Three months ws passed.
He tried to roll over.
His left arm twitched. His shoulder moved maybe an inch. The rest of him stayed exactly where his mother had laid him, flat on his back, arms useless at his sides.
A sound came out of his mouth. Not a word. Not even a real cry. Just air and frustration.
The baby body was a prison.
He could think clearly. He could remember. He could remember dying, which was a strange thing to carry into a new life — the taste of hospital air, the beep of the IV, the Baki episode still paused in his mind. Yujiro Hanma's back muscles rippling like a demon's face. The yoga instructor's voice. Four counts in, four counts out.
And then light. New light. Harsher light.
Now he was Uchiha Mandy. Three months old. A name announced at a festival he barely remembered through infant eyes, all blurry shapes and loud voices and the spinning red of his grandfather's gaze.
None of that mattered if he couldn't move his own hands.
Mandy focused on his right arm. The elbow. Just bend the elbow. He'd seen babies do it. His own body refused. The nerves were there — he could feel the blanket against his skin, the warmth of the room, the dull pressure of the cloth wrapped around his waist — but the signals going out hit a wall.
Again. Twitch. Nothing.
Sweat beaded on his forehead. A baby sweating from effort. If anyone saw, they'd think he was sick.
He stopped. Breathed.
The yoga instructor's voice came back, sharper this time. Tarratak. Steady gaze. One point. Everything else falls away.
The cancer ward had taught him things the healthy world never bothered to learn. When your body betrays you, the mind either breaks or sharpens. He'd chosen sharpening. The instructor called it meditation. Mandy called it surviving the pain without screaming.
He'd stared at a candle flame then. A single point of light in the dark hospital room while his roommate slept and the machines beeped and his own cells ate him from the inside.
There was no candle here. But there was light.
A crack in the wooden shutters let in a needle of afternoon sun. It hit the floor about three feet from where he lay, a coin of gold on the dark boards.
Mandy fixed his eyes on it.
Breathing first. The instructor's voice, calm and practiced: In for four. Hold for four. Out for four. He couldn't count with precision — his infant lungs were too small, the rhythm came out wrong — but he could feel the shape of it. A pattern. A cage for the mind to rest in.
The light blurred. His eyes watered. Babies couldn't hold focus long. He blinked, found the coin again, held.
Minutes passed. Maybe longer. Time was strange in a body that slept sixteen hours a day.
But something shifted.
It wasn't dramatic. No sudden power. No chakra flood. Just a quiet settling behind his eyes. The frantic noise of his thoughts — I'm trapped, I'm useless, this is forever — dimmed to a hum.
He noticed his breathing had steadied. His small chest rose and fell without the ragged edge it had carried before.
He tried his arm again.
Still nothing. But the frustration didn't spike. He noted the failure and let it sit. The light was still there. His breath was still moving.
---
He did it every day.
Whenever he was awake and not being fed or changed or carried to some clan gathering, Mandy found the light. Different times of day meant different angles. Morning light pooled near the door. Afternoon cut across his mat. Evening was dimmer, softer, a glow instead of a blade.
He stared. He breathed. He let his body be still.
By the end of the first week, his eyes didn't water as fast.
By the end of the second, he could hold the point for what felt like a full minute before blinking.
The changes came quietly.
His mother noticed first. She would lean over him, black hair falling like a curtain, and instead of the unfocused infant gaze she expected, his eyes snapped to hers. Held. Tracked her face as she moved.
"Look at him," she said one evening. Her voice was tired — she was still wearing armor some days, still carrying the war in her shoulders — but something lighter crept in. "He watches everything."
The grandfather grunted from across the room. Tea steamed in his hands. He didn't look up, but Mandy caught the slight tightening at the corner of his mouth. Interest. Maybe approval.
Another day, a visitor came. A woman with a sharp voice and sharper eyes — some kind of medic, Mandy guessed from the way she pressed fingers to his chest and peered into his pupils. He didn't cry. He didn't squirm. He just watched her, calm, tracking her movements like he had all the time in the world.
"Strange," the woman said, pulling back. "He's too alert. You're not feeding him anything unusual?"
"Only milk," his mother said, and there was a small pride in it.
The medic frowned, not unkindly. "His pupils react fast. He follows light. Most infants don't… focus like that."
The grandfather spoke from his corner. "He's an Uchiha."
The medic left shortly after.
---
By the third month of practice, Mandy's memory had sharpened to a blade.
He could recall faces he'd seen only once. Voices. The exact tone of his grandfather's laugh during the festival. The way the sunlight fell on that specific afternoon when he'd first opened his eyes in this world. Even old memories from the before-life came back clearer — the nurse's name he'd long forgotten, the title of a book he'd read years ago, the exact sequence of moves from a Baki fight scene.
It wasn't photographic. Not quite. But it was close. Close enough that when his mother hummed a tune one night, he recognized it from three weeks prior. She'd only hummed it twice.
He couldn't speak yet. His vocal cords weren't ready. But inside his skull, the words lined up and waited.
The body was still a prison. He still couldn't roll over reliably. His arms still twitched when he wanted them to reach. But the walls of the cell had gotten wider. He had a practice now. A ritual. A small island of control in an ocean of helplessness.
One evening, as the light faded and the house settled into quiet, his grandfather lifted him from the mat.
" Baby, did you miss your grandpa"
" Grandpa... " Mandy words echoed in rooom