Nothing Else Matters

An Uzumaki-centric story

Chapter 1

"Botched Missions and Planned Motherhood"

(In the outskirts of Konoha)

Running swiftly through the Forest of Hi no Kuni, Kushina cursed her luck. This wasn't how she imagined her little escapade would go. It seemed luck was not on her side today.

Everything had been going exactly as planned. The barrier around Konoha, a creation by Uzumaki Mito, had been infiltrated without much trouble. She continued her trip to the Hokage's residence and Senju compound and burgled them with ease.

The Hokage's residence was the one of the most important locations in the village. It was where the supreme leader of the village lived with his family and kept his most valued possessions. Yet it had been pathetically easy to break into. The Senju compound might have been a ghost town, but it was protected by so many seals that ANBU didn't even bother patrolling it. The seals were devised by Uzumaki Mito. Being an Uzumaki herself, Kushina found no trouble in entering and taking what she wanted from the abandoned compound.

Trouble began when she was in the hospital. She had assumed that it would have been the easiest place to access compared to the Hokage's residence and Senju compound.

She was very wrong.

Not because of increased security or anything, but because someone else was trying to take what she looking for. She ended up confronting the pale weirdo who was digging through frozen semen samples. After snatching the vial from his hands before he could react, he tried to attack her. In retaliation, she blew up half of the hospital with a Katon jutsu. She might have overreacted a bit.

Needless to say it didn't take long for her get swamped by ANBU, which lead to her current predicament, Running westwards through the forests of Hi no Kuni with most of the Konoha ANBU and Hunter-nin on her back. This was not a very pleasant situation at all.

At this rate, they would catch up to her in about ten minutes.

She had already sent multiple pulses of chakra to the seal temporarily etched on her right wrist, hoping to be saved by her clans mate. Nothing happened yet, so she assumed something happened to delay the reverse summoning. Honoka was a very punctual person. This was not like her at all.

She had to stall until that halfwit cousin of hers decided to be merciful and save her from this predicament. She could only use elemental Ninjutsu, chakra chains were off the table. If they knew her identity nothing in the elemental nations would stop them from hunting her down and ripping the Kyuubi out of her.

She was about to turn around and do some damage when she was forced to duck because of a kunai whizzing dangerously close to her head. Quickly turning around to look at her assailant, she was surprised to see four ANBU. They wore blank masks with the kanji for "Root" emblazoned on it.

Kushina landed on a branch and analyzed the children who landed on the ground below her. That's what they were, children. The oldest, a blonde, looked her age while the rest looked barely out of the academy. If she started a conflict with them she would give the ANBU time to catch up to her. She started to frantically channel chakra to the seal on her wrist and prayed to whatever god existed that Honoka had stopped twiddling her fingers and started the reverse summoning process.

"Be careful with that kunai, children your age shouldn't be playing around with sharp objects" she smirked and waited for the inevitable reply. All she got was silence.

'Konoha Shinobi are extremely prideful, why won't they talk back? And what's with their eyes? They look as dead as a doornail.' Remembering a talk she had with her embarrassment of a cousin gave her a clue

'Emotionless children being in places they shouldn't be, doing stuff they shouldn't be doing. These must be Danzo's pets.' She had heard of the Foundation from Tsunade after Mito-sama passed away. She had been warned that the old fool might make a move for the Kyuubi's power.

From what she heard, Danzo was a very cunning and pragmatic man, why would he order his men to follow her? Sure, she was running away with several priceless treasures that belong to Konoha, but surely he wouldn't waste resources trying to recapture her when The ANBU and the regular forces were already on the job.

Could he know her identity? From what she heard of the man he would give his genitals for the massive power the Kyuubi wields. But he had no way of knowing who she was. Her hair, her most defining feature, was behind her cloak and her face was behind a mask.

'I have to take care of them quickly, if those ANBU come catch up to me, I'm dead.' Hopefully, if Konoha saw her running towards Iwa with their possessions, it would increase the intensity of the war. In the months prior, it seemed that the second Shinobi war might be drawing to a close. This little stunt should reignite tensions and keep the fire burning for a few more months.

She couldn't use her signature sword because of the Uzumaki clan symbol on the sheath, the fact that she was an Uzumaki is something Konoha mustn't know. Summoning a Ninjato she nicked from the armory back home to her right hand, she prepared to jump headfirst into their group and start slicing. Clashing her sword with the one closest to her, channeling some of her notoriously potent chakra to her arms, she overpowered his sword and gave him a nasty slice from collarbone to hip, effectively taking him of the fight. Flipping backwards into the air when the blonde tried to blindside her, she was caught flatfooted when one of the remaining Root ANBU threw a fistful of kunai while her final enemy fired a Fuuton: Reppushou to increase the velocity of the thrown weapons.

Caught in mid-air with a dozen pointy things hurtling towards her, Kushina couldn't find leverage to dodge nor could she summon her chains to deflect them. Kushina hastily molded Katon chakra and brought two fingers up to her lips and transformed the Katon chakra into the shape of a roaring ball of fire that vaguely encompassed the Wind jutsu approaching her. The fire swallowed the wind, melted the kunai and burned one of the children, charring the ground below him, the other being saved by the apparent squad leader, who put him on the ground after rescuing him.

'He could have cut me in half before I touched the ground, but he decided to save his teammate, how very… emotional'

She smirked at the unexpected turn of events and taunted the weakling in front of her, hoping to rile him up and lead him to losing his cool. "And here I thought Danzo trained you well. It seems that chest of yours isn't so hollow after all."

Silence was all she got in return. Damn, these guys were no fun at all. The child started going through hand seals for a water jutsu while the blonde started channeling Raiton chakra into his kunai in what seemed to be coordinated attack between them.

She prepared for round 2 of their fun play session when she simultaneously detected chakra seeping into the reverse summoning seal and five chakra sources landing a small ways from her. It seems the Konoha ANBU were here, thankfully Honoka decided to get off her ass and reverse summon her to safety.

"You have no chance of escaping, If you come willingly you may not be executed."

Initially the Konoha ANBU were hostile to her and her two previous opponents, but upon seeing their masks they recognized that she was the only enemy present, though they still seemed wary of the child-soldiers.

She gave a mischievous smile and started waving goodbye to everyone present. "It's been fun Blondie-chan, I hope to never see you or your pitiful organization ever again." She barely finished the last syllable before she burst into smoke, signaling her exit.

(Below the ruins of Uzushiogakure no Sato)

Popping into a sealing matrix in the middle of a dingy room under the ruins of a long lost country, Kushina felt her blood boil when she saw her thrice-damned cousin with that damned emotionless face of hers, as if she didn't almost kill her. She started slowly walking towards Honoka, who was slightly rattled by seeing her cousin with a face that personified fury, and smacked her loudly atop the head.

"I could've been killed, you idiot! What took you so long?"

Kushina was so furious that her face was a shade of red that matched her hair and her lungs were empty of air.

Recovering from the debilitating strike to the head, Honoka retaliated with a chakra enhanced kick to the shin. Looking her dimwitted cousin's awestruck face, Honoka had to admit that she felt cursed to be living with such a person. She might be her only living family that she knew of, but Kami she was slow.

"I wouldn't have taken so long if you hadn't messed up the seal you idiot! Do you know how long it took me to fix your mess? And you hounding me with those chakra signals definitely didn't help. The receiver seal would have been destroyed had you channeled a bit more chakra."

Kushina was surprised if the look on her face was anything to go by. Honoka might have been the younger of the two, but she was definitely the expert in the field of Fuinjutsu. Kushina had begged her to use Kushina's design of a reverse summoning array, to show her how far she'd come in her studies of the art. Reluctantly, she agreed to it. She knew field testing a seal in the middle of an important mission was not very wise, but her cousin had a knack for convincing arguments, which mostly consisted of pestering people until they gave her whatever it is she wanted.

Everything had been going peachy, she had been reading a book on the origin of chakra that she had taken from the untouched library on the outskirts of the village she and Kushina found when they first arrived, when Kushina sent a signal into the dispatcher seal. Naturally Honoka rushed to rescue Kushina from the undoubtedly dangerous situation she was in, when she found that the damned reverse summoning was not functioning properly. She unraveled the seal to find out what the problem was when she found a whole slew of problems. The design of the seal was definitely creative, as expected of Kushina, she wasn't a conventional person by a long shot.

The trouble was in the application of the symbols and kanji. Midway through the seal it seemed almost as if Kushina got bored halfway through the process of rigorously drawing symbols and started drawing random squiggles and nonsensical phrases. Honoka was so baffled by this that she didn't even take her eyes off the monstrosity for about three minutes. She was able to fix all the "mistakes" her scatterbrained cousin made and summon her before she was a corpse.

Honoka didn't even deign to explain the whole situation to Kushina, she would just forget about it after three minutes and repeat the mistake at a later date. Whoever said "more chakra is good chakra" mustn't have known an Uzumaki Jinchuuriki. Having her chakra coils overflowing with chakra might be considered a blessing, but Honoka thanked the gods that she was born with an unnatural of Yin chakra, giving her increased cognitive functions and brain power, unlike Kushina whose chakra is abundant with the physical side of chakra, the Yang. Kushina might be able to best a full team of ANBU, but she had the attention span of goldfish. The only reason she learned Fuinjutsu was because of her clan heritage. Hell, half the time she doesn't even use the Fuinjutsu that requires writing and drawing symbols, she just uses the ones that can be formed using her chakra.

The younger redhead attempted to steer the conversation towards something beneficial before Kushina retaliated to her kick. "Did you get it?"

Kushina's mood did a complete one-eighty when the she was asked about her mission objective. She couldn't wait to flaunt her achievements in front of Honoka. She guessed Honoka wouldn't even react to the fact that she basically did the impossible by breaking into Konoha, burgling a bunch of their most valuable possessions killing a bunch of ANBU and basically spitting in the face of the retrieval force that came to return the items to their village. Of course, she would exaggerate the story a bit, adding a bit of extra details that made her more of a badass then she already was. Honoka wouldn't be impressed though. She wouldn't understand how difficult infiltration and "repossession" of priceless artifacts is. She spends most of her time reading books and drawing seals. She was grown enough to admit that the little tyke was better than her in that particular field, but Honoka wouldn't understand the more physical side of the Shinobi life.

Plastering a smug grin on her face, completely forgetting about the fact that Honoka kicked her, something would usually bring even more ruin to the island had it happened at any other time, this time was different, she came bearing gifts!

Before Kushina started her overdramatic retelling of the events, Honoka moved her way from the sealing array, dragging her to a chair in the corner of the sealing chamber and sat down next her and started the conversation.

"Well? Out with it, did you get the samples or not?"

Her grin widened a bit at that, she had done that and more. "I did get the samples and a bit more"

Gods she was such a child. She questioned who the elder one in this particular relationship was. You couldn't just ask for information from Kushina, no, you have to coerce it from her piece by piece while she had that victorious expression on her face.

"What do you mean by 'a bit more'? You couldn't have gotten that much, the trip Konoha takes three days and you were gone for exactly three days and eight hours? Breaking through the barrier around Konoha would have taken half that time."

"Oh, that barrier was absolutely pathetic. It wasn't even a physical barrier, just a detection barrier. It took me less than half an hour to infiltrate it. I could've completely wiped the seal in three hours if I wanted to."

Honoka quickly figured out the reason why the foremost expert on seals would produce such subpar work. "Mito-sama must have been forced to dumb her seals down so they could be modified and maintained by future Konoha Shinobi. The poor woman must have suffered living with the imbeciles for most of her life."

"Well, after I Infiltrated the village, I killed the two ANBU guarding the Hokage residence and stole the forbidden scroll right under the geezers nose"

Honoka was slightly impressed by her cousin's work, stealing from a kage while he was in his residence is no easy task to be sure. Still, she would take everything with a grain of salt, Kushina might be skilled but some of her claimed feats were just too ridiculous to believe and she wasn't averse to muddying a story to make it more dramatic. Still, that was Kushina. She had a penchant for the dramatic.

"Good, the scroll will be useful to our plans. What else?"

Slightly miffed by Honoka's dismissal of her wondrous achievements, Kushina huffed and continued, resisting the urge to slug her cousin in the head for bringing her mood down.

"I broke into the Senju compound and retrieved all the scrolls Mito-sama brought to Konoha with her, as well as the ones she penned in Konoha. I also took all of Hashirama's Mokuton scrolls, They'll help my children in mastering their Kekkei Genkai without any guesswork."

"What about our clan's mask shrine? Did you find what we needed there?"

Kushina frowned "Unfortunately, no, I took all the artifacts on the shrine grounds. At the time, my cover was blown and ANBU were looking for me, I didn't have time to find and access the seals to go to the levels below ground."

Honoka didn't seem to be too rattled by the news. "While that is a disappointment, at least they're hidden from those who seek our clan's power. Nobody but an Uzumaki with training in our clan's sealing style would be able to decipher those seals."

"That's good to hear, it would be disastrous if somebody got their hands on our sealing techniques." Even while saying that, Kushina wasn't too concerned, Uzumaki seals were beyond most Shinobi. Even Minato-chan's sensei, Jiraiya of the Sannin, who was hailed as Konoha's greatest seal-master, would have trouble understanding the most basic Uzumaki seals. Only ones with the blood of the sage can hope to have a basic knowledge of Uzumaki Fuinjutsu. Tobirama Senju was a good example of this, being a Senju gave him some of the Sages innate understanding of the intricate art, with that knowledge, he created the Hiraishin no Jutsu. Of course, most of the actual sealwork was done by his sister-in-law, Mito Uzumaki.

The Uzumaki were the true heirs of the sage. The Senju and Uchiha might have forgotten about their origins amidst their pointless conflict, but the Uzumaki never forgot about their birth from the son of the progenitor of chakra. While the Senju and Uchiha were gifted with the Rikudo's body and eyes respectively, the Uzumaki were blessed to receive a fraction of the sage's thick chakra, both Yin and Yang, and the sages incredible life-force. Most importantly, they inherited his ideals of peace and coexistence, which their cousin clans ignored completely. Hashirama might have been a seeker of peace, but the same couldn't be said about his clan. The conflict between the Uchiha and Senju had been going since the spread of Chakra, and the aggression was not as one-sided as history liked to portray.

The Uzumaki were completely different, they didn't seek conflict, the first Hokage Summit was held in Uzushiogakure no Sato for a reason. The newly appointed kages knew that the island inhabiting clan would give an arm and a leg for long-lasting peace. Fat load of good that did them, The Uzumaki were destroyed, preaching about peace while being slaughtered like dogs. No more. The new Uzumaki clan wouldn't have such foolish ideals.

No, Kushina would ensure her clan would only look out for themselves, fretting about the Senju and Uchiha had only gotten them killed. She didn't want to see her children die for an impossible dream just as the rest of her clan did, family came first to her, she did know best, after all, she knew how being alone felt. When her clan shipped her off to Konoha for 'peace', she learned that her life was pointless without the bonds she had shared with her family. When she heard her clan was slaughtered, she felt an emptiness she hadn't felt before. Sitting in that lonely apartment in Konoha taught her the meaning of true despair. It was then she decided that she wouldn't be alone again, only family could fill the hole in her heart.

"I have also acquired Hashirama's genetic material." Kushina said in an uncharacteristically serious manner, breaking the silence that had befallen the two.

"Good, the revival of our clan will benefit from his Mokuton. Now I just need to finish the blood purging seal so the children will be pure-blooded, unfortunately, it might take some time." Honoka replied in an equally serious tone.

Kushina went back to her normal self and gave a mischievous grin. "You should take your time, we have to wait for your body to mature before you're impregnated."

Honoka almost groaned when she was reminded of her 'role' in the resurrection of her clan, she knew why she was the more eligible of the two, but she still didn't like it. "Can you please change your mind on that? I don't think I'm suited for motherhood."

Kushina answered promptly, this had been the thousandth time they had this particular argument. "You know I can't do that Honoka-chan, I'm a Jinchuuriki after all, childbirth would weaken me greatly. Don't worry too much, I'm sure my children wouldn't give you that much trouble, they will take after their mother, after all"

Honoka almost let loose a few tears at that, hanging around Kushina was painful enough, having to carry two clones of her in her stomach for nine months would amount to torture. Thankfully, Kushina would take the role of their mother, she was just chosen as a surrogate mother to carry Kushina's fertilized eggs. Getting pregnant was akin to suicide for a Jinchuuriki. Kushina had told of her stories of Mito's pregnancy, how she almost died giving birth to her only child. Only the presence of Hashirama's Mokuton and Iryo Ninjustu kept her alive.

Kushina had inherited the stronger genes of her clan, her blood was purer than any Uzumaki alive, she also manifested the Kongo Fusa, a secret technique requiring extremely thick chakra and gargantuan reserves to handle the strain of physically manifesting chakra. Kushina was chosen as one who will bear children to revive their clan, unfortunately, there was the slight problem of her being a Jinchuuriki. They came up with the brilliant plan of performing a surgery that was described in one of the medical scrolls her clan produced, it involved the transfer of Kushina's fertilized eggs into Honoka, who would bear the grueling task of carrying twin Uzumaki. She couldn't help but shudder in despair at her cruel fate.

Another period of silence descended on the two, leaving each to ponder their thoughts about the future of their clan.

"Have you finished the book?"Kushina asked carefully

"No, but I think I have all the necessary information." Honoka replied without giving away anything

"How long?"

Honoka seemed to ponder on her question "I would estimate 20 years, give or take a few months"

Kushina got up from her chair, indicating the end of their conversation. "Three more years. That should give you plenty of time to complete the seal and and mature your body to handle the strain of childbirth. It will give us time to wander the nations and look for any of our kinsmen, we might find some of them, even with the Shinobi world embroiled in war. It would also mean that they would be sixteen by the time our plans come to fruition."

Honoka also got up from her chair, their conversation hadn't ended quickly enough for her, she wanted to finish reading all the books in the Uzumaki library before she was forced to leave and follow Kushina on her travels. Honestly, she was tempted to use Kage Bunshin to finish the damn thing. "I can't wait" Her voice was obviously dripping with sarcasm.

After Kushina left the room, undoubtedly to train in something or other, Honoka promptly returned to the book she dropped on the floor upon Kushina's arrival into the sealing chamber, picking it up carefully, she continued regaling herself in the tale of the Otsutsuki clan, the ones who gave chakra to the world and birthed the Shinobi system. The tailed beasts and the divine tree. A story so fantastical it was almost ridiculous to consider to be fact, but she, being an Uzumaki, knew the truth behind the origin of chakra. She knew that Hagoromo Otsutsuki foolishly entrusted the world with chakra hoping to end war, seeing his oldest and youngest, Indra and Ashura fighting over what he thought was trivial, he entrusted his middleborn, Kennyo, with the task of protecting his brother's descendants from extinction. Kennyo followed his father's words to a tee.

The Uzumaki saved the Uchiha and Senju from extinction several times, each time hoping that the pain of loss would overcome the need for revenge,but as soon as the clans recovered from whatever rut they found themselves in, they were at each others throats. Until eight years ago, when the Uzumaki were wiped out. The Senju have fallen from the most prosperous clan to having one member, Senju Tsunade, The Sannin, her little brother Nawaki dying on a mission less than a month ago.

The Uchiha would follow soon too, she heard that they weren't treated well in Konoha and it was only a matter of time for a prideful clan such as the Uchiha to lash out. With the extinction of the two cursed clans, the Uzumaki would remain the sole carriers of the sages blood, then they would be free to fulfill their ambition, her and Kushina would make sure of it.

A/N: I've been wanting to try my hand at fanfiction for a while now, I present to you my half assed attempt at making something somewhat readable. II have a pretty good outline of where I'm intending to go with this story. Enjoy and review please!