A/N: I literally JUST found this in my documents. For some reason, I have a habit of doing this. I write a oneshot, or a chapter of a story and (if it's a story) save the chapter differently than the rest of the story, and then forget all about it. I don't remember making it (most of the time) and months (sometimes YEARS) later, I find it and go, "Oh! I remember this…hang on, what was the story plot again?"…well, you can kind of figure out the rest.

I made some edits to this, but this is, initially, a oneshot I wrote nearly two years ago. Hope you enjoy!

Title: Perhaps

Disclaimer:I don't own Naruto.

The boy was always there—out of the corner of Minato's eye. Laughing, smiling, waving, giggling, playing…. But the kid was never there when he turned to look.

As soon as Minato went back to whatever he was doing again, he would catch a glimpse of him, laughing, just beyond his sight.

The laughing and smiling wouldn't be so bad, really, if that wasn't all he did. No matter what, he never stopped being happy. And that was the problem.

When Minato was walking down the street, he was following along, and laughing. When he was talking with friends or comrades, the boy was giggling and pointing. When he was on an assassination mission, the kid would smile sadistically, still with a smile on his face, enthusiastically joyful at the death of another.

For eight years, Minato had been haunted by the growing child, the one with the blue eyes so like his. He couldn't tell any other features, for whenever Minato tried to focus on them, the boy would disappear. He was only the blue-eyed, white-skinned, child-in-the-corner-of-his-eye. Occasionally, Minato thought that he saw a flash of blonde—but that would be too coincidental, wouldn't it?

The Fourth Hokage didn't know if the boy would have haunted him his entire life without Minato ever seeing the kid's face, if that event hadn't happened. It was entirely possible. Perhaps he only showed because that event was relative to him. Perhaps he only haunted Minato because of that event.

That event being, naturally, the death of Namikaze Uzumaki Kushina. The day the red-haired woman died in the hospital, due to an incurable illness, was the day Namikaze Minato discovered the identity of the child he never really saw but from the corner of his eye.

When Minato was crying out his pain and loss, despairing at the loss of his wife, and mother of the now-deceased, not-yet-born, second-child of theirs, he turned to look at the dot in the corner of his eye, hoping to dispel the annoying ghost-child, hoping to be left to grieve in peace.

It took him a few minutes to realize that the kid wasn't dispelling, and was, in fact, still staring at him, laughing and smiling. A few moments after he realized, Minato was almost too angry to recognize the features staring back at him. The bright blond hair, the deep blue eyes, the whiskered cheeks.

It was his child, the ghost of the child he had lost the day he (Naruto) had been born. The child that he had condemned.

How long had he been consumed by guilt over this child? How long had he suffered?

Naruto's soul was the one the Shinigami had taken instead of his own. It was because Minato had forgotten just one thing when he summoned the Shinigami: the Shinigami had a will of its own, and its conscience was much higher than any mortal could hope to be. The Shinigami decided that Minato still had things to do in his life, and instead took the life of the blonde-haired child Minato so wished to save.

Naruto was the one who had bore the Kyuubi until his death that occurred only a few minutes—possibly seconds—after he was born.

Minato understood in that moment exactly why the child was haunting him. Who wouldn't haunt the one that had condemned their life to nothing? To death?

…

When Namikaze Minato took his life a few days later, though they were saddened, hardly any questioned it. Those that did wonder had nothing to go off of.

For how could they know that the ghost of his dead child was stalking him? How could they know that he feared that his second, unborn child of his would begin to stalk him, too?

All they could conclude that he was only grief-stricken over the death of his wife, which led to his suicide.

And (who knows) perhaps he was.