Quantum Entanglement
Tobirama is dying.
He is not afraid. Tobirama is a shinobi; he had to come to terms with the idea of his own mortality the moment he picked up his first kunai at the age of three. The fact that he has lived to the age of fifty-seven is all but a miracle in and of itself. He can think of no better way than to die to give his students—the next generation of Konoha’s leaders—a fighting chance at survival. At least he can say he has fulfilled his duty as teacher and commander.
His heart beats like a wardrum in his ears, frantically trying to pump blood to vital organs that are beginning to shut down under the blood loss and fatal chakra depletion. A bone-deep chill has begun to set in, creeping up his fingertips and aching in his muscles. His lungs feel like they’re on fire. Still, Tobirama exhales.
Perhaps, now, he will be reunited once more with his brothers. He has made them wait for far too long, though he doesn’t think any of them will hold it against him. Tobirama has much to tell them. He hopes they will be proud.
He knows Konoha will do alright. Saru is smart and capable. A bit too trusting perhaps, but maybe that isn’t so bad. His anija had been the same, after all. Besides, Saru has the rest of his teammates there to keep an eye on and help him. Danzo will stay vigilant, Homura will make sure they are focused, Koharu will keep their ambitions alive, Torifu will be the voice of clarity and calm, and Kagami will be the glue that holds them together. They are all good kids, and put together, Tobirama knows they can achieve anything they put their minds to. They will be alright. The village will do well under their hands.
Tobirama has done all that his duty demanded of him. Mistakes were made, yes, but he can honestly say he only ever did his best. Perhaps now, he can finally rest.
With darkness beginning to creep into the edges of his vision, Tobirama allows his eyelids to flutter shut.
“SENSEI!”
No. Heart hammering painfully in vain, his eyes snap open. He can only just about manage to turn his head in the direction of the call, but he would recognise Kagami’s voice anywhere even if he can’t see him yet. Desperately, Tobirama tries to listen past the ringing in his ears, hoping he might be able to hear the disturbance of an approach or any words exchanged.
His chakra has depleted almost entirely; he doesn’t even have enough to scrape together and mould for sensing. Tobirama has no idea what Kagami is doing here, whether he has the rest of the team with him or if there are pursuers. If his student needs help, Tobirama is in no position to know or aid him.
He tries to push himself up to see better but his limbs have no strength to cooperate with this endeavour. By the end of his pathetic attempt, Tobirama is out of breath and his vision has darkened almost entirely. Every beat of his heart rattles painfully in his skull.
It’s no use. He simply doesn’t have it in him to move anymore.
But bodily travel isn’t the only avenue open to Tobirama.
Even as the thought occurs to him, he knows it’s a ridiculous idea. There’s no guarantee that he will end up anywhere near Kagami, and that’s assuming he will survive the trip or even manage to trigger the jutsu with his flagging chakra. It’s a doomed undertaking right from the start.
But, well—Tobirama has to try. Kagami could be alone out there, in need of even a second’s distraction. What if no one else is there to give him that moment’s opening? Tobirama managed to take out about half the Kinkaku Force but that still leaves roughly ten S-class assailants who could be fighting against his lone student right now.
Besides, the worst that could happen is he dies a few minutes earlier than he will even at this rate. There’s nothing to lose.
Gritting his teeth, Tobirama grasps for the very last of his chakra reserves, scraping together what he can so he can search for his hiraishin markers. He locates the one nearest to where he estimates Kagami’s call came from and focuses.
The thing with the hiraishin is that it only gets easier to use with time. Perhaps, a similar claim can be made for most jutsu, but with the hiraishin, it’s not just a matter of practice leading to ease—it’s that repeated usage of the jutsu literally makes one more liable to slip between the dimensions that their universe is composed of. The hard part is always to actually find a way through the endless nothingness of reality to an anchor point.
So, Tobirama does manage to successfully trigger the jutsu, seemingly against all odds.
And then he runs out of chakra.
For a moment, there is nothing but endless darkness around him. And then, all at once, the agony of his body desperately trying to hold itself together in a plane it was never meant to be exposed to for so long, let alone in the state of near-death that Tobirama had already been. If Tobirama could breathe he might have screamed. As it is, he is helpless to do little more than grit his teeth through it.
It’s like being torn apart from the inside out. The atoms making up his physical form are pulled apart in different directions, literally ripping him open at the seams. ‘This is how I die,’ Tobirama thinks dully.
Then, he feels himself lift and be tugged, as though by some sort of hook. And then nothing. His consciousness floats in endless liminal space with no form to occupy.
He can not see or hear or smell or feel. Still, somehow, he knows the four dimensions interact and sprawl out into infinity around him. The spacial dimensions meet time and twist endlessly and Tobirama simply twists with them. He has no way of knowing how long he spends like this, suspended in between existence, or if time is even a valid existence here.
For a second, for an eternity, he drifts.
And then, drawn in by a powerful gravity, Tobirama is pulled in some unidentifiable direction. Space-time bends under the force, and he bends with it, twisting and hurtling through the four dimensions until finally, finally, he is slammed back into the physical plane of reality with all the gentleness of a battering ram.
There is a burning, an ache that Tobirama is helpless against as his soul bullies its way into a new physical vessel and forces itself to fit in whatever way it can. Now that he can feel again after so long of nothing, every sensation is overwhelming. Distantly, he thinks it must be raining judging by the smell and sound, but every raindrop against his skin feels like it may as well be a water bullet instead.
Bile rises up in the back of his throat, bitter and painful, and Tobirama can only open his mouth to vomit even as it feels like his stomach is trying to crawl right up his throat and out his mouth too. His head is spinning and eyes watering, and he desperately blinks, trying to see better and block out his vision all at once because he doesn’t know where he is or who he is or if he is safe, but his mind cannot catch up to anything that is happening to him. All he can do is react, uncomprehending as he stumbles and lands on his knees, jolting his entire system, making it feel like his brain is rattling against his skull.
The chakra of this body is dangerously low, which explains how his soul managed to occupy it in the first place. There is a nauseating pain in his arm from the fall he took just now, and the amount of swelling tells him that the radial bone is almost certainly fractured. Hunched over as he is, he has no doubts that at least three of his ribs are in no better condition.
Most worrying of all is the gash in his thigh. It is bandaged, albeit poorly, and Tobirama is in no condition to look at it right now, but he can tell from the smell and uncomfortable heat emanating from the wound that it is infected.
All terrible signs even without the supernatural disorientation from having his soul suddenly flung out of the void of space-time and back into the physical plane.
To make matters worse, now that some of the ringing in his ears is beginning to abate, Tobirama can faintly make out the distinct snapping of branches in the near distance—a telltale sign of shinobi unused to tree-hopping pursuing.
Gritting his teeth, he swears under his breath.
So, not only does he have to put up with being stuffed into a new body without his consent, the body has to basically be falling apart and also have hostile forces in pursuit of it. Perfect.
A part of him is tempted to lie down right here in the soft dirt and let his end come for him right now. Tobirama has lived his life and died a death he is not ashamed of. He should be allowed to leave the mortal world behind now.
As it is though, the larger part of him refuses to give up. Tobirama has always been pragmatic to a fault. He triggered a space-time jutsu that fundamentally relies on chakra resonance to traverse through the void of the universe while he had no chakra to spare for the resonance phenomenon to actually occur. Now, his consciousness has come to, though he has no idea where he is or how much time has passed since his ‘death’.
What he does know is that, if he wants to live, he needs to get moving. Right now.
Taking a deep breath, Tobirama braces his weight against one hand and forces himself to climb onto shaky feet, breathing purposefully through the bout of nausea that comes with putting weight on an injured leg and forcing a body that wants to shut down to move. Putting one foot in front of the other might as well be the hardest thing he has ever attempted to do, but Tobirama forges on, stumbling through the forest with a single-minded drive to see this through and survive.
It is a matter of pure chance that he happens to catch sight of his distorted reflection in a puddle on the forest floor, but it is almost enough to stop Tobirama in his tracks entirely, because staring back at him is a familiar face—his own, as a matter of fact. Except that it is clearly…younger. He looks like a teenager. Though he does have the marks on his face, so he has to be older than fifteen at least, but he didn’t catch enough of a glimpse to be sure.
That said, if this is truly his body, then Tobirama can at least hazard a guess at where he is and who is after him. And if he’s right, then the Senju compound is seven minutes away on foot and Tobirama stands enough of a chance to actually make it out of this alive.
With renewed vigour, he bites the inside of his cheek and forces himself to continue. Thanks to the pain lancing up his limbs and the haze of fever from the infected wound, he can’t quite force himself into clarity as he’d like to, streams of thought constantly slipping away along with his grasp on time, but Tobirama does not lose his way. He grew up in these woods. This was his home for the first two decades of his life. Now that he knows where he is, he could even find his way to the compound blind.
The compound walls come into view and Tobirama could shed tears from the overwhelming force of his relief. His pursuers are close; he has only barely managed to stay ahead of them and he might not make it to any of the patrol squads in time.
Tobirama is going to have to take a gamble here, but it might also just be his only shot.
Forcing himself to focus, he gathers up as much of his chakra as he can without causing his organs to shut down and then releases it all in one go, flaring it up high and bright in a beacon that will give his location away. He is running the fatal risk of this resulting in an earlier capture by the shinobi from Land of Wind that are on his tail, but this is his best shot at getting found by someone of his clan too.
With the last of his energy spent, Tobirama collapses against the nearest tree and struggles to catch his bearings, his breath entirely knocked out of him and spots dotting his vision. He isn’t going to be able to stay awake much longer whether he likes it or not. There will be no way of knowing if his gamble paid off or not until he wakes up—if he even does at all.
It feels like the world is spinning around him again. Tobirama swallows down the nausea and carefully breathes through it.
Then, like an oasis in the desert, a wave of chakra crashes into him with all the force of a star collapsing, the signature as familiar to Tobirama as his own, though he hasn’t felt it in years. Tobirama’s eyes snap open, filling with tears despite him never having been one to cry. Just this once, he is powerless against the swell of his emotions. How could he not be?
Hashirama is here, after all.
Bursting through the trees that bend to his will and make way for him, Tobirama’s brother arrives like a hurricane, panic and fury etched into his face for the world to see, chakra pouring out in waves that might make others uncomfortable under the weight of Hashirama’s feelings. Tobirama can only find it reassuring, however. This is chakra he has been around since his birth; he has known his brother and felt his love even before he was born.
It means that Hashirama is still alive. He is alive and looks so young and his hair is barely past his shoulder blades and he is here because Tobirama called for him and he came.
“Tobirama,” Hashirama breathes, wild eyes finally landing on his little brother.
There is so much Tobirama wants to say to his elder brother, stories and words he has wanted to share since the day Hashirama passed away and left him all alone for the very first time, but now that they are here, the words get lodged in his throat and nothing comes out.
All he can manage is an awed, “Anija.”
He is safe now, he thinks. Hashirama will take care of his pursuers and make sure nothing else happens to him. Tobirama can worry about everything else later.
For now, he finally closes his eyes and lets the darkness take him once more.