Kushina stopped folding clothes and turned around with a grin to see a familiar face sitting on the low-lying roof. A man with almost pale skin and chin-length red hair that covered his eyes, he wore traditional plated clan armor over black formal attire with long sleeves that covered his hands.
He just sat there smiling and waiting for her to react somehow, which she did by walking over, hands on her hips as she looked up at him, "Why Nagato-sama. You don't have anything better to do than come pick on little old me?"
Dropping down from his seat on the roof, Nagato landed with a bit of a stumble, chuckling sheepishly at not looking very cool, "I call it checking in." He said, getting a big hug from the spirited mother, "Good to see you Kushi… it's been a while. I wanted to stop in before the Senju Clan meeting in about a week. No idea when else I'd have the free time."
"Being clan leader is a tireless job after all." Kushina commented glibly, "I don't really get much to do with clan affairs anymore as you know, so it's nice to know sometimes that I've got a friend up there somewhere. But I guess it does get lonely up at the top for a 'God' after all."
"Don't you start calling me that now too." Nagato complained, revealing behind his red bangs a pair of strange purple eyes with ring ripple patterns in them, "I actually like the fact that someone around doesn't always consider the Rinnegan first when they think of me."
"Because when I think about Nagato, I can't help but think back to the crybaby you used to be. Sticking those fancy eyes in your head all of a sudden can't make me forget that." Back before Nagato had somehow awakened the Rinnegan, he and Kushina had been friends.
Back then he didn't have many of them because of his personality, but after it became known during his early teen years that he had the Rinnegan things changed popularity-wise for him, and to his credit he grew into it to the point where when it came time to select a new clan head he was chosen despite being under thirty at the time, mostly due to the deterrent that the threat of the Rinnegan posed for potential enemies of the Uzumaki Clan.
Even so, even with people falling all over them to get on the good side of the man that had inherited the legendary eyes of the Rikudou Sennin, Kushina wasn't one of them and still treated him like regular old Nagato, something that he actually appreciated to keep him honest.
By the time he became clan head a few years back Kushina had already fallen out of favor for having Naruto with a roaming, clanless ninja, so it wasn't as if she cared about making more people angry. Thus she spoke on what she felt about what she was privy to with clan activities, and Nagato liked to use her as a sounding board of sorts for a completely unbiased opinion that wouldn't suck up to him.
That, and he'd known her for his entire life and had seen how beautiful she'd become. She'd been a great active ninja. She probably still was. And she was a close friend of his.
"So." Nagato said, looking around as the lovely female redhead got back to working on the laundry, "Where's your firstborn?"
Kushina chuckled darkly at the topic of Naruto being brought back up, "Take a guess."
Powerful as he was, Nagato felt the need to take a step back for safety just in case Kushina's temper wasn't level, "…Ran off again?"
"Of course. It's his thing apparently." As annoyed by it as she sounded before she sighed and a melancholy look came to her eyes, "Not that I can really blame him for not wanting to be around here with the way things are for him. It's the only thing I regret about being with Minato; what it's done to Naruto just for being born." A pretty big regret even if it was the only one she had.
Most of the Uzumaki Clan didn't claim Naruto as one of them because of the nature of his birth. Even though Kushina and Minato were married at the time of conception and birth, Naruto was perceived as a bastard. The fact that he didn't look like a single one of them didn't help either. It just drove the stake in further.
"You could remarry back into the clan. That would solve most of the hate." Nagato presented to Kushina as an option, "If you married someone with enough pull they could even shield Naruto from the way others treat him." For some reason it sounded like he was talking about himself, even if he didn't say it aloud, "It'd be better than it is now."
"I'm not divorcing Minato."
"He could be dead. You haven't seen him in how many years?"
"You know better." Kushina said with a ghost of a smile on her lovely face and a shake of her head, "Shame on you."
"Sorry, sorry. It's just that you know what it's like on the mainland. If it wasn't for-."
Kushina cut him off and explained everything he was about to say, "I know, I know. If it weren't for the Senju, the fact that we're our own island nation, and the fact that you having the Rinnegan scares the hell out of most of the superstitious clans out there we'd be up to our necks in enemies."
Fuuinjutsu was that dangerous of an art to specialize in, and the Uzumaki Clan was the best at it in the entire world. It was like they could speak their own language with the arrays, the hand-seals, and the effects. Even the children were fairly decent at it.
That made a lot of people afraid, for many reasons. Most prominent of them being that fuuinjutsu was the only known way to defend in earnest against the nine forces of nature in their world that went by the collective name of the biju, none of whom had been seen attacking in quite some time. Years and years.