The Decemberist : Part II [YonShi, KushiMina, KyuuYon, KyuuOC; R]
Title: The Decemberist: Part Two ∙∙∙ Lookingglass
Author: the_lady_lamb
Genre: Naruto
Sub-genre: Angst/Romance
Summary: (Part II: Chapters XXXI-XXXV) Namikaze Minato is nothing other than what he makes himself, but he knows that the war that makes itself affront him is not the war he sould really worry about. He just doesn't know how much until he meets Her.
Rated: R for semi-gratuitous violence and sexually suggestive themes.
Author's Notes: What started out small has blown into something I never expected. (For you guys, yukari_rin and fujiwara_san.)
CHAPTERS XXI-XXV
CHAPTERS XXVI-XXX
The Decemberist
PART TWO ∙∙∙ LOOKINGGLASS
xxxi.
It was the force of the depressive atmospheres and the letters themselves that coax Minato into the showers this night, too. Although, to say it is night is not entirely accurate - Minato has taken to sleeping early and waking at sporadic intervals throughout the evening. It is better than not sleeping, but it is born of nervous energy which is similarly spawned from his overall sunkenness, and so it definitely isn’t a positive occurrence. His hair echoes his inner disrepair - it’s almost to his shoulders now, and he’s vaguely reminded of Jiraiya when he looks at himself in mirrors, which isn’t often. He doesn’t like to see his eyes, the way they look now. They seem hollowed out, a bit, and he’s waiting for them to go back to normal.
While he waits, he walks silently down the hall, and pushes the door to the showers open, because it’s two o’ clock in the morning, and if he isn’t sleeping he feels the need to do something productive, because otherwise he just sits around and thinks, and that’s painful. (There’s too much to think about, nowadays.) He steps onto the tile and starts at how cold it is, rubbing his arms through his sweats.
He walks into one of the stalls and hangs his towel over the door. It’s late, and so there’s a potential for the noise to wake someone, but he isn’t particularly worried. Courteousness is different with men than it is with women. And if he didn’t take a shower for the noise it would make and somebody found out… He doesn’t really want to visualize the outcome. It really wears on a person to live with so many for so long a time. He wonders how Shisui has managed it for this long - the Uchiha family is so large that sometimes when they were younger she would recount stories to him of her yesterdays and he would get so overwhelmed by how many people were involved that he would lose what the story was even about, and then she would have to retell it. Nowadays he isn’t so easily perplexed, but she still has such a large family, so many relatives constantly bustling in, out, and around her life every minute of it. For Minato, who has always only had his mother, the very idea is just impossible.
He takes off his shirt and (after looking around him for no perceivable reason other than he’d really like his privacy) and his pants and folds them neatly and sets them on a stool that is set out for the purpose. The chill embraces him suddenly and he shivers against it, standing out of the way of the water as it shoots with a metallic squeak from the faucet. When his goosebumps are overwhelming and the water that catches against the thrill of his skin is warm in some bland sense of the word, he steps in and sighs as it hits his nerves directly, like a child with piano keys. (But he’s only heard Shisui play the piano once, now that he thinks about it; a big grand that her mother keeps in the foyer.)
He breathes, takes a moment to truly relax his muscles, tilting his face up and closing his eyes. There is so much stress clouding his mind right now, and all he wants to do is wash it out of him like something stubborn from a dishpan. He knows how to do that. His mother taught him that when he first moved out. First moved out. He aches so badly for his home. It’s been so long since he’s felt the loamy warmth of Konoha around his shoulders, that soft scent of leaves in his pockets, the gentle smile of people he would gladly give his life for, if only to see them again. Sending Kakashi to fight on the Grass and Rain front. What are they thinking? It’s ludicrous is what it is. Simply ludicrous.
He sighs discontentedly; ludicrous is an excellent adjective for the entire thing. If he thought winning would solve something, he would figure out a way of doing it, but as it is, he’s lost their cause and it doesn’t seem to be coming back to him any time soon. War is such a sad business altogether. Didn’t there exist some peaceable, democratic way of doing this? Is the Fire Nation the only one in the world that abided by their treaties? The only one that had any honor at all, any insight into the horrific art that war is? It greatly troubles him to think that anyone in their right mind - very less those who had power over others - would choose to go to war with anyone, very less someone they had promised not to go to war with. When he was younger, he admits that he did not think anything of it. War was simply what was. But now it is coming down to the gridline and he’s not pleased with it any more. Minato is so much more a dove than a hawk, and its beginning to show and make him doubt himself.
He looks up into the lighting, draws his fingers through his hair thoughtfully. It strikes him as viciously unfair, the way this war has taken up so much of his mind’s space. Had he his own way, it would not be on his mind at all, but its only more and more obvious with the passage of time how much life has determined that he will not have his way, regardless. He frowns to himself, reaches up and adjusts the spout a little so that the water hits more of his neck than his face and ducking under it again.
He’s in a strangely puckish mood for being so put out, and so distracted that it takes him a very long time to realize that he has glanced over another person’s face and not even really noticed them at all. The realization is so sudden and so startling that he leaps back nearly a whole foot before rushing to cover himself, spewing a lot of gibberish nothings in the midst of doing so. Kushina snorts rather loudly at him, most especially when he wraps his arms over himself.
”Oh yeah, because obviously I’m marveling at your goods. Smooth one, Namikaze.”
Minato splutters, and she cocks an eyebrow at him. She’s leaning over the separating wall between them, her arms crossed; he thinks she might be standing on her tiptoes to do it, since the barrier only comes up to about the middle of his chest but, then, so does Kushina. “What,” he hisses through his teeth (as if someone might overhear him), “are you doing?!”
She scoffs. “Taking a shower. Duh. What does it look like I’m doing?”
”Being- Being-”
”Obnoxious? Perverted? Weird as hell?”
”One of those, yes!”
”Jesus, will you chill out, Keiko? Christ.”
”Get back on your side!!”
”Fine, fine,” she says, pulling her arms back over the barrier and ducking back out of his sight. (When she does he heaves a soft sigh of relief, but a hand up to his chest where his heart’s still thudding, having almost stopped from fright. His hands are shaking a little. Is it really normal for women to just spring up like that? God, she’s really so abnormal…) “You don’t have to be such a pussy about it. I just thought you looked…”
Minato tries to keep his voice from shaking but doesn’t quite succeed. (She really has manged to scare him very badly. He’s contemplating going for his towel and making a run from it. Is it really appropriate for men and women to shower together? Certainly this can’t be the intended construct of the showers.) “…l-looked what?”
”…sad, I guess.” He sees her lean so that only her eyes and the top of her head peer over the top of the barrier and he immediately skitters out of the way of her sight. “Look, will you stop being such a freak? I didn’t know you hadn’t noticed I was here. Anybody ever told you you’re really spacey?”
”No,” he says worriedly, “not that I can remember.” He wrestles with his mind and decides that if he can’t go without a shower, he can forfeit drying off afterwards. He grabs up his towel and knots it doubly around his waist before diving back into the spray, hoping that it will take the red out of his face.
”Ease up and stop acting like such a virgin. It’s not like I’ve never seen a naked guy before.” Minato turns about another three shades of pink as his commander snickers to herself sinisterly. “Honestly, I grew up with three older brothers. I’ve seen more than you can possibly imagine. Seriously. Like, there was this one time-”
”Kushina-san,” Minato says quickly, cutting her off, “I really don’t need to hear whatever you’re about to say.”
”I’m trying to make you feel better.”
”It isn’t working.”
”You’re such a pussy. Did you even notice I came in?”
”No.”
Kushina snorts. “Spa~cey.” He hears her kick something across the tile that sounds like plastic - maybe a shampoo bottle, maybe. Minato scratches the back of his neck nervously and looks around for his own showering supplies, finding them where he set them down near his clothing. They’ve gotten moved a little in his haste to get his towel back, but he leans over and takes them up, looking over the bottles and labels. “What were you thinking about, anyway?”
Minato unzips the plastic bag and takes out his own shampoo, trying to get his fingers to stop shaking as he pumps a spot exactly the size of a 100￥ coin into his palm. “I’m…I’m not sure anymore. I was kind of…drifting. Thinking has started to just get really…I’m not sure. Tedious, I suppose.”
”Tedious? You think that might be bad for you? Not thinking?” He hears her change her position so that the water hits her body differently. It’s a strange thing to visualize, and his blush returns. (He wonders what the matter with him is, exactly.) “But I guess I know what you mean. Seems like the more I think, the worse stuff gets, and then the more I have to think about.” She starts pouting, then, he can hear it. “Now, see, I was hoping it was something more interesting than just you being weird. Like that girlfriend you supposedly have, for instance.”
Minato scowls, and speaks with a warning tone. “Kushina-”
”Yeah, yeah, I know she’s not imaginary. I was kidding.”
Minato lathers his hair up, alarmed by how much of it there seems to be, all of a sudden - he has to go back for more shampoo no less than twice, and does so in the long silence between them as Kushina decides to speak. When she does, the bubbles are foamy between his fingers, fluffed in their own way.
“…what’s she like, anyway?”
Minato blinks, turns to look at where he can see the very top of her head beside him. It’s odd for her to ask, but Kushina is odd, so he supposes that he should answer her question instead of standing here acting stupid about it. As he chooses his words his mood changes completely - his nervousness is changed into an airy nostalgia that suits him much better. He smiles to himself, thinking about it. “She’s…well, she’s Shisui, I guess.”
”What’s that mean?”
”It means…” He thinks, puts a hand up to his mouth for a second. (The soap soaks into his hair.) “…she’s like…a spider lily. Like, if there was ever a woman born of a spider lily, it would be her. She’s that kind of person.”
”…have I ever told you you’re weird?”
Minato chuckles to himself.
”What’s she good at it?”
”Almost…everything, it seems. She’s beautiful, she’s intelligent, she’s poetic to a fault…but, I can’t imagine that she really has any. She has…a huge family, but that can’t be helped. She’s cold in some ways, I suppose, but she’s entirely clean cut. She’s like…well,” he smiles to himself, “she’s Shisui. She’s like Shisui because that’s who she is. I don’t think I can explain it very well. There’s no one to really compare her to except…her.”
”Sounds out of your league.”
”Most certainly.”
There’s another silence and Minato takes the opportunity to realize there’s still lather in his hair and wash it out, hands scratching into his scalp comfortingly.
”You really love her, huh?”
Minato smiles and looks down at the drain in the floor. His chest aches. “More than I can possibly say.”
”…that’s kind of cute.”
He blinks back at the barrier, and just like last time, his demeanor changes as he does. The nervousness returns effortlessly and he fumbles with the shampoo bottle, just barely managing to keep it from falling. “…thank you,” he says at last, get his conditioner as quickly as he can so that it won’t be off the ground for too long. He doesn’t want to embarrass himself.
”You gunna marry her?”
”I…” He pauses. “I…haven’t thought about it.”
”Liar. You’re too effeminate to have never thought about it.”
”I’m not sure her family would approve.”
”…how long have you two been together?”
”Um…officially?”
”Do I sound like I care?”
”Er…somewhere around five or six years. I can’t be entirely sure, since I’m not sure what you’re measuring ‘togetherness’ by.”
”Five or six years?”
”I believe so, yes, assuming I understood the question…”
”And her family wouldn’t approve?”
”Well, no, I don’t know that they would.”
”Then fuck ‘em.”
”Wha-What?” Minato stares over at her and finds that she’s popped her head over the barrier again and is grinning at him semi-maniacally. Her whole face is beaming with the intensity of it, and he can’t be sure even remotely of what’s going on in that head of hers but he’s relatively certain he doesn’t like where this is going (even if there’s definitely a part of his mind that loves to hear that there is someone else alive in the world who would sometimes like to tell the Uchiha family to go screw itself).
”Fuck ‘em. You’ve dealt with ‘em this long. Chances are you’re going to stay together even if you don’t get married. So fuck ‘em.”
She ducks back down, looking pleased with herself and Minato marvels at the simplicity of it. He has to admit that, as cut-and-dry as she says it, it’s possible that that could very well be the way this all works out. Of course, the Uchiha could probably find some way to try to be underhanded and marry Shisui off to somebody else but Minato knows that she would never stand for anything of the kind. If worst comes to worst, they simply won’t marry and can just live on together without it. It’s sort of a formality he used to like to daydream about when he was kissing her sometimes when they were teenagers but he hasn’t thought about it for a while now.
”Five or six years…Christ. How old are you?”
”Hm? Nineteen.”
”Shit, you’re telling me we’re the same age? Oh, knowing my luck, I’m older than you, even! Five or six years?! You guys hooked up when you were thirteen?! Fuck!” Kushina seems truly incensed by the idea of it, which puzzles him until she explains it irritatedly: “I haven’t ever had a boyfriend more than a couple of months. And most of those were long-distance. This village is way too small - it’s just weird to date people who are kind of like siblings to you, y’know? And you’re all kind of jerks, to boot…”
”…men?”
”Sure, let’s go with that.”
”I don’t think all men are jerks…”
”Including yourself? No,” she says lightly, “I guess they’re not.”
He takes a second and realizes she’s complimenting him. “…thank you, Kushina-san.”
”You’re welcome.”
He waits another moment before deciding to ask: “…isn’t it a little strange for a woman to bathe in a men’s shower?”
”Yeah, but, I mean, like I said, I grew up with three brothers and my dad. Feminine modesty isn’t exactly my thing. I mean, I didn’t think anyone would be in here, but I didn’t really care either. There are walls, you know. And besides,” she says, noticing that Minato’s giving her a look (the invader of privacy boasting that she has some? For shame,) “the women’s showers have pipes that are all messed up. Kaigyo pulled a prank on all the girls when I was, like, twelve years old - somehow got every spout in there to randomly shoot ice-cold water at us, little bastard. We’ve never been able to get them completely back to normal. And, I mean, I’ve taken showers in here since I was little.”
”You stayed here as a child?”
”This whole thing was more a part of us all playing pretend when we were younger,” she says, a little to herself this time, “some big game, I guess. It’s not now, of course, but it was then. We did everything here. When there weren’t any soldiers around, it was all huge and ours to screw with. I mean, when there were soldiers here, we got in big trouble. But otherwise it was really cool.” She picks up a bar of soap and starts running it up and down her arms. “What about you? Any childhood memories to speak of? Or were they too clouded by your Perfect Girlfriend?”
Minato coughs out a laugh. “I wasn’t dating her when I was six.”
”Oh, I bet you were thinking about it.”
”Not when I was six.”
”Is she the only one you’ve ever had? Girlfriend, I mean.”
Minato is slightly taken aback. “…well, yes.”
”Are you serious? The only one? Are you sure that’s healthy?”
His eyebrow creases slightly. “What are you talking about?”
”Your first girlfriend has lasted you six years? Long enough that you think you want to spend the rest of your life with her? Does that sound realistic to you? I mean, I’m not saying you don’t love her - it’s obvious you do. I just mean, how are you even sure she’s the one for you when you haven’t even looked around?”
Minato frowns, stomach churning softly. “…I know how to value what’s in front of me.”
”Well, I mean, Minato, seriously. I’m not doubting you or anything, I’m just saying: how can you expect to fully appreciate her if you’ve never loved and lost? Never loved anyone else but her? There’s a thing with novelty, sure, but you can’t honestly be willing to just settle down like this without even looking around. I mean- Ah! Shit!” A yellow bar of soap comes skating out onto the floor at his toes. “Can you get that for me?”
He reaches down and picks it up, holding it between two fingers and going over to the barrier, but she surprises him by rising up to meet him almost out of nowhere. They bump noses and he pulls backwards, startled by it. She seems oblivious and somehow they stay within inches of one another as she takes it out of his hand. “Thanks.”
They stay like that for a moment, and Minato finds himself staring at her, her eyes especially because of the way they bore into him over the lapse of those twenty seconds. They stand very still together and it feels like the world has walked away without them onboard, swinging its arms jovially in the sunlight of a new day. The water keeps running, goosebumps rear their icy little heads on Minato’s arms and stomach, a small thrill races down his spinal chord. The room echoes with their silence, their motionlessness. Everything is still around them, as if waiting, and Minato just can’t turn away from her because suddenly simpleness is an abstract dream he has never had before. He stares at her and her eyes are oceans, her eyes are storm clouds, and the autumn red that frames her is her moonlight.
He kisses her and doesn’t think about it, and both their eyes snap closed when he does, as if they are thinking about someone else, but they aren’t thinking at all. Minato isn’t thinking whatsoever. His mind flatlines and he presses his lips to hers and finds them to be warmer than he should find even vaguely attractive - she’s burning, a roiling, unconquerable heat, and it suits her. There are no hands involved, but he can feel that her bare shoulders are still there, taunting him.
His chest constricts.
He starts thinking again when the door slams on the opposite end of the room, and in the second that he does he immediately stops breathing and withdraws from her abruptly.
They stare at one another.
Amenbou’s voice echoes around the room.
”Kushina, are you in here?”
”Yeah,” she says loudly, not even looking in his direction for a second. She’s still staring at Minato, and he’s still staring at her, hand clamped tightly over his lips.
Minato speaks in a voice just above a whisper. “…I think I should go.”
It’s a moment or two before she speaks to him, very softly. “…you can take my towel. That one seems kinda wet.”
Minato turns red. “I…I don’t-“
Kushina’s come back and thrown it around his shoulders nonchalantly before he can protest. She doesn’t really look at him. “Just take it. If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a hundred thousand times, you can’t get wet out here or you’ll never get dry, and that’ll kill you. Don’t be an idiot.”
Minato watches her for a long time, and she finally looks back at him. “…he’s my brother. It’s nothing he hasn’t seen before.”
And so he turns and gathers up his things with slowly increasing haste and then bolts from her over-imposing presence. When he next sees her she is dry and so is he and so there is no reason for them to make eye contact. By that time, he has also written Shisui another letter, one that (inevitably) he will never send.
Shisui,
I’ve done something terrib
Shisui,
I’m
Shisui,
Please kill me. I’ve done exactly what I thought I might do and proven myself so irreversibly ill worth you that I can no longer stand myself or the thought of
Shi
Shisui,
I love you so much. Never forgive me for this. That is all I can ask.
Everything,
Minato
Ironically, the first time she reads it is almost exactly a month before she attempts suicide over thoughts of him, which is similarly two months before her cousin murders her for it.
(“I’M YOUR FAMILY! I’M YOUR FAMILY SO LOVE ME! NOT HIM!”)
Life is cruel, sometimes.
xxxii.
There have been strange goings on in the forest around them, and while he certainly isn’t the first of anyone to notice it, it doesn’t elude him at all that the Uzumaki siblings are greatly troubled by it. Every time they’re outside together, they stay close to one another - it’s rare that the army separates much nowadays. There’s too much risk involved, especially since they don’t understand the Cloud’s strategy or even how they’re managing what they’re managing: the guerilla attacks that are too numerous to be as random as they seem, the mysterious knowledge of the locations of even the most covert of Whirlpool organizations, the disappearance of shinobi after shinobi. It seems certain that the Clouds have an informant, that there is a turncoat among their ranks and, on top of that, the Clouds have some terrible advantage that they haven’t yet identified. There is a coursing tension in the air, a desperate fear that every step they take will be their last, and it shoots their nerves through. It isn’t long before Minato starts at the sound of his own footsteps, spooks at the sight of anything vaguely out of the ordinary.
There is an algebra to his disaffected nervousness, and he wants to know that he can effectively avoid her, which of course he can’t. There’s nothing to be done for it - Kushina is his commander (and so he would feel about it this way even if he- even if he-) … (it is something he cannot bear to think. He has never thought it before, and he can no more bear it now than ever. Perhaps it is worse now. There is a chance. A chance that he has never, will never forgive himself for this.) He wonders if it is her he cannot stand being around or himself, but regardless, whenever he is, his skin itches him painfully, and he is apt to (as soon as she is not looking, as soon as no one is looking) writhe to get out of it. He can’t stand himself, the vividity with which his memory serves him her body and her lips and her voice and he strains and roils, twisting away with a desperation he has never felt before.
When they speak, they do not truly speak.
When they look, they do not truly look.
When they are together, they are apart.
And so on. (Forever.)
Minato;
That pettiness at all might grace you - I have passed on your regards. Hatake-kun was grateful for them and told me himself to say that a certain “Rin” is here as well; he also told me to be cautious in my wording, that it might inspire in you more worry. He needn’t have bothered but it was rather polite of him. He said it very slowly. Carefully. Like a rabbit on an icy lake. (I was reminded.) But not the timidity of one, perhaps? A warrior that you yourself have raised as a parent. (I have heard that he was the Fang’s child. So it goes.) That his spirit might not break as such. But perhaps Obito-kun has broken it already, and it is the healing that will save him? (Does one hope so morbidly? Or is the earth truly round? That we might fall off its ages in the midst of our “Great War”. I am offended by even the thought of it. Just now-) A cat. From somewhere far off, it came into our encampment, seeking me.
And I did not like it at all. (So I shooed it away. With the knives I keep in holsters. It has not come back. Presumably because it did not get away with all of its legs.) I do so detest cats. Insufferable demons that might raise my skin. I confess to hating them greatly.
A war waged against a feline enemy.
(But an easy triumph that way, perhaps.)
As triumphs go, of course, the one we have superceded, it might be that it is nothing. But, if it is permanent. (I have spoken already to my superiors.)
That I might see you. (Someplace other than places imagined.)
-Shisui
Minato finds himself paranoid, frightened that every move Kushina makes is the one that will back him into a corner. Every word to him is a threat, every sideways glace - even out of mild concern (he’s getting more and more skittish and people aren’t even taking notice because it is the way that they are now too) - is a painful jab, and his headaches become worse than they’ve ever been. They plague him in the nature of a chronic illness, so much that he starts to be incapacitated by them. It’s terrible, strenuous work, maintaining any air of normalcy when his legs want to give out under the weight of his head. He’s so scared, so nervous at all times, and so his nerves become so thoroughly frayed that he begins to look as desperate as he feels. Sleep eludes him. Noises become too loud, the eyes of others too harsh, so that he feels he will break under the company of his fellow soldiers.
And just when it becomes completely unbearable, Kushina really does corner him.
He is walking slowly down his own barracks in the middle of the day, having been sent home early, when a hand fists in the back of his shirt and flips his motion, making him stumble, falling hard against the wall, just as she grabs the collar of his shirt and presses him harder into it. The unforgiving flat of the plaster presses into Minato’s shoulder blades as he freezes completely.
”What the hell is wrong with you?!”
And Minato cannot answer the question, cannot answer both because he is too frightened of her (of his own self and his reactions to her) and because it is the same questions he has been asking himself over and over and he can’t answer it. She stares at him, stares at him with her sea-storm hurricane eyes and he can’t even work the muscles of his jaw to defend himself. He just stares back at her, stupefied, wondering (vaguely) if all women are insane or just this one. Reasoning eludes him half-mockingly, and finally she throws him back again, making a strangled, exasperated noise.
”God, fuck yourself, Namikaze! Go fuck yourself!”
Minato stares at her back as he goes, and notices (quietly) that there are almost wings coming out of her small shoulders, that there is something almost otherworldly about her. He feels as if he’s been tossed by waves in the ocean for hours, which is a strange and unfamiliar sensations to him. (He smells salt, and so he stays very still for a very long time.)
When he finally does move, it is to walk unsteadily to his bedroll, and he is out for almost three days straight.
xxxiii.
When Minato wakes it is quiet outside of him. It is patient - the night sky is a darkened velvet blue dappled with sky and a ripe crescent moon. The air is gently still, not stifling or void, but gently silent, calmingly stagnant, as if it is being patient too, awaiting a lover who is far away, awaiting a love that could be nearby, awaiting some movement from the ground below. He walks quietly, no blanket around him this time, his gaze riveted upwards for some time until he is quite a ways from the barracks in the direction leading away from the village, and he walks quietly and unknowingly into the Uzumaki sibling’s presence. He finally looks down and starts because Kaigyo is directly beside him, watching the complacence on his face.
”…you awake?”
”Wha- Oh! Oh.” He tries to calm the explosion of jitters in his stomach, brushing at nonexistent dirt on his clothing. “Yes. Yes, I’m sorry.”
”Nothing to be sorry for,” Amenbou says soothingly to his other side, and he starts again, nodding graciously as he can while being so ungainly. The eldest Uzumaki reaches to pat his shoulder with an air of brotherhood.
”It’s very warm for November, isn’t it?” He scans the ground now, silhouetted in the way he is now jumpy, as if he has been jolted from a nightmare. It is uncomfortable to be in their presence, but it is more uncomfortable to not have known he was in their presence from the very beginning. He reaches up to rub at one of his arms and scans the horizon, widened as it is by the inlet sea on whose banks they are three positioned.
Amenbou is a tall ghost beside him, caressing the same scenery with his eyes. “It is. It’s nearly twenty-seven degrees, out here, that’s hardly normal - this land is rather predictable in its temperature. Throaty, almost. Consistent. Our climate usually never goes too far above heats like this in the summer. For it to be so warm…it’s eerie.”
Minato recognizes the person standing nearly twelve meters out in the water, then. He watches her and she stands still as midnight, back straight and unrefined in its cordedness, arms tight at her sides, head directed up at the heavens. He watches her for a long moment - she looks not entirely unlike Shisui, the way the moonlight hits her shoulders, and he wonders if maybe the Uchiha is playing a long-winded joke on him, and has been Kushina all along. It isn’t at all her style, and so he thinks maybe not, but if it is true he wonders if she’ll let him know of it, soon. He wonders back to the letter she wrote most recently and then he wonders forward.
Too far forward.
Kaigyo’s voice is quiet. “Kushina’s like our mom, y’know. Mom, she was always really sensitive to the way stuff worked. Always really, really sensitive to the oceans. She could always hear it better than we could, was always really, really sensitive that way. ‘Sthe way ‘shina is too. She can always tell.”
That is when Minato feels it - there is suddenly a phantom gripping at his back. A sudden panic spikes in his stomach; a thrill shots up his spine; he goes board stiff. There is a strange noise in his brain, a soft, low, ominous humming, and it suddenly fills him with something. He feels as if there is a rumbling he cannot identify coming from the ground beneath him and from just inside his throat. He constricts, moving to rub his arms. Amenbou and Kaigyo watch him silently, visibly counting his goosebumps. The eldest nods quietly.
”Like that. You can feel it.” He turns his narrow face out to water and frowns contemplatively to himself. “Both you and Kushina can hear the ocean’s song far better than we can. But it’s the same thing.”
Kaigyo chews his lower lip. “A bad feeling.”
Amenbou’s baritone voice is terse. “Something’s coming.”
They are all quiet for a long time. Minato feels that, every second that passes, he will vomit. He feels as if there is something tangled yarn-like around the insides of his skull, trying to force its way out, either through his head or down into his mouth and his stomach. The goosebumps refuse to fade, prickling against his skin and along the insides of his cheeks and he cannot help the feeling that, somehow, the insides of his lungs are home to a warzone unlike this one. One where there is no perceivable end to the conflict, good or bad.
It distresses him in the same way of their not-silence.
The sound thrums through his bones, and even when he has excused himself and fretted back down to his bed he cannot sleep because of the pulse of it inside his head. He cannot silence it because it seems to embody the silence itself, and it is a long time before he closes his eyes again and when he does it is to clench them tightly, his hands over his ears, in vague and vain attempts to block it out.
xxxiv.
The first thing that Namikaze Minato, he who will be Konohagakure no Yondaime Hokage, notices about the day (fateful as it might be) is that it looks exactly the same as the day that Keisui died and that gives him a very queer feeling in his stomach. It’s strange, mostly because he does not realize that that is what it is until quite some time afterwards, after he has been given due time to reflect. All that he knows is that when he looks at the sky there is an electric catch at the back of his throat and it makes him greatly uneasy. The water has a pulse today, a heartbeat, and it puts him on edge. (Most infants relish in their mother’s heartbeat. But mankind - Minato in particular - is the kind of infant to know only that where there is a heartbeat, there is something waiting to stop it.) The sky is dark, ominous and swollen with clouds and exhaled belief and goosebumps are crawling up his arms as they watch the sun rise.
He is sitting against one of the larger trees, feet balanced against the water as if it were worth, Hizashi perched amiably beside him. They are almost friends nowadays, which is strange, but Minato can feel that they are both tense now in the same way. There is something not right about the air, something that makes his lungs tighten nervously. They watch (one pair of eyes sky blue, the other an opaque lavender) as the Uzumaki siblings gather in a tight, nervous cluster at the front of their group, exchanging terse looks and worried gazes. It is evident that they have formulated a strategy but nearly impossible to tell whether or not they have actually invested hope in it as successful. There’s a strong underlying worry painting their features as they watch the skyline and it makes them all nervous. There is no movement for a long time, only them watching the trees and talking softly together. Unable to hear them, their peons watch their body language, veiled and well-trained to act responsively to what their leaders might be thinking: the angle of Amenbou’s back, the dark way Kaigyo’s jaw is clenched, the way Kushina’s hands curl and uncurl where they rest along her leg.
Something’s coming.
The idea of danger hangs in the air.
Amenbou speaks to address them all:
”We’re going into the forest.”
(To die?)
Minato clenches his fists and thinks of someone-
(“I can’t die, sensei! Not here and not now!”)
But it’s been a long time since he’s seen Kakashi’s shapely face. A long, long time. (Too long, he thinks, since he’s really seen anyone’s face. It feels like, every time he and the other ANBU remove their masks they remove their own faces, too, like tissue paper, so that the throbbing muscle beneath is exposed to the cool, salty air.) He lingers, his breath skating softly over the memories of his students, of Shisui, of teachers he has both had and been partner to. Educational schemes are not necessarily his thing but he cannot help it - he misses them badly.
He feels tired. Tensed. His muscles grip him as if they are badly afraid of falling off of him when he moves. (And he does move, restlessly and in small circles.) He stays against his perch and Hizashi stays beside him, and that is the way of it.
The way the Uzumaki siblings go on to explain it, they three will travel together and their troops will travel in a semi-ring in their wake - the idea is to put just the perfect amount of distance between the troops and them. It’s an ambush and so they will do the majority of their communications through summoned beasts versus actual rendezvous, and it is everyone’s hope that the Clouds will be deceived into thinking the Uzumaki siblings have come on their own. (Hope that they don’t dare feel because if they do, it will be crushed that much easier.) If it works, it will work brilliantly.
If it does not work, it will just be one thing of many, and they will improvise to the very best of their ability.
There is a strange and savage sound against the inside of Minato’s skull and he feels his throat constrict unhappily. It’s a bad headache that plagues him. (A ghoul queen. I see a thousand ancient bodies. I feel-) The air is abnormally cold, even for November, and he worries, he worries deeply.
Kushina is the first into the forest, her brothers following dutifully afterwards.
xxxv.
Shisui’s is a distant, limited foresight, one she thinks an hourglass might have were it tipped sideways, laid horizontally across some person’s waiting table. The land smells unfamiliarly like driftwood and she thinks that no one could ever really belong here, the way the fog wreaths the thick trees so long into the morning, and the way water seems to be the only constant. (Shisui has never been taught how to swim, and so she is instinctually wary of the way the whole of Uzugakure’s culture is founded upon it.) She reaches up to her long hair and pushes it away from her face habitually, as if it were bothering her. It isn’t, of course, but what is bothering her she cannot really voice. It is as if there is a ribbon hanging down from her hair and trailing along her shoulder blades from time to time and making her think that there is a spider on her back. It’s a strange sensation, since Shisui has never been the type to really toy with ribbons. Wire always seemed the more useful brother, in that way.
Theirs is a small party of four (they have been walking at a moderate pace for nearly a week now), and she can tell the pinker of her two smallest comrades is not used to such practiced silence, which she thinks is strange considering that how easily it comes to Kakashi. Strangely, it reminds her a bit of her own days with the full Team 7, when Sanosuke was not a ramen chef and Minato was smaller and cute. Mind, the situation was reversed where three members of the group (if she was including her sensei) were raucous and the other was a practiced facilitator of silence. It operated in much the same way, though - the alienation, that is. (In its own way.)
She looks up into the trees, counts the rows of branches and estimates that he is almost seven meters up from her, which is a long way to fall, and while she trusts him as a Sannin, she has very little faith in his abilities in the realm of…precautionary measures.
”Sensei,” she calls calmly up at him, “are you certain?”
Jiraiya grins back at her and shoots down from the tree tops. Rin jumps a little, but Kakashi barely glances up. (For his prodigal ability, Shisui has identified his patience and unshakeability as that of a slacker.) Her sensei flips his hair a little; the years have altered him some. His nose ring (so long regarded by the Council of Elders as unnecessarily gaudy) has begun to look like a mole in its habitual roost along the crest of his left nostril, and the sun has painted short but growing lines across his face. His hair having gone so pale so early, Shisui has never seen her teacher as truly young, this is certain, but she finds a soft and subtle unhappiness in the way his aging is evidenced in his handsome face.
All the same, his landing is as robust as ever, and his grin exposes all of his teeth.
(She finds that Jiraiya looks somewhat like a dog when he smiles, and seeing that she is not much fond of dogs, Shisui keeps that opinion to herself. She is not sure why she thinks it exactly. She cannot justify her reasoning and so she does not voice it at all. It would not make sense to voice it without having some reason. Her own face is straight enough, like porcelain. Surely not all people smile so ferociously? But she hasn’t ever really thought about it before.)
”We’re getting close, I promise.”
”But Jiraiya-sama,” Rin says gently, “you said that days ago.”
”Well,” he says, with a short nod, “I mean it this time.”
There is a long silence. Shisui, being long used to such things (she endured it throughout her entire childhood, did she not? She thinks she must have,) simply waits it out. (And at that time, Minato was the one there to site him as ridiculous. Of course, Minato has not talked about him in a long time. Shisui thinks that maybe he thinks that it would be bad luck, whatever they might say. As if it might doom him. And so they instead pretend that he is not gone because he was never there to begin with.
”I have not seen you in a long time.”
”I was in Konoha and Sarutoubi-sensei mentioned to me that a commander of an old student of mine had written in because that student had requested leave to voluntarily support a different border.” That same dog-smile. Ugly in a familiarly handsome way. “On the opposite side of Fire Country no less.”
”You mean Sandaime-sama.”
”He asked me if I felt like coming to collect you.”
”…I will infer from that that you did feel like it, sensei.”
And a buckle-buckle laugh. “I bet Minato’s been missing you something nasty, Shi-chan.”
And she knows that he will probably be very happy to see him. It is a detached, aching knowledge, the kind that she might pepper her salad with. She intersperses it with the not-comfort that is the knowledge that he could die in the space of time it takes her to think of him. She has not received a letter from him in response to her last and in the same arbitrary way that lovers will, it bothers her somewhat. But she says nothing for the superstition that it might bring him misfortune.) The same superstition that has kept Minato silent about their sensei for these long-short years.
She sighs softly through her nose.
Only Kakashi notices, and he says nothing.
They walk a while further through a forest without any real name of consequence and after almost a half-an-hour the trees begin to thin out suspiciously. Shisui counts the space between them and soon enough they are looking out onto a waterfront. Her back prickles faithlessly; they can see the whole thing from their vantage point since they are on a hill overlooking it. The ocean (called Minikuiyou, the Ugly Sea, by locals) is a sharp ended thing, a deep bay that gluts out into prettier things that are far more expansive - it is deep and grayish and ruddy without being charming at all, and reminds her of an oil pond in a way. Jiraiya looks down on it and whistles at the huge twin redwoods growing at its opposite ends on two small pedestals of yellow dirt that hardly look large enough to be suitable.
”I told you we were getting close.”
They have been still almost a minute before Shisui looks down at the ground.
It’s just trembled beneath her.
(But it is Kakashi who wonders at it aimlessly, his quiet voice bored and strung like string across his teeth:)
”…what was that, exactly?”
CHAPTERS XXXVI-XXXX
Author: the_lady_lamb
Genre: Naruto
Sub-genre: Angst/Romance
Summary: (Part II: Chapters XXXI-XXXV) Namikaze Minato is nothing other than what he makes himself, but he knows that the war that makes itself affront him is not the war he sould really worry about. He just doesn't know how much until he meets Her.
Rated: R for semi-gratuitous violence and sexually suggestive themes.
Author's Notes: What started out small has blown into something I never expected. (For you guys, yukari_rin and fujiwara_san.)
CHAPTERS XXI-XXV
CHAPTERS XXVI-XXX
The Decemberist
PART TWO ∙∙∙ LOOKINGGLASS
xxxi.
It was the force of the depressive atmospheres and the letters themselves that coax Minato into the showers this night, too. Although, to say it is night is not entirely accurate - Minato has taken to sleeping early and waking at sporadic intervals throughout the evening. It is better than not sleeping, but it is born of nervous energy which is similarly spawned from his overall sunkenness, and so it definitely isn’t a positive occurrence. His hair echoes his inner disrepair - it’s almost to his shoulders now, and he’s vaguely reminded of Jiraiya when he looks at himself in mirrors, which isn’t often. He doesn’t like to see his eyes, the way they look now. They seem hollowed out, a bit, and he’s waiting for them to go back to normal.
While he waits, he walks silently down the hall, and pushes the door to the showers open, because it’s two o’ clock in the morning, and if he isn’t sleeping he feels the need to do something productive, because otherwise he just sits around and thinks, and that’s painful. (There’s too much to think about, nowadays.) He steps onto the tile and starts at how cold it is, rubbing his arms through his sweats.
He walks into one of the stalls and hangs his towel over the door. It’s late, and so there’s a potential for the noise to wake someone, but he isn’t particularly worried. Courteousness is different with men than it is with women. And if he didn’t take a shower for the noise it would make and somebody found out… He doesn’t really want to visualize the outcome. It really wears on a person to live with so many for so long a time. He wonders how Shisui has managed it for this long - the Uchiha family is so large that sometimes when they were younger she would recount stories to him of her yesterdays and he would get so overwhelmed by how many people were involved that he would lose what the story was even about, and then she would have to retell it. Nowadays he isn’t so easily perplexed, but she still has such a large family, so many relatives constantly bustling in, out, and around her life every minute of it. For Minato, who has always only had his mother, the very idea is just impossible.
He takes off his shirt and (after looking around him for no perceivable reason other than he’d really like his privacy) and his pants and folds them neatly and sets them on a stool that is set out for the purpose. The chill embraces him suddenly and he shivers against it, standing out of the way of the water as it shoots with a metallic squeak from the faucet. When his goosebumps are overwhelming and the water that catches against the thrill of his skin is warm in some bland sense of the word, he steps in and sighs as it hits his nerves directly, like a child with piano keys. (But he’s only heard Shisui play the piano once, now that he thinks about it; a big grand that her mother keeps in the foyer.)
He breathes, takes a moment to truly relax his muscles, tilting his face up and closing his eyes. There is so much stress clouding his mind right now, and all he wants to do is wash it out of him like something stubborn from a dishpan. He knows how to do that. His mother taught him that when he first moved out. First moved out. He aches so badly for his home. It’s been so long since he’s felt the loamy warmth of Konoha around his shoulders, that soft scent of leaves in his pockets, the gentle smile of people he would gladly give his life for, if only to see them again. Sending Kakashi to fight on the Grass and Rain front. What are they thinking? It’s ludicrous is what it is. Simply ludicrous.
He sighs discontentedly; ludicrous is an excellent adjective for the entire thing. If he thought winning would solve something, he would figure out a way of doing it, but as it is, he’s lost their cause and it doesn’t seem to be coming back to him any time soon. War is such a sad business altogether. Didn’t there exist some peaceable, democratic way of doing this? Is the Fire Nation the only one in the world that abided by their treaties? The only one that had any honor at all, any insight into the horrific art that war is? It greatly troubles him to think that anyone in their right mind - very less those who had power over others - would choose to go to war with anyone, very less someone they had promised not to go to war with. When he was younger, he admits that he did not think anything of it. War was simply what was. But now it is coming down to the gridline and he’s not pleased with it any more. Minato is so much more a dove than a hawk, and its beginning to show and make him doubt himself.
He looks up into the lighting, draws his fingers through his hair thoughtfully. It strikes him as viciously unfair, the way this war has taken up so much of his mind’s space. Had he his own way, it would not be on his mind at all, but its only more and more obvious with the passage of time how much life has determined that he will not have his way, regardless. He frowns to himself, reaches up and adjusts the spout a little so that the water hits more of his neck than his face and ducking under it again.
He’s in a strangely puckish mood for being so put out, and so distracted that it takes him a very long time to realize that he has glanced over another person’s face and not even really noticed them at all. The realization is so sudden and so startling that he leaps back nearly a whole foot before rushing to cover himself, spewing a lot of gibberish nothings in the midst of doing so. Kushina snorts rather loudly at him, most especially when he wraps his arms over himself.
”Oh yeah, because obviously I’m marveling at your goods. Smooth one, Namikaze.”
Minato splutters, and she cocks an eyebrow at him. She’s leaning over the separating wall between them, her arms crossed; he thinks she might be standing on her tiptoes to do it, since the barrier only comes up to about the middle of his chest but, then, so does Kushina. “What,” he hisses through his teeth (as if someone might overhear him), “are you doing?!”
She scoffs. “Taking a shower. Duh. What does it look like I’m doing?”
”Being- Being-”
”Obnoxious? Perverted? Weird as hell?”
”One of those, yes!”
”Jesus, will you chill out, Keiko? Christ.”
”Get back on your side!!”
”Fine, fine,” she says, pulling her arms back over the barrier and ducking back out of his sight. (When she does he heaves a soft sigh of relief, but a hand up to his chest where his heart’s still thudding, having almost stopped from fright. His hands are shaking a little. Is it really normal for women to just spring up like that? God, she’s really so abnormal…) “You don’t have to be such a pussy about it. I just thought you looked…”
Minato tries to keep his voice from shaking but doesn’t quite succeed. (She really has manged to scare him very badly. He’s contemplating going for his towel and making a run from it. Is it really appropriate for men and women to shower together? Certainly this can’t be the intended construct of the showers.) “…l-looked what?”
”…sad, I guess.” He sees her lean so that only her eyes and the top of her head peer over the top of the barrier and he immediately skitters out of the way of her sight. “Look, will you stop being such a freak? I didn’t know you hadn’t noticed I was here. Anybody ever told you you’re really spacey?”
”No,” he says worriedly, “not that I can remember.” He wrestles with his mind and decides that if he can’t go without a shower, he can forfeit drying off afterwards. He grabs up his towel and knots it doubly around his waist before diving back into the spray, hoping that it will take the red out of his face.
”Ease up and stop acting like such a virgin. It’s not like I’ve never seen a naked guy before.” Minato turns about another three shades of pink as his commander snickers to herself sinisterly. “Honestly, I grew up with three older brothers. I’ve seen more than you can possibly imagine. Seriously. Like, there was this one time-”
”Kushina-san,” Minato says quickly, cutting her off, “I really don’t need to hear whatever you’re about to say.”
”I’m trying to make you feel better.”
”It isn’t working.”
”You’re such a pussy. Did you even notice I came in?”
”No.”
Kushina snorts. “Spa~cey.” He hears her kick something across the tile that sounds like plastic - maybe a shampoo bottle, maybe. Minato scratches the back of his neck nervously and looks around for his own showering supplies, finding them where he set them down near his clothing. They’ve gotten moved a little in his haste to get his towel back, but he leans over and takes them up, looking over the bottles and labels. “What were you thinking about, anyway?”
Minato unzips the plastic bag and takes out his own shampoo, trying to get his fingers to stop shaking as he pumps a spot exactly the size of a 100￥ coin into his palm. “I’m…I’m not sure anymore. I was kind of…drifting. Thinking has started to just get really…I’m not sure. Tedious, I suppose.”
”Tedious? You think that might be bad for you? Not thinking?” He hears her change her position so that the water hits her body differently. It’s a strange thing to visualize, and his blush returns. (He wonders what the matter with him is, exactly.) “But I guess I know what you mean. Seems like the more I think, the worse stuff gets, and then the more I have to think about.” She starts pouting, then, he can hear it. “Now, see, I was hoping it was something more interesting than just you being weird. Like that girlfriend you supposedly have, for instance.”
Minato scowls, and speaks with a warning tone. “Kushina-”
”Yeah, yeah, I know she’s not imaginary. I was kidding.”
Minato lathers his hair up, alarmed by how much of it there seems to be, all of a sudden - he has to go back for more shampoo no less than twice, and does so in the long silence between them as Kushina decides to speak. When she does, the bubbles are foamy between his fingers, fluffed in their own way.
“…what’s she like, anyway?”
Minato blinks, turns to look at where he can see the very top of her head beside him. It’s odd for her to ask, but Kushina is odd, so he supposes that he should answer her question instead of standing here acting stupid about it. As he chooses his words his mood changes completely - his nervousness is changed into an airy nostalgia that suits him much better. He smiles to himself, thinking about it. “She’s…well, she’s Shisui, I guess.”
”What’s that mean?”
”It means…” He thinks, puts a hand up to his mouth for a second. (The soap soaks into his hair.) “…she’s like…a spider lily. Like, if there was ever a woman born of a spider lily, it would be her. She’s that kind of person.”
”…have I ever told you you’re weird?”
Minato chuckles to himself.
”What’s she good at it?”
”Almost…everything, it seems. She’s beautiful, she’s intelligent, she’s poetic to a fault…but, I can’t imagine that she really has any. She has…a huge family, but that can’t be helped. She’s cold in some ways, I suppose, but she’s entirely clean cut. She’s like…well,” he smiles to himself, “she’s Shisui. She’s like Shisui because that’s who she is. I don’t think I can explain it very well. There’s no one to really compare her to except…her.”
”Sounds out of your league.”
”Most certainly.”
There’s another silence and Minato takes the opportunity to realize there’s still lather in his hair and wash it out, hands scratching into his scalp comfortingly.
”You really love her, huh?”
Minato smiles and looks down at the drain in the floor. His chest aches. “More than I can possibly say.”
”…that’s kind of cute.”
He blinks back at the barrier, and just like last time, his demeanor changes as he does. The nervousness returns effortlessly and he fumbles with the shampoo bottle, just barely managing to keep it from falling. “…thank you,” he says at last, get his conditioner as quickly as he can so that it won’t be off the ground for too long. He doesn’t want to embarrass himself.
”You gunna marry her?”
”I…” He pauses. “I…haven’t thought about it.”
”Liar. You’re too effeminate to have never thought about it.”
”I’m not sure her family would approve.”
”…how long have you two been together?”
”Um…officially?”
”Do I sound like I care?”
”Er…somewhere around five or six years. I can’t be entirely sure, since I’m not sure what you’re measuring ‘togetherness’ by.”
”Five or six years?”
”I believe so, yes, assuming I understood the question…”
”And her family wouldn’t approve?”
”Well, no, I don’t know that they would.”
”Then fuck ‘em.”
”Wha-What?” Minato stares over at her and finds that she’s popped her head over the barrier again and is grinning at him semi-maniacally. Her whole face is beaming with the intensity of it, and he can’t be sure even remotely of what’s going on in that head of hers but he’s relatively certain he doesn’t like where this is going (even if there’s definitely a part of his mind that loves to hear that there is someone else alive in the world who would sometimes like to tell the Uchiha family to go screw itself).
”Fuck ‘em. You’ve dealt with ‘em this long. Chances are you’re going to stay together even if you don’t get married. So fuck ‘em.”
She ducks back down, looking pleased with herself and Minato marvels at the simplicity of it. He has to admit that, as cut-and-dry as she says it, it’s possible that that could very well be the way this all works out. Of course, the Uchiha could probably find some way to try to be underhanded and marry Shisui off to somebody else but Minato knows that she would never stand for anything of the kind. If worst comes to worst, they simply won’t marry and can just live on together without it. It’s sort of a formality he used to like to daydream about when he was kissing her sometimes when they were teenagers but he hasn’t thought about it for a while now.
”Five or six years…Christ. How old are you?”
”Hm? Nineteen.”
”Shit, you’re telling me we’re the same age? Oh, knowing my luck, I’m older than you, even! Five or six years?! You guys hooked up when you were thirteen?! Fuck!” Kushina seems truly incensed by the idea of it, which puzzles him until she explains it irritatedly: “I haven’t ever had a boyfriend more than a couple of months. And most of those were long-distance. This village is way too small - it’s just weird to date people who are kind of like siblings to you, y’know? And you’re all kind of jerks, to boot…”
”…men?”
”Sure, let’s go with that.”
”I don’t think all men are jerks…”
”Including yourself? No,” she says lightly, “I guess they’re not.”
He takes a second and realizes she’s complimenting him. “…thank you, Kushina-san.”
”You’re welcome.”
He waits another moment before deciding to ask: “…isn’t it a little strange for a woman to bathe in a men’s shower?”
”Yeah, but, I mean, like I said, I grew up with three brothers and my dad. Feminine modesty isn’t exactly my thing. I mean, I didn’t think anyone would be in here, but I didn’t really care either. There are walls, you know. And besides,” she says, noticing that Minato’s giving her a look (the invader of privacy boasting that she has some? For shame,) “the women’s showers have pipes that are all messed up. Kaigyo pulled a prank on all the girls when I was, like, twelve years old - somehow got every spout in there to randomly shoot ice-cold water at us, little bastard. We’ve never been able to get them completely back to normal. And, I mean, I’ve taken showers in here since I was little.”
”You stayed here as a child?”
”This whole thing was more a part of us all playing pretend when we were younger,” she says, a little to herself this time, “some big game, I guess. It’s not now, of course, but it was then. We did everything here. When there weren’t any soldiers around, it was all huge and ours to screw with. I mean, when there were soldiers here, we got in big trouble. But otherwise it was really cool.” She picks up a bar of soap and starts running it up and down her arms. “What about you? Any childhood memories to speak of? Or were they too clouded by your Perfect Girlfriend?”
Minato coughs out a laugh. “I wasn’t dating her when I was six.”
”Oh, I bet you were thinking about it.”
”Not when I was six.”
”Is she the only one you’ve ever had? Girlfriend, I mean.”
Minato is slightly taken aback. “…well, yes.”
”Are you serious? The only one? Are you sure that’s healthy?”
His eyebrow creases slightly. “What are you talking about?”
”Your first girlfriend has lasted you six years? Long enough that you think you want to spend the rest of your life with her? Does that sound realistic to you? I mean, I’m not saying you don’t love her - it’s obvious you do. I just mean, how are you even sure she’s the one for you when you haven’t even looked around?”
Minato frowns, stomach churning softly. “…I know how to value what’s in front of me.”
”Well, I mean, Minato, seriously. I’m not doubting you or anything, I’m just saying: how can you expect to fully appreciate her if you’ve never loved and lost? Never loved anyone else but her? There’s a thing with novelty, sure, but you can’t honestly be willing to just settle down like this without even looking around. I mean- Ah! Shit!” A yellow bar of soap comes skating out onto the floor at his toes. “Can you get that for me?”
He reaches down and picks it up, holding it between two fingers and going over to the barrier, but she surprises him by rising up to meet him almost out of nowhere. They bump noses and he pulls backwards, startled by it. She seems oblivious and somehow they stay within inches of one another as she takes it out of his hand. “Thanks.”
They stay like that for a moment, and Minato finds himself staring at her, her eyes especially because of the way they bore into him over the lapse of those twenty seconds. They stand very still together and it feels like the world has walked away without them onboard, swinging its arms jovially in the sunlight of a new day. The water keeps running, goosebumps rear their icy little heads on Minato’s arms and stomach, a small thrill races down his spinal chord. The room echoes with their silence, their motionlessness. Everything is still around them, as if waiting, and Minato just can’t turn away from her because suddenly simpleness is an abstract dream he has never had before. He stares at her and her eyes are oceans, her eyes are storm clouds, and the autumn red that frames her is her moonlight.
He kisses her and doesn’t think about it, and both their eyes snap closed when he does, as if they are thinking about someone else, but they aren’t thinking at all. Minato isn’t thinking whatsoever. His mind flatlines and he presses his lips to hers and finds them to be warmer than he should find even vaguely attractive - she’s burning, a roiling, unconquerable heat, and it suits her. There are no hands involved, but he can feel that her bare shoulders are still there, taunting him.
His chest constricts.
He starts thinking again when the door slams on the opposite end of the room, and in the second that he does he immediately stops breathing and withdraws from her abruptly.
They stare at one another.
Amenbou’s voice echoes around the room.
”Kushina, are you in here?”
”Yeah,” she says loudly, not even looking in his direction for a second. She’s still staring at Minato, and he’s still staring at her, hand clamped tightly over his lips.
Minato speaks in a voice just above a whisper. “…I think I should go.”
It’s a moment or two before she speaks to him, very softly. “…you can take my towel. That one seems kinda wet.”
Minato turns red. “I…I don’t-“
Kushina’s come back and thrown it around his shoulders nonchalantly before he can protest. She doesn’t really look at him. “Just take it. If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a hundred thousand times, you can’t get wet out here or you’ll never get dry, and that’ll kill you. Don’t be an idiot.”
Minato watches her for a long time, and she finally looks back at him. “…he’s my brother. It’s nothing he hasn’t seen before.”
And so he turns and gathers up his things with slowly increasing haste and then bolts from her over-imposing presence. When he next sees her she is dry and so is he and so there is no reason for them to make eye contact. By that time, he has also written Shisui another letter, one that (inevitably) he will never send.
Shisui,
I’ve done something terrib
Shisui,
I’m
Shisui,
Please kill me. I’ve done exactly what I thought I might do and proven myself so irreversibly ill worth you that I can no longer stand myself or the thought of
Shi
Shisui,
I love you so much. Never forgive me for this. That is all I can ask.
Everything,
Minato
Ironically, the first time she reads it is almost exactly a month before she attempts suicide over thoughts of him, which is similarly two months before her cousin murders her for it.
(“I’M YOUR FAMILY! I’M YOUR FAMILY SO LOVE ME! NOT HIM!”)
Life is cruel, sometimes.
xxxii.
There have been strange goings on in the forest around them, and while he certainly isn’t the first of anyone to notice it, it doesn’t elude him at all that the Uzumaki siblings are greatly troubled by it. Every time they’re outside together, they stay close to one another - it’s rare that the army separates much nowadays. There’s too much risk involved, especially since they don’t understand the Cloud’s strategy or even how they’re managing what they’re managing: the guerilla attacks that are too numerous to be as random as they seem, the mysterious knowledge of the locations of even the most covert of Whirlpool organizations, the disappearance of shinobi after shinobi. It seems certain that the Clouds have an informant, that there is a turncoat among their ranks and, on top of that, the Clouds have some terrible advantage that they haven’t yet identified. There is a coursing tension in the air, a desperate fear that every step they take will be their last, and it shoots their nerves through. It isn’t long before Minato starts at the sound of his own footsteps, spooks at the sight of anything vaguely out of the ordinary.
There is an algebra to his disaffected nervousness, and he wants to know that he can effectively avoid her, which of course he can’t. There’s nothing to be done for it - Kushina is his commander (and so he would feel about it this way even if he- even if he-) … (it is something he cannot bear to think. He has never thought it before, and he can no more bear it now than ever. Perhaps it is worse now. There is a chance. A chance that he has never, will never forgive himself for this.) He wonders if it is her he cannot stand being around or himself, but regardless, whenever he is, his skin itches him painfully, and he is apt to (as soon as she is not looking, as soon as no one is looking) writhe to get out of it. He can’t stand himself, the vividity with which his memory serves him her body and her lips and her voice and he strains and roils, twisting away with a desperation he has never felt before.
When they speak, they do not truly speak.
When they look, they do not truly look.
When they are together, they are apart.
And so on. (Forever.)
Minato;
That pettiness at all might grace you - I have passed on your regards. Hatake-kun was grateful for them and told me himself to say that a certain “Rin” is here as well; he also told me to be cautious in my wording, that it might inspire in you more worry. He needn’t have bothered but it was rather polite of him. He said it very slowly. Carefully. Like a rabbit on an icy lake. (I was reminded.) But not the timidity of one, perhaps? A warrior that you yourself have raised as a parent. (I have heard that he was the Fang’s child. So it goes.) That his spirit might not break as such. But perhaps Obito-kun has broken it already, and it is the healing that will save him? (Does one hope so morbidly? Or is the earth truly round? That we might fall off its ages in the midst of our “Great War”. I am offended by even the thought of it. Just now-) A cat. From somewhere far off, it came into our encampment, seeking me.
And I did not like it at all. (So I shooed it away. With the knives I keep in holsters. It has not come back. Presumably because it did not get away with all of its legs.) I do so detest cats. Insufferable demons that might raise my skin. I confess to hating them greatly.
A war waged against a feline enemy.
(But an easy triumph that way, perhaps.)
As triumphs go, of course, the one we have superceded, it might be that it is nothing. But, if it is permanent. (I have spoken already to my superiors.)
That I might see you. (Someplace other than places imagined.)
-Shisui
Minato finds himself paranoid, frightened that every move Kushina makes is the one that will back him into a corner. Every word to him is a threat, every sideways glace - even out of mild concern (he’s getting more and more skittish and people aren’t even taking notice because it is the way that they are now too) - is a painful jab, and his headaches become worse than they’ve ever been. They plague him in the nature of a chronic illness, so much that he starts to be incapacitated by them. It’s terrible, strenuous work, maintaining any air of normalcy when his legs want to give out under the weight of his head. He’s so scared, so nervous at all times, and so his nerves become so thoroughly frayed that he begins to look as desperate as he feels. Sleep eludes him. Noises become too loud, the eyes of others too harsh, so that he feels he will break under the company of his fellow soldiers.
And just when it becomes completely unbearable, Kushina really does corner him.
He is walking slowly down his own barracks in the middle of the day, having been sent home early, when a hand fists in the back of his shirt and flips his motion, making him stumble, falling hard against the wall, just as she grabs the collar of his shirt and presses him harder into it. The unforgiving flat of the plaster presses into Minato’s shoulder blades as he freezes completely.
”What the hell is wrong with you?!”
And Minato cannot answer the question, cannot answer both because he is too frightened of her (of his own self and his reactions to her) and because it is the same questions he has been asking himself over and over and he can’t answer it. She stares at him, stares at him with her sea-storm hurricane eyes and he can’t even work the muscles of his jaw to defend himself. He just stares back at her, stupefied, wondering (vaguely) if all women are insane or just this one. Reasoning eludes him half-mockingly, and finally she throws him back again, making a strangled, exasperated noise.
”God, fuck yourself, Namikaze! Go fuck yourself!”
Minato stares at her back as he goes, and notices (quietly) that there are almost wings coming out of her small shoulders, that there is something almost otherworldly about her. He feels as if he’s been tossed by waves in the ocean for hours, which is a strange and unfamiliar sensations to him. (He smells salt, and so he stays very still for a very long time.)
When he finally does move, it is to walk unsteadily to his bedroll, and he is out for almost three days straight.
xxxiii.
When Minato wakes it is quiet outside of him. It is patient - the night sky is a darkened velvet blue dappled with sky and a ripe crescent moon. The air is gently still, not stifling or void, but gently silent, calmingly stagnant, as if it is being patient too, awaiting a lover who is far away, awaiting a love that could be nearby, awaiting some movement from the ground below. He walks quietly, no blanket around him this time, his gaze riveted upwards for some time until he is quite a ways from the barracks in the direction leading away from the village, and he walks quietly and unknowingly into the Uzumaki sibling’s presence. He finally looks down and starts because Kaigyo is directly beside him, watching the complacence on his face.
”…you awake?”
”Wha- Oh! Oh.” He tries to calm the explosion of jitters in his stomach, brushing at nonexistent dirt on his clothing. “Yes. Yes, I’m sorry.”
”Nothing to be sorry for,” Amenbou says soothingly to his other side, and he starts again, nodding graciously as he can while being so ungainly. The eldest Uzumaki reaches to pat his shoulder with an air of brotherhood.
”It’s very warm for November, isn’t it?” He scans the ground now, silhouetted in the way he is now jumpy, as if he has been jolted from a nightmare. It is uncomfortable to be in their presence, but it is more uncomfortable to not have known he was in their presence from the very beginning. He reaches up to rub at one of his arms and scans the horizon, widened as it is by the inlet sea on whose banks they are three positioned.
Amenbou is a tall ghost beside him, caressing the same scenery with his eyes. “It is. It’s nearly twenty-seven degrees, out here, that’s hardly normal - this land is rather predictable in its temperature. Throaty, almost. Consistent. Our climate usually never goes too far above heats like this in the summer. For it to be so warm…it’s eerie.”
Minato recognizes the person standing nearly twelve meters out in the water, then. He watches her and she stands still as midnight, back straight and unrefined in its cordedness, arms tight at her sides, head directed up at the heavens. He watches her for a long moment - she looks not entirely unlike Shisui, the way the moonlight hits her shoulders, and he wonders if maybe the Uchiha is playing a long-winded joke on him, and has been Kushina all along. It isn’t at all her style, and so he thinks maybe not, but if it is true he wonders if she’ll let him know of it, soon. He wonders back to the letter she wrote most recently and then he wonders forward.
Too far forward.
Kaigyo’s voice is quiet. “Kushina’s like our mom, y’know. Mom, she was always really sensitive to the way stuff worked. Always really, really sensitive to the oceans. She could always hear it better than we could, was always really, really sensitive that way. ‘Sthe way ‘shina is too. She can always tell.”
That is when Minato feels it - there is suddenly a phantom gripping at his back. A sudden panic spikes in his stomach; a thrill shots up his spine; he goes board stiff. There is a strange noise in his brain, a soft, low, ominous humming, and it suddenly fills him with something. He feels as if there is a rumbling he cannot identify coming from the ground beneath him and from just inside his throat. He constricts, moving to rub his arms. Amenbou and Kaigyo watch him silently, visibly counting his goosebumps. The eldest nods quietly.
”Like that. You can feel it.” He turns his narrow face out to water and frowns contemplatively to himself. “Both you and Kushina can hear the ocean’s song far better than we can. But it’s the same thing.”
Kaigyo chews his lower lip. “A bad feeling.”
Amenbou’s baritone voice is terse. “Something’s coming.”
They are all quiet for a long time. Minato feels that, every second that passes, he will vomit. He feels as if there is something tangled yarn-like around the insides of his skull, trying to force its way out, either through his head or down into his mouth and his stomach. The goosebumps refuse to fade, prickling against his skin and along the insides of his cheeks and he cannot help the feeling that, somehow, the insides of his lungs are home to a warzone unlike this one. One where there is no perceivable end to the conflict, good or bad.
It distresses him in the same way of their not-silence.
The sound thrums through his bones, and even when he has excused himself and fretted back down to his bed he cannot sleep because of the pulse of it inside his head. He cannot silence it because it seems to embody the silence itself, and it is a long time before he closes his eyes again and when he does it is to clench them tightly, his hands over his ears, in vague and vain attempts to block it out.
xxxiv.
The first thing that Namikaze Minato, he who will be Konohagakure no Yondaime Hokage, notices about the day (fateful as it might be) is that it looks exactly the same as the day that Keisui died and that gives him a very queer feeling in his stomach. It’s strange, mostly because he does not realize that that is what it is until quite some time afterwards, after he has been given due time to reflect. All that he knows is that when he looks at the sky there is an electric catch at the back of his throat and it makes him greatly uneasy. The water has a pulse today, a heartbeat, and it puts him on edge. (Most infants relish in their mother’s heartbeat. But mankind - Minato in particular - is the kind of infant to know only that where there is a heartbeat, there is something waiting to stop it.) The sky is dark, ominous and swollen with clouds and exhaled belief and goosebumps are crawling up his arms as they watch the sun rise.
He is sitting against one of the larger trees, feet balanced against the water as if it were worth, Hizashi perched amiably beside him. They are almost friends nowadays, which is strange, but Minato can feel that they are both tense now in the same way. There is something not right about the air, something that makes his lungs tighten nervously. They watch (one pair of eyes sky blue, the other an opaque lavender) as the Uzumaki siblings gather in a tight, nervous cluster at the front of their group, exchanging terse looks and worried gazes. It is evident that they have formulated a strategy but nearly impossible to tell whether or not they have actually invested hope in it as successful. There’s a strong underlying worry painting their features as they watch the skyline and it makes them all nervous. There is no movement for a long time, only them watching the trees and talking softly together. Unable to hear them, their peons watch their body language, veiled and well-trained to act responsively to what their leaders might be thinking: the angle of Amenbou’s back, the dark way Kaigyo’s jaw is clenched, the way Kushina’s hands curl and uncurl where they rest along her leg.
Something’s coming.
The idea of danger hangs in the air.
Amenbou speaks to address them all:
”We’re going into the forest.”
(To die?)
Minato clenches his fists and thinks of someone-
(“I can’t die, sensei! Not here and not now!”)
But it’s been a long time since he’s seen Kakashi’s shapely face. A long, long time. (Too long, he thinks, since he’s really seen anyone’s face. It feels like, every time he and the other ANBU remove their masks they remove their own faces, too, like tissue paper, so that the throbbing muscle beneath is exposed to the cool, salty air.) He lingers, his breath skating softly over the memories of his students, of Shisui, of teachers he has both had and been partner to. Educational schemes are not necessarily his thing but he cannot help it - he misses them badly.
He feels tired. Tensed. His muscles grip him as if they are badly afraid of falling off of him when he moves. (And he does move, restlessly and in small circles.) He stays against his perch and Hizashi stays beside him, and that is the way of it.
The way the Uzumaki siblings go on to explain it, they three will travel together and their troops will travel in a semi-ring in their wake - the idea is to put just the perfect amount of distance between the troops and them. It’s an ambush and so they will do the majority of their communications through summoned beasts versus actual rendezvous, and it is everyone’s hope that the Clouds will be deceived into thinking the Uzumaki siblings have come on their own. (Hope that they don’t dare feel because if they do, it will be crushed that much easier.) If it works, it will work brilliantly.
If it does not work, it will just be one thing of many, and they will improvise to the very best of their ability.
There is a strange and savage sound against the inside of Minato’s skull and he feels his throat constrict unhappily. It’s a bad headache that plagues him. (A ghoul queen. I see a thousand ancient bodies. I feel-) The air is abnormally cold, even for November, and he worries, he worries deeply.
Kushina is the first into the forest, her brothers following dutifully afterwards.
xxxv.
Shisui’s is a distant, limited foresight, one she thinks an hourglass might have were it tipped sideways, laid horizontally across some person’s waiting table. The land smells unfamiliarly like driftwood and she thinks that no one could ever really belong here, the way the fog wreaths the thick trees so long into the morning, and the way water seems to be the only constant. (Shisui has never been taught how to swim, and so she is instinctually wary of the way the whole of Uzugakure’s culture is founded upon it.) She reaches up to her long hair and pushes it away from her face habitually, as if it were bothering her. It isn’t, of course, but what is bothering her she cannot really voice. It is as if there is a ribbon hanging down from her hair and trailing along her shoulder blades from time to time and making her think that there is a spider on her back. It’s a strange sensation, since Shisui has never been the type to really toy with ribbons. Wire always seemed the more useful brother, in that way.
Theirs is a small party of four (they have been walking at a moderate pace for nearly a week now), and she can tell the pinker of her two smallest comrades is not used to such practiced silence, which she thinks is strange considering that how easily it comes to Kakashi. Strangely, it reminds her a bit of her own days with the full Team 7, when Sanosuke was not a ramen chef and Minato was smaller and cute. Mind, the situation was reversed where three members of the group (if she was including her sensei) were raucous and the other was a practiced facilitator of silence. It operated in much the same way, though - the alienation, that is. (In its own way.)
She looks up into the trees, counts the rows of branches and estimates that he is almost seven meters up from her, which is a long way to fall, and while she trusts him as a Sannin, she has very little faith in his abilities in the realm of…precautionary measures.
”Sensei,” she calls calmly up at him, “are you certain?”
Jiraiya grins back at her and shoots down from the tree tops. Rin jumps a little, but Kakashi barely glances up. (For his prodigal ability, Shisui has identified his patience and unshakeability as that of a slacker.) Her sensei flips his hair a little; the years have altered him some. His nose ring (so long regarded by the Council of Elders as unnecessarily gaudy) has begun to look like a mole in its habitual roost along the crest of his left nostril, and the sun has painted short but growing lines across his face. His hair having gone so pale so early, Shisui has never seen her teacher as truly young, this is certain, but she finds a soft and subtle unhappiness in the way his aging is evidenced in his handsome face.
All the same, his landing is as robust as ever, and his grin exposes all of his teeth.
(She finds that Jiraiya looks somewhat like a dog when he smiles, and seeing that she is not much fond of dogs, Shisui keeps that opinion to herself. She is not sure why she thinks it exactly. She cannot justify her reasoning and so she does not voice it at all. It would not make sense to voice it without having some reason. Her own face is straight enough, like porcelain. Surely not all people smile so ferociously? But she hasn’t ever really thought about it before.)
”We’re getting close, I promise.”
”But Jiraiya-sama,” Rin says gently, “you said that days ago.”
”Well,” he says, with a short nod, “I mean it this time.”
There is a long silence. Shisui, being long used to such things (she endured it throughout her entire childhood, did she not? She thinks she must have,) simply waits it out. (And at that time, Minato was the one there to site him as ridiculous. Of course, Minato has not talked about him in a long time. Shisui thinks that maybe he thinks that it would be bad luck, whatever they might say. As if it might doom him. And so they instead pretend that he is not gone because he was never there to begin with.
”I have not seen you in a long time.”
”I was in Konoha and Sarutoubi-sensei mentioned to me that a commander of an old student of mine had written in because that student had requested leave to voluntarily support a different border.” That same dog-smile. Ugly in a familiarly handsome way. “On the opposite side of Fire Country no less.”
”You mean Sandaime-sama.”
”He asked me if I felt like coming to collect you.”
”…I will infer from that that you did feel like it, sensei.”
And a buckle-buckle laugh. “I bet Minato’s been missing you something nasty, Shi-chan.”
And she knows that he will probably be very happy to see him. It is a detached, aching knowledge, the kind that she might pepper her salad with. She intersperses it with the not-comfort that is the knowledge that he could die in the space of time it takes her to think of him. She has not received a letter from him in response to her last and in the same arbitrary way that lovers will, it bothers her somewhat. But she says nothing for the superstition that it might bring him misfortune.) The same superstition that has kept Minato silent about their sensei for these long-short years.
She sighs softly through her nose.
Only Kakashi notices, and he says nothing.
They walk a while further through a forest without any real name of consequence and after almost a half-an-hour the trees begin to thin out suspiciously. Shisui counts the space between them and soon enough they are looking out onto a waterfront. Her back prickles faithlessly; they can see the whole thing from their vantage point since they are on a hill overlooking it. The ocean (called Minikuiyou, the Ugly Sea, by locals) is a sharp ended thing, a deep bay that gluts out into prettier things that are far more expansive - it is deep and grayish and ruddy without being charming at all, and reminds her of an oil pond in a way. Jiraiya looks down on it and whistles at the huge twin redwoods growing at its opposite ends on two small pedestals of yellow dirt that hardly look large enough to be suitable.
”I told you we were getting close.”
They have been still almost a minute before Shisui looks down at the ground.
It’s just trembled beneath her.
(But it is Kakashi who wonders at it aimlessly, his quiet voice bored and strung like string across his teeth:)
”…what was that, exactly?”
CHAPTERS XXXVI-XXXX