The Undesired Second Chance

Chapter 10: The New Guy

Minato absentmindedly tapped the wooden end of his brush against his drink, the audible clink dampened by what water he left in the glass. The wind chime hanging at the window rang in a gentle breeze. He had commandeered the kitchen since his desk wasn't nearly large enough to spread out everything (mental note: get a bigger desk). His scroll full of various sealing notes lay unrolled across the table in front of him, and Minato stared at the elegant spiral.

He was distracted: busy considering the person who had drawn it there.

Axel was, to be frank, kind of weird.

A good kind of weird. Just... different than he had come to expect.

It had been a few weeks since then, but Minato still had no clue why he had decided to seek out somebody he had only meet twice, kind of—and a civilian, no less!—and yet he still couldn't say it had been a bad decision. Far from it, actually, and that was a big portion of why he was so confused.

He'd stopped by several other times, just wanting to chat or maybe fish for more information about the spiral or, as he had come to discover, a whole slew of other random tidbits. His scroll of notes was getting rather crowded with theories and thoughts and the occasional attempt at explanation written in by Axel in large careful script. Most of Axel's notes had drawings to go with them, to clarify any issues in his writing.

The last time Minato had visited, just the other day, the store had appeared to be up and running; the shelves were built and stocked with everything from basic civilian tools (which were, perhaps, a little over represented for a smithy in a shinobi village) to tools of a more... deadly variety.

Since he'd blown up a good number of the regular kunai he had had on hand, Minato had bought a small set of ten. In a mildly interesting coincidence, although he had only chosen based on how the throwing knife felt in his hand, all ten he had chosen off the rack had been made by Axel rather than Morimoto.

With a quiet noise of a jingling key, and a soft swoosh of familiar chakra to temporarily disarm the various security seals on the front door, someone let themselves in. Then there was a pause.

"Yo, Minato, you here still?" called Kushina in that brusque, to-the-point way of hers. She could sneak with the best of them, and often her directness was just a cover for something sneakier, but not now.

"Yes?" Minato looked up to smile at her as she walked in. "Welcome home."

She quirked one red eyebrow at his relaxed greeting, and then ran a cursory glance over the latest mess he had brought to their kitchen table. Then a more focused one, once she took in just what project he had laid out. "Is this that sealing thing you've been on about for the past few weeks but haven't let me help with?"

"I let you help at the start!" he objected. "Then you tried to commandeer the entire project, so I kept it to myself."

Snorting a bemused laugh, Kushina shook her head slowly: couldn't argue with that. She pulled out another chair and sat down across from him, reading through the notes on the scroll with increasing interest.

A good deal of it—well, most, to be honest—was in her boyfriend's familiarly tidy handwriting. Less often, but always with a sort of confidence in content, was another script; the lines themselves were uncertain, but, unlike the 'what-if's from Minato's scribbles, these seemed to be explanatory.

After reading one such note and looking over the image next to it, Kushina paraphrased, "Triangles are strong shapes in architecture stuff, so they could be strong for seals. Ya know, that... does sorta make sense."

Minato nodded distractedly as he considered a list of increasing numbers. He tapped the number '3' contemplatively, followed by the numbers '5' and '8'. Thinking aloud, he said, "I feel like these come up a lot."