Naruto: The Awakened Soul

Bedroom.

A soft ray of sunlight slipped through the window and nudged my eyes open.

I wanted to groan and stretch. Couldn't, though.

Hinata, sleeping soundly in a small puddle of her own drool on my collarbone, was reason enough not to do something that tactless to the little sweetheart.

A whisper of a technique, and the excess moisture simply ceased to exist.

As cute as the whole picture was to watch, waking up that way wouldn't have been particularly pleasant for her.

The night had been wonderful. Even if we didn't get much actual sleep.

And what can I say about Hinata's initiative? A decisive kiss, and what followed, something we'd apparently been craving far more than either of us had realized.

It had been very bold of her, especially given her temperament.

Soon my attention shifted to my little sunshine as she woke up, her eyes swimming with emotion, everything from mortification to deep, quiet satisfaction, until they found mine.

"Good morning," I said softly, pressing my lips to her already-reddening forehead.

Hinata, acting entirely on reflex, grabbed the blanket and tried to bury her head in it, simultaneously pressing herself deeper into my chest.

"G-good... morning..." came the muffled reply from somewhere beneath the fabric. Her long hair, still spread out over the outside of the blanket, made for a pretty funny picture.

"Yesterday you were so much braver. Where did that decisive Hinata go?" I asked warmly, beginning to stroke the blanket where her back would be.

No answer.

Deciding not to push, I changed the subject.

"Breakfast in bed?"

After a beat of silence, a timid nod came from under the covers.

This time I materialized the food from chakra.

After that, Hinata managed, still under the blanket, to get her bra back on, because showing herself like that was, well, embarrassing, and we settled into our meal.

We weren't tired or hungry, exactly, but food made for a good decompressor. By the end of it, Hinata had reclaimed enough composure to be herself again.

I kept things easy and natural, the two of us trading awkward little remarks back and forth. Even while still tangled up in each other's arms, it worked, grounding us, helping us settle into each other. And before long, the feeling crept in that we hadn't quite said everything we'd wanted to the night before. Which meant we ended up staying in the bedroom for another hour or so.

Afterward, still wearing matching traces of bashfulness, we got dressed and headed out to the garden. Tending to it was one of Hinata's hobbies.

The winter look of all those plants had its own quiet beauty.

We sat there, wrapped up in each other again, enjoying the closeness, more innocent this time, just talking.

Between that and a few other small things, the whole day slipped by, until the four of us finally gathered for dinner.

"Oh, mmm!" Karin spotted us the moment we walked in, eyes practically sparkling with barely contained excitement, and tried to say something. Sakura's hand over her mouth cut her off.

"You did promise not to embarrass Hinata about this, remember?" the pink-haired girl reminded her, at which point Hinata began turning several shades of red. The muzzled Karin deflated visibly, nodded, and was released.

"How was your day?" I asked pleasantly, as if absolutely nothing had happened.

We settled at the table. Hinata sat beside me, still flushed, her gaze drifting anywhere that wasn't the redhead across from her.

"Productive," Hinata replied primly. "On the project issue..."

"How are you two just talking like nothing happened?!" Karin cut in without ceremony.

She was more than capable of being serious when she needed to be. Right now, she was simply indulging the sin of her own personality.

"You'll understand when you're older." Sakura patted her on the shoulder.

"Hey! You're only three months older than me!"

"Exactly." Sakura nodded at Karin with the patient air of someone explaining something to a child who just doesn't get it, and continued her story.

The other Uzumaki, and I don't mean myself, sat there visibly simmering, wrestling with her promise. But anyone watching could see the questions straining at the leash behind her eyes. Something along the lines of "How was the sex?!" and approximately a thousand follow-ups on the same theme.

Dinner wrapped up, a quieter affair than usual, for a couple of reasons: Hinata was still embarrassed, and nothing appropriately on-topic was managing to squeeze its way into Karin's otherwise very creative brain. Afterward, I kept Hinata company. She needed time to settle into everything. And a temporary shield from a certain red-haired individual who could, on occasion, be deeply, deeply persistent. So yes, I kept watch.

A couple of days later, because turning every day into an unbroken string of dates with an obvious conclusion would have been excessive, and this needed to happen naturally, I turned to a project I'd been putting off for a long time.

I stood in the lab, facing an empty body capsule, looking straight through it.

Kushina. So much time had passed, and yet the day I was born still followed me.

In the shinobi world, death is, in a certain sense, considered a grace. And summoning the dead, something unholy.

I didn't share that view. I'd simply been too buried in experiments and in building this world, making it safe, making it stop being a problem, to get around to this. Always put it off.

And now, at last, it would be done. Something I'd wanted for a very long time.

Over my raised palm, I began forming a small crimson cluster: life energy with a trace of Yin, given shape as genetic material through the Creation of All Things technique.

"I don't have her body. That doesn't matter." I began shaping the small red cluster above my upraised hand. "Life energy with a fraction of Yin, expressed as genetic material from blood..." Enormous amounts of energy began condensing within the fluid. "Adjust a portion to set a female baseline..." Reality began to tremble from the sheer volume of it. And still I pushed the concentration higher, wanting it done right.

When the Empire joined the process, channeling the energy of the Earth itself—

Crack.

An invisible fracture ran through the world, as if space along its length had simply slipped.

Crack.

Crack.

The world was breaking under it, and I stopped. Even my chakra alone was too much: only a small fraction of it existed within this reality at any given moment, the rest perpetually distributed across nearby dimensions and parallel worlds. That had always been the architecture of a Supreme Chakra Holder.

But by bringing the Empire into it, the new body had been given an affinity not only for my energy, but for the energy of the Earth itself, though far less of that would remain after Kushina's soul returned from the Pure Land and settled into her own SCH.

The energy expended exceeded what was needed to build a body by orders of magnitude. A normal body, at any rate.

Dispersing the chakra, I stilled the trembling of space, and brought into being something greater than merely a human form.

Several minutes later, the body of a beautiful red-haired girl floated in the liquid of the sarcophagus. The finer details of her appearance still needed finishing, but for those I would draw from Kushina's own chakra, which preserved an exact impression of her face.

Behind the capsule, a rift opened in space, and soft pink light poured through.

I could have resurrected Kushina in an instant the moment I'd retrieved her soul along with her chakra, simply reconstructed the old body from its imprint. But I'd built a new one deliberately. It would not be my mother by birth. Nor a twin. But our higher form would be alike, and so we'd encounter no complications of any kind. Not even if we wanted children.

A pulse of chakra into the Pure Land, and it returned to me with the soul I needed.

Shortly after, body settled in the capsule, an hour to refine the remaining details, and once I was satisfied that the soul had taken hold perfectly, I lifted Kushina in my arms. Her eyes were closed, her body unconscious.

Once, Tobirama had noticed, while resurrecting enemies with his forbidden technique, that they never remembered their time in the Pure Land. The reason is simple. They sleep there.

We moved from the lab to a proper bedroom, a far more welcoming place to wake up in than cylinders and machinery.

"My world..." Seated at the edge of the bed, I touched her face with my fingertips. "Time to wake up, Mom..."

Her eyelids trembled, and a moment later, bright violet eyes opened. The gaze was empty at first, as if she hadn't fully come back yet. Then her pupils focused and slowly rose to me.

"Welcome to the future, Mom," I said quietly, and smiled.

She went still. Then, still uncertain, she raised a hand and touched my cheek with her fingertips, as if testing whether I was real.

"...Naruto," she breathed. For a moment, she was clearly trying to fit what she was seeing into her head, and then realization hit her like a second wave. "You... you just called me Mom..."

Her voice broke, almost cracking into a squeak.

Kushina's eyes filled quickly. She blinked, and tears spilled down her cheeks.

"We're not inside the seal, my clone is there... This must be an illusion..." She squeezed her eyes shut and buried her face in my chest. "But such a wonderful one."

"You're wrong. In an illusion, I'd be shorter."

"Heh, how would you know what I was actually imagining?" She lifted her head, eyes wide. "Although... well, fair point."

Kushina had wanted to walk with me through every step of motherhood. But...

"The real world doesn't always go the way you want it to. But I'm glad I found you again."

"Wait... That can't be possible."

"It is."

"...Dattebane."

"Cute word," I said softly, stroking her hair.

With her beside me, something warm spread through me, as if something long absent had finally settled back into place. I had almost let myself believe in that rare, quiet stillness. But then Kushina said the thing that made something tighten unpleasantly inside me.

"So that means... Minato too?"

I exhaled.

"No. I'm not going anywhere near the Shinigami for him. That seal could have been done differently..."

Kushina went rigid.

"He had no choice. There was no other way."

"For him, maybe." I couldn't quite hold back a bitter smile. "But with a fūinjutsu team and the Third's help, there absolutely was. And that barrier... it was unnecessary."

Without really thinking, I cupped her face in my hands and tugged her cheeks lightly. Her eyes flashed with hurt, and the tears came harder. I let go immediately.

"But I don't blame you. Hours of stress and a flood of postpartum hormones, there's no way you were thinking clearly at the time."

"He wanted me to... when the time came... to do what only a mother could," Kushina spoke slowly, her face still pressed to my chest. "To tell you the things only I could tell you. And he wanted to say the things only a father could. Our chakra remained in your seal."

"But the moment never came. I'm not exactly the type to let Kurama break loose." I said nothing further for a moment. "Better to leave it in the past. Minato... I'm sorry, but I don't think I'll ever be able to love him. What he did might earn respect from a lot of people. From me, it only leaves pain. He wasn't caught in the grip of emotion the way you were. And his choices took my parents from me for eighteen years. Left me alone in the village, with no home, carrying the burden of a jinchūriki."

"...Forgive me."

"Though it wasn't all bad. Hiruzen knew how to keep his word. As a guardian figure, by the standards of the time, I'd give him a solid seventy-five out of a hundred." I pulled her back into my arms. "And I did say I don't blame you. Maybe I'm piling too much on you right now... Let's change the subject."

She pressed into me harder.

"Let's... just be here together."

"Nope, you little fool. If I go quiet now, you'll spiral straight into the dark."

"You... Is that any way to talk to your mother?" She pulled back just enough to look up at me with an expression caught somewhere between baffled and very mildly offended.

"Better you take that as a scolding than drown in guilt," I said with an easy laugh. Kushina turned the words over in her head, then let out a sad little sigh. "The modest individual you happen to be sitting on, by the way, that's the Emperor of Humanity. And then some, really. Want to hear how my life got to be like this?"

My words had clearly snagged her attention, shifting it, at least partly, away from wherever it had been drifting, even as they added a note of genuine bewilderment. And so I launched into the story, holding onto Kushina, metaphorically speaking, with everything I had, not giving her a single crack to fall into.

My account, with all its digressions and details, stretched until deep into the night. And as it happened, without either of us separating, we fell asleep in the same bed.

Interlude. Uzumaki Kushina

Kushina woke in the dark, with no idea where she was. There was warmth nearby, at her head and under her palm. She eased back and saw Naruto's face.

Her mind stopped. And then everything crashed in at once: fear, disbelief, joy, grief, gratitude... Her fingers reflexively curled into the fabric of his shirt, as if letting go would make him vanish.

For a full minute she stared at him without blinking. The blond hair, tousled by sleep. A clean jawline, high cheekbones, flawless skin, a face beautiful to the point of something almost otherworldly, and yet not theatrical, just natural. Beneath those closed eyelids, she remembered, were deep sapphire eyes.

The world around her dissolved. She didn't notice when her palms came to rest on his face. She leaned closer, without thinking, on instinct, until their lips were centimeters apart.

And then she wrenched back. Only now did she register what she'd been about to do. And the fact that her entire body was burning.

Arousal?...

Pregnancy rewires a woman: it amplifies the need to protect and care, and suppresses everything else in relation to the child. Years of raising one cement that further. But Kushina had never raised Naruto. Her mind, her chakra, they knew this was her son, and what she felt for him was the purest thing she had. But her body was responding the way it was built to respond to an attractive man. And he was attractive. Very. And those two layers, the maternal tenderness and the physical, didn't cancel each other out. They settled on top of each other.

No. This isn't right.

With every ounce of will she had, she turned away and stared up at the ceiling.

Minato surfaced in her thoughts. Then Naruto's words about him.

Pain needled her heart.

Eighteen years had passed. Kushina didn't know what might have happened to Minato inside the Shinigami's stomach in that time. Maybe his soul no longer existed at all. Or maybe whatever remained wouldn't be enough to resurrect him properly.

She didn't know much about the God of Death. Only that he was an extraordinarily dangerous entity, and that any interaction with him was dangerous and always demanded a price.

Technically, Kushina knew the method: summon the Shinigami, tear open one's own stomach, release the souls sealed within. But whether the god would demand payment, unknown. Shinobi had given their souls to him so rarely that Minato's case was the only one she'd ever heard of outside vague mythology. Which meant the terms were a complete mystery. Could it be a soul-for-soul exchange? What if he wanted a soul with powerful chakra, hers, or Naruto's? And even that wouldn't guarantee success. The possibility that the summoner would simply be consumed, freeing no one, couldn't be dismissed.

And then there was Naruto's feelings about it. He clearly resented his father deeply for what he'd done. Kushina understood that, even though it twisted something inside her.

Naruto would never let me take that risk, she thought, with grief and warmth in equal measure. Grief for the past that seemed beyond recovery. Warmth for the son she had only just found.

Definitely not right after bringing me back.

Even in the best case, Minato returned, but at the cost of Kushina's soul, then what? For Naruto, it would be a second loss. He might end up hating his father even more. He might refuse to accept him at all. And without his son's help, the ritual, and the resurrection itself, would likely be impossible anyway.

So the choice was simple. Try to free Minato, and possibly die, leaving Naruto alone. Or stay, and carry the grief of losing a husband. In the first case, that same grief would fall on Minato instead, and probably far heavier.

Lost in her thoughts, she didn't notice half an hour pass. But the answer came.

Kushina would not try to resurrect Minato.

Eighteen years ago they had already run, and it had given them nothing. She would not run again. She was a mother. Her debt to her son had only grown over those years. And she was going to give everything she had to make up for it, and then some.

With new resolution in her eyes, Kushina turned and pressed her lips gently to Naruto's forehead. She lingered a moment, looking at his sleeping face, then quietly slipped out of bed and padded soundlessly into the hallway.

"Empire... are you there?" she whispered, calling up what she'd heard in yesterday's stories.

Her son, singular tyrant, and god, and emperor of this world... Kushina had listened to him laughing as he told her about how slow, dense, and incompetent some of his subordinates could occasionally be, and trying to picture him in that role had been genuinely difficult. When the very same Naruto had assured her she didn't need to, she'd been relieved to take him at his word.

She already knew about the network that cloaked the world and the intelligence that governed it. So she called out to it now, hoping to ask directions for her usual morning bath.

As if reading her thoughts, a smooth black panel, something like a door, silently opened before her. Beyond it was a spacious bathroom: high ceilings, darkened glass looking out over the garden, minimalist finishes. A large tub at the center was already filling with hot water, carrying the calm scent of lavender.

Kushina stepped inside, as if guided.

"Technology these days..."

She grinned, feeling suddenly ancient. Then she turned, and instead of a doorway found only a large mirror, behind which there appeared to be a door and tall cabinets.

She returned to the mirror, shrugged off her robe, and looked at herself.

"Oh, no, not ancient."

Exactly how they'd brought her back remained a mystery, but the body was if not identical to her old one then very close, only more toned. She had never in her life been in this kind of shape, this aesthetically put-together. Her face was a touch less round, the features somehow sharper. Despite the change being striking but not radical, she felt power inside herself that she'd never known before. But the most striking thing was the chakra. Her reserves were considerably larger than they'd been in life, and the control over them felt almost effortless by comparison. When she channeled chakra into her eyes, she stumbled back, the pattern in her irises had shifted into concentric rings bearing tomoe.

Kushina froze. She didn't know the details of how the resurrection had been done. But if the body wasn't simply restored but actually improved... he had worked on it. And if he'd worked on it... he might have seen her undressed.

Her face went scarlet, all the way to the tips of her ears.

W-what am I thinking?! He's my son!

She shook her head sharply and threw the thought out. The water in the tub had stopped running, time.

Kushina lowered herself into the hot water and finally let herself relax. No new thoughts came. Twenty minutes later she climbed out, dried off, and found two small wheeled stands beside her, which had definitely not been there before, holding neatly folded clothes: a soft, floor-length dress in white, the familiar kind she liked. While she was getting dressed, the stands disappeared without a trace.

"I've never been a guest at a daimyo's before. But this is probably a lot fancier than that," Kushina mused, considering that she currently had a supremely powerful artificial intelligence as her attendant, one that could, with its equally formidable reserves of energy, produce for her just about anything she wanted.

But instead of indulging that, she thought. She wanted to explore the mysterious house, but more than that, she wanted to do something for Naruto. And breakfast in bed, made by her own hands, seemed like exactly the right idea.

Kushina pressed two fingers to each temple with theatrical flair, squeezed her eyes shut, and wished herself to the kitchen.

The passage opened.

A bright room unfolded before her, full of unfamiliar metal objects: gleaming surfaces, panels with buttons, tall silver cabinets. All of it felt alien, but approaching what looked like a stove, she managed to switch it on with a thought. The cabinets held ingredients. The wooden shelves held familiar dishes.

Kushina lost herself in it. Cooking had always been one of her favorite things.

But soon there was a knock at the door.

She smiled, expecting Naruto. Instead, three girls stood in the doorway.

Blue-black hair, pale skin, and a face so red with embarrassment she looked like she might pass out, that one was barely holding it together. The redhead beside her was no less flustered, which, for anyone who knew her, was deeply out of character. The third, pink hair, was working hard to hold herself together and stepped forward to take the lead.

"Good morning, mother-in-law-sama."

"...Huh?" was all Kushina managed. Then the recent memories surfaced, followed immediately by the realization. "So there are seriously three of you?!"

"Our paths with Naruto converged, and became permanently intertwined," the leader confirmed with great seriousness. Though the phrasing, perhaps not the best she could have chosen, gave her nerves away.

"...Dattebane."

She continued.

"I'm Sakura. This is Hinata," she said, as the blue-black-haired girl gave a ceremonial bow. "And this is Karin." The redhead still hadn't come back online.

The words reached her consciousness with a delay. And then Kushina was hit by several waves in fast succession: joy, because her son actually had people close to him in this world... followed by suspicion, were their feelings genuine? And then, swiftly after, jealousy.

For a moment, the three girls seemed to shrink. Kushina's chakra surged outward, not hostile, but balanced right on the edge. The light in the room dimmed. The air began to warp.

Then, a second later, the chakra receded. Kushina gave an apologetic smile.

"Sorry, girls, lost in thought for a second. Come on, let's get to know each other properly."

Uzumaki Naruto's POV

Waking up to something resembling bloodlust in one's own home was unexpected. As was the fact that Kushina had run into the girls this fast, we'd had a proper introduction planned, with me present. It came out awkward.

To my relief and quiet satisfaction, Kushina didn't take my girls as a threat. Setting aside, of course, those first flickers of intent that had jolted me awake.

After the meeting, when we'd all settled around the table and were working through the food, which was excellent, I sat and listened to a gentle, borderline interrogation: the girls walking Kushina through our history from the very beginning. She'd already heard it from me, but this was Kushina's way of showing she cared, she wanted to verify everything herself, wanted to make sure it was all really okay. Whatever that meant to her.

We talked for around two hours, maybe a little more. By the end, the atmosphere had loosened considerably. There was still plenty of adjusting ahead for all of us, but there was no rush.

Once that was done, and I'd confirmed that the girls were fine and no one had hit their limit, I took Kushina to Konoha.

She wanted to see how the village had changed over the years, and giving her a tour was easy enough. Besides, I understood that right now I was the only fixed point she had in this world. Being there wasn't optional.

"The buildings weren't this tall before..." Kushina breathed, staring up at the nearest fifty-story tower as we materialized on the wide boulevard. "And these people... they're staring at us."

"Yeah," I shrugged as the people around us began parting in a wide arc and looking my way as if a god had just stepped down from somewhere. "This is nothing. Used to be they'd rush me, ask for autographs on... sometimes not the most dignified locations, or just decide they absolutely had to touch me. Why, I still haven't worked out."

She looked at me thoughtfully. Then swept her gaze over the drifting crowd and shuddered.

"How do you stand those looks?"

"You get used to it." I took her hand, which seemed to make some of the onlookers' eyes positively shine. "Let's keep moving... I'm pretty sure there were a couple of reporters back there."

We wrinkled our noses in unison and moved on down the street.

She kept turning her head the whole time, like a tourist who'd never seen anything like this in her life.

"I can't believe Konoha changed this much."

"After I became Emperor, the city's population jumped tenfold. Had to build somewhere for all the newcomers."

Soon a familiar stone face came into view above the towers and we drifted toward it. It turned out to be a modest half-kilometer statue of me on a plinth. On the plinth, inscriptions:

Six months since the founding of the Great Empire — hunger defeated.

Ten months... — cancer defeated.

One year, seven months... — the last war on Earth concluded.

One year, eight months... — old age declared a treatable illness. Mortality fell by more than one hundredfold.

Two years... — poverty abolished.

Two years, three months... — the unified Network, the Empire, connected every home...

...

...

"Is this all real?" Kushina whispered, staring at it.

"Yeah," I confirmed easily.

"'Yeah'?! Naruto, this is... this is—!" She couldn't find the words to contain the full scale of what had happened to the world since the Empire's founding.

"These aren't even the most impressive things I've done. Remember the story about the Otsutsuki battle? And none of it was only me anyway."

"I'm so proud of you..." She pulled me into a tight hug.

"I know... it's a little awkward," I laughed softly and patted her on the back.

Shortly after, we continued on. And a couple of blocks further, my sphere-vision caught Kakashi bounding across the rooftops. He was just scanning around when his gaze snagged on the red head beside me. Not quite the red head you usually see around here.

The sight hit him hard enough that he completely lost track of where he was in space-time. Specifically: he kept moving, flew straight into a shop sign, and then fell from about the height of a fifteen-story building. Quite neatly, thanks to a small nudge of my chakra, he landed splat in front of us.

"Kakashi, you really ought to work on your situational awareness. Not great for someone who doesn't look where he's flying," I remarked with a snort.

"Kakashi?!"

At my mother's exclamation, the man snapped upright and yanked the cloth from his second eye. The Mangekyo was already spinning.

He froze. His expression was pure speechless shock with a silent question riding behind it.

We stared at him.

"Kai!" Apparently deciding to cover his bases, he tried dispelling a genjutsu. The scene didn't change.

After another second of drilling us with that mismatched gaze, he landed on a conclusion, the wrong one. "Naruto, this is obviously some kind of terrible joke. My ANBU reported that—"

He was winding up for a full lecture. I cut him off.

"Would be a terrible joke if I'd pulled it. But this is real."

"You got big, Kakashi-chan..." Kushina's expression grew complicated. Up until this moment her resurrection had felt somehow not entirely real, as if she'd stepped into a different world, one that belonged to Naruto and his girls. But here was someone from the old world. And he looked exactly like eighteen years had actually passed.

"Kushina-sama... is it really you?" His gaze kept snapping between the two of us.

"Yes..." There wasn't much more to say in that moment, so she shifted to something lighter. "How's life been, Kakashi-chan? Find yourself a girl yet?"

"..." Kakashi looked down.

"Heh, we can skip that one. I'm busy right now, but we'll talk sometime, okay?"

A jerky nod.

"Good. Now go on, you need to pull yourself together."

Another jerky nod, and he turned and walked away on legs that were mostly air.

"So much has changed..." Kushina said quietly, watching him go. "You grew up... A moody teenager became Hokage..."

"But that only means a lot of things can start fresh." I stepped closer and put an arm around her. "And I'll be right here with you."

In answer, she silently pressed her face into the space just below my collarbone.

We stood like that for a while, then moved on toward the mountain of faces.

Talking through one subject and then another, we walked the streets of Konoha, and Kushina kept finding old buildings, pointing at them very directly and asking if yes, that is actually that place, right?

Eventually, when we reached a large obelisk about a hundred meters tall, a node in the chakra network, the topic between us started to sharpen.

"The Empire... You said it can read the surface thoughts of thousands of people at once. And that you don't usually process all that yourself?"

"Usually not," I confirmed. "I can read minds on my own too. But I don't use that on people close to me. What are you getting at?"

"No, just... wondering."

"..." I said nothing. But when Kushina began to turn red, the expression that appeared on my face said everything without a word.

"No! Don't you think I'm some kind of pervert, dattebane! And, oh!" She caught herself when the people who had been walking past us stopped, when usually they kept moving and stared less.

"That's nor—" I had been about to make a joke about self-gratification, but Kushina kept going.

"I just love you very much. As a mother," she swallowed. "I just... don't know what came over me back there."

I stopped and looked at her.

"Did you do something while I was asleep?"

"What?! No!"

"Then... do you mind if I take a look anyway?"

No answer. Just a face the color of a tomato and a gaze that was simultaneously pleading and resigned.

"Go ahead... Maybe you made an error somewhere when you were bringing me back," she finally said, grabbing onto that thought like a lifeline.

I connected my chakra to the Empire and looked. And... I was surprised. I glanced at Kushina, which made her shrink about two sizes, like a bedridden patient watching a psychiatrist and bracing for the diagnosis. I didn't like that look on her, and kept my own face carefully neutral so as not to make things worse.

"No, I'm fairly certain I... put you together correctly," I said, choosing my words with care. "The thing is, you brought me into this world, and we shared a great deal of time together back then, early on, and yet apart. Between us, there never formed the kind of bond that develops between parents and a child they actually raised. I grew up too far from you." I paused, weighing the decision. "So if feelings have taken this particular shape... I don't think we need to hold them back."

"N-Naruto..."

"And yes, you're very beautiful, and more importantly, you're kind and caring. I love you, and I'm not opposed to making what we have fuller, if that would make us both happier..."

After those words, a wave of emotion so powerful hit Kushina that I positioned myself to catch her if she started to go down.

"I think that's enough for today. Shall we put a pin in this?" I offered.

A quick nod.

"You look incredibly cute when you blush."

"..."

Afterward, in a silence that was equal parts charged and awkward, we continued our walk through Konoha. Topics didn't exactly come easily, so before long we found ourselves back home. And only there did something finally give us something to hold onto.

Kushina noticed a small blue fiery cat in Karin's arms and, with clear surprise, asked whether that was, by any chance, the Two-Tails bijuu. She got a yes, went briefly blank, then simply nodded.

She was clearly starting to get accustomed to the kind of supernatural that surrounds me on a regular basis.

Riding the wave of tailed beasts, Kushina asked how a certain flea-ridden fox was doing. She was told: no longer inside me, moved out to a nature reserve. When she asked why, I explained that I had originally planned to let him live at home as a pet. A form of ongoing punishment, in a sense... But after a year, when he'd given up entirely and was begging me to end the humiliation and swearing on everything he had never to go near humans again, I released him into the wild. The Two-Tails, Matatabi, on the other hand, had taken quite a liking to things here, regular meals, the pets from her former jinchuriki, and the other residents of the house.

The One-Tail and the Three-Tails had been released as well.

Kushina listened to all of this and nodded, as if it were perfectly within the bounds of normal.

After that, I showed her one of the home theaters. And this landed. A natural homemaker at heart, even if life hadn't let her be one for long, she discovered that the shows that had come out while she was away, and above all the ability to watch them at home, from the very first episode, all in a row, without leaving, pulled her in completely. I didn't fight it. She had taken in a great deal already. What was still coming could wait. Better she rest now and let herself breathe.

As for me, I turned to Empire business and a few ongoing projects. Not for long, though. With all processes running smoothly, I could free up as much time as I wanted these days. And this well-earned break, I wasn't stingy with it when it came to the people who mattered.

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