#endoplasmicpanda

-

The second loop was short, confusing, and sent Minato half into a tree.

He wasn’t aware at that time why they should have been called loops, however, so he simply referred to them as various failed experiments. Because that’s what they were - failures.

Failures in a never-ending struggle to tame time, no less, but still failures. No one ever accused Minato Namikaze of being anything less than ambitious.

The Second Hokage was a genius: a truly gifted shinobi. His ideas, however, were loose and scattered - much like the leaflets of paper filled with bizarre jutsu he penned (and then subsequently shoved into drawers that Minato later found in the Hokage’s library, after pestering the Third about it for so long that the man gave up and handed him the key).

Minato supposed, in hindsight, that it took one to know one.

Perhaps that was why the Hiraishin jutsu stood out to him above all the others. It was a technique that was so close to being something, that Minato could not rest until it was.

And that, after several months of endless experimentation, was why Minato found himself lodged in a dense patch of foliage.

He had overshot the calibration, and wound up freezing time for all of three seconds. Just enough time to trip, fall forward, and end up with a leg pierced on a stalk of sheared bamboo.

Kushina had not been happy about that incident.

Minato spent the brief period of time after the second loop tweaking his adjustments to the Hiraishin even further, perfecting what the Second Hokage had deemed imperfectible.

Time travel itself was impossible, that much had been proven to him by Tobirama’s extensive notes on the subject, but Minato wasn’t interested in time travel.

No. Instead, he found himself pouring hours of his time into the study of time dilation - the means by which to stop time, rather than wrestling with it. It was the path of least resistance, and still yielded the same effect: allowing him to move about in a bubble, out of phase from the rest of the world. Vast distances could be travelled in mere fractions of a second. Enemies could be struck down effortlessly, as if frozen in solid ice, and would die before ever seeing their killer. The world would pause for him, and wait at his beck and call.

He would be a god.

But it was all still theory. An impossible feat, for certain, but not impossible enough for Minato Namikaze.

The long, sleepless nights between loops Two and Three were spent under the quiet embrace of a desk lamp aside a pile of weathered old books from the Third Hokage’s personal library, and copious amounts of lukewarm tea.

As with all things Minato pursued, he found what he was looking for.

The next loop awaited him.

-

Loop Three proved to be just as much a failure as Loop Two, but no less important.

Having determined that simple concentration wasn’t enough to prevent himself from disengaging from the Hiraishin’s effects, Minato found himself locked in a bubble of space-time for nearly thirty-six hours. He sat alone, waiting for the jutsu to expire, the world around him frozen in motion. He had gotten so bored, in fact, that he had begun to count the leaves in the trees - and from that point on, Kushina bragged about the fact her boyfriend was fast enough to count entire trees worth of leaves in what seemed like a split second to anyone that would hear it. “That’s the power of the Hiraishin,” she’d brag.

Minato let her. They didn’t need to know the hows or the whys.

-

Loop Four was frustratingly similar to the one previous. Minato had managed to reduce the offset by a considerable amount - but that meant he still was forced to sit in a sphere of frozen time with nothing but himself, the pebbles at his feet, and his own unpleasant thoughts for nearly three hours.

The next time, he would bring a book. Or, at the very least, a stick to draw in the dirt with.

-

Loops Five and Six experimented with the diameter of the sphere. He still found himself stuck in what was, essentially, an isolation chamber for a far too long amount of time, but now he could stretch and move a bit - at least, as much as he was able to before chakra exhaustion began to eat away at his senses, eventually knocking him out the farther he pushed.

He woke up after Loop Five with a concerned Kushina shaking him to death, and woke up after Loop Six to an enraged Kushina shaking him to death. There was no middle ground.

He promised, rather half-heartedly, he would “be careful”; but he suspected Kushina saw through the ruse as soon as the muttered, sheepish promise slipped past his lips.

The way she shook her head and looked at him told him just as much.

-

Loop Seven tested the boundaries of the sphere. He purposefully left the diameter up to as much as ‘winging it’ would suffice, and began walking.

He found that he could move the sphere with him as he went, but it was very draining. Many factors, it seemed, cut away at his chakra reserves, almost to the point only a jinchuuriki would be a worthy wielder of the technique.

Minato realized soon after that Tobirama wasn’t being ignorant in dropping the project and focusing on his library of others with far more potential. Instead, he was simply being economical.

Minato was anything but. He had his heart set on the Hiraishin, could feel the potential power coursing underneath the lines of each page in Tobirama’s notebook.

No, Minato wasn’t economical. But he was determined.

-

Loops Eight through Fifteen proved fruitless, and it was only in Loop Sixteen that Minato discovered the missing link.

Kushina.

After several consecutive days of coming home tired and exhausted, Kushina demanded to observe Minato as he trained.

She watched him as he activated the Hiraishin, only the slight tilt in her eyebrow showing she was impressed. Once firmly settled in the cockles of near-frozen time, Minato had the chance to simply watch her - frozen in place, eyes bright as diamonds, her posture ragged and daring.

Minato bent over and plucked a small yellow flower from a bush to his right, feeling the tug of his jutsu extending to the flower’s space in the universe. His chakra encapsulated it in the grasp of the Hiraishin, moving it along through time parallel with Minato.

He reached over and tucked the knotweed between Kushina’s hair and her ear, smiling for a moment, before he disengaged the jutsu.

After he came back from under the influence of the space-time technique, the redhead clucked her tongue and waggled her finger at him.

“Seals,” was all she had said. “You need to focus your chakra so you don’t waste it all? Use seals. That’s what they’re there for, y’know.”

Minato’s eyes widened. Was it really so simple? Seals?

She blinked, reaching into her hair to grasp at something that wasn’t there before. She lowered the knotweed, smiled, looked up at Minato in surprise. “Wait, when did you do that?”

Minato was already gone.

-

Loop Seventeen was long delayed. Seals were the key, Minato realized that now.

The Second had used a basic seal when he first created the Hiraishin, that was certain, but Minato had dismissed the idea almost without a second thought. But he may have thrown the baby out with the bathwater in doing so.

Minato sat in the library at the desk that all but bore his name at this point, pouring over scroll after scroll, detail after detail - anything and everything he could get his hands on regarding seals, sealing arts, and just how he might be able to pull something off.

He started with Tobirama’s seal, attempting to decipher the strange, cryptographic means by which the man had crafted his art. He truly was a visionary, Minato had to admit, but the Second Hokage had many neurotic tendencies that made using his notes as reference next to impossible.

And then when Minato returned home that evening, angry and disappointed in himself, it was Kushina (again) that brought him out of his slump.

“What is it, exactly, that you’re trying to do?” she sighed with an eyeroll, murmuring ‘do I have to do everything around here’ under her breath as she dragged him to his study, an inkwell and brush finding their way into her hands almost by means of magic. “Look, it’s not that hard. All you have to do is use your brain a little.”

Minato watched her work, memorizing every minute detail as she laid brush to tapestry.

Loop Seventeen happened three days later.

-

After the thirty-second loop, Minato felt the Hiraishin was complete enough for an exhibition.

He had done all the testing - the seals did a fine job of localizing the sphere of the Hiraishin’s influence to an area on its own, and a small bit of flourish Kushina had taught him as he was completing it allowed for the bubble to extend to his location regardless of where he was, pulling upon little to no chakra in doing so.

It was around the time that he demonstrated the technique to both his sensei and the Hokage himself that Minato truly realized the extent of what he had accomplished.

“Tobirama was an inventor,” Sarutobi had mused that afternoon, from between lips gripping a pipe. “But you, Minato, are an innovator. Far too few shinobi have this skill. And it is one that will carry you far indeed.”

“Sensei’s right, kid,” Jiraiya smiled, crossing his arms across his chest. “You managed the unthinkable. The Second created more jutsu that is probably natural in his lifetime, and I’d be hard pressed to call any of them, save for maybe the Shadow Clone jutsu, complete.”

He was right. Minato had reduced the chakra costs from astronomical to hardly a drop, made a somewhat inconsistent technique that relied on the caster’s concentration and chakra potency into something based around seals and numbers, and created something that had the potential to devastate. Destroy.

Minato only nodded. “I certainly hope the Hiraishin’s complete. At least, complete now.”

Jiraiya let out a barking laugh. “Brat, you’ve spent more time researching for that technique than I did for any one of novels. Hell, all of my novels. I’ve seen what you can do with it. If it’s not finished, I’ll eat Gamabunta.”

Minato paled at the proclamation, but before he could respond in some sort of timid manner, the Third spoke up.

“I have a mission for you,” Hiruzen hummed, plucking a sheet of paper from his desk and sliding it forward. “Well, rather, a mission for your certain subset of skills. You say the Hiraishin allows you to… stop time?”

“Slow it,” Minato corrected. “And it requires a base. Tobirama used force of will, but that was far too unpredictable, and nearly impossible to use in battle. Not to mention how draining it can be. Instead of that, I’m using seals. But that means--”

“We get it, Minato,” Jiraiya interrupted, waving him on. “Spit it out.”

“I… yes. But only around markers I’ve already placed.”

Hiruzen paused, uncertain.

Jiraiya spoke again. “What about kunai?”

“Kunai?” Minato asked. “What about them?”

Jiraiya shrugged. “I dunno. Can’t you attach your seals to kunai and throw them?”

Once again, Minato found himself back at the drawing board.

-

Loops Thirty-Eight, Thirty-Nine, Forty, and Forty-One were forgotten in the heat of battle.

Minato swerved to the right, slashed his kunai at a shadowed figure, and ducked back as the foggy forest swallowed him.

He had just assassinated the military commander of the Hidden Mist. It was understandable that they would send their best men to return the favor.

Minato ducked, rolled, and slammed his elbow behind him as the hunter-nin stumbled forward. The movement carried Minato forward, and he dove out of the way of an explosive blast that rattled the surrounding clearing like glass in a windowframe.

He saw the blade before the shinobi that held it, tucked aside like an afterthought, forgotten in the heat of battle.

His body moved faster than his mind did, flaring chakra, molding it in a way that had become something short of second nature to him.

Time slowed. Flickered. Stopped.

Minato blinked again, his own body caught in the technique. He was hung in the air like a cloud, dangled above .

But he was safe.

He could have used a shunshin, or even a kawarimi. But instead, for some inexplicable reason, his body moved first - and here he was, caught in the throes of life-threatening battle, his most imperfect, most unrefined jutsu keeping him alive.

He smiled. Fitting.

Minato landed on the ground with catlike grace, his neck angling upwards, analyzing the battlefield. He leaned forward, grabbed the kunai from midair, and used it to slice the Mist ninja’s throat in two, quickly and without emotion.

He froze for a moment when the blood didn’t come pouring out. But then he remembered: time dilation. For some bizarre reason, the sensation of killing without blood sickened him. It made the job more... surgical, almost.

He plucked a basic kunai from his pouch, a seal - temporary - tied around the handle with thin white string, and launched it across the clearing, watching as it pierced the bubble of the Hiraishin’s influence and trailed its own path through time. The blade landed, and the two points connected.

The bubble expanded, grew like a small pocket of air trapped underwater, and Minato vaulted across the clearing to the other Mist ninja.

Another bloodless murder, and Minato disengaged the technique.

The job was done.

Minato took two steps forward, listening with a grimace as his actions out of time began to catch up with him, and the two ninja gurgled and moaned as they bled out.

Another step.

This time, he heard another sound.

It took him a heartbeat, then another to realize it was coming from his own mouth.

He looked down at himself, at the blade of the kunai that was piercing through his chest like a tumor, and the way blood, black as coal, began to trickle past his flak jacket and seep into the earth.

His heart seized.

“Heh,” the third Mist ninja said from behind him, cockiness bleeding into his words, “you may be fast enough for those two, but you’ll never be fast enough for me.”

He didn’t remember why he did it - why he felt compelled to use the Hiraishin. Perhaps Minato wanted a moment to kill his killer before the man could watch his death, or perhaps he wanted a moment of carefree silence to mourn himself… for the life he was undoubtedly about to give up from simple inattentiveness.

An image of Kushina flashed through his mind, bedecked in white and surrounded by the vibrance and beauty of color and marriage and love--

He roared, enraged. The jutsu flared, bubbling up past his skin like boiling water, flickering through the air, far more powerful than any time Minato had used it before.

The forty-second loop was the loop where Minato died.

But it was also the first loop - the first real loop. The first loop where time really did go back on itself, change itself, become anew.

He watched with disbelieving eyes as the blood spilled on the grass between his feet began to move, travelling up his body until nested within his chest once again. He watched as the kunai dislodged itself from his chest, and watched the fabric in his jacket stitch itself back together. He watched the leaves in the trees, as they retraced their steps in time and danced a familiar dance.

The bubble expanded past his skin, chasing time away like a skittish animal, until it returned to the way it was every other time - a shimmering sphere of impossibility, hovering just outside of his reach.

Minato turned, and saw red. The red of blood, the red of anger and rage… the red of the hair of his wife on the wedding day he so nearly missed.

Hiraishin had given him another chance, and he wasn’t about to soil it. The forty-second loop was where Minato died, but was also the loop where Minato was reborn.

-

The previous forty-one times Minato had used the Hiriashin, he realized later that month, were all loops. Every single one of them.

Sure, he hadn’t noticed it at first. But calling the forty-second ‘loop’ the first of its kind wasn’t accurate.

The Hiraishin twisted time more than just by freezing it. That was merrily because Minato hadn’t been pushing it as far as it could go, for fear of depleting chakra reserves and leaving him stranded, locked out of time.

In the heat of the moment, death on his doorstep, Minato had thrown any and all caution from his mind. He pushed everything he had into the technique, and it had delivered.

Minato could cheat time. He could cheat death.

“No shinobi, regardless of title, has ever held within them the power of a god - the true power of a god,” Sarutobi had said one lazy afternoon, after Minato had revealed his discovery, chest still heaving from returning to the village following another round of tests. The Hokage twiddled with his beard a little, staring out past the tall, imposing pillars that adorned the top of the Hokage’s Tower and down into the village he oversaw.

He turned, looked at Minato’s wide-eyed face, and gave him a look of fierce honesty - of expectation. “But you, Minato, are the first to truly wield it.”

Minato could cheat life. He could cheat chance, and reason, and calculation.

He turned, leapt from the rooftop, ran all the way home. His hands shook as he landed in front of his doorstep. A mix between terror and gratitude, adrenaline-bolstered fear locked them in place above the handle to the front door, and Minato just stood there.

He stood, and quivered.

Kushina had jumped when she opened the door to come looking for him an hour later, only to find him inches away. She pulled his shellshocked body inside, held him as he took massive gulps of air, rubbed the tension in his shoulders away with the soft pads of her fingertips.

“You’re alright,” she whispered to him as he stared, dazed, out the window into the fading light of early dusk. “You’re fine.”

Minato could cheat life, cheat death, cheat time. He had become a god, wielding that which had never before been wielded by man alone.

But Minato could not cheat the weight of the world on his shoulders, pinning him to the earth like the mortal he was.

-

“You should try teaching,” Jiraiya told him over dinner, two weeks after loop number one hundred and fifty-two. “It suits you.”

Minato froze. “Sensei?”

“Exactly,” Jiraiya winked, leaning his forearm across the table. “You’d be a fantastic sensei, kid. You’ve always had a knack for explaining the unexplainable. You would be a fantastic role model.”

“He’s right, you know,” Kushina said with a sly smile as she walked by, a bowl of ice cream in her hands. She slid into the seat in between the two men, and watched with a cocky grin as Minato floundered under their combined scrutiny. “What’ve you got to lose?”

He met Kakashi, Rin, and Obito three weeks later.

War followed not much longer after that.

-

He remembered the four hundred and ninety-sixth loop very well.

Everything was routine. Everything was supposed to be routine.

But war was war, and not even Team Minato, led by a god, could survive unscathed.

Minato had used the Hiraishin, just as he had many times before, as a means of traveling across continents - and the four hundred and ninety-sixth loop was no different in that regard.

But Minato quickly realized just how wrong he was, and how life changing Loop Four Hundred and Ninety-Six would become.

After Obito’s death, Minato receded into his jounin shell. Life dulled, drifted past his glazed eyes like beads of water dripping down stained glass.

He failed as a teacher. He failed as a shinobi. All of his uncertainty came flooding back, and more often than not Minato found himself marching towards the Hokage Tower, hands clenched into fists, to hand in his resignation. It was Kushina, only Kushina, that held him back, reminding him of his obligations.

But then Rin died too.

Kakashi took it harder than Minato did at first, but Kakashi’s pain fed into his own. He felt like a father would, struggling to stay strong for someone when he needed someone strong himself.

But still he powered onwards, simply because he had no alternative. Minato was a logical man by nature, and he knew his own strengths and weaknesses. He knew how his mind coped with loss.

So he buried himself in his research, studying seal after complex seal, mastering the art in a manner that few before him had ever accomplished.

He discovered the Reaper Death Seal after Loop Five Hundred and Twelve by accident.

He poured through several old Uzumaki tomes that Kushina had dragged up from the basement, long forgotten. He pieced together the archaic technique after weeks of backbreaking, exhausting research, and in the end, even after testing the jutsu’s less lethal components with rigorous valor, Minato still wasn’t certain the jutsu would work.

And then he became Hokage.

And his life went from stressful to chaotic with the snap of the Third Hokage’s fingers.

-

Loop Five Hundred and Thirty was a simple trip to the Hokage Tower - a summons.

“So you say this jutsu allows you to split… souls?” Hiruzen asked, scanning through the large ream of paper Minato had composed on the Reaper Death Seal.

“Well… yes.”

“Teach me,” the Third said, and his eyes were steeled and resolute.

Thanks for reading! It definitely is a bit rusty and reads more like my old style than my new, but I still really like it and the concepts it introduces.

I’m gonna cheat and use this as my response to the WIP Meme I was tagged in last night by @blackkatmagic (because otherwise I won’t have enough WIPs to use for this week!). the first line is:

The first loop Minato didn’t consider a loop at all.

“What other reason could there be?”

Wow. That came out 100% whiny. He sounded almost as pathetic as he felt.

“A reason that makes sense,” Kushina said flatly. “One that isn’t entirely against everything Kiba stands for. It’s not like he wasn’t blatantly exposed to your sexuality before he moved in with you. He put up with more than enough PDA from you and Sasuke - ”

“We’re not talking about Sasuke, Mom - ” Naruto said loudly, then grabbed his ears and whimpered.

“I like talking about Sasuke,” Kushina grumped. “I’m gonna have to take up watching soaps if you’re well and truly over him. The melodrama! The mood swings! The plotting sessions with Mikoto! The time I doused him with the garden hose - Tachi-kun’s constipated face -”

Naruto smothered himself with his pillow. “You love laughing at Sasuke more than you love me.”

“Mm. Close call, but not quite. Now, reasons. What reasons did Kiba give? And I’m talking what he actually said, not what you decided it meant. I can’t imagine Kiba being all ‘ew gross, too gay’—”

“He didn’t,” Naruto said, miserable. "He just–just stood there, with the kitchen table between us, and smiled a smile that made him look sick, and said he’d decided to move out. No reason.“

"And?”

“And I said ‘what the hell, you’re not serious’ but no, he was serious, and I, uh, maybe freaked out just a tiny bit okay? Because we worked so hard to make this place a comfortable shithole even if it’s still a shithole -”

“It is a shithole, but isn’t that why the landlord didn’t care about the dog? What’s he going to do with the puppydog?”

“- Exactly! So I said these things to him, and asked him about Akamaru, and he looked terrible but just said this fake-okay ‘I’ll get something worked out’ and I was like ‘I don’t want to abandon this place - where did I mess up, I’ll take out the trash right away and close the door all the way when I poop - ’”

“What?! I broke you of that habit in third grade!”

“And you know what he said? ‘I don’t want to be an asshole and leave you without someone to split the rent, so I’ve started looking for roommates - How would I feel about living with Hinata?’”

“Oh. Ohhh-no. You can’t do that to Hinata, Naruto. You walk around with your shirt off. You sleep naked. She may know you’re gay, but a girl’s got limits. If she jumps my baby boy—”

“Mom! But yeah, actually I said something like that to him, and he gets all pale and so I start blabbering that of COURSE I’d never come on to Hinata, I mean I know that she’s like a sister to him, but she’s like eight thousand percent safe from me because I’m at least eight thousand percent gay and—”

“AND?”

“And he says something like—I think he said ‘That’s the problem’? and, like, twelve ’sorries’ and then he…he left. Just. Gone.”

“That’s - that’s it? He didn’t say anything else? You’re sure he didn’t say anything else?”

Naruto pushed his phone towards her, open to texts from Kiba explaining that he’d come to get all of his shit so someone else could move in.

Tomorrow. Which was today.

Kushina read through them, then started scrolling through older texts messages, brows arcing in mischievous curiosity.

Naruto snatched his phone back. And promptly collapsed into his pillow, mumbling curses.

“Aw, poor hungover frat baby,” Kushina crooned, still not even pretending to be sympathetic. “No, I’m not letting you go back to sleep. Up you go. Into the shower. I brought everything for omelets. Heaven knows I wouldn’t find anything of edible worth in your fridge…”

It was hard to be annoyed about one’s (entirely unsympathetic) mother when she drove two hours to fix one’s woes with omelets.

Naruto headed to the shower.

.

.nk.

.

“Okay, I’m beginning to see why you spent most of the night drunk-texting your dad. I’ve thought of everything you would have done that would make Kiba not want to live with you but ALSO not tell you why he won’t live with you. It looks like this.” Kushina smacked a clean plate down in front of her son. "Empty. Zero. Nada. Here’s your omelet.” Piping hot barely-browned eggs folded neatly around melting pepper-jack cheese and Italian sausage and three kinds of peppers (but no slimy mushrooms because Naruto refused to appreciate edible fungi as anything other than ew gross ) flipped from pan to plate, and Naruto couldn’t help but feel a little hope bubbling up.

“I guess I’ll try talking to him again. It’s just… Last night, he, he looked so - not disgusted? Uncomfortable. Really really uncomfortable. Stayed on the other side of the room the entire time, like he was afraid I might reach out and grab him with my eight-thousand-percent-gay hands–”

“I’m really not buying the gay stuff, Naruto. What makes you think that’s what this is about? I may not know him as well as some of your other friends, but he asked you to move in with him when Sasuke spending the night was still something that happened sometimes - goodness, when are you going to accept that I know these things? You tell your dad everything and he tells me everything. Stop choking and drink your orange juice - but you won’t convince me that boy’s not marshmallow pie personified. He laughed all three times I pranked him.”

She chopped a quarter-onion while saying all of this, and set it sizzling in the pan, then set about decimating another pepper. A peek sneaked over one shoulder showed her boy’s dejection setting in again. And not even halfway through the first omelet. Mercy. Where’s Minato when you need him?

“I did something,” Naruto mumbled, shoulders hunching in. “Like… Not one thing. We started out so great, getting this place all fixed up, and we screwed up almost all the DIY shit we googled the first couple times around but Kiba never got mad and -”

Oooh. Something big is coming. “Aaaand?”

“He’s - he’s hot, okay?! He’d be, like, soaked from a pipe we didn’t get in quite right, or, or laughing at cat fail videos with Akamaru and I just -”

“Yeeeeees?”

“I stared. I stared, okay?!”

Kushina tried so hard not to laugh. Poor Naruto’s cheeks were so red. He was more of a man than a boy now, she had to admit, twenty-one years old and coming up on his last year of undergrad. In so many ways, though, he exactly mirrored the bashful five-year-old kept in memory right in the middle of her heart, bright-eyed and blushing, bursting with the confounding thrill of a first crush. “You like him. Like-like him.”

Naruto made an impressive try at hiding his entire head with his arms. She barely made out the reply that came, but felt their ache echoing in her own belly, just a bit. “How I could not? He’s - he’s - Kiba - he - he’s so -”

“Strong? Loyal? Manly? Adorable as his pure and perfect puppy?”

“Ugh. Yes.”

“…Are you sure he’s not gay?”

“Yes - I mean, we haven’t really talked ‘bout that but - I mean, he said something like ‘attractive people are just plain attractive’ one time but - anyway it doesn’t matter, he obviously doesn’t want to be gay with me—”

“Why not?”

“Because he WOULD BE ALREADY, wouldn’t he? Or at least he wouldn’t have move out of the house when I couldn’t stop my stupid eyes from looking at him way too much—”

“Kiss him,” said Kushina.

“What?! NO! MOM! As if I haven’t wrecked the friendship enough!!”

“Well, that’s my advice. I’m not going to repeat it. Finish your omelet, buster.”

A second omelet, this one with onions and mushrooms, appeared on the table. Naruto wouldn’t eat it. She would, rather than let it be wasted, but if her hunch was right—

Inuzuka Kiba crashed through the door. He looked sweaty and anguished and had obviously spent most of the night running, both figuratively and literally, but he also looked very, very determined.

Ten points for timing! Kushina cheered to herself, carefully turning off the stove.

.

.nk.

.

“I’m sorry,” Kiba was saying, and Naruto still had a forkful of omelet halfway to his mouth, staring again. Kiba smelled like sweat and dirt and sharp morning air and he looked so serious and Akamaru was nuzzling his elbow, bless that puppy, now Naruto could breathe again—

“I keep screwing everything up,” said Kiba, “and I’m sorry. But I’m no coward. I’m gonna tell you what I need to tell you and then I’ll get all of my shit out of your way.”

He was still moving out. Naruto’s hopes hit rock bottom.

“Every time I get too close, I want to kiss you.”

He couldn’t keep living here. Not in this 120-year-old shithole tiny-ass house they found that was affordable and close to campus and allowed pets and thanks to them had a working shower and a roof that didn’t leak anymore—what?

“It’s not new, okay? I’ve felt this way since—since freshman year, at least—and I know how you are about Sasuke, I know I’ll never compete. But I screwed up, okay? I thought if I moved in with you—if I found out about all the stupid annoying gross stuff you do when you’re at home, I’d get over this glowing image I had of you. But it didn’t work, okay? It didn’t work. I’ve seen you pick your nose and be idiotic about avoiding vegetables and barely survived you stinking this place to hell when you had that disgusting stomach bug and I know for a fact that you’ve only washed your sheets twice this semester and I love you more. And I can’t. I can’t, Naruto. I just—I’ll always be your friend, I’m here if you really need someone, you know that, but—”

“She was right,” Naruto said, wonder exploding a tiny firework jubilee somewhere in his chest. “Wow. I can’t believe—”

“What, who? Did Tenten tell you? She swore—”

“Kiss me.” He’d made it to his feet. The happiness was going to shake him to bits. He had to find some kind of words quick or he’d be too shattered to make words at all. “Kiba. You’re—I’m—here—”

Kissing Kiba was like bursting into summer. Like the shocking relief of plunging into cool water, like running as fast as you can for the joy of it, like feeling the sun leak into your pores, seeping warm and healing to the very center of your shoulder bones.

“Don’t move out,” Naruto begged lowly, holding on just in case Kiba felt like running again.

“I…don’t think I have to? If I can really just—kiss you and—”

“Let’s try, yeah? At least until summer—”

“Okay,” said Kiba, shellshocked. Beginning, big and free and amazed, to grin.

“You can marry him, too,” Kushina said, and laughed wickedly when Kiba started, whipped around to notice her presence in the room for the very first time, and promptly panicked. “Sit down. I made you an omelet. And I’ll make one for you, too, Akamaru, you sweet doggo you!”

.

.nk.

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The End!

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Prospective chapter title: “A Disaster Contains Itself”

Obito:

Born unfortunate in the most fortunate clan, grown up dead-last, and graduated a dunce on a team of greats. She'd died, been remade, seen her love murdered, remade herself... all for what? The world is trash. Burn it.

She was a walking disaster. She'd always been a disaster—a small one, that held only herself. But she was growing—had grown. She was a volcano, a tsunami, a hurricane now. She'd remake the world, better and kinder, with waves, fire, and death.

It's what she deserved, for all her pain. It's what Rin deserved.

(Maybe, it was even what Kakashi deserved.)

I know what sarcasticbirb meant by “disaster lesbian”, but overinterpreting a single word and running it into the ground is my jam.

Kakashi:

Am I cursed?, she thought. Pretty sure I'm cursed. People died around her. She knew, intellectually, it was the way of ninja. Arguably, none of it was her fault (she told herself). The world was garbage, that's just how it worked.

First Mama, then Papa, then Obito, Rin... now Minato. Her second father.

Definitely cursed.

Not sure how to write Rin yet, but we’ll see.