The Decemberist: Part One [YonShi, KushiMina, KyuuYon, KyuuOC; R]
Title: The Decemberist: Part One ∙∙∙ Prophecy
Author: the_lady_lamb
Genre: Naruto
Sub-genre: Angst/Romance
Summary: (Part I: Chapters I-X) Namikaze Minato's life flows precisely according to prophecy. This he knows. But what he can't know is how to protect her entirely...or even how to avoid hurting her himself.
Rated: R for some non-graphic sex.
Author's Notes: For you guys, yukari_rin and fujiwara_san. I love you dearly. I'll finish Part Two in time for Christmas. Pinky swear. ♥
The Decemberist
PART ONE ∙∙∙ PROPHECY
i.
The first time Namikaze Minato, he who will be Konohagakure no Yondaime Hokage, comes into contact with the demonic realm, it is in the streets of Amegakure. His teacher has been eager to reach here for some reason, and they (the infamous Team 7) have lingered here now for some time, which is strangely disconcerting. The mission itself was only a Level C - an escort mission far below them in their semi-prodigal, thirteen-year-old glory. But Jiraiya had accepted excitedly, had pressed them and their charge to travel with ungainly swiftness, and so here they are. It is the third day in a row he has left them to their own devices, left them to entertain themselves in the crowded marketplace down the street from their hotel, and it bothers Minato to quite a great extent, but he will not say anything about it. It is not his way, even if the exotic wares and vendors have long ceased to hold his interest.
When he blunders into Yohko - or, more accurately, when a strange women of ulterior race, a women he will later come to know as Yohko purposely crosses his path - it comes as more than a small surprise, one that makes him blink dazedly. Minato is not well-accustomed to blundering into people (blundering in general) because he is very careful as a general rule, and he is certainly not well-accustomed to blundering into people who were not there to blunder into half a second ago. (In the same way he is not well-accustomed to forging these unfamiliar streets alone. But Shisui is sitting several kilometers from him like some strange marble statue, sitting with a large bouquet of flowers - white lilies, hyacinths, all of them, all fresh - in between her stiff arms, fitting gracefully straight on a barstool unworthy of her presence. She has been sitting in this way for a very long time, her tea-blood hair cascading across the soft, feminine curves of her face, her eyes the pinnacle of masculinity in her, fallow and drifting. Shisui has stretched and bent androgyny into an art of her own, after all. She looks neither masculine nor feminine, really, an ambiguous deity of amber glass. The flowers had been a gift and they had sat down with them in their bulk, sat down and Minato had watched her sit in the same way she is sitting now for nearly an hour before she finally spoke to him, her voice bitter.
“He’s here to look for someone.”
It seemed an offended statement, really, one born of lips that did not often speak, and never sang. And now that he has been thinking a while, Minato knows that she must’ve been thinking of her family in that moment, must be thinking about them still. He cannot quite garner how Jiraiya’s half-responsible abandonment of them might’ve struck such a chord with her, but he knows that it is not his place to ask, or even to say. He knows her to be deeply entrenched.
In the same way he knew the words meant-
“Leave me.”
Her lips are now still held in the same thin lines they were when she said it and her eyes are still the same cold fire, and so Minato has adhered to her wishes. With a politeness unbecoming of someone so young as himself, he has excused himself from her presence, has attempted to remove himself from her troubles, and he hopes that such an excuse will be enough. He does not know what she has that she must forgive him, but he hopes that it is not too much. He hopes that it is not too painful. And in this way did he so excuse himself.)
As he excuses himself now, bowing his head as his cheeks flush. He looks up afterwards, though, looks up expecting to see Shisui’s face without even knowing that that is what he is expecting.
And this is his mistake.
Yohko’s entire countenance is weirdly golden, which distracts from the overall strangeness of her - her hair is pale sunlight streaked with bold copper and hangs loosely around her short, round face; the copper is coupled with gentle shrapnel-type flecks that dapple her golden, cat-like eyes, and there are golden bracelets and bangles that move underneath her white traveling cloak. In being as she is, her features unite themselves wholly, despite their being strangely inhuman in their almost-lively unhealthy pallor. She looks like a phenomenon in and of herself, a freak of nature without being out of place, which is a subconscious realization on his own part.
But upon seeing the way his cheeks flush at the idea of impoliteness, her mouth curves, a gleeful smile blooming, it’s wings bursting forth, and her face alights with it. She reaches down without consent and takes his yet-small hand between her own. Her voice is that of a singer, that of a nightingale, and it rushes over itself in romping, improper discourse. The delicate bones of her fingers distract him, but he is puzzled - perhaps most of all by the fact that all of her words come out as giddy laughter.
But the words puzzle him as well.
“I’ve found you!”
Without doubt.
ii.
“Where did you go?”
Minato brushes his hair out of his face and feels guilty, even though he should be asking Jiraiya that question not the other way around. Someday he will have a son who will boldly state as such and the man will find a new reason to make him sleep on the floor in their hotel room. But for the time being, Minato is small and unconscious of such things. Unconscious of most things. There is a degree to which his politeness is just humiliating - for a shinobi to be cordial in the way Minato is cordial is for a shinobi to have a death wish. There is more than one reason in this day and age that chivalry is dead.
Shisui still has her bouquet of flowers held to her body. She does not touch them with her hands, nor does she take her piercing eyes from Minato’s face. The Namikaze reddens softly under their scrutiny.
“Sanosuke isn’t here either.”
His future hermit of a teacher sighs at him. “Maa. Excuses, excuses…”
It’s true, of course, so no one fights it. They stand around in a silence instead - terse for Minato, unobliging for Shisui, and simple for Jiraiya - and wait for their pudgier teammate to show his face. There is a feeling like hermit crabs in Minato’s stomach, as if he had abandoned them previously, and he finds it difficult to look up into Shisui’s face, because Yohko’s is as fresh in his mind as it is, and his own face is still warm from the encounter. Minato will be this way with women and with others until the day he dies - it is his politeness that will end him emotionally, it is his power of will that will end him physically. He knows nothing of this yet. But it is not impossible to guess at.
When he finally does meet Shisui’s eyes it is with an almost solemn impishness, and she notices. (It’s inevitable. Shisui is born of a line that notices everything, as is a certain dark-eyed prodigy who will be conceived not too far from now.) What she notices about him exactly, of course, she keeps silent and to herself and the flowers, but there are certain things about Shisui that are not feminine enough and so cause her “women’s intuition” to malfunction at times, and she makes up for this by being an Uchiha, because there is no other way for her to compensate. Her eyes are amber mirrors, piercing and strong in their wholeness.
“You seem…”
She pauses. Studies him.
“…disenchanted.”
What he seems is “distressed”, really, offkilter and odd. His eyes are swollen with a knowledge he does not seem to want at the surface of his mind. She watches him shift self-consciously, as if he is try to press it deeper into the folds of his mind. It almost seems as if it makes him uncomfortable, the way she notices without qualm or hesitation.
She knows it doesn’t though.
He puts his hands in his pockets.
“…somebody told me something strange.”
Jiraiya, who has been surveying the streets with his broad hands held authoritatively on his hips, his elbows jutting out like wings, glances over his shoulder and his long white hair to raise an eyebrow at the blond. “Like what? You meet a fortune teller or something? Didn’t take your money, did they? If they did, don’t you dare ask me to go get it back for you. Way too much trouble.”
“It was woman.”
“Was she good looking?”
Minato waits a second before deciding not to answer. He’s known Jiraiya long enough to know that any answer at all would remove all real meaning from the conversation at all, send it into a predictable spiral that would eventually end in either a sex talk, or Jiraiya leaving to pursue her, most likely an awkward, haphazard combination of both. So he decides to make believe that Jiraiya asked him a different question entirely - what she told him, maybe - and answers in a way that will direct the conversation in the way it should go.
“…she said I was going to die.”
Jiraiya goes very, very quiet, before speaking.
“…did you pay her?”
“No.”
“Then forget about it.” He pulls at his lion’s mane of white hair and hoists himself forward. “Come on. We’ll wait Sanosuke-kun back at the hotel. Come on.” He moves into the crowd, his expression surprisingly dark. Minato’s fingers pull at the inside of his pants uncomfortably.
Shisui is quiet behind him for a while before she speaks.
“…how foreboding.”
iii.
The rain is a gentle sway and his body is a gentle swell, like the kind that are slowly growing on Shisui’s chest. He takes his shoes off in the doorway as he drips on the tile, leaning one way and then the other. There is a soft pendulum motion, a strange sense of rhythm that following gifts everything with, and he breathes in the scent of it. The world is wet and gray, and his mother comes to welcome him home. She looks unhappy, and it could be because she nearly always is unhappy-looking, but the way he’s raining on their floor is more than anything probably the cause of it. She is a thin woman, not very motherly in figure or in attitude, and Minato thinks that he is alright with that for the most part. He got her hair, anyway, and it looks alright.
“Where is your umbrella?”
Minato shrugs, loosely, apologizes for being wet, and his mother turns and goes to fetch something from the real inside of the house, telling him to wait for her. He sighs and pulls at the soaked-wet strands of his hair. (They’re halfway plastered to his head, slicked down to the side of his face, his dark eyelashes clumped together in the wet. His umbrella is, of course, in the hands of none other than Shisui, and he knows this because he put it there and would not do otherwise if given the chance to do so. After all, they had been training together when the rain had begun to fall and it’d been difficult to convince Jiraiya that calling up one of his frogs to shield them from it so that they could continue would be less than ideal. He’d seemed sort of bemused at the notion that crushing people was less than ideal.) Minato shakes himself, trying to both be rid of the water and rid of the idea that his teacher is an idiot. He’s not an idiot, really, and that’s an incredibly rude thing to even think. He’s eccentric. That’s the word. (That’s all.)
The moment he looks up is, consequently, the moment his mother tosses a towel in his face. The thick terry cloth is warm from the dryer and just the heat of it is enough to make him sigh and flush with a deep, full-hearted contentment. He’s quick to reach up and hold it against his forehead, rubbing his cheek against it cat-like.
“For the sake of all sakes,” his mother says, folding her arms across her flat chest. “You’re almost fourteen years old, aren’t you?”
“I suppose so.”
“Then act it. Child, I’d swear you’re always this meek. For the sake of all sakes. Sometimes, I don’t know if you’re even a boy at all.”
He drags the towel through his hair and as the strands begin to dry they spring up of their own accord. In seconds, he’s mussed but only halfway damp-looking, water springing off of him like thousands of tiny insects. The idea isn’t as uncomfortable as it could be. “I’m sorry, Mother.”
“Like that Minato. Like that. What sort of boy are you? The ‘keeping chivalry alive’ kind, that’s what you are - a little knight. Like in a story book. Shinobi aren’t knights, you know. You ought to learn rudeness. Atleast a little bit. You’ll never survive the Chuunin exams if you aren’t even a little bit rude.”
Minato imagines himself dressed in a clunky suit of armor and chuckles to himself. “How inconvenient.”
His mother watches him.
“I wonder who your princess in a tower is, then?”
Minato begins folding the towel in half and hurriedly changes the subject to dinner.
iv.
The first time Namikaze Minato, he who will be Konohagakure no Yondaime Hokage, realizes that there’s someone watching him it is at perhaps the most inconvenient time imaginable: halfway through Team 7’s second day in the Forest of Death, and it catches him so offguard that he falls off the branch he’d previously staked out as his own.
The fox is small, its body about the length of his forearm, a creamy white zag of movement out of the corner of his eye - it’s a worse scare because of the fact that it’s inches from the right side of his face and it absolutely wasn’t there before, all tiny black and gold and white features and bad, bad timing. He stumbles, spooked, and falls backwards, losing control and his hold. His yell is auspicious (his foes jump to attention) in wake of it and for six seconds his speed is a constant. A formula. (Constant velocity - terminal. Nine point eight meters per second. It’s the slowest he’s moved in hours.)
Speed is Minato’s only perceivable skill by shinobi standard, which is lucky because it results in the backflip that saves his life. A chakra driven javelin misses his neck by mere centimeters, passing so close that is cuts a clean hole through the top of the shoulder of his shirt as he dives just beneath and somersaults into the concealing foliage of the forest floor. He’s shooting up from the shrubbery in milliseconds, bounding up the trunk of the tree and knowing that their attack on Sanosuke will subside and reevaluate itself to appropriate his fall. He moves around such actions with knowledge that they will be made, even; to Konohagakure’s Yellow Flash, the Mist-nin are easily avoidable. Maneuverable. Even the large-looking blue juggernaut with the fearsome teeth.
As soon as they turn to react to his fall (the two smaller ones, that is - the juggernaut fends off Shisui only long enough to follow the blond blur that hurtles out of nowhere) he’s blown up from behind them. As soon as they really know he’s down, he has delivered a well-aimed (he hopes) punch to both of them. His brain only registers feeling someone’s teeth against his knuckles as he skids to land and they’re airborne. The tumble through space towards the ground far below and he rockets after them. (Because this is the correct order, now.)
Sanosuke sees his opportunity and skids onto the ground beside him. They mold together secondarily, forming the seals more quickly than is really safe or natural.
Kinbaku bankon no jutsu!
Tangles of tree roots are equally quick, though, ripping forth from the dirt with wooden gasps as they snake forward to grab and constrict the limbs of their two opponents. The Mist-nin shout and twist but the bindings only tighten in response to their efforts. Sanosuke and Minato both survey the effectiveness of their immobilization tactics before throwing themselves back and up again, driving up the side of Shisui’s tree of choice with a degree of chakra control and camaraderie reminiscent of ninja twice their age.
On reaching her branch, though, its only too evident that Minato’s unexpected blunder has resulted in Team 7’s quick seizure of the upper hand. As they land behind her, the juggernaut Mist-nin is just tearing out of her fingers on his shirt, just managing to wrestle out of her hold on the front of his travelling cloak. He seems to have decided that three-on-one gives the Leaf-nin too large of an advantage, that they aren’t really worth his trouble. Minato and Sanosuke’s introduction of kunai into the equation only seem to reinforce and solidify his decision.
“Yeah,” he mutters - his face is cemented in an eternal grin by his wide set eyes and rows of sharp teeth, “way too much. Shit.”
He leaps off in a different direction and starts running as fast as it seems he can, leaving his friends far behind. Minato almost starts running after him, but Shisui puts out her arm and keeps him from it.
“Let him go. We have what we need.”
“But-”
“I’m alright,” she says pointedly, looking over at him with a beautiful face that composed and serious. “So are you. What more are you after?”
“I-”
“Minato-kun.” Shisui’s voice is amber, perhaps slicked in molasses (but that is far too sweet - the right color but far too sweet. But so is bean paste, and the wrong color besides. He wonders if there is anything to really represent her aside from her tea. Aside from herself). “Why did you fall?”
He has no answer for her.
“What did you see?”
He pauses, realizes that Sanosuke is no longer standing in their midst, that Shisui’s truth is resolute, and that she is watching him with a strange intensity. He doesn’t know how to answer her question and so he stays still for a small moment feeling awkward and out of place.
“…did you paint your nails?”
She blinks at him. “What?”
“Never mind. It’s fine. Um. It was nothing. Let’s go- Uh, Sanosuke-kun’s probably got the scroll by now, you know? We should go help him make sure they’re…incapacitated. Or, uh. You know. Whatever.”
He turns to go and after a few moments, she follows him quietly, smiling to herself. If he notices, he does his very best to avoid blushing when he thinks she can see it clearly. He doesn’t really succeed, but it’s the most chivalrous gesture to make, given the situation.
They’re almost half a mile away when she finds her place to run beside him, hands folded primly behind her back.
“It’s plum.”
“It…it looks nice.”
She smiles.
“…thankyou.”
v.
When they arrive at the central tower, they are about two and a half days early, the second team of twelve to arrive, and so are taken to hotel-like rooms that are installed above the hall they will presumably be fighting in. The hall itself is a room with a level ceiling, and so everything built above it is of an entirely different nature; there is a small, cafeteria-style dining hall and then a long winding staircase that leads past almost twenty windowless rooms on four different stories to a small balcony that overlooks the entire forest and can see almost to the farthest edge of the village itself.
Jiraiya leads them up the staircase, room keys in hand, explaining things as they go. “If Konoha were ever attacked at it’s Western Gate, this would be the center of our resistance forces. It’s one of the village’s most important buildings.”
Minato is tired, his limbs aching from exertion, but he maintains his slow and waning curiosity, continues to pose questions so that Jiraiya will not change the subject. His teacher has a very bad habit of doing that and coming up with obscurely deep and painful topics, when put in such a position. The last time they’d simply let him sit awkwardly without showing interest, he’d gone off on a long tangent about the spiritual taxation of illness. It hadn’t been a particularly fun conversation. “The Shodai was in charge of its construction, was he not…?”
“That’s right! But it was the Nidaime whose men built it.” Jiraiya looks over his shoulder at Minato, his excitement soaking into the statement. The blond smiles at him, chuckling tiredly. His teacher has a definite funniness to him. It’s slightly endearing.
“Alright. Here we are.” Jiraiya hands them each a key as they reach a landing halfway up the staircase. “You each get a separate room. I’m staying in one downstairs - just ask one of the other Jounin if you can’t find me.”
Their faces bend, puzzled.
(But the person to ask the question is-)
Shisui speaks.
“…sensei. Why are we all being assigned separate rooms? Certainly there cannot be enough rooms for them to be able to afford us such luxuries.”
Jiraiya’s face relaxes into an overshadowed sardonicism and his smile at them is dark. It makes Minato’s insides twist around themselves a little bit. (And his words do that twice as well.)
“Well, you might be moved into each other’s rooms as conditions change, it’s true. But we - the Jounins, that is, both of our village and others - doubt that that’ll have to happen. The way things are going, it looks like we’ll have enough rooms this year. Just like last year, and every year before.”
Minato stares up at him.
“…sensei. Of the thirty-six Chuunin candidates…how many are expected to…make it here alive?”
And Jiraiya’s smile turns a toxic kind of bitter.
“We’ll have more than enough rooms to accommodate, Minato. Let’s just leave it at that.”
Jiraiya bids them farewell and Namikaze Minato, he who will be Konohagakure no Yondaime Hokage, simply stands there, key in hand and insides turning a brutal sort of cold. His throat and stomach caress and constrict together, and it feels like his whole self is going to start shaking so hard that he falls to pieces. He stares into space, and he can think only-
Exactly our age.
Sanosuke swats his arm lightly. “They’re the enemy, Minato. Christ, let it go. Better them than us, you know? And now there’ll be less of ‘em to fight by the time we’re Jounin. Just puts Konoha that much further ahead. Lighten up.”
“They’re exactly our age, Sano.” Somewhere in some other village, there’s a mother whose child left a week ago to come here and who isn’t ever coming back. Somewhere in some other village, some woman’s child just died pursuing-- “They’re-…”
The same as we are.
His insides feel so cold. So numb.
“Let it go.”
And somehow, Minato can’t forgive him for saying it, because he knows that if it were them, if it were Shisui’s mother, their village mourning their loss, those Mist-nin, those Whirlpool, Grass, Watefall, Rock-nin would say the same thing, and it’s something he just can’t forgive. Callousness in the face of another person’s pain. He can’t stand it.
And so he whirls around and punches Sanosuke so hard in the face it makes his hand hurt. His friend smacks headfirst into the wall and makes noise like an elephant that just had one of its limbs ripped off. Minato doesn’t really care what he has to say, and he storms over to his assigned room and jams the key into its respective hole and doesn’t let himself worry about it too much until he feels Shisui’s artful fingers on his arm.
He looks up at her, eyes burning and she looks back at him.
And then she smiles, which baffles him.
“I think you might be mastering this ‘rudeness’ concept.”
“I think you’ve been spending too much time talking to my mother.”
“Do you have a princess you’re tending to, then?”
“…I’m going to go to sleep.”
She lets go of him, then, and he turns away from her, regret sinking into him like a bad dye. He doesn’t know what he’s regretting or why (definitely not punching Sanosuke - being alive? Getting here without a scratch on him? Not being someone else, so that one mother might be spared the weeping, one village might be spared the heartache? He doesn’t know,) but he knows he regrets it, and deeply. He turns the knob and his door swings open.
“…Minato-kun, are you going to be alright?”
He doesn’t answer.
(And he doesn’t really need to.)
She shuts the door for him, knowing he doesn’t want to close it in her face.
He lets her, and his heart feels heavy in his chest.
vi.
When he emerges from his room again it’s late evening and there are long slats of dying sunlight along the floor, like reams of fabric. He’s strangely reminded of Western marriage ceremony he saw last autumn. (But that was in the morning. And this is not.) Shisui is standing right where she was seven hours ago, and if it were not for the fact that now she is wearing different clothes - a yukata-like top, a light violet, over dark skin-tight shorts - with her hands inconspicuously in the small of her back. He nods to her, watches the floor.
“Sanosuke-kun’s face is like patchwork, you know.”
“I’ll apologize.”
“Now?”
He is quiet. His lips are very tight, thin across his teeth. She comes closer and startles him - too close, almost, but as he jumps upright, surprised, looking quickly to her calm face, eyes widening, and he can’t tell her to move away.
“You don’t have to apologize, you know.”
He watches her. His breath is coming oddly fast, his heart beat is oddly hard, oddly-odd. There’s nothing to be done for it. He’s quickly memorizing the familiar curves of her face, the lines of her body, her legs, her hands. The purple looks white because of the depth of the red-brown in her hair and he feels the muscles of his wrist bunch and flex. A soft slab of orange sun falls across the amber crystal of her face. He feels it catch on his eyelashes, he feels it fall through him like a small child. (He wants to snatch it back away from the edge. He wants to keep the child from falling and yet, what field of rye are they really standing along? Does he really know?)
Her voice is silken. Velvetty. Smooth and circular and completely unwound. She looks perfect. Sounds perfect. “You don’t have to apologize,” she says (and he realizes how soft and low her voice has become), “if you don’t want to.”
(Yohko had giggled around it.
“Courtesy that is your charm. So will it be your downfall.”)
They look at one another for a long time and when Shisui’s warm breath falls across and intertwines with his own, it takes everything he has to turn away from it. They stand there that way for a long time, before she speaks again.
“…do you want to?”
And he knows she isn’t asking about apologies.
His face flushes. She takes his hand gently.
“Then what are you waiting for…?”
And so he doesn’t speak.
He presses their lips together instead, and Shisui feels warm and charming and his whole being is in pain. His whole body flushes and shakes a little, like he thought it would, and he kisses her instead of speaking.
And she understands completely.
Which is what really matters.
vii.
The first time Namikaze Minato, he who will become Konohagakure no Yondaime Hokage, knows that he’s fallen in love with Shisui in a way that is completely irrevocable is when he goes away with Jiraiya in the month following the Chuunin exam. They take a long trek to what is easily the other side of the ninja world and every day he moves he can feel the distance, as if it is a piece of red thread stretched taut between them. There is a constant, soft ache in his chest when he looks back over the horizon towards his home, where he knows she is training with her uncle in their family’s training compound. Usually, because she’s a girl, Shisui would train under her aunt, a kind and pretty woman Minato has met only a few times before (Mikoto, he thinks her name is), but the woman is nearly eight months swollen with her first child, and so training under her is entirely out of the question. It’s a pity, which is something Shisui said herself, and Minato doesn’t doubt her. Even if he cannot remember the woman’s name at first pass, he can definitely remember the tales he’s heard of her - a Jounin of unsurpassed skill with a standard bō staff, he’s heard, with eyes that can kill a man and daggers between the lips that form her charming smile. The Heads of the Uchiha Clan are, needless to say, the Heads of the Uchiha Clan for very good reason.
Her uncle, though, she’d professed, will do a fair enough job. Minato does remember his name: Fugaku. A tough, thick man with a lean, well-muscled exterior, a hard gaze and a cruelly perfect body. To Minato, the man’s whole countenance seems calloused, and it makes him wonder if in his time away, Shisui’s deadly barbs will be fashioned into even more dangerous points.
Jiraiya looks at his distant eyes over the fire and speaks to him through a mouthful of fish. The dark-blue summer night is alive with the sounds of cicadas in the surrounding trees, the musical hum of the river, the dance of fireflies overhead. “What are you thinking about?”
”What do think of Uchiha Fugaku?”
”Good man,” Jiraiya says with bowed nod, biting through another piece of salty fish skin into the flesh of it. “Respectful. Almost as polite as you, just a little more…rough around the edges. Fantastic ninja. You won’t meet a better one in all your life, Minato, save maybe the Hokage. And you definitely won’t meet anyone with a more bombastic wife. And that includes the Hokage.”
Minato raises an eyebrow at him. Jiraiya nods emphatically, cheeks full of food. “I’m dead serious, kid. Body to kill, smile that could knock your freaking heart out o’ your chest, and powerful as all get out. The mind that woman’s got astounds. I almost convinced her to marry me once. Best three minutes of my life right there.”
Minato snorts and bites into his own fish. “What’s power have to do with it?”
”Power’s got everything to do with it.” Jiraiya’s voice is full of a firm seriousness. “I mean it, kid. You want a woman with a lot of power on her hands. Not because you want to take it from her - don’t you ever get into a relationship with a woman looking to take her power away from her, and I mean ever - but because you want to be able to respect her for everything she is. I mean every little thing. And you can only do that if she can take care of herself. The most wonderful thing in the world is when you know full well a woman could pass you up and so does she. And she stays with you anyway.
”The only girl you ever really know loves you is a girl with power. Don’t you ever forget that. That’s one of life’s most important lessons if not the most important one, and too many guys don’t know it.”
Minato waits, chewing his food, watching the fish on its stick. Its once white belly has been blackened by the flames of their fire, its eyes dulled and crystallized by death. To some extent it looks happy, which is strange. “…well, that puts you at quite an advantage, doesn’t it, sensei?”
Jiraiya’s grin is broad, and Minato understands that he has comprehended the lesson exactly.
”Damn straight.”
viii.
They battle.
It’s not fighting. It can’t be, not really, because fighting is not designed as an educational experience. But it is fighting, in its own way. It can’t be called a lesson, or even that instructional, and so it is a battle. Minato goes at him and he goes at Minato and they hold nothing back, not even things that could seriously hurt one another with. There are no winners and there are no losers, because as soon as Jiraiya pins him, as soon as Minato has his sensei on the ground beneath him, they whip back up into their initial positions and go at it again, as if nothing has occurred at all. The pain in Minato’s chest neither dies nor strengthens and so, as the days pass and Jiraiya gives him black-purple bruise after black-purple bruise, he simply tries not to linger on it, not to wonder.
(And he does wonder, when he is not properly distracted. When they are lying together beneath the stars and Jiraiya is snoring loudly, Minato is staring deep into the stars, trying to pick them apart from one another, his head balanced on his arms, which are slowly threading and tightening with new cords of muscle he hasn’t known before.) Fighting-type taijutsu is not his strong point; it distracts his mind, his focus does, and so he does not linger. (Does not wonder. But at night he does. When the fire is dying, his head is still buzzing, busy and frantic with thoughts of her, with wondering, with a sick feeling every time his lips tingle and his chest aches, because there is every part of him that wants to pray she does not feel this pain, that she is not sick with longing the way he is. Minato is a romantic after all, and ridiculously chivalrous, besides. But he doesn’t obey every part of him. He doesn’t. Because if he did, he would still be in Konoha.)
There’s a lot that can happen in a month. What happens, inevitably, for Minato is that his body becomes something other than itself. Within thirty days, he shoots up, grows almost ten centimeters. His clothes get too small for him, and too tight with the explosive growth of the muscles in his arms, the slow waning of the baby fat lingering deceptively like a lather over his quickly forming abdominals. His core is a center of great physical power for him, naturally, which comes from the speed at which he’s able to travel. That is their focus, too, as a team - his inability to truly boast skill in any other realm of shinobi talent. They work from the first blossom of dawn over the horizon to the very dusk, they work far past the point where Minato is tired, work far into the point where he is exhausted each and every day. (And still he lies awake wondering. Wondering quietly, to himself and to the stars, “Can she feel this?”, every part of his body telling him that it is cruel-hearted to hope that she can.)
Jiraiya doesn’t make mention to it.
Instead, he makes mention to each and every one of Minato’s other discrepancies, each and every one of his individual weaknesses. He picks at him, verbally and physically abuses him every minute of the day that they aren’t eating or sleeping. Nothing is safe, really. Advice turns into cruel mockery turns into cruel battle. Shopping is an opportunity to criticize his personality. Talking is an opportunity to criticize his adolescence. Girls are an opportunity to criticize his chivalry. Bathing is an opportunity to criticize his body.
Minato is neither easily angered, nor is he truly ever as bad as Jiraiya mockingly accuses. They both know this. But Minato is human and always has been - there is only so much he can take before he either starts hitting Jiraiya or starts to really believe what he’s saying.
And it’s only when he does the latter that Jiraiya hits him.
Which is alright.
They battle, after all, which means that nothing is really ever finished between them. And it is the twenty-eighth day, as Jiraiya ruffles his hair for the millionth time that Minato understands the real mechanics of tough love. It helps him truly comprehend just how much Jiraiya resists complimenting him for the sake of his own strength, the way he never tells him "good job" except when he most deserves it, which makes it feel that much better. He really comprehends it, in a crystalline clarity, he understands that the amount of genjutsu he has learned in a month, the amount of taijutsu, the degree to which he’s improved is monumental. It’s not the Chuunin exams Jiraiya’s preparing him for. It’s life. It’s people.
It’s not nice, per se, but it’s paternal and it indicates how hard Jiraiya’s trying with him, how hard he’s working to make him stronger, and so Minato is thankful for it all the same. When he says so, Jiraiya mocks him about it for almost an hour. But his spirit doesn’t dampen at all because he meant it, regardless, and really Jiraiya’s just proving his point, and so his teacher finally lets it go, and after a few more hours of meaningless taunts and then a few hours more of silence between them, Jiraiya reaches over and ruffles his hair offhandedly again.
They go back home the next day and Jiraiya engages him in a long conversation about old fairytales, knowing Minato has an almost childish love for them. It’s the best “you’re welcome” he gets in his entire life, and he never really forgets it for so much as a moment, what Jiraiya worked so hard to give him.
He never really forgets Shisui either. Not for a second.
But that’s an entirely different story.
ix.
Namikaze Minato, he who will become Konohagakure no Yondaime Hokage, has very soft hands for a ninja, a fact that is entirely reliant on his refusal to use weaponry to any real end. His power is, of course, his greatest weapon, now only barely surpassing his speed, which has come as a great surprise to his teacher and not too much to him. But power is hand seals in the ninja world, not weaponry, and so calluses (the kind that Sanosuke has, that Jiraiya has) are signs of either trial versus talent, or dark memories, not of power. Skill, perhaps. But not power. That is why God has given Minato such quaint, unassuming hands, without sutures or sharpness. They are soft, creamy pieces of him, easily molded with softly protruding bones at the knuckles that look like rounded hills. They’re calming, his hands.
Shisui’s are too, of course, in the way women’s hands will be, but they are also completely opposite in so many ways. In the ways Minato’s hands are round, homely, Shisui’s are brisk, sharp and fickle in their own faithlessness. It is as if Shisui’s birth as something of a deity has made her hands oppowite of what they should be, irony in and of themselves. They are cool, gentle, but the bones in them make each line geometrically perfect. In the ways that Minato’s hands bode a singularity in their smoothness, Shisui’s hands are divine and perfect. Untouchable. In the way Minato does not have calluses, it is evident that for Shisui to even think of developing them is an impossibility in the same way it is an impossibility that Shisui will stop drinking tea, very less tasting of it when she kisses him. There’s nothing to cough at, though; it’s a pleasant sensation, the somber warmth of her mouth.
That is the way Sanosuke finds them, holding hands and kissing as new daylight folds over the front porch of his house. The fat boy scowls, his dark cheeks bending downwards as Minato pulls back from her with a tender reluctance and she react in the same way of a person swatting at flies with only a half-intent to keep them at bay. Sanosuke yanks up the zipper of his Chuunin vest with a huff of breath, and Minato looses his fingers a little bit from Shisui’s, his chest aching with the lost contact.
”Get a room.”
Shisui carefully slips her pinky over his as they walk together and warmth cascades up his forearm and across the expanse of his stomach. She keeps her disinterested look on her face, but Minato’s smiling enough for the both of them, his golden hair catching the sunlight with a vengeance, so in the end, it doesn’t matter too much. She’s also kind enough to bridge the courtesy gap and make polite conversation between the three of them, they two walking carefully together, Sanosuke stomping angrily ahead, stirring up dust.
”I hear Orochimaru-sensei will be visiting with us today.”
”I hear kissing in public gives you diseases.”
It’s too bad they’re in earshot of Jiraiya when Sanosuke says this, because it means he gets laughed at for it, which inevitably does nothing to lighten the dark shade his day seems to be taking. “Where in God’s name did you hear that?”
Sanosuke turns a bright red.
Minato squeezes Shisui’s pinky affectionately within his own, and lets his sensei’s approval wash over him like an ocean wave. (Jiraiya has noticed them together for some time now, of course, and has easily noticed them holding hands like this when Shisui feels like it - he’s far more perceptive than he lets on, after all. He is one of the Legendary Sannin, after all. Minato forgets that sometimes.)
But so is Orochimaru.
And that is, in itself, the fundamental problem.
x.
The first time Namikaze Minato, he who will become Konohagakure no Yondaime Hokage, comes in contact with the too-soon-to-be defect Sannin Orochimaru he is remarkably young, and he’s reminded of it in the way Orochimaru looks at him. There is a certain amount of something that tightens his tongue at the back of his throat and, while he and Shisui have released their hands, he is suddenly driven to dive for hers, grab it, pull her back and away. Because the first thing the Snake does, having walked onto the field is turn to stare at her, heatedly, moving his golden eyes up and down her body in a way that is so unabashed that Minato wants to hurt him for it. It’s raucously offensive to him, but it is very nearly spinechilling when those cold eyes fall on him next, maneuvering under his clothing with an ease that sets him stiff and still. He’s never been so blatantly stripped in someone’s imagination before, and the Snake does not smile at him, and he is glad for it, because when those eyes leave him, it takes twenty seconds for him to remember to shiver in revulsion.
The first time Namikaze Minato meet Orochimaru, he is so thoroughly disgusted that it almost surprises him, and to that end is he alarmed by the righteous distaste that fills him. It is not hatred, not really - Minato has no reason to hate him, has not ever really hated anyone. But the degree of severity of his dislike amazes him. He hates being around him; from that moment onward will Minato avoid being in the same room with him when he can. It’s too disturbing, the way it seems like Orochimaru is constantly examining his ribs beneath his shirt, or the guiding curves of his hips and pelvis. It’s as if he’s being autopsied while conscious, and it’s so intimately disturbing that he hates the sensation of even being near him for extended periods of time.
The first time Namikaze Minato meets Orochimaru is only telling of things to come.
It is not lost on him that his reaction is Jiraiya’s to an extent, and that Shisui’s is instead identical to a cousin only yet a few months old who Orochimaru will grow to loathe with a frightening intensity - a loathing that will ultimately drive the stake of Uchiha Sasuke into his cold, wax heart. The sickliness of his skin is evidence of this; his preference of Minato over Shisui’s eyes. All this foretells what will be.
But, at the moment, Minato knows only that when Orochimaru looks at Shisui, he looks at her body and not her eyes, which stare back at him so intently that he cannot meet them, even when surveying her face. Minato knows only that Shisui’s amber eyes flash a deep and crimson red that he has seen only thrice before, and that he sees so large that day that it scares him out of his skin. And he follows her set example, staring back into Orochimaru’s pale, cutting eyes, trying desperately not to let the snake think his disgust is fear, somehow.
How it happens doesn’t matter - that Jiraiya instructs his students to fight first against Orochimaru and then against him as a training exercise eventually doesn’t matter. All that matters is the fluidity with which Minato and Shisui meld together to do so, the way suddenly, for the first time ever, her speed almost triples and they run together, unthinking, speed matched, speed intense. There is nothing and everything that they are, in this instant; they become one another, Minato through his heart and Shisui through her eyes, which glow intensely before shattering into blood, dark fragments littered and swirling. Her eyes look like whirlpools, like mirrors, like foreseen death, and they make the same motions.
How it happens doesn’t matter.
All that matters is that when they are still, Minato is breathing hard, Shisui is standing upright, Sanosuke and Jiraiya are speechless, and Orochimaru can still not force himself to looking at her eyes.
His voice is a willow branch across some poor child’s shoulders.
“…how magnificent.”
Minato never gets another compliment from Orochimaru, not in the entirety of his life. And he is grateful for it, because the first one makes him throw up halfway home.
Shisui puts her hand on his back as he stands up again, wiping at his mouth.
“Are you alright?”
“…if anyone ever looks at you like that again, I’ll kill them.”
He’s deadly serious, his azure eyes burning and she can tell. He knows she can. She presses her soft hand deeper into the small of his back and he almost sighs against here before remembering how angry he is. It isn’t jealousy, even; it’s a newfound protectiveness. (Not even of Shisui, perhaps, but of his village. Orochimaru’s eyes remind of another set of eyes he has never seen before. He can’t place exactly why the pucker factor is so strong or why he finds himself as nauseated as he is.) She presses her palm up against a knot in the small of his back, which is painful in a calming sense, her fingertips a pleasant cool that massages its way into him.
But her eyes are storm clouds.
“…of course.”
CHAPTERS XI-XX
Author: the_lady_lamb
Genre: Naruto
Sub-genre: Angst/Romance
Summary: (Part I: Chapters I-X) Namikaze Minato's life flows precisely according to prophecy. This he knows. But what he can't know is how to protect her entirely...or even how to avoid hurting her himself.
Rated: R for some non-graphic sex.
Author's Notes: For you guys, yukari_rin and fujiwara_san. I love you dearly. I'll finish Part Two in time for Christmas. Pinky swear. ♥
The Decemberist
PART ONE ∙∙∙ PROPHECY
i.
The first time Namikaze Minato, he who will be Konohagakure no Yondaime Hokage, comes into contact with the demonic realm, it is in the streets of Amegakure. His teacher has been eager to reach here for some reason, and they (the infamous Team 7) have lingered here now for some time, which is strangely disconcerting. The mission itself was only a Level C - an escort mission far below them in their semi-prodigal, thirteen-year-old glory. But Jiraiya had accepted excitedly, had pressed them and their charge to travel with ungainly swiftness, and so here they are. It is the third day in a row he has left them to their own devices, left them to entertain themselves in the crowded marketplace down the street from their hotel, and it bothers Minato to quite a great extent, but he will not say anything about it. It is not his way, even if the exotic wares and vendors have long ceased to hold his interest.
When he blunders into Yohko - or, more accurately, when a strange women of ulterior race, a women he will later come to know as Yohko purposely crosses his path - it comes as more than a small surprise, one that makes him blink dazedly. Minato is not well-accustomed to blundering into people (blundering in general) because he is very careful as a general rule, and he is certainly not well-accustomed to blundering into people who were not there to blunder into half a second ago. (In the same way he is not well-accustomed to forging these unfamiliar streets alone. But Shisui is sitting several kilometers from him like some strange marble statue, sitting with a large bouquet of flowers - white lilies, hyacinths, all of them, all fresh - in between her stiff arms, fitting gracefully straight on a barstool unworthy of her presence. She has been sitting in this way for a very long time, her tea-blood hair cascading across the soft, feminine curves of her face, her eyes the pinnacle of masculinity in her, fallow and drifting. Shisui has stretched and bent androgyny into an art of her own, after all. She looks neither masculine nor feminine, really, an ambiguous deity of amber glass. The flowers had been a gift and they had sat down with them in their bulk, sat down and Minato had watched her sit in the same way she is sitting now for nearly an hour before she finally spoke to him, her voice bitter.
“He’s here to look for someone.”
It seemed an offended statement, really, one born of lips that did not often speak, and never sang. And now that he has been thinking a while, Minato knows that she must’ve been thinking of her family in that moment, must be thinking about them still. He cannot quite garner how Jiraiya’s half-responsible abandonment of them might’ve struck such a chord with her, but he knows that it is not his place to ask, or even to say. He knows her to be deeply entrenched.
In the same way he knew the words meant-
“Leave me.”
Her lips are now still held in the same thin lines they were when she said it and her eyes are still the same cold fire, and so Minato has adhered to her wishes. With a politeness unbecoming of someone so young as himself, he has excused himself from her presence, has attempted to remove himself from her troubles, and he hopes that such an excuse will be enough. He does not know what she has that she must forgive him, but he hopes that it is not too much. He hopes that it is not too painful. And in this way did he so excuse himself.)
As he excuses himself now, bowing his head as his cheeks flush. He looks up afterwards, though, looks up expecting to see Shisui’s face without even knowing that that is what he is expecting.
And this is his mistake.
Yohko’s entire countenance is weirdly golden, which distracts from the overall strangeness of her - her hair is pale sunlight streaked with bold copper and hangs loosely around her short, round face; the copper is coupled with gentle shrapnel-type flecks that dapple her golden, cat-like eyes, and there are golden bracelets and bangles that move underneath her white traveling cloak. In being as she is, her features unite themselves wholly, despite their being strangely inhuman in their almost-lively unhealthy pallor. She looks like a phenomenon in and of herself, a freak of nature without being out of place, which is a subconscious realization on his own part.
But upon seeing the way his cheeks flush at the idea of impoliteness, her mouth curves, a gleeful smile blooming, it’s wings bursting forth, and her face alights with it. She reaches down without consent and takes his yet-small hand between her own. Her voice is that of a singer, that of a nightingale, and it rushes over itself in romping, improper discourse. The delicate bones of her fingers distract him, but he is puzzled - perhaps most of all by the fact that all of her words come out as giddy laughter.
But the words puzzle him as well.
“I’ve found you!”
Without doubt.
ii.
“Where did you go?”
Minato brushes his hair out of his face and feels guilty, even though he should be asking Jiraiya that question not the other way around. Someday he will have a son who will boldly state as such and the man will find a new reason to make him sleep on the floor in their hotel room. But for the time being, Minato is small and unconscious of such things. Unconscious of most things. There is a degree to which his politeness is just humiliating - for a shinobi to be cordial in the way Minato is cordial is for a shinobi to have a death wish. There is more than one reason in this day and age that chivalry is dead.
Shisui still has her bouquet of flowers held to her body. She does not touch them with her hands, nor does she take her piercing eyes from Minato’s face. The Namikaze reddens softly under their scrutiny.
“Sanosuke isn’t here either.”
His future hermit of a teacher sighs at him. “Maa. Excuses, excuses…”
It’s true, of course, so no one fights it. They stand around in a silence instead - terse for Minato, unobliging for Shisui, and simple for Jiraiya - and wait for their pudgier teammate to show his face. There is a feeling like hermit crabs in Minato’s stomach, as if he had abandoned them previously, and he finds it difficult to look up into Shisui’s face, because Yohko’s is as fresh in his mind as it is, and his own face is still warm from the encounter. Minato will be this way with women and with others until the day he dies - it is his politeness that will end him emotionally, it is his power of will that will end him physically. He knows nothing of this yet. But it is not impossible to guess at.
When he finally does meet Shisui’s eyes it is with an almost solemn impishness, and she notices. (It’s inevitable. Shisui is born of a line that notices everything, as is a certain dark-eyed prodigy who will be conceived not too far from now.) What she notices about him exactly, of course, she keeps silent and to herself and the flowers, but there are certain things about Shisui that are not feminine enough and so cause her “women’s intuition” to malfunction at times, and she makes up for this by being an Uchiha, because there is no other way for her to compensate. Her eyes are amber mirrors, piercing and strong in their wholeness.
“You seem…”
She pauses. Studies him.
“…disenchanted.”
What he seems is “distressed”, really, offkilter and odd. His eyes are swollen with a knowledge he does not seem to want at the surface of his mind. She watches him shift self-consciously, as if he is try to press it deeper into the folds of his mind. It almost seems as if it makes him uncomfortable, the way she notices without qualm or hesitation.
She knows it doesn’t though.
He puts his hands in his pockets.
“…somebody told me something strange.”
Jiraiya, who has been surveying the streets with his broad hands held authoritatively on his hips, his elbows jutting out like wings, glances over his shoulder and his long white hair to raise an eyebrow at the blond. “Like what? You meet a fortune teller or something? Didn’t take your money, did they? If they did, don’t you dare ask me to go get it back for you. Way too much trouble.”
“It was woman.”
“Was she good looking?”
Minato waits a second before deciding not to answer. He’s known Jiraiya long enough to know that any answer at all would remove all real meaning from the conversation at all, send it into a predictable spiral that would eventually end in either a sex talk, or Jiraiya leaving to pursue her, most likely an awkward, haphazard combination of both. So he decides to make believe that Jiraiya asked him a different question entirely - what she told him, maybe - and answers in a way that will direct the conversation in the way it should go.
“…she said I was going to die.”
Jiraiya goes very, very quiet, before speaking.
“…did you pay her?”
“No.”
“Then forget about it.” He pulls at his lion’s mane of white hair and hoists himself forward. “Come on. We’ll wait Sanosuke-kun back at the hotel. Come on.” He moves into the crowd, his expression surprisingly dark. Minato’s fingers pull at the inside of his pants uncomfortably.
Shisui is quiet behind him for a while before she speaks.
“…how foreboding.”
iii.
The rain is a gentle sway and his body is a gentle swell, like the kind that are slowly growing on Shisui’s chest. He takes his shoes off in the doorway as he drips on the tile, leaning one way and then the other. There is a soft pendulum motion, a strange sense of rhythm that following gifts everything with, and he breathes in the scent of it. The world is wet and gray, and his mother comes to welcome him home. She looks unhappy, and it could be because she nearly always is unhappy-looking, but the way he’s raining on their floor is more than anything probably the cause of it. She is a thin woman, not very motherly in figure or in attitude, and Minato thinks that he is alright with that for the most part. He got her hair, anyway, and it looks alright.
“Where is your umbrella?”
Minato shrugs, loosely, apologizes for being wet, and his mother turns and goes to fetch something from the real inside of the house, telling him to wait for her. He sighs and pulls at the soaked-wet strands of his hair. (They’re halfway plastered to his head, slicked down to the side of his face, his dark eyelashes clumped together in the wet. His umbrella is, of course, in the hands of none other than Shisui, and he knows this because he put it there and would not do otherwise if given the chance to do so. After all, they had been training together when the rain had begun to fall and it’d been difficult to convince Jiraiya that calling up one of his frogs to shield them from it so that they could continue would be less than ideal. He’d seemed sort of bemused at the notion that crushing people was less than ideal.) Minato shakes himself, trying to both be rid of the water and rid of the idea that his teacher is an idiot. He’s not an idiot, really, and that’s an incredibly rude thing to even think. He’s eccentric. That’s the word. (That’s all.)
The moment he looks up is, consequently, the moment his mother tosses a towel in his face. The thick terry cloth is warm from the dryer and just the heat of it is enough to make him sigh and flush with a deep, full-hearted contentment. He’s quick to reach up and hold it against his forehead, rubbing his cheek against it cat-like.
“For the sake of all sakes,” his mother says, folding her arms across her flat chest. “You’re almost fourteen years old, aren’t you?”
“I suppose so.”
“Then act it. Child, I’d swear you’re always this meek. For the sake of all sakes. Sometimes, I don’t know if you’re even a boy at all.”
He drags the towel through his hair and as the strands begin to dry they spring up of their own accord. In seconds, he’s mussed but only halfway damp-looking, water springing off of him like thousands of tiny insects. The idea isn’t as uncomfortable as it could be. “I’m sorry, Mother.”
“Like that Minato. Like that. What sort of boy are you? The ‘keeping chivalry alive’ kind, that’s what you are - a little knight. Like in a story book. Shinobi aren’t knights, you know. You ought to learn rudeness. Atleast a little bit. You’ll never survive the Chuunin exams if you aren’t even a little bit rude.”
Minato imagines himself dressed in a clunky suit of armor and chuckles to himself. “How inconvenient.”
His mother watches him.
“I wonder who your princess in a tower is, then?”
Minato begins folding the towel in half and hurriedly changes the subject to dinner.
iv.
The first time Namikaze Minato, he who will be Konohagakure no Yondaime Hokage, realizes that there’s someone watching him it is at perhaps the most inconvenient time imaginable: halfway through Team 7’s second day in the Forest of Death, and it catches him so offguard that he falls off the branch he’d previously staked out as his own.
The fox is small, its body about the length of his forearm, a creamy white zag of movement out of the corner of his eye - it’s a worse scare because of the fact that it’s inches from the right side of his face and it absolutely wasn’t there before, all tiny black and gold and white features and bad, bad timing. He stumbles, spooked, and falls backwards, losing control and his hold. His yell is auspicious (his foes jump to attention) in wake of it and for six seconds his speed is a constant. A formula. (Constant velocity - terminal. Nine point eight meters per second. It’s the slowest he’s moved in hours.)
Speed is Minato’s only perceivable skill by shinobi standard, which is lucky because it results in the backflip that saves his life. A chakra driven javelin misses his neck by mere centimeters, passing so close that is cuts a clean hole through the top of the shoulder of his shirt as he dives just beneath and somersaults into the concealing foliage of the forest floor. He’s shooting up from the shrubbery in milliseconds, bounding up the trunk of the tree and knowing that their attack on Sanosuke will subside and reevaluate itself to appropriate his fall. He moves around such actions with knowledge that they will be made, even; to Konohagakure’s Yellow Flash, the Mist-nin are easily avoidable. Maneuverable. Even the large-looking blue juggernaut with the fearsome teeth.
As soon as they turn to react to his fall (the two smaller ones, that is - the juggernaut fends off Shisui only long enough to follow the blond blur that hurtles out of nowhere) he’s blown up from behind them. As soon as they really know he’s down, he has delivered a well-aimed (he hopes) punch to both of them. His brain only registers feeling someone’s teeth against his knuckles as he skids to land and they’re airborne. The tumble through space towards the ground far below and he rockets after them. (Because this is the correct order, now.)
Sanosuke sees his opportunity and skids onto the ground beside him. They mold together secondarily, forming the seals more quickly than is really safe or natural.
Kinbaku bankon no jutsu!
Tangles of tree roots are equally quick, though, ripping forth from the dirt with wooden gasps as they snake forward to grab and constrict the limbs of their two opponents. The Mist-nin shout and twist but the bindings only tighten in response to their efforts. Sanosuke and Minato both survey the effectiveness of their immobilization tactics before throwing themselves back and up again, driving up the side of Shisui’s tree of choice with a degree of chakra control and camaraderie reminiscent of ninja twice their age.
On reaching her branch, though, its only too evident that Minato’s unexpected blunder has resulted in Team 7’s quick seizure of the upper hand. As they land behind her, the juggernaut Mist-nin is just tearing out of her fingers on his shirt, just managing to wrestle out of her hold on the front of his travelling cloak. He seems to have decided that three-on-one gives the Leaf-nin too large of an advantage, that they aren’t really worth his trouble. Minato and Sanosuke’s introduction of kunai into the equation only seem to reinforce and solidify his decision.
“Yeah,” he mutters - his face is cemented in an eternal grin by his wide set eyes and rows of sharp teeth, “way too much. Shit.”
He leaps off in a different direction and starts running as fast as it seems he can, leaving his friends far behind. Minato almost starts running after him, but Shisui puts out her arm and keeps him from it.
“Let him go. We have what we need.”
“But-”
“I’m alright,” she says pointedly, looking over at him with a beautiful face that composed and serious. “So are you. What more are you after?”
“I-”
“Minato-kun.” Shisui’s voice is amber, perhaps slicked in molasses (but that is far too sweet - the right color but far too sweet. But so is bean paste, and the wrong color besides. He wonders if there is anything to really represent her aside from her tea. Aside from herself). “Why did you fall?”
He has no answer for her.
“What did you see?”
He pauses, realizes that Sanosuke is no longer standing in their midst, that Shisui’s truth is resolute, and that she is watching him with a strange intensity. He doesn’t know how to answer her question and so he stays still for a small moment feeling awkward and out of place.
“…did you paint your nails?”
She blinks at him. “What?”
“Never mind. It’s fine. Um. It was nothing. Let’s go- Uh, Sanosuke-kun’s probably got the scroll by now, you know? We should go help him make sure they’re…incapacitated. Or, uh. You know. Whatever.”
He turns to go and after a few moments, she follows him quietly, smiling to herself. If he notices, he does his very best to avoid blushing when he thinks she can see it clearly. He doesn’t really succeed, but it’s the most chivalrous gesture to make, given the situation.
They’re almost half a mile away when she finds her place to run beside him, hands folded primly behind her back.
“It’s plum.”
“It…it looks nice.”
She smiles.
“…thankyou.”
v.
When they arrive at the central tower, they are about two and a half days early, the second team of twelve to arrive, and so are taken to hotel-like rooms that are installed above the hall they will presumably be fighting in. The hall itself is a room with a level ceiling, and so everything built above it is of an entirely different nature; there is a small, cafeteria-style dining hall and then a long winding staircase that leads past almost twenty windowless rooms on four different stories to a small balcony that overlooks the entire forest and can see almost to the farthest edge of the village itself.
Jiraiya leads them up the staircase, room keys in hand, explaining things as they go. “If Konoha were ever attacked at it’s Western Gate, this would be the center of our resistance forces. It’s one of the village’s most important buildings.”
Minato is tired, his limbs aching from exertion, but he maintains his slow and waning curiosity, continues to pose questions so that Jiraiya will not change the subject. His teacher has a very bad habit of doing that and coming up with obscurely deep and painful topics, when put in such a position. The last time they’d simply let him sit awkwardly without showing interest, he’d gone off on a long tangent about the spiritual taxation of illness. It hadn’t been a particularly fun conversation. “The Shodai was in charge of its construction, was he not…?”
“That’s right! But it was the Nidaime whose men built it.” Jiraiya looks over his shoulder at Minato, his excitement soaking into the statement. The blond smiles at him, chuckling tiredly. His teacher has a definite funniness to him. It’s slightly endearing.
“Alright. Here we are.” Jiraiya hands them each a key as they reach a landing halfway up the staircase. “You each get a separate room. I’m staying in one downstairs - just ask one of the other Jounin if you can’t find me.”
Their faces bend, puzzled.
(But the person to ask the question is-)
Shisui speaks.
“…sensei. Why are we all being assigned separate rooms? Certainly there cannot be enough rooms for them to be able to afford us such luxuries.”
Jiraiya’s face relaxes into an overshadowed sardonicism and his smile at them is dark. It makes Minato’s insides twist around themselves a little bit. (And his words do that twice as well.)
“Well, you might be moved into each other’s rooms as conditions change, it’s true. But we - the Jounins, that is, both of our village and others - doubt that that’ll have to happen. The way things are going, it looks like we’ll have enough rooms this year. Just like last year, and every year before.”
Minato stares up at him.
“…sensei. Of the thirty-six Chuunin candidates…how many are expected to…make it here alive?”
And Jiraiya’s smile turns a toxic kind of bitter.
“We’ll have more than enough rooms to accommodate, Minato. Let’s just leave it at that.”
Jiraiya bids them farewell and Namikaze Minato, he who will be Konohagakure no Yondaime Hokage, simply stands there, key in hand and insides turning a brutal sort of cold. His throat and stomach caress and constrict together, and it feels like his whole self is going to start shaking so hard that he falls to pieces. He stares into space, and he can think only-
Exactly our age.
Sanosuke swats his arm lightly. “They’re the enemy, Minato. Christ, let it go. Better them than us, you know? And now there’ll be less of ‘em to fight by the time we’re Jounin. Just puts Konoha that much further ahead. Lighten up.”
“They’re exactly our age, Sano.” Somewhere in some other village, there’s a mother whose child left a week ago to come here and who isn’t ever coming back. Somewhere in some other village, some woman’s child just died pursuing-- “They’re-…”
The same as we are.
His insides feel so cold. So numb.
“Let it go.”
And somehow, Minato can’t forgive him for saying it, because he knows that if it were them, if it were Shisui’s mother, their village mourning their loss, those Mist-nin, those Whirlpool, Grass, Watefall, Rock-nin would say the same thing, and it’s something he just can’t forgive. Callousness in the face of another person’s pain. He can’t stand it.
And so he whirls around and punches Sanosuke so hard in the face it makes his hand hurt. His friend smacks headfirst into the wall and makes noise like an elephant that just had one of its limbs ripped off. Minato doesn’t really care what he has to say, and he storms over to his assigned room and jams the key into its respective hole and doesn’t let himself worry about it too much until he feels Shisui’s artful fingers on his arm.
He looks up at her, eyes burning and she looks back at him.
And then she smiles, which baffles him.
“I think you might be mastering this ‘rudeness’ concept.”
“I think you’ve been spending too much time talking to my mother.”
“Do you have a princess you’re tending to, then?”
“…I’m going to go to sleep.”
She lets go of him, then, and he turns away from her, regret sinking into him like a bad dye. He doesn’t know what he’s regretting or why (definitely not punching Sanosuke - being alive? Getting here without a scratch on him? Not being someone else, so that one mother might be spared the weeping, one village might be spared the heartache? He doesn’t know,) but he knows he regrets it, and deeply. He turns the knob and his door swings open.
“…Minato-kun, are you going to be alright?”
He doesn’t answer.
(And he doesn’t really need to.)
She shuts the door for him, knowing he doesn’t want to close it in her face.
He lets her, and his heart feels heavy in his chest.
vi.
When he emerges from his room again it’s late evening and there are long slats of dying sunlight along the floor, like reams of fabric. He’s strangely reminded of Western marriage ceremony he saw last autumn. (But that was in the morning. And this is not.) Shisui is standing right where she was seven hours ago, and if it were not for the fact that now she is wearing different clothes - a yukata-like top, a light violet, over dark skin-tight shorts - with her hands inconspicuously in the small of her back. He nods to her, watches the floor.
“Sanosuke-kun’s face is like patchwork, you know.”
“I’ll apologize.”
“Now?”
He is quiet. His lips are very tight, thin across his teeth. She comes closer and startles him - too close, almost, but as he jumps upright, surprised, looking quickly to her calm face, eyes widening, and he can’t tell her to move away.
“You don’t have to apologize, you know.”
He watches her. His breath is coming oddly fast, his heart beat is oddly hard, oddly-odd. There’s nothing to be done for it. He’s quickly memorizing the familiar curves of her face, the lines of her body, her legs, her hands. The purple looks white because of the depth of the red-brown in her hair and he feels the muscles of his wrist bunch and flex. A soft slab of orange sun falls across the amber crystal of her face. He feels it catch on his eyelashes, he feels it fall through him like a small child. (He wants to snatch it back away from the edge. He wants to keep the child from falling and yet, what field of rye are they really standing along? Does he really know?)
Her voice is silken. Velvetty. Smooth and circular and completely unwound. She looks perfect. Sounds perfect. “You don’t have to apologize,” she says (and he realizes how soft and low her voice has become), “if you don’t want to.”
(Yohko had giggled around it.
“Courtesy that is your charm. So will it be your downfall.”)
They look at one another for a long time and when Shisui’s warm breath falls across and intertwines with his own, it takes everything he has to turn away from it. They stand there that way for a long time, before she speaks again.
“…do you want to?”
And he knows she isn’t asking about apologies.
His face flushes. She takes his hand gently.
“Then what are you waiting for…?”
And so he doesn’t speak.
He presses their lips together instead, and Shisui feels warm and charming and his whole being is in pain. His whole body flushes and shakes a little, like he thought it would, and he kisses her instead of speaking.
And she understands completely.
Which is what really matters.
vii.
The first time Namikaze Minato, he who will become Konohagakure no Yondaime Hokage, knows that he’s fallen in love with Shisui in a way that is completely irrevocable is when he goes away with Jiraiya in the month following the Chuunin exam. They take a long trek to what is easily the other side of the ninja world and every day he moves he can feel the distance, as if it is a piece of red thread stretched taut between them. There is a constant, soft ache in his chest when he looks back over the horizon towards his home, where he knows she is training with her uncle in their family’s training compound. Usually, because she’s a girl, Shisui would train under her aunt, a kind and pretty woman Minato has met only a few times before (Mikoto, he thinks her name is), but the woman is nearly eight months swollen with her first child, and so training under her is entirely out of the question. It’s a pity, which is something Shisui said herself, and Minato doesn’t doubt her. Even if he cannot remember the woman’s name at first pass, he can definitely remember the tales he’s heard of her - a Jounin of unsurpassed skill with a standard bō staff, he’s heard, with eyes that can kill a man and daggers between the lips that form her charming smile. The Heads of the Uchiha Clan are, needless to say, the Heads of the Uchiha Clan for very good reason.
Her uncle, though, she’d professed, will do a fair enough job. Minato does remember his name: Fugaku. A tough, thick man with a lean, well-muscled exterior, a hard gaze and a cruelly perfect body. To Minato, the man’s whole countenance seems calloused, and it makes him wonder if in his time away, Shisui’s deadly barbs will be fashioned into even more dangerous points.
Jiraiya looks at his distant eyes over the fire and speaks to him through a mouthful of fish. The dark-blue summer night is alive with the sounds of cicadas in the surrounding trees, the musical hum of the river, the dance of fireflies overhead. “What are you thinking about?”
”What do think of Uchiha Fugaku?”
”Good man,” Jiraiya says with bowed nod, biting through another piece of salty fish skin into the flesh of it. “Respectful. Almost as polite as you, just a little more…rough around the edges. Fantastic ninja. You won’t meet a better one in all your life, Minato, save maybe the Hokage. And you definitely won’t meet anyone with a more bombastic wife. And that includes the Hokage.”
Minato raises an eyebrow at him. Jiraiya nods emphatically, cheeks full of food. “I’m dead serious, kid. Body to kill, smile that could knock your freaking heart out o’ your chest, and powerful as all get out. The mind that woman’s got astounds. I almost convinced her to marry me once. Best three minutes of my life right there.”
Minato snorts and bites into his own fish. “What’s power have to do with it?”
”Power’s got everything to do with it.” Jiraiya’s voice is full of a firm seriousness. “I mean it, kid. You want a woman with a lot of power on her hands. Not because you want to take it from her - don’t you ever get into a relationship with a woman looking to take her power away from her, and I mean ever - but because you want to be able to respect her for everything she is. I mean every little thing. And you can only do that if she can take care of herself. The most wonderful thing in the world is when you know full well a woman could pass you up and so does she. And she stays with you anyway.
”The only girl you ever really know loves you is a girl with power. Don’t you ever forget that. That’s one of life’s most important lessons if not the most important one, and too many guys don’t know it.”
Minato waits, chewing his food, watching the fish on its stick. Its once white belly has been blackened by the flames of their fire, its eyes dulled and crystallized by death. To some extent it looks happy, which is strange. “…well, that puts you at quite an advantage, doesn’t it, sensei?”
Jiraiya’s grin is broad, and Minato understands that he has comprehended the lesson exactly.
”Damn straight.”
viii.
They battle.
It’s not fighting. It can’t be, not really, because fighting is not designed as an educational experience. But it is fighting, in its own way. It can’t be called a lesson, or even that instructional, and so it is a battle. Minato goes at him and he goes at Minato and they hold nothing back, not even things that could seriously hurt one another with. There are no winners and there are no losers, because as soon as Jiraiya pins him, as soon as Minato has his sensei on the ground beneath him, they whip back up into their initial positions and go at it again, as if nothing has occurred at all. The pain in Minato’s chest neither dies nor strengthens and so, as the days pass and Jiraiya gives him black-purple bruise after black-purple bruise, he simply tries not to linger on it, not to wonder.
(And he does wonder, when he is not properly distracted. When they are lying together beneath the stars and Jiraiya is snoring loudly, Minato is staring deep into the stars, trying to pick them apart from one another, his head balanced on his arms, which are slowly threading and tightening with new cords of muscle he hasn’t known before.) Fighting-type taijutsu is not his strong point; it distracts his mind, his focus does, and so he does not linger. (Does not wonder. But at night he does. When the fire is dying, his head is still buzzing, busy and frantic with thoughts of her, with wondering, with a sick feeling every time his lips tingle and his chest aches, because there is every part of him that wants to pray she does not feel this pain, that she is not sick with longing the way he is. Minato is a romantic after all, and ridiculously chivalrous, besides. But he doesn’t obey every part of him. He doesn’t. Because if he did, he would still be in Konoha.)
There’s a lot that can happen in a month. What happens, inevitably, for Minato is that his body becomes something other than itself. Within thirty days, he shoots up, grows almost ten centimeters. His clothes get too small for him, and too tight with the explosive growth of the muscles in his arms, the slow waning of the baby fat lingering deceptively like a lather over his quickly forming abdominals. His core is a center of great physical power for him, naturally, which comes from the speed at which he’s able to travel. That is their focus, too, as a team - his inability to truly boast skill in any other realm of shinobi talent. They work from the first blossom of dawn over the horizon to the very dusk, they work far past the point where Minato is tired, work far into the point where he is exhausted each and every day. (And still he lies awake wondering. Wondering quietly, to himself and to the stars, “Can she feel this?”, every part of his body telling him that it is cruel-hearted to hope that she can.)
Jiraiya doesn’t make mention to it.
Instead, he makes mention to each and every one of Minato’s other discrepancies, each and every one of his individual weaknesses. He picks at him, verbally and physically abuses him every minute of the day that they aren’t eating or sleeping. Nothing is safe, really. Advice turns into cruel mockery turns into cruel battle. Shopping is an opportunity to criticize his personality. Talking is an opportunity to criticize his adolescence. Girls are an opportunity to criticize his chivalry. Bathing is an opportunity to criticize his body.
Minato is neither easily angered, nor is he truly ever as bad as Jiraiya mockingly accuses. They both know this. But Minato is human and always has been - there is only so much he can take before he either starts hitting Jiraiya or starts to really believe what he’s saying.
And it’s only when he does the latter that Jiraiya hits him.
Which is alright.
They battle, after all, which means that nothing is really ever finished between them. And it is the twenty-eighth day, as Jiraiya ruffles his hair for the millionth time that Minato understands the real mechanics of tough love. It helps him truly comprehend just how much Jiraiya resists complimenting him for the sake of his own strength, the way he never tells him "good job" except when he most deserves it, which makes it feel that much better. He really comprehends it, in a crystalline clarity, he understands that the amount of genjutsu he has learned in a month, the amount of taijutsu, the degree to which he’s improved is monumental. It’s not the Chuunin exams Jiraiya’s preparing him for. It’s life. It’s people.
It’s not nice, per se, but it’s paternal and it indicates how hard Jiraiya’s trying with him, how hard he’s working to make him stronger, and so Minato is thankful for it all the same. When he says so, Jiraiya mocks him about it for almost an hour. But his spirit doesn’t dampen at all because he meant it, regardless, and really Jiraiya’s just proving his point, and so his teacher finally lets it go, and after a few more hours of meaningless taunts and then a few hours more of silence between them, Jiraiya reaches over and ruffles his hair offhandedly again.
They go back home the next day and Jiraiya engages him in a long conversation about old fairytales, knowing Minato has an almost childish love for them. It’s the best “you’re welcome” he gets in his entire life, and he never really forgets it for so much as a moment, what Jiraiya worked so hard to give him.
He never really forgets Shisui either. Not for a second.
But that’s an entirely different story.
ix.
Namikaze Minato, he who will become Konohagakure no Yondaime Hokage, has very soft hands for a ninja, a fact that is entirely reliant on his refusal to use weaponry to any real end. His power is, of course, his greatest weapon, now only barely surpassing his speed, which has come as a great surprise to his teacher and not too much to him. But power is hand seals in the ninja world, not weaponry, and so calluses (the kind that Sanosuke has, that Jiraiya has) are signs of either trial versus talent, or dark memories, not of power. Skill, perhaps. But not power. That is why God has given Minato such quaint, unassuming hands, without sutures or sharpness. They are soft, creamy pieces of him, easily molded with softly protruding bones at the knuckles that look like rounded hills. They’re calming, his hands.
Shisui’s are too, of course, in the way women’s hands will be, but they are also completely opposite in so many ways. In the ways Minato’s hands are round, homely, Shisui’s are brisk, sharp and fickle in their own faithlessness. It is as if Shisui’s birth as something of a deity has made her hands oppowite of what they should be, irony in and of themselves. They are cool, gentle, but the bones in them make each line geometrically perfect. In the ways that Minato’s hands bode a singularity in their smoothness, Shisui’s hands are divine and perfect. Untouchable. In the way Minato does not have calluses, it is evident that for Shisui to even think of developing them is an impossibility in the same way it is an impossibility that Shisui will stop drinking tea, very less tasting of it when she kisses him. There’s nothing to cough at, though; it’s a pleasant sensation, the somber warmth of her mouth.
That is the way Sanosuke finds them, holding hands and kissing as new daylight folds over the front porch of his house. The fat boy scowls, his dark cheeks bending downwards as Minato pulls back from her with a tender reluctance and she react in the same way of a person swatting at flies with only a half-intent to keep them at bay. Sanosuke yanks up the zipper of his Chuunin vest with a huff of breath, and Minato looses his fingers a little bit from Shisui’s, his chest aching with the lost contact.
”Get a room.”
Shisui carefully slips her pinky over his as they walk together and warmth cascades up his forearm and across the expanse of his stomach. She keeps her disinterested look on her face, but Minato’s smiling enough for the both of them, his golden hair catching the sunlight with a vengeance, so in the end, it doesn’t matter too much. She’s also kind enough to bridge the courtesy gap and make polite conversation between the three of them, they two walking carefully together, Sanosuke stomping angrily ahead, stirring up dust.
”I hear Orochimaru-sensei will be visiting with us today.”
”I hear kissing in public gives you diseases.”
It’s too bad they’re in earshot of Jiraiya when Sanosuke says this, because it means he gets laughed at for it, which inevitably does nothing to lighten the dark shade his day seems to be taking. “Where in God’s name did you hear that?”
Sanosuke turns a bright red.
Minato squeezes Shisui’s pinky affectionately within his own, and lets his sensei’s approval wash over him like an ocean wave. (Jiraiya has noticed them together for some time now, of course, and has easily noticed them holding hands like this when Shisui feels like it - he’s far more perceptive than he lets on, after all. He is one of the Legendary Sannin, after all. Minato forgets that sometimes.)
But so is Orochimaru.
And that is, in itself, the fundamental problem.
x.
The first time Namikaze Minato, he who will become Konohagakure no Yondaime Hokage, comes in contact with the too-soon-to-be defect Sannin Orochimaru he is remarkably young, and he’s reminded of it in the way Orochimaru looks at him. There is a certain amount of something that tightens his tongue at the back of his throat and, while he and Shisui have released their hands, he is suddenly driven to dive for hers, grab it, pull her back and away. Because the first thing the Snake does, having walked onto the field is turn to stare at her, heatedly, moving his golden eyes up and down her body in a way that is so unabashed that Minato wants to hurt him for it. It’s raucously offensive to him, but it is very nearly spinechilling when those cold eyes fall on him next, maneuvering under his clothing with an ease that sets him stiff and still. He’s never been so blatantly stripped in someone’s imagination before, and the Snake does not smile at him, and he is glad for it, because when those eyes leave him, it takes twenty seconds for him to remember to shiver in revulsion.
The first time Namikaze Minato meet Orochimaru, he is so thoroughly disgusted that it almost surprises him, and to that end is he alarmed by the righteous distaste that fills him. It is not hatred, not really - Minato has no reason to hate him, has not ever really hated anyone. But the degree of severity of his dislike amazes him. He hates being around him; from that moment onward will Minato avoid being in the same room with him when he can. It’s too disturbing, the way it seems like Orochimaru is constantly examining his ribs beneath his shirt, or the guiding curves of his hips and pelvis. It’s as if he’s being autopsied while conscious, and it’s so intimately disturbing that he hates the sensation of even being near him for extended periods of time.
The first time Namikaze Minato meets Orochimaru is only telling of things to come.
It is not lost on him that his reaction is Jiraiya’s to an extent, and that Shisui’s is instead identical to a cousin only yet a few months old who Orochimaru will grow to loathe with a frightening intensity - a loathing that will ultimately drive the stake of Uchiha Sasuke into his cold, wax heart. The sickliness of his skin is evidence of this; his preference of Minato over Shisui’s eyes. All this foretells what will be.
But, at the moment, Minato knows only that when Orochimaru looks at Shisui, he looks at her body and not her eyes, which stare back at him so intently that he cannot meet them, even when surveying her face. Minato knows only that Shisui’s amber eyes flash a deep and crimson red that he has seen only thrice before, and that he sees so large that day that it scares him out of his skin. And he follows her set example, staring back into Orochimaru’s pale, cutting eyes, trying desperately not to let the snake think his disgust is fear, somehow.
How it happens doesn’t matter - that Jiraiya instructs his students to fight first against Orochimaru and then against him as a training exercise eventually doesn’t matter. All that matters is the fluidity with which Minato and Shisui meld together to do so, the way suddenly, for the first time ever, her speed almost triples and they run together, unthinking, speed matched, speed intense. There is nothing and everything that they are, in this instant; they become one another, Minato through his heart and Shisui through her eyes, which glow intensely before shattering into blood, dark fragments littered and swirling. Her eyes look like whirlpools, like mirrors, like foreseen death, and they make the same motions.
How it happens doesn’t matter.
All that matters is that when they are still, Minato is breathing hard, Shisui is standing upright, Sanosuke and Jiraiya are speechless, and Orochimaru can still not force himself to looking at her eyes.
His voice is a willow branch across some poor child’s shoulders.
“…how magnificent.”
Minato never gets another compliment from Orochimaru, not in the entirety of his life. And he is grateful for it, because the first one makes him throw up halfway home.
Shisui puts her hand on his back as he stands up again, wiping at his mouth.
“Are you alright?”
“…if anyone ever looks at you like that again, I’ll kill them.”
He’s deadly serious, his azure eyes burning and she can tell. He knows she can. She presses her soft hand deeper into the small of his back and he almost sighs against here before remembering how angry he is. It isn’t jealousy, even; it’s a newfound protectiveness. (Not even of Shisui, perhaps, but of his village. Orochimaru’s eyes remind of another set of eyes he has never seen before. He can’t place exactly why the pucker factor is so strong or why he finds himself as nauseated as he is.) She presses her palm up against a knot in the small of his back, which is painful in a calming sense, her fingertips a pleasant cool that massages its way into him.
But her eyes are storm clouds.
“…of course.”
CHAPTERS XI-XX