ANBU Weasel dies in the destruction of the village she'd given up everything to protect.
Her Kage drags her limp body through the dirt, stumbling and swearing as he gets her into the middle of the seal drawn with desperate fingers through the mud.
"You have to change this," he tells her as he collapses down on his knees, her body half cradled in his lap and against his chest. "There is no-one else who can do this, do you understand?" He fumbles for her hand, squeezing it tightly as he looks down into her eyes. "I have to be the one to activate the seal." There's something frail and desperate, a last shred of hope in the blue of his eyes. "You have to change this."
He presses his forehead against hers and something warm drips against her face. "I'm sorry," he laughs wetly. "I just realised I don't even know your name." He huffs, his breath warm against her lips. "Doesn't matter now." He draws back and wipes at his eyes. "Make sure to tell it to me when you're back, alright?"
He smiles and she wants to reach out and trace it – wants to etch it into her very soul.
She loves this man – her Kage.
Her next breath is a rattle and he frowns in worry and he's saying something as he stumbles to his feet but she can't hear him.
The last thing she sees is a pulse of violent red that tears through her ruined body and then a flash of brilliant blue light.
She wakes up six-years-old again.
Like all orphans with a lick of chakra in their blood it doesn't take long before recruitments to the Academy comes sniffing around.
Raidou is a familiar face – younger than she ever remembers seeing him and sans the scar on his cheek. Fifteen, maybe, and he'd clearly pulled the short straw coming out to the poorer districts of Konoha.
"You're a brave kid," he tells her.
He knows as well as she does that save her there is maybe one other kid with enough chakra to ever make the ranks.
Her mother was the third cousin of the current Raikage whose cousin in turn she'd been named for. It's an entirely convoluted story and she meets the man twice before he executes her parents for treason two days before she turns five.
She has her mother's dark skin and coarse curls and her father's build and eyes but she remembers little of them.
She does know that they were both shinobi – good enough to make it to the rank of chunin.
It wasn't the rule but it usually meant larger and more developed chakra coils compared to children born to civilians and she'd been accessing her chakra since waking up two months earlier. Chakra sensitives, those sent out to recruit, could sense that and he would be weeding the hopeless cases out to prevent overloading the classes at the Academy.
He does raise an eyebrow at her name but since A took the Raikage post the letter system exclusive to Kumo had become, not well-known, but at least familiar to anyone with a Bingo Book.
She spends the rest of the day scouring the streets, finding that her feet has automatically led her to the Hokage tower around mid-noon. She buys dango from coins pocketed from civilians who'd glared at her just a tad too forcefully and spends nearly two hours just watching shinobi move in and out of the front entrance.
It's nearly two years until Kyuubi and the death of the Yondaime. They're at the end notes of the Third Shinobi War.
"You have to change this."
She takes a sip of her cider.
Namikaze Minato was the father of her Kage and he would die on the night of the Kyuubi attack alongside Uzumaki Kushina. The Sandaime would be forced to come out of his retirement and with Danzo in his ear it would ultimately lead to the Uchiha massacre and the loss of one of the brightest shinobi Konoha had ever birthed and then, later, the betrayal of a second.
Her body is only six – it will be eight at the night of the Kyuubi attack. It is beyond her physical capabilities to handle.
But information can be shared.
Thing is, one does not just walk into the office of the Hokage – especially not as a street rat. She would be turned away at the door and if she insisted it would be made forcefully.
Her best bet is getting into the Academy and get someone curious enough.
ANBU use a specialised coded language for message exchanges. It's common enough to be overlooked but there are key phrases that look strange when repeated enough by an Academy-kid. Especially when HOKAGE and INFORMATION and EMERGENCY are the ones appearing.
It would mean nothing to a chunin teacher but she just needs someone to look – someone high-ranked enough to have the ear of the Hokage.
It was the next best thing to throwing a brick at a Clan Head for attention.
Sure, some of them were reasonably accessible. Yamanaka ran a flower shop on his spare time outside T&I and Akimichi had chains of restaurants that he occasionally visited which made for excellent stake-out spots. And since the Uchiha's hadn't been blamed for the Kyuubi-attack courtesy of Danzo Fugaku was a good choice too as the head of the KMPF.
But she doesn't trust them.
ANBU Weasel is loyal to her Kage and her Kage only. He has sent her back in time to prevent the complete destruction of the village he loved but her Konoha is already gone.
The Yondaime was the closest she got to her Kage.
He has to be the one told first.
She's given her own apartment on her entrance to the academy and a small spending fee for bare necessities.
The first thing she buys is a bright orange mug to drink her morning juice in and then buys a pair of simple straw sandals. She trades the oversized cast-offs from the orphanage for proper clothes and picks up one of the scentless soaps through henge at one of the popular shinobi haunts.
Being on her own again is both good and bad.
She'd spent most of her life alone – one didn't become ANBU for the company. But the last three years had been spent in trenches, huddled up for warmth during nights where they didn't want to catch attention, a constant at her Kage's side.
It feels strange not to have him there with her. Feels strange with the silence.
Even at his lowest her Kage had been chatty.
She distracts herself with training – works through what the Academy gives her to keep track on what level she's expected to be at while picking up new material under henge at the library. Her chakra control is shot to hell but it's a bit like stretching out a cramped muscle and it doesn't take long before she's keeping several leaves stuck to her body while pouring over a new book.
She's at the top of her class without any effort – a child prodigy in the making.
She'd been good the first time around but not twenty-eight extra years of experience good.
It naturally makes people wary and she tries not to smile as she codes the test carefully to read YOU ARE RUNNING OUT OF TIME in the margins.
In the end, she gets what she wants.
She is not prepared for her own reaction.
ANBU Weasel loves her Kage more than anything. At twenty-eight she hasn't been called by her civilian name for over six years and she both clings to it and takes every opportunity to shove it into her Kage's face.
"I can't be a Kage without a village," he insists when she dons her mask. "You don't have to wear that anymore!"
It becomes an old argument.
The blond hair and blue eyes are so much like her Kage that for a second she forgets how to breathe. And when she looks to the side, away, she is met by a familiar chin and nose caught between a curtain of blood and she recoils so hard she steps onto her teacher's foot, seeing mouths moving and hearing nothing.
She comes aware of the world to a familiar mask and a stringent of ANBU-coding for safety and a tap-tap of SAFE against the floor.
Over-kill.
She tells the man as much and gets a snort of amusement from the female ANBU behind him.
He's ANBU Bear but he's not her ANBU Bear. He'd either been retired or dead by the time she donned her mask. Likewise the woman is entirely unfamiliar and she doesn't even remember seeing an ANBU Gorilla in the ranks.
"Now that you're here with us," ANBU Gorilla says, "mind telling us how a seven-year-old is familiar enough with ANBU code to subconsciously revert to it upon being startled?"
That's an understatement if she ever heard it.
She can kinda see why these two are partners.
ANBU Weasel will only speak to the Yondaime and the Yondaime is what she eventually gets on a second try – this time with her hands bound and he with a hat crammed over his head which makes her stare as ANBU Gorilla drops her to the ground between them.
Without the combination of yellow hair and blue eyes it's easier to see that the shape of their eyes are different and she slowly relaxes her shoulders as she mentally categorizes him as Kage's Father.
"In one year and three months you and your wife are going to die."
She's done smoother mission reports but it isn't her worst one.
Yondaime listens without interrupting as she draws the picture in broad terms, ignoring the way both ANBUs loom over her as she struggles with compromising twenty-eight years of living history.
"And then he sent you back here."
She nods, feeling strangely exhausted as she struggles not to sway in place. There's a familiar grief tugging at her attention but she pushes it back – focuses on the man before her and the warmth of the two ANBU who'd gone very still somewhere around the death of the Sandaime.
"This is a lot to take in you understand."
"I do." She makes the ANBU sign for SECRECY and enjoys the twitch from ANBU Bear behind her. "I'm having a hard time believing it most days and I'm living it." It comes out more bitter than she means it to and she draws a deep breath to center herself.
"You've been back for almost a year," ANBU Bear says with a note of suspicion. "How come you didn't approach anyone else before this? If what you say is true we've lost valuable time planning for this catastrophe."
ANBU Weasel can rationalize it best she can – can make excuses that would fit the narrative.
But she looks at the Yondaime, meets those blue eyes of his as he threads his fingers together by his chin and watches her with sharp eyes. "Because I loved your son," she tells him honestly. "And because, as his father, you're the closest thing I have to him now."
It's easier to meet Kushina a second time.
She's in T&I, flopped out on her back on the floor with a bowl of food untouched beside her. It isn't bad food – rice and a good portion of salmon with actual spices. But her anxiety is making her nauseous despite her best effort to curb it.
She turns her head when the door creaks open and her Kage's mother steps inside and it's startling to realise that she'd been older on her day of her death than this woman would ever grow to be unless they managed to change the events of the Kyuubi-attack.
Twenty-two, she thinks, almost twenty-three.
Her Kage had only reached his twenties.
She folds down on the floor unceremoniously, long red hair pooling behind her. She's in shinobi gear – blue shirt and pants with the standard Uzumaki spiral on her shoulder and there's a smudge of dirt on her cheek. Post-mission and a hurried clean-up.
"Tell me about him." It isn't a request. "Tell me about my son."
Her Kage is sixteen when he becomes Hokage, Konoha is gone before he turns seventeen.
It had gone to shambles long before that. The Sandaime had served too long, had been too lenient with Danzo who'd conspired with both Orochimaru and Madara in a twisted effort to bring Konoha back to the glory days through full-scale war.
Maybe they would have had a chance if Orochimaru hadn't taken the body of Uchiha Sasuke on the boy's sixteenth birthday, losing them the ally of Uchiha Itachi who'd sacrificed everything for his little brother and whose wrath had been wretched and desperate.
Tsunade-sama had done her best but the aftermath of the invasion had left Konoha weak and with Danzo constantly working against her in the shadows it had been a fruitless effort from the get-go. She'd been killed at the Kage meeting where Iwa and Kiri revealed themselves to be in alliance with Akatsuki. A had narrowly escaped thanks to B but both the Godaime Hokage, her ANBU guard and the Kazekage had been killed.
She gets appointed to the personal guard of her Kage because she's at the right place at the right time and it is she who drags him away on the command of Haruno with the promise to keep him safe.
She sits beside his unconscious body as Konoha levels into nothing with the roar of the unleashed bijuu.
He never forgives her for it.
In the end they have more to risk by not trusting her and it's decided that she cannot stay on her own.
ANBU Weasel picks up her orange cup and bag of clothes and glances around herself as they step into the Nara compound. It is a good choice – the Nara clan were nomads from the beginning and naturally tended towards darker colouring which meant she didn't stick out like a sore thumb.
They were also a clan renowned for their intelligence and their lands guarded by their deer which would make it hard to sneak information past their noses if it turned out that she wasn't what she claimed to be. With the Yamanaka Clan and Akimichi Clan being close friends with the Nara Head it wouldn't be strange for her to move between them either.
Clever, she thinks, as she trots after the young Nara matriarch.
"Is that all you have?" Yoshino asks as she drops the bag of clothes by the dresser and puts the cup on the bedside table. "Yondaime-sama said you'd been back for almost a year now."
She has some notebooks sealed into the scroll tucked into her back pouch and a handful of books from the Academy but other than that?
"I have to buy more soap," she admits. "But other than that I'm set."
This gets her a sigh for some reason.
She doesn't see the Yondaime or Kushina for several weeks as she struggles to get into the rhythm of having people around her. Shikaku is pretty laidback and content to leave her to her own device but Yoshino is firmer.
"Breakfast, lunch and dinner will be served downstairs and we eat together," Yoshino tells her when she tries to slink upstairs. "You can't hide away forever."
So she tries.
She ventures downstairs towards the evening and reads curled up at the edge of the couch as Shikaku and Yoshino drink sake together, occasionally playing a game or reading out loud from books. They bicker a lot and those evenings are the hardest to remain by them.
She's twenty-eight, almost twenty-nine, but her body is going on seven and she's not the only one who finds it hard to find a middle-ground as Shikaku substitutes her sake for one of the ciders she's fond of.
"It's bad for your growth," he says when she slants him a look. "You might be an adult but your body is not. Also, it doesn't reflect well on us if you're spotted drinking sake."
She concedes to the fact that he has a point.
Yoshino's pregnancy becomes a thing in January and it's a strange thing to imagine and she wonders if it'll really be a small Shikamaru that is being born or if she's already changed things.
Mikoto is heavily pregnant and ANBU Weasel is at least half-way reasonably sure that she hasn't impacted that clan in any way so she's expecting a small Uchiha Sasuke come July.
She doesn't remember Haruno's parents but she does start keeping an eye out for pink haired babies when she runs errands for Yoshino and Shikaku as an excuse to get her out of the house.
Her Kage is born the tenth of October and she finds that her steps leads her past the Hokage office more often than not and she tries to distract herself by alternating her time between training and going over information and answering questions from any of the people chosen to keep an eye on her.
Mostly it's Inoichi or Shikaku or Yoshino but occasionally Choza and his wife Yuya stop by with enough food to make her feel bloated for days. It doesn't help that one of them had picked up on her fondness for anything with apples and she falls in love somewhere around the time she tastes the apple tart pies Yuya pushes over in her direction.
They're an interesting combo. Yuya is a tall willowy woman who is nearly matched in height with her husband and they appear as quite the power couple side-by-side despite the latter being civilian born.
She meets Inoichi's wife Ayano once – a round robust woman with a sharp no-nonsense attitude. But she works as a diplomat and spends more time out of the village than in it.
She seemed to suit Inoichi well, with him being practically married to his work in Intelligence. She remembers Ino fairly well from her Kage's reflections and the more time she spends with the man the more she suspects it had been a marriage of convenience although they appeared amenably enough to each other.
"I'm pregnant," Kushina tells her as she stops by for tea in February and ANBU Weasel nearly drops her cup.
Yoshino and Shikaku are both there, so is Inoichi, and she feels their eyes on her as she places her cup slowly onto the table, her eyes fixated on the still flat stomach of the woman before her and an achy sort of desperation she doesn't know what to do with.
"Tsunade-hime says the child will be born in late September, early October."
Her Kage had been born on the tenth of October.
Her fingers curl into the fabric of her shorts and she draws a desperate breath as she struggles to center herself. Finds her lip quivering and bites down on it ruthlessly as she draws another breath.
In through the mouth, out through the nose.
"Congratulations." It comes out hoarse and she clears her throat desperately, curbs the urge to flee as she folds her fingers together carefully.
Kushina watches her with contemplative eyes as she struggles to get herself under control. "Minato wasn't just yanking my chain," she says and ANBU Weasel looks up at her. "You really loved him, didn't you?"
"He was my Kage." The only one she'd had and she'd failed him.
Kushina shakes her head. "It doesn't have to equalize the same thing. Following orders and loving your leader is two separate things entirely." Her eyes grow soft. "He must have been a great man."
ANBU Weasel swallows roughly. "The best."
Her mother is from Kumo and she inherits her affinity for lightning from her. Her father had been Konoha born but she has next to no luck getting as much as a fire going to her Kage's endless amusement.
"Lightning and fire is practically the same thing! One just sparkles a bit more." He'd said one evening as she wiggled down through the hole of snow leading into the cave with an armful of wood. "Hell, I'm pretty damn useless at anything but wind but even I can get a fire going."
Of course, even lightning made fires but it was the principle of the thing.
In Konoha it is just another thing that sets her apart. Fire is the main-element in Konoha, wind a close second. Earth release tended to crop up just about everywhere since it was so versatile but iron and different strange metal releases tended to belong exclusively to Suna and Iwa. Water belonged to Kiri and Lightning belonged to Kumo.
Marriage happened, sex happened, illegitimate children carried to term. But Kumo tended to keep to themselves and Lightning was still fairly rare outside its walls save for the likes of Hatake who wielded all elements with an ease that made most turn tail and run even with him being only thirteen.
She had to resist the urge to tear out the page from the Bingo Book when she first saw it – Hatake was ridiculously adorable at this age. She had a hard time reconciling the picture of the pervert adult Hatake with the grouchy thirteen year old and even harder trying to imagine him as ANBU Wolf whose name was whispered in the halls long after he'd taken the roll of jounin-sensei.
On the 24th of February Yoshino turns twenty-five and ANBU Weasel spends the evening at one of the trainings grounds to avoid the party thrown in her honor. As a seven-year-old she wouldn't have been wanted there anyway and she figures even she deserves a night off from responsibilities.
She lets a spark of lightning wander between her fingers, looping it playfully as she gets it up to speed. Flicks it from index to middle to ring finger, from one hand to the other.
It almost white and it contrasts beautifully against the dark of the night and against her skin.
Mesmerizing.
There's a scuffle and she tilts her head without looking away from the spark and the Yondaime pulls himself up among the branches and seats himself beside her.
"Shikaku is worried," he tells her. "It's nearly morning – the party ended two hours ago."
Her hand snap close around the spark, catching it in a cage of her fingers.
"Do you think we're doing the right thing?" she asks.
"Are you asking me if given the chance of saving the life of my wife and son is doing the right thing?"
"Fair." She extinguishes the spark and tilts her head to look at him. "You don't have to keep wearing the hat, you know?"
"But it makes it easier for you." It isn't a question. "You took care of my son – you are here because of him. The least I can do is keep a hat on." There's levity in his tone but she would have to be deaf to miss the genuine thankfulness behind the words.
"It might not be him that's being born."
The Yondaime tilts his head, his face angled up to watch the stars. "No," he agrees. "It might not. But if we do this right he will never grow up to become the man your Kage was either."
She's startled to hear him say what she's been thinking.
"Will it make you love him any less?" Yondaime asks her.
"No," she says honestly because she's had a lot of time to think and in the end she understands.
He tilts his head towards her and her ears warm at the gentle pride reflected in his eyes.
"I never said thank you, did I?"
"I'm not doing this for you," she reminds him. "I'm following the orders of my Kage."
"My son." And his voice is so soft.
She feels kinship with him in this moment – this man who will love her Kage unconditionally, just like her.
"Tell me truthfully – how have you really been handling all of this?" He looks at her with those blue eyes and she sees another face entirely before she catches herself. "You never agreed to this and yet here you are – thrown into a house with strangers and forced to dredge up bad memories day after day. An adult trapped in the body of a child." He reaches out, catching one of the braids she hadn't bothered to pull back and tucking it behind her ear.
He has kind eyes – eyes worthy of a man carrying the title of the Yondaime.
"It is what it is," she tells him and when he doesn't remove his hand immediately she takes the moment to enjoy in the skin-on-skin contact she'd missed from long nights curled together with her Kage as he studies her.
In the beginning it had only been an excuse for warmth but it had become a comfort – entwined so completely with each other.
He smiles softly. "He was lucky to have you."
Sasuke is born in July and while she's reasonably sure the baby looks something like the boy in picture her Kage had shoved into her face more than once she's no expert on small pudgy little faces.
It's also the first time she meets Itachi while she's lingering at the side of the Yondaime with the excuse that he'd offered to keep an eye on her while her 'Uncle Shikaku' ran an errand in T&I.
Mikoto and Fugaku both were well aware of who she was – all Clan Heads were, at least to some extent. How much she'd left entirely to the Yondaime but if they wanted to prevent the massacre they had to make sure the Uchihas knew they were trusted and respected by the village despite Danzo's venomous roots crawling through the shadows.
What better way than to share a time-travelling ANBU-agent?
He is younger than her by two years – five, maybe going on six, she isn't entirely sure on the details. Small for his age while she was tall for hers, his eyes curious where he sat at the foot of his mother's hospital bed, Sasuke feeding hungerly as the Yondaime chatted easily with Mikoto who looked tired but content.
ANBU Weasel raised a hand and gave it a little wave and his head tilted to the side as he raised his hand and gave a little wave back.
Weasel meet Weasel, she thinks to herself with a curl of her lips that is cautiously copied.
She likes Itachi so sue her.
The kid is adorable. And intelligent. After nearly a year of having more than one worm shoved into her face and being forced to play dumb around adults not in on the whole time-travel thing she'll take it.
So, she asks Yoshino who insists on taking her shopping before letting her anywhere near the Uchiha compound. It's nothing dramatic – just a gathering of clean shirts, hoodies and shorts to replace the ones she's been running ragged on the training ground and two new bands to tie her braids back.
They end up picking up some basic shinobi gear because Yoshino might be civilian but she married into a clan of shinobi and she gets it.
Itachi doesn't really know what to do with her, or anyone really, and he's such a child genius that it's almost painful to watch him try to get along with his classmates at the Academy.
He's five, started early, and the smallest in his class. The bullies are on him like sharks scenting blood. Which, their problem really – he's young but Itachi is leaps ahead of them.
It works for him and against him in this scenario.
She watches him from where she's crouching on the roof before deciding to interfere as one of them hefts a rock with clear intention.
Someone screams and a rock thuds to the ground as she lands between them.
"There you are Itacchin." He blinks at her. "Ready to get going?" She shoves her hands into the pockets of her shorts, rocking back onto her heels with a grin as she takes advantage of her height to loom as she turns around. "Or were you going to play with your classmates?"
She's wearing a thigh-holster which are only allowed by those nearing graduation age which for another five years will be ten as the earliest and not the twelve her Kage had graduated to. It garners her a group of wary eyes.
Itachi, in her world, had graduated at seven but it was one of the things she'd really pressed on the Yondaime to change and he'd worked quick.
"Everything he did he did for love and Konoha ruined him," her Kage tells her with a deep, aching regret.
"Well?" she says, meeting the eyes of the head bully and baring her teeth in an innocent grin.
She buys them two scoops of ice cream each and a warm cider to share and they eat it on a grassy hill near the training grounds.
"You could have dodged that hit." Itachi looks content with his two scoops of chocolate while she's regretting her choice of salty peanuts because someone had been seriously heavy handed with the salt.
"I could have," she agrees as she half-heartedly scoops the melon onto the other in an attempt to lessen the impact on her taste buds. "But you saw his face, didn't you?" It's a rhetoric question – Itachi had seen it and he'd been a second from acting when she'd decked the kid flat. "He was so happy to have gotten a hit in, so sure of his superiority, and then just – wham."
She hasn't had a decent fight in months – she'll take what amusement she can and the bruised eye is a familiar kind of pain.
"You know they were going to beat you up, right?" she checks, because kids had been strange for her even when she was a proper one and, again, child genius. "Or, well, try."
"It would have been foolish." Itachi looks at her. "They stood no chance."
"They are jealous because you're better than them." She gives up and pushes the salty peanut scoop clean off and into the grass where ants descend on it. "It'll get better once you get your own team and you get up in the ranks – the higher the rank the more eccentric shinobi tends to be." She bites into the melon with relish. "But until then," she says as she swallows, "you're going to have to dodge a few rocks or hope you get moved up and placed under an apprenticeship before getting your own proper team."
Apprenticeships were rare but with child geniuses like Itachi it was a good choice. Give them time to develop without actually sending them out into the field.
"They are jealous because you're better than them." She gives up and pushes the salty peanut scoop clean off and into the grass where ants descend on it. "It'll get better once you get your own team and you get up in the ranks – the higher the rank the more eccentric shinobi tends to be." She bites into the melon with relish. "But until then," she says as she swallows, "you're going to have to dodge a few rocks or hope you get moved up and placed under an apprenticeship before getting your own proper team."
Apprenticeships were rare but with child geniuses like Itachi it was a good choice. Give them time to develop without actually sending them out into the field.
If the Yondaime listened to her it was the best thing he could do with the kid. Plus, if they placed Itachi under the rank of someone famous enough it would make the Uchiha's look good and trusted in the eyes of both the civilian and shinobi population.
She made a note to bring the angle up to the Yondaime's attention once the whole Kyuubi-business had been dealt with.
"Is that what you're going to do?" Itachi asks curiously.
"Probably," she admits. She hadn't talked it out with the ones in charge but the thought of doing another minimum of two years in the Academy made her seriously consider choosing the civilian life.
She was pretty sure she'd make a good wood-worker.
Or she could open a ramen shop – her Kage would have gotten a kick out of it.
"Do you want to watch a movie?" she asks suddenly. "There's a new one out – about a dog and a witch. Not too sure on the details but anything with a witch has to be good, right?"
To her surprise, Itachi agrees.
Itachi becomes a fixed presence in her life of adults after that.
They make a habit of finding new strange foods to try – scouring through the districts of Konoha for rare fruits, squids and fishes and baked goods. Suna is famous for its spicy food and Kumo for the rare fruits that grow in the near constant rain and thunderstorms and they try anything they can get their hands on.
The whirlpools that ravage Kiri brings in all sorts of strange creatures and on one memorable occasion they end up with an eel nearly three meter long which they carry home to Mikoto who laughs at them both as she relives them of the burden with an ease that reveals her past as a kunoichi.
Fugaku is surprisingly patient with her presence and she wonders just what the Yondaime had been telling the two because he doesn't protest when she steals away his son after training with a wave or drops by to have dinner with them and falls asleep on the couch half-cuddled with the kid.
Itachi will never have a normal childhood – he's too clever for that and she's not a child anyway. They don't play games or pretend and neither are the sort to pull pranks. But food, a pause from the reality of the shinobi world, a sense of normalcy – it did them both good.
They do end up training together because they're shinobi – it's what they do. She's got some twenty years of experience on him but Itachi is good and he clearly enjoys finding ways to try and work around her. Quick to think on his feet and with an ingenuity that would one day mark him as the strongest genjutsu master there was before he succumbed to his sicken-
She drops her bowl of soup half-way to the table and Shikaku frowns as he kneels before her with questioning eyes.
"I need to talk to Tsunade-sama."
It's the beginning of October before she can blink.
She finds herself at the Uchiha compound under the watchful eye of Mikoto and Itachi who doesn't understand what she's doing there exactly but senses how antsy she is as he does his best to distract her.
Fugaku spends more time at the Hokage tower than out of it and there are guards circulating the house constantly.
On the night of the tenth she climbs through the window and onto the roof and it only takes minutes before Itachi is right there beside her, his hand grasping hers beneath the moon.
"One day I'm going to tell you everything," she promises him as she stares fixedly towards the Hokage tower. "Every sordid little detail."
He squeezes her hand and she realises she's trembling.
"I know," he says simply.
As the wail of the alarm breaks the silence of the night Itachi watches over his little brother and mother while ANBU Weasel tears towards the explosion of red hot chakra.
"KURAMA!" The fox is an old friend by now – she doesn't even flinch when the violent chakra rips through her as those behind her stumbles to their knees. "DON'T LET HIM DO THIS TO YOU!" she shouts as the ancient being roars in pain and agony, red orbs warping with the sharingan forcing the mighty being under his control. "YOU CAN FIGHT THIS, I KNOW YOU CAN!"
Chains keeps him down – looping desperately around the bijuu as Gamabunta and another large toad she doesn't recognise struggles to keep him down. Katsuyu is everywhere, healing those hurt by the explosions or flattened under the force of the Kyuubi.
She feels hot – almost like she's burning – and she touches her hand against her chest and feels the familiar pulse of demonic chakra against the palm of her hand.
Remembers the red tearing through her before the blue light of the seal tore her away.
"KURAMA!" she skids back from the force of his roar. "ONE DAY," she grabs at the chakra and struggles forward as the chains pull him flat against the ground. "YOU WILL BEFRIEND A MAN WHO WILL CHALLENGE EVERYTHING YOU BELIEVE IN! HE WILL HAVE THE POWER TO REVOLUTIONIZE THE WORLD." She stumbles as her skin tears open. "BUT ONLY WITH YOUR HELP!"
A single red eye pins her in place, desperate and angry, and she winds her chakra with that from her own Kurama and slams her palms against his nose.
She wakes up in the hospital.
She's wrapped up in layers of bandages and there's an unimpressed Tsunade-sama checking her over. "We don't know what you did," the blonde says tersely when she blinks her eyes open. "But it pretty much fried you from the inside out."
"That," she says with a cough, "was my Kage doing what he does best. Ever the hero." She scrubs at her face. "Did it work?" she asks as Tsunade prods a glass of cool water into her hands and helps her sit up.
Tsunade drops down on the edge of her bed. "You made a lot of ruckus, that's for sure." Tsunade smirks at her when she blinks. "The tiniest ANBU there ever was arrived onto the field, shouted nonsense at the fox and made a glorious red lightshow before slumping over in a dead faint on its nose." Tsunade shakes her head, looking rather like she didn't believe it. "It didn't eat you – just, dropped you aside and demanded to be sealed into Minato and Kushina's child."
She straightens. "So they're both-"
"Alive, yes." Tsunade's face softens. "You changed history today."
She crawls through the window, ignoring the flare of chakra from tense ANBU-agents who melts into the shadows on the command of their Yondaime.
Kushina meets her eyes across the room and they're the exact shape of her Kage, only green instead of blue. In many ways it's far more painful to look into them than her husbands because blue eyes are a dime a dozen but the exact shape together verbal-tick at the end of her sentences makes her ache.
But there's another with her today and she looks at the bundle on Kushina's chest, the little snuffle and gurgle from something with tufts of sunshine blond hair.
She takes a step forward and then another to the new mother who smiles warmly at her.
"You never told us his name," Yondaime says from behind her.
"Naruto," she rasps. "Uzumaki Naruto."
"Hear that Minato?" Kushina grins at her husband. "You're just going to have to take my name when we marry."
She reaches out, stroking a dark finger down a tiny whiskered cheek.
"Would you like to hold him?" Kushina asks gently.
She nods, following the gentle directions on how to support the head and how to hold and settles carefully on the couch with her tiny Kage snuffling sleepily in her arms as the two new parents talk quietly.
There will be plenty of time for questions and explanations, for further planning and solutions.
She smiles at the tiny baby that will one day become the Rokudaime of Konoha and draws him close, pressing her lips against his tiny ear.
"My name is Blue D."
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The original plan wasn't to post this but her story stuck with me and it's been bugging me so now I'm uploading it. Maybe her voice just needed to be heard? I'm not sure.
There are so many amazing stories with main-characters being thrown this and there in time so this was born because I enjoy exploring the characters in the margins. Those who become something morebecause circumstances demand it of them. Because of loyalty, because of love.
About eleven chapters are done, I'll try to get them up when I can.
Cheers!