The first thing I end up posting on ffnet after months of nothing~
I hope that, um, it serves to entertain. It'd be lovely if you could point out any mistakes spotted.
The first time Kushina heard anyone call her pretty was when she was first brought into Konoha with her bones all cracked and her body looking all worse for wear and her lungs punctured -- and she had an acute sense of time that told her that she probably wouldn't even last half an hour if there wasn't a pretty damn good doctor in this hidden village. When she struggled to open her eyes to see what kind of a fucktard just dared to utter that she was pretty -- and dared to say it with such brutal honesty marking his tone --, she saw the sky. Blond hair and blue eyes? She had a looker calling her pretty.
Kushina offered a weak smile, a substitute for a sarcastic laugh.
A week later, she found herself breathing and facing a warm, gregarious smile. She eyed the face, wondering why it was there and why it was smiling at her so affably. Everything was soon put into place. This was the dick that had called her pretty in what she thought was her dying moment.
"Good morning to you," he said in a somewhat cheerful manner. "I hope that you're feeling better already."
Kushina was thirteen and right in front of her was a lovesick thirteen-year-old boy who was like a saint compared to other boys his age.
Other boys his age would've introduced themselves or asked for her name or did both. Other boys his age would've received a well-aimed punch from her. And other boys wouldn't even have the gall to call her beautiful.
She was tall and lanky and and painfully flat, and her hair was cut in such a boyish manner. She wasn't docile or flirty or anything near the Ideal Woman. Boys and men were her comrades and friends, never quite love interests. Most of all, she was more in love with the notion of swapping hits than swapping saliva or words of never-ending love.
Though right now, in foreign territory, there was a foreign boy who was probably more than just an inch shorter than her who was giving her the friendliest smile she had ever seen on a stranger. And he was probably crushing on her, too. Otherwise, why would he be sitting in front of her with a bouquet of flowers for the vase sitting on the table beside her? Otherwise, why in the world was he the first person she saw after being knocked out for days?
"They're all dead. Just in case you were wondering," he said after he arranged the flowers as neatly as possible.
Kushina stopped breathing for a moment before she nodded and clutched the covers of her bed as tightly as possible. She had already anticipated that as she'd been told that it was a possible consequence by her own parents. Still, a thirteen-year-old was no adult.
"Everyone?" she asked.
"There are some survivors from your village. Two of them have been brought here, in Konoha. The rest of them went to other medical facilities," he said.
Konoha already had too many people to tend to. Three foreigners were already too much. At least Kushina understood that much.
"I see," she said. Then she looked at him, "Thanks."
He smiled that brilliant smile of his at her. "It was nothing. Get well soon."
He walked out of the room, shutting the door as quietly as possible behind him. As soon as he did that, Kushina buried her head in her pillow and stifled her cries as much as possible. She wouldn't want to bother the rest of the hospital because virtually everyone she knew was probably ten feet under, and it wasn't as if it was any fun crying in some foreign place.
Outside, Minato leaned on the wall behind him and looked at a hallway light. Wartime had never been any fun at all.
At least he now knew of someone around his age who was stuck in the middle of it all.
Minato had soon come to terms with the fact that trouble followed Kushina wherever she went.
She was an eternal klutz. She was a tomboyish, warmongering fool. She never really thought ahead of time. She said her raw, unedited thoughts. She was, Minato thought, simply brilliant. She was a walking disaster and he thought that she was just amazing. Because she was full of mistakes and because she was so brutally frank with the world. She was an enviable being through and through. At least, well, this was what Minato thought.
"Would you like to go out with me?" was the only thing that he could say when he saw her beating up a couple of chuunin from Kumo.
He was as lovestruck as a prodigy of a boy could be.
And they were in the middle of a potentially life-endangering mission.
"What the fuck, Namikaze?!" Kushina exclaimed as she executed a wonderful roundhouse kick which hit the ninja standing behind her on the jaw. "And there's a ninja to your right!"
Minato quickly disposed of the aforementioned enemy ninja -- and this was done in such an effortless way that made Kushina envious -- before repeating what he said. Just in case Kushina hadn't heard it clearly through all the noise.
"I asked you if you would like to go out with me."
"Can't you pick a better time to ask that?"
"There's no better time than the present." This was what his teacher liked to say.
"Well, we won't have any present if you keep spewing all this love stuff out of your mouth." She aimed a barrage of kunai at advancing chuunin.
The two of them were so horribly outnumbered and back-up was, according to one of Minato's ever-helpful frog summons, still near Konoha. But Kushina still held this belief that she would live to see the dawn of a new day. Apparently, so did Minato, if his dating remark was anything to go by. Then again, it wouldn't at all be odd if he survived. He was, after all, a renowned child prodigy.
A candidate to be Hokage, even.
"I'd like to give myself a bit more assurance when it comes to tomorrow," Minato said. "So is your answer a yes or a no?"
"If you keep asking, I'll say no!" She was known for her astounding hotheadedness.
"How come?" He'd just managed to hit a ninja, who was creeping behind Kushina, in the middle of the eyes with a shuriken.
"Just because!"
"You could've just said that you fancy someone else."
"I do not fancy anyone else!"
"So you like me then? Because you don't fancy anyone else?"
"Shut up, Minato, and concentrate!" She delivered a punch in the gut to yet another advancing ninja.
She and Minato weren't going to hold out for long, especially if better ninja started to appear -- they had been, after all, been in the battlefield far too long and with hardly the time to take a break. Damn couldn't those fucking back-ups hurry-up because they, meaning Minato and she (but there was more emphasis on she), were pretty damn close to dying. And it didn't at all help that Minato was acting so weird. She was briefly wondering if he'd been poisoned behind her back or if his genius was becoming too much for him and he was now on the path to insanity.
She sure hoped that was all just her imagination.
"I see," Minato said.
The two of them spent the rest of their time valiantly clinging to dear sweet life as they exchanged blows and projectiles and fancy jutsu with their numerous opponents.
It was a comfortable sort of silence if they were to treat as all the battling as white noise. Kushina thought that she could deal with this, could become familiar with this and let this become her life.
Except she really couldn't because that would be a seriously boring way to die. And she didn't like being accustomed to something for such a long time.
So then she had the gall to live to see the next day -- she was stuck in the hospital for now; the good news was that she could go and start wrecking havoc on the village again after two days -- and to hear Minato pestering her with flowers and "I love you"'s.
The first thing she did when she got rid of the casts and the walking sticks was to punch him.
She missed. Because they didn't call him the Yellow Flash for nothing.
"I'll get you soon enough, Namikaze!" she screeched.
Somewhere far, far away, Minato smiled and clutched the bouquet to his chest. It was true love. He was sure of it.
The stench of the battlefield clung to their skin and held their sense of smell hostage. They were dirty, they were tired, and they were heavily injured. More so Kushina than anyone else because she liked being the Heroine and because she couldn't stand seeing anyone from her side getting hurt. So she was always the front-runner of the whole battle.
"I really, really love you, Kushina," Minato said.
He clutched her hand and tears were adorning his face.
The woman he was speaking to, on the other hand, was scowling and struggling to retrieve her hand from his particularly strong grip.
"Dear sweet lord, Minato, I'm dying and that's all you've got to say to me?" Kushina rasped. "And that hurt you fucking med-nin. Ease off the chakra -- I'm already unstable as it is."
"We're doing the best we can without the painkillers," the med-nin growled. "The painkillers which you didn't want to drink."
"I just hate taking that shit. Anyway, couldn't you have just, I don't know, turned off all pain receptors or something?"
"With the way you are? We'd be lucky to have you both feeling numb and alive with that."
"Anyway, you're pretty much patched up now, Uzumaki," another med-nin said. "You're far from dying."
"What the fuck?!" Kushina exclaimed.
"Isn't that supposed to be a good thing?" Minato asked her.
She only glared at him.
"Here I was thinking that I wouldn't be seeing the light of the world soon," she said.
"False alarm," the second med-nin said.
"I was poisoned badly and I fucking hurt like goddamn hell and I'm not nearly dying? What in the world is that?!"
"Well, Uzumaki, you seem to have a high resistance when it comes to poisons -- as expected of ninja, really."
"We were dealing with some rough enemies. You'd think that they'd bring poison that could snuff me out!"
"I think that all of that sour milk you keep drinking keeps you immune from everything," Minato said in a rather introspective manner.
"Shut up, and stop making fun of me."
"I'm not making fun of you. I'm just stating an observation of mine."
"Don't you dare get any weird ideas and start drinking expired milk yourself, Namikaze," the second med-nin said sternly. "You're not used to it like her."
Minato ignored the med-nin in favor of smiling at Kushina.
"I just knew that you were amazing," he said.
"Just... just shut up, Minato," she said weakly. "I don't need your love crap. It kills me more than the milk."
"I love you, too, Kushina."
"As soon as we go back to Konoha, I will beat you so much that you wouldn't be able to perform even D-missions for a whole month."
"I'll be looking forward to it."
There was nothing in the world Kushina would do to be able to punch that sweet smile off of him.
And briefly, she wondered what he found so interesting and lovable about her; and she wondered why he had this penchant of proclaiming his love when at least one of them was in one of those fifty-fifty situations. But these thoughts were quickly shut in the back of her head as plans for revenge started filtering through her mind. She would see the end of Namikaze Minato as soon as everything stopped hurting and as soon as she got some of her dignity back.
"Will you marry me?" he, one day, asked in a voice that held no hesitation or nervousness at all.
Kushina smiled at him. Before she unexpectedly punched -- her last display of her boorish manners just for old times' sake -- him as hard as she could.
He dodged as he always did though and she wondered if she should just say no.
"Sure thing."
But saying no would be the stupidest thing that she would ever, ever do in her life.
"I've already given out the invitations," he started saying, "and I know someone who makes wedding dresses that you'll like--"
"Minato, does everyone in Konoha already know that we're going to get married except for me?!" she exclaimed.
"Maybe."
He threw a wink at her, the very first wink she'd ever seen him do, before he disappeared in a midst of smoke.
Then she was left wondering and fuming about what she saw in him because he obviously brought out the best of her worst. And to think that she was already past her boyish stage.
"Wait until I get my hands on you, Minato!" she said in the form of a battle cry.
But it wasn't as if she minded at all.