When Kushina is young, she feels as though she has chained a part of herself down with the Kyūbi. Taken out pieces of herself and turned them into shackles to bind them both. It is one of many things she never talks about.
Here is another: Kushina does not like to compare herself to Namikaze but of course, it feels inevitable. Everyone does constantly and—she hates him. She hates him. Minato is everything she is meant to want and everything she is never going to be.
(The key difference between them is that he never goes down and she never stays down. Kushina doesn’t like to look Minato in the face because she will too easily see whatever strange thing is dead behind his eyes and then——she will promptly lose her temper and open the floodgates of hot, red, rage she keeps locked inside her. Kushina will throw the first punch and he will take to his heels and all her hard-earned fury will have been wasted on Minato’s too-pretty face.
It's not worth it. It's never worth it.)
They ask her for her name when she comes to Konoha.
Uzumaki Kushina, she says. She wants to scream it right into the Sandaime Hokage’s wrinkled face.
She is a sacrifice; she knows this. They have been telling her so since the day she received Mito-sama’s summons. Since the day she stepped foot across the border into the Land of Fire and heard that all her friends were dead.
Here is the truth: The girl is a jinchūriki. She is brimming from the crown to the toe top-full of power and still, she owns nothing, not even herself, in the eyes of Konoha.
Here is the truth: The girl is a weapon. She is beautiful. Kushina knows this, because all sorts of idiots are always telling her so. Pawing at her hair, her hips, crowding sloppily against her flat chest and pert nipples.
They would turn and run if they knew what lay behind her breastbone. It is not the Kyūbi that they should be afraid of. Her danger is all her own. She has come by it honestly.
Her hands are soft, callouses healing over before they can form properly—torn up palms smoothing over into pink, unblemished skin by the time she gets home from training. They look like civilian hands, Inochi says, only half-mocking.
On her last mission Kushina tore open a man’s rib-cage with three broken fingers. She spent ages scrubbing bits of tissue and shards of bone out from under her nails.
She hasn't a bruise to show for it.
In Kushina’s dreams she digs for an eternity at the base of a giant tree, scraping out great chunks of soggy earth, nails snagging on the roots. All at once it seems the dirt gives way into a chasm that gapes beneath her, as wide as Uzushiogakure’s guardian whirlpools——as deep as the universe itself. And there in the dark, a pool of stars withering away, silently, into nothingness.
She watches for a long time, all those little bright spots collapsing in on themselves behind her eyelids.
Kushina makes her rage a weapon and buries it deep. Chokes down the part of herself that wants to kill everyone she’s ever seen: in the drab Konoha Intake Office, later in the Academy, then in the rocky forests of Kumo where Minato says, “let me take you home.”
(Home is a place Kushina cannot return to. Minato's face is perfect, in the low light of Kumo's forests. He looks like he belongs——an otherworldly, terrible, thing.)
Kushina does not quite know when the anger took root in her. When it grew strong and twisted into something too big to contain in her chest, but it’s good. It’s familiar. She knows then that the Kyūbi is not the only one whose hate could burn worlds. There is a thread there, a hint of a connection that could blossom if she chose to pursue it.
She won't.
The Kyūbi is yet another anchor dragging her down, just like Minato. He has a sweet smile when he looks at her——just a barely-there tilt of his lush, red mouth.
Kushina aches to split it open with her teeth.
There will never be any tenderness between her and Minato. They have both already been overrun with things neither of them can give name to. There's no room left inside Kushina, for all the space has already been filled.
As for Minato, she does not know what it is that slumbers beneath his skin, but she suspects it's no less monstrous than what is under hers. All they have is the aching shadow of compatibility. It is enough. She will have no less.
(Kushina does not truly know why they end up falling together, or even how it happens, really. It is as though he’s always been at her back and one day she turns around and Minato's shadow is smiling in her peripheral vision with dead eyes and a mouth full of hidden blood and death and rage and——she can relate.
Companionship, Kushina decides, is resilience in the face of threat.)