Chapter Text
Minato faced Death, looked up at the giant grinning skull, and dared to blink.
Horrid, decayed purple tissue of what had been skin, stretched along its white bone like threads of fabric. Eyeballs, old as the dawn of man held his gaze. “I’ll strike you a bargain.”
From barren nostrils, Minato shivers in its warm, putrid exhale.
“I’ll be your footman. I’ll carry souls from battlefields, reap the sickly, strike fear of Death into humanity and in return, I only ask you to watch over my son.”
I am already feared. Death whispered in his mind. A ghostly shadow behind his eyes. And i already have footsoldiers.
“But you’ve never had me ,” Minato said, “You’ve seen what I can do, I’m sure many souls have passed the doorway to your gallows on my behalf.”
The God breathed. Rumbling air filling the cavern of the spirit realm Minato stood in.
Twenty years . That is how long I will give you to prove your worth, mortal child. Three thousand and thirty three souls. Do not make me regret it.
Minato watched in abhorrent fascination as something dark wound itself around his neck, his wrists and ankles. The tar sunk into the pores of his skin and soul. Branding its new toy.
And then the spirit cavern dropped beneath his feet and Minato was sucked under. Pushed through worlds and spat out, Minato landed in an alley. Mind and body somersaulting.
“Oi,” a tall silver-haired man, darkly robed, shuddered out of shadows and shoved a scythe into his hands.
Minato didn’t have time to question, seeing just as mysteriously the man disappeared.
“Are you here for me, sir?”
Minato turned, coming to face a weary old man in rags. Halo’d by flies and gangrene.
“Sir?”
Hollow and muffled.
Not a foot away, the voice sounded as though it came from a metal can connected by string. The kind of telephone games and kids at the orphanage used to make before it all went to shit.
“I believe I am,” Minato held his scythe. Weightless in his hands.
The man cocked his head, and the bloodshot dead eyes stared. “You’re...the Fourth.”
“I was.”
“Is that what I’ll become now? A grim reaper?”
“No,” Minato raised the curved blade, prepared to carve through the ghost. Body knowing what to do. “You can rest.”
“Thank you,” the man gave a last, wobbly smile before the metal cut through him head to toe. Like ink in water, the man’s spirit floated into the reincarnation cycle.
Minato didn’t know how he knew that.
Black residue of the ghost curled circles in the air before fading. Leaving the sight of the man’s collapsed body in the alley.
.
Atop the Hokage building, Minato sat and listened. Spine curling by the second. Haunching him over and over as he listened .
“ - matron isn’t comfortable with the child - “
“I don’t care,” Hiruzen said. “Naurto will remain in their care. It’s what’s best for the child.”
Without thinking, Minato tossed a sealed kunai. Metal blade flying in an aimless direction and he flashed . Appearing outside a diner, he tossed another.
He visited three orphanages, filled to the brim, before landing outside the window of his son’s room. Alone and wailing, his child rolled in his dingy crib. Kushina had made one for their son before he was born. It was in their apartment, in the nursery Naruto will never see.
A woman no older than Minato stormed inside. Demanding silence and tossing arms in the air. Teeth bared.
She wanted to hit his child, strangle his child.
His Naruto.
Minato, not understanding how such a monster was allowed near his son, an entity of darkness leapt from his body and swept through the woman. Her eyes blanked, face slackened and her body fell. Leaving behind a stunned soul in place. Looking after her body in sudden terror.
“It - you monster,” she gasped.
Blaming his son.
An innocent babe shocked silent by the noise of a body that had been so angry hitting the ground.
“Don’t you dare,” Minato said, and the lady fell to her knees as she met his dark blue gaze. “This is what you get for messing with my son.”
“L-Lord - “
And with that his scythe swept through her spirit. Covering the distance with its massive rod and blade.
Dropping from the windowsill, he stood over his son. Wanted to feel that soft skin of innocence under his fingertips and kiss that frown of confusion off his face.
So, very carefully, he reached down into the crib.
“I wouldn’t do that,” the gravelled voice of that grim reaper in the alley stopped him. “The Kyuubi doesn’t like Death all that much. Wouldn’t want to tick it off.”
Sighing, Minato stepped back and appraised the lithe, grey-haired figure before him.
“I also,” the man said, leaning against his own scythe like a walking stick, “wouldn’t make a habit of killing humans before their time.”
“Why not?” Minato asked, staring distastefully at the woman who dared wish to strike his son. Hiruzen had promised to look after his child yet he willingly let such beasts near Naruto. The boy who carries the weight of the village’s sacrifice on his tiny shoulders. If Hiruzen was letting this happen, Minato dreaded what the future held in store.
Jiraiya, where are you?
You promised.
“For one,” the grim reaper stated, “The whole thing is improper practice. You’re new here. So it can be forgiven. She wasn’t anyone important considering the grand scheme of fate-lines, however,” he straightened, grim-faced. “It’s still improper. Souls that haven’t finished their line of fate tend to be a headache for the guys upstairs.” He jutted a thumb upwards. “They don’t like it.”
“I’ll try to restrain myself from now on,” Minato said but held no promises. The grim reaper sighed, seeing this and shrugged.
“Your head, not mine.”
.
Minato discovers three weeks had passed since his and his wife had orphaned their son. Being the previous host of a kyuubi and the last ‘pure’ Uzumaki, her body was burnt. Mysteries erased. Ashes spread to air beyond Konohagakure’s walls, in hope of her reuniting with Uz ushiogakure. Her lost village.
The only piece left of Minato’s wife was her name on the memorial stone.
Minato stood under the rain he couldn’t touch, the cold he couldn’t feel, and traced her name engraved into metal.
“I’ll protect him,” he promised. By now the orphanage matron’s body had been found, and Naruto had been moved to a new location. A new lonely environment filled with hate and distrust.
Minato had watched it all, watched the broken promises Hiruzen and Jiraiya had made, watched his friends mourn, unable to intervene due to a screwed law of silence, and vowed no more.
The babe will not be harmed.
A baritone of Death whispered beneath the dark sky.
“I’ll be watching,” Minato warned.
A chuckle. Amused by the human.
Your list.
In-between the fingers tracing his wife’s name, a scroll slips. Catching it, Minato read the list of names.
“These are all in Sunagakure.” He knew as well as he knew the matron lady was called Suki and she had passed through the reincarnation cycle not seconds ago. “Naruto - “
Will be watched over.
That was Jiraiya’s job. The job he had sworn to as Godfather.
In the span of a night, Minato had lost his wife, his students, the man he looked up to as a father-figure, and the man he had respected his entire life.
From an orphaned child to the Fourth Hokage, Minato had bled, lost, sacrificed students and sacrificed himself countless times over.
And the Village he had risked it all for, had turned on his only child.
“What a lousy life I made for myself,” Minato rolled up the scroll and slipped it into a pouch on his flak jacket. “I’m going to say goodbye to my son, if that’s alright with you.”
Sunagakure will be waiting. When your human world duties are finished, the shadows will aid in travel.
.
Death is literal with words.
Minado crouched to the bottom of Naruto’s crib, held out a hand and felt something caress his palms. Same in fashion not moments ago as he bid his son a goodnight.
“You’re Shadow?”
A black, snake-like creature ticked his pinky. Just as Minato began to laugh at the absurdity of conversing with a shadow entity like some regular Nara, it double looped his forearm and tugged. Minato, halting his fighting instincts, went stumbling headfirst into the shadow beneath his son’s crib.
Where the floorboard should have been, Minato sank into a bottomless pit. Tumbling until the black teathers brace his back and shove him upwards with a gentle ‘oof’.
Out behind some little girl’s closet, Minato popped. Stunned.
If Minato could feel his heartbeat, it would have been racing.
“...Thank you, Shadow.”
Minato got the distinct feeling Shadow patted his head with an inky tendril as he strode from the little blonde girl’s room.
.
Minato stays longer than he would have liked to witness a child, not much older than Naruto, bear the weight of a Jinchūriki brand.
He witnessed the sealing, reaping a man during the rickety process, and found himself unable to fix the crumbling child’s soul.
“One day,” he promised the toddler. Broken and tainted by a seal too weak for its own good, teal eyes met his blue ones. Chubby hand reaching for blonde hair framing his face. “I’ll come back and fix you. And maybe then, you can meet my little Naruto.”
His last moment in Sunagakure was spent poking the child’s forehead and having a babysitter shriek as the child rocked back from an unknown force.
.
Out amongst Sunagakure dunes, tucked away beneath mounds of sand, hid an underground cavern. Not many would notice or dare venture beyond the cracked opening in the ground. Minato however, was Death’s soldier. He had nothing to fear.
Over the course of months of work, Minato had set up a rudimentary workshop. Benches from yard sales, scrolls and pots of ink he snatched from houses of souls long passed, Minato had begun an exploration into something that would defy the laws of nature.
“What’s that you got there?”
Minato draped a towel in a useless effort to cover his sealing work and turned to glare at the visitor.
The man who handed the very Scythe that now lay beside his bench, strolled around his cavern workshop. Hung from chains secured into the stone enclosures were candles.
“Nothing you need to concern yourself with.”
“That does absolutely nothing to wane my concern,” and quicker than Minato could track, the silver-haired reaper was at his side and pulling away the cloth. Curiosity dimmed his brow, hand tracing the intrinsic patterns scrolled to fine paper.
The reaper looked at Minato.
“These seals, you can’t possibly be thinking - you’re a madman.”
“I’m practical,” Minato stood. Barring the reaper from the rest of his work. “If all goes well, these seals will help my son.”
“You can help from Shadow.”
“I want my son to see me. Know who he’s talking to and to be proud of his lineage. Being an invisible hand isn’t good enough.”
The reaper scoffed. Head shaking beyond disbelief. “Don’t pretend you’re doing this for your son, you're doing this for yourself. You’re dead, Minato. With a capital D. ”
“Are you going to stop me, reaper?”
The man looked away. Grim-faced. “You’re unfortunately under our Lord’s protection.”
“Leave then, if you’re of no use.”
“You’ll regret this, Minato. The Dead aren’t allowed to speak.”
Minato sat and stared at his work and started to slowly reorganise the mess that had been made. At the subtle gust of cold air, Minato paused and glanced at the space where the silver-haired reaper once stood.
In the darkness, Shadow slithered across crevasses of rock and circled under his table-light candle.
“I’m doing the right thing,” he said. “For Naruto.”
His child.
.