A/N: I wanted to explore what Minato must have gone through, thinking he'd lost one of his Genin, in Catch Your Breath by Lang Noi. Permission to post this has been given. There is a Minato POV in both chapter 49 and 54 of CYB and I really liked what I read. I can only hope to be as good, really.
Minato is supposedly the fastest man alive.
But he wasn't fast enough to save Obito from being crushed under tons of rocks. He wasn't fast enough to save Kakashi from being taken and tortured for information. He wasn't fast enough to save Kei from losing the person she'd always done her best to protect. He wasn't fast enough to stop Iwa from getting their hands on his team.
The fastest man alive isn't all that fast, he's still too slow.
He blames himself, at least a little, despite anything Kushina tells him about how it isn't his fault. He's, well, he feels a bit lost. He failed his team, how can he look them in the eye, the two he has left? He wants more than anything to go back to that moment, to go back and kill those three Iwa-nin responsible for his loss, before they can harm his team, but he knows it is impossible.
The only thing he can do, is protect what he has left, and make sure that it will never happen again. They don't get to die before him. He swears it.
That was probably the worst part of hearing that he was about to lose another of his team, possibly even all of it.
He'd panicked and raced towards them, he'd prayed he'd make it, he'd moved as fast as he could have, under the circumstances. He'd been terrified that he wouldn't make it.
Sometimes he dreams that he hadn't.
Sometimes he dreams of arriving in the middle of a carnage, in the middle of death and loss and the lifeless bodies of those he had been supposed to protect. Sometimes he dreams that he walks into it, he dreams that his feet refuses to move any faster, he dreams that he knowingly is too slow, and he dreams of failing his team.
Minato is supposedly the fastest man alive, and had he not made it then, it would have been entirely his fault.