whirlwind - Mixelation - Naruto (Anime & Manga) [Archive of Our Own] (2024)

Namikaze Minato had no idea that in another timeline, he’d die young. He did not know there was a world where he’d die the day his precious son was born, and that his last moments would be regretting holding the child only once, and that he’d simultaneously lose his beloved wife in a terrible wave of violence and adrenaline. He did not know there was another timeline where, during the war that earned him his infamy, Sarutobi Hiruzen would be able to march him through Rain Country and directly into Earth Country, instead of increasingly convoluted campaigns into other small nations, and that this would end the Third Shinobi War years earlier at the price of thousands of Rain Country citizens’ lives.

In this timeline, his little family was alive and well. Kushina had an office two floors below his, and they had plans to eat lunch together. Naruto was at the academy, presumably driving his teachers up the wall.

Minato was at his desk, rolling eraser shreddings together. Naruto had sworn this brand was made so that you could wad all the shreddings up together and then reform them into a new eraser. This was not advertised on the packaging at all, but according to Naruto, all the academy students were doing it.

Minato carefully pressed the little pieces together. Who knew the way of erasers quite like an academy student, after all?

He took his newly reformed eraser, which was a gross gray to the original eraser’s white, and squished it experimentally between his fingers. It did seem pretty solid. He went back to trying to rub out the fuuinjutsu sketch he’d messed up.

The eraser shreddings ball immediately fell apart into a useless mess. Hmm.

There was a knock on his office door, and Minato wiped all the eraser shreddings into the bin under his desk before calling for the person to enter. His whole secret ANBU guard had watched him do that, but that didn’t mean Danzo needed to know what he did on his lazy days.

Danzo came in looking as surly as ever. Hidden about the room, Minato’s secret guard shifted. Danzo had his own personal guard with him, from his wing of ANBU, a singular masked identity sticking to the shadows as seamlessly as any ANBU.

“Danzo-san,” Minato greeted, smile tight. “You don’t have a standing appointment, and yet I knew you’d be here.”

“You know better than to keep important information from the council,” Danzo replied, without even a bow of greeting. “You can’t lead effectively unless you utilize us.”

Minato kept his smile in place. He knew he’d be having this meeting with Danzo the second he’d let the current situation slip around Matsuoka.

So, good news: he had confirmed Matsuoka was leaking intel to Danzo. Bad news: now Danzo was going to be up his ass about said intel.

“And what, exactly, have I failed to share with you?” Minato asked.

Danzo crossed his arms. “That Morino is still alive,” he said.

“Ah, that…”

Minato leaned back in his chair, uncapping his water bottle to take a long sip. He did this as slowly as possible, just to be annoying.

His immature little act worked, because then Danzo said, “I trust you are acting quickly.”

“The situation is delicate,” Minato replied. “You’ll be updated when there’s something you need to know. Dismissed.”

Danzo’s eyes narrowed. He did not move at first, staring Minato down. Minato smiled grimly back at him.

Then, when Danzo finally did turn, Minato called after him, “And next time remember I told you you don’t need a personal guard in my Tower. Wouldn’t want you to take a pay cut for disobedience like a newbie chunin, would we?”

Danzo did not visibly react. He wouldn’t care about the pay cut, but the mark on his record would at least be slightly embarrassing.

When he was gone, Minato took a moment to rub his temples. The whole Danzo situation was truly hitting a… well, not a billing point, per se. Nothing felt like it was boiling, not yet. But definitely it felt like one too many impromptu meetings and scoldings. Like… like, if Minato wore glasses, and instead of boiling there was light steam, and so whenever Minato tried to do something, his glasses would steam up and he’d have to clean them.

Minato had been told he wasn’t good at metaphors. But the point was: it was all very annoying.

Minato had yet to come up with a good way to deal with Danzo. As Hokage, Minato was the ultimate authority in the village, and in theory he could just command Danzo to retire. He could demote him and then punish him for treason when Danzo inevitably refused to give up power. But Danzo had a lot of respect and social power in the village still, especially in ANBU and with the older generation. A move like this would lose Minato his own support.

When he’d taken up the role of Hokage at twenty-two, Minato had not been worldly and experienced enough to curb Danzo at the beginning. He’d thought Konoha’s strong council presence was a boon to him, as an unexperienced young face. He’d considered Danzo’s insight to be invaluable during the war.

And now here Minato was, nearly ten years into the job, and he was tracking rumors like a gossipy academy student. The situation was tricky. And kind of stupid.

Well, at least Danzo seemed unaware of a second key bit of info. If he played his cards right, Minato could set his plan into action before Danzo caught wind of it.

Morino Ibiki had been captured by Iwa at the tail-end of the Third War. Morino was a key intelligence agent and had been carrying communications meant for their spies in Iwa’s ranks. Because he was intelligence, Konoha had assumed he was captured alive.

However, as far as they knew, the spies he was in communication with were never compromised. This left the following options. One, Morino was dead, having never broken under interrogation. Two, Morino was captured and interrogated, his information extracted, and Iwa had either done nothing or was playing a years-long game. Three, Morino was still alive, captive in Iwa, because he had not broken under interrogation.

They had recently gotten confirmation Morino was indeed still alive, under the care of Iwa’s T&I. Minato wanted him back. Part of it was simply that Morino was Konoha, and Minato didn’t like sacrificing Konoha-nin when he could at all help it. The more practical reason was that Morino had a lot of privileged information Minato did not want Iwa to have. Even if Morino had been resisting Iwa for this many years, there was no guarantee that he would continue to resist them.

Minato and a very select number of his strategists had known about this for months, but were stumped for how to go about retrieving Morino.

What Danzo did not know was that Iwa had recently sent word that they would include Konoha in their call to entrants for the Iwa-hosted Chunin Exams in six months. The Exams had maintained a regular schedule, rotating between villages, since the war ended, but neither Iwa nor Konoha had invited each other when they hosted.

In pursuit of maintaining peace, Iwa had written.

It smelled very strongly of a trap. Iwa had not made any other offers of peace. Asking for Konoha to send their precious genin into the village seemed suspicious.

But. It would also give Konoha unprecedented access to Iwa.

They could retrieve Morino.

Minato went back to doodling ideas for a seal array. With six months, he was sure he could figure out a transportation seal simple enough that a jounin and their genin team could do it, whisking Morino away from under Iwa’s nose.

xXx

“No,” Kushina said, bending over Minato’s desk to look at his notes. “This isn’t even in the realm of what a rando Jounin could figure out without years of extra training.”

Behind her, Naruto, fresh from the Academy, was swinging his umbrella around like a sword. Droplets of rain flew off it. He seemed very happy to be ignoring them for the moment.

“Kakashi could,” Minato said.

“Kakashi could maybe get it on the time scale you want, and only because you were his sensei,” Kushina countered, putting a hand on her hip. Naruto’s school bag dangled from her other hand. “Most Jounin don’t have the baseline knowledge to just pick up new types of fuuinjutsu. And you don’t even have a finished seal yet? You’re going to have to get someone who’s already trained.”

Minato frowned down at his notes again. Kushina was definitely right, because part of Kushina’s job was to oversee fuuinjutsu training within the village. She knew better than anyone what realistic expectations for this type of thing would be. Most Jounin could be taught to activate a seal someone else made, but for this type of mission, it was best to have someone who could make it from scratch.

Iwa would probably be pretty paranoid about Konoha-nin bringing in any pre-made seals. Imagine if someone snuck in a Hiraishin marker. Iwa would lose their minds.

“Not to mention you can’t do a transportation jutsu with just one person,” Kushina continued. “So you’re going to need a second person who can help out.” Her lips quick up into a grin. “Unless you think you can teach someone Hiraishin in half a year?”

Minato pouted at her. Maybe if he had more than six months, and also didn’t have to be doing seven thousand other things a day as Hokage, he could come up with a transportation seal that could be executed by one person. But, as it stood, Hiraishin was the only one-man way to teleport.

And no, no one was going to be learning that in six months. There was a reason he was the only one to manage it since Tobirama.

Naruto knocked over the office coat rack with his umbrella, and Minato teleported across the room to catch it before it fell.

“Hey, kiddo,” he said, grinning down at Naruto. “Remember the rule about playing weapons inside?”

“Keep away from the furniture,” Naruto mumbled. “Sorry.”

The teleported home, to avoid the rain. Minato told Naruto about his failed eraser experiment while he helped him out of his raincoat.

“Oh, you gotta use spit,” Naruto told him brightly. Kushina wrinkled her nose.

After dinner, Naruto ran up to his room to play, and Kushina dove directly into another ongoing problem Minato was having.

“Naruto would be such a good older brother, don’t you think?” Kushina said, curling up next to him on the couch. The scent of jasmine tea from the warm mugs in their hands curled around them.

She pulled a throw blanket over them. It was safe and warm and quiet, here with Kushina, and this was where Minato was at his absolute weakest. He did nothing to stop her from musing about their life with a hypothetical second child.

Minato had no idea how to field Kushina when she got like this. He loved their little family with all his heart, but Kushina being pregnant was incredibly dangerous, and Minato barely had time and energy to parent one kid. He frequently had to stay late into the night in the office, and Kushin was also working full time. Naruto spent a lot of afternoons in a backroom studying rather than playing or training with his parents, and Minato felt perpetually guilty about it.

He did like the idea of more kids. He just also recognized that having more kids was a terrible idea.

“Do you remember, at dinner, when Naruto was saying how he showed those little kids where toads like to come out in the rain… imagine if he had a little sibling to show…”

Minato squirmed. Naruto would be a fantastic older brother.

They just really shouldn’t be having another kid…!

“Just think,” Kushina babbled. “Naruto has my face and your hair, so we’ll have a girl with your face and my hair. Oh, she’d be so pretty–”

Minato gathered their empty mugs and fled to the kitchen.

Kushina liked to brag she’d never lost an argument to him. This wasn’t really true, but she did tend to get her way more often than not. Part of it was that Kushina was often just right. Another part of it was that Minato was a huge sap who just wanted to give his wonderful wife whatever she wanted.

He had held off before. He’d been holding her off about the kid thing for over a year.

He watched the water drain from washing the cups and imagined a little baby with Kushina’s bright red hair. That would be cute. Or maybe their baby would have Kushina’s chubby cheeks, or her nose, or maybe they would get the hiccups the way Naruto did as an infant, or…

No, stop, he commanded himself.

He needed to figure out a way to distract her… maternal instincts.

xXx

Lead Strategist Nara Shikaku looked at Kushina. Then he looked at Minato like he was stupid.

“What?” Minato said, defensively. “She’s the only one qualified.”

“She’s…” Shikaku pinched the bridge of his nose. “We can’t send our jinchuriki into Iwa.”

“It’ll be fine,” Kushina said, waving her hand dismissively. “I’m also the Hokage’s wife, so they can’t do anything without causing a whole kerfuffle, you know.”

“That’s not…” Shikaku started.

They were seated around a small table in a private room in the bowels of Hokage Tower. This much security was maybe overkill to discuss the Morino mission, but it did mean they could freely talk about whether or not it was a good idea to let their jinchuriki go run a mission to Iwa.

Shikaku sighed loudly and cracked his neck. To Kushina, he said, “You don’t think you can teach some other, more disposable Jounin this seal Hokage-sama is going to cook up?”

“Nope, not in six months,” Kushina replied. “There’s some people in R&D who could do it, but they’ll all lab nerds unqualified for the rest of the mission, you know.”

“We did pull their files,” Minato said, pushing the stack at Shikaku.

Shikaku flipped through them, his frown growing deeper and deeper as he went.

“Hatake can’t do it?” he asked as he read.

“Maybe, if I manage to hash out a really clean seal with enough spare time for him to learn it,” Minato said. “But I don’t think we can count on it.”

“Besides,” Kushina continued, her face lighting up. “I’ve always wanted to be a Jounin sensei! Oh, the kids will be so cute.”

Shikaku gave Minato another look.

“We do need it to be a legit team,” Minato said defensively. “The closer it is to a traditional three-man genin team, the better.”

It wasn’t uncommon to just sort older genin into teams specifically for the Chunin Exams, with the accompanying Jounin as a glorified babysitter. That was perhaps the route they were going to have to go. But it would look even better if they could pull some younger people and dress them up as a traditional post-Academy team.

“I guess…” Shikaku glared down at the files like they’d personally offended him. He sighed again. “Kushina never had to go to the battlefield during the war, and we have no known leaks, so her status as a jinchuuriki is unknown. Iwa is unlikely to target her for that. She could become a target just for being your wife, though.”

He looked meaningfully at Minato.

“But we can also say I’m being sent as an act of good faith,” Kushina countered.

They went back and forth about this. Kushina had pitched this to Minato when he’d first floated the idea of her taking this mission. During the war, Kushina had been kept in the village as a sort of reserve, her abilities as a jinchuriki meant to be a last-ditch effort in the face of calamity. When Minato had taken the hat, he backed away from treating his precious wife as a living weapon, but her skills had also been more valuable in-village. Because Kushina had never been deployed to the frontlines, her reputation outside of Konoha wasn’t much. She could go into Iwa claiming it was an act of trust to walk the Hokage’s beautiful wife over, and Iwa would not know she was secretly a quasi-unkillable badass jinchuriki capable of single handedly holding back a tailed beast.

Plus, she had a Hirishin marker in her jinchuuriki seal. If things really went to sh*t, Minato could just go get her. It wasn’t totally risk-free, but it wasn’t as bad as it seemed on the surface.

“Okay,” Shikaku said at length. “I’m still going to stick someone on trying to find a better Jounin sensei, but let’s go with Kushina for now. What’s our strategy for the genin team? I know you don’t like doing this, but Danzo has--”

“Oof, no,” Minato replied. “We’re not resorting to using ROOT unless we absolutely have to. I already pulled one candidate. I’ll call him in.”

Uchiha Itachi was politely waiting in the hallway.

“Itachi-chan!” Kushina greeted cheerfully.

“Please do not call me that,” Itachi said, sitting at the fourth seat at the table.

Shikaku gave Minato another look.

“What?” Minato asked. “Itachi has the exact profile we want.”

“I’m technically a genin,” Itachi said, face blank.

Minato still wasn’t sure letting Itachi graduate early and then go into ANBU as a tiny genin was the right move. But Itachi’s parents were close family friends, and Minato had been walking a difficult line between them wanting to push their genius son through promotions as fast as possible, and not wanting to let kids with single-digit ages go out on war missions, no matter how talented.

Putting Kakashi in ANBU so Minato could have direct supervision over him had worked out alright. Trying the same thing on Itachi… well, he had kept him off the frontlines. Itachi was just… still Itachi.

“Publically he’s a genin and only a genin,” Minato said. That Itachi was an ANBU captain was relatively well-known, at least in certain parts of the village, because ANBU identities ranged from even Minato not knowing some people’s faces, to incredibly poorly kept secrets. But on paper… he was just a genin. They wouldn't have to do anything to cover that up. Minato continued, “Plus he’s thirteen. Perfect age for a talented young genin to take the Chunin Exams.”

“So you want to send your wife and the Uchiha clan heir into a potential death trap,” Shikaku said.

“Well,” Minato said. When you put it like that…

“It’ll be fine,” Kushina said. “I’ll definitely take care of you, Itachi-chan!”

“Don’t call me that,” Itachi said.

“Okay, so you identified one genius genin,” Shikaku drawled. “Is he enough to assist with this seal that may or may not be impossible?”

“I don’t see why not,” Itachi said. “Kushina-san made it sound like I would only need to know the basics.”

“Kushina- sensei,” Kushina corrected, cheeks bunched up in a huge smile. “Yes, for just the assisting part, it’ll be a bit of a crunch, but I don’t see why any reasonably talented genin couldn’t learn it.”

“Right, well,” Minato continued. “I think the other two just need to be anyone between the ages of ten and fourteen who can work with Kushina and Itachi.”

“Uh- huh,” Shikaku said, unimpressed. “What’s your plan for them while Kushina and Itachi are breaking into Iwa’s T&I? Are you just going to abandon them?”

“We’ll get in real fast, teleport Morino-san off, and then be right back!” Kushina declared.

“My genjutsu should make that more than possible,” Itachi said.

Shikaku stared at them for a very long moment, then turned to Minato and said, “I’m going to think of an alternative to this transportation seal plan and get back to you.”

xXx

Minato had very carefully carved out a few hours over the weekend to take a family picnic in the park, and Kushina was enthusiastically telling Naruto about Itachi.

Naruto, of course, knew who Itachi was. Mikoto had become one of Kushina’s closest friends after they’d had babies at around the same time, with Mikoto having all sorts of advice and support for baby-wrangling. Naruto had grown up playing with Sasuke and Itachi. He’d slept at their house a few times, even, when Kushina was out of the village on a mission and Minato had an overnight emergency in the office.

Kushina was simply explaining all the things she liked about Itachi because she was maybe running an insane mission with him. Of course, to Naruto, it probably seemed like his mother had spontaneously started explaining Itachi to him. It was Kushina, though, so this probably just seemed like normal mom-talk to him.

“Wouldn’t it be cool,” she said to Naruto, “if you were also a big brother like Itachi? Wouldn't that be fun, to have a little baby brother or sister?”

Minato froze in the middle of unpacking their bento. Kushina did not have a manipulative bone in her body, so there was no way she was doing this on purpose, but if she got Naruto on the baby train… well, Minato would be done for. Toast. Kaput. There was no way he could say no to both of them. They’d be having a second baby, risk to all of Konoha’s safety be damned, and Minato would not be sleeping again for the next ten or so years.

Fortunately, Naruto blanched at the idea.

“Mom, Itachi is a weirdo,” he said. “And I don’t want to have to play with a baby, you know. They can’t do anything cool!”

Kushina pouted. “You could teach them things…” she tried.

“Do you know what would be way cooler?” Naruto said. “If I had a big brother! Like, like! Itachi is a weirdo, but he taught Sasuke how to breathe fire.”

“That is pretty cool,” Kushina agreed, immediately reigning in her disappointment like the awesome mom she was. She absentmindedly smoothed a spot on their picnic blanket, and Minato set her and Naruto’s bento in front of them. “I think your equivalent would be… ah, you should get Kakashi to teach you Raikiri.”

Naruto became so excited by this idea that he ended up on his feet, and Minato had to tug at his arm to get him to sit back down and eat.

“Or,” Minato said, “you eat lunch to charge up your chakra, and then we play training games. Then you’ll be ready to learn Rasengan in no time.”

“YEAH!” Naruto yelled, and Kushina burst into giggles.

xXx

Shikaku did not come up with a good alternative plan to the transportation jutsu. There simply was no better way to extract a living person with just a four-man cell, three of which had to be genin. They could switch their plan to simply breaking into T&I and killing Morino tp protect his intel, but Minato categorized that as a last resort for a live retrieval plan. They also talked about sending multiple genin teams so they could get multiple jounin in Iwa, but that introduced too many moving parts and would seem more suspicious to Iwa.

“At least pull someone with a big, showy jutsu, in case you need a distraction for the infiltration,” Shikaku said.

“Big enough to distract a whole village?” Minato asked skeptically. “We don’t even have jounin like that.”

And so, Minato pulled two promising young pe-genin and set them up to do a practice graduation test with Kushina and Itachi. Both of them had failed their initial academy exit exams and were doing internships. Like many pre-genin, they’d found better footing with the extra year or two of training, and their reviews were good. They were exactly the type of new genin a village might send to show off in a public space like the Chunin Exams.

Important to Shikaku’s increasingly numerous grumblings, they were both politically unimportant and completely expendable if the mission did go up in flames.

Minato didn’t like thinking about his own ninja like that, and Kusina would lose her sh*t if he voiced it aloud. But it was a factor.

“Itachi-kun?” the girl of the group said, blinking owlishly at Itachi when Minato introduced them. “You were in my class! Do you remember?”

“No,” Itachi replied flatly.

“Really? I remember you…”

“Perhaps because I was memorable, and you were not.”

“Anyway!” Minato interrupted. “This will be the equivalent of a genin test, and will determine if the three of you continue in your internships or not.”

The two genin also weren’t important enough that it would be a detriment to Konoha if he kept them out of the genin pool just because they failed this test.

Kushina had been babbling for the past week about what test she was going to use, choosing to invent her own rather than borrow Minato’s bell test. It was really cute, actually, and she hadn’t mentioned having a baby at all.

When the potential team came back into his office that evening, one leg of Kushina’s pants had been burned off from the knee down. Itachi looked mildly unsettled. Both pre-genin looked like they’d been rolled through the mud and were in tears.

“So, uh,” Kushina said. “Everyone failed, big time.”

So team number one was a no-go. So were teams number two and three.

“Please stop throwing me off cliffs,” Itachi hissed at Kushina.

“Learn to play nice, then!” Kushina replied, wagging a finger in his face. “And stop setting me on fire!”

Of the six pre-genin and new genin Minato had tried, Itachi had successfully made five of them cry. He talked back to Kushina, too, which Minato should have anticipated but somehow didn’t. Itachi was… bad at playing nice with others, as Kushina said. He had several complaints on his record for being overly mean to subordinates, which Minato had not previously given a second thought to because Itachi’s mission record was near-perfect.

Such a personality was not great for a genin, though.

Minato could just assign genin to them without the test. But he did need Itachi and Kushina to get along for the mission, and having some compatible personalities around would ease any tension. Besides, Kushina was so excited about the idea of having her own team. He didn’t want to deny her that.

Four months out from the Chunin exams, with only six weeks to declare a team to Iwa, they had no extra team members, and Minato still hadn’t figured out a transportation seal. Shikaku had come up with some increasingly wild alternative strategies, but the transportation seal was still the reigning champion, and every strategy required them assembling at least one genin team.

If it really came down to the wire, ROOT had some preteen infiltration agents, but… well, Minato was not going to Danzo if he could help it.

Then again, he might have to. It turned out that teaching even just part of a half-complete piece of fuuinjutsu to even a genius like Itachi was kind of a tall order.

“So, I'll be doing all the heavy-lifting, but you have to modulate the targeting compartments,” Kushina was explaining, Minato’s latest notes on the jutsu rolled out between them. “Or maybe you'll be in charge of the anchoring compartments. We don’t know yet.”

There was a tiny crease in Itachi’s forehead. “I still don’t understand what the difference is,” he said.

“Er, well, we’ll go over that when we have the finished product,” Kushina said.

“And how many compartments will there be?” Itachi asked.

“....I don’t know yet,” Minato said. “Either three or five. It’s an odd-numbered seal.”

“Or one, if he gets a really good idea,” Kushina said brightly.

Itachi’s brow was still creased, which was a lot of expression for him.

At the very least, Kushina had stopped calling him -chan.

xXx

Minato had been largely keeping Itachi off of overnight missions, due to the urgency of assembling this Iwa mission. He had to bend and mobilize Itachi’s team when an ANBU team led by Kakashi went missing.

Itachi was no good at fuuinjutsu, or at playing well with other genin. But he was one of Konoha’s best. His team got to Kakashi in record time, and returned with… some random feral preteen ninja. Minato ended up in his office until late in the evening. He had a lot of things to go over, and also he wanted to visit Kakashi the second he was awake.

(The hospital had promised him that Kakashi would make a full recovery and there was no need to worry, but Minato was still his sensei. He was going to check up on him.)

One of the Yamanaka interviewers had very proudly presented Minato with a piece of fuuinjutsu pulled from one of the captured preteen’s brains. She was, maybe, Orochimaru’s latest curse on the shinobi world, so that was a little worrying. But it seemed like she was just an unfortunate member of one of the Sound Country clans, caught up in whatever experiment Orochimaru was pulling by uniting all of them. Her initial interrogation had only been surface level, but the amount of potential intel she had on Oto meant T&I would be worrying about her for a while.

However, this seal was… this was not something Orochimaru would ever come up with. The poor Yamanaka had been so confident they’d uncovered some super secret and important jutsu, but…

Someone knocked on his door, and Minato called for them to enter. Itachi stepped inside.

“What's up?” Minato asked, still frowning down at the seal.

“I wanted to ask how the interrogations of the two… foreign ninja went,” Itachi said.

Minato looked up at him. Itachi had been weirdly invested in them since he brought them in. Picking up random unaffiliated shinobi wasn’t really a normal occurrence, but Itachi was free of his responsibility over them the moment he’d handed them over to T&I. It was strange to be asking follow-up questions.

“They were cooperative,” Minato said blandly. Well, the girl had been a little too cooperative, and the boy had yelled a lot. But given they were here against their will, and given that they had helped his student escape, Minato was willing to be lenient with them.

“If they went positively,” Itachi started. He paused, and Minato got the sudden and surprising impression he was nervous. “Well, surely you’ve noticed.”

“Noticed what?” Minato asked.

“They’re my age,” Itachi said. He jutted his chin at the seal on Minato’s desk. “One’s a fuuinjutsu user and one has the showiest jutsu possible.”

Minato stared at him. He stared back down at the seal.

Holy sh*t, he thought.

“I would be willing to… ‘play nice,’ as Kushina-sensei said,” Itachi finished.

What’s happening? Minato wondered. All of his thoughts slammed to a halt. That was, actually, insane.

But it kind of made sense.

But it was insane.

“I think it would be advantageous to Konoha to attempt to recruit them, at least,” Itachi said. “They’re talented.”

Minato was pretty sure Itachi had never referred to another living being as “talented” in his life. What was happening?

“That's all,” Itachi concluded. “Have a good evening, Hokage-sama.”

He left. Less than an hour later, Kushina showed up with a hot dinner for him, and Minato still felt like he was maybe losing his mind.

“Is Kakashi alright?” Kushina asked.

“Yeah, he’s unconscious but they said he’ll be fine,” Minato replied, feeling slightly light-headed. “I think he’ll be showing up to hide in our guest room in the next day or two.”

“Naruto will like that,” Kushina said. “I’ll make sure he has clean towels.”

“Hey, Kushina,” Minato said, pushing the seal from the Oto girl at her. “What do you think of this?”

Kushina examined it for a few moments, eyes tracing it as Minato pulled the plate she’d brought him towards himself. Kushina’s cooking, as always, smelled wonderful. He was so lucky to have her as a partner.

Then, Kushina’s face broke into a wide smile, and she laughed.

“What is this?” she asked.

“What do you think it is?” Minato asked innocently, blowing on his first bite.

“It’s a joke, isn’t it?” Kushina said. “It looks stupid complicated, but it doesn’t do anything. It just moves chakra around indefinitely. Actually, this design is really good… I bet it’d last for years. Who made this? Have they tried it out yet?”

Oh god, I think Itachi’s right, Minato thought, listening to Kushina’s analysis of the seal.

He wasn’t going to get any sleep for a long time, even without a baby, was he?