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Braiding Izuna’s hair would be a labor of love only if Tobirama considered it to be particularly laborious. This is what he tells Izuna when the smaller boy crows about his Senju, so precise and so deft, making such careful work of his birdsnest of curls, so gentle. Hashirama is thrilled beyond belief at this news, of course, and if Tobirama were an angrier boy, a colder boy — the boy he’d been before the war held his hatred to the light and shone through the empty fauxicties of it — he might’ve tugged Izuna’s hair for it next time. But he isn’t that boy anymore. And he doesn’t pull. He’s gentle, if you can believe it, really truly gentle; curls falling into place at his fingers like water flows in a river.
It starts like this. Izuna is half asleep on the hardwood one night. Tobirama is late getting home.
There are candles coupled along the chabudai, where a still-warm glass of honey and lemon is steaming and golden. Izuna’s eyes are half closed, one hand knitted in the thick of his hair, red hair-ribbon hanging from his lips. He’s stained with light from the hollow of one of the candles he’s set out, but Tobirama swears he glows all on his own when he smiles like that and says, “Ah, Tobirama. Okaeri.”
“Tadaima.” Tobirama eyes him from his place in the doorway carefully. “Are those the candles my brother sent?”
The flames quiver underneath Izuna’s pinkened fingertips. He hums, almost dubiously, as though he’s somewhere else. His comb hangs limply in his free hand while the wax stains the other. “I especially like this one,” he says. “Rosemary. Rosemary. What a beautiful fool, your brother. Such a nose for the nicer things.”
“Some fool,” Tobirama hums, and starts for the mantel, tugging his armor over his head. He sidesteps a stack of Izuna’s books and paints, ducks beneath a chime that dangles just beside the fireplace. There are blue curtains, hand-sewn, casting their dark light all throughout the foyer with the kiss of the moon just behind them. In his peripheral, Tobirama catches Izuna’s eyes chasing him, crimson like dark wine, and the blue casts a light over him that is unfairly beautiful in the wake of his candles. He’s untying some sash that’s knotted when he sees Izuna turn back to his tea, comb abandoned on the countertop.
There’s a fondness in the way Izuna sighs when Tobirama turns back to him, kneeling behind him with a soundlessness akin to only men like them — so conditioned to war that the delicate parts burrow between their ribs and make a home in their hearts. Tobirama presses his forehead between Izuna’s shoulder blades. “You’re tired,” he deduces.
“Yes,” Izuna snorts. “How astute of you. Would you like a prize?”
“No.” Tobirama‘s lips find the nape of Izuna's neck. “You’ll do well enough.”
Izuna’s hand slides across the slope of his shoulder until he finds Tobirama’s ear, tugging lightly before burying his fingers in his hair. When he scratches, Tobirama almost preens. “You,” Izuna breathes, and tugs his ear again. Tobirama nudges his hand away, up into his hair again with a flick of his chin. “Kami. You’re like a housecat.”
“Terrible creatures,” Tobirama mumbles, and the barely-there goosebumps that bubble up on Izuna’s neck are almost like a reward. He comes down off his knees, tucks his legs up and around Izuna in a hurdler’s stretch, another kiss on the part of Izuna’s hair. He hums contentedly when Izuna traces the outline of his jaw, but the warmth of his hand, the beat of his drowsy chakra is gone all too quickly.
Tobirama tucks a strand of black hair behind Izuna’s ear and cranes his neck to tuck his chin over the his shoulder. There’s the thrum of his slow pulse everpresent, and the warmth of his skin is so deliberate that Tobirama might guess he’s pushing his chakra out on purpose to keep the house heated. Izuna reaches over his shoulder to tug Tobirama’s furs off and drapes them over his chest. “Your face is cold,” he complains.
Tobirama breathes in the smell of Izuna’s candles. Rosemary really is nice. He’ll have to thank Anija again later. “It’s snowing,” he reminds Izuna. “You’re warm.”
“I’d rather be warm in bed,” Izuna remarks, smarting. His yukata slides off one shoulder and he pulls Tobirama’s pelt over the bare skin almost as fast as Tobirama moves to press his forehead against it. Izuna makes a warm sound, low in his throat. “No. No. I’ll fall asleep sitting up at this rate. Just come to bed, would you?”
And he does. Izuna brings his tea along with him and offers Tobirama sips, lifting the glass to his lips carefully, though the honey sloshes out without Tobirama’s steady hand anyway. They find the bathroom in the borrowed light through the slits between their curtains and Tobirama puts on incense while Izuna fusses with the water, combing it through his hair with his fingers.
“Your comb,” Tobirama says, bleary-eyed in the doorway. “I’ll get it.”
“No,” Izuna says. It seems to surprise him almost as much as it surprises Tobirama. His resolve hardens quickly and he fits a few fingers in the mess of curls at his scalp. “I’ll just do without the braid tonight. I’m too tired to sort through all this.”
Tobirama makes a strange face at this. “It’ll be worse in the morning,” he says. “You never do without the braid.”
“Hn. I’m tired, Tobirama. I spent all day translating clan scriptures for Aniki. If it’s a mess in the morning, I’ll handle it. Besides, I’d tried earlier and there were knots I couldn’t . . . reach.”
Tobirama stops, considering. Izuna hasn’t gone without a braid in well over two years, if memory serves, which it often does. Tobirama remembers the important things: how Izuna takes his tea, the taste of smoke on his lips, the way the red haze in his eyes glimmers especially bright when Madara comes around. Tobirama had stayed up late watching the festivities that first night, fireworks at the end of the war like a final battlecry, and his eyes had followed Izuna everywhere, everywhere, everywhere. There’s a unique feeling that comes with pushing a sword between somebody’s ribs; watching Izuna walk from booth to booth, arm-in-arm with Niori, half blind and still bandaged, Tobirama had realized the feeling was terror.
After that, the things he remembers are warmer. The tea, the smoke, the eyes. He’s sure he knows the lines of Izuna’s hands by memory now. But the thing he knows, would know even in death, with shaking hands at the end of the world: is Izuna’s hair. It’s a fuss to comb out but a much bigger fuss when tangled, and so Izuna braids it.
This is an immovable fact of nature. The sun rises in the east and sets in the west, the red birds that Anija feeds all migrate south when the frost sets in, the rivers freeze over and the tides grow cold in Uzushio. And Izuna braids his hair. Long, precise fingers molding curls to bend like the air around his fire, liquid heat. Precious hands, cherished hands — an artist’s hands covered in the dark scars of a solider. Izuna braids his hair.
Izuna sighs tiredly at his reflection. He is beautiful, still.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Tobirama says. Izuna turns with one eyebrow perked, curious. Tobirama will never understand how Izuna suspects he is the house cat of the two of them; Izuna walks as though he’s made of heavy silk, the arches of his shoulders high and his eyes slanted dark. It’s all so catlike. Dark and confident and hunting. Hungry. Though Tobirama supposes it could be just that. Izuna has always had a wilder spirit. Not a house cat, no, but a panther or a tiger, mane like a halo around his beloved head. What can Tobirama do to soothe this spirit, here, where Izuna is tired and the scar at the center of his torso is still pink and brown and half-healed, a gnarly thing shaped like Tobirama’s pride? He tries not to think about how stern he sounds when he says, “I’ll help you.”
Izuna’s eyebrows shoot skyward and a laugh like a holiday escapes him, surprised and almost elated. He doesn’t look as tired, his lazy red flush drained from his face, but Tobirama feels his own skin begin to burn with the weight of being mocked. Has he truly said something so humorous?
“You?” Izuna asks, incredulous, half a breath escaping in a smile. “Don’t be foolish, Tobirama. I wouldn’t expect you to know how to do my hair.”
Tobirama fights the urge to scowl. “You’re saying I couldn’t do it?”
Those hands settle on Tobirama’s chest, slide over the soft fabric of his tunic and smooth it over, all the way to his shoulders. “I’m saying,” Izuna tells him, dark eyes coming up to meet his, “it would be more trouble than it’s worth.”
A tense pause. Tobirama stares down at him with his eyebrows pulled down. “For you, I’d do it,” he says, unthinking. “No matter how troublesome. For you I’d do it.”
Izuna states up at him with a careful, unreadable expression. His eyes are heavy and darker than an ink spill.
“You’ll be patient,” Izuna had said, almost two years ago now, back on his feet after he’d been sat on the haunches of death for weeks after the war. Hashirama had done a well enough job of healing him, but the rasp in his voice was tight, and if Tobirama focused hard enough he might even swear one could find a string of ivy or two growing from the heart of Izuna’s wrist-veins, all the way up to the meat of his ribs. Such is the power of the Senju. Izuna had been lighter since that day.
“I would not bother you with anything more than that,” Tobirama had replied. Izuna breathed, still, nowhere gentle but everywhere light — half painting, half skyline — and leaned bodily against the back of his bed, headboard tightly held together with cloth and vines and sinewy twine. His eyes closed. His throat exposed. But his nails sharp. Teeth sharper. Izuna is not a man who is unfamiliar with killing. Tobirama had tightened his jaw, straightened his shoulders. “My patience—”
“You will be patient,” Izuna said again. That same unreadable look. Trying to solve a fractured puzzle, to guess the ending of a sentence unspoken. A coy up-turn of the lips. “You know, Tobirama-kun, for a man of such intellect, I would think you would know when to hold your tongue.”
Tobirama had only blinked at him. There was a stretch of quiet before Izuna spoke again, facing the window. He had looked like something from the snow.
“You’ve caused my clan great suffering,” Izuna said, in no gentle tone. “You’ve buried the hilt of your sword in my chest, and now you ask for forgiveness.”
Tobirama had braced both hands on his knees. Something of a bow. Something of hiding the way his face had gone dark with guilt.
“I am not so unreasonable,” Izuna decided. “I’ve known you much too long to trust you, you know. But. You have a way of making me think, which no one else seems to be any good at. I haven’t ever felt so alive as when I was dying by your hand. You kept me busy. Kept me alert. I learned the hand signs and sat with them, slept over them for months. And you were a good enemy. So good of an enemy, I…,”
A breathless, haunted laugh. Tobirama had shaken where he sat.
“You ask for forgiveness,” Izuna murmured. “But would you kill for me? If not to put it through my chest, would you hold your sword for me? For the people I’ve loved?”
Tobirama had not been sure of what to say. He only shook.
A long pause, then. Izuna stared down at the vines that lined his wrist, Hashirama’s touch graced all along the ridges of his open-cloth chest.
“For you, I’d do it,” Izuna said. “For you, I would.”
Here and now Izuna is staring at him with a look of something so clouded in love that Tobirama can feel the heat of it pour from Izuna’s fingers, still resting over the planes of his shoulders. His eyes are so dark that they swallow his pupils entirely. There is only refracted light, the washroom bathed in yellow and gold from the candle lit by the casings of face paint, of hair oils, of jasmine and lavender incense and geodes from the West, where the Earth clans presented their devotion. He is so beautiful that Tobirama cannot speak. He wouldn’t dare.
“Okay,” Izuna says. “Alright.”
After a moment Izuna pulls away, taking the honey tea with him. He glides from the bathroom to the bedroom, sits with his legs crossed on the edge of their bed, blankets and hand sewn tapestries strewn about and used as foliage to the garden of the place they rest. Half are complete. The other two are still only lines on long banners of color. Izuna’s mother had left them behind, Tobirama remembers Anija saying (and his eyes had been so full of love love love that Tobirama was certain Madara had bore his heart raw with the touch of this story), when she fell in the first clash; Izuna was only five then. Now Izuna sits on the edge of the bed with his eyes closed, folded legs, tired and soft with the moon’s kiss. Tobirama can’t help but wonder if he looks anything like her.
He finds the comb on the chabudai and the ribbon discarded on the floor beside it, comes back to the bedroom where Izuna had sat unmoving, unreasonably warm, and for all his elegance — almost deafeningly calm. The still-hot cup of honeylemon sits in his lap clasped tight between those steady hands. His eyes do not open.
Tobirama makes for the washroom again, gathers up what hair oil he knows Izuna doesn’t mind the smell of, and starts off again.
The bed dips as he sits down behind the barely-swaying form of the one he loves. There is a fist sized knot in his chest, as though this is his first time being this close to somebody — his first time being this close to Izuna. Want purrs from the heart of him.
The first knots are the worst. Tobirama exhausts most of his energy trying to prove things on a daily basis, and his capabilities in this instance are among them. He will do this right. For Izuna, he will.
There are a few quiet seconds where the only sound is the pick of the comb and the sound of Izuna’s gentle hissing. Tobirama swipes a thumb over the nape of Izuna’s neck at every noise, every sharp tug. He will learn to do this tenderly. There are ways to love and this is the one Tobirama believes he is suited for. Izuna’s hair and his hands in it, picking the last of the sun from between those curls he loves so.
(“You’re very beautiful,” he says at one point.
“You don’t have to flatter me so much,” Izuna drawls back in response, eyes still closed. “I already sleep with you.”)
When the worst of it is through he moves to the ends, long and near the middle of Izuna’s back, littered with birthmarks and burns and scars from the debris of their childhoods. The ends are not so bad, and they’re healthy as well. He had heard from Mito what exactly healthy hair looked like, when she’d fussed over how Anija never seemed to have any split ends. Izuna’s hair is soft and slick with the oil coating Tobirama’s fingers; it breathes with him.
He divides the whole of it into three sections, gently scraping the comb over Izuna’s scalp to gather his bangs. Izuna makes a sound at that, hair on his arms rising, and Tobirama almost smiles.
The quiet during the time when Tobirama folds Izuna’s hair like origami is a welcoming quiet. There are moments where Tobirama eyes the facepaint in the bathroom, wonders distantly if the old marriage traditions still hold true, if Izuna would line his face with patterns and markings and call Tobirama his in life and death. An unfair thing to want, perhaps, but for these moments of quiet, Tobirama cannot imagine a better way to grow old. He takes each strand with compassion and holds Izuna’s bangs back with a few of the long pins clipped over the side of the comb, fastened with twine and old markings that leave them scratched. Tobirama lets his hands fall to Izuna’s shoulders, to his lower back, to his arms at his sides, the hedge of his thigh where there’s enough skin for Tobirama to run his fingers across and hold, hold there, steady and quiet and wanting until the morning sun swallows the crux of everything and steals them along with it.
The ribbon ties it all together. Izuna leans back heavily against him.
“Thank you,” he whispers, before sleep takes them both.