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Madara rushes into Tobirama’s bedroom, the shoji door nearly breaking from the force of him slamming it open.
His frantic eyes immediately land right on the pale, unmoving figure on the futon. The figure on the bed did not stir from their slumber, the chest beneath the covers moving rhythmically without any irregularities. Pale lids cover preciously sharp red eyes. Pale arms lay beside him. The position is so unlike his usual curled-in-sleep self.
His breath is stuck in his throat, threatening to choke him. His hand tightens on the doorway. He doesn’t register the crack under the force of his fingers.
Tobirama looks like he’s just sleeping but he looks dangerously still. If he hadn’t been visibly breathing, he’d look dead. Dead like his brothers—young, too damn young, faces covered with white cloth, still, lifeless; so unlike the lively flames they had been—, his parents—cold hands in his as they breathe their last—, and his fallen clansmen. Warm hands cold. Unreachable. Static.
So very, very unlike the ever-moving man with multiple lines of thought on anything and everything under the sun and then some simultaneously going through his mind whom he loves so much it aches.
It takes all he can muster to not collapse right there by the doorway at the sight. The lead weight in his heart threatens to ground him where he stands.
He doesn’t blink, half-afraid that he would open his eyes to his beloved with an unmoving chest. His life stolen by his own carelessness.
(“We found him collapsed in his lab. He’s in a coma.” Hashirama’s voice is uncharacteristically grave as if, with Tobirama’s absence, he had to be the serious one for once. His brown hand feels like a weight heavier than the giant tree the Senju had once thrown at him.
Madara has to remember to breathe, air moving in and out of his body in quiet, shuddering gasps as the reality of it all set in.
A dainty hand touches the back of his hand to offer assurance, and he turns to look. Mito’s brown eyes burn into his, rife with determination. “I’ve been looking through his notes. I’m close to the answer, I know it. I will find out how to fix this, Madara. I will never let my brother sleep forever.”
Hashirama gently pats his cheek. “You can visit him in the meantime. We’ll bring you whatever news we have immediately.”
Madara has never moved faster in his life.)
His footsteps are deathly loud in the silence. He can’t hear Tobirama’s breathing in the midst of it. He collapses beside the futon, armor and unwashed hair and all.
The familiarity of it all threatens to crush him. Countless memories of sitting beside deathbeds of his loved ones run though his mind once more. Breathless gasps leaving final words, the light leaving once-lively eyes, still chests, white cloth over dead-pale faces, slack hands in his.
He takes Tobirama’s hand in his. It’s warm, a meager comfort from the chill that has taken root in his chest ever since Hashirama told him of the news. It’s a comfort nonetheless. His nose stings.
Dark eyes take in every feature of the man laying in the futon. The white hair, the sweeping white lashes, the curve of the smart mouth, the slope of his nose, the strength in his jaw, the firm chest still rising in falling.
Maybe if he looked hard enough, he would never forget a detail. But this isn’t how he wants to remember his love.
The image he wants to have engraved into his soul is whenever this man laughs, whenever he has the ever-bright glint of discovery and fascination in his eyes, whenever he eviscerates people with so few words, whenever this reserved man softens in his presence, whenever he turns to look and sees this man’s love for him naked on his face.
Not like this.
He buries his face in the palm of the pale hand he holds, his breath stutters from the weight in his chest. Tears gather and streak down his cheeks in warm, salty streams. He shuts his eyes tight as he starts to sob.
He breathes in the scent of Tobirama, ozone and sea and oak melded into a scent of comfort and familiarity. He grounds himself in the warmth of the hand in his. He’s not dead. He’s not dead. He’s not dead. He still breathes. His chakra still thrums. He’s still warm.
Madara’s tears lessen and he has enough strength in him to look at the gorgeous face below him. He blinks the tears gathered in his eyes to see Tobirama’s asleep face clearer.
The stillness of his beloved threatens to break him and he can’t help but kiss that marked cheek and mouth, his own mouth wet with his tears. When the mouth beneath his doesn’t move to reciprocate, his tears flood his eyes once more.
He buries his head into Tobirama’s neck, mouth opening in a soundless cry. His sobs ring throughout the room. His chest feels heavy and hollow at the same time.
Unseen by shut dark eyes buried in a pale neck, precious red eyes flutter open.
“Madara?”
Tobirama—
He nearly breaks his back with speed of which he straightened up.
Awake red eyes framed by white lashes look at him curiously like he hadn’t been almost death-like in the coma he just woke from. He’s awake. He’s alive. A flood of words want to flow out through his throat but the sheer number of them threaten to suffocate him where he sits.
“Madara, what’s wrong? You look like you’re on my deathbed. You- you’re crying.” A pale, warm, alive hand reaches up to wipe his tears. It suddenly stills after one wipe. “Ah.” He remembers.
Madara finally finds his voice, choking out, “You fucking idiot, I was gone for a week to find you in a coma.” He’s holding too tightly—he feels light but exhausted with the sudden relief from the weight on what felt like his soul—on the hand in his to wipe his no doubt wet and disgusting face.
There is hesitation in Tobirama’s face as it seems the gravity Madara had put on the situation is clear to him. A hand paler than Madara’s held his cheeks. “I was… studying a coma-inducing poison from Yuki no Kuni that Umeko—” A cousin of his, Madara remembers. “—found. I accidentally mixed it in with a volatile compound in a moment of carelessness—I admit that I had missed sleep. I am… very sorry to have distressed you.”
Before he could explode at the audacity of this man to scare him so much with the result of his recklessness with his own safety, he is rudely interrupted.
“MADARA! MADARA, MITO FIGURED IT OU—” Hashirama lumbers though the still-open door only to stop, stock-still at the sight he finds. He reanimates not a second later. “OTOUTO!!”
Both of them wheeze from the force and weight of such a tall and bulky man landing right on them. Madara’s armor doesn’t help matters, digging into all the uncomfortable places. They squawk at the large man to “Get off!!” but wood must have grown in his ears because he decidedly does not get off.
Madara manages—miracle of miracles—to extricate himself from the older Senju’s embrace with much effort and bears witness to another episode of brotherly Senju squabbling, Tobirama smushing Hashirama’s face away as the taller one tries to gather the squirming younger into his arms.
His eyes crinkle at the sides, chest light. This is the kind of image he wants to keep in his soul forever.