Archive of Our Own

You were standing in the largest lab in Iwagakure’s underground southern base when the summons came.

“Ah, Emi-chan!” the ANBU nin rapped his knuckles on the nearer counter, letting you know he was there like you hadn’t heard his almost-silent footsteps pacing up the hall moments beforehand, “Fudo-san is requesting your presence in Lab Seven.”

It was an effort to smother your instinct to scowl – restraint was keeping you alive and keeping your mission from crashing and burning in the fires of your temper and disgust.

Soon, you reminded yourself. Soon, there will be justice.

When soon was though, you weren’t sure.

“I need to finish this report,” you told the nin. The name he’d introduced himself with was Ryu, though you weren’t as inclined to trust that the Iwa nin had actually given you his name as he was to trust that you are truly Emi Saro, daughter of a jonin and a chūnin, a fledgling healer with a grey moral compass. Iwa has been trying desperately to catch up to Konoha’s prestige, even this early after both villages’ founding, but they do not have Hashirama Senju and they do not have patience either.

And their ambition has made them blind because they have no idea that Emi Saro of the Land of Earth is halfway across the world, living a new life on a subtly manufactured whim to travel the Great Nations, curtesy of one irate clan leader’s dōjutsu.

Make them regret, Madara had ground out to you at the gates before you left.

One of the branch family’s sons hadn’t come back from a solo mission, his panther summons living to tell the tale of ANBU nin marked with the symbol of Iwagakure dragging her unconscious master into the depths of the earth. Her contract had severed in the hours it’d taken her to return to Konoha and the panther had fought the contract-reverse summons and her grief to deliver the report. 

Keiichiro Uchiha had activated a katon blast seal before his death, destroying his eyes, most of his face, and his entire chakra network, effectively killing any hope the researchers in the labs had to unlock the secrets of his clan’s illustrious kekkei genkai.

You’d read his file a week after being inducted into the facility and sat for a long, long time in silence.

“Yeah, too bad,” Ryu shrugged, deceptively nonchalant. “It’s urgent.”

A shame, the researcher had scribbled in Keiichiro’s file, though sedation may prevail in the capture of an Uchiha in the future before suicide seal can be activated.

SoonSoonSoon.

You exhaled a breath through your teeth.

I am Emi Saro, you told yourself again, and Ryu is interrupting my work in genetical experimentation of shinobi with kekkei genkai, which is extremely important to the conservation of Iwagakure over Konohagakure.

“Okay,” you said when you smoothed your own ire down and pulled the guise of Emi Saro back over your mind. “Lead the way.” 

Ryu’s smirk grew into a grin and he motioned with his chin.

“You’re so uptight, Emi-chan,” Ryu teased as you fell into step beside him, because he thought Emi Saro’s irritation was her flustering at his flirting. “You know, working too much can make your hair grey.”

“And not working enough can make you lazy,” you answered flatly, biting into the edge of your lip to stop from outright snarling at the boy – because that’s what he is: a boy.

‘Ryu’ – or whoever the hell he actually is – was sixteen years old and his ANBU tattoo is still the color of fresh blood on his right triceps. It was easy to hate him – he was a part of the horrors you’ve been researching while trapped in this underground compound as much as you are a Konoha nin – but it was even easier to remember that he was a boy every time that you look at him. There was still pudge in his cheeks and his eyes were bright with mirth more often than they were darkened with experience.

Save him, an instinct screamed at you. Before it is too late!

Damn him, said another. He is one of them.

When you were brought into the compound, his role was explained to you as just a containment guard, but you’d found the file on him in your assigned office before Keiichiro’s.

‘Ryu’ – Iwagakure – ANBU – flank position – kekkei genkai: Bakuton.

You’d noticed the stares of some of the other researchers on the boy’s back when he escorted you around the compound before too; always hungry, always waiting. The boy was ANBU, but you weren’t sure he could pick up on the subtle cracks of black ambition that slipped out from under the other researchers’ controlled composures. They all had their own projects already, screams you could hear at any given time, all locked behind doors secured with powerful sealing chakra. They were all waiting for the boy that walked beside you to be strapped on his back to an examine table, eager to violate and explore his kekkei genkai, and you knew they were just waiting to see who would be assigned to take him apart, layer by layer.

You were glad you were in genetic research – Ryu was a boy, and you didn’t believe you could preserve your cover at the expense of his life, his allegiance to Iwa or not.

“What does Fudo-san want?” you asked, turning one of the long corridors with Ryu. He’d led you deeper into the underground, nearly two floors below where you’d been stationed. The intel that Hashirama had given to you a few months ago about the compound had been miniscule and almost obsolete; you hadn’t even known the true depth of the structure until you were in it, which spoke to Iwa’s own concealment abilities. There were ten levels to the facility, and while you were walking along the corridors of the eighth floor, your office and quarters were on the sixth floor.

Ryu shrugged, hands on the back of his head as he walked. “Probably wants your opinion on something. His summons told me to get you and the scrappy little thing wouldn’t spare a detail.”

Fudo’s summons – you were able to recognize at least two distinct moles already, but there were at least seven on the man’s contract. They spoke like humans and walked like normal animals, but apparently they had a nose for detecting subterfuge. At least, that’s the rumor you’d heard from the other researchers.

“My opinion?” you repeated, raising an eyebrow.

The moles hadn’t reacted to you at all, nor breached the thin awareness of chakra you let spread out around yourself at all hours while being in the base, but if they were truly as cunning as you’d heard, you were willing to bet you’d already be dead. You had no doubts that your disgust leaked out often enough while you were assigned to evaluate samples that were sent to your lab, but you’d been able to mostly tamp down entirely on your ire.

You’d collapse this place down unto itself when the time came for it, and not just for Keiichiro Uchiha anymore.

“Well yeah, you’re a valuable asset,” the ANBU nin replied and then cleared his throat, a blush darkening the bronze of his skin. “It’s, uh, why he brought you on, he said. Probably wants your thoughts on something science-y and important, yeah.”

You gave the nin a thin smile, knowing he’d take it and run with it as an encouragement, but Ryu’s eyes were on a sealed door, mouth set into a firm line.

“Paranoid git,” Ryu muttered, dropping his arms and popping his knuckles. “I hate these damn seals – so annoying and literally everywhere.”

You hummed noncommittedly, watching his hands fly through the hand seals to unlock the door.

Bird – Hare – Ram.

Ryu’s chakra funneled through his flat palm on the doorway, and the stone moved, leaving an open cleft in the stone wall. You could Sense Fudo’s chakra now, and three other ANBU nins you’d taken note of milling around the compound, as the door behind you closed, stone sliding back into place.

An instinctive part of you immediately went on guard, but your hands remained at your sides and away from the kunai in your leg holster as you followed Ryu into the room. His posture had stiffened slightly, the man with a scar curling tightly down from his hairline to his neck flashing his chakra in warning at the younger boy beside you. The man had introduced himself as Isao, and Ryu called him taichō. Of all the nin you’d come across in the compound, Isao and his second would give you the worst trouble when it came time to destroy the place, each of their chakra natures sparking like wildfire against your wind nature.

The room you’d walked into was an antechamber of sorts, it seemed.

“Ah, Saro-san,” Fudo spoke, drawing your attention away from the ANBU captain. Behind Fudo, Isao’s second in command slouched against the wall, though the position did nothing to conceal just how deadly the man was. You’d heard of the Stone nin with a killing streak a mile wide, but hadn’t expected to encounter him while you were undercover at all. Truth told, Kanaye Suzuki was a reckoning all to himself, and you’d spent hours wondering why he wasn’t Ryu’s taichō. The man called himself Michi to you, but Michi was from a clan known across the greater continent for blood spilling in the same way the Senju were known for their diplomacy.

You forced yourself to smile at Fudo and the other nin in the room before they realized you were assessing them.

“Fudo-san,” you replied, and then nodded to the ANBU nins. “Ryu said you requested me?”

Hashirama’s file did have information on the lead researcher of the compound. Fudo Ito was acknowledged in Iwagakure as a scholar and his research methods were known to every other shinobi on the continent. The bingo-book was a new thing, but you still remembered Hashirama’s unrestrained expression of revulsion when he read the entry for the man standing six feet in front of you. He was only a C-rank threat, mostly because where he excelled in knowledge, he lacked in ninjutsu, but that didn’t stop Hashirama from ordering every shinobi he let leave the village to remember the danger.

“Yes,” Fudo answered, waving his hand at the ANBU nin around you. “You haven’t got any personal projects right now, do you, Saro-san?”

“Ah, no, Fudo-san,” you replied, not bothering to hide your apprehension. To these nin, you were an orphan, parents recently murdered by Konoha nin, and hellbent on devoting yourself to a cause. Realistically, you were a Konoha nin barely containing her revulsion and hesitation at being assigned a person to dissect and take apart. Handling their tissues were bad enough when you could Sense their fear and pain in the residual chakra signatures in the samples, but you knew you wouldn’t be able to keep up your cover if you were supposed to carry out procedures on the victims themselves. It was why you’d specifically presented Emi Saro’s research into genetics and chakra processes to Iwa and not her full range of knowledge. The woman was better off wherever Madara’s suggestion had sent her, that was for sure. “I’m assigned to the genetics research division.”

“Right, right,” Fudo nodded, glancing toward the closed door to the room beyond. His gaze snapped back to yours and you bit your tongue to keep from flinching. Madman, you wanted to say. You are a madman, Fudo Ito.

Ryu – just in line with your peripheral – had a pallid expression on his face.

“I’m assigning you to a subject,” Fudo said. “Whatever you were doing, give it to that other researcher on your team and I want your concentration here. We’ll start small and work up – I want this one living as long as we can help it – longer than the others.”

Suzuki scoffed quietly as you nodded.

“Blood samples, tissue, hair – whatever it is that you can do, do it on this one,” Fudo ordered, stepping into your personal space. You didn’t move, other than to grit your teeth as the man neared close enough for you to kill with just a swipe of your hand. The ANBU nin in the room merely looked on, boredom clear in their exposed faces. “You’ll keep him alive – he’s yours now, and I want him alive until we’re through.”

“Yes, Fudo-san,” you nodded again, though your mind was racing. Maybe you should have expected this, but you had so meticulously crafted Emi Saro’s repertoire to these nin around both what you needed to get noticed and what would keep you from interacting directly with any of the victims that you thought it was clear enough that Emi Saro wasn’t capable of direct experimentation. Your goal was to gather as much information as you could about Iwa’s illegal experimentation on humans, not contribute to their twisted science. “Though, Fudo-san,” you began, “my specialties aren’t exactly qualified for what you may be…looking for.”

The fourth ANBU nin chuckled softly under his breath.

Fudo waved you off, ignoring the ANBU nin too. “This one’s special and you’re the only one not assigned anywhere else. I want him alive for answers anyway, and the others are too prone to killing their assignments early on.”

Ryu’s face took on a grey shade.

You forced a thin smile and ignored the roil of disgust in your gut. “I’ll do my best, Fudo-san.”

“Good,” Fudo huffed and then spun on his heel, zeroing in on Isao. He didn’t quite invade the nin’s space as much as he had yours, but you felt the brief flare in irritation from the ANBU captain before he smothered it. “The room’s secure, you said?”

“Secure as can be,” Isao replied flatly, hand positioned on the hilt of the tanto blade strapped to his waist. “Check it yourself.”

Suzuki and the fourth nin smirked, but Fudo scowled and clipped the taichō’s shoulder as he shoved past them. Isao made no outward sign of irritation, but his chakra signature curdled with faint killing intent.

“With me,” Fudo snapped at you and the four ANBU nin. Ryu moved to your side as Fudo set his hand upon the door separating the antechamber. There was no chakra signature that you could feel as the door moved away, stone sliding smoothly into the wall as Fudo stepped through the entryway, and that caught your attention before anything else.

With your own research and Hashirama’s help, you’d both come to the conclusion that all organic matter had chakra, including the dead, which made retrieving comrades’ bodies when death invaded the mission plans all the more important. Chakra was a truth-teller, and a nin’s greatest tool to revealing a person’s secrets to the world. Iwagakure was apparently the first to realize it, after Hashirama had issued the order to Konoha nin to always retrieve a comrade’s body. That order had, in the end, resulted in months of jutsu research that had led to the suicide seal Keiichiro Uchiha had used – a jutsu of your own making, using fire to burn an Uchiha or Hyūga’s eyes, and cauterize their chakra pathways into useless tissue that no amount of medical ninjutsu could ever hope to heal. Madara had ordered his clan to memorize the seals regardless if they were active on the rotation roster or not, and the Hyūga had reluctantly followed their lead.

“Is he dead?” Fudo suddenly shrieked, jarring your thoughts as he grabbed Isao’s arm.

“No,” Isao snapped, shoving Fudo off of him. “He’s chakra depleted and restrained just like you wanted, Fudo. I don’t have time to deal with your temper tantrum if he was dead.”

Fudo breathed a sigh, and then grabbed you by the arm, jerking you through the four ANBU to the wall on the opposite side of the room. You noticed the chains first, anchoring bolts wrought with chakra suppressant seals positioned six feet off the ground and, hanging from them, black iron chains restrained the man they were attached to with some lax, enough to let him hunch over his lap. His wrists were red and raw where the chains were attached, and as your gaze swept across him, taking in the seals painted across his chest, your stomach plummeted into a pit.

“Ah, you recognize him,” Fudo grinned with barely disguised glee. He suddenly lashed out, and kicked the man’s bent leg.

The reaction was instantaneous –

Tobirama Senju’s head snapped up, snarling despite the gag in his mouth, blood and dirt stained to his face and hair, jerking against the chains as he tried to stand before identical cuffs on his ankles kept him down. All four of the chains attached to him swelled blue, sealing his chakra as he strained against them, and you gasped before you could stop yourself.

Fudo jumped backwards and then laughed, leaving you standing alone in front of Tobirama.

His gaze darted to yours and –

Confusion. Complete, utter confusion. The lines around his eyes creased and his lips parted around the gag, but then his jaw clenched – a hardening in his eyes and the set of fury, and he sneered at you, hatred clear on his face.

“He’s harmless,” Isao was saying, coming to stand beside you. “We wore him down to chakra depletion and cuffed him before we brought him here so he couldn’t activate any of those suicide seals Konoha seems to be suddenly so fond of.”

Tobirama had been captured by Iwagakure nin.

How the hell had Tobirama Senju been captured by Stone nin, of all the shinobi in the Great Nations? His nearest rival to power was in Kumogakure, from a clan of nins incredibly fast and adept to suiton jutsus, and this was obviously not Lightning Country.

Fuck. This was not supposed to be happening.

“He’s hardly harmless, taichō,” Suzuki called from the entry way, leaning against the wall there. He was picking at his nailbeds with a senbon. “That fucker nearly did me the curtesy of becoming left-handed.”

Suzuki waggled the fingers of his right hand at you, his hand and wrist wrapped in gauze and surgical tape, pink and red in some places.

Too bad he didn’t finish the job, you nearly snarled at the ANBU.

“This is Tobirama Senju, the Shodaime Hokage’s brother?” Ryu asked, standing a bit closer to the wall than he had been moments before Tobirama had lunged for Fudo. “He’s...”

“Harmless,” Isao repeated lamely, “and presumed dead outside of this compound, so keep your mouth shut about it, got it, kid?”

Ryu snapped to attention and nodded, eyes still on Tobirama. “Hai, taichō.”

Fudo grabbed your arm again, yanking you back. “I want blood samples done and results on my desk in the next twenty-four hours. No breaks and no slacking – he’s our key to unlocking and synthesizing the wellspring of chakra the Senju are known for.”

“Yes, Fudo-san,” you made yourself nod. You couldn’t look back at Tobirama – not when you were struggling to keep your hands from your kunai holster and force whoever it was that sealed Tobirama to let him go.

Fuck – this is bad. So, so damn bad.

Fudo dropped your arm and pointed at Ryu.

“You, boy,” Fudo snapped. Ryu straightened. “Get Saro-san whatever she needs.”

Ryu glanced toward Isao, who nodded.

“Hai, Fudo-san,” Ryu said.

“I want the rest of you to keep anyone not supposed to be on this floor off of this floor,” Fudo continued, pointing at Isao and the two nin behind him. “Do you understand? It can’t be known the Senju is here.”

“We’re not yours to order around.” Suzuki glared at Fudo over Isao’s shoulder.

“It’ll be done,” Isao replied, then nodded at the other nin in the room. “Jin, clear the floor and make sure there’s no stragglers.”

Jin moved with effortless grace and left the room without a word.

“Michi, with him,” Isao added after a moment, when Suzuki’s irritation didn’t abate. “Out of my sight.”

 Suzuki huffed and slipped out the door.

“Teach your subordinate some respect, Isao,” Fudo sneered. “My patience is the only thing keeping him from being reported to the Tsuchikage.”

“I’m sure he’d take your report into consideration,” Isao replied blandly and then looked toward you. The ANBU captain’s gaze was scrutinizing, assessing you as Emi Saro and not a Konoha nin, you reminded yourself as his chakra brushed against yours. “Avoid his hands if you can,” Isao said bluntly. “He can’t grab you, but I wouldn’t put it past him to break a bone in order to get some range of movement.”

“I’ll be careful,” you responded, ducking your chin so you wouldn’t have to keep looking into the taichō’s eyes.

Isao grunted.

Fudo turned on you again. “Blood samples before twenty-four hours is up. I want a superficial reading on his chakra levels too under those chains, and make sure you monitor his behaviors.”

I can tell you now he’s only going to be murderous from here on, you thought.

“Yes, Fudo-san.”

The chains holding Tobirama clacked as he strained against them again.

The corner of Isao’s mouth turned up. “He took out twenty-seven of us, but seeing him reduced to a test subject certainly has its benefits.”

You gave the enemy nin a hesitant look, otherwise struggling to bury your ties to Tobirama beneath Emi Saro, “You’re sure he’s harmless?”

Isao nodded. “There’s seven kinds of seals branded into those chains and three on his body – the Senju might claim to be a fūinjutsu master but he’s nothing compared to Iwagakure’s fūinjutsu users. He’s chakra depleted too, so the only weapon he’s got is that sharp tongue if you even bother to listen.”

“The chains are anchored to the stone itself, Emi-san,” Ryu inserted, trying to be helpful but his eyes gave away his apprehension. “Unless he can bring the wall down and the floor up, he’s entirely at your mercy.”

That thought didn’t sit well with you. Tobirama was not a force to be put down on anyone’s mercy or even to be controlled.

Your fingers ticked toward your kunai holster and Fudo scoffed.

“Don’t bring those around him either,” Fudo said, pointing at your kunai. “Maybe for the other subjects, but the Senju will probably try to take it from you with his teeth if he thinks he can – the whole clan is desperate enough for life to reduce themselves to power grabs.”

Emi Saro would nod her head and show fear and hesitation. Emi Saro is scared of Tobirama Senju.

You breathed, both to center your thoughts and look like you were trying to shore up bravery.

“Ryu-san,” you looked to the nin, “could you bring me my notepad from the other lab?” He nodded and made to leave, but you stopped him, catching his wrist. His pulse was pounding under your fingers. “Fudo-san, I’ll need to, ah, feed the subject too, after the blood is taken, and make sure his electrolytes are balanced. Water would be good too, at your discretion.”

“Have it,” Fudo waved his hand. “Keep him alive, I don’t care how, but make no mistake, Saro,” he said, leaning forward into your face. You gripped Ryu’s wrist tighter to keep from lashing out at the Iwa scientist, hoping the ANBU nin would only think you were afraid. “Your life is forfeit if the Senju dies.”

You nodded once and then again, forcing your person to be intimidated. “Yes, Fudo-san. I’ll take care of the subject.”

Fudo snorted as he left the room. “Let him wither for all I care, Saro, but make sure he hangs by those chains alive.”

I will kill you, you swore. When the day comes, I will kill you.

Ryu cleared his throat and you let his wrist go. “Sorry,” you said, glancing around the room. It was a stocked lab too, most of the same equipment in your own lab here too. Ryu wouldn’t know that though. “I need you to get food and water too, whatever’s available. And there’s a tray of equipment in my lab too – grab that.”

Ryu nodded, rubbing his wrist as he made his way out the door. He hesitated though, glancing toward Tobirama, who you could feel glaring holes into the side of your head. “I’ll be back soon, Emi-chan. Be careful.”

You flashed the ANBU nin a small smile, prodding his fondness for Emi Saro. “Don’t worry about me, Ryu. The subject can’t hurt me, right, just like your taichō said.”

Ryu frowned and then nodded, slipping out the doorway and sealing it behind him.

You listened, feeling out with your chakra as the Iwa ANBU and Fudo left the antechamber. Suzuki was on the opposite end of the floor, Jin in the immediate vicinity, and Isao and Fudo both approaching them. Ryu was following at a distance, all five of them moving toward the staircase that connected all ten of the levels. The faint chakra signatures of the three other researchers on the floor were intermixed between them.

Tobirama made a noise through the gag but you ignored him, searching the drawers of the lab table for a pen. When you found one, you snatched a piece of paper and scrawled the most effective silencing seal you could think of on it and then slapped it against the wall beside the door. It glowed as it took effect.

Instantly, your shoulders lost their tension.

“Fuck,” you hissed out and then turned on Tobirama. He was staring at you with calculating eyes, jaw still set. You didn’t hesitate to drop to the floor in front of him, reaching around his head to untie the gag.

“Tobirama,” you said, tugging the gag from his mouth. It was cut from his own shirt you realized as you threw it away, recognizing the Senju kamon embroidered into the fabric. “Are you okay? What the hell happened?”

He coughed, turning away from you, and you grabbed his shoulders, trying to send chakra to his arms and wrists, and heal the jagged cuts across his chest and stomach. The painted seals on his body glowed purple and you sucked in a breath, yanking your hands back as they absorbed your chakra too.

“Don’t bother,” Tobirama grunted. “You shouldn’t heal me – they’ll think you’re too compassionate toward me.”

You hesitated. “What happened Tobirama? How are you here? How did they get you?”

His face was a mess of caked blood and dirt, streaking from the cuts in across his forehead and cheeks, and smeared from his nose across his mouth and chin. He was a horror to look at, his power itself aside.

“Ambush,” Tobirama said, glancing toward the seal you’d put on the room. “Another team was attacked in the area and we weren’t sure if it was by Iwa or Grass nin, so Hashirama sent a unit out to investigate.”

You swallowed. “Any survivors?”

“No,” Tobirama ground out. “The other team was genin with their sensei, and I suspect they were attacked as bait to lure out stronger nin.”

Your stomach turned. “Stronger nin like the Uchiha or Hyūga.”

“Yes,” Tobirama nodded once. “Hashirama let me go in Izuna’s place on the retrieval squad since we weren’t sure if Iwa was responsible, and it turns out that was a good choice, considering Madara’s fury if Izuna were captured.”

You didn’t have the capacity for his sarcasm right now.

“You’re a Senju and the brother to the Shodai Hokage, Tobirama,” you shook your head, running a hand through your hair. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they had me searching your DNA for any signs of mokuton or a latent kekkei genkai.” 

Tobirama’s jaw clenched. “You’re undercover.”

You gave him an incredulous look. “You think I experiment on unsuspecting nin in my free time?”

“I think you’ve been absent from the village for four months with no contact and no indication that you were still alive,” Tobirama replied flatly.

“Evidently, I am,” you said, irritation leaking.

“Evidently,” Tobirama drawled.

You exhaled a breath through your teeth. “Kami, you’re annoying.”

Tobirama scowled, mouth opening to no doubt sneer some kind of retort at you as he usually did, but Ryu’s chakra signature flared up in your senses as he unsealed the door.

You stood up fast, retreating from Tobirama and simultaneously snatching his gag from the floor before you crossed your arm over your stomach, all before Ryu even crossed the threshold.

“Everything okay, Emi-chan?” Ryu asked, pushing a cart into the room. He’d brought your lab things and food in the same trip, a bowl of miso steaming on top of the cart. Two canteens of water sat next to the bowls, as well as a plate of vegetables and chicken. Those were meant for you, you knew, as you took stock of the ration bars and soldier pills on the cart too, set apart from the fresh food.

“Everything’s fine,” you replied, crossing the room to the ANBU nin. “I was just trying to ask the subject about his abilities, but he’s been rude about it.”

Ryu’s eyes flitted to Tobirama on the other side of the room, who you knew was scowling without even looking.

“He’s a powerful suiton user,” Ryu supplied, gripping the cart with white knuckles as you set the tray of food on the lab table. The soldier pills rattled in their bottle as you set them down. “He’s a sealsmaster too, and intel says he can do all the nature releases, yin and yang included.”

I know, you stopped yourself from saying. “Yin and yang releases?” you asked instead, hoping you sounded surprised.

Ryu nodded, still holding onto the cart. “His kenjutsu is weaker but still deadly. Not too strong with genjutsu, but he won’t be able to use any ninjutsu anyway while he’s sealed.”

Sealed.

“Ryu,” you said, turning, “do you know who sealed him?”

The ANBU nin shifted on his feet. “I did.”

Damn, you thought. You’d decided that Ryu was potentially a premature promotion from chūnin straight into ANBU, his chakra levels nowhere near a jōnin’s, but if he was a considerable fūinjutsu user, it made sense that he’d be drafted into an organization designed for discretion. And for the boy to know ten different types of chakra suppressant seals – strong ones too, if they were keeping Tobirama down – that was something impressive.

Impressive and dangerous, especially if he were ever to try to put a seal on you.

“The seals on his chest,” you began to say, gesturing toward Tobirama, “do you think you could undo them without freeing him?”

Ryu’s expression tightened. “You want me to remove the seals on him?”

“Just so that I can heal him,” you explained, trying to keep your voice level and somewhat meek. You rubbed the back of your neck, smiling shyly, “I can’t really keep him alive if he’s bleeding internally, Ryu.”

The boy straightened, blushing slightly as he looked between you and Tobirama.

“The seals on him are designed to slow his chakra in its pathways,” Ryu explained, frowning. “Taichō probably won’t want me to remove them…”

“But then I can’t keep him alive,” you sighed, resigned, and rubbed the bridge of your nose. “I’m not eager to see what Fudo-san will do to me if I end up being the reason why the Senju dies.”

Ryu huffed. “Fudo-san won’t be doing anything to you.”

You made yourself smile wider and look hopeful. “So you’ll help me, Ryu?”

Ryu glanced at between you and then Tobirama. “I don’t think he’ll let me get close enough to him to unseal him,” he said slowly.

You gave Tobirama a look over Ryu’s shoulder.

Tobirama sneered at either the ANBU boy or you.

“Isao-san said he won’t be able to grab me even if I did get close,” you said and then lowered your voice, almost conspiratorially. “He let me take the gag from his mouth.”

“Probably because his cruel mouth is the last weapon he’s got,” Ryu muttered and you gave an actual breath of laughter. Of course, even in the darkest, twisted corners of the shinobi world, Tobirama’s renowned sharp tongue and ability to weave words into weapons would be known.

Ryu smiled when you laughed, even as Tobirama glowered at you from afar.

“I’ll remove the seals on his body, but if Isao-taichō orders them to be replaced, I’ll have to do it,” Ryu told you. “The other seals on the chains will be able to take care of his chakra as he recovers, so you shouldn’t have to worry about anything else.”

“Thank you, Ryu.” You smiled widely, hoping you looked grateful.

Ryu blushed darker but crossed the room until he was standing only a few feet in front of Tobirama. You watched, bemused as Tobirama’s irritated gaze flicked between you and the ANBU nin, but his mouth stayed shut as Ryu dropped to his knees.

“Don’t try anything,” Ryu warned Tobirama, setting one of his hands on the kunai holster strapped to his left thigh.

Tobirama gave the boy a flat look.

“Nothing to say?” Ryu muttered. “That’s a first.”

“Nothing noteworthy,” Tobirama deadpanned. Ryu’s head snapped up from the seals, his hand gripping a kunai hilt, and you took a cautionary step forward, one hand rising to form an offensive seal if needed.

“No pleas for letting you go?” Ryu snapped. “Surely begging like the dog you are isn’t beneath you.”

Tobirama only glared.

Ryu scoffed and the seals on Tobirama’s chest glowed purple then faded into white curls of smoke. Where they were, Tobirama’s skin was clean, dirt caking everywhere else except the patterns of the seals.

“Emi-san is going to take you apart and put you back together and you will be awake to feel every cut of the knife,” Ryu sneered as he stood up. “By the time she’s done with you, you’ll be begging for death.”

A single, slender eyebrow raised on Tobirama’s face. “Really.”

Ryu snarled but before he could say anything, you cut in, beaming at him.

“Thank you, Ryu!” you smiled. “You’re sure I can heal him now?”

Ryu was becoming a mildly concerning shade of red, chakra sparking with embarrassment and alarm as his eyes darted back and forth between you and Tobirama. “I – um – yeah,” he nodded, rubbing the back of his head with his free hand. “Yeah, you’re okay. He couldn’t hurt you if he wanted to – not while he’s like this at least.”

EmiSaroEmiSaroEmiSaro

“That’s a relief,” you exhaled. He began to frown and then cleared his throat, the blush clinging his cheeks as it faded everywhere else. “He probably would’ve died and I would’ve been in deep with Fudo.” You winced. “You’re a lifesaver Ryu.”

Tobirama scoffed and you glanced at him, but he was already scowling at the floor.

“It’s no worries, Emi-chan,” Ryu gave you a wide grin. “Was there anything else you needed?”

You pretended to hesitate, looking between Tobirama and the ANBU nin again, but then nodded your head, smiling. “I’ll be okay from here. I’ve got the lab materials I need thanks to you.”

Flattery was sometimes more useful than a sharpened kunai, something you had realized in the months you’d spent undercover. Ryu was the easiest of the enemy nins to wrap around your finger, but a part of you recoiled from the manipulation. Combat and science were your strengths, and espionage was a very, very tedious thing when entombed nearly sixty feet beneath the earth and surrounded by ANBU-grade enemies at all times. The boy in front of you was coincidentally your access to the pulse of Iwa through the compound, but that didn’t make using him sit any less comfortably in your gut. Spying was a game you didn’t like to play, no matter how much satisfaction you would have when the mission was completed and the labs and experiments around you were destroyed.

Ryu’s blush remained as he gave you a short, two-fingered wave as he headed towards the door to the anteroom. “I’ll be around, Emi-chan! Shout if the Senju gives you any trouble!”

You nodded, giving him the same wave back. “Thank you!”

He slipped out the door, the stone sliding shut behind him. You waited until his chakra signature had left the anteroom and started up the hall to the main stairway to sag against the lab table behind you.

“Fuck,” you swore, head in your hands as you shook it. “This can’t be happening.”

“Emi-chan?” Tobirama’s voice came from the floor, sarcasm dripping.

“The name I’m working under,” you replied, waving your hand. “Emi Saro – she was the daughter of some dead Stone nins and we used her to get in with the operation here.”

“We?”

You gave Tobirama a look. “Hashirama didn’t tell you about the mission?” When he just stared at you, you sighed, kneeling on the floor in front of him. You raised your hands to his shoulders, pressing your palms flat against his warm skin. “Keiichiro Uchiha was reported kidnapped by his panther summons to us a few months ago,” you explained while you worked, chakra sinking into Tobirama’s system. He shifted, chains rattling, the only sign of his discomfort at the feeling. “We found out that Iwagakure has been collecting nin with considerable strength and kekkei genkais and bringing them all back here.” There wasn’t too much damage to Tobirama’s body physically, other than a smattering of bruises across his back that you felt through the broken capillaries, and a fracture to one of his ulnas, so internal bleeding was a bit of a lie in the end. His chakra drain was your largest concern. “Hashirama and I started to make an identity while Madara and Izuna investigated the nin coming and going from the area. After that, it was only a matter of getting Emi Saro noticed by the Iwa researcher leading the operation and being brought in.”

“Who is leading the operation?” Tobirama asked as you set your hand on his arm, concentrating your chakra to the bone beneath. He remained stiff under your touch, and you fought to not grimace at the awkwardness.

“Fudo Ito,” you answered. Tobirama scowled.

“The goal of the operation?”

Osteoblasts mineralized bone under your touch, and as you pulled back from his system, you gradually healed the bruising around the area, despite his warning against it.

“Well, the fool’s goal is to isolate and transfer the genetic traits that host kekkei genkais to another subject not from the same bloodline,” you replied, a bite of irritation in your voice. You’d listened to countless rants from Fudo over the last weeks about his dreams of creating the ultimate shinobi and had reconciled your suffering patience with the fact that once you had indisputable proof of Iwa’s actions, the man would be dead before he could say bloodline limit again. “Iwa’s goal is to discover how to stop or erase a kekkei genkai entirely.”

“‘Erase a kekkei genkai?’” Tobirama’s brow furrowed and you could practically see the thoughts racing across his mind. “It would be easier to kill an entire clan than spend years researching something as innate as bloodline limit.”

You winced at his surgical tone but nodded. “Fudo is sponsored by Stone, but I think his loyalties only go so far as the budget the Tsuchikage gives him.”

“The Tsuchikage is involved in this?” Tobirama asked, an eyebrow rising and irritating the slanting cut across his forehead. You reached before thinking and Tobirama’s gaze narrowed on your face as you pressed your fingers to his hairline.

“I’m nearly positive,” you answered, ignoring the proximity for the sake of your own sanity. This close, you could smell him now, the scent of turned earth and sweat clinging to his skin. Aside from literally living beneath the ground, it was the closest experience you’d had with the outside world since being inducted into the base. “If Iwagakure’s ANBU is structured anything like ours, then they report directly to their kage too. I’ve seen probably seven or eight nins regularly here enough to suggest that they’re assigned to Fudo.”

Tobirama remained silent as you stood, retreating to the table you’d set the food on. You picked up the bowl of miso, balancing the renge on the plate of chicken and vegetables, and tucked one of the canteens under your arm. Tobirama eyed the food as you kneeled in front of him again, carefully as to not drop anything or spill the soup.

“Is it drugged?” he asked.

“No,” you shook your head. “It’s meant for me – your food is supposed to be ration bars and soldier pills.”

He grimaced and you realized in the same moment you were going to have to feed him.

Fuck.

…

Tobirama Senju was a proud man.

You’d known that from the moment your paths had crossed those years ago in the new village center, when Hashirama had beamed and waved him over from the far side of the street, introducing you to the best scientist Konoha had to offer. You’d smiled, naïve and eager to meet anyone, and gave your name to the white-haired man who would become an unintentional keystone in your life. You came from a small clan settled near the Daimyo’s Palace, generations of shinobi in your family contracted to protect and guard the esteemed family – until whispers had turned to rumors and rumors to conversations about the clan leader with the mokuton release and who wanted to make a village. Conversations turned to debates when Hashirama announced his dream was shared by Madara Uchiha, and their clans’ peace treaty was acknowledged by the Daimyo himself.

And then you became the first shinobi in three hundred years of service to request permission to leave your duty as the Daimyo’s esteemed guard and bring all the knowledge you had on jutsus and chakra and history to the gates of Konoha.

Your place in the village was defined by your intelligence, and you were allowed access to the science compound Hashirama had created for his brother, and all the scrolls and documents the Senju and Uchiha had amassed through their clans’ histories. In those permissions, however, your life had become irrevocably entangled with the same man that had hardly acknowledged you for more than a moment since meeting you.

The same man you’d begrudgingly grown to admire despite his blunt personality and near-rude silence. It had taken a full year before Tobirama had an entire conversation with you without anyone else prodding it along, and by the time either of you had realized it, he was already back on his side of the research building and you were standing in your lab, graduated cylinder filled with solution halfway tilted toward a volumetric flask awaiting your dilution trials. 

The conversation hadn’t been meaningful, him returning the scroll you’d taken from the Daimyo’s library –

(“You would be arrested if the Daimyo ever found out about this,” Tobirama commented, letting the scroll close in his hands.

“The librarian would kill me first if he could find me before the Daimyo got the chance to put me on trial,” you replied flatly, smirking at your notes.)

 – and had evolved to him asking you casual questions about your experiment –

(“Hashirama mentioned the hospital stuff thought another chemical might’ve gotten mixed in with the penicillin stock,” you explained. “They already replaced their supply, but I’m just making sure it was just an irregularity and not purposeful.”)

– and when he’d left, and you’d realized you hadn’t wanted him to leave, enjoying his company for the first time since meeting him.

One conversation had evolved into two, and then three, and then you were referencing each other’s knowledge and bouncing ideas off of one another in the moments you took breaks together. You’d unintentionally taken dinner with him only a month after the penicillin debacle that had Madara fuming about the carelessness of the medics was solved, your conversation about the theory of chakra and its origins consuming your forefront thoughts until one of the yatai workers was calling you both to her stand, trying to press a plate of yakisoba into your hands.

She’d given another plate to Tobirama, ushering the two of you to one of the free tables at the street side. And Tobirama had stayed, interjecting with his own thoughts as you explained the notes you’d found in the Daimyo’s library about chakra, his gaze hardly ever leaving you for longer than a moment.

“Tell me,” Tobirama had said one day when you were sitting across each other at a table in Senju’s Main House, “how does one who comes from a family of shinobi whose only loyalties are to the Daimyo find the prospect of Konohagakure so appealing that they turn their back on the contract that promises their life to the longevity of the Daimyo’s?”

You’d paused, the cup of tea you’d been holding in your hands suddenly heavier beyond just porcelain.

Around you at the table, Hashirama and Tōka’s conversation ceased as well, until they were both looking between you and Tobirama.

“I’m afraid I don’t understand your question,” you replied steadily, trying to gauge Tobirama’s chakra. As always, his signature was composed and neutral, but you could see the cut in his eyes as he tried to figure you out, as though you were one of the many jutsus you both had spent hours discussing.

“Tobirama,” Hashirama spoke his name with warning.

“You lived a life of privilege without the stress of clan wars and territorial claims,” Tobirama replied, ignoring his brother and continuing to drill you to the spot with his tone alone. “You have never fought in battles like any other shinobi here, and your education extends far beyond most other people in the village because of the privilege you had as part of the Daimyo’s personal guard. I would like to know whether it is the promise of peace and end to conflict that you yourself would not be endangered by or the true curiosity of watching a village grow that by no means were you in part of building that brought you here?”

“Tobirama!” Tōka snapped. “Your words are cruel and unnecessary.”

You stared back at Tobirama, something like humiliation from his words tugging at your gut as you forced yourself to maintain eye contact with him. Gone was the man that you had spent months now with sharing knowledge and thoughts, replaced again with the person who had dismissed you with little more than a glance the day that you met.

“It’s alright,” you said, setting your cup down and glancing at Tōka and then to Hashirama, who was glaring at his brother and flashing you an apologetic smile. “Tobirama-sama’s question is valid.”

Tobirama-sama. You hadn’t called him that in weeks.

“I don’t have the experiences of war that you or the other clans in the village do, that is true,” you said, speaking to Tobirama again, “but that does not make me any less of a shinobi. I fought battles to guard the lives of people I thought of as precious and important as well. A contract may have been signed by my ancestors, but it was loyalty and friendship that allowed it to endure for so long.” You took a breath. “Do not call me privileged when it is only by association to the Daimyo that you cite. My education comes from years spent reading what I could and speaking to whatever ambassadors or clansmen came to the Daimyo. I lost family to battles as well, and I lost blood for a cause too. It may not have had the name ‘Konohagakure’ but the ideal of unity and peace were there all the same.”

You had stood to your feet, still holding Tobirama’s unwavering cold gaze.

“I came to Konohagakure to see an ideal that I held onto become tangible,” you continued, holding your chin up. “You are right – I did not help build this village, and I was not either man that signed the peace treaty between two clans who have warred for as long as history has been recorded, but I came to be part of it and ensure its longevity,” you couldn’t keep the bite out of your tone, “just like my family did for the Daimyo.”

You turned to Hashirama and Tōka, bowing to them.

“I have other business now,” you told the Shodai Hokage. “Thank you for the meal and your time.”

You left them in silence.

The next day, you’d requested Hashirama to put you on the active mission roster. He’d apologized over and over to you about Tobirama’s behavior, but you’d only smiled and told him he wasn’t responsible for his brother.

You’d heard Hashirama say something about sending Tobirama to Amegakure to order to facilitate peaceful terms, but you were already accepting your assignment to your new team and leaving before the Shodai’s kindness could make something about his brother’s coldness stab you in the gut.

You’d spent three weeks on active duty, out of the village more often than not, and journeying into parts of Fire Country that you’d never seen before.

And then Keiichiro Uchiha had been captured and forced to kill himself.

…

You released a short breath before picking up one of the cooked strips of chicken – always plain, with hardly more seasoning than salt seared into them – and held it up in the space between you and Tobirama.

Tobirama’s hard gaze nearly bore through your efforts to keep your composure secured around you.

“I don’t want to give you the pills or rations,” you said as explanation when he neither spoke nor moved. “They’re too high in energy and protein while you’re recovering from chakra drainage.”

You saw a muscle feather in his jaw. “I know that.”

You bit into the edge of your tongue, irritation flexing just slightly. “Then eat the chicken, Tobirama.”

His expression turned caustic. “I’m your prisoner, not your pet. They’ll suspect your allegiance if they kind out you’ve been feeding me your meals.”

Your mouth pressed into a flat line as you wrangled back the urge to roll your eyes at him. “Eat the damn chicken, Tobirama.” You tried to bring it closer to his face but he pulled back, showing you his cheek as he scowled.

“Give me the rations,” he snapped, glaring at you from the corner of his eye.

“You’re acting like a child!” you retorted. “It’s food, Tobirama, not a poison!”

To prove your point, you ate the piece of chicken pinched between your hashi and cut him a glare while you chewed. The food wasn’t poison, but it certainly wouldn’t be anyone’s first choice as a meal, that was for sure.

He huffed, turning his chin further away, letting you see the streaks of grime in his hair and the smattering of blood across the strong column of his neck.

You sat back on your haunches, gaze dropping away as you scoffed again. Of course – of course Tobirama was too proud to let you help him even now, when you were the only person who could grant him the mercy of kindness.

Tobirama’s pride…that was something you’d come to know of intimately while you’d worked together. He was intelligent, a genius in his own right, in both a laboratory and in a battlefield. Even in the Daimyo’s employ, you’d heard of the famous Senju Brothers and their battle prestige, the only rivals that stood to the equally famous Uchiha Brothers.

Ever since they were children, they had been among the ranks of their clansmen, you remember hearing a courtier in the capital whisper. How strong they must be as men now.

For a moment, you felt a stab a pity between your ribs as you looked again at Tobirama’s still turned head before it was squashed by empathy and understanding. He’d sooner accept the solider pills and ration bars because he wouldn’t need your help as much as he would if he were to accept the fresher food you were trying to feed him. He was a man who had been doing everything himself from the time he was younger than most of the genin in the village now, known across the continent as pillar of strength and power, and to be chained and sealed like an animal with you trying to feed him…

“Tobirama,” you spoke, keeping your tone beneath the waves of ire rolling off of him, “I’m your ally here.”

You met his gaze as his eyes flicked back to yours, and you both regarded each other for a long moment.

You were comrades by allegiance to Konohagakure, but had you ever really been allies to each other? You’d thought of him as a friend, for that short span when conversation and time was shared between the two of you before he’d tried speaking down at you at his brother’s table, but had you really been friends at all?

You pushed the thoughts away – now was not the time to think of it. Tobirama was in danger, and so was your mission.

The bone of his jaw pressed against his cheek again but he nodded once and then again before turning back to you. “Alright.”

You did him the favor of not commenting and raised another piece of chicken to his mouth. He took it, immediately turning away from you as he chewed, and you concerned yourself with picking one of the vegetables. The assortment was limited, every meal you’d been given since arriving prepped by someone who evidently deigned efficiency over flavor. All the foods were high in protein and nutrients, designed to make up for the absence of vitamins that would otherwise be available outside of the compound.

Silence stretched between the two of you until Tobirama had finished the plate of chicken and you were lifting the bowl of miso up.

“What is your mission here?” Tobirama asked as you filled the renge with soup.

“I’m supposed to be gathering proof of Iwa’s experiments,” you replied, setting the renge against Tobirama’s mouth. There had been an indignant tinge of pink crawling up his neck since you’d began feeding him, but by now his cheeks had darkened in an embarrassed flush as his lips parted and he swallowed the miso. Your fingernails dug into the flesh of your palm with the effort it took to not let your own embarrassment flood past your composure. “Hashirama wants undeniable proof of the atrocities happening here so he can present it to a kage summit and hopefully get the support of Kiri, Kumo and Sand to remove the Tsuchikage from office and tried for his crimes.”

Tobirama swallowed the miso as his brow furrowed. “Hashirama said nothing of this to me.”

You didn’t answer, filling the renge again and lifting it to his mouth again, but his lips didn’t part as he continued to stare down at you.

“Eat the soup, Tobirama,” you said, pressing the edge of the renge against his face. His eyes narrowed, the flush still present but nowhere near as pointed as his irascible expression. You scowled, rolling your eyes. “I infiltrated Iwagakure, the biggest enemy to Konoha, Tobirama,” you said flatly. “Only Hashirama, Madara and Izuna are supposed to know where I am because if word got out that a Konoha jōnin was undercover, the Great Nations would be looking twice at any foreign nin in their territories.”

“I know that,” Tobirama snapped, petulance beneath his words, “but I am my brother’s most trusted ally and one of his inner circle. I should have been told about where you have been all these months.”

You have never fought in battles like any other shinobi here, and your education extends far beyond most other people in the village because of the privilege you had as part of the Daimyo’s personal guard.

Irritation uncoiled in your gut, snaking around your heart.

“I know you doubt my abilities as a shinobi, Tobirama, but if your brother – the Hokage – could trust me with this mission, then you’d have no reason not to as well,” you replied, gaze unflinching as you stared back at Tobirama.

He clenched his jaw before he huffed, “Have you ever even been undercover before?”

Hands holding your face; a kiss pressed to your brow; the taste of tears in your mouth as you –

“Yes,” you ground out. His gaze flicked over your face, one slender brow rising in question, but you rolled your eyes and stood up with the half-empty bowl and plate. “Contrary to your prejudice about the Daimyo’s Guard, Tobirama, I did more than educate myself in the capital.”

Ghosts whispered in your memories, but you swallowed the old grief as you set the dishes back on the tray and shook your head before your gaze strayed to the clock mounted on the wall across the room. 17:47.

“I’m supposed to collect samples from you,” you said, staring at the clock.

You heard Tobirama shift on the floor, a soft rattle of chains as he moved. “You have plans to destroy this lab, which is why you need proof, I presume?”

“Yes, otherwise they’re likely to flee if they realize I’ve left the compound without their clearance,” you nodded, turning back around and crossing your arms over your chest as you leaned back against the lab bench behind you. Something vindictive and furious warmed in your chest as you thought of all the screams you’d come to hear since being brought to the compound. It took every amount of self-control within you to not do something; every sample that arrived at your desk or every limp and destroyed body you saw gurneyed out of a lab made you itch for a form of justice darker than just the Tsuchikage’s forced resignation. In the outside world, those nin on the tables might’ve been enemies or even allies, but here they were victims, and you tried your damndest to not be another contributor to their suffering, even when staying your hand meant you were an unwilling assistant to their torture. “I’m going to destroy all of it.”

“Take the samples you need from me,” Tobirama replied, now sitting back on his legs with his hands set on the tops of his thighs.

You raised a hand to your face, chewing on your thumbnail. “I doubt I’ll be able to lie entirely about any information I gather since Fudo will most likely look for himself, but I could let certain samples become contaminated.”

Tobirama’s head tilted slightly. “Do you know of the suicide seals Konoha has been using?”

You raised an eyebrow at him.

“Those seals are used to cauterize the chakra pathways of the individual activating them. There might be a way of altering their purpose, however, and make them destroy the surrounding cells as well.” Tobirama raised his arms, chains rattling and words dripping with sarcasm as he said, “I would test the theory myself, but…”

You shook your head, “I could most likely redefine the explosive element of the seal formula and improve the bakuton distribution equation, it will just be a matter of infusing your cells with my chakra in discrete enough amounts to avoid detection if Fudo does look at the samples.”

Tobirama’s brow rose again. “You know the details of the seal?”

You cracked a slim smile at him. “I created the torihazushi shīru, Tobirama.”

 You saw the surprise on his face before he could hide his reaction, and no smart part of you didn’t revel in the slight satisfaction of proving him wrong about you.

He cleared his throat, however. “Do you believe you’d be able to adjust the seal without alerting the ANBU about your testing?”

You nodded, crossing your arms loosely over your chest. “It should be simple enough. The real challenge will be making it small enough to infuse with individually with each of your cells. I don’t want Iwa having any trace of you.”

You felt Tobirama gaze on your face, but when you glanced at him from the lab equipment, he asked, “Could you apply the seal to one cell in a sample and adjust the bakuton jutsu so it eliminates the entire sample?”

“You mean make a bomb out of the sample itself?” you asked and then sighed, pushing off of the lab bench and crouching back down on your knees in front of Tobirama. You reached for the canteen of water and screwed the lid off, still thinking. “It’s possible I could do that, but that problem with Fudo detecting my chakra is there again.” You raised the canteen to Tobirama’s mouth and his expression hardened, but he let you tip the water into his mouth slowly as he drank. “I’d leave your samples alone entirely if I was sure I could destroy them when I’ve got the proof that I need, but I have no idea where Fudo would store them. In all honesty, I wouldn’t be surprised if he hid them with any of the paperwork I’m looking for.”

Tobirama jerked his chin up just slightly enough that you stopped and wiped his cheek off on his bare shoulder, smearing dirt across his skin. “Paperwork?”

“The names of the people he’s had brought here and experimented on, any correspondences with the Tsuchikage, records of the ANBU nin assigned here,” you explained. “I know there’s files on some of the victims, and the ones I was allowed to have copies of are already protectively sealed for transport back to Konoha, but that’s all they are – records. I want undeniable proof of what’s been allowed to go on here.”

You raised the canteen again but Tobirama shook his head. “How sure are you that Fudo would put my samples and the paperwork you need together?”

“I’m not sure at all,” you replied honestly. “Fudo is kind of a tricky bastard – he’s smart and he doesn’t trust or like the ANBU nin stationed here, so I doubt they’d know anything –”

“That boy,” Tobirama interjected.

Your brow furrowed. “Ryu?”

“He would be the easiest for you to get information out of if you pushed him,” Tobirama explained. “He’s infatuated with you and I doubt beyond his fūinjutsu that there’s much of a brain in his head.”

You gave Tobirama a flat look. “The boy is ANBU for a reason, Tobirama,” you replied, but then frowned. “There’s a record I’ve read on him here, actually. Ryu has a kekkei genkai, but I suspect it’s his status as an Iwa nin that keeps him off of a dissection table.”

Tobirama pursed his lips, head turning the side. You stood, knowing from the past that expression meant he was thinking, and set the canteen on the lab table.

“He knows what happens in this facility?” Tobirama asked.

“More than likely,” you nodded, “but I’m not even sure of everything that happens here and I’m supposed to be a researcher.”

“Is he your personal guard?” Tobirama asked, gaze narrowing.

“No,” you shook your head but then paused. Out of the ANBU stationed in the base, you saw Ryu the most often of any of them. Whether that was coincidence or the boy’s own intent, you weren’t sure but as far as you were aware, the ANBU were more ornamental than necessary. “As far as I’m aware, Fudo has enough trust in the researchers at least to believe no one is a spy.”

Tobirama’s gaze remained on you.

“Emi Saro has a specialty in cellular biology and genetics,” you told him, watching his eyes. “My job is to analyze some of the tissue samples sent my way by the researchers,” you explained. “I haven’t been assigned to any of the victims until they captured you.”

Tobirama huffed a breath through his nose and you sighed, rubbing the bridge of your nose.

“I want to have a competent bakuton seal before I take any samples from you, but I can’t be sure of how long adjusting the seal formula will take,” you said.

“How long did it take you to make the torihazushi shīru?” Tobirama questioned.

You pursed you lips and looked away. “Two years,” you replied. “I didn’t finish it until shortly before I left Konoha for the mission.”

“You were experimenting with a seal like the torihazushi shīru for two years?” Tobirama questioned, leaning forward slightly from where he sat on the ground. “Why?”

You shot a look back at him. “Why did you make the hiraishin seal, Tobirama?”

“To make sure I could ensure my safety and the safety of my brother and clan members,” Tobirama deadpanned. “Why did you make the torihazushi shīru?”

You looked away again. “I had comrades before I came to Konoha.”

Tobirama scoffed and your irritation reared its head again, and this time you were hardly able to contain it before the snapping comment came; “Did you say something, Tobirama?”

Tobirama’s expression was illiberal. “The Daimyo’s Guard is hardly a place for a seal like the torihazushi shīru.”

You stared back at Tobirama long enough that you realized his hair was shorter than the last time that you saw him, and there was a fresher scar than any of the wounds you’d healed around his shoulder, disappearing onto his back.

“The next time you visit the capital, Tobirama Senju,” you spoke quietly, fingernails digging into your palms as your hands turned to fists where they were folded over your chest, “visit the cenotaph dedicated to the Guard of the Fire Daimyo and try to count all the names of the shinobi killed in action.”

You pushed off the lab table, anger burning in your chest as you unsealed the door to the lab and all but stormed across the threshold into the ante room, letting the doors shut behind you. You were too within your own head to notice the oily chakra presence slink past your senses and far enough away now to not hear the stone doors grind open across their tracks again.

…

In the span of five and a half hours, you’d swiped another serving of dinner for yourself, eaten alone in your quarters away from the watchful eyes of the other researchers and the Stone ANBU nins, and managed to nap for almost four hours before stress consumed the dream you’d been having and you’d woken up in a cold sweat, the last flashes of your nightmare pulling away from your conscious mind.

Your temper had abated after an hour or two since you’d left Tobirama, but you hadn’t been able to bring yourself to go back once you’d finished your meal. Ever since that dinner when he’d belittled you in front his brother and Tōka, anything he said or did pricked against your patience in all the wrong ways. You hadn’t even seen much of him since that evening either, but you’d heard of some of his business in the months spent preparing for the mission into Iwagakure from the time you’d spent around Hashirama. Everything about him stung and you hadn’t let yourself think of why in fear of the sting becoming something that put a knife wound in your heart.

Still – he was your ally, if not by choice then by circumstance, and you needed the privacy of Lab Seven to work on hijacking your own seal without alerting Fudo or anyone else who could be watching. And…Tobirama was a piece of the home you missed deeply.

With a sigh, you stood up from your bed and reached for your kunai brace. Strapping the weapon to your thigh was a reassuring muscle memory, a reminder that you were not Emi Saro and that this was not your life.

The hallways were mostly empty on your walk down to the eighth floor, but you could feel the whispers of the other researchers’ chakra signatures against your awares and tried to ignore the weaker, flickering ones that belonged to their victims. The ANBU were nearly indetectable, and it was probably only because you’d spent so much time memorizing their presences that you could tell where they –

You froze mid-step.

Tobirama’s chakra signature was understandably and severely small, almost like a shallow echo or a passing brush of contact, but you knew it well – well enough to be able to tell it apart from anyone else’s in the entire world, even at its tracest amounts; even when it was being nearly suffocated by another presence that made dread fall through your chest like a stone through water.

You body flickered before you were really aware that you’d begun to raise your hand into the activation seal, and in the next breath you were unsealing the door to the ante chamber and then the lab, heart pounding against your chest as the sense of Michi’s chakra signature felt as though it were suffocating you.

The lab was dark, and your privacy seal was covered with a second, Iwa-made one that Konoha’s intel had determined was only used by the Stone’s ANBU.

“Tobirama!” you shouted into the room, smacking your hand over the light switch. The electricity crackled and then white light flashed across the lab.

Your breath caught in the same moment your heart seemed to stop.

Tobirama was leaning back fully against the wall he was chained to, chin resting against his chest and long legs spread out in front of him. His hands were cradling his stomach, and even from the entry way you could smell the blood.

Fear thundered through you as you sprinted across the lab, dropping to your knees next to him as panic crawled up your throat.

“Tobirama!” you tried again, grabbing his head and tilting his face toward you as your chakra poured into his body, racing breakneck through his systems. He was unconscious, cheek falling heavily into your palm as your chakra felt over the bruising on his brain, no doubt the reason for his concussion. Blood caked the side of his face and his hair, and there were deep cuts over his chest and torso, almost in the pattern – no, in the exact pattern of his kabuki marks, now smeared away in the blood and dirt on his face. He’d been punched and kicked in the ribs and gut, and you could feel where the muscles around his spine were going to bruise with the rest of him, and with every inch you moved lower on his body, the more fury built within you.

Nearly half of the bones in his ribcage had been fractured, but his right femur had splintered in what was no doubt a well-practiced stomp of a chakra-laden foot.

You shifted his body – as much as you could with the damn chains holding his limbs out from any true measure of ease – toward yourself, taking the pressure off of his head and letting it lay against your shoulder as you placed your hand over the breakpoint in his femur. His breaths came in short pants against your neck, his lungs straining against the tightness of bruised tissue in his chest cavity.

Through every cell you urged to heal and divide, you didn’t let your attention wander once from guarding that doorway. If Michi came back here to finish what he had started –

Tobirama suddenly came to with a sharp breath, what there was of his chakra rising defensively against yours only to be sealed by the chains.

“(Y/N),” he rasped, starting to move but then stopping when your hand came up to his stomach, gently pushing aside his hands.

“Don’t talk,” you said, biting into your tongue as your chakra felt the depth of the cut up his stomach and through the center of his ribcage. “I haven’t healed all the bruising yet.”

You couldn’t bring yourself to look at the fingermarks around his neck. Never in the two years you’d known Tobirama had you ever seen him this injured before, and you knew with every instinct that Michi had only been able to hurt Tobirama because of the chains keeping him from defending himself. Knowing that made the anger within you twist almost painfully around your ribcage, forcing you to draw a deeper breath before you chased after the ANBU nin through the compound and returned the gesture.

When you’d healed the cuts over his chest and arms to nothing more than pale white strips of scars, you lifted your hand to the base of his throat, letting your chakra soothe the broken capillaries and heal the split veins. You traced through his body systems again, and when you were sure you’d healed the damage Michi had caused, you shifted, easing Tobirama’s body back toward the wall and beginning to stand, jaw clenching.

Tobirama’s hand snapped out to grab your wrist and you nearly stumbled back onto him, just catching yourself by crouching on your haunches next to him.

“You can’t go after him,” he said, grip firm on you.

“I’m going to,” you snapped back. “That was –”

“Kanaye Suzuki, I know,” Tobirama interrupted. “You’re not going after him.”

You grit your teeth. “He’s alone in his quarters right now. It would be easy to kill him when he doesn’t expect it.”

“You can’t kill him,” Tobirama replied, voice irritatingly steady in spite of the fury that was roiling just beneath your skin.

“I’m not incompetent, Tobirama,” you snapped back, jerking your wrist from his grasp to no avail; his grip was stronger than you’d expected.

“If you kill him because he attacked me, you might as well prostate yourself in front of Fudo and name yourself as a spy,” Tobirama retorted, frustration seeping into his tone. “You’re supposed to be indifferent toward me, not risking your mission to needlessly avenge your comrade. You shouldn’t even have healed me as much as you did.”

Your temper cracked again and you hardly remembered to keep your chakra signature in check as you snapped back, “He could have killed you, Tobirama. There was nothing you could’ve done to protect yourself from him and –”

His hand tightened around your wrist, and you clenched your jaw, hardly finding a reason to hide your scowl.

“And that was his exact reason for attacking me,” Tobirama ground out. “As long as he believes there is nothing I can do against him, he won’t feel threatened and he won’t have a reason to suspect you for being a spy or for being loyal to Konoha.”

“There is nothing you can do against him, Tobirama,” you shot back. “The seals on the chains would be impossible for me to break without alerting the nin who placed them, and you can’t even move to defend yourself when you’re attacked.” You shook your head, rubbing the heel of your palm of your free hand against your forehead. “I shouldn’t have left the lab – I shouldn’t leave the lab at all. I didn’t think the ANBU would do anything to you since Fudo wants you alive, but –”

“Take the samples from me,” Tobirama interrupted, making your head snap up and brow furrow. “Take the samples from me and put a seal on them – unstable or not, just something that will explode and destroy the samples when you activate it.”

“I’d be gambling on the off chance that Fudo doesn’t examine the samples before he stores them and gambling that he stores them wherever he keeps any correspondence with the Tsuchikage,” you said, shaking your head. “That’s too much risk to blow my cover prematurely.”

“Well, you’re not Hashirama, so I would find your odds more promising,” Tobirama replied flatly. “If you’re able to Sense Suzuki’s chakra signature in the compound, you’ll be able to find mine even in the samples, correct?”

“Yes, but –”

“Then if you can retrieve both the samples and the paperwork then there’s no need for a destruction seal,” Tobirama said, finally letting go of your wrist. “You’ll just need to be sure you have every sample.”

You hesitated, fingers pressed against your forehead as you thought. “If Fudo were to get your cells…” You shook your head. “You haven’t heard him talk about these kekkei genkai, Tobirama. He’s obsessed with them and I’ve heard him say multiple times how he wants our villages’ clan kids for experiments. If Keiichiro Uchiha hadn’t used the torihazushi shīru, I have no idea what Fudo would’ve done to him or with the data he would’ve collected from him.”

Something akin to disgust took form in the expression on Tobirama’s face but he only said, “Take the samples, give them to Fudo and wait until you believe they’ve been stored with the paperwork and then go for them before the ANBU have a sense about what you’re doing.”

“I’ll have to take the samples and the paperwork and then get back here to break the seals on the chains all before what I’ve done is realized by Fudo and the ANBU,” you said, “and then we’ll have to make our escape on the off chance that we aren’t caught beforehand.”

Tobirama studied you for a moment. “Can you shunshin out of the compound?”

“No,” you shook your head. “I don’t know what kind of seals they’ve put in the structure, but no teleportation jutsus can be used to get outside until you’re up on the first level below the surface. The only way in and out is from there.”

“So the hiraishin would be equally useless,” Tobirama said, turning his head slightly. You watched his eyes fall to the adjacent wall. “We could create another room from this one using an earth jutsu to break the sealing boundaries and I can activate a hiraishin seal within Konoha.”

You shook your head. “Konoha is outside your range for one seal. There’s over a hundred miles between us and border with Grass. We’d have to shunshin out of the compound and probably keep going until we got in range of one of your seals.”

“The nearest seal is in a village in Fire Country just before the border shared with Grass,” Tobirama supplied. “That’s at least a two-day travel, and shunshinning that entire time is highly improbable for either of us.”

You nodded. “That’s why I planned on making sure I destroyed this place thoroughly enough when I was ready to leave that no one would notice one missing researcher for long enough for me to get a head start with no ANBU tails.”

Tobirama nodded and shifted in his position against the wall, which made you look at the blood and dirt that covered him almost as completely as a shirt would’ve. He was filthy, and while healing him fully could be let go, you doubted you could get away with cleaning the dirt off of him – by either his permission or beneath ANBU’s suspicion.

“You might as well take the samples now and prepare some kind of report for Fudo before your twenty-four hours is up,” Tobirama finally said. “Reporting to him about Suzuki attacking me might help distract him from you as well, since it’s evident he doesn’t like or respect the ANBU stationed here.”

You hadn’t doubted for a moment that Tobirama hadn’t been absorbing every detail of his encounter with Fudo earlier. “It might create tension with the team too since Isao already has problems keeping Suzuki in check,” you nodded.

“And the boy is distracted by you,” Tobirama added, tone nothing short of blunt. “You could tell him to pick you daises on the surface and by the time he comes back with a bouquet you’ll have the samples and the paperwork.”

You gave Tobirama an unamused look. “Ryu is ANBU, Tobirama, not a green nosed genin. Infatuated or not, he’s a Stone nin and I’m not Emi Saro.”

Tobirama huffed and you stood, glancing toward the lab door. You activated the seal to close it as you crossed the room to the silencing seal on the wall over your own. Anger sparking, you tore it from the wall and shredded the paper, letting the pieces fall into the waste bin at the end of the lab bench. Your gaze fell on the lab equipment and you glared at it.

“I don’t want to do this,” you said, not looking back at Tobirama.

“You have to,” came his answer.

You chewed on the inside of your cheek. “I don’t want to do this to you.”

You heard him move, the chains rattling as he settled with his legs crossed and wrists propped to rest on the inner sides of his knees. “I won’t take it personally,” he said dryly.

You snorted despite yourself and shook your head. “Good to know your sense of humor is at least still intact.”

“I have been told it is my strongest weapon,” Tobirama replied, a single eyebrow rising with his sarcasm. You smiled slightly and then looked back at the equipment. “If you’re afraid of hurting me, you won’t,” he added, breaking the lapse of silence.

Your smile returned, rueful and sullen all the same as you glanced at him. “I’m not sure anything could really hurt you, Tobirama,” you replied and leaned forward, picking up a pair of gloves from the counter.

…

Taking the samples from Tobirama was nearly as uncomfortable as feeding him had been.

He’d had the sense – out of indignance or awkwardness, you had no interest in defining – to turn his head away from you at first, at least, but as you sat on your knees beside him, preparing to draw blood into the lab provided vacutainers on the ground next to you, he watched as you prepped the needle for his vein.

“It’s better if you don’t look,” you said, positioning his arm. His hand fell into your lap, the tourniquet already around his upper arm, and you touched his inner forearm, feeling for a vein.

“You mistake me for my brother if you think a needle will give me a weak stomach,” Tobirama replied dryly.

You gave him a flat look and then pushed the needle into his vein. Sparing yourself the nausea – not that you’d ever admit it to him – you looked away from the blood moving through the tubing and watched the first tube fill until it was time to change to the second.

“Let me know if you begin to fill dizzy,” you said as an afterthought, briefly glancing up at Tobirama. You’d asked him to sit against the wall since the lab had no chairs, and had made him drink from one of the canteens of water you’d had left over from the dinner rations before you’d found the blood drawing kit in one of the cabinets against the wall. He’d been quiet almost the entire time, but you’d felt his eyes on the back of your head as you’d gathered the nerve to actually begin taking samples from him.

Fuck – the you that had entered Konoha two years ago would be beyond unnerved if she had known this was in her future. And yet…Keiichiro Uchiha and all the other victims deserved to be avenged.

“How old were you,” Tobirama started to say, exhaling through his teeth and swallowing as you set up the third vial, “when you joined the Daimyo’s Guard?”

He was looking away again, so he didn’t see it when your head snapped up in surprise and your eyes widened, thankfully. Still, you took the half second between securing the vial and placing the previous back in the tube rack to school your expression.

“I was trained by my parents to be a shinobi since I could walk,” you supplied, again watching the vacutainer fill with Tobirama’s blood. “I was officially assigned to the Guard on my seventeenth birthday.”

There was a paleness spreading from Tobirama’s cheeks down his neck, but he still spoke with focused coherence. “Why seventeen?”

You bit your bottom lip. “My brother died, and his spot needed filling.”

Tobirama’s eyes opened and his gaze flicked to yours. “You had…” he took a quick breath, “a brother?”

You forced yourself to watch the blood fill the vial. “Two. They both died.”

Tobirama’s breath came through his teeth. “Their names?”

Blood smeared across your face; a hand falling from your cheek –

“Seryu and Benkei,” you answered slowly. “Ser was the oldest, and then Kei.” Tobirama’s eyes held your own and you thought you saw something like grief in the crease of his forehead before he looked away again.

“You said…officially assigned?” he questioned as you switched the vials again.

You puffed a short breath. Of course he’d noticed that.

“The Guard is more than just its recognized members,” you explained, pushing down your memories of your brothers. “There’s ten guards officially assigned to the Daimyo, but there’s nearly forty of us in the background, running the missions to secure the capital, the esteemed family, and the nobility.”

“‘Officially assigned’,” Tobirama repeated, brow furrowing. “You were a member – in the background?”

“Yes,” you nodded, and then breathed. “The official guard can’t leave the Daimyo, but it’s the background guard that accompanies his family when they leave court or we’re assigned to a mission sponsored by the nobility.”

Tobirama grit his teeth, eyes darting up and then to the side. The pallor was spreading down to his chest, but there were still two vials left to fill. “What killed your brothers?”

You tried to not recoil at the bluntness of his question and instead used it as an anchor as you pushed further into your memories.

“Kei and I were assigned with a team to an undercover assassination of one of the Kaminari nobility building across the border Lightning shares with us,” you spoke mechanically, hands moving in autopilot as you switched the vials. “It was a distraction by the Daimyo of Kaminari.” You puffed a short breath of dead laughter. “It was a good distraction too, and with my squad outside the capital, the highest profile non-assigned guards were too far away to provide backup when the capital was infiltrated and the Daimyo was attacked.”

“The Capital Incident,” Tobirama breathed, fingers curling weakly into the fabric of your pants. “We heard about it – too busy…with…Uchiha.”

“Yeah,” you said quietly, “the Capital Incident.”

“You…and Kei?”

“We were ambushed by the Kaminari Daimyo’s private guard,” you replied, “and members from one of the clans that are part of Kumo now. Kei died in the attack protecting me from one of the nins using a poisoned kusarigama.”

Benkei had fallen to his knees holding your face in his hands as you’d sobbed out his name, desperately trying to hold his chest together while he kissed the crown of your head and started to slide through your grip as his heart stopped. The sight of him jumping in front of you from the death blow meant for you still haunted your nightmares, years later.

Tobirama was silent and, for a moment, you thought he’d passed out, but he was staring at his hand lying limp in your lap.

You swallowed and forced yourself to keep talking. “Only me and one of the other guards on the squad were left alive and we took Kei and the others’ bodies back to the capital as quickly as we could, but we got back to the capital too late.”

Tobirama’s eyes were on your face again and you used the excuse of changing the vials for the last time to keep from meeting his still-intense gaze.

“I was in time to say goodbye to Seryu as he laid dying in the attendance hall,” you spoke, willing yourself not to cry even as you felt your throat burn. “He thought the blood on my face was mine and asked me to tell Kei to keep his head out of his ass since he wasn’t going to make it much longer to tell him himself.” A short laugh left you. “Kei was always louder than Ser and I about his ninjutsu,” you explained, rubbing a long-faded scar on your forearm. “Ser told him he was going to get himself demoted if he kept it up.”

Tobirama was staring full on at you now, and you were nearly certain he wouldn’t have been so forthright if you weren’t practically bleeding him senseless. “You’re a medic,” he said, but you heard the question.

You ran your tongue over your teeth and shook your head. “Not until my brothers died,” you explained. “Not until I realized I could’ve saved both my brothers’ lives and the lives of my comrades if I had just known iryō ninjutsu.”

“And the torihazushi shīru?”

You changed the last vial, feeling sick for more than one reason as you absently ran your thumb over the weak pulse inside of Tobirama’s forearm in an unintentional attempt at comfort – for him or yourself, you weren’t sure.

“Some of the Guard has kekkei genkai,” you said. “The Kaminari Guard tried taking some of their bodies, and we were dispatched to retrieve them before the Guard crossed the border back into Kaminari. We got their bodies back and burned them, but after the funeral for my brothers and the others, I decided to start making the torihazushi shīru to protect the Guard members just in case we couldn’t get them fast enough.”

“Political strategy,” Tobirama mumbled, leaning heavily against the wall.

You shook your head, irritation draining from you. “Respect, Tobirama. My comrades were my friends too, and they didn’t deserve to have their bodies violated by anyone for anything, including a kekkei genkai.”

His gaze was half-lidded as he watched you remove the last vial and begin to clean up the needle and tubing. You released the tourniquet and monitored his circulatory system with chakra as his blood circulated slightly stronger through his arm with every passing minute. When the color had mostly returned to his hand and fingers, you stood, taking the rack of blood vials with you and setting them on the lab table as you reached for one of the blood replenishing pills that you’d set out before starting the draw.

You crouched back down over him, holding two of the blood pills and three of the soldier pills, as well as the canteen with the rest of the water in it.

“Bottoms up,” you said in a nearly mute tease, pressing the two blood pills to his mouth. His accepted them without a word, and you tried to ignore the brush of his lips against your fingers as you brought the canteen up to his mouth next. He took the soldiers pills too in the same fashion and you backed away faster than you would’ve had he been anyone else once you were sure he wasn’t going to vomit back up the pills.

Beside the vial rack, you picked up a pair of scissors and the last test tube you’d initially set out. Fudo had instructed you to gather any type of sample from Tobirama that you could, so you’d started with a skin sample and then saliva – an experience that he had been mercifully silent as death for – and you’d decided to take his blood and then the last sample, a cut of his hair. If he were actually a test subject and you had no morals, pulling his hair from his head would’ve been the better option of study, but with the torihazushi shīru already branded on the underside of the rack, you figured you could take your chances with cutting his hair.

Tobirama was leaning toward his right, slackening the chain attached to his wrist so he could drink from the canteen on his own while the left one tightened to keep him in place. You crouched at his left side again and reached, swiftly cutting his hair before he had a full opportunity to react to your closeness. He didn’t flinch, but you saw his gaze jerk from the canteen to the blade of the scissors as you stood upright, dropping his hair into the test tube and sealing it.

“Is that everything?” he asked, voice coming out more as a rasp than his usual drawl. You tried to not look at him as you nodded, organizing the vials. You weren’t nervous enough to make your hands shake, but between narrating the worst night of your life to Tobirama and risking putting the secrets of the Senju Clan’s genetics into the hands of someone you’d prefer to see chained to a lab floor instead of the man behind you, you were pretty damn close to sliding down the wall and tucking your head between your knees before your head exploded from the stress of what you were about to initiate.

Once you handed these samples to Fudo, you were going to be in a race against odds that could either lead to your act being exposed as a ruse and being killed for it or somehow managing to escape with the samples and Fudo’s correspondence andTobirama.

“I’ll take these to Fudo now,” you said, glancing at Tobirama.

He was already looking up at you from the floor, still sitting against the wall with the canteen set next to him. The color had mostly returned to his face, or what you could see of it through all the dirt, but you could see the physical drain in the slight slump of his shoulders and the less-caustic air about him. You needed to get him out of here, you realized, whether or not Fudo bought your lies and you succeeded in getting any paperwork, you needed to make sure Tobirama made it out of here, and not just because he wasn’t a lab rat you didn’t want your enemy using to unlock any secrets of the Senju Clan, but because he was Tobirama, and this wasn’t what you wanted for him.

“Tobirama,” you began to say, hesitating in the doorway as it slid open for you.

His head tilted slightly, his attention on you, but you swallowed whatever the words were that were swelling up from your chest and instead just nodded your head at him. His eyes narrowed, just slightly, but then he nodded in kind and you made yourself step through the threshold into the ante chamber, making sure to seal the doors behind you this time.

This will work, you repeated to yourself over and over again like a mantra as you descended the staircase to the eighth floor. Your heart was in your throat by the time you arrived at Fudo’s office door, flaring your chakra to alert him that you were there as you thought of nothing but the man a level directly above you, chained to the floor and nothing in you more than wanting to make sure he made it out of all of this alive, even if you didn’t.  

This will work, you chanted, even as Fudo’s office door opened and the sight of Kanaye Suzuki leaning against madman’s desk, twirling a kunai around his middle finger, sent your heart plummeting through your chest.

…

Tobirama was blind.

Not in the literal sense, but he might as well of been, because he had never felt so vulnerable in his life before the seals that siphoned away his chakra had been burned into the chains anchoring him to the lab floor. To have gone his entire life with so much to see and sense through the deep thrum of chakra that existed in all things and now have it almost entirely cut off from him felt as though he were missing a deep and incredibly important part of himself, and, he supposed, he was.

From a young age, he had been sensitive to chakra and its welcome but often loud presence in his mind. It had taken him years to learn how to control just how much he heard and what he could afford to ignore. Chakra had given him an edge like no other he’d met before in the battlefield, and his instincts had more than once followed the fluctuations of chakra than his own warrior’s discipline to save his life from a blade or jutsu from behind; he’d come to rely on it as much as anyone relied on the instinct to breathe.

When he’d found the remains of the genin squad and their jōnin sensei in that clearing at the edge of the border with Grass, he’d already known they were dead from miles away, the places in the chakra field that they should have filled instead vacant, but he hadn’t expected to find their bodies so brutalized. It was something he hadn’t seen since before Hashirama and Madara shook hands over the peace accords – the Suzuki Clan was known for their kenjutsu in the same way the Uchiha were known for the Sharingan and the Hyūga for the Byakugon, and the best plan of action when fighting the Earth’s Suzuki Clan was to keep them out of close range and use any force necessary to eliminate them. The only time the Senju themselves had fought the Suzuki while Tobirama was alive had been while he was still too young to properly wield even a kunai, hardly more than two years old, and since Hashirama’s mokuton release had shown itself before a prowess in blades had, his elder brother had remained with him behind the battle lines while their father led a fight that had driven the Suzuki back deep into Earth Land and away from the Senju territory. By grace of mercy or politics, the Senju hadn’t had any encounters with the Suzuki for over twenty years besides the odd sightings of victims until now. Until he’d been forced to swallow the tang of bile that had risen in the back of his throat when he’d found the bodies of the genin squad.

He shifted on his legs bent beneath him and scowled at the bite of the chains into the tender flesh of his wrists. If (Y/N) did manage to get him free, healing his raw skin would be among the first things he did – after he made sure the Kanaye Suzuki paid for what he had done to those children in the clearing.

Kami – (Y/N).

You had been the last thing he was expecting when the door to the lab had opened and the Stone nins had stepped through. He’d kept his expression as impasse and caustic as possible, but the moment you’d dropped to your knees and taken the gag from his mouth, it had been an effort of a different kind to not relax around your touch despite everything he’d done to keep himself as far away from you as possible. Months of pushing you out and away from him had culminated into the uncomfortable realization that he was no further from you than he had been that evening at the Senju House, jabbing caustic barbs against the points where he knew he could hurt you.

What words he’d said had been carefully sharpened with the whetstone of his own impudence, that he could admit, craftily using the arrogance he knew the village already associated to him and you expected of him to try to burn the frustrating bond strings you’d begun to tie to him. And it’d worked – you’d avoided him and had spoken less than ten words to him in the weeks between that dinner and his assignment to Kiri, and when he’d returned, you were gone. On a mission to Kaze no Kuni, he’d heard Hashirama remind Tōka. In retrospect, he perhaps he should have looked closer at the derisive snort that had left Izuna if he hadn’t been so bent on ignoring you.

And now here you were, ire peeking through the cracks in your patience when he pushed you, and the only thing standing in the way of a certain and long death by the hands of one Kanaye Suzuki coming to meet him personally; he was entirely at your mercy. There had to a god or two chuckling at the irony.

Tobirama’s head lifted when he heard the grating of the exterior stone door sliding across its track, and he set his spine straight, waiting for you to open the ante door and then for whatever would come next. The most difficult part of this plan would be ensuring you got the proof you needed to make the mission worthwhile, but Tobirama knew his own patience was wearing thinner with every moment that passed – there was too much risk, and if you were caught or put in danger, there was nothing he could do while chained without his chakra.

The ante door slid open and Tobirama felt something within him crack.

Perhaps, he thought, this is what the Uchiha hate feels like.

Your body hung from the grip of the boy you called Ryu, your right leg dragging as the ANBU nin moved further into the room. He could smell the blood that was smeared across your face and body, the remains of your shirt sticking to wounds across your gut and chest. Your shoulder was uneven from the broken collarbone jutting beneath your skin, and three kunai were embedded in your thighs, two in the left and one in the right, all hazardously close to where your femoral arteries traced through your legs. Tobirama couldn’t even tell if you were still breathing or not, and a thick, cold sense of panic was rising up from his stomach.

“Oh, don’t look so upset, Senju.” Kanaye Suzuki’s voice was ice down Tobirama’s back. The man was smirking, twirling a blood-stained kunai around his finger. “Your bitch is still alive, no worries, but she wouldn’t tell us her name. The real one – you know? My team and I, well, we thought you might have an idea.”

Behind Suzuki, two other Stone nin lurked. The one called Isao – the taichō – had his arms crossed over his chest, fury restrained to just a glare that Tobirama was sure radiated killing intent. The second – he’d heard called Jin – stood with his kodachi blades drawn, scowling at your limp body hanging off of Ryu’s shoulder. The boy himself was hardly touching you, no more than he had to, to keep you upright.

“You know, for someone called the Silvertongue Senju, you would think you would at least try to talk yourself out of this one,” Suzuki huffed, the kunai spinning faster and faster around his finger. Tobirama could feel what chakra he had roiling against the suppressants, and the seals must have been absorbing what leaked through because Suzuki’s face lit up as the seals around Tobirama’s wrists and ankles did too. “Oh! Look, Isao! The Silvertongue is angry!” He leaned back, looking toward the taichō with demented amuse.

“Normal procedure states we kill traitors,” Isao deadpanned, ignoring Suzuki as he stepped up on Ryu’s opposite side. Tobirama met his gaze, fury and hate pounding with his pulse as he struggled to keep himself from moving and forcing the chains to bite into him again. “But Fudo had the reasonable idea that we might be able to extract Konohagakure secrets from you by using your ally as motivation to talk.”

Tobirama breathed out with enough force to crush his ribs against the panic and fury in his chest.

Isao smirked. “We can start with names, if you’d like. Preferably her name and the names of her clan members to start, so that when we come to raze your village, we know which shinobi to leave behind in the ruins.”

Tobirama ground his teeth. He could deny knowing you, but that was hardly much better than confirming you were an ally to him and clearing any room for doubt that you were truly a spy. He was effectively restrained and there was no way for him to overwhelm the seals on the chains short of essentially killing himself in the process. Again, Tobirama was completely at the mercy of others, and he hated it like he had hated nothing else before.

“I don’t know her name,” Tobirama finally said, refusing to look at you and instead glaring up at the taichō in front of him.

“Liar, liar,” Suzuki crooned and then suddenly snapped the kunai in his hand to grip it fully. “We should play a game, Silvertongue! For every lie you tell, I’ll cut off one of your bitch’s fingers. Fair game, you think?”

Tobirama felt the ache in his jaw from how hard he was clenching his teeth.

“You’ll run out of fingers,” the fourth nin, Jin, interjected, sliding one of his kodachi into its sheath across his back.

Suzuki tipped his head in mock thought and then grinned. “She has toes, Jin! And when those run out, I’ll start on her limbs.”

Isao crouched in front of Tobirama and it was only by the grace of the chains’ lengths that Tobirama didn’t immediately slam his forehead into the man’s nose.

“Where are the secret paths into Konohagakure, Senju?” Isao demanded, holding his a tantō blade in his grip, a threat of its own kind.

“There aren’t any,” Tobirama grit out.

There was no way Tobirama could grab Isao and his tantō with the chains at the lengths they were, and Tobirama was having a hard time thinking of anything he could do. For all he knew, Fudo was testing your loyalty to Iwa by prompting Tobirama to confirm your alliance under duress, but this felt too real. He’d heard of the Stone’s cruelty, and it showed in their apparent permission of Kanaye Suzuki’s slaying of children, and he didn’t doubt that Suzuki really would start cutting off your fingers if they realized he was lying.

“Two lies, Silvertongue,” Suzuki chortled, grabbing your right hand and tilting his head as he observed your fingers. “Would you like to pick which ones go first, or shall I?”

“Did your Emi Saro ever tell you about Fudo’s summons?” Isao asked, using the tip of his tantō to cut a line through Tobirama’s already tattered pants. A line of blood welled up beneath the path of his blade.

No, you hadn’t. Tobirama hadn’t even thought to ask you about any of the other nin here beyond what you’d told him.

The answer must’ve shown on his face because Isao smirked again and tapped the tantō against the stone floor. “I thought they were pretty fuckin’ useless the first time I saw them, I won’t lie,” Isao drawled, tapping the blade twice more, “but then they opened their mouths and damn – well, you’ll see why it’s important to watch what you say even when you think no one’s around.”

On the third tap, a brown, lumpy creature suddenly emerged from the stone beside Isao, and Tobirama immediately recognized the animal: a mole. He’d never seen or heard of one in contract before, but the creature lumbered closer to Isao, tipping its head and showing its star nose to Tobirama as it sniffed at him and then recoiled.

“Fucking ugly things,” Suzuki scoffed.

Isao cracked a smile and patted the top of the mole’s head. “Fudo’s got a few of these things running around here, and you’d think maybe a privacy or silencing seal would keep them out, but you’d be surprised, Tobirama-san.”

Tobirama glanced between the animal and then up at you before meeting Isao’s eyes again, but the ANBU taichō was looking down at the mole.

“Go ahead, Riko-san. Say what you heard,” Isao said.

Tobirama’s gut tightened as the mole righted itself, sitting back on its hind legs and then tilting its head as if in thought. When it opened its mouth, Tobirama couldn’t stop his lips from parting in shock.

“Ryu is ANBU, Tobirama,” your voice spoke, an echo of a conversation hours old, “not a green nosed genin. Infatuated or not, he’s a Stone nin and I’m not Emi Saro.”

Silence. For a moment, no one spoke, until –

“Creepy,” Jin muttered.

Immediately, Tobirama tried to remember exactly what you had said during that conversation. Suzuki had beaten him within an inch of his life for over an hour and you’d come back to the lab while he’d been unconscious and healed him. You’d taken the samples afterward from him, but…

“Go on, Riko-san,” Isao coaxed, smirk growing as Tobirama watched the mole with growing dread.

“That’s why I planned on making sure I destroyed this place thoroughly enough when I was ready to leave that no one would notice one missing researcher for long enough for me to get a head start with no ANBU tails,” the mole spoke again, your voice almost perfectly mimicked.

“You understand why we’re a bit worried about our Emi Saro’s motivations now, Tobirama-san?” Isao asked, tapping the tip of his tantō on Tobirama’s knee. “It would be counterproductive, you see, to Iwa’s research here.”

Tobirama couldn’t protect you. There were no words he could say or things he could do to save you, and he knew he couldn’t betray his village and his brother, as much as he knew now that you wouldn’t want him to either. So, he raised his chin again and stared hard at Isao, willing the warrior within him to ignore the tightening in his chest as he spoke, “Do what you want. We both will die for Konohagakure.”

Isao smiled as he stood back up. “I was hoping you’d say that, because Riko-san heard one more thing, didn’t you, Riko-san?”

The mole shifted on its legs and spoke again, and this time Tobirama heard his own voice say, “If you’re afraid of hurting me, you won’t,” and the quiet, tired resignation in your voice as you had answered with that rueful smile that made something inside of him twist, “I’m not sure anything could really hurt you, Tobirama.”  

“Our Emi Saro sounds like you’ve hurt her feelings before,” Suzuki spoke, tauntingly as he traced the edge of your blood slick jaw with the tip of his kunai. “Poor Emi, huh Ryu? She’s so pretty and so cute, you think, and Silvertongue hurt those pretty feelings.”

Ryu grunted, shifting your weight on his shoulder and momentarily pulling you back from the kunai Suzuki had begun to trace over your bare throat.

“I think we should test just how true what Emi Saro said is,” Isao proposed, stepping back and standing against the wall near when Jin stood. “Michi – how do you think Tobirama-san would respond if you were cut the tongue out of his woman?”

Suzuki’s mouth split into a wide smile full of too much teeth. “He’d be glad then they won’t live long enough to adjust to the difference,” he answered grabbing your jaw and forcing your head up.

Tobirama jerked forward, chains brutally yanking him back into place as he snarled, “Don’t fucking touch her,” watching as Suzuki’s kunai came dangerously close to your mouth.

“Too late, Silvertongue,” Suzuki cackled, pressing the flat of his blade against your mouth. “Who do you think did this pretty number on her?” He swept his hand over the cuts through your chest and gut and then tapped on one of the kunai hilts in your thigh. You groaned, a sound of pain that lanced straight through Tobirama’s chest, and Ryu shifted again.

“What are the weaknesses of the Uchiha, Tobirama-san?” Isao questioned, twirling his tantō between his fingers. “You spend so much time with them and Izuna Uchiha was your rival for nearly two decades – you must have found ways to neutralize their Sharingan. Seals? Jutsu? Science?”

Tobirama held his silence, willing the thoughts of his own lab back home away from his mind.

Isao assessed him and then turned to Suzuki, giving a brief motion with his blade.

Before Tobirama could react, Jin had cut with the kodachi blade across your face, through your cheek and bisecting your lips with a horizontal cut. You cried out, eyes flickering open and breathing heavily, but Tobirama could tell the effects of blood loss were holding you too far away from consciousness for pain to bring you back to the surface for more than a few seconds. Already, you’d slumped back on Ryu, blood spilling from your face across the boy’s shoulder and chest.

Tobirama bared his teeth.

“What about the Hyūga, Tobirama-san?” Isao asked, bouncing one foot. “Any thoughts there on how to neutralize their eyes? We know your woman made that pesky suicide seal, but it would be in Iwa’s interests if we could bring them back alive without destroying their eyes.”

They were sick – demented and sick and if Tobirama died here, he prayed to every kami that his brother would find out the truth and destroy Iwagakure for its crimes against humanity.

He held his silence, even as Suzuki gave him a smile befitting a tanuki and leaned over your body, pressing on one of the kunai in your left thigh. Tobirama watched the blood seep through the fabric on your thigh, tracing down your thigh into a pool of blood at your foot. You were going to die – you were really going to die. Just like your brothers, and just like his brothers – you were going to die.

Tobirama bared his teeth. “There are no secret routes into Konohagakure.”

Isao tipped his head at Tobirama. “Routes be damned. I want to know the secrets to your village’s kekkei genkai and I want to know how to neutralize them.” He scoffed, then looked over his shoulder at his team and you, still hanging off of Ryu’s shoulder, Suzuki twisting the kunai lodged in your leg and Jin tapping the bloodstained blade of his kodachi against your bared neck. “You fucking Senju think you’re better than the rest of the villages because you got the Uchiha in on your little power trip,” Isao said, tapping his tantō against the floor again, posture cracking with fury. “You got the mokuton user and the Eternal Mangekyō Sharingan on your side, and you somehow roped in the Hyūga and the Uzumaki into your scheme too. Don’t you think it’s a little fair for the rest of us villages to have some kind of trick up our sleeves since Konohagakure only has aces in the hole?”

Tobirama snarled, “Funny – I should have realized how insecure Iwagakure is when compared against the might of the other villages. Perhaps your Tsuchikage realizes how easily you can be wiped from the map if only we cared enough to look upon your land.”

The tantō blade cut across Tobirama’s face with a swiftness that he gauged just in time to lean and let it cut through his cheek instead of his eye.

“Iwagakure will destroy Konohagakure one day, Tobirama Senju,” Isao snarled, a white-knuckled grip on his tantō.

Come a little closer, Tobirama wanted to say. Try to cut me again.

Instead, an alarm rang.

Instantly, Isao was on his feet, whipping around to Suzuki, Jin and Ryu behind him. The alarm screeched through the room, making the lights mounted in the ceiling flash between white and red in quick succession.

“Code 3 looks like,” Jin reported, dropping his kodachi from your throat and stepping back toward the door. Tobirama felt himself sit back slightly, strain lessening as the most immediate danger moved away from you. “Taichō?”

“Report to Fudo and assess the situation,” Isao snapped. Tobirama watched as Ryu started to shift, leaning to set you down on the floor, but Suzuki stopped him, grabbed your bicep and letting your weight fall slack between him and Ryu. “Ryu – Michi. I want you –”

Suzuki’s arm moved faster than Isao could react, but Tobirama lurched forward at the same time Suzuki’s kunai lodged itself into your gut. You gasped, eyes flicking open again, and a low scream left your mouth.

“NO!” Tobirama heard himself yell, fighting against the chains as you slumped entirely against Ryu, blood rushing out from around the knife wound as Suzuki shifted the blade, Tobirama’s heart falling further as he realized the Stone nin was cutting you away from any chance of survival.

“Kanaye, what the fuck?” Isao shouted at the nin as Suzuki grabbed your body from Ryu. “I told you to keep the spy alive!” The boy was standing with wide eyes, covered in your blood and his hands shaking in front of him as Suzuki threw your body at Tobirama. He could do nothing as you hit the ground on your side in front of him, blood pouring heavily and forming a pool between his knees as he strained to grab you, to hold you, to do something – anything – while you died right in front of him.

Again. Again – he’d seen this before. He’d seen this as a child, as his little brother laid in front of him already dead and gored through the stomach. This was it again. This was that death over again, but now it was you, and not Itama. Two different lives; two different enemies; two different loves; two of the same deaths.

The chains binding him were glowing furiously as they siphoned off his roiling chakra, and Tobirama could taste the blood in the back of his throat as his body fought against the restraints and the seals for any scrap of freedom to reach you.

Isao shoved both Ryu and Suzuki out of the lab, snarling something that was lost to Tobirama as the alarm continued to shriek and you continued to bleed out on the floor in front of him.

You were trembling, the shock and pain combining into something Tobirama could only fathom. This wasn’t a death befit to you, not to someone who had served in the Daimyo’s Guard, and not to someone who had been died for, and not to someone who had loved their home so completely to now die for that love. You didn’t deserve this – especially not while you’d been trying to protect him too.

“(Y/N).” Tobirama’s throat was tight, and he tried to ignore the crack in his voice around your name. “(Y/N),” he tried again. He could barely move his arms far enough to touch you, just barely skimming the edge of the torn fabric of your shirt, but your blood had reached his knees, soaking into his pants as he strained against the chains to reach you. “(Y/N)!”

A soft, breathless noise left you, your fingers twitching where your hand laid pinned beneath your side, inches from the hilt of the kunai still buried in your stomach. Tobirama felt like he was going to vomit.

“(Y/N)!” Tobirama yelled at you, snapping against the chains. “Get up! Get up, (Y/N)!”

Nothing.

Your hand had stopped twitching and he was watching your breaths come in shorter bursts.

Tobirama’s throat burned as he yelled at you over the alarm. “You have to tell me about your seal, (Y/N)! You have to tell me about your seal and you have to finish your research. All your notes – I saw them on your desk when you were gone! You have to finish it because I won’t do it for you!” He hissed between his teeth, trying to touch you again. His fingers swiped through the puddle of blood. “You have to yell at me for mistreating you. You have to yell at me and tell me that I was wrong so that I can make it right!” He was stopped from slamming his fist against the ground by the chain binding his right arm. He dropped his head, and swallowed thickly, watching your chest shudder, fighting to breathe.

“You have to get up,” he said, voice so quiet he barely heard himself. “You can’t…You can’t die here.”

A breath, and then another, and then you stopped breathing.

Tobirama was glad he couldn’t sense chakra. He was glad, because watching you die was enough to shatter something so delicate and protected within him, that if he had felt you die, he knew the fractures would break him entirely.

His lips parted over his teeth, and he suddenly remembered Kei, and how you’d told the story of your brother stepping into the line of fire for you, prepared to die for you, and for his brothers, Tobirama could have easily made the same sacrifice three times over, but it had been you that had stepped into the line of fire for him, indirectly or not, and now you were dead at his feet.

Ghosts haunted Tobirama every day, but he felt the weight as he earned yours.

The ante chamber door suddenly opened, and Tobirama’s eyes snapped up from your unmoving chest, hate and anger rising up his throat as he braced himself, trying to pull his chakra up again, enough to overwhelm the seals, but smoke was pouring into the lab, choking him.

“TOBIRAMA!”

The voice of his brother rocked something so deep within Tobirama that he sagged against the chains as Hashirama exploded out of the smoke, a fury of shinobi steel and brown hair, the hitai-ate of the Hidden Leaf bound across his forehead. He was smattered with blood and dirt, but he was there – Hashirama was here.

“Aniki!” Tobirama choked out, pulling against the chains again as his brother made for him. “Aniki – (Y/N)! Save (Y/N)!”

Hashirama’s eyes dropped to the body in front of Tobirama and Tobirama watched as his brother’s expression became something wrathful.

He immediately dropped to his knees, armor clattering against the floor.

“Hashirama!” A voice shouted through the smoke, and Tobirama felt his heart climb up into his throat as Madara Uchiha stole into the room, Mangekyō eyes roaming over Tobirama’s face, and then your limp body beneath Hashirama’s glowing hands. “What the fuck?” Madara snarled out and rushed across the lab. “Tobirama – what the hell happened?”

“They found out (Y/N) was a Konoha spy,” Tobirama choked out, watching Hashirama’s chakra press into your body. “They tortured her and Suzuki – Kanaye Suzuki – killed her.”

Madara’s hands stilled over the chains and his eyes turned onto you. “(Y/N)’s dead.” His voice was void of anything. It cut through to Tobirama’s core.

“I’ve got her,” Hashirama grit out, sweat beading down the side of his face through the grime. “Get Tobirama and get out of here.”

“Aniki –” Tobirama’s voice broke. “(Y/N) – you – you can save her?”

Hashirama didn’t look up at him. “I’ve got her. Madara – get my brother out of here.”

“The chains,” Tobirama shook his head. “You can’t unbind them. They’re sealed. The ANBU nin – he’s a boy. Ryu – you need him to unseal them. They’re Iwa fūinjutsu.”

As he spoke, Izuna Uchiha emerged from the smoke on the other side of the ante chamber door, snarling at the nin he had in a death grip around the bicep. Tobirama felt himself take a longer breath as he absorbed both Ryu and Izuna Uchiha crossing the lab.

“Scowl at me, Senju,” Izuna snapped at him. “You nearly look happy to see me and it’s making me uncomfortable.”

Tobirama couldn’t bring himself to do anything but fall completely back on his haunches.

Hashirama, Madara and Izuna. They were here. They all were here.

And Hashirama said he had you, that you were going to live.

Izuna suddenly flung Ryu forward, toward Tobirama, and the boy stumbled before he righted himself, avoiding crashing into Madara, who was still crouching at Tobirama’s side.

“Release Tobirama, boy,” Izuna ordered Ryu.

“I am,” Ryu snapped back at the Uchiha, but his hands were shaking, still covered in your blood. He formed a series of hand seals, both Madara and Izuna watching his movements, memorizing them with their kekkei genkai. The seven binding seals all around Tobirama suddenly glowed shades of blue and purple and then they evaporated, fading with the light. Immediately, Tobirama felt the low hum of chakra within his body, nearly depleted by still there, but his attention shifted to you and as Ryu unlocked the chains with another seal pattern, he slumped forward. He nearly fell on top of you and Hashirama’s healing hands, but Izuna caught him by the arm, and started to lift him up.

“Wait – wait,” Tobirama said, reaching for you. Izuna paused, and Hashirama took Tobirama’s hand. A buzz of chakra flowed between the brothers, and beneath the threads of Hashirama, Tobirama felt the fragile but living presence of your chakra, strengthening beneath Hashirama’s coaxing. It wasn’t a lot, but it was enough. Enough for Izuna to grunt beneath the full weight of Tobirama’s body as he righted them.

“Not missing any meals during your kidnapping, were you, Senju?” Izuna muttered at him, but it was all Tobirama could do to trust Izuna Uchiha as he watched Madara strike Ryu behind the head, forcing the boy unconscious.

“You came,” Tobirama spoke, half delirious.

Izuna huffed, pulling a scrap of cloth from his waist pouch and shoving it into Tobirama’s hand. “Cover your nose, asshole. The other nin are taken care of but your delicate Senju lungs can’t handle the smoke.”

Tobirama breathed through the cloth, and it was only when he realized Izuna had paused, watching him breathe, that the cloth had been treated, but Tobirama surrendered to the sedative as he felt for your chakra, pulsing weakly along the edge of his awares.

Alive. Alive. Alive.

…

You woke to the calling of birds.

Sparrows, if you remembered correctly, from the years you’d spent with your brothers memorizing the bird songs to create your own languages on missions.

Were they calling you now, Benkei and Seryu?

No…they were dead. They wouldn’t call for you because you…

You weren’t dead.

Patches of memories began to rise as you blinked in the early morning sunlight: Kanaye Suzuki’s too-wide smile as he’d embedded his first kunai in your thigh; the rawness in your throat as you’d screamed and screamed while Jin had slashed with his blade across your chest and stomach; Isao’s orders for your torture and his demands about Konoha’s secrets. Tobirama’s face; the gut-wrenching fear of him being hurt because of you; the realization that you were going to die.

A hand touched your left arm and you stiffened and then immediately relaxed as Hashirama’s chakra brushed against yours in gentle comfort.

“Good morning,” the mokuton user spoke, smiling sleepily at you. He was dressed for battle in dirtied armor you had only seen on a stand in his office before now, but his face was clean and his hair was pulled into a low tie on his back. “How are you feeling?”

You blinked at him, letting yourself remember the rest of your body as you held onto the reassurance of Hashirama’s chakra for reality like a child to their parent’s hand.

“I feel okay,” you answered, swallowing against the dryness in your throat. Hashirama nodded, even as you raised a hand to your chest, and then over your stomach. “I was – they tortured me. I was going to –”

“You did,” Hashirama interrupted sullenly. He exhaled and rubbed the back of his neck. “We were a little too late to save you before your heart stopped, but I was able to save your chakra before it cycled out of your system back into the world. I had to hold you there while I was healing you.”

You swallowed again. “You saved my life.”

Hashirama nodded, squeezing your arm. “You’re safe, and this is real. I promise. You survived.”

You could feel the tears welling up in your eyes. “Hashirama – I –”

He smiled. It was a kind one, with relief and friendship. “You had even Madara worried for a little bit, so you should feel accomplished.”

A soft laugh left you, a soreness spreading across your ribs. “He was only worried? What will I have to do to make him fret?”

Hashirama laughed with you, though you were both quiet in the morning light. “Tobirama fretted enough for the rest of us.”

At the mention of Tobirama, your smile ceased, and you held onto Hashirama’s hand with urgency. Thoughts of blood and gore crowded your memory, the stress and fear of freeing him and making sure he was safe flooding through you again. “Hashirama, is he –”

The door to the room suddenly opened with enough force that the door cracked against the wall, a sharp bang! making your ears ring. 

“He’s fine,” Hashirama chuckled as you both looked at Tobirama standing in the threshold of the room. He was wearing a pair of pants and a simple, short blue kimono shirt, typical of his usual attire, but without his fishnet undershirt or grey happuri. His hair was damp, and his face flush, and you could see his bare feet, as though he’d run from bathing and dressed in a hurry. “Dripping like a wet cat, but fine,” Hashirama smiled.

“(Y/N),” Tobirama finally spoke. You felt your chest seize, and Hashirama smiled again, this time more to himself, as he stood from your bedside and crossed the room to his brother.

“All is well, Tobirama,” Hashirama assured him. He nodded to you as he moved around his brother to leave the room. “There’s breakfast in the dining room when you’re ready. Madara and Izuna are nearby and Tōka will be on her way soon.”

Madara, Izuna, Tōka. You were home.

Somehow, you were home, in Konoha.

Hashirama left the room, nudging Tobirama forward so that he could close the door behind him. A moment of silence lapsed between the two of you, and then Tobirama took a slow step forward and then another quicker one, until he was at your bedside, sitting where his brother had sat only moments before.

“(Y/N),” he said again, an exhale in the shape of your name. You reached for his hand and he let you hold onto his fingers, holding onto his hand with both of yours.

Your throat closed and you felt yourself crying as you looked over his face, gauging the light marks from where he’d been injured and Hashirama had no doubt healed him. His kabuki paint was long gone and the grime had been cleaned from his face, but micro-thin lines were in place along the slope of his cheeks and chin, light scars to speak to the abuse of the Stone ANBU.

“You’re okay,” you managed to say, clutching his hand in a vice-grip you weren’t sure how you had strength for. “You’re okay.”

Tobirama loosed a withering breath and shook his head, reaching for your face. You felt his thumb wipe through one of the tear tracks on your cheek as he said, “I should be saying that about you. You died right in front of me.”

You swallowed, hands shaking as you nodded. “I know – I remember dying. I – I was so scared you were going to die too.”

Tobirama gave a short, derisive snort. “You were dying and you were worried about my life? I could do nothing while they tortured you.”

You leaned your face into his hand. “There was nothing you could do. Don’t blame yourself, Tobirama.”

He clenched his jaw. “I was going to let us both die for Konoha. They wanted our secrets.”

You exhaled slowly, and nodded slightly. “I know, and I would have –” You paused, and gave him a small smile, “I did die for Konoha’s safety, and I would do it again. I just – I wanted you to be free. I wish I had made sure of that before I died.”

Tobirama swallowed thickly. “My brother and the Uchihas came for us,” he answered. “That boy – Ryu. He sent word out to Konoha with one of his summons somehow. He told Hashirama where the base was, and that I was here and we were in danger.”

You felt your lips part in shock as you sat back slightly. “Ryu saved us?”

Tobirama nodded once, and then shook his head. “The boy told them his reasons were that he found his own file on Fudo’s desk to be the next experiment after they got rid of us, but that boy…” Tobirama frowned. “He told Hashirama he put his own bakuton seals on the samples you took from me and he gave all of the evidence you were looking for in the scroll he sent to Konoha to call for Hashirama. His ignition of the samples started the diversion Konoha used to infiltrate the compound.”

“The alarm…” you mumbled. “I heard the code alarm.”

Tobirama nodded.

“But why?” you asked, brow furrowing. “He saved our lives, but we’re his enemies.”

Tobirama’s mouth pressed into a line. “I believe his reasons were because of the kindness you showed him,” he replied. “He revealed his name to me when I woke up and asked that I give you his thanks for being his friend and his apologies for the harm you felt because of his comrades.”

You listened, trying to breathe deeply as you thought. Ryu had never truly felt like an enemy to you, not in the way that Fudo, Jin, Suzuki and Isao had. It had been Keiichiro Uchiha’s tragedy that had made you see a boy and not a shinobi when you looked at Ryu, but at the end of the day, you had always been (Y/N) (L/N) of Konohagakure, and he had always been Ryu of Iwagakure. But still…you had kept his file in your office with Keiichiro’s, knowing if Fudo was reminded of Ryu’s bakuton kekkei genkai, he would cease to be either a boy or a shinobi, and instead an experiment to be taken apart.

“Ryu’s kekkei genkai – it’s the Stone’s bakuton jutsu, for their Explosion Squad,” you said. “If they know he’s the one that revealed that compound –”

“Ryu is the only survivor,” Tobirama interrupted. “Madara and Izuna destroyed everything with fire.” The reassurance had unspoken particulars – the evidence of a spy, the research, and the bodies, of both the researchers and the victims.

The sudden nausea in your gut must’ve shown on your face because Tobirama took his hand from yours and reached to pour you a cup of water from the ewer on the table next to the bed. You drank it quickly, and then drank the next cup, until the sick feeling was gone.

“What about…” you swallowed, setting the empty cup down with your hands in your lap. “Suzuki?”

A dark look shadowed Tobirama’s face and he spoke between clenched teeth, “Hashirama dealt with him.”

An image of bloodstained wood crossed your imagination, but you ignored it before you truly were sick.

 Tobirama took the cup from your hands and set it back on the table as the silence rose again between the two of you.

The bird calls were more frequent as the sun climbed higher, lighting your room with panels of red-gold glow. You had vaguely recognized the Senju home when you’d woken, from the way the chakra had thrummed contentedly through the living wood Hashirama had constructed within the Senju Compound. No other buildings in Konoha felt the same, with the strength of peace and longevity woven into the walls. It was home, as much as the village itself, and the man at your bedside were.

“(Y/N),” Tobirama suddenly said, not so much breaking the silence as speaking through it. You looked back at him, from where you’d been staring through the open window to the nearby tree beyond, and the birds chirping along the great branches. When you met Tobirama’s eyes, you felt something within you ache, in the way your heart had in the months since you’d realized why he affected you like no other.

He’d been holding his own hands between his spread legs, but when you’d turned to look at him, he’d set them on his knees, so he bent slightly toward you, almost like he was prepared to speak war strategy to you. You could see the healed skin around his wrists, and another part of you that was still unsure of the reality you found yourself in was true or not, relaxed. He was healing. He was safe and he was alive. And so were you.

“Yell at me,” Tobirama said.

You blinked. “I’m sorry?”

A blush rose into Tobirama’s face, but he continued to look you in the eye, even as you stared at him wide-eyed. Had you thought too soon about his health?

“Yell at me,” he said again. “I have said things to you that deserve your anger, and I would hear your anger, if it meant fixing it – whatever it was between us – before I was so callous to you.”

You stared at him for a long moment, watching the blush on his face darken to match the scarlet of his eyes, and then you laughed. You tilted your head back and laughed, even as it ached your chest and as it made you breathless, you laughed.

“Tobirama,” you managed between laughs. “I’m not going to yell at you.”

The red in his face could have matched an Uchiha’s eyes if anyone were to judge, but you ignored the comparison for his own sake as you reached for his hands, shifting in the bed. He sat up, letting you take his hands into yours and then letting you touch the side of his face with one of your hands.

“I forgave you somewhere between force feeding you miso and dying, Tobirama,” you told him, fingers tangling through the longer strands of his white hair. “Your unkindness is not acceptable, and you won’t get off so easy if you do it again, but I don’t need to yell at you.”

His brow furrowed as he pivoted slightly to look at you head on. “‘Won’t get off so easy?’” he parroted, tone approaching incredulous. “You believe being chained to the floor and being forced to surrender all the danger to you alone was getting off easy?” he demanded.

“‘Surrender all the danger to me alone?’” you echoed in the same tone. “You hardly did any surrendering! I could hardly get you to work with me at first!” you retorted.

“Because I –”

He cut himself off and your eyebrow raised. “Because what? Because you are too proud and too rude to think I could handle the situation?”

He gave you a flat look, devoid of any irritation or antagonism. “Because I would rather die before I willingly send you into the line of fire for me.”

You blinked and realized your mouth had fallen open slightly when he lifted one of his hands from yours to chuck his index finger beneath your chin, pushing your lips back together.

“You’ll catch a fly,” he explained dumbly, raising his hand further to cup the side of your face.

You tried to smother a laugh through a quick exhale as warmth rose to your face beneath his hand, but this close to him, you could only hide your racing heart because he wasn’t touching a pulse point.

“Tobirama,” you managed to get out before he swiped his thumb across your cheek again, just like he did while you were crying.

“I ask for your patience,” he spoke, staring you in the eyes. “I have only known how to care for my brothers, and they have either died or grown into their own strength, and while I don’t doubt your abilities, I think it is fair to say that I regard you vastly different from Hashirama.”

Your lips parted again and this time Tobirama’s thumb traced the edge of them.

“I pushed you away to protect myself from this feeling, because I knew it could only mean a far worse breakage if I lost you, but having seen you try to protect my life and then die in front of me while I could nothing but watch, I realized I would rather love you and lose you, than lose you and have never loved you at all,” Tobirama continued. You felt a tear leave your lashes as your eyes welled, heartbeat loud and furious in your ears. “Tell me all that I have done wrong to you and let me fix it, and tell me your every thought and feeling, and let me help you make sense of it. Let me be that for you.”

A soft breath left you, and you reached for his face, holding it between your hands as the lengths of his still-damp hair tangled between your knuckles.

“Only if you can promise me the same,” you answered as steadily as you could. “Only if you can open up to me in the same way you wish from me, and only if you swear you will try to, if it’s too hard right now.”

Tobirama’s smile pressed into the sides of your palms.

“Watching you die was the hardest thing I have ever done,” he answered. “Everything else you could ask of me will be an easy effort.”

You laughed slightly as he stood up, only to sit on the edge of your bed in front of you. “You make jokes, Tobirama? I wasn’t aware you knew what those were.”

He leaned, setting his forehead against yours, and as you began to shut your eyes, he tilted his head slightly and spoke softly, breath warm against the bare skin of your neck, “There are many things I know that I think you will like.”

You snapped back instantly with wide, shocked eyes, the heat in your face feeling like Uchiha fire as Tobirama snorted, pulling you back to him in a tangle of limbs.

“I was only speaking of research,” he said, but you could hear his amusement as you scoffed into his shoulder.

“I know just as much research as you do, Tobirama Senju,” you retorted as his arms tightened around your waist.

“Oh?” came his response against your neck.

Perhaps death had been a mercy if it could spare you this embarrassment. Uchiha fire was a mountain stream compared to the heat burning on your face.

A moment passed where Tobirama only held you, breathing deeply around you. This was the man you’d risked your life for, without a doubt or hesitation beyond the assurance of his safety. You’d taken the wounds and the beatings from Isao and his men, letting them torture you if only it meant you protected not only your home, but also the man who’d made a home in your heart, whether he’d wanted it or not. And…this was the man who asked for your patience as he learned how to love you, who you had seen strain against his chains to reach for you while you’d been dying, the man you’d heard yell at you to get up. The man you’d been grateful at the very least to be with while you died, and now the man that held you near enough to him that you were sure he was thinking of the very same moments.

“Are you sure it’s not the suspension bridge effect?” you asked breathlessly into his shoulder.

You felt him laugh lowly as he pulled a hand through your hair and shake his head into your neck before he pulled back and set his forehead against yours. “Fear confirmed my heart; it didn’t reveal it.”