Chapter Text
Minato stood at the doorway to the room. Dawn lit it up a soft blue, creeping in through the green curtains Kushina had picked out for their baby. The crib he and Kushina had put together stood empty and unused.
Minato pressed his forearm against the frame of the door and buried his face in the crook of his arm. He took a long, shuddering breath.
It had been six and a half years since he’d lost the both of them. Kushina would make fun of him, if he couldn’t even come in here to clean. Some Hokage he was, she’d say.
He’d stopped hiring genin teams to clean years ago, promising himself he’d either move back into the house he’d planned to start a family in, or else pack it up and sell it. The Hokage residence, where he’d been staying for the past six years, was fine for just him. It wasn’t healthy that he was keeping a whole house as a shrine to his own grief and not even living in it.
He had packed up most of the other rooms. Some of the furniture– the couch he’d cuddled with Kushina on after long days, the side table she’d painted traditional Uzushio good luck fuinjutsu and some truly ugly frogs on for him– had migrated to his residence. He’d carefully boxed up his favorite possessions of Kushina’s: her decorative hair combs, the cardigan that had been his and she’d stolen, some of her old school supplies that she’d written notes about him on, her favorite bowl for ramen. He’d given away or tossed other things, as much as it had hurt to part with any piece of his once happy life.
He would never not miss Kushina. But he could process her loss. They’d known this was a risk. They’d grown up during war; they’d known either of them dying young was always a risk. She’d been an adult making her own choices.
He had no idea how he was meant to ever be okay after holding his infant son’s body. He hadn’t been able to bring himself to remove anything from Naruto’s room.
Naruto’s room that he'd never even gotten to sleep in and never would.
Minato could barely bring himself to enter it, duster in hand.
It took him a few hours to clean the house, and he arrived to his office late. No one said anything. You didn’t complain to the Hokage’s face.
He preferred dealing with the house in the mornings, when he could. Work was a good distraction afterwards, to keep him moving forward. Even if he’d utterly failed his own tiny family, he hadn’t failed Konoha yet. He went through his meetings as normal, read through new budget plans, approved suggested teams for missions. He listened to a borderline hysterical potential client describe problems with bandits in her village, and when his quote for a ninja team made her burst into tears, gently nudged applications to petition the daimyo for financial assistance at her. He smiled his best smile. She calmed down.
(Minato wasn’t going to not help her. But he also wasn’t going to give out free labor if he could make someone pay.)
His last meeting of the day was briefing a team of genin on their first ever out-of-village mission. He couldn’t personally do the briefing on every mission, but he tried to for the important milestones.
The genin were so tiny, and all fidgety with nerves. He thought about his own genin team and… no, that was a bad train of thought when he was meant to be presenting happy news with a smile.
Naruto will never get this, he thought instead, and his breath hitched awkwardly in the middle of describing the trade road they were meant to be clearing of rubble after a bad storm.
“You can request specialized equipment for the quartermaster,” he rushed to continue. If they noticed anything was off, they didn’t show it. “Your chances of meeting other ninja or bandits in that area is very low, but remember that mother nature is often more dangerous than either.”
The genin seemed excited about their mission when they left. Minato still felt like he’d botched his speech a little. He was proud that he’d gotten Konoha to the point that new genin could be eased into missions with simple, nonviolent ones like this. But he could still do better. He h ad to do better, to make the Konoha he’d wanted Naruto to grow up in.
I need to clear my mind, he decided, and then did what he always did when he needed to clear his mind. He went to his favorite training ground, hidden right around the back of the Forest of Death, and threw around some kunai.
He’d come up with some ideas to modify his Hiraishin marker a while ago and marked up some prototypes, but not had the spare time to really practice them.
He took a kunai with his new modification, tossed it into the branches of a tree, concentrated…
…and then made the roughest landing he’d done in years in the boughs of the tree.
So that had the opposite effect of making it smoother, he thought, dislodging the kunai for the tree’s bark. Unless the problem was him, and not the marker…?
He tried another prototype a couple times, and then the third. He thought these were both improvements. He retried the first one just to be sure the results were replicable…
…and then found himself in entirely the wrong place.
xXx
The problem with Hiraishin accidents was that they tended to be… strange. Most jutsu accidents ended with an explosion or a blade slipping or something like that. Hiraishin accidents ended with you standing in random places, sometimes with random pieces of clothing missing.
Minato was a little surprised to end up in a park, but not immediately worried. He was still in Konoha, and all of his clothes were in place. The interesting part was that when he tried his experiment, it had been 6 PM at the height of summer. The sun had still been out and blazing. Now it was dark and markedly cold.
He was in a park near the outskirts of the village. Hokage monument loomed in the distance.
Minato blinked a few times as his eyes adjusted to the dark. This end of the park had a playground for children. It had several street lamps, but half of them were out. He was currently standing next to a slide, which was covered in graffiti. These details seemed odd to him, as he’d been an advocate for Konoha’s park maintenance. Konoha sinking all their funding and manpower into the Third Shinobi War meant Minato had grown up playing on rusty and half-broken equipment, and he’d promised his unborn son that he’d have nicer places to play.
Minato was never going to get to be a father, and he saw this as all the more reason to support infrastructure changes to improve the village for families that did have children. He owed it to baby Naruto.
Ah, well. This park was pretty far out. Maybe it was somehow getting missed. Minato mentally filed the problem away to address after he’d figured out if he’d… blacked out for a while, or whatever had just happened.
There was one other presence in the whole park, a little kid was playing in a sandbox. Minato wondered where the kid’s parents were, this late at night.
Minato approached the kid, making sure to make enough noise to be noticed. The kid froze in the middle of making some sort of… sand pile… and looked up at Minato with suspicious eyes.
“What?” the kid demanded. He had light colored hair sticking out from under a knit hat. He scowled at Minato very seriously, which was adorably hilarious on such a young face. “What do you want?”
He must not recognize me, Minato decided, amused. It was dark, and the kid was pretty young. It was normal for him not to recognize the Hokage.
Minato squatted at the edge of the sandbox, resting his hands on his knees so the kid could see them. There were random patches of grass in the sand. The kid puffed himself up, his scowl still in place.
“Hey, kid,” Minato said. “I need some help. Can you answer some questions for me?”
“What questions?” the kid asked. “I’m allowed to be here, you know!”
Minato felt his stomach tighten slightly at the wording. It was so close to how Kushina used to talk, and this kid was about the age Naruto would be…
Get a grip, Namikaze, Minato thought. This type of distraction was why he’d screwed up the Hiraishin to begin with. He needed to focus. Lots of people probably happened to speak like Kushina.
“Actually, the park is closed after dark,” Minato said gently, and the kid looked scandalized. It was very cute, and Minato nearly laughed. Minato winked. “Don’t worry. I won’t tell anyone. After all, I’m here after closing too, aren’t I?”
The kid relaxed into a pout. He eyed Minato up and down, and Minato tried to look as friendly and unthreatening as possible.
“You’re a ninja!” the kid finally said, visibly brightening. “You have a hitai-ate!”
He pointed. Minato grinned.
“Sure am,” he agreed.
“Then why do you need help from me?” the kid asked, eyes wide.
At this point, it would have indeed been faster and more efficient to just teleport back to his office and ask an adult what happened. But this kid was very cute, and Minato liked talking to the youth of Konoha.
“I had a jutsu accident,” Minato said, very seriously. The kid’s eyes basically bulged out of his head. Adorable. “I’m afraid to tell any other ninja, in case they make fun of me. But you won’t make fun of me, will you?”
The kid got so excited he actually ended up on his feet, waving his arms intensely. Sand flew everywhere.
“No way!” the kid yelled. “Everyone makes mistakes, you know! That’s what the old man says whenever I mess up, and I mess up a lot! I don’t like when people make fun of me! So I won’t make fun of you, and if the other ninja make fun of you, I’ll beat them up for you!”
“Whoa, whoa!” Minato said, putting his hands up. This kid was enthusiastic. “That’s very nice of you, but you don’t need to beat anyone up for me, promise. Why don’t you hear my questions first?”
The kid took a deep breath.
“Okay,” he said, very serious.
“Do you know what time it is?” Minato asked. The kid shook his head. “Well, do you know what time you left your house to come here?”
“I dunno,” the kid said. “But I didn’t come here from my house. I came from the Academy, you know! I’m training real hard to be a ninja too!”
The kid rambled for a bit, spitting out random disjointed statements about his life and his day, and Minato frowned as he listened to the story, trying to fit all the random details together. The kid had had detention after class, after some prank he’d pulled on his teacher, and then he’d come immediately over to the park. He said he liked coming at night when the park was empty, because other children often wouldn’t let him play with the “good” equipment.
“Usually I have to wait until after dinner,” the kid was saying. “But in winter it gets dark real early, you know!”
This was true. It seemed it wasn’t nearly as late in the day as Minato had thought. So, that was good, except somehow the season had changed…?
The kid did know the date. It was not the one Minato had started his day on.
“Can you tell me… the year?” Minato said slowly.
The kid told him.
If the kid was right, Minato had gone back in time five months. So that was… a new way for the Hiraishin to be messed up. What a terrifying discovery.
When Minato, lost in thought, didn’t ask follow up questions, the kid was unperturbed. He continued to ramble about his ninja training.
(The kid had a long list of rivals to defeat, as apparently he wasn’t very popular among his classmates.)
At least, if Minato really was back in time, it was only five months. If he couldn’t figure out how to undo it, he could just lay low those five months until his past self also winked out of time, and just step right back into his life. Unless that wasn’t how time travel worked…? Tobirama had written some theories on time travel and seemed to think it didn’t work that cleanly…
“...and then I’m going to be Hokage!” the kid cried, pumping a fist in the air.
Minato grinned, despite the situation. This kid was a riot. How had he not noticed him before?
“I’m sure you will be,” Minato told him, reaching forward to place a hand on the kid’s hat, like he would to ruffle hair. “Thank you for helping me.”
Minato stood. He wanted to go to his office as soon as possible to get to work verifying he had time traveled, and maybe consult Tobirama’s old writings, but he also couldn’t just leave this kid alone. Minato needed to fix this problem as soon as possible for his responsibility to the village, but responsibility to the village also meant responsibility to this random kid. He’d drop him off at his home as quickly as possible, he decided. He’d love to see this kid’s reaction to realizing who he was. Or to getting to see his famous Hiraishin.
“Hey, kid,” Minato said. “My name is Namikaze Minato. What’s yours?”
The kid didn't seem to recognize the name at all. But he beamed up at Minato, showing all his teeth.
“This means we’re friends now, right?” the kid said. “I’m Uzumaki Naruto!”
The kid continued to ramble about how cool it was to have a ninja for a friend, but Minato couldn’t hear him.
He couldn’t hear anything. He couldn’t see. He couldn’t breathe.
Was this a joke? A sick prank by a villager? Or an attack, even? A cruel, evil genjutsu, maybe?
Minato suddenly wanted to flee, or maybe he wanted to fight, or to disappear forever. He had no name for this emotion, but he did push out his senses, tapping into his Hiraishin network. It lit up in his mind, scattered across the village.
It was wrong. There were fewer markers than there should be. And… one extra one.
Minato's gaze turned back to the kid in front of him. The kid had one of his markers in him, burning brightly at his belly.
“Hey, hey,” the kid said, taking Minato’s hand and tugging. “Are you alright, mister?”
Minato tried to dispel a genjutsu. Nothing happened. The kid was still staring up at him with blue eyes the exact shape of Kushina’s.
“Na… naruto,” Minato said, the word feeling too intimate to be spoken out loud. The kid just blinked curiously up at him. “I… I need to take you home. Where are your parents?”
This didn’t make sense.
“Oh,” Naruto said. “Don’t worry about that! I don’t have any, so I can stay out as late as I want, you know.”
Minato stared at him.
He sat on the edge of the sandbox.
He stared at the kid some more.
“Are you okay?” the kid asked, dubious.
“Do you know who the Hokage is, Naruto?” Minato asked weakly.
“Oh, yeah!” Naruto said. “Old Man Third!”
“It’s not the Fourth?” Minato asked, feeling like every cohesive thought he could possibly have was leaking out of his ears.
Naruto shook his head vigorously. “Nope! ‘Cause he’s dead.”
Minato had read through Tobirama’s theories on time travel many times. One theory was that true time travel wasn’t possible. Time was just infinite probabilities, constantly diverging with every decision anyone ever made, and one couldn’t go back in time because time simply wasn’t linear like that.
But one could hop into a different probability. A different timeline, where things played out just slightly differently.
Minato was also confident that there was no way to fake a Hiraishin marker. His past self in this timeline made one and put one in this boy, the same way he’d wanted to do for baby Naruto when he realized the baby had to become the Kyuubi’s next container, before everything collapsed as Minato’s first and greatest failure as a father.
Minato put his head between his knees and concentrated on breathing.
“Whoa, mister!” Naruto cried and helpfully patted his back. “Are you sure you’re a ninja? You don’t seem very tough.”
Minato laughed weakly, staring at the dark grass from between his knees. “You said you wouldn’t make fun of me.”
“Yeah, well…” Naruto stuttered out.
Naruto.
Minato sat up and looked at his son. It was too dark to see every detail of Naruto’s face, but now that Minato knew to look, Naruto looked just like Kushina. He even had the unusually chubby cheeks Kushina had hated as a kid.
He wanted to hug him, to kiss his cheeks and beg for forgiveness.
He also knew that would probably freak the poor kid out.
“Sorry, Naruto,” he said finally. “I have… I have more questions. Can we go inside somewhere?”
Minato himself had apparently died in this timeline, and if Naruto had a seal on him, Kushina was definitely also gone. There was no way she’d let Naruto run around parentless if she was still alive. But Minato still had a lot of questions. His questions about how Konoha was doing without his leadership faded to the back of his mind immediately as he stared down at his impossible son. Who was taking care of him, if he didn’t have parents? Was he in the orphanage? How was he doing in school? Was someone making him homemade lunches, or was he eating the awful stale breads the Academy sold?
Naruto squinted at him.
“Are you some kind of loser ninja?” he asked. “You’re crying.”
Minato laughed. He was crying. How embarrassing. This was a really bad first impression.