Characters: Minato, Kushina
Summary: He knows that he loves her when she whispers her pain. And when she trusts him, he knows he always will.
Pairings: MinaKushi
Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto.

While she's still recovering from the burns and she's so heavily dosed on antibiotics and painkillers that she barely knows who she is, let alone who Minato is, Kushina whispers about a singing tree.

It's a story her mother used to tell her, that there was a singing tree somewhere in Uzu no Kuni.

If someone could hear the song of the tree, and understand the words, they could sit beneath the tree, and any one wish they requested, they would be given.

Kushina's wish, her dearest wish from the deepest depths of her heart, ended up breaking Minato's own.

She wished that Konohagakure had never taken her from her home.

And she wished that they had never forced the Kyuubi on her.

Namikaze Minato can pinpoint the exact moment in time when he knows that he loves Uzumaki Kushina, a penniless orphan from Uzu no Kuni.

All he knows about her before now is that she was brought to Konohagakure as a political prisoner. Her father's name was Tanjiro; her mother, Manami. She had a younger twin brother named Arashi who died in combat; he had come over later, after the destruction of their village. She has red hair and violet-gray eyes. She is pale and very pretty, and she has the sort of temper that can make a wet cat seem absolutely docile.

Beyond that, nothing. Kushina is a whispering well of secrets; they hang around her like gauzy silk veils, obscuring her true features.

But now, those veils have been forcibly removed. Ripped apart by fire and chakra burns, in noxious red chakra and vertical pupils. In the hellish roar of something that should not be there.

Minato does not need to be told. He is not an idiot. He already knows, when he sees her lose control and transform.

But she has to whisper it from her own mouth.

Minato, not Namikaze Minato or the future Hokage of Konoha, just Minato, knows that he loves Kushina, not Kushina or the political prisoner from Uzushiogakure or the penniless, inconvenient orphan, when she whispers her pain. When she takes the veils of belligerence and defensiveness from her eyes, and shows how dark everything is, from her view.

When she tells him, just how much of a Hell life is for her.

Her fingers are burnt and bandaged, but they still reach for his. He loves her, he knows this now, immensely, when she reaches for him.

Minato tells Kushina to just trust him.

And when she says she will, he knows that he will always love her.

Beyond pain, beyond battle, beyond death.