Chapter Text
The Katon jutsu explodes before him with the white-hot intensity of a star gone supernova, a mighty conflagration igniting the air and burning greedily through everything it touches. Through the blistering blaze of fire and chakra, he senses several life signatures stutter, stutter, and then stop entirely, candles extinguished by his Dragon’s Breath. When the flames die away, charred, twisted corpses are left in their ruin, the vile smoke of carbonized flesh wafting off of their mangled forms.
Billowing clouds of ash and smoke obscure the battlefield, but for all the obvious power and prestige of his Sharingan, Madara has never needed eyes to see.
Even as the detritus left behind by his inferno darkens his field of vision, his awareness rises like a flood all around him, his mind’s eye wide open and focused on his surroundings with unerring accuracy, glaring through the cloudy cataract of the deathstalker venom.
The ley lines running beneath the surface of the earth – chakric faults that behave not unlike tectonic plates – converge at this spot, the core of a cluster of ancient bodhi trees, all but indestructible at their ironwood cores. The remnants of his Katon jutsu simmer in the grooves of their scorched bark, peeling away like sunburnt skin. They have survived millennia of Hi no Kuni’s seasonal wildfires; there is little doubt that they will survive this. They’re already shedding the dead bark, little flakes of withered natural chakra ripped off the wood by the hot, stifling winds.
There is nothing visible to Madara’s mind’s eye that can’t be excused as the latent power of the bodhi trees, their chakra signatures shining bright in his awareness like enormous, stationary flares. He has no proof that there exist enemies here that weren’t conjured by his own paranoid imagination.
He allows his head to drop, allows himself to breathe through the agony of the wound that hellish scorpion summons had inflicted upon him, allows his Susanoo to flicker and dim before it fades altogether, bony constructs shattering like so much glass, vanishing into the night as quickly as springtime frost.
The relief is instant and almost overwhelming. Madara’s chakra coils are stingingly raw and almost entirely empty, and when his blood loss and increasingly impaired higher thinking processes are taken into account, that last, desperate Katon: Dragon’s Breath was more than dangerous.
Nearly a full day of combat after forty-eight hours of travel and a week-long mission before that have worn him to the very bone, and when one last surveillance of his surroundings returns nothing unusual, he withdraws his chakra-sense, leaning into his exhaustion and allowing his legs to buckle beneath him.
He doesn’t have the chakra or supplies to send up a flare, doesn’t have the stamina to go any farther than he is, doesn’t have the lung capacity to simply call for help and pray that whoever hears him is a friend rather than yet another foe, doesn’t have the clarity of mind to devise any plan cleverer and more effective. The poison is spreading through his veins, slowly but surely, creeping along his blood vessels like a corrosive rust that consumes his chakra and his energy as it grows, pulsing in time with the beating of his heart.
He can’t ever recall being so tired in his life.
Madara permits himself a spare moment to take one breath, and then another, and then a third, rhythmic breathing doing away with his hyperventilation as his racing thoughts slow and coagulate. He defeated all of the bloodline thieves, and there is no more danger here, not now. He can just wait for a moment, pause and rest and catch his breath while he takes the measure of his surroundings and gathers the shards of his composure.
He knows that the scorpion venom contains a paralytic agent. Every second he spends not sprinting back towards the village is a second wasted, every minute not used to broadcast his need for assistance a minute where he allows his body to deteriorate further, but—
He’s so tired. Surely, surely, his body is strong enough to fight off the effects of the toxin. Surely, he can just spare a single short moment to prepare himself for what will no doubt be an agonizing journey, even if the distance remaining between his current position and Konohagakure would be laughable were he healthy, whole, well-rested.
His fingers shake on the handle of the gunbai when he tries to haul himself upright again, and although the open stab wound in his stomach protests plenty at the movement, that’s not his biggest concern. His legs feel oddly numb beneath him, muscles fluid and bones yielding where there should be surety and strength.
“Huh,” Madara says to himself, blinking as his hands stutter and shake and multiply in his vision. “Well, that can’t be good.”
It’s urgent, urgent, urgent, but he’s starting to forget what it is, and when he looks up at the charred outer bark of the bodhi trees, the world spins and blurs, increasingly unfamiliar even as it tugs at his memory. There’s something important, something vital, something he has to do for the safety of his precious people and his village, but – what exactly is it?
His mind’s eye is glazed and rheumy, its lids lead-heavy, and he can no longer resist the need to just let it slip shut altogether. He did a good job, he’s a good ninja, he doesn’t need to be constantly aware of everything, does he?
His thoughts swim sluggishly in the thick pool of molasses that has suddenly become of his brain, and idly he wonders if this is what it feels like to be inside Hashirama’s head. How does the man manage? No wonder he’s strange. If Madara’s thoughts were permanently impaired in this manner, he’d bash his skull against something hard until he was fixed or dead.
With his mind’s eye shut firmly closed, his sensor’s sight is gone. Of course, he still has his regular senses, still has his sight and his hearing and his sense of smell, but the smoke from his fireball is thick in the air and his Sharingan tug painfully at his optic nerves and he’s so, so tired.
He only notices the bloodline thieves when hands close strangling-tight around his neck, cutting off his oxygen supply and making him gasp for air like a drowning man. Their presence is oily and unpleasant, and how had he missed that, he’s a ninja.
“Go ahead and take them,” a voice urges, and fingers – different fingers, gloved this time, not unlike his own – prod at his face. Madara makes a sloshed attempt to bite at them, but he misses completely and just ends up hissing like a snake as the kekkei genkai hunter gropes at his eyes. “Come on, Kyōka. There could be reinforcements coming, and he’s still breathing.”
There’s a derisive snort, and somewhere beneath the encroaching darkness that settles over his mind in a heavy cloak of oblivion, Madara is offended. “The toxin has him all but dead, boss, and we’ve waited long enough that his higher brain functions should be impaired entirely if not gone at this point. It’s expensive as hell, but you were right; deathstalker venom does its work, and does it well. We have plenty of time to get them and leave, and all those reinforcements will find is a corpse with empty eye sockets.”
“That’s Uchiha Madara, you moron. As long as he’s alive, he’s a threat, and don’t you think that his absence would have been noticed by now? The man doesn’t make a habit of being tardy, and he’s got Senju Hashirama all but licking his sandals. The Hokage will send scouts out looking for him, and we better be gone by the time they reach him.”
“Fine, fine. Just a minute. I want to see how it looks in its native state. Stolen Sharingan are permanently activated, you know, and the Uchiha don’t let anyone near their eyes regardless of whether or not the dōjutsu has manifested.”
Distantly, Madara sees a tall, dark blur come closer and closer until a third pair of hands force his chin up and brush his hair out of his face.
“I suppose you’re right, but this is it, you hear me? I’m not risking our lives because you wanted to nerd out over a charged exploding tag. Every second we spend with him is dangerous. Konoha ninja could be coming at any moment, and he flash-fried all our sensor-nin; we wouldn’t know until too late.”
“Sage, boss, you’re gonna give me an ulcer with all that worrying. I think I’ve observed enough, so stop hovering, alright? Just hold his head still while I—”
The fingers poking at his eyes are suddenly possessed of a strength they didn’t have before, and they’re digging, digging, digging into Madara’s orbital sockets, and he’s still being choked, helpless to even shriek in his agony as his Sharingan are abruptly ripped out of his head.
“—secure the eyes, and now we can leave.”
“Fine work, Kyōka. Give them here and let’s go already.”
The hands around his throat tighten unbearably, and his thought process is impaired to such a degree that he can hardly register the agony sparking across his synapses. Squeezing, squeezing, squeezing, he’s trying to shout – for help, to insult the bloodline thieves, for the sake of his pain, he doesn’t know anymore – but no noise escapes his mouth.
The eyestealers – that’s what they are, eyestealers, and how did they manage to bring Madara so low that they were able to obtain his Clan’s most coveted secret? – fade from his awareness, and he sinks into the welcome blackness with a sigh on his lips and a strange pull yanking at the base of his skull.
It doesn’t matter anymore. Nothing matters anymore. They got his eyes.
Death, at this point, would be a mercy he doesn’t deserve.