I woke earlier than yesterday; the traitor rabbit had half-collapsed across me, its ears tickling my nose until I snorted myself awake, and before the sparrows could decide whether the day deserved a song, hunger elbowed in with its usual urgency, so I squirmed, rooted, and offered the persuasive little noises that mothers translate without even thinking.
Hikari answers at once, as she always does, gathering me with one arm and settling me into the cradle of the other with a motion so practiced it hardly counts as a separate action, and while I eat the room shifts from soft gray to pale gold and the quiet between her breaths feels like a lullaby, so I let the warmth and rhythm do their work and think of nothing else at all.
When the bottle and the breast have both paid their taxes and my body is content in that boneless, oceanic way that follows a proper feeding, Hikari shifts her grip and begins to walk, and I prepare myself for the gentle circuit we usually make—bedroom, hall, receiving room, garden view from the threshold—except that this time, turning with deliberate authority, she heads for the changing alcove instead; I protest on principle, because there is absolutely nothing to change at present and I have facts to support this claim, so I present my facts enthusiastically by windmilling my arms and splaying my hands in the international semaphore for all clear, but Hikari is immune to baby jurisprudence and deposits me on the padded mat with the gravity of a judge who has heard this case and ruled on it many times.
I am unfastened, inspected, and refastened with the brisk tenderness of a woman who knows exactly what she is doing, and then—this is the part that derails my certainty—she does not stop at ordinary; she begins to layer me. First a soft undershift like a warm whisper, then a quilted wrap that makes me feel pleasantly spherical, then an outer robe whose lining smells faintly of cedar and sun, and finally a small, serious coat with ties that are tied with a competence I respect even while I wonder what, precisely, we are preparing for. I peer up at her with the mild, curious expression that is my best available substitute for what mission requires this much fabric, but she only smiles, nips my nose with a breath like a kiss, and turns to her own wardrobe.
Watching Hikari dress is like watching a shrine being readied for a festival: the layers are practical and precise, the colors subtle under winter light, and the overall effect is that of a person who intends to be warm and beautiful without having to think about either once she steps outside; which, apparently, is the plan, because she lifts me against her shoulder, tucks the coat's edge snug under my chin, and sets out down the hall with a stride that feels like purpose.
We pass under the lintel of the outer room and turn toward the inner courtyard, and I realize with a small electric shock that I have never been beyond the boundary of our walls except in sight; I have known the world as lines and light through paper and seal and disciplined glances, I have learned its rhythms by hearing and by inference, but I have not yet put my own lungs into the same air as snow and sky. Hikari slides the door aside, the bamboo slats ghosting on their track, and the courtyard greets us with a breath that is so clean my whole body sits up to notice.
Cold, yes, and crisp in a way that pricks the skin and then warms it, but above all clear—a clarity that tastes like water drawn from stone, like the first page of a new notebook, like the answer to a question I did not know how to ask. The air enters me and changes my map of what air is; it is not the tired, polite oxygen of a city oven, heavy with exhaust and cooked dust, but something young and sharp, so that without meaning to I compare it to the last life's air, the kind that always carried a rumor of tires and damp concrete, the kind you learn not to notice unless you leave it and return. It is astonishing to me that I had forgotten this could exist, and then astonishing that I am surprised by my own astonishment, because of course a village without cars and chimneys stacked like chess pieces would breathe differently.
Konoha's quiet is a very specific quiet. There are machines, yes, the occasional clatter of a pump or the shiver of a loom, but there is no low, constant mutter of engines, no distant snarl of traffic, no metallic cough of buses; instead there is the gentle percussion of brooms, the soft tick of meltwater finding seams in tile, the creak of wood under the sun's thin encouragement. The courtyard has been swept clean with an attention that makes me briefly proud of whoever did the sweeping; the paths are a pale geometry against the darker earth, the stepping‑stones dry except where a narrow tongue of shade has spared a thin frosting of ice. Along the eaves and on the garden's low wall snow lingers in bright commas; on the roof the drifts have bowed to gravity, slipping until they rest like folded sleeves along the edge.
I do not know what month the calendar insists upon, but the air's mathematics suggest late winter yielding to early spring, and if I translate to the earth‑time of my other memory, it feels like the end of January, perhaps a day or two into February if the sun keeps its promises. Somewhere beyond the wall, someone splits wood; somewhere nearer, a servant laughs once and then remembers that laughs carry farther in cold weather and swallows the rest, but not unkindly.
Hikari steps into the courtyard proper and, with the composure of a woman conducting a small procession, makes a lap around the central pine; she tilts my body outward slightly so my eyes can drink the world without my nose freezing, and I drink, greedily and without shame. The pine smells honest and resinous; the stone lantern smells like old rain; the tatami edge at the threshold smells like straw and sunlight braided together. I breathe until the breathing feels like a new game: in through the nose, air like bright water; out through the mouth, a ghost of steam that proves I exist.
Hikari watches me with that look she saves for discoveries she can enable without understanding, the soft alertness that says tell me what you need and I will be it. I tell her by vibrating with delight. My arms windmill, but this time not in legal argument—this is celebration, pure and kinetic—and when my mittened fist thumps her collar she laughs without trying to hide it, a low, bright sound that complicates my plans and steadies them at the same time. She lifts me a little higher so I can see over the line of her shoulder, and I, scandalously happy, make the kind of syllable that is not language and is also the best language we have today.
We stay out longer than I would have guessed possible, because Hikari is not reckless and the cold is not cruel, and she has prepared me with such thoroughness that I am more dumpling than child; we walk the perimeter, pausing so I can inspect icicles orchestral and fragile along the north eave, then continue to the far corner where meltwater has made a small, laboring brook of the gutter. On the roof the snow sighs and slumps. In the garden bed the first green appears as speculation rather than fact. I tilt my head until my fontanelle complains softly and consider the sky, a pale wash that promises depth later.
Somewhere in the middle of the circuit, while Hikari names plants to me as if nouns were talismans and I reward her with absorbed silence, I notice again the absence of the city's chorus, and with it the absence of soot; my other life's winter had been a catalog of little surrenders—hands raw from salt, breath turned sour by idling engines, a horizon you had to imagine while blinking away grit—and this winter is a different arithmetic entirely. I cannot help it: I fall in love with the air, utterly and without reservation, and the air, being generous, pretends not to notice.
It is Hikari who notices me. She tilts me to study my face, reads the angle of my eyes and the quiet catch of my breath, and concludes with a pleased certainty that I am in an unusually radiant mood; she plays accordingly, adjusting the tempo of our walk, adding small bounces that make the coat's quilt whisper, tapping the tip of my nose with a knuckle warmed between her palms. I reward her with whole‑body glee, an abandon that would be humiliating if it were not also the truest thing about this morning.
Time does what time does with babies; it stretches and then contracts without warning, and after what feels like a whole day and probably an hour, my body begins to issue a different memo, polite at first and then more insistent, explaining that the battery which powers curiosity is also the one that powers everything else, and that reserves have dipped below the recommended threshold. I resist the way all reasonable people resist sleep—briefly, with unconvincing arguments and excessive blinking—and then, when the inevitable arrives, I lean into it like a swimmer surrendering to the float.
Hikari feels the shift the instant it happens; she tucks my head into the warm valley where her neck meets her shoulder, draws the coat's edge a fraction higher, and retraces our path with the certainty of a captain returning to harbor. The door slips closed behind us with that satisfying cedar sigh; the indoor air wraps around my face with its familiar warmer notes; the courtyard becomes a bright memory stored right next to the rabbit, ready to be taken out and held up to the light when I am in the mood to be dazzled by how little and how much a morning can change a world.
I do not toggle anything; I do not test the seal; I do not attempt to calculate wind direction by the drift of steam from my mouth; I simply close my eyes while Hikari moves through rooms that have already adjusted themselves to her pace, and somewhere between the changing alcove and the sleeping mat I let go in earnest, content in the knowledge that tomorrow will still be winter, the air will still be clean, and I will be slightly larger, which is the kind of progress that adds up without anyone needing to publish a report about it.
Author's Note:Thanks for your support so far! Please leave a comment or a review — or even drop some power stones.Your support is what motivates me to keep writing.Thanks to all of you! 😊
Author's Note2:I hope the baby phase isn't too unrealistic(or boring) — I have to Google most of the things so that Hinata isn't jumping around like a grown-up and doing flips in week one.It also makes it hard to come up with content other than her training her chakra without it sounding repetitive… because, well, what do babies normally do at this age? XDDD