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Butsuma lifts the pot and pours the boiling water into his cup, onto the tiny handful of leaves that he's sacrificed from his carefully hoarded stock. Obtaining tea is an impossibility up here on the mountain, high above whatever passes for civilisation, but there are some luxuries he finds he's unwilling to live without.
No one would recognise the clan head of the Senju under his well worn and patched clothing, the callouses on his hands formed more from wielding a woodcutter's axe than a kunai, but Butsuma is still himself. Age and experience are a history which not even time can wash away, and he's shinobi enough to pass unnoticed through the village in the valley, stopping only long enough to purchase tea.
Or perhaps not completely unnoticed, for there is the soft scrape of a footstep on the rocks of the trail.
Butsuma is not the sensor his second son is, not even half, but this mountain is barren of other humans and the approaching chakra is as familiar as his own.
"Hm." Tajima ducks under the branches of the oak tree which hides the mouth of this cave, and the leaves which brush over his head call up memories which Butsuma pushes away with the ease of long practice. He says nothing, not even when his old rival kneels on the opposite side of the fire, for what is there to say?
They cut the thread which bound them a long time ago, or near as to make no difference.
"So this is where you've come," Tajima looks around thoughtfully, far more than is necessary to inspect his meagre belongings. "You're a hard man to find."
"Deliberately so." The tea has steeped for long enough and Butsuma raises the cup to his lips, savouring the first small sip. "I don't know why you've come, but there's nothing for you here."
"Nothing?" Tajima raises an eyebrow, the same expression Butsuma has seen so many times before. "That's a lie."
"All shinobi are liars." It's a truth that neither of them can dispute, nor do they want to. "But I'm not lying when I say it."
"You might not think you're lying, but you are." Tajima's pointed finger feels like a stab, and Butsuma has been stabbed by him enough to know. "All the things you discarded when you left - your dead wife, your sons, your clan - I don't care about any of that, and you know it."
Butsuma does know it.
His wife, his sons, his clan... they were more obstacles to Tajima than anything else. Barriers he threw up between them, in the name of duty, when they were truly rooted in fear.
Oh, as the head of his clan, he needed children to continue the line, yes. As an alpha, he had a duty to sire those children. As a Senju, the grudges of his ancestors called upon him to fight the Uchiha.
To give all of that up, for a fragile tether to another person, an enemy... he couldn't do it.
It terrified him.
And so he failed.
Failed his family, failed his clan, failed the gods.
It was left to the next generation, a better generation, to take up that charge and bind themselves together to achieve something that he never dreamed possible.
Peace.
"Butsuma." Tajima's voice is low, coaxing, and he sounds the same as he did all those years ago when he made the offer, an offer Butsuma closed his eyes and ears to. "I am here for you."
"I'm too old." Instead he focuses on the swirl of leaves in his cup, seeing the past as much as the present. "Tajima, I can't."
"That's what you said then, that the world wouldn't allow it, that the pairing of two alphas would destroy both our clans, give them one more reason to fight each other." The Sharingan spins in Tajima's eyes, and Butsuma unwillingly looks up to meet it. "But that world is not this one."
"Our sons have built a new world, one in which two alphas have brought our clans together. Isn't it a world worth exploring? A world worth living in?" Tajima holds out his hand, steady and unshaken even after all these years. "There are still places to go, things to do, to see... and someone to do it with. If you are willing."
That outstretched hand, calloused and scarred with the marks of a life lived hard, wrinkled with age... Butsuma reaches out, taking it and watching as red threads bind them into one.
A single soul, the way they always should have been.
"I think I've drunk deeply enough of bitterness," he smiles at their linked fingers and lets his soulmate pull him to his feet. "So, Tajima, show me this new world and whatever sweetness it may bring."
They step out into the sunlight together, under the dappled green of the leaves, and Butsuma thinks no more of the tea he left behind.
He doesn't need it anymore.