He watches her slit her own throat from ear to ear, watches her neck smile up at him before it regurgitates blood, watches her crumple to the floor, and knows it is his own fault.
After tonight their small family will be dead; the two of them will sign themselves over to two kinds of eternal hell and Naruto won't even exist the way he does now, small and so very quiet in his arms. He didn't even cry when he was born; he just looked around with blurry eyes and Minato had been sure something was wrong with him, that the cord had tangled around his neck during delivery, that it was something in his family history, that it was a one in a million disease that he was unique enough to have. But Kushina hadn't cried either, hadn't needed medics or doctors or pain killers. She only crouched on the bed like a tiger, bearing down and delivering with a grimace- and so quickly too. She cleaned him and breast fed him and neither of them cried. She delivered the placenta without cutting the cord, just a small ball of blood and nutrients in a membrane now, so that the cord could be cut when the time came- the miracles of medical ninjutsu. He could only watch like a bystander at a murder, a civilian during war- the fourth Hokage reduced to uselessness by the birth of his first and only son.
He watches her scratch at the floor through her own coagulating blood and is glad he is signing himself to eternal hell- maybe he can make up for this.
She said she wanted to do this. Self sacrifice ran in her family. She would be the sacrifice of the Konoha she had come to love. She would make sure the demon did no more harm than was strictly necessary. She would make sure the damn thing was sealed properly. That the plan was carried out. She had been so sure, even in the throes of labor, that she could do it. She had been so willing to do this for him in the same way she had been so willing to love him and marry him and bear his son.
It sickens him that someone like her would do something like this for someone like him. Why should she do this? He could never love her the way she deserved to be loved. He could never give her enough of himself to break even with everything she had given him.
In his arms, Naruto stirs at the sound of his mother coughing and spraying blood out of her throat. Neither of them looks upset or bothered. Kushina is coughing and slight tracks of tears are running down her face- but he suspects that is merely her eyes watering through the pain. Naruto is almost relaxed in his arms. He is full and ready to get to the serious business of sleeping and eating like other infants. But unlike other infants, he will also attend to the serious business of holding a demon at bay from people whom he hasn't met yet, who would consider him a bastard, who will not think of him as a savior, Minato knows.
By saving his village Minato is destroying himself in more ways than he had ever imagined. He should have known. It was Kushina who told him that real torture is choosing who lives and who dies.
This feeling of betrayal by his village, of loss on his own head, threatens to overflow in the worst ways, to seduce him into fleeing with his family, to convince him that Kushina is more important than his village. Duty binds him where he is, binds his family to sacrifice.
All at once he weeps. If he attends his death with red eyes the Kyuubi will not care and the Shinigami will have already seen them. His thick tears land on Naruto's forehead, stirring the child into wailing for the first time. He holds Naruto close to him, as if he is not about to inflict the worst trauma of his lifetime. He watches through blurry eyes as Kushina's breathing breaks and her tears flow freely with her blood into the pattern of ground meal she put on the floor. He wishes he could reach out to her, wishes that this jutsu didn't require her to die on her own. He falls to his knees when he hears her death rattle and hates hates hates the scroll that will allow him to save his village only because she killed herself.
He has killed them both because he wants to save them. He is sacrificing his family because he loves it. He is terrible for both the people he loves the best because he never meant to hurt them.
He wonders if this is worse than the eternal hell he had imagined.