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 XI-XX) 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. ♥
CHAPTERS I-X
The Decemberist
PART ONE ∙∙∙ PROPHECY
xi.
Minato leaves on a day when there is fog in the air, a week and a half before he and Shisui are due to start training for the Jounin exams. His mother seems deeply unhappy about it, but he’s seventeen, will be eighteen in another four days, the twenty-fifth of January, and she can’t really stop him. She simply keeps her sharp arms folded and her blue eyes on his as he hoists his pack a little higher on his shoulder.
“It’s only an apartment a few blocks away, Mother. It’s not the ends of the earth.”
“I know,” she huffs, the gentleness of his voice doing nothing to soothe her. She looks deeply troubled, the folds forming at the sides of her mouth aging her. He smiles softly, reaching forward to stroke the side of her face in a moment of sincere adoration. The woman who raised him is slowly growing older, slowly aging in this young house that he’s grown up in, and it hurts him to part from her too, but he knows himself, knows the fearsome way he now lusts for independence, itching for a chance to spread his wings. He knows the way she watches him fondly when she thinks he isn’t paying attention.
His mother. (Namikaze Kuzunoha. It's a good name. She's a good mother.)
“I love you, you know.”
She huffs and pushes him a little.
“Go. You’d better come over for dinner. I have to teach you how to cook, still.”
Minato laughs and hugs her shoulders, which are the boniest parts of her.
They don’t cry. Don’t think about it.
“Be safe.”
“Not the ends of the earth,” he says, voice almost sing-song, a reminder. She sighs, seeming deeply saddened and relieved and somber, all at the same time. Her eyes are loose, like someone’s brasier come unknotted, unlaced.
“It really might as well be.”
xii.
Jiraiya leaves on a day when it’s raining, a week and a half after Shisui and Minato pass the Jounin exam. Minato is the only one to see him off, because Minato is the only one to see him go, the only one who wakes at three in the morning to run out into the maelstrom for no perceivable reason save that he desperately thinks he must, that there is something he desperately needs to do. The raindrops are surprisingly large and knock at him abrasively. His insides careen with the lighting and he surges forward in a blur, dodging the sky’s own fat tears until he and Jiraiya nearly collide at the open gate. His teacher has a rice picker’s hat on, his gentle eyes unshielded for once.
And Minato can yell only one thing over the storm.
“When are you coming back?”
And Jiraiya simply smiles, reaching out a gruff, gloved hand to ruffle his soaked hair, pushing it up and away from where it’s plastered to his forehead. (His hitai-ate is on the nightstand. At home. Without him.) The familiar warmth of his fingers makes Minato tense grimly inside, and he is reminded of a monk, somehow.
But Jiraiya is not a monk.
Jiraiya is a pervert. And a teacher.
His teacher.
“You’re a fantastic ninja, you brat. You both are.”
“When are you coming back?”
“Take good care of her, Minato. She loves you, y’know.”
Minato doesn’t report to the Hokage office when the sunlight hits his roof, and he doesn’t report when it leaves. He comes home, takes a shower and sits down on his bed. And then he stays there, just staring at his alarm clock as the minutes, hours, day ticks by motionlessly. Birds change to people change to the mindless movement that always consumes and overrides the peacefulness of an autumn afternoon. He simply sits, motionless in only his pajama bottoms, disassociated completely, and when Shisui comes to his windowsill, she says nothing, simply waiting for him to acknowledge her. And he does, after a while; he slowly gets up, goosebumps shooting across his arms as he takes the towel away from his shoulders and holds it out of the way. He’s been still for a long time and so he is dry and smooth to the touch, but very cold. His hair has dried into a strange shape to reflect his quiet morning (mourning), and he kisses her as she tries to get it back in order. He kisses her gently and distractedly and for a very long time, both of their knees slowly molding a dark pink to the shape of the windowsill. He closes his eyes and simply lets her guide him through everything, hands busy in his hair for only a few minutes longer before they slow and begin tracing slow circles against his scalp instead.
When he finally pulls back, his face is the one lightly flushed (as always), but he still looks sad and half-ill, and so she simply watches him. He draws back completely, gently taking her by the hand and leading her in, knight-like. He is reminded of his childhood. Of Jiraiya. Of Sanosuke who has long fallen away from his life, really. Of his mother, inevitably. Of Shisui.
She wraps her arms around his waist and he breathes a little easier. (Though he wasn’t aware that he had been holding his breath in the first place. Wasn’t aware that she is the only one who can ease this pain, who can warm him up now. And he wonders, vaguely, if that is his heart’s doing or Jiraiya’s. Because the man did make mention to her. Pointedly, even.) His muscles, tensed by cold, by mourning, relax gently against the cool flesh of her, against the fabric of her Jounin vest and the press of her lips to his collarbone.
“One teacher to another, I suppose then.”
He’s not sure exactly what she means by that when she says it, but she knows how to educate what she will, and undresses the rest of him with an ease and delicate charm that is both unseemly and very becoming. There’s a degree to which he admires the gracefulness of her body, the incredible perfection of it, and when she kisses him, it’s as if a gentle relief is flooding him from mouth to hips and back again, reverberating through his body like an echo. She drapes him over the bed like an oversized doll, and he kisses her softly, tenderly, lovingly, lets her educate him entirely, absorbs knowledge from her curves as she absorbs knowledge from his lack there of. The sun sets as she lets him in and it is a cool relief. It is a gentle assuaging of everything he is worth. She educates him and he learns. He learns and she learns from his learning. And as twilight envelops the village like a blanket does he wrap his hands around her and returns to himself, kissing her forehead and brushing back the sweaty strands of her hair. There is no metal and no brittleness and no hunger, and the ache is not dulled but it is sanctified. It is baptized exactly as it is.
The next day, Minato applies for training to become a Jounin instructor for one of Konoha’s Genin teams, and Sandaime looks at the application and then looks back up at him with a long smile and no words around his pipe.
And that is the end of it.
(The beginning.)
xiii.
Namikaze Minato, he who will far too soon be Konohagakure no Yondaime Hokage, first meets his squad and thinks, primarily, that they are all adorable, save the occasional deeply irritating factors, Hatake Kakashi himself being the largest one. Other than that, he misses a real first impression of them - his real impression is one of a general magnitude, a general impression rather than any impression of numerical status. This is because, of course, because he is there to witness the war with Iwa as it first begins. He is there, standing beside Sarutoubi-sensei when the news arrives that a squadron on the Stone border has been attacked and that war has been declared in their name. Minato has been slightly outraged and entirely ripped apart by the thought ever since, his insides tearing at each mention of it, at each restriction by it, at each soldier that is announced wounded or dead. The entire ordeal has put the whole of Konoha on edge, has inspired a new irritability in everyone.
It keeps him from being the teacher he really should be for the first few months, surviving entirely on his instincts as an instructor and his great annoyance with Kakashi, who seems to do nothing except intensify his frustration. The boy is prodigal, lanky with a bad attitude and hair like moonlight, and if Minato were any other person, he might hit him for speaking when he does. Minato is not any other person, of course, his sense of propriety being quite a bit broader in magnitude than his blond temper, and so he does not. But sometimes it’s difficult to avoid thinking of it.
The Sandaime had introduced him to the boy with a word that he was still deeply wounded by the suicide of his now-late-father, which Minato remembers hearing about, but Kakashi is so young in fundamentally everything he does (six-year-olds were not meant as warriors, and Minato is distressed at the very existence of him, by his Chuunin status) that Minato has a hard time not considering himself a babysitter. It’s as if the boy has done nothing in the years since his father’s passing, has let his body age independently of his brilliant mind, and has remained in the dark, bitter depths of childhood, regardless of his accelerated rank. The loss has, inherently, made him a cynic, and a smart one at that, which Minato thinks is worse than if he were somehow unintelligent, which might be better. The boy is bitter, bitingly cruel to the point of his words leaving obvious and open wounds on his teammates, Rin especially. Obito is the subject of his most terrible criticisms, but as time goes on, the boy works harder and harder not to cry in his presence; Rin is not so strong. Kakashi seems to like to let her feel safe, let her try her hand at defending Obito from his vindictiveness, and then cut her across the stomach with the meanest thing he can think to say at the moment, and Rin’s tears are truly hard to see. Perhaps it is Minato’s misogynistic upbringing kicking in (he doubts it, of course, but as Jiraiya would say, Rin is a pretty girl, but powerless in comparison to those who are truly “worth it”, and Minato has a hard time not thinking of what Jiraiya would say nowadays) but Obito’s tears affect him differently. He will comfort him, he often does, before urging him to become strong enough to sit through Kakashi’s attacks without flinching, teaching him methods he can use. But with Rin, it is entirely different; he wants to comfort her, it’s true, but he what he really wants to do is defend her from the onslaught altogether. Each time it happens, the suppressed urge to hurt Kakashi quadruples and it becomes very, very difficult to restrain himself.
That being the case, he does his best to simply keep things under control. Kakashi is his difficulty constantly. From night until morning, Minato knows neither what to do with him, nor what can be done for him. He’s long forfeited the idea of Kakashi healing of his own accord, and sometimes he throws out the very idea of Kakashi healing ever by any method of his, by any method of anyone’s. It’s a sad thought, really, but no matter how he tries, he cannot see underneath Kakashi’s underneath. The water is too cold for him, too deep. He knows that the boy won’t trust him to enter it, either, this he knows too well. Kakashi is completely guarded in his presence, and every time he is not, Minato ends up scolding him, and harshly. He can’t seem to repress the urge - when he sees the proverbial white of Kakashi’s belly, there is too much in him that needs to strike it so that he knows the boy will feel it. It’s all so difficult that he even keeps from discussing it with Shisui. His mother doesn’t really know how to help him, but she tries her best.
“Just…I don’t know, Minato. Just work him through. If you let him stay like this, he’ll just be an even bigger problem for someone else. You really want to put someone through that?” She knows he doesn’t though. Minato might not be as polite as he was in his younger days, but he still can’t stand to put his own problems off onto other people. He’s individualistic in that way. And Kakashi has become his own problem, definitively. It’s the sad truth, and it’s something he just can’t understand how to deal with.
He talks with his mother more, now that he doesn’t live with her - it has a lot to do with the fact that Jiraiya isn’t there himself to advise him and Minato can only rely on himself as far as what he thinks the now-hermit would say. But it also has plenty to do with the fact that she isn’t there anymore. The constant, reassuring figure in his life has become Shisui instead, and so she has become him, they have become one another. They return home at the same moment and meld together for a kiss every night and he makes dinner and she makes tea. It is their routine, their gentle forget-about-the-world-but-forget-me-not routine and sometimes it ends differently and sometimes it does not. Either way, he doesn’t talk to her about Kakashi. He talks to her about things in general and she understands. Shisui is training to be in the ANBU, now. She can hardly tell him anything specific either. It’s fine though, because in the end they can still talk about everything that really matters.
He comes home, kisses the side of her face. “I love you.”
She pats his leg affectionately, smile coy. “Yes, you do.”
And so it is that Kakashi eludes him almost entirely. It’s sad, but its happenstance, and it is everything that he can do to get up in the morning sometimes, raid sirens screaming in his ears from the dreams that haunt his sleep. He starts to look starved a little; starved and tired. Rin notices, natural healer that she is, and when the boys aren’t looking she is the source of his gentle smiles, the slow and shadowy return of his bright-eye nature. She treats him respectfully but loves to dabble around with her own curiosity when Kakashi and Obito have successfully distracted one another - she worries about him with homemade remedies, tribal, herbal, things she finds in books and sometimes they work, and sometimes they don’t, but Rin has very good instincts. Never does she do something to him that has any lasting negative effects. There are no rashes, no side effects. It is a natural nurturing instinct that guides her, a superhuman, transcended mothering urge that he caters too with a practiced ease. She is a girl in a world of boys, not overly powerful but certainly beautiful in mind and soul. He likes Rin very much. He likes Obito, too; not to the same degree, but powerfully. He loves them all powerfully, it’s true. Within six months he treats them as he would his own children, thinks of them in the very same way.
And that is why Kakashi plagues him so, really. Because, in the end, Minato is too polite to dash his brains out, and after awhile he knows that, even if it were to happen, it would be out of the purest form of platonic love he has ever felt, a soft and desperate kind of devotion that only puts the best sort of pain in his heart, and weighs heavily on his ability to sleep at night.
xvi.
It is in the sixth month that Minato whips the cigarette from Kakashi’s pale lips without thinking. It’s somewhat because he can’t stand the sight of his youngest with smoke billowing from his mouth, but it’s mostly because he isn’t thinking. He isn’t thinking and the smoke looks all wrong, smells completely wrong. Kakashi’s small, twelve-year-old mouth isn’t meant to spew smoke. The other child he’s with, a gruff-looking creature with bones that are heavy-set, jumps back from Minato, dark eyebrows flying up as he comes out of nowhere, morphing in out of the shadow to tear the cigarette from Kakashi’s lips even though he dismissed his students some hours ago. The blond spits his words at both of them.
“Don’t smoke, Kakashi.”
His student stares at him, dark eyes sharp with contempt. His hitai-ate keeps his hair away from his face but it’s almost a pity that it does - the firelight from the lamps only serves to further shadow his aristocratic face, further mar his pretty features. Minato ignores the wound as it is made and looks up at the other boy instead, who looks restless at the way in which the Jounin’s blue eyes are burning.
“Go home, Asuma.”
The boy hesitates, looks ready to say something in his defense.
“Go home, Asuma.”
And Asuma does. He pauses to pat Kakashi half-amicably on the bridge of his arm before tearing off in the opposite direction, thinking that they both are ridiculously troublesome, but that the teacher’s rage almost frightens him with its intensity. He’s like a woman, almost, in that way. But it’s not really worth it to stay behind and watch Kakashi get his ass smeared across the pavement.
Minato’s rage glows in the firelight. He looks angrier than he really is, which is surprising - it is almost impossible that he should lose his temper over something so small, but Kakashi has a masochistic love for pushing all his buttons at once, for testing every set boundary to its utmost limits. And because Minato is not really thinking, it doesn’t seem wrong to be angry, because even if he has not explicitly told Kakashi not to smoke, even if Kakashi is not technically under his jurisdiction at the moment-
His cerulean eyes catch and glow with anger.
“You’re better than this, Kakashi.”
“I don’t remember asking, sensei.”
“I don’t remember having to wait for you to ask in order for me to tell. I’m your teacher, Kakashi - I’ll tell you what I have to and you’ll listen, do you understand? I’m tired of this. I’m tired of you and I swear to all heavens that if you don’t shape up I’ll find a way to force you to.”
His student scoffs. “Force me too? Says the man who lets a twelve-year-old tend his insomnia. How do you plan to force me into submission, sensei? How exactly is it that you plan to keep me in line, make me into the perfect little soldier? A sharp reprimand? Smacking my knuckles with a ruler?” He snorts disrespectfully. “Good luck.”
It is in that moment that Minato employs corporal punishment for what it’s worth for the very first time and the very last time. Because, in the end he isn’t thinking, and if he is, he is thinking that maybe he has been entirely wrong about his previous reservations about hurting Kakashi to prove a point. He is thinking that if Kakashi will not show the white spot for him to drive a stake through, he will flip the boy himself, spin him in circles until he can find it on his own, without the boy consciously showing him. He is thinking that if he can find the spot of his own accord, if he can reveal Kakashi’s belly himself, he will have the power of always knowing where it is, and then he will truly have achieved something in their relationship. He will have truly stepped forward.
And so Minato moves - so fast that his student’s eyes can’t follow him, so fast that he does not catch in the light - and within less then seconds, there is a crater where Kakashi’s face has impacted the side of the building his back was against only a moment ago. His hands are behind that back, held there by the manacles of Minato’s hands, Minato, whose knee is buried in the flesh of his spine, whose cheek is side-by-side with his.
Kakashi’s eyes are wide. Surprised. Blinking dumbly.
Minato’s voice is a low, ominous threat.
“I am more powerful than you Kakashi-kun, and so I would advise that you not test me. When I say that I am tired of this sort of behavior, I mean that I will not tolerate it. I’m tired of you. And I am you teacher - it is my duty to make sure that you do not drag this sort of behavior into your adulthood. So I’m going to knock you off your fifty foot pedestal right now, so that no one else will have to do it in the future. I’m going to amputate your ego at the knees so that you don’t walk into adulthood with your nose in the air and your worthlessness worn like a wreath around your neck. I’m tired of it. And I’ll put an end to it no matter what,”
he shoves Kakashi away by the knee in his back, into the side of the building,
“it takes.”
(Because I love you. Because you’re my child and I love you.)
He stands up, releasing him, and Kakashi slides down the wall a ways before recovering and dragging himself to his feet. He holds the side of his face, a large bruise blossoming on the side of his jaw. Minato reaches forward, yanks his hand away and pulls his facial mask back up and over his mouth from where it’s bunched around his neck. As soon as his hands are away he can see the way Kakashi’s whole head is throbbing from the temple down. He wonders, idly, if anyone has said anything of that nature in Kakashi’s presence before. He highly doubts it.
His voice is dark.
“Don’t smoke.”
Kakashi doesn’t. Not ever again. Not even long after his teacher’s death. And Asuma can never bring himself to quit, simply because every time he tugs one of the nicotine sticks out of his weapons pouch and lights it, Kakashi’s eyes get a strange half-pleasant, half-tortured look, as if he is remembering something that is both nice and incredibly painful.
The most immediate consequence on Minato’s end, of course, is that he is never the inadvertent subject of Kakashi’s adept criticism ever again. It’s a strange bond that they form that day in the sixth month and it only gets progressively stranger, but never progressively worse. (There are only improvements ever made.) And in that way is Kakashi the one who inevitably stays inside and involved with Minato’s life until far after it’s end.
The severity of that is measured, inevitably, by Obito.
xvii.
Uchiha Obito is assigned to him in his early days primarily because he is an Uchiha and Minato is a friend of the family, and secondarily because he is a failure. In one of Konoha’s most predominant and outstanding clans, he fails to garner anyone’s notice, being as completely and wholly average as he is. In no way is he extraordinary at all: he is a nice boy, but not the nicest; he is a sensitive boy, but not the most sensitive; he is a thoughtful, smart boy, but not the most thoughtful, nor the smartest. One of the only adjectives with which to describe him are “loving” and “frightened”, and both fail to really comprise what Obito really is. He has no real skills to speak of, no latent talents that have made themselves apparent, and shows virtually no promise as a ninja. For all the ways in which Minato defends Obito from Kakashi sometimes, he cannot really protect him from his moonchild’s fiercest criticism of all because - for all its offensiveness - it is also very truthful. He badgers Kakashi for his rudeness, but he cannot chide him for being untruthful, and he knows how much Obito knows this, and how much it hurts.
And it is this hurt that spawns their largest problems as a team, most especially when the Great War is categorized as such, and as his boys turn thirteen, his girl turns twelve, and Minato turns nineteen there is an introduction made between them and the battlefield. There is a gap that is bridged, delicately, and his students are no longer as such.
“They are warriors, Minato,” Sandaime says gently, and the blond leans more heavily against the tall window of his office. The old man (and he truly is becoming an old man now) has his hands held behind his back when he says it and Minato has his eyes closed to the idea, his hand on the windowsill, and a bad ache in the back of his throat. It is a painful announcement. A painful gap. But Konoha has no more soldiers. The ones with experience are long dead, and the ones that aren’t are the ones with teams like Minato’s - teams that can no longer afford to be spared war’s true breadth. “Warriors under your command. And this country’s badly in need of them.”
And it is Kakashi, the cynic, who sits beside him stiffly and tells him that his face is pale. He should go home. Get some rest. Get a girlfriend. Minato says softly that he already has one. Kakashi says stiffly that she must not be any good.
Minato assigns him a D-Rank mission involving the education of young school children on the subject of kunai. Great amounts of kunai. For somewhere around four hours of a day wherein he is later assigned to shovel out a horse stable.
Kakashi doesn’t say anything negative on the topic of girlfriends for a long time after that.
xviii.
Their first mission is inevitably small - a removal of old battlements on the Leaf’s eastern-most border. Minato does not explain it to them as an act of war and so they do not think of it as such, which he thinks is good, because the last thing to know about war is that you are participating in it. If you participate in it knowingly, you must have courage. If you participate in it unknowingly, you are left to forever question yourself for your naïveté, which is far better. You aren’t haunted the same way, and that makes all the difference.
For this reason does he guide them swiftly through the motions; they set off bombs left behind, clear the field of discarded weaponry, chase off buzzards. He goes ahead to move the corpses away himself because there is some desperate need for him to shield them from this. He doesn’t like it and so he keeps it from them in every way that he can, drags the dead bodies away the night before, so that he is unreasonably tired on the day of the actual mission itself. But it’s no trouble, really. There’s no comparison really, no reason he would go back and do it differently. Kakashi has already seen too much. Rin is already predestined to see too much, simply being the medic-nin that she is. And Obito isn’t ready. Not yet. Warriors they might be. But children they still are. His children. And he likes them that way.
Their first mission is inevitably small and goes inevitably wrong as such. Everything that can go wrong will go wrong, and for every disaster is Minato there, is Minato defending them, and it feels all wrong. He’s filled with a startling anguish a knowledge of undesirable things creeping up on his students in ways that he cannot control. He feels as if it is their childhood being robbed them and he can’t stand it. And so it is inevitable that the enemy soldier emerges from the forest when he does.
He is thin, starved, his eyes crazed, and Obito is the one who sees him first. He looks up, through orange plastic and yells out to him, startled. Rin glances over her shoulder at him, looks into the grass further and screams in alarm, and Kakashi looks over and Minato stares, blue eyes putting a crosshair over the man’s bald head. He startles himself with it, visibly chokes, shakes his head to rid himself of it. (Surely the war hasn’t done this to him, where even a helpless man like this is threatening, just in his very existence?) Kakashi glances over at him, questioning. Obito yells out to the man, trots a little closer to him, asks him if he needs help.
And the man draws out a broad-edged sword that just grazes the tip of the Uchiha boy’s nose and Minato has blown through his chest in an instant, snatching Obito to him, diving beneath the sword and plunging his kunai through the man’s stomach as he shoots past. There is a gaping crater of flesh left behind him and his hand is gloved in blood and Obito trembles and shakes and eventually cries against him as the enemy-nin collapses to the ground. He cries and his tears build at the edges of his goggles and Minato simply stares, facial features an ugly soft and gently serious. It’s almost strange how at peace he seems to be and Kakashi and Rin watch him.
“…Kakashi, please help me move the body. Rin, come here, check Obito for wounds.”
Obito is shaking almost convulsively, face flooded with distress. “N-No! I’m-I’m-I’m fine! I-I…s-sensei, you…you…”
Minato pulls away from him though, patting his head lightly, pain flooding his chest and weighting his stomach. Kakashi coldly tells Obito to stop sniveling and Minato doesn’t have the heart to tell him not to be so angry, that it’s alright to be frightened because he was. Because he is. Because he wouldn’t have just killed their enemy otherwise, if he wasn’t frightened. It’s what you’re frightened of that affects things.
Kakashi lifts the man’s head and Minato lifts the man’s feet and they carry him into the forest and toss his down among the dozen other corpses that Minato moved this morning. Kakashi stares at them for a long time before Minato speaks to him in a soft voice:
“…you’re soldiers now.”
Kakashi is a Jounin two months later.
And that is the end of it.
(The beginning.)
ixx.
When the blade sings through the air, he collides with the first man he sees, he collides with a ferocity and a violence that he has never felt before in his life, with an electric thrill that shoots from his hips all the way up his spine. His feet spike with pain as he lands, his head reels with momentum and he smacks warriors into trees, he smacks blades into bodies, and he puts holes in a blind whirlwind of protective momentum. He is a streak of blond, a halo of gold and he collides with the world and with the enemy in a decimating destructive impossible force of nature. He breaks bones and smashes holes in trees and in mere minutes are they torn open and sprayed across the field as if they are nothing.
It’s a long moment of breathing wherein he stares at the damage he’s reeked, the havoc that’s slowly breathing itself out. Inhale. Exhale. His face, his body exudes calm. His fists aren’t clenched. There isn’t a spot of dirt on him. Not a spot of blood. But his eyes; his azure eyes are white coals, his eyes are burning brightly. He’ll kill them all again. If they get up again, he’ll kill them, all of them. He slowly exhales, slowly catches his breath.
And then he looks over his shoulder and Rin is the only one conscious, staring at him almost blindly, her face dazed, grateful and crushed like a china platter. He walks slowly over, kneels beside her, strokes her face tenderly, the constant father figure. She looks dazed. Only Kakashi hangs, limp, off of her strong shoulders and there is a slow creeping worry that inches across the surface of his stomach. He runs his fingers gently against her and she stares at him, sad, dazed, heartbroken. Kakashi’s face is bleeding, and there are dried tears on one side of it, running adjacent to a long unfamiliar stroke across his left eye.
Rin is the one to tell him the story of how Obito died, and he stays very still for the entirety of it, his whole body going cold.
After she is done, he sends her off, telling her to take Kakashi to an open meadow not too far from them, and as she carries him off he walks slowly to the very edge of the gorge and feels his own heart slowly breaking. He stares down into it before the emotion overtakes him again and he’s ramming his fist into the stones, slamming his body and his power against them, overwhelmed, his mind and his heart an impenetrable maelstrom. His speed can’t help him and it throws him into an imbalance, throws him into a grief-stricken panic, and he disregards it, shatters his knives on the stones, exerts all his power against them, and in moments he becomes the wind. He becomes intangible, he becomes a vortex of air, a similar one newly swirling in his palm and he silently blows all the rocks to pieces with it, tears a wound deep into the Earth, tears so deep that he destroys the basin altogether, and penetrates into the river deep below.
He only finds the uncrushed part of his deadlast student’s body - the other is long lost in the rubble - and he lifts the boy carefully, delicately cradling him to his chest. His whole body shakes with anguish, and he is the most unsteady he will ever be. It takes him almost a half an hour to realize that there is no possible way to revive him, that the best way to honor Obito’s monumental sacrifice is to let the river carry him away, and only once he’s set him down and let go does he truly absorb the feeling of his sadness, the incredible, concurring factor of it.
He does not cry.
He goes back to camp and waits for Kakashi to wake instead.
And when they return to Konoha, he stumbles in to Shisui’s room and collapses on her bed and she holds him without reluctance. It is days before he can stand up straight. It is even longer before he and the Sandaime are on speaking terms again. And even then, his relationships with everyone around him are entirely changed. The end and the beginning. (He doesn’t cry at Obito’s funeral either. The first time he cries about it is much, much later on. And it is with Kakashi, which is entirely fitting.)
Kakashi is the one to name his attack the Rasengan.
And they do not talk about it much afterwards.
xx.
It is through Obito, too, that Namikaze Minato, he who will far too soon be Konohagakure no Yondaime Hokage, comes into direct contact with the Kyuubi no Kitsune for the first time. It is inevitable, of course, the way he meets him (in the same manner that he met Yohko who he still does not know as Yohko many years before), but it determines him. It determines the rest of him, more than anything, and that being the case, it is depressing, looking back on it.
Looking to it, looking straight at it (which is usually the more important thing) it’s just a very intimidating, irritating experience, as Kyuubi is himself.
It’s when he’s out in the market for flowers that it happens, which is strangely anticlimactic for Kyuubi. The monster is apt to play the primadonna if he can, any time he can - the more melodramatic, the better he seems to like it. (It’s catering straight to the most painful things, it’s human heartbreak that Kyuubi lavishes in. Cruel tricks are easily his most petty pass time, and inevitably how he met his wife in the first place. It is virtually always his intention to wound those that he comes into contact with, and he usually manages just fine. By the end, Minato knows all of this very, very well.) He appears as a woman stricken with incredible beauty and that is how he catches the store owner’s attention; all flowing lines and pale blond hair and golden-crimson eyes that catch the light just so. He (she? Not really, though. You can’t call a male female, even if he’s dressed like one) seems juxtaposed onto a feminine frame, his white cloak and golden bangles more than eerily familiar when they catch Minato’s ears.
But it’s his effeminate charm and wiles that catch the attention of the store owner. Minato is able to successfully ignore them after a short while. It’s after he has departed and the store owner starts to shriek something about money changing to leaves that Minato is finally paying attention.
(An old myth. But one that angers him nonetheless.)
Minato is an ungodly sort of fast - has only gotten faster since Obito’s death (because he has to be; he and Kakashi both have gotten much, much faster, as a preventative measure. They refuse to lose anyone else. Life is all about balance. About other lives within itself. What a strange occurrence, the way people will hang on to one another instead of themselves,) - and so he whips through the crowd and corners what has been a mysterious woman up until now at the town’s very edge. Or rather Kyuubi stops, and he stops and they stare at one another.
“That was cheap.”
“Is that supposed to be a pun?” The Fox’s mouth curls revealing sharp canines. “I’m told humans are very fond of puns. The humorous use of a word or phrase so as to emphasize or suggest its different meanings or applications, or the use of words that are alike or nearly alike in sound but different in meaning; a play on words. Puns. Such irrelevant things.” He cocks his head amusedly to the side and by the curve of his neck, by the thickness, Minato sees that the store owner was mistaken in assuming he was female. “Like you, a little.”
“You seem to like the sound of your own voice quite a bit.”
“Don’t you?”
Minato narrows his eyes distastefully. The Fox seems genuinely curious, pale golden-red eyes aglow with some sort of malicious delight. They stand like that for quite some time. It’s strange, the atmosphere that infect the air around them, the way the Fox’s nails seem to extend excitedly as he reaches slowly to pull down the hood of his cloak, the same one that-
”…the woman in Amegakure.”
The Fox’s smile is abrasive. You could cut yourself on the edges of it.
”You must be referring to my Wife.” He fingers the bangles that float around his neck in a thoughtful sort of way, his sharp teeth now so visible that Minato is surprised that he hasn’t caught his lips on them yet. It seems odd for some reason that there should be no blood on him whatsoever. “I seem to vaguely recall her using these clothes for an outing some days ago.”
”Years.” Minato’s correction is off-handed, a secondary thought, but the ethereal presence in front of him catches upon it, his long mouth doubling over itself in a dark frown, as if he has been offended.
”Your kind seem to find that word so important,” the Fox says, voice insolent, an arrogant baritone drawl. “What do years really mean when they don’t age you, anyway? There’s no reason to milk so much from it, really. But I suppose you humans hardly survive long enough to compensate for your own existences, very less understand the true insignificance of a year. Of time. Don’t you ever get tired of measuring it? Of making believe it can somehow trap you, defeat you in a way death will not?”
Minato stares at him, insides coursing with a rough-edged electricity. “Are you saying that you aren’t human, then?”
The Fox snorts. “Are you blind?” His smiles unfurls across him again, cruel and taunting. “Your kind is senseless, it amazes me. Can you hear anything? See anything?”
”I can see that you aren’t human.”
”You can see that now,” the demon says lightly. “Now that it coincides with your train of thought. Humans do that so often it’s nauseating. You can see only once you’re convinced you can. How limited that perspective must be.”
”What are you?” Minato is deadly serious, his blue eyes on fire, and he can see them reflected back at him like mirrors in the Fox’s should-be eyes. There is a pungently bitter taste in his mouth. “What can you know of humans if you aren’t one?”
And that putrid smile widens.
”Plenty.
”I am the Kyuubi, after all.”
Minato stares at him blandly, and the Fox erupts into laughter.
”That’s right. That’s right.” And suddenly long, clawed fingers extend to just barely brush his cheek, running along the line of his jaw. Minato recoils instantaneously, but the damage is done - Kyuubi’s body heat startles him with its intensity, his skin smarts. It feels like he’s been burned with a hot poker. “She said you’d give me that look. That one exactly. I remember. Namikaze Minato, aren’t you? He who will, by way of the Great War, usher in an era of peace, and a longstanding revolution. Not that the Revolution itself has been truly identified yet. Not accurately. But you must understand what I say when I say that I can still see it. Yes, yes. I’ve waited a long time to meet you. A much longer time than you can imagine - I use increments of lengths far more sparingly than you.”
”What are you talking about?” There’s a soft degree of revulsion that twists in Minato’s throat with his words, a distaste that makes its volatility very abruptly known, and he stares at him, sharp pains dappling his arms. His face still smarts where the Fox had gall enough to touch him. Kyuubi grins.
”Such a fragile thing, the human mind. You know, I almost think you could have never met her and it wouldn’t have changed the Course whatsoever. You seem as uniform as all the rest. Resolute and unchanging as such. So many ideals. It’s a pity. You aren’t too bad on the eyes. With a change of species and birthright you could’ve easily been mistaken for one of mine, with looks like yours.”
Minato’s mouth bends sharply downward. “The Course?”
Kyuubi blinks at him for a second before his smirk widens further. “Oh, that is interesting.”
”What is?” Minato’s frustration thins him.
”You intend to try to escape it then? Your fate?”
Minato’s body goes abruptly cold, a chill shooting through him, his anger blanketed in a layer of new-fallen snow. He says nothing. He doesn’t move.
Kyuubi’s laughter is tearing through him within moments, as he knew it would.
”But you’ve already played so far into the Prophecy. You’re still resisting it? Beasts and burden, you are as foolish as I thought, aren’t you? How predictably atypical. You humans are such creatures of denial. You’d think having my Wife deliver that sort of thing unto you would help you resign yourself to it.”
”Does she even have a name?” Minato avoids addressing the actual subject, avoids actually watching his lips move. He does as he did with Orochimaru years ago and stares so deeply into Kyuubi’s eyes that it feels like he could smash them if he wanted to. He stares, unafraid and unwavering. The world has become a soft burning sensation in his temples, and it’s not very pleasant. (But he isn’t moving, and he isn’t scared. Not like he is for Kakashi sometimes. Not the way he was for Obito.)
Kyuubi snorts. “Yohko. Not that it concerns you.”
”She is your wife, isn’t she?”
”One of them.”
”One of them?”
”The kit goes so far as to call the kettle black. God, you’re exactly as she described, too. Your mannerisms - they’re stifling. It’s remarkable no one’s killed you yet. If it will calm you down, I will say that she’s the Favorite, that the rest of them know it.”
Minato’s disgust must be evident on his face because Kyuubi can’t seem to stop laughing. It echoes against him, seeringly hot and relentless and cruel. Kyuubi’s laughter is the black, unescapable, suffocating heat of a sunspot, but easily twenty thousand times worse for it’s sharp, malicious intent. “Have you really forgotten, then? The Prophecy. She said she told you of it, recited it for you so that you wouldn’t forget. That’s harder than she’s usually willing to try.” He smirks widely, still chuckling darkly, eyes on his.
”If I tell you again, do you promise to pay attention? Foolish little kit. Insignificant little darling.” Kyuubi leans too close then, and Minato’s stomach wrenches, beating itself against his ribcage. (Or is it his heart? He can’t remember which is which for a second. Kyuubi’s closeness generates overwhelmingly sinister thoughts and feelings in him, ignites his body like it’s on fire, and he almost twists in pain, feeling the Fox’s oppressive power and recognizing it as disaster flames licking up his legs. It’s incredibly painful, the sheer amount of power he has.) He wants to hit him, but he’s not sure which is the best tactic, since it isn’t every day you have an opponent like this. And, of course, he’s never heard of Kyuubi’s victims escaping. He makes his plans quickly, rerouting the intimate, electronic pathogens in his brain. Any other words he would say are forcibly stopped in his throat, and he is easily aware that it is Kyuubi who is responsible. The Fox smiles down at him. Minato is slightly alarmed by their height difference - the animal has to be almost 190 centimeters tall, apparently to add to its naturally intimidating persona.
”If I tell it to you, do you promise not to forget?”
And of course he can’t say no.
He clenches his fists and keeps his eyes hard instead.
And the Kyuubi laughs.
”How entertaining. You, Namikaze Minato, he who will be the unknowing king to knowingly beget kings, he who will plant the seed that will bloom and choke the Fan in it’s greatness, the Crane at it’s length. You know every line she told you. I can see it. Politeness, staunch chivalry that is you charm. So will it be your downfall. And so it goes that good medicine tastes bitter in the mouth; it is the duplicity of your own heart that will betray and destroy you. A spider lily and a Narcissus. Both will you hold tightly in your grasp, tightly when they are threatened, and even tighter when it is you who threatens them. And when it is that you are driven to the ground by Heaven itself and they are cut from your hands, both will crumble and die in your absence. The Narcissus, immediately. The spider lily in due time. You remember all this, of course.
”And so the music of the Whirlpool will be the one to dance to. And the song of the Piano will be the one that signifies and mourns your passing.” Kyuubi’s face is so grotesque. “The reverse side that also has a reverse side. So it is that your golden self will ultimately ruin the lives of those whose belief in it is the least deluded. So it is that those ruins will beget Change, beget Revolution. It’s magnificent, you know. I really can’t wait.” He leans forward, an ungodly close, and his fingers are on Minato’s jaw again, searing heat tearing through him. He wants to hurt him so badly. His violence is the burn against his skin.
Kyuubi laughs.
And then he kisses him.
Minato is fast - incredibly fast, ungodly fast - and it’s less than three seconds that span the time it takes for him to blow Kyuubi ten feet from him, his lips burning with a white heat that makes him want to vomit. He feels nauseous, his whole body tensed so tightly that he wants to reach down and start ripping springs and wire. Kyuubi collides with a tree some six meters away and is laughing so hard and cruelly it doesn’t look like he’ll ever stop. Minato’s so disgusted that it takes all of his self-control not to slam him in the stomach with a Rasengan right there.
The Fox cracks an eye at him, glee more than evident. “I was right. You would’ve been so much better as one of mine rather than one of yours.”
”Shut up.” (It is the extent of Minato announcing his decision to leave and pretend as if this didn’t happen. It’s been a long time since he’s seen Jiraiya - Shisui’s been on a mission the whole week long and he’s been waiting so desperately for her to come back, and if she doesn’t come tonight he thinks he might rip a hole in the house. The nervous tension he feels now is so incredible.) He watches him unwaveringly.
”You’ll meet her soon. I can feel it. The Great War has brought with it the very best of things it seems. Oh yes.” He smiles widely and Minato stares at him for twenty seconds longer before turning on his heel and starting back for safer, more well-inhabited ground at a proud, painstakingly civilian pace. Kyuubi’s laughter echoes after him.
”That which quickly ripens, so does it quickly rot, dear kit. Remember that!”
Minato pays the store owner back himself and when Shisui comes home early in the evening, he kisses her long and hard, kisses her in every way he hasn’t kissed her before, runs his mouth tenderly over ever part of her body in a vain attempt to cleanse Kyuubi’s burns and kisses from his own. If she notices his distress she is careful not to mention it, and he tries his best to thank her by way of caresses, by way of running deft hand over her smooth thighs and telling her that he loves her repeatedly. Endlessly.
He kisses her until early morning when she finally starts breathing normally and eases him out of her and helps the long process of redemption and of cleaning up after themselves. The sheets are mussed with them but it isn’t too much of a problem, really. They share a shower, they share their bodies, and so it is inevitable that it will not be a problem.
But when he breathes, pain spikes through him like a dagger.
That notice Shisui does spare him as she caresses his chest with her delicate fingers, counting the ways in which she can both clean the sweat from his skin and make him tremble as if he is on the verge of generating more for her to dry from him.
”You look troubled.”
He kisses her forehead in a characteristic moment of post-coital gentleness (of post-birth gentleness - so it goes that Minato is always pointedly gentle with her, as if he does not think himself deserving of her beauty. And truly, he does not,) and then they simply lie together, naked beneath the bed covers, not necessarily cuddling because the excess heat has a way of making Shisui uncomfortable, but certainly together in every since of the word. As if the world is not upside down. As if their country is not at war. As if the time they both have left to live is easily significant and predictably so. For Shisui, as if Minato is the only one who will ever see her body in this way, who she will ever allow to love her so unabashedly.
For Minato, as if Shisui is the only one he will ever love.
And so it is that they wake on time, dress as they should, go about their lives in the orderly fashion they always have afterwards.
And Minato is careful never to tell her of the Prophecy.
That is someone else’s job entirely.
Author: the_lady_lamb
Genre: Naruto
Sub-genre: Angst/Romance
Summary: (Part I: Chapters XI-XX) 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. ♥
CHAPTERS I-X
The Decemberist
PART ONE ∙∙∙ PROPHECY
xi.
Minato leaves on a day when there is fog in the air, a week and a half before he and Shisui are due to start training for the Jounin exams. His mother seems deeply unhappy about it, but he’s seventeen, will be eighteen in another four days, the twenty-fifth of January, and she can’t really stop him. She simply keeps her sharp arms folded and her blue eyes on his as he hoists his pack a little higher on his shoulder.
“It’s only an apartment a few blocks away, Mother. It’s not the ends of the earth.”
“I know,” she huffs, the gentleness of his voice doing nothing to soothe her. She looks deeply troubled, the folds forming at the sides of her mouth aging her. He smiles softly, reaching forward to stroke the side of her face in a moment of sincere adoration. The woman who raised him is slowly growing older, slowly aging in this young house that he’s grown up in, and it hurts him to part from her too, but he knows himself, knows the fearsome way he now lusts for independence, itching for a chance to spread his wings. He knows the way she watches him fondly when she thinks he isn’t paying attention.
His mother. (Namikaze Kuzunoha. It's a good name. She's a good mother.)
“I love you, you know.”
She huffs and pushes him a little.
“Go. You’d better come over for dinner. I have to teach you how to cook, still.”
Minato laughs and hugs her shoulders, which are the boniest parts of her.
They don’t cry. Don’t think about it.
“Be safe.”
“Not the ends of the earth,” he says, voice almost sing-song, a reminder. She sighs, seeming deeply saddened and relieved and somber, all at the same time. Her eyes are loose, like someone’s brasier come unknotted, unlaced.
“It really might as well be.”
xii.
Jiraiya leaves on a day when it’s raining, a week and a half after Shisui and Minato pass the Jounin exam. Minato is the only one to see him off, because Minato is the only one to see him go, the only one who wakes at three in the morning to run out into the maelstrom for no perceivable reason save that he desperately thinks he must, that there is something he desperately needs to do. The raindrops are surprisingly large and knock at him abrasively. His insides careen with the lighting and he surges forward in a blur, dodging the sky’s own fat tears until he and Jiraiya nearly collide at the open gate. His teacher has a rice picker’s hat on, his gentle eyes unshielded for once.
And Minato can yell only one thing over the storm.
“When are you coming back?”
And Jiraiya simply smiles, reaching out a gruff, gloved hand to ruffle his soaked hair, pushing it up and away from where it’s plastered to his forehead. (His hitai-ate is on the nightstand. At home. Without him.) The familiar warmth of his fingers makes Minato tense grimly inside, and he is reminded of a monk, somehow.
But Jiraiya is not a monk.
Jiraiya is a pervert. And a teacher.
His teacher.
“You’re a fantastic ninja, you brat. You both are.”
“When are you coming back?”
“Take good care of her, Minato. She loves you, y’know.”
Minato doesn’t report to the Hokage office when the sunlight hits his roof, and he doesn’t report when it leaves. He comes home, takes a shower and sits down on his bed. And then he stays there, just staring at his alarm clock as the minutes, hours, day ticks by motionlessly. Birds change to people change to the mindless movement that always consumes and overrides the peacefulness of an autumn afternoon. He simply sits, motionless in only his pajama bottoms, disassociated completely, and when Shisui comes to his windowsill, she says nothing, simply waiting for him to acknowledge her. And he does, after a while; he slowly gets up, goosebumps shooting across his arms as he takes the towel away from his shoulders and holds it out of the way. He’s been still for a long time and so he is dry and smooth to the touch, but very cold. His hair has dried into a strange shape to reflect his quiet morning (mourning), and he kisses her as she tries to get it back in order. He kisses her gently and distractedly and for a very long time, both of their knees slowly molding a dark pink to the shape of the windowsill. He closes his eyes and simply lets her guide him through everything, hands busy in his hair for only a few minutes longer before they slow and begin tracing slow circles against his scalp instead.
When he finally pulls back, his face is the one lightly flushed (as always), but he still looks sad and half-ill, and so she simply watches him. He draws back completely, gently taking her by the hand and leading her in, knight-like. He is reminded of his childhood. Of Jiraiya. Of Sanosuke who has long fallen away from his life, really. Of his mother, inevitably. Of Shisui.
She wraps her arms around his waist and he breathes a little easier. (Though he wasn’t aware that he had been holding his breath in the first place. Wasn’t aware that she is the only one who can ease this pain, who can warm him up now. And he wonders, vaguely, if that is his heart’s doing or Jiraiya’s. Because the man did make mention to her. Pointedly, even.) His muscles, tensed by cold, by mourning, relax gently against the cool flesh of her, against the fabric of her Jounin vest and the press of her lips to his collarbone.
“One teacher to another, I suppose then.”
He’s not sure exactly what she means by that when she says it, but she knows how to educate what she will, and undresses the rest of him with an ease and delicate charm that is both unseemly and very becoming. There’s a degree to which he admires the gracefulness of her body, the incredible perfection of it, and when she kisses him, it’s as if a gentle relief is flooding him from mouth to hips and back again, reverberating through his body like an echo. She drapes him over the bed like an oversized doll, and he kisses her softly, tenderly, lovingly, lets her educate him entirely, absorbs knowledge from her curves as she absorbs knowledge from his lack there of. The sun sets as she lets him in and it is a cool relief. It is a gentle assuaging of everything he is worth. She educates him and he learns. He learns and she learns from his learning. And as twilight envelops the village like a blanket does he wrap his hands around her and returns to himself, kissing her forehead and brushing back the sweaty strands of her hair. There is no metal and no brittleness and no hunger, and the ache is not dulled but it is sanctified. It is baptized exactly as it is.
The next day, Minato applies for training to become a Jounin instructor for one of Konoha’s Genin teams, and Sandaime looks at the application and then looks back up at him with a long smile and no words around his pipe.
And that is the end of it.
(The beginning.)
xiii.
Namikaze Minato, he who will far too soon be Konohagakure no Yondaime Hokage, first meets his squad and thinks, primarily, that they are all adorable, save the occasional deeply irritating factors, Hatake Kakashi himself being the largest one. Other than that, he misses a real first impression of them - his real impression is one of a general magnitude, a general impression rather than any impression of numerical status. This is because, of course, because he is there to witness the war with Iwa as it first begins. He is there, standing beside Sarutoubi-sensei when the news arrives that a squadron on the Stone border has been attacked and that war has been declared in their name. Minato has been slightly outraged and entirely ripped apart by the thought ever since, his insides tearing at each mention of it, at each restriction by it, at each soldier that is announced wounded or dead. The entire ordeal has put the whole of Konoha on edge, has inspired a new irritability in everyone.
It keeps him from being the teacher he really should be for the first few months, surviving entirely on his instincts as an instructor and his great annoyance with Kakashi, who seems to do nothing except intensify his frustration. The boy is prodigal, lanky with a bad attitude and hair like moonlight, and if Minato were any other person, he might hit him for speaking when he does. Minato is not any other person, of course, his sense of propriety being quite a bit broader in magnitude than his blond temper, and so he does not. But sometimes it’s difficult to avoid thinking of it.
The Sandaime had introduced him to the boy with a word that he was still deeply wounded by the suicide of his now-late-father, which Minato remembers hearing about, but Kakashi is so young in fundamentally everything he does (six-year-olds were not meant as warriors, and Minato is distressed at the very existence of him, by his Chuunin status) that Minato has a hard time not considering himself a babysitter. It’s as if the boy has done nothing in the years since his father’s passing, has let his body age independently of his brilliant mind, and has remained in the dark, bitter depths of childhood, regardless of his accelerated rank. The loss has, inherently, made him a cynic, and a smart one at that, which Minato thinks is worse than if he were somehow unintelligent, which might be better. The boy is bitter, bitingly cruel to the point of his words leaving obvious and open wounds on his teammates, Rin especially. Obito is the subject of his most terrible criticisms, but as time goes on, the boy works harder and harder not to cry in his presence; Rin is not so strong. Kakashi seems to like to let her feel safe, let her try her hand at defending Obito from his vindictiveness, and then cut her across the stomach with the meanest thing he can think to say at the moment, and Rin’s tears are truly hard to see. Perhaps it is Minato’s misogynistic upbringing kicking in (he doubts it, of course, but as Jiraiya would say, Rin is a pretty girl, but powerless in comparison to those who are truly “worth it”, and Minato has a hard time not thinking of what Jiraiya would say nowadays) but Obito’s tears affect him differently. He will comfort him, he often does, before urging him to become strong enough to sit through Kakashi’s attacks without flinching, teaching him methods he can use. But with Rin, it is entirely different; he wants to comfort her, it’s true, but he what he really wants to do is defend her from the onslaught altogether. Each time it happens, the suppressed urge to hurt Kakashi quadruples and it becomes very, very difficult to restrain himself.
That being the case, he does his best to simply keep things under control. Kakashi is his difficulty constantly. From night until morning, Minato knows neither what to do with him, nor what can be done for him. He’s long forfeited the idea of Kakashi healing of his own accord, and sometimes he throws out the very idea of Kakashi healing ever by any method of his, by any method of anyone’s. It’s a sad thought, really, but no matter how he tries, he cannot see underneath Kakashi’s underneath. The water is too cold for him, too deep. He knows that the boy won’t trust him to enter it, either, this he knows too well. Kakashi is completely guarded in his presence, and every time he is not, Minato ends up scolding him, and harshly. He can’t seem to repress the urge - when he sees the proverbial white of Kakashi’s belly, there is too much in him that needs to strike it so that he knows the boy will feel it. It’s all so difficult that he even keeps from discussing it with Shisui. His mother doesn’t really know how to help him, but she tries her best.
“Just…I don’t know, Minato. Just work him through. If you let him stay like this, he’ll just be an even bigger problem for someone else. You really want to put someone through that?” She knows he doesn’t though. Minato might not be as polite as he was in his younger days, but he still can’t stand to put his own problems off onto other people. He’s individualistic in that way. And Kakashi has become his own problem, definitively. It’s the sad truth, and it’s something he just can’t understand how to deal with.
He talks with his mother more, now that he doesn’t live with her - it has a lot to do with the fact that Jiraiya isn’t there himself to advise him and Minato can only rely on himself as far as what he thinks the now-hermit would say. But it also has plenty to do with the fact that she isn’t there anymore. The constant, reassuring figure in his life has become Shisui instead, and so she has become him, they have become one another. They return home at the same moment and meld together for a kiss every night and he makes dinner and she makes tea. It is their routine, their gentle forget-about-the-world-but-forget-me-not routine and sometimes it ends differently and sometimes it does not. Either way, he doesn’t talk to her about Kakashi. He talks to her about things in general and she understands. Shisui is training to be in the ANBU, now. She can hardly tell him anything specific either. It’s fine though, because in the end they can still talk about everything that really matters.
He comes home, kisses the side of her face. “I love you.”
She pats his leg affectionately, smile coy. “Yes, you do.”
And so it is that Kakashi eludes him almost entirely. It’s sad, but its happenstance, and it is everything that he can do to get up in the morning sometimes, raid sirens screaming in his ears from the dreams that haunt his sleep. He starts to look starved a little; starved and tired. Rin notices, natural healer that she is, and when the boys aren’t looking she is the source of his gentle smiles, the slow and shadowy return of his bright-eye nature. She treats him respectfully but loves to dabble around with her own curiosity when Kakashi and Obito have successfully distracted one another - she worries about him with homemade remedies, tribal, herbal, things she finds in books and sometimes they work, and sometimes they don’t, but Rin has very good instincts. Never does she do something to him that has any lasting negative effects. There are no rashes, no side effects. It is a natural nurturing instinct that guides her, a superhuman, transcended mothering urge that he caters too with a practiced ease. She is a girl in a world of boys, not overly powerful but certainly beautiful in mind and soul. He likes Rin very much. He likes Obito, too; not to the same degree, but powerfully. He loves them all powerfully, it’s true. Within six months he treats them as he would his own children, thinks of them in the very same way.
And that is why Kakashi plagues him so, really. Because, in the end, Minato is too polite to dash his brains out, and after awhile he knows that, even if it were to happen, it would be out of the purest form of platonic love he has ever felt, a soft and desperate kind of devotion that only puts the best sort of pain in his heart, and weighs heavily on his ability to sleep at night.
xvi.
It is in the sixth month that Minato whips the cigarette from Kakashi’s pale lips without thinking. It’s somewhat because he can’t stand the sight of his youngest with smoke billowing from his mouth, but it’s mostly because he isn’t thinking. He isn’t thinking and the smoke looks all wrong, smells completely wrong. Kakashi’s small, twelve-year-old mouth isn’t meant to spew smoke. The other child he’s with, a gruff-looking creature with bones that are heavy-set, jumps back from Minato, dark eyebrows flying up as he comes out of nowhere, morphing in out of the shadow to tear the cigarette from Kakashi’s lips even though he dismissed his students some hours ago. The blond spits his words at both of them.
“Don’t smoke, Kakashi.”
His student stares at him, dark eyes sharp with contempt. His hitai-ate keeps his hair away from his face but it’s almost a pity that it does - the firelight from the lamps only serves to further shadow his aristocratic face, further mar his pretty features. Minato ignores the wound as it is made and looks up at the other boy instead, who looks restless at the way in which the Jounin’s blue eyes are burning.
“Go home, Asuma.”
The boy hesitates, looks ready to say something in his defense.
“Go home, Asuma.”
And Asuma does. He pauses to pat Kakashi half-amicably on the bridge of his arm before tearing off in the opposite direction, thinking that they both are ridiculously troublesome, but that the teacher’s rage almost frightens him with its intensity. He’s like a woman, almost, in that way. But it’s not really worth it to stay behind and watch Kakashi get his ass smeared across the pavement.
Minato’s rage glows in the firelight. He looks angrier than he really is, which is surprising - it is almost impossible that he should lose his temper over something so small, but Kakashi has a masochistic love for pushing all his buttons at once, for testing every set boundary to its utmost limits. And because Minato is not really thinking, it doesn’t seem wrong to be angry, because even if he has not explicitly told Kakashi not to smoke, even if Kakashi is not technically under his jurisdiction at the moment-
His cerulean eyes catch and glow with anger.
“You’re better than this, Kakashi.”
“I don’t remember asking, sensei.”
“I don’t remember having to wait for you to ask in order for me to tell. I’m your teacher, Kakashi - I’ll tell you what I have to and you’ll listen, do you understand? I’m tired of this. I’m tired of you and I swear to all heavens that if you don’t shape up I’ll find a way to force you to.”
His student scoffs. “Force me too? Says the man who lets a twelve-year-old tend his insomnia. How do you plan to force me into submission, sensei? How exactly is it that you plan to keep me in line, make me into the perfect little soldier? A sharp reprimand? Smacking my knuckles with a ruler?” He snorts disrespectfully. “Good luck.”
It is in that moment that Minato employs corporal punishment for what it’s worth for the very first time and the very last time. Because, in the end he isn’t thinking, and if he is, he is thinking that maybe he has been entirely wrong about his previous reservations about hurting Kakashi to prove a point. He is thinking that if Kakashi will not show the white spot for him to drive a stake through, he will flip the boy himself, spin him in circles until he can find it on his own, without the boy consciously showing him. He is thinking that if he can find the spot of his own accord, if he can reveal Kakashi’s belly himself, he will have the power of always knowing where it is, and then he will truly have achieved something in their relationship. He will have truly stepped forward.
And so Minato moves - so fast that his student’s eyes can’t follow him, so fast that he does not catch in the light - and within less then seconds, there is a crater where Kakashi’s face has impacted the side of the building his back was against only a moment ago. His hands are behind that back, held there by the manacles of Minato’s hands, Minato, whose knee is buried in the flesh of his spine, whose cheek is side-by-side with his.
Kakashi’s eyes are wide. Surprised. Blinking dumbly.
Minato’s voice is a low, ominous threat.
“I am more powerful than you Kakashi-kun, and so I would advise that you not test me. When I say that I am tired of this sort of behavior, I mean that I will not tolerate it. I’m tired of you. And I am you teacher - it is my duty to make sure that you do not drag this sort of behavior into your adulthood. So I’m going to knock you off your fifty foot pedestal right now, so that no one else will have to do it in the future. I’m going to amputate your ego at the knees so that you don’t walk into adulthood with your nose in the air and your worthlessness worn like a wreath around your neck. I’m tired of it. And I’ll put an end to it no matter what,”
he shoves Kakashi away by the knee in his back, into the side of the building,
“it takes.”
(Because I love you. Because you’re my child and I love you.)
He stands up, releasing him, and Kakashi slides down the wall a ways before recovering and dragging himself to his feet. He holds the side of his face, a large bruise blossoming on the side of his jaw. Minato reaches forward, yanks his hand away and pulls his facial mask back up and over his mouth from where it’s bunched around his neck. As soon as his hands are away he can see the way Kakashi’s whole head is throbbing from the temple down. He wonders, idly, if anyone has said anything of that nature in Kakashi’s presence before. He highly doubts it.
His voice is dark.
“Don’t smoke.”
Kakashi doesn’t. Not ever again. Not even long after his teacher’s death. And Asuma can never bring himself to quit, simply because every time he tugs one of the nicotine sticks out of his weapons pouch and lights it, Kakashi’s eyes get a strange half-pleasant, half-tortured look, as if he is remembering something that is both nice and incredibly painful.
The most immediate consequence on Minato’s end, of course, is that he is never the inadvertent subject of Kakashi’s adept criticism ever again. It’s a strange bond that they form that day in the sixth month and it only gets progressively stranger, but never progressively worse. (There are only improvements ever made.) And in that way is Kakashi the one who inevitably stays inside and involved with Minato’s life until far after it’s end.
The severity of that is measured, inevitably, by Obito.
xvii.
Uchiha Obito is assigned to him in his early days primarily because he is an Uchiha and Minato is a friend of the family, and secondarily because he is a failure. In one of Konoha’s most predominant and outstanding clans, he fails to garner anyone’s notice, being as completely and wholly average as he is. In no way is he extraordinary at all: he is a nice boy, but not the nicest; he is a sensitive boy, but not the most sensitive; he is a thoughtful, smart boy, but not the most thoughtful, nor the smartest. One of the only adjectives with which to describe him are “loving” and “frightened”, and both fail to really comprise what Obito really is. He has no real skills to speak of, no latent talents that have made themselves apparent, and shows virtually no promise as a ninja. For all the ways in which Minato defends Obito from Kakashi sometimes, he cannot really protect him from his moonchild’s fiercest criticism of all because - for all its offensiveness - it is also very truthful. He badgers Kakashi for his rudeness, but he cannot chide him for being untruthful, and he knows how much Obito knows this, and how much it hurts.
And it is this hurt that spawns their largest problems as a team, most especially when the Great War is categorized as such, and as his boys turn thirteen, his girl turns twelve, and Minato turns nineteen there is an introduction made between them and the battlefield. There is a gap that is bridged, delicately, and his students are no longer as such.
“They are warriors, Minato,” Sandaime says gently, and the blond leans more heavily against the tall window of his office. The old man (and he truly is becoming an old man now) has his hands held behind his back when he says it and Minato has his eyes closed to the idea, his hand on the windowsill, and a bad ache in the back of his throat. It is a painful announcement. A painful gap. But Konoha has no more soldiers. The ones with experience are long dead, and the ones that aren’t are the ones with teams like Minato’s - teams that can no longer afford to be spared war’s true breadth. “Warriors under your command. And this country’s badly in need of them.”
And it is Kakashi, the cynic, who sits beside him stiffly and tells him that his face is pale. He should go home. Get some rest. Get a girlfriend. Minato says softly that he already has one. Kakashi says stiffly that she must not be any good.
Minato assigns him a D-Rank mission involving the education of young school children on the subject of kunai. Great amounts of kunai. For somewhere around four hours of a day wherein he is later assigned to shovel out a horse stable.
Kakashi doesn’t say anything negative on the topic of girlfriends for a long time after that.
xviii.
Their first mission is inevitably small - a removal of old battlements on the Leaf’s eastern-most border. Minato does not explain it to them as an act of war and so they do not think of it as such, which he thinks is good, because the last thing to know about war is that you are participating in it. If you participate in it knowingly, you must have courage. If you participate in it unknowingly, you are left to forever question yourself for your naïveté, which is far better. You aren’t haunted the same way, and that makes all the difference.
For this reason does he guide them swiftly through the motions; they set off bombs left behind, clear the field of discarded weaponry, chase off buzzards. He goes ahead to move the corpses away himself because there is some desperate need for him to shield them from this. He doesn’t like it and so he keeps it from them in every way that he can, drags the dead bodies away the night before, so that he is unreasonably tired on the day of the actual mission itself. But it’s no trouble, really. There’s no comparison really, no reason he would go back and do it differently. Kakashi has already seen too much. Rin is already predestined to see too much, simply being the medic-nin that she is. And Obito isn’t ready. Not yet. Warriors they might be. But children they still are. His children. And he likes them that way.
Their first mission is inevitably small and goes inevitably wrong as such. Everything that can go wrong will go wrong, and for every disaster is Minato there, is Minato defending them, and it feels all wrong. He’s filled with a startling anguish a knowledge of undesirable things creeping up on his students in ways that he cannot control. He feels as if it is their childhood being robbed them and he can’t stand it. And so it is inevitable that the enemy soldier emerges from the forest when he does.
He is thin, starved, his eyes crazed, and Obito is the one who sees him first. He looks up, through orange plastic and yells out to him, startled. Rin glances over her shoulder at him, looks into the grass further and screams in alarm, and Kakashi looks over and Minato stares, blue eyes putting a crosshair over the man’s bald head. He startles himself with it, visibly chokes, shakes his head to rid himself of it. (Surely the war hasn’t done this to him, where even a helpless man like this is threatening, just in his very existence?) Kakashi glances over at him, questioning. Obito yells out to the man, trots a little closer to him, asks him if he needs help.
And the man draws out a broad-edged sword that just grazes the tip of the Uchiha boy’s nose and Minato has blown through his chest in an instant, snatching Obito to him, diving beneath the sword and plunging his kunai through the man’s stomach as he shoots past. There is a gaping crater of flesh left behind him and his hand is gloved in blood and Obito trembles and shakes and eventually cries against him as the enemy-nin collapses to the ground. He cries and his tears build at the edges of his goggles and Minato simply stares, facial features an ugly soft and gently serious. It’s almost strange how at peace he seems to be and Kakashi and Rin watch him.
“…Kakashi, please help me move the body. Rin, come here, check Obito for wounds.”
Obito is shaking almost convulsively, face flooded with distress. “N-No! I’m-I’m-I’m fine! I-I…s-sensei, you…you…”
Minato pulls away from him though, patting his head lightly, pain flooding his chest and weighting his stomach. Kakashi coldly tells Obito to stop sniveling and Minato doesn’t have the heart to tell him not to be so angry, that it’s alright to be frightened because he was. Because he is. Because he wouldn’t have just killed their enemy otherwise, if he wasn’t frightened. It’s what you’re frightened of that affects things.
Kakashi lifts the man’s head and Minato lifts the man’s feet and they carry him into the forest and toss his down among the dozen other corpses that Minato moved this morning. Kakashi stares at them for a long time before Minato speaks to him in a soft voice:
“…you’re soldiers now.”
Kakashi is a Jounin two months later.
And that is the end of it.
(The beginning.)
ixx.
When the blade sings through the air, he collides with the first man he sees, he collides with a ferocity and a violence that he has never felt before in his life, with an electric thrill that shoots from his hips all the way up his spine. His feet spike with pain as he lands, his head reels with momentum and he smacks warriors into trees, he smacks blades into bodies, and he puts holes in a blind whirlwind of protective momentum. He is a streak of blond, a halo of gold and he collides with the world and with the enemy in a decimating destructive impossible force of nature. He breaks bones and smashes holes in trees and in mere minutes are they torn open and sprayed across the field as if they are nothing.
It’s a long moment of breathing wherein he stares at the damage he’s reeked, the havoc that’s slowly breathing itself out. Inhale. Exhale. His face, his body exudes calm. His fists aren’t clenched. There isn’t a spot of dirt on him. Not a spot of blood. But his eyes; his azure eyes are white coals, his eyes are burning brightly. He’ll kill them all again. If they get up again, he’ll kill them, all of them. He slowly exhales, slowly catches his breath.
And then he looks over his shoulder and Rin is the only one conscious, staring at him almost blindly, her face dazed, grateful and crushed like a china platter. He walks slowly over, kneels beside her, strokes her face tenderly, the constant father figure. She looks dazed. Only Kakashi hangs, limp, off of her strong shoulders and there is a slow creeping worry that inches across the surface of his stomach. He runs his fingers gently against her and she stares at him, sad, dazed, heartbroken. Kakashi’s face is bleeding, and there are dried tears on one side of it, running adjacent to a long unfamiliar stroke across his left eye.
Rin is the one to tell him the story of how Obito died, and he stays very still for the entirety of it, his whole body going cold.
After she is done, he sends her off, telling her to take Kakashi to an open meadow not too far from them, and as she carries him off he walks slowly to the very edge of the gorge and feels his own heart slowly breaking. He stares down into it before the emotion overtakes him again and he’s ramming his fist into the stones, slamming his body and his power against them, overwhelmed, his mind and his heart an impenetrable maelstrom. His speed can’t help him and it throws him into an imbalance, throws him into a grief-stricken panic, and he disregards it, shatters his knives on the stones, exerts all his power against them, and in moments he becomes the wind. He becomes intangible, he becomes a vortex of air, a similar one newly swirling in his palm and he silently blows all the rocks to pieces with it, tears a wound deep into the Earth, tears so deep that he destroys the basin altogether, and penetrates into the river deep below.
He only finds the uncrushed part of his deadlast student’s body - the other is long lost in the rubble - and he lifts the boy carefully, delicately cradling him to his chest. His whole body shakes with anguish, and he is the most unsteady he will ever be. It takes him almost a half an hour to realize that there is no possible way to revive him, that the best way to honor Obito’s monumental sacrifice is to let the river carry him away, and only once he’s set him down and let go does he truly absorb the feeling of his sadness, the incredible, concurring factor of it.
He does not cry.
He goes back to camp and waits for Kakashi to wake instead.
And when they return to Konoha, he stumbles in to Shisui’s room and collapses on her bed and she holds him without reluctance. It is days before he can stand up straight. It is even longer before he and the Sandaime are on speaking terms again. And even then, his relationships with everyone around him are entirely changed. The end and the beginning. (He doesn’t cry at Obito’s funeral either. The first time he cries about it is much, much later on. And it is with Kakashi, which is entirely fitting.)
Kakashi is the one to name his attack the Rasengan.
And they do not talk about it much afterwards.
xx.
It is through Obito, too, that Namikaze Minato, he who will far too soon be Konohagakure no Yondaime Hokage, comes into direct contact with the Kyuubi no Kitsune for the first time. It is inevitable, of course, the way he meets him (in the same manner that he met Yohko who he still does not know as Yohko many years before), but it determines him. It determines the rest of him, more than anything, and that being the case, it is depressing, looking back on it.
Looking to it, looking straight at it (which is usually the more important thing) it’s just a very intimidating, irritating experience, as Kyuubi is himself.
It’s when he’s out in the market for flowers that it happens, which is strangely anticlimactic for Kyuubi. The monster is apt to play the primadonna if he can, any time he can - the more melodramatic, the better he seems to like it. (It’s catering straight to the most painful things, it’s human heartbreak that Kyuubi lavishes in. Cruel tricks are easily his most petty pass time, and inevitably how he met his wife in the first place. It is virtually always his intention to wound those that he comes into contact with, and he usually manages just fine. By the end, Minato knows all of this very, very well.) He appears as a woman stricken with incredible beauty and that is how he catches the store owner’s attention; all flowing lines and pale blond hair and golden-crimson eyes that catch the light just so. He (she? Not really, though. You can’t call a male female, even if he’s dressed like one) seems juxtaposed onto a feminine frame, his white cloak and golden bangles more than eerily familiar when they catch Minato’s ears.
But it’s his effeminate charm and wiles that catch the attention of the store owner. Minato is able to successfully ignore them after a short while. It’s after he has departed and the store owner starts to shriek something about money changing to leaves that Minato is finally paying attention.
(An old myth. But one that angers him nonetheless.)
Minato is an ungodly sort of fast - has only gotten faster since Obito’s death (because he has to be; he and Kakashi both have gotten much, much faster, as a preventative measure. They refuse to lose anyone else. Life is all about balance. About other lives within itself. What a strange occurrence, the way people will hang on to one another instead of themselves,) - and so he whips through the crowd and corners what has been a mysterious woman up until now at the town’s very edge. Or rather Kyuubi stops, and he stops and they stare at one another.
“That was cheap.”
“Is that supposed to be a pun?” The Fox’s mouth curls revealing sharp canines. “I’m told humans are very fond of puns. The humorous use of a word or phrase so as to emphasize or suggest its different meanings or applications, or the use of words that are alike or nearly alike in sound but different in meaning; a play on words. Puns. Such irrelevant things.” He cocks his head amusedly to the side and by the curve of his neck, by the thickness, Minato sees that the store owner was mistaken in assuming he was female. “Like you, a little.”
“You seem to like the sound of your own voice quite a bit.”
“Don’t you?”
Minato narrows his eyes distastefully. The Fox seems genuinely curious, pale golden-red eyes aglow with some sort of malicious delight. They stand like that for quite some time. It’s strange, the atmosphere that infect the air around them, the way the Fox’s nails seem to extend excitedly as he reaches slowly to pull down the hood of his cloak, the same one that-
”…the woman in Amegakure.”
The Fox’s smile is abrasive. You could cut yourself on the edges of it.
”You must be referring to my Wife.” He fingers the bangles that float around his neck in a thoughtful sort of way, his sharp teeth now so visible that Minato is surprised that he hasn’t caught his lips on them yet. It seems odd for some reason that there should be no blood on him whatsoever. “I seem to vaguely recall her using these clothes for an outing some days ago.”
”Years.” Minato’s correction is off-handed, a secondary thought, but the ethereal presence in front of him catches upon it, his long mouth doubling over itself in a dark frown, as if he has been offended.
”Your kind seem to find that word so important,” the Fox says, voice insolent, an arrogant baritone drawl. “What do years really mean when they don’t age you, anyway? There’s no reason to milk so much from it, really. But I suppose you humans hardly survive long enough to compensate for your own existences, very less understand the true insignificance of a year. Of time. Don’t you ever get tired of measuring it? Of making believe it can somehow trap you, defeat you in a way death will not?”
Minato stares at him, insides coursing with a rough-edged electricity. “Are you saying that you aren’t human, then?”
The Fox snorts. “Are you blind?” His smiles unfurls across him again, cruel and taunting. “Your kind is senseless, it amazes me. Can you hear anything? See anything?”
”I can see that you aren’t human.”
”You can see that now,” the demon says lightly. “Now that it coincides with your train of thought. Humans do that so often it’s nauseating. You can see only once you’re convinced you can. How limited that perspective must be.”
”What are you?” Minato is deadly serious, his blue eyes on fire, and he can see them reflected back at him like mirrors in the Fox’s should-be eyes. There is a pungently bitter taste in his mouth. “What can you know of humans if you aren’t one?”
And that putrid smile widens.
”Plenty.
”I am the Kyuubi, after all.”
Minato stares at him blandly, and the Fox erupts into laughter.
”That’s right. That’s right.” And suddenly long, clawed fingers extend to just barely brush his cheek, running along the line of his jaw. Minato recoils instantaneously, but the damage is done - Kyuubi’s body heat startles him with its intensity, his skin smarts. It feels like he’s been burned with a hot poker. “She said you’d give me that look. That one exactly. I remember. Namikaze Minato, aren’t you? He who will, by way of the Great War, usher in an era of peace, and a longstanding revolution. Not that the Revolution itself has been truly identified yet. Not accurately. But you must understand what I say when I say that I can still see it. Yes, yes. I’ve waited a long time to meet you. A much longer time than you can imagine - I use increments of lengths far more sparingly than you.”
”What are you talking about?” There’s a soft degree of revulsion that twists in Minato’s throat with his words, a distaste that makes its volatility very abruptly known, and he stares at him, sharp pains dappling his arms. His face still smarts where the Fox had gall enough to touch him. Kyuubi grins.
”Such a fragile thing, the human mind. You know, I almost think you could have never met her and it wouldn’t have changed the Course whatsoever. You seem as uniform as all the rest. Resolute and unchanging as such. So many ideals. It’s a pity. You aren’t too bad on the eyes. With a change of species and birthright you could’ve easily been mistaken for one of mine, with looks like yours.”
Minato’s mouth bends sharply downward. “The Course?”
Kyuubi blinks at him for a second before his smirk widens further. “Oh, that is interesting.”
”What is?” Minato’s frustration thins him.
”You intend to try to escape it then? Your fate?”
Minato’s body goes abruptly cold, a chill shooting through him, his anger blanketed in a layer of new-fallen snow. He says nothing. He doesn’t move.
Kyuubi’s laughter is tearing through him within moments, as he knew it would.
”But you’ve already played so far into the Prophecy. You’re still resisting it? Beasts and burden, you are as foolish as I thought, aren’t you? How predictably atypical. You humans are such creatures of denial. You’d think having my Wife deliver that sort of thing unto you would help you resign yourself to it.”
”Does she even have a name?” Minato avoids addressing the actual subject, avoids actually watching his lips move. He does as he did with Orochimaru years ago and stares so deeply into Kyuubi’s eyes that it feels like he could smash them if he wanted to. He stares, unafraid and unwavering. The world has become a soft burning sensation in his temples, and it’s not very pleasant. (But he isn’t moving, and he isn’t scared. Not like he is for Kakashi sometimes. Not the way he was for Obito.)
Kyuubi snorts. “Yohko. Not that it concerns you.”
”She is your wife, isn’t she?”
”One of them.”
”One of them?”
”The kit goes so far as to call the kettle black. God, you’re exactly as she described, too. Your mannerisms - they’re stifling. It’s remarkable no one’s killed you yet. If it will calm you down, I will say that she’s the Favorite, that the rest of them know it.”
Minato’s disgust must be evident on his face because Kyuubi can’t seem to stop laughing. It echoes against him, seeringly hot and relentless and cruel. Kyuubi’s laughter is the black, unescapable, suffocating heat of a sunspot, but easily twenty thousand times worse for it’s sharp, malicious intent. “Have you really forgotten, then? The Prophecy. She said she told you of it, recited it for you so that you wouldn’t forget. That’s harder than she’s usually willing to try.” He smirks widely, still chuckling darkly, eyes on his.
”If I tell you again, do you promise to pay attention? Foolish little kit. Insignificant little darling.” Kyuubi leans too close then, and Minato’s stomach wrenches, beating itself against his ribcage. (Or is it his heart? He can’t remember which is which for a second. Kyuubi’s closeness generates overwhelmingly sinister thoughts and feelings in him, ignites his body like it’s on fire, and he almost twists in pain, feeling the Fox’s oppressive power and recognizing it as disaster flames licking up his legs. It’s incredibly painful, the sheer amount of power he has.) He wants to hit him, but he’s not sure which is the best tactic, since it isn’t every day you have an opponent like this. And, of course, he’s never heard of Kyuubi’s victims escaping. He makes his plans quickly, rerouting the intimate, electronic pathogens in his brain. Any other words he would say are forcibly stopped in his throat, and he is easily aware that it is Kyuubi who is responsible. The Fox smiles down at him. Minato is slightly alarmed by their height difference - the animal has to be almost 190 centimeters tall, apparently to add to its naturally intimidating persona.
”If I tell it to you, do you promise not to forget?”
And of course he can’t say no.
He clenches his fists and keeps his eyes hard instead.
And the Kyuubi laughs.
”How entertaining. You, Namikaze Minato, he who will be the unknowing king to knowingly beget kings, he who will plant the seed that will bloom and choke the Fan in it’s greatness, the Crane at it’s length. You know every line she told you. I can see it. Politeness, staunch chivalry that is you charm. So will it be your downfall. And so it goes that good medicine tastes bitter in the mouth; it is the duplicity of your own heart that will betray and destroy you. A spider lily and a Narcissus. Both will you hold tightly in your grasp, tightly when they are threatened, and even tighter when it is you who threatens them. And when it is that you are driven to the ground by Heaven itself and they are cut from your hands, both will crumble and die in your absence. The Narcissus, immediately. The spider lily in due time. You remember all this, of course.
”And so the music of the Whirlpool will be the one to dance to. And the song of the Piano will be the one that signifies and mourns your passing.” Kyuubi’s face is so grotesque. “The reverse side that also has a reverse side. So it is that your golden self will ultimately ruin the lives of those whose belief in it is the least deluded. So it is that those ruins will beget Change, beget Revolution. It’s magnificent, you know. I really can’t wait.” He leans forward, an ungodly close, and his fingers are on Minato’s jaw again, searing heat tearing through him. He wants to hurt him so badly. His violence is the burn against his skin.
Kyuubi laughs.
And then he kisses him.
Minato is fast - incredibly fast, ungodly fast - and it’s less than three seconds that span the time it takes for him to blow Kyuubi ten feet from him, his lips burning with a white heat that makes him want to vomit. He feels nauseous, his whole body tensed so tightly that he wants to reach down and start ripping springs and wire. Kyuubi collides with a tree some six meters away and is laughing so hard and cruelly it doesn’t look like he’ll ever stop. Minato’s so disgusted that it takes all of his self-control not to slam him in the stomach with a Rasengan right there.
The Fox cracks an eye at him, glee more than evident. “I was right. You would’ve been so much better as one of mine rather than one of yours.”
”Shut up.” (It is the extent of Minato announcing his decision to leave and pretend as if this didn’t happen. It’s been a long time since he’s seen Jiraiya - Shisui’s been on a mission the whole week long and he’s been waiting so desperately for her to come back, and if she doesn’t come tonight he thinks he might rip a hole in the house. The nervous tension he feels now is so incredible.) He watches him unwaveringly.
”You’ll meet her soon. I can feel it. The Great War has brought with it the very best of things it seems. Oh yes.” He smiles widely and Minato stares at him for twenty seconds longer before turning on his heel and starting back for safer, more well-inhabited ground at a proud, painstakingly civilian pace. Kyuubi’s laughter echoes after him.
”That which quickly ripens, so does it quickly rot, dear kit. Remember that!”
Minato pays the store owner back himself and when Shisui comes home early in the evening, he kisses her long and hard, kisses her in every way he hasn’t kissed her before, runs his mouth tenderly over ever part of her body in a vain attempt to cleanse Kyuubi’s burns and kisses from his own. If she notices his distress she is careful not to mention it, and he tries his best to thank her by way of caresses, by way of running deft hand over her smooth thighs and telling her that he loves her repeatedly. Endlessly.
He kisses her until early morning when she finally starts breathing normally and eases him out of her and helps the long process of redemption and of cleaning up after themselves. The sheets are mussed with them but it isn’t too much of a problem, really. They share a shower, they share their bodies, and so it is inevitable that it will not be a problem.
But when he breathes, pain spikes through him like a dagger.
That notice Shisui does spare him as she caresses his chest with her delicate fingers, counting the ways in which she can both clean the sweat from his skin and make him tremble as if he is on the verge of generating more for her to dry from him.
”You look troubled.”
He kisses her forehead in a characteristic moment of post-coital gentleness (of post-birth gentleness - so it goes that Minato is always pointedly gentle with her, as if he does not think himself deserving of her beauty. And truly, he does not,) and then they simply lie together, naked beneath the bed covers, not necessarily cuddling because the excess heat has a way of making Shisui uncomfortable, but certainly together in every since of the word. As if the world is not upside down. As if their country is not at war. As if the time they both have left to live is easily significant and predictably so. For Shisui, as if Minato is the only one who will ever see her body in this way, who she will ever allow to love her so unabashedly.
For Minato, as if Shisui is the only one he will ever love.
And so it is that they wake on time, dress as they should, go about their lives in the orderly fashion they always have afterwards.
And Minato is careful never to tell her of the Prophecy.
That is someone else’s job entirely.