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Genma hits the ground running and skids to a halt in the clearing three steps from Jiraiya’s broad back.
Strangely, the sky is growing lighter and at first Genma wonders if dawn is approaching early, illuminating the space in eerie purple streaks. The thought dies as he reaches Jiraiya’s side and sees the barrier, glowing faintly, and behind it—only a glimpse—of Minato. His fingers are still twisted in the final hand-signs of whatever terrible jutsu he’s just unleashed as the Kyūbi strains and snarls, and at his back Genma sees the briefest shape of a burial shroud and a hideous mask with long curving horns—before the Sannin says, “look away,” sharp as a knife.
Genma shuts his eyes behind his mask just in time to hear the faint swish of grass that signals Raidō and Iwashi arriving with another ANBU squad behind them. Abruptly, he feels a flash of heat across his front and pressure blooms in his ears and behind his eyes.
Somewhere in front of him someone is screaming—a dying, vengeful cry. The noise is somehow muffled, as though Genma is suspended in time listening to all the night’s sounds in sequence.
The faint crackle of Konoha’s walls burning some ways to the east is overtaken by an inhuman howl as the fox’s tails thrash and writhe and fail to break free of Kushina’s chakra chains. It builds and builds in a stuttered rise in volume that culminates abruptly in a baby’s wail and muffled thud that Genma wants to unhear.
He doesn’t open his eyes. There's blood pooling in his mouth from where he’s bitten into his tongue and his face feels wet. He realises that he's crying silently behind his mask.
“Let’s go,” Jiraiya says.
The barrier is gone. Left is a hideous vision.
Kushina is slumped over one side of a squat stone altar where an infant is bawling. Her eyes are closed and her long red hair is tangled around her white face, blending in with the blood still trailing from her nose.
Genma knows she’s dead before he sees her, felt her spark go out in that terrible moment, but he doesn’t understand why. She’d survived the harrowing birth and extraction of the bijū and still rose to chain the fox down long enough to get it behind a barrier and sealed.
“Chakra exhaustion,” Jiraiya notes grimly, as though he’s overheard Genma’s thoughts. “The forced extraction tore open her whole pathway system. She was haemorrhaging chakra since the birth. I don’t think anyone else would or could have fought as hard as she did.”
They move closer to the altar and there—the Yondaime lies sprawled across the grass, silent and still. His chest gapes open in the shape of the Kyūbi’s claw, leaking blood so dark it’s almost black. His eyes are half-lidded, staring into nothing, and the corners of his mouth are tilted up in an almost-smile, as though he’d seen something humorous just then, in the moment of his death.
For the briefest moment Genma sees Jiraiya’s expression crack as he steps away, like he’s left his heart there on the ground where Minato fell.
At once, Jiraiya turns on his heel and plucks up the crying babe from the altar. He cradles the child close to his breast, saying, in a terrible, quiet voice, “be gentle, when you lay them in the tomb.”
Genma tries not to think about that night.
The memory of it intrudes, nevertheless, into his dreams, and then into his waking hours when he stands sentry above Minato and Kushina’s infant child. He’d half-expected Jiraiya to vanish into the shadows of the Elemental countries the moment the fires were out, the Sandaime was reinstated, and the endless funerary rites were completed. Instead, Jiraiya had stayed, spending long nights working or just pacing, curling over scrolls and ink with the baby sleeping quietly beside him.
They would sit in the dark, Jiraiya and Genma's ANBU squad, silently orbiting the little crib that was their centre of attention. Jiraiya had left eventually, as Konoha could not afford to lose their foremost spymaster and only loyal Sannin to baby-sitting.
Still, he’d return often to check in, to ensure that the child was fed and safe and warm, even if care came at the hands of a killer in a mask.
They hadn’t bonded over the experience, if Genma could call it that; the hideous failure to protect their Hokage, the agony of standing by as their friends sacrificed themselves, the bittersweet knowledge that there was no other way.
But when Jiraiya left he would tuck Naruto back into Genma’s arms, first as an infant peering out over the crook of his elbow, and then as a toddler pressing a chubby cheek against his mask.
Genma took him always—gently.