Work Text:
Soul Deep
Tobirama’s world is a kaleidoscope of colors from the day that he is born. Everything he looks at is so remarkable that he doesn’t even understand what life is like for all of the other children his age. When he’s three his father lays flowers down and tells him to point to the one that looks different, and yet every single one is different, vibrant and bold and none of them look the same. He can’t decide, but he doesn’t want to disappoint, so he chooses one.
“It’s blue,” his father nods, “Uzumaki maybe, that’s good. We are their allies. Shame it wasn’t green like your older brother.”
This seems to be the end of it, Tobirama is not asked to sort the flowers again, although all his chores now seem to revolve around the color blue. Fetch the blue water, wash the blue dishes, sort the blue laundry.
His baby armor is presented in shades of blue, his weight to carry and learn how to fight in. He wonders what the other colors are called (Hashirama’s the color of the leaves), but he’s not even sure how to ask.
Kawarama is born next, in shades that look like the earth and trees, and still Tobirama doesn’t have the words to explain what he looks like, what everything looks like to him. He’s starting to realize that what he sees is not the same as all of the other children, he sees his own eyes in the mirror and they are the color of the blood under his skin, and yet nobody ever comments on it.
The last Senju sibling to be born is Itama, Tobirama’s youngest brother. He looks like Tobirama, with a vulpine face and calm expression, but his eyes and hair are mismatched, not quite like Tobirama at all. One side of his face is Hashirama’s dark earthy colors while the other side matches Tobirama’s stark brilliant hair and he has a single blood colored eye.
“Why is one of Itama’s eyes like Hashirama, and the other one like mine?” Tobirama asks their mother.
“You can see that?” She asks, startled, but clutching tight to Itama, not allowing him to fall even in her shock.
Tobirama nods, pointing to the eye that looks just like his. “What does it mean?”
“His eyes, or that you can see them?” His mother asks, she’s shrewd and astute, otherwise she wouldn’t have survived so well in the ruthless Senju clan.
Tobirama isn’t sure exactly what she means.
“Itama has some of my blood, my clan colors, and so do you, that’s why your eyes and one of his are the same as yours and mine,” she clarifies. “But it also means that you have already met your soulmate, the person who will be there for you no matter what, your life’s constant and most important person, or they are supposed to be.”
“And I’ve already met them,” Tobirama says, and it should be a question, but he is also shrewd and astute and so it is not.
She smiles, shifting Itama to her breast to feed as he fusses, unbothered by the revelations happening around him.
“Yes, Tobirama, everyone in the world can only see in shades of black, like Itama’s dark hair, and white like your own, and if they are lucky a single color to guide their path on the way to their soulmate. Usually when you see each other, eye to eye, both of your worlds will bloom into color.”
“We thought yours was blue,” she hums, “but I guess it doesn’t matter so much now. You can see all of the colors, you have been given a gift by somebody most special to you.”
“But how do I know who they are?” Tobirama asks, “I have always seen like this, every moment of my life, all the way back that I can remember.”
“Well, we will have to find the person whose world showed up in color the moment they first saw you,” she smiles, “it may be a little hard, but have hope Tobirama, you’ll find them one day. They must be a Senju too, a baby born at the same time or perhaps…”
He hangs on to her every word, his mother is wise, and to be respected. He tells himself that he must not hold his breath, a warrior never holds his breath.
“Perhaps, you should ask Hashirama,” she suggests. “He was the first person to hold you when you were born… even though he never said anything…”
“Will you come with me?” Tobirama asks, it’s not that he’s afraid, but he doesn’t know how to explain all of this complicated information about soulmates, he doesn’t even know the proper names for all the colors he sees, and he knows Hashirama must not either.
“Of course,” his mother offers, “we will go as soon as Itama is sleeping soundly in his bed.”
Tobirama waits most patiently, until she is ready to come with him.
They find Hashirama playing in the mud outside, small trees growing around him as their supervisor looks on, bored by a young child doing his simple drills.
“Hashirama,” their mother calls, softly. “We need to ask you something very important.”
Like all of her children, Hashirama knows when to press and when to stand tall and listen to careful instruction. It’s just that he chooses not to.
“Yes? Yes?! Of course, I know so many important things,” he smiles and claps his hands together. “I am very clever.”
“You are,” she teases, kneeling down so she’s closer to the height of her small children. “I need you to remember for me, the day when the world stopped being dull and started being bright and full of so many different things. The sky suddenly was like the river, and the grass like the trees, and your brother’s eyes shone like rubies.”
“ What?” Hashirama asks , “but Tobirama’s eyes are the same color as the sky, the rocks, and the river. Everything is, everything except for the leaves on the trees and the grass on the ground most of the time.”
“Oh,” she nods, “thank you for telling me, I understand, alright, back to your training. Tobirama, please help me while we take Itama back inside.”
He knows it means something, but he doesn’t understand what, but he also knows that he probably shouldn’t ask in front of Hashirama. He doesn’t want to hurt his beloved older brother's feelings.
“What does it mean?” He whispers into the soft silk of his mother’s skirt. “I don’t understand.”
“I’m sorry Tobirama,” she apologizes, Itama still cradled in her arms, clutching her long sleeves and staring at Tobirama over her forearm. “It means that Hashirama is probably your soulmate, but you are not his.”
“Does it matter?” He asks, confused. “He can’t see like I can, can he?”
“No, not yet, maybe one day, but it means you must do one thing for me, something very important and possibly very difficult,” she whispers conspiratorially.
“Of course, mother,” he agrees, solemn and serious as his young age will allow.
“Stay with Hashirama and support him. One day you may be all he has,” she runs her free hand along the side of his cheek and kisses his forehead.
“I promise,” he bows, as formal as he can manage. “I will do my very best.”
xxx
Izuna is the quintessential Uchiha, the pinnacle of what they are supposed to be. He’s the second son, the spare to the heir of the main family and he is to embody everything the Uchiha hold dear.
His older brother Madara is a little strange in comparison. He’s strong, he’s fast, and he’s fierce, but he’s too thoughtful, too soft. He doesn’t see the color red.
“What are those flowers along the bottom of mother’s haori called?” Izuna asks his father. “They’re so pretty.”
“Those are spider lilies, higanbana, they are your mother’s favorite flower and they are in the color crimson. Crimson is very important to the Uchiha.”
Izuna nods along, climbing up into his father’s lap, trying to filch the shuriken he knows are hidden in the folds of the hakama, secured with ninja wire. It’s a game he never tires of. Any shuriken he can steal become his forever.
“Why is crimson important?” Izuna asks, blinking and trying to look as innocent as possible.
“Crimson is the color of our sharingan, the power in our eyes. It is the color of the blood that keeps you alive, your heart and your lips. It’s our color. The one on our fan, the deepest of our fires. If you have an Uchiha soulmate, then it’s usually the color you see, it’s beautiful.”
Later, curled up in their futons, Izuna cannot sleep.
“Madara,” he hisses. “Madara, are you awake?”
“No?” Madara grumbles, turning over and laying an arm over his face. “I am not? Go to sleep, Izuna.”
“I just have one question, just one, I promise.”
Madara turns to face him, eyes wide in the darkness, hair falling over half of his face. “What is it?” He asks, sleep thick in his tone.
Izuna’s brow furrows, his tone is serious. “Do you see crimson?”
Madara doesn’t speak for so long that Izuna almost starts to think he has fallen asleep. He knows his brother hasn’t, he smells salt in the air and hears the sniffing that Madara tries to hold back.
“I don’t see any color at all, nothing special, not a single one. I don’t think I have a soulmate,” he confesses in the night.
“Oh,” Izuna says, and suddenly his colors don’t feel so special anymore, he can’t even share. “I’m… sorry.”
“Me too,” Madara agrees and that is the last he ever truly speaks on it. Izuna too, after that day. He sees the crimson as a blessing unto itself, but he stops looking around corners wondering if he’ll find his soulmate, wondering if they’re born yet or dead by the machine of war or if they are just around that corner.
He doesn’t want to find something that Madara will never have.
xxx
The day Senju Tobirama meets Uchiha Izuna on the battlefield isn’t a particularly special day at all. He’s since learned most of the colors from books and clansmen with soulmates, so Tobirama has the words to describe him accurately. Black hair, cream skin, red eyes. He’s so unlike the Senju, so sharp and angry at the world.
Tobirama doesn’t know what color he sees the world in, doesn’t ask and doesn’t care.
His family took Tobirama’s little brothers away. He’s the enemy, fight after fight after fight.
Until Tobirama fells him in battle, and then he is something else entirely.
xxx
Izuna sees crimson everywhere he looks at home. The fan, the embroidery, the sharingan. It’s his favorite color, even if it’s the only one he sees. He lines his coat with precious red silk, protecting his skin from the rough scratch of the exterior wool, the bottom is embroidered with mother’s spider lilies. It’s an unusual choice, but Izuna insists on it.
When he meets Senju Tobirama it becomes nearly an obsession. Tobirama’s skin is light, his hair is pale, and the crimson lines that adorn his cheeks and chin are hypnotic. His eyes, devoid of sharingan, shine like the rubies in the Uchiha treasury. Izuna is enthralled, not his soulmate no, but he sees Tobirama in all the color he ever wants to.
They are evenly matched, striking at each other’s weaknesses, water against fire, steel and skill against more steel and more skill. Izuna uses his powerful eyes, yes, but only in their more limited power, he wants to see Tobirama bleed crimson, not burn in the black flames of hell.
They dance around each other like two cranes, poised and cautious. Until one day Tobirama’s sword pierces his side and the crimson Izuna wanted to see spill from Tobirama’s flesh spills from Izuna’s instead. It’s a dark stain on his already dark coat.
He doesn’t die, but it’s a near thing.
xxx
Izuna’s wound doesn’t bring the Uchiha clan down to their knees like Tobirama hoped. It does bring them to the negotiation table, bartering against a generation-long war with talks of a ceasefire-and peace-in a way that Tobirama had never dreamed of.
In a way that Hashirama had always hoped for, it’s masterful, the way Madara carefully words the arrangement, Hikaku of the Shadow-Walk at his side, and Tobirama knows with dread that Izuna should be here, would be here, if he could.
Tobirama almost asks where Izuna is, but it would be too rude, too stark. Instead he sends his regards for Izuna’s continued health.
He is met with Madara’s telling snarl.
(War almost breaks out again.)
xxx
Izuna offers his eyes to Madara, in an effort to feel useful, and yet Madara does not accept.
“You could find my soulmate with them, see crimson, have my love as your own,” Izuna tries to barter. “I’ll make you a true Uchiha.”
“And yet, even with your crimson seeking eyes, you’ve never tried to find your own soulmate,” Madara rolls his eyes. “I’m not taking them, they are yours and you deserve a chance at happiness.”
“I know that it’s somebody in the clan, most likely, so I try never to meet their eyes. I don’t want to know, sometimes I wonder if our siblings had lived, if they would have found theirs.”
Madara shakes his head. “Perhaps, but if we stayed at war it wouldn’t matter what soulmates we could find or not. With every life waiting to end on that bloody battlefield there would be no soulmates for anybody to keep.”
“I haven’t found anybody I want to keep yet,” Izuna shrugs. “I won’t need my eyes to do so.”
“Keep your eyes anyway, you need the crimson light more than I do. You’re more an Uchiha than I could ever hope to be, as all our clan keeps telling us,” Madara grimaces, and it casts his face in an ugly light. Deep shadows are under his eyes.
“A village is a frightening idea,” Izuna says for the thousandth time.
“And yet,” Madara pauses, “you opposed our elders to make it.”
Izuna is melancholy, missing the days when his own ignorance was bliss. “Our medical services are inadequate, I see that now. I won’t consign my unknown soulmate to death for my own prejudice. I won’t condemn any more of my beloved people to my fate.”
“And I won’t condemn you to mine,” Madara finally smiles. It’s a small twitch of his lips, but Izuna appreciates the effort all the same.
(Izuna will live, but the Uchiha healers can do little else for him.)
xxx
Tobirama seeks out Izuna in the village at the earliest appropriate opportunity, two years after the peace negotiation started. He misses clashing his blade with somebody who knows how to wield one, misses the hiss and steam when his water dragons devour a fireball in a fight.
“I thought perhaps you had died, or ran away,” is what Tobirama opens the conversation with. It’s perhaps inappropriate, but Izuna has just begun making his own waves as a strategist and commander of the Hokage’s secret division.
“Har, har” Izuna mocks, but his eyes trace the lines on Tobirama’s cheeks, marveling at the new ones that have extended down his neck only to disappear into his semi formal kimono. Tobirama follows them with his own, and notes the blush on Izuna’s face.
“You’ve been drinking sake,” he observes, although the scene is very clear, Izuna sitting cross legged on the other side of his low desk, a sake set and office paperwork surrounding him.
“How can you tell,” Izuna replies dryly, waving his hand over to where the sake bottle sits. Tobirama lowers himself to the floor to take the set across from him. It’s rude but Izuna is also not holding himself as the pinnacle of manners.
He pours his own cup, uncaring if Izuna has just drank from it, doubly rude.
“It’s the flush across your cheeks,” he admits, “pink like a sakura petal.”
Izuna’s face darkens to a deeper and richer blush, even more embarrassed it would seem. Or angry, the two seemed to go hand in hand for Izuna.
“Congratulations,” Izuna mutters.
“On what?” Tobirama’s head cocks to the side.
Izuna looks a little taken aback, “I wasn’t aware you had found your soulmate, congratulations.”
Tobirama flushes at that, drinking another cup of sake to hide his discomfort. His own clan is used to him seeing colors, but the Uchiha, of course, would likely not be aware.
“You are too late for congratulations, I have seen color all my life,” Tobirama muses. “My soulmate is my soulmate, but I am not theirs.”
“Oh,” Izuna says, and it’s one syllable but it sounds like a tragedy on Izuna’s lips. The Uchiha are known for their close soulbonds, usually found within their own clan. “I haven’t ever looked for mine, I like the colors I do see.”
Izuna’s eyes rest politely on Tobirama’s collar, where his crimson lines swirl and spiral out towards his shoulders. “Oh,” Tobirama says, and it holds its own revelations. “I…” he wants to ask, to know more about why Izuna wouldn't hold to the Uchiha ideals, why he rejects this part of himself.
“Would you be interested in a spar, kenjutsu only?” He asks instead.
Izuna does grimace at that. “I would be interested, but I’m afraid I don’t spar with my sword at all anymore, Uchiha medicine is not like that of the Senju. I will feel your sword in my side for all eternity.”
Tobirama doesn’t feel sorry for Izuna, and knows Izuna well enough to know he would not appreciate it.
“Don’t make the mistake of thinking I am not deadly in my own right. I am not weak,” Izuna flashes his sharingan for a moment, a reminder that his genjutsu is still terrifying even if he struggles to wield a blade.
Tobirama isn’t phased. “I know that you are not weak, however it seems any match between us would only be full of lethal force, and not a very good idea. Perhaps we could find another activity to work on together…”
“Are you lonely?” Izuna asks, flat and a little rude, but also sincere, questioning.
Tobirama’s brother has just found his soulmate, an Uzumaki by the name of Mito, with eyes and cloth as green as the spring leaves that used to be the only color Hashirama saw.
Tobirama stares Izuna in the eyes, calm despite the earlier reassurance that he was aware of how dangerous the action could be. “Yes,” he replies. “I am.”
xxx
Izuna would have liked to turn down Tobirama’s offer to teach him sealwork, specifically the kind that heals and helps, but he can’t. The offer of knowledge was too great for the clan to pass up on (despite the offer being specific to Izuna) and his interest in the subject is also significant.
Seals do not require him to be whole of body, only in mind, and the artistry plays deeply into his sense of drama. He starts with simple things, storage seals and seals for keeping tea hot, his chakra binding easily to projects that require heat. Lanterns, a hearth. He likes that he can meet Tobirama’s eyes and not be afraid that his world will burst into color around him. He’s safe, he’s not the one.
“Is it strange to watch your soulmate dote on somebody else?” He asks, curiosity slowly stewing under the surface. They’re closer now, the Izuna of a year ago would never have asked.
“I have always known one day it would happen,” Tobirama shrugs. “That was very out of the blue though, why do you ask?”
“Out of the blue?” Izuna follows up, he doesn’t know the phrase.
“Out of the blue - the clear sky, the flat ocean if you ask the Uzumaki, your coats are dyed a dark indigo blue, it’s like…” Tobirama shrugs, explaining the color to somebody who doesn’t see it is not easily done.
“It’s unexpected,” Tobirama says.
There’s a lot that Izuna didn’t expect when Tobirama asked to spend time with him, out of the blue, that very first time. Tobirama trying to explain colors to him would have been the last thing on his list.
“I didn’t know my coat was blue,” Izuna slides his fingers over the rough wool.
“What do you see? One color, the more unusual two? Not blue, I imagine,” Tobirama teases.
Izuna snaps his teeth playfully, “Of course I don’t see blue, I’m an Uchiha, we almost always have soulmates in-clan, maybe because the Sharingan wants to recreate itself, maybe it just makes our colors more similar. I see crimson.”
“Oh,” Tobirama whispers, his fingers rising to trace the lines on his cheeks, his chin, trailing down to pause across his chest where Izuna knows the lines stretch down his body. “My seals…”
“I did not know they were seals until you offered to teach me, but yes I see them,” Izuna nods. From where he is kneeling it’s an easy motion to slide closer, fingers on the floor, paper all around them. His fingers reach out to trace the red across Tobirama’s cheekbone. Tobirama almost kicks over the bowl of ink near his foot as he jerks at the contact, eyes wide and bright crimson, meeting Izuna’s head on.
The world still doesn’t burst into color, but Izuna never expected it to.
“I see you,” he says instead, “you are the color I was born to see.”
“I am,” Tobirama replies once again, but neither of them say anything more that day.
(Izuna has seen crimson his whole life, but it’s the first time he knows why.)
xxx
Tobirama wears more and more red in his clothing, in his hair, in lines over his eyelids. He tells himself that it’s not an effort to sway Izuna to his side, but he knows in his heart that it’s a lie. First it's the stitching on his clothes, then the lining of his haori, and if Hashirama or Madara realize this change, they do not say.
The only one that comments upon it is Mito, and she only makes a single remark. “If you were only to wear more indigo, one would think you an Uchiha, brother.”
“Only if one could see it,” Tobirama clarifies, and of course, Mito can see it, as do many of the older Senju, but she is the only one bold enough to comment.
Izuna doesn’t say anything at first but he does reach out to touch Tobirama’s efforts, fingers tracing the lines of stitching, thumbs sweeping across his closed eyes.
It’s only when Tobirama shows up in a haori with red lining, gray tones of mountains embroidered on the back in stark contrast to the bold inside, that Izuna comments at all.
“You are wearing my colors,” he points out.
Tobirama nods, eyes lined in red closing to show off his efforts as he does. He considered painting even his lips like his cousin, but thought that might be a little too much.
“You are wearing my colors,” Izuna whispers quieter, “do you also want to be mine?”
“I do,” Tobirama says, simple and to the point, and then he closes his eyes as Izuna leans in to kiss his lips, chapped and rough but oh, so willing.
xxx
They are married in the winter, just so the entire procession can be lined with fire, and nobody is cold that night. Typically Senju wedding outfits are colorful, to represent spring and fertility. Uchiha usually wear a myriad of colors to represent having found their soulmate and being able to see with full use of their eyes.
Izuna and Tobirama wear shades of white, gray, and red.
(The colors of Izuna’s choice.)