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Hashirama blinks onto a battlefield. It shouldn’t be surprising, considering he was on a battlefield before too, arms also outstretched towards his wayward Uchiha friend, but the difference was stark. For one, it was glaringly bright. The sudden switch to a full moon night to sun-up caused Hashirama’s eyes to reflexively water. For another, the dying men in his periphery didn’t wear the flak jackets that implied belonging to a hidden village. They wore battle armor, the likes of which he hadn’t seen in an age.
And likewise — in place of the massive jinchūriki tree reaching up into the clouds, swathes of forested lands grow more and more familiar as Hashirama takes them in.
He knows these trees. These are his motherland trees. The ones that were eventually cut down to aid in the fertilization of the earth that had become Konoha’s foundation.
That would become Konoha’s foundation.
The blow of this thought is so great and heavy and final that the decisive drag of a white hot blade into his side and back out almost doesn’t register.
These are his motherland trees.
And that means that somehow, some way, Hashirama, in between one blink and the next, has lost absolutely everything .
o-o-o-o-o
His older brother takes out the overgrown tree on an otherwise typical day with otherwise typical weather during an otherwise typical skirmish with the bastard Senjus. In fact, the day had seemed so ordinary that Izuna wouldn’t even have known anything happened had it not been for his opponent: Senju Tobirama, an otherwise airtight bastard with almost more stupid and painful jutsus that you can spin a Sharingan at.
The same White Demon who suddenly pivots his arm right into the glancing edge of Izuna’s kunai, drawing a gratifying amount of blood but also thrusting Izuna every-so-slightly off balance — Izuna’s heart stutters, the instinctive chill rising up whenever he can’t control his body exactly the way he needs to against this particular opponent — oh, but the bastard is going to be in for a surprise if he thinks that’ll be enough of an advantage to pay back the drawn blood — and then flees.
Trained reflexes guide Izuna into throwing a few poisoned senbon after the bastard, but it takes an unforgivably long moment before Izuna realizes he should be following . Shit. Shit ! What the hell is wrong with him?! Every second the White Demon descends onto the field, unhindered. is enough for the bastard to irrevocably injure one of Izuna’s clansmen for life — Izuna knows this, and yet he still lets the bastard pull away. Lets himself get drawn into an almost lull, thinking that the White Demon and him had some sort of understanding — first take out each other, then all the unfortunate souls left to survive their clan heir — Kami, how fucking foolish !
If any Uchiha dies under that bastard’s hands — if any Uchiha dies — it’s on Izuna’s head.
But for whatever reason, the Senju hasn’t gone for any of Izuna’s infinitely more vulnerable clansmen. Instead, he’s barreling across the fields, stealth abandoned for pure speed, towards —
— towards Madara?
The sight of his brother’s carnage is so unexpected that Izuna’s first thought is to bypass it entirely and think that the Senju were playing tricks, that the White Demon and his brother were conspiring to take out Madara first and then slaughter the rest of the Uchiha together.
And then Izuna sees beyond Madara’s frozen form to the man left in two halves on the ground.
Wait. That’s —
Nii-san. He just. Did he — come to his senses? Had Madara finally — ?
But he doesn’t — he doesn’t look like it.
But whereas Madara remains frozen and Izuna’s steps slow from the uncertainty, there is still one more participant on the field with no such compunctions.
The wind stills, the sun glows sharper, and a massive dragon of water roars into existence out of thin, rapidly drying air and blasts towards Izuna’s brother. But even in what appears to be the early stages of shock, Madara is still a model shinobi. His hands fly through the signs without him even really seeming aware of it, and the dragon is forced to eat a Great Fireball almost five times larger than its own head.
The dragon explodes in a burst of steam, but the steam doesn’t blanket the field the way Izuna expects. Instead another dragon roars into existence in the next instant — this one far more gas than liquid and with the volume to show for it. It doesn’t go for Madara again. Instead, it wails like a tea kettle and storms back onto the battlefield like its wielder had just done, in the opposite direction not even two seconds prior. It brings with it a truly searing heat, Nii-san’s specialty, if the sudden yelps emerging from the combatants were any indication.
“ RETREAT !” Izuna hears his opponent's voice shout across the field, past the dragon of billowing steam; hoarse. “ RETREAT !”
For all that the orders were sudden, a good half of the fighters, nearly all of the ones in the innermost area, had already been forcibly disengaged by the earlier steam. Those Senju fighters, albeit startled, began to pull back, and Izuna’s clansmen hesitated, unsure of whether to pursue. The ones who notice Izuna’s proximity turn to him in askance, but Izuna holds up palm, fingers flat but angled slightly down: hold .
Izuna would ordinarily love to chase down the Senju dogs to their hideouts — without the clan head and clan heirs leading, they’re a bit more scattered, but Hikaku’s kunoichi opponent is holding them loosely in formation — and wipe them all out at the roots, but judging by the way this battle has gone, there’ll be plenty of time in the future to follow through. Because even more important than all that is making sure that the recent turn of events is…
Is real?
Is permanent.
Anyway, the more experienced of his clansmen have already noticed that something has fundamentally shifted in their war with the Senjus. The ones close enough were already watching Senju Hashirama’s body distort with horrified fascination.
Senju Hashirama apparently falls like any unprepared shinobi, but he sure dies like an abomination of nature. Even with the White Demon crouched and blocking a good half of the view, it’s hard to miss the roots slowly crawling up the gaping hole in the man’s torso, pushing against his skin. Meanwhile, bunches and bunches and bunches of wildflowers are spontaneously sprouting and dying by the bloodied lower half of the purported God of Shinobi.
And yet, worst of all — Izuna sees Senju Hashirama’s mouth moving sluggishly. It’s a litany, from what he can lipread: no , mostly; gone , said four times; and then, creepily, something that resembles a heavily slurred, I can’t .
If Senju Tobirama is saying anything in response, Izuna can’t see his mouth enough to tell.
Madara should be able to, but Izuna can’t get a read on his brother from where the other man looks down at the two Senjus blankly. For a growing moment, Izuna thinks his brother is about to have a mental breakdown.
But then Madara’s fingers tighten on his gunbai, and Izuna is awash with a mix of relief — that’s still his brother, still his Clan Head — and a deep, unsettling unease .
Madara raises his gunbai, slowly and unerringly. Still hunched over the fallen form of his brother, fingers swollen and red in the glimpses Izuna catches, Senju Tobirama doesn’t look up.
But Senju Hashirama does.
o-o-o-o-o
“Let go,” says a voice. “Anija, Anija , don’t fight it. Anjia, please .”
It’s not a voice that often says please. Hashirama knows this. Mournful, he says, “‘s gone.” Pain blossoms across — everything. Everything . It all hurts, and the roots, they know, and they tell him — there’s an after, let go, become them, and the pain it’ll go — but. “No,” he tells them, or tries to. “ No , no.” He needs to stay like this — he can’t protect a village as a tree, he can’t protect Konoha as a tree — he needs to be human . “No.”
But there’s no Konoha. He’s — the roots, they’re holding him through this, comforting him, assuring — but they’ll change him and he can’t have that, not with Konoha on such a precipice, one Hokage dead and another barely settled, war already back on the horizon —
— he has to be there but where is it?
Where is Konohagakure?!
“Stop!” someone says, demanding. Hashirama knows only one person with the kind of closeness that begets this sort of disrespect. Briefly, Hashirama is happy, before the terror and agony and horror washes it away. Because, he remembers, that person is gone, and now Konoha is — “Don’t fight it! Just let go and I’ll help you ! Anija!”
It’s Tobirama. Hashirama is suddenly aware, viscerally, of the chilly, salty chakra trying to free him of his own death grip on his chakra. It’s thin, needle-like, insistent, and it almost hurts.
It’s Tobirama .
His brother. He has it. Hashirama’s genius little brother — it’s all still in there, or will be in there, the fundamentals — Tobirama has it. Had it. Will have it again.
He squeezes his hand around Tobirama’s wrist. He doesn’t remember when it got there, but it doesn’t matter. He needs to let Tobirama know. “I can’t ,” says Hashirama, and he means to say something like I can’t make Konoha come true anymore, please, otouto, make up for your anija's shortcomings one more time , but the next words don't come and he chokes on sap.
But his brother grabs Hashirama’s hand right back — he doesn’t really feel it but he sees it — leans down with his narrow, piercing red eyes, lips thinned in ways that are a little like a Clan heir but a lot like a little brother and says, “You can. You will. I’ll make sure of it .”
And Sage of the Six Paths above, he gets it . The relief turns everything white and hazy, and the pain hollows into something more distant. His brother understands. His brother gets it .
If his brother gets it, then he'll have a plan. And the plan is to have Hashirama let go. Alright. But how strange. The very last project his brother and his wife had worked on together was to figure out how to get Hashirama to do the exact opposite and hold on . But it's a different time, and if his brother has at least one idea, it is leagues above Hashirama's none.
And so Hashirama looks up. He feels, rather than sees, the way the sun glints off Madara's metal gunbai and scatters pinpricks of heat off its bloodied surface. He lets go.
o-o-o-o-o
It wasn't as if Tobirama had thought to the contrary, but these past few days have confirmed that for all the critical processes that trees provide to their surrounding landscape, the inside of one isn't very hospitable. Downright suffocating, in fact.
In the initial stages, it was still manageable. Although Tobirama had quickly found himself encased in wood, Anija’s disorganized state of mind saw the new rings emerge haphazardly, and the uncontrolled variations in thickness allowed for a fresh, if small, supply of air through the gaps. By the second day, however, there was enough growth that those pathways were being sealed, and fast. It didn’t help that Anija’s Mokuton had a strong preference for Tobirama’s own water-style chakra, and grew thickest in the spots Tobirama sent it out to probe.
Abruptly and unrelatedly, Tobirama had been reminded of the data in the Senju planting records, and the pattern of trees grown too close together stagnating each other’s growth in fierce, unseen competition. But the thought slipped away soon enough, because although interesting, it was meant to isolate out parameters for Mokuton development and wasn’t applicable to the current situation. And Tobirama had stalled long enough.
There was nothing else to it. He couldn’t allow himself to suffocate to death in the new vessel of Anija’s chakra, and so Tobirama could only grit his teeth and pull out a simple kunai and carve his way back down into the root system, where the porous soil and the trickle of fresh river water will be enough to supply him. It rankles him, even if he’s reasonably confident carving away that wood would do no lasting damage.
Tobirama has had ample time to come up with theories, and foremost of them is that not only is this tree Hashirama, but all of this tree is all of Hashirama. It’s in the chakra flow; where shinobi have their chakras concentrated stably into their tenketsu points, Hashirama’s new distribution is completely flat, with only sporadic excitation of chakra indicating new Mokuton growths.
It’s almost enough to mimic natural chakra entirely, if not for the feeling of it. Natural chakra is slippery and without defining characteristics. This, however muted, tastes like cypress pressing at the back of Tobirama’s throat, and feels like sun-warmed dirt. It’s Hashirama, but as if he’d been evaporated. In terms of changes, it’s drastic.
But it is not , Tobirama believes, irreversible. It’s a belief of necessity, that there is something Tobirama can do for this Hashirama that he could not have done for the grievous injuries left on Hashirama otherwise.
There are of course no precedents. It’s hard to say how much of Tobirama’s postulate is based on evidence and sound logical reasoning, and how much of it is assumed because there truly is no other way . Because either Tobirama’s premise holds, and he can indeed find a way to return his Anija as he’s always known him, or it doesn’t, and Tobirama has lied to Hashirama, made promises he cannot keep , and will either choose certain death or extreme injury of Hashirama’s remains in an attempt to free himself and return to the Senju compound.
It’s said that if you eliminate the impossible, what remains is the truth. But impossibility can be colored by sentiment in the same way as anything else, and so by eliminating the futures that Tobirama cannot and will not accept, rendering them impossible, what’s left is simply this: he will restore Hashirama, and Hashirama will have his village.
Tobirama estimates he has a little over two weeks left in the combination of his dry rations (of which there was a singular stale fish tin. For obvious reasons, he wasn’t expecting a long-term stay), scavenged resources (an unfortunate field mouse found by the roots), and chakra stores ( very hard to ration as it is needed to maintain air supply).
There is certainly a lot of pressure.
It’s a good thing he operates very well under pressure.
o-o-o-o-o
It’s dark and quiet. It’s an unfamiliar feeling, but Hashirama thinks it’s an indicator of progress. After all, he doesn’t remember feeling something before this, which probably means it was all nothing . Or as his younger brother likes to insist, the complete absence of anything.
Speaking of Tobirama, another sensation comes to Hashirama’s notice — but at the same time, it seems to have always been there — and it’s his brother’s chakra, fine and light like a misty spray of seawater, and it’s … circling? Swooping and diving and twisting in a strange sequence, and Hashirama knows his brother well enough to know that this is deliberate. Maybe even a jutsu. Tobirama has long fallen into the habit of hyper-efficiency, and it’s a characteristic that applies to his chakra exercises as well.
But even so, his brother rarely broadcasts the movement of his chakra like this. If that is also deliberate, then…
It feels a little like moving through molasses, and it’s the slowest Hashirama has ever moved in all his time living and undead combined, but he follows it. He knows he makes the right decision, because immediately after his brother’s chakra noticeably slows down in its unknown dance. Performing an act in measured steps and holding just long enough for Hashirama to finish completing one before starting the other. It’s a call and response that either goes on for forever or not long at all, and then suddenly, Hashirama can see.
It’s not human eyesight by any means. It’s a full rotation and then doubled — one perception filled with bright warmth, trickling smoothness, and campfires; and then, another perception of humid darkness, richly heavy breath, and a fine misty smear that must be Tobirama.
Hashirama draws closer to that one, still clumsily following the path carved out by his brother’s chakra, and suddenly he begins to feel vibrations. It feels like a soft, barely-there buzz against his skin — sound, perhaps? Is Tobirama talking? Hashirama tries to follow it, hums along in some strange capacity — and then —
And then he’s there .
He’s there, in the muggy, carbon-rich darkness, and suddenly he’s looking at his younger brother, thinner than Hashirama has ever seen him, grimy and exhausted and dried blood crusting his mouth.
Hashirama opens his mouth — tries to — says, To’ra ?
His brother’s eyes snap open. “ Anija .” Tobirama says, and when he slumps back the impact of it and the vibrations of his voice traverse through Hashirama’s skin. Wait. Where exactly is Hashirama, relative to his brother? It feels a little like everywhere , which isn’t possible, Hashirama thinks — thinks ? — and does he even have skin?
To’ra, am I a tree?
Tobirama snorts, eyes half-lid. “You’ve been a tree for two weeks now.”
Have I???
A smile flashes by Tobirama’s face. It’s not his usual grin, the one when he figures out something long before anyone else can manage it — this is a softer one, unguarded, one Hashirama kind of recognizes but doesn’t really remember . “Still a work in progress,” Tobirama says, voice getting quieter as he speaks. “Anija, do me a favor. I’m going to sleep. Don’t let me suffocate. And when I wake up, tell me about the future.”
And before Hashirama can do anything more Tobirama knocks out, and all the chakra threads he’d apparently been intertwining with the root system below wink out too.
o-o-o-o-o
Madara’s routine for the past two weeks goes something like this: startle into awakeness, choke down breakfast, get together a squad and march their way to the disputed territory, take up sentry there for anywhere from two hours to twelve, eat some meals in the meantime, head home, shower, eat dinner, sleep, and dream of Hashirama’s tree growing a face to ask Madara, blankly why why why . Sometimes there’s no tree though. Sometimes, it’s him alone in a dark, humid cave, listening to water drip off the stalactites with the distinct impression that he’s there to hide from the light.
There had been a time maybe, long ago, when Madara thought it’d be cool if he and Hashirama could hang out and skip rocks more. It’s the kind of stuff a little kid thinks about, a kid who just lost all but one brother and couldn’t find anyone else in the family (Father too old and Izuna too young, respectively) to grieve with without making it all worse.
Well. Madara is now spending hours everyday in Hashirama's company (technically?), and it’s the stuff of literal nightmares.
And it’s more than just Madara that Senju Hashirama’s … remains … are terrorizing.
One of his clansmen walks up to him. It’s Hikaku, ready to rotate positions. But then: “Madara-sama, the flowers have started moving,” he says.
Madara tears his gaze away from the massive tree planted at the center of the clearing. He lingers, briefly, on the grotesque facsimile of a water dragon snaking along the perimeter of the Senju lands (or, what was once a water dragon before the briars took over). His Sharingan spins to life. “Where?” A flower moving was not too strange, all things considered, but the majority of the shinobi who could do that in this part of Fire Country were the Senju. Had one of them finally come back to confirm the status of their clan head and clan heir? Or was it, against all odds, Hashirama?
(Does Madara want it to be Hashirama?)
“Not a flower,” says Hikaku, voice even in a way that rings alarm bells. “The flowers . All of them.” But even as he says so, he points to a single flower; a small red tsubaki with its golden-yellow center in full display.
Madara squints against the setting sun and scans it all over, and frowns. “I don’t see any chakra flow.”
Hikaku says, “There was no chakra. When I was walking over here, it was still facing the sun.”
“Is it following you?” Madara flares up his Mangekyo and orders Hikaku: “Walk ten meters northwest and I’ll track it.”
Hikaku nods, sharp, and walks in that direction. Madara watches him go in the peripheral, but keeps the focus of his gaze on the tsubaki, and frowns. There’s no movement. Not even a rustle of the wind.
“... Madara-sama.”
Madara glances away at Hikaku’s call, and sees his clansman standing, shoulders tense and eyes pinned onto something off to the side. Following the line of sight, Madara turns his head to the left and sees:
A tsubaki. Small and red, with its center facing the spot where Hikaku stands.
Later that evening, Madara is having the usual quiet dinner with his brother (for reasons Madara doesn’t particularly want to ask after, the general mood of the Uchiha compound has been somber ever since that fateful day) when Izuna asks, apropos of nothing, “Do you think Senju Tobirama is dead?”
Force of habit makes Madara ask, “Do you think he's dead?” Then after buying enough time to properly process the question, Madara adds, “You know him best out of any of us.”
Izuna grimaces. Whatever emotions are in that expression are too muddled for Madara to untangle. Or for his brother, evidently, because Izuna changes the subject and says, “More people are beginning to think that there's a curse being cast on our lands. Senju Hashirama's final vengeance and all that.”
“I don't think Hashirama would do something like that.” At Izuna’s sharp look, and also the discomfort in his chest, Madara amends: “I've never heard of previous Mokuton users being able to cast curses.”
Izuna scowls down at his perfectly heated dinner and pokes it hard with his chopsticks. “Hah! Like that's what matters! Nii-san, you've never understood how people are . Stupid and superstitious. After Hikaku goes around gossiping his head off about some stupid flowers of all things, now all everyone wants to talk about is how Senju Hashirama was cut down pleading for peace and how that stupid tree he's turned into is some kind of envoy made to see through his dying will or take revenge or some other shit like that. Can't the guy just die like a normal person? But no. He's a fucking hundred meter tall tree blocking out the sun and now all those elders want to talk about is symbolism and karma — ”
“Hikaku isn't the type to gossip,” Madara says, a little taken aback.
“Oh, shut up, Nii-san!” says Izuna shrilly. “That's not the point either! The point is that a month ago all those assholes were still at the training grounds bragging that they'll be the next to draw Senju blood, and now half of them are whispering behind your back wondering why you didn't accept a ceasefire earlier !”
Izuna taking that tone sends Madara into high alert, kicking his brain into overdrive. “Izuna,” Madara says. “Hey, look at me.” When his brother does, mulishly stuffing an inarizushi into his mouth as it does so, Madara continues, “You know it's impossible to have unanimous approval all the time, and you also know that that's not what being a clan head is about, anyway. I'm here to make hard decisions, not popular ones. And even if I did choose wrong like some people apparently think I did, it's not on you.”
Clearly, he hits the nail on the head and Izuna blurts out “Of course it is!” around a mouthful of rice. He swallows hard and angrily. Mouth clear, Izuna snaps, “I've been telling you it's a trap all along, haven't I?”
“I can pick who I listen to, you know,” Madara says in what he feels is a reasonable tone.
Izuna scoffs, “Yeah, okay.” Which smarts a little. “And the worst of it, the absolute fucking worst of it , is that now there's proof that Senju Hashirama would pursue peace until his death, that the fucking — that fucking Senju Tobirama would choose his clan head over slaughtering our clan, which is fine and dandy and absolutely useless now, because they're either both dead or one of them is so out of his mind he'd go and suck his own brother dry of chakra .”
“You… ” Madara’s throat goes dry. “You think… that's what happened? To Senju Tobirama?”
Izuna gestures with his hands. “Thirsty roots meet water supply, what else can it be? You saw what it did to the water dragon the White Demon sent out. It started off powerful enough to blast through the wood and then a few hundred meters later, it was totally gone. Absorbed. And then the guy himself, encased in that tree for what, two weeks now? Without a single movement of his chakra to the outside? He's gone. Senju Hashirama died, took his own younger brother out with him, and now our clan can't decide if it's time to attack the Senju Compound or submit themselves to the prayer halls.”
Madara takes it in, and says, “Before we left today, someone tried to set the tree on fire. Lobbed a Great Fireball at it.”
“Yeah?” says Izuna. “I'm guessing it didn't work?”
Madara lets out a bark of laughter, humorless. “It burnt maybe a half meter up before the tree just grew over it.”
“Hah,” says Izuna, equally grim. “Fantastic.”
o-o-o-o-o
“I killed Izuna?” his brother repeats, nose scrunched. “But. Hm. I supposed it would have happened eventually. How ?”
Not this time, hopefully! Hashirama says, in what he hopes passes for stern. It’s hard to say if any emotions are being transmitted through, but his brother should know him well enough to hear it anyway. And it was the space-time jutsu you’ve been — you are? — tinkering with. The one with the medium — have you decided to try kunai yet or are you still working with electrical conductors? To’ra, do you want me to —
Hashirama knows the answer by the way Tobirama’s chakra lights up. “Show me, Anija,” he says.
Internally sighing — his little brother can be so callous sometimes — Hashirama does.
It’s definitely the biggest reaction Hashirama has received thus far. And considering Hashirama had immediately gone for what he thought were the most important points — Konohagakure, the God Tree, Madara’s stone tablet of world domination — it makes him feel a little helpless. It’s not that his brother doesn’t have the capacity to understand any of that, because the little brother that accompanied him to the undead future certainly didn’t have any trouble.
It’s that Tobirama doesn’t yet have the means to. He does not know of a world where warring between clans has ended, only to attract warring between countries. He does not know of a time when the biggest threats to humanity were not simply other people, but forces so great they eclipse the world entirely.
And because of this, he doesn’t know of a village where shinobi of different clans and different allegiances can live peacefully, side by side, united together as one and so strong for it they’ve taken down gods.
Hashirama’s heart — or whatever currently passes for one — aches for this version of his brother in a way he hadn’t known to do the first time around. Because that peace, that ambition, that vision is in his brother — because it was still this Tobirama, the one who doesn’t know Konoha, who walks around the compound always sensing for the next big conflict, who took plans for a sanctuary never before existed and built it so practically and sturdily it outlasted him threefold.
This Tobirama who, even after nearly two decades of living in the peace Hashirama had always envisioned, still hadn’t been able to shake the values of the tumultuous period he’d been born into. When his brother martyred himself at 46 and faded against Hashirama’s senses, Tobirama had not acted in a way befitting a Hokage — the most important and powerful man in the daily operations of the village. Tobirama acted like he was still a clan heir, secure in the knowledge that Hashirama was still there, that Hashirama could bring the village to weather through the storm, that Tobirama had not been expected to outlive Hashirama significantly and thus the real successor had always been in the next generation.
Tobirama finally looks up from marveling — and it definitely is marveling, Hashirama can tell — the symbols Hashirama forms into the wood. It’s one of his brother’s favored jutsu for a reason. “You said you became the Shodaime through popular vote. But then you implied that I succeeded you —”
You did !
“That makes no sense. Who headed the Senju clan?” his brother asks, as sharp as ever. “Never mind how unlikely it is the other clans were willing to allow this — certainly we had to draw a clear line somewhere. But who is even next in line? Touka ?”
We worked on dispersing the clan during my reign, Hashirama explains, and he feels his brother’s chakra flare in icy shock. You thought of it, eventually, and I agreed. To lead a village means to hold an equal allegiance to all of it —
“No conflicts of interest,” his brother murmurs, hesitant.
Hashirama winds a soft vine around his shoulder, in the same manner he once cupped it. We never said it outright. Just that there was difficulty integrating the civilian population.
His brother seemed to arrive at the same conclusion he did all those years in the future, and the unhappiness in his chakra was an exact copy. “Outclan marriages,” Tobirama said, finally. “Senju women to civilians, and … Senju men to clans with kekkei genkai?”
More or less. Some just never married. Touka, for example. Whether as a comfort or as a finality, Hashirama reveals, In the future, my granddaughter was the last to carry our family name.
“A millennia of history,” Tobirama says, quietly. There’s something approaching devastation in his voice, and Hashirama grows himself closer. And perhaps his brother needs it, because Tobirama doesn’t pull back. He anchors himself physically onto Hashirama, hands shaking, and whispers, almost as if to not let anyone hear, “Just like that.”
His brother was by and large one of the most competent clan heirs of any era, but if he had any blind spots, it was only in Hashirama. Hashirama, who had his brother’s indulgence in pursuing peace in times of war. Hashirama, who had his brother’s aid in dissolving their own clan.
And Hashirama cannot lie and say that he wouldn’t ask his brother to do it all again. Because —
“It was worth it.”
It was worth it. It was everything Hashirama had ever dreamed of, and more. Faced with that belief, that memory, of something so infinitely better than anything they have now, Hashirama could not weigh his past — current? — life against it in any capacity. He could not go back to being just another Clan Head, throwing away the lives of his current clan members so that they will in turn whittle away at the lives of his future villagers. He could not turn away from her.
One way or another, he would see Konoha built again.
After a long period of silence, Tobirama says, “I suspect you’ll have a hard time asking our clansmen to accept the Uchiha for a while, at least.”
Hashirama hums, and only then does he realize he’s making audible noise. But it doesn’t distract from his thought — being a tree can only be so exciting — and he says, “We don’t have to start with the Uchiha. In the future the Sarutobi were really the most enthusiastic about participating in the village. I’m sure we can convince them again.”
Hashirama’s vision must be developing back towards what it used to be, because he sees, rather than feels, Tobirama’s eyes narrow. “And what of Madara?” his brother asks.
“What of Madara?” Hashirama repeats, not really as a question and definitely not as an answer. He smiles, and feels his lips stretch with the act. “He’ll join us when he’s ready.”
The closure was an unexpected boon of the undead future, in Hashirama’s opinion. From the very beginning, Madara’s dream of peace and a village had always struck Hashirama with such poignancy that it felt like any second not working towards that dream was to lose it. Whether that dream on the river banks all those decades — years? — ago was something Madara had equally cherished, had nurtured in his heart the way Hashirama did, or was something Madara had thrown out with the casual whimsy of a child, hadn’t seemed to matter so much as that it was this person with this dream of peace, of all things. Learning of the story of Indra and Asura lessened that ache, some, though Hashirama suspects that it’ll always be there.
But it does help, in equal parts bittersweet and relief, to know that even if this life doesn’t quite play out, there’s a very solid possibility of the next. And as much as Hashirama still feels he owes it to Madara to see this dream through, he feels he owes it even more to those two children with the potential to grow up in peace.
Planting trees had never been about immediacy, anyway.
o-o-o-o-o
o-o-o-o-o
o-o-o-o-o
Senju Hashirama exits the tree with far more grace than he enters it. The bark and underwood peel apart in layers, and suddenly there he was. Whole. Human. Flesh. It seemed almost as if nothing happened to him at all, were it not for the gnarl of root by his foot that still vaguely resembled an arm and half a torso.
He shrugs off the genjutsus of the surrounding spectators without even a blink, to their horror, and then turns his back on them to reach into the open space of the trunk. To his observer’s even greater horror, he gently extracts an unconscious man, both familiar — male, armored, bloody — and unfamiliar — muscles atrophied, white hair matted dark — and carefully hoists the limp body onto his back. He gives the onlookers on last acknowledgement: a smile.
And he carries his younger brother back, towards the certain future.
o-o-o-o-o
o-o-o-o-o
o-o-o-o-o
In one of the last skirmishes before the birth of Konohagakure, the Shodaime, Senju Hashirama, was slain with his hands still outstretched for peace, and he fell down in bloody halves into the same lands that nourished his Mokuton. And it was here that Shodaime proved, once and for all, that he was God in body as well as name; that he did not die like man. The Shodaime would have stayed there, supine, breathing and withering, for weeks upon weeks in a slow decline before the final breath could escape his barely mortal confines.
Or at least, he would have, had it not been for his mortal incarnation’s brother: the Nidaime, Senju Tobirama.
The Nidaime, though mortal, was a man of exceptional cleverness and exceptional perseverance, and he dedicated both to his dying brother’s cause. He forsook all else, even his own mortal limits, even the danger of his clan’s ancestral enemy. The Nidaime toiled for a month without food or water, fervently inventing ways to prolong the Shodaime’s dwindling life, fearing to turn his formidable mind away lest it be too late.
But thankfully, it wasn’t. In a fantastical display of humanity and divinity alike, Senju Hashirama rose back up on the thirtieth day, hale and whole once more.
Legends of Yore: The Founding of Konohagakure