Chapter Two: The Space Between

He felt nothing at all, and he had no weight.

Naruto drifted in a silence so complete that it pressed against his eardrums the way deep water does, a thick and physical quiet that seemed to be holding something back. There was no wind. There was no sound of his own heart, which was the detail that unsettled him most, because that particular drumbeat had been keeping him company in the background of every moment of his life and he had never once thanked it for the service.

He was naked, and alone, and floating in a pale endless nowhere.

It was not black. It was not even grey. It was white, and the white went on past the point where his eyes could agree that it was a colour, spreading outward into a kind of soft blankness that might have been an ocean of cloud if clouds ever held that still. He turned slowly in place. His body threw no shadow in any direction. His breath left him and simply stopped existing, without so much as misting the air.

Without deciding to, he curled up. Arms around his knees, chin tucked, shoulders drawn in. He was shivering, which made no sense, because there was nothing here cold enough to shiver at. Perhaps it was just what a body does when it has run out of instructions. Perhaps it was the same instinct that makes a newborn pull toward warmth that has not arrived yet.

His eyelids were unbelievably heavy. He could sleep here. He could let the white take him and stop being a person who had lost a village, and that seemed, at the moment, like a reasonable and even generous offer.

Then something in his chest went off like a struck match.

It was not pain, exactly. It was closer to a sudden arrival, a flood of heat that came roaring up through his ribs and out along his arms and yanked him back into the shape of himself so hard that his eyes snapped open just as

He was crushed.

Not by iron this time. By arms. Two sets of them, one closing around his shoulders and one around his waist, gripping him from either side with no warning at all and absolutely no intention of letting go. He got a mouthful of somebody's shirt and a faceful of somebody's hair, and there was warmth against his back and warmth against his front, and for one bewildering second he was being squeezed between two strangers like a child in the middle of a family portrait.

"Gah!" said Naruto eloquently, and tore himself loose.

He stumbled backward on bare feet that had nothing to push against, spun around, and found himself facing them.

The man was tall and broad through the shoulders, with hair the colour of a wheat field in full sun and a calm sort of smile that suggested he had been calm for a very long time and expected to go on being calm. His eyes were blue. They were a familiar blue. There was a metal plate on his forehead, and the leaf carved into it caught a light that came from nowhere.

Naruto's mouth went dry.

The Fourth Hokage. Minato Namikaze. The man whose face had been staring down at him off the side of a mountain since the day he learned to look up.

Beside him stood a woman with hair like a river of fire running down past her waist, and eyes that managed to be sharp and warm at the same time, which Naruto had not previously believed was a thing eyes could do. She had one hand on her hip and she was grinning at him the way a gambler grins when a bet finally comes in, and she was looking him over in a manner that made the skin on his arms prickle.

"See, Minato?" she announced, entirely too pleased with herself. "He's got my face."

Minato chuckled and shook his head. "He has my colouring. And he is a boy, which makes it my win."

Her grin widened. "Just wait until he starts crying for ramen, dattebane."

Naruto blinked.

That word. The way she attached it to the end of the sentence, careless and automatic, the way a person does with a habit they stopped hearing themselves say decades ago. He tilted his head at her.

"Datte..bane?" he repeated. "Who are you two? Are you, like, Reapers or something?"

The woman's expression went completely flat for the space of half a breath.

Then she crossed the distance between them in three strides and brought her hand down on the top of his head with a thump that had genuine engineering behind it.

"Ow!" Naruto clutched his scalp and staggered. "What was that for?"

"We're your parents, idiot," she said, in the tone of a woman explaining that water is wet.

Naruto stopped.

The words arrived, and then they did not go anywhere. They stood there in the front of his mind with their arms folded and refused to be filed. Parents. His parents. He did not have those. He had never had those. The entire architecture of him had been built on the foundation of not having those, and now two people were standing in front of him claiming to be the foundation, and the whole structure creaked.

He stared at them, first one and then the other, and when he finally spoke his voice came out thin and unsteady in a way he hated.

"What?"

·•—–٠✤٠—–•·

Time did not move there, not the way it moved in the world.

There was no sun to cross a sky and no moon to replace it, no clock, no bell, no stomach growling to mark the hours. There was only the same unchanging white spreading out in all directions, as though the three of them were sitting together inside the blank page of a book that nobody had finished writing. Days may have passed. Months may have passed. Naruto came to suspect, later, that it had been years, and he never found anyone who could tell him otherwise.

Nobody grew hungry. Nobody grew thirsty. Nobody needed to sleep. There were only voices, and old memories, and a great deal of laughing.

At the start he had no idea what to say to them. His head was still trying to absorb the fact that these two people, a Hokage carved into a cliff and a redhead who talked as though she could wrestle the Nine-Tailed Fox into good behaviour, had produced him. But they made it easy. They did not press him and they did not demand anything from him. They simply talked, and let him listen, and gradually he stopped standing at a distance and sat down.

Minato told him about growing up in Konoha, a quiet boy who liked books and was always half a head shorter than the others in his year. He told him how Kushina had arrived as a transfer from a place called Uzushio, loud and fierce and impossible to overlook with that hair, and how she had hated the village on principle and made detailed plans to run away back to the sea. He told him about the night the Cloud ninja took her, how he had followed them for hours through the dark woods, not by tracking chakra, which she had been too clever to leak, but by finding strands of red hair caught on branches where she had been dropping them one at a time on purpose. He told him that he had carried her home on his back, and that she had shouted at him for most of the trip, and that from that night onward she had never really left his side again.

Kushina cut in constantly to correct the record.

"Don't make it sound like a fairy tale, Naruto," she said, waving a hand. "Your father was a clumsy little beanpole. I only fell in love with him because I felt sorry for him."

She winked when she said it. Minato went on smiling the smile of a man who had heard that particular line several thousand times and had never once believed a syllable of it.

Then she told her own stories, at volume. How she had made a point of trying the ramen in every village she passed through, including some she had no business being inside of, purely to establish whether anybody anywhere could beat Ichiraku. Nobody could, she reported, and she had the evidence. How she had become a personal nightmare to the fox sealed inside her whenever it started thrashing, pinning it down with chakra chains and, in her own words, beating it into behaving. How she had once hit an ANBU hard enough to crack his mask because he would not stop trailing her on a mission she had explicitly told him she could handle alone.

And how she had put Jiraiya, the actual Jiraiya, into a river with one kick, after he had accidentally wandered in the direction of the women's training ground for the third accidental time that week.

Naruto laughed so hard at that one that he had to lie down on the white.

Minato added, mildly, that despite the temper she had made Jonin before she turned twenty, and that the temper had possibly helped.

They told him about their wedding, where Minato had worn the same small unruffled smile for the entire ceremony and Kushina had nearly gone over the table at the priest for mispronouncing her name. They told him how Minato had taken the hat not because he wanted a mountain with his face on it but because the job let him stand between the people he loved and whatever was coming, and she was first in that line. They told him that when she had said she was pregnant, he had not spoken for a full minute, had simply held on to her as though she were the last important object in the world.

And then, more quietly, they told him about the night he was born. The masked man. The seal coming apart. The fox loose in the streets. The decision, made in minutes, to put the beast inside a newborn, because they had looked at the alternatives and then looked at their son and decided that he would be strong enough to carry it.

"We knew," Kushina said, and for once her voice was not loud at all. "Not hoped. Knew."

In return, Naruto gave them everything he had.

He told them about a childhood spent working out which streets to avoid at which hours. About the pranks, the paint on the monument, the smoke bombs in the Academy, all of it designed with the sole purpose of making somebody, anybody, look directly at him and say his name out loud. About Iruka, who had been the first adult to treat him like a person rather than a container. About Jiraiya, who had taught him things and then had the poor taste to die. About the Chunin Exams, and Team Seven, and a hundred missions and one particular mission that had never ended.

He admitted the things that still sat in him with their weight unchanged. That Konoha had been flattened while he was standing in it. That Sasuke was still out there and still not coming back. That Sakura had never once looked at him the way he had wanted her to. That he had promised half the village he would be Hokage and had instead been buried under it.

The words came out over what felt like years, and the white swallowed all of them and gave nothing back.

Kushina refused to let him sit in any of it. Every single time he used the word failure about himself she struck him on the back of the head, not hard enough to hurt, hard enough to interrupt.

"You are my son, Naruto Uzumaki," she said. "My son does not quit because he lost a round."

Minato went at it differently, quieter, coming at him from the side. He told Naruto that strength had never been about not falling, because everybody fell, and that the whole trick was in the getting up, which was boring and unglamorous and did not make for good stories. He said that his own supposedly flawless record had been assembled out of mistakes he had been lucky enough to survive and clever enough to study afterward. He said that being Hokage had nothing to do with the title or the hat or the face on the rock, and everything to do with being somebody worth following.

"And you have already done that part," Minato said. "That is the hard half. The rest is paperwork."

It went on and on. Stories, arguments, teasing, more stories. Sometimes Kushina embarrassed him until his face went the colour of her hair. Sometimes she attacked his head with both hands until it stood up worse than usual, which he would not have believed was possible. Sometimes Minato simply sat beside him with a hand on his shoulder and said nothing for a long while, and the nothing was steady and good.

They did not permit him one single second of self pity.

And if it truly had been decades in that place, if Naruto had genuinely sat with them for years and talked about everything and nothing until everything and nothing ran out, then they had spent every one of those seconds making certain he understood one thing and would keep understanding it afterward.

He had not been alone. Not then. Not at any point. Not ever.

They carved that into him so deep that the white could have swallowed everything else and it would still have been there.

And somewhere in that endless stretch, without noticing the moment it happened, Naruto stopped thinking of himself as a failure and started simply thinking of himself as their son. Their loud, stubborn, ramen-obsessed son.

·•—–٠✤٠—–•·

It began so slowly that he nearly missed it.

One moment the three of them were sitting cross-legged on the blank floor of that place, Kushina in the middle of describing how she had once reduced a grown ANBU operative to tears using nothing but a facial expression. The next moment her outline was soft at the edges, as though somebody had gone over her with an eraser and not pressed hard enough to finish the job.

Naruto frowned. "Hey. Are you two getting blurry?"

Kushina looked down at her own hands. The edges of her fingers were glowing faintly, breaking apart into small drifting sparks that rose, hesitated, and then floated toward him. Minato was doing the same, his shape going gentle at the borders, pale light seeping out of him.

Naruto's stomach dropped out from underneath him.

"Wait. No. Don't tell me you're leaving."

Kushina gave him a smile that was far too calm for the thing turning over in his gut. "Looks like our time's up, kiddo."

"No." The word came out of him before he could organise it. "No, you can't go. I just got you. I only just" His throat closed around the rest of it and he had to force the next part through. "I don't want you to leave. Not yet. Not ever."

She reached out and cupped his cheek. Her thumb was warm against his skin even though most of her hand had already stopped being a hand.

"We aren't really leaving, Naruto."

And then it happened properly.

The sparks coming off her fingers did not drift away into the white. They went into his chest. A dozen at first, then a hundred, then too many to count, sinking through his shirt and his skin like embers going into water and not going out. Minato's light followed, slower and steadier, while those calm blue eyes stayed fixed on Naruto's face the entire time.

Naruto recoiled so fast he nearly fell over backward. "Gah! You're, you're going inside me?! That's creepy."

Kushina laughed, though her voice shook on it. "Who knows? Maybe it means we get to be together forever, dattebane."

"Kushina." Minato's voice cut in, gentle and considerably more concerned than it had been a minute ago. "I think we should probably do something, because I am fairly sure the In Between is cracking."

"The what?" Naruto's head whipped around.

Minato's fading outline knelt in front of him so that they were eye to eye.

"This place. It is the space between life and death. We have been talking so long that we forgot what it is for." He glanced past Naruto's shoulder, and Naruto followed the look and saw them, thin jagged black lines spreading across the white like a spiderweb across a window. "You either go back, or you go on to whatever comes after. Time is not real here. But if you stay too long, the place stops being patient."

"And then what?"

"It throws you away."

"That still doesn't explain why you're climbing into my ribs."

Kushina was more than half gone now, her arms nothing but coiling light. "You complain too much. Just take it, brat. Naturally."

Naruto flailed at the glowing wisps sinking into his chest, batting at them uselessly, which had approximately the effect of swatting at smoke. "No. No, no, stop it. It's creepy."

"It's family, idiot."

"It feels like ghosts crawling around inside me."

"Breathe."

"Don't tell me to breathe while you're haunting me."

Minato was the only one not shouting, although even his voice had picked up speed. "Naruto, calm down. This is good. It means we will always be with you."

"I don't care if it's good, it's weird."

The cracks deepened. Light came pouring in from somewhere behind the white, too bright to look at directly, and everything began to shake, and their voices came apart and scattered like sand off the top of a dune.

Kushina's face was the last thing left of her, still grinning through all of it.

"We love you, Naruto. Don't you dare forget it. Dattebane."

And then the dark came down over everything at once.

This dark was not the same as the last one. The last one had been empty. This one was crammed full, loud with the thumping of blood and the scrape of raw air going into raw lungs, and underneath it all there was something burning in the middle of his chest that was hotter than any fire he had ever put his hand near.

He went down into it, and the white closed over the place where his mother had been standing, and somewhere far off and impossibly far ahead of him a forest was waiting, full of trees older than anything in the Land of Fire, holding its breath.

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