For the first time since emerging from the seal, Ryusei inhaled fully.
Air—real air, mountain-cold and earthy—dragged through his chest, burning like he'd swallowed cinders. The ache blooming under his ribs was jagged and bright and absolutely, undeniably real.
He was alive.
Not in that suspended way he'd been inside the seal—where time had felt like a long, feverish dream, looping in on itself until he couldn't tell if he'd been there for an instant or forever. In there, moments had stretched like spun glass, thin and fragile, then cracked and folded back into nothing. He'd walked without moving, breathed without breathing, slept without rest.
Here, gravity had teeth again. The ground had weight. The wind had fingers, tugging at his hair, sliding over his bare shoulders.
He looked exactly as he had when they sealed him.
The cloth wrap slung low over his hips was clean, the knot firm at his right side. The inked seals that wound over his body in intricate patterns were sharp and unblurred, black script hugging his collarbones, spiraling at his ribs, circling biceps and forearms like coiled serpents. None of it was burned into him; there were no scorched edges, no melted lines. They were art and function both, laid onto his skin with purpose, not damage.
His scars remained: the half-moon slash across his left shoulder from a Kumo jōnin's sword, the neat puncture at his lower ribs where a spear had nearly found his heart, the jagged line along one thigh from an explosion tag that hadn't entirely missed. Old history written in flesh.
His veins, though, betrayed the one thing that hadn't changed at all.
They stood out black under his skin, crawling up his forearms, his neck, toward his temples—swollen, ugly, as if ink had been injected straight into his bloodstream. Corrosive Chakra Disease. CCD. The old curse that had nearly killed him as a child and then spent nineteen years trying again and again.
The pain came back with the air: a slow, acid burn in his lungs, a grinding ache behind his sternum, the sting of chakra scraping through channels that had been raw since birth.
He welcomed it.
Pain meant there was something left to hurt.
The smoke around him shifted, swirling in heavy coils. It tasted like old seals and burned chakra, thick enough to sting his eyes, but his vision cut cleanly through it.
His Sharingan opened with unhurried inevitability.
Red bled over black, tomoe sliding into place with the familiar glide of a blade slipping back into a well-worn sheath. Three in each eye, mature and settled, rotated slowly, taking in the world like a predator adjusting to sunlight after a long time underground.
The first thing those eyes fixed on was the man whose wrist he held.
Mizuki's breath came in small, hitching bursts. His pupils were pinpoints, sweat already beading at his temple despite the cool air. He twisted, tried to wrench his arm back, but the hand around his wrist didn't move.
Ryusei wasn't squeezing. There was no visible strain in his forearm, no tremor in his fingers.
His grip simply was—solid as a carved pillar, inescapable as the ground beneath them.
Mizuki might as well have tried to pull his arm free of stone.
The traitor's voice strangled in his throat. "Wh—what are you—"
Ryusei raised his free hand.
The motion was almost tender.
Two fingers extended, hovering for a brief heartbeat in the scant space between them. Mizuki flinched as if expecting a killing blow.
The fingers touched his forehead with the gentleness of a healer checking for fever.
"Kanshō," Ryusei said.
Observation.
His voice was rough with disuse, the word sanded at the edges. Chakra shaped itself around the syllables anyway, spinning out from his hand and sinking into Mizuki's skull like ink sinking into paper.
The world tore.
From the outside, Mizuki's body jerked.
His spine arched, muscles locking tight. His eyes rolled up, showing too much white. A foamy breath hissed between his teeth. His knees gave out, but Ryusei's hand held him upright by that single wrist, keeping him from collapsing entirely.
Minato saw the chakra surge—sharp, controlled, aimed like a blade. ANBU in the treetops twitched. Minako's hand walked unconsciously toward a kunai at the back of her belt. Naruto pressed himself harder against her side, small fingers bunching the fabric of her flak jacket.
"Dad…?" Naruto whispered.
Minato didn't answer him. His gaze stayed locked on the crimson in Ryusei's eyes.
The smoke around them vibrated faintly, reacting to the genjutsu like disturbed water.
Inside Mizuki's mind, Ryusei stepped through the shattered surface of reality and into memory.
—
The world around him rebuilt itself in a blink.
Blue sky dropped into place overhead. White clouds drifted in lazy clumps. Warm sunlight slanted over the familiar wooden façade of the Academy building, throwing long rectangles of light over the packed dirt courtyard.
Ryusei could smell chalk and dust and sweat.
Children's voices filled the air, sharp and high and full of energy, bouncing off stone and wood and the metal targets lined up along the far wall.
He stood off to the side, unseen. The genjutsu shaped itself around Mizuki's perspective, but Ryusei stepped out of that center and watched, detached.
A crowd of academy students clustered around the middle of the courtyard, forming a ring. In the makeshift arena they'd created stood a boy with hair that looked like a firework—a chaotic, bright yellow explosion. His orange jacket was slightly too big. His goggles sat crooked across his forehead. His grin was unabashed and bloody-lipped from where he'd kissed the dirt a moment ago.
Naruto.
He looked younger. Smaller. Less honed than the version standing behind Minako in the real world, but the chakra signature threaded through him was the same, bright and wild and aching.
Opposite him stood a dark-haired boy with a calm expression and a clan fan on his back, throwing a shuriken with effortless precision toward a wooden post.
"Again," Iruka called out, voice carrying over the courtyard.
The instructor stood a few paces away, a clipboard tucked under one arm, his expression hovering somewhere between stern and fond.
"C'mon, Naruto! Focus your chakra before you throw the kunai, not while it's in the air!"
"I am focusing!" Naruto shouted back. "My focus is just… focusing later!"
Some of the kids laughed.
From under the shadow of the Academy's eaves, Mizuki watched.
Ryusei turned his head to look at him properly.
Mizuki stood with his arms folded, leaning against a wooden support post, eyes narrowed slightly. His mouth was curved in what would have been a pleasant line on another man, but here it pulled wrong, the edges brittle.
"Hopeless," Mizuki muttered under his breath. "Can't even stick a basic clone. And that… is the Fourth's son."
There it was—that sour pull of envy, thick as spoiled milk. Ryusei could almost taste it.
Naruto stumbled again, coming out of a hand seal sequence half-off, chakra belching around him in a messy cloud. He coughed, tripped over his own feet, and ended up flat on his back, staring up at the sky.
He didn't stay down long. He rolled, popped up, and set his hands together again.
"I said I'll do it," he grumbled. "So I'll do it."
Iruka's shoulders dropped a fraction in quiet exasperated affection. "Alright. Once more."
Mizuki's fingers tightened where they tucked under his arms.
"Stubborn little idiot," he said, contempt and something else braided through the words. "Everyone keeps coddling him. If it weren't for his parents, he'd have washed out ages ago."
Ryusei watched Mizuki watching Naruto, taking in the way the man's gaze flicked from the boy to Iruka to the distant stone faces of the Hokage Monument.
There it was, the spark: that hungry twist when his eyes caught Minato's carved stone features. The bitter calculation, the quiet tallying of what others had and what he did not.
He'd seen that look before. In war camps. In clan compounds. On the faces of men who resented the children of famous shinobi for inheriting expectations and opportunities both.
Ryusei moved forward. The memory blurred, smearing outward like ink touched with water—
—and then snapped into a new shape.
—
Night wrapped around the village.
A light drizzle fell from a heavy sky, turning stone walkways slick and reflective. Lanterns hung at regular intervals along the main streets, but in the narrower alleys between buildings, the light barely reached. Those gaps were full of shadows you could hide a lifetime in.
Mizuki stood in one of those alleys now, in the lee of a jutting roof, cloaked form pressed partially into deeper shadow. The faint glow from the street didn't quite touch his face, but Ryusei saw the tension in his jaw, the way his fingers twitched around the small scroll he held.
Water pattered onto the scroll's waxed surface, beading and rolling off.
"Where are you…" Mizuki whispered, looking toward the mouth of the alley, then up at the rooftops.
His pulse beat faster here. Ryusei could feel it in the genjutsu, like standing next to someone at close quarters and unconsciously syncing to their breathing.
A giggle oozed out of the stone beside him.
Not human. Not sane.
The wall to Mizuki's left rippled.
Colour bled across the stone—black swallowing grey in a rising tide on one side, white bleaching the other. A pair of eyes opened first, too wide, too bright, gleaming in the dim. The rest of the body followed, peeling out of the wall like fungus bursting from damp wood.
Half black. Half white. A jagged grin splitting the unnatural face.
Zetsu.
Ryusei's chakra recoiled, a hot flare in his gut. His fingers twitched. Old instincts screamed at him to move, to attack, to annihilate—but this wasn't now. It was a recorded echo. A memory. He forced himself to keep still, to witness.
Mizuki dropped to one knee, more from shock than reverence.
"You—" he choked. "Y-You can't just—"
"Appear?" Zetsu finished, voice smooth, sliding and wrong. "That's rather the point."
The mostly white half smiled wider. The black half's eyes turned lazily toward the scroll in Mizuki's hand.
"You have it?"
Mizuki swallowed, throat bobbing. "Not yet. But I know how to get it. I've… made arrangements."
He pictured Naruto with a brief flash of thought. Ryusei saw it, felt the flare of contempt, the oily satisfaction.
Zetsu hummed. "Ahhh… the jinchūriki."
Mizuki clenched his teeth. "He's just some runt the village dotes on because of his parents."
"Mm." That sound again, soft and pleased. "You believe that."
"It's true!" Mizuki hissed. "Nobody appreciates what I… what we do. I have more skill than half the jōnin, but I don't get the recognition, the missions, the rank— I'm stuck babysitting brats who can't even make a basic clone."
Ryusei watched the way Zetsu's gaze sharpened at that. The way the creature leaned forward, feeding on the bitterness.
"So you'll fix that," Zetsu murmured. "By… using one of those brats to take the Scroll of Sealing for you."
Mizuki licked raindrops off his lips, eyes darting. "No one will suspect me. They all think he's a problem child already. If he's caught, they'll blame him. If he isn't…" His mouth curled. "…he'll be dead, and I'll have something you want. You said I'd be rewarded."
Zetsu's smile stretched slow and predatory.
"The world will reward you," he said. "Or punish you. We'll see which you merit."
Mizuki shivered, but the greed didn't leave his eyes.
Ryusei stepped closer, the alley's shadows wrapping tighter around his broad shoulders. Zetsu's chakra signature crawled over his senses, sickly and familiar.
The last time he'd felt it had been in half-heard whispers and glimpses in the periphery, back when the village had still been a fledgling surrounded by wolves in human form. He'd warned Tobirama once: There is something that moves between the clans that is not truly ours. Something that is not a man. Tobirama had believed him. Hashirama had frowned. Mito had looked thoughtful and set him to training harder.
Ryusei had never pinned it down.
Now he watched the parasite bargain with a petty man in a narrow alley.
His fists curled.
The memory lurched.
—
Fire lit the sky.
The heat hit first—the blast-furnace wind that roared through the streets, carrying with it the stench of burning wood and flesh and old stone. Screams followed, a jagged chorus that made the air shiver, and over all of it, the deep, bestial roar of a creature that shouldn't exist in the world of men.
Ryusei found himself standing in the middle of a war-torn street, ghost-light of the genjutsu painting flames across his skin. His lungs burned with remembered smoke, even though his body here never inhaled it.
The Nine-Tails stood amidst the village.
Chakra as dense as a collapsing star, vile and furious, poured off the fox in waves. Its massive tails smashed through rooftops and walls as if they were paper. Its eyes burned with baleful, mindless hatred.
Around its legs, Konoha shinobi were ants with knives and jutsu, hurling themselves at the impossible and buying seconds with blood.
On a half-shattered rooftop across the way, a blond man in a torn cloak appeared in one flash of gold and vanished in another, reappearing atop a building further away, hands already shaping seals.
Minato.
Younger. Whole. Both arms moving in practiced patterns. His face was set, eyes narrowed with focus, but fear lived there too. Not fear for himself. Fear for the village below.
With each reappearance, a flash of seal formula burnt against Ryusei's senses—Flying Thunder God marks laid down like a web. The battle moved faster than any normal eye could track.
Inside the rubble of a storefront, Mizuki crouched, eyes wild.
He watched Minato fight, watched shinobi die, watched the fox tear through buildings… and his first emotion wasn't sorrow.
It was calculation.
If the village falls… if other powers move in… there will be opportunities.
Ryusei felt the thought like a bitter taste on his tongue, traveling along the genjutsu link. His jaw clenched.
Minato vanished again in a bloom of golden light, reappearing further out, nearer the village wall, dragging the fox's massive chakra with him, trying to pull the destruction away from the heart of the village.
The memory didn't linger on the final sealing. It didn't show the moment Minato lost his arm. Mizuki hadn't been there close enough to see those details. He'd been huddled in his little pocket of safety, sheltered by others' sacrifice.
The flames blurred into smoke and ash and weeks of reconstruction.
Ryusei forced the genjutsu forward.
—
Years spiraled past.
Reports. Staff meetings. Missions Mizuki wasn't picked for. Missions he was picked for that didn't bring the glory he wanted. Students passing through the Academy. Naruto growing from tiny nuisance to lanky preteen, loud and careless and eager.
Hate. Jealousy. Grievances shuffled against the inside of Mizuki's skull like cards.
Ryusei didn't need to linger on every slight. The pattern was clear.
Self-pity that refused to turn into self-improvement. Resentment that loved itself more than it loved justice.
Finally, the memories sharpened again, snapping into recent focus.
Recent, to Mizuki.
To Ryusei, all of this was the future.
He watched Mizuki training alone in a glade, kunai thunking into a tree trunk with increasing force. He watched him smile at Naruto in class, false warmth curdling behind his eyes. He watched him examine the mission roster, eyes catching on the words "Scroll of Sealing," greed flaring like a struck match.
And then he watched the plan form in Mizuki's mind in crisp detail:
Manipulate Naruto—tell him the scroll will help him graduate.
Get him to steal it.
Take the scroll from him in an isolated area.
Kill the boy.
Blame it on a missing-nin or rogue attack.
Deliver the scroll to the puppet masters whispering behind the walls of the village.
Finally get the recognition, the power, the escape from insignificance he believed he deserved.
Ryusei saw Naruto's face, as it had appeared only hours ago in Mizuki's mind: open, trusting, lighting up when someone, anyone, told him they believed in him.
His stomach twisted.
The genjutsu pressure intensified. Mizuki's mental landscape shuddered around them, protesting the intrusion. Ryusei could feel the man's consciousness fraying at the edges, screaming against what was being dragged into the light.
He had enough.
Ryusei let go.
The world of memory cracked like glass under a hammer. Shards of sky and stone and faces flew apart, dissolving into a grey nothing that became—
—
—the clearing again.
Mizuki collapsed to his knees in front of him, eyes snapping back into focus. He gagged, retching, one hand digging into the dirt as if he could anchor himself against the vertigo of having his mind turned inside out.
A thin line of blood trickled from one nostril, down over his upper lip. His breaths came in harsh, panicked pants. His chakra felt ragged, like torn cloth.
Ryusei's hand finally opened.
Mizuki's wrist fell away from his grip as limp as if the bones had been removed.
He stayed where he was, kneeling, hunched, shoulders shaking.
Ryusei straightened slowly.
The motion made his vision swim for a heartbeat—too much chakra use after too long in nothing—but he locked it down. He'd lived with pain since he'd been old enough to understand the word. This was familiar.
He turned.
His Sharingan settled on Minato Namikaze.
The Fourth stood a few paces away, between Ryusei and Naruto, Minako flanking his other side. His cloak fluttered faintly in the disturbed air. The empty right sleeve hung tied at his ribs, fabric folded neatly, the absence of the arm noted and then ignored—Minato's chakra didn't feel diminished by it.
Minato's posture was open but ready, weight balanced, one foot slightly ahead, hand near his weapons pouch. His blue eyes were steady, mind racing behind their calm.
Up close, Ryusei could see the resemblance to the stone face he'd glimpsed in Mizuki's thoughts. Strong jaw. Sharp nose. The kind of beauty that came from clean lines and clear conviction.
He could also see the exhaustion etched into the corners of his mouth and the skin under his eyes. The kind that didn't come from sleepless nights on missions, but from holding a village in your hands long enough that your fingers forgot how to relax.
"You," Ryusei said.
The word dropped into the clearing like a stone into a still pond.
Naruto flinched.
Minato's eyes met his without flinching. "Me."
Ryusei took a step forward.
Chakra thickened around him, not in a flare, not in a wild burst, but in that quiet, terrible way a storm front thickens the air before the first lightning strike.
"One-armed Hokage," Ryusei said, tone flat. Not mocking. A statement, weighted. His gaze flicked to the tied sleeve, then back up. "Minato Namikaze."
Minako's muscles drew taut. "Who are you?" she demanded. Her hand hovered near her kunai, eyes narrowed, body angled toward him just enough to be ready without showing her whole stance.
Ryusei didn't look at her yet.
He kept his focus on Minato.
"I saw," he said. "In his head." He jerked his chin once toward Mizuki, still panting on the ground. "What has happened while I was gone."
His lips thinned.
"I saw the fox tearing through the village. I saw you stand in its shadow. I saw you lose an arm and keep your life. I saw the wars. The dead. The rebuilding. The children taught to fight under a monument built from the bodies of men I knew."
Minato's jaw tightened. "You went through his mind."
"Yes."
"That is a violation," Minato said, even as part of him acknowledged the hypocrisy of objecting when genjutsu interrogation was hardly a foreign concept to Konoha.
Ryusei's eyes cooled a fraction. "It was necessary."
Mizuki made a weak sound, somewhere between a groan and a whine.
Minato didn't look at him.
"You know what he intended," Ryusei said. "What he arranged. What he was willing to do to this child. To your child. To the jinchūriki. To the vessel of a power that could raze this village to the ground."
His gaze slid sideways, catching Naruto behind Minato's shoulder.
Naruto stared back, wide-eyed, throat bobbing when he swallowed. He looked very young in that moment. Not a future hero. Not a living weapon. Just a boy who'd almost died at the hands of a man he called sensei.
Ryusei's mouth flattened further.
He looked back to Minato.
"You allow this," he said.
Minato's brows drew together. "No. I—"
"You do," Ryusei said, not raising his voice, but putting weight behind the words. "You allowed this man"—another flick toward Mizuki—"to stand in front of your children and shape their minds. You allowed a boy like that"—he nodded toward Naruto—"to move through this village with a target painted on his back and no awareness of it. You allowed him to put his hand on a scroll that never should have been within reach of ignorant fingers."
Naruto flinched again at "ignorant," but Ryusei wasn't looking at him, didn't soften it.
Minato's spine straightened by a fraction. "Naruto was not unprotected. I placed seals on him. Markers. I was watching when he took the scroll. We reacted the instant—"
"You reacted when he was already on the ground," Ryusei cut in. "With a traitor's knife aimed at his throat and his blood on a seal no one can name."
Chakra thrummed beneath his words, a deep, almost inaudible vibration in the clearing.
"You stand there cloaked in the title Hokage," he continued. "Do you even remember what that title means? It is not 'the one who commands.' It is not 'the one whose face is carved into stone.' It is 'the one who endures so the children do not have to.'"
Minato's teeth clicked together.
Minako stepped up, temper flaring. "You don't get to talk to my dad like—"
Ryusei's head turned toward her, slow and smooth, like a predator finally deigning to acknowledge something that had been yapping at the edges of its attention.
Minako stopped.
Not because something supernatural stilled her—because instinct did.
He was taller than she'd first registered. Shoulders broad, chest scarred, seals curled over his skin like wrapped chains. His hair, long and black, fell loose halfway down his back, a few strands clinging to his neck where sweat or condensed chakra dampened it. That strange, unhealthy dark throbbed in the veins along his throat.
But it was his eyes that nailed her in place.
The Sharingan wasn't all that made them unsettling. She'd seen Sharingan. She'd worked with Uchiha on missions, sparred with them, watched that red gaze spin through analysis and anger and focus.
This was… older.
Less like a bloodline limit and more like a battlefield god choosing to notice you.
He studied her for a full heartbeat.
She refused to look away.
"You have fire," he said at last. There was no condescension in it. Just assessment. A nod to something he recognized. "Good."
The acknowledgement hit something inside her she hadn't known was waiting. Minako swallowed, shoulders squaring on reflex.
"Still doesn't mean you can talk trash," she muttered, because her mouth refused to shut when it should.
One corner of his mouth twitched, almost there and gone.
Then he turned back to Minato.
"You inherited this dream," Ryusei said. "You did not watch it being argued into existence in smoke-filled rooms and on blood-soaked fields. You did not stand with Hashirama as he spoke of a village where children didn't die before they learned their own strength. You did not stand with Tobirama as he named the need for structure, for law, for systems to keep men like that—" another barely-there motion toward Mizuki "—from chewing through the foundations."
Minato's throat worked. "No. I didn't. I learned about it from my sensei. From the man who stood here before me."
"Hiruzen," Ryusei said quietly.
There was a note there, under the name. Something that didn't belong to this moment.
His chakra flared once, small and sharp, as if the thought physically hurt.
"You call yourself Hokage," Ryusei said. "So prove that you remember what that word costs."
Minato let out a breath through his nose.
He eased his stance—just enough to show that he wasn't going to attack first, not enough to actually leave himself open.
"And if I don't measure up to your standards?" he asked. There was no flippancy in it. Just a simple, level question.
Ryusei lifted his chin.
"Then we have a problem."
Chakra rolled off him in a wave.
The clearing responded. Grass flattened. Loose stones vibrated. Smoke snapped sideways like a cloth being whipped in a high wind.
Ryusei's chakra was thick, oppressive, suffocating and alive. It felt nothing like the malevolent, tidal churn of the Nine-Tails. That was rage and hatred and raw, explosive force. This was density—compressed years of battle, of training, of forcing his will through a body that tried to self-destruct with every burst of power.
Minato's skin prickled. Old reflexes moved before he consciously decided to let them—he drew his chakra up in answer, golden and cutting, lightning-coated and wind-sharp.
The air between them grew heavy and sharp at once.
Minato's cloak shifted around his legs as chakra pressure rose. Lightning spider-webbed faintly along his remaining hand, current dancing over his knuckles. Space itself seemed to lean toward him, trained by years of Flying Thunder God use to respond to his call.
Behind him, Naruto quivered, wide-eyed, as if caught between awe and terror.
Minako adjusted her footing again, subtly putting herself more between Naruto and Ryusei. Her chakra slid along her tenketsu, ready to leap.
Up above, unseen but present, ANBU tensed on their branches, hands inching toward weapons. Their masks hid their expressions, but even masked, even disciplined, they couldn't entirely dampen the instinctual fear that crawled along their spines.
Two forces about to clash.
One, the protector of their present.
One, a ghost of their past.
If either of them let go fully, the forest wouldn't remain a forest for long.
Ryusei's Sharingan spun, the tomoe tracking the smallest shifts in Minato's weight, the flare and focus of his chakra, the way the space around his hand bent minutely where Hiraishin formulas waited to be triggered in distant places.
"Let me see," Ryusei said softly, almost to himself, "if the Will of Fire still burns… or if we just built a comfortable coffin and called it peace."
Minato's fingers brushed the familiar shape of a three-pronged kunai in his pouch.
Once, he'd thrown blades like this at men nearly as powerful as he was and watched them fall with neat, precise strikes.
He'd never done it in front of one of the men those legends had been built on.
Before either of them could move—
"ENOUGH!"
The voice cracked across the clearing like a staff striking stone.
It wasn't loud in the physical sense; no chakra rode it, no jutsu. But decades of command lived in that single bark. Battlefields had gone quiet for that tone. Children had stopped mid-step. Kage had listened.
Both men froze.
Ryusei's eyes shifted first, flicking toward the trees.
Minato turned his head.
The foliage at the edge of the clearing parted as if shoved aside by an invisible hand. Leaves fluttered in the displaced air. Branches creaked.
Hiruzen Sarutobi stepped into view.
He moved like he'd forgotten, for a moment, that he was old. The weight of his robes didn't slow him; the staff in his hand wasn't a crutch, but an anchor. His sandals barely made a sound on the torn earth.
The evening light caught the lines carved into his face—more than Ryusei remembered, far more—but the eyes were the same. Deep. Searching. Shadowed by things he'd seen and done and chosen.
He took in the scene in one sweeping glance: Minato, crackling with lightning and tension; Ryusei, naked and sealed and standing at the heart of a dead storm; Naruto, peeking from behind Minako; Mizuki crumpled on his knees; the burned edges of the scroll sprawled over the ground like a gutted beast.
For half a heartbeat, Hiruzen's gaze simply stopped on Ryusei.
His staff eased a fraction toward the ground.
His breath stuttered in his throat.
"…no," he whispered.
Not denial. Not rejection.
Disbelief, raw and sharp.
Ryusei stood very still.
For all his chakra, for all his anger, something in his chest clenched at the sight of the man in front of him. Not as a Hokage. Not as the Professor. As a boy he remembered sitting cross-legged on the training field, trying so hard to balance a leaf on his forehead with too much concentration.
"Little Monkey?" Ryusei said.
The name slipped out before he could stop it, old habit cutting under the moment's sharpness.
Minato's brain hiccupped.
Little… monkey?
Hiruzen flinched like the words had been a physical blow.
His fingers spasmed on the staff.
"You…" He took a stumbling half-step closer, as if afraid that if he moved too fast, the vision would vanish. "You can't— Ryusei…?"
His voice cracked on the last syllable.
Ryusei's mouth curved. It wasn't quite a smile. There was too much weariness in it. Too much pain. But there was warmth, suddenly—thin, fragile, but there.
"You got old," he said.