Chapter Text
The earliest memory Madara can lay claim to is a nightmare.
Senju – vicious, bloodthirsty monsters who will rip into children like Madara, like Madara’s siblings, who are the reason why so many of their people are sad and sullen and aching inside – stand over newborn baby Izuna, and he’s there, trying to stop the infant from crying. If they make any noise, the Senju will find them, and if the Senju find them, they will die. Of course, Madara is barely four and Izuna is only a few months old, so his piercing caterwauls echo through the bedroom they share, and the demons waiting outside the door learn of their location.
Izuna is ripped from his arms as he screams, trying to remember the hand seals required for the Grand Fireball, trying to summon his wild, uncontrolled chakra, trying anything, and it’s not enough. His baby brother’s sobs increase in pitch and volume until there’s a wet gurgling noise, after which they stop altogether, and Madara shrieks like a hawk and batters at Senju legs and torsos and faces as he’s lifted up by the back of his yukata.
There’s the cold press of razor-sharp metal against his throat, and then a searing, stinging, breathless kind of pain, and then he wakes, body slick with sweat and heart beating double-time in terror.
Two nights later, the unthinkable happens.
His voice warps around the screaming, but no sound reaches his ears. In the distance, he can hear baby Izuna wailing, but the noise falls through his mind without registering as such.
When Father brings out the body, small, slender limbs folded up and pressed carefully against his chest, dark-haired head drooping unnaturally, black craters weeping blood where there should have been eyes, Madara isn’t strong enough not to cry.
First it was Jirō, the original heir, Father’s pride and joy, his eldest son, the firstborn. Madara was barely an infant when he died, a victim of the Senju’s child-killing patrols, and so he’s never known what his parents’ faces look like without the shadow of his loss weighing them down. Next, Madara’s younger twin, Shōto – a brother he did know – a brother whose absence has carved a big black hole in his chest where there should be a heart.
Now Kō, seven, just hardly able to perform the Grand Fireball. They brought him home on a stretcher with his torso cut open from hip to collarbone, and Kaa-chan hadn’t been quick enough about shepherding Madara away to keep him from catching a glimpse of the empty eye sockets.
Bloodline thieves, kekkei genkai hunters, eyestealers.
He’s never come afoul of them before – few ever have – but they’re out there, and they covet the Sharingan with a dangerous jealousy, a jealousy that leads them to prey on young Uchiha, just leaving the safety of the compound for their first long missions, a jealousy that has stolen Madara’s brother away from him, a jealousy that he might one day become victim to himself.
Madara insists on sleeping with Izuna in his parents’ room after that, insists that they take shifts so that no one is ever not watching the baby, throws almighty tantrums and spits fire and cries until smoke comes out of his ears, and finally, finally, old man Tajima caves, allowing his remaining sons to share a living space with he and his wife.
He wakes to an all-consuming blackness that subsumes his mind like floodwater, mind filling with thick dark static and nerves alight with the familiar, unwelcome sensation of bright, blistering agony. Distantly the sound of someone humming drifts in through one ear and out the other, a pleasant, soothing melody brought to life by a beautiful, gravelly voice, and he fixates on the noise, trying to breathe through the sudden, excruciating pain in his eye sockets. The sound is low and sonorous, nothing like the high-pitched chattering and shrieking of his hawks, but something in Madara’s mind can’t help but associate the two. It’s soothing, grounding, and unconsciously he relaxes, the tension bleeding out of his sore, overworked muscles as his fists unclench.
The humming increases in volume as he thrashes in his pain. The hurt radiates from his lower stomach, abdomen burning and stinging fiercely, and there’s a strange, heavy pressure lurking behind his eyes.
There’s something significant about that, something he should be aware of, but lucidity eludes him like so much water dripping in between his fingers. Desperately he grasps for it, reaching, reaching, reaching, not wanting to fall prey to the feral, instinctive fear he can sense lurking at the base of his skull, but it slips away again and again and again, and the frustration builds until the hands smooth across his fever-hot forehead, calming, grounding.
The fingers are cold and slender, their touch a balm to Madara’s animal anxieties. The contact lasts for barely a moment, but it’s soothing enough to send him spiraling back into the void.
The voice doesn’t wake him until it’s time to change his dressings. For the most part they work in silence, cool clever fingers stripping the soiled strips of cloth from his body with minimal pain and replacing them with deft speed some of the Konoha medic-nin could learn a thing or two from, and Madara’s just fine with that.
He attempts to blink open his mind’s eye, to observe his surroundings when his regular sight is still recovering from the ordeal of the eyestealers, but it’s crusted shut, glued closed with some kind of sticky chakra that repels his energy like two northern poles.
“Ah, ah, you shouldn’t do that. I sealed away your chakra-sense so that you wouldn’t overwhelm your mind with stimulus. The toxin that had been ravaging your nervous system will have made you extremely sensitive to chakra, and I thought it best that you not endure any unnecessary pain.”
The explanation makes sense, but the true blindness still leaves Madara unsteady and awkward, and he’s just about to lash out at his caretaker when they speak again.
“…It’s been a few days since you were last awake and lucid, though. It’s possible that we could try removing the bandages keeping your eyes shut. The medical jutsu I used to implant them doesn’t take more than a day to heal over, and enough time has passed that it should be safe to do so.”
The hands probe tentatively at his face, and Madara recalls the other hands with vivid clarity. Before he can think there’s the sensation of sinew and bone giving way beneath his fingers, an unfortunate crunching sound, a hiss of pain that’s not his own.
“Stay away from me,” he snarls, voice pitched unnaturally low, chakra flaring. The shinobi who had saved him is utterly silent but for the tight sound of their breathing, their fingers still caught in the iron clamp of his grip.
They don’t make a noise when he releases them with a curse, fumbling at the blindfold and growling when it tangles in his hair and sticks to his face, tacky with dried blood.
He opens his eyes for the first time since their violent removal to the sight of a world drastically changed since the last time he saw it.
The first thing that meets him is the Senju bastard, but he can't focus on the shock of that, because...
Tobirama’s eyes are red.
Red is a phenomenon he’s never known before. Tomatoes, lifeblood, and Madara’s own Sharingan; crimson, scarlet, dying-flame red.
It’s beautiful. He’s beautiful.
Madara has known the man’s face for years now, but something about the vivid vermillion of his irises makes him take a second look, a deeper look, a look that has him breathtaken by the sudden, glaring obviousness of Tobirama’s loveliness. His hair gleams like molten silver in the afternoon sunlight, shafts of lazy gold spilling over him to illuminate his skin with a gentle glow. His eyelashes sweep over his cheeks as he blinks, long and pale and terribly delicate, an odd aesthetic for a shinobi Madara has known as the most ruthless human being he’s ever met, but for some odd reason, it suits him. Delicacy is never something he’s associated with Tobirama before, but with his vision renewed, it’s all he can see; the bones of his face are fine and elegant, the arch of his eyebrows set perfectly over those gorgeous slanted eyes, the high sweep of his sharp cheekbones accented by the way his happuri clings to his face. He’s all white and gray and silver but for the deep, bloody red of his eyes and his facial tattoos.
The most wonderful thing in the world, Madara recalls his mother telling him when he’d asked her as a child what soulmate vision was like. It doesn’t change anything, doesn’t make things look different, but it adds this entire dimension that wasn’t there before. You’ll know it the moment you get it, my darling. There’s nothing like it.
The presence of colors can only mean one thing, and as he forces his mind to process the realization, the universe shatters, the ground tilting beneath him, Tobirama’s face blurring as he falls, the darkness returning.
Senju Tobirama is his soulmate.