Minato knew he was in trouble, his chakra supply was running dangerously low and he was near exhaustion himself. Somehow he had been spotted while on an undercover mission in Iwa, he had managed to alert his teammates of the situation without pointing his pursuers in their direction. They would follow protocol and notify the Hokage who would then dispatch a small team to retrieve him. He only hoped they got here soon enough, right now his pursuers were following him strictly on the basis of him being suspicious and since this was war time nothing was left unchecked.
He hoped that they hadn't detected the transformation jutsu he had applied with his last little bit of chakra. Instead of the six foot two man with spiky blonde hair and blue eyes he was so famous for he was now a five foot eleven man with a receding brown hair line and brown eyes, all of which were common traits found in Iwa. He walked into a local tavern, something he normally avoided, and sat down to have a drink. The three men who had been spying on him entered a few minutes later and took a seat at a table near the door.
Once again Minato cursed his luck, when would back up arrive? It should be any day now, he wished it was yesterday. He wondered who they'd send, someone who was good at keeping a low profile no doubt. How would they go about smuggling him out of Iwa? He was brought out of his thoughts as he heard the door to the tavern open. Using the mirror behind the bar he saw that a woman was the one to enter, she had pale blonde hair and a tiny waist but she was too far away for him to get any more detail. Normally he wouldn't be interested in a woman like her, sure he looked occasionally but he never really had time for dates, but then she locked eyes with him via the mirror.
Was she his back up? He had never seen anyone like her back in Konoha before so maybe she was using a transformation jutsu too. But she didn't come to the bar; instead she went directly for the Stone Ninja who were watching him. Maybe she wasn't his back up after all. He let his focus drift as she began flirting with the tallest of the ninja to something else.
About an hour later he decided to chance the inn he was staying at. He really needed to keep moving and stay in public but that might be suspicious and he was already suspicious enough as it was. He wished he could change his form without them noticing but the surge of chakra would alert them and he would be hauled in for questioning without a second thought.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw that the stone ninja had also left the tavern and were trailing him via the roofs, they weren't being very discreet about their presence but then again he was supposed to be a simple civilian not a trained ninja.
It happened so suddenly that he almost drove a kunai into the person's chest but managed to restrain himself, just barely. He looked down to see that a woman with dark brown hair and pale green eyes had latched onto his arm. From the smell of her and the light blush on her cheeks he could tell she was drunk. He also noticed that she was rather tiny only coming up to his shoulder even in his shortened form.
"You know you're kinda cute mister." She said giggling madly. "My name's Rin, what's yours?" she began tracing circles on his chest.
It was clear that this girls name was not Rin; this was a sign that she was his back up. the only Rin he knew was ten years old had purple clan markings on her checks and was a terrible blusher when it came to a certain silver haired genius he knew.
He gave her a broad lecherous smile that he had seen his sensei Jiraiya wear pretty much all the time. "Inari." He said circling an arm around her waist.
She giggled again as she placed both hands on his chest and reached up on to her tip toes to get closer to his face. He knew what escape plan she was going to use, they had studied it at the Academy, back then his classmates had all giggled at the prospect. Right now he wasn't looking forward to it very much. He just prayed she wasn't one of his fan clubs and tried to force dates out of him after this.
"You know the drill right?" she whispered low enough that he barely heard it.
He nodded and she leaned him to kiss him. All in all he wasn't surprised to see that his first and only kiss was on mission. Jiraiya was dramatically embarrassed that his star protégé was twenty years old and had yet to be kissed. He would not tell Jiraiya about this and he would have to hope that this girl wouldn't go bragging around the village that she had kissed him. This whole plan just spelled doom.
She pulled back and took his hand in her own, leading him down the street. When she began pulling him in the direction of a brothel he knew that his fate was sealed and that Jiraiya was the one who organized the retrieval mission. He was going to kill his sensei; the pervert was probably watching him right now. He now wondered who his sensei had chosen to seduce him. He desperately wished he hadn't needed to play along and that he had enough chakra to use his flying thunder god technique to get out of there.
The undercover ninja pulled him past the whores who were eyeing him, and into a spare room. The room was clean for the most part but he'd prefer not to touch anything just in case, especially the bed in the corner. He didn't even want to think about touching that thing.
"Can we speak freely?" he asked in a hushed tone.
The woman turned back to him and nodded. "Yeah as long as we keep it reasonable." She said as she moved to the wall to the left of them.
She began rapping on the wall in various places with two of her knuckles as she pressed her ear close enough to the wall to hear for a hallow place.
"So is there a secret passage out of here?" he asked while glancing toward the door.
"Yeah it this place was built during the last Great War, the woman who runs it is a sleeper agent." She said. "Ha! Found it."
He watched as she got down on her hands and knees and pushed on a patch of wall. For a minute there it looked like nothing was going to happen until a square of wall two feet high and two feet wide began to sink in. once she had pushed it in far enough for them to crawl through she turned back to him with a wide smile that didn't fit the face that she had transformed into.
"Wont my three tails get suspicious if we disappear just like that?" he asked.
She looked thoughtful for a moment. "You remember that blonde that walked into the bar and started flirting with them about an hour before you left?" she asked and he nodded that he remembered. "She's my teammate and gave them all slow acting poisons that should be kicking in soon. She'll meet us at the border with your teammates."
And with that said she turned back to the opening and crawled in, Minato dropped down to his hands and knees and followed suit. Once inside he pushed the square of wall closed just in case the poison hadn't taken effect yet and his pursuers decided to check in on them. As it turned out the tunnel they were in was only two feet tall and on a downward slope and was so dark that he constantly kept bumping into the woman, well her bottom to be more precise.
"So, uh, what's your name?" he asked trying to keep his distance in the pitch black.
"What you don't recognize me?" he joked.
"Can't say that I do." He said with a light chuckle.
"Well I suppose the jutsu makes it hard to guess my identity but then again that was the point. Besides you don't exactly look like the Yellow Flash."
Minato winced, he hated that name. "Like you said, that was kind of the point. So do I get a name?" he asked again.
"Kushina Uzumaki." She said.
Uzumaki? He knew that name, but for the life of him he just couldn't connect the dots in his memories. He knew he had never been sent on mission with her so that was crossed out. Did he know her from the Academy? He hadn't spent much time in school as he had flown so quickly through it and then after that he was sent on missions. After he had become a chunin he had left on a three year training trip with Jiraiya and upon return was made a jonin. After that he had been in such high demand he hardly spent any time in the village so really not remembering her was to be expected.
"Finally!" he heard her exclaim from somewhere in front him. He squinted ahead of him to see that the tunnel had widened and that Uzumaki was standing up and brushing the dirt from her knees.
He also noticed that she had lit a lantern that had been placed nearby. He crawled the few more feet out of the smaller tunnel until he was able to stand up as well. He released the jutsu on himself had he odd experience of growing a few inches to his normal height. He looked over to see that Uzumaki had done the same. Instead of the tiny brunette he had seen before a woman that was just a little shorter than his previous form stood there. She had extremely long red hair that went down past her waist. She was very pretty and Minato couldn't remember meeting anyone like her before.
"What are you staring at?" she asked with her eyes narrowed.
"Huh? Oh nothing I was just trying to remember where I had heard the name Uzumaki from." He admitted a bit sheepishly.
"We were at the academy together, I'm pretty sure we graduated the same year but I'm not sure." She said thoughtfully as she flung a strand of red over her shoulder.
And then it clicked. "Tomato." He said out loud without meaning to.
Her eyes narrowed as she snapped her head to look at him, Minato couldn't help the involuntary step back. "What did you call me?" she demanded in a hiss.
"I'm sorry I didn't mean to say that out loud I was just connecting the dots." She took a threatening step forward and he took another step back. "I don't think you look like a tomato at all, I think your hair's beautiful." The words spilled out of his mouth so fast he wasn't exactly sure what he had said.
She paused in her advance but continued to glare at him. After another moment of glaring with Minato's hands held up in the universal symbol of surrender, she took another step forward and poked him in the chest. "You better watch your step." She warned before turning around and walking down the tunnel.
He now knew how Jiraiya felt when he pissed off Tsunade; he didn't know women could be so frightening. Once he had said her old nickname out loud it all came back to him, the brilliant red hair didn't hurt either seeing as how he had never seen another shade like it. She had been a loud and violent child, often calling him girly and flaky. She was right, they had graduated together but had been split up and he couldn't recall seeing her since.
Minato jogged until he caught up with her. "So, uh, what have you been up to since the academy?" he asked hoping to get on her good side again. There was a reason her name had been changed from tomato to hot blooded habanero.
She glanced at him out of the side of her eye. "Actually I've been training for the most part, this is one of the few missions I've been on since I was made jonin." She said thoughtfully.
"Really? What have you been training for?" he asked. It was odd that a jonin wouldn't be sent on many missions especially during war time.
"Oh, that's classified sorry sunshine." She said with a strained smile.
Minato knew when not to push, especially if it was classified so he changed the subject. "Sunshine?" he asked with a raised eyebrow.
She turned to him and gave him a thousand watt smile. "Your hair is so yellow and spiky that it's like the sun."
He chuckled again as they kept walking and talking. He was surprised at how easy conversation flowed between them; usually he could only have a real conversation with men or older women. Women his age or younger were impossible to talk to because all they did was giggle and blush, some were even so forward as to hang onto him or try to kiss him. It was very hard to remain polite in situations like that.
After another hour of walking Minato was getting tired, after he had been discovered he had been forced to stay awake and it was starting to catch up with him. "How long does this tunnel go for?" he asked.
"All the way past the border, about another day from here." She said absently as she slowed down to a stand. "Think we should make camp?"
"Sounds good to me." He said with a smile as he sat down right there in the middle of the tunnel cross legged.
She followed suit and pulled two ration bars out of her weapons pack, handing one of them to him. He took it and immediately began munching on it. He looked around at the part of the passage they decided to rest in. it was a dirt tunnel and didn't hold much prospect for a comfy sleep. It didn't look like Uzumaki had brought anything for sleeping on either because she was glaring at the ground too.
After he finished the rations bar he laid back on the rough ground and using his arms for a pillow as he folded them behind his head. It wasn't comfortable by any means but it was the best he could do. Before closing his eyes he glanced over to see Uzumaki squirming on her patch of hard pact dirt trying to get comfortable. He closed his eyes, willing for sleep to take over him. But just as he was about to succumb he heard a shuffling noise and felt a weight on his stomach.
He peeked an eye open to see a head full of red hair lying comfortably on his stomach. "Comfortable are you?" he asked with a raised eyebrow.
"No, but it'll have to do." Uzumaki said as she reached over and shut off their lantern leaving them in complete darkness. He chuckled and closed his eyes again; this girl had absolutely no sense of humility. "Hey! Pillows don't laugh." She protested.
He snorted. "Yes mam." He mumbled and received a poke to the ribs because apparently pillows aren't allowed to speak either. Out of all the girls he had ever met, this one by far was the most interesting.