Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Living Louder

[ SpartanComforts ]

Uzumaki Kushina dies amongst carnage, bloodied and weakened but blazing bright and magnificent nonetheless.

She awakens in a similar state.

The first few years of her new life are filled with nightmares and screaming, so much screaming. Every time she closes her eyes she’s overcome with memories of excruciating pain and paralyzing fear, except she can’t freeze up now, Minato needs her, Naruto needs her —

The Kyuubi looms, red and furious and murderous, and destroys all that she loves.

Her new mother is bewildered and exhausted, nearly driven out of her mind from her nonstop screaming. She’s apologetic about the trouble, she really is, but there’s a certain catharsis in screaming your terrors from your mind, chasing them away for a precious little time before they creep back into your dreams again.

And for all that she’s bold and confident and Kushina, her death is perfect fodder for nightmares and trauma. October tenth was just one clusterfuck of a night, first with her finally giving birth to her son (which she will never, ever regret, but seriously, no one ever prepared her for just how painful it would be), being attacked and nearly having a heart attack as the masked man stole her son (the son of a bitch, she didn’t spend hours pushing and feeling like she was being torn in half for this shit), being stolen by the masked man, having the fox ripped from her body, being left for dead (death by giant fox paw isn’t exactly glorious), forcing her half-dead body to chain the Kyuubi, and finally, finally, having a claw the size of the Hokage tower gouging her body. 

It’s no wonder she’s traumatized.

But Kushina — or Akane, as she’s apparently now called — is strong, a blade forged in fire. She survived a war and the destruction of her homeland, she became the human sacrifice necessary to hold the demon fox, and she is used to loss. 

So she allows herself to grieve, to rage, to scream, but she picks herself up and builds herself up again.  

Kushina (because Akane is just too weird, it’s… not her) grows older, and she realizes that while her mother is always there, pale and tired and drawn, she doesn’t remember seeing a father anywhere.

He comes when she’s three.

Father is a large, severe man, hulking muscles and grim countenance, and from the moment he enters the room Kushina knows something’s not right. Her mother folds in on herself and can’t seem to meet his eyes, and Kushina sees those slim, delicate hands trembling before they’re tucked into apron pockets. There’s a sense of wrongness in the air, something heavy and suffocating, and she forces herself quiet, to observe better.

The man approaches, looks down at her with clinical interest. “Is this her?”

“Y-yes.” Mother’s voice is barely a whisper.

“Has she manifested a Quirk yet?”

Quirk? 

Mother, impossibly, seems to shrink in on herself even more. “N-no. Not yet.”

The man’s face twists and before she knows what’s going on, Mother is on the floor, shaking uncontrollably, her long hair gripped in one meaty hand as the man yanks her up and hurls verbal abuse at her, and —

Kushina knows battle. But she doesn’t know battles like this, has never been so intimately confronted with such horrors within the walls of her own house, where she is supposed to be safe.

And Kushina? She’s a woman who fought in a war.

The chains, when they come, are familiar. Through the blinding rage she feels a measure of relief that not everything from her past has been lost, because even lost and isolated in a new village, the foreigner who doesn’t belong, she has always had her chains.

The man is wrapped in chains and thrown against the wall with enough force to make it shudder. For a moment there is a stunned silence as everyone stops to process the scene: a helplessly sobbing woman on the floor, a bruised and startled man bleeding from his temple, and a toddler red with rage, chains tipped with deadly points sprouting from her back, waving like cobras moving to a snake charmer’s tune. 

Then, absurdly, the man laughs.

He laughs, and laughs, and laughs, and Mother cowers on the floor, covering her face in despair.

Training, he says. We are training your Quirk.

Kushina has been a kunoichi, has been through grueling training. This is not training, this is abuse. For all her memories and steely determination, she is still physically all of four years old, and yet he is relentless, pummeling her with his fists and shouting at her to get up, get up, stop fucking crying.

She hates him, but she wipes her tears and stands.

She’s faced down a rampaging Kyuubi. This man, in the grand scheme of things, is nothing.

Mother escapes. 

Kushina doesn’t blame her for it, even as she closes the bathroom door behind her.

She is six, seven years old, constantly bruised and aching and burning with hatred, when her life takes a turn for the better.

Her father, the despicable man, has been captured. Apparently he’s an infamous criminal, notorious for his powerful Telekinesis Quirk, and he’s been captured. Arrested. Put behind bars.

Is this freedom?

The authorities in this strange new world, her world, sweep into the dilapidated house she’s been a prisoner of for seven years. A woman with a flawless bun and stern face gazes at her with kind eyes, offers her a place to stay, a future, and Kushina seizes the opportunity, but on one condition. 

“I want to change my name,” she says.

The woman’s brows rise, but there is something sympathetic in the curve of her lips. “Oh?”

She lifts her chin. “My name is Uzumaki Kushina.”

A day later, one Uzumaki Kushina, with blazing scarlet hair and a maelstrom behind gunpowder blue eyes, walks into the orphanage and starts a new life.

Chapter Text

Living Louder

[ SpartanComforts ]

Several things become apparent to her as time passes.

For one, this world is so different from her last that it makes her head spin to just try and count the discrepancies. This new world has thousands of years’ worth of history, unbelievably well documented and freely shared, and the first time she reads about the Roman Empire, she nearly has an aneurysm. It blows her mind, how far back written records go, because ninja hoarded information religiously and would rather destroy documents than let outsiders lay eyes on them.

Another thing that has her reeling is just how large the world is. There are over a hundred countries and thousands of languages, which is just downright bizarre. For all that the Hidden Villages and their respective countries have their differences, there have never been issues of miscommunication born from language barriers. Everyone on the continent spoke the same language, though naturally there were local dialects, with their own unique slang and odd pronunciations. But having languages so vastly different from each other, to have to learn a whole new language just to communicate with foreigners, is… unreal.

But it’s real. This is her new reality.

(Wistfully, she thinks Minato might have liked this new world of hers. He’s such a nerd sometimes, she can easily see his eyes lighting up at a new challenge, can almost envision a tail wagging as he tackles something new to study and master.  

Would Naruto be the same? Would he geek out over jutsu theory and history, like his father, or would he be like her, leaping headfirst into the thick of things, learning from the bruises and adrenaline rush? 

Her chest hurts something awful and she needs to stop.)

Kushina’s introduction to the existence of heroes is somewhat anticlimactic.

She’s just finished up her morning kata, a leftover habit from her kunoichi days, and is passing by the common room when Sumu, one of the boys at the orphanage, looks up and spots her.

“Kushina!” He lifts an arm and waves it, urging her into the room where he and several others are crowded around the cheap television. “Kushina, you’ve got to see this!”

She’s sweaty and pleasantly sore and badly wants to shower, but she indulges the children and joins them, dubiously eyeing the screen. It looks like a movie, with a humanoid stingray rampaging across a shopping district, but she does a double take as she sees that actually, this is the news channel. And it’s streaming live.

And then, of all things, what appears to be a sentient pair of jeans waltzes into the scene and deftly takes down the stingray.

Kushina is staring uncomprehendingly at the TV as the rest of the children burst into raucous applause. 

“What was that?” she says blankly.

Sumu turns and gives her a wide, starry-eyed grin. “That was Best Jeanist, the number four pro hero! Isn’t he great?”

She thinks back and realizes that yes, the moving jeans had probably been a man. She remembers sleek golden hair topping the ridiculous jean ensemble.

What an awful fashion statement, she thinks, but out loud she just says, “Pro hero?”

Somehow the children trip over themselves to shout about the hero industry and argue over their favorite heroes — the unanimous agreement that All Might is the Best Hero Alive aside — and she doesn’t get to shower until an hour later.

They get scolded by the headmistress for neglecting their chores that day, but Kushina goes to bed with something like hope sparking in her chest.

When she dreams, she dreams of sparring against Minato and Mikoto and laughing, adrenaline like fire coursing through her limbs.

The next day, she marches up to the headmistress, looks her dead in the eye, and says, in a voice that brooks no argument, “I’m going to become a pro hero.”

It’s like the world sharpens once she settles on a course of action. She’s been drifting, unsure of her place in this world, but with a renewed sense of purpose everything seems brighter, sweeter, louder. 

Better.

In her nightmares Kushina stares down the Kyuubi, snarling and full of hatred, and thinks back on what Mito-sama once told her.

We came here to be the vessels of the Nine-Tails… But before that, we must find love and fill the vessel with it.

“I won’t hate you,” she tells the memory of the rampaging fox. Because that’s all it is, a memory. A nightmarish one for sure, but still just a memory, just a monster inside her head. “You took so much from me, but I’m not going to let you win.”

The Kyuubi curls its lips and snarls.

But Kushina, she’s not just a frightened little girl with no friends and no homeland and a crushing responsibility in her near future. She’s a grown woman who’s had her share of love and loss, who knows the beauty of tragedy and the agony of love, whose love for Konoha and Minato and life was enough to hold the fox at bay for years, and she pulls.

She pulls on every ounce of love she’s ever felt, relives every moment with Minato and Mikoto and all their friends, relives all those near-death experiences that left her more appreciative of life than before. She runs through memories of Minato rescuing her from her kidnappers, giggling with Mikoto and gossiping in between spars, arguing with her teammates and pulling their asses out of the line of fire, holding Mito-sama’s journals in her hands and tracing the worn kanji with her fingers. She immerses herself: she’s five and splashing through the waves of Uzushio’s beaches, basking in her mother’s warm laughter. She’s twelve and panting, triumphant after a battle. She’s fifteen and blushing to her roots, Minato in a similar state as they silently freak out over their first kiss. She’s nineteen and exhausted, on the front lines, and Mikoto is massaging her tense shoulders, humming under her breath. She’s twenty four and feeling like she’s being ripped in half, but so full of love that she aches with the force of it, listening to her son howl.

She gathers those precious experiences in her arms and holds tight.

The Kyuubi dwindles in size and no longer blocks out the moonlight with its shadow. The fires blazing through Konoha are doused, the screams of her fellow villagers fade into silence, and slowly, before her unflinching gaze, Konoha rebuilds itself. The nine-tailed fox sits, sullen but harmless, like a miffed cat at her feet.

Kushina, her cherished memories still clutched to her chest, exhales slowly and drops her arms. The memories fall from her embrace like fireflies, drifting up like glowing embers, and embed the dark night sky as distant but brilliant stars.

They are memories that remind her to love, to mourn but to push forward, but they are still memories in the end. She can’t cling to them forever.

Soon enough she stands alone in a lonely clearing with a grumpy Kyuubi nipping at her ankles, staring up at the starlit heavens, feeling something akin to peace wash over her. In the distance she imagines she can hear the murmurs of Konoha at peace, undamaged and beautiful as it was before her death, and she smiles.

Uzumaki Kushina smiles, and chooses to live.

Omake

Ikeda Yubie, headmistress of Komori Residence, looks up from her paperwork as someone knocks on her door. Her quirk, which allows her to keep track of every child under her care, informs her that it’s one of the newer children, Kushina, at her door. “Come in!”

Uzumaki Kushina walks into her office looking like a woman on a mission. Her eyes are steely and there is a set to her jaw that indicates the stubbornness for which she has become well-known around the orphanage.

Yubie hides a smile and lifts a brow instead. “Yes, Kushina-chan?”

She’s not entirely sure what she’s expecting, but it’s not this. Kushina looks resolutely at her and says briskly, “I’m going to become a pro hero.”

The girl stands, legs spread shoulder-width and face stony, as if anticipating a refusal. As if she’s expecting Yubie to shoot down her ambition, to dissuade her, and is prepared to defend herself.

But Yubie finds herself speechless. Once it’s evident that she will not say anything, Kushina nods smartly and sees herself out.

This isn’t the first time children have told Yubie that they want to become heroes. In fact, it’s practically expected, with every new hero who graces the streets, who flaunt flashy moves and apprehend criminals. Heroes are the new big celebrities, and it’s only natural for children to admire and emulate them.

Except Kushina hadn’t spoken like a child dreaming of becoming as cool and famous and respected like the heroes on TV. She hadn’t spoken like a child who cycles through ten different dream careers in the space of a week. The way she spoke was firm, a declaration of intent, nearly prophetic in how the words dropped like stones, weighty and grave.

This is what will happen. This is my will. 

Yubie leans back in her seat, pensive, and thinks that if anyone is going to make her dreams a reality, it’s going to be Uzumaki Kushina. No one with eyes like that, searing and unforgettable, is going to be anything less than exactly what they want to be.

Kushina knows what she wants, and she’s going after it with a single-minded intensity that, honestly, has Yubie looking forward to seeing it happen.