Suzu: this chapter might want to be read in conjunction with some earlier chapters, particularly 1, 6, and some of the turning point chapters.


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There's an image in her soul. It's almost like a memory, tucked behind her heart, to the left of her peripheral vision, felt so deeply that she doesn't want it to be true. It's almost like a fantasy, a deep thrill that starts off the way only a kunoichi's fairytale could start.

Minato on the battlefield.

No, not Minato. Konoha's Yellow Flash.

His senses heightened, ready to explode with carefully repressed power. She loves that moment before he turns into a streaking yellow flash, and that's the afterimage burned on the back of everyone's eyelids.

Hers.

In those moments, she feels it's almost safe to love him. She wants to be there with him, fighting alongside, not a damsel.

But there are so many worse things than being a damsel.

His eyes are impossibly blue, a molten, searing pool that looks across enemy lines at her. There's a roaring silence that is deafening when she tries to muffle it out by clogging her ears. The roar comes from inside, and suddenly, it's outside, too.

Her fantasy sours, the thrill bleeding dry and coating her tongue with an ashy aftertaste.

She doesn't want to test if this is real. It could be real, ohgodohgoditcouldbe.

Because he is something like a hero, looking across the divide at her, and she is something like a—

Well, she is…

You know.

Fill that vessel with love.

No. It's not safe to love.

Fill that vessel with love.

Yes, she thought she would try, take a leap of faith, so carefully, because she has friends, she has a village, to help her. Sometimes, these things take a village. Kushina learns to cope with that vulnerability because vulnerabilities are a fact of life and she did not come this far to back away without a fight, without trying. Yet, somewhere in the back of her heart, there's an image tucked into her soul, so deeply she doesn't want to acknowledge it, but she knows.

It's not quite safe. Never quite safe.

Just because you are in love doesn't mean you can love that person the way they deserve to be loved. Love is a gamble. Love is a decision, a choice. But monsters don't have the capacity to make that choice. A monster that is horribly, awfully in love—but still a monster. This is not right, doesn't make sense, and she wants better for him. He deserves better.

Fill that vessel with love.

As if.

She tried.

She's trying, damn it.

She's dying, trying.

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Intermissions 50

– end of jounin exam –


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Minato opens his eyes.

If the events that unfolded in the night are like a lucid nightmare, crystal clear and troubling, then the present is like a hazy dream at dawn, bathed in golden light and blurred in the last bits of consciousness that Minato's brain can muster.

His ears are ringing. He imagines that, after the rows of trees came crashing down—ancient sycamores splintering like toothpicks—the resounding silence is, at first, like a soft prayer, gradually lifting up new birdsong in harmony with the idyllic scene of the new dawn. The daybreak's light scatters on the newly cleared expanse, where detritus, roots, and brambles have been blown clear away from the hurricane's eye.

He realizes that his body is as horizontal as the tree he was formerly perched on.

Laying there on the ground, looking up overhead, he sees shinobi sailing down from still-rooted trees like blurred leaf shadows (appropriate, Minato thinks vaguely), sprinkling the clearing, swarming like ants, shouting barrier seals and other unknown jutsu.

Two masked figures approach and pick up his body, though he can't feel the elevation of his legs or his arms. It doesn't matter. Several sun-haloed faces, some masked and some not, come and go from his view. People are mouthing concerned words, but most of the blurred figures don't spare him a glance.

As hands prop him onto a makeshift stretcher, Minato dredges up the last of his energy and tries to catch a glimpse of the figure he fought, of the nightmarish beast that seems so out of odds with the rays of daylight.

And, like some absurd fairytale, the dawn has indeed exorcised the foul creature. Its form is unmoving, lying limply and facing the bright sky.

As Minato's consciousness fades away, he watches the dense chakra fade away to reveal red hair and a battered, pallid face.

Maybe he's hallucinating, Minato thinks deliriously.

He closes his eyes.

Opens them again.

Kushina. The truth dawns.

This moment, bathed in golden light, is the most awful fairytale ending Minato can imagine.

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tbc