Trigger warning: This story contains scenes of domestic abuse and child abuse.
Chapter One
Years later, this is what Uzumaki Kushina will remember of Whirlpool: the impossible blue of the waters, rippling with gold at dawn, a little of the rising sun captured by the river; Okaasan's bright laughter; the rich smells of her grandmother's cooking, spiced fish and steamed rice and jasmine tea; the sea-salt taste of tears on her lips; the scent of tobacco that clings to Otousan's clothes, familiar and comforting as a lullaby.
A Konoha shinobi takes her away from her home in the middle of the night, just two weeks after Kushina has turned nine years old.
Okaasan cries and clings to her and whispers, "Be a good girl while you're away."
Otousan kisses her forehead. "I know you'll make me proud," he says.
Her older brothers look on with white faces as a stranger takes her by the arm, and Shiro holds Hidenori back to keep him from attacking the Leaf nin.
It's a dark night, the moon new, the sky starless, and Kushina can barely see Uzushiogakure as she leaves. She will have nothing to cherish later, no last sight of the home she loves to hold dear.
On the long journey to the heart of the Fire Country, Kushina asks her escort questions—Why does she have to leave Whirlpool? How long will it take to reach Konoha? What does the Leaf want from her?—but the man behind the mask has little to say. He tells her to be quiet, keep up, and do as she is told.
Kushina has studied the ninja arts since she was five, and part of her wants to fight, but she wouldn't stand a chance against a full-fledged Konoha shinobi.
Besides, this man didn't steal her. Kushina knows that her clan—her family—they gave her away.
The Hokage says they are not at war.
Shinobi leave the village and never come back, more and more every week. Minato visits the cenotaph and sees new names engraved there. Characters on stone because there is nothing to return to the grieving families, the bodies of the dead lost or mutilated or left behind. Minato is only nine, but he's old enough to understand these things. Old enough to know when he's being lied to.
Today, he sits on the roof of a weapons shop and watches the people milling in and out of Konoha's gates. Farmers bringing fresh produce into the village, ninja leaving to carry out missions. Minato eats a bun the baker gave him, something left over from yesterday's stock. It's stale and cold and a little bit hard, but the bread still tastes like butter. Besides, he didn't have dinner last night or breakfast this morning, and just now he'd eat nearly anything to quiet the ache in his stomach.
He's just about to search out some other amusement when he sees the Hokage meeting an ANBU and a young girl. The ninja is as masked and inscrutable as every member of his order. The girl looks to be about his own age, and she has long, red hair that catches the summer sunlight. Minato wonders what could be so important about her, that the Hokage himself came to greet her at the gates.
He hardly thinks of the red-haired girl throughout the rest of the day, and by evening he's too nervous about going back to his house to much care about the mystery surrounding her arrival. Hunger drives him home with the setting sun, a hollowness in the pit of his belly, familiar and unwanted.
"You're late," Otousan says, as soon as he walks through the door.
"I'm sorry," Minato answers, even though he isn't.
He takes his place at the small kitchen table, and Okaasan serves dinner. Her hands tremble as she sets the bowls of soup before her husband and son, but she's careful not to spill them; Otousan hates a mess almost as much as he hates dishonesty.
"Thanks," Minato says, and his mother gives him a rare smile.
The soup is thin, too much broth and little else, but he knows better than to comment on this. Work has been slow for his father all summer, and besides, it would hurt Okaasan's feelings if he complained.
There is no talk around the dinner table. Silence woven between the sounds of three people eating not-quite-enough. It's a nervous quiet, fraught with tension, until Otousan breaks it. He calls the Academy a school for liars and says, "You must fit right in, then, huh?"
Minato doesn't know if his father wants him to answer or not, so he just keeps his head down.
He's used to this, though: Otousan's temper, Okaasan's fearful obedience, his own silence. If he were braver, Minato might tell his father what he really thinks—that Namikaze Katsuo is an ignorant man who mistrusts shinobi because he's afraid of them. He has no desire to go to bed hungry again, however, so he keeps his mouth shut.
The next morning, his belly growls loudly in the middle of taijutsu training, and the other children laugh.
Minato punches Yamanaka Inoichi in the eye, and he falls to the ground, clutching the left side of his face. Hyuuga Hiashi comes for him, but Minato is fast—the fastest child at the Academy, even though he only started last month—and he gets behind the older boy easily enough, kicks him in the back of the head.
No one is laughing at him anymore.
Minato helps Hiashi up and asks, "Are you okay?"
The Hyuuga heir frowns. "I don't understand you, Namikaze," he says.
He has noticed that the children from the older clans like to call him by his surname. Maybe as a reminder that they come from ancient and honorable families, while Minato's father is a bricklayer.
Before she came to Konoha, Kushina never thought much about her hair. It's red like her mother's and father's and brothers'. Red like many of the Uzumakis of Uzushio. Long, because this is the style of the women in Whirlpool, whether civilian or kunoichi. But in the Leaf, she's heard nothing but "tomato" for her round face and her bright hair.
Her schoolmates call her foreigner and outsider. By the end of her first week at the Academy, Kushina has fought half the boys in her class and beaten them all. She goes back to the house she shares with her shinobi guards and Mito (the vast estate that she refuses to think of as home) and nurses her scrapes and bruises.
I hate it here, she thinks. I want to go back to Uzushio.
But she can't. They won't let her.
It's on her thirteenth day in Konoha that the Hokage and Mito finally sit her down and explain her purpose to her.
"You're to be the second jinchuriki of the Nine-Tails," the Sandaime says.
Kushina knows what this means. She does, after all, come from a clan famed for its sealing abilities, and the Kyubi is feared far and wide as the worst of the tailed beasts.
A vessel for a monster. That's what they're going to turn her into.
"Why?" Kushina asks. "Why me?"
"Because your chakra is special, powerful," says Mito. "Strong enough to suppress the might of the Nine-Tails… just like mine."
Mito reaches across the table and takes her hand. The old woman's skin is soft and paper-thin. So frail and fragile that Kushina can hardly believe she holds within her body the most powerful of the bijuu.
"But what if I don't want to be a jinchuriki?"
The Hokage shakes his head. "You were chosen, Kushina."
He doesn't say anything more, but she understands. She was chosen, and the chosen don't get to choose.
"It won't happen right away," Mito says softly. "I have a year left, maybe more. We won't entrust the Kyubi to you until my time draws nearer."
"And then you'll die." Mito is the only person in this village who has been kind to her, and Kushina doesn't want to be the cause of her death.
"Yes, I will," Mito says. "But first I'll have lived as a proud kunoichi of both Uzushio and Konoha. And someday you'll want to be able to say the same."
Kushina nods, even though she doesn't quite know what Mito means.
Minato thinks the girl from Uzushio is beautiful. Her hair is long, thick, and red, and he's never seen anything quite like it before.
He wants to tell her that he's new to the Academy too, and he knows what it's like to be an outsider. That she's brave and fierce and he would like to be her friend. There are many things Minato would like to say to Uzumaki Kushina, but any time he looks in her direction she just glares back and asks what he's staring at.
He sees her as he leaves the Academy. She's sitting by herself on the swing, and she looks tired and lonely. Maybe he should tell her what he thinks of her, or at least say hello. He takes a first step toward Kushina, but for some reason he feels nervous, and he turns toward home instead.
Minato never feels nervous. Not even when Jiraiya caught him practicing his jutsu in the closed Academy at night, and he thought for sure he was going to be chastised by one of the legendary Sannin. Instead of being reprimanded, Jiraiya insisted that he join the Academy. His father didn't like the idea, of course, but a civilian does not say no to a jounin, and a week later Minato was enrolled.
The daylight is dying, and Minato hurries along, heading south toward the poorest district of Konoha. Houses grow smaller and dingier, the streets narrower, gardens replaced by garbage. The signs for businesses are gaudier here, as if they can make up for the cheapness of their wares with bright colors. Most of Konoha carries the scents of trees and flowers, but all Minato can smell here is trash, things rotten and unwanted.
He's heard that Kushina lives with Senju Mito, the First Hokage's widow, in that grand house on the northwest edge of the village. What would she think of his own home, where it's too hot in the summer, too cold in the winter, and so small that it barely has room for Minato's family of three? He believes that she wouldn't care. That a girl like Kushina doesn't put much stock in things like that.
Still, when he reaches his family's house, he sees it with fresh eyes. How it's squeezed between a pawn shop and a used clothing store. The peeling paint is more grey than blue now, and when he steps inside he's reminded that the furniture is mismatched and threadbare. All secondhand, someone else's junk.
Okaasan stands at the stove, stirring a pot of what Minato hopes is not soup for the fifth night in a row. "How was school?" she asks.
"Fine," he says. Today he learned the three best techniques for breaking a target's neck and worked on his transformation jutsu, but he doesn't think his mother would want to hear that.
After dinner, Minato goes to his room and tries to ignore the cries coming through the thin walls. He starts to read a book, but between the lines he hears the stinging sound of his father laying hands on his mother. Otousan screaming and Okaasan crying. He closes his eyes and covers his ears, wanting to stop what's happening but knowing he can't. That within these four walls and under this roof, he's powerless. He needs to think of something else, anything else, and for some reason his thoughts go to the girl from Uzushio. Fierce Kushina, who always stands up for herself, who doesn't back down from a fight. She's brave and strong and she never gives up, and thinking about her makes Minato feel just the slightest bit less afraid.
He ventures out of his room once it's quiet, and he finds his mother sitting at the kitchen table. Okaasan's pale face is tear-streaked, but she's no longer crying. Her eyes look empty, vacant, her expression blank. Purple bruises already bloom on her left cheek and around her wrists like bracelets. Blood runs from her nose, drips down her chin onto her cotton yukata. Minato runs cool water over a dishtowel, wrings it out, and wipes his mother's face. She sits, still as a statue, while he cleans her up, and doesn't say anything. Then he washes his hands under scalding water, once, twice, until they're tender, pink, and clean.
It's almost like a script they follow. A ritual they have performed before and will perform again.
Kushina knows Namikaze Minato, of course, the boy-wonder who has mastered more jutsu in a month than his classmates have learned in five years of study. Some of their peers love him for this—especially the girls—and some of them hate him for it. The awestruck claim he'll be the next Hokage for sure, but Kushina thinks that's stupid; the Yondaime will be one of the Sannin. The cruel say he lives in a one-room shack, that his parents are illiterate as well as untrained in the shinobi arts.
Even if it's half-true, none of this matters to Kushina. What matters is that Minato is staring at her, again.
"What are you looking at?" she asks.
His sky blue eyes widen and he turns around without answering her.
Kushina doesn't understand why Minato does this. Maybe he thinks she's ugly like the rest of the boys do, but he's too polite to say so, if not quite polite enough not to gawk at her.
Koichi-sensei says, "Today we'll be working on nature transformation at the most basic level. You all learned your nature types last week. Find the classmates who are the same type as you and group together."
Kushina doesn't go to her classmates, and no one comes to her. That is, until Minato approaches. "Hi," he says. "I'm wind. What are you?"
"Fire," Kushina says.
"Oh." He sounds almost like he's disappointed. "Then you're over there with Ando and the others."
Uchiha Ando is the boy Kushina hates most. He's arrogant and mean, and he calls her much uglier names than tomato. He glares at her when she joins his group but doesn't say anything.
Koichi-sensei teaches them a simple ninjutsu form that sparks red-gold flames in your cupped hands. Ando performs it successfully on his third try—faster than anyone except, predictably, for Minato, who mastered his own wind ninjutsu on his first attempt.
"Let's work together," says Mikoto, who is some sort of cousin to Ando. Kushina doesn't hold this against her, though, because Mikoto seems uncommonly kind and humble for an Uchiha.
"Okay," Kushina says.
Together, they soon have handsful of fire, and Mikoto says, "See, your element is just like our country's. You belong here, no matter what those boys tell you."
Kushina's cheeks grow hot, and she can't think of much to say besides, "Thank you."
That night, she tells Mito about what Mikoto said, and the old woman smiles. "She's right, you know. This is your home now."
"Uzushio is my home," Kushina says, maybe a little sharper than she should.
"You don't have to lose Uzushio to embrace Konoha," Mito says patiently.
Kushina considers this, so the next day after class she walks right up to Mikoto and asks, "Would you like to be my friend?"
The Uchiha girl laughs. "I'd love to," she says.
Minato goes to the Academy every day and learns new ways to disguise himself and hide and kill. In the morning he studies grammar and mathematics, and in the afternoon he practices hurling shuriken at targets. He finds that most of the ninja arts come easily to him. Perhaps Otousan is right, and this is because Minato is a liar, and liars make good shinobi.
Okaasan's bruises fade from purple to a sickly yellow-green, then disappear, only for his father to give her fresh marks the very next week. Summer turns to autumn, and autumn turns to winter. Minato reads and practices his jutsu and helps his mother on the nights when she can't help herself. In the spring, Koichi-sensei moves him up to the advanced class with twelve- and thirteen-year-old students who are on the verge of becoming genin. Mostly, he's excited to learn more challenging material, but a small part of him wonders whether he will ever see Kushina anymore.
In May, Minato graduates from the Academy with the highest scores of any student since the school was instituted.
He earns his hitai-ate, but when he wears it into the house, Otousan rips it off his head and says, "Not here, not under my roof."
Minato thinks about telling his father that he graduated ahead of every student who has ever passed through the doors of the Academy. But he knows that Otousan would not be proud, would not even care, so he tells his mother instead.
"That's nice, Minato," she says, dully, as if he just reported the weather to her.
He leaves the house—he can't stand to be stuck here, not one moment longer—and he runs across the village, back to the Academy. He finds Kushina where he hoped she might be, on the swing where she often sits after class. She digs her sandal into the dirt, scowling at the ground. Her knees and knuckles are scraped, he notices.
"Did you get into another fight?" he asks.
She looks up and frowns at him. "What do you want, Minato?"
At least she calls him by his given name. That's something. "I graduated today," he says. "I was at the top of my class."
"I know. Everybody knows. Koichi-sensei wouldn't shut up about how brilliant you are."
Minato feels himself blush. "Oh."
Kushina tilts her head to the side, and her long hair spills over her shoulder. "Are you here to brag, or what?"
"No, I just—I wanted to talk to someone about it."
"Didn't you tell your parents?" she asks.
"They're civilians," Minato says. "They don't really get what it means to make genin." This isn't the truth. The civilians of Konoha live in the shadow of the shinobi they cater to, and they understand the ninja hierarchy as well as anyone. Perhaps Kushina is still too new to the Leaf to know this, because she doesn't contradict him.
She makes an expression that's almost, but not quite, a smile. "Well, good for you," Kushina says. "I mean it. You'll make a great genin."
"Thanks." Minato tries not grin too widely, but he can't help it. Uzumaki Kushina just wished him well and told him he'd be a good ninja.
"I've gotta go," she says. "I don't want Mito to worry."
"Right. I'll see you later then?"
"Yeah," she says. "Sure."
Those are the last words Kushina speaks to him for over three years.
Author's Notes: So this is my MinaKushi prequel story. I have a lot of feelings for these two characters, mostly due to SilverShine's fabulous fic, The Girl from Whirlpool. This chapter was written many months ago, but due to the number of projects I'm already juggling, I didn't want to start another multi-chapter and so decided to hold it back. But what the hell, I really want to share it, and this seems like the right time.
As I stated in the trigger warning above, and as I'm sure you noticed reading this chapter, this story will feature domestic abuse and child abuse. I realize this is not everyone's cup of tea, but for a number of reasons (some of them personal), this is the story I envisioned for Minato and which I really wanted to tell.
I'm planning for this fic to span from Minato and Kushina's childhood up until the day of their deaths. What I really want to explore with this story is the effect that training children to be soldiers can have (especially during a time of war), the ethics of the shinobi system in general, and of course the characters that make up that system.
