Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Tobirama doesn't think about the future. 

There are too many battles to fight, missions to finish. All he’s ever known is war--envisioning something different feels a lot like a child’s silly dream. 

Sometimes though…

Sometimes there is something in the back of his mind that calls him forward. Something far away and ephemeral like the shimmer of the sun on a still lake, the steam rising from a freshly baked loaf of bread, or the small white hairs on the back of sturdy leaves. It’s a shred of wonder, or home, or safety, perhaps even happiness, that calls to him from somewhere beyond his reach.

A liminal space--not quite a dream, but not a memory either. But it is always gone before he can grasp it, his hand closing inevitably around nothing but air. 

In the end, it only serves to assure him further of the truth of the world: that thoughts of the future are for other men, not him. The future is for men like Hashirama, whose eyes can see beyond war and death. 

Tobirama doesn't think about much past survival.

...

The symbol comes to his mind easily, naturally, nudging his quill into drawing it on a piece of yellowed parchment. A circle inside another, larger circle, and six lines that loosely resemble wings. It looks perfect, and Tobirama stares at it in confusion for a few minutes, willing it to spill it’s secrets, because he doesn’t know where it came from.

“What did that poor parchment do for you to glare at it like that?” Toka asks somewhere behind him.

“Does a closed door mean nothing in this house?” Tobirama snaps, but it comes out more long-suffering than scathing. Privacy is a dream he doesn’t bother chasing anymore.

Tōka snorts and hops herself up to sit on his desk. Three very rare, very expensive scrolls tumble to the ground and roll away. 

“What’s that?” she asks, peering down at the mark. Her long hair crawls across the parchment and smears the ink.

He sighs, running a hand over his face. He can feel the migraine coming, “A summoning mark,”

Tōka  hums in thought, “Odd look for a summoning mark,”

“Yes, I’m aware”. Tobirama traces the edges with his eyes again, where the ink has become smudged, “It just...came to me,”

It’s unusual, to say the least. Neither drawing or calligraphy have ever been his strong suits, and he generally has to doodle idly for a good few hours before his efforts yield something even remotely accommodating to his needs, when designing a new seal. It shouldn’t be this...effortless.

“Maybe it’s fate,” Tōka  shrugs, already bored with the topic.

This time, Tobirama snorts. He carefully cleans his brush and leaves it in his case, rising to his feet and putting the strange mark off his mind. He’s nothing if not practical, after all. “Maybe it is,” he agrees sardonically, and leads the way to the training grounds.

…

He’s going to die today. Tobirama’s certain of it. 

He blinks blood and sweat out of his eyes. There is a deep gash on his leg, his insides feel charred from breathing in flames and smoke. His eyesight is beginning to swim. 

“Senju,” Izuna says, eyes flickering black before bleeding back to red -- he's exhausted too. The hand on his sword is firm,“You’re done”

As always, those eyes see right through him. Uchiha Izuna is his match, and always has been. They have fought this fight countless times before, in this life and all the others, it feels sometimes. 

This time feels different. 

Not far from him, Hashirama and Madara are facing each other, leveling the landscape with each powerful blow. But even their strength, titanic as it is, is dwindling.

“Please, Madara,” Hashirama tries, as always, the plea in his voice obvious and for all to hear. He says nothing more, but what he wants is obvious. Please, end this, brother. Come to my side.

For a second, the Uchiha looks like he’s thinking about it. His eyes fade back to onyx and he stands for just a moment, heaving breaths seeming to rip through his body like earthquakes. They are all tired and halfway dead, and for all that Tobirama knows both he and Hashirama never aim to kill while faced with the other, a fight is a fight and death is always a possibility. If he yielded, it would end. If he gave into Hashirama’s pleas for peace, it would all end.

For all that Tobirama scoffs at his brother’s childish dreams, in moments like these he can see the appeal.

But, as always, Madara’s eyes stray to the side, roaming over the bodies littering the ground and to his brother, Izuna, his one true north. He pauses on the blood on the floor and on Tobirama’s hands, as if to reassure himself of the choices he makes. The sharingan flares to life once more, and he launches himself to Hashirama with a battle cry. Mad titans, the both of them. 

Hashirama will not know of Tobirama’s death until after the smoke has cleared. 

“Yield, Tobirama,” he hears above the rushing in his ears.

With some difficulty, he focuses his eyes on his enemy once again. Around them, the battle continues. 

“I do not recall giving you permission to use my name, Uchiha,” Tobirama mutters, his arm nearly sagging with the weight of his sword. He’s not done yet. He has one last weapon to try.

Izuna scoffs, red eyes fading to exhausted black. 

“You have one foot on the other side and still you take offense at me using your given name? Your arrogance never ceases to amaze me, Senju dog. Yield, or die.”

Tobirama doesn’t dignify that with an answer, instead hurtling forward, raising his sword without much finesse to take advantage of the Uchiha’s dwindling strength. Izuna moves his neck out of the way  and the blade connects with Izuna’s upper arm, drawing a cascade of blood like an explosion when the man ducks low. Tobirama feels a sharp pain on his upper thigh, the shrill agony of steel piercing through skin and flesh nearly enough to make him scream.  

“Izuna!” Madara yells then, releasing an attack that sends Hashirama flying, even as he sounds absolutely ready to drop everything and rush to his brother’s side. Tobirama often wonders what it must be like to be the focus of that razor sharp, laser focused attention, to be the center of all of that coalesced sheer willpower. Surely it must be exhausting, but Izuna handles it with the easy, detached grace with which he seems to handle everything.

“Just a scratch,” he says, letting blood flow from his wound freely as steady red eyes watch Tobirama pull the kunai from where it’s been deeply imbedded into the meat of his thigh, the serrated blade tearing the flesh further on the way out. Blood flows like life leaving his body, sticky and rich under the midday sun, and Tobirama allows himself a smile at his enemy’s quick-thinking strategy. Feigning exhaustion, risking injury; all as a last resort to maim Tobirama’s greatest asset: his speed. Not far from something he himself would have done.

“Tobirama,” Izuna says, looking down at him. There’s a cut under his eye that’s bleeding freely, and his clothes are torn and tinged red in spots. They are not their brothers, with their seemingly endless power and imperatives to never truly hurt one another. They are human, they are vicious, and they’re halfway dead today,“Yield,”

Tobirama scoffs and stands up straight, his arm nearly sagging with the weight of his sword. He’s not done yet. He has one last weapon, a final ace up his sleeve. He meant to try it out before using it in battle, but well--if Izuna kills him, it’s not like he’ll get another chance to even try it.

He smirks, packing the expression with as much of the conceited superiority he isn’t feeling at the moment as he can, and watches the emotions play out of Izuna’s face. Surprise, outrage, anger. Truly these Uchihas are much too easy to manipulate.

“You are stupider than I thought if you believe I’d yield to you”, he smirks, packing the expression with as much of the conceited superiority he isn’t feeling at the moment as he can, and watches the emotions play out on Izuna’s face “.There’s something I’d like to try with you. Unless you’d like to bow out, scaredy cat.”

Izuna scoffs. 

“I think that’s the bloodloss talking,” his enemy spits out, but falls back into a fighting stance, “I know all your tricks by now, old dog,”

The universe seems to hold its breath.  

“Not this one,” Tobirama almost smiles, “If you wanted to run and hide under your brother’s skirt, now would be the time.”

Surprise, outrage, anger. Truly these Uchihas are much too easy to manipulate. He dodges Izuna’s first attack and lays the mark, quickly returning to a fighting stance. His chest is heaving and he feels lightheaded from the blood loss, but if this works he just needs to hold on a little bit longer. If it doesn’t, he’ll die, but that’s out of his hands.

When they clash again, he waits until the last possible moment, until Izuna’s kunai is embedding itself into his armor, until the feeling is nearly claustrophobic, and he can feel the other’s nearly wasted reserves of chakra colliding with his own. He waits until the mark is perfectly lined behind Izuna’s body, right where it needs to be for the blow to be fatal before releasing the last of his chakra in one brilliant flash--

Hiraishin.

Everything happens very fast.  

He feels himself flickering into nonexistence, summoned by the mark--

“Shit!” Izuna shrieks, “Shit, shit, Tob-!”--

Black eyes wide and panicked, he lets go of his weapon and reaches for Tobirama--

...panicked?--

A roar like the fall of a titan shakes the ground, a rumble like the earth is shattering in two--

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Madara tumble to his knees, clutching at his chest--

Everything fades to black.  

…

Tobirama comes to, naked and bleeding profusely, in front of a house overlooking a cliff. His heart clatters inside his chest like it might burst, his entire body shivering convulsively. Not having the constricting weight of his armor and his happuri on him feels disconcerting, like being unmoored. He reaches out his flickering chakra and instinctively searches for the flaring bonfire that is his brother, but his wildfire is nowhere to be found. Tobirama’s breath catches in his throat, because that can only mean--

No. No.  

His brother is just far away, Tobirama tells himself. 

He’s teleported himself somewhere much further than he expected, it would seem, that is all. 

Something went wrong with the jutsu. No problem. The lack of clothing is far more intriguing, but he adds it to the list of things to consider later as he concentrates on not shaking apart. For now though, he must focus on returning to the battlefield before his absence becomes costly, before his body fails him further.

He’s so lightheaded from blood loss that he is surprised when the door a slides open, and he concentrates very hard not to faint as he ducks behind a tree, but not before catching a glimpse of--

“Tobirama,” the man who is himself, but can’t possibly be, calls out, gaze not wavering from the tree. “I can see the blood pooling at your feet,”

Tobirama peeks his head out from behind the trunk to find a man that can be none other than himself looking at him from the engawa, dressed in simple house robes. He’s older, this other version of him, but not by much. There’s a few more lines around his eyes and he's a bit broader around the chest, but the most jarring difference is perhaps the man’s expression. He’s not smiling, or anything of the sort, but he does look--calm. Less severe.

It’s extremely disturbing.

“What is this?” Tobirama asks, stepping out from behind the tree and peering suspiciously at himself, completely forgetting the fact that he’s still stark naked and bleeding. His mind is racing, coming up with and discarding a dozen different explanations in a second, “It can't be genjutsu. Izuna is not that powerful,”

There's a pot of lilies on the engawa, pale white blooms spilling on the polished dark wood. A familiar clay tea set is placed next to it, well loved and recently used, cups still steaming faintly -- his Mother's tea-set, which he keeps jealously guarded amongst his few possessions. 

“This is not genjutsu,” his older self concedes, following his gaze, “You are twenty-four, I’m thirty-nine. I’ve been where you are, and now we’re both here in this present. You’ll be gone shortly, so listen closely: the Hiraishin worked”

Tobirama’s mind is reeling as he looks back at his counterpart, “What--What does that mean? What is happening?”

“You’re exactly where you have to be. That is all you need to know,”  

“I don’t understand,” Tobirama shakes his head, but even as he speaks he can feel himself flickering away. He can’t breathe, the world is spinning. He’s talking to himself and it is impossible, but that person truly is himself. The same chakra signature, the same mannerisms, the same face. How did this happen? How does he fix it? What does it mean? Why would it eve--

He appears in the dining room of his house, sitting on his usual spot. Hashirama and Tōka stare at him over their soup, speechless.

“What the--” Tōka begins, but the rest of her sentence is drowned by Hashirama crying out and toppling the table over in his haste to attach himself to Tobirama with all his limbs. 

Tobirama passes out.

…

“You were gone for three days,” Tōka says when he awakens, her stoic facade shattered as she wrings her hands on her lap in an uncharacteristically nervous gesture. He’s lying on his bed with his brother partially draped over him, caught in uneasy sleep even as he holds onto Tobirama’s wrist, as if afraid to let go.

Three days.

“You disappeared,” Tōka manages, her voice thin and shaky. “You were there, and then you just…faded.”

So, it wasn’t a dream. Great.

“Where did you go?” she asks.“. What happened?”

“I don’t know, it didn’t make any sense.” he growls, shifting a bit and feeling the stitches on his side and his thigh pull. Izuna got him good this time.
As if reading his mind, Tōka speaks again.  “Izuna spoke to Hashirama, as he carried his brother away -- he told him that you lived, and to wait for you,”

Izuna’s panicked expression flashes through his mind, but he banishes it at once. Izuna had nothing to do with this -- it was just blood loss making him see things that weren't there.

“He probably wanted to take credit,” he grumbles, crossing his arms. Hashirama squirms in his sleep, “On my word, this was just an ordinary fuck-up,” 

He doesn’t really need reminding of all the times his experiments have failed in the past, and neither does Tōka, who’s usually the one that laughs at him as he cleans up. 

This time, however, she’s not laughing at all, “I don’t know, cousin. This felt too real,”

Which is, Tobirama realises, the true problem behind it all -- it felt too real. When he blinks, his older self appears behind his closed eyelids, brimming with a sort of tranquility Tobirama's never experienced in his lifetime.  Birds chirping, blossoms spilling on the engawa, tea served for two -- a quiet life.  Tobirama grits his teeth.

…

Several hours later, freshly healed and pushing through the kind of headache that, for him, generally precedes a painful bout of muscle spasms and back pain, he spends hour upon hour poring over his notes, trying to find the loop that caused him to fail in such a spectacular manner. He reads and re-reads every single detail of his research, trying to figure out what happened.

His other self said that the jutsu worked, but he’ll be damned if he’s going to believe a figment of his feverish imagination. He stays locked up inside his room for a whole week, which even for himself is pushing it, but his clansmen say nothing. Every half-hour, like clockwork, either Hashirama or Tōka poke their heads through the now perpetually ajar door, a panic set in to their features like they’re waiting for him to disappear again.

He can’t really assure them that it won’t happen again. All he can do is try to figure out what went wrong. 

With every hour that passes, the whole thing seems to him more and more like a dream. It’s only the shadows on Hashirama’s face that remind him that he was actually gone from the world for three days. While he was caught in a fever dream, his family thought he’d died, and they’d been left without a body to bury.

What if he hadn’t been able to return? It doesn’t bear thinking.

A week goes by, then two, then a month. 

“Maybe you just passed out from blood loss and the hiraishin simply teleported you away from the fight and then back to us?” Hashirama theorizes, absently signing documents without even pretending to skim through the contents. 

Tobirama dutifully places another stack of paperwork by his elbow. 

“It doesn’t explain the part where I went missing for days. You do have a point in that what I saw does feel more like a hallucination than anything real.” 

“More like a dream,” Hashirama says, looking at him with a wistful smile, “What a dream, though. My baby brother, thirty-nine years old and at peace,”

Tobirama says nothing. 

Seasons change and summer rolls into autumn, and Tobirama has no answers. Another month goes by. 

His family stops tip-toeing nervously around him, they stop invading his privacy every few minutes to make sure he’s still there. His brother’s duties as Clan Head and his dream of peace once more become the center of his attention, the forefront of his mind.

Tobirama himself doesn’t precisely give up on his research, but he allows it to become secondary. He starts taking missions again. 

His future self’s tranquility blurs in his mind. He convinces himself that whatever it was, it was nothing more than a fluke. Temporary, reversible, and one time only.

This is, of course, when it happens again.

…

One minute he’s feeding the falcons, and the next one he’s springing to his feet and dodging a fireball the size of a horse, buried in snow up to his ankles. The heat falls against his back like a curtain he avoids just in time, but his movements are followed by the smell of singed hair. Even as he falls into a defensive stance, he’s acutely aware of the fact that he’s naked. The cold burns and his breath comes out in visible puffs. He has no weapons, but with all this snow he has enough water to level a small army.

He goes through the hand signs and gathers chakra in his throat, the water dragon vicious and deadly and already perfectly pictured in his mind--

“Tobirama!” a child screeches, extremely high and extremely young and extremely terrified.

Tobirama nearly chokes on his own burning chakra trying to swallow it down, falling to his knees on the snow.

“Oh, Gods! Did I hurt you? I didn’t mean it! I was training!” the child cries, and there are tiny, freezing cold hands hovering over his face and shoulders, unsure of what to do. Tobirama tries to gather enough breath to tell the kid to stop yelling in his ear, but he can barely do anything other than shiver miserably, his knees going numb, “I didn’t know you’d show up! I’m sorry, I’m sorry!”

There’s an invocation, and then there’s a heavy cloak wrapping over Tobirama’s shoulders and body, keeping the worst of the cold at bay. Tobirama looks up. His breath catches in his throat at the black eyes that gaze at him.

“Tobirama?” the boy, who can’t be more than eight or nine and can be nothing other than Uhiha, asks. Concern drips from his every pore, and it’s hard to even look at.

“Who are you?” Tobirama asks, voice coming out far more soft and weak than he’d meant. He figures after swallowing a ball of his own chakra he should just be glad he can even speak at all.

The boy blinks owlishly at him.

“Oh,” he says, comprehension visibly dawning on his face, “You’re not the same Tobirama that came to see me last week, are you?”

...last week?

“...this has to be a mistake. I’ve never met you before,” is what he settles for, trying very hard not to let his heart beat itself out of his throat. 

The tiny Uchiha perks up at this, completely oblivious to Tobirama’s inner turmoil. There’s snow caught in his hair, and he’s not wearing adequate clothes for the winter.

“Oh, that’s ok. I was confused too, the first time we met” the boy nods, then clarifies, “Well, the first time I met you, I guess. Since this is the first time you are meeting me,”

“You’re mixing tenses,” Tobirama points out absently, a reflex leftover from growing up with his grammatically impaired older brother, as he tries to process all this new information and turn it into something that makes sense.

The Uchiha boy huffs and crosses his arms over his chest in a very grown up--and very familiar-- fashion, “Well, you did it first, with all the time-traveling ”

A wind picks up then, cold and unforgiving. Long tresses of raven hair lash out like whips. The image is disturbingly familiar. 

Tobirama frowns, suspicion gnawing at the pit of his stomach, heart sinking into the depths of oblivion, “Who are you?”

The boy blinks owlishly at him, then scratches the bridge of his nose, thoughtful, “I can’t tell you my last name,” he says apologetically, but he reaches out his hand to Tobirama, open and friendly and trusting, “But you can call me Madara! Nice to meet you again!”

Tobirama doesn't keep a recollection of the first time he heard that name, nor the first time he laid eyes on dragonhide red armour plates across a devastated, burning battlefield. What he remembers is Tōka's tear streaked face, Hashirama's cracked expression, when they were unceremoniously informed that Tōka's older brothers, Tōri and Tōma, had been killed in action -- burnt alive in a skirmish against the Uchiha.  

They buried the twins -what was left of them - in the sacred forest on a crisp autumn morning.  There wasn't much of a ceremony, because there was no time, there were no resources and there wasn't enough of them left to even warrant a ceremony.  It was just the main family, broken and beaten beyond recognition, cracking at the edges.  Tobirama stood next to Tōka, pressing their shoulders together to give her something to hold herself up, while his younger brothers huddled around a weeping Hashirama two steps behind them. Father gave a speech about war and victory and honor, but none of them listened, and people began to walk away almost as soon as the ceremony was done. Perfunctory -- just another Tuesday morning. 

Harirama was the last to leave, called back to his duties as Honorable Son -- he placed a hand on each of their shoulders, devastation etched in every line of his face, and hurried after Father.  Soon, it was only the two of them left, staring at the small headstone adorned with Hashirama’s conjured flowers, the ones Father said -loudly- were a waste of his energy.  

“They’re saying it was a boy--my age or younger,” Tōka said, voice nearly drowned by the sound of leaves rustling in the wind, “. Tajima’s son.”

Tobirama turned to her sharply, unable to mask his shock. 

“He managed to draw Tōri into a genjutsu for a split second, and he…he separated them, took Tōma somewhere, but just for a second, just enough for their joined jutsu to release, and then somehow Tōma’s throat was slit and he burn--he burned them both,”
The twins had been monsters in battle, their unique connection paired with their water and earth nature allowed them to use Mokuton effectively and devastatingly when together. Theirs was a battle-honed version of the style, refined into a weapon of mass destruction -- nothing as artistic or poetic as Hashirama's forests and goddesses. To think that someone their age had bested them when together… the information was unsettling to say the least.

“How do you know this?” Tobirama asked, trying to wrap his mind around the recollection of events through the dread crawling through him like the rustle of leaves.

“I listened under the door while Butsuma-sama told my granny -- he said something about a Black Castle," Tōka sniffed, eyes lost in the distance.

“It's an Uchiha technique,” Tobirama replied, combing through everything he'd ever heard of it, “Something like a prison dimension -- I thought it was a legend,”

Tōka snorted, “What a way to find out it wasn't,”

She was talking like they were discussing the weather -- like she was not suddenly the only child left born of her Mother's womb. Tobirama understood at the time, because he had felt something similar when Mother had died, a skullcrushing numbness that made him bury his face in his studies and lowered the volume of everything. He would understand even better in years to come, as time and war took his family one by one until only he and Hashirama were left.  

At the time, however, he didn't know what else to say, and suggested they head back. 

They walked slowly back to the compound, breathing in the crispness of autumn. At the edge of the forest, Tōka stopped and closed her eyes. 

“I'm alone now,” she told herself. 

Tobirama didn't know what to say, so he said nothing. He grabbed Tōka’s hand, pulled her to walk at his side, and hoped the gesture conveyed what he wanted it to.  Her fingers were cold, but her hand in his was the beginning and of it all. 

You're never alone. I'm always by your side.  

They walked back in silence.

“Tobirama?”

In the present -the past, the future- Uchiha Madara says his name in the lilting voice of a child, like the name is his to say, his to hold between his hands and call out. Tobirama has a split second to realize that the boy is missing one of his front bottom teeth, then he’s sitting on top of his clothes inside the falcon cage. 

The old lady in charge of correspondence faints.

…

“It’s not possible,” Tōka states, as if trying to convince herself.

“But it’s happening,” Hashirama points out, mystified.

Tobirama groans, and continues to bang his forehead against the table.

“Time-travel…” his brother says, for the fifteenth time. The bewilderment in his voice is battling with childish excitement.

“Genjutsu, until proven otherwise,” Tōka snaps at him, and slams a hand down on the table, hard. “Cut that out, Tobirama.” 

That’s the low, dangerous growl she used to use on him as a child, and it usually came right before a fist collided with his head. Tobirama sits up straight at once.

“But how?” Hashirama stresses “I’m not the genjutsu expert, but I know they cannot stretch so long, and at intermittent times? Also, if he were in a genjutsu, he wouldn’t disappear for fucking days at a time,”

“The Uchiha have surprised us before,” Tōka counters, arms crossed. 

The three of them have been going in circles for the past hour, repeating the things they know over and over and hoping at some point it will all start making sense.

“Izuna is not that good,” Tobirama states for what feels like the thousandth time. 

Its not that he actually believes he’s been jumping back and forth through time. It’s just that he can’t really see the Uchiha second in command coming up with such an elaborate jutsu, much less executing it in the middle of battle. 

Izuna is an efficient fighter, not given to prolonging a kill, not even for a larger scheme. Besides, why would he do it? What would be the point of showing him an older version of himself? Why show him a younger version of Madara? It makes no sense, he has no motive.

Quietly, like she doesn’t really want to say it, Tōka ventures, “But Madara is.”

Heavy silence drops over them like a curtain. Hashirama’s usually open and cheerful face closes off.

Even after all these years the Uchiha Clan Head is a sore topic when the three of them are alone. 

“Madara didn’t do this.” Hashirama finally says. “He wouldn't.”

Tobirama grits his teeth--the amount of blind faith Hashirama places in his one-time friend never failing to make him as angry as he’d been that fateful day by the river. The twins flash through his mind, and he knows Tōka is thinking of them as well, but she says nothing. 

Tobirama couldn’t bring himself to share what he’d seen, merely confiding that he’d been led to believe he’d traveled approximately twenty years into the past in this second opportunity. He has a feeling that telling his brother and his cousin who he’d seen would not end well, for any party involved.

“Now, time-travel--” Hashirama says thoughtfully, dispelling the ghosts in the room, and Tōka groans, throwing her hands in the air in clear surrender. Hashirama grins, “On the slim chance that it’s true, think what you could do with this power, little brother! The things you could learn, the people you could meet, the tragedies you cou--”

“No,” Tōka growls, and Hashirama’s mouth snaps closed with a click, “On the slim, thin, minuscule chance that it might be true, you can do nothing .” she crosses her arms and leans back on her seat “If you’re truly slipping through cracks in the fabric of time, even the smallest change could fuck up our existence even worse than it already is,”

Hashirama pouts.

“You’re no fun, Tōka-chan,”

The glare he gets could peel the skin off of lesser men, or at least men who hadn't been on the receiving end of it through their formative years. Hashirama merely sulks.  

Tobirama ponders telling them he’s spoken with at least two people, one on each occasion, but decides against it. It would entail discussing the contents of what he’s still regarding as extremely vivid hallucinations.

“I had considered that,” he says instead, “We haven’t enough information, so caution is prudent,” 

If he approaches the whole thing as if it were a mission, he finds it isn’t so hard to think about it.

“Yes, yes,” Hashirama rolls his eyes, “Caution. We wouldn’t want you to bring the apocalypse upon us, would we? Or worse, actually have fun, for a change”

“It’s serious, Hashirama!” Tōka says, slamming a hand down on the table and making the cutlery rattle, “Messing with time could be--”

“Ah!” Hashirama grins triumphantly, “So you are admitting that it really is time-travel!”

“No,” Tōka  narrows her eyes to slits of pure hatred, “I’m saying that if it--”

Tobirama is getting ready to tune them out--something that comes to him naturally after a lifetime of these arguments--when the room fades and he finds himself sitting on cold stone, an onslaught of wind raising gooseflesh on his bare skin. One does not appreciate the easy comfort of wearing clothes until that is taken away. 

He’s in a camp, albeit a small one. A fire crackles quietly. A horse is leashed to a tree, gazing at him as if unimpressed by his sudden materialization. Standing on a slope a little ways away, a lone figure stands, cloaked in twilight. Tobirama grabs a discarded quilt from the ground and wraps it around himself before reaching out his sensor chakra, which is not something he had an opportunity to do before. He cautiously feels the individual, sending small tendrils of his pale blue chakra in his general direction. His eyes narrow at what he feels.

He only proves to himself what he expected to find: that the only person in miles around is the person he’s looking at, and that that person is Uchiha Madara. The overwhelmingly hot chakra sizzles when it comes in contact with his own, and it takes effort not to physically recoil from it. He can tell from his reduced height and unsteady chakra flow that he’s a child yet, not a man, and what this implies leaves Tobirama gobsmacked and thrilled all at once.

This is no genjutsu. 

The tragedies you could prevent, Hashirama had wanted to say, and the heady power of knowing exactly how many could be prevented, if he were to reach out right now and strike, is nearly unbearable. He moves without even realising it, taking cautious steps forward towards the unsuspecting figure, feeling the air currents shift around him as he wallows in the need to kill him, now.

Tobirama has never been one to lose himself in his emotions, which is not to say he doesn’t have them. He does, but he simply does not allow them to cloud his judgment, the way his brother so often does. 

He’s the calculator, the strategist, the cold hearted soldier--because someone has to be. And so he calculates, looking at the turned back of his most hated enemy, and ponders the pros and cons of cutting his life short. 

Would it truly be devastating to the fabric of time, he wonders, if Uchiha Madara ceased to exist a good decade before coming on to his true power? The temptation is devastating, and he takes another step forward without even meaning to.

“I can feel you wanting to kill me,” Madara says, seemingly unconcerned. He turns around,  “Bad Tobirama.”

His voice is yet unbroken, but his eyes are as perpetually bruised as ever -- the effect makes him look older, skin stretched thin. Suddenly all of Tobirama’s killing intent leaves him, because he is looking at a tired child.

“How long have you known me for?” 

“I can’t tell you,” Madara says. When Tobirama narrows his eyes at him, he shrugs, “Your future self asked me not to”

“You seem certain I’m from the future”

“You told me. Besides, you always look the same,” the boy says. After a pause, he adds, “Also, I’ve seen you. Not you, but the other... you. Present tense- you,”

This sets Tobirama’s head spinning, and all he can do is ask, “You know who I am?”

Madara smirks half in the shadows, barely touched by the fire’s light.

“You’re Senju Tobirama, son of Butsuma, brother of Hashirama,” he says, then chuckles, “You are a funny looking little boy who’ll grow up into being my own personal time traveling nuisance. That’s all I know,”

There’s a lopsided smile on Madara’s face. It makes it seem like he’s in on a joke he won’t bother sharing. 

Tobirama grits his teeth, “We’re enemies,” 

Madara looks older than he did when they first met, that fateful day on the river when Hashirama had to give up on a friendship that always meant to him more than brotherhood ever did.

Tobirama is not a man easily led by his emotions. But he’s never hated anyone the way he hates the boy before his eyes, and the man that he’ll become.

Madara takes a step closer, his face illuminated by the small fire.

“Senju Tobirama and I, we’re enemies. He’s my enemy. You?”

There’s bags under his eyes, and scratches on his pale cheeks. His hair is singed in places. Once again, he’s not dressed for the cold and his nose is red. The image is a stark reminder that he’s still a child, no matter the blood on his hands, the blood that’s already there, and the blood that’ll come after. 

He smiles with cracked lips, hair whipping out in the wind.

“You’ll always be my friend,” he says, eyes wide and clear and so certain.

Tobirama has no answer.

We’re the same person, he’s about to say, but then Madara’s wry smile flickers away and fades into darkness, and he’s sitting on his clothes at his spot at the table, watching Tōka argue with his brother.

“-- were time-travel, then he’d have to be careful, because mayb--why is he naked? Why are you naked? What just happened?”

Tōka is confused, but Hashirama seems closer to childish excitement than anything else.

“Is it time-travel?” he asks, nearly bouncing on his seat.

Two sets of warm brown eyes regard him expectantly. Tobirama is hyper aware of the fact that he’s absolutely naked.

“Yes,” he says, and it feels a lot like defeat, “It is time-travel”

…

Tsukiyo-sama regards him impassively from her high throne of rock and iron, black-lined yellow eyes fixed on him with a mixture of both annoyance and concern--the regal eyes of a mother faced with a child presenting to her a mess of his own making and looking to her sheepishly for advice. That she is an Iron Wolf the size of a large cart does not take away from the image -- if anything, it adds to it. 

Underneath her great white paw rests the fluffy chew toy in the shape of a cat Tobirama got for her. Occasionally, she bears down on it gently to hear it squeak. It’s adorable. 

However, it does not help make him feel any less like a scolded child caught with his hands in the cookie jar as he kneels before her.

“Ignorant pup,” she snarls, her hot and foul breath blowing his hair like a gust of wind. The chewing toy squeaks as it compresses under her angry paw, “What have I told you about meddling with powers you do not understand?”

“That I shouldn’t and that I deserve every adverse outcome of my idiocy because I keep doing it despite your advice,” Tobirama dutifully replies, head bowed low. 

“I ought to let you absorb the consequences of your actions fully,” she rumbles, annoyed. They both know she won't.

“Please, my lady,” Tobirama grovels anyway, “I wouldn’t have asked your counsel if I weren’t truly desperate,”

She ponders this, cocking her massive head to the side, then sniffs a bit. Her nose is about the same size as his whole face. 

“I suppose you do smell remorseful,” she allows. The toy squeaks mournfully. “And this offering is rather satisfying. Very well, I shall aid you in this,”

Tobirama sighs, relieved.  

“Thank you, my lady. I'm afraid my research on spacetime seals has borne little fruit,” 

Tsukiyo-sama scoffs, unsurprised, “Humans hold little knowledge on these subjects. I doubt you'll be able to find much outside of Land of Whirlpools private library, and even that wouldn't be enough to help with your issue, I reckon,”

Tobirama had considered all this to be possible, but the thought of using his Clan’s connection to the Uzumaki Clan to ask for help in unraveling his problem made his stomach churn with embarrassment. Of course, Tsukiyo-sama’s disdain is only marginally better, but at least he is more familiar with bearing the brunt of it after over fifteen years.

“Have you ever heard of something similar happening?” he asks hopefully. 

She snaps her teeth, “Not quite. The way you speak of it tells me that this works like a contract with a summons, but in this case the summons is a human instead of a creature of the Realms,”

He hasn’t thought about it like that.  “So like a reverse summons? Like what you use to call me into your Realm?”

“Silly pup, that only works because our contract is a channel that works both ways.  The way you’ve described it, you're the one being pulled, but you can’t pull on anyone. Or anything,” she growls like the rumble of thunder. 

“So there's someone pulling on me. Summoning me. How is that possible?”

Tsukiyo-sama narrows her eyes at him and sniffs loudly. The toy squeaks a sound of contemplation. 

“Your aura seems different,” she concludes after a few seconds,"There's something there now that wasn't the last time you were here. A contract of sorts-- but different to the one you signed with me”

Tobirama feels his tight hold on his temper begin to waver, “But I didn’t sign anything!” 

She snaps her teeth at him, inches from his face, “Your soul did, pup.  And a contract on the soul is nearly impossible to break”

There’s a sinking feeling in his chest, like the floor is slowly being pulled out from underneath him, like the fabric of reality pulling apart. 

“Can you tell who's the other party?” he asks, nearly in a daze. He doesn’t need anyone to tell him who the other party is. 

“It isn't a written contract where you can see names listed on a piece of parchment.” Tsukiyo-sama scoffs disdainfully -- she always gets huffy when his human mind fails to grasp things she and hers find instinctive, “This is allegiance--devotion.  Like what you have for your pack of humans”

“My Clan,” Tobirama supplies absently, trying hard not to crumble underneath the weight of these revelations. 

“That,” Tsukiyo-sama nods happily, impervious to his sullen mood, “I can tell when I see them, that they're your pack, even when I don't know who they are.  Perhaps if you were to summon me, I would be able to pick out the other party of you contract by their aura.”

Despite it all, Tobirama feels a spike of curiosity at the notion, “But if I were to summon you in the past, would you be able to remember this conversation?”

With a low grumble that promises destruction and pain, Tsukiyo-sama pulls up into her full height, “I am a creature of spirit, pup. My realm is outside of the human concept of time.  If you call on me, I shall be of use,”

The words make him feel better. Knowing that somehow he might not be so absolutely lost in all this -- that he might have some way of unraveling this mess, and that he would not be facing it all alone -- makes him feel lighter. That there is someone that might help him--someone with whom he might be able to share all this load…

He bows and reaches forward, caresses a white paw with claws long as his fingers.  Her fur is soft like a dream, like a cloud, like it was the first time he touched it as an awed child, “Thank you,” 

Tsukiyo-sama looks at him fondly. She's always had a soft spot for him, and they both know it.  

“I expect another squeaky offering from you,” she grumbles.  

…

Predictably, the next time he travels he’s nowhere near any place or any person he knows. He stands awkwardly in the middle of a strangely ominous and humid wild forest. The tree pattern is like nothing he's ever seen before, and even the rocks seem foreign. The shapes seem almost like--giant bones?  

“Where the hell did you bring me, you bastard?” he mutters crossly, slapping a bug off his face. The thing flies off dejectedly. 

Irritated - and really fucking cold, goddamn - he spreads his senses outwards to--what? Get a feel of his surroundings? Become acquainted with the woodland creatures? Tobirama grits his teeth.  

He wants to find Madara. He wants Tsukiyo-sama to look at the boy--the man, the animal, the demon--and tell Tobirama his suspicions are wrong.  He wants confirmation-- but most of all, he wants not to be tied to the one enemy he's despised above all others. 

But as far as he seems to reach, that dark mass of wildfire chakra cannot be found. Annoyed, he doubles on the effort, vibrating with the intensity of his outreach. Where the hell is he? Why did he call Tobirama to this godforsaken place? 

The forest feels like an emptied grove, like the way trees feel after being struck by lightning and made burnt out and hollow, living death. Here’s something that was once full of life, now an empty husk left to suffer -- waiting, longing. 

Gritting his teeth with effort, he focuses his senses downwards, where something seems to dwell. Tendrils of chakra coil and clasp against the damp soils and trail down, down, down, until they eventually catch on to a massive source of energy underground  - something monumental and old, ancient, its weight and power creating ripples like a stone thrown into water.  

He breathes in and out slowly, tries to feel out the shape of it, the nature of it, but it feels foreign. It's something like a stone, he imagines, like a lump of volcanic rock or something similar, but not of this nature, of this world. Tobirama huffs, because if he didn't know it to be impossible he would think it might have come from outer---

He startles at the sound of a branch breaking underfoot somewhere behind him, and he's summoning a water dragon even before he finishes turning around, his entire being poised for the fight in a millisecond. 

“Oh,” a soft voice utters, a quality to it like the sound of wind rustling through dry leaves. A pale, black haired woman is looking at him, dressed in a blue kimono patterned with geometrical shapes. Her face and body convey awe, something like shock maybe, but also a distinct lack of fear. She's holding a backpack to her chest like a shield. 

Tobirama's water dragon dies before its jaws can open even a fraction, chakra burning his throat as he swallows it down for the second time in as many weeks -- he honestly hopes it won’t become a habit.  A sudden strong wind redirects the water splash and the entirety of it falls on his face as if it were a well aimed bucket. Or five. 

“I--Hello,” Tobirama squawks, trying to sound dignified as he's blinking water from his own jutsu away from his eyes. He lifts his hands in front of himself, “I won't harm you, ma’am.”

The woman blinks slowly, black eyelashes like raven wings flutter soft over her cheeks like she's waking up from a dream. 

“Alright” she says. The flatness of her vocals denotes a Land of Fire accent, even if her appearance gives him no more clues about her. Her hair is pulled up into a tidy bun, black bangs framing her face like an inkspill. Her light blue kimono moving in the gentle breeze makes him feel uncomfortably aware of a fact he'd nearly forgotten.

“I’m naked,” Tobirama states, color rushing to his face so fast he feels he might faint. 

“You are,” the stranger agrees with a nod, her purple gemstone earrings swaying with the movement. 

“I--this will sound very strange, but I don't really know where I am, and I don't quite enjoy being naked,”

The stranger blinks a few more times in that same unsettling fashion as before. 

“Oh?” she cocks her head to the side with a frown, like she doesn't quite understand why someone would be put off at being naked in public, then her eyes widen and immediately she shuts them tightly, “Oh! Oh. Alright. Yes, I--Well, this forest can be quite -- yes. I believe I might have something--.” 

She turns and rummages furiously through the contents of her backpack while Tobirama stands awkwardly, trying to reign in the urge to shift his weight from foot to foot. With a triumphant hiss, the stranger seems to find what she’s looking for, and she turns back to Tobirama with her eyes closed, proffering a bundle of carefully folded clothes to him. Respectfully, she turns away to let him dress. 

The clothes are simple, robe and pants in a thin grey material, once of great quality and now mended in some places, nearly see-through in others, soft like an embrace. A well loved and cared for set of male clothes in a woman’s backpack - strangely enough, they fit him.

“Thank you.  Again, I'm terribly sorry for this, ma’am,” Tobirama says to signal he’s now clothed. 

He bows to her, but she waves him off in good nature.  

“Nothing a healer hasn’t seen before,” she shrugs, though Tobirama can see a slight blush on her face. She smiles at him, “I can show you a way out of this forest and the road back to town, if you want,”

Tobirama pauses at this. On the one hand, he dearly wants to keep prodding on the massive source of chakra he felt underground, the one he still feels calling to him. Out of everything, it seems like it might hold some clue into why he’s been called here in the first place.  

On the other hand, this would be the first time in one of his travels that he manages to speak with someone other than Madara, or himself: here is someone he doesn't know. Also, there is something about this woman--something about the fearless shape of her shoulders, the nearly feline quality of her eyes, the inherent danger to her carefully controlled chakra-- that calls to him. 

Oh well, it's not like he has anything better to do, and this forest does seem like it's waiting for him to stumble on a pebble just to kill him. 

“What is a healer doing in a place like this?” he asks as they begin walking side by side on a meandering path, the logic of which seems to be known only to her. 

“Research, mainly,” she says after a brief, thoughtful silence, ". I've been traveling for some time. Right now, I’m trying to figure out this forest’s secrets”

Tobirama thinks about the massive chakra source he can still feel pulsing underground and threads lightly, “Are you researching the cure for an illness?"

She gives him a look.  

“Deliverately obtuse is not a good look on anyone, Shinobi-san.  You're clearly aware this forest is not quite like any other,” 

“What makes you think I'm Shinobi?”

Her lips twitch into a smirk, like she's in on a joke he's not quite getting, “Let us call it female intuition. You also did conjure a rather large water dragon,”

“Ah,” Tobirama feels his face color, “Not my finest moment, I’ll admit,”

She laughs, an airy sound that cuts through the silent forest -- no birds or animals scurrying, nothing breaking the silence other than the sound of leaves moving in the wind. 

“Indeed,” she nods, still smiling, “I think it's more my place to ask the naked stranger for his story, no?”

“My story is actually very complicated. And most of it, I cannot tell.” 

“Hn.” she looks sideways at him, eyes dancing in a strangely familiar fashion, “You are entitled to your secrets, Shinobi-san, but--consider disguising the truth for me.”

Against his better judgement, Tobirama likes her. 

“Let us say I was summoned here,” he says after giving it some thought, “though I'm not certain why -- the reach and conditions of the summoning contract are still unclear. I'm in something of a moment of research myself.”

“Anything conclusive?”

Tobirama grimaces, “Nothing I can be glad about,”

“Ah.” she makes a face and nods in sympathy, “Time. Time and patience are good for all things.”

Tobirama feels his lips curl in amusement at the platitude, “Forgive me, but that sounds like something someone much older would say.”

“Oh, I'd venture that I'm much older than you, Shinobi-san.” her gemstone earrings catch the sun and sparkle a bit, “I don't really look my age, though you won't make me say it--a lady is also entitled to her secrets, you know.”

Tobirama ducks his head, huffs out a laugh. Around them, the forest feels as though it is watching with bated breath. 

“This place feels old, like ancient canyons and mountaintops.” he says, finally giving voice to his thoughts, “It feels like something that was once something else, and it's waiting for something, to change again,”

The stranger nods in acknowledgement. 

“The locals call it Mountain Graveyard,” she says as they come across a large treelike white formation -- it takes Tobirama a few seconds to realize it's a massive rib, bleached white by the sun, “I have my theories. Indeed it seems to have been the preferred dying spot for several different species of megafauna, however this is not enough to explain the amount of chakra that's emanating from this place,”

Even now, beneath their feet, that overwhelming mass of chakra pulses, dormant in its wait. “Is the source of it what you're looking for?”

“Not quite,” she smiles, eyes brightening, “Tell me, Shinobi-san, are you familiar withYin-Yang Release?”

Tobirama searches his mind for any speck of information, and he realizes there isn't any.

“A form of chakra transformation?”

“The base of chakra transformation,” she tells him -- Tobirama’s eyes widen, “and as such, the base of life itself. To master it would befind the key to creation,”

She tells him of a power so immense, so unfathomable, it holds within itself the secret to both spiritual energy and physical energy. The mastery of it would entail an understanding so deep and absolute of physicality, spirituality and matter itself, Tobirama doesn’t think the span of a human life would be enough to achieve such prowess -- but to even scratch the surface of this knowledge, to come close to it and to grasp enough of it to apply to the things he already knows --  it's fascinating. Every single thing that comes out of her mouth is a new world, a new universe. He feels absorbed, enthralled -- he tries to wrap his mind around as many concepts as he can, asks questions and gets answers that far exceed his current knowledge and ability to understand, but he feels giddy with it nonetheless -- the world she uncoils for him  feels like a world of marvels. 

After nearly an hour of conversation, the forest silent and solemn around them, he realizes every enunciate is pointing somewhere. 

“You want to beat death,” he states, amazed. 

Her eyes widen minutely, but she doesn’t deny it. 

“Your mind is quite fast, Shinobi-san,” she comments, nearly fond. However, she becomes grave, “Do you find it dreadful?”

Tobirama thinks of small bodies being lowered to a grave and fields drenched in blood, crows circling overhead. He thinks of the smell of charred flesh, a long night spent sleepless by a sickbed. A world without death, Tobirama thinks -- his body feels light. 

“No,” he says resolutely.

His companion ducks her head in something that looks like defeat and relief at the same time. 

“You wouldn't,” she mutters, nearly too low to hear, but before he can ask what she means she looks back at him, “The truth of it all -- what I truly desire is to fulfill a promise I made. But I don't know how.”

Tobirama frowns, “A promise to create life?”

“Something more difficult,” she winks, “To be happy.”

Before he can help himself, Tobirama scoffs.

“Only the hopelessly naive would demand such a promise,” he declares, scathing, and immediately realizes the insensitivity of it -- this is what happens when he’s allowed to converse without Hashirama as a buffer. 

He’s about to hastily apologize as he’s been thoroughly indoctrinated to do after he unavoidably sticks his foot in his mouth, but the stranger once again surprises him -- she bursts out laughing.  

“He was that kind of person,” she giggles, wiping a tear from the corner of her eye, “I'm not.  I think it always scared him, that I wouldn't get out of my mind long enough to live,”

Blindsided by the turn in the conversation, Tobirama fumbles a bit for something to say, and considers remaining silent. His companion is seemingly content to keep walking next to him, gaze placed forward. Feeling strangely compelled to, and against his better judgement, he speaks. 

“I’m--the same. The world of logic is a safe place for me. Something as vague as happiness--” he admits, shaking his head. 

The stranger glances at him with even eyes -- he wonders if he might be caught in some kind of genjutsu, if something outside of himself is compelling him to find such familiarity in her, but a fast analysis allows him to conclude that he isn’t. Somehow, he’s found in this stranger a kind of kinship that makes him want to share something with her, he realises -- like glancing at a mirror. 

“I don't know how it is that a person should go through life. I don't know if true happiness is even attainable and I don’t understand people who are so certain of it." he continues on the same line, but then -- he thinks of Hashirama’s gentleness, his dreams, his unreasonably large heart, “However, I -- I rather like people like that. I don't think I need to understand them,”

The stranger looks stricken for a moment, eyes wide and jaw slack, but she composes herself with a snort. She looks at him fondly as they reach the edge of the forest, a crossroad rising to meet their feet.

“I do as well,” she confides, her hair dancing in the wind. 

At that moment, Tobirama realises that she knows him. She knows him beyond a passing acquaintance or recognition as a Shinobi -- this stranger knows him enough to not be afraid of him, to be able to explain concepts to him in a way that he understands -- he understands, he realises, because it's the same way he himself would explain them. There's a familiarity in her gaze, a fondness -- but also a yearning.   

Tobirama's heart races, he opens his mouth to speak, to demand answers -- he wants to understand, he wants to know what she is to him, this kindred spirit, but before he says anything the world blurs. He has a second to see her face fall in sad disappointment before it all fades. 

…

“So you went to a place where there are strange bones the size of trees, you talked to a woman who knew you were Shinobi, who gave you clothes that fit you perfectly, gave you a class on a sort of chakra you'd never heard off and who somehow also knew you enough to be disappointed instead of shocked at you disappearing?" Tōka summarizes, askance. 

“Correct,” Tobirama mutters distractedly as he skims a parchment focused on the Geography of Land of Waterfalls, a small and newly emancipated country near Land of Water -- he feels the kind of rocky formations he saw might be found there. His study is a mess -- maps and scrolls and uneaten food on every surface. 

Tōka’s spread hand obscures his view of a frankly terrible map. Annoyed, Tobirama looks up. 

“I don't understand," Tōka says through gritted teeth, “why you talked to her in the first place,”

It gives Tobirama pause. 

He's been locked up researching frantically ever since he came back three days ago to find mere hours had passed since his disappearance, writing down everything the stranger said as faithfully as possible. At some point, Tōka and Hashirama showed up demanding answers, so he told them as much as he could -- as much as he could explain. The truth is that he himself does not know, but there was something about her, about the way she moved and spoke to him, the distinct affection written in every line of her face--

“She seemed harmless,” he concludes, to Tōka’s obvious dismay. 

“She could be an assassin!” she yells, about three sentences away from slapping him, Tobirama gouges. 

He raises an eyebrow, “A highly inefficient assassin, as she found me there naked as a babe.”

“Maybe she's waiting for the next time you show up.”

“How would she know?”

“Perhaps she's a witch and she cursed you!” Hashirama chimes in cheerfully. 

He’s summarily ignored. 

“She said she was a healer.” Tobirama says, writing it down again. She truly might have been a healer, as her chakra was soft edged and tightly wound, and her hair carried the scent of burnt pine and rosemary. 

Tōka rolls her eyes dramatically, “Oh, well. If she said she was a healer, then that's alright then.”

At any other time, Tobirama would have been on her side. This time, however--

“She felt familiar.” he says, thinking back on the way it felt to hear her talk, the air around her, her gemstone earrings, “. There was something about the way her chakra felt against mine-- I knew she wasn't a threat. I felt--calm,”

Hashirama looks at him as though he’s gone mental. To nobody’s surprise and in direct opposition to their cousin, he’d been delighted by the story of the stranger he met in foreign lands and time, but the current expression on his face seems more in line with thinking his brother’s been replaced by some kind of changeling. 

Tōka raises an eyebrow, stealing Hashirama’s teacup from his slack hand, “Is that your female intuition talking?”

Tobirama huffs, then frowns, thinking back on the stranger's seemingly permanent amusement, the elegant line of her neck-- He drops his quill. 

Ah. 

“I think she might actually be a man.”

Tōka snorts tea out of her nose.  

…

The next time he travels, he’s ready for it. He’s biting his finger as soon as the world starts fading around him and executing the summons even before reality asserts itself around him once more. 

It turns out to be a life-saving call, since he materializes on the side of a goddamn cliff and the only thing that stops him from tumbling to his death are Tsukiyo-sama’s reflexes. That, and the way her sharp claws take purchase on the slippery rock, because of course: it is also raining.

“A warning, insolent pup!” she growls, muscles straining to make the climb with Tobirama perched precariously on her back. They are both drenched in seconds.    

“I don’t get a warning! It just happens!” he squawkes miserably, holding on for dear life as she starts jumping up the side of the cliff and to the top. 

She grumbles some more, cursing the idiotic nature of human pups, but she doesn't shake him off and she keeps climbing, so he thinks he might be out of danger. Thunder roars overhead. 

They reach the top of a scarped cliff formation overlooking a tempestuous sea, waves crashing into each other as the storm rages. The cold wind bites mercilessly at his exposed skin as he clutches Tsukiyo-sama’s thick fur -- what he wouldn't give to have such a magnificent coat at this time. 

“I know this mountain range!” Tsukiyo-sama bellows over the overbearing sounds of nature, “Humans call this place Land of Lightning!”

“I've never been here before!”

Tsukiyo-sama's ears move rapidly.

“I can feel your pack nearby!”

Tobirama shivers, teeth chattering,“Let's go there!” 

“You'll die in this cold, pup,” she huffs, tail coming to cover his exposed back, “First, shelter!”

Tobirama protests but she is relentless -- and right. She finds them a relatively dry cave to weather the storm, and it takes Tobirama three tries to start a small fire with how humid it is in this wretched place. 

“I might be out of time before this storm passes,” Tobirama mutters, annoyed and cold and miserable, warming himself by the fire. 

Tsukiyo-sama scoffs, lying spread out behind him. “Better to survive with empty hands than die with them full,”   

She’s right. However, Tobirama remains cold and miserable, and won’t reply. His moodiness amuses her, and in turn her amusement makes him sulk harder. 

“Rest, pup,” she chides, uncharacteristically gentle. 

It surprises him enough that he lies back against her soft fur, instantly warmed by the heat she produces. He must fall asleep at some point, because he awakens to her cold nose pressing to his closed eye. 

“The storm has broken. Your pack is nearby,”

They leave the security and warmth of the cave in the cover of darkness. Tobirama remains painfully aware of his nakedness, even though Tsukiyo-sama's long and fully dry tail drapes across his back and protects him from the worst of the cold.  

They travel about a kilometer through rocky terrain to what's clearly a war camp, about a hundred men large, stationed in what seems like the old, dried up bed of a long gone river. There's surveillance all around, tired looking shinobi in strange green uniforms. Between Tobirama’s sensing skills and Tsukiyo-sama’s ability of blending with nature, prowl quiet as the wings of a butterfly, they manage to elude them completely as they attempt to approach what appears to be the command tent, a small fire burning timidly in damp soil just outside the curtained opening. The canvas must have some sealing power, because he can feel no chakra signatures from inside.

Tsukiyo-sama sniffs. 

“That one. Your pack is in there.” she rumbles low as they lurk behind a large rock. 

They remain hidden for a few minutes.  Just as he's about to suggest they move closer, the curtain moves aside. 

He feels him before he sees him. Even though he's good at masking himself, Madara's chakra signature is as scorching as a lava torrent, as caustic as an acid spill.  It's tightly reigned in, along with his temper, made small and manageable through sheer willpower -- subdued might be a word to use, if this were any other man. He walks out of the tent in full dragonhide armor, impervious to the dismal weather in all ways except for how his hair puffs into further volume than usual.  

Tobirama's blood seems to boil in his veins. This is the first time in his travels that the man looks as Tobirama knows him -- the same white paper skin like the scales of a snake, black eyes like the center of a storm, hair whipping in the wind like wings of crows. A portent of doom.  

Pack, Tsukiyo-sama said, which means they can conclude that his contract, the one his soul has acquired somehow with no input from his brain, is to the man in the clearing, currently seating himself on a log by the fire with a caustic frown on his wretched face.  

(It all means one more thing: either they are in a past unbearably close to their present, or they are currently in a future unknown.)

“Well, that's a disappointment,” Tsukiyo-sama rumbles low, and before he can wholeheartedly agree she adds, “I suppose we won’t be able to find out anything new today,”

This comment gives Tobirama pause, “What do you mean anything new?”

“The bleak pup with the Sharingan is your pack, but we already knew that,” is the infinitely confusing reply.  

Tobirama’s mind stutters to a blank.  

“What do you mean,” he says flatly, enunciating every word-- focusing on facts is the only way he might not go insane at this moment. 

Tsukiyo-sama's ear twitches in annoyance, “He’s always been your pack, before your soulbond. I thought that’s why he was always play-fighting with your brother. You mean to tell me you didn’t know he was pack?”

Tobirama swallows, “This is--new information. The soulbond -- what's changed?”

“In him? Nothing. There was always something binding him to you, but now there's also something binding you to him.” she lets that sink in, sniffs and then ads, “He has your scent on him now, too.”

Tobirama stares until Madara’s shape nearly blurs.  The man is seated by the fire -- smoking a pipe, out of all things to be doing, and staring at nothing, scraggly hair moving in the wind.  The camp is dead for the night, everyone asleep except for the surveillance team, and Madara seems everything but alert, despite his full armor. He seems unexpectedly small without his gumbai.  

Tobirama could kill him now.  He's obviously distracted, tired in a way that speaks of a long campaign, and alone -- there's no Izuna in sight, ready to strike at the drop of a leaf.  Tobirama feels a spark of satisfaction at the possibility that the man might be dead at his hand.

It is at this moment that Madara’s eyes suddenly focus, and like a river current vying for the sea, black meets red across the clearing. For a moment, the world seems to come to a standstill. Every thought of a fight, of ending Madara here and now, leaves Tobirama in the face of utter shock.

Because Madara's black, fathomless eyes are wide in his stricken face, and in the darkness illuminated only by the low fire Tobirama is astounded at what he finds there, what he senses in the man’s subdued chakra signature. 

First, recognition.  And then grief.  Heartrending, gut-churning grief.  

They look at each other for a long moment, seemingly suspended outside of time.  Madara's breathing is noticeably labored, even at this distance, and Tobirama finds his own is as well.  The moment stretches until the fledging fire dies out with a miserable splutter like a full stop in a long, gutting poem.  Madara rises from his seat and returns to his tent.  

Tobirama holds on to Tsukiyo-sama’s fur for a few minutes, until the world fades around them and they are hurled back into the present--a sunny day in Hashirama's garden.  

She licks his face to snap him out of his trance. 

“What are you going to do, pup?”

Tobirama’s mind, for once, is blank. 

“I have no idea,”

…

In the following weeks, Tobirama travels so often he becomes used to it --mainly to the past, to a blur of time from the moment Madara was still missing some teeth to his early adolescence.  

Most times, he manages to skip actually having to speak with Madara, when he manages to land somewhere off the boy’s sight. He stays, hidden and silent, watching snippets of someone else’s childhood that might as well be his own. The endless hours of training, the grueling lessons on strategy and politics and finance, the missions not meant for such young eyes--it’s all familiar in an uncomfortable way.

Uchiha Madara entered the battlefield at an earlier age than Tobirama or even his brother did, and scaled up the positions at an even faster rate. The monstrous power combined with the sharp, agile mind made him a force to be reckoned with, and Tobirama remembers his name being whispered amongst the adults of his clan, awe and fear coloring their voices.

He remembers being five years old, remembers his father taking him and Hashirama to the empty aftermath of a battlefield. He remembers the smell of charred flesh, bodies turned into nothing but coal, and the looks on the faces of the survivors. 

Tobirama looks at the child, really looks at him, and it takes true effort not to kill him.

Other times, he travels and doesn’t see Madara at all. He appears in the forest, kneeling next to a wooden toy shaped like a horse, or at a very familiar spot by the side of the river. The connection is always there, always calling him, like a string attached to his ribcage, right above his heart. Tobirama would love nothing more than to cut it, before he loses his mind. 

He doesn't see an older Madara again, even though he waits for that moment with bated breath -- he promises himself that next time he sees him as he is, as a man and not a child, he will do what must be done.  

And if he occasionally ponders on fathomless black eyes and the infinite grief he saw in them, he tells himself it won't make his hand waver. 

…

He lands face down just outside the Senju Compound, loose dirt going straight up his nostril, thankfully hidden by bushes and tallgrass. He suppresses a sneeze and his chakra as soon as he can, lest his younger self will know of his presence, and raises his eyes just in time to see his brother run past towards the guarded gate. He's visibly rattled, hurrying on his way home from his first meeting with Madara, carrying with him a helmet emblazoned with the Hagoromo crest.

Someone is waiting for him at the entrance.

He watches, entranced, as his brother runs to a boy whose back is turned to Tobirama. His breath catches in his throat and he lowers his face to the dirt, allowing himself to only catch a glimpse of white and brown hair, all on the same head and combed methodically, nearly obsessively apart because when the colors mix it just looks wrong, don't you see? Of course you don't know. You're so lucky you have normal hair, I have to walk around looking like a panda bear. Don't call me a panda bear! Just because I said it doesn't mean you get to say it. I hate you sometimes, Tobirama.

His limbs start tingling and he fades away before he can tell if the boy who turns around is Itama or not.

He tells himself it isn't. It's easier that way.

…

Tobirama's duties as second in command include, but are not limited to, managing expenses and resources, and ensuring all of their missions are correctly catalogued and assigned. He's not in the frontlines so much anymore, as Hashirama is generally more suited for shows of power, and when it comes to brute strength Tōka is second to none. He is, however, eligible for missions, so long as they require a certain minimum requirements to make them worth his while: these requirements make it so he gets a solo mission that meets the criteria about once every month, at best.  

When two months go by, and he hasn't been assigned any missions in as much time, he checks the roster, and finds that he's been unceremoniously removed. Then he sharpens his blade and marches into Hashirama's office. 

“It was a logical decision!" Hashirama screeches, covering his face with a ledger. Wood chips off his desk as the outer surface succumbs to bitter cold chakra. “I was going to tell you! It's just that between you disappearing so much and everything, with your condition, it just-- I don't know, it slipped my mind! I'm sorry!”

He peers at Tobirama from behind the ledger, eyes wide as saucers. He looks contrite enough. 

Tobirama sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose, “You should have told me at once,”

“I know, I'm sorry,” Hashirama cautiously puts the ledger down, close enough to reach in case he needs it. He smiles gently, “It's not such a big deal, you know. We can put you back on the roster when you find a way to fix it,”

“It's special treatment.”  Tobirama grumbles, crossing his arms over his chest, “It isn't fair, I should pull my weight like everyone else,”

Hashirama rolls his eyes and comes to stand in front of Tobirama, places his hands on his shoulders. 

“You pull the weight of about ten people everyday, Tobirama.  Let me carry it for a bit, yeah? Like you always do for me,”

Tobirama won't meet his eyes. It might make sense to Hashirama, but it makes him feel guilty. He grits his teeth, angry at everything, and nods. 

Being off from the roster means he has more time on his hands now than he's ever had before in his life.  He pours nearly all of it into his research, trying to find a fix for his problem, and also some nervous sprints of cleaning.  

For the first time since their mother passed, the house is spotless.  

…

He’s writing a letter asking for aid and accommodation to Uzumaki Ashina, Clan Head of the most powerful clan of Land of Whirlpools and a dear friend of his mother’s, and has enough time to set aside his brush so as not to spoil all his work before he finds himself kneeling on a forest floor, a branch digging painfully into his ankle. Naked and bleeding. Again. Marvelous.

The upbeat voice in the back of his head that sounds suspiciously like Hashirama points out that at least it’s not snowing nor raining this time.

“Shut up,” Tobirama growls at the voices in his own head.

“I didn’t say anything,”

Tobirama looks up, startled. 

Madara giggles and opens the scroll slung over his shoulder, activating the summoning seal with a sloppy flare of chakra. A thick grey cloak from the first time materializes in his hands, and he throws it over Tobirama’s head.

“You really should figure out a way to time travel with your clothes on, you know,” the boy says, placing his hands on his hips, “I don’t know what they think about it in the future, but adults from this time don’t like grown men who show up naked in front of little boys. I know. I asked my father,”

Tobirama suppresses an inappropriate snort at the thought of Uchiha Tajima being asked that question by his son. He also wonders who suffered his wrath for that particular crime.

“They don’t like it in the future either,” he limits himself to say, holding the cloak more securely to himself as he stands, “You told your father about me?”

Madara rolls his eyes, and sniffles, “No. For the millionth time, I didn’t tell anyone. Having a naked time traveling friend with rabbit eyes is not really good for my reputation, you know,”

Another sniffle, and Tobirama wonders if no one ever explained to this kid the concept of weather appropriate clothes. Then he processes the part where Madara compared him to a rodent, and he glares. Because he's a little shit, the boy giggles.

“How old are you?” he asks, just to say something. Madara’s intent stare could burn holes into a brick wall.

The boy puffs his chest and grins, “I’ll be ten in three weeks!”

Ten. Tobirama does the math reflexively, before he can remind himself that that is a bad idea. That means that, somewhere out there, beyond this forest and the surrounding lands, Tobirama is seven years old, and his whole family is still alive.

He can remember, clear as morning air, his mother’s smile, forever subdued and pained but kind nonetheless, her pale hair and crimson eyes exactly like his own. His father was different then, while she lived. Less angry, more prone to smile.

He remembers teaching Kawarama how to read, watching his little fingers trace the plain kanjis, while Itama slept in his crib, tired after a day of learning how to walk this world that was new for him. He remembers Hashirama, lying face down on the floor, dead to the world and snoring faintly, the comfort of their family life the only dream of peace he needed.

Somewhere out there.

Tobirama is assaulted by an onslaught of grief so powerful it makes him crumple to the ground, shaking and trying not to fall apart. Of all the moments to have a mental breakdown that's been years in the making--

“Tobirama?” Madara is crouched beside him, his hand resting comfortingly on his back. “Are you okay?” he asks quietly as Tobirama dry heaves.

The boy kneels in front of him and peers into his face, concern in his peerless black eyes.

In the darkness of their depths, Tobirama sees Kawarama’s coffin being lowered to the ground. He sees Uchiha Tajima’s sword protruding from his father’s chest. He sees his mother’s corpse, her slit throat, the blood on the ground, and suddenly every breath he takes carries the smell of Itama’s charred flesh, sickeningly sweet, that long sleepless agony.

“Why you?” Tobirama spits, eyes narrowing with anger and pain. The boy recoils a little, but doesn’t scurry away, “Why must I come back to you?”

Out of all the people in the world, why his sworn enemy? Why a member of the clan that burned most of his family to ash? Why the child who bewitched his brother and charmed him into believing in foolish dreams of hope and peace, only to leave him heartbroken and forever disappointed with life? Why the man whose name has forever meant strife and pain in Tobirama’s mind, the greatest general of the Uchiha to date?

Why this child, so young and wide eyed, whose death would fix so much?

“Oh,” Madara says suddenly. He throws his arms around Tobirama’s shoulders, his face buried against the back of Tobirama’s neck. The display shocks Tobirama so much that his mind goes blank, and in the second that follows he remembers to breathe. “I’m so sorry. About your family.” Tobirama feels himself crack a little.

He stays for five more minutes, shellshocked and crumbling, and then materializes, thankfully, on the floor of his bedroom.

A whole day went by.

…

The rumour spreads around the compound like wildfire in the driest autumn. 

Senju Tobirama, second in command of the Senju Clan, is time-traveling against his will. Naked.

Tobirama rolls his eyes at the murmurs and the stares, but lets them gossip all they want. Better they think he’s been canoodling with the Sage of Six Paths than having them believe he’s a deviant who enjoys running naked through the streets and stealing clothes from hanging lines.

…

The lake shimmers in the midday sun, undisturbed but for the occasional plopping sound as a fish breaks the surface, ripples widening out. Dragonflies hover dangerously close to the water, as if testing their skill, while butterflies and bees limit themselves to the wildflowers and thistle blossoms by the shore. On a patch of flattened long grass a little ways away, there are two children. Madara, who clearly had planned to be alone with his scrolls to get some reading done in the peaceful quiet of the lake, and Izuna, who foiled his plans by trailing after him, and is now dejectedly playing with a stick he fished out of the shallow water.

"Nii-san," the boy says suddenly, a troubled frown on his face, "why is the lake blue?"

Madara looks up from the scroll he's inspecting, and promptly answers, "Because it copies the sky,"

Izuna nods, momentarily satisfied. Madara returns to his scroll.

Less than a minute rolls by, then, "But why is the sky blue?" the younger boy demands.

Madara looks at him and blinks, concocting an answer. His lips twitch. 

"Because it's not purple," he finally decides, certainty lacing his every word. Izuna thinks about this, then nods solemnly, like it is the most logical piece of information he's ever received, and returns to his task of digging a hole in the dirt with a stick. 

Tobirama is finding it difficult to believe that this is the same person that's come dangerously close to killing him on six separate occasions.

Uchiha Izuna is his longest standing and most respected opponent. He’s younger than Tobirama by a few years, as the Uchiha tend to enter the battlefield at a younger age than other Clans, but his tactical genius rivals, and at times even surpasses, his own. He can clear entire battlefields, raining fire and destruction upon his enemies without breaking a sweat, and his masterful swordsmanship is feared in all the five Great Nations, even admired by the samurai of the Land of Iron.

This Uchiha Izuna is small, seven years old at best. He's articulate for his age, very interested in the way everything works, and hangs off his older brother's every word. He also has two short swords tied to his back, the handles sticking out over his shoulders for easy reach. The first time they clashed in battle, one of those swords went into the throat of Tobirama’s uncle, his father's younger brother, as he was giving the order to retreat. The other had pierced Tobirama through the shoulder, twisting on the way out -- the scar was shaped like a starfish and limited his mobility on that arm. It ached terribly when the weather was humid. 

"It would look better purple," Izuna comments whistfully, pausing on his digging and looking up expectantly. Madara smiles and mumbles an agreement.

Both boys look almost exactly like they did the first time they crossed blades, that fateful day on the river. 

They're distracted, both of them. They feel secure in the lands they deem to be their own, and neither noticed the disturbance in the air when Tobirama landed in the treeline, giving him enough time to suppress his chakra. They have no idea he's here, no one can see him, no one can know.

His fingers itch to form the seals, a voice in his head telling him to just do it.

"Mother says that you need a haircut," Izuna comments. The stick has gone from being a shovel to becoming a bird, flying around as high as short arms can reach.

"I think I'll let it grow longer," Madara says, picking at the shoulder length tresses with his fingers.

Izuna drops his arms to his sides and gapes.

"But that's dangerous!"

It's true. Long hair is a hazard in a fight, essentially being a leash to be conveniently placed in an opponent's hand. Senju children are to keep their hair cropped as close to the skull as possible, to avoid catching fire when faced with Uchihas. Only the most skilled of fighters, or the most reckless ones, allow themselves such vanity.

Madara shrugs, and returns to his reading.

Izuna huffs, angry at the dismissal, and chews his lip. He mumbles a bit under his breath, apparently still at an age when he needs to vocalize his thoughts, and crosses his arms above his small ribcage. He's momentarily distracted from his grumble by a bumblebee steadily making it's way towards his brother's head, but instead of telling him, he just looks at the insect make it's way closer and closer to the distracted boy. When Madara sees it, he yelps and swats at it with the scroll, falling backwards trying to avoid it, glaring when the younger boy giggles delightedly at him.

Izuna sniggers for a little longer, and then he cocks his head to the side and makes his way to his brother, crouching next to him. He peers at the other's face, concentration slowly dawning into glee.

Madara looks up at him and makes a face, "What?!"

"Hikaku was right," and his delighted grin turns into teasing, "In a certain light, you really do look like a girl,"

Madara just stares at him, blinks once, then splutters.

"What," he says flatly, not even a question. Izuna laughs, backs away swiftly just in time to avoid his brothers clutching hands reaching for him, and breaks into a dead run across the still surface of the lake. Madara jumps to his feet, scrolls tumbling to the ground with a thud, and follows in hot pursuit.

"IZUNA!" he bellows, heavy feet splattering water all over his clothes,"Come back here so I can kill you!"

The younger boy, whose more refined chakra control allows him to stay dry, hoots with laughter, "Why would I do that?!"

"It'll hurt less than if I have to catch you!"

Izuna just laughs and laughs, feet skittering over the water and barely making a sound. After a five minute race, filled with taunts and insults, Madara falls on his face with a painful sounding splat, one of his arms slipping dangerously under.

"Well?" Izuna asks, breathing heavily. "Weren't you going to catch me?"

But Madara doesn't answer. His body sinks a little bit more, until he's floating face down.

"Nii-san?" Izuna's expression shifts, and he rushes to his side, "Nii-san! Are you o-EEK!"

Madara grabs his brother's foot with his submerged hand and pulls him all the way under with a huge splash.

"Nii-san! " Izuna cries once he can finally get his head above water. The older Uchiha looks down at him with a grin.

"Will you ever not fall for that?" he asks laughingly, then his grin turns menacing. "Now, now. I believe I said I'd kill you, right?"

Izuna bravely tries to swim away, although it's more like an underwater flail, but gets caught, and after numbly watching Madara dunk the younger boy's head in the lake repeatedly for a good ten minutes, Tobirama's limbs start tingling. The children and the lake fade away, and he lands on his bed, his room swathed in sunlight from the open window, his hands still burning with chakra and the intent to kill.

There's children playing somewhere outside, laughing delightedly, and usually the sound would be enough to lift his spirits. But not today.

He closes the curtains, hides under the covers, and doesn't come out until it's time for dinner.

…

“The Uchiha have been quiet lately,” Tōka says from her perch on the window, like commenting on the rain, “Too quiet.”

Tobirama chooses his words carefully, tries not to think of the awkward attempts at comfort from a child.  “There's been a lull in activities, yes. At least that we know of.”

“Conflict between the neighbouring feudal lords is cooling.” Hashirama points out, frowning at an expenses report -- he's never been very good at math, “There are less assignments all around.”

“I think Uchiha Madara is out of commission.” Tōka states sharply, words like swords, face like granite, “We should ambush. Now, while they are vulnerable,”

In the questioning silence that follows, the rasp of Hashirama's quill as he places his signature at the bottom of the page is loud. 

“No,” he says finally, grave eyes dark with determination, “We will not disturb the peace, however tenuous. I’ve drafted a peace treaty -- it’s on its way to Madara as we speak,"

Tōka bristles, but Tobirama beats her to it. 

“Why wasn't I informed of this?” he snarls, outraged -- it's the roster situation all over again, his place in the Clan, at Hashirama's side, becoming blurry and undefined.

Faced with their discontent, Hashirama smiles thinly. 

“Because I knew you’d make that face,” he says simply, sadly -- like his heart bleeds through every word.

Tōka huffs, livid, and storms out with an angry yell. Tobirama frowns at his brother for a long moment.  

“It was just a dream, brother.” he spits through gritted teeth, “Why must you insist on trying?”

Hashirama sighs, tired and sad and old beyond his years, “Because it was a good dream-- It is a good dream. And I know he still cares for it, Tobirama. I know him.”

Do you? Tobirama wants to ask, but loves him enough not to.

He leaves without another word.   

…

He lands on his feet, for once, and the first thing he feels is cold mud between his toes. At least he's not doing paperwork anymore, though he’ll probably have to finish it when he returns.  If he returns. 

The second thing he feels is Madara Uchiha approaching like a desert storm.

“Sage give me strength,” he mutters, trying valiantly not to destroy everything within a mile radius.

“You shouldn't call for him in vain, you know,” Madara says conversationally, throwing a cloak at him.  “Izumi-san is always saying you should leave prayer for the big problems,”

Tobirama grits his teeth, bristling, but he wraps the cloak around himself. It fits perfectly, covering him down to his shins.  

“I'm not praying. I'm just --”

 What? Trying to hold it together? 

“-- vocalizing.” he finishes lamely.

Madara raises an eyebrow, unimpressed, then nods sharply, “Ok then, we're having sulky Tobirama today.  That's good to know.”

“I'm not sulky,” he huffs, crossing his arms over his chest.  

Madara snorts, “Of course you're not.”

The nerve on that scruffy boy -- it takes Tobirama every ounce of his considerable self control not to wring his neck.  

“Why are you standing around in the mud?” he barks, looking around at the decimated wasteland they are at. His feet are cold.  

Madara pauses, looking away. 

“I was training. It's good to train in tough terrain like this--helps with balance and mobility and all that.”

Tobirama’s eyes narrow. He looks at Madara carefully as the boy resolutely looks away. He must be about sixteen at most, though the bags under his eyes and exhaustion lines on his face always make him look older than he is -- his lips seem slightly blistered, like he’s been using too many fire jutsus. His hair is up for once, brushed and pulled up into a ponytail, and his clothes are nearly formal, like he's bound for an official meeting of some kind -- black robes trimmed with red, streaked with mud. They’re on a barren land, mud like clay under their feet. The surrounding trees are burnt to nearly nothing, still smoking. 

Tobirama stretches his senses out to get a feel of their location. He lifts an eyebrow.     

“Also, this is the furthest away from the Uchiha camp you can be without outright leaving your territory.” he points out flatly. 

Madara looks back at him, eyes wide. Then he laughs, mirthless. 

“Of course you can sense this far out,” he chuckles, pressing the heel of his palm to his closed eye, “Yeah. There was a Clan meeting and---well, today was--not good.”

Tobirama freezes. Madara is not yet a man, it would seem, but not a boy either… 

He gives into curiosity, heart picking up in expectation, “How old are you?”

If Madara is surprised at the change of subject, he doesn’t show it. 

“Just turned fifteen. I feel older though -- I feel really old. Are you pondering my death?”

Tobirama forces his entire body to remain still, reeling in killing intent by the skin of his teeth. 

“What makes you say that?” he asks, bewildered at being so easily read. 

Madara sighs, dejected. His arm flails out as if to point out the entirety of him. 

“You always want to kill me, when you're like this. I pieced it together a few years ago, though I don't really see you --this you-- so much anymore.”

There is a world to extrapolate from his words, but Tobirama focuses on the important. 

“What makes me different from the -- other me?"

Tobirama grinds his teeth at the implication that there might be a different version of him only this boy knows, one that does not look at Uchiha Madara with the sole intent to find the perfect moment for his death to take place, the only thing giving him pause being the boy’s age and some vague concern over what shape the future might take if he gives in and Madara--

--Madara smiles a little, mood visibly lifting slightly, though his body remains a single line of unhappiness.

“Well, you’re sulky, for one,” he says, holding out one finger like he’s going through a numbered list, “but the other you gets sulky too. About bugs, or when the weather is too wet, or when he loses at shogi.” the boy laughs, a soft and miserable sound. His hand falls back to his side, defeated, “I think the big difference is that you--well, you really hate me.”

Tobirama doesn’t even have to think about it. 

“I do, ” he agrees truthfully.  

Madara's face closes off like a safebox clacking shut, his chakra shrouding him like an angry, snapping cloud.

“You can leave, you know. You're not stuck to me or something.” he snaps, fists clenched at his sides. 

Tobirama is about to rise to the bait and angrily point out that Madara could do the world a favor and go die somewhere, when he realizes -- his enemy looks more miserable than angry. 

“You're upset.” he says dumbly instead. 

Unhappy and streaked with mud, like a small animal caught in a trap, Madara snorts, “Oh really? I hadn't noticed.”

He crosses his arms, chakra snapping and coiling tighter and tighter -- the centre of a storm.  

“I've hated you most of my life. You should be used to it by now.” Tobirama points out, considering this to be the most logical truth to be found at the core of their miserable years of acquaintance.  

Madara makes a wounded noise and resolutely turns from him, leaving himself completely open to attack. There’s a dragon embroidered on the back of his haori, red and white and imposing, right below the Uchiha crest. 

Tobirama could kill him. 

“Yeah. I really should.” Madara mutters, thin and dejected. After a pause, he adds, “You can kill me now, if you want.  I don't think I’d mind.”

Tobirama’s mind goes blank, “What?”

Madara shrugs. His voice barely carries in the breeze.

“I keep thinking maybe that's the finish line, you know? Maybe you kill me at some point, and all your hatred just goes with me. And after that, you start being nice to me because you already spent all your hate.”

Well. That argument is on a level of stupidity one would usually only associate with Hashirama. 

Tobirama scoffs, “That doesn't make sense.”

And Madara once again shocks him by going from a near whisper to decibels previously unheard of in the human realm. 

“So? You never make sense!” he shrieks, shoulders almost at his ears, “It's a viable possibility! I don't know what goes on in that wretched Senju brain of yours!” 

“My brain is not wretched!" Tobirama says stupidly, bewildered and vaguely aware he’s shouting, “Why are you so upset?!”

“I don't know!”

It’s clearly a lie, and Tobirama is about to say so, when Madara does something that makes every thought in his head screech to a halt -- with his back still turned to his enemy, he lets out a sharp, overwhelmed noise, and starts crying. 

Tobirama stares, his jaw gone slack. His feet are cold. 

“Its just too much, sometimes!” Madara sobs, arms wrapped around himself. 

Tobirama watches him, then away, then back to him, then sighs, pressing a finger to his temple. He watches for a moment, at a loss. He’s never been good at comforting people, and he doesn’t want to do it right now, but Madara’s body is wracked with painful sobs and he’s only fifteen -- his gut churns in something like sympathy.

He swallows a few times, then opens his mouth. 

“If I were to kill you, your father would go for my head, and Hashirama would go for his, and we'd continue on that road forever.” he reasons, the face of absolute logic. 

“Isn't that where we are right now? It's the same thing!” Madara cries, somehow managing to yell while still sobbing-- a rare ability that once again pairs him with Hashirama in his mind, “We pretend we get paid for it, but the money isn't even good anymore! It's just an excuse. This country’s been razed to the ground with all this war and nobody knows how to stop!  Let's kill each other for the hell of it, at least!”

Tobirama blinks, momentarily disarmed -- except for the last part, those sound like thoughts he might pluck out of his own head. 

Still, he soldiers on, “There has to be a mission.”

Madara turns around to face him. His face is a disaster -- eyes nearly closing with how puffy they are, lips nearly bitten through, tears and snot all over him. Still, he’s imposing -- he looks up at Tobirama like he’s looking down, a core of steel and dragonfire to him that nothing can alter. 

“Why?” he barks, gone all the way to furious in the span of a second, “Because if there isn't a mission we are totalling ourselves for absolutely no reason? Hate to break it to you, but that is exactly what's happening now.”

“There is a reason.” Tobirama insists.

“No there's not! There's just the mission!” he slashes his hand though the air, “Unquestioned, unchangeable, undeniable -- Our lives amount to nothing more than our use to fullfiling some rich old fuck’s war fantasy. We're nothing but tools!”

Tobirama's heart races. 

“We are!”

Madara looks at him like he’s been slapped. 

“And you're ok with that?” he asks, voice shrill, like the answer to this question might make or break the world as he knows it. 

Tobirama swallows, breathing fast, and realises he doesn’t have an answer.  He feels like he’s being trampled on, his whole world shifting under his feet. 

“I don't know.” he admits in a whisper, and the uncertainty feels like a betrayal to himself. 

Black eyes regard him evenly, seemingly younger and older than the world itself. 

“Well I'm not. I'm upset. And I'm angry. I want to change this world, but I'm scared. I scare myself sometimes, because I think that if I can't change this world, if I can't make it better for Izuna, then I think I'd rather watch it all burn to nothing than have it stay the same.”

He breathes evenly. Once again, he turns away. “So what I’m saying is, if you want to kill me you can. I'll change the world or I'll end it, so if you want to get rid of me now, I'll let you.”

His back is to Tobirama. The dragon looks bright with a sudden burst of sun through the clouds. Tobirama could kill him.

“And if I don't?” he asks, voice thinner than he expected it would be. 

Madara huffs, looking back at him over his shoulder with clear black eyes, “Then I guess you’re gonna have to be nice to me.”

The pull of him, of his words and his resolve, is indescribable - like a wind that wants to grab him and pull him upwards. He wonders if Hashirama felt something similar when they met.

“You’re asking for a lot,” Tobirama scoffs, heart still racing, “How long have you been out here?”

“A few hours,” Madara shrugs, crouching down. His hands come up to rub his shoulders as he shivers, the picture of misery, “I came out here because I wanted to see Tobirama, not you. It’s not fair,”

The last part is said so petulantly that Tobirama can’t help but come to terms with the fact that he’s dealing with a child. It doesn’t matter that Madara’s words carved into him, that his complaints and his anger feel as familiar to him as his own thoughts. It doesn’t matter that this is the person that killed Tōka’s brothers, the person that so enchanted Hashirama into treason. He’s a boy, going through a terrible day, and he came to the middle of nowhere in the hopes of meeting with a friend. Instead, he found Tobirama. 

He feels old and worn, like a rain charm forgotten on a ledge, at the mercy of the elements. He hopes that perhaps his curse will have some compassion on him and allow him to fade away, but it doesn’t happen. He stands in the mud, surrounded by destruction, and listens to Madara trying not to cry again. 

He sighs, crossing his arms over his chest.

“What happened today?” he asks. It feels like a defeat.
Madara doesn’t answer immediately.

“I proposed a plan to gradually raise the active combat age to 13.” 

Tobirama stares at his small form, dumbfounded.

Madara looks back at him and huffs a laugh, “That was the general reaction, yes. Then I got torn apart.  It must have looked funny from the outside I guess.” 

“Wha--” Tobirama starts, then stops and tries to wrap his head around such a notion. He’s keenly aware of Madara’s puffy eye on him. 

“It’s--an interesting notion,” he concedes, “A bit naive for current reality,”

Madara shrugs, “It used to be like that, before all the battles the past two decades, the formation of the Great Nations -- Shinobi would train for at least a decade before coming of age. The Clans became more sought after and powerful than ever, but it gave them hubris: the old fuckers think they're never going to die, but at the rate we’re going, all of the old Clans will be nothing but a faded memory in less than fifty years. Something has to be done about it and--” he sighs, lets his head hang between his shoulders, “well, it’s just sound resource management,”

Tobirama swallows hard, annoyed at how logical it all sounds.
“My brother would say that people are not resources,” he points out. 

Madara huffs out a laugh. 

“Now that’s naive,” he says with a smile, rising to his feet. He turns back to look at Tobirama, resolute, “I think it could be done. In ten, twenty years, we could get there -- its too late for Izuna, and all the brats already fighting now, but--”

Tobirama thinks back on  Kawarama, on Itama. He remembers their silly questions, how they hung on his every word: how sweet it was, those precious few years when he was an older brother.  

“Thirteen is not ideal,” Madara continues, gaining security as he speaks, “but I think it could be a good goal. It would increase chances of Shinobi reaching adulthood, becoming better,”

It's a logical thought. Hashirama and himself thought of something similar, began enforcing it as soon as they came into power: children had to go through a six year training period before being allowed into the battlefield. It wasn’t ideal, and parents sometimes made their children begin at younger age than necessary, but it somewhat allowed their devastated youth a better chance of survival.  What Madara proposed, however--  

Madara was once one of five brothers, he knows -- Tajima's eldest son was Kou, a firepower capable of leveling a small nation, cut down in an easily avoided ambush plotted by seasoned Nara warriors decades older than him. If such a warrior had been allowed to grow into himself--

Kawarama was cut down in a moment of distraction, and the choices that led Itama into an ambush were easy to account to his age -- Father never wanted to admit it, instead blaming the outstanding battle prowess and ruthlessness of the the Uchiha, but Tobirama knows their deaths, as well as his own survival into adulthood, were nothing but a cruel game of chance. 

He got lucky, and they did not. 

“A six year old shouldn’t be out fighting.” Tobirama says, his voice a rasp. He clears his throat, and continues, “They’re slow and bad at following orders. They get distracted easily. Even at ten, their brain is too scattered to make good choices under pressure,” 

He swallows hard, tries to banish all thoughts of his family away from his mind -- a small body being lowered to a grave, charred flesh and a chant of pain stretching into a long night. Madara looks at him gravely, like he can tell exactly what he’s thinking, but doesn’t call him out: he’s probably thinking of his own ghosts, this boy of fire and war, whose life sometimes seems like such a mirror to his own. 

“It’s a good idea,” Tobirama concedes eventually, and Madara smiles. 

“Too bad it got summarily rejected,” he shrugs, then winks, “Hopefully the old fucks will start dying out in a couple of years,”

Tobirama huffs a small laugh, taken by surprise, “That thought is a bit seditious,”

“I’m out here with my own personal Senju time traveler, I think we’ve crossed the seditious line some time ago,” Madara rolls his eyes, dispelling the darkness that’s clung to this encounter, “Maybe you could show up naked to the next meeting -- that’s sure to cause some heart attacks,”

Tobirama gives him a dirty look, but doesn't dignify that with an answer. They stand around in the mud in silence for a few moments, each in their own thoughts. 

“Don’t give it up -- your idea,” Tobirama says finally, the words clawing free from his throat by force: he simply cannot hold them in. 
“I won’t. I’ll just keep pushing.” Madara promises, “Someday, we’ll get there.”

 …

Contrary to popular belief, Tobirama has not always been a grown man. He never had Tōka’s brash character, or Hashirama’s bubbling energy, and his logical mind never allowed him to court as foolish a wish as his brother’s, but as a child Tobirama wished for things. He wished he wouldn’t have to do missions that left him cold and empty inside, wished to sleep for a full day and rest his weary bones, wished to skip his grueling lessons, and wished to keep the family he still had left. He never once tried to fool himself into believing he could achieve even one of those wishes.

Madara, though. Madara dreamed.

He dreamed awake. He dreamed outloud. He dreamed in extravagant rants of glory and utopia, then chided himself for being a fool and laughed. He dreamed in small bursts of frustration, then in cold moments of fury. He dreamed in words, in movement, in action, and he dreamed with a single-minded focus that hurtled him forward and upwards through the chain of command, to his father’s side and beyond. He dreamed through death and blood and doubt, then slept and continued dreaming.

Tobirama always thought that a dream of peace was his brother’s idea, but he now knows enough to see that Madara’s dissatisfaction with the world had come from early childhood, his ideals at least roughly developed by the time he met Hashirama by the river and willingly and knowingly committed treason.

This, too--for a long time Tobirama entertained the idea that perhaps Madara as a child possessed the same kind of aloof disregard for rules Hashirama did, thus not truly realizing the weight of his actions when disclosing secrets to another ninja. But he now knows that was not the case: Madara’s position was high enough that he did not have the luxury to even for a second forget the rules. He knew them perfectly, knew them enough to dance around them.

A swig of dry spirits sets his throat ablaze.  He shakes his head to clear it. Across from him, Tōka moans pitifully. 

It was someone’s twentieth birthday today.  In this dat and age, reaching such a milestone is an accomplishment. In accordance to tradition, children were ushered into the central house early in the afternoon and given enough sugar to leave them comatose while the entirety of the adults in the Clan currently not on assignment went to the training fields and got absolutely hammered under the clear night sky. Hashirama is somewhere near the fire, dancing arm in arm with his assistant to some truly appalling music -- they brought out the taiko drums for the occasion, but the only person who knew how to hold a beat died sometime ago, and the strings had sounded better about two hours and five bottles ago. 

So, it was Madara’s dream as well. Only it wasn’t something as abstract as peace, but something more akin to less meaningless death.

The words ring true to him in the sense that he’s thought of them dozens of times, and he wonders if all the children of war have twin realizations. He’s been fighting for his clan’s survival all his life, only perhaps that is simply the story he tells himself: the longer the battle drags itself forward, the less of his clan there is left. The paradox is all-engulfing and everlasting. He sees them die around him everyday, and for what? How many of the people he grew up with are there left? How many will continue to survive? The Uchihas fare no better. Their numbers dwindle, but their will is set ablaze and their determination burns. They’ll follow their leader into their death, their commitment to their clan unwavering and true, but they’re tired. They’re all tired.

Madara’s childhood was consumed by his passion, laser-like focus on changing the way things were--a noble dream, and one he’d been willing to die for.

But then why? Why won’t Madara take his brother’s hand, why won’t he sign the peace treaties Hashirama’s been offering for so long? It’s like every time he manages to shed some light on the mystery that the man is, another piece of the puzzle succumbs into pitch black darkness.

Tobirama remembers a time when he himself believed that if only adults would make a commitment and stand by it, then conflict would end and they would have peace. He’d been a logical child, but a child nonetheless: such an agreement meant trust, and trust--

--inscrutable crimson eyes shining from above, tomoe swirling lazily inside. Blood splattering with every step, air carrying a faint metallic tang and the smell of singed hair and cooking meat. A lifetime of torture in a second, a life of suffering in a blink, fields planted with corpses and ashes soaked in blood--

Trust is not an option.

Tōka chooses that exact moment to raise her head from her arms. Tobirama sees in her unfocused eyes the moment she realises the mood he’s in and that she is absolutely trapped because they are the only ones left at their table. 

“Do you ever question the reason we’re fighting?” he asks mercilessly. She groans. 

“I hate it when you get all philosophical," she whines, “Can’t you just do something embarrassing and pass out like normal people?”

He nudges her with his foot, unrelenting, “Answer the question,”

He passes the bottle, wiggling it enticingly. Tōka sighs and grabs it. 

“We’re Shinobi. We're born to fight in wars not our own.”

He watches her -- his dear cousin, so beautiful and powerful -- tip back the bottle and chug the remaining contents, tongue slipping out to get the final drop. It should be enough -- it’s the answer he himself would give. Still--

“Is that answer good enough for you?” he asks, thinking of Madara's tear streaked face, his miserable, angry determination. 

Tōka makes a face. 

“Are you asking me if I'm happy with my life?” she huffs, face contorted in inebriation and contempt, "People like us aren’t born for happiness, Tobirama. We're just the cogs that make the wheel turn. Unseen, unmissed and ultimately, easy to replace. I don't think I can dream of a better world, the way Hashirama does.”

Once again, like he felt that day in the mud, he feels like he’s being trampled on. This is Tōka’s truth, he understands: the story she tells herself. It’s so similar to his own, to the thoughts that plague him deep in the night when nobody is watching him, the moments when he’s feeling like nothing matters. He should be glad, he thinks, that he got the answer he wanted. There’s no hope, there’s no dreams. Nothing matters and never will.

There is no imperative to find happiness, or to try to be better. There’s just the churn of the wheel. 

He’s not glad.   

Something must show on his face, because Tōka snorts. When he looks up, he finds her smiling, something infinitely gentle in her inebriated gaze. 

“But I'd like to, sometimes.” she whispers, and it takes him a moment to understand that she’s adding to her earlier words, “For your sake, for that dork over there… I don't mind much for myself, but for you--I'd like you to have a long and happy life.” she shrugs, “Even if it is just a dream.”

He’s shocked into silence.  After a moment, he reaches for her hand across the table. Her fingers are cold and familiar, her hand in his seemingly the beginning and the end of it all. 

Exactly then, Hashirama falls on his ass after a complicated spin and the entire Clan falls over laughing. 

…

There’s a dark blue haori and loose pants neatly folded under a rock, which is helpfully labeled “For You” in bright red followed by a childish doodle of a rabbit with enormous front teeth. Tobirama glares at it for a good ten minutes before giving up and picking up the clothes. They’re moldy, slightly damp and smell from being exposed to the elements too long, but the pants are a good fit. He stares at the Uchiha crest on the back of the haori, scoffs, and shrugs it on inside out before sitting on the ground to wait.

Madara doesn’t show up for about an hour, but Tobirama can feel him meandering the forest without much hurry. The boy’s chakra is like a beacon, or a target, spiking up and down as he finds things that interest him or breaks into short pointless bursts of speed, as if racing himself somewhere. He seems to gravitate slowly but surely towards Tobirama, his thoughts obviously all over the place and yet not in his surroundings, because when he finally makes it to the clearing and raises his eyes, he does a double take before his face lights up in surprise.

“You’re real! You’re real!” Madara squeaks, running towards him excitedly. He trips on a fallen branch on his way and faceplants on the forest floor, sending dead leaves flying. Tobirama winces, but the boy picks himself up like nothing happened. “You’re really real!”

He topples to his knees in front of him, beaming expectantly. He’s the youngest Tobirama’s ever seen him yet.

“I am really real,” he confirms. Madara’s grin widens more, if that’s even possible.

“I knew you were real,” he says, nodding enthusiastically, “Hikaku said maybe I imagined you and you were a halusion--”

“Hallucination?” Tobirama raises an eyebrow, momentarily ignoring the alarming notion that Uchiha Hikaku might know about him.

“Yes, that’s what I said! Well, not what I said. What he said. He said you were a hallucianon--”

“Hallucination.”

“--that. But I told him you weren’t! I said you were real and you’re real! You’re really real!” he finishes, sitting back on the fallen leaves with a grin. He cocks his head to the side and makes a face, “You smell funny,”

Tobirama scowls, “It’s the clothes, not me. Did you know I was coming?

“You said you were coming back,” the boy bristles, raising an accusing finger at Tobirama’s face, “But you said you’d come back soon! That was months and months ago, Tobirama!”

“I don’t control it,” Tobirama shrugs, “I just come and go. How many times have we met?”

“We met once,” Madara crosses his arms and grumbles under his breath, something about rude time travelers. His hair sticks out in all directions, a leaf perched proudly on a tuft like a flag on top of his head.

Tobirama picks it out and shows it to the boy, “You’ve been rolling around the bushes?”

Madara flushes bright red and shakes his hair out like a dog, sending leaves and twigs flying everywhere.

“No,” he drawls out, but visibly perks up. Fishing inside his pocket, he proudly presents Tobirama with his treasure: six small, white pebbles, “I’m looking for little rocks. I’m teaching Toga how to play Fivestones, so I need to find some that fit in his hand,”

“And this required you to dive into a puddle?” Tobirama smirks, pointing at the mud splattered all over the boy’s dark clothes. Madara sticks out his tongue, and Tobirama snorts, then asks, “Who’s Toga?”

“He’s my little brother, Togakushi!” Madara says cheerfully, “He’s a little boring to play with, but Hikaku went off on a mission so now it’s just me and Toga. He can’t play outside yet so I tried to teach him how to play conkers but he got mad because he could never hit the chestnut and he started crying really hard, and then I wasn’t looking and he ate a bit of the thread, and that was bad. But then he pooped it out, so it was ok,”

“How old are you?”

“I’m seven,” says Madara, puffing up his chest with a grin.

“And your brother?”

“Oh, he’s three,” Togakushi is clearly a favorite topic, which means that Izuna isn’t yet born. This is disturbing in many different ways, “He can’t talk really well yet, so Hikaku says he doesn’t count. Do you have any little brothers?”

Tobirama pushes down a surge of emotion with practised ease, “I did,”

“Oh,” Madara’s face cracks with an understanding of loss far beyond his years, and he scrambles to his feet to throw an arm around Tobirama’s neck. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what I’d do if I lost Toga, too,” he says.

Izuna isn’t yet born then. 

Five brothers, Tobirama thinks, but only two will reach adulthood. He remembers that day in the mud, the overbearing face of Madara’s determination, streaked with anger and grief and steel -- Tobirama doesn’t look at him, lest he see the truth on his face. That his baby brother, the centre of his world, will be dead before he even reaches adolescence.

“D’you wanna play Fivestones with me?”

The change of topics is as abrupt as the boy himself, “I--don’t know how to play,”

“That’s great! I can practise teaching you!” Madara grins, reaching back into his pocket for his stones as he looks around for an appropriate patch of dirt to play. Tobirama follows obligingly, listening as the boy babbles, “Hikaku taught me how to play, but he’s not a very good teacher so he started stammering and messed up the rules. Then he got mad because I beat him. Our last game was a tie, so we have to have a tie breaker when he gets back--” suddenly he stops, turning around with an uncertain frown on his face, “Hikaku and I are still friends in the future, right?”

Tobirama doesn’t answer, wondering if he should. Tōka’s words about messing up their lives by interfering with the past swirl into his thoughts, making him pause. Would it truly make a difference to disclose such unimportant information? Would it change Madara’s behaviour? Could he sway the boy’s actions by doing it? How different would the future be, if Uchiha Hikaku weren’t Madara’s lieutenant?

Madara clearly takes his silence to be negative. “Oh, no. We’re not, are we?” His face crumples and his eyes well with tears, his lower lip wobbling as he clutches his stones to his chest. Tobirama stares in horror.

“No,” he says, but it’s the wrong thing to say. Tears spill down the boy’s cheeks and, “No, no! I didn’t mean that! Oh, no, please don’t cry,”

But Madara doesn’t hear him, “I don’t want to play anymore!” he wails, throwing his stones away. Being a genius level shinobi, and specialized in the use of ninja tools like all the Uchiha, the stones leave his hand as deadly weapons. One of them catches Tobirama in the shin.

“Fuck,” he hisses, faintly panicking because crying children are not something he thinks he’s equipped to handle. He falls to his knees, hand hovering over the boy’s shoulder for a few seconds before awkwardly settling down, “Look, I promise you are still friends”

Puffy coal eyes regard him guardedly, “You’re not lying?”

“I wouldn’t lie to you,” he lies. Madara sniffles, wiping at his face, but he doesn’t step away from the hand on his shoulder, seemingly drawing comfort from it.

“I lost my stones,” he says forlornly.

Tobirama smiles, because it would seem he now knows that Madara was and will always be a very ugly crier.

“You threw your stones,” Tobirama corrects, the ‘at me’ is left out because Madara still looks the picture of misery despite the reassurances.

They look for the stones in silence, Tobirama making a show of searching while simply picking up any small stone he finds. When he presents them to Madara, the boy frowns, picking one up, “Is this my stone?”

“It is. I’d recognize it anywhere,”

Madara nods, satisfied. There’s tracks of tears and mud on his face, and his hair looks like a bird’s nest. The child is an absolute mess, playing alone in the forest with a time-traveling stranger. Tobirama is starting to see where the strange child and teenager he’s been getting to know came from.

“You can never tell anyone about me,” he blurts out suddenly.

Madara looks up from where he’s seated on the ground again, “Why not?”

“Because,” he deadpans, “It’s the rules,”

“There’s rules to time travel?” Madara frowns, sounding more skeptical than any seven year old has any business sounding, but then his eyes widen and his mouth form an “o” of surprise.  “Is that why you can’t have clothes?”

“...Yes,” Tobirama says, sensing that this is a necessary concession, “That’s why,”

Madara nods like this is the most logical thing in the world.

They play Fivestones for an hour, although it’s mainly Madara explaining the rules and Tobirama pretending not to understand just to annoy him. The boy is very close to either chucking a stone at his head or turning into a rage tomato, but then Tobirama returns to the present. Only instead of landing in his room, where he'd been packing for his upcoming trip to Land of Whirlpools, he lands right next to it but outside of the house, and inside the koi pond. The fish swim by his face, unbothered. 

…

The boat ride is long and miserable, but as soon as Tobirama steps off the wooden deathtrap and onto the harbour, he wants to get back on it and return home. Land of Whirlpools, apparently located five miles from the surface of the sun, is everything Mother ever waxed poetic about: green, hot and humid -- but somehow she never got around to mentioning the mosquitoes. 

"This weather is ridiculous," Hashirama moans. His usually straight, tame hair is frizzy and sticking out in every direction, and he looks miserable. Serves him right. He's the one who wouldn't listen to reason and tagged along despite Tobirama telling him not to, reminding him that they couldn't just go and leave the country at the same time, they have a clan to manage, damnit. But reasoning with his brother is useless at the best of times, headache-inducing at the worst, and the truth is that Tobirama is not feeling at his best, these days.

His temper is stretched thin, he's tired of being yanked back and forth through time, his sanity is in tatters, and the heat is not helping. If there's even a small chance that someone in this blasted island can tell him how to fix this, then his clan will have to deal.

Hopefully, the Uchiha will remain quiet for as long as this trip takes --the last treaty Hashirama sent returned with the wax seal pointedly unbroken-- and even if someone decides to attack them, he has absolute faith in Tōka's ability to make them regret it. He cringes at the thought of Tōka also being in charge of the food supply for as long as they're gone, but he figures that if the clan survived Hashirama's incompetent management through those three months Tobirama spent as a captive of the Inuzuka, they can survive anything. There'd been actual tears, when Tobirama resumed his post. Someone even baked a cake, out of the very last cup of flour and eggs pilfered from a sparrow's nest.

So, the clan will be fine.

"Carry me," Hashirama says, leaning against him.

His brother, however, might not survive this trip.

"I will not," Tobirama says, trying to shift him away.

"But I'm tired and didn't sleep at all last night," Hashirama whines and leans harder. 

Tobirama knows this is true. He's the one that had to hold Hashirama's hair back as he lost his entrails over the side of the ship, and that image is not leaving his mind's eye anytime soon.

"The walk will wake you up," he states, trying to lean away, but it's hopeless.

In the end it's carry Hashirama or drag him by a foot, so Tobirama plops him up piggyback and walks the 3 and one half kilometers from the harbour into the tiny village of Harō with a sleeping Clan Head drooling on his shoulder. This development increases the usual amount of gawks and stares they receive when visiting foreign lands.

Tobirama adds to his mental favorites collection one elderly woman, who was sitting outside her house sharpening tools, who looks up when they walk by, and rubs her eyes. She follows their progress down the road by leaning over further and further from her sitting position and keeps rubbing her eyes every few seconds.

They make their way through town undisturbed. Land of Whirlpools is a tiny country populated almost entirely by fishers and farmers, with a modestly numbered shinobi clan scattered here and there, but the village of Harō is different from most villages here. Harō happens to be the home of one of the most prominent shinobi clans in the country and so, however entertained the villagers might be by the sudden visitors, they know better than to push their luck with foreign shinobi, no matter how ridiculous they might appear upon first glance.

Eventually, they stand in what might be the town square, if the small temple and market are anything to go by, but it's hard to tell. It looks more like a deposit for the town livestock, a playground for pests and a general health hazard. 

He jostles Hashirama on his back.

"Anija, wake up,"

"No," is the petulant reply.

"Anija, wake up so I can set you down,"

"No," and the arms around Tobirama's neck tighten.

"Anija, wake up or I'm going to back up to one of those interesting brown piles that goat just left and drop you,"

"Fine," Hashirama says, sighing like Tobirama is being ridiculously unfair, "I'm awake.”

Tobirama unceremoniously rolls Hashirama off his back and onto the floor. He sits sullenly for a minute, waking up. 

“This is hell,” Hashirama declares, combing his sweat-drenched hair back, “And there’s a church in it.”

As if on cue, mosquitoes choose that exact moment to swarm. 

They spend a good five minutes slapping themselves around to try and get rid of the pests, until they realize that pretty much everyone in the square is staring at them, every villager with their own carefully ignored army of mosquitoes swarming around their face. It would seem learned immunity is the only way to go.  

“Come on,” Tobirama growls, pushing Hashirama towards the closest gawking goat-herder. “Let's get this over with,”

He feels sort of bad inflicting Hashirama on the man this early in the morning, but when flies begin joining the swarm that just won't get away from his face, he decides that misery loves company. The man watches him approach as if entranced, like a small prey animal might look at a King Cobra the second it unlocks its jaws. 

"Good morning, Friend!!!" Hashirama booms, cutting through the rural soundtrack of animal baying like an explosion, his smile bright and gaining wattage by the second--the man doesn't stand a chance, "I would ask for your help, if you would be so kind!!!”

Forty minutes and a terrifying goat-ride up a cliff later, they arrive at a sprawling villa overlooking the ocean, terraces and balconies spilling with exotic plants. Far from charming, the whole thing reminds Tobirama of poorly stacked plates in a pile. At least the punishing wind makes the mosquitoes relent a bit -- thank the Sage for small mercies.

At the gate, their welcoming party is already waiting.  

“Ah, Hashirama-san, Tobirama-san,” Uzumaki Ashina greets affably, eyes nearly closed in a smile, “Just in time as I predicted, and not a second later,” he turns to his companion, a tall young woman in a green kimono, “I win. Pay up, kid.”

To their gobsmacked surprise, she rolls her eyes and hands the Uzumaki Clan Head a handful of coins, which the man pockets with a cackle. 

“It's an honor to see you both,” Tobirama says with a bow, just to say something, “How did you know we’d arrive now?”

“Oh we were sun-bathing on the roof and we saw your goats coming up the road about twenty minutes ago.” Ashina says, blinking slowly. “I bet you’d arrive at dusk on the dot, unharmed,” 

“And I bet Hashirama would fall off the cliffside, goat and all,” Uzumaki Mito says with a courteous smile. They both turn to stare at her, trying to correlate the image before them to the one in their minds -- a ten year old menace that dropped a smelly smoke bomb in Tobirama’s room, had a public duel with Tōka that ended with half the compound on fire and made Hashirama cry about four times a day during the three months she’d visited them. 

“Mito-san!” Hashirama screeches, wide eyed. 

“Hashirama-sama,” Mito bows to him, the picture of grace, “I see you’ve allowed your hair to outgrow that abominable bowlcut,”

Hashirama had cried as they watched the boat receding in the horizon. When asked, he’d turned back to them and said, ugly sobbing, “I asked her to marry me and she said I was too ugly!”

Dehydrated, hair a mess and covered in mosquito bites, he looks about two cutting remarks away from crying right now, “You've grown--taller,”

Tobirama doesn't groan out loud at the lame conclusion, but it's only because he's so used to his brother making an ass of himself it doesn’t really register anymore. 

Mito raises an eyebrow, “Amazing, is it not? What some sun and water can do,” 

“Mito,” her Honorable Father chides, but he’s still smiling -- he might be drunk, Tobirama thinks, “Our friends are tired from a long journey.  Retire to your rooms -- bathe and get some rest. Tonight we'll feast, and tomorrow we'll attempt to shed some light on the problem Tobirama-sama finds himself in,”

“I thank you kindly,” Tobirama bows again, “However, time is of the essence. Could we begin at once?”

Unprompted, the old man slaps his shoulder hard. His spine rattles like beads on a necklace. 

“Nonsense!!!” Ashina booms, making him step back a bit with the intensity. Mito is still smiling -- she might be drunk as well, “No problem has ever been solved with a tired heart, or an empty stomach!!! Also, it would seem your brother has passed out!!!”

Later, after they've bathed, drunk about three gallons of water each and gone through a feast consisting of many courses of the same ramen, they sit on the floor of their shared quarters and try not to die of the heat.  

“I’d forgotten how much you liked her,” Tobirama comments.

Hashirama spent dinner trying and failing not to stare at their host's daughter, preening under her attention any time she bestowed it and shrinking at the onslaught of her frankly hilarious jokes at his expense. 

“I'd forgotten too. It feels like breathing,” Hashirama says, voice colored with wonder. His eyes are disarming, “Like I've been holding my breath and now I can breathe properly again,” 

They look at each other in vague horror, then Hashirama laughs sheepishly. 

“Too much?” 

Tobirama smirks, “Maybe save that for the third date,”

His brother laughs, throwing himself on the futon, “Oh, Tobirama! I'm glad I came. I know the circumstances are not the best, but I look forward to these few weeks. I miss you, you know,” 

“I'm always around,” he grumbles, embarrassed, “We're together all the time,”

“I know, but it's not the same when we're working. I miss my brother,”

The comment hangs in the air. They look at each other for a moment, both knowing Tobirama can't express feelings effectively to save his life, but Hashirama smiles at him knowingly.  

“Oh, that we could stay in this beautiful place forever," Hashirama laments with a sigh, then accidentally swallows a bug.   

Tobirama is dispassionately watching his brother cough out a lung, when he feels his stomach churn and the world fade away. He has a distinct moment to think that at least his brother's wish is granted, they're staying in this horrible place for an indefinite amount of time, before he finds himself kneeling on the grass in the middle of the Uchiha camp.

"Uh-oh" a roughly ten year old Madara says, eyes wide. There's a smudge of dirt on his cheek, and a horde of curious children behind him, peeking at the naked man who appeared out of thin air in the middle of the playground.

Madara manages to take off his haori and throw it at him before Tobirama finds himself chased by a throng of outraged Uchiha women wielding kunais, swords, and enough firepower to level a country, holding the small cloth around his middle as he's called a pervert and a fiend in a dozen different, increasingly inventive ways.

He fucking hates time travel.

…

Usumaki Mito is intelligent, proud and very beautiful, her flowing red hair pulled up into two buns that would look idiotic on another person, but look strangely dignified on her. She eats like a starved pig and drinks like a sailor that just got paid. Hashirama is so in love it's embarrassing, like watching a house cat trying to court a lioness. 

Still, Tobirama appreciates her no-nonsense attitude and her serious approach to all things research, enough to forgive and forget all the pranks she pulled on him when they were kids.

Five days into their visit, Mito makes Tobirama strip and sit on a wooden box. She paints  meticulous arrays of seals all over him, her face a mask of concentration. It's cold, it's awkward, it sucks, but he sits through it with as much quiet dignity as he can muster.  

After half an hour, she finishes and unexpectedly activates the seals. He doesn't squeak, but it's a near thing. Mito looks at him intently, then writes something down. It goes on for three hours.

“This is not a seal,” she concludes, not even turning around to let him put on his clothes, “At least, not a human seal. There's a chakra signature here that is not related to you, and it's not related to your -- other person.”

Tobirama digests this as he shrugs on his haori, thinking on how the original hiraishin seal had come to him, as if through a revelation, “How? I can't sense any other chakra,” 

“That's because you’re looking for a chakra nature, this is something different, something alien,” her eyes glimmer maniacally - she's practically vibrating in place. “Or at least something more primary.”

Tobirama stills, “Something primary,”

Tobirama's mind races back to the stranger he met in one of his earliest travels. Black flowing hair, laughter like wind-chimes, and a head full of knowledge so vast it made him feel like a little boy. Yin Yang release -- the beginning of all life.  Surely there's nothing more primary than that.  

He tells Mito as much as he can recall of that encounter, and she lights up like the sun coming over the mountains. 

“Ninshu!” she yells excitedly, “I have a book!”

They wind up spending about three hours looking for that book, which winds up being a set of stone tablets Hashirama insists on carrying himself from one side of the villa to the other. 

“What a man,” Mito deadpans, piling them up to cover Hashirama's eyesight. Hashirama beams, making three steps forward before tripping on a rock and sprawling in the dirt.  The tablets are fine.

Ninshu turns out to be a religious precursor to modern ninjutsu, attributed to the Sage of Six Paths. Its original goal appeared to be to connect people's hearts and bring about world peace, which makes for quite a bleak commentary on their world.  

“How did he think that teaching people how to shoot fire and lightning bolts at will would be conducive to world peace?,” Tobirama asks, fascinated at the stupidity of it all. 

Mito hums thoughtfully.  “Maybe he just thought it looked cool,”

From his sprawl in the dirt, Hashirama remains immobile.  Mosquitoes swarm around him. 

They look into Ninshu for a few days, looking for clues on the connection of Yin-Yang Release and space-time seals, but it turns out to be a dead end -- information is too scattered, too vague, to be constructive to any conclusions that might aid him in his soul contract problem.  

However, not everything is lost.  

With Mito’s help, he polishes the initial hiraishin formula and successfully teleports from one end of the villa to the other, scaring the shit out of Hashirama.  

“I think you could teleport objects too,” Mito says over tea one morning, apropos of nothing.

Tobirama blinks, “Two seals,”

Hashirama nearly squeals in delight. 

Four hours later, they've teleported all of the contents of the dining hall to the beach. When Tobirama's exhausted his chakra on tests, Hashirama timidly shows some seals he's been working on, ones that would allow him to use mokuton to build houses, bridges and piers. They stay up all night building a scale village, giddy like children.

When Hashirama falls to exhaustion, Tobirama catches Mito watching his sleeping face, and they both pretend he didn't, faces red. To break the awkward silence, he tells her about his unfinished projects -- his multiplication jutsu, tandem exploding tags, venom extraction using wet medium. She tells him of her dream. 

“Regeneration at a cellular level,” she whispers, eyes shining, “No more frail old age, no horrible memory diseases - just dignity, until the end. You've given me a key to that,”

“Yin-Yang Release,” Tobirama realises in wonder, then snorts, “I’ll thank that person, if I ever see them again,” 

When the time to leave comes around, Tobirama is shocked to realise he enjoyed himself, and he's going to miss her. 

"Lady Mito, you hold my heart," Hashirama states, voice heavy with feeling. He's kneeling on the pier, holding one of her hands in both of his own, looking up at her with a mixture of awe and adoration mutts generally reserve for their owners. It is painful to watch.

"Really." Mito states, unimpressed. Tobirama wants to dump his brother in this god forsaken island and name her Clan Head. His life would be so much easier.

In the end, he has to drag Hashirama bodily into the boat and restrain him so that he'll stop making a fool of himself. Tobirama returns to the pier, frazzled and sweating. There's muted screaming coming from the boat, a constant litany of things like You are an executioner of love, Tobirama!. And I will return, my sweet, fear not for you are the only one! Even the villagers that stopped by to gawk cringe.  

The two of them stand awkwardly for a few seconds.  

"My apologies," Tobirama says, bowing respectfully.

"Unnecessary," she waves it away, then shrugs. "He's... amusing,"

She says it like the older man is a particularly pestering puppy, or someone else's quirky child, both tolerated merely for the entertainment value. Tobirama really, really likes her.

“I must say this particular sort of complication is something I've never really seen -- you carry a great scientific question with you, Tobirama-sama,” she says, looking contrite, “I’m sorry for not being of aid to you, in the end,”

Tobirama thinks about all the research they did, his new ability to teleport nearly at will and just how much he got to hear Harirama laugh these past three weeks.  He waves her off. 

“It's been most informative, Mito-sama,” he tells her truthfully, "Your knowledge of seals and chakra nature is truly second to none,”

“I--well,” she huffs, a blush tinting her face, but she doesn't look away, “You are quite an intelligent man, Tobirama-sama. I would like to work with you again on the future," 

They both cringe, at themselves and at each other, and Tobirama realises that the redheaded kid that once put ink in his canteen and dyed his teeth black is also quite possibly his soulmate. Hashirama’s forlorn moans and the seagulls are the only thing interrupting the awkward silence.  

Mito coughs, “About your predicament, Tobirama-sama. May I suggest you try to immerse yourself further?”

Tobirama frowns, “What do you mean?”

She hums and looks over the horizon, following the path of seagulls with dark blue eyes. He's transfixed for a second by how beautiful she is, this warrior child of warriors, how young, even though she's probably his age, if not a bit more. The Uzumaki are known for their longevity, yet Ashina is the oldest one left, all his children but Mito dead or missing, the fire in their eyes extinguished for good. Much like his own brothers, they were born to die.

She probably won't live to be an old woman like her father. She won't live to test that renowned longevity. That is a sad notion in itself, and for a split second Tobirama burns with a sudden rage at the injustice, because she should.

Then she looks at him and smiles.

“This is your life, Tobirama-sama. There might be something to be learnt out of all of this, but you must allow yourself to live it.”

Tobirama holds her eyes.

“I’ll consider it.” he allows.  

She winks, “Please do.”

…

One minute Tobirama is staring blankly at the midnight sky, holding his brother's hair back as the man throws up over the side of ship, and the next he's kneeling on an ant nest large enough to have it's own government system, complete with three powers, a vast amount of redundant public servants and subterranean anterooms containing nothing but large stacks of paperwork. At the sudden invasion of a large naked man, the ants attack. Tobirama doesn't scream, but it's a very near thing.

He jumps back as far away from the thing as possible, directing freezing jets of water to his legs with a jutsu before blindly and violently scrubbing them with his hands, so that if the ants don't fall off at least they'll die drowned or crushed. Once he's satisfied that he won't get bitten by tiny, disgusting insects, he glares at the nest. If he could, he'd set it on fire.

Though he's never been a very outdoorsy person-he's always preferred to stay in, which set him apart from the other boys in his clan since childhood-Tobirama's never outright hated the forest until now that he has to spend so much time unclothed in the wild. Didn't this kid have a house? Although, considering the fiasco that travel that landed him smack in the middle of the Uchiha compound was, maybe it's better that he shows up where there's no one around. His head still hurts from that one frying pan that connected with his skull.

It's late at night, and it's cold. The stars are out, and the moon shines bright upon the earth, bathing it in silvery light that's enough to see by. Tobirama feels the little monster nearby, alone in a clearing minutes away, and he contemplates his options. This could be a short trip, and since the boy hasn't seen him, he can just wait it out and not have to see him at all. On the other hand, the trip might not be short, since it's been proven that they can be quite long and last for several hours, it's cold, and he's naked. And wet. With a sigh, he starts walking.

He can tell the second that Madara notices he's around. There's a jolt in his chakra, monstrous as it is, like an uptick in his heartbeat that makes his control snap minutely, and then there's tiny tendrils of raw power reaching out gingerly outwards. He wonders where the boy learnt how to do that, since Tobirama isn't aware of any sensor Uchihas, but that kind of chakra control needs to be taught. He saves that piece of information to look into it later.

As soon as he's within reach, a scroll comes flying towards him, aimed perfectly at the centre of his face. He's seen it before, it's the standard summons one where Madara carries Tobirama's coat, which is a strange thought in itself. Glaring at the situation in general, he activates it and wraps the warm fur around himself. It fits perfectly, which only annoys him even more.

Madara is sitting on a log by a small fire, the spartan camp signaling he's either going on a mission or returning from one. His black stallion is just as impassive upon Tobirama's sudden appearance as it was the last time, but this time there's a large quilt thrown over it that comes up almost to it's ears, and it's steady puffs of breath are visible in the cold air as it regards him calmly, used to his presence. The very thought is disturbing.

"Are you having a staring match with Yoru?" Madara asks nonchalantly then, looking up at him with eyes blacker than the night, "I should warn you, though, he's one of the quiet ones. You know what they say about those,"

Tobirama snorts, raising a hand to pat the horse's warm flesh. It presses it's head eagerly into his hand, like he's done that a million times before..

"Night, huh?" he mutters, giving in and scratching the animal between the ears, "Rather unimaginative name for a black horse,"

"Izuna wanted to call him Super Fire Hooves-san," Madara pipes in.

Tobirama raises a questioning eyebrow.

"He was five," he shrugs, "It was that or Buttercup. Father said that those names weren't acceptable for a war horse, and called him Yoru. Izuna got so mad, he held his breath until he passed out. I think he still calls him that, in his head,"

"Super Hooves-san?"

"Super Fire Hooves-san," Madara corrects without missing a beat, then rolls his eyes, "This is my brother we're talking about. Of course he calls the horse Buttercup,"

Tobirama has a hard time imagining Uchiha Izuna being capable of even saying that word, but the thought still makes him chuckle. He's freezing and the fire seems to call for him, so he sheds his doubts and sits by it on another log placed next to the one Madara's sitting on. He toys with the idea that Madara placed it there just in case he'd show up, and discards it as ridiculous.

"Why are you wet?"

Tobirama mentally flails for an answer, but settles on an evasive, "It was raining in the future,"

The boy looks at him, and Tobirama discovers that the Absolutely Underwhelmed by Your Nonsense Uchiha Look is actually something the youngsters hone into perfection.

"From the ground up?", little shit that he is, Madara grins, "There were bugs and you panicked, didn't you?"

"It is none of your business," he grits out, glaring at the giggling boy, "Why are you out in the cold anyway?"

At this, the laughter stops, to be replaced by a sullen silence as the boy looks away from him and at the crackling fire. Tobirama keeps glaring, because he'll be damned if he's going to let Uchiha Madara make him feel guilty, eleven year old or else.

"Well?" he demands sternly. The boy sighs, rubbing at his red-rimmed eyes. 

"I did something terrible," he confesses, looking like he's waiting to be struck down by some invisible force.

Madara keeps talking,"I cheated on a mission," he nearly whispers, swallowing audibly. His eyes are wide, and there's fear in them, swirling in the charcoal black. He's unused to those eyes being easy to read, "I was supposed to make friends with this girl, get her to invite me to her house, and then I had to slit her throat so that her father would find her dead,"

Assassinations have always been common. Child assassinations less so, but the pay is all the greater because of it. His father never shied away from them, because they needed the money, and because it is the mark of a good Shinobi to do the job no-one else dares-or simply cannot bring themselves-to do.

He remembers those missions well. The ones that left him confused and hollow and angry and tired at the same time. The ones his father preferred to give to him instead of his brother or Tōka, believing perhaps he wasn't as affected by them as they were because he chose not to show it. The other possibility is that his father did know they affected him, but chose to ignore it because regardless of his feelings, Tobirama always got the job done. He's not sure which thought upsets him the most.

If the Senju Clan did them, before Hashirama's rule, then there was always the distinct possibility, nay, certainty , that the Uchiha, renowned for their lack of scruples, did them too. The thought must have crossed his mind, at least peripherally. It's only logical, after all.

Although, he doesn't think he ever could have pictured an emotion as raw, as human, as the one he can now see taking a hold on Madara's-young, too young, much too young-face.

"But I couldn't do it. I couldn't. She was so nice, and I just…" he swallows again, thick with unshed tears, and shakes head, raven hair sticking out in every direction, "I've done it before, but this time I just-"

The boy almost chokes on a too-big breath, chest heaving. His eyes are too wide, and he swallows again and again. Bile, Tobirama realizes suddenly, and it's funny, in a very dark way, but he'd never considered any Uchiha capable of having such a knee-jerk reaction to anxiety or fear like nausea. 

The impassive black eyes are forever ingrained in his waking consciousness, and he's never been able to look past that, he realises -- even when he saw Madara cry, that day in the mud, he made certain that Tobirama couldn't see his face, holding on to dignity as much as he could.  

"I-I put her father in a genjutsu," Madara admits softly, miserably, like he's waiting for the executioner's axe. "I made him believe I killed her,"

Tobirama looks at his small form, at the way he's clutching at his stomach, looking away from him like he can't bear looking into anyone's eyes. A child, he marvels. Just a child. Not much different to the boy he once was, or his siblings, squirming and exposed under his father's watchful eye.

A memory comes to him then. An assassination mission he went on with his brother and Tōka, commissioned by one of the Daimyo's most prominent opposers. The daughter was their mission, since it was known the man doted on his child and would crumble upon her death, but they got there too late. All the servants told the same story: they'd found the child dead and given the body proper burial, wept as they cleaned the floors and left flowers on her tomb every day. Yet there was no body in the grave when they dug out the coffin, and no one could say for certain what the cause of death had been. The genjutsu was near flawless, unbreakable without leaving the victims permanently damaged, performed by a master, and Tōka sang praises to it for months and months thereafter.

They'd tracked the girl down, found her living in Land of Wind with a distant relation, and Hashirama had taken one look at them and written “Target: Deceased” on his letter to their father.

Tobirama raged at him as they watched the falcon fly away, "She's our mission!"

"No," Hashirama said, with all of the solemnity of his twelve years of age, "She's just another tool,"

He was right. In the end, the Daimyo committed suicide, and the opposer took over his position, only to be toppled over himself a few years after, by the very men who'd celebrated his ascent. The wheel keeps turning.

"She doesn't deserve to die," Madara says, suddenly defiant and very much like the young man he'll become, the one that will enchant Hashirama to the point of near obsession, "She's Izuna's age,"

Tobirama sighs, searching his mind for something to say, and coming up with the same line his father threw his way when he himself had questioned his orders for the first time, "At times, a shinobi must do things he doesn't deem right,"

Upon hearing those words, Tobirama bowed his head in deference to his Father and left, internally deeming them the stupidest platitudes ever uttered by an adult to date. He resolved to never voice his doubts again, but to always be the one who made the final call from that moment forward. If he had to live with what he had to do, then he'd be willing to die for what he couldn't live with.

Madara, though. Madara crumbles into a visage of dismay and self doubt.

"You think I was wrong, then?" he asks, anxiety eating away at his voice, "I shouldn't have saved her?"

Tobirama remembers the little girl, Itama's age, playing with a mutt puppy on a pile of sand and laughing. He remembers feeling outrageously jealous of her, for being able to laugh so freely, and live so happy, when so many were dead and so many never even lived in the first place. He remembers being angry for being a child who had to act like an adult, or for being an adult who thought like a child, and because he could not remember ever laughing like that, even in the best moments of his life.

He looks at Madara then, just shy of twelve years old, alone in the countryside and dreading his father's rage, dreading Tobirama's disapproval, because he let another child live.

“I'll change the world or I'll end it”, Madara will say someday, angry and sad beyond tears. He’ll turn his back on a man who could kill him, and he'll say to go ahead. He'll be something different someday, something streaked through with steel, and he’ll make Tobirama stumble.  

But tonight he’s stumbling, and he needs something to hold on to. Tobirama ponders things he cannot understand, and pushes him in the right direction.  

"You did good," he rasps, and pretends he doesn't see the way Madara's shoulders slump, like the weight of the world has been lifted off them.

He did that.  Tobirama lifted that weight. 

Madara smiles, but it's a wobbly thing, shaky like a leaf in autumn, and Tobirama wants to tell him to stop. They sit in silence for a while, letting the night roll by on the crackling of the fire.

"Oh, hey," Madara croaks suddenly, reaching for his bag and rummaging around it until he finds a rectangular wooden box. He presents it to Tobirama triumphantly, "Look what they sold just outside the villa,"

Tobirama peers at the box suspiciously, "What's that?"

The boy rolls his eyes and opens the box with a flourish, revealing the contents to him. Inside the box, ordered in neat rows, there's a dozen tea-cakes shaped like delicate green leaves, each painstakingly moulded and decorated with powdered sugar. Truly admirable work.

"I don't like candy," he says when the box is shoved at him, gently, as if not to jostle the contents.

"But they're your favorites!" Madara cries, shoving the box at him with a bit more force, a stubborn set to his jaw not much different than a mule's, or worse, Hashirama's.

"Alright, alright," Tobirama says exasperatedly, taking the box when it becomes obvious it's either take the box or be brained with it. He scratches his head and gingerly picks out one of the confections. He holds it at eye level and peers at it suspiciously from all angles.

Next to him, Madara crosses his arms over his chest and huffs, "If I wanted to poison you, I would have done it that time I found you half starved by the training grounds,"

Tobirama frowns, "What do you-"

"Just eat it!"

"Alright!" he sighs, "I'll eat this, but I told you: I don't like sweets,"

Madara rolls his eyes so hard Tobirama could swear he heard the optic nerve snap, but then he settles back with no comment, apparently to watch Tobirama eat, little creep that he is.

Tobirama sighs again, wondering how this became his life, and then he takes a bite, chewing experimentally. The texture is off-putting at first, but it's not too sweet, and the green tea flavor is subtle, and refreshing. It's much better than he expected it to be, the creamy centre bursting sweetness on his tongue, and he can't really remember the last time he ate something like this, something that he wasn't eating just because of it's nutritional value, or because he had to eat something and Tōka was shoving it down his throat.

It's...nice.

"Well?" Madara asks once the cake is gone, invading his personal space and gawking at him with a grin wide and delighted and just a tad smug.

Tobirama clears his throat dignifiedly, but when the boy giggles, he knows he's caught.

Alright. Apparently, they are his favorites.

…

Upon their return, Tōka takes one look at them, says, “Finally,” dumps a handful of scrolls on Tobirama’s arms and goes hunting. She isn't seen for a week.

“Well, there’s still food in the vaults, and nothing’s on fire,” Tobirama says, frowning at some papers and not understanding anything he reads, “Sure, the forest animals shall suffer her wrath, but at least when she gets back we’ll have smoked venison. That’s always a plus,”

“Oh, gods,” Hashirama moans, disgusted. The bits of his face visible through his fingers are tinged green with nausea, “Don’t say that,”

“It’s good to have you back,” Hashirama’s secretary, Ichirou-san,  tells them both, a look of genuine relief washing over his face, “I trust you had a pleasant boat ride,”

“It sucked,” Hashirama booms, his eyes blank, but he’s smiling. The secretary’s eye twitches with violence.

“Any new developments?” Tobirama asks, massaging his temples, “How are the crops coming along? And the situation with the Nara clan?”

“It’s all-all going well,” Ichirou-san stammers in his characteristic mumble, “However, there’s something--”

“The Naras didn’t show at the meeting point again?” he growls, narrowing his eyes. Lazy fuckers always pulled the same stunt -- they've been groveling for a chance to meet with the clan leader for months.  

“N-no. The young man they appointed was on time, and though he complained copiously about the early hour the negotiations went as expected,”

Hashirama smiles wide at him. Tobirama doesn't grin, but he feels very satisfied.  

“Then what is it?”

“Well--it is hard to explain,”

“What is it,” usually, Tobirama has limited patience for the man’s particular temperament, but the trip took it’s toll on him and he’s not feeling precisely tolerant.

The man gulps at the glare he receives, but looks away and starts to speak, “The surveillance parties sent out to scout the Uchiha compound--”

Tobirama sits up straight, blinking away sleep and tiredness. He feels Hashirama tense,“They’ve been captured? Maimed? Killed?”

They didn’t send parties large enough to engage, at Hashirama’s request, and Tobirama is cursing himself right now. The men sent were prepared for a scouting mission, if they were attacked--

“N-no, sir,”

Tobirama breathes a sigh of relief. Hashirama’s energy uncoils a little bit, and the air in the room is breathable once more.

“What then?”

“Have they done that thing again where they made everyone dance until they fainted?” Hashirama pipes in.

There’s a collective shudder at the memory.

“No, sir. Thank the gods, not that.” Ichirou says, scratching his head in bewilderment, “They brought something, though. I--well, I think you should see it,” the man reaches into his bag and pulls out a square wooden box, plain and dark but for the confectioner’s logo on top of the lid. He slides it to Tobirama on the table with a shrug, “We’ve scanned for poisons, genjutsu, hidden seals, traps...Nothing.”

Tobirama knows. He’s not listening anymore. He opens the box to find, lined in neat rows, a dozen green-tea cakes shaped like leaves and sprinkled with sugar. There’s nothing written, nothing that can be seen, and yet the message feels like a punch in the gut nonetheless.

Your favorites.

…

He lands face down on a patch of soft grass. He growls darkly, hating everything.

He’s surprised to find that he’s once again smack in the middle of the same Uchiha compound, but there’s no one for miles around. The lines of high and mighty oaks he saw the few times he was here are gone, sad stumps left in their place like maimed limbs protruding from the dry earth. The koi pond at the centre is empty and dry, the bones of bamboo water fountains left pouring air into nothing.

There’s a few neat rows of houses, all abandoned without sign of resistance and ransacked by opportunists, the windows smashed and doors forced open. There’s no sign of fighting, no blood on the floors, no burns on the walls, no discarded weapons, no remnants of chakra, no molten rock and splinters. In one of the houses, a bed is still made, a stuffed bear made of rags left neglected on top of the covers. It’s like the child simply did not return one day. Tobirama curls into a corner, naked and shivering, and tries not to think about how Madara may be dead, how Hashirama might be dead, how Tōka might be dead, how he might be dead. The day fades into night, the hours crawl by him. Time slips away, and he’s reminded of how everyone fades from his life like boats receding into the horizon, how no one is permanent, not even himself.

The whole place is empty of anything, and for a sensor like him it’s like a black hole, swallowing universes whole. He returns to the present to find not a second has gone by. 

Tobirama feels unbearably old.

…

Someone hovers over his bed.

“Awaken, Senju,” a voice like the rumble of thunder speaks, “I have a need of you,”

Tobirama startles awake and into a nightmare, for the ghost of Uchiha Madara is standing next to his bed.

He’s with his back against the wall and falling into a fighting stance even before his mind can finish processing the fact that even though he can see Madara, he can’t feel him. He would think he’s dreaming, if it weren’t for the fact that he can feel his brother sleeping in the room down the hall, a nightmare making him toss and turn, and he can sense Tōka in the kitchen, sleepless and numb, nursing a glass of spirits. Across the street, the sentry’s head bobs once and he startles awake, shifting his weight from one foot to the other to keep his mind busy and awake until his shift finally ends.

Madara watches him scan his surroundings, and doesn’t say a word. Somehow, he’s hiding himself from Tobirama’s senses. Without his massive chakra about himself, he’s as insubstantial to Tobirama as a spirit or a fae, his intentions as murky as the sea after a storm. He knows he’s caught, that he’s been caught since he opened his eyes and fixed them directly into Madara’s Sharingan: a fool’s mistake, and one that’s cost him everything.

“Are you here to kill me?”

To his credit, his voice is calm despite the fact that his heart is hammering against his ribcage. All he can see of Madara beyond his dark silhouette are his eyes, which are very red and very amused. It’s the same look a cat might give a mouse in it’s paws; dinner and a game, all in one.

“Not today.” he says simply, like he’s bestowing a gift.

Tobirama’s eyes narrow. “A social visit, then? I believe you’ve got the wrong room,”

“Being deliberately obtuse does not suit you,” says Madara chidingly. A pause, then,“I reckon you know exactly why I’m here”

Tobirama lights the lamp on the bedside table, bathing the room in a soft golden hue. Was the lamp there before he woke up, or is this all part of a genjutsu? He doesn’t know. His memory is hazy, although whether that’s because he just woke up or he’s caught in an illusion, he has no way to tell. He can feel Madara’s Sharingan follow his movements.

The moment is surreal. The golden light does Madara no favor, his face a study of stark light and shadows, darkness pooling around his sunken eyes and there where his hair falls over his forehead. His face is impassive and his posture is relaxed. It takes Tobirama a moment to realize that what’s strange about his appearance, other than the fact that he’s in Tobirama’s bedroom, is that he’s not wearing his armor. Without the outer layer of bulky red metal and clad in a simple black tunic and pants, the man looks leaner, almost--small. Definitely not any less imposing, but slighter, and all the more dangerous for it.  Tobirama is struck by how off-putting it is to see that mass of unruly black hair devoid of at least one twig or leaf caught somewhere.

Madara’s expression is patient. He’s been waiting for this conversation, Tobirama realizes. Been waiting for a long time. 

It suddenly crashes around Tobirama’s head that this man and the child he lost at conkers with just this morning are the same person. Up to this point, it’s been easy to put out of his mind the fact that he’s been actually traveling through time, but now the thought is impossible to avoid.

For some reason, Tobirama feels violated, like something else’s been taken from him. It’s not just that he’s being yanked back and forth through someone else’s life, it’s not just that he’s been forced to face the death of his family over and over during the past few months, it’s also that Madara’s known him since he was a little boy. That fateful day on the river, Madara had known him for at least five years prior. Somehow, illogical as it is, he feels betrayed by his own enemy.

Here’s a man who knows more about his life and future than he himself does. The thought is jarring, and it sets his blood ablaze.

“You’ve known me since you were seven years old,” he accuses. There’s still a part of him that harbors hope that the other will deny everything and laugh cruelly. That way, this will all just have been a bad dream or a distasteful genjutsu.

But Madara doesn’t deny it.

“Six,” he corrects, then quiets again, watching Tobirama almost hungrily.

“How…?” Tobirama starts, but trails off, not knowing how to finish. How did this happen? How do I make it stop?

He settles for, “Why?”

Madara huffs, somehow rolling his eyes with his whole body. The gesture is so familiar by now that Tobirama has to resist the urge to chuck a shoe at him.

“I don’t know why. You’re the one better equipped to impart an explanation,” is the answer he gets, an edge of frustration to the words, “All I know is that a time traveling Senju’s been stalking me most of my life,”

Tobirama feels the blood drain from his face, “How many times?”

“Dozens,”

“Does it ever stop?”

Madara shrugs again.

“You usually looked like this,” he says, not looking at him, “But then again, your family ages well,”

The omission is easy to grasp in that Madara said usually, not always. Tobirama shuts his eyes and breathes in slowly through his nose, reigning in his temper. He has to open his eyes fast though, because he can’t feel Madara there, right where he can see him, and it’s tattering his nerves. He feels like he’s hallucinating, or facing a ghost. There’s a void where Madara’s monstrous chakra should be, and that is not right. It reminds him too much of the empty Uchiha compound, and oaks chopped near the root.

“What is it for?” he asks, nails digging into his palms. Sage, his stomach hurts.

Madara blinks very slowly. Tobirama sees a flash of a red-nosed boy in the snow, and grits his teeth.

“What do you mean?”

“What was the point of this?” Tobirama growls. “This-this ridiculous game?” 

Madara snaps back, arms crossing over his chest, “You tell me,”

“I don’t know!” he’s aware he’s pacing and quite probably shouting, but he also knows that trapped inside Madara’s genjutsu nobody can hear him so he doesn’t care, “Why would I come back to you? Why always you? What’s the fucking point of this?”

He’s been faced with the gut-wrenching choice to murder his enemy during the man’s infancy, thus sparing himself and others countless losses; he’s been forced to accept the fate of his deceased loved ones over and over again; he’s been moved by the words of a boy that seemed to carry within him the power to move mountains; he’s been brought to his knees by an empty room and the certainty that life is fickle.

He needs a story to tell himself, but he’s never been good enough at dreaming to concoct a tale that will make his chest stop burning at the helplessness he feels, at the injustice of it all.

“I can’t tell you that, because I don’t know,” says Madara, eyes narrowed to slits.

Tobirama huffs out a helpless laugh and lets his arms fall limply to his sides, “That’s not helpful,”

“It’s not my job to help you, Senju,” Madara snaps at him, vitriol lacing each word. Whereas his original approach had been open and borderline friendly, which is a notion Tobirama won’t touch for now, he’s currently as distant as Tobirama’s ever seen him. Arms crossed over his chest and scowl firmly in place, he’s the enemy Tobirama’s used to seeing, with shadow and light dancing across his face in a play of smoke on mirrors.

“Tobirama,” he hears himself say, caught in the play of emotions that drag themselves across the Uchiha’s face even underneath the cold veneer.

Madara frowns, momentarily thrown, “What?”

“You--” he swallows, then lets the words out, “You always call me Tobirama,”

Always, since the very beginning, at the best and worst of moments.

Madara blinks, then looks at him consideringly. His bangs cast a shadow across his face that looks like a scar, splitting his face in two: known and unknown, past and present. He raises his hand slowly, hypnotically, and as if by art of magic a wickedly sharp blade appears between his deft fingers.

It’s at this moment that Tobirama realizes Madara’s eyes are black, not red, and this is no genjutsu, but the real world.

He’s standing against the wall of his room, breathing hard and absolutely disoriented. He blinks unfocused eyes to keep Madara in his field of vision, he feels himself losing consciousness. His chakra control is shot and his body is trembling, weakened beyond belief, and it’s a struggle just to stay upright. Damn that cursed Sharingan.

He gathers just enough control to send out a chakra wave so powerful it must wake the neighbors, but he doesn’t care: all he cares is that, down the hallway, Hashirama startles awake.

Madara scoffs disdainfully, eyes alight with something he can’t quite place.

“Hn. Not you,” he says, and lets fly. Tobirama’s eyes widen, but he can’t move. He cannot move.

The blade buries itself deep into the wall less than half an inch from his temple. A few strands of silvery white hair flutter to the floor. His heart pounds with fright. Shit. Shit.

Madara smiles thinly, “Don’t look so upset. You know I never miss my mark. Goodnight, Senju.”

Iridescent black flames line his silhouette for an instant, like an inferno opening to swallow him whole, and then burn his frame away. Hashirama slams the door open just in time to see the last of the shadow fire consume itself into thin air.

“What happened?” he barks, watching Tobirama slide to the floor and away from the blade.

He rubs at the side of his head with trembling fingers, and a small clump of hair comes away just as Tōka comes running into the room, looking frazzled and ready to fight despite being in her nightclothes. He knows that her keen eyes can capture everything, from the sweat that’s making his clothes cling to his body to the glittering remains of foreign fire chakra in the air, and he can feel the second her eyes fall on the blade embedded on the wall.

He swallows twice, then tries to speak, “I--”

“--Tobirama,” she says, alarm etched on her features.

Hashirama grips the blade and pulls it from the wall, his large hand engulfing the hilt. It’s a small curved thing, an ornate piece of metal polished to a high shine and sharper than wind, and when his brother dangles it questioningly in front of his face his heart nearly stutters to a stop.

Engraved into Madara’s blade is the curiously unique symbol of Hiraishin, and curling into the entrails of the metal like vines of fading blue and crimson are old tendrils of Tobirama’s chakra, curled together with Madara’s own in a tight, intricate pattern.

Fire and water bound together, like two destinies intertwined.