Dear Diary,

I can't cope.

My optimism has come back to haunt me. My folly makes me feel deep shame.

Kushina's been driving me up the wall, which is in and of itself nothing new.

She's been driving me up the wall since the day she beat up Chouza after he called her a tomato when I was seven. It has been a very long and thorough process, to the point where I hadn't even realised how much up the wall she was driving me until I got to the top and realised there is no more wall to be driven up.

Now, for context's sake, I've been having fangirl issues since before I hit puberty in any meaningful way (well, Jiraiya-sensei is under the impression that there isn't a meaningful way of hitting puberty without rupturing someone's hymen as soon as you get your first boner, but I'm going to wisely ignore that because my sanity can only take so much and, as previously mentioned, there is no wall left to be driven up anymore), and Kushina, in her pregnancy-hormones-fuelled rage, decided to do something about it.

I would just like to reiterate that Kushina is insane, and that hasn't changed just because we had a shotgun wedding three days ago because Miko-chan found out about the pregnancy and declared that the child couldn't be born in the "bosom of sin" (which I think is a bit too late, really, considering our profession) and so she'd roped Yoshino-chan in the planning process, and somehow Inoichi overheard and declared himself one of the "Wedding Planning Widows".

We're already married, first of all.

And secondly, none of them are widows.

Shikaku wisely pointed out that it was best to shut up about this or they would become widows to prove a point, and because the world went mad some time when I was five, and Miko-chan and Yoshino-chan make an unholy alliance, this made a scary amount of sense.

The wedding was a sham, by the way.

The WPW planned it for three weeks, three weeks in which I woke up at the crack of dawn, made Kushina breakfast, wanted to kill myself as I read report after report filled with pedantic griping and border patrol issues – and by issues, I mean that Sawago-san doesn't like Ishi-san ever since Ishi-san's cousin looked at Morino-san's chin mole the wrong way in a routine census check and labelled him "possessed of an unfortunate facial deformity" in his report, which is more gossip than I've heard since I was at ANBU HQ after the head of our unit gave birth to the Daimyo's twin sister's ex-husband's dog's child. Suffice it to say, I still have no idea how much of that story was true, but as previously stated, the world is insane so anything's possible –, came home and got kicked out of the house by Kushina because she was "planning something spicy, dattebane!" and I wasn't to interrupt (and I should have. I really really should have), crashed onto Shikaku's couch while Shikaku muttered over his paperwork as Head of Jounin (sometimes, when I find time in the day that isn't filled with work and inefficient logistics reports and clan-civilian council meetings and pregnant women complaining about lactation and bowel issues, I'm almost sorry I've cursed my best friend with paperwork. Almost.), got a few hours of sleep until Kushina came bursting through the door and dragged me to our apartment, tried to go to sleep again but had to deal with horny Kushina instead, (which is almost but not the same as angry Kushina, and is only a shade away from homicidal Kushina), and then get woken up in the middle of the night to forage across Konoha for "chocolate-covered tuna", "oranges-stuffed squid" and that one memorable time when it was "chicken brain cooked in that thing that tastes like mint but it isn't dattebane!"

Rinse and repeat.

The wedding that they managed to plan – between answering Itachi-chan's increasingly panicky questions about gestation periods, staving off Inoichi's "help", recruiting Kakashi-kun as the flower girl and him swearing "never again", and some deer escaping the Nara forest and wreaking havoc on the fish market – was about as coherent as you would expect the thing to be given that it had absolutely anything to do with Inoichi.

They'd invited everyone we knew, but hadn't told anyone why they'd been invited. They booked a venue that didn't exist (and hadn't since a particularly enthusiastic Mitarashi Anko and Maito Gai had decided 'casual sparring' meant 'no-holds-barred warfare', which I'm sure is a mistake anyone can make). The catering arrived for three hundred more guests than showed up, but at least we gave that to the orphanage and the Bachelor district so it didn't go completely to waste. There was a pigeon invasion some time between when Kushina realised what was happening and the cake was being cut. Many a brave warriors were felled. There are more photos of the event without me than there are with me.

Because, crucially, they hadn't told either me or Kushina that this was happening. Because if they had asked, we would've told them we got married ages ago but had just forgotten to file the paperwork. Because just before I got the time to, Rin-chan had—

Anyway.

We signed a piece of paper at the end, but Kushina refused to look at me for days after it was over, and I think Shikaku had to forge my signature because I was passed out into a cup of coffee that Hana-chan had been kind enough to prepare for me. Except I'm pretty sure she didn't use milk. And I'm too scared to ask what she used.

There are some things I would rather not know.

But anyway, this was about the madness that was Kushina and her "spicy" idea to literally sprinkle hot chili peppers in every single one of my fangirls' underwear drawer so that they "stopped thinking with their girl-dicks". Or so Inoichi informed me as I twitched my way into an actual aneurysm and had to be hospitalised when I came back from my five minute lunchbreak to seventeen stacks of paperwork more than when I had left.

I don't even know how she knew which ones were the fangirls.

Miko-chan says that she's been infiltrating their ranks ever since April, and Kushina triumphantly showed me a book filled with addresses meticulously penned down in alphabetic order that she'd procured using her "supreme sneak skills and godly gifts of persuasion dattebane!", which is a whole other box of crazy to unpack.

I calmly told her from my hospital bed that I was a fully functional adult capable of handling some preteen and teenage zeal. Kushina reminded me that stalking and manhandling were a crime. I calmly pointed out that she had done the exact same thing, with additional breaking and entering and sabotage. Kushina then decided that that meant that I wanted her to be in jail. I calmly told her that this was untrue. Kushina whacked me over the head, burst into tears, blamed me for causing the start of all three shinobi wars and every single blight and plague that had ever ravaged the known world, and then stomped out of the hospital room, marched straight over to T&I, and forced the prison guards to lock her into maximum security.

My wife is insane.

So I had to deal with the paperwork of her underwear sabotage causing mass hospitalisation, panic, and a whole nineteen pages of a complaint letter from some grandmother about the "vile degeneration of the youth of today". On top of the release forms for my wife, concerned letters from the Daimyo about my wife being in prison, Jiraiya-sensei waggling his eyebrows at me and calling the handcuffs kinky of all things, and compulsory therapy sessions for all the people in T&I Kushina traumatised with her personal brand of insanity.

I thought writing this down might help. It has not.

Jiraiya-sensei's left this book on my desk, and he said to read it in my own time, and I laughed like a mad person because what even is "my own time"? I haven't had time to myself since my face got chiselled into the Hokage Monument!

Yours in incredible exasperation,

Namikaze Minato