Chapter Text
It starts with a woman named Juri. Juri has no family name, which is common in Iwa, but she does have Iwa’s only living bloodline limit, which is less common.
Explosion Release is an important commodity, but it’s not quite enough for Juri to win many special privileges within her village. Juri’s grandmother had had a different but now extinct bloodline limit. Juri grows up being admonished for not having inherited it, with basically no compliments for her skill with Explosion Release. There’s lots of young shinobi like her, after all. Iwa’s got a whole program to breed more of them, after the First Shinobi War. They can’t afford to lose their last Bloodline Limit, not when places like Konoha and Kiri have so many.
It would have been so nice for Juri to have both, they keep reminding her. Everyone keeps reminding her of every flaw. It slowly creeps into her brain, building unreleased fury in the back of her mind.
Juri does not appreciate the constant criticism, nor does she enjoy being talked about like someone’s failed experiment. She further doesn’t appreciate being sent on deadly mission after deadly mission. Somewhere towards the height of the Third Shinobi War, she gets into her captain’s face, screams No, fuck YOU! and blows up both her teammates and the Suna team they’re currently fighting.
It hadn’t exactly been a planned move. She had woken up that morning fully intending to run this mission like normal, despite the constant headbutting with her captain. A month later and she won’t even remember what exactly had set her off, besides just being sick of everything. Still, there’s no coming back from that.
She scratches a line through her Iwa hitai-ate and flees. It’s both the most stressful thing to ever happen to her and a relief.
Keep in mind, dear reader, that inheritance works in funny ways.
xXx
Namikaze Minato bumps into Juri right at the border with Rain Country. The weather is especially miserable that day, even for this part of the continent, and they both happen to retreat to the same dingy bar to hide from the cold and sleet.
He picks her out of the crowd immediately. She’s the only shinobi in the tiny town. Later, he won’t remember much about what she looks like, just that he hadn’t considered her a threat. There isn’t much Minato considers a threat to his personal safety at that point in his career.
If pressed, he would say she was probably pretty, given what happened, but what he will actually remember is resigning himself to a fight when she stands up and walks over to him. She’s a missing-nin, but she’s still former Iwa, and no matter how hard you try, you simply can’t get away from who you are. Why approach him, unless she has a grudge or a deathwish or both?
That’s not what happens. She propositions him instead. He will not remember the details of her appearance, but she must have been convincing.
“Believe it or not, I hate them more than you,” she says. She must have done something here, something sexual with her tone or body language. Minato will remember a fun little squeeze in his stomach. “I’d love to show my appreciation for your work.”
Minato is due to be married in six months, and he does take pause. His entire relationship with Kushina so far has been open, because he spends months away at a time and neither of them like a cold bed.
They’ve negotiated and renegotiated their open relationship dozens of times. Their latest conversation had been about how tying the knot will change it, and they had decided to leave their terms as-is until they’re actually married. However, somehow sleeping with an enemy missing-nin has never come up. It’s never occurred to either of them that it could be a temptation.
Minato decides Kushina will think it’s sexy. He thinks it’s a bit sexy, at least, to sleep with the enemy, to have the enemy wanting him to sleep with her. Juri is clearly very into the idea of sleeping with her village’s most lethal enemy. She’s enthusiastic. It’s a fun night.
The condom breaks.
This has never happened to either of them. Juri acts panicked enough that Minato believes it was truly an accident and not some convoluted plan by his enemies. “I can not afford to get pregnant,” she says more than once, and she definitely can’t. She’s a missing-nin with no permanent home or resources. Iwa is hunting her.
After the initial panic, Juri comes to her senses and promises she knows the contraceptive jutsu. Minato makes her do it in front of him, watching the hand signs closely. When she’s done, they both heave silent sighs of relief. They part ways feeling mutually satisfied and do not give the other any way to contact each other.
Minato goes home and reports the broken condom to his beloved fiancée, but neither of them give the incident much worry. The contraceptive jutsu is easy, and Minato saw Juri do it, and also what are the chances that this random woman would get pregnant from this one hook up?
Kushina does indeed think sleeping with the enemy is kind of sexy. They roleplay it a few times and otherwise never think of Juri again.
What neither of them know is something which Juri herself has no idea about: she has a bloodline limit which affects her internal anatomy. No, not the Explosion Release. Juri has been trained in how to modify her chakra to do common techniques with that. But while she didn’t manifest her grandmother’s bloodline limit outwardly, she is a carrier, and there are slight differences in her internal workings that the jutsu doesn’t account for.
Inheritance, as I said, works in funny ways. Despite being performed perfectly as it was designed, Juri still falls pregnant.
Half a year later, Minato and Kushina are married, and Juri is recaptured by Iwa.
xXx
Iwa doesn’t execute Juri. She’s pregnant with a child expected to have the Explosion Release. That’s valuable to them.
“I’m a fucking incubator,” Juri tells her unborn baby, alone in her isolated cell. “Figures. I wasn’t a person to them before, either.”
Juri spends her last three months of pregnancy in a prison, interrogated over and over by Iwa. She says the father is a farmer she’d shacked up with in Rain Country. She doesn’t know what Iwa will do to her or her baby if she admits the father’s true identity.
“He had a huge dick, yeah,” she spits at an interrogator when he demands to know how she could be so slutty and careless with Iwa’s precious genes. What if they hadn’t captured her, and she’d just let some other village have her magic Explosion Release baby? “You know how us stupid women can be with our precious little wombs. Dick was so good that I guess I just forgot about contraceptives.”
They don’t appreciate how Juri talks. They do appreciate that her baby is born with tiny mouths in his hands, just like her grandmother.
Juri names the baby Deidara. Deidara is lucky, she decides, because his cute little extra mouths win her a ticket out of prison. They might have taken him away if he were a more usual Explosion Release baby, but they don’t want to accidentally fuck up him up, not when he has a double bloodline limit. They stick Juri and her new son in a shitty apartment and warn her that she’ll be watched closely.
Also, now that they know she can make babies with the extinct bloodline limit, they want her to reintegrate into Iwa.
“I guess I did want you, after all,” Juri will murmur to baby Deidara at some point, when he’s taking a rare moment to sleep instead of spitting up all over her or pooping himself. She would have found a way to get rid of him if she hadn’t.
He is very cute, Juri thinks. She likes him, likes that she made something she thinks is important. She wishes Iwa hasn’t gotten their hands in them, but at least Deidara is lucky.
This is the closest anyone will come to admitting love to Deidara for many, many years. Iwa in wartime is not a place for such banalities.
xXx
Deidara will not remember his mother’s face either. Later in life, process of elimination will point to her probably looking like him. He can’t be sure, though. There’s no photos of her left. Iwa won’t bother to preserve any semblance she’d been involved in Deidara’s life at all.
Deidara will only remember a few flashes of her. Her sitting with him in doctors’ waiting rooms, mostly. Iwa loved poking and prodding him, all the time. He has to have nineteen separate surgeries by the time he’s a teenager, to make sure his mouths grow and develop properly without harming the rest of him. These are mostly miserable memories that endear him to no one, but he will remember liking being with his mom in the waiting room.
She gives him clay in the waiting rooms, where there are no toys to entertain a toddler. That’s what he’ll remember liking: hands flipping through a purse and producing children’s sculpting clay in some new flashy color. It’s the same stuff his Academy teachers will give him and the other kid his age with Explosion Release.
He doesn’t remember her bending over him, all mean teeth, and telling him to put on a good fucking show, yeah, for all the Iwa medics evaluating him. He has no memory of her voice. He doesn’t know he got his verbal tick from her.
His clearest memory of her will be the day she leaves. He’s freshly four years old, just started at the Academy. He’s been caught playing with clay instead of doing his work too many times, and they call in his mom to meet with his main teacher.
She has bags under her eyes. Deidara has no idea that Iwa has been shopping her around, picking out men for her to make a new Deidara with. He just remembers her yelling at his sensei.
“Why do you fucking care?!” she screams. “He’s four! He’s just doing what he wants! You fuckers want him to be good with the clay! What the fuck do you expect me to do about it?!”
She takes him home, and Deidara is given new clay to replace what his sensei took away. Juri marches around their little apartment, muttering to herself and pulling out clay from all sorts of places. Some of it is children’s clay she had hidden from Deidara, who is getting increasingly good at finding hidden things he’s not meant to play with. Some of it is boring white stuff she shoves into packs at her hips.
Deidara is very pleased with suddenly having seven new colors of clay. He doesn’t complain at all as Juri ushers him onto their balcony and then stands on the railings.
Deidara is only four, so he has never known to question why his mother can get away with yelling at other ninja, like his academy teachers. He doesn’t know she used to be in the Demolition Corps, which meant she was once a kunoichi worthy of fear and respect.
“Remember, Deidara,” she tells him. “Make sure you keep giving these fuckers a good show. Watch– just like this!”
She launches herself off their balcony and onto the roof of the neighboring building. Deidara drops his clay, pressing his face into the gaps of the railing to watch her run across the roofs. He loses track of her quickly, but then a few moments later, there’s a huge explosion off in the distance. It’s so loud that it shakes the apartment building, even kilometers away. It lights up the whole sky, turning it bright orange. Deodara watches in awe.
Deidara never sees his mother again. Iwa takes away the clay she left him with and puts him in a group home with other orphans. They deny any questions Deidara ever has about his parents, but Deidara will forever remember this day clearly. He will remember he once had a mother, and he will remember the thudding in his heart at the sight of an explosion. And while he won’t remember this part exactly, the fear and confusion at waking up with a normal life and then having everything he knows ripped away from him by the end of the day will be permanently written into his core.
Inheritance, after all, isn't just genetic.
xXx
Juri doesn’t survive the week.
I am not a dog to be bred, she thinks, and I am not a doll to be played with!
She blows herself up when she’s inevitably surrounded with no escape. Her ninja skills are rusty, and the war is dying down. Iwa has lost many shinobi over the years, but of the people left, they have more free to hunt down missing-nin than they did before.
“That bitch could have done a lot of damage if she did this in village,” sighs the captain of the team sent to investigate the crater she’s left. “Good thing she was stupid enough to try and run…”
But Juri had known exactly what she was doing, when she’d run. She’d bought herself enough time to send a message to Konoha, about their new Hokage’s bastard son. She’d had to do it outside of Earth Country, because she was sure Deidara would be killed if Iwa had intercepted.
The next move is Konoha’s.
xXx
Uzumaki Kushina also doesn’t survive the week. Her son, Naruto, dies before her, ripped from her arms by a madman. Minato flees with the baby, but newborns are delicate and the damage has already been done. Baby Naruto doesn’t make it, and in Minato’s absence, the madman releases the Nine Tailed Fox, sealing Kushina’s fate.
Minato does survive, sealing the Fox into himself with Kushina’s help. She passes away in his arms.
Minato is devastated. His village is decimated. He works many sleepless nights and has to grieve in horrific solitude, keeping a strong face for the sake of his village. The terrible, unceasing ache of the loss of his family will weigh on him for the rest of his life. He will blame himself and spend years replaying events, wondering what he could have done differently.
The message from Juri, received right as all of Konoha is plunged into chaos, ends up buried in a report that Minato doesn’t read.
That is, until ten years later, Minato goes shuffling through some old documents in order to prepare for renegotiating a peace treaty. A note falls out of a low-priority report package from the week of the Nine Tailed Fox’s attack.
Everything changes.