Chapter Text
Uzumaki Mito is no longer a young woman. Her familial gifts have offered certain… advantages… in the race against time, but long years serving as first a kunoichi and, later, something of a politician in her late husband’s civic experiment have not helped her. Neither has her burden, chained and only mostly asleep inside her, growing more and more aware and wrathful by the day. She created the bindings and chose to uphold them within her soul and indomitable will, but truly, she would not have chosen it if she had had a choice.
No, it was Madara’s fault — and to some extent, Mito’s husband’s as well.
Hashirama. Mito hasn’t dreamt of him in weeks, her love for him content to rest within her heart and not bring his visage alongside her other nightly apparitions. It would be a pale reflection of his truthful self, besides; Hashirama always was larger than life, larger in life, a presence that seemed to shine like the sun. Warm, beautiful, bursting with life, and often deadly.
Or, if not like the sun, similar instead to some primeval forest, kin to the ones Mito has grown more than familiar with in her time in Fire Country. One stretching far below both the soil and far above, filled with nature chakra and purpose beyond that of any individual human. Even the nickname bandied about by allies, enemies, and clan alike — Senju Hashirama, the God of Shinobi! — failed to accurately capture him.
Mito’s memory, still keen despite the years bearing down on her and making her ever more aware of the weakness in her joints, does slightly better.
But not quite good enough.
Tonight, however, Mito’s mind wanders away from her usual rest, and somewhere in the space at the back of her soul (somewhere, behind the seal not resting, but certainly placed, upon her abdomen) her burden stirs, too. Agitated, perhaps, or filled with ever-increasing ire. Mito doesn’t care to check.
Her mind wanders, and she dreams, half-awake and half-asleep. First, her husband is beside her, the two of them sharing quiet words out of some memory years passed. Young, only a few years into their marriage, Konohagakure no Sato a budding dream and not yet a great tree amongst the forest of the nations.
She turns to tell Hashirama something, some news from her family back in Uzushio, or some query on the latest delegation to one of the clans that would someday settle down in Konoha.
Instead, he leans over their low table to kiss her.
Mito reciprocates, their tea (or sake — whichever they had been drinking on that long ago occasion) abandoned beside them. Chakra sparks within their embrace.
The dream dissolves as Mito sighs, the spark of chakra between them a dim reflection of what they had actually shared.
Her sleep deepens, her breathing evens out. No longer a sigh but the same steady pace of true rest.
She dreams next of Uzushio, its white sands and soaring cliffs and colorful wharfs and marketplaces. All are painted in such broad, idealized strokes that she first imagines it as a great seal, laid upon the earth rising from the sea, and not the map of her childhood home that is nearly as engraved upon her as that of her burden.
Her burden — the demon inside her — and the map distorts once more into a great seal, swallowed up in a whirlpool and then distorted into the swirling lines of the Eight Trigrams containing it. Mito dreams of the ink bleeding across her skin (the actual seal, contained like she had drawn each line with a needle and not a calligrapher’s brush) and of the whirlpool of her soul that surrounds its prisoner.
She dreams of what it, perhaps, is dreaming.
Long ago, the Sage…
Long ago, nine beasts and two brothers…
That dream, too, dissolves into less than nothingness. Even now, Mito understands she won’t remember it.
She dreams once more of Hashirama, herself at his side as she observes his conversation. It is Madara, and not Tobirama, that he seeks counsel with, and she gazes onwards as whatever words they share light up his eyes and make his body grow yet more animated.
“Peace,” she picks out from the words passing between the two of them, “a place … children … never know war … our dream … finally come true!”
Children, and she dreams of her own.
She dreams of their children, too — her grandchildren, Tsunade and Nawaki. An image of Hashirama teaching their very young granddaughter to play cards, brightly colored hanafuda and money Mito pretends not to see spread out on the floor between them.
Had that happened, truly? Or was it only a genjutsu of her own mind, making up for Hashirama’s absence…. When Mito woke, she would surely remember the truth of the matter, but her haze of dreams seemed to blur the years. What had happened before his death, or never had the chance to, after — it was not important now.
She dreams of a long ago snippet of conversation, trading old folk tales with Hashirama. Her husband, ever the romantic, proclaims that if the old lovers-tale was true that, in the next life, his face was truly that of the one he most loves upon this earth, his reflection would be no less than that of Mito’s. Surely, he tells her, with how gracefully she aged, if she still lived, he would easily find his way to meet her again with such an obvious cue to guide him back to her.
Of course, Mito is now old. No longer is she a young woman in the full bloom of youth, filled with all of the passions of love, nor still filled with the great yearning that comes from life stretching before her, endlessly on into a horizon she has no patience to contemplate.
And each life has its own loves; it is no good to dwell on “once was” and not “what now is.” However she and Hashirama might meet again, and in whatever manner it might come to pass, it would be on different grounds, with different relationships to each other. The great wheel of the world turns endlessly, and it will not pause for the two of them.
Deep within her dreaming heart, however, she is struck by the notion that her husband’s soul has descended from the Pure Lands and is once more among the living. Disregard that it has been more than 49 days, or less than 500 years, or however long the sages say the cycle of samsara takes! An old woman’s heart knows.
Aah , Hashirama, have you tired of the Pure Lands already? Or are you here only as long as it takes to bring your wife’s soul back with you? She wishes to see her husband again, but don’t return for this silly old woman’s sake! Go, be young again, and enjoy life.
Mito can almost hear his laugh —
Oh, perhaps Hashirama is right, and he will look just as if he was her own reflection, unburdened by the years that have passed since they last parted. Perhaps she is, and he will not be weighed down by his past lives.
Still, she hopes that, in whichever form he takes this time, they will get a chance to briefly meet.
All this fades as her sleep deepens even further, though somewhere within her heart she is reminded of all the love in all its many forms that rests there. Youthful passion, mellowed and strengthened in turn by time and experience. The familial pride she still holds for both the clan from which she took her name and the clan she grew to love. The love of the dream which her husband made reality, and most of all, the simple, deep love of life.
Later, when she has awakened and slept again and risen many times, she receives news from Uzushio that her niece has had a daughter of her own, Kushina. Not yet a year old and only scarcely named, her family already believes — like all good parents do — she will go on to do great things.
The girl’s mother writes that even so young, she greatly resembles Mito. Perhaps someday she will visit Konoha.