-Minato-

Sometime, at moments exactly like these Minato idly went through his mind for possible candidates for his replacement. Council meetings were boring, mind-numbing things filled with subtle nuanced politicking and clan rivalries. Often times he would find himself mediator between two major clans at conflicts over the most asinine of situations. He hated those instances, but, yet at this moment he wished the current meeting was one of them. Instead, he found himself under the scrutiny of the intent gazes of the inner council.

A passive look of boredom marked his face, as so often did when he had council meetings. He would have sighed, but denying them the satisfaction of knowing they got under his skin was one of the few things he liked about these meetings.

"Hokage-sama, as I was stating before the interruption of Inuzuka-san, have we found the source of the occurrence that happened three weeks ago. We've heard no word from your office, and the location of my clan's quarters is indeed in the eastern sector. Despite generous donations from your person, and other close allies we'll have much difficulty rebuilding what was damaged. Most notably our refrigerators, it's the middle of summer and two of our industrial refrigerators were heavily damaged. It'll take weeks to get them running again let alone have them running at full capacity. Without those refrigerators our ice cannot be made."

"Our market shares will see sizable drops in the upcoming month, and it'll take years to recover. That withstanding, the cost to repair or replace our refrigerators further impact my clan's funds. We simply wish to know what happened so that we may better prepare ourselves if such an unseen event were to occur again."

Minato changed his face to one of concern. "You have my condolences Shibi-san. I've personally seen the damage done to your clan compounds and can only imagine the long term effects it will have on your clan and its future business dealings. The matter is currently being investigated, and I'm personally overseeing it, however for the inconvenience I personally offer ten thousand ryo to you and your clan for damages imposed. Hopefully it will expedite the process of your rebuilding."

Shibi nodded at the blond man and Minato smiled a small smile back in return. "The clan will do its best to pay you back as fast as possible Hokage-sama."

"No need, It a gift from the Namikaze-clan to the Aburame-clan, old friends hold no debts to me."

Shibi bowed, then sat down. "Hokage-sama, if I may?"

Minato cast a look at Danzou. "You may." Idly he wondered what game the man was playing, what move his machiavellian mind was going to attempt to make.

"It's in question as to the Shinobi discovered along the barrier in critical condition some few weeks ago. While an injured Shinobi is usually nothing to worry about, this shinobis appearance occurred on the same date as the occurrence some weeks ago. My question Hokage-sama, is why are you hiding this shinobi? What about his has prevented you from giving the council news about him and his appearance?"

The room became quiet, and Minato cast a casual gaze at Danzou. He hated the man when he got like this, hardheaded and paranoid and suspicious and a pain in his ass. He pondered for a moment on how to proceed, of course he had a plan for a situation like this, and of course he had considered Danzo's possible own ploys but he hadn't thought the man would be so bold so fast. He would have to talk with the man after then. He looked at Danzou, and the elder one eyed man looked at him. They shared a look of understanding then he stood up. Fine then, so be it.

"The shinobi discovered by the barrier team is a student of Jiraiya-sama he picked up a few years ago, and also a distant relative of my wife Kushina. I'm sure you know of the clan's right for claim of all individuals within the clan Danzou san? The joint Uzumaki-Namikaze clan claims right of membership and responsibility of him." The room was silent, so much so it was damn near deafening.

"Still Hokage-sama does he have any relation to the

He had to forcibly stop his smirk as Danzo's face twitched in annoyance. Still though, Danzou had forced his hand, making him reveal something he'd hoped he could keep secret for a few more week. Still he cast a look at Danzou. They would need to talk then, he let a small smile escape his bored façade as he ended the council meeting. Danzou had happily not redirected the conversation back to topics better left alone. Good then.

-Arashi-

The music beat around him. It thrummed into his skull, pounded its way into his mind. Its beats were sharp harsh things that started high, and climbed higher, until finally the base dropped and his entire body seemed to thrum with the anticipation of that moment. He hated it. But still, he kept a scowl off his face, and his blue-grey eyes scanned the night club with distaste. In his world the young shinobi hang-out had been a dark bar secluded in the back of Konoha only accessible by passing an A-level genjutsu.

This place…the music dropped again and he felt his heart accelerate. Naruko seemed to be enjoying herself though, and so, he sat with his fruity alcohol in his hand his eyes scanning the room and his chest pain slowly dulling. He looked at the bartender, a tall lanky blond with dark brown eyes and eyebrows a little too large to make her beautiful. He watched Naruko dance around the room, moving with swift grace that was required to be a jounin, her body was pressed against some random dark haired chunin and the two danced a deep…intimate tango. He twisted back in his seat, downed the fruity sake and sighed.

"Do you have anything harder? Something that burns on the way down and isn't so sweet?"

The bartender looked up from task and looked at him. She blinked, large doe eyes seeming stunned, then she blushed, blinked again and he couldn't help but to smile.

"Y-yeah, umm, I have some Grain Sake In the back."

"Thank you," He smiled back at her, then looked around once more. Naruko was walking back towards him, her face somewhat confused, and yet, happy.

"So I take it a place like this isn't up to your standards?"

"No, it aint' that, this is just not my scene. I don't like," he paused for a moment to contemplate his words. "I don't like all these people around me, I don't like the loud distracting noise, the sweet alcohol. This just isn't-" He stopped mid speech.

A ghost passed by his senses in that moment. A whisper of someone dead, someone gone. Ino…He stopped talking, froze mid-sentence stunned into silence. Nearly a year after her death, and still, he knew her chakra like he knew himself. He could sense it in soul, recognize it miles away in the deepest darkest pits, on the foggiest of nights, even here, in this loud overbearing place. Even when hundreds of chakra signatures crowded together into a far too small space he could sense her.

Like a violet in an all-white room she shone out to him. His mouth fell open, his breath hitched, and a whirl of emotions slammed into him. The music pounding in his skull drifted away. The people to close disappeared. He stood up, his chakra pouring out of him like a waterfall, an unstoppable wave that forced it way past his mental restraints. He reveled in it, in sensing her alive, the shinobi around him were startled but he didn't care. He wouldn't care...because she…she…

"Arashi?" Naruko's voice snapped him back into reality. Suddenly his chakra reeled back, pulling suddenly until it was constrained once more.

"I think…I think I should leave. I'll meet you back home." He moved past the crowd of shinobi, twisted his way around the moving force of dancing bodies, and in a few seconds escaped into the quite cool night of Konoha. He looked up, the moon hung over head in a large white blue tinted ball. The winds splayed his now long red lock to and fro.

He only stood there for a few seconds, then, he disappeared. Moving in a sudden burst of blinding fast speed, so fast Konoha wasn't a blur but a stream of flickering dark hues and colors, before reappearing on the fourth Hokage's head. When he did he kneeled suddenly, his chest was an inferno, his chakra coils a cesspool of pain and agony. There was something very, very wrong with his chakra. He took deep, long breaths.

"Fuck." He lay down atop the fourth's head, his eyes scanning the night sky as his lungs claimed desperately for breath. His mind reeled…she was alive, she was alive. She and everyone else was alive…he hadn't really thought about it. He'd known of course, but knowing and knowing comprehending to the full depths what words meant were two different things. His wife, was alive...

"Fuck." But she wasn't his wife, he realized. This Ino hadn't been to war. This Ino hadn't seen him at his lowest. This Ino wasn't the same fierce yet jovial woman who had forced him to get up, to look life, nay living in the face and re-seize his own happiness. This Ino was just that this Ino not his Ino and the knowledge made his heart ache…

He watched the stars with disinterest. His mind drifted, drifted, drifted until he was back to the war. Getting ready to fight Madara. He knew he was going to die, this was a thing he anticipated, his death. The battle was still fresh in his mind. He could remember everything, every detail. The memories struck him suddenly as he fell into a shallow sleep.

His blood boiled. It always did before he fought Madara. Trying to be stealthy was pointless, so instead he became a beacon. A moving mass of monstrous energy. Sage mode, his own monstrous reserves and the combined energy of Kyuubi and all other eight Bijju. With so much energy he could reshape the landscape in a heartbeat. With a twitch of his wrist he could give birth to a second sun, a spinning ball of doom so bright, so potent it could turn night into day, and day into a white brightness so all-consuming it could turn you blind. He could pour so much energy into an attack it transcended the meta-physical and became something more. He could move faster than the eye could register, warp space and time…and all of it meant nothing before Madara. It all meant nothing to a man who could will an attack undone. A man who could simply decide that he had never been struck.

This time though, this time though he was ready. An arcane seal matrix stored in the old Uzumaki vaults requiring nearly all of his chakra reserves to write. It did one thing, created by the sage hundred, or perhaps even thousands of years before, it was meant to stop him. Or one of his descendants that gained powers like him. It had taken him four days to write, and nearly half his blood. When he was done he had a seal the size of a small town, then he compressed it down, and down. Into a small barely the size of a pinprick.

The fight had been brutal, a long hard battle that had created new landscapes in just a few short minutes. Ravines formed in seconds. River beds revealed as flame jutsus, monsoons of fire turned forest into ashes and lakes into steam. Then, after what seemed like an eternity, he touched Madara. And the seal activated.

He woke up when tiny pinpricks of water splashed against his skull. His body ached from sleeping on the cold stone, and his neck was as stiff as a board, and his chakra coils and chest still tingled with dull tinges of pain. He let out a long sigh, he wasn't ready to get up. Not quite yet.

"You're awake?" It was a soft firm voice he'd come to associate with one person.

"Yeah." Her head leaned over his. Blood red locks flowed down and intermingled with his own on the cold hard stone. She seemed confused, and interested in him at the same time. "So, you gonna tell me about why you ran off last night?"

"I thought…I thought I recognized someone special to me." He was silent as he lay there, his grey cloudy eyes staring into her own twin deep blue pools. "It brought back bad memories and I needed to get out of there. To go somewhere to be alone."

"Lady troubles?" He didn't respond and she fell into an awkward silence. He looked at her one more time, then suddenly he rolled to the left, and slowly forced his body to stand. He sat down again almost immediately. He overlooked Konoha. It was near dawn, and dark grey clouds seemed to move in on the village. Ever stray droplets of water sometimes escaped their high floating prisons and fell onto the city below. The light from the dawn sun cast a wide hue of colors that filled the grey clouds disappearing into the horizon.

"Something like that." He let his voice drift off as he watched the sun rise.

"You move pretty fast you know that? I mean, by the time I came outside I couldn't see you at all, and I could barely sense you too. You're a stealthy bastard too. Fast and stealthy."

"I needed to be stealthy, and fast. In tanzaku if you were an urchin and weren't both, you weren't an urchin for long. You either got caught and locked up, got caught and beat, or worse…"

"Oh." He turned to her and smiled a small smile.

"Don't worry about it, that's in my past now."

The sun rose a little higher, and the clouds grew a little darker. The tiny pinpricks of rain fell a little bit more. His mind wandered. The people in this Konoha, living ghosts and all wouldn't know who he was. Kakashi, Jiraiya, the old hag, Iruka-sensei, Sakura, Ino…He was a stranger to them, and in truth they were strangers to him…but they were alive. Here, in this world they were alive. He took solace in that. He made friends of them once, he could do it again.

"Arashi, can I ask you something?"

"Go ahead."

"I want you to spar with me."

"What?"

She had a dedicated look on her face. "Spar with me, I want you to spar with me. The old pervert has been training you for six years. I want you to spar with me."

He looked at her, looked in her eyes, and then nodded. She was trying to prove something to herself, he didn't know what but he knew that look well enough. It was his look. His look of defiance, his look of needing to show that he was more, that he wasn't a failure, that he wasn't a fuck up. That he, Uzumaki Naruto, or perhaps Uzumaki Arashi now was someone to be noticed.

"When I'm healed." The sun disappeared behind the rain clouds and they started to fall.

"Lets get home."

They were soaking wet by the time they reached the Namikaze abode. Naruko opened the door, and the two entered.

"Naruko-nii! Your home!" A light bell voice called out. A blond speedball rolled out of the hallway and into him. He looked down somewhat confused, he cast a look at Naruko and she laughed.

"Mikito, that's not me."

"Huh?" She looked up, bright eyes staring at his tall red haired form. He smiled down at her. She seemed confused, looking back and forth between Naruko and him.

"Hello." He said.

-Jiraiya-

The cold stream brushed over his body. Within its waters tiny silver fish darted back and forth, swimming as fast as they could as a deep larger carnivorous salmon darted past. The large foliage of Mount Myoboku spanned for miles around. His breath came once every few minutes, and his strong muscled arms remained tensed for a seeming eternity. A toad appeared, a man sized orange hued thing that moved far to stealthy for a creature such as it. He ignored it, many toads came when he was like this. Some to watch, some to jest, some to simply stare at the old hermit with the white hair and the too long beard.

He instead focused on the flow of nature around him. On the stream, on the flowers, on the leaves and trees and swimming, flowing life around him. He took a breath, his heart moved like molasses, only beating once every few seconds. His metabolism stopped, he was at peace. Here on Mukubu, with only the toads and the plants and the insects and nature, untouched raw nature was he at peace. A lifetime of whore mongering to make up for a woman who'd never love him back hadn't brought him peace. A lifetime of drinking and perving hadn't brought him happiness. But here in Myoboku…when nature chakra enveloped him, when he let it run through not just his coils but over every one of his cells.

When he lived off it, and only it, for weeks on end…he was at peace, his mind blank, the empty feeling gone, and the closest he'd been to happy in a long, long time.

"Jiraiya-sama."

He took his first breath in half an hour, savored it, and let it out in a slow, long, deep drag. Air had never tasted so sweet.

"Hia?"

"Gammamaru-sama and Fukasaku-sama have called your presence, they say it's important. They ask you to make haste."

He opened his eyes, horizontal golden eyes looked at the toad. He sighed and stretched. He hadn't moved an inch in nearly four days. He was hungry now too, you could live for weeks of nature chakra but that didn't mean you wouldn't feel the hunger. He sniffed then frowned, he could smell the wretched scent of his own unwashed mouth.

"Bring me food. I'd prefer fruit and meat over anything, and my toothbrush as well. My breath smells like shit. Tell the old badgers I'll be there after I've had a decent meal or two, or four in me."

The orange toad seemed hesitant and he sighed. "Yes?"

"They speak of haste Jiraiya-sama."

"Their far older than me," he laughed. "And will outlive me by a few more lifetimes. If I can wait to eat a meal they can wait as well."

He stripped as the toad hopped away. Removing his clothing and jumping into the cool waters of the stream. He grabbed the sand of the river bed and used it to scrub himself clean. He lay in the water for a few moments, letting its cold chill wash around his body. The rivers of Myoboku were always cold from the perpetual snowmelts above the mountain.

By the time the toad returned with food he was drying his skin with the heat from the overhead sun. His hair was been washed. He had brought fruit mostly, and some mystery meat as well. He ate quickly shoving the food into his mouth without a lot of discretion.

When he was done he ran his hand over the small seal inked on the back of his palm, pushed some chakra into it, and summoned a change of clothes.

The walk to the temple of the elder sage was a brisk one, and when he got there he found the impatient form of Fukasaku looking at him.

"You're late."

"Maa, what's a few moments to us? A few days, nay years? As long as he comes yes?" The elder sage laughed a long deep laugh, his great form heaving at his own humor. Every breath he took made the room tremble from the might of his voice. The great scrolls, twelve times Jiraiya's size at their smallest shuddered from the deep boom of his voice.

"I had to bathe." The toad sniffed.

"Not well enough obviously. Something's happened, the sage had a vision."

The great sage opened his blind eyes. "I dreamed of war Jiraiya, peace cannot last forever. The child was ready. Peace coming from her will, from her strength. Go to her, and yet I dreamed of another child. Moved from the vial, the void and pushed into this realm. A lost pair of lost souls..drifting, drifting, no destinies, no twines of faith to bind them. They change all they touch. They wrap all the see. A demon turned good, a boy turned…turned…"

He stopped and took deep long breaths. His eyes were grey and wide, his mouth quivering.

"Go, Jiraya, find the child, find the boy and the demon, go. Peace will not last long.

"Where?" He knew though, he didn't even need the elder sage to tell him. "Konoha." Fukasaku answered. He was about to curse when a small messenger toad appeared.

"Jiraiya-sama."

"Yes?"

"A missive from Minato-sama. He demands you return immediately."

He sighed. His eyes roaming between the toads in the room. He knew he couldn't stay away forever. His hands were flipping through hand signs in moments. A puff of smoke, a sense of vertigo and having his mind twisted in a way he couldn't quite describe and he was in Minato's office. His blond haired student looked surprised then pleased. He stood, still a fair bit shorter than him, but nature chakra made you tall, and moved towards him. Minato enveloped him in a hug. He responded in kind, thought it was somewhat awkward for him.

"It's been a long time."

"It has sensei."

"Minato I…"

"No need." Minato let him go. "I wouldn't have called you here if it wasn't an emergency." He walked behind his desk and pulled out a small envelope. He handed it to Jiraiya, and he opened it and started to read through it.

Jiraiya looked up.

"I know it seems farfetched sensei, but sit down, you-"

He laughed. "I believe you."

"Huh?"

"I believe you. The elder sage. He had a vision, he told me to come back just as the messenger toad arrived. Said something about a fox, and a boy, and a child bringing peace."

The two sat in silence.

"So you only came because of the elder sage?" Jiraiya could feel Minato's frustration in his voice. It was understandable he'd been away for years. He opened his mouth to retort, to try to explain. But he found himself fumbling for the words, not quite grasping what he needed to say. The words slipping from his hands like of so many grains of sand. How to explain the realization that his life, up to this point had been a pantomime of small failures and regrets with only a few shining successes in between. How to explain the sheer unhappiness that had consumed him so long ago, the period where it had dawned on him his life, for the most part had been pointless. That he'd spent nearly half a decade of his existence between binging on booze and whores. Tsunade drank and gambled, she still did, and a chance meeting between them, a chance night together had dismayed him. It was awful, the day after he meant, not the actual night, that had been wonderful, but the look in her eyes.

The anger that seemed to seethe, the shame, the loathing, the realization that the woman he loved would never love him back. That his life had been meaningless, that his career was his only one shining point of his existence.

That, still, even now, he found himself floundering barely grasping on to the small things. That he felt lost…absolutely lost.

Minato…happy, successful Minato with a wife that loved him, and children and a village that adored him would not understand.

So instead he sighed, and mumbled out a quite retort. "It's complicated Minato."

Minato looked at him, and nodded. Though from the quick twitch of the man's lips it was obvious he would bring it up again. He'd been away for a long time, and Minato was far from happy about it.

"Minato, it's complicated."

"Is it sensei?"

He felt a spark of anger flash into existence, then It burned itself out almost as fast as it had arrived leaving only the blank emptiness. This was why he spend every free moment he could get on Myoboku.

"Yes." He stood up, the conversation was over as far as he was concerned. Minato wouldn't understand, and he couldn't be bothered to try and explain it. "Yes, it is."

-Authors Note-

Ugh, it's been forever, I don't even know how I managed to get this thing out, I really don't, college has started for me and soon I'll get working part time. I'm going to have less and less time to write but I'll keep at pushing one chapter out a month for at least one of my stories, expect a new story soon. Then after that new story, a chapter of starting small and the cycle repeating itself. Waves of time is on indefinite hiatus, I've hit a wall I can't get over, but eventually I will, I'm not giving up on it…yet.