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She wouldn’t have believed herself if Uchiha Yukari told Haruno Sakura that the fearsome Uchiha Madara was the most loving parent she ever met.
Yukari sits on a cushion at his feet, spine straight and obedient in that precise way that tells him she’s trying very hard not to squirm.
Her hair, dark and thick like his, falls past her shoulders now, and he’s halfway through a lattice braid she’d requested from one of the scrolls he’d unearthed for her.
He finishes the braid with a practiced tuck, then ties the end with red thread—her favorite color. Yukari smiles when she sees it.
Then: a voice at the door, all teasing lilt.
“Look at you, Anija,” Izuna says, leaning lazily against the frame. “Who knew the Demon of the Battlefield could do plaits?”
Madara doesn’t even look up. “Say another word and I’ll put flowers in your hair.”
Izuna barks a laugh, delighted. “Please do. I’d look better than you ever did, old man.”
Yukari turns her head just enough to catch her uncle’s grin, bright and boyish despite the faint scar along his cheek. She’s always liked Izuna—how easily he laughs, how quick he is to wink at her when Madara’s being especially stern.
Madara seems softer when Izuna’s around. His voice loses its edges. His sighs aren’t quite as sharp.
Yukari reaches up and touches the end of her braid, letting the red thread slip between her fingers. “It’s really good,” she says, and though her tone is casual, there’s something reverent beneath it. “Better than what I tried.”
Madara huffs, but he’s pleased. “Obviously. You were holding your arms at the wrong angle. Again.”
“Then you’ll have to show me. Again.”
He looks down at her—his daughter with her strange sharp mind and softer soul—and his mouth twitches in a way that might be the start of a smile.
“I’ll write it down,” he says gruffly, brushing a strand of hair behind her ear. “Next time, you do it on Izuna.”
Izuna gasps. “Traitor.”
“Practice dummy,” Madara corrects.
“I’m offended on behalf of my follicles.”
Yukari giggles and pats the cushion beside her. “Come on, Uncle. You said you’d let me try the double-braid crown.”
Izuna groans but flops dramatically into place, sprawling across the floor like a man doomed. “If I end up looking like Hashirama’s deer summon, I want it in my will that you did this.”
Madara sits back, arms folded, watching with a smirk as Yukari threads her fingers through Izuna’s long, dark hair, mimicking the movements he taught her.
She’s clumsy at first—her grip too tight, her angles awkward—but she’s patient, and her brow furrows in the same way Madara’s does when he’s focused.
That look on her father’s face—she covets it. Since she was born, since she realized who he was and who she was, she has always been trying to figure out how to make him stay in the village. Stay with her.
In this moment, she allows herself to relax, to feel the peace in his eyes resonate through her.
Perhaps, just by existing, she has already won his loyalty for Konoha. After all, her father would never leave her.
Hashirama is a lucky, lucky man. Not only has he survived his early childhood, but he’d gotten his village.
And not only that, but he had gotten Madara to stay by his side—not just in name, but in truth. Not as a rival or a shadow of their old friendship, but as a partner. As something sacred and hard-won.
But the unexpected blessing, the one that still sometimes knocks the wind from his lungs when he sees her bounding across the training field or curled up in Madara’s lap, is his daughter.
Born with a cry like thunder and hair like ink, she had gripped his finger so tightly her first day that he swore she meant to keep him anchored to the earth. She had Madara’s glower and his stubborn chin, and oh, gods, she had his smile.
Hashirama adores her.
He adores her even when she’s wiping her nose on his robes, even when she’s reciting clan history to him like a lecture, even when she gets into another argument with the Senju elders that ends in awkward silences and very polite, very tense letters of apology.
Sometimes he watches her from the Hokage’s tower when she trains with Tobirama—spinning water like silver thread—and he wonders how someone so small can carry so much.
Even when the Senju look at her with narrowed eyes, disgust buried under thin smiles. Even when she has to prove herself twice over because she is not just a Senju, and never only an Uchiha.
Yukari holds her head high.
She is ten when she first makes a sapling grow from her palm, without seals, without guidance, and Hashirama—Hokage, warrior, founder—falls to his knees in the garden with tears in his eyes.
She looks at him, startled. “Did I do it wrong?”
“No,” he says hoarsely. “No, Yukari. You did everything right.”
She tilts her head at him, unsure. The sapling in her palm trembles slightly, roots curling over her skin, seeking purchase. It’s pale green and a little crooked—more weeds than wood—but alive. Alive, and hers.
Yukari looks down at it, brows furrowing. “I didn’t mean to. It just… it wanted to grow.”
That afternoon, he helps her plant the sapling. She puts his hands over hers to guide her as she helps it take root in the soil. He feels her chakra, warm and living, just like the ambient energy from the forest around them.
It’s a little sakura tree. Yukari smiles at it wistfully when she sees it bloom for the first time.
Yukari may be Hashirama’s child, but she is Tobirama’s student. He thinks he at least deserves half the credit for how his niece turned out.
Maybe more, if we’re being honest.
After all, he’s the one who taught her how to read battlefield maps before she could tie her sandals properly.
He’s the one who taught her chakra control through water-walking drills in freezing streams and blindfolded sparring.
He’s the one who explained the difference between theory and practice, and how strategy could win wars when brute force wouldn’t.
Although, she was such a bright girl. She always grasped everything he told her so easily, so quickly. Wryly, he wonders where she got it from.
Certainly not Hashirama, who spent half his youth talking to rocks and the other half chasing butterflies into battle. And not Madara, who feels his way through problems with instinct sharp as steel but no patience for the drawn-out mechanics of theory.
She catches things no ten-year-old should. Finishes his equations before he explains the last sigil. Disassembles his defensive tags and improves them in ways he didn’t think of—and he’s been refining those for years.
Tobirama once found her in his lab at midnight, scrawling new permutation symbols in the margins of a paper he’d locked away with a personal seal.
She looked up and said, “You were using an outdated spatial anchor. It drifted.”
As if that explained everything.
(It did.)
He doesn’t ask how she got past the lock. He doesn’t want to know.
She hands him the scroll the next morning, neatly annotated. “I didn’t change too much,” she says, almost sheepish. “Just the stabilizer formula. Oh—and I added a failsafe loop in case of mid-jump chakra collapse. I think it’ll hold now.”
She’s ten. Ten.
Tobirama reads it. She’s right. Of course she is.
He clears his throat and says, gruffly, “You spelled ‘oscillate’ wrong.”
She grins at him. “On purpose. To see if you’d catch it.”
He wants to scold her. He wants to tell her that poking at things she doesn’t fully understand could get her killed, that she’s meddling with principles most shinobi never even hear about. He wants to remind her that she’s still a child.
But instead, he says, “Next time, don’t wait until midnight.”
And she beams.
He watches her walk out, braid swinging, and thinks not for the first time: We are all so, so doomed.
Izuna is glad to be an uncle.
He’s not subtle about it, either. From the day Yukari learned to toddle, she toddled straight into his arms, and that was that.
Madara pretends to be irritated by how quickly she latched onto his younger brother, but even he can’t keep a straight face when he walks into a room and finds Yukari riding Izuna’s shoulders like a triumphant war general.
Yukari, bless her, is devious. She figures out early that Uncle Izuna is a direct line to things her fathers would absolutely say no to: fireworks, sugar, shinobi-grade wire, sparring with real kunai.
Madara says no, Hashirama says maybe, but Izuna?
Izuna grins, winks, and says, “Don’t tell your parents.”
Sometimes Yukari laughs like him, full-bodied and reckless. Sometimes she rolls her eyes exactly like Madara. Sometimes she tilts her head in thought and it’s so much like Tobirama that Izuna has to double-take.
But when she’s running full-speed into trouble with a smile and a dare, it’s all Uchiha—and all his girl.
He never thought he’d get to be an uncle. Never thought the clan would last long enough to be something more than soldiers.
Hell, he doubted he’d live past twenty-five
And now he has a niece who wants to braid his hair while lecturing him about chakra coils.
“You know,” Yukari says thoughtfully, fingers deftly weaving strands of his hair into a looping pattern she saw in an old Water Country manual, “if your chakra were less volatile, you could probably use short-range body flicker techniques without burning out your lungs.”
Izuna snorts. “Are you calling me inefficient, brat?”
Yukari doesn’t even pause in her braiding. “No,” she says sweetly, “I’m calling you inefficient and outdated.”
Izuna lets out a sound that’s somewhere between a scoff and a laugh. “You’re lucky I’m fond of you, gremlin.”
“You’re lucky I haven’t drafted a list of jutsu optimizations for you yet,” she retorts, tying off the braid with a flourish. “I’ve got notes. Pages.”
“Of course you do,” he mutters, reaching up to feel her work. It’s neat—intricate, actually, more decorative than anything he’d ever wear in battle.
“Tobirama-sensei says you’re not very open to criticism, but I believe in you, Oji-chan!” Her smile is wide and caustic and he flicks her on the nose when she flashes it.
“Tell Tobirama-sensei that I said shove it,” Izuna mutters, but there’s no heat to it. “And you, Miss Genius—shouldn’t you be doing something more ten-year-old-y? Like terrorizing civilians or setting off traps in the Senju quarter?”
Yukari hums, tying off the braid with a piece of red thread, just like she likes it. “Maybe later.”
She hops off the bench and gives him a smug little smile. “You’re welcome, Uncle Izuna. Now you look elegant.”
“I look ridiculous,” he says, reaching back to touch the braid—but he doesn’t take it out.
Not yet.
Not ever, maybe.
He watches her skip off, full of curiosity and wickedness and the kind of simple, uncomplicated joy he’d never thought Uchiha children would be able to have.
He used to walk through the village like a stormcloud in human form. People would flinch when he looked their way, speak in whispers when he passed. Children hid behind their mothers, shinobi held their breath.
Now he walks through the village market with Yukari perched on his hip and a basket of vegetables in his other hand. She’s babbling about a frog she saw by the river, and Madara—Uchiha Madara—nods solemnly like its top-secret information.
He doesn’t correct the merchants when they smile at him too brightly or coo at Yukari. He just pays with exact change and reminds her to say thank you.
Council meetings are even worse. He used to silence rooms with a glance.
Now? Yukari brings coloring sheets. She sits in his lap, drawing flowers on ANBU reports while Madara debates mission strategy like it’s perfectly normal to have a toddler kicking her feet at the table.
Hashirama thinks it’s adorable. It’s hard to get anything done when Madara is holding their cute little daughter in the same room.
It’s especially hard when Yukari decides she must be involved in every aspect of the discussion.
She’s five, but already sharp as a tack, and completely convinced the Hokage’s meetings are just grown-up storytime with extra maps. She clambers into Madara’s lap mid-briefing, points at a border sketch, and asks, “Is this where the mean daimyo lives?”
Madara doesn’t even flinch. He adjusts her on his knee and answers seriously, “No, that’s just the Fire Temple. The mean daimyo lives over here.”
Tobirama is less than impressed, but even he doesn’t have the heart to say it out loud when Yukari looks up at him with big, serious eyes and asks if he wants to borrow one of her crayons.
(He takes the blue one. Later, he forgets it in his sleeve and finds it during a debrief with the Hyūga elders.)
Madara acts like it’s all beneath his notice—like the little socks Yukari loses under the war table and the tiny doodles in the margins of classified documents are just unfortunate side effects of fatherhood.
But he keeps every single drawing she makes.
He has a whole drawer of them in his study. One of them is a stick-figure family where he’s drawn with Very Angry Eyebrows and a kunai. Hashirama is smiling and wearing a crown. Yukari is holding both their hands and surrounded by flowers. It’s dated in the corner in her uneven handwriting.
He’s a father. And someone out there thinks he’s a hero—even if his eyebrows are Very Angry.
Hashirama found the drawer once, of course. He didn’t say anything.
He just smiled, kissed Madara’s temple, and said, “She draws you perfectly. Perfectly captures your grumpiness.”
Madara grumbled something about bias and artistic inaccuracy, but his ears turned red for the next hour.
Madara used to believe the only way forward was through fire.
That peace was a lie told by the weak to survive the strong, that love was a fleeting indulgence no shinobi could afford, and that legacy meant carving your name into history with the bones of your enemies.
He believed in strength. In vengeance. In the slow, patient burning of every bridge that could have led him nowhere but a battlefield.
He was born for war. Raised in blood. He’s led the Uchiha for longer than most men live, carried the weight of every death, every grudge, every bitter oath sworn over a grave. He thought it was his destiny. His purpose.
Now his purpose is this—to be a father. To raise a girl who will never have to fight for survival the way he did. To protect her, teach her, and watch her outgrow him. To leave behind not a weapon, not a legend, but a child who believes the world can be more than pain.
When he looks in the mirror, he sees the version of himself he’d thought lost. The one he once buried beneath armor and fire. The one Hashirama kept reaching for with both hands, even when Madara couldn’t see it.
Hashirama hums off-key as he dices vegetables in the kitchen, sleeves rolled up, hair tied haphazardly with a bit of string Yukari left on the table. There’s rice steaming in the pot, miso heating gently, and a stack of Yukari’s favored pickles already laid out with childish neatness—she insisted on helping last night and nearly spilled half the vinegar.
In the next room, Madara is fighting a noble battle against the world’s most stubborn cowlick.
Yukari squints at him in the mirror as he tries, again, to smooth her bangs into submission. “Just let it win, Tou-san. You can’t beat physics.”
Madara scowls. “I’ve only ever been defeated in battle by your father. I’m not about to be bested by hair.”
Hashirama calls from the kitchen: “She gets it from you, you know. You could sharpen kunai on your hair when you were her age.”
“Oh, like your hair was any better, bowl-cut!” Madara scowls playfully, fighting a grin. “Between the two of us, we know you were the one who looked like a loser!”
Hashirama’s face falls dramatically, shoulders slumping. “ Loser ? I’ll have you know I was adorable!”
“You were a disaster, ” Madara fires back, finally surrendering to Yukari’s stubborn cowlick with a muttered curse. “Hair like a rice bowl, teeth too big for your face, and you tripped over your own feet every time you got excited. It was tragic.”
Yukari giggles, clutching the red thread in her hand. “ Tou-san, don’t be mean. Papa probably had a glow-up.”
Hashirama strolls in with a plate in each hand, beaming. “Exactly! Puberty was very kind to me.”
“ Miraculous, ” Madara mutters under his breath. “We all thought you were a lost cause.”
Hashirama sets the plates down with exaggerated care, like he’s placing treasure on an altar. “Well, look who’s talking! I remember very clearly a certain boy who refused to cut his hair for years because ‘it intimidated the enemy.’”
“It did intimidate the enemy,” Madara says stiffly, reaching out to smooth the frizz from Yukari’s braid. “You wouldn’t understand the strategy behind it.”
“I understand it got tangled in a pine tree during a mission and you cried,” Hashirama says, smug.
“I was eleven, and it was pitch dark, and that tree was malicious, ” Madara snaps.
Yukari giggles uncontrollably, snorting when she imagines her father’s face. “Papa,” she wheezes, “did you really cry?”
Madara crosses his arms and lifts his chin. “I did not cry. I cursed loudly and with dignity, as any seasoned shinobi would.”
“Right,” Hashirama says around a mouthful of rice. “Dignity. That’s what you yelled with when you got your hair stuck and threatened to burn the entire forest down.”
“It was tactical escalation. ”
“Of course.”
Yukari beams between them, pleased beyond reason. “I think you’re both lucky you lived long enough to be parents.”
Madara blinks, the corner of his mouth twitching.
Hashirama reaches over and ruffles her hair—undoing half the braid Madara just fixed. “We really are.”