Uzumaki Mito looks at her and says, in a voice too quiet and hoarse to be healthy, "Love him."
Kushina doesn't quite know what she means. She knows what she's here for, of course—as Uzushio's sacrifice, princess of a fallen kingdom; second Jinchuriki for the Kyuubi no Kitsune. Kushina isn't stupid, she knows what Mito is, what she will become.
"Yes, Mito-san," she says, respectful; because this is the original princess of Uzushio, the original red-head Uzumaki sacrifice. Kushina's a cheap copy.
(It's not Mito's fault that Kushina's her replacement. The blame lies at the feet of Konoha, and Konoha alone.)
"Promise me," Mito says, her grip tightening on Kushina's shoulder. It's strong, stronger than she'd think from a sick old lady with once-red hair. "Promise me you'll love him."
"I promise," Kushina says, wonders what she's signed up for as Mito relaxes, smiles. Wonders if this old lady is insane, driven mad by the Kyuubi, or old age.
"Good," Mito says, and that's the last time Kushina talks to her.
All she can remember of the sealing is pain. Pain, bright, sparking down her nerves like the prickle of lightning over skin, but far, far worse. She thinks she screams, blood-red Chakra flowing into the seal, ink still wet on her stomach.
When she comes too, she discovers that she'd bitten straight through her lip with teeth far sharper than usual. Her tongue traces canines far too sharp to be human, and she thinks demon, but she doesn't say it.
(When she looks in the mirror, she doesn't recognise herself. Her eyes are darker, now, bordering on red. Whisker marks lie like slashes across her cheeks, done in threes. Her teeth are sharp, pupils elongated. She looks dangerous.
Running her tongue over sharpened canines, she thinks she kinda likes it.)
The villagers, it seems, are far less inclined to keep their thoughts to themselves. Kushina hears the whispers, sees how they avoid her. They fear her. Kushina watches them, hears the whispers in the air and the whispers in her head and decides that she can't stop them from being scared of what's inside her.
But she can make them scared of her for her.
She's the last Uzumaki in Konoha, the last member of a clan so feared that three hidden villages worked together to wipe it out. She's a storm, wind and water, the fire of hatred and the sun setting over an ocean, and she throws herself into her training with a single-minded determination.
It's in one of those sessions that Kushina really meets the Kyuubi for the first time. She knew, in a detached sort of way, that he was the one whispering in her head. Just like she knew, in a detached sort of way, that he's the Kyuubi no Kitsune, a demon fox so powerful he had to be sealed to be stopped.
But she meets him, and she's so, so tired, and he looks at her with old eyes, burning with malice, and he says, "I will lend you my Chakra."
And Kushina looks back at him, sees soft orange fur and paws big enough to crush her, and she thinks I have the upper hand and she says, "I think I'd just like to sleep here for a bit, y'know?"
(This is the story of how Uzumaki Kushina fell asleep with the Kyuubi no Kitsune and woke up with blood-stained teeth. This is the story of a little girl with red hair, who discovered she'd ripped a man's throat out in her sleep and swallowed the taste of blood when she woke up.
This is the story of Uzumaki Kushina, who killed a man and smiled about it.)
They call her monster, after that; watch her a little more closely. She takes to training herself, in no taijutsu style she knows—it's instinct and the Kyuubi's laugher guiding each move. Kushina knows she looks half-feral, knows that with each step down this path she loses whatever traces of humanity she had left.
But she thinks of Konoha, thinks of the Kyuubi, bound, and herself, bound just as strongly, and she hates.
It's enough.
(She feels humanity slipping through her fingers, and she doesn't care.)
Call me Kurama, the Kyuubi rumbles eventually, deep but more settled, now. She sits deep in the bowls of Konoha, waiting for some poor, unsuspecting soul to pass her by.
Call me Kushina, she thinks right back, and Kurama grumbles, but he does.
She's already forgotten her promise, but she loves him anyway.
(Mito probably didn't mean this.)
She graduates early, is given a team that's scared of her and a teacher that's more so. They're scared of Kurama, though, not her as much—they think she's lost control, that she's little more than a demon in human form. Kushina doesn't discourage those thoughts—she likes the way they say it, in fact.
Demon.
It tastes like victory on her tongue.
(They're talking about Kurama, but she can pretend they're talking about her. Pretend they think she's powerful in her own right. She'll show them.
One day.)
They put her on the front lines—of course they do. She's the Jinchuriki of the Kyuubi no Kitsune, more demon-fox than human. Her hair is long and her eyes are sharp, and she has the skills and the Chakra to back up the ribbon of red that flows down her back.
Her hair is a handhold, but only if they can get close enough.
(And if they do get close enough, it's only because she let them. The ones she let through usually find her teeth in their throat before they can get a handhold.)
Kushina thrives in the thick of it all, thrives with a sword through her stomach and blood dripping from her lips, thrives as she pulls it out and shoves it through an Iwa-nin's eye. She thrives with blood-red chakra flowing through her veins, thrives in this time of chaos and blood and hatred and war. She thrives because Kurama thrives, and together they're an instrument of destruction.
She loves it.
The first time she meets Namikaze Minato, he steals her kill. She snarls at him, more feral than not and entirely unused to human speech—who'd talk to a demon, after all?—but he smiles at her and says, "Your hair is very pretty." Then he vanishes, leaving behind nothing but a strange-looking Kunai with seals carved into its hilt.
She's more intrigued than she is irritated, even as Kurama rages about their missed kill, deep within her stomach.
The next time she meets him, it's one of the very rare times she's not on the front lines. He ducks into the mess hall and Kurama starts growling, forcing the sound from deep within her throat.
"You," she says, voice rough from disuse, "you stole my kill."
"Uh," the blonde says, stumbling back, "Sorry?"
She leaps at him, and he vanishes. There's a curse from outside, and she's soon following him, playing cat and mouse with the fastest man in the world. She catches him, eventually, and they fight; but he slips through her fingers at the very last second. Kurama hums, a deep rumbling purr that feels like acceptance, and Kushina sits on the ground outside the camp, wind and fire playing over her fingertips, and thinks she accepts him too.
(Later, she admits in a voice smoother than ever before, that she hadn't really been trying to kill him. That it had been a test, Kurama desperate to know if they were incompetent or if Minato was just good enough to reach the Kumo-nin before them.
Minato asks her what the result had been, and Kushina had given him a grin full of too-sharp teeth and asked what he thought the answer was.
Then she had vanished, sneaking off into the night with all the stealth of a fox—although she'd always seemed more fox than human - and never really answered his question.)
When the war ends, they're the Yellow Flash and the Demon Fox of Konoha. Unoriginal, but ninja have never been great at naming things. Konohagakure is, after all, the village hidden in the leaves.
(Kushina has always found that funny, because the Hidden Villages are not hidden at all.)
When the war ends, Kushina and Minato are two of the most well-known ninja throughout the entirety of the Elemental Nations—S-ranked, with flee-on-sight orders in most Bingo Books. Kushina delighted in the terror her very appearance brang, delighted in how civilians cowered away and enemies fled.
If there was one thing she and Kurama shared, it was a fondness for both the chase and the kill.
Minato, on the other hand, did all he could to seem less intimidating. Kushina would have approved of the tactic—draw your prey in, make them trust you, then pounce—if she didn't know that it wasn't a tactic.
Sarutobi looks at Kushina and her anger and bloodlust, looks at her and the way she holds herself, the way she revels in her flee-on-sight order. He looks at Minato and his kindness, the way he restrains Kushina in a way she won't do to herself, and he pairs them together.
"You're a team," he tells them, but he means Minato, control our best asset and Kushina, don't kill him. Like she ever would.
Kushina is a storm, wind and water and the fire of the setting sun over the sea. She is amoral, the fox's container and the fox's only friend, but she likes Minato. He intrigues her.
She won't kill him, not until she finds out why.
The first mission they're sent on together is a C-rank—"to let you get used to working together," Sarutobi had said, like they hadn't worked in perfect harmony during the war—escort mission. The remainders of Minato's genin team (because she can't count the white-haired brat as a genin, he's a jounin, so it's not a fucking genin team-) is left behind, and the civilians they're set to guard stare at them with mixed awe and fear. Kushina preens under it while Minato squirms, obviously uncomfortable.
She almost wants to laugh at him—how's he supposed to be Hokage if he can't handle a little awe?
(Okay, so, she does laugh at him—throws her head back and shows off her sharp teeth as she cackles. That the civilians twitch at the sight just makes her laugh harder, until she finally calms and fakes wiping at her eyes.)
The mission is, of course, a cakewalk; the only issue is bandits, and they run before Kushina even gets her claws into them - notoriety, right? She chases them down and kills them anyway, of course; returns to Minato with bloodstains around her mouth and up her forearms.
"What did you even do to get blood everywhere?" Minato asks her, apparently forgetting that there are civilians behind him.
Kushina's grin is nasty when she replies, "I shoved my hand through his chest and ripped out his heart."
There's a retching sound behind them, and Minato sighs. Kushina's grin seems fixed to her face, entirely unrepentant.
(They get paid more than is strictly necessary, and Kushina cackles about it for half the trip. Minato frowns at her, disapproval written across his face, and Kushina sticks her tongue out in an entirely childish manner. It's great, though, because doing so shows off her teeth; still bloodstained. Minato just frowns more.)
After that, they get sent on fewer guard missions, more assassination and eradication missions. Kushina's entirely unsurprised—they're wasted as guards, and she doesn't have the temperament for it; even though she's more socialised now. It's entirely Minato's influence, but Kurama doesn't seem to mind, and he keeps buying Kushina ramen. It's a win-win-win, she supposes—Kurama gets to kill people, she gets free Ramen, and Minato gets to 'save' her.
Of course, her confirmed kill-count is insanely high—not because people catch them, but because her favoured method of execution is tearing her target's throat out with her teeth (or ripping their spine out with her bare hands, or ripping their heart out with her bare hands)—or other intensely violent methods. It's really quite easy to tie kills back to her, in the end. Sarutobi hates it, but she's good at what she does, in the end, and he can't afford to lose her.
When Sarutobi steps down, her partnership with Minato breaks. How could it be sustained when half of the partnership is acting Hokage, after all?
But she's called into Minato's office on the second day of his leadership anyway, and is offered a white mask, painted with a stylized fox.
"Welcome to ANBU," a bear-masked ninja says, dropping down next to her. It takes all of her self-control—only there because Minato is watching her, careful—not to tear his throat out where he stands. "And to the Hokage's guard."
When his words register, Kushina turns to Minato, completely and utterly betrayed. Minato shrugs, unrepentant, and she half-thinks this is payback for their first mission together; when she'd terrorised their clients and left with over half the pay.
(This is the story of how Uzumaki Kushina, the Demon Fox of Konoha, gets a job that keeps her crouching in the rafters of a dusty office most of the day, and makes a few friends in unexpected places.)
"So," Bear-ANBU says—and he's not wearing his mask at the moment, but he smells and sounds the same—the senbon in his mouth clicking against his teeth. He's younger than Kushina thought. "You're the new guard, huh, Demon Fox?"
Kushina smiles at him, sharp teeth on full display. "Only because Minato is a dick."
Bear-ANBU laughs, holds out a hand for her to shake. "Shiranui Genma. Nice to meet you, Uzumaki Kushina."
She tilts her head, runs her tongue over sharp teeth in what seems to have become a habit, and when he doesn't flinch, she takes his hand and says, "It's nice to meet you too, it would seem."
(Genma takes her to get her ANBU tattoo, lets her rake claws down his arm and hiss as she tries to stop Kurama from healing it too fast for ink to settle under her skin. He understands, but he doesn't like it, and she struggles to hold his Chakra back after calling for it for so long.)
Sitting around in the rafters of the Hokage's office all day is immensely boring. Kurama grumbles, deep in her stomach, and Kushina finds herself restless, shifting constantly. The other guards watch her, carefully non-judgemental, but that they watch at all has Kushina's hackles rising.
Occasionally, she'll jump down, drag Minato from his paperwork and out for a spar. He enjoys their spars, she knows he does, but they're far too few with too much time in between. Kushina knows she's restless, knows its building up and up and up as she snaps at people, burns off energy with intensive training when she's off her shift.
Sometimes, she even drags Genma out. He puts her out of commission for an hour with one of his poisons, once, and Kurama rumbles his approval from deep in her stomach.
Uzumaki Kushina is the half-feral Demon Fox of Konoha, and she hates being restricted.
Minato knows this.
She doesn't know why he does it anyway.
Then someone breaks in. Someone, some idiot from Kusa was stupid enough to break into the Hokage tower, to take an assassination mission, or to try and claim a bounty. Kushina catches him, grins with too-sharp teeth, and drags him to meet her Hokage, claws firmly embedded in his shoulder.
Minato grins, just as nasty, and tells her to take him to T&I.
(He tells her she can stay there.)
(This is how Uzumaki Kushina joins T&I, if only part-time. Anko and Ibiki seem to like her, at least.)
Kushina likes sitting in on T&I's interrogations. Sometimes, they let her kill the prisoner when they're done with them, and it's a break from the monotony of watching over Minato as he does paperwork all day. She revels in the screams, revels in the way people struggle and cry when they see her.
It's cathartic.
Minato thinks she's insane. Kushina doesn't agree, but she doesn't disagree, either. She does, after all, remember her last conversation with Mito; remembers thinking, idly, that she'd gone insane in her old age, or through her contact with Kurama.
Kurama grumbles, a quiet disagreement, and Kushina mentally pats him. He's like a great, big, bloodthirsty dog, really.
She's happy being insane though; happy being the half-feral Demon Fox of Konoha, terror of the Hokage tower and the T&I division.
(She is irritated that Minato seems to have calmed her down somewhat, though - she'll have to up her game in the future. Maybe she should castrate someone…)
Minato is woken up to people yelling about the brutal murder of one of his elders. Honestly, he's not that bothered by it; but he's the Hokage, he has to file paperwork and choose new elders and organise a funeral and find out which one actually died, gods, he's busy.
All of this is why he doesn't notice the severed extremity lying on his desk until he's seated in front of it.
He puts his head in his hands, sighs, and calls, "Kushina!"