Madara, Madara, and Madara ; Part 3 (Naruto)
He had a lot of time to think.
A lot.
Being dead does that to just about anyone. He went through the cycle most know.
Denial
He was awake, he was thinking and conscious and alive - of course he was alive. If he was dead he would be somewhere else - and clearly, being dead was something more obvious than whatever this is.
Anger
He always was predisposed to anger - to thinking of the world as a cruel place, one made to oppose him for no reason other than it can. He fought his entire life to make the world something of a better place - to try and make it into one he felt safe letting his clan live in.
He never got there.
Bargaining
If he was truly dead he wouldn't be able to think - but if he was somehow dead and could think anyways - well obviously it's a sign. That he's meant to be doing.. something and going back and no longer taking his mortality for granted. He just- needs to figure it out, first.
Obviously.
Depression
..Is this truly it? is this the punishment for his crimes, of wanting simply a better world? To sit still for eternity with nothing to do but think, driving himself to insanity? If so, the world was truly a cruel place.
But he already knew that - so why does it feel so disappointing?
Acceptance.
..It seems, truly, that this is it. That he is dead, and this is all that remains of him.
How tragic.
Then, as if the fates were mocking him - just as he finally accepted his new state, he was forced from it once more.
The first thing he did after the inherent chaos of his own birth, was study the other one.
Apparently, he was not alone in his - re-life.
The main difference was that the other one was, to his knowledge, a real child.
A genuine child, stuck to his side and one that will be forced to compare to him for the rest of his life.
He first observation was that they had no features that were especially similar at first glance. The child had a bright eye-catching blue hair - much too bright for any shinobi short of an Uzumaki really. Paired with yellow eyes, it seemed that his general black coloured eyes and hair that could come from just about anywhere would always make him the second out of the two spotted in crowds. Their appearances were so varied it barely seemed they were related, let alone twins - yet some lingering of his features can be seen in the jaw, in the eye shape - this was clearly his direct relative.
It's hardly a new phenomenon to him, to have a relative this close to him in age. To have a sibling, even.
But a twin is something rather new to him. A twin - well, he feels some sort of pity about that. For this child, this perfectly average babe - they will be compared to him for the rest of their life. He wouldn't even be surprised if by the end, they'll have grown to despise him.
For now though, this child - this was his flesh and blood. His very own. He does not feel it now - but it will sink in soon.
For now, he will wait until that moment.
For now, that's most of what he's capable of doing.
The other one - apparently she is his sister.
He strains his ears to hear the things the one who had birthed him whispers to her about, frantically in the morning and well into the night - and he discovers his sister's name is Meiko, his is Mirai, though his mother's name is unknown to him. She doesn't speak to him - though she mentions him often. Along with him, she speaks of sins, of repenting, of demons.
He doesn't quite understand - sinning is a concept he is aware of, but the way she speaks of it is more civilian in nature than anything else. To kill a clansmen is to sin but to kill the enemy is to protect yourself and by extension the clan, arguably a virtue - a model he never fully agreed with. Civilians tend to have the much more easily digestible model of to kill is to sin, but it is not if it is done in self-defense.
Noblemen will take 'in defense' very far - it's why offending them is dire to merchants. Average civilians, though - they see the need to attack 'in defense' only if they are obviously threatened. She clearly uses the latter model - though she never quite expands upon what it is she has done that she feels is sinning. It is remarkably odd - as from what he had observed, she seemed to be of the skill of a low-intermediate kunoichi.
He resolves to look into that later, if he can keep his head straight enough to.
For now, he figures he needs to set a good example - the poor child may make her first word "sin" if the woman keeps speaking to her like that.
(Deep in his mind, he recalls being told early a lifetime ago the horrors of the world. Of being read diaries of his ancestors who crawled to war and never returned, learning what they had learned and being told to be sure not to make the mistakes that led to their ultimate demise.
Perhaps, he reflects many years later, this initial act of reaching out had been some form of pity. Relation. Projection. Maybe all three.)
One day, when the woman is lingering outside the door after she 'left' for the morning; something she does on average for about an hour before really leaving for wherever it is she goes - he approaches Meiko.
Mirai has drawn his conclusions - this being, that she is a child. His twin sister, yes, but still a child. A child whose only form of interaction with her supposed caregiver is the fearful whispers of a woman who believes herself, for whatever reason, to be damned.
His first opinion on his kin was that she would one day grow to despise him - and this has not changed. Though, Mirai feels a sense of..responsibility, in a way, to ensure that this child lives long enough to feel anything about him at all.
In the end this leads to the ultimate decision that, for now, he needs to make sure she can function within society in the future. The first step to achieving that is to ensure she can speak words - ones that are not just echoing broken prayers.
(He thinks that - perhaps then he had been making excuses. That he already had been attached, on some level, to the idea of a sibling who would never leave his side. It is the selling point of twins, is it not? To have a companion for life, one who will never leave you, one that will love you unconditionally?
Of course, he'd probably puke if he was presented with the idea this had been the logic behind his thinking, as adverse to bonds he was at the time.)
"Imouto."
He had been practicing with his vocal cords and their ranges - training them back to their prior strength slowly over the course of many days and nights while Meiko sat and listened to the woman speak to her.
Of course, Mirari isn't so detached from reality as to expect Meiko to actually understand what the word he spoke even meant - it was a starting point. She is Imouto in the same way the blue thing that's above her when she goes outside is the sky - it's meant to be a point of reference. As she grows older and is able to understand more complex concepts, he'll gradually shift from Imouto to a polite, if distant, Meiko-san.
(But of course she defies all expectations - as she often did back then, when his expectations of his sister had been that of akin to the expectations one may have of an insect.)
Clumsily, she tilts her head and lisps out "Ihmahtoe" - it had a high tilt near the end, as if asking a question. It was an obvious echo of the word he spoke to her not even a few seconds ago.
...That was unexpected, to say the least. So far in this life, Meiko had been completely silent. She made the occasional huff of air, but she did not babble like he does. She seemed to be beyond content to listen instead of speak - no matter how obviously lacking in comprehension she was of the words spoken to her.
Mirai gets out of his stupor quickly, and feels the need to swiftly correct her - lest he be left to the fate of being called little sister for the rest of Meiko's childhood.
He points his fist at her - lacking the motor control to utilize his fingers enough to attempt to unclench his hand in a mock parody of 'pointing' to her - then himself.
"Imouto, Ani."
Mirai had two purposes behind this action - one, to test her comprehension of simple gestures, and two - to see if her echoing of his words had been a simple fluke.
Meiko points at herself, then him - clumsily, her arms clearly not used to doing much other than laying to the side of her.
"Ihmahtoe, Ahnay?"
It seems that she catches on quite quickly. Perhaps even something to the level one may call a genius, if Mirai was generous. He grins despite himself - feeling an odd sense of pride in this fact.
Ah, it seems that he's accepted her as..a sister, reluctantly. He recalls feeling similar about his youngest brother, when he had been alive younger.
(He tries to ignore the fact that the moment Meiko spoke, their mother ran as far from her spot outside the door as quickly as possible.)
His sister is static in a way few things are, in life.
It seemed her mind ran miles per minute, and somewhere in the equation her body forgot it must move as well. She sits and turns her head - but she does little to crawl around. Mirai tries to get her to follow his figurative footsteps by moving more - but she seems to be unwilling to budge on that. He's not quite sure to make of that - for her to echo his actions when being spoken to, but being content to only watch when not directly addressed.
She is admittedly quite strange.
He recalls pulling her hair - an accident. He had wanted to know if she had gotten the more 'fluffy' descriptor his hair had, or if she had the almost hay-like texture of their.. 'mother.' He didn't account for his poor motor control, and ended up pulling it in the process.
Admittedly he..panicked. Quite badly, actually. From his knowledge this had been the first time in her life she would be injured by another human being -
(He was three. He was just meeting his cousins and they decided to shove him - lacking coordination he fell on his face. They laughed at him. He remembers hating them more than anything else in the world in that moment.
His world was quite small at the time, he quickly learned.)
- and it was..stress inducing. He felt like every time he tried to do simple acts of kindness, he on principle preformed them wrong - doing more harm then good in the process. That as a person, clearly doing good was not what a creature like him was built for.
Breaking him out of his self-loathing spiral - his sister did something quite odd.
She smiled and giggled - as if it were the most natural response in the world to such an act.
His sister - she had not smiled before. She had quite the neutral face - when they were a few months old it had been far less severe, but it hardened quite fully over time into stone. He figured this to be a leftover of how their 'mother' seemed to suddenly distance herself entirely from their lives, affecting her emotional development in the process but-
but she smiled and laughed, and it was because of something he did.
No one ever giggled at him before. He himself had quite the neutral face - and he never went out of his way to draw such a response from anyone. It was a new sensation entirely.
If he finds himself pulling her hair more often just to see her smile - well, no one has to know that. It's not as if anyone else was around to judge him for that, anyhow.
The woman who called herself their mother had been making herself scarce as they got older. She only came into the house for brief periods of time - minutes into the night, to stock the fridge - then to leave again.
He still does not have the means to follow her, nor any real desire to do so.
However, he finds that he still needs to eat.
After the woman leaves he gets up from his shared bed - much too big for a lone child, even two of them - and sorts through the food. He leaves some non-perishables on the nightstand, so it is within easy reach in the morning.
Meiko seems to have drawn the assumption that the woman puts it there. He would correct her - but she has so very little of her mother. Perhaps it's odd - but Mirai can't help but think that if Meiko tried to put a face to the word 'mother' she wouldn't have anything besides a vague outline based on herself.
Even he, once upon a time, knew the face of the one who had brought him into the world. To take such a menial thing from her - it would simply be cruel.
Mirai thinks that perhaps they would be approaching three, or maybe four - if he had any ownership over a calendar figuring that out would be easier, but all he knows is that he was born sometime this season based on estimate.
The woman no longer does shopping - she simply enters the house, leaves money, and goes right back to wherever it is she finds herself when she is not at the house once more. He's been meaning to look into it - but the only time he is not under the watchful eye of Meiko is when it is dark, and Mirai does not trust his safety as, to what amounts as, a civilian orphan toddler in the dark streets at night.
He trusted his skill - but that was a lifetime ago, when he was taller, older, more experienced - if he tried any of his techniques now he's almost certain he'll overestimate his abilities somehow and grievously injure himself - if he doesn't outright die.
He takes the money as motivation to finally get around to getting Meiko used to crowds - a harsh task, considering they are a year past the age clan children will be forced to socialize, and the usual civilians generally set up 'play-dates' for children that last from infancy to twelve years old. He worries he's missed the adjustment window for these things.
Meiko was clearly unused to crowds, but not to the extent that it'd be impossible for her to navigate one if she finds herself stuck. He was relieved about that - apparently he had been worrying about that more than he thought. Despite her..not awfulness with large crowds, she clearly still disliked them - so occasionally he'd ask if she'd prefer to stay in the house while he went to get groceries.
She always came with. It could be that she just has an extended interest in exploring the terrain outside of the house, but he figures that it's more that she prefers not to be alone.
That's fine, he recalls his siblings never being overly fond of it either.
Now that they're in public more, he finds that the village he left behind is..not the same as the one he's found himself in now. It wasn't obvious at first - but overtime he realized that everything seemed a lot less..tense, here. Swarms of people animatedly spoke in the streets, smiled at him when he looked their way - he can tell the extreme contrast to their only point of reference of adults so far bothers Meiko as well.
It's in the way the people speak, the way they move and even the way they smile - it all indicates one thing, something is different here.
The crowds - they murmur "Uchiha" not with distrust or distaste, but simply wonder and curiosity.
He finds this especially jarring - especially knowing the opinions on the Uchiha clan and how they had been, when he had died. He has assumed upon rebirth that his death and birth lined up perfectly - he died, and nine months later he was alive in the form of Mirai. Yet he never fact checked this before - for all he knows, he's been teaching Meiko etiquette that was three hundred years out of date.
That aside - something has changed.
He's not sure he likes that - the uncertainty that comes with knowing that something is wrong, but not being sure exactly what it was.
Then, one day, when he is six Meiko comes up to him asking who Uchiha Izuna is and why ladies at the market coo and tell her that she looks just like him - and he.. has a tentative idea, that he knows what happened.
The orphanage matron is very polite. His sister has a lot of questions - he thinks this is the most he's ever seen her talk before in one sitting.
Meiko was the quiet one, she preferred to let him handle the talking.
Today he does not feel like talking.
Here, Uchiha Madara is alive. Uchiha Madara has procreated. Uchiha Madara is their father.
Here, Uchiha Izuna is alive, and apparently is a very good iryo-nin. There's tales of him being able to heal even the most fatal of strikes, even preformed on himself.
He does not know the source of these changes - and that is unpleasant, seeing as they are about to meet their father. Of whom Mirai, might he just add - once was in another reality.
It seems he..forgot to mention that part, perhaps.