Chapter Text
It started when she was sixteen.
Being captured during a war wasn't unthought of, wasn't an impossibility, and it was a contingency that they all, of course had to plan for.
Of their remaining team, it wasn't a surprise that they'd grabbed her. Politically, she was the Yondaime Hokage's student, and Yondaime was notoriously emotional about people he considers his, and compared to his other surviving student, she was substantially weaker.
Less famous. Less everything.
So she woke up in the dark with a thrashing violence of chakra above her, unfamiliar nin standing over her in their pale sterile scrubs, their kumo hitai-ate glinting with the little light thrown by the glow in the room.
"Thirty-fourth attempt."
And then it was pain.
***
They'd wanted to cage a bijuu. They were gods made of natural chakra, and generally people avoided them if they could and they wanted to cage a bijuu.
She'd understand it, in a technical, hypothetical way.
If you could harness the power of gods, why wouldn't you?
Kirigakure didn't want to risk their own fighters while the method was still experimental, so prisoners.
It should have killed her. It should have ripped her apart.
But instead, her skin split and she screamed and she ripped them apart.
And then she went home.
***
Those who knew what she was now couldn't meet her eyes.
Rin had grown up in Konoha, the taste of autumn leaves in the air, with its strict seasons and heavy summer rains, where everything looked-smelled-tasted green and glowing.
Now there was the taste of salt on her tongue if she breathed in, and if she turned towards the east, the urge for the ocean pulled like a tidal wave.
***
"I'm sorry I was late," Kakashi said to her once.
Kakashi couldn't meet her eyes either - and she didn't want to try, just curling her hands to hide the claws.
Minato-sensei didn't want to send her on missions; when she got angry it was a huge rush, vicious and tidal, cold and overwhelming, and she drowned in it, even as she grew monstrous and and ripped up the ground and flooded the fields.
And she was angry a lot.
The Sanbi was a god of water, of the typhoons and the hurricanes off the coast, devastating. Humans were nothing to it.
But now it was awake and confined to a small mortal vessel and it hated it.
***
It felt wrong, that suiton jutsu came too easily now, just releasing it was a torrential rush of water, icy and dark, every yin to the fire that she had been used to. That the sanbi had overridden her affinity and she had to relearn it all over again, her fire jutsu coming out weak and riddled with steam.
"You probably could combine it," Kushina-sensei told her as she struggled with not turning Training Ground 8 into mud. Or a new river. "Seems like it'd be a sort of steam or mist-like release.. Right?"
Rin knelt in the mud, and felt it seethe under her fingers.
"Maybe," she said.
***
The only ones who still looked her in the eye was Yondaime-sama and Kushina-sensei. Minato had been her jounin-sensei but once she'd become chuunin, before this, Kushina-sensei had noted her interest in seals and healing, and had taken her on to help direct her training as Team Minato slowly dispersed.
Now she had to relearn control, and not blast flesh apart, not to punch something and have a tree explode from the force.
"You'll be able to get it, I'm sure," Kushina-sensei said, red hair sparkling from the mist that hung in the air, from Rin's breath, turning everything into a kaleidoscope of glittery colours. Red upon red like the flames that Rin could no longer call up anymore. "You've got the discipline, Rin-kun."
"I can't."
"You can," Kushina-sensei said, blue eyes so dark they were almost black, and Rin could feel the water god stir within herself. Dark blue like the depths of the ocean, quiet and still.
"You're a shinobi of Konoha, don't forget that."
***
The seal was a bastardized version of cagement from Uzuoshio, the fact that it could cage and seal a literal god of chakra and nature into a person was fascinating, and both Minato-sensei and Kushina-sensei studied it, modified it, worked on it. Rin knew as much about the seal as anyone else, the first year she was back, but it wasn't like the seal could keep the sanbi's chakra from leaking into hers, couldn't keep its anger from flowing down her arms, splitting her skin over and over and lengthening her hands into claws when she lost grip of her anger.
Of all people to stay away from, she knew, was Kiri, because who had they kidnapped to torture for that seal? Who had they turned to get that knowledge at all?
As useful - as much as she'd wanted - to turn that rage and hate onto her captors, turn the tides on them, the risk was too great even if the gains might have been just as great, and Yondaime-sama wouldn't risk Kiri ripping the sanbi out of Rin and turning it on Konoha.
***
The first meal Rin got when she got home, she nearly spat it out.
Fire Country was native to many spices - it was always a relief to come home to the burst of flavours across her tongue after a mission in another country, and she'd been looking forward to it, the first bite to say I'm home, I'm safe, I made it.
But the first time a thinly sliced piece of peppery steak passed her tongue, she'd gagged and spat it and a pond's worth of seawater out, heaving as sanbi screamed in her head, her chest, feeling her nails claw across the wood counter, her teammates, her countrymen jerk away, and she knew, she was never safe again.
***
Eventually she learned medical jutsu again. If her touch was ice-blue instead of the warm touch of green that most medic nin had, if she was better at cutting things open than she was at knitting them together, at least she had a speciality.
Eventually she learned how to make water clones that hit like a tsunami, eventually she learned how to blanket an entire stadium with deadly mist, each drop burning with poison and scalded the eyes and scoured the lungs.
Eventually she learned to pull a thick shell over herself, impervious to many attacks.
She was a shinobi of Konoha, she was going to make this work.
***
It ended when she was eighteen, when the kyuubi attacked.
The only thing she could do was hold off the kyuubi, defend a section of wall while Yondaime-sama and Kushina-sensei worked feverishly to evacuate the Village, to get everyone safe and -
"I can seal it within myself," Kushina-sensei said, heavily pregnant and her hair red and burning in the flame of the kyuubi.
The kyuubi was a towering inferno of flame and chakra made real, so bright and crackling that the smoke of burning wood and meat spiraled smoke and blotted out the sun.
"Kushina, no," Minato said, voice cracked from the smoke.
"Idiot," she told him. "Women are made to hold more than one life."
It wasn't an excuse, it was barely a reason, but maybe, maybe it would have worked. Rin would have volunteered to be it, this time, since she knew the pain of taking in a god and making space within herself.
But the sanbi raged against the fire, and water hated fire as much as fire hated water, and it was only her weak human mind that was barely holding back a fight of gods on mortal lands.
Maybe it would have worked, if Kushina hadn't gone into premature labour.
And Rin had to hold off the kyuubi while Kushina gritted out the birth of their beloved, wanted, desired child and heir of Uzushio and Konoha, both her and Minato's hands scrabbling in blood while he tried also to make the seal.
And.
The child didn't cry when he was born, too weak. Too young. too premature.
"Seal it into him," Kushina said. Because her child was dying, and her blood was all over the too-tiny body, and Rin was barely holding off - barely managing to pin the kyuubi to keep the rest of the village safe and Minato's face was streaked with blood and tears as they traced and burned the seal to the tiny, barely breathing body.
A child so small couldn't hold a god so huge; even Rin couldn't help but feel the sanbi bursting from her skin each time the kyuubi thrashed, whipping and setting the mountains and forests on fire.
They'd just managed it, they completed the seal.
"Let go now, Rin!"
And she dropped the hold on the kyuubi, barely holding onto the barrier of water keeping the rest of the Village away and safe -
And the rush of fire seared her face, a hot-dry breath of air that would have scarred her if it weren't for sanbi -
But Yondaime and Kushina had no such protection.
In the last flail, the kyuubi lashed out and claw and tail killed them both even as the kyuubi spiralled into the child.
The child that.
Breathed and cried and screamed like any newborn.
***
It ended when she was eighteen, the village in tatters and Sandaime taking up the title and hat again.
Turned out that the sanbi hated the kyuubi, and the seal that Kushina had modified had put the kyuubi to sleep.
She'd meant for the kyuubi to die with the boy, since he was born so tiny and premature.
But the kyuubi kept the baby breathing even as it slept within him and the Sanbi knew it could kill the kyuubi now.
But the seal tied the kyuubi to naruto's life and she refused to kill her sensei's child.
"Must you leave," Sandaime-sama had said, and she nodded, keeping her hands tight and clenched.
She left in the middle of the night, with a scored through hitai-ate.