"Namikaze."

The name is uttered with the gravitas of an executioner speaking to the condemned.

Minato eyes the jitte that the Uchiha men wear at their hips - glorified sticks fashioned from pig iron not fit for making blades. All because the village won't trust them with edged weapons. And these men presume to hold even a semblance of authority?

It's almost enough to make a boy laugh.

"You mean to tell me," begins Jiraiya lounging in the seat next to his charge at the ramen stand, "that a genin fresh out of the Academy made it past Uzumaki-made seals, jonin-level genjutsu, and a whole pack of ANBU to break into the Hokage Tower and break back out again with no one the wiser?" To say his sensei is unimpressed is to say water is wet. "Minato's a little genius, but you're making him out to be Hashirama's second coming."

I could be.

He doesn't say it aloud, but he doesn't have to. Jiraiya can see the promise in him, the genius, the makings of greatness.

That's probably why Jiraiya decided to treat him to a free lunch instead of putting him through that infantile bell test so common with Academy graduates meeting their jonin-sensei for the first time.

Jiraiya, Minato notes, is simply Jiraiya. Jiraiya of no clan. Jiraiya who came from nothing and made himself something.

Minato decides he will forgive Jiraiya for implying he is not as great as Hashirama.

Not yet.

"We have orders from Chief Fugaku," one of the joyless Uchiha drones on. "We are to bring the Namikaze boy in for questioning."

"And I have it on good authority from my sensei that you're barking up the wrong tree."

The world goes still in the way it always does before violence.

Minato can see the gears grinding in the Uchiha's head as he weighs his life against his duty.

Can he overcome a jonin of Jiraiya's level? In this moment, this hour, the big man is not Jiraiya of the Sannin, nor Jiraiya the Sage. Those names and titles are still years away. He is simply jonin Jiraiya. Capable, but not yet legendary.

But there is nothing simple about Jiraiya, the Third Hokage's student.

To offend this man, armed only with chopsticks (Jiraiya has killed men with less), is to offend the Third Hokage.

The older of the two Uchiha moves his hand from that space just above the jutte to his comrade's shoulder, already steering the younger man away even as his eyes whirl with a single tomoe in each eye.

"A thousand apologies."

The men vanish in a buzz of Body Flicker.

Gone, as fast as humanly possible, to save their lives and go tattling to Chief Fugaku, no doubt. Grown men fleeing like cockroaches.

So this is the power of the Hokage's name. How much power does the man himself wield?

It's almost enough to make a boy salivate.

"So tell me, Minato" Jiraiya stares as the place the two policemen occupied a moment longer before turning his penetrating gaze to the boy, "how'd ya do it?"

"Minato."

He has lost count of how many times she has said his name. She mutters it, pants it, over and over and over again like a mantra, like a prayer.

Fitting, he supposes. Jiraiya-sensei told him you have a woman wrapped around your finger when you can make her say "oh my God!"

He has overheard the guy talk from the others. Who has the biggest tits, the greatest ass. Who's a screamer. Who's not. He has even heard that some other boys in his graduating class don't like talkers.

Throws off their rhythm, they say.

Minato supposes he could tell Kushina to be quiet, but why should he?

That "Minato, Minato, Minato" a sign of a job well done.

"Namikaze!? Minato Namikaze!?"

Minato stops in the middle of the street. He does a comical looking-left-and-looking-right (something he saw Jiraiya-sensei do on their mission to Grass, a mission that was all about making people forget he was Jiraiya the Hokage's student and think of him as nothing more than a fool) before suddenly jerking a thumb at himself.

"You mean me?"

"O-of course!" The biwa player says, wildly waving his free hand. "You are the hero of The Ballad of Minato and Kushina!"

"Come again?"

"Namikaze."

Hiashi Hyuuga mutters the name with such venom, such contempt, that it's a wonder he hasn't vomited after holding the name on his tongue.

Minato frowns.

This is wrong. All wrong.

He's heard his name muttered in frustration before. Yamaguchi-sensei often says his name like that when Minato starts asking questions about "advanced chakra theory that's way too advanced for kids like you."

He's heard his name muttered with exasperation. The matron at the orphanage would always scold him when she caught him sneaking into the cupboard at night for second dinner. She made him feel so guilty for his big appetite, but he would later learn this was the first sign his chakra circulatory system was waking up and needed more fuel.

But never before has he heard someone use his name like a bad word.

Hiashi is a Hyuuga. Minato knows that's a pretty big deal. Has to do with their big, white eyes and all the fancy, white clothes they wear. They have special ninja eyes, which lets them get bigger jobs with bigger payouts to afford all of those fancy clothes.

It must be nice.

Even at this tender, just-entered-the-Academy kind of age, Minato understands, if only vaguely, the concept of haves and have-nots. He couches it mostly in terms of clan kids and not-clan kids, but he had never really taken the time to think about it before.

Stopping and thinking about who got to be a clan kid was like stopping and thinking about who was born a boy or a girl. It didn't really mean anything.

Did it?

"Minato!"

"Uzumaki."

The habanero bristles.

"Y-you! Why do you have to go and say it like that!?"

The boy stares back as blankly as possible.

"What do you mean? That's your name, isn't it? You should be proud of your clan, Uzumaki."

He's expecting anything. A blistering rant. An incoherent howl. Maybe even an attack.

He's already going over judo stances in his mind.

He doesn't expect Kushina Uzumaki to turn and storm off in a huff, her waterfall of hair swishing and splashing all about her. He blinks. Were those tears in her eyes?

"Namikaze, man," Shinsuke says one sweaty, sunny afternoon, apropos of nothing, "ya really shouldn'ta been at Kushina the other day like that."

Minato looks up from his whetstone but not at Shinsuke. Shinsuke who is always blathering about this or that. He worried that Megumi, the girl on the team, would be the vicious gossip, but she had the decency to keep her tongue locked up more often than not.

Minato studies the edge of his new kunai, a triple-pronged product of his own design, and marvels at the way it catches the dappled sunlight dancing through the leaves.

Minato sees his invention, his genius in physical form. And it is good.

"She was tryin' ta be nice," Shinsuke barrels on, as he so often does. Shinsuke the talker. Shinsuke the Akimichi bastard, if a certain rumor is to be believed. At least that's what everyone says about his mother (the whore, the rumors also say) and his absent father. Funny that a boy who has suffered so much under the words of others should go spreading them. "Prob'ly wanted ta thank ya for savin' her from those Cloud goons and all."

Minato grunts, putting his glorious work away and beginning on another.

Everyone and their mother has been talking about it. He would have known about that even without Shinsuke. "Hero," they call him.

"Genius."

"Cloudsbane."

"Romantic."

That last one gives him pause.

Then he starts thinking about how to make use of another tool at his disposal and how best to mold it to his liking.

Namikaze.

A generic name given to baby bastards and foundlings from a lonely stretch of coast far to the east.

Namikaze. Water and wind. A fitting name for what may have been a fisherman's son.

Or had his father been a sailor? And what about his mother?

He did not know, and for the first time, that ignorance gnawed at him. His mind suddenly hungered for knowledge and ached at is absence.

His earliest memories were of the orphanage. Orphan. Another word, another name, another title. It hadn't meant anything to him then, either. He didn't know what he was missing because he never had it in order to miss it.

Words like "father" and "mother" were abstract to him. Like the Hidden Cloud Village or the Hidden Mist or any of the others. These were all things he read about, understanding that they existed in some sense even if he could not see them.

Like the wind on his face.

Namikaze. Wind and water.

It had taken a spoiled little Hyuuga to set his mind spinning with questions, to send him here, to the library, in search of a scroll that might explain why this Mr. High and Mighty would treat the name Namikaze like it was something to be ashamed of.

Minato was finally old enough to start grasping at the shape and the weight of the village's unofficial caste system, and those sharp edges cut him deeply.

"Minato!"

Kushina almost bowls him over as she launches herself at him like a javelin to put him in the mother of all bear hugs.

He responds with an erudite "urk!"

"Oh, uh, sorry!" She says, fretting over him in a way that looks wonderfully out of place with the way she's all dolled up in the finest yukata Mikoto could lend her. He knows damn well a Whirlpool refugee couldn't afford that. Girls like to dress up for the festival, and it does look wonderful on her.

But he opts to take a different track. It's something Shinsuke the gossip told him about Kushina and how much a stray comment he made in the Academy, so many years ago, had such a profound impact on her.

"I'm glad you didn't cut your hair," Minato, almost a man, says as he reaches out quite suddenly to stroke Kushina's glorious mane.

She blushes so bright a pink that she practically glows in the evening gloom.

(Jiraiya-sensei would be proud.)

"You heard about that?" Kushina squeaks like a mouse, shifting her weight from foot to foot and playing with the same length of hair that Minato just touched as his hand falls away.

"Mm," Minato says, looking up to the stars. "Yoshino told me. Shinsuke, too."

Kushina scowls.

"Bunch of gossipy hens."

"I don't much like hens either. But I like you."

He turns to her, then, and sees a kaleidoscope shining out of her. The blush of teenage affection turns to the blanched white of surprise and shame and then finally back to a healthier hue as she sees the gentleness of his own features smiling gently back at her. He knows. He knows just who she is and what she is and what she harbors and he doesn't hold it against her. She has found, she thinks, someone who truly appreciates her. Not for her blood or her passenger. Just for her hair, for herself.

She leans into him then, and he remembers Jiraiya's lessons in women. This is her telling him to have her first kiss.

It's his, too.

In that moment, that glorious moment, he forgets himself.

He forgets how much more useful a Tailed Beast will be to the next Hokage if the girl wrapped around the Fox has already fallen for him.

"Namikaze?"

Hiashi Hyuuga stares up at his savior with his white eyes watering.

"It looks like we made it just in time," Minato says, extending a hand to help his injured comrade out of the mud and the blood. "I was worried we were too late to save you after we saw what happened to the rest of your squadron, Hiashi."

Hiashi, now needed more than ever to step into his destined role as the head of the clan with his father's recent illness, doesn't even pause to consider how casually the other jonin has addressed him. Minato and his team put their lives on the line to sneak behind enemy lines to rescue this one man. They weren't heirs. Whether they lived or died made no great difference to the people who walked the halls of power.

Only Hiashi would smooth the transition from one gilded generation to the next.

This man, this bleeding, blinking man, just became one of the most powerful people on the continent.

And he did not bat an eye at Minato's informal address. Did not push away the hand offered to him.

"I… I owe you my life, Minato."

Minato does his best to look solemn and serious, and it is not entirely a lie.

He has reason to take this all very seriously. He has been acknowledged. This man, lord and master of all Hyuuga, now owes him a life debt.

Once the news reaches the village, that is sure to influence Hiruzen Sarutobi's decision on who his successor should be.

"Namikaze," he says.

"Pardon me, Lord Fourth?" asks Chief Fugaku, clan head Fugaku, Fugaku of the Uchiha who have done a poor job of concealing their attempt for this low-born Kage.

"Let's not stand on ceremony here," Minato says, reclining in his new seat, in his new robes, looking out over the village to gaze upon the new image of his face carved into a cliff. It is everything he could have ever wanted. Well, almost everything. The Hyuuga have already acknowledged him. The Sarutobi, too. The Shimura. The Nara. The Aburame. And so on and so forth. But one piece of this particular puzzle is still missing. "You can address me as Namikaze."

He smiles then, and it is razor thin and razor sharp.

He thinks of the first time he ever met an Uchiha. Two of them, actually. He was a boy at a ramen stand, and they were coming to ask him how and why he had stolen the scroll that would allow him to perfect the Second Hokage's last and greatest jutsu. They were right to suspect him, of course, but it mattered not at all now. He was the Hokage, and his word was law. The Uchiha would respect him, they all would.

"I said," Minato repeats, "you can call me Namikaze."

He sees the war in Fugaku's ink-dark eyes. He sees the struggle between honoring his warchief and honoring his clan by refusing to bow any deeper to this nobody. To say the name, to speak them aloud… it is to say the Uchiha have fallen so far they will beg and scrape for the blessing of even this man.

It is a wound to what remains of their pride. Siding with Hashirama. Tolerating Tobirama. Bitterly accepting Sarutobi. Is a Namikaze a bridge too far?

Minato intends to find out.

Teeth grind. Neck veins bulge. The eye flashes red for such a brief instant that a lesser man might have missed it.

But Minato sees. Minato knows.

He knows how hard this is for a highborn like Fugaku, and that makes this all the sweeter.

"Yes, of course, Namikaze."

Minato smiles then. He smiles because he has won.

"Minato," Kushina greets him at the door as she so often does. The usual warmth in her smile, the usual kiss on the lips. It's a greedy kiss. Oh, so she's in that kind of mood.

Minato smiles into the kiss as he pushes her deeper into the apartment. The hat and the robes fall away. Both the exhaustion of a fourteen-hour day and the euphoria of the village's last clan submitting to him melt away.

He has his title, his reputation, his title, his power.

And he has the love of a good woman.

He wonders if he will ever tell her how it all began - with a bastard's name and a burning resentment. He wonders if he will ever tell that it was a kunoichi's mission in reverse.

He wonders, and he does not care.

He loves his life and everything in it.

This woman is special. He loves her almost as much as he loves himself.

But he does not love her enough to honor her last request.

He will go down in history as the second man to tame the Fox, and he won't let something like sentimentality stand in the way of that.

He will live on through the child, his last and greatest masterwork.

Hiruzen names the boy Uzumaki.