Chapter Text
Minato’s eyes snapped open.
The first thing he saw were trees. Dappled light played across the moss growing on tree trunks, the leaves filtering down from a bright blue sky. He slowly pushed himself up, head pounding, his Hokage cloak in tatters. His hand instinctively went to his stomach, searching for the seal, but there was nothing. Just skin slick with dried blood. The last thing he remembered was—
Kurama’s fury. His son’s cries. Kushina's blood.
And now… here.
He staggered to his feet. The air was thick with chakra that was familiar but somehow off. He was in Fire Country, that much he knew. He could feel it in the soil, the humidity, the weight of the land. But every instinct honed from years of war prickled beneath his skin.
Something wasn’t right.
Minato flared his chakra, expecting a genjutsu to catch and shatter.
Instead, something answered, faint but familiar.
His hiraishin marker, etched deep into the bedrock beneath the Hokage office. It was a secret tether only he knew about—one that had always hummed a little louder than the rest. It had been quiet for so long. Now it called to him like a lighthouse across the continent.
Without hesitation, Minato flashed.
——
He thought he felt the moment of death, a blinding light washing over him as he used the last of his chakra. He knew he felt the seal take and the fox's chakra lurch and fall silent. He didn’t understand why he was still alive.
——
Minato stepped into the Hokage’s office—and was immediately met by steel.
Four ANBU were surrounding him, blades drawn. The sudden pressure of their killing intent hit like a wall. None of their signatures were familiar but Minato didn’t flinch. Instead, his attention snapped to the desk at the far end of the room.
Behind it sat Sarutobi Hiruzen, motionless, pipe frozen midway to his mouth. His face, though composed, carried the unmistakable flicker of shock. He was older than what Minato remembered as well. Deep lines etched his face, the years carved into his cheeks and brow like weathered stone. His hair had grown white.
For several long seconds, neither spoke.
Minato forced his heart to calm and breathing to slow as he tried to figure what was going on.
The Hokage’s office was different. The hardwood floor was more worn and the Hokage desk showed new chips along the outer edge. The books on the shelves, the rug Minato was standing on, the paintings hanging on the walls were unfamiliar.
Minato turned toward the window and found what he was looking for, past the ANBU who were frozen in place: the Hokage Monument and his own face staring back. His likeness, just as he remembered it.
It wasn’t all a fever dream. Minato wasn't thrown in the past where he wasn’t Hokage yet and his cloak and memories would land him in a T&I cell faster than he could say the Will of Fire.
Minato was Hokage and the Hokage Mountain proved it. At the same time, the Hokage’s office clearly wasn’t his anymore. There was only one logical conclusion.
“Lord Third, how long was I gone for you to be reinstated?” Minato asked, confused.
——
The answer to that question turned out to be ten years, or maybe always, because Minato wasn't in the past or even in the future. He was in a whole alternate reality, a world shaped by the same names, the same faces, but where history had taken a different turn.
According to the Third, the Namikaze Minato of this world died the night of the kyuubi’s attack. He had succeeded in sealing the beast and dying with it—but at the cost of everything. Kushina hadn’t survived. Naruto hadn’t either. There had been no miracle. Just devastation and the slow healing of a village without the family Minato had given his life to protect.
“Of course, Obito-kun and Rin-chan will be happy to hear the news,” Hiruzen said, voice almost light. “Though I imagine they’ll be quite shocked to see you looking as young as the day they lost you.”
Minato’s head snapped up, eyes narrowing on the older man.
Hiruzen met his gaze with the shrewd calm of someone who had just dropped a stone into still water, waiting to see what lived underneath. The names hadn’t been offered in kindness but cold calculation behind a mask of civility. It was a clear bait.
One that Minato couldn't help take.
“I want to meet them,” Minato said thickly. “Rin and Obito. Where are they?”
The request—or perhaps the demand—hung in the air for only a moment before one of the ANBU shifted beside him.
“Sir,” The operative with a hawk mask said cautiously, “Standard procedure requires we confirm your identity by a sensor and a Yamanaka. Until then, contact with any shinobi would need to be restricted—”
With a silent snarl, Minato’s chakra reached out for the hiraishin seal that was behind the Third, out of sight under the window sill, and tugged.
When the ANBU registered the yellow flash and snapped around, it was too late. Minato was already leaning against the window, his arms crossed across his chest in a wordless gesture of restraint.
“Do you really need more proof?” Minato asked.
His voice wasn’t raised, but it didn’t have to be. It still cut through the room like a drawn wire, taut and razor-thin, because if Minato had been an enemy, he could have killed the Third and disappeared already. Now the room knew it too.
A subtle tremor moved through ANBU. Even masked, Minato could feel the shift—the thrum of recognition at the sight of hiraishin, the pressure of certainty crushing whatever doubts they’d held just moments before.
The hawk-masked shinobi dropped to one knee. The others followed immediately.
“Forgive us, Lord Fourth,” Hawk said. “Welcome back.”
From beside him, Hiruzen finally exhaled, placing his pipe down. He glanced up at Minato carefully—not like a man watching a ghost, but like one studying a lost weapon, unexpectedly found.Minato had appeared at his side without sound, warning, or hesitation. And still, Hiruzen showed no fear. Only the quiet, practiced calm of a shinobi.
“Minato, where was I heading to when I left the Hokage office for the final time?”
It was an identity challenge, drawing from a quiet, personal moment so insignificant that it would never be written down. A moment only the real Minato could know.
He answered without hesitation.
“In my world, you were excited to have dinner with your family, sir,” Minato said. “You’d gotten a reservation at Takeda’s Yakiniku and you invited me with the warning that I might have to roll you home.”
The Third let out a dry, wry laugh. The sound was roughened by age but unmistakably genuine, the kind of laugh pulled from somewhere deep and worn, carrying more than amusement. There was relief in it. Disbelief. And perhaps, tucked beneath it all, a flicker of grief.
“Hawk,” Hiruzen said finally, seemlessly shifting back to business, “Summon Uchiha Obito and Nohara Rin. Tell them it's urgent, and nothing else.”
Hawk rose silently, gave a curt nod, and vanished in a flicker of shunshin. The Third turned back to Minato with a measured look and gestured toward the chair opposite him.
“Minato. Sit. Have tea with me.”
His tone was gentle but firm. His severe look had softened as he transformed from the Hokage into the man Minato grew up listening to at Jiraiya sensei's side.
“I imagine you have questions,” Hiruzen said, already pouring from the small kettle beside him. “As do I.”
Minato stood motionless for a moment, caught in something like hesitation. The adrenaline was fading now, leaving behind the hollow ache of uncertainty. He wasn’t sure why it struck him so suddenly, but as he looked at the offered chair on the other side of the desk, he realized: He couldn’t remember the last time he sat there.
Minato was always the one behind the desk. The person giving the orders, reading the reports, making the impossible decisions.
The Fourth finally sank into the seat and looked at the current Hokage of Konoha.
“Questions,” Minato echoed, his voice low. “Yes. I have more than a few.”
He reached forward and accepted the cup of tea offered to him, fingers briefly brushing the porcelain. It was warm. Real. And for the first time since he’d woken up beneath red bark trees, so was he.
——
Minato didn’t make it halfway through his cup of tea before Hawk returned. When the door knocked, Minato found himself getting to his feet.
“Come in,” Hiruzen ordered as he settled back in his chair.
Two shinobi followed Hawk in, confusion and worry clear on their faces—until their gaze landed on Minato.
The Hokage office was quite a sight, Minato was sure. The Third, sipping his tea in silence, beside a man who died over ten years ago. Minato wasn’t even sure what expression he was wearing.
Obito’s reaction was instantaneous. His eyes snapped wide open, the guarded calm shattering into anger, but his anger wasn’t the fiery temper he had as a child. Now, it was colder, heavier, weighted down by a lifetime of grief and unanswered questions, and beneath it all, a searing sense of betrayal.
“What … ” Obito’s voice was strained, “Is this some kind of sick joke?”
Rin, standing just a step beside him, reacted differently. The color drained from her face, but where Obito’s anger exploded, hers was quieter. More analytical. Minato could see the gears turning in her head, as she thought through the implications of a dead man to be allowed so close to the current Hokage.
In turn, Minato soaked in the sight of his two students who, in his world, died before the age of majority. Here, They weren’t children anymore. Obito was almost as tall as him now, broad-shouldered and filling out his jonin vest. Rin was somehow even thinner but still possessing that quiet focus he remembered so well.
They were faces Minato had never seen, couldn’t even imagine because his own memories of them were frozen in time—smiling in training fields, scowling in arguments, laughing after missions.
But now, faced with his students, he realized he’d be able to recognize them anywhere. It would be in the smallest things: the way Obito’s left foot still turned slightly outward when he stood still, the way Rin’s thumb absently brushed her palm when she was anxious. Even their chakra was so achingly familiar that it took Minato’s breath away.
“We are still figuring out how this happened,” The Third said kindly, “But we appear to be graced by a Namikaze Minato from a world different from ours.”
It was a neutral statement as things went, but also an unspoken permission—a vouch from the Hokage himself offering legitimacy in the face of impossibility. The weight of that confirmation hung in the air, solidifying Minato’s presence in this world.
Rin’s eyes widened, full of shock, hope, and something dangerously close to heartbreak. "It’s really Minato-sensei?"
Minato’s throat felt like sand. He cleared it, but the words still scraped on the way out.
“The last thing I remember is fighting the Fox in my world. I thought I was dead when I woke up in some forest and hiraishined to the Hokage office. I’m not your Minato sensei back to life though. I don’t have his memories and in my world, you both,” Minato swallowed hard. “You two—“
He couldn’t say it. He couldn’t bring himself to tell them that in his world, their lives ended too soon. That he had to bury them in his heart for years and still carried the weight of those funerals every day.
His breath hitched. The sheer magnitude of the moment—of seeing Rin and Obito alive, grown, strong, real—crashed down on him all at once.
It felt like standing at the edge of a cliff and looking down—not into a fall, but into something endless and unknowable. A second passed. Then another. His chest tightened as grief and disbelief warred in his lungs. His vision blurred.
For a terrifying moment, Minato couldn’t breathe.
Whatever Obito and Rin saw made them move.
Arms wrapped tightly around Minato. Rin’s smaller frame pressing into one side, Obito’s solid weight on the other. They held him like a man clinging to the edge of the world—and Minato returned it just as fiercely, holding them like the universe might rip them away if he let go.
And then he felt them begin to shake. Obito’s breath hitched in his chest, a quiet, shaky sound and Rin buried her face against his shoulder, trembling. The force of it hit him harder than any physical blow. He could feel it in his very core—the loss they had carried, the grief, and beneath all of it, the relief of finding him again, even if it wasn’t the same man they had known. Instinctively responding to their distress, Minato reflexively and protectively cloaked his chakra around them like he always did on their missions together.
That was what undid them.
Obito broke first, a sob slipping free as his grip tightened. Rin followed a second later, not loud, but raw—like something had cracked open deep inside her.
The three stood in the hush of the Hokage’s office, and for a heartbeat, nothing else existed but this moment.
His team, his students, were alive. Standing, breathing, and older than the pictures in his mind ever let them be.
They may not be the Obito and Rin he remembered but it didn’t matter because in any world, in any life, they were his.
And that was the point that Minato realized with a start, what he hadn’t asked, being so distracted by the realization that Obito and Rin were alive.
“Where’s Kakashi?” With growing excitement that he would get to see his entire team as adults, Minato asked, “Knowing him, he’s missing all the fun by being out on a mission, isn’t he?”
Obito and Rin stiffened in his arms.
A beat, then—
“Sensei,” Obito started, words heavy with grief.
——
This really wasn’t Minato’s Konoha.
In this one, Kakashi was dead.