Quantum Interference
Rei is two years older than Tobirama, with wide set shoulders and a stocky build. He is shorter but has more muscle mass, and those are favourable odds for a match based purely on hand-to-hand. Tobirama watches his opponent warm up with pursed lips as he methodically stretches out his wrist and fingers.
He is not surprised that things came to this. Though they never duelled in his first life, he and Rei were on the list of people that could not be made to work together for their mutual safety after the Hatake joined Konoha, and that didn’t change through nearly three decades and two wars. Neither could trust the other when there remained scores to be settled, but Hashirama had hated the idea of Tobirama getting involved in another duel given the disaster of that first time, so they never managed to work through it.
This time, without his brother here, Tobirama hopes they might be able to make things clear one way or the other.
Eizan approaches them as proctor, looking older and weary as ever. “This is a trial of honour. Neither of you are allowed any weapons or usage of chakra, and you will fight until one of you either surrenders or is unable to continue. Am I clear?” They nod. “Very well. Then we will call this match to a start.”
He leaves the makeshift arena that has been sectioned off with a circle of rocks and sticks, joining the crowd that has formed outside of it, comprised of curious shinobi and civilians alike. There are several Uchiha present, sharingan already spinning, and Tobirama only has the time to sigh before a high four note whistle sounds to mark the beginning of the duel.
Rei wastes no time, immediately springing forward and lunging to grapple for Tobirama. He sidesteps and dodges neatly, managing to keep just out of reach even as Rei follows quickly in dogged pursuit. For every step Rei takes, Tobirama takes two back. He has always been fast even without the hiraishin, his entire fighting style having been built around agility and precision, and he stubbornly outpaces Rei now as he uses the openings to study his opponent and catalogue his style of combat.
“Stop running away,” Rei snarls, putting more force into his dive for Tobirama and managing to crowd close with the added momentum.
Not deigning to respond, Tobirama blocks the frenzied hits that follow, taking the blow on the elbow and following with a hard smack to the jaw that enrages his opponent as intended. “Sloppy,” he notes coolly. “Unfocused.”
Rei lets out a guttural sound that is more animal than man. “Fuck you,” he spits out, rust coloured eyes narrowed to slits. His next punch lands hard against Tobirama’s ribs before it can be blocked, and he narrowly avoids biting his own tongue at the immediate flare of pain. “If you’d just listened and stayed, he wouldn’t have left.”
“It wasn’t his decision to make,” Tobirama says, kicking the other man squarely in the chest to force him back before leaping away. “I made my choice.”
“Yes, you made that perfectly clear.” Rei sneers and draws close again, fingers gripping for the bruise that is blooming against Tobirama’s side where that punch landed, nails digging into skin and drawing blood. “Chasing after your brother like some fucking dog. You’re a disgrace to your blood, Tobirama. I never understood what he saw in you.”
Narrowing his eyes, Tobirama twists harshly to escape the hold, allowing himself to overbalance towards the ground. He breaks the fall with his hands, catching himself and heaving his weight onto them to kick Rei in the throat and push him away, closing his fist around loose dirt and debris before spinning out to come up on his feet.
As he may have intended to, Rei has touched a nerve. Tobirama aims to extract sufficient retribution.
First, a visual distraction. He swings his handful of dirt right into Rei’s face, mechanically slapping down the immediate blind jab that follows. Counters with a cross punch to the cheek, and while Rei stumbles back from the hit, Tobirama follows after him like liquid, bringing his arms back to swing them forward and clap his hands around his opponent’s ears, effectively befuddling him by taking auricular balance out of the equation.
Dazed and driven by rage, Rei digs his heels into the ground and attempts a rounded hit to his vulnerable ribs. Tobirama anticipates as much, employing an elbow block and then a body shot to Rei’s open torso. A haywire punch coming in from the left. Tobirama intercepts it, moves with his own momentum and slams his elbow into Rei’s face, strategically weakening his jaw before fully fracturing it with a follow up punch.
Rei’s eyes are wide with pain, rage and a wild grief. Tobirama meets them evenly as he slams his fist into his chest and cracks the bones there. Swinging from one hit to the next, he subsequently traumatises the solar plexus and then decisively dislocates Rei’s jaw entirely by slamming his skull into it. Finally, he spins around and kicks into the man’s diaphragm, sending him stumbling into the dirt.
In summary: tinnitus, fractured jaw, two cracked ribs, one broken entirely, and a haemorrhaging diaphragm.
A hush falls over the arena, all eyes on Rei to see if he will be able to get back on his feet and continue the fight. Tobirama knows he won’t, not when he specifically targeted balance and then made it nigh impossible to put that much strain on the trunk. The full physical recovery will take six weeks without chakra healing. It will be six months before Rei will be able to stomach the thought of meeting Tobirama’s gaze again.
He certainly will not be offering any more insults or questioning Tobirama’s blood and loyalty again.
“It is my win,” Tobirama pronounces. He spins on his heel, turning his back to Rei in a deliberate power play and strides away, absently pressing his hand to his ribs and knitting the cracks in the bone back together, smoothing away the damage until not even the crescent imprints of Rei’s nails remain on his skin.
The gathered crowd parts for him, no one daring to contest the outcome of the duel. None of them look Tobirama in the eye. None but one that is.
Through the crowd, sharingan spinning, Uchiha Izuna’s eyes find Tobirama, and he does not look away.
“You’re leaving.”
Tobirama freezes, muscles tensing for a split second before forcefully relaxing, and he resumes his task of completing a final check of the lab to make sure he doesn’t leave behind anything of importance. “I finished formulating the vaccine for mass reproduction. My job here is done.”
Izuna makes an acknowledging hum low in his throat, watching Tobirama with the same unreadable something in his gaze that hasn’t left since the duel three days ago. “Where will you go from here?”
“The Senju compound.” A pause. “Will you be trying to hunt me down?”
“I don’t know. I probably should. Logically, I mean.”
“Logically,” Tobirama agrees. “Why did you come to see me, Izuna?”
For a long moment, Izuna is silent, and Tobirama thinks he will not answer him so he silently returns to what he was doing. Then, the Uchiha speaks up, “I thought I knew you.” Shrugging, he amends, “I thought I knew enough. I know you are cold, vicious, perceptive, and calculating. I know you are dangerous and that I can never seem to get a step ahead of you before you catch up. I know you are my enemy.”
Blinking, Tobirama points out, “You’re not wrong.”
“No,” Izuna agrees, “but apparently you don’t want to be my enemy, so I guess that just makes me something of an asshole.”
Lips twitching, Tobirama says, “You are an asshole.”
Izuna rolls his eyes. “Shut up. My point is that now I know you’re more than just those things. I know you’re willing to help even the Uchiha, I know you are loyal to the causes you devote yourself to and that you would go to extreme lengths to prove it, and I know that peace is one of them for whatever reason.” He looks frustrated now, eyes narrowed into a glare directed at the floor. “I know more about you now, but I understand even less, so I wish I didn’t.”
“You’re overthinking this,” Tobirama notes, brows furrowing.
“Probably,” Izuna admits. “It was easier to hate you when I thought you felt the same.”
Tobirama carefully does not raise a brow at that. ‘Interesting,’ he thinks, leaning back against the table that had served as his workstation. Folding his arms, he considers the young man across from him and admits, “I don’t want to kill you.”
Exhaling sharply, Izuna closes his eyes, shoulders slumping. “You have to,” he says. “You have to want to kill me, and I have to want to kill you.”
“Why?” Tobirama challenges.
“Because it makes sense!” Izuna snaps. “Because that’s how things always have been. How they’re supposed to be.”
Tobirama softens, lowering his voice as he says, “They don’t have to be.”
Izuna shakes his head. “You’ve gone and made everything difficult.”
“I won’t apologise for that.”
“Of course not,” Izuna scoffs, resigned. “I don’t know how you are able to let go of the anger. Every time I try to even think about it, I see my dead brother’s face and it is accusing me of forgetting. How could I do that? To him, to myself. How could I ever do that?”
Tobirama pulls his chakra closer to himself to minimise the backlash he can feel from Izuna’s chakra leaking his storm of emotions everywhere. He breathes and the salty smell of sadness stings his nose. “So, what—you’ll hold on forever?”
“It’s all I have. Don’t you get that?”
Izuna has held onto his grief too long, Tobirama realises abruptly. He has held on so long that it lives inside him, and he has become little more than a vessel for the ghost that haunts him. “I don’t know how to help you,” Tobirama admits because you can’t ease someone else’s heartache if they don’t want it gone, no matter how hard you try.
“I don’t want you to help me,” Izuna counters, frustrated. “I don’t need help. I need you to—to make sense again.”
“I do make sense, Izuna,” Tobirama says softly, “and that scares you.”
Something fractures in the fragile look on Izuna’s young face. He looks like he wants to scream and claw at Tobirama’s face. He looks like he wants to cry. He does none of those things. Instead, he breathes slowly and shrugs. “Maybe.” Bitterness bleeds into his voice and he says, “You make me feel like there’s something wrong with me.”
“There might be, but I think that’s human.”
“You are my enemy,” Izuna states, void of any inflection, as though reminding himself.
Tobirama looks at him. “Do you really believe that?”
A sharp inhale. “I want to.”
Smiling wryly, Tobirama points out, “Nothing in life stays the same forever.”
Izuna swallows. “And still I never learned how to let go of anything.”
“You are afraid of change,” Tobirama observes. “Do you think you will be left behind?”
There is a stretch of silence that feels endless as Izuna stares at nothing. Finally, he says, “I don’t make it easy—to stay, I mean. I know that. I know people think I do this on purpose, because I’m mean or hurtful. I can’t explain why I’m this way or why I get so angry sometimes, but I know I’m difficult. It would…make sense. It’d make sense for me to get left behind. So, I have to be the one to hold on. Because,” he falters, “because no one else might.”
Tobirama wonders if Izuna has ever confessed this to anyone else. He wonders what it means for him to be offering this honesty to his enemy, he wonders if even Izuna knows the answer to that, or whether he would be able to accept it if he did know.
He asks again, “Why have you come to see me, Izuna?”
“I don’t know,” Izuna says, half desperate and half afraid, like he wants Tobirama to give him the answer just as much as he doesn’t want to listen to it.
Tobirama does not call him out on his lie.