When Namikaze Minato dies, after the initial shock and sleepless nights, you find you are able to keep your breath even and hands still if you imagine Minato in a heaven alike your forest.
There, it is a perpetual autumn. The leaves continue to fall, and fall, and yet the trees are never barren. The air is cool and you can feel it changing to winter with each breeze upon your face, but it is an amaranthine transformation that is never complete.
Minato sits beneath an orange and gold maple, with the sunlight dancing incandescent patterns upon his face around the gently fluttering leaves. He is autumn, and yet so much more than autumn because he's a golden leaves will never match, and his half-closed eyes shame the clarion skies with their blueness ("it's a shame, he was like the boy's father…better than the one he had, anyway…").
"It's not so bad," he says, in the voice like bells and thunder at the same time, and it makes you wonder yet again how warmth and strength can exist so close beside each other, "it's not all that bad, this fire…" he says, and you wonder if he is talking to you or not because Minato always looked you in the eye when he did that.
But he sounds almost happy, and you realize you haven't seen him as relaxed as this since that time you watched autumn fall into winter together.
You want to tell him a lot, because things have happened since autumn left Konoha for good. He'd like to know that the baby's doing fine, and that he laughs just like his father does (though it bleeds your heart each time).
But you say nothing, because those eyes (like autumn skies, and sunlight that can always break your darkness) would make you tell him that Jiraiya's found the bottom of the bottle more times than you can count if you wanted to, and that he won't look at the baby yet because he says he doesn't want to see a ghost. You don't want him to know that the baby cries and cries for his mother, or that villagers whisper monster already.
You say nothing, and are glad your shirt covers the fresh insignia upon your shoulder.
The Fourth Hokage smiles and sighs, and you breathe in the air from his lungs and find the inside of him tastes like autumn too, or honey licked off your fingers.
"Kakashi," someone calls you, and it sounds like Rin, but you ignore it because she isn't allowed here with you and Minato.
You may be winter, but you'll always favor fall.