He can feel the moment they're finally gone, Dad and Kushina, and he can ease down a little. Slips a tail around Sasuke, lets it coil tight around his knee, and is shocked clean away from the lurking anxiety attack when Sasuke elbows him in the head.
"What? It was all right before!" Naruto yelps in bewilderment and growing anger.
"That was before," Sasuke says.
Before Naruto violated him. "Sorry," Naruto says, and he is sorry, he's so sorry he doesn't know how to exist around it, but he's also sick and tired of having to be sorry. "It's not fair," he says, randomly and forlornly. "Shikamaru doesn't feel it like this."
"Shikamaru's human."
A shifter mind is made for the bond, completed by the bond. A human mind remains largely unaffected by it, unable to perceive it.
"Was it really," Naruto says vaguely, "Kakashi really brought you here?"
And Sasuke's mind goes on lockdown, so sudden and so hard, it's like he's locked himself out of it. Everything inside Sasuke's skull is black noise and his voice comes brittle, sounds like truth for the first time, now that Naruto can no longer tell if it is. "Yes."
"That's –"
"Keep yourself the fuck out of my head."
Naruto makes an I'm trying type gesture, around an incoherent impression of an arm around his middle that, going by the hair brushing his forehead, is probably Kakashi's. "You're kind of leaking."
Of course he is. He's repressing present emotion so hard, memories are bleeding through instead because something has to, that's the nature of the bond.
"Why?" Naruto says.
"I don't know. Shut the fuck up about it."
"He'll be in trouble with Orochimaru."
"Yes," Sasuke says, in that dead voice he has sometimes, the worst one. "That's why your father really wants us north, isn't it, to keep me away from Orochimaru."
"I guess," Naruto says stupidly, caught on the idea that he – well, he knows Orochimaru, of course he knows Orochimaru. But he doesn't know him like this: the sound of his laughter, rough and dry like old papers, the complicated smell of his clothes that comes from trying very hard to wash out any incriminating smells. His touch, his trust, his threat. Battered wife syndrome, he thinks dizzily, can kids have battered wife syndrome?
This time Sasuke looks ready to vomit, and Naruto wants to touch him and if he does Sasuke will vomit, and Naruto has done this to them.
To this needed, suddenly-alien person that Naruto feels like he knows, the same way he knows his own body, but didn't know this about.
He's barely aware of muttering, "I'm going to kill him."
He wouldn't have expected that to be what makes Sasuke finally explode. He lashes out in one of those uncontrollable movements that usually only happen to Naruto, tableware crashing to the floor. "You will do nothing of the kind!" He's so young suddenly and so breakable after all, with violence trembling just under his skin.
"What do you want, then?" Naruto yells back, wretched and young and violent too, and his voice breaks over Kyuubi's fangs. "What do you want me to do, nothing?!" He feels like a child again, when you need everything so very intensely and everyone has the power to refuse you.
"I wanted you to do nothing from the start!" Sasuke's breathing hard but he's not screaming, his voice is so much edge it'd break if he screamed. "But it's too late now and you're not taking anything else!"
"You said," Naruto says, "you said that I could." The words are the tightrope on which he's trying to walk across the abyss between them.
Bite me now. Sasuke climbed into his lap, Sasuke tugged down the neckline of his own shirt, Sasuke pulled Naruto mouth to his shoulder. Bite here.
"There's no point talking about it now," Sasuke says, looking straight ahead and not at Naruto at all. "What's done is done."
"I know," Naruto says, almost can't say because his throat is closing too tight for air. What's done is done, but the talking about it, the picking at the scab – Naruto can't stop. Which is a big part of what got them here, and maybe a big part of what'll get them out. "So if, if you'd known what it meant. You wouldn't have. You wouldn't have agreed."
Sasuke does look at them him, that look like an incision. His are the sort of eyes that stab and cut and pin people. He's so very much someone who could never be ignored, but then again so is Naruto.
"I would still have had to."
Naruto biting him, Naruto's mind in his, is not what Sasuke would choose last in the world.
"You'd have done it anyway," Sasuke says quietly, the anger fading, coming glacial instead of volcanic.
For a moment the world goes white around him, nuclear winter. "I wouldn't have forced you."
Sasuke has to know that's true, has to feel it, but he's clearly doubtful. Scornful, even. "You'd have died."
"Yeah."
"You're such a fucking child, if you're really suicidal then –"
"I'm not. I'm glad I didn't die, I'm really glad, and yeah it's selfish and I'm sorry about how it happened but I didn't want to die!"
He's breathing hard, so hard he's a little lightheaded with it, and Sasuke looks set to explode only it turns into an implosion instead, a lifetime of rage and betrayal turned in on himself.
It's devastating, to push Sasuke too far. And all the same you have to push, or you'll never get anywhere with him.
"Fuck," Naruto says, dropping his head into his hands. Cold sweat is breaking painfully across the hot skin of his scalp. "I thought – I really trusted him. I thought I was all grown up but I… I trusted him." He's not even sure, really, if he's talking about Dad or Kakashi.
"I know," Sasuke says, again in that way like he understands perfectly, that way he's always had.
"Shit," Naruto says. "Shit shit shit."
"Yeah," Sasuke breathes. "People are shit. I guess if you're dumb enough to trust them it's your own fault."
"I want to trust people."
When Naruto curls a tail around his calf, Sasuke doesn't pull away. It seems they both feel shipwrecked.
"I did say you're an idiot."
Naruto sticks his tongue out, feels hopeless enough for that, stripped down to childish essentials, and amazingly feels better. "I prefer cynically challenged."
Amazingly, too, the corner of Sasuke's mouth quirks. Bitterly, in a tiny movement, but it quirks.
"It would be better to go north," Sasuke says eventually.
"Mmh," says Naruto. It would give them something to fight besides each other. More importantly, it will keep Sasuke safely away from Orochimaru. "Shit, when you'd rather be in a war zone…fuck."
"I wasn't lying," Sasuke says. "I'll slay your demons. I don't mind."
"I know." He rests his head on his arms, which are sprawled all over the table. Through his fringe he sees Sasuke's beautiful restless fingers, which have gone instinctively to the bread knife. And it would be so horrifyingly simple, to stand up. To tip Sasuke forward over the table, trap him between the table and Naruto's body, caged in by Naruto's arms. To rest his face against the back of Sasuke's neck, to fill his mouth with it. To… He swallows, his mouth suddenly full of saliva and the throbbing of his cock echoed by every pulse point in his body.
He wants to lick the inside of Sasuke's elbows, an irrational desire that eats away the rest of the world.
"Sasuke," he whines, for distraction. "Say something."
Sasuke looks him in the eye, contact like a flashburn, and Naruto's hands are prickling with claws and with desire to touch.
"Please."
"Naruto," Sasuke says in an extremely measured voice. "Being a control freak is cute when it makes you colour code your notes. It's not cute when it makes you rather like killing people. Don't test me." He sounds like he's quoting someone, probably Orochimaru, as if finding his own words would just be too much effort, right now.
"You have to give me something."
"I don't owe you jack shit."
But there is something, whether Sasuke intends it or not. The memory's blurry with adrenaline, and of someone large reaching forward and Sasuke – little Sasuke, he can't be more than six or seven – ducking closer instead of ducking away. Knifing the man so there's splatter all over Sasuke's face, in his eyes and nose and mouth, blood everywhere and thicker things too, pulsing out of the man's stomach, which is wide open.
It really should make Naruto stop having painful sexual fantasies about him.
Sasuke stands up. "I'm going back to bed." He does look tired, with the bond like a chain through his mind, dragging Naruto like a loadstone. With the seal cracked open but not gone, its broken edges a bleeding scar across his thoughts.
"I want to go with you."
"I don't care."
He doesn't try to stop Naruto following him back up to Naruto's room, doesn't react to Naruto standing just inside the doorway, staring at him taking off his shoes and the huge jumper. He lies down on the bed, curled tight under the cover, and is immediately lax and heavy with imminent sleep.
It's an airless minute until his breathing evens out completely, and Naruto feels like a stone rolling downhill, taking a shaky step forward and then another and another. He's not going to do anything. He's not. He's just going to see if Sasuke's really asleep. He's not going to – the mattress dips under his weight, but Sasuke doesn't react. His skin is soft and sweet under Naruto's hand, his hair thick and even softer, slick as kitten fur. Naruto's breathing rasps past his open lips, so shallow he's lightheaded again, and this is sick. The only reason Sasuke's not waking up is he's used to being molested in his sleep.
Naruto's done sick things before. Up north, in the war, two days ago he was there doing horrible things.
He has killed people, and still this is the worst thing he's ever done, because this is something he does to Sasuke, with no excuses left.
Slowly, carefully, he lies down on his side, slipping his arm around Sasuke. At first he can't breathe at all, inching closer and closer, until Sasuke's spine is cutting into his chest, like his body has become the sheath for a blade. He curls himself around Sasuke, nose in the short hairs at the back of Sasuke's head, knees bent to fit inside the curve of Sasuke's legs drawn up tight against his body.
His face is hot and tight, burnt by the knowledge that Sasuke wouldn't permit this, if Naruto had given him any choice.
Even now he feels that he'll die if he doesn't slide his hand lower, where it can undo Sasuke's trousers, has that numb slow-mo feeling that accompanies a death wound, but it is just a feeling. He knows it's just a feeling, and tries to believe it.
"I'm sorry," he whispers, intertwining his fingers with Sasuke's, where they're curled in almost a fist just under Sasuke's chin.
This is how subhuman filth acts, this is how a selfish, brutal monster behaves.
Hatred has never made him act like this.
He's so hard he hurts again – not again, not really: it stopped for a handful seconds after he'd come, but he was hard again almost the instant he was out of Sasuke – a dull pain that spreads over his skin until it envelops his whole body like a corrosive burn. If Sasuke woke up now, there would be no hiding this from him.
But Sasuke sleeps.
His breath puffs warm over Naruto's knuckles, his heart beats steadily against Naruto's wrist.
Hatred, he thinks wildly, has never narrowed his world so much, erased everything else until only one person existed, one compulsion.
The tshirt Sasuke's wearing is thin and rather worn, revealing visible ribs and the mark where Kyuubi's fangs went in, just above the trench of Sasuke's clavicle. Naruto's jaws ache at the sight, he bites at the inside of his own cheeks until his mouth tastes of blood but it's all wrong, what he needs is to lick Sasuke's skin, thin and tearable with the blood so close to the surface he could almost taste it without even biting.
"Sasuke," he whispers.
Sasuke, it emerges, still dreams in Japanese. Sasuke, who looked past Naruto at the broken bed and sneered, how is this any different? He mumbles, "Yamete."
Jesus, Sasuke…! It makes Naruto go red all over, not with blood this time but with Kyuubi's energy. Sasuke's hand, strong and calloused, suddenly feels small in his. Naruto remembers another instance of being a monster, when the bond compulsion was first starting to drag at him and Konohamaru had abruptly gone from bragging about his martial arts technique to demanding, do you love him more than me?
Naruto had said, it's not a competition, because the alternative was saying, yes.
And Naruto spent last night on the floor, with his heart beating until he felt bruised on the inside of his ribs, and eventually he falls asleep too.
He wakes up with the smell of Sasuke thick in his nose, a smell of belonging and happiness, with Sasuke warm and safe and close and – elbowing him sleepily in the nose. Naruto rolls away with a grumble, clutching at the mess on his face. Still transfixed by Sasuke, who shuffles onto his back and almost takes out his own eye with a clumsy knuckle.
"Naruto," says Dad.
"Cubbie," Grandma Tsunade interrupts. "And Sasuke. I'd like to check up on the bond."
"Mmh, sure," Naruto mumbles, distracted.
Sasuke's face is flushed with sleep, and just – just this.
His eyes are perfectly clear though. "No," he says sharply.
Tsunade lifts an eyebrow. "In view of the circumstances, especially given the seal –"
"No," Sasuke repeats. "You can try to force me or not. I consent to nothing."
Naruto thinks of Kabuto, and shudders.
Dad puts a hand on Tsunade's arm. "But you're still willing to go north and deal with the demons?"
"Yes." Sasuke's clearly resentful at the admittance.
"Come here, then, Naruto," Tsunade says.
"Actually," Dad says, "maybe we should take this to my office. Why don't you join us when you're ready, Naruto?"
And if this was real, this thing between him and Sasuke, if things had gone right – Naruto could have sighed then, and fallen back on the bed close, close to Sasuke. Could have smiled at him, and kissed him, and –
"What the fuck were you doing, anyway?" Sasuke grumbles.
"I fell asleep," Naruto says. "I was tired too."
Sasuke, surprisingly, seems to accept this.
And so Naruto has to add, "I wanted to be close to you."
Sasuke makes a dismissive gesture. "What else is new."
Naruto manages a weak grin, and then hears himself asking, in a blithe stupid voice, "Have you ever slept with someone because you wanted to?"
"Sure," Sasuke says at last, and Naruto stops breathing. "It wasn't – it doesn't have to be a big deal."
"But it would," Naruto says. "With us."
"Yeah."
"And you don't want to."
"No."
"Yeah," Naruto says, resting his chin on his knees, locking his arms around his legs. "Okay. I get that." He swallows, and keeps swallowing for a bit. Sasuke looks at him, silent. Eventually Naruto says, "These other people. You didn't trust them."
"One of them," Sasuke says eventually. It's obviously a painful admittance, but one that pride doesn't allow him to shy away from.
"This is – different."
"Yes," Sasuke says, quick and cutting. "Mainly because I'm not sleeping with you."
"Eh," Naruto says, hitting him on the arm and not letting his fingers linger, "that's what you think. You'll come around. I mean, all this, who could resist?" And then in a small voice, stumbling over the words, quickly like when you walk over broken glass, "Is it because of last night? Or wouldn't you – if I hadn't…"
"If that's all you want, then go ahead." Sasuke has gone listless and lax, half-lying against the headboard. He wouldn't struggle now. His eyes are dead eyes, thinking of England eyes. Weltschmerz eyes.
And Naruto has to sit very, very carefully, keep himself still, or he will rupture. "I want you," he says, helplessly honest. Meaning it so much it feels like he's speaking a foreign language, one he can't rely on, can't really express himself in. "Not just – I mean, god. I want you."
"I'm not – suddenly going to want to," Sasuke says slowly, strangely tentatively.
"I know," Naruto says, and the words stick in his throat but he scrapes them out because he owes Sasuke that. He owes himself that. "I mean that sucks. I mean, that sucks for me. But this is my problem. Not yours. I just need to deal with it. And I'm going to."
"You're going to stop wanting me, just like that?"
"No! I feel how I feel. That won't change, I can't change that. But I don't have to let it – I mean, what I do with it, that's something I decide." Sasuke looks cruel and speculative, and also a bit lost. Then he puts his hand on Naruto's thigh, steady heat and deliberate pressure as he strokes along the inseam of Naruto's trousers, up to the edge of his groin, and Naruto's ears start ringing, that's how hard his pulse is beating. "What the hell are you doing?"
"Evaluating your trustworthiness." His fingers twitch, and he turns it into kneading, knuckles brushing Naruto's erection. Precome soaks through Naruto's underwear. "Don't do anything."
"I – does coming in my pants count as doing something?"
Sasuke snorts, the snort that's his version of a laugh. Lifts his eyebrow and lifts his hand away. "Nah."
"Good," Naruto mutters, closing his eyes because the sight of Sasuke beside him, looking suddenly approachable, is doing nothing to calm him down. "Good."
"Would you still want this," Sasuke asks pensively, "if it wasn't for the bond?"
Naruto can't read his face. "I don't know," he admits. "You – I've always wanted you. But the sex, I don't know."
"Yeah," Sasuke says distantly, distractedly, "okay."
"Hey," Naruto mumbles, resting his forehead against the edge of Sasuke's shoulder, which makes Sasuke stiffen, "I'm not – I always did this!"
"Che." But he allows the touch for a few seconds.
"I guess I should go," Naruto mumbles.
"Mmh," Sasuke says, and Sasuke's still a little sleepy, and at home now after all here in Naruto's room, and he's not going anywhere.
"Okay," Naruto says, and at last tears himself away.
Dad and Tsunade fall quiet when he enters the study. Naruto's sad to be surprised that Dad should stand up and embrace him.
And it should be fine now, a touch other than Sasuke's, it shouldn't burn him anymore.
It doesn't, really. It just feels a little dead.
"Thank god," Dad says, in his private voice, the one that shakes a little even though it's not rhetorically convenient. "Oh thank god." Then when he steps back, hands still on Naruto's shoulders, "You shouldn't still be this desperate."
Naruto shrugs. Tries to smile, and it hurts, sits like a lie on his mouth. "He doesn't want me."
Dad stills. He looks older now, older than Naruto remembers him. "He seemed – all right with you, during breakfast."
What is your life, when you're being seriously asked by your father if you raped someone? Naruto has never particularly wanted to be human, has never understood the recurrent shifter desire to be less, but he wants it now. God, he wants it now.
"He let me," he says at last. "He just didn't want to."
"Tch," Tsunade says. "Don't give me that look." She manhandles Naruto into sitting on the edge of Minato's desk, placing hands coated in green energy on his head. "I'm not denying he's had a hard life, but that doesn't mean he's not a racist sociopath."
"He's not," Naruto argues. "He just – hates everyone."
That's one of the very few things Naruto's ever said about Sasuke that Minato is unequivocally prepared to believe.
"I think," Tsunade says rather shortly, noticeably not denying that Sasuke no doubt hates the exorcists too, "that I'm being as polite as can be expected to someone who crippled my husband."
"Yeah," Naruto says, more quietly but still clearly mutinous, squirming under her examination. "But…"
"I know," Tsunade cuts him off. "I do know."
"Yeah," Naruto says again, but like they're sharing a secret now. That too is Yui's way of drawing people in, though she never smiled like Naruto, who grins so his cheeks are scrunched up until they resemble those of a hamster.
"Everything looks fine," Tsunade decides at last, stepping back. "Reasonably fine. Considering the circumstances."
"Stingy," Naruto says. "I'm great." But he stops in the doorway, looking back at Minato. "About going north. We should go soon."
"Is there doubt?" Minato asks. And there is now, so much doubt. He doesn't actually know Sasuke, who might be more fickle and more cruel than anticipated. It had been a pleasant surprise, never once hoped for, that he'd agree so quickly to exorcise for them.
"No," Naruto says impatiently. "He doesn't – he might not like me very much right now, but as I haven't actually cut off pieces of him, I'm still kind of far and away the better alternative. We both want away from Orochimaru asap."
"I'll make the arrangements," Minato says. "Tomorrow at the latest."
Naruto nods absently, worrying his lip. "About Rock. They'll obviously hate him because, you know. Mist Town. So I thought I should do it. I mean, he could take care of most of the demons, we could sell it to the humans as here, we brought you an exorcist, you've been trying to exterminate us for years and you venerate them, and they never did shit for you but now we've brought you a fucking crusader – but yeah, anyway, that's not going to go over so well with Rock, yeah? So I figured I'd better handle that. Get them in line too, so they're not all chafng at the bit after being assimilated much sooner than they were counting on."
"Learn to shield," Minato says. "And then we'll work from there."
Then when Naruto's gone – drawn, Minato thinks uncharitably, to Sasuke like a fish with a hook through the gills and not having the sense to mind – he turns to Tsunade. "Do you imagine he could really exorcise?"
"Possibly," Tsunade says. "I wouldn't have thought it before, but… Well, whatever his other failings, Sasuke certainly doesn't lack for power. With what he contributes to the bond, Naruto might actually be able to heal himself faster than the exorcist energy can burn him. If Sasuke shields him, it's not unfeasible."
"He would," Minato decides to believe. He let me, Naruto said, and Minato thinks again of Sasuke in his office, years ago, telling him to send Naruto away. Of Sasuke at breakfast, closing his fingers with no fuss and no hesitation around Kyuubi's wrist.
"And," Tsunade goes on, going through his papers, "you believe he'll go north as some kind of demon slaying PR ambassador for us?"
The way Sasuke stared at Kakashi yesterday, with the dead eyes of someone murdered – Minato sympathises, of course, especially in view of how that's the way Sasuke's looked at his own family for years, but it also means Sasuke won't be loyal to the exorcists. And he might not harbour any love for shifters, but… "I think Naruto put it best," Minato says, remembering a tiny Naruto scrambling onto his lap and scrunching up his face, trying to sound scornful as he paraphrased, "'He doesn't have hobbies, he has a calling.' Killing demons is, as far as I can tell, the only thing he's interested in. I doubt it matters to him whom they're currently targeting, as long as he can slay them."
Tsunade makes a non-committal sound. She has never denied that Jiraiya was foolish to engage in that duel with Orochimaru. She has always agreed that he was stupid to disregard Sasuke's presence, always maintained that he could have recovered better, if he'd been less bitter, less fond of drinking.
Minato too believes this. And all the same, Jiraiya is his father. Sasuke might technically be family, now, but Minato doesn't love Sasuke and he doesn't expect he ever will.
"A more interesting question," Tsunade says, "is how Kushina will handle him."
Minato pretends not to understand. It's a tactic that serves you surprisingly well in public life, but has never worked in private, at all.
"Naruto," Tsunade says, merciless and amused by his pretence, "might be sentimental, and very fond of Konohamaru. Sasuke's not, and Sasuke's a power-hungry little bitch." She waves away an objection that doesn't come. "He's power-hungry the way that people who have been powerless are, the sort of hungry that can't be sated. And we all know Konohamaru's less suited to be Hokage than Naruto."
"Konohamaru's twelve," Minato points out. "It's hardly a fair comparison."
"Compare him to Naruto at twelve. Or Naruto at six. Either case, the comparison's not favourable to Konohamaru."
"Kushina will do what's in the best interest of our people," Minato says. It might be true.
"Step back and let her son be disinherited in favour of your mistress' love child?"
"You never liked her," Minato remarks. There's no real emotion left in the words, all these years too late.
"Yui? No, you know I didn't."
A weak-minded, foolish girl, that was always his mother's take on Yui. Still Tsunade hadn't interfered, making it insultingly plain that she assumed he'd grow out of his infatuation eventually. If Yui had lived, maybe he would have. But she died brutally and because of his failure to protect her, died at the height of his love for her, and so stepped onto a pedestal that time can never erode.
And so in a sense he's been living in an afterwards, ever since. Like he'd been part of a fairy tale, and then they reached ever after, but he was stupid and didn't realise his story was over so he just kept going, even though it was all done, there was nothing else left.
That's untrue and inexcusable, a selfish and childish view of life. He has children he loves, a tribe to govern, a wonderful wife.
He returns to his desk. It's in one of its drawers that he keeps the photo of Yui. It's a picture of an elfin, smiling woman, small the way that makes her pregnancy look almost grotesque. She's shy about it, in the picture, resting a hand just on the side of her hip, half obscuring, half framing the swell of her stomach. Across the back of the photo is scrawled in Kakashi's adolescent handwriting, Alone, most strangely, I live on.
Minato's first child, the child he took under his wing when he was still a child himself – a piercing-eyed, mute-mouthed exorcist who'd fallen through all the safety nets and was going to hit the ground alone.
He's cuttingly aware that it was unfair to ask Kakashi to bring Sasuke here, though he hadn't realised just how unfair until he saw them together, smelled them all over each other.
It's fortunate in the extreme, then, that Sasuke's amenable to being their pet exorcist, because Kakashi has repaid his debts now and will not help Minato again.
I never intended for you to be hurt, Minato could say, and it would be true, but it would also be a cheap excuse because he can't regret it. The fact that he didn't know – well, he should have known. He should have been better, should have found a way to save Naruto without making Kakashi choose between people and so lose them all.
His hand comes to rest automatically on the drawer that contains the picture, but he hasn't opened it in years and he doesn't now.
Kakashi never liked Yui either, though unlike Tsunade he certainly never said so.
He looks at me as though I've stolen something from him, Yui used to say, uneasy around the child she had never been able to regard as a child, a failure she was ashamed of.
It the end, when she had been taken, it was Kushina who called Kakashi. He came striding into Minato's office on silent assassin feet, and sat down on the edge of the desk. He never usually touched anyone, but he was close enough, then, that his side brushed against Minato's slumped shoulder. "I assumed," he said, in that cold quiet voice of his, a night-time voice in the bright daylight, "that you hadn't contacted me because you had this in hand."
"I," Minato said helplessly. It had been some time, at that point, since he'd spoken to Kakashi, who had long since grown friendly with the Uchihas. Even now, Minato thinks, he's probably still friends with Itachi. And Kakashi was no longer an unwanted little runt, a traitor's child, but a crusader prodigy. The light of God sizzled and burned under his skin; in the air was the faint, white-on-white outline of wings.
Kakashi's voice grew quieter then, came rusty and broken, and gradually Minato understood that this was Kakashi trying to speak softly, to show care, perhaps even tenderness: "I'll take care of it."
In the end there was never anything to be done, never time for Kakashi to take care of anything, because less than thirty hours later Yui was dead.
Kakashi had come back to see him, after. Then too Minato had been in his office, behind this very desk, and this was the moment when he broke.
People make such a big production of it, he'd always associated the idea of breaking with torture, with powerful cinematic scenes. In actuality it was a mundane occurrence, he was sitting in his chair behind his desk, in an office grown stuffy with his sweat and his anxiety, and quietly and without any fuss he had broken.
Kakashi had perceived this immediately, and has never forgiven him for it. He said, quietly, with an edge of something not quite sadness and not quite irony, "Yet each man kills the thing he loves."
Minato supposes, coldly, he seems always to be cold lately, that Kakashi has lived by that motto now, handing over Sasuke.
This is not, he thinks. This is not who I wanted to be.
"Appointing Naruto as my successor would lead to massive strife, especially given Sasuke. Anyway – there's little point to this discussion before Konohamaru's been bonded."
"Quite," Tsunade agrees. Nobody expected her to love Naruto, the cause of so much regret and so much public embarrassment, but he charmed her from day one. With some difficulty, perhaps, because she's always championed Kushina, but there can be no doubt which grandson she would have wished to be legitimate. "I suppose Naruto will finally understand, now."
"Yes," Minato agrees. Remembers Naruto defiantly confused, and convinced he would find a cure for the bond compulsion. He will know it now, the existential imperative that turns you into an animal, helpless in the yoke of instinct. Naruto too will have done things, now, that he never wanted to do, that he wouldn't have thought he could live with.
The difference, of course, is that if asked who in all the world he would like for his mate, there can be no doubt whom Naruto would choose. No, that's not quite right: it wouldn't seem to Naruto like a choice at all.
If only, Minato thinks, it were a choice, or at the very least something you could predict. He hasn't allowed himself this thought since before he married Kushina, because once he'd sworn the love oaths and put the ring on her finger, it would be too unfair, too hypocritical.
But Naruto has always made him hypocritical, and looking after him now he thinks: if only it didn't hit you like cancer – sudden and deadly, and there might be indicators, predictors, you try and you hope for someone who won't kill you, whom you could love, but in the end it just hits you, and maybe you're lucky and maybe you're not.
Usually, people do bond with someone they know. Someone they're close to, even. Usually, but far, far from always.
"My concern at the moment," Tsunade breaks in, "is the seal. It's not gone, you know, and a broken seal in addition to the bond will mean considerable strain."
"How bad?" The real question is who they can get to subdue the seal. Orochimaru certainly won't be willing, but Kakashi's burnt his bridges with Orochimaru now and wouldn't want Sasuke hurt – perhaps even Itachi…?
Tsunade shrugs. She looks like she'd like to have a drink, and Minato has little doubt that she'll indulge this desire very shortly. "Given the intense psychological trauma he's sustained over the last few years, I wouldn't be surprised by a psychotic break."
"Jesus Christ," Minato mutters. So what was this all for? Another useless rescue, another instance of risking everything for somebody already lost… "This was never fair to Kushina, to Konohamaru – to anyone really."
"Minato," she says, her voice softer suddenly. She's speaking to him in a way she hasn't in years and years, speaking to him as her child. "You're still torn by this absurd notion that a parent must always love their children equally."
"I love Konohamaru."
"I know. And I know you love Kushina. But you don't love her the way you loved Yui."
He's reminded of another one of Kakashi's ubiquitous quotes. Minato himself was never a great reader, thinks of the words as belonging to Kakashi although Kakashi, always meticulous, had no doubt provided the correct citation. I do love Akari, I suppose. I love her because she's beautiful, and kind, and because she loves me, and because I know she deserves my love. I guess I love her, if that's what love is. But it's not the same way I love Akane. Akane is beautiful, and she is kind, but I don't love her because of all those things. I love Akane because I love her, I really cannot say anything other than that.
"You know Kushina's always saying Naruto's too soft to be Hokage," he says, aimless words.
Tsunade catches them easily. "Well. That won't be a problem anymore, not with his mind chained to Sasuke's."
People used to say the same thing about Minato. He supposes Yui's kidnapping and subsequent death proved them right.
Nobody's said it since.