Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto or any of its characters.
Warning: Spoilers for important recent manga events.
Heaven Ain't All It's Cracked Up to Be
"...And then, he pulled these frog suits out of his backpack and made us wear them! We had to wear those stupid things for a whole week!"
Konan's feet hovered an inch or two above the fluffy white cloud, her paper wings flapping gently to keep her aloft. In front of her, Minato sat cross-legged on a cloud of his own. The two had been reminiscing about their former sensei, and when Konan mentioned the frog suits, Minato shot to his feet.
"You mean he made you guys wear those too? Oh, thank the gods! You have no idea how much it means to me to know that I wasn't the only one subjected to that indignity!" In a fit of enthusiasm, Minato threw his arms around Konan.
"Ahem." Minato looked back over his shoulder at the sound of two throats being indignantly cleared. The color drained from his face.
"...Minato?" Kushina's arms were crossed over her chest, and she looked decidedly Not Happy.
Nagato stood next to her, glaring. Or at least, Minato thought he was glaring. The Rinnegan always looked stern, so it was a little hard to tell. "Yondaime-sama. Please explain."
Minato quickly released Konan and waved his hands around as if they'd been burned. "It's not what it looks like! I didn't mean-"
In another section of the cloudscape, Sarutobi and Asuma sat side-by-side, Sarutobi smoking a pipe and Asuma a cigarette. "So," Sarutobi asked serenely, "had you and Kurenai-chan decided on a name for my second grandchild?"
"No, we were trying to decide between-hey, what's that?" Asuma pointed to a speck that was rapidly approaching through the air.
"Hm?" Sarutobi tilted his head back and watched as Minato went soaring over their heads and plummeted head-first into a cloud.
"I wonder what sent him flying like that?" Asuma asked.
Sarutobi considered for a moment. "I would say either Shinra Tensei or One Thousand Years of Pain."
Listening to the enraged shouts from the clouds a few hundred meters away, Asuma speculated, "Maybe both?"
Sarutobi nodded sagely.
Minato's legs kicked comically in the air as, like a turtle, he struggled fruitlessly to right himself. As luck would have it, the Shinigami was passing by and pulled Minato out of the cloud, setting him on his feet before stomping over to where Sarutobi and Asuma sat.
"Asuma," he announced gruffly, "some guy named Kabuto called. He wants you back in the living world, and he has the jutsu to back it up. Get down there."
"Right-o!" Asuma said as he dove down through the clouds.
The Shinigami sighed. "I swear, it's been nothing but trouble since the Rikudo Sennin taught you people ninjutsu. Hashirama creates random trees all over the place, Jiraiya gets stuck in a genjutsu every other second for peeping at the Uchiha women, Haku keeps freezing the clouds into a skating rink, and Itachi just started his third forest fire this week trying to blast Madara with an Amaterasu. I keep telling him it's impossible to aim accurately from this high up, but does he listen? Luckily, the mortals aren't suspicious-they just blame all the wildfires on global warming." He shook his head in exasperation. "Kabuto can have the lot of you for all I care. Let him try dealing with dead souls who can manipulate the very fabric of reality and see how he likes it." He slouched off, still muttering under his breath about "troublesome shinobi."
"Hmph. Old sourpuss," Sarutobi commented to no one in particular. "He's just mad that Minato-kun and I got out of his stomach."
A/N: So, I was randomly wondering if Jiraiya made any of his other students, like Minato, wear those frog suits. And then I imagined Minato and Konan talking about Jiraiya's eccentric training methods, and those musings eventually expanded into this.
I know Minato can teleport, but the poor guy was probably too shell-shocked after getting hit wit One Thousand Years of Pain to do Hiraishin. (Besides, it's a humor fic, so it's not necessarily intended to be accurate.)
Poor, poor Shinigami. He probably cried when Jiraiya showed up...