and we dream
Madara dreams of different worlds. He tips his head back and laughs to a purple sky and loves so much it hurts, Tobirama a warm line against his side. Then he woke and bit back a howl (he couldn't forget any part of him, not when every memory of him was burned in his mind with the sharingan on the battlefield- he had been so beautiful- and eventually as he read everything he had on Tobirama like that, just to keep him close when the paper fell to pieces) he dreams and it is a pain he would not give up for any anything (he has already payed the price of it). She understands, Touka with her dead brother, she look at him and knows. Sometimes she tells him stories of his youth and he tells her of all he knows from the fragments he left on paper, she shows him how Tobirama helped her pin up her hair until she could do it on her own. (he is astonished to have his hair so tamed, in the heat of the desert it is a blessing. He teaches her how to tear a man’s heart out still beating, it is considered a fair trade on all sides)
They destroy every person that so much as laid a hand on Tobirama; during the days they fight their way across every country to wreak their vengeance and the night he dreams (sometimes he could almost feel fingers combing through his hair even after he awoke) it is a kind of peace. Not the one he thought he fought for but something (he tries not to think on the village too much, the memory hurts, he doesn’t understand why Hashirama refused to so much as think of his brother) and they make do. The affection between them will always be based in a man long gone, they are too alike to care for each other over much otherwise, but it is better than Madara would have expected when he walked away from everything he thought he would ever want. (Madara never expected to find love, not as the clan head and not given his focus on the future of his clan, he thought his dreams would always be for others)
Always he thinks of what could have been; theirs would never have been an easy relationship, but Madara has never particularly liked easy, and he knows there would have been passion between them.