Fractality
Summary: She may have been broken, but she never was a person who shied away from asking uncomfortable questions. Five times Kushina said what had to be said, and one time she didn't. Multi-chaptered story, complete in six parts. Kushina, Minato.
Warning: Tiny, tiny bit AU in the last chapter. Because…
Set: Story-unrelated. (Could be seen as prelude to Alternative Reality. Or as a tie-in to Shadow Flame. Oh well, it's my head canon, so it can probably be tied in with many of my fics. No need to read any of them to understand this one.)
Disclaimer: Standards apply.
i. Asymmetry
She stood at the door when Minato arrived: a fleck of blinding color in a sea of uniformity. Her red hair shone despite the dim light. It clashed with the ill-fitting dress she wore. Her hands were clutching at the material, opening and closing, hair fell into her face and hid her features. It was a grey, foggy day of early fall that they met for the first time, in a dim corridor of a building that seemed to have made it its purpose to surpass the grayness of the day outside. The Academy building of Hidden Leaf was functional, bare-walled and colorless. And it was quiet, because classes had already started and doors were closed against intruders, welcome or not.
The girl was staring at the ground but when Minato came close enough she looked up and the flaring, burning anger in her eyes that was directed at him and yet not at him shot through him like a harpoon. She glanced away immediately but not before he had seen her rage, and wondered whether she was angry with him and what he had done to deserve her anger. A second later, the door next to Minato opened and a man stepped through. He had brown, unruly hair and crow feet around his eyes. A pen stuck behind his ear, and three fingers of his left hand were missing.
"You must be Namikaze Minato," the man said and held out his hand. "Kushina," he said, looking over, and Minato realized he was talking to the girl. "This is Minato. He'll be starting the year late, too, so you have something in common."
Minato saw the anger in her eyes burn hotter. She didn't move closer, and she didn't greet him. There was something in her face that seemed… strange. Minato couldn't pinpoint it, despite his ability of reading people. She seemed out of place and yet familiar. Her red hair contrasted starkly with her pale skin. Stormy green eyes and a stubby nose completed her face, green eyes like the ocean after a storm, and for a second something flashed through his head-
Minato, determined to at least make an effort, lifted one hand. "Hi."
The girl glared at him and turned away. The memory died, unnoticed.
"Kushina," the teacher reprimanded, but she didn't react. She glanced at the wall, again with this alien and familiar expression.
And Minato knew they wouldn't get along.
...
They didn't.
...
Minato soon found himself in the center of his new class. The lessons were easy, the teachers acceptable, the kids here didn't know him and he didn't miss home at all. Kushina was different. Kushina was quiet and withdrawn, she was impolite and snappy and when someone tried to talk to her nicely she gave rude answers or ignored the people. She also had the very annoying habit of screaming when she got angry. Minato heard her voice for the first time on his the very first day of school. During lunch break, a boy picked a strand of her hair and commented on its color. Kushina punched him in the face and shouted at him to "Never say that again or I'll make you pay!" and promptly was sent into the corner of the classroom where she stood for the rest of the day, glaring at the boy and the wall, alternatively. It didn't help her that she seemingly didn't have any interest in finding friends. Every time she introduced herself it sounded like a challenge. It was tedious, and soon became annoying. And Minato had so much else to do, so different things to ponder. Here, there were no elder stepbrothers who could hide his books or laugh at his questions or beat the shit out of him because they felt like it. So excuse him that he actually enjoyed being in Leaf, living there and living there freely. It felt like he had left everything that had made him unhappy behind, and he did not miss it one piece.
It could have gone on forever.
...
It couldn't last forever.
...
"So?" Kushina demanded, furious, her voice rising in intensity. Soon, she would be screaming, screaming the way he had heard so often. Minato wanted to shut her mouth so badly he saw stars dance in front of his eyes. "And what about you? Don't pretend you're oh-so-high-and-mighty! Genius prodigy, model student, dream of every girl in the radius of two miles around the school – but there's nothing more to you, is it? You're a fake. You smile all the time and go around fooling everyone, but you're not fooling me. Everyone dances around your past – good for them. I certainly won't. By all means, go on pretending you're living your happy little life without any worries and troubles. Did you actually think just for a second-" and she enunciated the words very clearly – "that you were better than me?"
She stood there, glaring at him, anger radiating off her like sparks from a flame.
Minato and his friends stared at her, stunned. The girls found their voices sooner than the guys.
"What is with her?" One of them fluffed herself up, glancing at Minato with approval-seeking eyes. "How dare she insult you like that! That clan-less orphan, how could she compare herself to you? I bet her family sent her here because they didn't want her anymore…"
"Man, she hates you," Fugaku said, shaking his head and dropping a hand on Minato's shoulder. "Isn't she freaky?"
Kushina stared at the Uchiha hard and wordless, until the dark-haired boy threw Minato an uncomfortable look. "Just saying."
"Yeah," Kushina echoed, acerbically. "Just saying." And off she went, without another word.
Her silence, Minato thought, was answer enough. As his had been. So he smiled, like he always did, and brushed off the topic, and soon Uzumaki Kushina was forgotten by everyone else.
...
What indeed had been freaky, he later thought, was the accuracy with which Kushina had pinpointed his weaknesses.
...
Minato's smile wasn't entirely fake, but it wasn't entirely honest, either. Smiling had been the only way he had been able to endure his stepfather's and stepbrother's taunts and abuses. Had his classmates known that he'd grown up as the bastard son of a fisherman's wife, badgered and beaten by the man and the siblings that hated his sight, they certainly wouldn't have flocked around him so quickly. Minato had been born on the southern coast of Fire Country, in a poor and desolate village full of old and disillusioned people. His mother had been pretty once, but that was long before she tried to run away with a wandering musician and was caught by her brothers and father. Pregnant, she had been married off to the next available fisherman. The man happened to be widower and already had six sons and two daughters, little wonder his first wife had died. Namikaze Miyako's future was cut into stone the day the rope was bound under her and her husband's wrists. Perhaps, had she bore him some more children, he wouldn't have beaten her quite that much. Nevertheless, she withered away, and in her condition there was no place or thought for her bastard son. Perhaps Minato reminded her of her lost love – so the romantics in town said – because he had the wheat-blonde hair of Wind's people and eyes blue as the sea on a sunny morning, and that was the reason why she left him mostly to his step siblings. Maybe, though, she just didn't care anymore. Minato never held it against her.
But he never felt much love for her, either.
Very quickly, the people in his village noticed his abilities. Minato taught himself to read at early age. He was bright and soaked up knowledge like a dry sponge soaked up water, always asking, always questioning. Nobody knew, but he was able to recall pictures and texts he had once seen with perfect clarity. In other places, places where he would grow up loved and cherished and protected, he would have been called a prodigy, there, he just was the cuckold child of a drunkard. Minato grew up around fish knives and hooks, knowledge that easily shaped his UMGANG with kunai and shuriken. And thanks to his sunny nature – or perhaps it was pure stubbornity – he became neither conceited nor withdrawn. All those qualities made him likable, and of promising potential, and so it came that he was accepted into Leaf with open arms when he finally arrived. Had all the people in Leaf known – his classmates and their parents and the distant relatives he stayed with – known why he had come to Leaf in the first place, they would probably have thought of him quite differently. Because, when his stepfather had tried to hit his wife in a drunken rage, Minato had taken a fishing knife and defended his mother, costing the man an eye in the process, they wouldn't have accepted him so easily.
The thought made him wonder what Kushina's story was. Just out of scientific curiosity.
...
("I know how it is to leave everything behind." –"Don't bother.")
...
The most intriguing thing: although they had expected it of her, the volume of her voice hadn't risen beyond a normal person's voice; despite her anger she had remained surprisingly calm. Only her eyes had conveyed the depth of her rage. And a world of pain. That day, Minato began to suspect that there was much more to Uzumaki Kushina than everyone suspected.
A few days later he was told he would be able to skip two classes and take the Academy's graduation exams instead. He passed with flying colors and was whisked away to his new team, and the girl with the hostile attitude and the flaming red hair disappeared into the background of his thoughts.
They didn't meet again until six years later.
