The candle was definitely judging me.
It guttered in the corner of my room, wax puddling like a tiny melted corpse, while I hunched over my notebook with ink-stained fingers and a brain that would not shut up.
The dorm room the orphanage gave us was small but neat: narrow bed, tiny desk, window that leaked moonlight. Everything beige, like the caretakers thought neutral colors would prevent emotional damage.
Joke's on them.
I tapped the end of my brush against my glasses and frowned down at the page.
A neat, proper seal array sat in the center—a basic storage formula, the kind Iruka had praised that afternoon. Tight circles, four cardinal points, little anchors for chakra. Efficient. Safe. Boring.
Around it, the margins were chaos.
Self. Change. Body. Truth.
My attempts at the kanji crawled along the edges in uneven rows, little soldiers with broken legs.
自
変
体
真
I'd written them, crossed them out, written them smaller, tried to sneak them into sub-arrays, then angrily scrubbed them into gray smears.
"Stop looking at me," I muttered at the page.
Obviously, it didn't.
My hand moved anyway, brush gliding in automatic little loops as I sketched a new circle on the next sheet. Habit. Muscle memory. The first thing I'd really owned in this world: ink + chakra = something that listened to me.
Most days, that felt like a miracle. Tonight it felt like a dare.
Naruto's stupid Sexy Jutsu kept punching my brain from the inside. The way he'd just—poof—flipped his body like a card trick, grinning through the smoke, not a trace of shame.
Like shifting shapes was as casual as changing clothes.
I swallowed.
My brush hesitated above the paper.
"What if…" I whispered, which were probably the most dangerous two words in any language.
I knew Transformation was supposed to be an illusion. A thin layer of chakra that tricked the eye. But I also knew seals could bind things. Anchor them.
If you were smart.
If you were stupid, you got "explodes in your face" or "your arm forgets how to be an arm."
The brush touched down anyway.
Circle. Four points. Connecting lines.
I added a tiny auxiliary ring, like a satellite. Labeled it 自 in the narrow space.
Self.
My fingers trembled.
Okay. Hypothetically. If you made a seal that latched onto your own chakra signature—your "self" pattern—and then cross-linked it with a continuous transformation matrix, you could maybe—
"Lock it in," I said under my breath. "Make it real."
Make me real.
My chest tightened. The room seemed to shrink around me, walls pressing in, memories pressing harder.
Old memories, from the Before. Hands grabbing the back of my neck. Voices hissing what are you like it was a crime. Mirrors avoided like landmines. Clothes two sizes too big so no one had to see.
I blinked hard until the candle smear on my glasses turned back into a flame.
"Bad idea," I told the paper. "Terrible, terrible idea."
The brush hovered anyway, inching toward the center of the array.
傍 — Body.
変 — Change.
真 — Truth.
If I got it right, I could anchor this body, this shape, this self. Tell the world: this is not a costume, this is not temporary, this is not negotiable.
If I got it wrong…
I pictured my chakra snarling into a knot. Muscles spasming. Skin not matching the map underneath. Getting hauled into the hospital and having to explain why my soul had tried to jailbreak through a seal designed by an eight-year-old amateur.
Hubris, my brain offered primly. Classic cautionary tale stuff. Girl flies too close to the sun, falls, breaks her everything.
Also extremely, soul-breakingly tempting.
I drew one more line.
It almost completed into something like a stabilization loop—half self, half body, feeding back into the center. A "stay like this" command.
My hand started shaking so hard a droplet of ink splattered right across the middle.
"Shit—"
I jerked back, heart slamming, brush clattering onto the desk. The half-formed seal stared up at me with a bleeding black eye.
For a second, the air felt thick with wrongness. Not real chakra, just… the knowledge that if I pushed even a little further, I'd be testing something I absolutely wasn't ready for.
I pressed my hands flat on the desk until my knuckles went white.
"Okay," I said out loud, to the room, to the candle, to myself. "New rule. No experimental soul surgery after midnight."
My laugh came out thin and jagged.
I flipped the page over so I didn't have to look at it and grabbed a fresh sheet. This time, I forced my brush to draw something safe. A simple tag. Explosive, yes, but predictable—tiny controlled burst, not existential detonation.
Seal for "push." Seal for "stop." Seal for "heal bruises," the one I'd been trying to improve so Naruto didn't have to pretend he didn't care when he tripped over his own feet during training.
Useful things. External things. Things that weren't my reflection on a page.
My chakra pulsed faintly in my fingertips, eager to be used, to flow into the ink and animate the shapes. I held it back. I didn't activate anything. Not tonight.
The candle hissed as a bit of wax fell, collapsing the wick slightly.
I leaned back in my chair and rubbed at my face, leaving a streak of ink on my cheek. My glasses were smudged; the world blurred at the edges.
"What if it fades?" I asked the ceiling quietly.
This body. This voice. This chance.
What if someone decided it was all a fluke and took it away?
My heart did that awful drop again. I had no guarantee. No contract. Just… waking up one day and discovering I'd been slotted into a life where people called me "she" without flinching.
It still felt fragile. Like smoke. Like breathing too hard might break the illusion.
I clutched my hitai-ate where it lay on the desk, thumb tracing the spiral of the Leaf. The metal was cool and solid under my skin.
"This is real," I whispered. "I'm real."
No seal. No jutsu. Just words.
They felt small. They were all I had.
Ink-stained fingertips, light brown hair falling into my eyes, glasses sliding down my nose, oversized clothes hanging off a body that finally felt like it belonged to me.
I almost reached for the half-finished self-henge array again.
Instead, I blew out the candle.
Darkness surged in, soft and absolute. Moonlight painted a pale square on the floor. My eyes slowly adjusted.
In the quiet, with no brush in my hand, it was easier to choose not to tempt fate.
"I'll get strong first," I told the dark. "Smart first. Live first."
Then, maybe, someday, I'd earn the right to write seals about truth and self and body.
For now, I shuffled to bed, leaving the dangerous page buried under safer diagrams.
Behind my closed eyes, Naruto exploded into a cloud of smoke again, reappearing in that ridiculous girl form and cackling.
"Must be nice," I mumbled into my pillow.
Sleep finally dragged me under.
On the desk, unseen, the half-finished array dried into permanent hesitation—one ink-black loop short of rewriting the girl who'd drawn it.