Madara, Madara, and Madara ; Part 2 (Naruto)
She dies.
She thinks the hypothermia got to her before the water did - but everything was too fuzzy at the time to tell, really.
She wakes.
It's dark, and she's surrounded by liquid. She cannot move, and she feels the distinct separate beat of a heart along with her own.
She sleeps.
Well - It's not exactly sleeping, but she settles well enough. She lets her consciousness slip and she doesn't think. It's just close enough to sleeping for her to get comfortable.
Her brother looks nothing like her.
That is her first thought, hours after being born and finally gaining her bearings.
She doesn't remember babies having such clear eyesight at birth. It takes weeks to see colour, then to see vague shapes, then to see directly in front of them, and finally focus.
Right now she sees the world with some difficulty - but not enough to indicate a newborn. Not enough to be natural.
Of course, she doesn't really remember babies being born with long blue hair either - so she really cannot say if what she knows is correct at all.
Her brother looks upon her with equal, if not more scrutiny she looks upon him. Seemingly satisfied with his observations, he gives a silent huff before moving a little closer to her.
Silently closing her eyes as her twin's hand entangles with her own clumsily - she thinks she'll find herself loving him easily.
She listens to the language her new mother speaks - as sparingly as such an event is. It seems to be an odd mix of languages she can't pin easily - but she definitely hears the occasional English influence, and that is enough to build a foundation of knowledge on.
Over the coming months she finds that the language is mainly based on English with some Japanese grammar rules occasionally thrown in. Of course she can't be sure - English itself is based on several different languages - but she's pretty sure. Her ears just were not developed enough to catch most of the murmured undertones of her mother's words to understand that at first.
She contemplates what her first words will be with extreme difficulty. Eventually she looks upon her brother's vaguely angry neutral state, and decides - not before her brother gets sick of her silence first though.
One day, three months after their birth ; her brother looks upon her with intent.
"Imouto."
Oh, being shown up by a three month old. Of course, she can't just pull the correct term of address for her brother from nowhere - especially as she hasn't quite heard it before and she's really not sure if she actually knows the correct version. The little nuances in language are important here, apparently.
"Ihmahtoe?"
Ah right, she hasn't spoken before now. Her vocal cords are quite unfortunately unused to most sounds - at best she can only manage ihmahtoe.
Her brother pauses a moment before shaking his tiny little head. His aims his fist in her general direction before pausing and aiming his fist at himself.
"Imouto, Ani."
..Are babies usually meant to be this smart? She doesn't remember speaking at all until seven months old, or really having this much situational awareness until she was two. Even then, she was considered something of a prodigy.
Maybe, here this is normal - babies that have such clear words so early. Perhaps they just advance faster - that would certainly explain her eyesight. Surely though, this is still a little fast? Babies that recognize patterns and speak clearly at three months old?
Well, if her brother is going through all the effort to correct her - who is she to deny him of his title? Kids need positive reinforcement right? Yeah, that sounds familiar.
She points her fist at herself, then him to convey that she understood the notion,
"Ihmahtoe, Ahnay?"
Her brother smiles for what she thinks to be the first time before nodding in the bobbing way kids do. Her heart melts a little bit.
Her brother moves around much more than she does.
She moves too, of course - but she heard something online once about babies having ninety more bones than adults because they haven't melded together yet. She worries that she may overestimate her physical limit and displace something rather important if she moves, too used to her more durable body to correctly judge if she can do something or not.
She moves her head much more though - children's heads shape around how they lay as babies, and she wants a very normal looking head that isn't flat on one side, thank you very much.
Mostly though, she feels fragile. Like a good wind could carry her off into the sunset.
Her brother has no such paranoia about moving too wrong and breaking all bones in his body at once - as seen from his constant moving. If he was not holding her hand ; he was sitting up, he was grabbing her hair, he was trying to crawl - he moved so often you'd think he didn't know not moving was a thing a person could do.
She finds this to be somewhat amusing, but she usually can keep that pretty internalized - not fully though, as seen with the unfortunate habit she had gained of giggling when he grabs her hair.
The first time she did it he visibly startled, he then tugged her hair again. This was even funnier to her - and a giggle erupted from her without her consent.
He looked at her then, like she was the most precious thing in the universe at that very moment; and she thinks it gets easier to love her brother each day then it did the last.
She looks at him and all she can think of is that she wants him to smile more.
They are two, and their mother is something of a ghost to them. Their mother is more a concept, than a real breathing person.
She leaves food within reach each morning - more than enough to last the entire day and provide three meals if they both stretch it out strategically and split it evenly between them.
Her brother likes taking charge of how they manage their meals. She lets him - she's meant to encourage her sibling, and her brother seems to like being the older one ; so she lets him handle most things. If he ever proves to be inefficient in something she'll take over that task and teach him how to do it right - but they haven't quite got to that point yet, so she lets him handle what he wants.
Maybe that's a bad way to deal with children - but she doesn't really know or care. To her, he is her brother first. If her older brother wants to handle how they manage meals, her older brother can manage their meals.
She doesn't know their names. Her brother is Ani to her, and she is Imouto to him. That was enough for her at first.
They're three now, and people look upon her brother and murmur "Uchiha."
This means - well, a lot. She processes the new knowledge of her world and comes to realize it changes nothing. It means everything, but ultimately, changes nothing.
Her brother, with spiky black hair and pale skin and black eyes - he's still her brother, even if he bears a striking resemblance to a certain ghost of Uchiha.
Hell, even her - her neon blue hair that's been taming and rapidly darkening with age, her paper pale skin, her vibrant yellow eyes ; she's still her brother's sister, even if she does look like an Uchiha with a poor colour reskin.
It does put things in context. Like the city, and the language, and well - most of everything.
It changes nothing, but it surely means something.
She looks at her brother and studies him. She comes to the alarming realization - that he's exactly like Madara Uchiha. To the very root of most his mannerisms, he screams of Uchiha blood.
Of course, children are not their parents. Crazy old nukenin in caves aside - her brother has his own little quirks ; like using much softer language, and picking out all of their clothes for them, and watering the plants around the house she impulsively bought.
He is as much her brother as he is Madara's son - but at the end of the day, he's still very much Madara's son.
(She questions how that's meant to work - isn't he meant to be around ninety now? Actually, she's not sure she knows the year correctly. Maybe she'll ask her brother later.)
Thing is, she's not really meant to know who Madara is.
She has a rule to knowledge - if she cannot explicitly remember a moment where someone has brought something up with her before, she does not 'know' it, and therefor cannot reference it.
The day she ultimately sees a picture of Madara Uchiha, be it in the academy or a bingo book - he will not be "The guy that Ani looks like" - but instead "The guy that looks like a taller Ani."
Until then, she 'knows' nothing about the Uchiha her brother hasn't told her before. ("They are one of the founding clans of Konoha, our village." he says, when she asks what an 'uchiha' is after going to the market one day. She feels dull once more for not realizing where she was sooner.)
She worries what this means - to be a bastard Uchiha of the main and most likely only Uchiha nukenin.
Then she sees people stare at her when she is five and say "Looks like Izuna-sama, if he was a bit shorter and had longer hair, yeah?" and her reality is flipped again.
She goes up to her brother after that, and asks him who Uchiha Izuna is, and why people at the market say she looks like him.
For once in her life, her brother looks entirely off-center.
He says the strangest thing ever, looking the most distraught she's ever seen him - "I...do not know."
This - really has never happened to her before.
She's not sure what to do, she planned on correcting her brother if he ever got something wrong - but here she is also in the dark. Izuna died long before the village was founded. Uchiha Izuna was not a popular name among civilians; people even debated his existence in the future - he is certainly not the kind of person you speak of like he is still living when Madara Uchiha hoards his very existence like gold.
For the first time in her life, she looks at her brother and says something equally as strange in return.
"Let's ask Okaa-san."
They stay up late into the night, waiting for their mother's return.
When the door ultimately opens, she notes with several levels of surprise that this is the first time she's seen her mother outside of old photographs clearly not intended for their eyes around the house. She has a nice pale blue hair colour that contrasts her own midnight blue like night and day. Her eyes are a dull yellow - like unpolished gold. She looks just like her - if not a lot less extreme.
She opens her mouth, and before her words can even come out - her mother starts screaming.
She tries not to remember much beyond that. A lifetime ago - her therapist told her that trauma that occurs at a young age will often be repressed by the brain in order to protect itself. She doesn't know much about psychology, so she's inclined to believe a professional - but for some reason, she remembers everything with such alarming clarity and-
Oh. Right. Uchiha parent.
She has a good idea why she can remember it despite her attempts otherwise.
On one hand, the orphanage matron was more than willing to tell them about their supposed father - and give large amounts of background knowledge to them. Apparently Madara Uchiha and Izuna Uchiha are lovely people - pacifistic, polite in their own way, and highly support the idea of civilians learning basic protection skills. On the other hand, she unlocked the sharingan.
The sharingan.
At five years old.
Madara Uchiha himself only activated it at, what, twelve?
She was quite stressed.
Most of all though, she's been thinking over her older memories more often - memories without any brother in sight.
She's trying to drag up memories of Madara besides what she already knew - old man in a cave - and all she figures out is that sometime before the titular character is born, Madara deserts the village and eventually decides to..kill the world? She's not quite sure, it's..admittedly been a while. Point is, all she really knows of him is that he tried to start an apocalypse, and very nearly succeeded.
And he might be her father.
Her actual blood father.
She felt rather faint.