Characters: Nagato, Kushina
Summary: Nagato knows how the blood of Uzu no Kuni was spilled. Now, he wonders if any of the blood was hers.
Pairings: None
Author's Note: With Madara's mention that Nagato was an Uzumaki, I got this idea. I've officially gone insane again. Obviously, this is just a drabble that isn't going anywhere, but still.
Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto.
"You've got really weird eyes, you know."
Nagato has met his maternal cousin, the daughter of Uzushiogakure's leader, for the first time today, and he's decided that he doesn't like her very much.
At five, Uzumaki Kushina is three years younger than her cousin. They don't look very much alike, apart from their hair—the vividly violent red shade of a hemorrhage of blood—which is to be expected, considering they're cousins and not siblings; Nagato isn't even officially an Uzumaki, since his father doesn't bear the name. However, given his hair, no one could mistake him for anything but an Uzumaki.
It would be very satisfying to snap at the girl that she doesn't exactly have typical eyes herself—Nagato knows few people who have eyes that particular shade of violet-gray—but he is by nature a polite boy, and he doesn't say that.
"I know that, Kushina-dono."
Nagato is polite, but he can't keep the coldness out of his voice and Kushina senses it, wilting just a little bit and going back to her parents.
She avoids him for the rest of the night.
Years later, lying on a cot in a shack, listening to Jiraiya snoring and the sounds of Yahiko and Konan sleeping peacefully in the dark, Nagato is awake. There is rain outside, as usual, and thunder; a thunderclap particularly loud makes the windowpanes shake.
He was dreaming. Nothing unusual about that. But Nagato is surprised, has surprised himself, by dreaming about a cousin he once knew very briefly, Uzumaki Kushina.
That had been the only time they ever met, the night when she tactlessly commented on his eyes. His parents had sensed the ugly storm clouds of war brewing over Uzu no Kuni, and left the next day. They had thought Ame no Kuni would be a safe place to go.
If only they'd known, Nagato reflects bitterly, mouth twisting. If only they'd known.
Uzu no Kuni is no more; Nagato has been isolated in an isolationist country, but he knows that much. All the world knows of the spectacular fall of Uzu no Kuni.
Kushina… Kushina had been to Nagato's eyes annoying, but she'd also been like a brand of sunlight even after the sun itself fell over the ocean. All that long red hair, swishing in violent color. She could be an annoyance, but she was too bright and too cheerful to hate. Even Nagato had to be begrudgingly fond of her, even as she unknowingly ridiculed his appearance.
Now, listening to rain and thunder and snoring, Nagato's mind is drawn to the fall of Uzu no Kuni.
He can picture it. Pools of blood on the stone walkways like puddles after a rain shower.
Nagato wonders if there was a small puddle—for Kushina surely still would have been a child at the time of the country's fall—red and rife with a princess's blood. If all that red hair spread like fingers of the sun on the flagstones, until it died and decayed and lost all its virtue.
Then, he lies back down to sleep, and does not think of his cousin again.