I Don't Know You Anymore - Chapter 5 - mabledonut (2024)

Chapter Text

He’s taller now. His white hair was a little longer than how he used to keep it, too. His limbs were lankier, and a little on the lean side, for a shinobi, but he was broader in the shoulders than he had been before, with a small red tattoo on his left bicep, one whose design had always reminded Minato of a cross between a torn leaf and an unblinking fiery-red eye. The tattoo glared at him now, like a permanent reminder of the separation between them, of where the focus was fixed now.

And of course one of the biggest differences between then and now was that now he was wearing the standard snow-white porcelain ANBU mask over his regular cloth mask.

“Hokage-sama.”

“Hound.”

It was their first interaction in months. Or in a sense, their first meeting ever, at least in their new roles. The first time face to face (or what passed as face to face, what with all the masks) after Kakashi had successfully managed to use his Foundation mission schedule to dodge the Hokage’s request for an audience for the last couple of months.

So far, three months into the job, Minato had found taking on the mantle of Hokage to be pretty straightforward. He had taken to adopting a slightly more formal and commanding version of his normal on-mission persona when dealing with emissaries and subordinates, but with Kakashi, or Hound, rather, he found himself floundering for the first time, and floundering hard. He had no clue what demeanor to take. Supportive…? Compassionate? Inviting? Hopeful…? Nostalgic…?

All of those options had backfired on him too many times to count.

The clock was harsh and unforgivingly loud all around them, the seconds ticking by, without result. Shifting, ticking past ever faster but never changing pace. The first snowfall of winter had just fallen outside the windows of the big round office, snowflakes drifting down in a semblance of peacefulness. In contrast to the soft layer of snow beginning to coat the rooftops and streets, the silent space inside the office felt like it was already iced over, like every inch between them was strewn with invisible shattered glass. On a precipice, the two of them. The hard jagged cliffs’ edge of half-remembered memories constantly pushed down, repressed or torn out like unwanted weeds. Torn out or trimmed down out of sight, but not uprooted. That was the whole problem, really. The inability to get right down to the roots.

Lacking any real plan, Minato's thoughts traveled back to the familiar footsteps of establishing protocol first and foremost:

Mokuteki wa nan desu ka?

What’s the goal here?

The dim echo of his own naive voice answered the question the moment he posed it, returning to his mind through the thick passage of past years: “I’m going to get all four of us through this war, okay? However I have to. Whatever it takes.”

…That was the goal back then.

So much for that.

So now what’s the new goal.

Even the mere memory of what he had said back then made it feel like his face had just caught flame. “Your goal is to keep your students safe, during a war?” He’d been mocked soundly for it, the other jonin sensei all laughing him to scorn. “I’m sorry, Namikaze-san, but that’s just stupid. Those are good intentions, but you gotta brace yourself for the inevitable…”

Now he understood what they had been laughing about. It wasn’t just his unbearable naivete. It was the very concept of safe genin in the first place.

I promised you once, Kakashi. I promised you that I’d keep everyone safe.

My first mistake as sensei.

I’m not surprised you hate me.

What a stupid thing to say.

“If you have no further instructions for me, Hokage-sama—”

“Stay a moment,” Minato said without quite making it an order, speaking without a plan, desperate for a second chance. “Stay, just—”

An assenting nod, but nothing else.

It was almost as though the clock on the wall was screaming the word back at him as the seconds ticked past without any measurable change or progress.

Stay.

Stay.

Stay?

Stay where?

Stay here…?

For what? What’s the purpose? What’s the point?

I promised you that I’d keep everyone safe.

Stay here in this room with me, this room filled with ghosts and ice and shards and memories heavy as stone weights tied to our legs?

Stay?

Safe?

Stay?

…What a stupid thing to say.

Whenever Obito stonewalled or went into quiet-mode like this, you could prod and encourage and lightly tease and joke around to lighten the mood, and eventually the dam would crack and then break. But with Kakashi, each passing second was like one closed door after another. It had been at least a few years since he had even bothered to sneer dismissively when Minato spoke. Instead he just stared and stayed and waited blankly for his next set of orders.

What’s the purpose. What’s the point.

Stay here?

Here is…

‘Here’ was a dead-end. The top of the tower. The summit, sickening as it was to admit. There was no goal, here, no route to victory, here, because this was the victory. Or it was supposed to have been. No bigger, better, higher outcome to reach. No major result to work toward. Just a room full of invisible glass and a too-loud secondhand on the clock and a couple of cold, clinical roles to fulfill.

Kakashi is gone. He’s not in there anymore. Or if he is, he won’t talk to me, and maybe that means it’s time for me to stop trying.

So eventually, lacking other options, Minato settled on a cold and clinical demeanor, soft and detached, to reciprocate what he was being given:

“Tell me about the recent assignment to Iwa,” he instructed the silent ANBU agent in front of him. “I want your assessment about the sincerity of their intention to cease agitations at the border.”

ANBU Hound nodded, then began a precise, detailed, but all-too-short listing off all of the relevant information. By the time he had finished, perhaps half a minute had passed, and Minato was back to staring and nodding, only barely maintaining his control over the shifting and uncertain emotions under the surface.

“Further requests or instructions?” Hound asked him impassively.

Minato stiffly shook his head no.

Hound nodded, preparing to leave, apparently not the least bit bothered or put off by the strained awkwardness of their meeting, the oppressive formality, the jagged shards of icy glass that spiked into Minato’s chest every time he opened his mouth to speak to him.

He’s not a child anymore, he reminded himself, not for the first time, as the other voice deep within him warning him not to give up tried to stand up and shriek. He’s a soldier. He’s one of the sacrifices of war, same as Rin. And Obito too, really. War always comes at a price, and the cost you had to pay was that tiny kid he used to be.

The war that was a disease on all our lives for years on end, and even if we both survived it, neither you nor he was immune…

“Kakashi,” Minato couldn’t help murmuring just one time. Just one last overture, and then he would finally put it behind him, if indeed Kakashi truly didn’t want to, didn’t care to—

“Hokage-sama,” Hound bowed, his porcelain-masked face pointed toward the floor as he delivered his most personal speech yet: “I humbly request that all further briefings and mission assignments be delivered via written instructions deposited in my ANBU locker, according to standard ANBU protocols.”

Minato didn’t want to, but he ended up nodding. He was too preoccupied with doing everything he could to ignore the aching, yanking thud in his glass-strewn ribcage, where the thin memory of Ohayo, Kakashi-kun and Ohayo, Minato-Sensei! still reverberated, swung loose and unhinged inside him like a broken pendulum, like a pair of near-silent echoes dying away in the distance across an immense canyon.

…There’s nothing here anymore, Hokage-sama, warned that dead-eyed, unblinking, half-red stare right before the door clicked shut behind Hound’s back. Stop looking for something that no longer exists.

Open your eyes, Minato.

Then why did it feel like he was pressing them shut.

This is reality now. Stop letting him hurt you like this. That was the unspoken thing, the undercurrent of Kushina and Obito and Jiraiya-sensei’s warnings to him to just give up already. The ones that the voice of his own better judgment had adopted.

Quit trying to fix things that broke years ago. Look at the facts. Open your eyes.

But the thing no one seemed to understand was that it hurt either way, eyes open or shut.

Minato’s first act upon becoming Hokage three months earlier had been to appoint Nara Shikaku and Inuzuka Tsume to his small council. They weren’t random choices. In addition to giving him traction with two of Konoha’s bigger clans, the two of them were strong-willed without being too headstrong; people he had trusted with his own life out on missions and who had entrusted him with theirs. But most importantly, they were two people he knew would not hesitate to express vehement disagreement with him if and when the need arose, unlike close friends or former teammates or (worse yet) those with the glow of hero-worship in their eyes, which was most of Konoha at this point, given the rumors about Minato’s involvement in the Kiri ‘operation’ that were swirling around. Having objective and divergent points of view on his small council would be critically important to keeping himself on the right path.

The second thing he did was prioritize full revisions to the shinobi manual. In spite of Hiruzen’s strong hints that it would be better to take a subtle tack, Minato took and maintained a very firm public commitment to changing the Nidaime’s protocols, some of which he had disagreed with since before he became a genin. He convened a special edits and revisions panel headed by Aburame Shibi’s brother-in-law, and Umino-sensei (Minato had forgotten her name, but she was a quiet but popular teacher at the Academy). Utatane Koharu had also finagled a way to keep herself on the committee, somehow, but that was alright. Change wasn’t going to come overnight. Minato was willing to work brick by brick, laying a road for a better future stone by stone.

The first few months passed at breakneck speed, though. It felt like he was always bumping into people in the hallways, giving and receiving an infectious feeling of excitement and purpose. The bustle and crowds of people who now needed attention from him, the joking and jibs of “Working too much, Yondaime-sama?”

No, he answered even as he grinned and returned greetings at lightning speed. Not nearly hard enough.

He refused to move to a different residence, although a few people had hinted that his current apartment, while spacious, was too simple, and a larger and more elegant home would be more suitable for receiving visitors, domestic and foreign. Minato stood firm. He would receive all visitors in his office in the Tower. Work was work, but his home was his home, and he, Kushina, and Obito fit nice and snugly into it. None of them were interested in dislodging and moving to new living quarters, no matter how much Kushina complained about how much she hated the finish on the cabinets and the pattern on the countertops in the kitchen. And they had already just finished remodeling the office into the baby nursery, after all. Simple is good. Simple will be fine.

Minato did make some substantial changes to his office at the Tower, though. First off, he moved it from the windowless reception room on the first floor that Hiruzen had favored (due to arthritic pains in his knees) to the big round office on the top floor of the Tower that had been Tobirama’s private study after Hashirama had died and left it vacant. It was a well-appointed room; Minato could see why his predecessors had favored it. Light streamed in from the many windows, which (against the advice of his ANBU guards) he often left all the way open, even in late fall and winter, enjoying the feel of the seasonal changes, even when it occasionally brought an unwelcome chill.

It was never truly cold sitting behind Hashirama’s heavy, homemade wooden desk, the one that had been in a storage room in the basem*nt ever since the death of his brother, Lord Second. It felt like the room was always warm with the solid presence of others, whether they were materially or immaterially in the room with him. Probably because of his smaller-than-average stature, Hiruzen had used a single chair or kneeling rug placed on a small dais at the front of the room for receiving visitors and claimants. Minato, however, preferred to be on more even terms with his guests and visitors. And he liked running a fingertip or even a palm across the shining wood surface of the desk. It reminded him of those who had come before, and of their intent in settling in this one particular place, in the shade of the trees and the mighty arc of rising cliffs behind him.

He did keep one object from Hiruzen’s time in office, though, and he kept it front and center: a fulgurite paperweight, a half-foot-tall piece of petrified lightning that Biwako had found on the beach during her and Hiruzen’s honeymoon trip to the shores of the Land of Whirlpools many years ago. The Sarutobi family had kept it as an heirloom for decades until Hiruzen had decided to gift it to Minato on the day he left office.

“With it, I also give you the advice that the Nidaime gave to me, and to all of the members of my cell,” Hiruzen had murmured with a distant but faintly proud smile. “‘A good shinobi can learn to absorb some blows, the ones that will not kill you. A great shinobi must learn to absorb many blows, the ones you cannot evade. But no matter how hard you try, there is no shinobi who can absorb every blow. You can only absorb so much, and you must know and remember where that limit is.’ Those were his words to us. I have always tried my best to embody their wisdom.”

For a moment longer than he should have, Minato considered how to respond, before settling on a slightly pallid smile and a loose gesture at the many scrolls and stacks of paper littering his desk that awaited his attention. “If you’re offering a reminder of the value of delegation and teamwork, you don’t have to sell me on any of that, Sandaime-sama. There’s no way I’m going to be able to get through all this paperwork myself…”

Hiruzen accepted his somewhat light answer with a matching smile and then a deep bow, which Minato rose and matched.

“This world is cruel, Minato-sama,” Hiruzen warned as Minato rose from his bow. “It will gut you if you let it.”

You can only absorb so much, the elderly, bent man repeated the warning with his eyes as he left.

Minato waited until the door clicked shut behind the previous Hokage. Glanced around the room to check that he was entirely alone. Gave the inherited fulgurite paperweight a long, considering look, then sent an equally long, considering look at each of the giant stone faces staring down at him from outside the open windows. Shodaime, Nidaime, Sandaime. All three of them watching him, safeguarding their precious Village with unblinking but unaffected and unaffectable dead eyes…

Blinking his way back to the pile of scrolls stacked under the paperweight, Minato sat up straight and unwrinkled the sleeves of the white haori that had gotten bunched around his arms.

“Let’s fix this mess,” he whispered to himself, heart beginning to race with excitement.

“…Impossible. No way. Dumb as, and I don’t say this lightly, dumb as a f*cking rock, Sensei,” Obito hurled abuse at him later that evening, about two minutes into their late-afternoon ninjutsu training session.

Remembering Hiruzen’s advice from earlier, Minato crossed his arms over his chest and stood firm, silently absorbing the relentless onslaught of verbal blows.

“Dumber than one of Jiraiya-Sensei’s plotlines. Dumber than Aoba after five rounds of sake. And not just dumb, but a f*cking huge waste of time and energy. Seriously useless, Sensei, it’s a completely useless, stupid, terrible, awful, sh*tty idea. I mean, look at the facts, that would take us a million years, at least, and you’re the Hokage now, if you hadn’t noticed, so you really don’t have that kind of time on your hands anymore!”

“I’ll make time,” Minato shrugged, settling into his stance and recrossing his arms so the other one was on top. The only thing that’s going to take a million years is waiting for Obito to come around to the idea, but I’m in no hurry.

“Come on, Sensei- sama, you must be joking,” Obito continued to scoff and whine at him. “It was already hard enough learning water release!”

“But look how well you managed that,” Minato reminded him, not allowing himself to rise to the bait of distraction that was Obito’s drawl of Sensei-sama.

“Sure, after like a billion years of pure, unmitigated suffering!!”

Minato got it. He really did. Minato’s own worst chakra-affinity had always been earth-style. It had taken him several years of focused, painstaking training just to get the hang of the very most basic doton releases, and even still, it was his least-preferred option in real battle.

Obito’s weakest was and always had been lightning. Whereas Kakashi was a natural with it, due to it being his individual chakra affinity. Unlike with the water-release, which Minato had been pretty sure had been physically harder for Obito to figure out, Obito’s problem with raiton jutsu seemed to stem from a mental block, a fear of never being able to live up to the gold standard set by his younger teammate.

Now that the cause of the block had left their vicinity, though…

(Not that the memories ever really left, but…)

Minato sighed and kicked his toe against the dirt of the training field they were using. “Look, Obito, it’s probably going to be uncomfortable and difficult, at least at first, but I really think you can do it. I bel—”

“DON’T give me that I believe in you crap, Sensei!! I’m not a stupid kid anymore; I’m not about to fall for that!!”

…Okay, I guess it’s gonna take him a little more time to come around to the idea, then.

But Minato was pretty sure it would work. At least in theory, it seemed like a pretty good plan. A mokuton plus raiton combination, giving double speed to the former, and durable shape to the latter. He’d have to find a way around the insulating effects of the mokuton, but he was pretty sure that with the force of Obito’s chakra reserves behind it, plus Obito’s very keen intuitions about how and when to switch chakra-natures, they’d manage to find a way to deal with it.

“Let me at least just review a few of the basics of lightning release with you, Obito-kun. We’ll start small—”

Obito didn’t let him finish; he unleashed a long, angry, wordless howl of frustration, resistance, and rage at Minato, then rolled his neck back and finished his yell with his face pointed up at the sky. Then he plopped down onto his bottom on the training ground dirt, and then he flopped over onto his back, folding his arms over his forehead as he shut his eye to the unresponsive blue autumn sky overhead.

A couple of minutes passed in silence.

(…Come on, Obito-kun…

Just give it a try…)

And then finally:

“FINE, WHATEVER,” Obito shouted up at Minato from the ground, not bothering to re-open his eye. “But you know this is going to backfire, right? It’s f*cking stupid, and it’s never gonna work.”

“…Won’t really know for sure until we try, though, right?”

The water dragon jutsu Minato had taken so many pains to drill into his second-most naturally-gifted student had eventually become eleven-year-old Obito’s strongest jutsu, or one of them. So much raw chakra to power it. Reportedly, no one had seen one as powerful since the days of the Nidaime, who had allegedly caused tidal pools to form on top of rooftops with his (and untold amounts of water damage, by implication).

The first time Obito had used it in battle had been the day with the purse snatchers near the border, how Kakashi had fallen behind, and then Rin went back to kneel at his side and help. Minato remembered how Obito’s attention had kept going behind them, back to his fallen teammates. To the point that Minato had to shout at him to get him to focus on the actual battle.

“Obito, now, use the water release, like we talked about —”

“But I’m!”

“Just do it! Now! Don’t hold back!”

He had, thank the Sages, eventually complied.

And later on, afterwards, Obito had been glowing, practically levitating with proud excitement as they raced back to rejoin the others.

“Great job with that water-dragon, Obito-kun!” Rin called out to them, beaming widely, her excitement matching his as she helped Kakashi hobble down the street, his arm draped over her shoulders as he limped along next to her. “That was seriously amazing! And nice work getting those purse-snatchers while we were busy, too!”

“Aren’t you gonna thank me?” Obito had yelled at Kakashi as they caught up to each other.

“For what? For nearly drowning me, or for sending me flying into a hunk of concrete so hard you broke my toe?”

Obito’s smirking grin had slid from his face. He gritted his teeth so loud they squeaked; Minato could hear his molars sliding around inside his mouth as he growled, drawing breath to yell and scream —

Minato quickly grabbed Obito’s shoulder and wedged himself in between the two of them, walking in the middle of his group of students instead of hanging back, like he usually did. “What Kakashi means to say is, that was really impressive, Obito-kun. We’re all so proud of you!”

At his other side, Kakashi spluttered, “That’s not even close to what I meant t—!”

“You don’t have to pretend, Sensei, I know he hates me,” Obito interrupted whinily before Kakashi could finish. Both boys stuck their faces around Minato’s waist to glare at the other, Obito adding a stuck-out tongue, as Minato glanced over and shared a tired sigh with Rin.

By that time, though, they had been a team for three mission-laden, war-stained years, so they were all well aware of it. How you suck and I hate you often meant something like I’m grateful to have you in my life and I don’t actually know how I would function without you, but I really don’t know how to say that to your face without losing face, either. The hot and cold of it all. The fiery but unexpectedly tender, tenuous but ever present connection between Obito and Kakashi.

And by ‘all,’ he really just meant himself and Kushina and Rin. They’d all spied the lost, drifting look in Kakashi’s eye at training the time when Obito got food poisoning and had to stay home for a week. They’d heard Obito pitch the world’s most enormous fits over Kakashi being sent out on solo missions or shipped out to fight alongside other chunin.

“I mean, I basically saved Kakashi’s life using that water-release yesterday, and all I got was this measly tin of dog biscuits to feed to Pakkun…!” Obito complained to them the very next morning at training, still rubbing sleep from his eyes after they had all stayed up far too late at Bingo Night with his gran the night before. “And then on top of that, he gets to skip training all because he’s on stupid mandated bed rest all for his dumb broken toe—“

“He’s never given me dog biscuits,” Rin interrupted with a slightly petulant cast to her face that halted Obito’s complaining right in its tracks.

“Nor me,” Minato supplied honestly.

“Really?”

“Doesn’t trust me around Pakkun without supervision,” Minato continued as Rin nodded. “Says I’ll spoil him with human food and toad treats and make him sick to his stomach because, and I quote, ‘ Pakkun has a tiny belly and doesn’t know when to quit and finds it laughably easy to manipulate you, Minato-Sensei.’”

“Woah, that’s like, a scary good impersonation, Sensei,” Obito murmured, suddenly less heated.

Minato shrugged. I have known him since he was tiny, after all.

“And once when I tried to feed him vegetables, Kakashi got mad at me and told me that was rabbit food, not suitable for dogs who need their strength for hunting and tracking,” Rin added into the silence.

Obito went quiet for a long while after that, moving his goggles up onto his forehead and staring wonderingly at the small tin of doggie biscuits in his hand.

“Lettuce,” Rin said with even more emphasis. “He wouldn’t even let me feed Pakkun lettuce.”

Minato gave her a small grin, and she sighed and shrugged as Obito simply stared at the dog biscuits.

“…Ah, teammates,” Obito had eventually said with a sort of sagacious fondness after a long while had passed. “It’s better to have ‘em than to not have ‘em. But sometimes only barely.”

Within the first week of becoming Kuni no Hi’s Kage, Minato had paid another visit to the Toad Sage (This time, the meeting was very easy to book).

“How about now?” he said the moment the formalities had finished. “Can you get me an audience with Pakkun and the other ninken now?”

“Eh…well…” croaked the old sage with far more uncertainty in his croaking than Minato had been hoping to hear.

“We’ll… uh, we’ll see, Mina-chan,” said Mamma Toad. “Let’s just wait a little and see.”

His consternation matched theirs. “Why can’t I just talk to one of them?”

Uneasy looks and a chorus of low, untranslatable croaks were his only answer. The ancient toad sage just murmured something about being too old for politics, ribbitted his lips together, and then turned his head slightly to one side, inclining his eyes toward nap-time. Minato shot a look over at Ma and Pa, hoping one of them would intervene before the giant frog collapsed into unconsciousness, but both of them were making soothing quiet ribbits.

“Past his bedtime, already,” Mamma tutted.

“But it’s only 1:00pm…?” Minato tried not to complain.

Pa Toad sighed at him, waved him over to the other side of the chamber with a flippered hand, and said, “…Mina-chan, the Sage won’t like it, but we’ll do what we can for you. I’ll send a message and ask ‘em, the ninken, I mean, but I wouldn’t get your hopes up too high. They’re pretty angry. Barkin’ mad about it. Pressing the issue could come off as, what’s that word. Indelicate.”

“Well, let’s at least give it a try,” Minato urged.

He checked back in 48 hours later only to discover that the small group of toads in charge of sending the message to the ninken for him hadn’t even had a chance to finish the first draft of the letter yet:

“Dearest Pakkun—”

“No, Fondest Pakkun—”

“I ain’t fond of him! He nearly gnawed my back legs off during training that one time—!”

“Can I write out some ideas for you?” Minato offered, only to be rebuffed by a storm of ribbits and croaks.

“You have enough and then some on your plate, Minato-sama-chama! Go home and leave this to us! We’ll manage!”

“It’ll just take me ten minutes at most, and then you can re-write it if you want.”

Nervous, neckless blinks and ribbits of disagreement all around. One of the older toads pressed his flippery hand to his bald forehead. The younger toads around him were sweating a slick oil, a sure sign they were all quite nervous.

“…Leave ‘em be,” urged Pa Toad. “It may take them a while to get the wording right, Mina-chan, I mean-a -sama. Come back again in a few days, we’ll see how it’s going.”

Which he did, only to be informed that it wasn’t going anywhere at all. It was still stuck in the drafts committee and seemed like it would be for some time yet.

“This is a tricky one, Mina-chana-sama. Give us a little more time to think…”

“What’s tricky about it?”

“Eh… I want to get the wording right, but, uh… well, if I recall rightly, there was some funny business with the ninken and that Hatake kid you used to teach, and so now the ninken don’t seem to like being reminded of any connection to him. Something happened a few years ago, and so I don’t really know what to say, because no one wants to talk about it, I guess.”

Tell me a-f*cking-bout it, Minato thought to himself as he stormed off back to Konoha.

So now Minato’s best and basically only lead was the file.

Or it should have been, except that…

“A seal?” he exclaimed in dismay. “On the file itself…?”

Requesting the file detailing the events that had led to the death of Nohara Rin was his third official act as Hokage, on his second day on the job, first thing in the morning. He dispatched Hiruzen’s secretary, Katayama Juri, a middle aged woman with faded-blonde hair, horn-rimmed glasses, and a clipped, oppressive, let’s-not-have-so-much-joking-around-in-here-when-people-are-trying-to-work kind of personality to go pull the file from the archives for him.

She was back in his office by midday to deliver the file in an envelope, along with the very unfortunate news.

“I’m sorry, but what do you mean there’s a seal on the file that even a Hokage can’t remove or override?!”

She adjusted her glasses and sent a pointed look at the envelope on the desk between them. “As I said, this particular file has a seal with a twenty-year expiration.”

“Twenty years!?”

“If I recall, the plan was to do fifty or a hundred years, but it ended up being too complicated,” Juri informed him.

“Too—”

Minato didn’t even bother to finish. He anchored his elbows on the big heavy desk and buried his hands in his hair and waited for his head to implode on itself, since it felt like it was about to any second now.

f*ck you, too, Hiruzen.

“If there is anything further I can assist you with, Hokage-sama…”

“Thank you, Juri-san. That will be all.”

As soon as she left, Minato’s office became engulfed in a gloomy, deathly repressive sort of quiet. The kind you only encountered at a cemetery early in the morning, before anyone else was awake. Like the seal on the envelope had risen up and trapped him within its confines, too. The ticking of the clock was the only disturbance. Each tick sent a fresh spark of anger and frustration and bitterness through him. Sending a short glare at the piece of fulgurite on his desk, Minato sat back in his chair and then stared unblinkingly at the sealed envelope in bitter, frustrated, angry silence for several minutes. Chewed on his tongue for a while, then drummed his fingers on the top of Hashirama-sama’s desk, feeling but not hearing the fall of his own fingertips against the heavy wood.

Then he stood up. Closed all the windows. Took extra care to pull each of the blinds shut to ensure that his ANBU guards outside the office were unable to see what he was about to do. Moved his haori out of the way and opened the storage scroll on his vest where he kept his personal things. Laid his black notebook flat on the desktop. Painstakingly, Minato traced every curving line and stroke of the elaborate, vaguely-leaf-shaped seal into one of the blank pages, then copied it out a second time, this time ripping out the page when he had finished it.

Even though it was only his second day on the job, he went home two hours early to talk to Kushina that evening, pressing a kiss to her jawline as he hugged her from behind, and then pressing the folded piece of notebook paper into her hand.

“Kushina, darling, love of my life, and heiress to the collective wisdom and knowledge of all of Uzushio. Can you maybe possibly look into finding a way to break or undo a seal that’s got a twenty-year duration?”

Kushina had half-turned away from the plate of noodles she had just finished cooking up (slapping his hand away when he made to grab one to taste; “Get your own, Mr. Sexy-Kage; I made these for me and the baby!”). Screwing up her eyebrows, she fixed him with a that’s a weird question, if you know what I mean kind of look as she flipped open the paper Minato had torn out of his notebook, scanning its contents with bemusem*nt and curiosity.

“Sure… I guess… If it’s important…”

“It’s important.”

She glanced up at him, registering the seriousness of his tone. “Then I promise.”

One of the most unexpectedly painful things was discovering how other than Maito Gai, no one else in the Village really seemed to care one way or the other about whether Hatake Kakashi lived or died. Kushina would get that wrung-out do you seriously have to bring it up again look on her face. Obito wouldn’t even tolerate a passing mention of him anymore.

And as for the rest of Konoha…

“What about sending Hatake, once he gets back?” asked Nara Shikaku one day in the large council with fifteen or twenty other jonin all crowded into the round office, shortly after Gai deposited a missing-person’s mission request scroll from a village in Kusa on the Hokage’s desk. “I hear he’s quite skilled with tracking and retrieval, among other things.”

“We have his ninken to thank for the tracking part of it,” Tsume grunted her disagreement. “And a sensitive mission from an allied nation like this, I think Kusa might be a little nervous about us sending them a shinobi with such a notorious reputation…”

Minato pulled the mission assignment scroll closer and pretended to muse over its contents.

“Meaning, can we trust him to actually retrieve the target, rather than killing them the moment he makes contact.”

Who the f*ck said that.

Minato had to force himself not to jerk his head up to check. Simply flicked his eyes over at Akimichi Chouza, whose large belly was reverberating with laughter following what seemed to have been Yamanaka Inoichi’s acerbic remark, unless perhaps it might have been Inuzuka Gaku’s—

“He might not want a low-stakes mission like this in the first place. Assassination missions are his favorite, I gather,” Hyuga Natsu said. “That’s what everyone says, anyway….”

“Other than suicide missions,” came a low and barely audible murmur that Minato couldn’t discern the source of.

His breath thinning unexpectedly, Minato searched each throat in turn, trying to find the origin-point of the murmurs while trying not to listen to the ripples of hushed laughter, or to Obito’s teeth grinding from where he stood at Minato’s side.

“Hatake Kakashi and Maito Gai,” Minato announced his decision, shooting a quick look at the green-suited chunin who had delivered the message in the first place.

“Better you than me,” Shiranui Genma murmured to Gai.

“Try not to let him leave without you this time,” advised Ebisu.

“…Sure you don’t want to tag along with them, Obito?” Genma wise-cracked a few minutes later as the meeting adjourned. “You look like you might enjoy getting some energy out.”

“Because a mission with the Friend-Killer is just the thing for that,” Ebisu laughed and nudged his teammate as Obito stormed away without a word. Gai, on the other hand, sent a meaningful look over in Minato’s direction, who still felt strangely short of breath.

We have a serious problem, Gai said without saying.

Minato wasn’t in any way ignorant of that fact. He had kept his own feelers out, which meant expanding his growing personal spy network in his own ANBU staff. Ever since taking office, he had periodically spoken privately with Shiranui Genma and Uchiha Shisui, who were both ANBU and who both served alongside Kakashi from time to time, and talked regularly with Maito Gai, who wasn’t ANBU, and who Kakashi barely ever acknowledged, but who still kept his ear to the ground for Minato anyway.

Only last week, Minato had asked Genma to stay long after a small-council meeting, pressing him for an update.

“He…”

“Yes?”

“Well, it’s probably nothing, but…”

“Go ahead, Genma-kun. Tell me.”

The teenage boy across from him had adjusted his bandana around his hair a little bit, but there was only so long that you could stall for time when the Hokage had asked you a direct question. Genma had shuffled from foot to foot and fiddled with the ANBU mask in his hair and the senbon in his mouth for a bit, then grimaced at him as the words finally came spilling out:

“He shakes in his sleep.”

“…Like shivering?”

“Mn. Nightmares, we think.”

“‘We’?”

“Me and Shisui. The rest of the team, too. Shisui says he’s seen him with tremors during the day, sometimes, too, but he hides it from the rest of us. Shisui can only pick up on it when he’s using the Sharingan.”

“I see.”

(It still hurt, hearing the facts, even when left unspoken, even when received indirectly. It hurt to know, and it hurt not to know).

Gai was no pushover. Over the course of several discussions, always after the office had emptied out, Gai kept insisting in a hushed murmur that Minato had to take action, and soon, that “with respect, you’re missing the bigger picture here, Hokage-sama. The element of purposeful, reckless self-endangerment is the problem that must be addressed —”

Minato had interrupted him hard: “I’m definitely not missing that element of it, Gai.”

He regretted his angry outburst the moment the green-suited shinobi left the office, to Shikaku’s low murmur of “awfully tenacious, that one, isn’t he?” as he re-entered in Gai’s wake.

Thank god for that.

(“Juri-san, what’s Maito Gai’s regular salary?” Minato asked his secretary a quarter of an hour later. “Can you see to it he gets a 10% raise…? And can you ask Mitokado Homura to please come to my office for a private request at his earliest convenience?”)

“I want to bench him for a few months,” Minato said the next afternoon at his meeting with Mitokado Homura, the moment Homura had reached the deepest point of his bow of greeting. “Hatake Kakashi.”

By the time Homura had risen from his bow, a shallow frown had settled over his age-spotted features. “I would advise against it, Yondaime-Sama.”

I don’t care what you advise, Minato had to bite back. You’re not here to give advice or dispense ‘wisdom’ anymore.

“Nevertheless, my decision is that Hatake Kakashi be given a three-month leave of abse—”

“For what cause?”

Minato blinked, taken aback; he hadn’t realized that he’d kind of been getting used to people being afraid to interrupt him when he spoke.

“What shall I list as the reason, when I put this request into the system?”

…You ARE the system, he attempted to convey with his silence. Make up a reason.

Again, Minato swallowed down the retort, instead coming up with words for Homura to fill in the blank, quietly astounded by the man’s lack of imagination and intuition. “Recurring, sleep-interrupting trauma from past missions—”

“If any such trauma is listed, it will become part of his permanent file.”

Minato stopped again, narrowing his eyes at the perhaps-more-shrewd-than-he-at-first-seemed man in front of him. He’d always assumed Homura was something of a pushover, one of Hiruzen’s yes-men…

“If it becomes part of his permanent file, then any shinobi with access to that file will be able to verify the truth or falsehood of the claim,” Homura continued, a clipped edge in his voice. “And if there is no truth to the claim…”

Settling his arms over his chest, Minato sat back in his chair and decided to take a more direct tack: “What are you getting at, Homura-san?”

“Merely trying to issue a warning in advance of what, with due respect, I believe would be a grave blunder, Yondaime-sama. The appearance of such personal requests is… generally unfavorable.”

Minato raised an eyebrow as he evaluated the man’s statement, and Homura took the opportunity to continue.

“People will say you are playing favorites, trying to keep your friends and former students off of the front lines and away from the dangers of active duty. After all, you’ve already pulled a few strings to get Young Obito his part-time position helping out at the Academy. Hardly a dangerous assignment. One that many of the older and more experienced shinobi would be better suited for. Or so people might well say.”

“Obito’s position has nothing to do with Kakashi’s—”

“Protocol states that if an agent in the field is healthy and performing up to expectations, then there’s no need to take them off of the active-duty roster,” Homura said, again without waiting for Minato to finish. “Otherwise, perhaps other shinobi will begin to ask themselves, what sort of nightmares do I need to pretend to suffer from, what sort of maladies must I fake in order to be taken off the next mission I don’t want to go on ?”

“It’s not fake —”

“If that’s the case, then I presume that Hatake will eventually put in the request for the leave of absence himself, in his own due time,” Homura said with a bow as he dismissed himself from the meeting without waiting for Minato’s permission. “Assuming the, er, nightmares are affecting him so profoundly in the first place.”

After he left, Minato fumed. Nearly picked up the piece of fulgurite from Hiruzen and hurled it at the door. The only thing that stopped him was the entrance through that same door of Shikaku and Tsume, who had been waiting outside for the meeting to conclude, and who hurried in as soon as Homura left.

“He’s a petty asshole,” Tsume asserted with a jerk of her thumb over one shoulder, eliciting a rare nod of agreement from Shikaku. “Always has been, but it’s double as bad as before, now that he’s convinced Danzo got passed over for your sake.”

“Why did I even put him in charge of the mission ranking and assignments committee in the first place?” Minato asked with his fingers pushed into the corners of his eyes.

“I believe that was Hiruzen’s decision, actually,” Shikaku reminded him.

“Yeah, about two seconds before leaving office,” Tsume added.

“…which means that if I transfer or demote him right away, it looks ugly,” Minato said, collapsing backwards in his chair in exasperation. “Like I’m spitting in Hiruzen’s face…”

“Well, you did say you didn’t want yes-men,” Tsume grinned as Shikaku nodded heavily at him.

As it happened, Gai and Kakashi left for Kusa on the same day and at the same time that Obito returned from a short B-rank he’d taken with Anko and Kurenai. Minato had decided to come in person to greet them at the east-facing an gates. A busy day, with many people coming and going, so there was a short line for the checking-in and checking-out desk. Minato arrived just as the small crowd happened to align Hatake Kakashi going out with Uchiha Obito coming in.

An imperceptible line of tension emanated between the fifteen-year-old ANBU and the recently-turned-sixteen jonin. A wordless exchange. Brushed shoulders, bumped elbows. The swirl of red on Obito’s blue sweater knocking against the small red shoulder tattoo on Kakashi’s bare arm.

Catching himself holding his breath, Minato stared hopefully between the two of them, but nothing more came of it. Kakashi left without a word, and Obito’s face twisted and turned sour as he grimaced down at his shoes like there was something awful and foul stuck to them, and by the time Obito’s gaze rose to meet Minato’s, his expression was one of callously forced comedy, like what Minato had just witnessed was all some grand, un-funny cosmic joke.

(But that was Obito for you…).

The connection between Obito and Kakashi had always been… fractious, but powerful. Dynamic. One of them from a ruined legacy, one from Konoha’s most feared and venerated clan. Two orphaned shinobi kids, both from prestigious families, with the gaze of Konoha upon them. One of them had excelled in spite of that gaze. One of them had floundered, probably in large part because of that gaze.

Strangely, counterintuitively, the connection between them had only become stronger and more pronounced after Obito ‘died.’ They had never been short of reminders. The spinning black-red eye in Kakashi’s socket that had oh-so-briefly been his. The long pink-white scar on Kakashi’s left brow bone and cheek. Even the heavy sag of Kakashi’s shoulders, and the lack of a body to bring home afterwards.

Sometimes, it felt like all the fallout from Kannabi had fallen on Kakashi.

Minato still remembered the dull winter day several years back when Kakashi had let himself into Minato and Kushina’s apartment just after Kushina left to run some errands (he must have waited outside for her to leave), dusted the light covering of snow from his shoes and shoulders and knees, and sat himself down on Minato’s living room couch. Eleven-year-old Kakashi with his head bent down into his knees, his shoulders shaking so hard that the tanto strapped to his back was making little clinking noises against the metal straps of the scabbard. He wasn’t making eye contact, so Minato sat at his side, giving him space, but staying close enough to grab hold of the kid if he needed to be grabbed, and asking him a series of yes or no questions that were answered with jerky shakes or nods of the head until Minato finally narrowed it down.

“What happened to Obito… That happened in spite of your efforts, Kakashi, not because of them,” he remembered hastening to say, or something along those lines, unsure the kid was hearing anything he was saying at this point. He’d been so surprised at seeing such a severe reaction from the usually stoic shinobi, but mostly because it hadn’t happened in the weeks or months right after Obito’s death. Kakashi had been bottling up his breakdown for nearly a half a year, at that point. Minato had been watching him closely over the last five months, watching as Kakashi adopted more and more of Obito’s little mannerisms, wondering how long Kakashi could protract the blow, waiting for the shoe to drop, and drop it did, but not nearly as soon as he had expected, and not for any particular reason that Minato could discern except that it happened to fall on the day exactly thirteen days after what would have been (and actually had been) Obito’s thirteenth birthday. Kakashi had always had a thing about anniversaries and special holidays, but mostly because he marked them in a less traditional way. A birthday plus thirteen days. An anniversary plus one week. Like he was giving himself buffering time, enough of a cushion to try to survive the crushing weight of the blow once it finally and inevitably landed on his small shoulders.

“It happened in spite of you, not because of you, Kakashi,” Minato had repeated a few times, hoping against hope that he was saying the right thing, venturing hesitantly to place his hand on Kakashi’s shoulder, then unclipping the ever-present scabbard and setting it and the tanto to one side so he could settle his palm over his student’s shivering, shaking back. Pressed his thumb against the ridge of Kakashi’s spine in order to press in his point, praying the move would alleviate the agonizing sting affecting the silent kid underneath him, rather than somehow seal in the bite of the barb that seemed to be digging into him. “You couldn’t have prevented it. You and Rin did all you could…”

After a long while, Kakashi had stopped shivering. Went still for long enough that Minato had briefly wondered if he had fallen asleep.

And then abruptly popped his silver-haired head up, his eyes stern and set and totally dry, and asked very formally if he, Minato-Sensei, had already made dinner plans for that evening, and if not, would he be willing to accept a delivery of Ichiraku’s ramen for he and Kushina.

“What sort of question is that,” Minato had burst out laughing. “Of course we’ll accept, but Kakashi, you don’t have to bring us ramen. Let me invite Rin, too. We’ll all go ou—“

“I’ll have Shiba and Akino drop off three servings at 6:30pm this evening. One for you, one for Kushina, one for Rin.”

If Obito were still here, he’d jump at the chance to go out with us, Minato wanted to say. If you’re so intent on turning yourself into him, then you should come with us too. I think it’s what he would have wanted.

“Alright,” he eventually settled on instead, because the look in Kakashi’s mismatched eyes was so determined, he was pretty sure he wasn’t going to be permitted to say no without winning a ninjutsu duel over the issue first. “But I’m paying, and you have to eat with us, and you’d better get at least two or three extra servings for my bottomless-pit-of-a-stomach girlfriend.”

That had gotten a snort of a laugh out of him, a genuine Hatake Kakashi laugh too, not one borrowed from his deceased teammate.

(And a screeched “Your what?!?!” from the other room, as Kushina arrived back home and let herself in through the balcony door).

So perhaps Gai was right that the fear of failure was still affecting him, despite his long record of success after success.

Perhaps even still, to this day…?

It seemed impossible, or at least very unlikely, but…

(“He shakes in his sleep,” Genma had said…)

Kakashi wasn’t the only one having nightmares, though. Minato was having recurring bouts of them, too, of twenty-year seals and thick black kanji written on canvas and tiny tally marks, all of them coming to life, or a semblance of life. Long black strokes, one after another, all swarming towards the playgrounds and swingsets and treehouses of Konoha like so many undead zombies, all of them animated by the desire to consume, to strangle, to choke the breath out of the lungs of the living—

He woke that night, jolting upright in bed like he’d been struck by a lightning bolt and clutching his mouth to keep from screaming out, just like he had three times already before that month alone.

“Honey, relax, it was just a dream…”

“Sorry, Kushina…”

Still gasping for breath and closing his eyes as his wife rubbed her hand over his back and then and turned over in bed, Minato sank his head back into the too-warm pillows and tried to push the slew of gory images from his subconscious mind, but it took a long while to calm the troubled race of his heartbeat.

He kept seeing Kiri nin, when he closed his eyes.

All those lifeless shinobi on the ground.

So many lives ended at his hand.

(He had no idea how many papers and files it would take to hold all his own tally marks, if he were ever to try…)

Glanced over at the clock: 3:47am. Too early to get up, even just to go pace at Rin’s grave, like he usually did after a particularly grim one. And he’d only fallen asleep two hours earlier, so he should really try to sleep…

He closed his eyes and sent his tired mind back, thinking about that day eight or nine years ago…

Eight or nine years ago, the day when Minato had just returned from stopping a squad of Suna nin and found out that his own squad had been ambushed by ten or twelve enemy nin, and that eight-year-old Kakashi and nine-year-old Obito and Rin had (thankfully) managed to win the victory all on their own, despite being so badly outnumbered. The awful stench of burning flesh filling the air, mixing with the uncaring warm glow of the red-orange sunset all around them. Kakashi, it seemed, had done most or all of the work of neutralizing their enemies, but Rin had taken on the always-unpleasant job of disposing of the corpses on her own.

“The boys are over there, Sensei. Obito’s been trying to help him, but Kakashi — he’s just, he’s been doing that for over an hour,” Rin informed him in a hurried, nervous, deeply concerned whisper, pointing downstream.

A few hundred paces away, Obito was standing next to where Kakashi was hunched over a small stream. Even from this distance, Minato could tell Obito was yelling at the smaller silver-haired nin for all he was worth.

As soon as he caught his first glimpse of the grayed-out, nearly-catatonic look on Kakashi’s face, Minato was instantly reminded of how Kakashi had been in the weeks right after Sakumo died, the many long sessions of hand-washing Minato had stood sentinel next to him for. How six-year-old Kakashi would linger at the spotlessly-scrubbed white porcelain sink, especially right after a meal, his small arms trembling, and how he would then make up excuses after a few minutes had passed to go back to the sink and wash his hands all over again, painstakingly, almost ritualistically, citing stains or contaminants that were entirely invisible to Minato’s quickly-scanning eyes…

(It’s just one of those things, Jiraiya-Sensei had shrugged at him around a swig of sake when Minato had sought him out for help and advice about it. It’s not hurting anyone, so it’s probably not a big deal, not until his water bill goes through the roof, anyway.

Just leave the kid alone, Minato-kun, Tsunade had instructed him after she finished socking her teammate’s shoulder. It makes sense in his mind, for whatever reason. So whatever you do, always let him finish his little ritual. Don’t interrupt him.

She’s right, Orochimaru had drawled at them with a slow, superior smile, tapping the pointy ends of his long fingernails against his glass instead of drinking with them. Leave him be. It might prove quite dangerous trying to stop him, you know. Hatakes can be rather difficult creatures… )

The day of the ambush, though, had been the first time Minato had ignored the Legendary Sannin’s advice and just inserted himself into the middle of the ritual before he could think better of it. He water-walked right over to Kakashi and Obito, knelt half-in and half-on the surface of the flowing stream, and firmly wrapped Kakashi’s small, not-actually-blood-stained-anymore hands in his, dismissing Obito with a quick but firm thank you, Obito-kun before turning all his focus to the young boy in front of him who was crouched unsteadily in the pebbles and mud, still trying to shove his shaking hands back into the flow of the water beneath Minato’s feet.

“This isn’t like what happened back then, Kakashi,” Minato had murmured, his mouth only a few inches away from Kakashi’s ear, but still uncertain the kid was hearing him. “You had to do this. It was a matter of survival. You protected yourself, and Rin, and Obito. You didn’t do anything wrong, okay?”

Kakashi gave him a long blank look.

Slowly began to focus on Minato.

Then shook his head.

“I—I…”

“Yes?”

“I… am a shinobi of Konoha,” the small voice replied, almost reciting the words at him as he struggled to pull his hands free, clearly trying to come off as composed and self-assured, but sounding terrifically unconvincing. “I… I—I am—”

“Kakashi, you didn’t do anything wrong,” Minato repeated, wrapping his hands around Kakashi’s again, this time even more firmly. “This was something you had to do, for the mission. For our team. For Konoha. Do you understand?”

“I—”

“But just because you had to do it doesn’t mean it feels good, right?”

The kid’s eyes suddenly became almost as watery as the stream below, and his face contorted like he was trying to swallow the rocks under their feet. He blinked a few times, softly, hiding the evidence of his tears behind his lids. Then blinked many times, much harder, face screwed up like he was trying his best to just hold every thread of himself together even as the brutality of the war around them tugged at every loose stitch and seam. “Minato-Sensei, I—I—”

“It’s okay,” he soothed as Kakashi trembled in his grip, still trying with all his might to push his hands back into the water. “It’s okay, Kakashi, it’ll be okay. Trust me, alright? It’ll be okay…”

Someday.

Someday we won’t have to do this anymore. I promise, kid.

Someday…

The war was over now, and with it the killing (well, most of it), but the nightmares weren’t. Minato wasn’t convinced they ever would be.

Kushina, it seemed, had spoken to Jiraiya about it at some point. Six or seven months into Minato’s term, Jiraiya invited him out to a round of drinks at the local bar, clearly trying to get him so sh*t-faced he’d have no choice but to slide into bed early and sleep through the night.

“My treat, Minato-kun. Sages know you’ve earned one by now!”

He had no idea how Jiraiya could possibly think so, and he still had a stack of work to finish once he got back after drinks, but Minato accepted the jovial invitation all the same.

“How’s it been so far, eh?” Jiraiya asked after their drinks arrived. “Everything you expected and hoped for?”

“Ehh,” Minato shrugged, trying to play it off as a joke. It’s been miserable, he was sure that his expression said before he hid it by looking the other way. The same old miserable struggle it was before, only twice as infuriating….

“You still missing Kakashi, then?” Jiraiya said in a much lower and less jocular tone, his eyes going softer and more acutely perceptive than Minato had seen them in years. The question and the change in demeanor had come at him so suddenly, Minato barely caught Jiraiya-Sensei’s next words; the older man was saying something rather poetic about it being like picking at a festering wound, like ripping the scab away from an oozing, unhealed sore.

“…I know it’s been hard, Minato, but this year has been easier than the last, hasn’t it?” Jiraiya paused and then added, “And next year will be even easier.”

“Did Kushina say something like that to you,” Minato frowned at the table separating them.

Jiraiya huffed a laugh. “No, she did not. I’m telling you myself. Honestly. It hurts right now, but if you stop clinging to it, try your hardest to clear your mind, find ways to stop picking at the wound, then it’ll fade. Slowly, steadily, it won’t hurt as much. It’ll just fade away, if you let it. If you just give it some time.”

This sounds like something from one of your books, Minato thought sourly around a mouthful of sake, because he didn’t want to say it out loud and possibly start an argument.

“You know, my teammate could heal even the most serious of injuries in under a minute. Ten tops. She was… she was something else. Most of us are not like Tsunade, though. For us normal mortals, healing takes time.”

The silence of the cliche descended over their table.

“Oh! You know what, that’s not half-bad,” Jiraiya burst out as the sake brought his own words slowly circulating back up into his brain. “Write that down for me, kid, I’m gonna use that in a book.”

Sighing as he automatically resumed their old routine, Minato shot his companion a pointed look, then took out his notebook and uncapped his pen, made sure the page he was about to write on was blank front and back, wrote healing takes time on it , then sent Jiraiya another look, the longsuffering do you have more you want me to add, Sensei? look that he had worn the many hundreds of times he had scribed for the warrior-turned-author in the past. Then he sighed again and tore out the page and handed it over.

“Thanks, Minato-kun,” Jiraiya hummed, looking quite a bit less inebriated than he had a minute ago as a familiar it’s just for research! eavesdropping gleam entered his eye. “New notebook, by the way?”

“Private,” Minato said, palming his hand over the battered black cover. You aren’t fooling anyone, Sensei.

“Eh, suit yourself,” Jiraiya said with a shrug that once again wasn’t fooling anyone.

Intelligence gatherers are always such nosy busybodies, Jiraiya-Sensei had himself complained dozens of times over the course of their many reconnaissance missions.

Once a spy, always a spy…

The page next to the one Minato had torn out and given to Sensei was full of carefully assembled notes on one Izumo Kanra. Twenty-four years old. A member of Root ANBU for the last three years. Fire-release chakra affinity, with a marked penchant for genjutsu as well. Limited skill with doton and raiton. And a very superior attitude, for someone whose skills were so decidedly average, at least in Minato’s opinion. He was good by most nin’s standards, but decidedly average among the ANBU elite with whom he was ranked.

Which made it easy for Minato to kinda sorta kidnap him in the dead of night and tie him to a metal folding chair in an underground basem*nt room of an abandoned industrial warehouse near the docks along the river. Out of all the Root ANBU agents he could have interrogated, he had picked Kanra both because Kanra had been one of the ones on the scene soonest afterwards, but also mostly because of that time a year ago when Kanra had picked a fight with Obito and left him with a black eye that had lasted more than a week. That fact alone made what Minato was about to do slightly easier to stomach.

“I’m not going to tell you anything,” Kanra sneered at him from where he sat trapped against the chair. A tawny-haired kid with a habitual sneer and a vindictive glint in his dark eyes when he laughed. “I don’t care what you do to me. ANBU don’t talk.”

Minato was an old hat, though. Torturing someone for information wasn’t exactly in his wheelhouse, but it wasn’t like it was totally outside the parameters of what he’d had to do in his shinobi career, either.

Anyway, Kanra wouldn’t remember any of this in the morning. Minato was relatively experienced with memory seals, if he did say so himself. The one he was preparing to place on Kanra wouldn’t hold up against a really committed T&I department, but luckily, Minato was the one with the power to appoint or demote the head of that department, at the moment. Thanks to Jiraiya-Sensei’s philandering ways, Minato had a lot more experience repressing undesirable information rather than extracting it, but whether hiding it or exposing it, it was very well-ingrained in him that being a good shinobi was really all about information control.

Even so, it was slow-going.

“Why did Hiruzen order you to bring back the body instead of disposing of it at the site?”

“Not saying,” Kanra drawled.

“Why were there claw marks on her stomach?”

“Not saying.”

“Where’s the agent who went with you to retrieve the body? What happened to Hama?”

“Not sayi— aghhh —!”

Yanking a few fingers out of their sockets did give him some sporadic answers, eventually. Hama Ichibu. Dead. Incidentally, the story went that Ichibu had tried to reveal some privileged information about something ANBU-related to his lover in the middle of the night. She had found him in the morning dead in their bed, his eyes glazed over and his lungs frozen with an unknown poison.

“R-Root handiwork,” Kanra gasped as Minato wrapped his fingers around Kanra’s broken pinky and slowly started to squeeze. “It was what got me interested in getting recruited to the Foundation division of ANBU in the first place. If you know they’re coming for you anyway, might as well jump into the deep-end of the pool yourself rather than wait to be shoved in.”

Which was an illuminating answer, although it also made Minato more than a bit curious.

“Tell me more about the deep-end of the pool,” he said as he took hold of the pinky again, making Kanra pale and keen, a thick sheen of sweat glittering across his forehead in the thin lantern light of the underground room. “I want to know everything you know about the Foundation.”

…Which led to some very interesting answers, not that Kanra himself had confessed any of them to Minato willingly.

It turned out that Kanra hadn’t exactly been bluffing when he’d promised he wouldn’t say anything about the night he’d retrieved Rin’s body from the beach where Obito had buried her. As it turned out, ANBU agents who reported to the Root Subdivision were not physically capable of revealing certain high-level intelligence, even under duress. Thanks to Kanra’s somewhat involuntary demonstration, Minato now knew that most if not all members of Root ANBU had seals on their tongue, which prevented them from discussing certain sensitive matters in case of being taken prisoner by the enemy.

And which also prevented them from discussing certain sensitive matters ever, at all. With anyone.

That’s… something alright.

One thing that had been clear from the start but was now becoming increasingly obvious was that several of the people who knew what had happened the night that Rin died did not want Namikaze Minato to find out what had happened.

Danzo, for certain.

Hiruzen, seemingly.

Kakashi…

Danzo wants control, and Hiruzen wants to placate Danzo, like he always does, but Kakashi…

Kakashi wants…

The answer was murky, completely unclear.

“My name is Uchiha Obito. My interests are, like, a lot of things! It’s hard to describe. But cool stuff, mostly, like winning at Bingo Night with my gran. My dislikes are when people are jerks for no reason. And my dream is to become the strongest ninja ever, and become the Hokage someday, and have my stone face carved onto the cliffs, and watch over and protect the entire Village with my Sharingan eyes…!”

A bit of a scramble as his two new teammates pointed out the obvious flaw in the plan with the goggles and the sculpting of eyes bugging out from them.

“Nohara Rin,” said the young girl next to him with a big smile after a round of muffled laughter at Obito’s expense. “I like rabbits and takoyaki and drawing and being with my friends. My dream is to become a medical ninja like Princess Tsunade and learn how to heal others, so I can take care of the people who are precious to me and make them feel better when they get hurt.”

As she concluded, Minato painted an encouraging smile over his features, trying his best not to fall into a sick, dark, fiery spiral of rage. Repressed all the thoughts of how eight- and nine-year-olds really should not be involved in international warfare like this. How it went against the very principles upon which Konoha had been founded years ago. He shoved it down, repressed it before it could begin, seeing as how he could spiral all he wanted, but it wouldn’t do a damn thing to keep Lord Third from graduating Rin and Obito’s class early; it wouldn’t do anything to change the fact that Konoha needed literally every jutsu-capable hand on deck in order to have a shot in hell of surviving Kumo’s most recent wave of brutal attacks…

Painted on a false smile and nodded, and then shook his head once to clear his thoughts. And in the meantime, everyone turned to the third and final kid in the lineup.

A delicate clearing of the throat.

And then a less-delicate elbow to the side of his ribs.

“Hatake Kakashi,” the kid in the blue mask finally piped up, his nose twitching under his mask.

Followed by a long pause.

“…Likes, dislikes?” Minato prompted him after almost a half a minute of silence, crossing his arms over his chest as he leaned back against the railing of the Academy rooftop, trying very hard not to smile as the effort to repress his genuine amusem*nt slowly began to replace the dark spiral he’d been struggling with a few moments before.

Kakashi, bless him, must have known somehow that Minato was smiling. He glared hard at him in response.

“This is dumb, Sensei. We already know each other.”

An efficient, honest, and grounding answer, rooted in the truth exactly as he sees it. Minato tried to bite it down, but he couldn’t quite stop the smile that was creeping across his face. How very Kakashi.

“Likes? Dislikes? Dreams for the future?”

“I like… ninjutsu,” Kakashi finally offered, kicking at his heels and glaring darkly at an innocuous speck on the cement. “And…” (a very short glance at Minato, and then a rising blush, and then the next word came out so soft and rushed, Minato wouldn’t have heard it at all but for the fact that he was already so used to reading the lips underneath the cloth mask, that he knew the shape of most of Kakashi’s mumbles by heart:) “...and teamwork. And dogs,” he added in a louder, clearer voice as Minato beamed and his chest swelled with pride. “I dislike people who waste time. And my dream is —”

“Out of everyone here, you’re the one who wasted the most time, Bakashi! You couldn’t even answer a simple question about likes and dislikes!”

“I’m not the one who got here forty-five minutes late, Deadlast!”

“Forty-five ! No way, what are you talking about, it was barely even ten!!”

Only another forty-five minutes later, while leaping away from their small but prying fingers as he dangled a pair of chiming silver bells in front of their faces, did Minato realize he had never gotten a complete set of answers to the most critical question he had posed to his genin so far.

Teamwork and ninjutsu and dogs are important, but so are dreams for the future.

A mop of silver hair came flying at him from the trees, its owner very nearly snagging one of the small silver bells from the set, almost but not quite ripping it from his grip as Minato quickly flipped himself around in mid-air to evade the attack.

What is it you want most, Hatake Kakashi…?

But now he knew.

Kenshin.

It had been there, rising up from the afterimages of his most unsettling dreams, staring him in the face for years on end, despite the way that Minato had closed his eyes and his ears to its influence again and again. He’d seen it staring him right in the face that day last year when he broke into Kakashi’s apartment, read the kanji on his bedroom wall, but even so, it was Koharu’s voice, not Kakashi’s, echoing around the inside of his skull, the memory of the many, many times they had gone back and forth arguing about the extensive revisions that Minato wanted to make to the mere preface to the shinobi manual:

‘Kenshin’ is the foundation of everything, the basis of what it means to be a shinobi of Konoha! The great personal sacrifice required for true devotion to the Will of Fire. The sacred duty, dedication, and commitment to preserve the lives of the Village as a whole, even if it entails a heavy cost to the single individual.

To expurgate the presence of the concept of kenshin from our manuals would be the same as unraveling the fabric of our very way of life. It would be spitting on the ideals that led to the founding of the Village itself…!

(Koharu’s voice, but her sensei’s words.Sometimes Minato hated Tobirama’s way with rhetoric so much, he wanted to snarl and hurl his hardest Rasengan right into the center of the second stone face staring down mutely at them all).

“You heard the kid countless times with your own damn ears. ‘Anything for the mission,’ right? Wasn’t that his whole shtick…?”

There’s more to it than that, he had wanted to argue with Jiraiya, with Koharu, with Obito, with Hiruzen, with Tobirama, everyone. With Kakashi himself. There’s more to life than completing missions in service to the Village, Kakashi, he’d told the kid himself many times, both out loud and in his head.

…There’s more to YOU than that, was what he had meant.

But deep down, he knew that if Kakashi had taken the time and effort to paint the word onto an otherwise blank canvas and hang it on his bedroom wall where it would be the first thing that he saw in the morning and the last thing that he saw at night, then he must have found some measure of comfort or solace in the concept.

Always had. That deep rift in his soul, the always-bleeding, seeping wound that Sakumo’s death had left behind… Little Kakashi had used the rules and regulations of the shinobi manual to patch the wound, paper over it, and in spite of his objections, Minato hadn’t been blind to the fact that it did in fact seem to help, at least a little. So he had let him. Time and again.

And as time went on, Kakashi had absorbed all those instructions as though they were his own thoughts. Their stringent terms had become his lifeblood, their directives seamlessly woven in with his own mental and emotional calculations. They offered every shinobi a promise of safety, regularity, and a process for decision-making that would grant if not absolution than at least justification to even to the darkest of crimes, that would enable one to avoid the long and sleepless nights, the endless nightmares, the ever widening, ever deepening pool of darkness that seeped across the inside of one’s head…

Yes, it was an awful way to live, but it was a way to live. It was the reason why in spite of Gai’s fears and warnings, Minato had never seriously believed that Kakashi would ever follow in Sakumo’s steps. Kakashi of the post-Sakumo era had been utterly resolved against it, singularly committed to his own survival, and his teammates’, and that of the Village as a whole.

(… Why? Minato asked himself, far too long after the fact. Why had it never occurred to him, all those years as jounin sensei, why had it never occurred to him that he might someday be required to investigate all the way down under the surface, dig down deep into the depths of the oozing wound, and discover which of those three ultimate priorities his student would privilege over the others, if he were ever forced to make such an awful choice…?)

“You really think I should try talking to him again?”

Brows low, Gai nodded firmly at him. “You must, Hokage-sama. It is imperative.”

According to Gai, the mission he and Kakashi had taken to retrieve the missing person in Kusa had been a success, but only in name. Kakashi had been nearly mute. Spoken maybe ten words the whole time in spite of Gai’s best efforts. Had found the trail of the missing person without even using his ninken to do so, and had safely returned them to their family within 24 hours of receiving the assignment, and with nearly no assistance from Gai. Also, Gai informed him, Kakashi was handwashing again, more intensely than before. Had stopped their progress on the mission twice, not to eat or rest or navigate, but in order to run his hands under the water from a sink for about half an hour while Gai listened outside.

“I’ll give it a try, Gai-kun, but…”

(Gai had requested a private audience for the mission report, but even so, Minato found it was hard to make himself say the next few words aloud, with the fire of shame consuming his insides):

“But I’m pretty sure I’m actually making it worse.”

Could barely get the words out around the constriction in his throat and the sinking feeling in his gut. Again, he remembered that time on the couch after Obito’s thirteenth birthday, the unshakeable worry that he was somehow pushing in a buried barb, rather than carefully pulling one out.

Watching Kakashi from a distance, it just seemed like all that unswerving, unrelenting commitment stemmed from a problem with the shinobi way, specifically with the protocols, specifically those spelled out in the manual, which was something Minato actually could fix, or at least directly affect, and he therefore redoubled his efforts to do so. No matter how much pushback he received from Koharu along the way. He needed to get the revisions finalized and published as soon as possible, in order to match Kakashi’s own frantic pace.

“Workaholics, the both of you,” Obito had remarked once as he lounged on the couch, throwing dark purple grapes into his mouth even though it was his night to prepare dinner for the three of them.

“Both?” Minato quoted back, frowning in confusion as he pulled frozen leftovers from the freezer for Obito to reheat. “Meaning me and who?”

Obito’s face curled up in a puckered frown as he chewed on a mouthful of grapes, and he didn’t elaborate, but by then, they both knew.

Meaning you and Kakashi.

But in fact they had all become studious, intense, workaholics, all of them. Even in their free time, their thoughts were mostly consumed by their work.

In his own increasingly sparse spare time, Minato was going over manual revisions and mission assignments, demoting and promoting, and doing whatever he could to hunt down the missing pieces of information, the pieces of the puzzle that had been kept from him for years on end.

In between part-time training of her special-ops cell and her last few bouts of morning sickness, Kushina was studying relentlessly, trying to crack the code on the sealed file, not that Minato had told her that was what she was doing, because if she did know it could mean many kinds of trouble, but Kushina was pretty savvy, so she probably did know, in some sense, and was staying quiet about it for his sake.

Within the last few months, Obito had finally mastered the Hiraishin jutsu and was now working on a lot of very advanced raiton jutsu and some mokuton combinations that Minato sometimes woke up in the dead of night with exciting new ideas for, which was much more pleasant than waking up from the nightmares. Sometimes Obito was still awake, so the two of them would head out to a training field at two or three in the morning and run through ninjutsu drills together until they both collapsed from exhaustion. Minato’s ANBU guard was none to happy about it, but Obito seemed to enjoy it, at least a little, given the slightly manic bouts of laughter they both fell into from time to time while trying not to wipe each other off the face of the earth.

And in the meantime, Kakashi had just completed a record number of S-ranks for Lord Danzo, and there were rumors about Danzo wanting to promote him to squad leader, despite the fact he had so few years of experience in ANBU. From the outside, he was excelling, even if knowledge of his progress as a shinobi was relegated to those with need-to-know clearance.

But sometimes, it seemed to Minato like for every great stride that Obito took, overcoming mountains of difficulty, Kakashi was quietly backsliding, falling out of sight, disappearing down a deep dark hole, buried in the shadows…

He could have turned on the kitchen light, but he didn’t want to bring attention to his presence ahead of time, so Minato waited in the dark in one of the two rickety dining chairs in Kakashi’s small and almost completely undecorated apartment, a stern look twitching across his face now and then and a bag of food on the table and another one at his feet, because Kakashi never ate anything but microwaved meals, apparently, and had left his cupboards completely bare of all supplies, emergency or otherwise.

Footsteps shuffled on the landing at 3:10 in the morning, the door rattling slightly as the key was turned in the lock.

Minato schooled his face, settling his sternest, calmest, coldest, most clinical expression over his features.

(“Stop coming in here!” he half-expected Kakashi to snarl at him. “You aren’t my sensei anymore. It’s 3:11am. Don’t you have other places to be, anything else to do. I’m not a kid anymore, Sensei. I know how to manage my own groceries.”)

Minato schooled his expression and braced himself for a blast of that familiar fiery ire.

Or at least a trace of it.

A flicker.

But instead, Kakashi just stared at him from the shadows of the doorway. Dead-eyed and obviously dead-tired, but with the rigid standing to attention posture expected of every Konoha ANBU agent at any time, even three in the morning.

After a moment or two of silence, Kakashi shifted slightly so that he was standing inside the apartment, but kept holding the door open behind him.

Out you go, Minato.

Heart starting to race, Minato opened his mouth and started talking, started in without any strategy whatsoever, just desperately hoping:

“Gai is concerned that y—”

“Rule 72(d) states that no shinobi of any rank can legally break into and enter the dwelling of any other shinobi, Hokage-sama,” Kakashi said over him at the same time.

…Not Kakashi.

Hound.

Hound had said it.

Hound was holding the door open for him, waiting for him to leave.

(Just leave, just leave, just leave, came the faded, beeping echo of the long-since-disposed-of oxygen machines. He clearly hates you more than anyone alive, and he has every reason to, since you’re the one who left the barb in. You’re useless. You never could do a single damn thing to extract the sting, or alleviate the pain, so just leave, just leave, just leave…)

Minato sat there at the table, trapped in his own self-disgust and bitter self-loathing, sneering at himself and at the fading echo of the questions that had been swirling through his mind for the last five or six hours as he sat there alone in the dark.

How am I supposed to be a sensei from afar. How to explain what does and doesn’t truly matter, when I’m not even in his life anymore.

How to watch over a student you can’t stop caring about, no matter how many times you tell yourself to let it go.

Impossible.

Useless.

Waste of time.

Stupid, sh*tty, f*cking useless questions, Sensei Hokage-sama.

…There was no one here to teach anything to.

Nothing left of his once-student except that empty, dead-eyed, shinobi-shaped shell.

Minato nodded once in acknowledgement of Hound’s recitation of the rule, an undercurrent of hot, stabbing anger making the action a bit stiffer and sharper than he meant it to be, then without another word, without even rising from his seat, teleported himself out of the prison of the tiny, unwelcoming, airless, empty shell of an apartment and back to his own quiet, cozy, lamp-in-the-hall-left-on-for-you, Nato, just turn it off when you get back, warmly-welcoming but somehow equally-empty-of-oxygen home. Pulled open the balcony door the moment he crossed the kitchen and plopped down in the deck chair outside, finding the twinkle of the starlight unbearably hostile above him, and the night air all around him similarly unbreathable.

The official response from the ninken arrived many weeks after the toads finally sent his request:

No contract, no contact.

“Wonderful,” Minato ground out between clenched teeth.

“Got a message for you, but it’s unofficial, under the table,” croaked little Kaoru-chan from down at his ankles right as he made to leave, making Minato bend down and pretend to examine a rather ordinary lily pad near the tiny reddish-orange frog’s wide mouth. “It’s from the big licker, Pakkun. He says he really wants to talk to you. The problem is that the Ninken Mother has forbidden it.”

“Why’s that?”

“Something about the Hatake kid violating the terms of the summoning contract.”

“…huh?” Minato asked, head tilted in confusion. “Which terms? What violation?”

Kaoru answered his inquiry with a broad croak and a full-body jiggle that Minato had learned long ago was the toad-equivalent of a shrug. “I’m no expert or nothin’, but I guess unlike our contract, there’s a term in there about actually using summons regularly, or else the contract expires.”

“He stopped using them…?”

Another jiggle. “The rumor going around is that the Hatake kid doesn’t like sharing his kills anymore. They had a fight about it at one point, and now the kid has just stopped asking them to help. Doesn’t summon his pack often enough to maintain the terms.”

Wait.

Minato ran his hands over his forehead in dismay.

So even Pakkun is mad at Kakashi for what happened with Rin…?

“From the croaks going around about it, I guess Hatake’s ninken are getting bored and frustrated, and it’s been so long, some of the other ninken, including the Mother, are telling them that the contract is already void…”

“Is that what Pakkun wants to talk to me about?”

A third jiggle, this time with no accompanying croak, signaling that Kaoru had grown a bit nervous or disinterested. “Maybe? He just said he wasn’t talking to the Hatake kid no more, and he wanted ta talk to you instead, but he can’t do that unless he gets summoned, so…”

“Not sure you should rush it, Mina-chana-sama,” said Mamma Toad from behind him, suddenly making it very obvious that his and Kaoru’s little secret didn’t belong to just them anymore. “It’s a delicate situation…”

No f*cking kidding.

Pakkun wanted to talk to him, but Minato had no way of reaching him, and Ma didn’t want him talking to Pakkun, for some reason, and Gai wanted Minato to talk to Kakashi again, but Kakashi didn’t want to talk to anyone, it seemed, but least of all Minato, and in the meantime, Shikaku and Tsume and Homura and Koharu and everyone else in the Village wanted the Hokage’s undivided attention for one thing or another, all of it seemingly completely unrelated to the Nohara Rin affair from four years ago.

Water under the bridge, Hokage-sama-chan. Ancient news… Best to let it go.

What Minato currently wanted most was to rewrite every last one of the Nidaime’s beloved protocols.

Rewrite history, too, while he was at it.

Rewrite all the mistakes of the past, if only such a thing were possible.

But even if impossible, the next best thing would be to finally clear the air at long last. It was like the upper tiers of the Konoha shinobi world had shrunk, somehow, into a tiny, dusty, musty old attic room with too many people’s pain and anger and grief trapped inside it for years on end. It might be impossible to open all the doors. There was only so much one person could do, even when they were technically at the top of the pecking order.

The most Minato had hoped to do in years past was blow a billowing gust of a rasengan-shaped whirlwind through all the cobwebs of standard mission requirements and old outdated protocols. Rewrite the entire shinobi standard operating procedure, from bottom to top. But that was looking less and less like a realistic possibility with every passing day.

…The least, the bare minimum he wanted to be able to do during his reign as Hokage, would be to at least crack open the windows.

He wanted to talk to Koharu about it, but the old woman kept finding excuses to dodge his presence, so the next time he ended up discussing protocol revisions was with Katayama Juri as she tendered her provisional resignation one evening after everyone else had already gone home, and he begged her to stay on at least temporarily while they could train her replacement, suggesting that perhaps she would also consider accepting a position on the manual revisions committee, to which she shook her head respectfully.

“I’m afraid I would not be of much help with that, seeing as how I have never served as an active-duty shinobi, Minato-sama.”

“Even so,” he argued, his head filling with arguments about how skilled she was with editing out extraneous details and getting to the heart of affairs for him. But before he could deliver any of them, Juri was removing her glasses to clean the lenses, fixing the stone faces outside the window with a quietly piercing look as she did so.

“Did you ever hear the story about the last day of his life? Senju Tobirama, I mean. He sacrificed himself for the sake of his six students. They attempted to help, but he jumped in front of a blow meant for one of them. At least, according to the stories. That’s the sort of man he was, though. They will never forget it, either. Hiruzen, Danzo, Homura, Koharu…”

As she listed off the familiar names, Minato’s eyes fell from hers to the fulgurite paperweight on his desk.

“If you continue trying to rush through the revisions to the Nidaime’s protocols, the many years of effort that he put into creating them… It will be perceived as an insult to those who served under him, whether directly or indirectly.”

“See, Juri-san, this is exactly why I need you,” Minato said with a sigh.

She received it with a slight smile, then a bow. “I served in the role of Hokage’s personal secretary under both the Sandaime and the Nidaime, Minato-sama. I saw what it was like for both of them. The position of Hokage is difficult, but it will become… smoother and easier, in time. Like polishing a stone. All the grave concerns weighing on your mind, everything that causes you confusion and turmoil… eventually, it will cease to bother you so much. Not because those concerns aren’t serious and important, but because you get used to having to pile everything onto the altar. You simply become adjusted to prioritizing the good of everyone, even at a steep cost to the individuals involved. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing is of course arguable, but the whole point of being Hokage is that someone has to do it. This job, this role, this responsibility has fallen to you. So no matter how difficult it becomes, you must always strive to be worthy of it.”

Minato was still sitting there at his desk an hour later, thinking over her words, lost in thought, staring in silence at the piece of petrified lightning, ignoring the pile of paperwork underneath it as he pondered what she had said…

And then with no prior warning, Kakashi let himself into the large round room with a mission report in his hand that he must have thought Minato would be out of the office for.

“It’s not time-sensitive, Hokage-sama. I’ll leave it on your desk.”

“Kakashi, I heard—”

For a second, their eyes locked, and Minato found himself hungrily staring into the mismatched eyes behind the double mask, staring, searching, seeking for some sign or other —

But Kakashi didn’t so much as blink at him.

“Recently, I happened to hear that Pakkun has a message for me,” Minato began boldly, just trying to prolong the interaction in any way possible. “If you could summon him, I’d like t—”

“Unnecessary,” came the perfunctory reply, with just a trace of clipped edge, just the tiniest suggestion of hostility.

What were you doing asking around about Pakkun?

Who were you even asking in the first place…?

He’s my summons, not yours.

None of these objections materialized, though. Kakashi passed him the mission report and was gone an instant later, like he had simply evaporated on the spot while Minato was still frantically trying to cook up some reason for him to stay.

Someone has to do it. Someone has to pay the price, make the sacrifice.

He pressed his fingers into his eyes.

I’m the one wearing the stupid hat and cloak.

So why does it feel like it’s him who’s paying, not me…?

Minato was so distracted by his own swirling thoughts and the unexpected but unproductive conversation with his former student that he ended up sitting there in his chair for another half hour, completely blanking on the time and date of the party for Uchiha Itachi’s promotion to chunin. By the time he finally remembered, the sun had mostly set and the party was more than halfway over, and Obito was already off with Shisui or someone somewhere, and Kushina was sending him several Seriously, Nato? looks.

“God f*ck,” Minato cursed at himself under his breath just before he made his deepest bows of apologies at the Uchiha main family’s front door. “Just completely forgot the time, Fugaku-san, Mikoto-san, I’m so sorry.”

Mikoto forgave him instantly (“You are the Hokage, now, after all!” his former classmate teased him. “I’m sure it must be very busy, Minato-kun.”). Kushina, not so much. She sent exasperated, knowing glares at him all through dessert, as people made toast after toast to the solemn-eyed ten-year-old sitting at the head of the table opposite Fugaku.

Uchiha Itachi. The star of the show. The talk of the town. So promising. So much potential. So gifted and talented, an actual prodigy. Had basically carried Team Two on his back through the recent chunin exams. The youngest-ever Academy graduate, but one. And now the youngest ever to be promoted to chunin, but one.

But one, the phrase kept reverberating around Minato’s tired head, the phrase sending a jolt through his frazzled nerves as he sipped at the far-too-bitter wine in his glass. But one, but one, but one…

“…you must be so proud, Fugaku-san,” exclaimed a shinobi whose name Minato didn’t know, but who half-turned to incline his head toward Minato anyway. “After all, considering just how well Konoha’s last child prodigy turned out—”

The wine glass shattered in Minato’s too-tight grip. Liquid spilled over his hand, wine mixing with blood where the glass dug into his fingers and palm. People swarmed toward him, hurrying to fix it for him, and Minato just about lost it, he nearly snapped. Kushina grabbed him by the elbow and hurried him out before he could do serious damage to village relationships, claiming the baby was kicking up a storm in her belly, but Minato was pretty sure she wasn’t fooling anyone.

“Sorry,” he mumbled to her halfway through their walk back home as she finished tying a handkerchief around his still-bleeding palm.

“It’s not me you need to apologize to,” she snapped back.

“I saw him earlier, and it—I guess it set me off,” he mumbled, not bothering to specify which him he was referring to. At some point in the last several months, any use of Kakashi’s name had become more than just a friction point between them. It now nearly always developed into an all-out fight whenever the subject came up.

“You can’t just be sad about it forever, Minato. That’s not healthy, if you know what I mean. It’s one thing if it only affects you and me and Obito, but it’s another thing when you’re the Kage of an entire Village and it starts to affect everyone around us, too…”

Finally, as they walked home in the looming dusk, Kushina called a truce, apologizing for harping about it, blaming the emotional mood swings on pregnancy and the hormones and all that.

“Minato,” she sighed heavily. “It’s not my business, and I will stay out of it. You don’t have to stop thinking about him on my account. You can do whatever you want and I will support the f*ck out of it the whole time. But I just don’t have it in me to hope for it to change anything at all anymore, if you know what I mean.”

Which lasted all of about a week until Kushina found out about the secret notebook from Jiraiya, which Minato hadn’t really officially acknowledged as a secret until the moment Kushina held it up in front of his face and challenged him about it. She said she had ‘happened upon it’ while doing their laundry, and had clearly been reading through it without permission for the better part of the last quarter of an hour. But it turned out she had also been told exactly what to look for by a certain Toad Summoner. So it had only been a matter of time before she sniffed out where Minato kept the actual notebook.

“So you and Jiraiya have been talking about me behind my back?” he snapped at her angrily.

“Not like that. Not like that, Minato. All I did was ask about the Valentine’s love poem you wrote me and whether he had helped you with it and all he said was trust me, Minato did that all on his own, you can probably read some of his earlier drafts in that little notebook of his, and I said what little notebook of his, and he said the black one he carries around with him all the time —”

(Her Jiraiya impressions were truly horrendous).

“So you decided to just open it up yourself, then.”

She held up the notebook, glaring at him hotly. “This is an obsession, Minato. You need to let it go. All of this whole section, about him learning such terrible things from you?! None of that is your fault! He is his own person, and you are not responsible for all of his behavior or his actions—”

“He only had one teacher, Kushina, so he had to have learned it from me!”

“Stop giving yourself so much credit. He’s an adult—”

“He’s literally fifteen—”

“Yeah, but you know what I mean! He’s been a chunin for like ten years—”

“Seven years—”

“And chunin are adults in the eyes of the law! I’m not the one in charge, that’s just the world we live in!”

For a moment, that just hung in the empty space of the small laundry room, the unsettled air between them, and then Minato nonverbally responded with a facial expression along the lines of Um, hang on a second, the one in charge around here is—

“Mi-NA-to—”

“It’s the world we live in for now,” he replied verbally. “And it doesn’t have to be that way forever. And it won’t be, if I have any—”

Before he could finish, Kushina huffed an angry, exasperated sigh and swatted him hard on the top of the head with the notebook before abruptly tossing it to the top of the pile of dirty clothes and returning her attention to furiously folding the laundry as he bent to retrieve it. “Just reading between the lines, Minato, when is the last time Kakashi said anything to you that wasn’t ‘get out’ or ‘leave me alone’ or ‘get away from me’ or ‘ go f*ck yourself.’”

“Kushina…”

“Actually, when is the last time he even said anything to you!”

He was heated and frazzled, twice as much as he had been the time when he’d snapped the stem of the wine glass the week before. He couldn’t stop himself, returning her barbed retort with a half-throttled yell:

“I can’t give up, do you understand? I can’t let it go. That’s just not possible.”

“Why!”

“Because I made a promise I would be there!” he shouted at her at full volume, finally just saying it out loud as he gestured with the notebook, sending a loud metallic thunderbolt clanging through the small room as he accidentally slammed the spine of the notebook against the side of the washer.

Kushina dropped all her folding and whirled on him, nearly gasped at him, shaking her head, open-mouthed in astonishment. “To Kakashi? You made a promise like that to Kakashi!?”

“To myself,” he corrected her swiftly, his forehead in his palm as he massaged the intense throbbing that lay just beneath his skin. “That day after his dad died, the day of the funeral, I swore, Kushina, I promised myself that it just didn’t matter how much of a pain he might become, or what he might end up needing from me, I swore that he would always ha—”

Have a place in my heart.

He had to break off, throat tight and face hot and eyes stinging and searching, staring at the walls and ceiling, blinking away salty-tasting tears even as a few of them started sliding down his cheeks and into his mouth before he had a chance to scrub them away with the back of his hand.

Always.

“…okay,” she said at last into the tremors of his emotion-choked silence, releasing the last of her vitriol in a huff of air aimed at his shoulder as she pressed a quick hug to his chest and a kiss to his ear and thumped the little black notebook he had dropped against his sternum, holding it there until he reached up and took it again. “Okay. I get it. I promise, okay? I’m never gonna fight with you about it ever again, no matter what. But just one thing: just promise me you wont talk to Obito about it though.”

“Obito?” Minato repeated back, blinking away the rest of his tears in deep confusion.

“Yeah.”

“Why would I talk to Obito about it? I told you already that I wouldn’t—”

“Just don’t, okay? It’ll only upset him, and I think he’s finally moving past it, if you know what I’m saying.”

…That thing Jiraiya had said about when they were out drinking, something about picking at a festering wound, ripping the scab away from an open sore. Well, there was really no other name for what he and Kushina had been doing just now, was there.

“Okay, Kushina. I promise.”

After all, I’m the one in charge now.

I’ll be able to keep him safe myself.

“He WHAT?”

“He… uh, chakra-exhausted… himself…?” Uchiha Shisui repeated in a very small voice, guilt curling his shoulders inwards like one of the leaves dying in the midsummer heatwave on the trees outside the window of the Hokage Tower main office. “He exhausted his store of chakra, I mean.”

…Of course he did.

“But only a little bit, and he recovered pretty quickly, only three days in bed this time instead of four, and his plan actually worked, is the thing! We were outnumbered at least five to one, but he managed to get all of our opponents at once in a kind of improvised chain-lightning-style jutsu. It was so cool, Hokage-sama, really brilliant, I mean. He rigged up some ninja wire, almost like a net, and then he had me body-flicker around to link all of them together, and even used their weapons as links in the chain to conduct the charge, but…”

Minato shoved the hard rim of the Hokage hat (he had already grown to hate the awkward weight of the damn thing, and the way it trapped sweat in his hair for hours on end) away from his brow and cradled his forehead in his hands, massaging his skull hard with his fingertips. “Has he already been released from the hospital, then?”

“Well, uh…”

Either he already sneaked out or never checked himself in, Shisui’s clenched-teeth nervous pause told him.

Sighing, Minato pretended to return his full attention to the mission report on his desk, feeling his frown lines deepening, digging into his skin. “Ask him to report to my office first thing tomorrow morning, at 8:00am.”

“Can’t, Yondaime-sama.”

He looked up sharply. “And why’s that?”

“Because he already left again. Danzo-sama gave him back-to-backs. A-ranks, I think, unless they were S-ranks.”

Of course he did.

The big triangular hat went to go live on a peg on his office wall after that. Every now and then, Minato would spin slightly in his chair, the better to glower at the pointless, too-heavy thing in silent resentment, sometimes imagining he could set fire to the hi kanji embroidered onto it with the heat of his glare alone.

I’m the one in charge here. And yet Danzo is the one who controls which battles he fights, and who he fights them with, and who he fights them against. Now that Homura is gone, I’m supposed to be the one in charge of ranking missions and assigning nin to fill them, and yet every time I try to give him one, he’s already gone on one of Danzo’s mysterious Foundation operations.

When he summoned Danzo to his office to talk about it, the old snake somehow turned the conversation into a discussion about how few ANBU officers had managed to survive the ravages of the war, and how he was seeking the honored Yondaime’s permission to promote Hatake Kakashi to squad leader.

“I’ll think on it,” Minato said shortly.

“Please do,” replied Danzo, somehow managing to convey with just those two words the impression that Minato was the one making a request, and Danzo was the one who would be granting it or not, based on what he saw fit.

Minato stared at the fulgurite for a long time after Danzo left, lost in his thoughts. A frozen bloom of energy. Forever trapped in place.

Kakashi is just too skilled of a shinobi not to receive the role of squad leader and then captain sooner or later. If what Danzo says about the number of other captains being severely winnowed down in the last few years is true, then I’m sure Kakashi has already taken on the role of acting captain on several ANBU missions by now. And I’m certain he’d be better in that role than many of his comrades.

…And yet, isn’t this exactly what I was always asking Hiruzen NOT to do?!

He thought it over. Genuinely considered giving Kakashi the promotion Danzo had arranged for him in the hopes it would keep Danzo in line, and keep Kakashi out of the line of self-sacrificial fire.

Which seemed likely to backfire.

Hard.

The infernal mess in his mind just kept getting bigger and bigger, somehow.

Now you know, laughed a snake of a voice in his mind, a bitter blend of Hiruzen and Jiraiya and Danzo and Orochimaru. How it feels for the sensei to lose control of his pupil.

…His eyes on the fulgurite, but his mind drifting back to that first time he’d had to watch Kakashi experience what it meant to not have quite enough chakra on hand for the needs of the situation. Remembered teaching the then-five-year-old boy a B-rank chain-lightning-style raiton technique that Minato really should have known was too advanced for him, but Kakashi had stubbornly insisted on being taught anyway. Good thing Minato had noticed him swaying on the spot, his big gray eyes drifting closed, about to fall flat on his face…

“Come here, little guy…”

Kakashi had fallen into his waiting arms, and then fallen asleep on Minato’s shoulder about a half a minute into their journey back home. As a consequence of being short for his age, Kakashi was very light. It was like carrying a warm, slowly-breathing pillow, and he was never so snuggly when he was fully conscious, so Minato might perhaps have slowed his pace and shuffled just a little as he watched the sun set down the path back to the Hatake estate in the lowering gloom of the spring evening, sakura petals drifting past their shoulders, then finally handed him off to Sakumo when they reached the plum tree at the front entrance to the estate, as Sakumo immediately waved off Minato’s apologies regarding the chakra-depleted state of his son.

“It’s not the first time,” Sakumo had hastened to reassure him, a warm and easy and appreciative and deep smile on his face, as though by over-expressing his own gratitude, he hoped to make up for his child’s complete and total lack thereof. “Thank you, Minato-san.”

“It’s my pleasure,” Minato had returned just as easily as he transferred the sleeping child into his father’s arms.

He’d meant it, too.

Kushina went into labor the first weekend in May, in a safe house outside the Village under a protective barrier maintained by several ANBU guards, though Hound was not among them. Uzumaki Mito was present. Sarutobi Biwako, too. The seal on the kyuubi remained perfectly intact the whole time, thank all the sages and gods.

“What will his family name be…?” Mito asked them in her age-creaky voice, right after Biwako left to send a message to her husband, who was the acting Hokage in Minato’s absence.

“Ah, well, I’m glad you asked, Mito-Baachan, cuz tha’s an excellent question, if ya know what I mean,” Kushina replied with an exhausted but still mischievous wink up at Minato before he had the chance to say anything, in the exact same tone she had used half a dozen years ago to answer his first request for an official date.

(The memory of Kushina from years earlier filled his mind, the way she had leaning against her doorframe, with her long red hair draped over her shoulders, listening with wide, sparkling eyes to Minato’s spiel about how they didn’t have to make it a romantic thing, a boy-girl thing, like boyfriend and girlfriend, it could just, you know, if she didn’t want it to be that, then it could just be a—

She had interrupted him by grabbing his shirtfront and planting a two-second open-mouthed kiss on his lips.

Both of their faces had turned as red as her hair, afterwards.

“…So, just to clarify, I’m guessing maybe you do want to make it a romantic thing?” he had asked nervously as he reached out and interlaced his fingers with hers, palms pressed tight together, his heart beating about a million miles an hour.

She had laughed that beautiful laugh of hers and squeezed his hand tight and momentarily adopted a fussy-librarian type of voice as she said, “Well, Namikaze Minato, I’m very glad you finally asked, because I have been waiting a f*ck of a long time to answer that truly excellent question…”)

“There are pros and cons to each side,” he answered Mito as the memory and its current-day consequences washed through him, filling him with warmth and happiness and love. He tried to look up, but wasn't quite able to tear his gaze from the pink-red face of the tiny baby cradled in his arms, the opening and closing of little Menma’s slightly parted mouth. “I think Namikaze Menma has a real ring to it, but…”

Mito hummed in understanding. “Namikaze has the weight of a Hokage behind it now, and yet perhaps that’s not entirely a good thing,” she mused wisely.

She was right. Minato had made many enemies over the course of his career, even before the whole demolishing-half-of-Kiri-in-a-single-night thing that had happened last September. He shuddered, trying to drive out the unwelcome memory of that hellish rainy night from his mind, wanting to fill today with pure happiness and peace—

“How about Uchiha?” Obito suggested brightly from just outside the delivery room, where he was standing guard in case of possible threats.

“It’s not gonna be Uchiha.”

“Just sayin’, it’s up for grabs if you guys want.”

Kushina, smirking tiredly, called back, “Get in here, Obito; Minato and I have something we want to ask you.”

“I’m not coming in until all the blood and gross stuff is cleaned up!!”

“The blood and gross stuff is all cleaned up.”

“Hell no, lady, I can tell when you’re lying, you know—”

“I’m not lying!”

“Well, I’m not going to risk it—”

“Obito, get your stupid dumb ass in here so we can ask you to be the godfather to our baby already, if ya know what I mean!!” Kushina hollered raggedly at the door, somehow finding the energy to prop herself up on her elbows in order to get her point across.

“G-guh— godfuh —”

“Seriously, Obito-kun,” Minato added his voice to hers, his heart swelling with joy as he finally looked up from baby Menma’s face into the wan face of his wife, who was grinning like a very tired cat. “Please come in.”

A little later that night, after Biwako returned with some paperwork and then left again, just before Mito shuffled off to help her and the ANBU adjust the stakes of the barrier seal, Obito suddenly turned his attention from the youngest of the Uzumaki bloodline to the oldest.

“Hey, what even happened to the rest of the Uzumaki clan, anyway?” Obito asked Mito.

Mito’s lined face filled with shadows of old sadness, and Minato kicked Obito’s shin in warning.

“No really, what actually happened?” Obito insisted on asking again. “I never heard…”

“Did you not pay any attention at the academy, Obito?” Kushina said, leaning over and whacking him upside the head with some papers, one of which happened to be Baby Menma’s birth certificate.

“Of course not!” Obito replied emphatically as Minato quickly nabbed the birth certificate before it could get crumpled in her rather hormonal grip. “That was always Rin’s job…”

While the other two went back and forth about Obito’s notoriously horrendous study habits, Minato pulled a black pen from his jacket, noting the very chewed ends, feeling a sudden, unexpected tightness seize him, a sting of unresolved pain dig into him like one from a scorpion’s tail. Same pen he’d stolen from Kakashi’s apartment three and a half years ago. So chewed, it was starting to resemble the petrified lightning paperweight on his desk.

He uncapped the pen and smoothed the birth certificate across the top of the nearest counter, carefully inscribing the kanji for whirlpool into the blank space under his hand, then started to sign his own name below it, only for the ink to run out just as he was starting the radical for Minato. Tried flicking the pen and scribbling on a spare corner of another piece of paper, but it was no good. The pen had run dry.

A humorless smirk pulled at one side of his mouth. This world is cruel. Wasn’t that what Hiruzen had said?

…It will gut you if you let it.

“I’ve got a spare you can borrow,” Obito called over to him, shifting the tiny infant sleeping in his arms slightly so he could dig a pen out of his vest, chucking it lightly at Minato’s head. Minato just barely caught it before it hit his ear. “But I need that back intact, okay? That’s my favorite pen, and if you chew it to pieces like you do every other pen, I’ll raise my precious god-child to cup a fart in your face at every opportunity. Don’t think that I won’t.”

The smirk cracked and became a smile as Minato shook his head at the two of them and Kushina moaned something that sounded suspiciously like “what have we done” under her breath.

(This world has been cruel, up to now…)

But cradled in Obito’s nervous arms was a brand new life.

A fresh start.

A beautiful ray of hope.

Minato slid both pen and paper over to Kushina for her signature when he was done, then tucked the sleeping baby back into his own arms so she could sign her own name while Obito continued to grumble about how she’d better not steal his pen either, and how he still thought Uchiha Menma would be a much cooler and more fitting name.

(…This world has been cruel, up to now, but we can always start again).

“Uzumaki Menma, we have been waiting a very long time for you,” Minato whispered, lips pressed against the small blond head.

Having a new baby in the house meant doing lots of laundry. Lots and lots of laundry. Minato still wasn’t sleeping much anyway, so while Kushina was up nursing their infant son, he usually got up and hid in the laundry room, scrubbing bits of dried baby spit-up from the shoulders of his white haori. Getting all the stains out was damn near impossible, though. “Just have your secretary order a new one for you, a replacement,” Obito chided him from the living room sectional where he was sprawled out watching late night tv. Minato hummed his disagreement before giving up and going to perch with Obito on the arm of the couch, trying to get lost in the nothing of the advertisem*nts, trying his best not to think about the symbolism of it all.

After an hour or so, Obito was snoring soundly under his arm, and Minato was thinking back to the first day he put on the cloak, the first fitting held early in the afternoon, at the same time that the first round of fireworks had started going off. News had broken in the city streets of Kiri’s surrender and the Mizukage assenting to sign the peace treaty that would end formal hostilities between all five great ninja nations for the first time in almost ten years. The haori that the seamstress had slipped over his shoulders had felt long but also elegant, and had fit him almost perfectly even before the tailors began their work. Minato liked the fabric and the feel of it. Liked it much better than the stupid hat anyway.

“I’m proud of you, Minato-kun," Jiraiya-Sensei had said as he thumped his hands heavily onto Minato's haori-covered shoulders. “But I’m sorry too…”

That day before he became the Hokage, Jiraiya-sensei had smiled at him in the mirror after the tailors had left, and then wrapped a big arm around his shoulders, hugging him tight, tighter, in fact, then he had in all the time Minato had known him. “I’m sorry this burden is gonna fall on your shoulders, kid,” he had murmured in Minato’s ears as he pulled away.

Confused, Minato had turned to stare at him. “This is what I’ve wanted since before I became a genin,” he reminded the one person who really shouldn’t need reminding of that fact.

“Hmm,” sighed Jiraiya, staring at him thoughtfully, and Minato wondered briefly if perhaps Jiraiya too was reviewing all the years they had spent side-by-side, fishing and fighting and sneaking into places they were supposed to be sneaking into, and sneaking into places they weren’t supposed to be sneaking into, and sneaking into places they really, really weren’t supposed to be sneaking into.

The lazy half-grin Jiraiya had shot at him confirmed Minato’s hypothesis, the slow small chuckles that echoed from his big chest, and the shake of his white-haired head as he ruffled a hand through Minato’s. “I’m very proud of you, Minato-kun,” he repeated. “But I’m also sorry, too.”

Minato had been appointed Hokage the next morning, just a handful of mornings after the one in which he had torn through the ranks of Kiri’s special forces, and had collapsed onto his couch just as word reached the higher-ups that Kiri had frantically surrendered and were planning to sign onto the five-nation peace treaty after all. Shimura Danzo had attended the official ceremony, but he had been strangely absent from the 6:00am small council with Hiruzen, Jiraiya, Homura, and Koharu.

“He’ll turn up when he wants to turn up,” Jiraiya had shrugged when Minato had asked him about it later.

But he hadn’t. Hadn’t turned up until lunch with the Mizukage's visiting dignitaries that afternoon. Only the gods and sages knew what backroom deals he’d been negotiating for his own benefit in the meantime, what secret schemes he’d been plotting…

“The guy is like black mold,” Jiraiya concluded summarily when he was in town next following Menma’s one-month-old birthday party, about twenty minutes after Minato had teleported himself and his old sensei over to the office for a few minutes to pick the man’s brain for ideas about how to get rid of Danzo once and for all, away from the chakra-enhanced hearing of interested ears back at home. “Damn near impossible to remove, and sickening you all the while beforehand, without you even realizing how deep and bad it is.”

While Minato groaned and stuck his forehead in his hand and tried not to think about the many ways in which they were all sick with it were already, Jiraiya cleared his throat, lingering by the door just long enough to add, “Also, are you totally sure about ‘Menma’? I still prefer Naruto, you know. Not too late to change it, I believe.”

Minato threw a pen at him to get him to leave, returning to staring down the list he’d drawn up earlier, drumming his fingers on the desk to the beat of ichi, ni, san, shi…

Daimyo’s special council.

Diplomatic liaison between Ame and Kusa.

Special envoy to Suna, or Kiri, or Kumo.

Ichi, ni, san, shi…

None of the proposed appointments had proven tempting enough. Minato had searched for months on end, but thus far, dislodging Danzo from his office as Shadow Hokage and ANBU Commander had indeed proven impossible. The man simply demurred with a small but firm shake of his head and intimated that Minato ought to fill the proposed vacancy with the very capable Aburame Shinko, or the widely venerated Nara Hisoka, or the greatly esteemed Inagi Izuko. He himself was greatly honored by the request, but he feared he must decline due to Village exigencies and his own gradually failing health. Seemed the man was ‘sick’ with some sort of lung ailment or condition, which required him to stay within the confines of the Village at all times in order to receive regular medical treatment. Which meant he was, coincidentally, always within close range of the Hokage’s office. Just that morning, Minato had suggested that perhaps a trip to the hot springs or some warm location in the south of Kuni no Hi would clear up some of the chronic congestion in his chest. Danzo had given him a deep bow and insisted that he was managing fine at the moment, and then politely reminded Minato that he needed to sign off on the proposed mission assignments and promotion requests that Danzo’s agent had left on his desk the previous morning.

Ichi, ni, san, shi…

“Shimura Danzo can never be allowed to leave the Village,” Hiruzen had warned Minato matter-of-factly during their private conversation the day before Hiruzen officially left office. The old Sarutobi’s tone had been crisp and controlled, but there was a trace of a tremor in his age-spotted hands as he spoke: “A defection by Danzo would be a disaster like no other. He holds far too many secrets up his sleeve. If he were to turn against us, he can and will eviscerate us. As much as you may dislike him personally, Minato-san, and disagree with some of his viewpoints and methods, you must find ways to work with him in order to retain his loyalty, or else risk atrocities the likes of which will make those of the recent war seem utterly trivial by comparison. You do not want to force the innocents of Konoha to pay that cost.”

…So thus far, Minato was stuck with the rot, just as Jiraiya-Sensei had predicted.

Ichi, ni, san, shi.

Ichi, ni, san, shi. Even with my eyes shut, nothing’s gonna hurt me.

A childish refrain that had been popular in his youth, during games of blindfolded-ninja tag all over the playgrounds of Konoha. For some reason, as Minato sat staring slightly to the side of the promotion request, staring deeply into the swirling wood grain of the grand old desk where a thousand reports had been handed in and handed out, where decisions affecting the destiny of tens of thousands of lives and deaths had been made, and declarations of wars and peace had been signed, and this one request was just one in a cascade of a hundred other stones, barely a pebble in an avalanche, but it felt somehow like the heaviest weight of them all, the refrain kept echoing back into his head:

Ichi, ni, san, shi.

His heart sinking lower with each repetition.

Ichi, ni, san, shi…

This feeling, this feeling, this feeling like stupid, useless sh*t even though he was supposed to be the pride of Konoha, the strongest of all their shinobi…

Isn’t it ever going to fade, like Sensei promised it would…?

He couldn’t help a mirthless chuckle from forming in and escaping his throat. A bid for freedom, quickly silenced by the oppressive weight of the unbreathable mold-tainted air of this stifling room. Now he understood why Jiraiya-Sensei had expressed sorrow, that day when Minato’s promotion to Hokage had been announced.

Couldn’t help but think back to all those times in years past when a younger version of Obito had expressed a desire to become Hokage… Kushina, too. Even Minato’s past self…

None of them understood. They didn’t know the nature of it. The painful, heavy, twisted truth: That being Hokage meant upholding the law, and respecting the rules, and establishing the proper procedures and protocols, and making the tough calls that no one else wanted to make. It meant treating everyone as fairly as possible and not making exceptions for favorites.

…It was in some ironic sense the least powerful position he could be in right at the moment.

He signed the promotion request to make Hatake Kakashi an ANBU squad leader with his eyes half shut, and his heart entirely closed for business.

“Numb yourself out. Build a shell around yourself. At least around your big open heart. Close it down until the pain starts to fade, until it doesn’t really hurt anymore…”

…You’re wrong, Jiraiya-Sensei, Minato thought as he lay in bed alone that night, staring up at the ceiling while Kushina fed Menma in the nursery. It hurts. It still hurts even years later. It f*cking hurts to love someone and then lose them.

And Minato couldn’t help thinking… couldn’t help suspecting that someone had designed this situation to make him hurt. To make all of them hurt.

Levers.

Strings.

Manipulation.

Information control.

Control of one’s enemies is the natural result of controlling the flow of information.

Was that not exactly what formed the basis of all their shinobi protocols from the manual…?

After eleven long months of working on it, Kushina finally cracked the code on the sealed file for him. She brought the solution to Minato at his office at lunchtime in late August, on a day when it was the last piece of news he’d been expecting to receive.

Minato set his freshly brewed coffee down on nthe desk; his fingers had begun trembling with anticipation the moment she laid the seal-reversing code in front of him. Dismissed his immediate guard personnel without bothering to cook up an excuse. Probably they were all going to think he was about to get up to some sort of illicit hanky-panky. Which in a sense maybe he was, but not with Kushina. She didn’t even stay more than a minute, just dropped off the code for him and glanced once at the window and said do with this what you will, then spun on her heel, her long hair whirling behind her and an “I gotta get back home before Obito gets fed up and accidentally murders the baby” tossed over her shoulder.

That afternoon, Minato didn’t bother to draw his blinds shut as he sat down to finally read through the complete and unredacted file detailing the confidential particulars of the death of Nohara Rin.

…Every good story has one, echoed Jiraiya-Sensei’s voice from years and years ago, from some rough-and-tumble tavern they had visited during one of their many journeys together, when he got boozy and started discussing literary theory, but the voice in Minato’s memories also sounded a bit like something Hiruzen might have said once around a thick puff of pipesmoke, too. The yank, as it were. The moment and reversal of recognition. The moment you find out that the story you’ve been reading up until now was not the whole thing.

The moment it lands on you that there was always more happening under the surface…

That everything you believed up until now…

It’s never the whole story.

Konoha Chunin Nohara Rin had been captured by enemy Kiri ANBU and taken from the scene of the initial battle, as confirmed by the testimony of Chunin Fujiwara Daichii, among others. The Kiri nin who had captured her had placed her under a genjutsu to make her more compliant, according to the testimony of Jounin Captain Hatake Kakashi, when reporting Nohara’s own words back to T&I personnel in Konoha two days later.

Shortly after her capture, the Kiri nin who had kidnapped her had somehow sealed the Three Tails Demon inside of Nohara’s body. They had sealed the Sanbi, of all things, into her belly, which seemed to have been the source of the clawmarks on her corpse that had been attested to by ANBU Lieutenants Hama Ichibu and Izumo Kanra, among others. Someone, the file didn’t specify who, but someone seemed to have triggered the release-conditions of the seal and opened the way for the Sanbi to emerge during Hatake and Nohara’s journey to rejoin Konoha forces.

And with limited time and limited resources, Hatake Kakashi had taken the initiative and opted to use the chidori jutsu to neutralize her, in order to stop her from unintentionally releasing the Demon, and thereby unleashing untold amounts of violence and bloodshed on the Village.

According to the notes from the T&I officers who had done the mindwalk, Uchiha Obito had arrived on the scene a few moments later. He had used mokuton jutsu and the power in his Sharingan eye to kill every Kiri nin he could find.

No survivors.

(The rest, Minato knew from his own conversation with Obito in the cell that had contained him for a little over a month after he returned: Obito had dragged the two smallest of the bodies, an unconscious Kakashi and a lifeless Rin, half a mile from the site of the battle up to the cliffs above a nearby black-sand beach. Had laid Rin to rest on a wildflower-strewn hillside overlooking the ocean, in a grave he’d dug with his own hands, then carried Kakashi over his shoulder all the way back to Konoha, stopping over in a secret underground location for about an hour along the way).

About 12 hours after Uchiha Obito and Hatake Kakashi’s return, Hokage Sarutobi Hiruzen had sent a team of Konoha ANBU to exhume Nohara Rin’s body from the shallow grave where she had been buried less than a day before.

The Sanbi had been removed from under the seal on her belly and retrieved, and was now in a confidential location, imprisoned under a high-level seal, awaiting an opportunity to be sealed into a new human host. Its current location was, for reasons of confidentiality, known only to Shimura Danzo and Orochimaru. Listed as one of Konoha’s current top-secret assets, highest priority but one.

Minato read the report at top-speed, eyes quickly tracking through every last detail he’d been hungering for over the last almost-four years. The moment he reached the end of the report, his head swiveled towards the window on the left-hand side of his office.

Rose from his chair so fast he nearly stumbled over his own feet.

“Kakashi…?” he called out the window, voice choking on the final syllable.

Just a tiny flash of silver amidst the unrelenting green of the leaves of the tree outside. A slight shifting, maybe, no more than the effect that would be caused by a ripple of wind.

Followed by too long of an empty pause.

“Hound,” he tried again, hearing the rasp in his voice but not bothering to clear it. “Come inside.”

Another slight shift, barely perceptible in the dappled sunlight patterns on the leaves, and then…

…Gone?

He was.

He was gone.

He had just… left.

Somehow even more stunned than he’d been a moment before, Minato blinked and then raised his eyebrows and then pressed his fingers against the casing of the window, leaning out to double-check, despite the fact that he already knew:

He left?!

…why.

Why would he…?!

Minato stayed there at the window stunned and dumbfounded and weak-kneed for a lot longer than he would have liked to admit, thoughts swirling in his head as a shattering whirlwind of feelings swept through him, head spinning and cycling through all of the facts he had just found out as all the while, the stinging barb in his own heart dug deeper and deeper into his center, sharpening and pulling and aching more with every throbbing pound.

Kakashi-kun—

The Three-Tails—

Why did you never tell me—

This whole time, he had genuinely believed from the bottom of his heart that Kakashi hated him, Jounin Sensei Namikaze Minato, and blamed him, Jounin Sensei Namikaze Minato, for everything that had happened that night, and that that was why he would no longer speak to him, wouldn’t so much as look at him —

But was it really, all along, was it really just —

Was it because —

So do I go after him right away, or —

Careening over a waterfall, tumbling in the foam, that was what this felt like, as all the pieces started snapping together too-rapidly, in his head —

Do I order him back here to talk to me confidentially, or—

Things suddenly started falling into place…

Or do I let it settle for a bit, but risk—

How could he never have just —

…Bits and pieces snapped into places, while other parts that had been stable and unshifting for years started exploding, the foundation of all his years-long-in-formulating theories and beliefs and resulting emotions about what had happened, the debris and rubble from the explosions scattering every which way around in him in the stillness and silence of the big circular mausoleum of an office.

Kakashi…

Needing air on his face like he needed blood in his veins, Minato flung the window wide, all the way open, not caring who among his other ANBU guards or the citizens he was sworn to protect might see him clambering out his own office like a child sneaking out of the house at naptime.

(Trust is a two-way street —)

A crushing burden, that information —

(Under the surface—)

Hard to speak about it —

(There’s always a second layer to the story — )

And then with his foot on the ledge, Minato paused, biting down hard on his lower lip as a sudden thought occurred to him:

(Always more going on, beneath the surface —)

Heart still pounding harder with every beat, Minato stopped in his tracks, thinking it over as the wind tossed his hair into his face, uncaringly blowing it this way and that.

Thinking very, very fast.

The things that had happened that night.

The information in the file Minato had just read.

The interrogation of Izumo Kanra.

The triple-stripe black seal that had been placed on the young man’s tongue.

Foundation ANBU agents are not physically capable of revealing high-level intelligence to the enemy…

Or to anyone else, for that matter.

…So then, was it hard for Kakashi to speak about what had happened that night, or was it physically impossible for him to speak about it…?

All the sudden, it just felt so simple, so easy: If there had been (until ten minutes ago) a twenty-year seal on the file, then surely, there almost certainly had to be, or at least there was a very high probability —

No, it was more than that. There had to be a seal on Hatake Kakashi, keeping him from leaking information or discussing the contents of the file, with Minato, or with anyone else. Therehadto be. That was the thing that made the most sense.

That was the only thing that made any sense.

The words that twelve-year-old Kakashi had screamed at him and Kushina in their kitchen so many years past came rebounding back with the force of one of Minato’s own Rasengan: “You don’t know anything, you don’t understand, you weren’t THERE — ”

…Well, yep, he suddenly thought at his clueless, blundering, stupidly ignorant past self. There must have been a f*cking lot of it that he hadn’t understood about it.

So all this time, he hasn’t talked to me, but maybe, just maybe, it’s not that he didn’t WANT to talk to me — it was because he CANNOT talk to me.

Slowly, he backtracked, lowered himself from the window sill, ducking his head back into the airless office.

…Okay.

He scrubbed at his hair and shuffled his white and red haori out of the way, ignoring the desire to pace and instead sitting himself back down in the Hokage’s chair, interlacing his fingers in front of his face and pushing his mouth and chin into them as he began breathing ever so slightly slower, and thinking very hard. Thought back multiple times to that story he had forced out of Kanra, the story about the ANBU agent who had died in his bed after revealing a Foundation secret to his lover.

(“Poison in his blood, the air frozen in his lungs…”)

Okay, Minato thought at his big triangular hat, which was still hanging unworn from the peg on the wall next to the door. So now all I need to do is get a message to Kakashi that somehow lets him know that I know about the seal, without blowing his cover at Root. I need him to know that I’m trying, and that I won’t stop trying until I get him out.

Rolling up his sleeves, Minato pulled out his black notebook and a fresh, entirely-unchewed pen, and opened up to a blank page.

He opted to wear both the bulky hat and the haori later that day, when he called on Lord Third for a formal meeting, though the interview took place in the quiet of Hiruzen’s home, rather than in the office. In the Sarutobi’s sitting room hung a portrait of Lord Third at his most formidable, staring Minato in the face, the portrait hanging behind the real Hiruzen’s tired, bent head.

He’s just an old man, Minato reminded himself as they exchanged perfunctory pleasantries. Don’t rage, don’t scream. Just get through the conversation. Finally get the answers you’ve been seeking all this time.

And yet Minato was still trembling with anger even though hours had passed since reading the file, since Kakashi had vanished on him without a word.

How dare you, Sarutobi Hiruzen. How could you.

He hadn’t wanted to start with such accusations, but they slipped from his lips almost the moment after Biwako left their presence with a bow. Hiruzen occupied himself with the tea tray, pouring a thin stream of sencha into both cups, and let Minato rail about it unchecked for a minute or so, then raised a thin, weathered hand and said, “We have to do what we have to do, Yondaime-sama. Surely you understand this part of the role, by now.”

'Had to', huh?

Minato balled his fists, thought of Obito and all the anger management tips they had exchanged over the years, and tried his very best not to smash the tea cup as Hiruzen held it up for him to take.

“I’m going to end this. I’m going to tell everyone.”

“You’re selling the price he paid far too cheaply if you allow the information about the Sanbi to be released to the public, Minato-sama,” Hiruzen warned him in a shaky, curling whisper, his voice a shadow of what it normally was due to the unseasonable cold that had swept through the population of Konoha in the last few days and weeks. Hiruzen took a long sip of tea to clear the rasping that had grasped his throat in convulsions, and then spoke again:

“It was never directly confirmed, but my belief is that someone nearby was able to somehow trigger the release of the seal on Nohara Rin. Until we know who that someone is, and where they are now, and how they were able to manipulate events in such a manner, we cannot afford to draw attention to the fact that we know about their existence.”

“You believe it was Madara, then,” Minato surmised, thinking back to their many earlier discussions about Obito’s year of imprisonment, and the short list of someones who would have been capable of such a feat. “That he was involved in… what? Tampering with Rin’s mind and getting her to open the seal? Or tampering with the seal itself…?”

Hiruzen shook his head and took a long drink of his tea. “It is still unclear. But Danzo is still looking into it. You and I and he all know that the servants of Uchiha Madara are still alive and operating from the shadows. Kakashi has sacrificed so much. His silence about this matter has bought us three years to investigate Madara’s involvement. But there is yet more work to be done.”

Minato shook his head from side to side, the white cloth hanging off the triangular hat trailing behind him, resting too heavily on his shoulders.

“With respect, Hiruzen-sama — you should have told me.”

“Perhaps,” said Hiruzen. “I did consider it, you know. I had no intention of hurting you. Believe it or not, my intention was to spare you from the additional hurt of knowing what you now know.”

Trembling with anger, Minato set his teacup down. “You thought that knowing she died as a result of enemy interference would be worse for me than wondering for years on end about why one of my students had suddenly turned on the other?”

“Kakashi and I spoke about it at the hospital, that morning after he returned,” Hiruzen said, his tired eyes going shadowed. “Rin died in agony. The seal caused her to experience great confusion and excruciating pain in her final moments. We both wanted to spare you from that knowledge. And we agreed that if you or anyone else were told about the involvement of the Three Tails, you wouldn’t rest until the truth was widely known. A risk we couldn’t afford to take, for multiple reasons. However, the rift that such secrecy caused between you and Kakashi was entirely unplanned on my part, and deeply unfortunate, in my view. I have more than once regretted…”

Hiruzen shook his head instead of finishing, and somehow Minato knew it was all the apology he was going to get.

Better than absolutely nothing, I guess, although not by much.

“Why couldn’t you have made it public later on, though?”

“Because maintaining the belief that our control of the Tailed Beasts is absolutely, completely perfect is of paramount importance. Not just to Konoha, but to the world at large. The idea that our own nin can be so easily abducted and have stolen tailed beasts sealed within them would cause a panic if it were ever to become widespread knowledge. The idea that a jinchuuriki could lose control of their beast, like your Nohara Rin nearly did that night, and likely would have, if Kakashi hadn’t neutralized her in time…”

Minato would have responded, except he was currently using all his reserves to repress and to resist the urge to hurl his teacup at the portrait on the wall.

'Neutralized.'

That’s one way of putting it.

“A deep loss, and a bitter untruth to have to spread, but preferable to the alternative.”

“What on earth do you mean?” Minato asked sharply.

Coughing into his shoulder, Hiruzen took another long, slow sip of tea before clearing his throat and answering.

“In addition to losing a talented mednin and a beloved student and friend, we also lost a very capable host of the Sanbi due to events spiraling out of our control that night, Minato-sama,” he said before taking another sip of tea, this one rather shallow. Then he set his cup down and fixed Minato with the sort of piercing look that made it quite clear exactly why Sarutobi Hiruzen had earned the position of Hokage in the first place all those years ago. “We lost the host of the Sanbi that night due to still-unknown outside influences,” he repeated. “Are you sure you really want to hazard even the slightest risk of losing the host of the Kyuubi, too?”

After that, Minato got stuck just…

Thinking.

…A full month’s worth.

Then two.

Then three.

Bouncing little Menma on his knees.

Going through the motions of maintaining the illusion that the Hokage was in perfect control of Village affairs.

Joking distantly with Kushina and Obito, not hearing more than three words altogether of whatever they had just said.

Watching Kakashi from afar, wondering what on earth was in his head. He’s lost weight since a few months ago. Minato’s mouth twisted. Wonder if that’s my fault, too.

…Thinking and watching and wondering and writing. A lot of writing. Each day stained sour and then sweet and then sour again as Minato penned letter after unanswered letter to ANBU agent Hound. The bitter aftertaste of what he now knew from the file and from his conversation with Hiruzen sitting thick and heavy on his tongue. Airless rooms and warmthless fires burning in the grates as the cold white weight of winter settled around their shoulders.

In the next few days and then weeks and then somehow months in which Minato tried to think what to say, to get through to his silent ex-student and once again made no progress, a circular pattern began to emerge: hope shot up and then died and then shot up again whenever he least expected it, often when he was cradling his infant son’s tiny head against his shoulder, rocking him gently to get him to sleep through the night. Hope and then despair and then hope again, constantly cycling through his mind, every time he remembered that there was a slim but extant possibility that Kakashi didn’t necessarily blame him for not preventing Rin’s death, that night. Didn’t necessarily hate and despise him for having been away at Mount Myoboku playing goddamn bingo with Jiraiya-Sensei and Mamma Toad, of all things. That he had been avoiding Minato for years on end for another reason entirely.

The enormous oh sh*t oh f*ck that rolled through Minato’s body from head to toe and back again every time he returned in his mind to all the things he’d done wrong in the last almost-four years. All of the unspoken poison and wrath on Kakashi’s face, every time Minato had tried to talk to him right after it had happened. How maybe, just maybe, some or all of that had just been yet another of Kakashi’s many masks…

…A cover disguising all that horror that must be living just underneath the surface. The list in Kakashi’s apartment suddenly made so much more sense. Not a mark of monstrous pride, like Minato had thought when he first discovered it, but tiny etched tally marks of shame. Living beings who Kakashi had been ordered to exterminate because of the threat they supposedly posed to the Village. People that Kakashi had been forced to kill, quite possibly against his will.

Oh, wait, so is THAT why he wanted to kill himself…?

The question arrived in his mind so unexpectedly, he very nearly dropped his precious six-month-old son straight onto the kitchen floor, the shock that rippled through him was so horrible.

He wants to die because he feels trapped, struggling under the weight of all this obligatory isolation, this forced secret…?? Permanently trapped in the role of Village assassin, Village punching bag, unable to even express his desire to be free of it…?

Fuuuck, Minato thought to himself as his gravitational jolt broke Menma’s peace and he started wailing. sh*t, sh*t, sh*tf*ck…

Only a few months after making him a squad leader, Danzo had already begun to hint that he wanted to promote Hound to the position of ANBU captain.

Kakashi had yet to respond to a single one of Minato’s letters.

So Minato was once again trying to figure out what to do. Weighing his options. Where Danzo was concerned, one had to be extremely cautious, but you also had to take action very quickly before things went too far too fast. It was like a viper in the grass. Any wrong moves or unnecessary pauses could have dire consequences.

He sat in the office one evening after another of Hound’s soulless, completely unaffected mission reports, staring at the sunset glinting on the edge of the fulgurite paperweight, and pondering his next move. The last thin rays of sunlight. Hiruzen’s long shadow. Danzo in the dark doing god only knew what, and Orochimaru creeping and crawling right along with him, presumably. Jiraiya out in the taverns doing f*ck all to help. Kushina and Menma and Obito safe and sound at home, and Kakashi — or Hound, that was — Hound was out there in the darkness right alongside Danzo. Unwillingly, maybe, but walking in lockstep with the Shadow Hokage all the same.

It seems safe to assume Danzo can and will kill Kakashi if I confront either of them to get the truth directly. He has already killed once in order to protect this secret, and no one would have even noticed, if not for the fact that I forced it out of Kanra.

…How had it gotten this bad.

Minato’s gaze drifted over to the stone faces outside: Senju All will be well in time Hashirama. Senju f*ck your comrades Tobirama, at least according to the protocols adhered to by his remaining students. Sarutobi You cannot absorb everything Hiruzen. And now, Namikaze f*cking stupid and completely useless c*nt of a sensei, f*cking useless when it actually counts Minato.

Minato closed his eyes, massaging his brow as scattered lines from the shinobi manual began to attack him almost at random:

Protocol dictates tight control of information at all times. Need-to-know bases only. Confidentiality is key. The hallmark of a strong shinobi is his or her control of their emotions, and the flow of information.

…The Nidaime had been wrong.

The protocol is wrong.

It had to be.

But letting the truth come out meant…

It could mean…

If Kakashi died or was killed out there on a mission, or was offed by Danzo for the so-called crime of discussing a Village secret, there would be almost no protocols to follow. No grieving family to deliver the news to. No long slow march to Obito’s gran’s house or the Nohara residence bearing the weight of a few thousand saved lives. Just a quiet body retrieval and a most-likely sparsely-attended funeral and then ten thousand or so waves of grief for Namikaze Minato to ride out alone.

…I’ve lost too many students already.

As bad as this separation between us is, at least he’s not dead. At least there’s that.

I can’t lose another student, not him, not Obito. Not Menma. I just can’t stand to go through that awful unrelenting grief ever again.

Sensei, not father. Sure. Of course. But…

But what does it even mean to be a sensei?

To be a father, even if only a temporary one?

…It means you lie, sometimes. It means you make rash promises, trying to protect them even when it’s useless. It means you absorb the blows. It means you are the one who will be there to catch them when they fall. It means you don’t stop trying, even when you’re “supposed to.” Even when they’ve outgrown you. Even when you carry your own burdens, too, large and small.

A bitter stab of a thought shot through him: Sakumo hadn’t done any of this.

But Minato had. Without thinking, without hesitating, without even consciously choosing to do so, he had adopted the role of part-time father or older brother to Kakashi the moment he assumed the role of sensei. Had done his best to put himself into that role, had assumed those responsibilities without hesitating.

Look where it had gotten them.

To Kakashi, he was just Hokage-sama now, and nothing more than that.

…I’m going to save you, Kakashi, even if you don’t want to talk to me. Even if you don’t respond to my letters. Even if you still hate me, even if you don’t care about me at all. Even if you don’t even want to be saved.

And yet, whenever they crossed paths, like they had earlier that very same evening, there was… no looming threat. No obvious dark spiders lurking in the corners of their world. Not a single trace of the warmth of a flickering memory, either. Just a stoic, dead-eyed soldier waiting impassively for the next set of instructions. Perhaps an occasional fraction of a flare of the old Hatake dismissiveness, whenever Minato attempted to express something as trivial and not-mission-relevant as an actual emotion in Hound’s presence. But it was only a fractional thing. Barely more than a twitch of the eyebrow, if that.

Calm down about it already, Sensei Hokage-sama…

The young man had fully melted into his role of perfect killing machine, in every other respect.

Seemingly, anyway.

“Mission timeline requirements?” Kakashi Hound had prompted him impassively after Minato spent a little too long in his watchful pause, unconsciously hoping to see that tiny twitch of the eyebrow just one more time, the one he had to impute from the flicker of an eyelid, since the brow itself was almost entirely hidden by the perfect porcelain mask.

“Please report back to me personally by next Monday,” Minato had replied, knowing the idea of receiving any sort of personal report from Hound was damn near ludicrous while simultaneously being completely unfunny.

You’re the only one who cares, Minato, he thought at himself as ANBU Hound bowed and left the office without another word. But even so. You can’t give up until it’s fixed, somehow or other. Even if he hates you for it.

And yet he still had moments of deep doubt.

Maybe Juri had a point, he thought at Rin’s grave the next morning as he crouched to light a stick of incense for her a few weeks after her birthday, noting the dead flower petals from the vase of lilies that someone, presumably Obito, had left there last week. Maybe it’s better if no one cares at all. If it all gets piled on the altar of self-sacrifice, the good of all, even at great cost to the individual.

Loneliness that arrived in the center of the heart, like the lighting of a match, like the alighting of a moth, like the flap of a butterfly’s wings, like the feeling of having a small warm sleeping pillow of a five-year-old removed from his arms, like the weight of a dead flower petal compared to a tombstone. A ghost of a feeling. Hardly more than a memory.

Sakumo’s voice floated back to him, from that day: “Thank you, Minato-san.”

A cherished memory, relegated to the back of the photo bin, never to be revisited except by accident. A hollow place that once was full. Opening his hands and making himself let go of the hope he’d struggled to quell and contain for weeks now.

For what, Sakumo-san? Thank you for turning your son into some sort of creature of the night, this silent skeleton wearing the armor of an assassin? Thank you for trapping him in the life of a monster, setting him on this path, watching over from afar as he was coerced into becoming this thing he never wanted to become…?

His eyes darted over to the far corner of the cemetery, where a lonely grave sat away from the others.

Sakumo would hate me for this failure, if he could see it.

And the next moment:

He hates me.

Kakashi must hate me.

There’s no way he doesn’t hate me.

Three, going on four years now of what more or less amounted to slavery, a life relegated to service in the Village’s longest shadows. And all Minato had done to try to stop it from happening was drop off groceries and break into hospital rooms and wait patiently for Kakashi to answer his f*cking mail already.

Why the hell would he, though. He must hate me so much, after everything he’s been through these last few years, the things I didn’t protect him from, things I was too stupid to know were actually going on under the surface.

Did Kakashi think this was all it had ever been about…? All those years of training together, battling at each other’s side. Going for ice cream at the end of another harrowing week? Kenshin. Self-sacrifice. Devotion. Giving up one’s ties, one’s desires, one’s entire self in service of the country as a whole. This must be the destination he thought 'Minato-Sensei' had been leading him toward, all that time…

Rin’s voice from that time at Waterfall Meadow shot into his mind, the memory so sharp and clear it was almost like she was still standing right next to him: “It was all just a waste, Sensei.”

Minato sank down onto his knees, pressing his fingertips to the dead lilies wilting against the stone, clenching one of the stray petals tight against his palm.

There’s nothing I can do about everything that happened in the past. But if there’s anything I can possibly do to keep him from hating his present, and his future, for something he never volunteered to do, something he quite possibly didn’t even mean to do in the first place…

…Like a storm brewing on the horizon. It was like a mighty bolt of lightning was heading for them, aimed right at the bedraggled remnants of what had once been Team Minato.

All I can do is try my best to get in front of it.

Try my best to absorb the blow.

When he wasn’t writing letter after unanswered private letter, once a week and then twice a week, he returned to writing out more and more private theories about what had happened. His notebook was running short of pages, so he crammed his letters in ever smaller. His chewed-up, borrowed pen was gone, but there was still plenty to chew over, metaphorically. The sealed file had raised almost as many questions as it had answered.

Had Rin been fully aware and conscious of everything that had taken place that night, or had she been lost in a haze from the genjutsu…?

Did she communicate the entirety of the Sanbi problem to Kakashi beforehand, or did he realize some or all of it on his own?

(It was like trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle with one’s eyes shut. He turned over piece after piece in his mind, trying to get the edges to line up).

Had Kakashi been performing the role of a willing executioner, sworn to silence by the seals and protocols he’d been compelled to obey, or was it possible, was it perhaps just as likely that he had been just as much a victim of their physical collision as everyone had always assumed she had been…?

Had someone else been lurking out there in the dark of the rain nearby, waiting for a chance to interfere from the sidelines, like Hiruzen thought?

Or had the two of them organized it together, planned out what had to happen, in order to keep more innocent lives from being destroyed?

Or had one of them chosen it unilaterally?

…Had it been Rin, all this time, who had made the ultimate decision?

Had she or had she not killed herself on purpose, in order to give Kakashi and the Village a slim chance at survival?

It was just a suspicion, but it was one Minato couldn’t seem to shake. His Nohara Rin, the girl who had smiled so widely at his dumb puns that it creased the purple on her cheeks, and who had offered to carry the team pack for him in spite of being half his size and the pack being about double hers — his Rin wouldn’t have put her teammate through something so horrible unless she had been denied any other option. But the way things were going that night, she wouldn’t have had much time to decide, one way or the other. Not with the Sanbi lurking inside her, no doubt waiting for the slightest chance to escape the seal.

Did she talk it over with him, get him to agree to it?

Could Kakashi even confirm or deny it, if I were to ask him?

Can anyone else possibly confirm or deny it, given that even Obito doesn’t know?

If Minato were to ask Kakashi outright…? Was there even the slightest chance that Kakashi would not be placed in grave danger just for telling him the truth of what had happened…?

…It was too risky. He didn’t dare try it. Not while Danzo was still around, silently lurking, watching from the shadows with his many unblinking eyes.

It was too dangerous to use direct methods, so instead Minato went back to using indirect ones.

Not bribery or torture this time, though. He got the idea from the way Jiraiya had led Kushina into confronting him about the notebook. Enlisted the help of a very seemingly-drunk Jiraiya. Late one Saturday night, Minato hooked his elbow through the Sannin’s and bought him several rounds of a specific brand of sake, one that tended to unlock his Sensei’s morose, macabre, melodramatic side, which would help him play the part more convincingly than a kabuki actor. Plied him with another round when Jiraiya started to sober himself up. Slowly, little by little, their conversation tilted as it often did towards the darkest corners of their shinobi lives, their deepest regrets, their worst memories…

“Mine was that night that Rin died,” Minato confessed in a quiet, honest voice, perfectly pitched to be picked up by listeners at the next booth over from theirs.

“Ahh… as to tha’, Minato-kun. Have you ever.” Jiraiya hiccuped at him, red-faced and bleary-eyed, the consummate professional. “Consider. Considered. That she wanted to do it.”

Minato raised his head and fixed his Sensei with a confused, surprised look, performing his own role to a tee.

“Wanted to do what, die?”

“Yeah. No. Yes.”

The bar was one that many young shinobi frequented on their off days. Minato had picked an evening when he knew Shiranui Genma was in town. Gekko Hayate was there, too, listening to him and Jiraiya-Sensei talk without looking like he was listening. Minato had actually thought it would go through Genma, but the young man with the senbon in his mouth looked dismissive, and a quiet snort escaped his nose when Jiraiya repeated his rambling question.

Hayate, on the other hand…

Out of the corner of his eyes, Minato could basically see the moment the idea landed in his head:

What if she jumped.

What IF.

…It was a genuine question. The file had heavily implied that Kakashi had killed her on purpose, but nowhere in the file did it say that Kakashi had said that he killed her on purpose. Therefore, it could have been Kakashi’s call, like Hiruzen had wanted him to believe at first, or some other unnamed person’s interference, like Hiruzen now seemed to want him to believe. It could have been an accident, just as Daiichi had proposed. But on the other hand, it could just possibly have been Rin’s will that shaped the events of that night, not Kakashi’s, nor the gruesome, lurking hand of fate, either.

Minato’s current intention was to just to pose the question, just to float it out there like bait on a fishing line, just to see if anyone or anything would bite. Even if it wasn’t exactly what had happened, maybe, just maybe, it would alleviate some of the unrelentingly negative social pressure on Cold-Blooded Friend-Killer Hatake Kakashi, if just a few of the people in his old circle started to wonder, started to ask themselves some questions…

And as for the questions Minato was asking more directly:

…Nothing.

Months went by, and still no response from his former student. Not a whisper. Not even a flicker of recognition when Minato carefully hinted at the existence of ‘additional instructions’ during Kakashi’s mission reports in the privacy of his office.

It didn’t deter him from writing letter after letter, though.

I’m sorry, Kakashi, he penned countless times. Please let me fix it. I know about the seal on members of Root. I know what happened, and I know it’s not your fault. I’m so sorry. I just want to try again. Please just give me another chance to try to fix it.

(One more chance to try to absorb the blow, to protect you from the horror and the cruelty of this world…).

He could have asked his still-only-semi-retired previous secretary Juri to deliver them, or her replacement, Wasabe Ryu, but he didn’t. Couldn’t risk it. He always dropped the letters off himself, in person, careful to avoid detection, but otherwise all but handing them off as directly as possible, sliding them under Kakashi’s front door or leaving them in his locker when he knew he wasn’t being watched. All of the letters written on that lined paper from the black notebook, tucked into nondescript envelopes, plain and ordinary, but all of them heavily sealed and highly protected.

Still, there was no acknowledgement from Kakashi, not even once, and over time, the lack of any response started to burn inside him so much worse than it had before.

I know, Kakashi. I know what happened. I know I should have been there. I should have prevented Rin’s death, and your silencing. I know you have every right to blame me for not being there, and every reason to hate me for not confronting you before now. But give me one more chance.

No response.

Work with me here just a little. Please.

Begging him for anything.

Just one more chance. Please let’s just start over from scratch. Try again, together.

…Still nothing.

Always nothing.

“The time has come to promote him to captain, Yondaime-sama,” said Danzo, staring at him from the shadows of the room they were in. It was in fact Danzo’s living room, although it seemed unlikely to Minato that anyone ever did much ‘living’ in it. The furnishings were spartan and colorless, the lighting almost non-existent. Minato had opted to call upon Lord Danzo at his residence rather than summon him to the office, hoping to throw the old man’s footing a little by the choice of locale. But once the conversation got underway, he immediately felt that the reverse was more accurate.

“I want Hatake Kakashi back,” Minato had declared the moment the door closed behind him. “He’s been under your command for three years. I want you to release him from all of his Root ANBU obligations so that I can put him on my personal security detail. I won’t hear any arguments; my decision is already final.”

“Very well, Yondaime-sama,” the other man replied, inclining his scarred chin towards his neck as he gestured for Minato take a seat. “Hatake is a good agent. His loss will be felt deeply by those who have worked with him in the Foundation.”

Just that one word — loss.

“You mean his absence,” Minato corrected him, shifting in his chair.

“Of course,” Danzo all but purred.

A trickle of fear. A feeling of being watched by a predator from the shadows.

Did I just walk into an ambush?

“I understand completely, Lord Fourth,” Danzo said with a bow. “Your household requires the utmost in terms of protection. Uchiha Obito alone is quite an interesting target for those who oppose Konoha, isn’t he? His abilities with mokuton, not to mention the Mangekyou Sharingan… I can see why you would be anxious for more protection, given that the cells from Lord First that make up part of his body are in such high demand.”

Every word out of Danzo’s mouth sent another layer of chill shooting down Minato’s back. How do you know about the Mangekyou Sharingan was shoved to the side; it felt imperative that he didn’t let on to Danzo that he didn’t know the full extent of what Danzo knew. “You’ve had reports of other nations who are interested in Obito, then?” he said instead.

Danzo inclined his head slightly to one side. “I hear reports of many kinds, Hokage-sama. He’s hardly the only compelling target in your circle, though, is he? The Nine Tails jinchuuriki, for another…”

This IS a veiled threat, then. Minato’s mouth creased into a disgusted snarl. “She already receives top-priority securit—”

“But one wonders, sometimes, whether she is truly safe from members of her own household. After all, you yourself sealed the will of Madara within young Obito, did you not? And yet sometimes it seems there are, perhaps, traces of his influence, even to this day.”

“Obito would never hurt Kushina,” Minato averred.

“Not intentionally, of course,” Danzo agreed.

“Neither intentionally nor unintentionally,” Mianto countered without missing a beat.

“One would hope not,” Danzo agreed again. “Though of course, accidents do happen from time to time, don’t they? Terrible accidents.”

…Something in the way he said it. Something in just how calculated and crafted the words were, while all the while sounding casual enough to escape notice. Evade blame. Something in the glint in Danzo’s eye, the barely-perceptible edge in his voice. The man was like a many-eyed spider. Reaching arms, stretching webs. Venomous bite.

What do you want, Minato nearly said outright. What do you want me to trade, in order for you to relinquish control over Hound?

But the sensation of being watched by a venomous predator who could strike at any moment was made doubly worse by Danzo’s next remark, an offhand comment about Menma, and the routine analyses that were done on every child with shinobi parents, measuring this and that, noting in particular his large natural reservoirs of chakra.

How do you have access to those private medical files —

“Such vast potential in such a small child,” Danzo hummed mildly before Minato had even finished the question in his mind. “Such interesting potential.”

f*ck.

Though he hadn’t intended to, Minato found he had clenched his hands into fists and his throat had grown too tight to breathe, let alone respond.

f*ckKKKKK —

While Minato was frantically trying to figure out how he’d been cornered so swiftly and completely, Danzo unexpectedly rose from his seat, making a humble, perfectly controlled bow before he spoke:

“As I said, Minato-sama, with your permission, I would like to promote Hatake to ANBU captain, effective immediately. I’ll draw up the promotion request for you to sign right now, if you would be gracious enough to stay a moment more. As captain, I will expect him to split his time between Hokage guard duties for you, and his regular Root duties. He does, at present, have something of a backlog of Root assignments, so I would not be surprised if it took him some weeks or even months before he has a sufficient amount of free time to take on new duties, but I’m certain he will prioritize your requests at the first opportunity.”

“And then we’ll… what, just share him between divisions?”

“Of course,” Danzo hummed his assent, pulling up some papers and a pen as he took a seat at his writing desk. “Hokage assignments naturally take first priority, but when Hound is not busy serving as your, what was it, guard detail, then he will be taking directives from me.”

Minato nodded woodenly. It was all he felt capable of at the moment. His mind was spinning, searching for an out, even as it frantically jumped ahead to the next question: What’s the catch. What are you going to ask me for in exchange, you old viper—

“Oh, and as it happens, Orochimaru mentioned to me just the other day that he will need another sample of the Shodaime’s cells from young Obito. His research has led him down a rather promising track, but the previous sample that Hiruzen arranged for him to have has now been depleted. Of course, Orochimaru would not make such a request unless obtaining more such cells was of the utmost importance to the continued safety of the Village.”

…f*cking snakes, both of them.

“I’ll… see to it,” Minato choked out as Danzo passed him the finalized promotion request and a pen to sign with.

… Everyone has a lever, Minato thought as he left the elegant but sterile residence. Somehow Danzo had figured out that in spite of years of separation, Kakashi was still one of Minato’s. Danzo was using his power over Kakashi this way in order to hurt and control Minato. He wasn’t about to relinquish that control without being compelled to do so first.

What do I do.

How do I get him out.

He’d been thinking it over for months on end now.

Too late, too long, Minato; you’re taking too long. Any mission could be his last, and you’re just sitting here.

He slipped into a nearby bar, changing his features to avoid notice, and took a seat alone in the corner, and continued to think.

I could ask Jiraiya his opinion. Especially for a strategy for dealing with Orochimaru.

But Jiraiya had been known to let certain pieces of information slip from his mouth in years past, whether in a planned or unplanned way, and any uncontrolled release of information could have disastrous consequences in this situation.

I could tell Gai about it, maybe …

He had already considered it. Several times. The problem was that Gai wasn’t ANBU, and had no knowledge of the silencing seals that were placed on Root ANBU, and Minato had no way of telling him without explaining how he had come by that information in the first place. He trusted and relied on Gai, but not to a point where he felt completely confident in Gai’s ability to infiltrate Root for him. He was confident that Gai would be willing to do such a thing for Kakashi’s sake, but Minato wasn’t about to let him.

He had more than once considered telling Obito and Kushina about what he had read in the sealed file, about the Three Tails having been sealed into Rin’s belly. Well, Kushina was bound to find out eventually, because she always knew when Minato was hiding secrets. She hadn’t so much as asked about the contents of that damned file yet though, in spite of the fact that she was the one who made it possible for him to read it in the first place. And she was still in the honeymoon period of new motherhood. It seemed best not to bring up old gnarled emotionally charged issues for the time being.

He could tell Obito about it, though. Thought about it quite a lot. Considered letting a few details ‘slip.’ But Kushina had asked him not to involve Obito. Multiple times. And if he were to outright tell Obito that Rin’s death was a suicide, that several signs pointed to that as a possibility, but if they were then later to discover that everything Kakashi had done was in fact on purpose, and it was not in fact a suicide…

Minato couldn’t think of anything more devastating than that. He certainly didn’t want to torture Obito with as-yet-unproven possibilities.

So with a slightly shaky sigh, Minato sank back onto his barstool and decided to think it through alone, again, and bide his time, and in the meantime, he pulled out his notebook and tried writing another letter, and keeping hoping for a better idea to occur to him, some opportunity or other.

Until one day in late April, a perfect mission assignment came across his desk. A really interesting and exciting opportunity. An anonymous source had brought Konoha Intelligence a dossier on the known locations of one Gatou from Land of Waves, that absolute sh*thead. His movements had been marked for a while now, where he had been and who he had been with, but Konoha had never had such a strong indication of where he was about to be. Minato was by no means a bloodthirsty man, but he had to admit it would be an absolute pleasure to remove all of that man’s internal organs from his body, after all the sick sh*t Gatou had been responsible for.

I could go myself, he thought as he dismissed Shikaku and Tsume and leaned back in his desk chair to think it over. I could ask Kakashi to come with me. Or I could take Obito with me.

But the thing was, and this was a trivial reason, but there was that upcoming birthday party for little Sasuke, over at Mikoto’s and Fugaku’s house. He had already missed almost the entirety of Itachi’s promotion party. Gatou would be in Land of Waves at, coincidentally, the exact same time.

I could send Obito alone, or I could send Kakashi alone.

But…

I can skip the party and assign Kakashi to come with us. All three. Like old times. I could make up some reason why all three of us have to go. Wouldn’t take us longer than half a day, probably, if I teleport us to the marker in Waves first.

But the thing was, if all three of them went, an argument was almost bound to break out. And if they ended up arguing again, Minato wouldn’t put it past Kakashi to just shunshin the hell out of there at the first opportunity, and then they’d be right back where they started, or worse…

The next report came in at midnight, just as Minato was leaving his office, still unsettled about what to do with the Gatou situation, and electing to walk home in order to try to clear his thoughts through movement after sitting too many long, stiff hours in his desk chair.

An ANBU in a white fox mask signaled at him from the shadows just outside the Tower, the barest trace of a movement to draw his attention.

“…Against how many enemy nin!?” Minato nearly spat, holding his mouth to contain his gasp.

“I’m not entirely sure,” said the agent. “All I know is that Danzo-sama just sent him off to the south of Iwa to deal with a nuke nin encampment in Iwa with only two other guys for back-up. Well, at least, the mission assignment was signed by Danzo, but I happen to suspect it might have been tampered with. Don’t ask me why or how I know, I just think it mighta been. That’s why I wanted to bring it to your attention in the first place, Hokage-sama.”

“I see,” hummed Minato, voice slightly choked. “Go on.”

“Danzo isn’t sentimental, by any means, but I don’t think he would have sent three of his best soldiers to certain death on purpose. Which leads me to think — or suspect, anyway — that maybe the command structure down at the Foundation is —”

The ANBU agent broke off, leaving the rest unspoken.

“…compromised,” Minato murmured for the agent, lowering his voice to half the volume he’d used before, the phrase certain death still making the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end.

The ANBU in the fox mask nodded, just a fraction of a movement, no more.

“I’ll look into it right away,” he murmured, and the agent nodded again, and Minato uttered a quiet thanks and then teleported straight to the Hiraishin marker nearest to the private residence and formal receiving room of one Shimura Danzo.

“You purposely endangered —”

“I would never do any such thing,” Danzo cut in before Minato could finish his furious yell. This time, unlike every previous encounter between the two of them, this time there was a razor-sharpsomething in Danzo’s expression, a stabbing twitch in the gnarled fingers that gripped his cane. More than mild irritation. This time, finally, the accusation that Danzo had been working against Konoha’s interests had for once triggered the release of visible anger in the tall, scarred, one-eyed veteran. “I serve Konoha, as do all agents who serve under me, Hokage-sama,” Danzo snapped at him, his half-covered face locked in an ugly snarl.

“And yet you sent only three highly capable and valuable shinobi out alone to deal with, what, something like a hundred enemies? Two hundred, if some reports are to be believed…?”

The tremor of fury running through Danzo’s frame suddenly stilled. Minato barely clocked it; he was so focused on his own fury, which kept flaring through him in heatwave after heatwave.

“Not all such reports are accurate, Yondaime-sama.”

“That’s not the point—”

“Hatake Kakashi and his team are valuable assets,” Danzo insisted, his voice and bearing returning to its more normal impassive tone as he settled himself into a seat at his writing desk even as Minato continued to pace the length of the living room like a nettled, displeased jaguar. “Hatake is my number one, as a matter of fact.”

The bold proclamation stopped Minato dead in his tracks.

“Excuse me?”

“He’s my best agent in the field, and my number one pick as successor when the time comes for me to retire,” Danzo said in a completely neutral tone, shifting his robes slightly as he adjusted in his seat, but if he was lying, there was no other tell. “He’ll make a very capable ANBU Commander one day. His abilities and commitment are unparalleled.”

Again, Minato was so taken aback, he simply stood and gawked for a moment before drawing himself up into a more authoritative demeanor.

“So you’re promising me that you have never purposely endangered his life for the sake of a mission? You’ve never sent him out on what people are calling suicide missions, you’ve never—”

“To do so would be completely contradictory to Konoha’s best interests.”

Minato stared hard, trying to assess the veracity of the claim.

Danzo didn’t even blink.

“And no one who serves under you in the chain of command has ever—”

“I control Foundation operations, Yondaime-sama. All of them. No one is permitted to so much as sets foot on the premises without my permission and knowledge.”

The statements were made without a trace of hesitation, which didn’t mean they were absent of lies, but…

“You’ll make sure he’s never sent out on a mission like this one again,” Minato told him, the words landing somewhere in the uncertain terrain between an order and a request for reassurance and a pleading beg.

“You have my word,” Danzo hummed.

And then — just for a splinter of a second — Danzo smiled at him.

For a moment, Minato felt so completely disarmed and off-rhythm, his instincts told him to teleport to a safe location and gather his family members tightly around him so he could protect them —

Then the thin smile disappeared, and with it, the feeling of incredible vulnerability.

Trickles of rage crept back in, trickles and then a flood of it, a tsunami wave.

“I will hold you to that promise,” Minato announced, certain the other shinobi could hear the threat in the words, could sense the killing intent in his chakra aura. Without another word to Danzo, he turned on his heel and left.

“So you’re completely certain they’re all alive?” exclaimed Minato when he received the report a few hours later at the top of the Hokage Tower at 5:35am, trying to find air to breathe in the darkened hallway where his ANBU was reporting to him, trying and failing to force himself to relax and act natural and not draw attention to himself, despite the fact that it was only himself and the porcelain-masked ANBU agent in the hallway.

“All operatives have returned, full health, no casualties.”

For a moment, Minato just sank, dropped his chin to his chest, one hand pressed heavily against the closest wall, the churning tornado of emotions of the past few hours finally releasing their chokehold on him.

Thank god. Thank god.

“What was the justification given for sending just one cell against so many enemies?” Minato forced out as his lungs pushed hard for air, punching an unsustenainably fast rhythm, in and out and in and out, and yet there was nothing, no air whatsoever, not the slightest molecule —

The porcelain mask of the Root ANBU operative who was Minato’s source tilted up just enough for Minato to read his lips: “As to that, well… some of the other Foundation agents… a lot of normal shinobi are too scared of him to go on any missions with him. It’s the same with Root, even though no one will own up to it. Hatake is very efficient, but he takes… unnecessary risks, sometimes. And then there’s the matter of… well, the rumor is that Danzo-sama…”

“Yes?”

“This is just a rumor, but… a few of the agents are saying that maybe Lord Danzo thinks that Hound’s death would be… inspiring.”

All the emotions of a few moments before returned in full strength, but this time accompanied by a jolt of sickness that ran through Minato from head to toe, arcing through his body like forking lightning, carving a path right through that place that until a moment ago had felt hollow, empty, and numb.

Inspiring.

The word itself was, anyway.

And dizzying, and terrifying.

It made Minato resolve to take action immediately, in any case.

Even if the only action he could currently think of to take was to throw his fist into the wall of his office the moment he had closed the door behind himself.

“f*ck,” he roared, uncaring of who might happen to overhear.

Do something, Minato, he thought at his bleeding knuckles as he yanked them free of the wall, shooing off the ANBU bodyguard (Tiger) who rushed in and tried to check on him. His legs itching to sprint and his arms tingling with the desire to punch again, he started pacing the length of the office, searching everywhere for ideas.

Do something do something do something do something…

“He is my number one,” came the recollection of Danzo’s words to him from a few hours earlier.But had it been a ruse, had it all been just a hollow promise, a way of getting Minato off of his back? Had sending Kakashi to his death been Danzo’s real plan all along?

“To do so would be completely contradictory to Konoha’s best interests…”

At the time, it had felt at least partially convincing, but now…

“Danzo thinks that Hound’s death would be… inspiring…”

…Suddenly, perhaps it was the roundness of the room, but somehow, suddenly, instead of pacing, he was spiraling, like slipping down a stair in the pitch black dark. Like accidentally drinking toad oil instead of water. Shivery with fear, but no way to shake off the slick layer of anxiety spiking through his system, again and again, with every footfall.

“f*ck,” Minato gasped, staring dazedly at the wall he had punched earlier. “f*ck f*ck f*ck. f*ck. FUUUCK.”

Do something, Namikaze. Get him out. Now.

But how.

When, where. With whom.

Do f*cking something, something, SOMETHING, do something before all that’s left of the kid you loved with your whole heart is just another tombstone and a memory. You only have so long to act before he won’t even be flesh and blood anymore, he’ll be dead in the ground and you’ll be responsible and you shouldn’t have f*cking DONE this to me, Sakumo, this was your kid to watch over and guard and care for and you just f*cking LEFT, this was your one precious f*cking kid and he closes me out because you closed him out first, you taught him that, not me, and then you left, you just up and left without having to face any of the consequences —

“f*ck!” he shouted again, this time throwing his fist into the headstone hard enough to send splinters through the polished rock. At some point he must have teleported to the marker on the Memorial Stone without even being aware of intending to. “God f*cking damnit, Minato,” he scolded himself in the dim gray light of morning as he shook out his heavily bleeding hand and stumbled ten or fifteen paces away from the war memorial for shinobi who had made the greatest contributions to Konoha’s success in the Second Great War, the exploding bone-splinters in the rock right over the spot where the name Hatake Sakumo had been inscribed and then scratched out years later.

“f*ck!” he whispered up at the last of the fading stars, finding no solace whatsoever in the cold, uncaring starlight far above. “What the f*ck do I do now?!”

…Thinking about Sakumo always led nowhere.

Thinking through various plans for how to talk to Kakashi led Minato back to a more familiar thorough equally frustrating impasse:

I’ll just go talk to him myself. Right now. I’ll wake him up if he’s asleep. I’ll track him down if he’s still out on the mission. Damn the consequences, if there’s a seal. I’ll keep him safe even if it means I never sleep again. He’s my kid, I’m responsible, and no one else is looking out for him, so I have to find a way to talk to him —

(“Not your son—”

“You are NOT my father—”

“You are not responsible—”

“This is not a profession for the soft of heart —”

“He doesn’t give a sh*t about us, Sensei, just f*ck off and let him f*ck off too—”)

In spite of all the long-ago echoes rebounding cacophonously against the walls of his skull, Minato took a crouch on the edge of the cold cemetery and began planning out another direct confrontation with Kakashi, in spite of how badly the last one had gone. Well, the last several…

If not he himself, then Gai was the most likely to be successful, despite the fact that Kakashi had barely tolerated his presence in the last couple of years. Maybe Genma, or Shisui…

Or maybe the best thing to do would be for Minato to try talking to Danzo again directly. Try to get Danzo to talk some sense into Kakashi. At least stop assigning him all these goddamn suicide missions. Find some way to threaten or cajole or bribe or control Danzo into doing his bidding, and thereby finding a way to control Kakashi as well. At least Kakashi respects and listens to Danzo, he reflected, though it was a thought with a mouth-twistingly bitter aftertaste.

If not Danzo, then maybe Jiraiya could help him.

Or Hiruzen, or Tsume, or Shikaku, or Mikoto, or Hayate, or…

Minato even considered asking Kushina for help, again, even, because as catastrophically fiery as her last few clashes with Kakashi had been, at least she would never, ever back down.

But for some strange, counterintuitive reason, the name and face that kept popping into his head as he paced back and forth in front of Rin’s grave, searching for a solution, trying to wrap his brain around the endless mess of threads and eyes and leaves and reaching arms, seeking a path forward, was…

Someone from the unlikeliest corner to look for hope…

“One more,” little Kakashi panted, wiping sweat from his brow. Eight years old, a chunin for just about a week now, and obsessed with trying to master the double-nin combo parry-attack Minato had shown them that morning. The height of late-spring heat. Rin was over at the hospital doing iryou-nin training, so it had just been the boys and him that day. “Just one more and then we can take a break.”

“Hell no,” Obito refused, his voice squeaking on the curse word that was a little too mature for a nine-year-old to be using regularly.

“I’m going another round whether you want to or not, you lazy crybaby,” Kakashi growled threateningly.

“Stop it, Kakachi! You can’t do it alone! It’s a two-person combo, dummy!”

Kakashi just growled at Obito again, lugging him bodily back to his feet by the elbow. “Just one more. We’ll get it this time.”

“SENSEI, please help me, your stupid genius idiot student is completely crazy!!”

Biting his tongue, Minato tried his best to keep his mouth in a perfectly flat line and prepared to attack the pair of them again.

Kakashi raised his hands and took a ready position. At his side, Obito flopped over backwards onto the dirt floor of the training ground, sending dust flying everywhere. He gasped for air dramatically, heaving and flailing around and doing a very fine impression of a dying fish.

“PLEASE, Sensei, PLEASE MAKE HIM STOP, I CAN’T TAKE ANYMORE—”

“Get up, Deadlast!”

Pretending to adjust his stance, Minato coughed hard and pressed his fist to his mouth, trying to hide his laughter under a veneer of Sensible Sensei as Kakashi reached over without even looking and yanked hard on Obito’s neck, trying to force him to get him to back up on his feet again.

“Kakashi-kun, maybe a ten minute break wouldn’t hurt—”

“Later —”

“HE’S trying to KILL me, Sensei, he should be reported to the appropriate AUTHORITIES, this is BASICALLY TORTURE—”

“Shut up and get ready, Obito! We’re going again whether you like it or not!!”

“STOP LAUGHING, SENSEI, I NEED HELP, PLEEEAASE!! SENSEI, GOD, ANYONE, SOMEONE PLEASE HELP ME!!!”

It had taken a long, long while, and Minato had very nearly burst out laughing half a dozen more times along the way, but eventually, Obito had wailed and flopped around enough to get Kakashi to see reason and take a five-minute break.

The small bickering day-to-day fights had been difficult but not impossible to manage, but the first time Minato had felt truly out of his depth as a sensei was at their training later that same afternoon, when Kakashi’s angry tantrum and Obito’s endless whining turned into a fiasco of overwhelming emotions. Rin had arrived just in time to run off to comfort a glum, teary-eyed, despondent Obito, leaving a furious, bug-eyed, angry Kakashi for Minato to deal with.

Kakashi wasted no time laying into him, yelling at Minato through gritted teeth.

“So I’m just supposed to make myself perform worse so that Obito will feel better about how bad he is?!”

“I’m just saying, maybe if you don’t rub it in his face all the time—”

“Name one time.”

“Huh?”

“Name one time when I did that!”

Kakashi. Seriously? This is something our team struggles with on an almost-daily basis.

Even though Minato had buried his face in his hand, Kakashi seemed to have read his thoughts via his expression, because he burst out, “I’m only doing it so he’ll actually try harder and not suck so much!”

“And how has that worked out so far?”

Kakashi had given him a hugely frustrated growl and huffed off, responseless.

But at training the next morning, he hadn’t actually complained for more than a minute or two when Obito showed up an hour late, and when the two of them sparred, Kakashi had actually offered Obito a hand to help him back to his feet after kicking him in the shin hard enough to make him buckle mid-punch. And Obito, miracle of miracles, had accepted it. Had listened instead of yelled self-defensively as Kakashi explained how if Obito tried to shift his weight more through the punch, he wouldn’t leave himself laterally vulnerable.

And by mid-day, they had synchronized a good first run-through of the double-nin combo-parry-attack that had proven so difficult the day before.

Progress, Minato had allowed himself to hope, eyebrows raised as he and Rin exchanged tiny delighted smiles on the sidelines and Obito asked what on earth ladders had to do with anything. Small, but I’ll take it.

As the sun rose behind him the next morning after a long and completely sleepless night, Minato drummed his fingers on the Hokage desk in the silence of his isolation, thinking hard.

I promised Kushina. I told her I wouldn’t bring him into it. I’m breaking my word to her, all for an idea that might completely backfire on everyone.

The idea he’d come up with wasn’t a good one. More than a little crazy, actually. Probably only seemed even halfway decent due to the sleep deprivation and stress and abject desperation. There were a lot of things that could go very wrong. A lot of things. It had terrible odds, from a rational standpoint. But for some reason, it was what his heart said to do, and the longer Minato sat there thinking about it, the more the idea became The Plan, the plan he couldn’t quite shake, with the name and the face he couldn’t quit pinning his hopes on.

“Ryu-san?” he called out.

His secretary popped his head in a moment later.

“Mission assignments for tomorrow,” he said in his best impersonation of a calm, even-keeled, level-headed Hokage. “C-rank for Inuzuka Gaku, D-rank for Tsuchigawa Naomi and her team of genin, and an S-rank for Uchiha Obito and Hatake Kakashi.”

He’d managed to keep his voice steady, though it was a near thing. Handed his receptionist the carefully-prepared mission orders to have delivered to two very separate locations.

Please, Obito-kun. Do something. Do anything.

…Or at least help me stall for time.