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An eye for an eye
It is the dark that seeds cruelty into justice, that drips contempt into
compassion, that poisons love with grains of doubt.
Revenge of the Sith - Matthew Stover
He stays. Kneeling in the dust, his body is curled up tight, the guilt, the shame coiling in his belly, a churning feeling that leaves him breathless. His mistake. His pride. His blindness.
Hate - he thinks - hate blinds you. Chokes you. Makes you stupid.
Across the room, Madara has twisted onto his belly, grasping blindly at the ground. Tobirama can hear him scrape himself along, bleeding, until he's within reach. His face is caked in blood and dust.
Tobirama reaches out, stopping just short of touching. He doesn't know where to. His face? Shoulders? Hands? He goes for that in the end - the touch is so fragile, so horribly vulnerable, but Madara takes it. He fumbles - his fingers are shaking - but when Tobirama guides them up, his grip on Tobirama’s fur is strong.
“Did I kill them all?” - he asks.
He has. Or at least he will have, when the few thieves who are still twitching on the floor will have bled out. It was a brutally crude loss of control via giant fire explosion - it must have caught Madara by surprise too, if he’s asking. The anaesthetic, most likely.
“You should have gone back for..” Tobirama tries but the words choke themselves.
Nobody tells an Uchiha what to do. Not even reason, apparently.
“Do you think you can get us out?” he tries again.
Against his shoulder, Madara nods. “I got rid of the locking seal when I broke down the door…and the outer wall too, I believe? I don’t know for…I can't feel your chakra at all but I'm not sure if it's exhaustion, the anaesthetic or whatever they…”
Likely a combination - Tobirama muses. The thieves had a seal master. One who didn't work with brushes and ink but with knives and blood. Before the loss of his chakra robbed him of most of his sight, Tobirama had been able to catch a glimpse of red hair. A piece of information that will need careful consideration at a later date.
“I'll be fine.”
“Good” - Madara says - “Good.”
He doesn't move.
_
They had told Tobirama what they were doing while they were doing it. They had mocked him with it, taunted him, laughed as they held him down. His fault, his mistake. He had fallen into the trap and that had forced Madara’s hand and he, too, had been forced to surrender.
“Technically, it’s not a given you will die” – their leader had whispered in his ear as he was dragged in chains back up to the wall, bleeding from the chakra seals etched into his skin – “Maybe the mad Uchiha will wake up in time. Do you think he’d come for you then?”
He won’t. Tobirama had thought, eyes closed, teeth gritted and then: I hope he’s smart enough not to. He had been wrong, of course. Once again, reason was chasing him and Madara was two steps ahead.
Finding their way out of their prison is a laborious process, mostly made of stumbling around in the darkness of the cave: the place is a maze of tight tunnels and dead rock. With his chakra sealed, Tobirama can do little more than follow along the path, one hand to the wall and one to Madara. The Uchiha is a good sensor and he’s adjusting - Tobirama can see it in the way he’s starting to straighten out his spine and walk by himself, pulling Tobirama instead of just being dragged along. He hasn’t let go though. Tobirama is not sure he can.
They reach the end of the cave like that, stopping only once to let Madara slit the throat of a lonely guard left at the entrance. He’s swift about it, brutal. Tobirama would do it himself but the seals etched into his skin stop him from being of much use. Without his chakra, the world around him is barely a blur and captivity and starvation have done little to keep him in shape.
“Wait.” - Tobirama says, “Wait. Should we at least try to go back for them?”
Madara stops. He’s still standing by Tobirama’s side, fingers curled into his fur, head tilted so it’s almost tucked under Tobirama’s chin. From far away, Tobirama’s natural vision is little more than silhouettes, shadows and impressions of colours, but from up close, the details are not lost on him, even like this. He can see - he can feel against his skin, the lack of tears. See the blood, the unnatural shape of Madara’s eyelids. Bunched up over nothing.
His eyes are gone. Both of them.
Sacrificed because Tobirama is an idiot.
“Even if you had your chakra” - Madara whispers - “It’s too late. There’s no point going back, the fire will destroy them anyway.”
_
They make it to the forest silence. Madara kicks at each step, the ground dead and unfeeling underneath his feet. Tobirama knows intimately what that feels like: stumbling in a world of damp and darkness. With his chakra he would not be struggling and doing the same - but he’s never known anything else. His discomfort is temporary and it will pass. There has never been a last sunset for him. There has never been a need to adjust. He has never questioned it: his eyes saw what they saw and it was little more than shadows. Such were the facts of life. But Madara, an Uchiha, had…
“Stop.” Madara says “Stop.” He’s shaking. He yanks Tobirama’s sleeve, making him stumble. “We are fucking stupid. Sit down.”
“What?”
“This whole blind leading the blind. Sit down.”
He yanks Tobirama again until he’s down on the forest floor. For a moment he thinks Madara has snapped, the Uchiha’s hands fumbling for his face and landing on his neck. Instead, he’s met with warmth. Madara’s chakra laps at Tobirama’s skin, seeps into his blood and cells like the caress of a winter sun. Yeah, Tobirama thinks, as the healing jutsu takes a hold of him and knits his skin back together. Yeah, they are stupid. There’s no need to release a seal if you can just erase it.
With a feeling of pins and needles like circulation coming back to a limb that had fallen asleep, Tobirama’s chakra comes unsealed. Between a heartbeat and the next, familiar pathwaves of light take shape around him, sketching the outline of the world. In the same breath, the horror of Madara’s loss becomes apparent. His chakra is fire: warm like the heart of a star, fluid like magma in the core of the Earth. The gaping voids in his skull are already cauterised shut, blood vessels burned instinctively to stem the blood flow. Madara is right: it’s too late. My mistake - Tobirama thinks - my own goddamned fucking mistake.
“I’m sorry” - he says, meaning it in a way he has no other words to explain.
“You know what pisses me the fuck off? I did this.”
Tobirama looks up, startled. Madara wrenches out of his grasp, stumbling back a few steps. “I fucking did this, Senju. Don’t you dare…don’t you dare claim it.”
“What?” - Tobirama stumbles.
“Fucking Senju” Madara mutters and Tobirama feels the angry flare of his chakra, a spike of temper like a pillar of flame. His whole chakra is raw with the loss. Mutilated by absence, dripping with grief. It burns with the same ferocity, the same warmth it always has. “I did this and I’ll say this the fuck once: it’s not my fucking eyes that built the sewers, is it? Not my eyes that built the Academy, not my eyes that dragged Hasirama’s drunk ass home from the harvest feast and guess the fuck what? It was not my eyes that taught Kagami how to climb my fence to steal my oranges.”
Hate - Tobirama thinks - hate blinds you. Chokes you. Makes you stupid. He would have bet that Madara would have let him die for even the chance of getting his eyes back. Hashirama, maybe. But him? He is a Senju. He is an enemy. He’s Izuna’s murderer.
Madara’s fingers reach out, skimming the contours of Tobirama’s face, a touch so horribly vulnerable in its boldness.
“This is the will of fire. The whole point” - he says - “is that I don't need my own eyes to see it through."