"I... didn't survive it, in a way," Minato confessed. Hands still in his pockets, he leaned back against the corner of some shelving, propping himself up. The relaxed posture, the pretense - it was innate. "I signed a contract. I ended up dying, in the end. Someone on the community brought me back."

Some people would've thought it freeing to say all that, but to Minato it just felt vaguely dangerous. He'd been living with that for over a year now, a long year in which he'd had no access to the community, to hardly any of his friends, and was just tired of the reality of it. There wasn't anything liberating in saying it out loud; he wanted to leave it behind.