Chapter 1
Tobirama stood vigil in the howling blizzard. The blood on his sword was freezing into blooming crystals as bodies on the ground cooled from the wind.
Ten Hagoromo around him lay dead, red splotches in the snow. By the time he had arrived, most of them had already been dead, and the rest Tobirama had easily disposed of with a flick of his sword and a single hand sign.
Now Tobirama was alone, looking down on the last living person in the clearing.
Uchiha Madara was slumped against the trunk of a tree, hot blood steaming in the cold. His chest rose and fell slowly, the only indication he was still alive, for otherwise he was completely still and despondent. Blood seeped through the cracks in his armor, and streamed in rivers down his face from empty sockets.
The wind shrieked, cold pricking Tobirama’s cheeks.
“Kill me,” Madara whispered.
Tobirama did not budge at the words. He considered them, for a moment. Weighed it out. Slowly, silently, he sheathed his sword.
“No.” he answered.
He kneeled into the snow. As his fingers touched Madara’s cheek, the forest lit up with a soft green glow.
—
When Madara woke up, he had expected darkness.
He had been, as embarrassing as it was to admit, been caught off guard. Already injured from a mission, Madara had been limping back through contested territory to the Uchiha lands. It was winter, and work for clans was few. Nobody would be trekking through the deep snow now, especially through contested territory, set far away from any real Senju or Uchiha settlement. Nobody wanted to freeze to death.
It was this assumption that led Madara to stumble through forest, blood dripping onto the snow, and his guard let down. His mission had been a special case: a high bounty that was too lucrative to pass up. The Uchiha had suffered a poor harvest during the fading fall, and the snow had been light enough to assume that Madara could make the journey.
From the start of the mission, it had all gone awry. The target had hired heavy protection from the Land of Wind, and though they may all lay dead now, they had managed to mark Madara with a heavy wound. Bad enough turned to worse as during the trip home, a blizzard set in, and soon he was surrounded by knee deep snow.
He needed to return back to the Uchiha compound with his commission. There were people depending on him.
He had been so caught up in the pain in his side, the bitter cold on his skin, and the worry in his heart that he hadn’t noticed his attackers until a senbon had lanced into his side.
A Hagoromo squad had found his bloodtrail, and few clans knew how to follow the scent of profit in blood like the Hagoromo could.
There were only ten of them, a fight which ordinarily Madara could have ended with not much more than a sigh and a few minutes, but he was injured, and tired, and as he hailed fire and destruction down upon his assailants, and felt his movements begin to lag and jitter, he realized with horror that the senbon had been poisoned.
The more he was just a second too slow, the more senbon and their poison sunk into him. It was a localized toxin, it didn’t spread through his blood as well as most. Rather the sting of iron in his skin was followed by an abrupt seizing of the muscle it had sunk into. Madara was unfortunately familiar with Hagoromo poison, on account of his clan’s frequent clashes with them, and he knew that if it was fast acting poison they wanted, it was well within their ability.
No, they wanted this poison to only affect certain parts of him, and it did not take much thinking to parse out why.
He grunted as another senbon sunk into his arm. Another that avoided his neck or face. They were preserving his eyes.
You couldn’t sell a broken product, after all.
Genjutsu smugglers were a scourge hated by all clans, but no more so than the Uchiha. If there was any monster that haunted an Uchiha’s dreams, it was not Senju, but rather the idea of losing one’s eyes. Senju, for all of their cruelty and monstrosity, did not steal eyes.
Hagoromo did, and Madara had been old enough long enough to have walked the halls of the medical wing and seen clansmen with bandages over their faces, and spirits broken. Madara had been clan head long enough to have mothers weep to him, holding their eyeless children to their chests, begging him to fix what could not be fixed.
Madara had been good about keeping traffickers off their land. But now, as he fell to the ground in a seized body that he could no longer control, it struck him that perhaps he had not been thorough enough. While he thought he had chased them out, the rats had been hiding in their holes through the long winter, waiting for the taste of blood to come out.
His eyes, the only parts of him still under his control, flicked around wildly. He knew he should turn them off, or otherwise the memory of their removal would be with him forever, but he could not do it. Sharingan developed under pain, a flower that bloomed in showers of grief and blood. Now, terrified for his life, terrified even more for the loss of his eyes, he could not turn them off. Fear kept them open.
The Hagoromo hunters, what charred remaining shinobi there were, now approached him. The Sharingan memorized each minutia of their features, each speck of ash across pale skin, each gash Madara had managed to carve into them, each splatter of blood across their faces. There were three of them left now, and Madara watched in clear detail as faces split into greedy smiles. He could see the reflection of the moon, in perfect detail, in their hungry eyes. He could see each furrowed crease in their irises as their eyes dilated.
Madara had never felt like prey.
He felt like it now.
He could not help the scream that tore from him as iron dipped into the socket of his eye. There was laughter at that, and Madara had never been more grateful that the Sharingan could not memorize sound. He doubted he would forget it, regardless.
The first eye came loose with a sickening squelch, and half of Madara’s world went dark.
He was afraid.
Madara was not used to being afraid. But not terror swallowed him like some great beast, devouring his flesh and replacing it with trembling, shivering fear. He was crying as the blade dipped now beneath his second eye.
Madara could only hope for a swift death.
The world went completely dark, and all Madara could feel was warm blood pouring down his cheeks. Somewhere within his new void, Madara could feel his heart break.
Madara was now completely helpless, crippled for life. He did not want to live in this dark. Madara wished for death.
Outside of his blindness, now he heard a choked off scream. Something heavy thudded to the ground, and a flare of chakra rippled across the snowy clearing, colder than even the winter chill.
Suddenly the clearing was silent, absent of even the smallest noise. Gone was the rustling sound of fabric as his eyes were pocketed away, the low voices talking over him like he was some sort of pig for auction, the laughter and the sharp sound of paper being unrolled. Now it was only silence, silence and cold.
“Kill me,” he whispered, with his last ounce of strength.
There was a single, terrifying beat where he thought he might be talking to air.
Then, clear and firm,
“No.”
Whatever might have been said after that, Madara could not remember. The blood loss had claimed him, and he slipped peacefully into a warm sleep, hoping to never wake up.
He did not expect he would either, much less in his clan’s medical ward.
For Madara, he was one moment sinking into death, and the next woken to pain in a place he did not recognise. It was a frightening, disorienting thing to be alive when you knew you shouldn't. He surged up in a panicked frenzy, and was met with noise and action. Hands and voices pressing against him. He pushed back the hands trying to calm him, unable to focus on the shouting voices around him. His eyes had snapped open, sharingan activated and-
He could see.
A bandage was wrapped around his eyes, but through the gauze, cream-colored light filtered in. He could see.
Madara stopped fighting, and hands from all over rested on him in reassurance. The fuzziness of the world around him, dampened by panic, began to take shape. The sounds of shouting transformed slowly, as ice melts to a stream, and became words again.
“-adara! Please, Lord Madara!”
His panic was gone, replaced by concern.
“Hikaku?” He asked, and was surprised by the rough quality of his voice. As if he had gone days without its use.
He heard a relieved sigh, and the shadows outside of the gauze shifted.
“Thank god, I was worried you would hurt yourself. Ah, Ikaru, please go inform Lord Izuna that Lord Madara has awoken.”
“Yes sir.”
Madara heard someone rise and leave them.
Madara’s face twisted, and he noted with displeasure a painful soreness, “What’s going on?”
“I’ll tell you,” Hikaku said, sounding worried still, “but please, deactivate the sharingan before you damage your eyes.”
His eyes.
Madara reached up to touch his face, and felt with a resounding relief that his sockets were not hollow. He could not help as he let out a choked sound, halfway between a gasp and a sob.
Madara cut the chakra flowing to his eyes, and the sharingan deactivated, leaving a residual burn.
“What happened?” he asked.
Hikaku sighed once more, and Madara made a mental note to stop being the reason for Hikaku’s constant stress, at least for a while after this.
“That’s what we want to know,” Hikaku said, “we found you just outside the compound. A patrolling squad stumbled upon you slumped against a tree, a blanket over your shoulders, and a bandage around your eyes.”
Hikaku’s voice was full of horror as he continued, “it looked as if they had been ripped out and somehow reattached. I…”
Hikaku trailed off, unable to say another word. Another voice, who Madara recognized as Uchiha Nozomi, the leader of their medical unit, spoke up.
“It was a cleaner job than any of us could have done,” she explained calmly, almost reverently, “cleaner than any of us could have imagined possible.”
Madara’s eyebrows shot up. Eye-transplants were not an unknown art, given how essential they were to Kekkei Genkai trading, or how important eyes were to the Hyuuga and Uchiha. But the Uchiha, in particular, specialized in treating the eyes, for rather obvious reasons. For someone to be able to perform one better than an Uchiha medic… not even the Senju should have that capability, for all of their renown in healing.
Madara reached up to tear the bandage from his face, but a hand shot out to stop him.
“Lord Madara, I am afraid you will have to keep it on for now. Your eyes need rest.” Nozomi said.
Madara felt anger rise in his chest, but he quickly doused it. Nozomi was right, even Madara wasn’t prideful enough to disobey.
“Madara,” Hikaku spoke once more, “what… what happened that night?”
And then suddenly the anger was back, now different and sharp. Not indignance like seconds ago, but fury, dark and hot.
“Hagoromo traders,” he growled, “they caught me off guard. Poisoned me with some sort of paralysis drug. Next thing I knew I was on the ground, and-” cold fear, darkness. Madara wet his lips and forced himself to continue, “they stole my eyes.”
“Do you remember anything more?” Hikaku asked.
A memory flashed through his mind, colder than cold, the silencing of sound.
“Kill me.”
“No.”
Then sleep.
“Someone killed the traders,” Madara remembered, “I can’t remember much about him through the pain, but he was male - deep voice, though I doubt I could pick it out through a crowd, too brief, and I was too far gone at that point. That’s all I can remember before the blood loss got me.”
“Whoever it was,” Nozomi cut in, “you got very lucky Lord Madara. Very few people can perform a successful eye transfer, and even fewer without leaving permanent vision loss. The work that your little hero did on you… well frankly it’s revolutionary.”
A hand was placed on the side of his head, and Madara felt Nozomi’s chakra trickle through him in examination. It rested warmly behind his eyes, and for a second Madara was revolted. It was strange - no Uchiha liked anything invading their eyes, and especially someone in Madara’s case. But it was not the invasion that disgusted him, rather a strange sense of wrongness - that the warm chakra was not snow-melt cold disturbed him. Madara shoved down his disgust, why on earth would he expect cold? Why did it feel like he had felt it before?
Nozomi, taking a close look at his eyes with the diagnostic jutsu, continued, “Lord Madara, you had been experiencing vision deterioration from the Mangekyo, correct?”
“Yes.”
“When you were first brought into the ward, we ran this same diagnosis. The severance point of your eyes had been bridged with a line of healthy young cells. Since then, they have continued to grow and the area has strengthened, the reattachment seamless. More than that though,”
She removed her hand from his face, leaving Madara relieved as her chakra was gone.
“Madara,” her voice was serious, “all the damage from the Mangekyo had been healed as well. Your eyes are practically brand new, in fact, they will most likely heal to be in better shape than they were before this. Your mysterious healer, whomever they are, can heal the Mangekyo blindness.”
Madara could not help the way his entire body froze with shock.
“What?”
Nozomi rattled on, “of course, it’s not permanent. Any further use will continue to damage your eyes, but they have been almost fully repaired…”
She continued on, but Madara could not hear her. All else in the world had faded to an unremarkable buzz as what she said echoed within him. Someone could heal the Mangekyo blindness. An illness that had plagued the Uchiha for generations was curable. There was a solution, there was a savior out there.
Suddenly, nothing else in the world mattered than finding who had healed him. Suddenly all of Madara’s fear, all of the long meetings with clan elders, all of the urging and resisting and insisting that Madara must blind his brother to save himself - all of it, all of it: meaningless. There was a cure. Madara would not have to take Izuna’s eyes. He would not have to damn either of them to an endless darkness.
He laughed in bewilderment, softer than he thought he was capable of.
There was a cure.
“..nerve tissue is much too fragile to even use Senju iryo jutsu. All the techniques I know are far too blunt for this kind of healing. The chakra control required what was done to you is impossible.”
Even Nozomi, old, aging, weathered Nozomi seemed amazed.
“It would be like trying to thread the eye of a needle from a mile away,” she breathed.
“How is this even possible?” Madara asked.
“We don’t know.” she replied honestly.
Madara was silent for a moment, thinking.
“Hikaku,” he intoned.
“Yes, Lord Madara?”
“Start a search through the contested area as soon as it is safe to do so. We need to find the remnants of the fight, and find any clues of who this person might be.”
“Of course.”
He turned his head slightly to where he knew the medic was, “Nozomi.”
“Yes, Lord Madara?”
“If we could find this person, would you be able to copy their technique with the sharingan?”
She sighed, “I am afraid not. Even if we had all the knowledge of Senju techniques, all the finest medicines in the land, and even if I could see how the himself healer did it, it would remain an issue of skill, not knowledge. This was a miracle, one I doubt anyone, even the Senju could reproduce.”
Madara quelled his disappointment, “I thought as much. Then it is of utmost importance that we bring them into our service, and keep them here. No matter the consequence.”
There was a tense pause, that even someone as dense as Madara could read.
“Would anyone like to fill me in on whatever I’m missing.”
He heard Hikaku intake a breath, try to speak, and give up.
Madara raised a brow.
“Come on, currently blind, you know. If an elephant is in the room, someone is going to have to tell me about it.”
“Madara…” Hikaku sounded strained.
“That is my name.”
“There is something you should know.”
“I should hope so.”
“You see, the thing is-”
A loud Bang! resounded through the room as the doors were thrown open, and Madara felt Izuna’s static-shock chakra roll over him in a nervous coil.
“You’re awake!” was the only warning before all 180 pounds of Izuna came crashing into him in something that was half hug, half tackle.
“Lord Izuna!” Nozomi snapped, yanking him back off Madara. Judging by the choking sound his brother made, it was probably by the collar as well.
“Thank god!” Izuna was sobbing dramatically, “I thought you’d be asleep forever!”
Madara winced from his volume, “The pond is not off the table, Izuna!”
Izuna remained undeterred, continuing to wail, “You could have been blinded for the rest of your life! I was so scared when they found you!”
All the blooming affection in his chest was thoroughly squashed when Izuna threw himself upon Madara again in a runny-nosed mess.
“Izuna, please! He’s fine!” Hikaku tried, though everybody in the room knew it was pointless to try and calm the Uchiha heir down when he had whipped himself up into a frenzy.
“How can you say that Hikaku! He could have been blind forever! If his soulmate hadn’t found him when he did then-”
Madara suddenly went very still, “What did you say?”
The room fell deathly silent, and Madara didn’t need his vision to feel as all eyes shifted to him.
“Soulmate,” he repeated, voice hollow of emotion, “You said soulmate just now, right?”
“Lord Madara-”
“You didn’t tell him yet?!”
“I was just getting to it! We had a lot to cover before-”
Madara felt numb. His mouth moved without his command, instinct taking over when his mind failed him.
“Explain. Now.”
A beat.
Hikaku cleared his throat.
“Madara, there is something you should know.”
—
To say Madara had thrown a tantrum was putting it very lightly.
Soulmates, as they were everywhere, were a sacred thing. Someone the universe had tied you to irrevocably, someone entirely yours and you theirs in ways you could hardly comprehend. Your soulmate was your everything.
To Uchiha, soulmates were even more than your everything. Everything you had belonged to them, and because everything could never be enough, you became more than you could have ever been before, just for them. Uchiha loved strong, and became strong for love. There was a reason the first touch of a soulmate left a mark on your skin. A soulmate changed you, deconstructed you and rebuilt you into someone better.
Your blood, your air, your gravity: they were all of it.
When Madara was young, he couldn’t wait to meet his soulmate. He dreamed about who they would be, how wonderful their meeting would be. He begged his father to talk about how he met his mother. He traced endlessly over the china-blue stains on his fathers knuckles and on the back of his mother’s hand from an accidental brush of skin.
He used to run around grabbing everyone he met’s hand, hoping with an almost delirious fervor that his skin would stain with their bond. Of course, it never happened, otherwise everyone in the five elemental nations would have heard within days. Madara had always been more the shout it from the rooftops type.
As he grew up, he relented and stopped his childish behavior. But, if he was being honest, the burning desire never left. Each touch of his hand upon another’s, he found himself wishing please, please, please.
In many ways, it grew worse.
His older brother had died when Madara was young, and so Madara was made heir. He gained power, and he gained responsibility. Little Madara became Lord Madara. He was shuttered away from easy, carefree days. Hashirama had been a reprieve from the dark study rooms, from the training yard, and from the certainty of the war he was to inherit. But after Hashirama’s brief interlude, Madara’s life was once again clouded with the encroaching storm of blood. Madara grew to carry the world on his shoulders, and he did not complain. He loved his clan, so when he wiped the blood off of his gunbai, he did not shy from the knowledge that he would yet again dye it red.
When his father passed, Madara became clan head. With that, the Uchiha clan depended wholly on him. He had to guide them, protect them, and fight for them. He had to be strong for them, and so he did. Madara became someone important. Now his hand brushing another’s meant something. Nothing was to be carefree anymore. Somehow, though he would never admit it, he wished for Hashirama’s peace more than ever now. He couldn’t tell anyone that - dreams didn’t protect his people.
People looked at him with either fear or admiration in their eyes. He was a powerful man. In a way, it felt his power had become him. He wondered, maybe, that Izuna and Hikaku were the only two to truly know him anymore. And even that was fickle. They did not know about how much he still dreamed about the escape from war. About how sometimes he dreamed about packing his bags and leaving. It was his darkest secret, because he truly loved his clan, and nothing he had to sacrifice for them would ever be too much.
But still.
Still.
Perhaps nobody saw Madara anymore. Ironic, for the Uchiha.
He dreamed, now, of someone looking at him with clear eyes that reflected nothing of fear, of admiration. No, he didn’t even need love. He only wanted someone to see him with no pretense, and listen without judgments to his ramblings.
So his obsession grew.
He built up and tore down an imaginary soulmate every day. One day they listened quietly as Madara read them shitty poetry. Another day they teased him with a sharp smile and made him fume and laugh in equal measure. Some nights he imagined skin upon his skin, heat and sweat and teeth and lips trailing across a blush. Other nights, all he could dare to wish for was a hand in his own.
Madara gave himself this one allowance. This one obsession to escape into.
He wished for everything, but expected nothing.
He didn’t need any of the fantasies. All he needed was something real.
When his skin brushed another’s, his mind still begged please, please, please.
He swore, when he met that someone, he would do anything to make them happy. He couldn’t wait to throw some massive, unnecessary party, to preen and show his someone off. He couldn’t wait to waste money and time on silly little things to give them. Madara had looked through his mother’s collection of clothes and jewels and wondered which one he would give first. Of course the rest would naturally follow, but in what order, and how fast?
Would his soulmate even like them? It didn’t matter. They could collect dust, and Madara would still give them. Just to give them something.
He was sure the day that they met, Madara would do anything to earn himself a chance.
He waited for his skin to stain with manic patience.
So, when he found out that he had not only met his soulmate apparently, but had not been able to see them, or feel them, or know them at all, and rather than all the parties and gifts, that he lost them, Madara predictably went ballistic.
“Are you fucking kidding me?!”
Nozomi quickly excused herself, walking away in what was barely not a run, leaving Izuna and Hikaku to deal with the absolute shit-storm that was about to happen.
It was a just-barely sort of thing that prevented Madara from accidentally burning down the medical ward. He spat fire and shouted, fuming and lashing out like a child - only one that was lined to the teeth with every fire jutsu known to man.
His tantrum had been loud enough to draw every curious Uchiha with ears to the medical ward. They arrived just in time for the entire clan to witness their clan head throw himself on the ground and wail a baby. Any worry they had felt for him vanished instantly. Lord Madara was fine; he was clearly back to his old self.
“This is unfair!”
It took Madara about two days to stop trying to break things, a third one to stop snapping irritably, and four people watching him at all times to ensure he didn’t tear the bandages off his eyes so he could see his soul mark.
“This is bullshit!”
After what had felt like a tortuous eternity, Nozomi had put a hand to his head, looked at the wound, and declared he was fully healed.
They walked him to his rooms, placed him before a mirror, and left him to privacy. He heard them rise, and walk, and heard the hiss of the shoji doors. Then he was alone. He had not been alone since the night in the blizzard. He would never admit it, but it frightened him now: darkness and silence.
He sat there in silence for a moment. After spending days trying everything in his power to just look, he was suddenly scared to. He did not know why.
His hands rose shakily past his face, gently grasping the bandages. Slowly, he began to unwind them, gauze pooling in his lap in a small pile, and the light beyond the bandages growing until-
Madara’s face stared back at him in the mirror, sharingan glowing red in the darkness of the room. Across the shelf of his cheekbones was a mirrored stain, red as blood.
Madara forgot how to breathe.
His soulmark.
Unbidden, a hand came up to trace along the mark. There was a long stain, reaching diagonally from below the outer corner of his eye to the end of his eyebrow. Beneath the harsh cut of his lower crease, a smaller misshapen blot rested. The placements of the thumb and a forefinger, where a diagnostic jutsu would be best performed on his eyes.
Madara laughed.
His eyes traced reverently across the marks, and how beautiful they were. Red as his mother’s carmine roses in the garden, blooming just as stunningly on his face. Madara almost found himself unsuited for such a delicate beauty, with the harsh cut lines of his face, but he only loved them more for it. The bud below his eye and the long petal touching his brow, he had never seen anything as pretty.
He watched joyously as the marks crinkled when he smiled.
Madara had found his soulmate. He had a soulmate.
How wonderful, that he still had his eyes to be able to see the marks. How incredibly lucky that he would still be able to see his soulmate one day.
And oh.
Madara’s hand traced the marks, and pictured the now dyed fingers that must have left them.
How amazing his soulmate must be, to give him back his eyes. How grateful, how indebted he was.
Madara locked eyes with himself in the mirror, and watched as that marked face set into an expression of determination.
He decided at that moment that he would give the world to his soulmate. Give anything, anything.
He had lost him.
Madara would never let go again.
—
Tobirama had never wanted a soulmate.
There were quite a few reasons why, but the first time he had the realization was when he first saw his father hit his mother.
They were not soulmates. There was no color from an accidental touch. His father had a gray spot on his cheek, faded from his soulmate who had died years before. Another Senju - dead before they even came of age. His mother did not have a soulmate yet, and so she and Bustuma married, and had children.
Bustuma had never loved her, but even he could muster up some tenderness for who had become his life partner. His mother was much the same. It was not a fairytale romance, but they both got something out of it. And it was enough. Not dazzling, not exciting, but it was not bad. And so they were happy with mediocrity.
Then one day his mother bumped into a visiting Hatake delegate, and where her brow met his collarbone turned a sunshine yellow. Suddenly, mediocrity was not enough for her.
Bustuma was not a jealous creature, but something in him broke. That his wife had a connection he could never have, that she got what was stolen from him, that she had promised him devotion to the Senju and now wanted to run to the Hatake-
It only took a month for his anger to build enough to the point where Bustuma then ensured that his wife’s mark would never again be sunshine yellow.
Now, in a way, the two of them were matched.
Two gray marks.
When Tobirama came along, it only made things worse. He looked nothing like his father, but rather like a dead man. However, Tobirama was his father’s child, Butsuma’s child. His hair was stark white, not Hatake gray, his eyes not black but ruby red - and besides, he was conceived long after his mother met her soulmate.
That did not stop Bustuma’s hand cracking across his face. That did not stop the haunted look in his mother’s eye.
If that was what soulmates made people do, Tobirama hoped he would remain markless his entire life.
As he grew up, he learned that his parents were a rare exception. Soulmates, it seemed, were truly destined for one another, pulled by some gravitational force together to connect in a supernova of a collision.
The splashes of colorful markings were not just an empty promise of what should have been, but rather what was. Grey was a tragedy but color was life and beauty and love.
Neither Kawarama nor Itama had met their soulmates before they died, and Tobirama bitterly believed it was for the best. He knew what gray did to people.
So when Hashirama first met Mito, and their skin dyed emerald at first touch, Tobirama had been terrified. Terrified like he had not been since his last brother’s chakra had flared in pain, just before it snuffed out. Tobirama was terrified for his last brother, and what on earth a soulmate could do to him.
Luckily, their love was one that assuaged worry. Mito was what Hashirama could never be: steady, practical, sharp. Hashirama, in turn, brought joy and adventure and love. They completed each other. They loved each other.
One day, before a battle with the Uchiha, Tobirama had seen Mito silently slip her hand into Hashirama’s. She said nothing, but their hands twisted into each other like it was a tether keeping them tied to the earth. Such a simple, gentle assurance.
Tobirama had never wanted a soulmate, but he did then.
Who wished him off when he left for battle? Who sat with him on the long nights? Who listened to the things he never dared to say?
He looked in the mirror that night and saw in his reflection a man killed out of jealousy. He saw an appearance that had called people to cry foul play, to name him a demon, and to scorn his snow-pale skin and rabbit eyes.
How could he be someone’s other half when he was not even whole himself?
He could not smile like Hashirama did. He could not be as dazzling as Touka. He could never be as beautiful as Mito.
What did he have, really?
Even Hashirama looked at him sometimes like he was somehow missing something vital. And many times it felt like he was. Tobirama was a tactician. Hashirama had no idea how to run a war, and he held no desire to. But both he and Tobirama understood that their negligence in tending to their garden of blood would only let it grow out of control, and the Senju would be swallowed up and consumed by the strangling vines.
So Hashirama looked at Tobirama, who had always devoted himself wholeheartedly to duty, and handed him to the keys of the armory.
Each drop of Uchiha and Senju blood that was spilt from then on almost always had Tobirama’s signature on it.
Hashirama loved his younger brother, he did, but even he was disturbed by the ruthless efficiency at which Tobirama could conduct a war. It did not take too much to mistake Tobirama’s sense of duty for hatred.
The Uchiha had killed his younger brothers after all, and Tobirama was never as good at forgiving as Hashirama was.
Easier still it was to confuse practicality for pessimism.
Tobirama killed when he was told to, and when he was called demon, he did not flinch. He had been called it many times before. After enough times, he began to repeat it.
He looked into the mirror and saw the man he supposedly looked like, and he saw the warmonger they all saw, and he saw the monster they all called him.
“Demon,” he whispered to himself.
For what else could he be?
Why else was he born like a bloodless spirit, looking like a man who had died for something as stupid as love, who could not live up to the promises that the universe made his mother.
For the first time, Tobirama wished he’d never have a soulmate, not for fear of the gray, but for the absolute certainty that he would disappoint.
Tobirama had the keys to the armory, and he was the one who drew the battle lines.
Who would ever love someone who’s stock and trade was only blood?
Who, indeed.
Apparently, Uchiha fucking Madara, according to the universe.
Tobirama tugged on a pair of black gloves, covering up the red on his hands once more.
‘Just kill me now’ he thought dispondantly.
The reason he had been out in the forest that night had been a stupid one. Sure, all clans kept up patrol in the winter, but they only kept squads running near to their compound. Nobody would be coming in the winter - the enemy was the cold more than anything, and so the winter became the only point of truce in the war.
So, realistically, there was no reason for Tobirama to be so far out from the compound during a snowstorm, let alone the blizzard that had set in.
But the thing was, as simple and stupid was… Tobirama just liked snow.
His clan, more inclined to the warm weather of summer and spring, tended to disagree, but Tobirama had never been much of a typical Senju. Few Senju could navigate a blizzard, and fewer still wanted to. But Tobirama found odd peace in a storm. Something about how the snow and wind swallowed him until nobody could find him.
The patterns he could see in the seeming chaos of it all fascinated him, and he liked to watch the flurries of snow dance elegantly in the bitter cold.
Tobirama had built himself up to be a hard man, in part to cover Hashirama’s blind spots, as his brother was all too soft sometimes. He allowed himself these small moments of gentleness, however. Little things to reaffirm he remained human behind the carefully fashioned armor he had made for himself: teaching the clan children, making jutsu, joking with Touka, and watching the snow dance.
He didn’t afford himself much, but he let himself have that.
The blizzard that swept fire country was an in-a-decade sort of thing. Wild and ferocious to the point even Tobirama had to be walking the snow carefully. He delighted in it. He could barely see between the flurries! He felt he could even get lost! What a wonderfully powerful storm. He actually had to strain his chakra to navigate the sleeting white, to feel beneath the layers of dampening snow and feel the sparks of life.
It was so blessedly silent within the howling storm, a reprieve that did not come easy for a sensor like Tobirama.
So when an obtrusive hot chakra burned into his sensing, he was justifiably put out. But his anger faded quickly as he identified the signature.
Iron-soot-smoke
Uchiha Madara.
Tobirama snapped his head over to the direction of the chakra, mouth hanging slightly open.
What on earth was the man doing out in this sort of storm?
He stretched his senses through the snow, and quickly picked up the slimy taste of ten other signatures: Hagoromo fighters, closing in on Madara. Their chakra seethed with violence and sanguine greed, reminding Tobirama of a fox creeping into a hen house. Tobirama could have laughed at the implication that Madara was the hen.
He almost left Madara to deal with them, but then Madara’s chakra flickered and burned with pain, and the Hagoromo struck, like a hammer meeting heated iron, sending a shower of fear-desperation-anger from Madera in all directions.
The man was losing? Tobirama’s brow pinched as he focused. Hagoromo signatures were dying, but Madara’s was growing increasingly panicked and unstable. Madara would not survive this fight.
And if Tobirama were any other Senju, he would have let him.
He was not Hashirama. He wasn’t some sort of all forgiving, all loving altruist. He had enemies, and he killed those enemies. Tobirama had fashioned himself to be a hard man, a pragmatic man; realistically, he knew he should let Madara die.
But Tobirama was a smart man, and he used it to get what he wanted. While most people thought that was war, it was not.
They must have forgotten, with time and with blood, that Tobirama had once opposed war. They must have forgotten that Tobirama fought and killed only that others may live. They forgot, and left Tobirama to his war. But even so, alone in the dark, Tobirama’s mind continued to tick away, to search wildly through shadows for a light, for a guiding star, an opportunity.
Something to take peace from dreams and lift it to possibility.
Madara had long been that light.
Madara was the only Uchiha who had ever once given serious thought to peace, even if it was when he was just a boy. People thought that after he and Hashirama severed their friendship, that he had grown out of childish ideas like peace. But people thought a lot of things, and Tobirama knew from personal experience that most of it was false. Most people could not sense chakra in the way Tobirama could, and so they could not feel as he did how Madara’s chakra dripped with revulsion and horror through every battle. Not only at Uchiha deaths, but at Senju too.
Madara was the key to peace, and Tobirama had spent years trying to figure out a plan to get him to accept Hashirama’s extended hand.
He still didn’t know how, but he knew that he needed Madara still.
Worse still, if Madara was dead, Izuna would take over the mantle of the Uchiha, and then there would be no hope for Hashirama’s peace, and it would almost assuredly spell the Uchiha clan’s eventual eradication. Peace in a way, sure, but at the cost of hundreds of lives, Uchiha and Senju alike.
If Tobirama wanted even the chance at a bloodless peace, he needed Madara alive.
Tobirama had reasoned it all out that night, in the snow. Then, he gathered chakra in his legs, and jumped.
Tobirama was not known as the fastest shinobi alive without reason, and that night he put even the swiftness of the blizzard gale to shame, racing so quickly that the air around him howled.
He approached the clearing and unsheathed his sword so that when his next stride carried him past his adversaries, it was with an arc of blood lancing off him.
The first Hagoromo body hit the ground, and the remaining two turned to look at him with fear. Tobirama’s hand curled into a single sign, and the white snow turned red. All the Hagoromo lay dead now.
At last, he turned to Madara. What a pathetic state he was in. An Uchiha without his eyes was as good as crippled entirely.
“Kill me.” Madara had said.
“No.” Tobirama had replied.
Instead of driving his sword through Madara’s still beating heart, Tobirama had sheathed it instead, and kneeled before the clan head. His fingers graced either side of his cheeks, smearing blood with them. He focused his chakra into the sockets, and assessed the damage. He needed to see what he was working with.
Madara had been incredibly lucky that Tobirama had found him, to say the least. The Hagoromo bloodline thieves had not been careful when extracting his eyes, and had left messily torn nerve endings behind.
Tobirama’s mouth had twisted down, as he looked closer. There were patches of dead cells on the optic nerve, and they extended past the tear and back into Madara’s visual cortex. Damage like this would have been heavily affecting the clan head’s sight. He would have been going blind.
Well, if that wasn’t a shock.
He decided then to shelve it for now. He had work to do.
Carefully, he retrieved a sealing scroll from the Hagoromo closest to Madara. It had been sealed with a key sequence, but it did not take much trying from Tobirama to break it. With a twist of chakra, Tobirama was holding Madara’s eyes.
Tobirama retrieved a pair of tweezers from his small medical bag. He wasn’t working in the best of conditions, but it would have to work for now.
It was kind of gross, even Tobirama would admit that, as he essentially had to shove Madara’s eyes back into his own skull. With one hand, he held open the bloodied, limp eyelid, and with the other he gently popped the eye back into its socket. Then, maintaining his diagnostic jutsu he viewed within the skull and used the tweezers to guide the nerve ending into place, so it was touching with the severed end.
And then for the hard part.
Tobirama rummaged through his bag, and pulled out a pair of seals. He placed them on the back of his hands, and watched as the paper flashed and disappeared and left him with ink markings over his bloodied skin.
The kind of work Tobirama had been about to do, working on the nerves and brain, was not the kind of thing that even he could accomplish unassisted. Very few had the fine chakra control to perform Iryo jutsu, but even Tobirama with his precision was all too blunt. The seals focused and reduced his chakra. The difference was comparable to fighting with Madara’s gunbai, versus the finest of senbon. Tobirama had to thread a needle from miles out, this was him giving himself a scope.
Then ready, Tobirama had sighed one last time, checked on his chakra reserves to confirm he had enough for the task he was about to undertake, and finally began work on the first eye.
Hours later, Tobirama had finished up, wrapping Madara’s eyes in gauze and patting himself on the back. Madara would make a full recovery. He dragged the man to his compound, thanking the blizzard for covering their signatures, and finally returned to the Senju compound.
He had thought that would be the end of it.
Finally alone within his quarters, he gathered water with a flick of his hand into a basin. He towled the blood off his face and neck from where it had splattered, then massaged the dried blood off his hands. Tobirama had to scrape at the dried residue to get it off, and the water turned red.
But when he lifted his hands from the water, nothing could have prepared him for what awaited him.
His fingers stayed red as the water below, stained permanently.
A soul mark.
The water in the basin froze as Tobirama’s blood ran cold.
And now, a week later, Tobirama stared down at his black gloves. Hashirama had asked about them, but Tobirama was able to avoid suspicion by citing the cold. He knew that the answer wasn’t likely to last into the summer, but he doubted Hashirama would even remember he was wearing them by then. Mito might, but she had always left him to his own affairs.
The problem had proven to be Touka.
She knew him as very few did, and she simply scoffed at his excuse. Tobirama hardly ever did things ‘just because’ and she knew it. A couple days of needling and she persuaded him to finally explain.
Tobirama cast one last long look at his gloves. Touka was watching him intensely. He grabbed the fabric gently between his fingers, and tugged the fabric off. As the black gloves peeled away from his fingertips, it revealed calloused white skin that turned red.
Touka softly gasped. Tobirama set his gloves down, and did not look her in the eye.
“You found your soulmate,” she whispered.
Tobirama solemnly nodded.
“And do you know who…?” she trailed off, unsure of herself. It was sad, but not unheard of for one to touch their soulmate without noticing until it was too late. The universe could tell you who was supposedly your other half, but would do you nothing to ensure you met, or stayed together.
Soulmates and tragedy overlapped more than anyone liked to admit, and Tobirama knew this better than anyone.
“Yes,” he said.
“And do they…”
“No.” he said flatly.
“Tobirama,” she tried, laying her hand across his, gently brushing his stained fingertips, “I- I don’t know what to say. I know you weren’t hoping for this.”
“It’s fine,” he said, “Nothing will come of it, anyway.”
Her eyes widened, “surely you don’t mean that? You’d actually leave them by themselves? Tobirama, I know you’re scared but you must at least try-”
“He’s Uchiha.”
He watched as his cousin’s face froze. The heartbreak Tobirama had not allowed himself to feel seeped into her features.
“Oh Tobi,” she whispered, and her hand tightened in his own.
They sat in the wake of it, in a silence that seemed to stretch beyond the room they inhabited: one that reached far out into the winter snow and across buried battlefields that themselves rested on buried bodies from a time no one could remember any longer. Their silence was the silence of the war, one seeming never ending.
“Hashirama’s peace, we must bring Hashirama’s peace.” Touka suddenly said, breaking the silence with a hard conviction in her voice.
Tobirama snapped his head up to her. Touka had never been in support of Hashirama’s attempted treaties, firmly standing on the side of survival rather than dreams. Touka liked fighting, and she was bitter as any other Senju was. Nobody truly liked war, but Touka bore it with a grim determination that even Tobirama could not match.
Touka looked at him, and her eyes softened, “Tobirama, you deserve the chance to love him.”
“Peace isn’t attainable,” he tried to say, but Touka merely rolled her eyes.
“If you thought that, you would have killed Uchiha Madara when you had the chance.”
Even Tobirama could not hide the shock that crossed him.
“How did you..?”
Touka laughed, a small soft thing, “what other Uchiha would you touch and not kill? Your soulmate certainly isn’t a child. Beyond that, I can think of no other that you would spare other than Madara.”
She sighed, “You’re my baby cousin, Tobi. You may think you’ve hardened your heart, but I know how much you detest this war you run. I see how you wish to fight the bit in your mouth, but steel yourself not to. I’ve seen you research Madara, and I’ve seen the way you look at him - you think he could tip the scales.”
“I could have ended the war if I killed him,” he whispered.
“You would have eradicated the Uchiha, had you.”
Tobirama took his hand away from hers, “would you have liked that?”
Touka looked at him with saddened eyes, “I would have not. I want the war over, but have never desired to watch you, or any Senju suffer for it. Tobirama, I have watched you grow up, and I have seen you play and hide all the cards you have, and I have been your second in command through all of it. I know just as well as you do how much blood would be spilt had Madara died.”
“We would win,” he said.
“At a cost,” she shot back, “and Hashirama would have hated you for it. You know that.”
Pain lanced through his heart, and he bared his teeth into a snarl, “don’t say that.”
Touka tried to touch his shoulder, but he pushed her hand away.
“Hashirama loves me,” he snapped at her.
“He does,” Touka agreed, “but he is a horse with blinders on, and his focus is not on the Senju, or me, or even you Tobirama. It is on peace.”
Sometimes, Tobirama thought, the truth could be a very hurtful thing.
Touka tried to touch his shoulder again, and this time he let her.
Her voice, when she did speak again, had lost its cutting bluntness, and was soft and smooth, “what I am trying to say with this, is that I would not have you suffer the pain of a Senju victory, not when there is another path. Peace - peace with the Uchiha - may not be the only end of this god forsaken war, but I think… well, I think it may be the only ending where any of us may be happy.”
“My soulmate will never love me,” Tobirama whispered.
“You can’t know that.”
“Touka,” and now it was his turn for cold truth, “I am the monster under their beds. Hells below, I am the monster under Senju beds as well. I know that. I made myself that. I did not build myself to be lovable, to be cherished. I built myself strong.”
He smiled ruefully, “Peace will come. I know it will, but please, do not expect from me what I cannot give you. I have killed countless Uchiha. I would not forgive myself, I do not expect anyone else to. I deserve that much.”
“You have always been a harsh judge.”
“Perhaps.”
“You truly believe it is impossible.”
Tobirama sighed once, derisively, “I am a warmonger Touka-”
Her face twisted angrily, “You are a soldier-”
“I am a monster!” he shouted, voice rising as it rarely did. Silence echoed loudly in the space following it, and it settled like dust across the still room. Touka looked at him with that same anger, that same injustice, but now she held her tongue. Her anger kept on a tight leash, all together reminded that Tobirama would always have the last word. Touka was the only one who would ever dare challenge him, bar Hashirama, but even she would bow when told. It was not her signature on the war deaths.
Tobirama ran a hand through the hair that had fallen loose over his face, readjusting the savage - the all too Hatake-savage that had cursed his mother - until he was once again civil, and once again his father’s son.
“I am a monster,” he repeated quietly, “There is a reason my hands are stained red, even in my soulmark.”
He looked down at his fingers, permanently a rich crimson. There would be no rid of it, short of cutting off his fingers themselves.
“This,” he laughed quietly, “I cannot even pretend to wash off. Fate can have a twisted sense of humor, sometimes.”
He looked at her, where she still sat in a terse silence. He smiled at her, genuinely appreciative in that moment of her anger. It felt good, he would silently admit to himself, to have someone angry for him. It made it easier to not feel anger of his own, and it reminded him that somewhere beneath this stone he had carved himself out of, there was still a person. Something that a good person like Touka thought was worth fighting for.
But the sentiment was all he needed. He didn’t need anything more. He didn’t need a soulmate, he didn’t need that kind of love. Tobirama was the practiced kind of starved, so he knew very well how little he could live on. This, just this, was more than enough.
Asking for anything more was not worth the problems it incurred.
“Peace will come,” he said, promised, “My happiness does not need to be on the treaty.”
Then he tugged on his gloves, covering up the marks, and stood. When he left the room, Touka was still sitting on the ground, watching him with angry, sad eyes, but daring not to say a word.