Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto.
The crows'll be having a field day, Minato thought dully as he gained his bearings. The clearing was saturated to the bedrock with blood, and already were the raucous sounds of crows coming up from the distance, as flesh putrefied in the tepid late afternoon.
The jutsu that made Minato's name so feared among the Rock had done its work well that day; twenty-eight dead in the blink of an eye, unable to scream or cry for help.
Minato twirled his kunai as he settled in against the great twisted roots of an oak, thinking.
He had killed a child that day. A Rock genin, no older than eight or nine; her grayish green eyes (a beautiful, absorbing color; Minato couldn't look away from it no matter how hard he tried) rolled into the back of her head as his kunai stilled her heart. Her small hands flew up in the air spasmodically as her back curved in a graceful arc, and her last gasped breaths accused Minato of murder as she died on the ground.
But this girl hadn't been an inexperienced novice, fumbling the kunai in soft palms like Obito still sometimes did. Her eyes may have been guileless and unsure but her body moved like a machine, graceful and deadly, a kitten born with teeth and claws. She was what her brutal Rock training had made her, a creature of war.
And the worst thing was, if he took away her hitai-ate, she could have been a Leaf genin.
Minato had come to a realization. The only thing that separated Leaf from Rock from Cloud from Sand was a symbol on metal and a color on a vest. It was the only thing that made them different. Ideologies made no differences whatsoever; they were flesh and blood shinobi, all driven down in the end to two basic instincts: kill or be killed. Beneath the skin, their hearts all beat the same.
Why are we fighting? Minato didn't know anymore. It all seemed so pointless. So many lives lost over a piece of ground.
No one else seemed to understand how pointless it all was, how useless it was to solve a problem with blade and fist. Minato saw nothing of what the preacher said of a just and glorious cause; all he saw was violence, death and pain, the faces of the dead morphing into the faces of everyone he had ever cared about when darkness fell over a killing field.
There could be no peace found on the battlefield, where bloody deeds were counted as great and whole clans met their end. It would go on forever, Minato feared, a never ending spasm of violence and bloodshed, until there were no humans left to carry gory tales and savage songs.
And until then, mothers would stand at their stoops and watch their children float away. Lovers would part forevermore. Friends would never see each other again. Whole generations of shinobi would go out to battle and bleed their lives for a world that didn't care.
There would be more battles, soon. And when night came, Minato would be taking pills to block out dreams of little Rock children with soft, smooth hands and gray green eyes.