Kushina. Minato. Aversion to perfection.
Kushina's straggling in line, thinking along the lines of 'anyone who cuts will be shot', in her typical harsh fashion, because everyone's equally hungry and impatient and desperate for the cold, gray rations being passed off as food. Really, however, she doesn't have to wait, shinobi's privileges and all that, if nothing else she could take them all out, but Kushina's stupidly righteous when she's starving and so she waits in civvies, hair and skin and clothing dulled to brown by the endless surge of dust, unremarkable in the crowds.
The whispers reach her first, apparently faster than his flash technique, but they barely prepare her for when she finally sees Minato. His brightness actually hurts her eyes. He is, he is larger-than-life beautiful, a veritable prince on a white horse, clean and obnoxiously perfect, starkly delineated from this miserable village, a world away. People around her stir - even the ignorants and the opportunists and the uttery ugly in both body and soul - and all lavish him with their eyes.
He's mine, Kushina wants to say, the words are fierce in her mind, but-
Here, in the shoes of the ordinary man, feeling painfully ordinary, Minato is something that cannot be owned: a force, powerful and terrifying and awe-inspiring. Here, she is not shinobi, nor the powerful jailer of the Kyuubi, nor his going-to-be wife, and she catches a glimpse of that blinding intensity.
The shinobi genius.
That's him. He's from Konoha, you know.
Oh my god.
Look here, Kushina wills him, for once, as many young girls and women and desperates willed able-bodied shinobi, see me, spare me a glance.
But Minato passes over her without recognition flaring in his distilled-sky eyes, another faceless person to feed and protect and possibly die for, and Kushina hates him a little for it.