Time Flows Like Ink

Summary: After a fuinjutsu experiment gone wrong, Minato is yanked into a future where his family is dead, his team fell apart and the Uchiha were slaughtered. With the defective seal burning in his palm, Minato struggles to stay afloat in a Konoha that isn't his.

Chapter 17

Minato stayed out of the training session only after an admirable attempt at coercion from Team 7. He couldn't get around promising to show them a move or two the next time. Even without Kakashi and Rin as their teachers, Minato was sure that in only a couple more years the three would be a force to be reckoned with.

He kept watching up until he spotted Jiraiya closing in on the training grounds and tore away his attention only reluctantly.

"You look good," were Jiraiya's words of greeting, and Minato accepted them with a smile.

"So do you."

Jiraiya stepped up next to him to join in watching the team train. The three were too engulfed to pay attention to the newcomer, but Rin paused and gave a small wave before leaping straight back into her task.

Minato decided to skip the smalltalk. "You managed to take care of Danzō."

More specifically, Sarutobi had – and been taken down with him in the process, according to Shikaku.

"Not quickly enough," Jiraiya muttered. "He stretched the conflict out for too long. There were far too many casualties."

"Maybe at one point he was just trying to take as many people as he could down with him," Minato guessed. He must have realized eventually that there was no way for him to come out on top.

Jiraiya hummed. "Maybe." He glanced at Minato from the side. "You'll do better, once you're back."

"I'm going to do my best," Minato said carefully, frowning at Jiraiya's phrasing. "Obviously."

"No, I mean it. You can do better, this time." Jiraiya paused, glancing at the team and their training exercises. "Back then, we didn't manage to track Danzō down in time. He made his move before we could do anything in turn. He brought the fight to us, not the other way round."

"You want me to bring the fight to Danzō," Minato said. "How?"

All of Konoha must have been looking for him. If all of them had failed, what difference could Minato make? Knowing what Danzō was planning didn't help him figure out his hiding place.

Jiraiya gave a grim smile. "I had years to come up with something. I've got a trick or two."

The seal he presented Minato with was elaborate and complicated – it looked like it had been developed and refined over a long time. Minato sorted it out slowly, tracing ink patterns and making sense of the unfamiliar style. Jiraiya's work wasn't anything like Kushina's or his.

"It's a... tracking device?" Minato guessed, picking out the main components and rapidly fitting the pieces together in his mind. If one component determined the target, and another one served as an amplifier... Minato frowned, picking out a part that seemed to exclude a certain area from the search. "What's this?"

"Konoha," Jiraiya said, peering over his shoulder. "I placed seals around the village to establish a perimeter. You'll have to do the same in the past to make it work."

"What for?"

Jiraiya's lips pinched. Instead of answering his question, he said, "The seal doesn't track Danzō. By the end of it... he made sure that there was nothing of his body left. I didn't have any of his DNA to work with."

"Okay," Minato said slowly. That would have made things more complicated. Without any of his blood – or, for lack of it, other genetic material – Jiraiya would have had to come up with a roundabout way to the solution. "How did you solve it?"

Jiraiya's frown deepened. "I used other genetic material. Of an Uchiha." He jerked his head towards Mikoto, who'd begun showing the kids a small fire technique. "Hence the perimeter to cancel out everything within the village."

Minato was missing something. He had to be. Jiraiya's words should have definitely started making sense by now. "Why would material from an Uchiha help in tracking down Danzō?"

Jiraiya paused. "Whatever you thought you knew about Danzō," he said, "he was worse. Much worse."

Jiraiya told him of mutilated Uchiha corpses and Hashirama's salvaged genes, and Minato realized that he hadn't known Danzō at all. None of them had.

"I'm gonna put a stop to him," Minato promised once Jiraiya was done, accepting the seal with grimly set brows. He hadn't needed the extra shove to feel determined to end Danzō, but it certainly didn't hurt.

The smile on Jiraiya's lips was joyless. "See that you do."

There wasn't anything more they could do while Minato was in the future. Danzō was already gone, and so were his subordinates – several years had been more than enough time to track them down, to interrogate them and to decide on a punishment.

Other than collecting information, Minato had no choice but to wait for his chance to go back and make a difference.

"There's one more thing," Jiraiya said. They'd gone back to watching the kids train, but neither of them paid much attention. "Kushina was busy trying to figure out your seal before she... well. As long as she could."

"I know." Minato rubbed a thumb over the skin of his palm.

Apart from prolonging the inevitable yank backwards (or forwards), Minato had no control over the seal currently dictating his life. They would need a way to stabilize it (or even completely get rid of it) eventually, or none of the things Minato was accomplishing would be permanent.

"Did she figure something out?"

"Maybe." Jiraiya furrowed his brows. "I helped where I could. We didn't find a solution, but we noticed something. Maybe."

Minato turned his head. "What did you find?"

"Whenever the seal drags you back, it builds up energy first. Right? You can tell when it's about to happen."

"More or less." Minato hesitated. "Sometimes it builds up over days. Sometimes there's close to no warning."

The unpredictability of the seal was concerning. It seemed to activate with no rhyme or reason, and as long as it continued to do so, Minato had no choice but to be flung around time as it saw fit. So far there had been plenty of other problems to occupy his mind, but eventually they'd need a solution.

"What about the first time?" Jiraiya asked. "The first time it brought you back to the past?"

Minato frowned, thinking back. "That one was different. It didn't give a warning." Or perhaps it did, and Minato simply hadn't paid attention to it. "It pulled me back after only hours. Every time after that took days, or even weeks."

Jiraiya hummed as though Minato had confirmed a theory of his. "What was different? What exactly happened right before it activated?" His tone of voice made it sound like he already knew the answer.

"I'd just found out that Kushina and most of my team had died," Minato said curtly. "Kakashi took me to the memorial. I thought Naruto was dead, too."

"You got overwhelmed." Jiraiya gave a slow nod. "I thought so."

"You think the seal is... what? Influenced by my mood?"

Jiraiya shrugged. "It's a working theory. You're not the type of person who makes a habit of letting your feelings take over."

Minato wasn't. If Jiraiya was right, it was no wonder Minato hadn't prematurely activated the seal another time since then. Kushina – as the more hot-blooded of the two – might have had more trouble keeping her temper in check and flung herself back and forth more rapidly.

"I'll keep an eye on it," Minato promised. He wasn't keen on sacrificing even a second of his time in the future to experiment and attempt to activate the seal intentionally.

Perhaps he could do some tests once he was back – although there were plenty of other things to take care of first.

Minato decided to spend the evening with Mikoto and the kids. Naruto and Sakura had both been invited to dinner, and Mikoto had offered Minato the couch for the night.

Fugaku's absence had never been more apparent, and Minato felt a pang of guilt at not having asked more questions about how Mikoto was holding up. It had been years for her, but that was no excuse. Minato promised himself that he'd make up for it once the children weren't there to overhear.

"Don't touch that!" Sasuke scowled and snatched away a large pan before Naruto could get his hands on it.

He pouted, but didn't try to get it back. There seemed to be an unofficial rule in the Uchiha household not to let Naruto handle kitchenware unsupervised.

"I wasn't going to do anything!"

"Just like you weren't going to do anything with the rice cooker right before it blew up?" Sakura muttered, cutting up vegetables undeterred by the boys' antics.

"We agreed not to talk about that anymore," Naruto whined.

Mikoto shoved a large bowl and a wooden spoon at Naruto. "Here. You can start stirring."

"Because there isn't anything you can screw up with that," Sasuke muttered.

"Shut up! I'm not that bad." Naruto scowled, but took the bowl from Mikoto. He grumbled heatedly under his breath and stirred with perhaps more enthusiasm than was strictly necessary.

Mikoto shot Minato a glance, her lips pinched as though she was holding back a smile. He supposed it meant that this was normal for them.

Itachi came home and joined them after they'd finished setting everything up. He was quiet, but not overly so. It did not seem as though he was walking on eggshells around Sasuke – already a vast improvement to the dynamic they'd had in the last reality Minato had been to.

Minato was itching to ask questions and find out more, but he held himself back. The kids were there, and he didn't feel like turning the dinner conversation into an interrogation.

Perhaps he'd get the opportunity at some later point in private. For now, Minato would simply enjoy the evening and hope that there would be many more like it – hopefully, eventually, ones that included Kushina.

Minato had expected to see the stranger in the ANBU mask again eventually. His appearance had been too purposeful and his ambush too calculated to have come out of a whim. Minato had known he hadn't seen the last of him – however, he hadn't expected the stranger to be quite this bold.

Minato had accepted Mikoto's offer to stay at her place for the night (seeing as Sasuke and Sakura seemed to have invited themselves to Naruto's apartment). Minato had spent enough time with Naruto that he no longer felt the need to keep an eye on him at all times. Besides, it was the perfect opportunity to bring up the heavier topics Minato wasn't willing to talk about in front of the kids.

"The massacre happened," Mikoto told him, "but we were better prepared for it."

"Did you find out who did it?"

She shook her head. "No. But we fought back and called for help as soon as he'd started cutting down our clan members." Her lips tightened and she averted her gaze. "He ran once the ANBU showed up. He needed the moment of surprise to strike. Once that was gone, he fled."

"He had no one to help, then."

Mikoto's brows twitched. "Whatever Itachi did in another reality, he didn't do it here."

"I know," Minato said, his voice quiet.

He quickly dropped the topic, not wanting to force Mikoto to think further about the sins her son had committed in another lifetime. Whatever had compelled him to do so, it was no longer the case. Minato had changed it, and there was no use in poking and risking reopening old wounds.

It was during a lull in the conversation that both of them felt it. Mikoto turned her head and stilled, and Minato's back went rigid.

A shinobi's instincts were no joke. Sometimes a hunch went beyond a spike of chakra, beyond even the most subtle hint that something was wrong.

"Come on," Minato muttered, and they headed outside without a wasted second.

It was insultingly easy to spot the source of their vigilance.

"Is that who lured you away the last time?" Mikoto murmured. "Kushina told me."

"He shouldn't have come back to the village." Minato's gaze was icy. "He shouldn't have come to your house."

The stranger sat perched on a nearby tree branch and made no move to hide his presence. He climbed to his feet upon realizing he'd been spotted – careless, as though he hadn't planned to stay hidden in the first place. He paused, looked straight at them and hopped onto the next rooftop at a pace even a genin would be able to follow.

"I'm going," Minato said, caution forgotten at the prospect of getting answers. He'd already established that the stranger wasn't able to take him in a fight.

Mikoto didn't so much as twitch. "I'm staying close."

It didn't occur to Minato to try to argue.

This time, the stranger showed no intention of leading him outside the village. He went to a semi-isolated corner of it – far enough that nobody would stumble across them by accident, but by far not able to prevent Minato from calling for help, if necessary.

"You're not here for a rematch," Minato said when it became clear that the stranger wasn't going to make the first move. Minato couldn't sense anyone around them, but he knew that Mikoto was watching. "How do you keep getting into Konoha?"

"Too easy."

"Why do you do it?"

The stranger looked at Minato with his masked gaze, motionless and unnerving in his inaction. He'd dropped down cross-legged on the ground – one of the most vulnerable positions he could have possibly chosen, and it still did nothing to make Minato feel like he had the upper hand.

"You shouldn't have spied on my friend," Minato said. Mikoto's children lived at her house. Naruto and Sakura were there more often than they were not. The thought of the stranger being close to them – watching them, able to hurt them if he felt so inclined – sent icy waves of fury up in Minato's chest.

"Not her," the stranger said. "You."

There were none of the mood swings Minato had observed the last time. There was none of the childish, unpredictable persona from then.

The stranger moved his arm in slow, repetitive motions, and it took Minato another glance to realize that there was a cat curled up in his lap. It looked content where it was, and the stranger showed none of his prior, giddy enthusiasm about it.

"Why aren't you attacking?" Minato asked, furrowing his brows.

"No need."

"Because you have no orders? Or because they've changed?" It had become increasingly clear to Minato that whoever the stranger was, someone else was pulling his strings in the background.

Minato felt slightly disturbed at seeing his more whimsical persona now missing. It had felt like the more genuine parts of him he'd had left.

"Curious what you'll do," the stranger murmured, and it didn't sound like the words were meant for Minato.

Minato didn't know why he kept trying to talk to him rationally. He didn't even know if the stranger was capable of a proper conversation.

Nevertheless he asked, almost exasperated, "Who are you? What do you want?"

"Doesn't matter now."

There was a pause. The stranger stopped petting the cat.

He turned his head to look at Minato, and Minato caught a glimpse of red. "You know."

Minato wasn't surprised when the shadow clone disintegrated. The cat landed on its paws, disgruntled but unharmed. It curled out of its perch and stalked off into the nearest alley without sparing Minato a glance.

He and Mikoto looked for the stranger, but they didn't put in a lot of effort. Minato knew him well enough by now to realize that it would be for nought.

Even as they gave up and retired for the day (after making sure that nobody would come within a hundred feet of Mikoto's home without them knowing about it), Minato couldn't stop thinking about what the stranger had meant.

He also couldn't squash an unnerving, irrational sense of familiarity.

A/N: My betas are Igornerd, To Mockingbird and PyrothTenka! Go check them out, they're all wonderful writers!