Chapter 3
Strokes of lightning, like celestial blades unsheathed, ripped asunder the bosom of the sky; shafts of dying sun, fast devoured by a canopy of cloud, tinctured red the rain that fell. Gusts in buffeting torrents here and there enacted their violence: bruised boughs, lashed at lamp-posts, cleaved through the intricate circuitry of wires, rendering tracts of the village dark; turned the world beneath into a dust bowl; stirred, as with a ladle, all not infixed into the ground— sign boards, cardboard cartons, clothing lines, sheaves of grain, were all set awhirl. Stirred, swirled, dashed to dust. The wind tonight was the wrenching gasp of a man on the precipice; the clap of thunder that accompanied it, the final groan, conversion to carrion.
Naurto reclined against the Hokage monument through it all, a stalk of straw in his mouth, and watched it unfold; stared at the sky, unseeing, then down below, in disdain. The salt-copper taste of the first drops of rain still clung to his lips. Raindrops. Lingering fingers that stroked softly.
They jogged his fantasy. He imagined in them the touch he never knew: that of his mother.
Uzumaki Kushina.
Their patter was a lullaby crooned, one that in its maternal hum allowed him to pretend for a second that all was okay. Though the heavens had now opened, and drizzle turned into deluge, the honeyed sweetness of those first notes still echoed in the mind and its mazy caverns. Those fingers that'd stroked skin and hair still strummed at the heart with lyre like efficacy.
And it was all Imagined.
Just imagined.
He closed his eyes, drenched but unbothered. Tried recapturing that initial sensation. But all he met were thoughts of discontent, a flood unchecked that washed away all else. Already the sensation was gone; already, the memory was dissolving too, and from its wreckage there eddied outwards a resentment that took even him by surprise .
"You must be proud, huh," he said softly. His voice was lost in the wind, which down below enacted an erasure on all that was too weak to withstand it.
"Isn't this what you wanted for me?" he called out again.
Only the roiling clouds rumbled in reply.
"Mapped out my entire life, I'm sure," he went on. "After all, you were exceptional. Fearless, I've heard. And selfless."
He stood. The scent of slush flooded his nose. It wasn't altogether unpleasant. He wiped his wet palms on his tracksuit, which by now was a muddy mess, then laughed bitterly.
"Yeah, that's it. Selfless as fuck. And infatuated with this shithole. You died for these people. That's what you'd want me to do too, huh? Die for em. They don't give a shit about me, but you'd want me to die for em anyway."
Five steps brought him to a puddle.
He knelt.
Stared.
The face that looked back at him was weary and whiskered, yet leonine in a way, the golden locks a snapshot of a star exploding.
So similar in some ways, yet so dissimilar, for surely that man would've never learnt resentment, never questioned any of this, this organized farce of killing and dying. The thought of entrapment would never even have occurred to him.
For there were people who revelled in being different, in being the bastion on which all hope was pinned. All meaning and purpose in their lives was distilled down to bearing on their shoulders the world and its various burdens; the entirety of their identity hinged on masquerading as a messiah. Peril came to them unsought, and they mastered it, for they were different, exceptional, special. They did not care about dying young, or only being a face on a monument; they did not care that they left behind no memory, or a broken family: service to them was in the glory of death, and not in the drudgery of life. Being a bulwark against the world and its ills to the fragility they fathered was irrelevant, meant nothing.
Selfish enough to have kids, but selfless in all else.
"You'd ask me to die, as you did, because you were exceptional. You loved em. You loved em more than you ever loved me. You turned your own son into a monster..."
And as he looked, as raindrops ruffled the puddle, the face seemed to morph, to age, to gain more definition and lose its whiskers. It now wore a sun struck smile, one that never in reality would alight on Naruto; for the man had not only destroyed himself, but every last vestige of what he, Naruto, could've had, to save these people who did not deserve it.
"All I ever wanted," Naruto whispered, tears and rain now mingling, "was to be ordinary. You, me, mum. Just the three of us in some small civilian village, away from all this. No death, no Shinobi, no expectations, no Hokage, none of what you made me. Just the three of us, in some small shanty. And we'd be happy. I'd be happy."
He rose, and began walking away, the wind still screaming in his ears.
"I hate you, dad," he said softly, knowing that Namikaze Minato's stone bust still loomed large behind him, wishing he could more than just colour it. Deface it, perhaps. Or raze it.
"I hate you more than I hate anything else in this world. For what you've turned me into, and the dream you've taken away."
A/N: I apologize for the shortness of the chapter. I hope that the update speed compensates for it. I intend to have longer chapters soon-ish, but am going through a phase rn where trying to put together a 5k word chapter (which is what I originally intended) just takes too much of a toll. This is a complete scene, though. Haven't nibbled away content from it or anything.
It narratorially made sense for Kishimoto to hide Naruto's heritage, as it set up a grand reveal later on. In doing so, I think he sacrificed some logic (Naruto looked like the splitting image of his father, and the Uzumaki name was probably a dead giveaway to anyone who knew Kushina Uzumaki, or knew of Minato and Kushina's relationship), but the pay off was worth it.
In this fic, however, there is no such payoff for his heritage being kept hidden, and it would saddle me with severe issues regarding the lack of logic mentioned above. Therefore, this is the course I've chosen. If you paid attention last chapter, then Sarutobi mentioned a 'debt I owed his father', which, when taken in tandem with Satsuki's lack of reaction to the disclosure, suggests that she knows too. We'll just establish at this point that anyone in the Shinobi force with a curiosity to look it up and a functional brain made the connection. I do not believe parts of the Shinobi force knowing would significantly change how Naruto was treated. Remember, ignored and covertly disliked, not beaten up and chased by mobs.
Naruto's attitudes are neither a projection, nor a reflection of the writer's. I am in no way suggesting canon should have gone like this. I might not even particularly share any of the attitudes this fic takes for its various characters. I'm just going with what might best suit this particular story. Will write an explanation/ contemplation in defence of this particular attitude (and make the case from both Minato's pov and Naruto's pov) next chapter, if that be necessary. Don't want this A/N to end up being longer than the chapter itself.
Feel free to review! (And no more update requests for other fics. I have PMs for that. Seriously).