Folding Twice
Prologue: Abnormal children
The death of his successor left like a punch to the gut, one which felt him utterly breathless. The sadness of loosing such a great man was chilling his very hearth to the core. The third Hokage would mourn his and his wife's death for many years to come, of that he was sure.
The Kyuubi's attack had taken the village by surprise; they had taken all the necessary precautions to ensure it remained contained during Kushina's labor and yet it had managed to break free despite all their precautions.
The village had lost many invaluable Shinobi during the night, all of them sacrificing themselves to protect those inhabiting the village. It was truly the noblest way of dying, Sarutobi thought, dying protecting the people you loved. Even knowing that crossing the Kyuubi's path meant assuring their doom, they still strived forward. The will of fire had truly been burning brightly in the hearths of the Shinobi of the village hidden in the leaves; knowingly laying their lives for those inhabiting the village.
The aftermath had been the worst thing Sarutobi had ever seen worst still than the battlefields of the Second and Third Ninja World Wars. The night would remain engraved in his and many other's mind for all the remaining of their life.
It should have been a day to rejoice, the venue of a new child into this world, his parents two of the best ninjas of the village. Alas it would seem he would be growing up alone as neither of his parents were still of this world. He was even cursed to imprison a tailed beast. Or so Sarutobi thought before looking down the crib that now hosted not one but two child…
His eyebrows had almost taken flight as much it had taken him by surprise. He was sure that Kushina had actually been pregnant of a single child and not of twins as the two babies in front of him indicated. He'd hailed for his old pupil Jiraiya to have council.
With his arrival a few days later, the Toad Sannin was able to determine that one of them had the Eight Trigrams Seal above his belly and was thus holding the Kyuubi. However, the seal seemed to be fluctuating erratically, dangerously so. The cause puzzled Jiraiya deeply; it seemed there was an imbalance in the amounts of Kyuubi's Ying and Yang chakras present within the seal. He could provide no explanation as to what could have caused such a thing to occur. It did however render the child vulnerable of unleashing the beast if he was to lose his control over his emotions.
And thus the two brothers were separated at birth, one to have a normal life with the habitants of the village, the other to be kept in the shadows, trained to master himself and sharpened into a knife, the only thing differentiating them being a seal invisible to the naked eye.