#kushina: well no i stayed overnight once when minato was stuck here but that doesn't count bc i wasn't a patient

[mixelation]

i love the minato in iwa snippet, but i gotta ask, how the hell did team 4 deal with that??? logically they know he’s a badass kage and all, but he has the presence of a baby kitten and a backbone of wet tissue paper, itachi at least seemed to be silently freaking out a bit there, but what about tori? deidara????

at this point none of them actually know what minato did, but all three of them are ready to go nuclear themselves. so when minato goes off, itachi just kind of assumes..... an itachi level of violence? he's freaked out by the sudden reminder minato could bend him into a pretzel if he wanted, but itachi also grew up with him and considers him relatively safe, so he's not as freaked out as he could be

for expediency i deleted some dialogue at the end. basically, minato was like "okay, who wants to go home, and who wants to go for a walk with me???" and deidara was like ME I WANT TO DO WHATEVER HORRIBLE THING TO IWA!!!!! and tori's exact wording was "ew." deidara is SO into fucking up iwa he gives zero thought to minato besides "cool, a coconspirator." tori does not get a thrill out of direct violence and she's too paranoid about being eaten alive to be like "oh worm you want this insane blood seal i have been able to do this whole time???" but at the same time in her brain she's still a glorified civilian and she doesn't differentiate between the danger minato poses vs itachi or deidara or even a rando jounin because she assumes once the power gap is big enough it's functionally the same as even bigger power gaps.

i think a team 4 debrief session would be fun though, to get everyone's reaction of "uuuum what the fuck, hokage-sama :)" and then also make minato unpack some of the insane bullshit team 4 did prior to his arrival. for example tori and deidara went out of their to befriend kurotsuchi, which is very darkly funny in hindsight. tori intentionally befriended mangetsu for strategic reasons and then cashed in her "manipulate the boy who likes you" card by weeping to him about how iwa kidnapped her sensei so kisame/kiri gets the story before iwa invents a justification. same people's limbs were melted off and a lot of brains were scrambled. in hindsight iwa was definitely trying to kill them IN the exam and none of them noticed until specifically asked about it. kushina reveals that despite being an active field jounin, she's never stayed the night in the hospital or had an IV, and this is the most insane revelation of the night