Forty years ago
He had no recollection of his life before the forest. He might have had a family once, but they were long gone, and all he knew was the empty solitude of the wilderness. Days and weeks and months walking through the shadows, having to learn to take care of himself, his human side retreating deep in his mind and allowing the wild parts of him to reign. It kept him alive, fended off those beasts that would hurt him, helped him hunt down prey to eat, and when the nights got cold he curled into a ball, rust coloured fur protecting him from the elements, thick tail curved around his body.
When the humans came with their loud voices and strange smells the other side of him reacted with fear, wanting nothing to do with them. It urged him to flee deeper into the forest that was his home. He never got far. A sharp pain blossomed in his back, and he stumbled to the ground, reaching behind to pull out a feathered dart, and when he tried to get his body to move again it had grown heavy. Drowsiness settled over him, and he didn't fight it, so tired from running, so he just let it happen, and when he woke he was no longer in the forest he had called home, and he was no longer alone.
The ground underneath him was hard, and he couldn't move freely, arms and legs pinned to the surface by thick leather bonds.
He had trashed and screamed and snarled until he got too tired to move, and the entire time someone was looking at him, not even reacting when he went from human to beast and back again, fur growing and receding, mouth filling with fangs and then turning into blunt teeth again. No, the man watched with keen interest in his eyes.
He slept, and he fought more, and he slept again, and still the man was there, watching, calmly.
Finally the other side of him, the one he had relied on to stay alive in the forest retreated, leaving a terrified human boy who no longer screamed but trembled. Scared and hungry and so, so lonely.
"What is your name?" the man asked then, and the sound of words were unfamiliar to his ears, but he knew what they meant, hadn't forgotten.
The first sound he made wasn't the word he had been trying to form, but a squeaking noise. He hadn't talked in months, the shapes of the words unfamiliar in his mouth, and he had to try a few times until he got it right.
"Name?"
He guessed he'd had a name. Everyone had names did they not? He knew there had been a time before the forest, when he was with others like him, a time of warmth and light. But something had happened, light turning to flames, and screams. So many screams, and he'd run and he had let that other part of him take over because he was too afraid to be alone, and there was comfort in that side, even though he knew he shouldn't let into it too often, not until he was older.
"Do you have a name?" the man asked again.
He closed his eyes, tried to think back, to a life before the flames and screams. A man, tall and strong, with light hair just like him, lifting him into his arms and swinging him around. My little Minato, the man had said, smiling at him.
"I am Minato," he said, and it felt right on his tongue. His name was Minato and he was all alone in the world, everyone he knew gone, eaten by the flames that Minato had fled from.
It was a week after he had been brought here and the man who had found him, Danzo, finally let him leave the small room he had been staying in, showing him around. It was a cabin in the woods, nothing special at all, a living room and kitchen with a few bedrooms upstairs. It was like the houses Minato had grown up in, deep in the forest, away from humans because his kind had liked the forest, liked the safety it brought, away from those that wouldn't understand what they were, the last of their kind.
They'd been a community, and they'd been happy, and now there was only Minato left.
Outside the thick timber walls of the cabin the forest rose on all sides, trees tall and imposing on the grounds, crowding the cabin.
The other side of him didn't like it, didn't like being around humans. They are dangerous, it told Minato, they will hurt us.
Minato ignored it. He didn't want to be lonely again.
He had spent a year in the cabin, and the forest wasn't imposing as much anymore, tree by tree falling as the men who lived here alongside Minato cut them down, creating a wound in a ring around the cabin, nothing but dying stumps left from trees that had been there for decades upon decades.
Two years he had spent in the cabin, and life had settled as well as it could. It was hard to remember his life before, it was like trying to catch water with his hands, the memories trickled away through his fingers, leaving nothing but drops. He remembered the face of his parents, and the sound of their laughter, the smell of his mother's cooking and the crackling of wood in the fireplace, but then the crackling would turn into the roar of a fire spreading from house to house, and laughter would turn into screaming, and Minato didn't want to remember even those flashes of memories anymore, because they just brought pain. They were all gone, and this was his life now.
He spent his days wandering and helping the others. They were adding on to the cabin, a whole new wing, and he might not be more than eleven years old, but he was strong. They called him runt and pushed him around, but he pushed right back.
Four years and two months he'd lived in the cabin, and no one pushed him around anymore. When Minato got too close they walked away, and Minato was feeling all alone again. The other men, shifters all of them, had been the closest he had to a family, but now they were afraid of him, shying away.
Minato curled up in a corner of his bedroom, sheets clutched to his chest as he shivered, trying desperately to push his other side back.
It didn't listen to him anymore. Minato didn't need to rely on it, not like he'd had to out in the forest, and for a while it seemed content to merely stay still, curled up in its spot deep in Minato's gut, but it was growing agitated. It didn't like Danzo, and it didn't like the other shifters, and it wanted to leave and find others like him. Minato tried to tell it that there weren't any like him left in the world, but it fought him, lashing out at the others to the point that they grew scared of him. Minato was taller now, shoulders broadening, arms strong from years spent working with his hands, building the very cabin they were living in.
He'd hurt one of the badger shifters, fangs tearing off his ear before he could stop himself, and since then no one wanted to spend any time with him, so he stayed up here, wishing he knew what to do.
Four years and three months and he couldn't' fight it anymore, and one night he left. He let the other side of him be in control for once, his body shifting into his other form as if this was how he was meant to be, the shift going so easily. Then he was running.
Trees passed in a blur, he scared up birds and critter as his sneakers pounded through the undergrowth. He wasn't even sure where he was running, but the other side, the one that was all instinct, seemed to know just where to go, making his way past hilltops and streams and over fallen trees. The moon was up, it's cold light splashing through the forest through gaps in foliage, and it was more than enough for him to see the path he made through the dense forest.
For hours they ran, until the sun broke over the horizon, chasing away the night and waking the forest around them.
His lungs were hurting, and his feet likewise, but he'd retreated into his mind, allowing the other side of him to rule, and it cared little for tiredness, kept pushing, and would keep pushing until his feet gave out from underneath him.
It didn't get to that. As sharp pains shot up his legs he jumped across a fallen log, and then he was there. He had felt it in the air, had known he was nearing.
He was breathing harshly, bent over with hands on his knees, sweat pouring down his face and neck, drenching through his clothes, but he was here, he was home.
The trees around him were scorched black in spots where the flames had eaten at them, but they had stayed strong, saved by the cold rain that had come that same night.
The trees further in hadn't been so lucky. Some had been burned just enough that they hadn't been able to stand up to it, still whole in places, but fallen over or dying. Then there were trees that was nothing but charred remains.
The fire had ravaged wildly, eating a large chunk out of the forest, acres of what at one point had been tall trees and lush undergrowth turning into ash as the fire devoured them whole.
The whole area would have been covered with ash and the skeletal remains of trees at one point, but four years had passed since then, and the forest was claiming back what belonged to it, the blanket of ash giving way to new growth, green and lush.
Minato's eyes watered with tears as he walked through the growing forest, seeing life where there had been so much death, knowing he had spent his childhood running through this very place, climbing in trees that were now gone, eating berries off of bushes that had died only to have new bushes with new berries grow in their place.
He remembered the hill he was walking up, and he knew exactly what waited him on the other side. At one point it had been a community, a couple dozen houses hewn from timber cut from the very forest they lived in. They didn't have much, but Minato remembered that they had been happy.
Nature was reclaiming what was lost, but there had been no Protos around to reclaim what they had lost, so where houses had once stood there were no new houses.
The fire had been strongest here, and there was nothing left from his home at all, houses gone as if they had never been there at all, and now a blanket of grass and flowers and bushes were declaring the place for theirs.
The ground was soft underneath his feet, and as he looked over the ground, hearing the faint thrill of birds in trees and little else it hit him that he was truly all alone in the world. There would be no one who understood his struggles, no one to show him how to channel his other side into something good, and he was terrified.
A part of him wanted to stay, to curl up in the place he had once called home and to let go. It had been easier when he had let the other side guide him those years back when he fled the terrifying roar of flames. The other side of him didn't feel loneliness or fear, it just existed, caring more about finding the next meal than it did feelings. The wild was no place for feelings.
Five years he had lived in the cabin, and his bedroom now had bars in front of the window, and a lock he didn't have the key for. He still wasn't sure if he had done the right thing in going back to Danzo, but he hadn't known what else to do, so after spending the day and following night in the clearing he had turned around and walked back. He had been welcomed with open arms by Danzo and distrustful eyes by the other shifters. As it became clear the other side of him wasn't under control he found himself restricted until his room was a prison, and he the inmate.
It was becoming increasingly hard to fight the other side, and he found himself lashing out whenever he was let out of the room, the anger rising to the surface at very little provocation. One moments he was fine, and the next something happened, and claws were ripping through the air. He hadn't hurt anyone since he got back, but he was sure it was only a matter of time. The other side of him didn't like being cooped up in here, didn't trust the others, would prefer to run free, to hunt for more like him, but Minato knew he was the only one. It had been common knowledge that his community was the last of their kind. They had never been many, and their volatile nature had lead to many family lines demise.
He remembered his community as a calm one. They knew how to channel the energy of the other side into something good, which was why they had thrived where others let the other side reign, falling into the trap of letting instincts rule. In the end that had been their downfall, in a world where humans were already distrustful to anything that was different they had been hunted down and killed generations ago.
Only the Vulpes that made up his community were left as far as he knew, and they'd been happy living in peace, until the day it all ended. Minato had no idea what happened. A camp fire out of control, or something more sinister, but he knew that when he came back from having snuck out in the middle of the night to hunt the flames had already taken over their houses, burning with an intensity that had his hair curl, and he couldn't do anything but escape.
There was no fleeing from the terror of losing control. He knew there were ways to channel his energy to less destructive paths, but he had no idea how, had never learned, too young for it to be an issue yet, and now there were no one to teach him.
Five years and eight months after he had been found in the forest Danzo came into his room, and Minato sprang from his bed, the other side seeing nothing but the freedom past the door. Danzo tried to stop him, and the next moment Minato had locked his muzzle around Danzo's knee and bit down, bone crunching between his teeth, the coppery taste of blood filling his mouth.
It took three wolf shifters to pry him off and strap him down, and Danzo's knee was never quite the same again.
Six years he had lived in the cabin when the door to his room opened and a man in a doctor's coat came inside, followed closely by Danzo, who seemed pleased, which was much at odds with how he had looked lately. The last year had seen Minato locked inside here more often than not, and the evidence was in the deep gorges in the timber walls where his claws had dug deep when anger and isolation got the better of him and he lost control of his other side.
The doctor was carrying a tray with a small vial of opaque green liquid and a syringe. Minato eyed it with distrust, pushing himself to the back of his bed to get as far away as he could.
It wasn't the first needle he had seen. Another doctor had come in often over the last year, taking blood samples and tissue samples and never offering any explanation, and all Minato could do was agree, because what option did he have? He had nothing, even if he left this place, so it was better he was here, where they would assure he wouldn't hurt anyone.
He didn't fight as the doctor ushered him to roll up the sleeve of his shirt, nor did he protest when the needle bit deep, and it felt as if he was injected with pure ice. His arm grew numb, and he kept calm, but then his body felt as if it was on fire, the purest agony he had ever felt, and he screamed until his voice gave in.
Seven years he had lived in the cabin when he was introduced to a knobbly kneed kid with big eyes that stared up at him.
"This is Yamato," Danzo had said. "Yamato, show Minato what you can do."
The kid looked mildly terrified, taking a half step back, but then he closed his eyes tight, and when he opened them again they were a deep red. Minato started to say something when he noticed the red tinge in the kid's hair that certainly hadn't been there before, and as he watched it turned into a bright rusty red and started spreading, just as his ears started shifting from round to pointed.
When a bushy tail with a white tip sprouted from the back of the kid's sweatpants and he made no move to turn fully into a fox it was clear that this kid was no ordinary shifter.
"You're… like me?" Minato asked, having never seen anyone who shifted like he did before, stopping halfway like that.
The kid looked up at Danzo and then started shifting back, looking tired when he was done, as if the shift had taken too much energy out of him, leaving him a little pale in the cheeks and hard of breathing.
"He's half-protos," Danzo said.
Through the years Minato would spend time around the kid, not quite a big brother, but more like an older cousin, showing him the ropes of the small world that was the cabin and the forest surrounding it. Minato couldn't shift since he was on the drugs, finding that other side of him dormant, not responding even when he tried to call on it. The kid was lucky in that sense, he didn't need the drugs. His other side wasn't as strong, his senses no where near Minato's, but easily controllable. Minato envied him that.
Danzo never told Minato just where the kid had come from, how he was only half-protos, and Minato never asked. He should have asked.
Eight years he had lived in the cabin and life had settled into a routine. Get shot up with drugs and be violently ill for a day, but then a whole day with blessed peace from the other side of him. The other shifters were still distrustful, but Danzo didn't appear to be, letting Minato go alongside him on his jobs. He was a businessman of sorts, and Minato didn't understand half of what he did, having lived on the outskirts of society for his entire life, first in the community and then in the cabin, but he could pick up packages and he could walk behind Danzo, making sure no one threatened the other man. He could beat up the bad guys, and he could follow orders. He was stronger than the others, and faster, even with the drugs coursing through his other side of him was dormant, but he was just as good without it.
Ten years he had lived in the cabin when he met her. Her hair a flaming red and eyes a violet he didn't seem to be able to look away from. He was only supposed to go into the town to find a man who had a package Danzo had requested, but he had gotten hungry and stopped by a diner, and there she was, green dress and a pleasant smile that turned into pure fury when one of the other customers tried to slap her behind.
He fell in love in that very moment.
Ten years and a month he had lived in the cabin when he was shot down by Kushina for the fifth time. She didn't seem impressed by him, telling him that he was little but a bully and a thug.
Ten years and five months he had lived in the cabin when he first kissed Kushina.
Ten years and seven months he had lived in the cabin when he realised that he was working for the bad guys, and the dread that filled him was as cold as the drugs he got every other day. Kushina had made him see what was happening, had made him question things he had been too afraid to question before.
Twelve years he had lived in the cabin when he finally found a way out, a plan that had been in the works ever since Kushina had told him that he was the bad guy in all of this. He needed to get away, but he knew that Danzo wasn't going to just let him leave. He had been furious when he had found out that Minato had a girlfriend in town, telling him that there were more important things in life than girls.
Minato didn't agree, Kushina was the most important thing to him, and he would do anything for her, including leaving the apparent safety of the cabin for a life with just the two of them. They could leave and make a life of their own somewhere else. They just needed to make sure no one would find them, then they could be happy.
Twelve years and four months he had lived in the cabin he would no longer live in. The moon was high in the sky, veiled behind clouds as Minato packed a bag with the few clothes that were all of his belongings, and then he left, dodging out of sight from the windows until he was lost in the trees, leaving behind dozens of vials filled with drugs he had neglected to take over the last months. Danzo had trusted him to take them himself, so he hadn't known that Minato had stopped, that he had found a way to keep his other side under control without the use of synthetic drugs.
There were no notes left behind, and he hoped Danzo would let him go.
One year he had lived in the little house in a quiet neighbourhood when Kushina waddled into the living room, clutching her belly and telling him that it was happening tonight and he better be ready.
Panic flooded him as he realised that nine months had already passed, and soon he would be a father.
He wished he could have brought Kushina to a hospital to have more competent people help her, but they were still in hiding and their fake names didn't come with any identification, so they had decided that they would do as generations before had done and make due in their own home. They'd gotten books at the library, reading all about home births, and was as prepared as two people barely into their twenties with no medical knowledge could be.
When Kushina first screamed he realised how completely unprepared they were.
It was a long night, and Minato had been on the verge of running out to get a doctor, no matter what their plans had been, but then, as the clock had just hit six am he found himself with a bundle of towels in his arms, a small face peeking up at him, wrinkled and looking a little mushed, still patchy with fluids, and in that moment Minato felt joy unlike any joy he had ever felt before, even as the little mouth opened and started wailing.
Kushina held out her arms, and he kneeled by her side, gently placing the bundle on her chest, marvelling at the tiny fingers curling into fists and then relaxing the moment he was pressed up against her.
Kushina looked tired, but there was a smile on her face.
"Our son," Minato said, and Kushina nodded.
"Our Naruto."
One years and six months they had lived in their little house when their world crashed down. They had been found, and as a gang of shifters rushed there was nothing he could do as every piece of happiness he had ever had was torn from him, his dream life shattering in front of him.
I'll protect him, Yamato had said and Minato wanted to believe him.
As he took his last breaths he hoped Naruto would get the life he had dreamed of, a life of love and happiness. He deserved everything, his beautiful boy.
As Naruto made his ways through the papers he was making a picture of his birth father that extended past the made up stories he'd had as a kid. Minato had grown up here after having been found all alone in the forest, his family presumed dead in a forest fire. There were plenty of notes on him, from his top speed to his blood type to his strength, everything meticulously noted down.
There were a couple more pictures as well, of Minato as a teenager, chopping wood outside the cabin, and one of him staring into the camera, blank faced.
Naruto wanted to take the pictures with him, something to remember the father he had never learned to know, but he knew he couldn't risk it, so when he had gone through the entire file he gently placed everything back in the folder and put it back in its place. It was clear that Danzo had done research on Minato, but there were no in depth medical reports, so there had to be more files somewhere else as well.
What Naruto had learned though was that Minato had used suppressants just like him, but he had found a way to control his beast, had been able to stop and leave, and for eighteen months lived a life away from the cabin. Danzo had noted as much, that he had found a stack of vials in Minato's room, hidden away, unused.
Maybe that was why Naruto wasn't given access to the vials, that he had to have the doctor or Sai give him every single one, because Danzo had been fooled once, and he wasn't about to be fooled again.
Naruto quickly looked through the rest of the cabinet, finding no information that was of any use to him. It was all endless folders of people he had no idea who was. Shifters and others that had been through the cabin over the years most likely. Danzo had been doing this for decades, if his father had gotten here when he was just nine. Dozens upon dozens of people, and several of them bore the same stamp as the first page in Minato Namikaze's file.
Terminated.
Danzo had killed his father and many others, and Naruto was afraid he would keep doing so. He would have to stop Danzo, but he was afraid that if he did so he would be left without the suppressants, and what if he didn't figure out how his father had managed to get control of his beast?
No, Naruto had to do that first, and as soon as he was free of the suppressants he could think of a way to stop Danzo. It would be too late to save his birth parents, but he could make sure the same didn't happen to other families.
He had no idea how Minato had learned how to control the beast, but it was clear that repressing it wasn't the way, because Naruto had done that since he was young and it first started making its presence known.
No, he would have to think of something else, and if repressing it wasn't doing it, then maybe it was time to set his beast free.
A/N: Not gonna lie, this right here is one of my favourite chapters of this fic. I hope you don't mind us taking this stroll away from the plot to fill up on some backstory!
