Time-Traveling Nuisance
The symbol comes to his mind easily, naturally, nudging his quill into drawing it effortlessly on the piece of yellowed parchment. A circle inside another, larger circle, and six lines that loosely resemble wings. It looks perfect, and Tobirama stares at it in confusion for a few minutes, willing it to spill it’s secrets, because he doesn’t know where it came from.
“If you stare at that with a just little bit more intensity, it’ll burst into flames,” Toka sing-songs somewhere behind him.
“Does a closed door mean nothing in this house?” Tobirama snaps, but it comes out more longsuffering than scathing. Privacy is a dream he doesn’t bother chasing anymore.
Tōka snorts and hops herself up to sit on his desk. Three very rare, very expensive scrolls tumble to the ground and halfheartedly roll away. “What’s that?” she asks, peering down at the parchment Tobirama’s been staring into submission for the past minute. Her long hair crawls across the parchment and smears the ink.
He sighs, running a hand over his face. He can feel the migraine coming, “A summoning mark,”
Tōka hums in thought, “Odd look for a summoning mark,”
“Yes, I’m aware”
“What did it do for you to glare at it like that?”
“I don’t know what it means.” Tobirama traces the edges with his eyes again, where the ink has become smudged, “It just...came to me,”
It’s unusual, to say the least. Neither drawing or calligraphy have ever been his strong suits, and he generally has to doodle idly for a good few hours before his efforts yield something even remotely accommodating to his needs, when designing a new seal. It shouldn’t be this...effortless.
“Maybe it’s fate,” Tōka shrugs, already bored with the topic.
This time, Tobirama snorts. He carefully cleans his brush and leaves it in his case, rising to his feet and putting the strange mark off his mind. He’s nothing if not practical, after all. “Maybe it is,” he agrees sardonically, and leads the way to the training grounds.
He’s going to die. Tobirama’s certain of it.
His comrades are locked in combat, all of them in various stages of exhaustion, some of them near collapse.
Not far from him, Hashirama and Madara are facing each other, leveling the landscape with each powerful blow. But even their strength, titanic as it is, is dwindling.
“Please, Madara,” Hashirama tries, as always, the plead in his voice obvious and for all to hear. He says nothing more, but what he wants is obvious. Please, end this, brother. Come to my side.
For a second, the Uchiha looks like he’s thinking about it. His eyes fade back to onyx and he stands for just a moment, heaving breaths seeming to rip through his body like earthquakes. They are all tired and halfway dead, and for all that Tobirama knows both he and Hashirama never aim to kill while faced with the other, a fight is a fight and death is always a possibility. If he yielded, it would end. If he gave up to Hashirama’s pleads for peace, it would all end.
For all that Tobirama scoffs at his brother’s childish dreams, in moments like these he can see the appeal.
But, as always, Madara’s eyes stray to the side, roaming over the bodies littering the ground and to his brother, Izuna, his one true north. He pauses on the blood on the floor and on Tobirama’s hands, as if to reassure himself of the choices he makes. The sharingan flares to life once more, and he launches himself to Hashirama with a battle cry.
Tobirama breathes in deep, trying to will the pain into submission and force his body to move. They’re evenly matched, he and Izuna. They’ve been evenly matched all their lives, and their fight could go on forever, but… But Tobirama is tired, bone-weary in a way he’s never been before. His body aches from exertion, and the gaping wound on the side of his torso, courtesy of Izuna’s sword which now lies scattered in pieces, pulls every time he draws in a breath. Izuna’s eyes see him move before he even thinks of moving, the twitch of his muscles and flare of his tattered chakra reserves enough tell for him, and his renowned speed means nothing when faced with an enemy that can practically read his mind.
“Senju,” Izuna says, eyes flickering black for a second before bleeding back to red. He’s tired, too. “Yield,”
Tobirama doesn’t dignify that with an answer, instead hurtling forward, raising his sword without much finesse to take advantage of the Uchiha’s dwindling strength. Izuna moves his neck out of the way and the blade connects with Izuna’s upper arm, drawing a cascade of blood like an explosion when the man ducks low. Tobirama feels a sharp pain on his upper thigh, the shrill agony of steel piercing through skin and flesh nearly enough to make him scream.
“Izuna!” Madara yells then, releasing an attack that sends Hashirama flying, even as he sounds absolutely ready to drop everything and rush to his brother’s side. Tobirama often wonders what it must be like to be the focus of that razor sharp, laser focused attention, to be the center of all of that coalesced sheer willpower. Surely it must be exhausting, but Izuna handles it with the easy, detached grace with which he seems to handle everything.
“Just a scratch,” he says, letting blood flow from his wound freely as steady red eyes watch Tobirama pull the kunai from where it’s been deeply imbedded into the meat of his thigh, the serrated blade tearing the flesh further on the way out. Blood flows like life leaving his body, sticky and rich under the midday sun, and Tobirama allows himself a smile at his enemy’s quick-thinking strategy. Feigning exhaustion, risking injury; all as a last resort to maim Tobirama’s greatest asset: his speed.
Not far from something he himself would have done.
“Tobirama,” Izuna says, looking down at him. There’s a cut under his eye that’s bleeding freely, and his clothes are torn and tinged red in spots. They are not their brothers, with their seemingly endless power and imperatives to never truly hurt one another. They are human, they are vicious, and they’re halfway dead today,“Yield,”
Tobirama scoffs and stands up straight, his arm nearly sagging with the weight of his sword. He’s not done yet. He has one last weapon, a final ace up his sleeve. He meant to try it out before using it in battle, but well--if Izuna kills him, it’s not like he’ll get another chance to even try it.
He smirks, packing the expression with as much of the conceited superiority he isn’t feeling at the moment as he can, and watches the emotions play out of Izuna’s face. Surprise, outrage, anger. Truly these Uchihas are much too easy to manipulate.
He dodges Izuna’s first attack and lays the mark, quickly returning to a fighting stance. His chest is heaving and he feels lightheaded from the blood loss, but if this works he just needs to hold on a little bit longer. If it doesn’t, he’ll die, but that’s out of his hands. When they clash again, he waits until the last possible moment, until Izuna’s kunai is embedding itself into his armor, until the feeling is nearly claustrophobic, and he can feel the other’s nearly wasted reserves of chakra colliding with his own. He waits until the mark is perfectly lined behind Izuna’s body, right where it needs to be for the blow to be fatal before releasing the last of his chakra in one brilliant flash--
“Hiraishin ”
After this, everything happens very fast.
He feels himself flickering into nonexistence, summoned by the mark--
Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Madara tumble to his knees, clutching at his chest--
“Shit!” Izuna says, letting go of the hilt and reaching for Tobirama, black eyes wide and slightly panicked--
...panicked ?
Then everything fades to black.
He comes to, naked and bleeding profusely, in the middle of a forest. It’s cold, which is strange, since it’s spring, and not having the constricting weight of his armour and his happuri on him feels disconcerting. He reaches out his trembling chakra and instinctively searches for the flaring bonfire that is his brother, the only one of the Senju who never bothers to hide his chakra signature, only to feel nothing. Hashirama is nowhere nearby, or maybe he’s--
Tobirama’s breath catches in his throat.
No.
His brother is just far away.
He’s aware that he’s trying to convince himself, but it wouldn’t do to panic when he doesn’t even know what the situation his. He’s teleported himself somewhere much further than he expected, it would seem. Something went wrong with the jutsu. No problem. The lack of clothing is far more intriguing, but he adds it to the list of things to consider later. For now though, he must focus on returning to the battlefield before his absence becomes costly.
There’s three chakra signatures nearby, tiny and unsteady, but promising, like that of small children at the very beginning of their training. Tobirama breathes in, and begins walking in that direction, trying his best not to let his mangled leg slow him down. The forest holds no clues for him, but that is not unexpected. After all, he’s not his brother, who can ask the trees for what they’ve seen and heard, and speak to the earth as if it were his old friend. All he can do is follow his senses as best as he can, and pray that by the time he returns it won’t be too late.
After a few minutes following first delicate tendrils of chakra and, as he got closer, the distinct sound of children’s laughter, he reaches his destination: a clearing, in which a small house is settled. The low roof is slanted to the side, and serves as a resting place for about a dozen doves, all of them peering curiously down at Tobirama as he makes his way covertly towards the front of the house. He hides behind a large oak by the porch, surveying the vast vegetable gardens that surround the small estate, and waits.
“I’m not doing it!” he hears one of the children, a boy, crow.
“Sensei says you have to,” a girl retaliates.
“You’ll have to make me!”
The sing-songed reply, followed by mock battle cries and laughter reminds him a little bit too much of rare afternoons spent neglecting his duty in favour of dipping his brother’s face repeatedly into a puddle, and he has to shake his head to free it from the memories before he ventures a look. What he sees has him gasping for breath.
There, hidden by the shadow of the small house, are three children. They were working the garden recently, it would seem, but their work somehow developed into an impromptu game of ninja tag, if the discarded garden tools and trampled weeds are any indication. This is nothing out of the ordinary, for children are children, even in times of war, and these small diversions are the pieces of their childhood they carve out for themselves whenever they can.
No. What has Tobirama’s eyes widening and his heartbeat spiking up is that two of the children are Senju, judging by their pale chakra and brown eyes and hair. One boy and the girl, both of them laughing exuberantly and chasing the other boy, who is also laughing, and is undoubtedly Uchiha. If his eyes, hair and complexion weren’t enough proof of his lineage, the Uchiha crest displayed proudly on the back of his pale blue haori would.
He’s so distracted by his finding, at first he doesn’t notice the argument going on inside the house until a harried man steps out, hisses “And stay right there!” to whoever is inside, shuts the door quite firmly, and turns to look at the tree behind which Tobirama is hiding. Tobirama concentrates very hard not to faint as he ducks back behind the tree, because the person looking at him is--
“Tobirama,” the man who is himself, but can’t possibly be, calls out, gaze not wavering from the tree. “I can see the blood pooling at your feet,”
There’s raucous laughter from inside the house at that. Tobirama peeks his head out from behind the trunk just in time to see his other version look up at the sky and sigh, as if asking for strength. He’s older, this other version, but not by much. There’s a few more lines around his eyes, but the most jarring difference is perhaps the man’s content expression. He’s not smiling, or anything of the sort, but he does look--calm. Less severe.
It’s extremely disturbing.
“What is this?” Tobirama asks, stepping out from behind the tree and peering suspiciously at himself, completely forgetting the fact that he’s still stark naked, bleeding, and there’s children nearby. His mind is racing, coming up with and discarding a dozen different explanations in a second, “Genjutsu? Izuna is not that powerful,”
More laughter from inside the house, and a put upon “Hey!” that has Tobirama frowning, because those voices are--
“None of that,” his older self says, glaring over his shoulder at the door for a moment before returning his attention to Tobirama, “You are twenty-four, I’m twenty-nine. I’ve been where you are, and now we’re both here in this present. You’ll be gone shortly, so listen closely: the Hiraishin worked , it didn’t go wrong.
Tobirama’s mind is reeling, “What--What does that mean? What is happening to me?”
“You’re exactly where you have to be. That is all you need to know,”
“All I need to know? You’ve told me nothing!” Tobirama snaps, hands fisting at his sides He’s seconds away from fainting, he just knows it, “How do I know that what I see is real, and not something conjured by that cursed Sharingan?!”
The older Tobirama’s lips twitch into a smile, “Anything essential is invisible to the eyes,”
“I don’t understand,” Tobirama says, shaking his head, but even as he speaks he can feel himself flickering away. He can’t breathe, the world is spinning. He’s talking to himself and it is impossible, but that truly is himself. The same chakra signature, the same mannerisms, the same face. How did this happen? How does he fix it? What does it mean? Why would it eve--
“Tobirama ,” a distinctly familiar voice chides as the door opens. Tobirama’s thoughts ground to a screeching halt, “Can’t you be less cryptical about this?”
Madara Uchiha’s black eyes are peering at him curiously over his other self’s shoulder, and they’re the last thing he sees before everything fades away. He ends up in the dining room of his house, sitting on his usual spot, with Hashirama and Tōka staring at him over their soup, speechless.
“What the--” Tōka begins, but the rest of her sentence is drowned by Hashirama crying, “Little Brother!” and toppling the table over in his haste to attach himself to Tobirama with all his limbs. Tobirama passes out from blood loss and oxygen deprivation.
“You were gone for three days,” Tōka says when he awakens, her stoic facade shattered as she wrings her hands on her lap in an uncharacteristically nervous gesture. He’s lying on his bed with his brother partially draped over him, caught in uneasy sleep even as he holds onto Tobirama’s wrist, as if afraid to let go.
Three days.
“You disappeared,” Tōka manages, her voice thin and shaky. “You were there, and then you just…faded.”
So, it wasn’t a dream. Great.
“Where did you go?” she asks. Tobirama doesn’t answer, but looks resolutely at the ceiling. “Little Cousin . What happened?”
“I don’t know,” he growls, shifting a bit and feeling the stitches on his side and his thigh pull. “It didn’t make any sense.”
When he blinks, Uchiha Madara’s eyes peer at him curiously from behind his closed eyelids, like he’s a strange specimen of a foreign species, or maybe a particularly stubborn kill. Tobirama grits his teeth.
Once he finally manages to peel Hashirama off his person, he spends hour upon hour poring over his notes, reading and re-reading every single detail, trying to understand where the Jutsu went wrong, trying to figure out what happened.
The Hiraishin worked, it didn’t go wrong, his other self said, but he’ll be damned if he’s going to believe the judgement of a figment of his feverish imagination, especially if said figment thought it prudent to turn his back on Uchiha Madara out of all people. Tobirama rakes his brain trying to figure out the meaning of that particular apparition, but comes up blank. He stays locked up inside his room for a whole week, which even for himself is pushing it, but his clansmen say nothing. Every half-hour, like clockwork, either Hashirama or Tōka poke their heads through the now perpetually ajar door, a panic set in to their features like they’re waiting for him to disappear again.
He can’t really assure them that it won’t happen again. All he can do is try to figure out what went wrong. With every hour that passes, the whole thing seems to him more and more like a dream, and it’s only the shadows on Hashirama’s face that remind him that he was actually gone from the world for days , that his family thought he’d died , and they’d been left without even a body to bury, instead of caught in a dream for a few minutes.
Had it truly been his future self who addressed him? Had he truly been so calm with Uchiha Madara at his back? It doesn’t bear thinking.
A week goes by, then two, then a month. Seasons change and spring rolls into summer, and Tobirama has no answers. Another month goes by. His family stops tip-toeing nervously around him, they stop invading his privacy every few minutes to make sure he’s still there. His brother’s duties as Clan Head and his dream of peace once more become the center of his attention.
Tobirama himself doesn’t precisely give up on his research, but he allows it to become secondary. Uchiha Madara’s eyes fade from his dreams, and his future self’s tranquility blurs in his mind. He convinces himself that whatever it was, it was nothing more than a fluke, temporary, reversible, and one time only.
This is, of course, when it happens again.
One minute he’s feeding the falcons, and the next one he’s springing to his feet and dodging a fireball the size of a horse, buried in snow up to his ankles. The heat falls against his back like a curtain he avoids just in time, but his movements are followed by the smell of singed hair. Even as he falls into a defensive stance, he’s acutely aware of the fact that he’s naked. The cold burns and his breath comes out in visible puffs, and he has no weapons, but with all this snow he has enough water to level a small army.
He goes through the hand signs and gathers chakra in his throat, the water dragon vicious and deadly and already perfectly pictured in his mind--
“Tobirama!” a child screeches, extremely high and extremely young and extremely terrified.
Tobirama nearly chokes on his own burning chakra trying to swallow it down, falling to his knees on the snow.
“Oh, Gods! Did I hurt you? I didn’t mean it! I was training!” the child cries, and there are tiny, freezing hands hovering over his face and shoulders, unsure of what to do. Tobirama tries to gather enough breath to tell the kid to stop yelling in his ear, but he can barely do anything other than shiver miserably, his knees going numb, “I didn’t know you’d show up! I’m sorry, I’m sorry!”
There’s an invocation, and then there’s a heavy woolen cloak wrapping over Tobirama’s shoulders, keeping the worst of the cold at bay. Tobirama looks up,and his breath catches in his throat. Huge, terrified black eyes are looking at him from a face that’s much too small, much too innocent, to belong to one of those he considers his enemies.
“Tobirama?” the Uchiha boy, who can’t be more than eight or nine, asks. Concern drips from his every pore, and it’s hard to even look at.
“Who are you?” Tobirama asks, voice coming out far more soft and weak than he’d meant, but he figures after swallowing a ball of his own chakra he should just be glad he can even speak at all.
The boy blinks owlishly at him.
“Oh,” he says, comprehension visibly dawning on his face, “You’re not the same Tobirama that came to see me yesterday, are you?”
...yesterday?
“...I’ve never seen you before,” is what he settles for, trying very hard not to let his heart beat itself out of his throat. What does the boy mean , “yesterday”?
The tiny Uchiha perks up at this, completely oblivious to Tobirama’s inner turmoil.
“Oh!” he says, and grins. There’s snow caught in his raven hair, and he’s not wearing adequate clothes for the winter, Tobirama notices absently, “Well, that’s good! I’ve been rehearsing for this. Hum...Ok.”
He closes one eye and sticks his tongue out in concentration, then takes a deep breath.
“It’s only with the heart that one can see rightly,” he recites, then looks up at Tobirama expectantly. His nose is red on his pale face.
Tobirama blinks several times.
“What?” the boy asks, looking confused “No good? I’m sure that’s how it went. You made me repeat it three times! ”
This does not help dissipate Tobirama’s confusion in the slightest.
“I made you repeat it?”
“The first time we met!” the boy nods, then clarifies, “Well, the first time I met you, I guess. Since this is the first time you are meeting me,”
“You’re mixing tenses,” Tobirama points out absently, a reflex leftover from growing up with his grammatically impaired older brother, as he tries to process all this new information and turn it into something that makes sense .
The tiny Uchiha huffs and crosses his arms over his chest in a very grown up--and very familiar-- fashion, “Well, you did it first, with all the time-traveling ”
He rolls his eyes for good measure. The gratuitous use of ridiculous, fiction-related terms does not pass unnoticed. A wind picks up then, cold and unforgiving. Long tresses of raven hair lash out like whips. The image is disturbingly familiar. Tobirama frowns, suspicion gnawing at the pit of his stomach, “Who are you?”
The boy blinks owlishly at him, then scratches the bridge of his nose thoughtfully, “I can’t tell you my last name,” he says apologetically, but then he grins wide and reaches out his hand to Tobirama’s, “But you can call me Madara. Nice to meet you!”
He is still gaping when the world begins fading to black. He has a second to realize that eight year old Uchiha Madara is missing one of his front bottom teeth, then he’s sitting on top of his clothes inside the falcon cage. The old lady in charge of correspondence faints.
“What?” the boy asks, looking confused “No good? I’m sure that’s how it went. You made me repeat it three times! ”
“It’s not possible,” Tōka states, as if trying to convince herself.
“But it’s happening,” Hashirama points out, mystified.
Tobirama groans, and continues to bang his forehead against the table.
“Time-travel…” his brother says, for the fifteenth time, the bewilderment in his voice battling with childish excitement.
“Genjutsu, until proven otherwise,” Tōka snaps at him, and slams a hand down on the table, hard. “Cut that out, Tobirama.” That’s the low, dangerous growl she used to use on him as a child, and it usually came right before a shoe collided with his head. Tobirama sits up straight at once.
“But how?” Hashirama stresses “I’m not the genjutsu expert, but I know they cannot stretch so long, and at intermittent times? Also, if he were in a genjutsu, he wouldn’t disappear for fucking days at a time,”
“The Uchiha have surprised us before,” Tōka counters, arms crossed. The three of them have been going in circles for the past hour, repeating the things they know over and over and hoping at some point it will all start making sense.
“Izuna is not that good,” Tobirama states for what feels like the thousandth time. Not that he actually believes he’s been jumping back and forth through time.It’s just that he can’t really see the Uchiha second in command coming up with such an elaborate jutsu, much less executing it in the middle of battle. Izuna is an efficient fighter, much like himself, not given to prolonging a kill, not even for a larger scheme. Besides, why would he do it? What would be the point of showing him an older version of himself? Of showing him Senju children playing with Uchihas? Why show him a younger version of Madara? It makes no sense , he has no motive .
Quietly, like she doesn’t really want to say it, Tōka ventures, “But Madara is.”
Heavy silence drops over them like a curtain, because even after all these years the Uchiha Clan Head is a sore topic when the three of them are alone. Hashirama’s usually open and cheerful face closes off, and Tobirama grits his teeth. Nothing in this world seems to matter more to his brother than keeping the dredges of a one-time friend’s innocence near his heart.
In his brother’s eyes, Uchiha Madara can do no true harm.
“He didn’t do it,” Hashirama finally says, and that is that.
Tobirama couldn’t bring himself to share what he’d seen, merely confiding that he’d been lead to believe he was five years into the future the first time, and approximately fifteen years into the past in the second. He has a feeling that telling his brother who he’d seen both times would not end well, for any party involved.
“I saw him fall,” Tobirama says. They haven’t spoken of the day of the Incident in the two months since it happened, and the details seem blurry in his mind: Madara’s hand clutching at his chest, Izuna’s wide eyed panic-- “As I faded,”
Hashirama nods once, “For a moment, yes. Then they retreated, but I didn’t pay much attention, as I was looking for you,”
Tobirama suppresses the urge to sigh at his brother turning his back on an enemy so blatantly, and instead focuses on trying to piece together the information he has. A few minutes of silence, then,
“Time-travel, ” Hashirama says, yet again , and Tōka groans, throwing her hands in the air in clear surrender. Hashirama grins, “On the slim chance that it’s true, think what you could do with this power, little brother! The things you could learn , the people you could meet , the tragedies you cou--”
“No,” Tōka growls, and Hashirama’s mouth snaps closed with a click, “On the slim, thin, minuscule chance that it might be true, you can do nothing .” she crosses her arms and leans back on her seat “If you’re truly slipping through cracks in the fabric of time, even the smallest change could fuck up our existence even worse than it already is,”
Hashirama pouts.
“You’re no fun, Tōka-chan,”
The glare he gets could peel the skin of lesser men, or at least men who didn’t grow up with her. Tobirama ponders telling her he’s spoken with at least two people, one on each occasion, but decides against it, since it would entail discussing the contents of what he’s still regarding as extremely vivid hallucinations.
“I had considered that,” he says instead, “We haven’t enough information, so caution is prudent,” If he approaches the whole thing as if it were a mission, he finds it isn’t so hard to think about it.
“Yes, yes,” Hashirama rolls his eyes, “ Caution . We wouldn’t want you to bring the apocalypse upon us, would we? Or worse , actually have fun , for a change,”
Tobirama glares at him.
“It’s serious, Hashirama!” Tōka says, slamming a hand down on the table and making the cutlery rattle, “Messing with time could be--”
“Ah!” Hashirama is grinning triumphantly, “So you are saying that it is time-travel!”
“No ,” Tōka narrows her eyes to slits of pure hatred, “I’m saying that if it--”
Tobirama is getting ready to tune them out--something that comes to him naturally after a lifetime of these arguments--when the room fades and he finds himself sitting on cold stone, an onslaught of wind raising gooseflesh on his bare skin. One does not appreciate the easy comfort of wearing clothes until that is taken away.
He’s in a camp, albeit a small one. A fire crackles quietly and a horse rests a few feet away, not at all startled by Tobirama’s sudden materialization. Standing on a slope a little ways away, a lone figure stands gazing out into the distance, cloaked in twilight. Tobirama grabs a discarded quilt from the ground and wraps it around himself before reaching out his sensor chakra, which is not something he had an opportunity to do before. He cautiously feels the individual, sending small tendrils of his pale blue chakra in his general direction, and narrowing his eyes at what he feels.
In the end, he only proves to himself what he expected to find: that the only person in miles around is the person he’s looking at, and that that person is Uchiha Madara. The overwhelmingly hot chakra sizzles when it comes in contact with his own, and it takes effort not to physically recoil from it. He can tell from his reduced height and unsteady chakra flow that he’s a child yet, not a man, and what this implies leaves Tobirama gobsmacked and thrilled all at once.
So it is true. This is no genjutsu. He is truly standing here, looking at a young Uchiha Madara losing himself in his own thoughts.
The tragedies you could prevent, Hashirama had wanted to say, and the heady power of knowing exactly how many could be prevented, if he were to reach out right now and strike, is nearly unbearable. He moves without even realising it, taking cautious steps forward towards the unsuspecting figure, feeling the air currents shift around him as he wallows in the need kill, now .
Tobirama has never been one to wallow in his emotions, which is not to say he doesn’t have them. He does, but he simply does not allow them to cloud his judgement, the way his brother so often does. He’s the calculator, the strategist, the cold hearted soldier--because someone has to be. And so he calculates, looking at the turned back of his most hated enemy, and ponders the pros and cons of going through with this.
Would it truly be devastating to the fabric of time, he wonders, if Uchiha Madara ceased to exist a good decade before coming on to his true power? The temptation is devastating, and he takes another step forward without even meaning to.
“I can feel you wanting to kill me,” Madara says, regarding him over his shoulder. “Bad Tobirama.”
His voice is yet unbroken and his eyes are still without perpetual bruises underneath them, and suddenly all of Tobirama’s intent leaves him, because he is looking at a child,“How long have you known me for?” he asks instead, clutching the quilt closer to himself.
“I can’t tell you,” Madara says. When Tobirama narrows his eyes at him, he shrugs, “You never want to tell me anything about the future. It’s only fair I get to not tell you about the past,”
“You seem certain I’m from the future,” he comments. Uchiha Madara is nothing if not absolutely mistrustful of other people’s intentions, being known to even doubt his own kin’s allegiance. Child or not, he would not trust a stranger.
“You told me. Besides, you always look the same,” the boy says. After a pause, he adds, “Also, I’ve seen you. Not you , but the other... you. Present tense- you,”
This sets Tobirama’s head spinning, and all he can do is ask, “You know who I am?”
Madara smirks half in in the shadows, barely touched by the fire’s light.
“You’re Senju Tobirama, son of Butsuma, brother of Hashirama,” he says, then chuckles, “You are a funny looking little boy who’ll grow up into being my own personal time traveling nuisance. That’s all I know,”
“We’re enemies,”
Madara turns to look at him fully then, the lopsided smile on his face making him seem like he’s in on a joke he won’t bother sharing. He looks older than he did when they first met, that fateful day on the river, when Hashirama had to give up on a friendship that always meant to him more than brotherhood ever did. It was that day that Tobirama’s loathing for his enemy, that could so easily command his brother’s absolute devotion with minimal effort and just as easily discard it, as if it were so much dirt, truly solidified.
Tobirama is not a man easily led by his emotions. But he’s never hated anyone the way he hates the boy before his eyes, and the man that he’ll become.
“Senju Tobirama and I, we’re enemies. He’s my enemy. You?” Madara takes a step closer, his face illuminated by the small fire.
There’s faint bags under his eyes, and scratches on his pale cheeks. Once again, he’s not dressed for the cold and his nose is red, the image a stark reminder that he’s a child still, no matter the blood on his hands, the blood that’s already there, and the blood that’ll come after. He smiles with cracked lips and shivers in the cold, long hair whipping out in the wind.
“You’ll always be my friend,” he says, onyx eyes wide and clear and so certain, and Tobirama has no answer.
We’re the same person, he’s about to say, but then Madara’s wry smile flickers away and fades into darkness, and he’s sitting on his clothes at his spot at the table, watching Tōka argue with his brother.
“-- were time-travel , then he’d have to be careful, because mayb--why is he naked? Why are you naked? What just happened?”
Tōka is confused, but Hashirama seems closer to childish excitement than anything else.
“Is it time-travel?” he asks, nearly bouncing on his seat.
Two sets of warm brown eyes regard him expectantly. Tobirama is hyper aware of the fact that he’s absolutely naked.
“Yes,” he says, and it feels a lot like defeat, “It is time-travel ,”
Tobirama slams the door open so hard a set of decorative swords falls off the wall with a calamitous rattle, and the old woman inside the study lets out an undignified squeak.
“Tell me what you know of space-time seals!” he demands loudly.
Hikari-sensei looks at him for a second before letting out a mighty sigh, bending to pick up the scroll she dropped in her moment of fright.
“Good morning to you too, Tobirama. Why, yes I believe the weather’s been lovely these past few days. Thank you for dropping by to see me for the first time in a month, child. Is there anything you’d like to know?” She puts her hands on her hips and looks up at him expectantly. The fact that she has to crane her neck nearly all the way back doesn’t make it any less effective now than it was when he was a child, and had to look up at her.
Tobirama sighs, but hangs his head.
“...Please.”
“That’s more like it, boy.” she says, cracking a smile, “Manners . If you dusted them off more often than twice a decade, you’d be married by now,”
He rolls his eyes.
“Good manners waste time,” he scowls, then adds, “And I don’t want to be married,”
The old woman snorts.
“That is a bag of cats better left for another day.” she says, cryptical as ever, and signals him to close the door and get inside. The room is tiny and circular, but the walls are filled floor to ceiling with shelves packed with scrolls and tomes of every color and size, “Now, space-time seals you say? I do believe I brought a scroll on space-time seals with me from Land of Whirlpools, but I also think you’ve already read it,”
Tobirama nods, crossing his arms over his chest, “It states the basics. Time bending for faster travel.”
“But that’s not what you’re looking for,” she says knowingly. Tobirama rakes his brain trying to find a way to explain himself without giving away too much.
“In the hypothetical case that a space-time seal was used to transport a person,” he says, making it sound like a purely theoretical question, and not a very real problem, “Could there be...side effects?”
If she notices his thinly veiled avoidance, she doesn’t point it out.
“Space time seals are tricky.” Hikari-sensei nods sagely, reaching for a scroll from one of the lowest shelves and peering at the label, “One wrong move, and you could find yourself in several places at once. Cousin Shinichi accidentally drew an incomplete mark one time and teleported himself all the way to Land of Wind, minus his nose and ears. Nasty business,”
She cackles mirthfully like an old witch.
“That’s a space problem,” Tobirama points out, used to his old sensei’s inappropriate sense of humour, “But what about a time problem?”
“Then you might find yourself temporarily misplaced,” she says with a shrug, inspecting the contents of another, much thicker scroll and frowning, “That is why unique marks are to be used. One mark, one travel. Makes certain any consequence you might face are a one time thing. Why, old grandpa Kimchi used to tell the story of the one time he spent an afternoon battling lizards the size of mountains.” she chuckles at Tobirama’s raised eyebrow, “We always thought he’d just had too much sake, but then a few years after his death some folks in Land of Earth dug out ribcages big enough to put a house inside, buried under millennia of dirt and rubble,”
That...is not good. He was hoping he’d be told it is impossible, that time doesn’t bend, pierce or break.
“...could it be a two time thing?” he asks, his voice much feebler than he intended.
Hikari-sensei looks up from her reading to raise a supremely unimpressed eyebrow at him, the one that lets him know that however good he might be at lying to other people he sucks at lying to her.
“In that case, absolutely hypothetical as it is,” she snorts,“the times would have to be linked. A particularly stupid and reckless shinobi would have left a mark behind. The mark would have to be there, calling out to you. Summoning you through time,”
Tobirama frowns. He didn’t leave any marks behind. What the hell did she mean by that? That was the first time he ever used that mark! Granted, the mark had appeared in his mind as if by art of magic. Fate , Touka had said, but perhaps that word was too much. Perhaps he’d seen it before, and it had been branded in his mind, a quirky little mark that drifted uselessly through his thoughts until the day it appeared, unbidden, at the forefront of them. A simple coincidence.
But where the fuck had he seen it?!
“Linked times,” he repeats, because maybe that’s a part of the problem he can figure out, “What do you mean by that?” at her pointed look , he rolls his eyes, “Hypothetically speaking,”
“Simply that. Linked,” Hikari-sensei repeats, pushing locks of her flyaway silver hair behind her ear “By a place, perhaps. Or a particular object,”
Tobirama closes his eyes and concentrates on his breathing. No. Just... no. But alas, he’s a man of logic, and no matter how hard he wants to deny the truth, hide away from it and never touch it, not even with a ten foot pole, he must confront it. And it’s obvious, that’s the worst part, and maybe if it weren’t also supremely inconvenient and horrifying and just plain wrong, he would have seen it sooner.
Because in all three of his travels, there was only one common denominator.
“What about a person?” he asks, mentally recoiling from the notion.
Hikari-sensei’s lips twitch, “Who?”
“Hypothetically?” he sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose. He can definitely feel the migraine coming this time, “Uchiha Madara ,”
Once Hikari-sensei finally finishes laughing herself silly, she hands him a handful of scrolls on time-space seals, a signed letter to her brother in Land of Whirlpools, pats his head, and laughs some more.
The rumour spreads around the compound like wildfire in the driest autumn.
Senju Tobirama, second in command of the Senju Clan, is time-traveling against his will. Naked.
Tobirama rolls his eyes at the murmurs and the stares, but lets them gossip all they want. Better they think he’s been canoodling with the Sage of Six Paths than having them believe he’s a deviant who enjoys running naked through the streets and stealing clothes from hanging lines.
In the weeks leading up to the journey to Land of Whirlpools, Tobirama travels so often he becomes used to it.
Most times, he manages to skip actually having to speak with Madara, when he manages to land somewhere off the boy’s sight. He stays, hidden and silent, watching snippets of someone else’s childhood that might as well be his own. The endless hours of training, the grueling lessons on strategy and politics and finance, the missions not meant for such young eyes--it’s all familiar in an uncomfortable way.
Uchiha Madara entered the battlefield at an earlier age than Tobirama or even his brother did, and scaled up the positions at an even faster rate. The monstrous power combined with the sharp, agile mind made him a force to be reckoned with, and Tobirama remembers his name being whispered amongst the adults of his clan, awe and fear coloring their voices.
He remembers being five years old, remembers his father taking him and Hashirama to the empty aftermath of a battle field. He remembers the smell of charred flesh, bodies turned into nothing but coal, and the looks on the faces of the survivors. “Wild child,” they’d whispered, and Tobirama had looked over the wasteland that had become of the forest, feeling the remnants of the corrosive chakra that permeated it, and shivered.
Tobirama looks at the child, really looks at him, and it takes true effort not to kill him.
Other times, he travels and doesn’t see Madara at all. He appears in the forest, kneeling next to a wooden toy shaped like a horse, or at a very familiar spot by the side of the river. The connection is always there, always calling him, like a string attached to his ribcage, right above his heart. Tobirama would love nothing more than to cut it, before he loses his mind.
Were Tobirama’s sensor skills any lesser, he would jump in surprise at the sudden appearance of a large figure at the door of his brother’s study
“The Uchiha have been quiet as of late,” a gravely voice intones.
Senju Torou is a large, stoic faced man a good fifteen years older than Tobirama, clad perpetually in black armour seemingly designed to intimidate enemies into retreat. His stance is proud and fearless, and his angular face is fixed in a scowl that makes even battle hardened Senjus cringe when it’s turned in their direction. In his childhood, Tobirama had been frightened of him, finally overcoming his unfounded, illogical fear at age thirteen.
At twenty-eight years old, they’re losing faith that Hashirama ever will.
“To-Torou-san! ” their Clan Head stammers, clattering to his feet and fixing wide eyes on their visitor, “To-to-to what do we owe this visit?”
Torou raises a supremely unimpressed eyebrow, and repeats, “The Uchiha have been quiet as of late,”
Tobirama noticed this as well. It is true that since his brother and Madara took charge of their respective clans, casualties have diminished considerably. The all-out war their fathers held against each other, and that dragged both clans nearly to ruins, ended with their death at each other’s hand. Skirmishes these days are few and far in between, and only when both clans are hired by warring parties, but still--
Three months of silence is too much.
“Send four surveillance teams to scout the surroundings of the Uchiha compound for suspicious behaviour,” he says, eyes narrowed, “Engage if necessary,”
“Two teams, each bearing a peace treaty. Do not engage,” his brother counters, his tone broking no arguments. Torou bows respectfully and leaves.
Tobirama sighs “Brother…”
But Hashirama merely raises a hand, and the look of pained compassion he turns on Tobirama is enough to set the younger man’s blood boiling. It’s that look that says that his brother sees in him the second coming of their father, and he despairs.
“They’ve done nothing,” he reminds him, tone pleading him to listen, to understand. Tobirama can’t remember when it happened, but at some point his brother started using on him the same tone he uses on Madara.
Madara. The name brings to him images now that are different from the ones he’s used too. Gone from his mind is the arrogant man with his bloodthirsty red eyes, the general with an army at his back and a power summoned from the depths of hell itself at his beck and call. Instead, there’s the image of a little boy with wide onyx eyes peering at his face, wild black hair tumbling in the wind and red nose cold, because he’s never dressed warm enough for the weather.
Wild child, a Senju soldier whispered over and over in his feverish state, over and over until he died.
His eyes had been delirious with pain, and the horror coiling within, more than the burns that consumed most of his body, were what remained with Tobirama for the longest time. He still sees them sometimes, if the nights are cold enough, and the smell of cooking meat still makes him gag and dry heave, if he’s not expecting it.
He narrows his eyes at his brother, at his foolish hopes for innocence already lost, and hisses, “Yet,”
This time, he feels it coming. He’s writing a missive to the Uzumaki Clan Head, asking permission to visit, and a hearing with a prominent elder by the name of Hisai Namikaze. He has enough time to set aside his brush so as not to spoil all his work before he finds himself kneeling on a forest floor, a branch digging painfully into his ankle. Naked and bleeding. Again . Marvelous.
The upbeat voice in the back of his head that sounds suspiciously like Hashirama points out that at least it’s not snowing this time.
“Shut up,” Tobirama growls at the voices in his own head.
“Hum. I didn’t say anything,”
Tobirama looks up, startled. Looks like there won’t be avoiding the kid this time.
Madara giggles and opens the scroll slung over his shoulder, activating the summoning seal with a sloppy flare of chakra. The same thick grey cloak from the first time materializes in his hands, and he throws it over Tobirama’s head.
“You really should figure out a way to time travel with your clothes on, you know,” the boy says, placing his hands on his hips, “I don’t know what they think about it in the future, but adults from this time don’t like grown men who show up naked in front of little boys. I know. I asked my father,”
Tobirama suppresses an inappropriate snort at the thought of Uchiha Tajima being asked that question by his little son. He also wonders who suffered his wrath for that particular crime.
“They don’t like it in the future either,” he limits himself to say, holding the cloak more securely to himself as he stands, “You told your father about me?”
Madara rolls his eyes, and sniffles, “No. For the millionth time, I didn’t tell anyone. Having a naked time traveling friend with rabbit eyes is not really good for my reputation, you know,”
Another sniffle, and Tobirama wonders if no one ever explained to this kid the concept of weather appropriate clothes. Then he processes the part where Madara compared him to a rodent, and he glares. Because he's a little shit, the boy giggles.
“How old are you?” he asks, just to say something. Madara’s intent stare could burn holes into a brick wall.
The boy puffs his chest and grins, “I’ll be ten in three weeks!”
Ten. Tobirama does the math reflexively, before he can remind himself that that is a bad idea. That means that, somewhere out there, beyond this forest and the surrounding lands, Tobirama is seven years old, and his whole family is still alive.
He can remember, clear as morning air, his mother’s smile, forever subdued and pained but bright nonetheless, her pale hair and crimson eyes exactly like his own. His father was different then, while she lived. Less angry, more willing to smile.
He remembers teaching Kawarama how to read, watching his little fingers trace the plain kanjis, while Itama slept in his crib, tired after a day of learning how to walk this world that was new for him. He remembers Hashirama, lying face down on the floor, dead to the world and snoring faintly, the comfort of their family life the only dream of peace he needed.
Somewhere out there.
Tobirama is assaulted by an onslaught of grief so powerful it makes him crumple to the ground, shaking and trying not to fall apart. Of all the moments to have a mentel breakdown that's been years in the making--
“Tobirama?” Madara is crouched beside him, his hand resting comfortingly on his back. “Are you okay?” he asks quietly as Tobirama dry heaves.
The boy kneels in front of him and peers into his face, concern widening peerless black eyes.
In the darkness of their depths, Tobirama sees Kawarama’s coffin being lowered to the ground. He sees Uchiha Tajima’s sword protruding from his father’s chest. He sees his mother’s corpse, her slit throat, the blood on the ground, and suddenly every breath he takes carries the smell of Itama’s charred flesh, sickeningly sweet.
Uchiha .
“Why you ?” Tobirama spits, eyes narrowing with anger and pain. The boy recoils a little, but doesn’t scurry away, “Why must I come back to you ?”
Out of all the people in the world, why his sworn enemy? Why a member of the clan that burned most of his family to ash? Why the child who enamoured his brother and charmed him into believing in foolish dreams of hope and peace, only to leave him heartbroken and forever disappointed with life? Why the man whose name has forever meant strife and pain in Tobirama’s mind, the greatest general of the Uchiha to date?
Why this child, so young and wide eyed, whose death would fix so much?
“Oh,” Madara says suddenly. He throws his arms around Tobirama’s shoulders, his face buried against the back of Tobirama’s neck. The display shocks Tobirama so much that his mind goes blank, and in the second that follows he remembers to breathe. “I’m so sorry. About your family.” Tobirama feels himself crack a little.
He stays for five more minutes, shellshocked and crumbling, and then materializes, thankfully, on the floor of his bedroom.
A whole day went by.