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Your father was a disgrace but he died with honor so you hold your head high and walk forward. You train and you train and you train and you train until your muscles ache with the strain and you can barely stand for lack of chakra. You come to the edge of breaking yourself and you push on.
Since the founding of Konoha the Hatake have fought and died and died and died, and now you are the last. So you stand with your spine straight and you fight. You are the last of your clan and all your ancestors are behind you and you carry the weight of all the eyes of Konoha on your thin shoulders. And so you stand as tall as your minuscule height will allow and you do not allow yourself to be crushed, and walk forward.
You do not cry and you do not smile and you do not question and you already knew all the rules by memory, but now you repeat them over and over again in your head because you cannot afford to misstep and your eyes are as blank as your mask. You do not allow yourself to have fun because fun is for children.
(The powerful surge of brilliant, dancing lighting puts a thrill in your chest, and your lips twitch under your mask where no one can see when you feel the rightness of a new jutsu, and maybe that’s the reason you are always pestering Minato Sensei to teach you more and practice until you are rung dry of every drop of chakra.)
Your father is a dark and awesome shadow and you must grow to fill it. You do not have time for anything else.
Minato Sensei looks at you as though you’re dying, day by day and inch by inch as you take parts of yourself and grind them to dust and leave them behind you, as though you are slipping away from him and he does not know what to do to stop you. (You wonder if you ever looked at your father that way, you wonder if he ever noticed.) But you are not dying, only growing up. Only sharpening yourself to be of use to the village, because that’s the only thing that matters, your father told you so in death.
Minato isn’t like that, but then Minato is different. He is like the sun, brilliant and shining and untouchable. You cannot ask the sun not to smile, the sun does as it pleases, warm and burning and invincible. (In the dark alone in your most fearful, faithless moments, you remember how your father was like that too, like lightning and a thousand thousand stars, unstoppable, and how it all went dark. And you wonder what could cause the sun to fall from the sky, and you know that the world will burn when it does.)
But you are not the sun, you are only small and silver-pale like a washed out shadow, and so you grind yourself to dust and you keep your fangs hidden and you are obedient. You are a legacy and a tragedy and a disgrace, and you are a genius and a prodigy and a tool and so you are perfect because you refuse to be anything less.