Blonding

Chapter 43 : Resolved

'When I was young,' my father said,
'And younger still than you -
My summers seemed to stretch ahead
In shades of skylight blue.

'The warmest air was twice as fair
Beneath the tops of trees -
Content to wait without a care;
To sit and shoot the breeze.

'But sooner summers slipped to fall,
And still, I couldn't see -
They hadn't really changed at all.

It wasn't them, but me.'

-Sam Garland

"There are no coincidences in our line of work."

But it was impossible. Minato knew it was impossible.

"Coincidences exist for a reason."

He couldn't have a son. He couldn't have a son. He was barely twenty-four years old. This man had to be at least in his late thirties.

"A blind ninja is a dead ninja."

Minato leaned forwards, elbows gripping the desk, and cupped his face in his hands. "That's…"

"Never forget that, Minato."

There were three distinct possibilities for what was happening: Minato had already counted them off in his head. The first, and most plausible, was that this man was playing him – again. They were assigned a mission from another village (perhaps Hidden Stone) due to how much they looked like Minato, and were given the preposterous task of drawing… something out of the fledgling Fourth Hokage that would no doubt come back and bite him in the ass.

Minato frowned. Perhaps the circumstances were incorrect, but the main theory itself seemed plausible. He mentally set it aside for later, moving on to the next in the list.

Possibility number two was slightly less realistic, but Minato included it in the list anyway. His week had been unbelievable enough as it was, and hesitance in times of danger lead to death.

He knew this first-hand. Thoughts of Obito fluttered through his mind, and he grimaced.

The second theory was that this man wasn't his son, as he had claimed: but was, rather, a distant relative. Once more, a knot of worry twisted upon itself from inside his gut. Perhaps theories one and two were linked – these two blond shinobi were related to him, somehow, and it was that very fact that made them even more dangerous than normally so. As unlikely as it might be that he had relatives hidden away in the bowels of the Elemental Nations, it was something that begged to be considered.

Minato shuddered.

The final possibility was the most alarming.

This man – Naruto, he reminded himself with a frown – was his son. He was here from… wherever it was he had come from, and had wreaked havoc on his life purely out of some sort of spiteful rage.

Or perhaps he was just an idiot.

The circumstances of his arrival were details that needed to be buffed out, of course, but for the time being, he had a place to start should the theory become more than just that.