"Are you sure about this?" Kushina leaned over her husband who was sitting on the floor of their apartment cross-legged, focusing all his attention on drawing a seal on his left palm. He moved the brush soaked in black ink elegantly, making every stroke as precise as it was humanly possible. For the untrained eyes, it would have looked like he was practicing calligraphy, but in reality, he was working on something much more delicate than that.
Minato stayed still for a moment to avoid the slightest tremble of his right hand as he answered. "Absolutely."
"But are you sure you're sure?" Kushina tucked a strand of her long red hair firmly behind her ear, fearing she would tickle him accidentally with her usually way too disobedient locks.
"Mhm," the blond offered a faint humming as an answer. He drew a few more slow, thoughtful lines with his brush before he gently put his tool down on the floor and raised his arm high with his palm facing Kushina. "It's done," he whispered with a hint of pride in his voice.
Kushina leaned closer to be able to inspect the carefully drawn mark on his palm. She narrowed her eyes as if she was trying to find a mistake in it, but every detail was perfectly executed. Minato's work seemed flawless as always, although she had doubts about the theory behind this new seal. She straightened up from her hunching position and folded her arms under her breasts, subconsciously giving away her uneasiness.
"We should think it through once more, Minato. If you mess up, you can easily get stuck in the past, ya know. And what will I do then, he?"
Minato stood up and ceremoniously took off his Hokage cloak, wrapping it around Kushina's petite figure. "I, Namikaze Minato the Yondaime Hokage, officially declare you, Uzumaki Kushina, to be my successor as the Godaime Hokage," he said playfully.
"This is not funny," Kushina pouted and gently slapped his hand away. She reached for the cloak around her shoulders to give it back to its owner when Minato stopped her by putting his hand on top of hers.
"Don't give it back. I'm leaving it in your care until I return," he smiled at her tenderly.
Kushina's eyes widened. "What are you saying? You're the Hokage, you can't run around without your cloak just like that, ya know."
"Kushina, I'm about to go back in time to the era of the Second Hokage. What do you think would happen if I'm appearing out of nowhere, wearing a cloak with 'Fourth Hokage' written on my back? It would be a disaster."
"That's true," Kushina pursed her lips in annoyance as though she was a child still enrolled in school, angry with someone giving a better answer to the teacher than her. "But I still don't understand why you think this is a good idea in the first place."
"I need to talk to the Nidaime about the Hiraishin. He was the one who created this technique, but as he's not alive anymore, I don't really have any other option but to travel back in time. But you know that, too," he said calmly, taking a wisp of Kushina's hair between his fingers.
"But I heard about that technique which lets you bring back the dead and –"
"I won't use that technique. It's immoral," he cut her off without any hint of anger in his voice despite looking sternly into her violet eyes.
"And time travel is dangerous! We don't know if the seal would even work, nobody tried to modify it like this before," she pleaded.
"How do you know? Maybe they just did their time travel so well that nobody noticed," he winked at her with a small laugh.
"Minato, you're not taking this seriously, are you? Control can slip out of your hands so easily. What if you accidentally change something and screw up the timeline? What if you can't come back as we planned? What if you die before you even get there?" she yelled with her eyes shut closed, her voice becoming more desperate with each of her unanswered questions.
"Kushina," Minato placed his thumb on Kushina's lips to silence her, caressing them lovingly. "We talked this through a hundred times already. Trust me."
Kushina opened her teary eyes and stared into Minato's sparkling cerulean blue ones. His gaze emitted confidence, love, and tranquility at the same time, and Kushina couldn't help but put her faith in this man standing in front of her.
She knew the plan by heart as they had planned it all together from the first steps to the last. They had spent months researching a technique that could make time travel possible, and she was the one who came up with the idea of modifying one of the existing time-space seals instead of trying to find something already established. When they finally stumbled upon a seal that seemed to be perfect, Minato started tweaking the lines of the seal to be able to use it for traveling back in time. He sketched at least a thousand versions before he could finally create a promising one.
Kushina couldn't really help with the modifying process as she wasn't even near to the genius level of Minato, even though she was the one who had taught him the art of sealing. He had asked her to verify the usability of the completed seal though. She had spent days analyzing every single detail from the placement of the signs used to the length and thickness of each stroke, but she couldn't find any flaws. In theory, the seal was perfect.
After Minato managed to create a theoretically functional seal, they planned the whole journey out. The basic idea was to go back a little more than 30 years into the past, to the period not long before Senju Tobirama, the Second Hokage fell in battle. To explain it shortly, the strategy was that Minato would find him, talk to him, erase his memories, and come back to his own time without changing anything significant while in the past. Simple, but incredibly risky.
At first, Kushina was very supportive, but as the day when they would put their plan into motion was approaching, she started questioning herself. She didn't see it as such a revolutionary idea as she had seen it before. Minato always reassured her that nothing bad would happen, but she had doubts now. The more she dwelled on the seal and its mechanism the more unanswered questions popped up.
They still weren't certain about a few things. Firstly, they didn't know how it would exactly work. They figured Minato's body would just get transferred to another time, disappearing completely from his own timeline, but they were yet to find out if this theory stood its ground. Secondly, they had absolutely no idea how the current time would be affected. Let's say, Minato would spend a week in the past, but would a week pass in his own timeline, too? Or would time just freeze and all Kushina could experience would only be Minato disappearing and suddenly reappearing again in a fragment of a second? They had argued about this quite a lot, as in Minato's opinion time would just stand still, but Kushina believed otherwise.
To tell the truth, it was what scared Kushina the most. She wanted Minato to be right with his theory about the freezing time because she didn't want to spend even a minute without him, knowing he was in the past and she wouldn't be able to help him at all. She didn't want time to continue without Minato being next to her.
Besides, she didn't want the village to stay without its Hokage for days or even weeks.
And the third, but the gravest worry of hers was that Minato would inevitably disrupt the flow of time. Even if he did absolutely nothing and would erase everyone's memory he came in contact with in the past, his appearance would already cause a tiny wave in the endless ocean called time. She didn't fear being ceased out of existence because she couldn't even wrap her mind around that possibility, but she was very much afraid of somehow losing their relationship together. Even the smallest misstep could cause big changes in the long run, and that terrified her, even though she wasn't someone to be scared easily.
"Are you sure you can come back with the same seal?" she voiced one of her many insecurities.
"If the seal works and I do end up in the past, it is usable for coming back, too. I promise," he gave her another comforting smile.
She let out a small sigh and grabbed Minato's shoulders, looking into his eyes tenaciously. "Don't you dare die on me."
"I would never. You would just travel back in time to kill me yourself, right?" he tilted his head to the side in amusement.
"You bet!"
Minato didn't answer, just leaned forward to plant an affectionate kiss on Kushina's pouty lips.
Author's Note: Thank you so much for reading through the prologue, I hope you enjoyed it! Upcoming chapters will be longer for sure. I'm really excited about this story, and I plan on taking my time to polish the chapters, so I'm not sure about the update schedule, but quality over quantity, I guess.
And just some quick info: English is not my first language, so I apologize for any mistakes I've made, I'm trying really hard but yeah. Feel free to point the mistakes out so I can correct them!