It was the late evening in Konoha. The cool air surrounded the village, lulling its many inhabitants towards the peaceful slumber they expected to have in a few hours. Well, not all its inhabitants.
Konoha hospital was still as busy as ever especially in operating room 7, from which the cries of a newborn baby could be heard echoing into the hallway. Inside the room, the wailing infant was wriggling in the arms of the medic nin who held him,ocean blue eyes scrunched up, and little arms and legs waving about wildly.
The tiny boy's parents both had their full attention focused on the little bundle of joy newly brought into the world, as the medic nin quickly wrapped him up in a previously prepared blanket. She then passed him into the arms of his blonde-haired father and turned to the woman lying on the bed.
"How are you feeling, Kushina-san?" the medic nin asked. The redhead, however, was completely out of it, with eyes for nothing but her son, and did not even hear the question.
The brown-haired medic couldn't help but stare in slight awe at the last of the Uzumaki clan. She had just gone through her first childbirth without any signs of pain besides a tensing of her jaw and terseness of speech. Even for a skilled kunoichi, that was a remarkable feat, as the medic herself could relate to, being the mother of two children herself.
Seeing that both her patients were perfectly healthy and no one in the room was paying her any attention, the medic left so they could have their family moment in privacy.
Minato was staring into his son's eyes, identical in color to his own, "You're a cute little Naruto, yes you are! You're so cute, with that cute little bit of blonde hair on the top of your cute little head, and those cute little whisker-marks on your cute little cheeks!"
Seeing the most powerful ninja in the world making baby faces and speaking doting-parent-eese brought a laugh from his wife, who was now sitting up in her bed. "Mina-kun, you look like an idiot. Give him here."
He paled and did as ordered, knowing by the glint in her bright green eyes that anything other than total compliance would earn him a savage beating in the near future.
The red-haired kunoichi just sat there looking at the infant, who had ceased his crying and was staring at everything around him in wonderment. "You're so adorable,my little Naru-kun. I could just sit here like this forever."
Konoha's Yellow Flash moved to stare at the baby as well. "Who's going to grow up to be an awesome ninja, just like his mommy and daddy, huh? Who is? My little Naruto here."
"Minato, you're making faces again." At his wife's sentence, the Hokage's hand reflexively went up to scratch the back of his neck.
"Oops! Sorry, Kushina-chan."
Then Naruto giggled.
On hearing the sound, the new parents instantly focused all their attention on their child. The next several minutes were pure bliss; the three of them together, the older two blocking out everything but the infant as they watched his every move and listened to his every sound and ingrained his scent permanently into their minds.
As ninja, they should have known better.
"For my Master!" The shout immediately drew their attention to its source, namely, four white-clad shinobi whose only distinguishing feature was the seven-pointed star on their forehead protectors, a symbol that, frighteningly enough considering just who they were, neither Minato nor Kushina recognized. Each of the mysterious attackers was in the process of throwing a kunai. The two new parents took half a nanosecond to process all of this and another half-nanosecond to calculate the trajectory of the four kunai and their intended target. Naruto.
For the first time in all their years of knowing each other, Kushina reacted slightly faster than her husband. She thrust her son into his father's arms, taking care to preform the motion gently so as not to damage the infant, and threw herself at the men in a tremendous burst of chakra.
The Hokage immediately knew something was wrong with Kushina. Normally, she would have just slit the attackers' throats or broken their necks or something, but she had... she had...
As he looked at his wife, standing amidst the pieces of four freshly-dead shinobi, coated in blood, his mind immediately jumped back to what she had told him so long ago when they had first started dating about her clan and what made the Uzumakis... different.
From there, as she turned to face him and the child, and her eyes started to shift back and forth between green and red, his memory moved on to a much more recent conversation, during the later stages of her pregnancy, where she had warned him about her clan's protection instincts with regards to their newborn. Anything that could possibly be viewed as a threat to the infant would be utterly destroyed. In the few recorded instances of attacks in the immediate vicinity of an Uzumaki female who had just given birth, the end result was always the same: mother and child completely alone amidst several miles of devastation.
Being ninja, they had come up with a plan for this kind of situation, but neither had really expected to need it.
The details of the plan they had developed came unbidden to the blonde's mind. No. This wasn't happening. This couldn't be happening! There was no way he was going to condemn his wife and son to that.
"M-Minato!" His wife's strangled cry brought him back to reality. As the Hokage watched his wife fight to hold off the instinctive call in her blood to start killing, even as the first tail ripped from her back, and her nails became more claw-like, he remembered. She had come up with the plan in the first place, to protect Konoha. She was ready to accept the consequences for herself, and besides, it's not like Naruto would be completely alone.
As he laid his child down on the bed where his wife had been moments before, the second tail came forth, and the red chakra began to fill the room. "Hurry!"
In the instant it took to reach Kushina, the world-renowned ninja looked at the situation logically. Leave his son fatherless and hated, without ever being able to have physical contact with his mother, or let his people in his die so that his wife could live, likely hating herself forever, and still leaving his son with only one parent. The answer was obvious.
As he wrapped his arms around Kushina and dropped a single three-pronged kunai to the floor, the third tail sprouted, then a flash of yellow light later, and the two were several hundred miles away.
Halfway across Fire Country from Konoha's location, in a pre-selected spot with nothing but miles upon miles of forests between it and the ninja village, two people appeared in a flash of yellow light. A second later, Minato was flung twenty feet away when a powerful wave of chakra erupted from his wife as the fourth tail appeared. Simultaneously, fur began to grow all over her body, the same red color as her hair, her teeth became sharp and pointed, and her face began to twist and change, nose elongating and eyes shifting back.
"What are you still doing here? Get back to Naruto!" she shouted at the Hokage.
The reality of the whole situation was finally sinking in on the blonde, and tears began to flow from his eyes. "Kushina-chan, I love you."
"I love you too. Now go! I can't hold myself back much longer!" Indeed it was true. Even as they had been speaking, the fifth and sixth tails had emerged, and Kushina had fully changed into her demon fox form, growing in size rapidly as her clothes ripped to pieces.
Her husband vanished in a flash of yellow just as she let off another, much more powerful chakra wave, tearing up the ground around her.
Two hiraishins later and Minato was in his office with his son held safely in his arms once more. He continued to cry as he hit the emergency alarm button beneath his desk, setting off sirens around the village. These particular sirens were the ones that signaled all genin to supervise evacuation of the village, while all other ninja congregated in front of the Hokage tower.
The Yondaime quickly made a kage bunshin, who headed to the roof, while the original began preparations for what was to come. Looking off to the west, there was a dull red glow on the horizon that was definitely not the sun, as that had set long ago. Thirty seconds later, the chakra wave hit, and Minato prayed it would not cause panic and chaos. Those were two things he didn't need right now.
Another thing he didn't need was a wailing Naruto, but he got it anyway.
The kage bunshin of the Hokage looked out on the assembled ninja forces of the village, prepared to address his people for the last time. "Everyone, listen up! That chakra wave you all felt moments ago was the Kyuubi no Kitsune. It is currently heading full speed towards Konoha, prepared to destroy our in the crowd stated yelling and talking at once saying things like"IMPOSSIBLE".Some of the civilians in the crowd even started to break down crying."EVERYONE" Clone-Minato yelled."Calm down, I have a plan to stop it, but I'll need some time, about a half hour. Unfortunately, it will be on us in under ten minutes, so we'll have to stall. I want all ANBU divisions to begin feeding their chakra into the barrier seals on the western quadrant of the village immediately. Concentrate the energy around seals 152 through 177. That should be enough to stop its momentum so that it doesn't just plow straight through us. Go."
About a fifth of the crowd leapt away, as he continued speaking to the remainder. "As for the rest of you, I want you all prepared to start throwing out jutsu like there's no tomorrow the moment it hits that barrier. The fox is a fire elemental being, so concentrate on suiton and avoid katon and fuuton. And remember that you need to hold it back for a while, so bring soldier pills and pace yourselves on chakra consumption".
"Do not attempt to kill the fox, just stall it. There will be enough people dying tonight without any foolish acts of misplaced heroism. I'm putting Danzo in charge of the battle until my arrival, and I need to see Sarutobi in my office immediately. Dismissed!" In a blur of motion, all present vanished to prepare.
The legendary Professor opened the door to what had once been his office to see his successor busily coating the room, a crying baby, and himself in seals. "Your students sure picked a great time to be out of the village, Sarutobi-sama."
The retired Hokage took one look at the infant on the floor, taking in all his features, most notably the eyes and whisker-like marks on his cheeks, in addition to the small, barely-noticeable tuft of blonde hair. "Yours?" he asked, even though the answer is obvious. At the nod, he continued. "What happened?"
Minato continued drawing as he spoke. "Not five minutes after he was born, four ninja attempted an assassination on him. It set off Kushina-chan's demon side in an instant. We were both focused completely on Naruto, so we didn't even know they were there till they shouted." The older man's facial expression asked his question far better and faster than words could have. "Yeah, I know, it's like they wanted to get themselves killed. The insignia on their forehead protectors was odd, too. A seven-pointed star.
"Anyway, they screamed "For the Master" and threw some kunai, then Kushina tore them apart. We came up with a plan, just in case something like that happened, but I never... but I never expected..." He held back his tears at the last moment. The salt water would ruin the ink.
Sarutobi looked around the room again, and at the two blondes. "What is all this?"
"I'm going to use Shiki Fujin to seal her. This stuff is to transfer her mind and soul from me into Naruto, and it'll all vanish when its purpose is done. He's the only thing around that would be able to contain the power of a nine-tailed demon, and once she's in her right mind again, at least he'll have a mother. I'm going to need you to take this hat back after tonight's done, sorry."
The old man looked on solemnly. "I don't mind. Besides, I quite enjoy the paperwork." The Yondaime froze for a full second on hearing that as his brain tried to process his predecessor's statement, failed, tried again, gave up, and erased it from his memory. "For what it's worth, you were an excellent Hokage, a great man, a wonderful husband, and an amazing father."
"Thanks, Sarutobi. One last thing. Give Naruto his mother's last name. He doesn't ned any more assassination attempts. I hope they'll see him asa hero." His face, however, showed that this final statement held no real hope at all. He knew what kind of life he was condemning his son to; it was why he had resisted following through on the plan. The two men stayed silent for the remainder of their time together. There wasn't really anything more to say.
The blonde Hokage stood atop Gamabunta, staring fearlessly into the eyes of the Kyuubi, tears overflowing from his wide-open eyes. The small bundle at his feet was the only thing preventing her from eating him as he performed the necessary handseals.
"Fuuinjutsu: Shiki Fujin!"
"I love you, Kushina-chan, Naruto. Grow strong, my son, and listen to your mother," he whispered, as a bright light enveloped them, forcing all the ninja present to turn away or go blind. When the light receded, the demon fox was gone, and Minato had fallen onto his back. Naruto was crying.