Minato tried everything and NOTHING was working! This can't be happening! This was a nightmare!
"LOOK!" he yelled suddenly, his face turning an alarming shade of red. "IF YOU WANT TO PLAY ROUGH WITH CHAINS AND RESTRAINTS, CAN WE AT LEAST DO IT ON THE BED WHERE IT'S MORE COMFORTABLE?!"
The silence that followed was deafening.
Minato's brain gradually processed what had just erupted from his mouth. His face went through several colors that didn't exist in nature before settling on 'catastrophic tomato.'
"I MEANT FOR SLEEPING!" he wailed. "JUST SLEEPING! INNOCENT SLEEPING! WHY DOES EVERYTHING I SAY SOUND WRONG?!"
Kushina didn't just laugh. She SCREAMED with laughter. The sound that came out of her was somewhere between a banshee's wail and a dying whale, but in the best possible way. She fell sideways on the couch, clutching her stomach as tears streamed down her face.
"DID YOU JUST—" she wheezed, gasping for air between cackles. "WHILE TIED UP, DID YOU ACTUALLY JUST SUGGEST—"
"I'M HAVING A MENTAL BREAKDOWN!" Minato announced to the universe, which only made her laugh harder. "NOTHING I SAY MAKES SENSE ANYMORE! I THINK I'M BROKEN!"
She couldn't do it anymore, she collapsed. She fell down the floor and her chains fell with her as they vanished.
The instant Minato felt freedom, his muscle memory kicked in. He launched himself across the room with the grace of a panicking gazelle, grabbed the tape, and vanished in a flash of yellow light so bright it probably confused several astronomical observatories.
Kushina lay on the floor, gasping and wheezing, tears of pure joy streaming down her face.
She laughed until she couldn't breathe, until her sides ached, until she was pretty sure she'd achieved some kind of enlightenment through pure amusement.
The tape was gone, but honestly? This was so much better. Plus, this wasn't over.
It didn't take him long to get back. Three hours to be more specific.
Minato walked through the front door with the casual air of a man who had definitely just been out doing completely normal, unremarkable things that absolutely did not involve burying a security tape in a location that would require at least three S-rank missions to retrieve.
"I'm home," he called out, his voice perfectly modulated to convey 'ordinary husband returning from ordinary activities.'
"Welcome back, honey," Kushina replied from the kitchen, not bothering to hide her smile. She could see it immediately - the way his shoulders were set, the hyperaware sweep of his eyes across every surface, the subtle positioning that kept his back to a wall.
This was Minato in full combat mode.
She'd seen him facing down the Nine-Tails with less tension than he was showing right now while hanging up his jacket. The man was operating at DEFCON 1 in his own living room, treating every shadow like it might contain enemy shinobi and every piece of furniture like a potential ambush point.
It would have been impressive if it wasn't so utterly ridiculous.
"How was your... walk?" she asked innocently.
"Very normal," he replied immediately, the response coming too fast and too practiced. "Just a regular walk. Through regular places. Doing regular walking activities."
She nodded solemnly. "Of course."
Minato approached the living room like he was entering a battlefield, his hyperaware gaze sweeping every corner for potential threats. This was Minato in full combat assessment mode, treating his own home like enemy territory.
He paused in the doorway, his eye twitched as they fell on the couch. The couch where his dignity had been systematically dismantled piece by piece.
He stared at it with the haunted expression of someone confronting the site of a great tragedy, then slowly turned to leave the room.
Then, with the deliberate movements of someone who had seen too much, he turned to leave the room.
He took exactly one step.
And froze.
A shiver ran down his spine - the kind of primal, instinctual reaction that spoke of predators and prey, of being watched by something dangerous.
Slowly, so slowly it was almost painful to watch, Minato turned his head to the left.
High up on the wall, mounted in the corner where it had an absolutely perfect view of the entire living room - especially the couch - was a small, innocent-looking security camera.
The same kind they used to have in their old apartment.
The kind that recorded everything.
For exactly five seconds, Minato stared at the camera with the blank expression of a man whose brain was processing information too terrible to fully comprehend.
Five seconds of perfect, crystalline silence. Minato's tactical mind processed this information with crystal clarity.
Then his face went through a series of expressions that would have been hilarious if they weren't so genuinely horrifying: confusion, realization, dawning horror, and finally, complete psychological breakdown.
Kushina. She'd planned this. All of it. The whole evening had been an elaborate setup, and he'd walked into it like a civilian wandering into a genjutsu.
Slowly, with the mechanical precision of a man whose soul was leaving his body, he turned around.
Kushina was sitting cross-legged on the very couch in the center of the room, smiling at him with the serene expression of someone who had just achieved perfect victory.
In her hands was a fresh security tape.
A new one.
One that had clearly just been removed from the camera that had been recording everything.
"Hi, honey," she said sweetly, holding up the tape and giving it a little wave. "Look what I found."
"No," Minato whispered.
"Oh yes," she replied, her grin widening.
He lunged forward, desperation giving him speed that probably broke several laws of physics.
But Kushina was ready for him.
With movements fluid as water, she pressed the tape against her stomach and began weaving hand seals. The intricate, powerful seals that only a jinchūriki could use.
"Sealing Technique: Internal Storage Seal!"
One of her golden chains came out the seal and wrapped around the tape, pulling it into her body, disappearing into the same dimensional space that housed the Nine-Tails. The same seal that had kept one of the most powerful forces in existence contained was now protecting a security tape of her husband having the most spectacular mental breakdown in shinobi history.
Minato reached her just as the seal completed, his hands grasping at empty air where the tape had been moments before.
She looked up at him with the satisfied smile of someone who had just achieved checkmate in the most elaborate game of psychological chess ever played.
"Too late," she said cheerfully.
Minato stared at her, then at his hands, then at her again. The full weight of his situation crashed down on him like a collapsing mountain.
The tape was gone. Not hidden, not destroyed, but sealed inside his wife using the same technique that contained a bijū. It was more secure than the village's most classified documents. More protected than the Hokage's personal files.
There was literally nowhere in the world it could be safer.
Which meant there was literally no way he could ever get rid of it.
Ever.
"That..." he said slowly, his voice hollow with the sound of a man whose spirit had just been completely broken, "is the most diabolical thing anyone has ever done to another human being."
"Thank you!" Kushina beamed.
Minato looked at her. Then at the camera. Then at the couch. Then back at her.
Then, like a marionette whose strings had been cut, he simply collapsed.
He fell backward onto the couch - the cursed couch where it had all begun - and lay there like a corpse, staring at the ceiling with the empty eyes of a man who had lost everything that mattered to him.
His dignity. His secrets. His ability to ever feel safe in his own home again.
"I'm dead," he announced to the ceiling. "I have died. This is the afterlife, and it's exactly as terrible as I feared."
"You're being dramatic," Kushina said, settling beside him on the couch with the casual air of someone who hadn't just committed the most elaborate act of psychological warfare in human history.
"I'm being accurate," he replied in the monotone of the spiritually defeated. " I am married to a tactical genius who uses her powers for evil."
"Not evil," she corrected. "Entertainment."
They sat in comfortable silence for a few moments, Minato still staring at the ceiling like it held the answers to life's greatest mysteries, while Kushina studied his defeated form with growing curiosity.
"Okay," she said finally, shifting to face him properly. "Fun's over for now, I have to know. What actually happened that night? I mean, I saw the... aftermath... but what led to you chasing a burglar while screaming profanity in your underwear?"
Minato let out a long, soul-deep sigh that seemed to come from somewhere around his toes.
"You really want to know?" he asked the ceiling.
"Are you really asking?"
Another sigh. Then he seemed to deflate even further, if such a thing was possible.
"Screw it," he muttered. "What's the point of dignity anymore? You've already seen everything."
He finally turned his head to look at her, his expression somewhere between resignation and mild shame.
"I was bored," he said simply.
"Bored?"
"Incredibly, mind-numbingly, soul-crushingly bored." He sat up slightly, running a hand through his hair. "You were on that week-long mission close to the border. Jiraiya-sensei was off doing... research... somewhere. My students had the day off. I had no missions scheduled for the foreseeable future. The apartment was too quiet, too empty, and I had absolutely nothing to do."
Kushina raised an eyebrow. "And?"
"I found that bottle of sake you bought for celebrating your promotion," he admitted, his cheeks turning slightly pink. "You know I don't really drink. Maybe once or twice a year at most. But I was just... so incredibly bored."
"Okay, so you had some sake. That doesn't explain the..."
"The screaming and chasing?" He winced. "Yeah, well, the drinking didn't stop with just a few sips."
He paused, clearly debating how much detail to go into.
"I may have... gotten creative... with my boredom solutions."
"Creative how?"
Minato's face turned redder. "I started playing Shogi. With the combined synergy of 5 of my very own shadow clones as my opponents, all at once."
Kushina blinked. "You played board games with a team composed of your clones?"
"It seemed like a good idea at the time! Intellectual stimulation! Strategic thinking!" He gestured helplessly. "But then I thought, 'what would make this more interesting?' So I made it a drinking game."
"Wha- huh?"
"Every time I lost a board piece I had to take a shot." His voice got smaller. "The clones... they started working together. Ganging up on me. They were good at it. I lost a LOT of pieces."
Kushina was now staring at him with a mixture of fascination and horror.
"How many shots?"
"I stopped counting after…I don't even know anymore. I had to get rid of 15 Sake bottles in the morning. I don't even know where I got them from."
"FIFTEEN?!" That amount of alcohol was EGREGEOUS! They were shinobi but still!
"It gets worse," he said miserably. "After the Shoji disaster, drunk-me decided that strip poker would be more entertaining. Go figure, my clones are apparently much better at poker than I am when completely hammered...Although I'm still convinced that they were cheating."
Kushina was trying very hard not fall back to her laughter. "So that's why you were in your underwear?"
"Well, no, that came after the ice bucket challenge."
She stared at him. "The what?"
"I don't know why drunk-me thought it was a good idea!" he said defensively. "It was some kind of test of will or something! I filled a bucket with ice water and dumped it over my head while standing in the shower!"
"While drunk?"
"Very drunk. And very cold. And very wet. Which is why I was in the shower when this...absolute genius decided to make his appearance."
Kushina was now grinning widely while her husband just sighed.
"The unfortunate timing was... unfortunate," he admitted. "I heard the noise, stumbled out of the bathroom, saw this masked figure in our living room, and my alcohol-impaired brain just... snapped."
"Hence the profanity."
"I don't even remember saying those things!" he protested. "I woke up the next morning with the worst hangover of my life, vague memories of chasing someone, and a very confused-looking Mrs. Tanaka asking if I was 'feeling better' and if I needed her to 'call someone.'"
Minato buried his face in his hands. "I have traumatic flashbacks now. Little glimpses. It's like watching a horrible movie starring someone who looks exactly like me but has no impulse control."
Kushina was quiet for a moment, processing this information.
"So let me get this straight," she said slowly. "You got drunk playing board games with yourself, lost at strip poker to your own clones, gave yourself an ice bath and then encountered a burglar while in this state?"
"Yes Kushina, thank you for summing that up."
"You're welcome. What I don't get is how your drunk brain's response to a home invasion was to chase the intruder while screaming curse words in your underwear?"
"My drunk brain apparently has a very different approach to conflict resolution than my sober brain."
She looked at him for a long moment, then started giggling.
"It's not funny," he said miserably.
"It's a little funny."
"It's completely humiliating."
"It's also the most ridiculous origin story for a security tape I've ever heard." She patted his shoulder sympathetically. "My poor, bored, drunk husband who just wanted to play board games in peace."
"Laugh it up." He said, she giggled some more.
"Oh I will, for YEARS. Did you even catch him?" She asked and he sighed.
"Mrs. Tanaka mentioned it the next day. Apparently I chased him three blocks before tackling him outside the ramen stand. The police force found him tied up with a belt, my belt, completely terrified and babbling about 'the scary underwear Shinobi.'"
Kushina stared at him. "Seriously?" She said holding it in.
"That's what the report said. He kept asking if all Konoha shinobi were 'that terrifying when they get out the shower'."
Despite everything, Minato felt a small smile tug at his lips. "At least I was effective."
"Very effective. Traumatically effective."
They sat in comfortable silence for a moment.
"You know," Kushina said thoughtfully, "this explains so much about why you looked so guilty whenever I mentioned that week."
"I thought you'd never find out."
"And I thought you'd just missed me and were being sweet about it."
"I did miss you. I also apparently handle missing you very poorly."
She leaned over and kissed his cheek. "Next time I go on a long mission, I'm confiscating the sake."
"Next time you go on a long mission, I'm going with you."
"Even to the desert?"
"Even to the desert. I'd rather face sandstorms than another night of drunk Shoji with my clones."
"Deal," she said, snuggling against his side. "I'm still not going to let you live this though"
Minato's only response was an agonizing groan.
Author Note:
THAT'S ALL FOLKS.