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In another life, in a different world, on the night the Fox was released, Namikaze Minato made the split second decision to leave behind his injured wife and newborn son to flash back to Konoha and face an enemy in an orange mask. Tobi, or Uchiha Obito, was forced to retreat after his ability was understood and exploited within seconds by the Fourth Hokage of Konoha. In the end, Minato transported Kurama to Kushina who, despite being weakened from blood loss and childbirth, held the Fox down and Minato traded his own life to seal half of the Fox into his child and the other into himself, knowing he would die.
——
The thing about decisions made under pressure though—whether it is under stress or in the space between life and death—is that they are separated by the narrowest of margins. One instinct followed rather than ignored. One thought given precedence over another. Essentially, when a fraction of a second decides the course of a lifetime, decisions are closer to chance.
So consider a world where Minato made a different split second decision: he refused to leave his wife and child behind. A world where Minato took them both to Konoha’s hospital, leaving them in the hands of people he trusted with the determination that the Fox wasn’t going to take a step further into his village.
This decision changes a few things. Some might even say it changed everything.
——
When he saw Kushina and Naruto were no longer in the outskirts of Konoha, Obito realized what Minato must have done. With the stinging humiliation of how easily his teacher had defeated him and the burning rage that Minato wasn’t going to lose his precious people, Obito returned to Konoha a second time, intent on killing Minato. If Obito wanted to ensure Konoha's destruction, the Fourth had to die. Besides, the fact that Minato had been his teacher only made the choice easier.
What kind of teacher had Minato been, really? The man had been absent when Rin needed him most. He had been too late to save Kakashi from losing his eye or Obito from the bridge. Even if Minato was hailed as a Hokage worthy of admiration, the title meant nothing to Obito. Heros who couldn't save the people they loved didn't deserve to be called heroes at all.
Hidden within the shadows of a ruined street, Obito watched the battle unfold. Around him, Konoha was dying. Buildings burned while streets had been reduced to rubble. The cries of panicked civilians echoed through the night.
Through it all, Kurama's roar shook the air.
One of the Fox’s tails swept through an entire row of buildings, reducing them to splintered wreckage. Dust and debris erupted into the night sky. The Fox was no longer under Obito's control, but it hardly mattered. Kurama hated humans enough on its own to wreck more destruction and death every second it remained free.
Minato was moving in golden flashes, appearing and vanishing across ruined buildings as he intercepted attacks that would have annihilated entire districts, and struck Kurama, disrupting the beast's movements and forcing its attention away from the village.
Then, Minato flashed onto a collapsing rooftop, just a building away from Obito. Broken tiles slid away beneath his sandals as the structure groaned under its own weight. His hands blurred through seals so quickly they were impossible to follow, but his attention was solely focused on the Fox.
He was distracted.
In that instant, Obito saw his opening, and his sharingan swirled into a three point pinwheel. He was going to use Kamui to tear Minato apart—
Kakashi ripped through Obito with a chidori.
——
Obito stumbled forward, more from shock than pain, as a hand wreathed in crackling blue-white chakra burst through his torso. For a split second, his mind simply refused to process what had happened.
Then the hand ripped free, splattering blood across the rubble.
Behind him, his attacker pivoted sharply, sandals carving trenches through the dirt as he changed direction in a single fluid motion. Lightning gathered in his palm once more, the familiar sound of chirping birds filling the air.
Kakashi was in an ANBU Toad mask, but Obito still remembered the blue-white static chakra; he recognized that hateful chirping birdsong.
There were a hundred ways to counter Kakashi, but Obito, who had been ready to kill his teacher, wasn’t ready to face his teammate.
He hesitated.
After a second chidori broke his mask, Obito retreated for good that night.
——
However, what really changed this world wasn’t Obito returning to Konoha a second time. It was that Kushina, thanks to being taken back to Konoha, was healed. Not fully, of course, but enough that she was able to hold Naruto in her arms and decide she would not condemn him to the same fate she had endured.
Against the protests of every medical-nin attending her, against their insistence that she remain in the hospital and leave the battle to the Fourth Hokage, Kushina walked out.
When she reached Kurama, Konoha was burning.
Minato was moving like lightning, yellow chakra flickering across the battlefield as he harried a literal force of nature. Kakashi followed in his wake like a sheepdog chasing a thunderstorm. Where Minato struck, Kakashi covered the gaps. His sharingan tracked Kurama's every movement through the chaos, searching desperately for an opening.
Then Minato created one.
A rasengan slammed into Kurama's jaw with enough force to stagger the beast. The Fox's massive head snapped sideways. For the briefest instant, the creature faltered, disoriented by the sheer violence of the blow.
Kakashi seized the moment.
(For a split second, Kakashi had seen a familiar face when his chidori broke the orange mask. It didn’t make any sense that Kakashi recognized the three pointed pinwheel, a pattern he had never seen in any sharingan except in the mirror.
The implications were impossible. Kakashi had no time to chase them though. Konoha was burning around him. Every second spent trying to understand what he had seen was a second in which more people could die. Kakashi had to focus on what he knew, which was that when the Nine-Tails had first appeared, its eyes had borne the unmistakable pattern of the sharingan. An Uchiha had controlled it. More specifically, the companian pair of the sharingan in Kakashi’s skull had controlled it.
It was a desperate hope, but if the Fox could be controlled by a sharingan, or by the particular sharingan Kakashi possessed, if Kakashi could stop it for even a second—)
Kakashi activated the mangekyo sharingan, looked at the Fox, and pulled.
Agony exploded through Kakashi’s skull. The sheer volume of chakra crashed against him like a tidal wave. Blood spilled from Kakashi's eye as his vision blurred and his legs gave out beneath him. Controlling a tailed beast, even for an instant, was beyond anything his body had been built to withstand, but Kakashi gritted his teeth and—
For three full heartbeats, Kurama froze as though the world itself had paused.
That was all Minato and Kushina needed.
——
Minato, despite being exhausted and injured from battle, rewrote a sealing originally meant for a newborn who had more malleable chakra pathways, to adapt it into something that could anchor a bijuu within an adult host.
Kushina traded her own life to seal half of the Fox into Minato and the other into herself, knowing she would die.
——
When Minato finally woke, seventeen days after Kushina sealed the Fox, he did not need to be told what had happened, who he lost. The answer was written in the carefully neutral expressions of the medics moving through the room.
Some part of him had known before he even opened his eyes; Minato remembered the look on her face when Kushina made her choice. She had known exactly what she was sacrificing, and Minato had known it too.
Knowing didn't make it hurt less.
Grief settled over him like a crushing weight. For a while, he simply lay there staring at the ceiling, unable to move, unable to think beyond the reality that he would never see Kushina or hold her again.
Then Souta, who understood Minato far better than Minato sometimes wished he did, quietly placed Naruto into his arms, and the rest of the world ceased to matter.
Minato stared down at the tiny bundle cradled against his chest.
His son.
Kushina’s son.
Naruto's eyes were closed. One tiny hand rested against the blanket wrapped around him. He looked small and fragile, completely unaware of the battle that had nearly destroyed a village before he had even lived a full day. Minato's breath caught in his throat.
Kushina was supposed to be here beside him, laughing at how nervous he looked holding a newborn. She was supposed to tease him for checking every five seconds to make sure Naruto was still breathing. They were supposed to laugh together when they saw Kakashi hold Naruto, looking even more terrified than Minato himself. He had imagined years stretching ahead of them, first words, first steps, birthdays, scraped knees, family dinners.
Kushina was supposed to be there for all of it. Instead, there was only silence.
Slowly, Minato curled protectively around Naruto. At some point Souta had ushered everyone else from the room, but Minato didn't notice. The door opened and closed. Footsteps faded. The room emptied.
Naruto stirred and let out a small, sleepy sound of protest before settling against his father's chest. The tiny weight of him was almost nothing yet it was enough to keep Minato from breaking apart completely.
Naruto needed him. No matter how much Minato hurt, no matter how much he wanted to close his eyes and mourn everything he had lost, Naruto still needed a father and Minato had to be strong for him.
Naruto was all Minato had now—
Wait. Minato’s gaze snapped up, remembering what the ANBU Commander had told him. That wasn’t true.
——
“We need you to let him go, Hokage-sama.”
The head medic's voice was quiet, respectful, and utterly certain.
For a moment, Minato said nothing. Then, still cradling Naruto securely against his chest, Minato reached out to brush his fingers through Kakashi's hair, something the teen complained he had outgrown but secretly enjoyed.
His student didn't stir.
The sight twisted something inside Minato.
"We'll give you some privacy," The medic murmured.
Kakashi seemed connected to half the machines in the hospital. Chakra monitors tracked fluctuations that still hadn't stabilized. Intravenous lines disappeared beneath blankets and seals designed to support exhausted chakra pathways glowed faintly against his skin.
For three heartbeats, his student had seized control of the Fox.
Even now, Minato wasn't certain how Kakashi had managed to face the nine-tailed beast tearing through Konoha, how he forced his will against an ocean of chakra and held it still. The strain must have been unimaginable. Minato had felt the crushing weight of Kurama’s chakra—the vastness of a force so immense that it barely seemed comprehensible as chakra at all. An adult Uchiha would have likely failed attempting such a feat and Kakashi had done it with a transplanted dojutsu that was never meant to be his.
It was a miracle Kakashi was alive at all.
So it made some level of sense that the medics, in that gentle way only people who had seen too much death could manage, asked Minato to let go. It wasn’t giving up hope, they explained, but accepting what had already happened and allowing his student to die without further suffering.
Minato’s hand stilled in Kakashi’s hair. His gaze never left the teen’s face.
——
Ever since he was a child, Minato had carried an emptiness inside himself. He had never found a name for it. It was simply there, as much a part of him as the color of his hair or the memories that haunted his earliest years: war, hunger, nights spent shivering in whatever shelter he could find, and the lesson learned far too young that no one was coming to save him. If he wanted to survive, he had to watch his own back.
Then, one rainy afternoon, he heard rumors of a strange man passing through town; it was a shinobi who could use chakra.
Minato tracked him down immediately and demanded to be taught how to use chakra better.
The shinobi had laughed.
The insolence should have been irritating, but it amused Jiraiya. The boy standing before him was scrappy, stubborn, frighteningly intelligent, and entirely unafraid. Somewhere between amusement and genuine interest, the Toad Sage decided to take him on as a student.
Jiraiya wasn’t quite family—he was too restless for that—but he had looked at a lonely, brilliant boy and decided he was worth teaching. Through his teacher, Minato learned to love Konoha, which gave him so much: a purpose, teammates, and even friends. For a long time, that was enough.
Then Minato met Kakashi.
Where others saw arrogance, Minato saw brilliance. It was hard to understand why the village ostracized this boy. Kakashi was everything Konoha claimed to value. Kakashi loved Konoha with all the fierce sincerity of a child who had been taught to place the village above himself, yet Konoha, in return, looked at him and saw only the White Fang's failures.
It was fine, Minato decided in the end. The village could keep its prejudices. Minato was going to keep Kakashi.
And Minato did. Kakashi became his student, his responsibility, his.
The void in him eased at that realization and paradoxically, Minato became aware of it's presence for the first time.
Then, Kushina walked into his life and shattered every understanding he had of himself.
Kushina saw him in a way no one else ever had, beyond the prodigy, beyond the future Hokage, beyond the mask of competence he wore so effortlessly. She had been fierce where he was gentle, loud where he was quiet, passionate where he was restrained. She burned with a brightness that drew people toward her despite themselves. Somewhere along the way, Minato had realized that he looked for her first whenever he entered a room. Her presence could improve even the worst day, and he wanted to lay every victory he had at her feet. She was someone to protect with every fiber of his being, but she was also someone who protected him in return; she anchored him, by turning a world that had always felt temporary into a home.
Now that she was gone, Minato was going to suffocate under that grief because there was no undoing it. Her absence was a wound that would never close. Every time he closed his eyes, he found her again—the warmth of her smile and the sound of her laughter. He remembered her hand in his, her voice, her dreams for the future.
Every memory was precious.
Every memory hurt.
And just like that, the abyss came rushing back.
——
It had been waiting for him all along, patient and hungry beneath years of happiness. Minato could feel the void lurking at the edges of his thoughts now. It stretched beneath his grief like a bottomless chasm, threatening to swallow everything else. Every happy memory became another reminder of what had been taken from him. Every dream for the future became another monument to something that would never exist.
There would be no miracle, it reminded him. No impossible rescue waiting just beyond the horizon.
Kushina was dead, and Minato would have to carry that truth for the rest of his life. Naruto too, because he would never be scolded by her, encouraged by her, or see the fierce determination in her eyes whenever she spoke about protecting the people she loved. Everything Naruto would learn about his mother would come from stories, as secondhand pieces of a woman who should have been there to raise him herself.
Minato looked down at his son, who was going to grow up never knowing his mother, and his student, who had risked life and limb again for a village that was waiting for him die.
——
The abyss whispered: the world should pay for this. It had stolen someone who was Minato’s, and was trying to take another. Weren’t some losses were too great to forgive? Was there not a point where mercy became foolishness?
Minato could let the world burn instead.
Better, he could burn the world to the ground—
Naruto snuffled in his arms.
——
Minato's grip tightened instinctively before he even consciously registered what he was doing. Every protective instinct he possessed surged to the surface at once, primal and immediate and utterly beyond reason.
His attention dropped immediately to Naruto, and after assuring himself that the infant was safe, his gaze flicked toward Kakashi. The same desperation that compelled him to check one demanded he check the other.
The teen’s breathing was so shallow that Minato found himself counting the seconds between each rise and fall of his chest.
Still, Kakashi was alive. Maybe barely, but still alive, and that distinction was important.
Perhaps grief had stripped away whatever objectivity Minato normally possessed. Perhaps exhaustion and heartbreak had left him clinging desperately to whatever remained.
He did not care.
When he looked at Naruto and Kakashi, something fierce rose within him. For years, protecting Konoha and dreaming of peace had been an abstract dream and duty. Now, holding his son in his arms while watching over his injured student, that responsibility took a more concrete shape.
The world needed to become something better, somewhere kinder. A place worth Kushina dying to protect, and Naruto inheriting. Somewhere Kakashi deserved to see.
“No,” Minato decided, outloud. Holding Naruto close, he ruffled Kakashi’s hair, and promised. “I’m not letting go.”
The world had taken enough. He was giving no more.
——
Minato had to find Tsunade.
The thought anchored itself in Minato’s mind like a small point of order in a world that had begun to fracture at its edges. It was not logic that led him there so much as memory and echoes of stories he had heard from Jiraiya.
Tsunade had always been spoken of like a storm held in human form. Healing hands capable of miracles. Strength that could split stone. A temper that could bend fate into submission if she chose to care enough to try.
It was perhaps childish faith, but Minato believed that if anyone could pull Kakashi back from the edge of death, it was Tsunade.
Before even that though, something else demanded his attention.
It had started as a flicker at the edge of his awareness. A distortion in space that rubbed wrong against Minato’s senses.
Not even Jiraiya-sensei understood but hiraishin seals were not simply passive seals to Minato. They were individual pressure points in the fabric of the worl, or like threads pulled too tight, waiting to snap or shift. It lived in his awareness the way a heartbeat lived in the body, existing even if he didn't care to focus on it.
So Minato noticed very quickly that something was wrong with one marker.
It was there. Then it wasn’t. Then it was again… as if it was moving in and out of this dimension.
The Fourth suspected he knew what, or rather, who that hiraishin seal was attached to.
——
Minato briefly considered waiting to recover before he faced his orange-masked assailant. The thought was then set aside, like a letter read in passing but never answered.
In theory, it was wiser to rest and heal. To let grief settle into something less volatile, and accept that even the strongest shinobi were still, in the end, human.
However, the one thing Minato was, before even Hokage, was a shinobi who had been shaped by war. Battles did not pause for recovery. Enemies did not hesitate out of respect for exhaustion. Besides, the world still thought Minato dead, and that was an advantage.
So mind made, Minato left his newborn and student with a shadow clone, took a deep breath and hiraishin-ed half way across the continent.
——
Minato blinked into existence and punched a rasengan into the stranger’s heart.
Immediately, Minato noticed three things.
One, the stranger could heal himself. It wasn’t instantaneous, but steady enough that Minato was going to have to lay multiple fatal blows to outpace the healing.
Second, in the privacy of the thick forests north of the Fire border, the stranger wasn’t wearing a mask.
Third, the stranger was Obito.
——
In his memories, Obito was a loud, eager boy who had constantly arrived late to training. He spoke about becoming Hokage with complete certainty despite having little talent compared to his teammates. He had driven Kakashi insane and made Rin laugh.
That boy was gone, and all that remained was the stranger standing before Minato now.
A distant part of Minato wondered, if he were a different kind of man, whether that realization would have made him hesitate.
In the end, Minato had been born into war and raised by it, becoming the shinobi powerful enough to end it.
Obito was only a fifteen year old boy.
——
Chakra sealed and dying, Obito stared at Minato.
"You didn't even hesitate."
The accusation emerged through blood and ragged breathing. There was no mistaking the bitterness behind the words. He kept staring at Minato, searching for something in his former teacher's expression. Regret, perhaps. Doubt. Guilt.
He found none.
Minato stood over him in silence.
The battle had ended only minutes ago, but it already felt distant. The adrenaline had faded, leaving behind only exhaustion and the grim reality of what remained.
Obito's body was broken. Deep wounds covered him from shoulder to hip, and his breathing had become increasingly shallow. Whatever healing ability Obito had was slowing with every passing second.
He had possessed more advantages than almost any shinobi alive, but even the mokuton meant nothing if you weren’t fast enough to catch Minato.
Obito, who had the hiraishin marker on his shoulder, was essentially a dead man walking.
No, a dead student walking, Minato thought bitterly.
Outloud, he said, "You killed Kushina. You attacked my son. You hurt Kakashi. You thought I would hesitate?”
It was the mention of Kakashi that made Obito bristle. Even now, Minato noticed ruefully, Kakashi was able to get under Obito’s skin.
"Kakashi wasn't supposed to be there," Obito snarled. “And you were supposed to be dead.”
There it was again, a hatred beyond that of an enemy facing an opponent. Minato had noticed it during the fight. At the time, survival had taken priority over understanding. Now there was time to ask.
He lowered himself into a crouch beside Obito. For several moments neither spoke and the ruined battlefield was eerily quiet around them. Then Minato met his student's gaze.
"Why, Obito?"
The question seemed to catch him off guard. Obito stared at him for several seconds before letting out a short, humorless laugh.
"Why?" He repeated. "You really have to ask?"
"Yes." Minato answered simply.
Obito shook his head. For a moment his eye drifted toward the dark sky above them. When he spoke again, the anger remained, but something else had crept into his voice.
"You were supposed to protect us."
Minato stilled.
"You were our teacher. You were the fastest shinobi alive. Everyone said you could do anything." The bitterness in Obito's voice deepened. "And yet you weren't there when it mattered."
The accusation landed harder than any attack from their battle.
Obito laughed again, but the sound was hollow.
"I spent months trying to leave to find Rin and Kakashi. I believed I could go back." His voice grew quieter. "And when I finally saw them again...I watched Kakashi put his hand through Rin's chest.
"I watched her die. Do you understand that? I watched the person who mattered most die while the world just kept moving."
His voice began to rise.
"The villages kept fighting. The wars kept happening. People kept killing each other,” His eye locked onto Minato's. “What was even the point?”
Minato stiffened despite himself.
"They called it sacrifice and duty. The shinobi way." Obito spat out, “I call it a lie."
Minato listened as years of grief poured out of his student. Obito spoke of endless wars, of children dying for villages that barely remembered their names and missions that destroyed innocent lives. That this was a world built upon suffering and maintained through violence.
"When she died," Obito said quietly, exhaustion beginning to overtake his anger, "I finally understood that this world isn't worth saving and it should burn."
Minato studied him for a long moment. The teenager’s breathing had grown increasingly labored. Blood stained the corner of his mouth, and each breath sounded more painful than the last. Yet despite the obvious damage to his body, the conviction in his voice had never wavered. Years of hatred and grief had hardened into certainty.
Other people might have argued and tried to convince Obito that he was wrong.
Minato found himself focused on something else entirely.
"You watched Rin die?"
Obito's expression immediately darkened.
"I saw Kakashi kill her."
Minato had heard the report from Kakashi himself. Kakashi and Rin had been by the border of Ame and Kusa, when Rin had refused to cross the border with the three-tailed beast sealed inside her.
“You were there, at that unimportant point by the border in the exact moment Rin died.” Minato considered it briefly. “Who healed you and gave you the mokuton?”
Obito bristled at Minato’s statement. "That’s not what’s important. I wanted to build a world without suffering."
Minato studied him.
Obito had been emotional and impulsive, but kind to a fault. He was the sort of child who gave away his lunch because someone else forgot theirs. He dreamed of becoming Hokage because he genuinely wanted to help people.
That boy had not arrived at this darkness by himself. Someone had led him here. Minato could clearly see the places where someone else's influence had been woven into the teenager’s grief. The assumptions Obito had never questioned because they had been planted when he was vulnerable.
"Who told you it was possible? Who convinced you that suffering could simply be erased?"
When Obito didn’t answer, Minato pressed, gently, “Obito, who controls you?”
"No one!" The shout echoed across the ruined battlefield. Obito struggled to rise before pain forced him back down. His breathing became ragged and his eyes burned with anger. "I chose this!"
“Ah,” Minato said unflinchingly, “A puppet, and you don’t even know it.”
——
For a long moment neither of them spoke.
The anger and bitterness were still there. Yet beneath it, Minato could see cracks forming in the certainty that had sustained Obito for years. The conviction that had seemed unshakable only moments ago now looked fragile, like glass splintering under pressure.
Obito looked less like a man defending a conviction and more like a boy defending a wound.
Minato had seen it a hundred times before: Rin insisting she was fine when she was exhausted; Kakashi claiming he didn't care after a failure. Children clung desperately to a decision because admitting otherwise would mean confronting the pain beneath it.
For the first time since recognizing him, Minato looked past the mask Obito had built around himself. He found a fifteen-year-old boy who had watched Rin die and never found his way back.
Something horribly stiff inside Minato loosened. He hadn’t even realized how tightly he had been holding himself until that moment.
"Obito..." He said quietly.
Obito flinched, a small, almost imperceptible movement.
A younger Obito used to do the same thing whenever he thought he had disappointed him.
Minato exhaled. He had been so quick to accept the enemy in Obito. He had failed to recognize how much of the child still remained.
——
Slowly, Minato reached forward and ruffled Obito's hair. The gesture felt absurdly out of place amidst the devastation around them.
Obito froze. For a moment, all the anger drained from his expression, replaced by naked confusion like he was expecting a trap.
Minato's hand lingered briefly before falling away.
"I'm sorry, Obito." The words were quiet and genuine but useless all the same. Minato forced himself to say them anyways. "I was too late."
Every decision that had seemed necessary at the time now felt unbearably small compared to the consequences before him. There was no place for rationalizations or excuses, so Minato offered Obito the only thing he had left: the truth.
"I was too late for you and for Rin,” Minato met Obito’s gaze. “I won’t be for Kakashi."
Again, it was the mention of Kakashi that got a reaction. For all his talk about false worlds and broken realities, Obito still cared.
The teenager fell silent. Then, in a small voice, he asked, “Really?”
”Yes,” Minato said fiercely, “I promise.”
The teenager searched his teacher’s face. Whatever he found seemed to loosen something in him. It wasn’t forgiveness, but it felt like trust.
As if satisfied, a broken, breathless laugh slipped out of Obito, barely there, wet at the edges with blood and fading strength. His eyes drifted past Minato, turning faraway, as though the present was already slipping away from him.
“Sensei,” Obito murmured at last.
Minato didn’t react to the word the way he wanted to. He didn’t let it become a wound.
“I’m… so tired.”
There would be plenty of time to grieve later; Minato forced himself to focus. He placed a hand over Obito’s.
“Obito,” He said quietly, “Tell me who lied to you.”
His student stared at him, wide-eyed, fading, dying.
Obito attacked Konoha and killed Kushina, but he was Minato’s once, too. Minato had to know. His grip tightened. “Please.”
——
The last thing Uchiha Obito said was a name.
——
Standing over his student’s body, holding an orange mask in hand, Minato wondered if Kushina, who was always the more talented sensor, had recognized the chakra signature that night. If she, faced with the boy they used to know, would have hesitated.
Minato hadn’t—he hadn’t dared to. That didn't mean it didn't hurt.
His gaze dropped to Obito’s closed right eye. He would need to destroy the sharingan or preserve it and return it to the Uchiha.
Then, Minato hesitated.
——
Kakashi had mentioned off-handedly that it felt like his eyesight in his sharingan was worsening. It had started after Kakashi told Minato about the the new shape the tomoe in the sharingan could take, and they had tested Kamui’s abilities and limitations.
Minato had warned Kakashi not to use the new ability, and to never let anyone else know. However, if Kakashi’s worsening eyesight was a price of kamui, that was going to become a problem.
He stared at Obito’s right eye, as he considered a possibility. An option that might one day become a necessity.
——
Just in case, he told himself as he turned away to begin tracking Tsunade down. Better to be prepared, just in case.
Minato tucked the storage scroll containing Obito’s eye into his vest pocket.
Kakashi wouldn’t like it, but that was okay. Minato was sure he’d be able to persuade him.
He always could.