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"He is perfectly fine, thank you!" Izuna-sama is still yelling and Hikaku winces as she drags her cousin away.
"Please," she rubs at her temples in frustration, knowing he means well but wishing he wouldn't anyway. "Just... leave them alone."
"I won't." Izuna-sama's mouth turns down in what is almost a pout - and she knows what his pout looks like better than most. "They're disrespecting you!"
"They aren't." Hikaku holds up her hand, stopping the argument which he's clearly bursting to have. "No, they're not. I don't feel disrespected and it's my opinion which counts. Your brother assigned me to work with the Inuzuka and I'm doing my job - do not make my work harder."
He subsides, truly pouting now, and she turns away, walking towards her own house, separate from his.
"I'm home!" She calls out, toeing off her geta and climbing the steps of the engawa.
"Welcome home," her lover's voice floats out of the kitchen and she peeks in to see what he's cooking. "How were the negotiations?"
"Terrible." She wraps her arms around his waist and presses her forehead to the nape of his neck. "Izuna-sama almost lost his temper. Again."
"He can see that you're uncomfortable and he doesn't know the reason why," Tobirama's strong hands wield the knife here, deboning a freshly caught fish, just as deftly as he always did on the battlefield. "To tell him or not is your choice, just as it was to tell me, but to ask him not to respond to your distress is impossible."
It's true and she sighs as she presses a kiss to the skin under her mouth, so much cooler than any Uchiha would have. "He loves me and I love him, but seeing is not knowing."
With the way her body has never matched her self, that is the truth of her life... but one which she has always been content to leave unspoken. The consequences of saying the words aloud, revealing a closely kept secret like this one, could be grave.
But, as Tobirama points out, silence also has consequences.
"Didn't it matter to you?" She slides her fingers through the gap of his kendogi, tracing the mesh underneath it and feeling the sweat from an afternoon spent training his students. "That I'm not the man you thought?"
"Not at all." He takes her hands and she feels his callouses rub over her palms, the marks of a life split equally between blade and brush mirroring her own. "It's you I fell in love with, and that hasn't changed. Why would how I feel?"
Hikaku shakes her head, laughing softly.
That's... logical and unexpected.
Perfectly, exactly, him.
The man she fell in love with.
"I'll tell Izuna-sama and Madara-sama," she tightens her hold, embracing him more securely, reassuring herself that she, at least, will always have this. "Tomorrow. For tonight... let's eat."
He lifts her hand and presses thin lips to her wrist, an assurance all its own, before going back to the fish, making no move to free himself from her grasp, and she smiles.
To be a shinobi is to take what you can and steal what you can't, and to have stolen the heart of a Senju, this Senju, is an achievement indeed.
Perhaps tomorrow she'll steal something else, equally as important to her.
Acceptance.