will receive a random template of power. In exchange, you will be reborn in a world of your choosing.'
He'd hesitated then, less from fear and more from the completely absurd surreality of it.
A world of his choosing gave him lots of options but even if there weren't expressions for him to read, he could feel the impatience growing in the being.
He wasn't stupid, so he chose quickly. Not picking something like Attack on Titan or somewhere mid-apocalypse, but he'd picked Fullmetal Alchemist.
He'd loved that story, after all. And he'd loved Xing in particular for the potential, all mystery and desert and quiet political strife, far from Amestris' main plot barrel-rolling into catastrophe.
"I want to be in Fullmetal Alchemist, on Xing," he'd told the voice. "Somewhere quiet. Away from the main story. I want time to plan. To build something. To… not die stupidly again."
'It sounds easy and boring,' the being said.
He grew nervous, but he was still quick to act. "Make me look like someone from Ishval, then. A dark skinned, white haired child in Xing? You can even make it interesting. Maybe the child of a seamstress and the emperor."
He hadn't cared who he'd be, not really. However he started to become relaxed when the presence seemed amused by his panic.
'A wise choice,' it had said with some mischievousness in its voice.
And, of course, after that, things had gone wrong.
He remembered it too clearly: being pushed, pulled, dragged between invisible points. The sensation of being threaded through the eye of an impossibly small needle. Voices like whispers, like pages turning. A gate.
Truth's Gate.
He'd known it instinctively when he saw it: the double doors, the blank white space, the little hunched figure with its too-wide smile.
He still wasn't sure if he'd stumbled into it by accident or been knocked off course like a piece of lint brushed aside.
'You know too much,' the truth had said, without moving its mouth. 'Or perhaps… you could know too much. Your power is… inconvenient. Too great for the balance of this world.'
He'd tried to argue. Hadn't even had a body and still tried to talk with a mind that was unraveling.
"If I can learn—if I prepare—"
'That is precisely the problem,' Truth had replied, smiling wider. 'You would. And it would be… messy.'
He'd had the distinct impression of someone flipping through his intended template's memories, frowning at pages of techniques and long, long lifespan, and then tossing it aside.
'Another world, then,' Truth had said. 'Another pattern to create. Another fabric to mess up.'
Before he could demand what that meant, hands of nothing and everything had grabbed him and thrown him through the Gate. Knowledge had crashed into him—alchemy, arrays, structure, equation—and then more, sharper and inhumanly refined—
And when he'd opened his eyes again, he'd been lying in a narrow bed in a cramped room that smelled of starch and ironing steam, with a woman crying quietly into her hands at his bedside.
'Mother,' the original Ren's memories had whispered.
He'd blinked up at her with unfamiliar eyes and seen white bangs fall into his vision.
He'd lifted an unfamiliar hand, darkened by the sun, fingers slender and already callused in ways that matched neither his old life nor Kisuke's piano hands.
His skin was tanned, his hair white, his eyes a pale, cutting silver that made the woman's breath catch every time he looked at her too directly.
He'd chosen someone from Ishval, he knew, but he also kind of looked like Izana from Tokyo Revengers when he'd finally glimpsed himself in a warped mirror a day later and nearly laughed himself sick.
"You're alive," his mother had told him over and over, holding him too tight. "You're alive, Ren. That's all that matters."
He'd been ten. Graduated from the academy. Recently placed in the Genin Corps because he and his squad had failed to make a jonin sensei accept them under them.
They failed the real test. The original Ren didn't know why, but the new Ren knew: They were civilians with no clan. No kekkei genkai. Not first in the class. Not a jinchūriki, not a prodigy, not a name anyone important recognized.
"It was obvious we would never get a jonin," he murmured to himself now, stepping around a puddle where some kids had spilled dye. Out loud, his tone held no bitterness, just a quiet statement of fact. "We were put in the wrong stack of papers before the exam even started."
It hadn't been malice. Just math.
But it had been enough to break the original Ren's heart. Enough to make a ten-year-old boy pray to anyone listening:
'Please. Just let me be strong enough to change this. To help her. To make it less hard on her. I don't want to be a burden.'
And something had listened.
Ren shook the memory off gently. There was no point dwelling. He'd inherited that wish. He'd made it his own. That was all.
Ahead, the familiar faded sign came into view, painted with careful but slightly uneven brush strokes:
Urahara's Tailoring
The bell above the door chimed softly when he pushed it open.
The air inside was warm and filled with the comfortable clutter of fabric bolts, half-finished garments, baskets of thread and spare buttons. Sunlight fell through the front window onto the long wooden counter and the worn stool behind it, where his mother sat hunched over a half-sewn flak jacket.
She looked up at the sound.
"Ren?" she said, surprise brightening her face. A stray lock of dark hair fell from her bun, and she pushed it back with the back of her wrist. "You're home early."
He closed the door carefully behind him, letting the noise of the street fall away. For a moment, he just stood there and looked at her—the lines at the corners of her mouth that hadn't been there seven years ago, the slight stiffness in her shoulders, the way her fingers flew automatically as she guided needle and thread.
He pulled his mask down fully, letting it hang at his neck, and stepped forward with a small smile.
"Work finished faster than I expected," he said. "Do you need help?"
Her brows rose in automatic protest.
"You've been busy enough, haven't you? The Corps keeps you running ragged. I don't want you wasting your free time sewing hems with your old mother."
"It's not wasting," he said, already moving around the counter to the workspace. He picked up a folded stack of uniforms waiting to be checked and began sorting them by size, deft fingers smoothing each seam. "And you're not old."
She snorted. "Tell that to my back."
He glanced sideways at her. "Then let me help so you can lie down earlier."
She narrowed her eyes the way she did when she suspected him of hiding something. It was an expression he'd seen on her face in both sets of Ren's memories.
"We're not behind on any orders," she said slowly. "And the month isn't over yet. So." She planted her needle carefully into the fabric and let it go, freeing both hands to fix him with a look. "What exactly are we celebrating, hm?"
He huffed a soft laugh, not surprised she'd already known; she always knew, after all.
Ren stacked the last of the uniforms and turned to face her fully, hands light at his sides.
"We're celebrating," he said, "because your son is now Vice Captain of the Barrier Corps."
For a heartbeat, she just stared at him.
The words seemed to hang between them like a thread, shimmering, unreal.
"Vice…" she repeated, then seemed to choke on the rest. "Ren—what—since when—?"
"Since this afternoon." He tried to keep his tone casual, but his chest felt strangely light, as if something tight had loosened there. "Official notice and everything. So I thought, if we finish early here, maybe we could have dinner together. A proper one."
Her hand flew to her mouth. Her eyes shone, and he felt something hot twist low in his stomach, sharp and aching.
She'd cried like that once before, over his bed in a too-small room, thinking she'd lost him.
Now her tears were different.
"I—Vice Captain," she said again, voice trembling between pride and disbelief. "My boy—"
She stood abruptly, coming around the table to grip his shoulders with both hands.
"Why didn't you send a messenger?" she demanded, half laughing, half crying. "I would have closed the shop! I would have—that's—Ren, that's a jonin-level post."
"Not officially," he said, but there was no real protest in it. His mother could label it however she wanted. "And I wanted to tell you myself."
She searched his face like she did when he came back late from a mission, as if checking for bruises he might be hiding. Then, slowly, her expression softened into something radiant.
"My son," she whispered, thumbs brushing his cheeks. "You've worked so hard."
He swallowed.
For training sessions, for late nights bending over seal diagrams and thread arrays, for careful experiments testing the edges of alchemy and fuinjutsu until his chakra burned.
For a promise a dead boy had made in the dark.
He leaned into her touch just a fraction.
"I had good reason to," he said.
She blinked rapidly, then let him go with a little shooing motion, wiping her eyes with the back of her wrist.
"All right," she said briskly, voice only a little thick. "If we're celebrating, I'll allow you to help. Fold that blue bolt over there—no, neatly, I taught you better than that—and then we'll close early. We can get some barbecue from that new place."
"Yes, ma'am," he said, mouth quirking.
He moved through the shop with easy familiarity, hands finding cloth and tools without needing to look. Thread, needle, fabric—these things had been his constants in every life now.
As he folded the bolt she'd indicated, he let a tiny stream of chakra slip into his fingers, guiding the cloth into a perfect line, edges aligning as if drawn by an invisible ruler. The fabric obeyed him like it always did, threads whispering against each other as they settled into place.
He could even hear Benihime softly humming from inside his soul as she always did when he stitched things together.
If his mother noticed the unnatural smoothness of the fold, she didn't comment. She was watching him with that same soft pride, as if seeing the boy who'd once come home from the academy with scraped palms and a bruised ego and insisted that he'd try harder next time.
He wondered, briefly, what the original Ren would have thought if he could see this. Vice Captain. Barrier Corps. His mother smiling like this.
Shaking his head, he smoothed the fabric one last time, the motion neat and controlled, and told himself that for now, this was enough for the promise he wanted to honor—to make things easier for the woman in front of him.
"Ren," his mother said, breaking his thoughts. "After dinner… tell me everything. About your new post. About the people you work with. You hardly talk about them."
He thought of the Barrier Corps headquarters. Of complicated seal arrays. Of whispered rumors about a war brewing at the borders.
Ren nodded.
"Okay," he said with a soft smile. "I'll tell you."
.
.
Thank you for the inspiration, PandaWukong!
And yes, I know, I should update my other stories, but I just had this idea and wanted to have an OC with a Monarch Butterfly summon and then thinking of butterflies reminded me of Bleach and how they use black butterflies for messages and guides, and then I wanted an OC with the abilities of a Bleach character (I was torn between Senjumaru and Urahara).
In the end, I wanted a seal master to be the protagonist, and Urahara suited that role best, the mad scientist that he is. Anyway, that led me to remember how similar sealing and alchemy are... Like they said, one thing led to another and now we're here.
Also, I wanted someone who looked totally unlike Orochimaru. So, instead of black hair, my OC has white hair. Instead of paper white skin, he's tanned. Then I realized that's what someone from Ishval looks like... It went full circle, I think, as I went back to him wanting to be reborn in the FMAB's world as someone from Ishval, but being screwed over by Truth.
Hehe.
PS. His name was going to be Lián, which means Lotus/honest/to-sympathize in Chinese, buuuut he did not go to Xing but ended up in the Japanese-speaking world of Naruto, so it changed to Ren.