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Here is the truth: Kushina did not have a seal.
Mito did. Kushina didn’t. She was chosen for her special chakra, yes. Her special bloodline. She wasn’t the only Uzumaki to have it, but she was the best.
At six years old she had the adamantine chains, each link a tangible, unbreakable piece of Fuinjutsu, and they were strong enough to bind a god.
So she did.
Kushina was eight when she threw out all her chains and more, filled her heart with love and grief and love for Mito, dead on the ground, and wrapped the Nine Tailed Fox in burning gold. He fought, and she bled and screamed, and slowly pulled him in. And in. The chains winched back into her chest and pulled the fox with them, a mighty construct of rage and power brought to heel by a very little girl.
They formed ink and words of binding on her stomach, yes, but it was just a record. A receipt. The jutsu was the chains that held him taught.
Delirious, half-mad with pain, and dizzy from childbirth and blood loss, Kushina watched as her husband fought a masked assailant with their newborn in the middle. Too tired to think, to fight, to process, still reeling but full of trust in him, she held her son to her chest and cradled him.
Minutes felt like seconds as she stared at him, so perfect.
And then Minato had taken the tailed beast, the escaped god, and tried to seal it into their tiny perfect son, with an experimental seal she had never seen before.
The attempt had killed them both.
Kushina kills Obito, but not that night.
It’s only weeks later, when she has lost her mind but found her enemy, that she chokes the life from him, crushes his throat with her bare hands. Weeks of dogged chase, relentless pursuit in the name of vengeance, and it should be satisfying, to feel him die, but the mask falls from Obito’s face as his desperate hand falls limp from her arm.
Obito left bloody gashes with blunt nails as she killed him.
Grief is a maelstrom in her heart as she finishes destroying the landscape they’d wrecked in the frankly cataclysmic battle.
(They’d fought for hours, Kushina and the boy who was Kakashi’s staunch rival, the bright and cheerful boy who loved ramen and helping people. She had outlasted him, a supernova of chakra against a bonfire, and then dug her fingers rough into the embers, when he was exhausted and too weak to fend her off.
Gods below, it hurt.)
Years later, when she can see straight without going blind with rage, Nagato brings him back.
But he cannot bring back her husband, her perfect son; those were claimed by the Shinigami, reaped by him, and don’t reside in the Pure Land. She knows. She has tried.
In a cloak of black and red clouds, she shoves back the hood and her hair spills out, blood red and soft. It has grown longer over the years.
Konan tangles pale fingers in hers, coming up beside her. They stare at the edge of the world, high in the mountain’s graveyard.
She won’t be capturing the tailed beasts, beyond the one enchained once again inside her. Akatsuki won’t be, either. Akatsuki is hers.
They’re not going to burn the world to the ground to make a painless lie. She’s going to embrace the pain, the whole world of it, and fix things.
It’s been ten years and the place where her son laid on her chest still hurts, will always hurt, but she has Kakashi and Obito and Rin to raise, a world to save, and—
Next to her, the loveliest woman in the world glows in the morning sunlight, lit up in all the colors of dawn.
And here too is the truth: the Sanin Jiraiya was no stranger to her. She had lost count of the happy evenings, the long hours where she and he and Minato had poured over scroll after scroll, had laughed and eaten and gotten ink absolutely everywhere.
She had taught him the seals of her people, as much as she could remember, and he had taught her all he knew. Jiraiya did not have a sealing teacher, grew to mastery on scraps and pure determination, stubbornness and intuited leaps and rough, rough practice.
He had been her teacher.
He had been Konan’s.
She turned her palm over, settling it flushed with Konan’s.
“I love you.” She says, low and fierce. “We start today.”
Unspoken is the dare for the world to touch this happiness she has forged for herself with blood and sacrifice, pain and rage and a grief so strong it had almost drowned the world.
But there were hundreds of children out there, trained as soldiers, used as killers.
“Yes.” Konan agreed, simple. They had said everything they needed to say.
It was simple.
The world was broken.
And they would save it.