Work Text:
The worst part, Tobirama despaired, was that Madara was a good writer.
He had gotten Madara as a client through — not 'the universe pushing them together because no one else could or should ever deal with their bullshit,' as Izuna put it (and Madara more or less agreed with, though with more sweet nothings) — sheer coincidence. By all rights, Tobirama shouldn't have been his editor at all. Madara wrote non-fiction. Though Tobirama had some opinion pieces and popular science articles under his name, he specialized in fantasy novels.
More to the point, he shouldn't have gotten Madara as a client because Obito was his editor first. Only, Obito had held out for about six months before saying, “Fuck this, I’ll do literally anything else,” and dumping the entire mess in Naruto's lap.
Naruto was an editor as well as the publisher's son, a show of nepotism that only failed to inspire grumbling among the rank-and-file because he personally dealt with the problem cases. He was the one who transformed Hyuuga Neji’s first novel from two-hundred pages of obnoxious fatalism to a beautiful treatise on hope, fate, and autonomy that even managed to touch Tobirama’s dead heart. Hell, he’d gotten Gaara (one name only, like Cher) to behave like a normal human being, instead of a cryptid who popped up on the local news for answering perfectly benign questions like a serial killer.
The kid worked miracles.
So when Obito had unceremoniously kicked Madara to the curb, citing 'irreconcilable differences' (like he was getting a divorce) and 'the desire to not fucking get Stockholm syndrome' (something he'd actually written in a work memo because Obito had never met a social norm he gave a fuck about), Madara should've gone to Naruto.
Should have. But Naruto was up to his eyeballs in some interpersonal drama between Haku and Zabuza — who were supposedly thicker than thieves; this was exactly why Tobirama never managed collaborations — so their publisher Kushina had said, “Fuck it, let’s just ask him who he wants.”
It turned out that Madara wanted whoever edited Sarutobi Hiruzen's last book.
Which was Tobirama.
Madara had read an interview where Saru had sung Tobirama’s praises — if with an overtone of mild dread, like one’s attitude toward a favorite professor who had a tendency for making freshmen cry.
Publicly, Tobirama said this showed Madara had good taste. Privately, he thought it indicated some degree of masochism.
At their first meeting, in a dramatic long coat and mismatched chunky scarf over his equally dramatic long hair, Madara had looked him in the eye and said matter-of-factly, "I know I'm good. I want someone to tear my work to pieces so I can be better."
Borderline-unhealthy perfectionism. Tobirama hadn’t been far off.
Reading Madara’s writing had won him over — deadpan but not cynical, lyrical without veering into purple prose. Madara had an eye for detail, a sense of rhythm and pacing that couldn’t be taught, and an underlying spite that came from caring too much and being salty about it. Tobirama was a sucker for all of it.
So the true tragedy of the situation was that Madara could write. Was capable of it. Was in fact very talented.
All things Tobirama would've said to anyone who asked — so long as it was out of Madara's earshot.
Of course, this was all before he decided to write a novel.
It had started promisingly enough.
Madara was, again, a talented writer with an engaging style. So even though what he was putting to paper was complete fucking trash, it took Tobirama a while to stop admiring individual scenes — which were fascinatingly punchy; he hadn't known Madara could write action — long enough to notice.
"Madara," Tobirama said, pinching the bridge of his nose. “If the main antagonist was alive that long, why didn’t he make any progress on his big plan? Did he spend all that time in the same cave? What was he even going to do if he didn’t find this random mutilated kid for him to gaslight into being his apprentice?”
The love of his life was sitting on their bed with his hair up and his glasses on, staring at his laptop with the look of intense concentration that he always had when consumed by the craft. He looked eminently fuckable — if only Tobirama could feel something more amorous than existential despair.
"What?" Madara asked absently.
“The main antagonist.”
"Oh, yes. What about him?"
Tobirama counted silently to ten. Then he counted to twenty. Then he said: “What was he doing this whole time.”
Madara didn't look up from his laptop. “Secretly pulling strings to orchestrate world events in his favor.”
"... I thought that was what his apprentice did after he died.”
He waved an elegant fine-boned hand. "Yeah, well, before that he needed to maintain a low profile.”
"... Okay?"
“He couldn’t beat the other founder in a fight, so he stayed out of sight until the other guy died — somehow. It’s fine, I’ll figure out the circumstances later. After that he had to refine the mass illusion technique and develop the god eyes ... and finish the cell grafts? Probably? Anyway, it’s more poignant to have the apprentice be behind most of the plot because his damage is directly a result of the shinobi system, whereas—” He frowned suddenly. "I feel like I sent this to you already. Wasn't it in the theme notes?"
Tobirama stopped reading that document after the explanation that the two main characters were reincarnations of the two founders of their village, who were themselves reincarnations of the grandsons of an alien goddess. He didn’t even want to touch on the choice to make the first incarnations brothers by blood when the two main characters had that much homoerotic subtext.
"Right," he said faintly. “But the apprentice says the founding of the village happened more than eighty years ago. The main antagonist has to have been waiting for at least four decades.”
Madara didn't respond for several moments.
"Fuck," he said finally. "I forgot about that scene."
Though Madara requested him specifically and Tobirama vetted him before agreeing to take him as a client, they still spent the first few months of their working relationship barely restraining themselves from punching each other in the face. It was that inevitable clash over artistic direction — and more to the point, they were both stubborn assholes.
"He meets his deadlines," Kushina had said when Tobirama eventually brought it up. It was a spurt of transparency brought about not by shame or commitment to honesty as a moral good, but by the desire to know if he should be buying champagne for when they transferred Madara to another editor. Whether that champagne would be celebratory or consolatory was up in the air. "And we don't have a suuuuuuper huge nonfiction department, anyway. Since Obito booted him, you're basically the only other option."
"There's ..." He racked his brain. "Doesn't Guy do non-fiction?"
Kushina broke into gut-busting laughter. "Oh, man," she said, wiping away a tear. "What I wouldn't pay — but no, I like Guy too much to make him deal with Madara. And I like liability paperwork too little to deal with Madara’s inevitable homicide attempt. No, no, no. You're stuck with him."
"I'm hurt," Tobirama said blandly. "You don't like me?"
She patted his cheek. In moments like this, it was obvious that she was a mom.
"Aww, Tobi," she cooed. "I like you just fine. But if Madara's with you, then the explosions are kept to a minimum and far away from me and my sensitive constitution—" she ignored the incredulous eyebrow he raised— "so with you, he will stay. You like him anyway, so stop complaining."
"What gave you that impression?" he asked, unsure if he was offended or not.
"Well, you haven't dumped him on Naruto yet," Kushina said cheerfully. "That's usually a good metric."
... Which is to say, they got together by accident.
If ‘accident’ was the word you were using for ‘post-argument fuck over his desk’, which Tobirama was. The unabbreviated version read more like ‘post-argument fuck over his desk, which blended with their existing weekly check-in over coffee, and somehow six months later Tobirama had a set of toiletries, a coffee machine too big to fit on his own counter, and half his closet at Madara’s apartment’ — but that was neither here nor there.
By the time Tobirama had to concentrate to remember if any particular shirt was originally his or Madara’s, he figured it was time to start telling people they were dating.
Or, at least, he was pretty sure they were dating?
... Fuck.
“Madara,” he had called, still glaring into the depths of his boyfriend(???)’s closet. “Are we dating?”
“What?” Madara called back. The spray of the shower subsided before cutting off. “I didn’t hear you.”
“Are we dating,” Tobirama repeated.
There was a worryingly long period of silence before the shower curtains rustled and the bathroom door swung open. Madara peered at him from under his mass of wet hair, towel haphazardly tied around his waist.
Tobirama stared at him. He stared back.
Eventually, Madara cleared his throat. “I’m sorry, you want to get into the ‘what are we’ relationship talk now?”
In Tobirama’s defense, he hadn’t thought it would be a talk. If he knew this was going to be a whole conversation — instead of Madara saying absentmindedly yeah, no shit, or scowling no, what the fuck (or, more likely, getting awkwardly gentle and trying to let Tobirama down easy) — he would’ve handed him a note that read “Are we dating?” with two checkboxes underneath for “yes” and “no” and instructions to drop it in the inbox on his work desk.
“Oh my gods,” Madara said, accurately reading the look on Tobirama’s face. “Let me put on clothes.”
Still holding the dress shirt that sparked this whole mess, Tobirama shuffled to the side while Madara scooted past him. He went straight for comfort clothes: his old university hoodie and the butter-soft jeans with the patched crotch, which meant Madara definitely thought this was going to be a discussion.
... Since when did he know what Madara wore when he needed a pick-me-up, anyway?
“So,” said Madara a little while later. He’d made tea, because he was from the kind of emotionally repressed household that sublimated their feelings into domestic rituals. Not that Tobirama had room to talk.
“So,” Tobirama echoed, fighting the urge to fidget.
Madara set down his cup of tea on the table with a sharp clink. “Okay, we can pretend to be functional adults for this conversation. Do you want us to be dating?”
Tobirama picked at the seam of his slacks under the table. “Ye—es?”
Madara looked unimpressed.
He tried again: “I thought we already were?”
“Well,” Madara said. “Apparently not, if you had to ask.”
Good gods, this was going poorly.
“Do you want us to be dating?”
Madara drummed his fingers on the table. “I let you bring half your shit to my place, including that godsforsaken coffee machine that sounds like a dying cat whenever you turn it on at fuck o’clock in the morning — yes, I want to date you.”
“Oh,” Tobirama had said. Then: “I should tell my brother. Hashirama will whine forever if I don’t.”
“Wait,” said Madara, “why is that name familiar?”
Hashirama had already been running for mayor at that point, having transitioned from teaching various high school science classes (read: whatever admin couldn't hire anyone for) to politics.
Tobirama should've seen it coming. Hashirama spent all his time as a child either tromping through the woods or sketching city plans.
"Madara?" his older brother had said when Tobirama mentioned his new boyfriend. "Uchiha Madara? Hey, we went to the same middle school! Let me see if I can find those yearbooks ..."
Tobirama had complained, many times, that Konoha was too fucking small. Somehow. Despite being one of the biggest cities in Fire Country. He occasionally threatened to move somewhere people didn't know his name and do all his work correspondence through email.
"Video conference, too, right?" Rin had said without looking up from her phone, the last time Tobirama had brought this up in the break room. Reporters had harassed him for the previous two days over some rumor about Hashirama's — he didn't even know — something about his personal life. These days, the moment his brother’s name was brought up in any conversation about politics, he zoned out as a self-defense mechanism.
"Absolutely not," Tobirama had snapped. Zoom was a special hell he wished only on his worst enemies. Then, begrudgingly: "I would take phone calls." More efficient to yell at people over the phone than over email.
But maybe all his suffering had borne fruit, if the end result was watching Madara's face turn an interesting shade of puce when Tobirama pulled out huge print-out photocopies of sixth-grade Madara, scowling at the camera and surrounded by quotes about how he planned to run for president.
He lasted longer than Tobirama expected before snatching them up and ripping them to pieces, his disgruntled frown identical to his younger self’s.
"I have more copies," Tobirama informed him.
"I'm going," Madara said through gritted teeth, "to burn Hashirama's fucking house down."
"So you do remember him?"
He rolled his eyes in that excruciatingly slow way he sometimes did solely to irritate Tobirama. "Kind of hard to forget when his face is on every election poster in the city. Admittedly,” he added, “it took me a while to recognize him without the bowl cut."
Tobirama was terrible at handing out compliments. It was part of why, though he had a greater range in genre and medium than any other editor at the company, he only worked with a handful of writers long-term.
It was also what had made him decide against becoming a teacher.
"I like kids," Tobirama told Madara, who wasn't paying attention to the 60 Minutes episode about Ame’s cult situation either. "But I'd fuck them up emotionally."
"There's university," Madara pointed out. "Or graduate school, more realistically, if you don't want to work with children."
Tobirama wrinkled his nose. "And spend the rest of my life writing grant proposals and not making tenure? I would not make tenure," he added at Madara's questioning noise. "Let's be honest, pissing off my department head would be one of the first things I’d do once I got hired. I'd piss off Kushina, too, if she wasn't ... Kushina."
"Ah, childhood dreams," Madara mused, smiling sweetly like he always did when Tobirama admitted that he was an asshole who shouldn't be allowed to talk to other people. "I can't believe I used to want to go into politics."
"What made you change your mind?" Madara was charismatic — in a shout-y way, if you were into that, which tragically Tobirama was — principled, and though their politics weren't completely aligned, he was logical and thorough and thoughtful. It wasn't cynicism that stopped him; Madara, like Tobirama, wished he was cynical but couldn't stop caring long enough to manage it.
Madara snorted a laugh. "You've been to town hall meetings, right? I'd set my office on fire if I had to talk to that many morons that often, never mind having to pretend to care about their petty bullshit."
Clearly, they were soulmates.
Still, soulmates or not, sometimes he wished he'd taken the redhead from the Konoha University art department up on that coffee date. Sasori was a little too into cadavers — and this from Tobirama — but at least he knew how biology worked.
And, you know, had never made him read shit he could never unread.
"It's not an extinction event," Madara was arguing hotly. "I mean — okay, it would kill everyone on the planet, but that wasn't the original plan. It's an illusion world, people need to be alive to be in the illusion."
"How would anyone eat while trapped in your fucking Norse-rip-off world tree," Tobirama snapped, hearing his temper audibly stretch to the breaking point.
"The tree provides nutrients," Madara yelled back, having lost his temper ten minutes ago. "How fucking stupid do you think I am?"
Before Tobirama could reply, Hashirama shoved a hand over his mouth, laughing in a vaguely threatening way. "Now, now, it's the winter solstice; can we not fight?"
He licked the hand resentfully. His brother, unfortunately immune to his antics (from growing up with him) and saliva-related grossness (from having a baby), didn't blink.
Tobirama sulked.
"Maybe," Hashirama suggested, with that sleep-deprived smile that meant if they annoyed Mito, or worse, woke Tsunade, he would gladly kick them into rush hour traffic, "we can calm down, stop yelling, and either talk about this like rational adults or stop talking about it."
Madara grumbled under his breath.
Hashirama raised an eyebrow. "Unless you want me to get out the talking stick?"
Tobirama made frantic 'abort' motions with his eyebrows.
Madara, the naive fool, only frowned. "The fuck is the talking stick?"
The talking stick was a mortifying exercise that Hashirama used to pull on his high school students to embarrass them into being nice to each other. It was a glittery wand with rainbow streamers, rhinestones and glitter galore, with an honest to gods unicorn head on the end. One would think it was Tsunade's, but Hashirama had owned the damn thing way before Mito popped out a baby.
The only upside to this situation was that Izuna was out of the country on a work trip and Mito was busy upstairs with Tsunade, so there were no witnesses pointing and laughing or filming them for future blackmail.
"Anija," Tobirama said plaintively, staring at his doom in sequins and pink cotton candy fluff. Somehow it got more elaborate every time he saw it. "Is this necessary?"
"Considering how I need to check on the turkey," Hashirama said, still smiling, "and you two need to stop shouting at each other, yes!"
"I regret asking," Madara said, too late.
"Too late!" Hashirama trilled, like the biggest and most annoying bird in the world.
"I really fucking regret asking," Madara said.
"You're not forgiven," Tobirama said flatly.
Madara's eye twitched. "I wasn't asking for your forgiveness—"
"Good, because you don't have it."
"—you arrogant, self-absorbed bastard, I was just expressing a—"
Hashirama cleared his throat.
They shut up.
He beamed.
"Now," his brother said beatifically, "the rules are: you can only speak when you have the talking stick, and I'll be deciding who has it. And if you break the talking stick, you're buying me a new one." He looked contemplative. "I have a few bookmarked on Amazon. There's this one with little dolphins that looks really cute."
"Anija," Tobirama repeated bleakly. The unicorn stared mockingly up at him with dead, soulless eyes.
"Anyway!" Hashirama held out the pastel monstrosity. "Madara! Why don't you start? What's the problem here?"
Madara hesitantly reached out, wincing when his fingers made contact with the bejeweled plastic. Another reason why Tobirama hated this exercise with the intensity of a thousand fiery suns: the glitter took forever to wash off.
"Well. It's work." At Hashirama's wide-eyed stare of encouragement-threat, he elaborated. "I'm writing my first novel and Tobirama—" Madara slanted a glare at him— "is being completely unhelpful. Like, fuck, it's not even constructive criticism anymore."
Hashirama made grabby hands for the talking stick. Madara eagerly returned it.
"That's a great start! Tobirama, why don't you tell your side?"
Tobirama accepted the talking stick with resignation.
"I think," he said delicately, "that there are parts of the novel that are good. Even great. You have a large cast with a wide array of personalities who bounce off each other in interesting ways, and though I have issues with some of the finer details of the worldbuilding — like, say, how the afterlife works — but as far as I can tell it's largely irrelevant to the story. My main issue is the plot structure. It's.” He futilely tried to come up with another way to phrase his next point, before giving up on delicacy. “Madara, it's so convoluted. What the fuck are you doing."
He handed over the talking stick, bracing himself.
"Good, good," Hashirama said encouragingly. "Except for that last part — but otherwise, good! Now, Madara, your response? And try to stay civil."
Madara bristled as he snatched up the unicorn wand. "It's lore," he bit out. "It's complicated, but so is any other epic fantasy setting. The world has history.”
"There are aliens, Madara," Tobirama burst out, ignoring how Hashirama dropped his head into his hands. "You made a magic system. Why the fuck are there aliens?"
"The line between sci-fi and fantasy is thin at best and arbitrary at worst, you genre purist," Madara snapped, pointing the talking stick at him threateningly. The unicorn head bobbed slowly.
"It's not genre purism! You need to foreshadow things!"
"I do!"
"An exposition dump halfway through the book from a weird man in a cave isn't foreshadowing! While we're on the subject — why do you have two different weirdos giving exposition dumps in caves?"
"Okay," Hashirama cut in. "I'm done. Madara, you're helping me with dinner. Tobirama, stay here and ... just stay here. Read a book or something."
"All you have are children’s books and harlequin romances," Tobirama muttered. "Not even the good ones."
"Why do I have to help with dinner?" Madara squawked.
"Because clearly the two of you can't be in the same room, Tobirama isn't allowed near the stove in this house, and, oh, I still need to check on the turkey."
Amid protests, Hashirama dragged Madara out of the room.
Tobirama sighed, pulled off the shelf the nearest book with a target audience over the age of five, and started flipping listlessly through Innocent Heart, Primed for Sin.
Tobirama was flicking through pictures of adorably sulky middle school Madara on his phone to recapture the feeling of sweet, sweet sadism. It was the only way he was going to get through this plot outline with his sanity intact.
There were only so many times he could leave ‘why’ as a comment before his brain leaked out of his ears.
He stared at the mass of digital red ink covering the Word document. He hadn’t even critiqued the last third yet and he already felt like he was losing his mind.
Hence the scrolling through embarrassing childhood pictures.
His laptop pinged with a new notification. He navigated back to the tab with the chat he had open with Madara.
M: honestly, the aloe vera thing barely counts, so it’s really more like three final bosses in a row
T: Why is the aloe vera thing even here
M: the goddess is trapped! in the moon! I had to have SOMEONE on her side near any other characters
T: Even leaving aside the absolute lack of interesting motivation, it’s still so incompetent that it took eight-hundred years to accomplish its ONE goal
M: which is why it barely counts as a main antagonist
T: It’s one goal to get someone to unlock the god eyes it needed for its secret scheme to free the alien goddess
T: ... Which was hidden behind another secret scheme to create a perfect illusion world, behind a cultish criminal conspiracy to maintain world peace through periodically using nuclear weapons
M: yeah what’s your point
M: by the way, what do you want for dinner tonight? I’m too lazy to cook so I figured we’d get takeout
T: There’s that River Country restaurant that we went to a few weeks ago
M: psh. you and seafood. alright, I’ll get you some grilled tilapia
T: Thanks
M: anytime babe
T: You have to cut down the ending
M: it’s a godsdamned ensemble piece, do you want the secondary cast to have fulfilling ends to their character arcs or not
T: Half those characters aren’t important
M: you fucking take that back
This was a typical interaction as of late. They tried not to bring work home with them, or at least to keep the shoptalk to before five PM. It still spilled over into their private life.
Tobirama never had to deal with this problem with other writers — but he didn’t live with them.
“Look, there was a certain gothic grotesqueness in the Chia Pet human cell grafted ... bust. Thing.” Tobirama grimaced. He couldn’t believe they were having this conversation in the middle of a cocktail party. “But having the founder’s face on the antagonist’s tit is just fucking bizarre.”
“That’s the point,” Madara said, uncharacteristically mild. He’d made the brave but foolish decision of grabbing the blue cheese-stuffed olives from the hors d'oeuvre table and was trying to choke them down with wine, an effort that left no room for indignation. “I’m trying to play up how unhinged he is.”
“He’s trying to bounce an illusion off the moon. He seems plenty unhinged already.”
Madara opened his mouth.
“If you say ‘there’s no kill like overkill’,” Tobirama said, “I’m going to leave you with your shitty food and go talk to Mito.”
Madara paused, shrugged, popped another olive into his mouth, and made a face.
“I don’t know what I expected,” Tobirama continued, staring into the middle distance as he talked to no one in particular. “You’re not subtle when you write essays either.”
Madara swallowed. “These,” he said with great dignity, “are very bad.”
Needless to say, by the time the novel had made it through structural and content edits and became the technical editor’s problem, Tobirama was hanging on to his composure by his fingernails.
Kushina raised her eyebrows at him during the meeting where the project was officially handed off to design and typesetting. As everyone else cleared out of the conference room, she waved for him to stay in his seat.
“Doing alright there, Tobi?” she asked.
He put his forehead down on the table and groaned.
“That good, huh,” she said. “Look at it this way: you don’t have to look at that book ever again!”
“I live with the author,” Tobirama said to the floor.
“You don’t have to edit that book ever again!”
That almost made up for the fact that he would be reading reviews about the fucking thing when it came out.
Thankfully, the torture of editing Madara’s last book was followed by a pleasant year and a half of finalization and marketing when he didn’t have to look at or think about any of it. Madara was taking a break from writing, which meant that they didn’t even argue over work. It was fantastic.
One night near the end of this blissful lull, they came home late from dinner with Izuna and muddled their way through their nighttime routines before crawling into bed. Tobirama drifted off to sleep with one arm around Madara, lazily tracing shapes on his stomach.
He woke up ten seconds later when Madara shifted and muttered something under his breath.
“What,” Tobirama said, cracking one eye open.
Madara looked pensive. “I’m thinking,” he said, “of writing a sequel.”