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Seventeen hours. If his math was correct, they had been at this for seventeen hours now. Having the Nara clan as a part of their budding village would be an amazing asset in many ways, which made it extremely important that they go over the proposal brought to them by the Nara representative in exquisitely fine detail. What was currently making them all miserable was the fact that the delegation which had handed them the proposal was made up entirely of geniuses who were masters at slipping in hidden clauses which could be interpreted in any number of ways. Getting caught in a legally binding trap by a Nara would be the complete opposite of fun.
In a grand understatement of how he truly felt, Madara was tired. They had started going over these documents an hour before noon and now it was so late at night it might as well be morning again. Touka had thrown up her hands in confusion after only a few hours. Izuna had struggled through a few hours more than her before slipping away to find out where she went.
Now it was only the three of them left. Hashirama looked as though he were trying very hard to melt in to the table, one finger absently scratching at the wooden surface in despair as his fatigue-reddened eyes scanned the page in front of him without seeming to take any of it in. Madara cracked his jaw on perhaps the hundredth yawn and very seriously began to contemplate slapping himself just to see if it would help him stay awake.
Why did they want the Nara to come here again?
Both men at the table jumped a little in surprise when Tobirama suddenly brought one fist down against the palm of his opposite hand, the smacking sound of it echoing in the otherwise still kitchen while he directed his glare equally between the two before him.
“Alright, that’s it. You both look terrible so just go to bed. You’ll be much more useful once you’ve gotten a little sleep.”
Raising his head, Madara squinted at Tobirama, wondering if the younger man even understood the irony of his own words. Currently in the middle of pulling his second all-nighter in a row and without having taken any sort of break in the last twenty-four hours, Tobirama was clearly the most tired of all of them. For him to tell either of them they looked terrible was most insulting considering how black the circles under his own eyes were, plainly visible against his pale skin.
Exhausted beyond belief, his brain having stopped working properly several hours prior, Madara spoke without giving much thought to filtering his words.
“Only if you come to bed with me.”
He didn’t understand at first why the other two men in the room were both suddenly staring at him as though he had grown a second head. Realizing he must have said something out of the ordinary, he went back a few second in his mind and replayed his own words. Ah. Not the best phrasing he had ever used but he supposed he could work with it anyway. Scowling to hide his embarrassment, he stood up from the table with sharp, jerky movements.
“You know what?” he growled. “I don’t care. Not one little bit. I am way too tired to deal with this right now. What did I tell you? Bed. Now.”
“Uh, Madara?” Hashirama piped up from the other end of the table.
“Shut up.”
“But-!”
“I said shut up!”
Grabbing a suspiciously quiet Tobirama by the wrist, Madara marched off down the hall towards his own bedroom. Hashirama could find the guest room easily enough if he wanted to stay here for the night as well but Tobirama he didn’t trust to actually go to bed without supervision. The idiot never seemed to care about the limitations of his own body.
Once he had shut the door behind them, Madara directed them both to the bed and pressed his companion down in to the cool sheets. Tobirama pliantly allowed himself to be tucked under the blankets, his eyes wide and his jaw occasionally opening as if to say something only to close again in silence. Madara gave a moment of thought to whether or not they should change before deciding it wasn’t worth the effort. He was too tired for that anyway and the bed was all but calling his name.
The man in the bed was also a bit too much temptation to resist now that he’d finally gotten him there.
Shoving Tobirama a little bit further to one side, Madara climbing in with him and dropping his head on to the pillow with more relief than he’d ever done anything in his life. Beside him, Tobirama finally spoke, his voice soft in the darkness.
“What...just happened?”
“We went to bed. Now we're going to sleep.”
“Uh...alright.”
Madara harrumphed and pointedly shimmied one of his legs over top of Tobirama’s, snuggling in to his shoulder and closing his eyes. Neither of them were likely to get more than a handful of hours of rest but any at all sounded like heaven right now. He was satisfied when his bed partner said nothing about the intimate position he had put them in, just laid there as though his brain were still trying to catch up.
Both of them stiffened when the door suddenly flew open and heavy footsteps marched over towards them, the flickering light of a candle illuminating the room. They looked up to find Hashirama hovering over them with one fist propped up on his hip disapprovingly. After waiting a minute or so to give him a chance to explain himself, Madara finally caved and spoke first.
“What the hell are you doing?” he demanded.
“You can’t just take my baby brother to bed like that!” Hashirama exclaimed. “I came to make sure that you two don’t get up to anything inappropriate!”
“Oh for chakra’s sake, you idiot, we are sleeping!”
“Sure! That’s what you want me to think!”
“Ugh!”
Madara turned his head back around and buried his face in Tobirama’s shoulder again in an effort to block the light of the candle from his eyes. If he just ignored the fool, would he go away on his own? Unlikely. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t hope.
“Ah, brother?” Tobirama eventually piped up. “Madara is correct. So if you would kindly fuck off.”
Hashirama gasped and, even without looking, Madara knew that he would be clutching at his chest as though physically wounded by such callously spoken words.
“But! What if he gets fresh with you!?”
“Go. To. Sleep. It is four in the bloody morning and I am exhausted. If he gets ‘fresh’ he’ll get nothing more from me than a yawn. Now buzz off.”
“No!”
As stubborn as always, Hashirama stomped over to the far wall where Madara had shoved a desk in to one corner. He plopped himself down in the accompanying chair and held the candle up as high as he could to keep the light on the pair of men under the blankets. Though they couldn’t see each other’s faces and were therefore unaware of it, both Madara and Tobirama rolled their eyes at exactly the same time, silently agreeing to just ignore him now.
Slowly the minutes passed them all by, the two men in the bed remaining slightly tense and unable to relax when they knew they were being stared at. Hashirama obviously had his sibling’s best intentions at heart - but he didn’t have to be so creepy and intrusive about it.
Both of them blinked in surprise when, with a loud clatter, the candle suddenly went out. They turned their heads to blink in to the darkness, curious, until the silence was broken once more by a loud rattling snore. Hashirama had fallen asleep in his chair. Tobirama chuckled as he dropped his head back to the pillow, all the tension easily flowing out of him and one of his arms wriggling under the pillow to support Madara’s head.
For his part, Madara found himself smiling as he snuggled closer. Perhaps he could be a bit more forgiving of how complicated the Nara documents were to look over. After all, he was already seeing the benefits.