AN: Not necessarily canon-compliant, but probably not directly contradicted either. Inspired by "brave soldier girl comes marching home" by 100demons on AO3.
While he plots positions on new maps already worn from dozens of fingers, he does not think of her. He argues with generals about troop placements, and moving the war front, and suicide missions, but her name never once passes his lips. He pores over reams of paperwork until his eyes blur, reading line by line; he does not skip to reports of her squadron. If her face is imprinted on Minato's eyelids all the more vividly while sleeping hunched over a desk, so be it. When he is her commander, she can not be Kushina.
While she and her team wait for untold hours to ambush, she does not miss a particular chakra hum beside her. She dances through enemies, a whirlwind of fierce energy, and does not ache for a phantom presence at her back. She receives her orders and executes them with ruthless efficiency; she does not hear his voice as she reads them. Kushina will dream of him that night, but while she is on the battlefield he can not be her lover.
It is all truth and it is all lies.
Minato carries her letters with him everywhere, savors every word Kushina writes, reads them over and over until her handwriting is engraved in his brain and he could recite them ten years from now. When it gets to be too much, and he cannot push the sound of her laughter away to focus on the cold facts of the war room, cannot sterilize his brain, he forces himself to leave them outside. He tells himself that it is so he can recite them to her ten years from now, can hear that laughter again as Kushina teases him for acting like a besotted schoolboy. It still feels like his heart is beating fifteen feet away and behind a door.
Kushina lives for the adrenaline crash once the battle is over. It means that her work is done and Kushina can go on with the business of living, of dragging herself and her teammates back to the base, and can finally, finally think of Minato. He gets her through the cold nights up north on hard ground, managing to sleep only by picturing sitting with him on their rooftop and bumping shoulders, the noon Konoha sun outshone only by his bright hair and warm smile. Kushina saves that unusually cold winter night building a fire and drinking hot tea for when the nights are even more bitterly cold and she's feeling particularly masochistic.
She does not allow herself to think of him while she is fighting. Kushina's memories of Minato are too precious to be stained with the blood she sheds.
He honors Kushina by keeping his emotions from his decisions. Kushina is infinitely more than war in his mind, and she is more than capable enough on her own.
The fading miniature sun behind Kushina's breastbone lights up once more when she gets Minato's care packages, reading his notes again and again, mouthing them like a prayer.
Minato's heart aches when he reads her letters, so tender and painful like he's dying but he's never been more alive, like all the color has been leaching out of the world and he gets it back with the red of her hair.