Chapter Text
The Senju bloodline has always been cursed.
Or so the legend goes.
It is never spoken of beyond the royal household, not written in any record meant for the public. Each generation learns it reluctantly, and from the mouths of those who have already borne its weight.
They say it began at the dawn of the world, when the land was young enough to remember the names of its first sons.
Indra and Asura, brothers born to the same father, raised beneath the same roof, taught the same prayers and laws. The old stories do not agree on which of them was first to breathe, only that both were gifted, and neither was content to remain in the other’s shadow.
Indra was the sharper of the two. He learned quickly, spoke little, and watched everything. Where others hesitated, he decided. Where others asked, he took. The chronicles say he believed order could only be enforced by strength, that a hand left open too long would always close into a fist. His brother, Asura was different. Softer spoken, slower to anger, beloved by those who lived and worked under his care. He believed unity could be chosen, that people would hold together if given reason enough to do so.
Their father favored Asura. Whether this was wisdom or folly depends on who is telling the tale.
When the inheritance was declared and Asura took the throne, Indra left, his followers in tow. For a time, the kingdom breathed easier, believing the fracture clean.
It was not.
Indra returned years later at the head of an army, his banner dyed dark with ash and blood. Brother turned blade against brother, and the land itself seemed to recoil from the violence.
Asura fought him. Each battle ended the same way: stalemate, retreat, more and more dead left behind. The stories say Asura wept over the fallen. That Indra, despite being culpable for the death of his own people, showed no remorse.
When Indra was finally slain, by his own brother’s hand, the world was already ruined beyond repair. Families were scattered. Bloodlines erased. Villages burned. The survivors gathered in the aftermath, staring at the wreckage of what it had cost them.
They swore it would never happen again.
It was desperation that drove them to the djinn, though the chronicles dress it up as resolve. The djinn were old, older than borders, bound to the deep laws of exchange and consequence. They did not give freely, but they understood fear, and fear makes for generous terms.
The survivors asked for unity. They asked for a bloodline that would never fracture, never turn inward with blade or fire. A ruling house that could not devour itself. The djinn listened and answered with a curse as elegant as it was cruel.
The first-born would carry crown and command. The second-born would carry obedience.
They would answer any order given to them. Command would take root before thought, before fear or refusal could even be imagined. They would move when told to move. Stop when told to stop. Kneel, bleed, labor, or wait—whatever was asked of them, so long as it was spoken aloud.
There would be no allowance for interpretation. A command was a command, and the body would obey it whether the mind wished to or not. One safeguard alone was woven into the binding. The second-born could not raise a hand against the Senju royal line and bring deliberate harm upon their blood. The djinn had no interest in a bargain that could be unraveled from within; a pact that destroyed its own anchor served no one.
This, they said, was how such bloodshed was prevented. This was how a house ensured it would never turn its blade inward again.
The survivors agreed. What was one life, weighed against the world?
Thus the curse was written into blood and bone, into lineage and law.
And thus, generations later, when a second son is born beneath cold skies and prayer flags snapping in the mountain wind, they call it tradition.
The wind is loud the night Tobirama Senju enters the world, rattling the shutters hard enough to make the oil lamps gutter. Frost creeps along the stone walls in thin lines, and the mountain bells ring for dawn long before the sun crests the peaks.
He comes into the world pale and quiet, skin white as milk, eyes a startling, unearthly red when they finally open. The midwives exchange a glance and say nothing. They wash him in warmed snowmelt, wrap him in white wool stitched with the Senju symbol, and place him in his mother’s arms.
His older brother howls the moment he hears him cry.
Hashirama is three years old and already too big for his age, dark haired and loud. He barrels into the birthing chamber before anyone can even think to stop him, skids on the rugs, and plants himself at the bedside. Their mother laughs, and lifts a hand in dismissal of the attendants’ murmurs. She shifts against the pillows and pats the space beside her, guiding Hashirama up onto the bed with a gentle hand at his back.
“Sit,” she murmurs, fondly.
Hashirama obeys at once, scrambling up and settling cross-legged at her side. His gaze is fixed on the bundle in her arms. Carefully, she places Tobirama into his lap, adjusting his small hands and supporting his head until she is certain he is secure. Hashirama freezes, stunned by the weight and warmth of him, face splitting into a wide grin. Tobirama’s tiny fingers curl reflexively into the fabric of his brother’s sleeve. Hashirama lets out a small gasp, then lowers his head until his forehead nearly touches the baby’s. He studies his brother’s face, the pale lashes, the faint rise and fall of his chest.
“He’s warm,” Hashirama reports. “Do you feel?”
Their mother smiles. “Yes,” she says. “Babies are warm.” She reaches out and pinches Hashirama’s cheek, thumb and forefinger pressing just enough to make him squawk and laugh. “You were warm too. Always running hot, even in the dead of winter.”
Hashirama beams, clearly pleased with himself, and glances back down at the bundle in his lap.
“What’s his name?”
She watches him for a moment before answering, gaze lingering on the way Tobirama’s fingers remain curled tight in Hashirama’s sleeve. As though he already knows where he belongs.
“Tobirama,” she says.
Hashirama rolls the name around his mouth. “To-bi-ra-ma,” he repeats, each syllable given equal weight. Satisfied, he nods. “That’s a good name.”
“I think so too.”
Hashirama looks down at Tobirama again, brow furrowing with fresh concentration. “Can he walk?” he asks.
Her lips twitch. “Not for a while.”
“Oh.” He considers this. “Can he talk?”
“Not yet.”
“What about hunting?”
She laughs softly. “No, my love. He won’t be able to do very much for some time. You’ll have to look out for him.”
Hashirama straightens at once “I will,” he says, without hesitation, “I promise.”
“I know you will,” she replies, and her voice softens further, as though she might say more.
The door opens. It is not a particularly loud sound, and yet the room stills all the same. The attendants straighten where they stand. The murmured prayers fade into silence as Butsuma Senju steps into the chamber.
He is dressed for the high valleys, as he always is: a long coat of dark wool, its broad shoulders trimmed in pale fur worn smooth with age. Intricate geometric patterns are stitched along the sleeves and collar in thread the color of old bone. A wide belt of worked leather cinches his waist, prayer tokens and small carved charms hanging at his side. Frost dusts his boots.
He pauses just inside the threshold, gaze sweeping the room. His eyes settle on the bed. On his wife, on the child in Hashirama’s lap.
Hashirama’s hands tighten around Tobirama, fingers curling protectively into the blanket. Their mother’s hand moves at once, resting over his knuckles.
“It’s all right,” she murmurs, though she keeps looking at her husband.
Butsuma approaches the bedside, boots striking stone in an even echoing cadence. He studies Tobirama with the same careful attention he might give a blade newly forged.
“So,” he says at last. “This is him.”
Butsuma doesn’t wait for an answer. He reaches out and lifts Tobirama from Hashirama’s lap with a single motion. The sudden loss of warmth jolts the infant awake. Tobirama’s face screws tight, breath hitching before his cry breaks free—thin and sharp, a sound too small for the space it fills.
Hashirama startles. “Hey—”
Their mother’s hand tightens on his knuckles.
Butsuma looks down at the child in his arms. Tobirama thrashes weakly, fists clenched, his cry rising and falling without rhythm. There’s a pause. Their mother’s breath catches. She knows this pause, knows the way her husband stills when he is deciding something that cannot be undone.
“Please,” she says, low and urgent. “He is only just born.”
Butsuma does not look at her.
He lowers his head, bringing his mouth close to Tobirama’s ear. His voice is eerily calm.
“Stop crying.”
Tobirama’s cry cuts off mid-breath.
The sound ends so abruptly it is as if it has been severed. Tobirama’s body slackens, limbs loosening, breath evening into quiet, obedient rhythm. The room remains suspended in that sudden quiet. Tobirama lies unnaturally still in Butsuma’s arms with no trace of the frantic life that had filled him only a breath ago.
Butsuma watches him for another heartbeat before straightening.
“It holds,” he says.
He lowers his head again, close enough that his breath stirs the fine, pale hair at Tobirama’s temple, and murmurs a prayer into the newborn’s ear. Then he steps forward and places Tobirama back into his mother’s arms. She accepts the child instantly, drawing him close, one hand cupping the back of his head, the other resting over his small spine. Her fingers tremble despite her effort to still them.
Hashirama watches the exchange in silence, confusion knitting his brows together. His gaze flicks from his brother’s slackened form to his father’s face, searching for an explanation, perhaps, or a familiar reassurance. He finds neither.
Butsuma turns away, boots leaving faint traces of frost as he crosses the stone floor. The door closes behind him with the same finality with which he entered.
Only then does the room breathe again.
The attendants resume their motions, murmuring prayers under their breath. The wind continues to batter the shutters outside, indifferent. Hashirama peers up at his mother, eyes wide, still holding the shape of his question even before he speaks it.
“Mama,” he says, voice pitched low. “How did Father make him stop crying like that?”
His mother does not answer. She looks down at Tobirama instead, at the way his small body lies pliant and trusting against her chest. Her mouth opens. Whatever words might have come do not.
Hashirama waits.
After a moment, she draws him closer with her free arm. He leans into her without resistance, still watching his brother from the corner of his eye.
“It’s all right,” she says at last, and it does not seem like the words are meant for Hashirama alone. “He’s sleeping now.”
Hashirama nods, accepting this as children do, filing the question away rather than discarding it. He rests his cheek against her and watches Tobirama’s chest rise and fall, rise and fall.
It will be years before Hashirama learns the answer to his question.
---
“Stop running, Tobirama! That’s not fair—you’re too fast!”
The shout cuts across the thin mountain air, laced with laughter. Tobirama’s legs lock mid-stride. One foot hovers above the frost-crusted grass, the other planted firm; his body halts, momentum carrying his small frame forward an instant longer before balance reasserts itself. He stands frozen in the middle of the open meadow, arms half raised, breath clouding white around his face.
The other children skid to messy stops around him. A girl with braided hair and cheeks flushed from the chase plants her hands on her hips.
“Why’d you just stop like that?” she demands. “You were almost at the rock—you could’ve won.”
Another boy, still panting, circles him with suspicion. “Did you trip? Or are you cheating on purpose so we don’t feel bad?”
Tobirama cannot think of an answer that would make sense. His muscles feel heavy, as though someone poured water into his joints and let it freeze there. The wind moves through the meadow, colored threads flutter and snap, sending prayers toward the peaks that watch them all with indifferent white faces.
“Come on,” the braided girl says, impatience creeping back in. “Let’s start over. You have to run properly this time.”
Tobirama’s heart is still pounding hard enough that he can feel it in his throat. He would rather go back inside. The wish rises sharply in his chest. But the words have already been spoken, and the game must begin again. He cannot refuse it any more than he could refuse the wind that pulls at his coat.
The morning had begun in the quiet warmth of his mother’s chambers, a new book resting open across his knees. She had sent them both outdoors before noon, smiling in that gentle unyielding way of hers, saying the air would do them good and that boys were not meant to grow up folded between walls. Hashirama had taken that encouragement and turned it into insistence. He had been eager to chase after the older children who trained beyond the ridge, and before he ran off, he had pressed Tobirama toward the meadow with a careless certainty that he would follow. Tobirama had not argued.
And so he stands now in the brittle grass beneath the snapping flags, because he was told to come out, and then told to play, and his body has always known how to answer that better than his mouth ever could.
He nods. It is easier than speaking
“All right then,” one of the boys says, clapping his hands. “You’re it.”
The others groan in unison.
“Again?” one of the girls complains. “He’ll just freeze up if we tell him to.”
“I won’t,” Tobirama says quickly.
They all look at him. He realizes too late that he has spoken too sharply. Heat creeps up the back of his neck.
“I mean,” he amends, quieter now, “I won’t freeze.”
The girl with the braid hesitates before shrugging. “Fine. Go on, then.”
They scatter with renewed shrieks, boots tearing up the damp earth as they race toward the slope and the crooked pine that marks the boundary of their imagined kingdom.
Tobirama counts to five beneath his breath.
He runs harder this time, legs eating the distance of the space. The air burns cold in his lungs. He tries not to listen for their shouts. Still, every raised voice tightens the knot low in his spine. He braces without meaning to, expecting the invisible hand to seize him again.
He reaches one of the boys in three strides.
The boy glances back too late. Tobirama stretches forward and catches a fistful of his sleeve, fingers closing firmly around wool. The momentum nearly pulls them both off balance, but Tobirama steadies himself and taps the boy’s shoulder with his free hand.
“Got you.”
The boy stumbles to a stop before beaking into a grin.
“See?” he pants, doubling over with his hands on his knees. “That’s how you’re supposed to do it.”
Tobirama nods again.
They play until the sun slips lower and the frost melts into slick mud beneath their boots. They invent new rules, abandon them, argue, then forget the argument in favor of a new chase. Tobirama follows each shift without protest.
Hours pass in a blur. By the time the first low toll of the evening bells drifts down from the shrine above the cliffs, Tobirama’s hands are numb and streaked brown, the hem of his outer robe dark with mud from where he fell. He hates the way it clings, heavy and wet against his calves. He hates the grit beneath his fingernails, the way the damp seeps through to skin.
The others peel away in twos and threes at the sound of the bells, called back by their own families. They wave to him distractedly as they go.
“Tomorrow!” the braided girl calls over her shoulder.
Tobirama lifts a hand in acknowledgment.
He stands alone in the meadow for a moment after they disappear down the slope. The prayer flags have gone still in the windless dusk. The peaks above wear fresh veils of cloud. Children are taught not to linger at this hour. Dusk belongs to the unseen, when the air thins and carries words farther than they should go. Voices raised carelessly might travel where they are not meant to.
He walks home slowly.
The corridors are already lit when he enters the compound, lamps glowing gold against the blue-gray of early evening. Servants move through the great hall, carrying in bowls that steam faintly in the cool air. The smell of broth and roasted root vegetables fills the space.
Tobirama pauses just inside the threshold of the great hall, mud dripping from his boots onto the swept flagstones. He hates that too—the mess he is bringing inside, the way it will have to be cleaned.
His mother is there, standing near the long table where the evening meal is being laid. She turns at the sound of his footsteps, her expression shifting from musing to startled concern.
“Tobirama?”
She crosses the room in quick strides, skirts brushing the floor, and kneels before him without regard for the mud that transfers to her hem. She cups his face in both hands, thumbs brushing chilled cheeks that burn red from wind and shame. Her gaze travels over him and her brows draw together.
“Were you out this entire time?”
He nods again.
She searches his face a moment longer, as though looking for cracks in porcelain. “You’re freezing,” she murmurs. “And covered in mud. Come here.”
She draws him gently toward the fire, guiding him to sit on the low bench nearest the brazier. Servants glance over but do not interfere; they know better than to hover when she tends to her sons. She kneels again, this time to tug off his boots one at a time, careful not to let the worst of the mud smear further. Warm air from the coals reaches his stockinged feet. He curls his toes against the sudden heat.
“Was it the other children?” she asks quietly, not looking up as she sets the boots aside to be cleaned later.
Tobirama watches the firelight flicker across her hands.
“We were playing,” he says.
His mother pauses, lifting her gaze to meet his. “And where was your brother?”
Tobirama does not understand why the answer to the question matters, but he knows that saying the truth might bring trouble to Hashirama. His fingers curl into the fabric at his knees.
“Tobirama.”
Her voice is gentle, but there is steel beneath it. Tobirama keeps his gaze lowered.
“He was busy playing with other kids.”
His mother exhales through her nose. She reaches out and brushes a streak of dried mud from his cheek with the pad of her thumb.
“Busy,” she repeats, flat.
Before Tobirama can decide whether to nod again, the outer door swings open with a gust of cold air. Footsteps cross the threshold. Hashirama strides in, cheeks still flushed from the wind, hair wild and dark with sweat, the front of his tunic streaked with grass and dirt from the practice grounds. He is grinning at first, the careless grin that always seems to fill whatever space he enters. The grin falters when he sees their mother kneeling before Tobirama, the way her shoulders are set, the state of him drenched in mud.
“What happened?” he demands, striding forward. “Did you fall?”
Their mother rises slowly to her feet.
“I might ask you the same question,” she says. “Where were you this afternoon, Hashirama?”
He blinks. The question catches him off guard.
“I was training,” he says, as though it should be obvious. “With the older boys. Father said I could—”
“You left your brother alone in the meadow.”
Hashirama frowns. “He was with the other children. I saw them playing when I passed by earlier. He was fine.”
“He was out there for hours,” she says, voice low. “Until the evening bells. Covered in mud, freezing, because no one thought to bring him inside.”
Tobirama keeps his eyes on the floor. He can feel the heat rising in his face again from the sudden, uncomfortable attention. Hashirama looks at him, confusion taking over his face. It is followed by a flash of guilt, then defensiveness.
“He could’ve come in whenever he wanted,” he says, crossing his arms. “I didn’t tell him to stay out there all day. I just told him to go play with the other kids!”
“You told him to go play,” their mother counters quietly. “And he did. Because that is what he does.”
Hashirama’s jaw tightens. He glances at Tobirama again, searching for support, but Tobirama keeps his gaze fixed on the coals.
“That’s not fair,” Hashirama says at last, voice rising despite himself. “I always have to take care of him. Always. Watch him, bring him along, make sure he doesn’t get lost or hurt or—or whatever. He’s five, Mother. He’s not a baby anymore. Why does everything have to stop because he can’t just… decide for himself?”
The hall has grown quiet around them. Tobirama’s hands press harder into his knees. Their mother steps closer to Hashirama.
“He is your brother,” she says, tone cold. “Not a burden.”
“I know that,” Hashirama snaps, then immediately looks as though he regrets it. “That’s not what I meant.”
“Then tell me what you meant.”
Hashirama opens his mouth, then closes it again. The anger drains as quickly as it flared.
“I just wanted to train,” he says finally. “Just once. Without worrying.”
Their mother watches him for a long moment, her gaze steady as the mountain peaks. “Then at least have the decency to bring him inside. You do not leave him unsupervised, Hashirama. Not ever. It’s you and me who look after him. Do you understand?”
Hashirama meets her stare, his own eyes bright with frustration. Tobirama sits rigid on the bench and embarrassment burns in his chest, sharp and unfamiliar; he wishes he could sink into the flagstones, disappear like frost under midday sun.
“I understand,” Hashirama mutters at last, though his tone says otherwise.
Their mother nods finally.
“You will not go outside for the next week,” she says. “No training, no meadows, no running off. You stay within the compound until you learn what responsibility means.”
Hashirama’s face twists. “That’s not—”
“Enough.”
The word hits. Hashirama flinches as though physically struck. He stands there a heartbeat longer, chest rising and falling, then turns on his heel. His footsteps echo sharp and angry across the hall as he storms toward the inner corridors, the door slamming behind him with a thud that rattles the lanterns.
Tobirama stares at the floor, the knot in his stomach twisting tighter. His mother turns back to him, expression softening a fraction. She extends a hand.
“Come along now,” she says gently. “Let’s get you cleaned up. Then we can eat.”
A command again, soft as it is. His body responds before his mind can catch up—legs straightening, feet planting firm on the warm stones. He takes her hand, small fingers curling into her palm, and follows her toward the baths.
---
They eat in near silence.
The hall hums softly around them with the muted sounds of ladles against ceramic and the low murmur of servants moving about their work, but the space at their table feels curiously hollow. Tobirama keeps his eyes on his bowl. The broth is hot enough to sting his tongue; he lets the heat drive out the lingering chill in his bones.
Across the room, the place where Hashirama usually sits remains empty. Butsuma is away from the compound, as he often is, called down from the high valleys on matters of border and tribute.
Their mother speaks little. She brushes her fingers through Tobirama’s hair, smoothing it back from his brow. He leans into the touch. When the meal ends and the dishes are cleared away, Tobirama lingers by the dying brazier, listening to the crackle of embers settling into ash. The knot in his stomach has not eased, tightening with every empty glance toward the doorway.
He slips away when the servants begin extinguishing the lamps.
Hashirama’s room lies at the end of the inner corridor, near the narrow window that looks out toward the training grounds. The door stands half-closed. A faint strip of lamplight spills across the stone floor.
Tobirama hesitates only a moment before nudging it open.
Hashirama sits on the edge of his pallet with his back to the door, elbows braced on his knees, head bowed. The lamplight throws his shadow long against the wall.
“Tobi?” Hashirama says after a moment.
Tobirama steps fully inside. His feet make no sound on the stone.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
The words are small. He isn’t sure precisely what he is apologizing for, but he offers the apology anyway, because it feels like that might mend the tear he can sense between them.
Hashirama exhales sharply through his nose.
“You don’t have to be sorry,” he mutters.
Tobirama stands there, hands folded neatly in front of him.
“I didn’t mean to,” he adds. The words tumble out, unpracticed. “I didn’t mean to get you in trouble. I can tell Mother it wasn’t your fault. I can—”
Hashirama turns then, dark eyes flashing. “I said you don’t have to be sorry,” he snaps.
The words strike harder than their volume warrants. Tobirama flinches despite himself.
Hashirama drags a hand down his face. For a heartbeat he looks almost frightened by his own temper, but the frustration remains.
“Just—” he says, gesturing vaguely toward the door. “Go away, Tobi. Get lost. I’m fine. I just don’t want to talk right now.”
The words settle over Tobirama with a familiar, instant weight.
He does not have time to decide what they mean before his body has already chosen an interpretation. His feet turn him neatly toward the door. He walks out of Hashirama’s room without looking back, because looking back would be lingering, and lingering would be disobedience.
Get lost.
The corridor beyond is dim, lamps lowered for the night. Shadows pool in the corners where carved charms hang from doorframes, their small bones and beads clicking softly. Tobirama’s bare feet whisper over the stone as he goes. He passes his own door without slowing. He passes the shrine alcove with its flame and cannot bow.
The outer gate stands ajar, as it often does when the night watch changes. Tobirama’s hands push it wider, metal cold enough to sting, and then he is through, stepping onto the frosted path that winds down from the compound toward the open valley. His night tunic is thin wool, no coat, no boots. The cold bites at once, sharp against exposed skin, but his feet do not falter.
Get lost.
He takes the turn that leads toward the meadow. The grass is slick with dew and the last remnants of melted frost. His toes darken with damp. The meadow opens wide and empty, stripped of laughter and shrieks, bordered by pines that stand like sentreis in the dark. He crosses it without slowing.
Get lost.
The forest is colder. The ground is uneven, littered with roots and fallen needles. Branches shift overhead with the faintest movements of wind. Each sound seems louder for the absence of human voices.
Get lost.
Tobirama keeps walking. He cannot think about where he is going. There is only the forward pull, the steady rhythm of his feet.
Get lost.
He steps over a fallen branch, then another. He follows a narrow deer path deeper between the trees.
It is only when the last faint glow of the compound lanterns disappears behind the rise of the hill that the command loosens, there are no further instruction.
Lost.
Tobirama stops. The stillness around him is absolute. The trees crowd close, their trunks dark pillars. Above, the sky is a narrow strip between branches, clouded over, offering no stars. Somewhere in the distance an owl calls, and the sound raises goosebumps along Tobirama’s arms.
His breath comes out in white puffs. He realizes then that he is alone.
He turns his head, searching for the path he followed, for the shape of the hill, any familiar landmark. Everything looks the same. The forest erasing where he came from.
His throat tightens. He wants to go back.
The desire is overwhelming, sharp enough to makes his eyes sting. He can picture the warmth of the hall. He can picture his mother’s hands, her voice. He can picture Hashirama’s room, the lamplight spilling onto the floor.
He takes one step in what he thinks might be the right direction. Hesitates, foot hovering over the needles.
Tobirama lowers his foot again.
He wraps his arms around himself, fingers digging into his own sleeves. His skin prickles with cold. The damp has crept up his legs. His feet ache now. He swallows hard, but the tightness in his throat remains.
A sound escapes him. He presses his lips together as if he can force it back in, as if he can swallow the shame along with the fear, but the fear is bigger than he is. It swells behind his ribs until it spills over.
Tobirama’s face crumples. The first tear tracks hot against chilled skin. Then another follows, and another, and suddenly he is crying in earnest, silent at first and then broken by uneven gasps that fog the air in front of him. He drops to the ground as though his legs have finally remembered they are his. It leeches heat from his skin. He draws his knees up to his chest and folds over them, arms wrapping tight as he tucks his face into the crook of his elbow. The forest looms. Every creak of a branch sounds like something approaching. Every rustle might be teeth or claws or a hand reaching out of the dark.
He does not know how long he sits there. Time stretches. The sobs slow eventually, fading into shuddering breaths, but the fear remains. His tunic clings wetly now, Warmth spreads between his legs, then cools quickly in the night air. Shame twists in his gut, but he cannot move to fix it. He huddles smaller, face buried, waiting for the dark to swallow him whole.
The sky lightens by degrees. Black fades to deep blue, then to a thin gray at the edges of the canopy. Birdsong starts, they come out tentative at first then grow louder. The forest wakes.
Voices come with the dawn. Faint, distant echoes carried on the wind. Calls, names. His name.
“Tobirama!”
He lifts his head slowly, ears straining. The voices grow louder and overlapping. Men’s voices, rough and urgent, mingled with the crunch of boots on needles.
“Tobirama! Where are you?”
He tries to call back. His throat is raw, voice cracked. “Here...”
It is not loud enough. He tries again, louder this time, the word breaking on a sob. “Here!”
Footsteps crash closer and branches part. A figure emerges from the trees—a guard, tall and broad in felt coat and leather belt, prayer tokens glinting at his side. His face is lined with exhaustion, eyes widening as they fix on the small, huddled form.
“Oh no,” the guard breathes, voice rough. “My prince.”
He crosses the distance in three strides and drops to one knee, reaching out with careful hands. His gaze flicks over Tobirama’s thin tunic, his bare feet, the trembling.
“What are you doing out here?” he murmurs, disbelief and relief tangled together. He strips his own outer robe from his shoulders and wraps it around Tobirama at once, thick wool swallowing the child’s slight frame. The warmth is immediate and almost painful.
Tobirama’s mouth opens but no words come. His face twists again, and the tears spill freshly, reflecting in the light.
“It’s all right,” the guard says, voice softer now. He shifts closer and lifts Tobirama as though he weighs nothing, one arm braced beneath his knees, the other firm around his back. Tobirama stiffens before sagging, exhausted to the bone. His forehead presses against the guard’s shoulder. He can smell smoke in the man’s clothes, and metal, and the sharp scent of morning.
The forest recedes behind them as the guard carries him. Tobirama keeps his eyes half-closed, letting the motion rock him.
The compound appears over the rise as the sun finally crests the peaks, pale and cold. Lanterns still burn by the gate. Too many people stand in the courtyard, faces drawn tight. Guards move along the perimeter as if they might still be searching, even now.
At the center of it all, his mother. She breaks into motion the moment she sees him.
Her outer robe is thrown on wrong, clasp undone. Her hair has come loose from its braid. She crosses the courtyard at a run, boots skidding on the frost-slick stone, and reaches them with a broken sound.
“Tobirama!”
The guard lowers Tobirama carefully into her arms. His mother gathers him as if she can make him disappear into her, one hand cradling the back of his head, the other pressing him close against her chest. Her breath shudders over his hair. Her cheeks are wet. He feels the tremble in her limbs as she holds him.
“Oh,” she whispers. “Oh, my love.”
Behind her, Hashirama stands frozen. He is still in his nightclothes, barefoot like Tobirama had been, hair wild from sleep or frantic hands. His eyes are red-rimmed. The moment Tobirama is in their mother’s arms, Hashirama moves forward in small, jerky steps. “Tobi,”
Tobirama lifts his head just enough to see him. Hashirama stops a pace away, as if he is afraid to touch him.
“I’m sorry,” Hashirama says, the words tumbling over each other. “I didn’t— I didn’t mean it. I didn’t know. I thought—” His breath catches, sharp and ragged. “I didn’t know it would make you go like that.”
Their mother shifts, drawing Hashirama in with her free arm, pulling them all together. Tobirama feels his brother’s hand clutch at his sleeve, fingers trembling.
“I promise,” Hashirama says, words tumbling fast and fervent. “I won’t say it again. Ever. I didn’t know.”
Tobirama does not know what to do with the apology. He does not know how to explain that he knows Hashirama’s words had not been cruel, that Hashirama had only been angry, that he had not meant it. If only it mattered what he had meant.
Tobirama simply stays where he is, pressed against his mother’s chest, breathing in the familiar scent of her wool and skin. His mother tightens her arms around him once more.
“Inside,” she says, no room for argument. “Now.”
This time, the command carries no cruelty. Only the desperate, shaking need to have him safe where she can see him, where words cannot reach out and drag him into the dark again.
---
His mother died the following winter.
There had been two pregnancies after him, though Tobirama understood that only in fragments at the time. He knew there had been hope, because Hashirama had whispered to him in the dark about a baby sister, or a little brother. He knew there had been loss, because each time the hope vanished, the whole compound seemed to fall still.
The first child had left her weak. The second killed her.
She died in her bed with the shutters barred against the storm and the lamps kept burning through the day. Tobirama remembered being led away before the end, one of the older attendants pressing a hand gently but firmly between his shoulders. He remembered resisting just enough to feel the pressure turn absolute. He remembered Hashirama’s voice carrying through the half-closed door, breaking, unrecognizable in its grief. He remembered the smell of medicine. He remembered waiting in the corridor with cold feet and folded hands, staring at the carved grain of the wall until the patterns blurred.
Afterward, the household changed shape around the absence she left behind.
No one laughed so readily in the evenings. No one knelt to warm Tobirama’s feet by the brazier or brushed his hair with absent tenderness, or checked that he had washed properly before prayer. The bells still rang from the shrine above the cliffs each morning, but the sound came muted through the weather, as though the mountain itself had wrapped the world in cotton.
Hashirama changed too.
Grief chipped away at him. For a while he grew louder, as though noise might override what had happened. He climbed where he should not climb, fought boys bigger than himself, came home with bruises darkening along his jaw and shoulders. Nevertheless, some part of the old carelessness had been burned out of him that winter, and when spring came at last, it did not return.
He stopped throwing commands over his shoulder without thinking. Stopped saying come here, wait there, hold this, do that in the loose, thoughtless way children used with one another. If he wanted Tobirama near, he went to fetch him. If he wanted something passed across the table, he asked the servants or rose to take it himself. It was a developing skill, sometimes Tobirama caught him breaking off mid-sentence, the first shape of an order already in his mouth, and watched him begin again.
It made life gentler, if only between them.
That same spring, Tobirama received the markings of his mother’s line. The tattooing took place at the shrine, beneath the watch of the old priest and the mountain wind. Red lines were worked into the skin beside his eyes, on his chin, with a bone needle and pigment ground from ochre and cedar ash.
The markings were older than the Senju, according to some stories. Children received them when they were judged old enough to carry their ancestors’ protection into the world. The custom came from their mother’s clan, and no reigning line had worn the markings in generations. Heirs belonged first to the crown and its traditions; lesser branches were permitted to keep older ones.
Hashirama had complained bitterly about the exclusion until the priest produced the needles. After that, his objections became considerably less audible.
Tobirama remembered their sting and the smell of incense. He remembered the priest telling him that no child marked by the mountain ever walked entirely alone. At six years old, he had wanted very badly to believe him.
As Tobirama grew older, he came to understand the curse with a clarity that had not been possible when he was small.
A casual instruction could seize his body as completely as one of Butsuma’s coldly spoken decrees. He could pray for as long as he was told to pray, kneeling on woven mats until his legs went numb, while Hashirama slipped out of the temple courtyard the moment the old priest turned his back and returned grinning, entirely unpunished by anything except the slight scolding that followed.
The tutors too quickly discovered that Tobirama was diligent without requiring discipline, and after that they ceased to spend effort trying to restrain Hashirama when he wriggled in his seat or turned lectures into arguments. It was not that Tobirama resented learning. Often he did not. Books opened for him where people did not. How diligent Tobirama is, the tutors would say, How devout. How well-mannered. How serious.
By nine, Tobirama understood enough to hate the praise almost as much as he hated pity. He began to test the curse in small, secret ways.
If spoken commands could seize him, then perhaps words stripped of voice would do the same. The thought came to him one afternoon during lessons, while his brush hovered over copied scripture and the tutor’s droning voice blurred into the scratch of bristles on paper. He held the idea in his mind until the lesson ended, guarded it through the evening meal and took it at last to Hashirama.
His brother was twelve by then, long limbed, sprawled on his stomach across the floor of their shared sitting room with a half-mended practice glove beside him
“What are you doing?” Hashirama asked, watching as Tobirama knelt opposite him with a sheet of paper and an inkstone.
“Testing something,” Tobirama said.
That earned him a sharper look. Hashirama had become wary of that phrase over the years. “What kind of something?”
Tobirama hesitated, then pushed the paper toward him. “Write a command.”
Hashirama glanced down. “What kind of command?”
“Anything simple.” Tobirama kept his voice even. “As long as you do not do it aloud.”
Hashirama stilled, the glove slipping forgotten from his fingers.
For a moment Tobirama thought he would refuse. Hashirama’s mouth tightened in the way it always did whenever the curse was made too visible between them. With a sigh, he reached for the brush. He wrote in large, uneven characters:
Stand up.
The ink shone wetly in the lamplight. Tobirama looked at the words and waited.
Nothing happened.
The invisible weight he was expecting never settled into his limbs, no command lodged itself beneath his ribs. His body remained his own, and the sheer relief of it came so sharp he almost laughed.
Hashirama saw the change in his face and sat up at once. “It didn’t work?”
Tobirama shook his head.
“Good,” Hashirama said, radiating brightness.” That’s good.”
They tested it twice more, with different phrasings, different hands. Tobirama obeyed none of it.
The curse, it seemed, belonged to the living voice. That discovery felt like winning something, though Tobirama could not say what.
He grew bolder after that, if only because there were very few avenues left to try.
There was a mirror in one of the unused side chambers, its surface polished bright. Tobirama stood before it one afternoon, the room silent around him, and studied his own reflection.
He tried the simplest commands first.
“Sit down,” he said, steadying his voice.
His reflection remained standing, pale and still, watching him with the same attention he gave it.
“Turn around.”
The silence pressed in on him, faintly humiliating in a way. He had gathered enough evidence. There was no reason this should be any different.
Still, he might as well try. Tobirama tightened his fingers at his sides, and drew in breath.
“You will no longer obey.”
The words sounded thin in the empty room, stripped of authority the moment they left his mouth. He felt foolish as soon as he spoke them, a child playing pretend. The mirror offered no answer. His body did not stir. After a moment, he exhaled and stepped away.
He knew, even then, that it had not worked.
And yet, the next time his instructor spoke sharply from across the training yard—told him to hold—his body obeyed before thought could catch up, as it always did. The motion was seamless. It stung more than he expected.
It went on like that for years: small tests, careful failures. He learned that the curse did not care for fairness and had no ear for nuance. It heard direction and answered it. Everything else was only human decoration.
What did change, as the years passed, was Tobirama himself. His body lengthened. He proved quick with a blade, quicker still with forms and footwork, precise where Hashirama was instinctive. He learned to move within instruction as deftly as other boys moved beyond it. The weapons masters praised his discipline. The priests praised his focus.
Butsuma understood usefulness better than anyone.
By eleven, Tobirama was being taken beyond the compound walls as an asset in training. Butsuma did not waste words on praise. He wasted even less on comfort.
“Watch.”
“Remember.”
“Again.”
and Tobirama watched and remembered and went through the form until his shoulders burned and his palms blistered beneath the practice wrap.
His father was not a man given to needless displays. He did not strike Tobirama for sport, nor command him merely to savor obedience. He simply recognized what his second son was and shaped him accordingly, the way a blacksmith might shape steel.
Hashirama hated it.
He never did it openly, open defiance still came hard between father and heir. But Tobirama saw the set of his mouth whenever Butsuma summoned him. Saw the way Hashirama found reasons to linger nearby after his brother returned from some excursion into the lower provinces.
Tobirama never knew what to say to that either.
He is standing at the edge of the western training field when Hashirama finds him there.
The day is cooling toward evening. The last of the younger boys have already been called in to wash. Tobirama stands with a saber in one hand and his free arm folded behind his back, posture straight despite the ache beginning low in his shoulders. He has been standing there long enough for the shadows to change direction.
Hashirama comes down the path from the upper terraces, damp hair curling at his temples from the baths. At fourteen he has begun to lose the last soft traces of childhood without becoming any less visibly himself; he still moves as though the world will always make room. He slows when he sees Tobirama.
“Tobi?” he calls, then stops himself and comes closer, voice pitched more carefully. “Why are you still out here?”
Tobirama turns his head.
“One of the instructors told me to wait. My practice sword cracked.” He glances down at the weapon, where a splinter has indeed lifted near the guard. “He said he would fetch another.”
Hashirama looks past him toward the empty equipment shed, the long stretch of field in the fading light.
“How long ago?”
“A while.” Tobirama shrugs. “I imagine he was called to some other task.”
Hashirama exhales sharply. He drags a hand back through his damp hair, leaving it more disordered than before.
“Stop waiting.”
The shift is immediate. Tobirama’s shoulders loosen a fraction, the stillness easing out of him. The lingering weight of the earlier command slips its hold without resistance. Hashirama watches it happen. His jaw tightens before he looks away.
“I was heading inside,” he says, glancing back toward the lit corridors. “Thought I might get some food. Would you like to join me?”
Tobirama looks at him. “I would like that,” he says.
Hashirama’s expression softens, a smile breaking over his face. He reaches for the damaged saber, taking it from Tobirama without comment, and turns toward the path.
Tobirama falls into step beside him.
---
Tobirama was fourteen the first time he killed a man. It was not his last.
The first one died quickly. Tobirama remembered that much with a clarity that made everything else blur. The wet resistance of the blade, the breath leaving him in a rough sound that did not resemble anything human for long. It happened in the narrow dark between two storehouses in one of the lower valleys, where the snow had turned gray with soot and foot traffic. The man had been selling information, or carrying it, or meant to carry it farther than Butsuma was willing to allow. Tobirama had been told what he was, and then told what to do.
He had done it.
Afterward, Butsuma asked only whether the message had been recovered intact. Tobirama said yes. Butsuma nodded, and gave the order to move on. By the time they returned to the mountain compound, the blood had already dried in the seams of Tobirama’s gloves.
Butsuma trusted very few people. Fewer still with matters he considered delicate. Men could be bribed, frightened, turned. Officers grew careless. Guards talked. Even loyal retainers carried their own ambitions beneath the skin. But Tobirama obeyed. Tobirama watched. Tobirama remembered. Tobirama did not hesitate when told to act.
There were traitors who passed names to rivals in exchange for silver. Couriers who rode at night with sealed letters tucked into their sleeves. Informants hidden inside temple records and merchant houses, men who smiled politely by day and sold pieces of the realm by night. There were also those whose guilt seemed less certain: a steward who asked too many questions in the wrong company, a messenger who lingered too long at a border inn, a minor official whose brother had married into the wrong family. By the time Butsuma set Tobirama on their trail, certainty had already been decided elsewhere.
The work was rarely clean. As the missions grew harder, the marks came back with him more often. A split lip one month. Finger-shaped bruises darkening along his forearm the next. A slash across the ribs that pulled every time he twisted to rise from bed. Once, a knife laid open the flesh of his thigh badly enough that even Butsuma’s mouth flattened at the sight of it, though he said only to have it stitched and be ready to ride again within the week.
Hashirama still hated.
At fourteen, he had hated it in the blunt way of youth, anger that flared hot and fast, sharp words and clenched fists. By twenty, it no longer burned itself out as easily. It settled into an anger that lingered, that lived in every glance he turned toward their father and in every word he chose not to swallow.
He argued with Butsuma constantly, unyielding confrontations that carried down corridors. Their father met that defiance with cold steadiness. A ruler must use the tools available to him. A son of the royal line did not exist for comfort. Sentiment was a luxury no one in their position could afford.
Hashirama never accepted those answers. He only grew older around them. Tobirama tried to tell him it was fine, tried to quell the fire in the only way he knew how. He could take it. He was built for it, or near enough. He was quick, and careful, and difficult to surprise.There was a grim sort of pride in that competence, and he clung to it.
Hashirama never believed him.
Tobirama had long since stopped expecting him to. In any case, it wouldn’t soften the work that followed. So when the summons came at dusk, he went without hesitation.
The light has already begun to thin along the mountain ridges, the sky washed pale where it meets the snow. Tobirama stands at the edge of the inner hall, hands folded behind his back, waiting.
Butsuma Senju does not keep him long.
“There is a settlement three hours’ ride south,” he says. His voice is the same flat instrument it has always been. “A handful of rebels hiding among farmers. Fifteen souls at most. They have been sheltering a courier we cannot allow to reach the southern cities.”
Tobirama inclines his head.
“They are not soldiers. They will not fight like soldiers. That does not make them harmless.” He studies him for a moment longer. “Go, leave no one standing.”
The words settle into Tobirama’s bones. They take hold, root and bind.
“Yes, Father.”
---
The valley is narrower than he expects. Smoke curls above the trees, the scent of cooking fire drifting between the pines. Tobirama pauses at the edge of the clearing. There are fewer than fifteen.
He counts them without thinking. Eight, clustered near the fire. Three more at the edge of the tree line, speaking in low voices. A woman kneeling beside a bundle of cloth and tools. A man with a bow slung across his back, bending to stir food in a pot.
And a child.
The boy sits cross-legged near the fire, a carved piece of wood clutched in his hands. He is speaking to one of the men—his father, perhaps—voice bright and unguarded in the dim. Tobirama’s breath leaves him slowly.
They do not look like rebels.
They look like a family that has been moving too long, resting where they can, sharing what little they have. The kind of people who exist in the margins.
For a moment, Tobirama does not move. The command remains inside him but he has obeyed worse than this. That is the thought that comes first, and he hates it as soon as it arrives. It slips into place with the ease of long practice. Worse than this. Men with knives. Men who begged. Men who spat in his face and cursed him even as they bled out between his hands.
The child laughs.
It is a small sound, bright and ordinary, carried thinly through the pines. The boy holds up the carved piece of wood in both hands as if showing off some great treasure, and the man beside him glances over with a tired smile.
Tobirama’s chest goes cold. He lowers himself soundlessly into the trees and watches a little longer. The woman by the bundle is mending a torn strap with reddened fingers. One of the men near the fire coughs into his sleeve, a wet sound. The child keeps talking, words tumbling out in that careless stream only children possess, certain that someone will listen.
Perhaps a courier only passed through. Perhaps someone here gave shelter where they should not have. Perhaps he is one of them. Perhaps Butsuma was wrong.
Tobirama closes his eyes for one heartbeat. He reaches into the inner fold of his sleeve and draws out two small twists of waxed wool wrapped in thin silk. He presses one plug into the left ear, then the right, seating each. When he opens his eyes again, he has already begun to move.
The first man dies before he can cry out.
Tobirama comes down from the tree line, one hand over the man’s mouth, the blade driven quickly beneath ribs. Hot blood spills over his fingers at once, slicking his grip. The second turns at the soft disturbance of boots. He has time only to inhale. Tobirama catches him across the throat.. He drops to his knees clutching at himself, eyes wide with disbelief.
The clearing erupts.
The bowman reaches for the weapon at his back. The woman rises too quickly, knocking the bundle of tools over. A pot goes over in the dirt, broth spilling into the fire. Sparks jump.
Tobirama does not think through the sequence. His body answers with the efficiency that has been beaten into it. Left, pivot, cut. A man stumbling backward over the firepit, it looks like he’s screaming.
One of them gets a blade into him.
It slides shallowly along his side, not deep enough to stop him but enough to burn. Tobirama turns on instinct and drives his own knife up beneath the man’s jaw. Warmth sheets over his hand. He jerks free before the body has finished collapsing.
Another catches him across the mouth with the butt of a tool or a fist—he cannot tell which. Pain bursts white behind his eyes. He tastes blood at once, metallic and thick. There is a shift sharp and wrong inside his left ear. Loosened wool dragged half-free by the force of the blow, enough that sound rushes back in ragged pieces.
There are too many voices.
Run—
Get him—
Please—
A woman is crying. One of the men near the trees manages three stumbling steps before Tobirama reaches him and drags him down into the dirt. The struggle is brief. Then it is over.
By the time the clearing stills, his breath is coming hard and ragged through his nose. Blood has dried tacky across one side of his neck and freshened again where there is a split in the skin at his brow. His side throbs with each inhale. Around him the camp sags into ruin. And the child is still alive.
Tobirama goes very still.
The boy has backed himself against one of the packs near the edge of the clearing. He cannot be more than six, perhaps seven. The carved bit of wood is still in one hand. A toy horse, Tobirama sees belatedly, or meant to be one. One ear has been whittled too large. The tail is only half-shaped.
The boy is crying without sound. His mouth opens and closes around breaths that do not seem to fit inside him.
Tobirama’s fingers tighten on the hilt of the knife.
The command presses against the inside of his skull.
Leave no one standing.
The boy is not standing. The thought comes to him so suddenly he nearly sways with it. Slowly, very slowly, Tobirama lowers his blade. The boy flinches anyway.
“Don’t,” he hears himself say, and his voice sounds wrong, too close to pleading. He does not know whether he is speaking to the child or to himself. “Don’t move.”
The child freezes. Tobirama had not meant— no, that is a lie. Some part of him had meant it. He had wanted stillness. And now the boy sits rigid against the packs, eyes huge and brimming, his little body terrified into obedience by a stranger’s need. Tobirama can only look at him. Then revulsion goes through him so hard it is almost nausea.
He takes one step back.
“Tell me to leave,” he says.
The boy stares back.
Tobirama thinks he does not understand. The words are too strange, carrying no shape the child can grasp. Or perhaps he understands too well, and that is the problem. The child’s mouth trembles, opening as though to speak, but no sound comes. His throat works around nothing. His chest heaves in small, broken pulls of air.
Tobirama feels everything inside him begin to splinter.
“Please,” he tries again, and the word is stripped of anything resembling authority. “Say it. Tell me to go.”
The boy’s gaze flicks to the bodies behind him. To the man by the fire. To the woman crumpled near the spilled tools. Back again, wide and uncomprehending. He makes a small, thin cry that catches in his throat and breaks there. His body jerks into motion without warning. He scrambles to his feet, knocking into the pack behind him and runs.
Tobirama’s body moves before thought can even reach for it.
He catches the boy by the shoulder. Small. So small. The bones too slight beneath his grip. The momentum spins him halfway around, feet slipping in churned dirt. Their eyes meet—close enough that Tobirama can see the wet shine of tears clinging to the child’s lashes.
Tobirama’s hand drives forward. He does not register the blade going in. There is only resistance, followed by the terrible absence of it. The boy’s breath leaves him in a startled sound, more surprise than pain.
He catches the boy as he folds, because some older, more useless part of him cannot bear to let him hit the ground hard.
For a moment he is holding him. For a moment longer, the boy is still alive.
His eyes search Tobirama’s face with an accusing bewilderment. His fingers twitch weakly where they curl against Tobirama’s sleeve, then slacken.
The weight changes. It is a small thing, that change. Tobirama understands it anyway. He sinks to his knees without feeling the impact. The knife falls from his hand, landing somewhere Tobirama cannot hear.
The child lies across his lap, head tipped into the crook of Tobirama’s elbow in some grotesque parody of tenderness. Blood creeps in dark ribbons along the weave of Tobirama’s sleeve. He is too young. He is so young.
Tobirama can do nothing but stare.
The first dry heave tears out of him. He lurches sideways, one arm clamped around the child while his empty stomach convulses. There is little in him to bring up; he had ridden hard and eaten less. Bitter spit burns the back of his throat. He coughs until tears blur his vision and his side screams with the strain.
When it passes, he is still there, kneeling in the wreck of the clearing, holding the evidence of what he had done. The sky does not split open. No god descends in fury. The fire gutters low among the kicked apart logs and sends up thin streamers of smoke.
The world goes on.
---
By the time Tobirama returns to the mountain compound, dawn has already given way to morning.
The ride back exists only in fragments. Hooves striking frozen ground. Pine and stone and the hard white line of the peaks. He thinks someone spoke to him at the outer checkpoint. He must have answered, or perhaps only looked long enough that they stepped aside.
He dismounts in the upper courtyard.
The stable boy who takes his horse says something too, but Tobirama does not catch it. His ears are full of a dull rushing sound, like winter water under ice. He lets the reins go without looking. One of his hands is still red to the wrist. He stares at it for a moment as if it belongs to someone else.
The courtyard stones pass beneath his feet. The doors open before him. Warm air rushes out, carrying the smell of cooked grain and damp wool drying by the hearths.
He keeps walking.
Servants turn as he enters the great hall. Conversation breaks apart mid-word. Blood has dried in dark scales down the front of his armor and gone tacky again where fresher wet has spread from the cut at his side. There is more on his face. He knows there must be. He can feel it tightening when he breathes.
At the far end of the hall, Hashirama rises so quickly that his bench scrapes hard over the stone.
He had been halfway through the morning meal, sleeves pushed carelessly to the forearms, a scroll unrolled beside his bowl. Tobirama sees all of this. He sees, too, the exact moment his brother understands that something is wrong beyond the usual wrongness.
“Tobirama,” Hashirama says.
Tobirama reaches the center of the hall before the first tremor goes through him.It begins in his hands. A fine, ugly shaking that makes the blood at his fingertips gleam wetly in the light. His breath catches and refuses to settle. The hall tilts sideways. Someone moves at the edge of his vision and he recoils before he can stop himself, a flinch that sends pain lancing through his side.
Hashirama is there before anyone else can come near.
Tobirama stares at him. There is blood on Hashirama’s mouth.
No. Not blood. Pomegranate, perhaps. Or tomato juice. He blinks hard and the image shatters. Hashirama is only Hashirama, eyes dark and horrified, hands held open and empty at his sides.
“Tobi,” he says, and his voice is low. “Would you look at me?”
Tobirama does. Hashirama’s gaze flicks down, taking in the blood, the torn edge of Tobirama’s sleeve, the mud crusted at the hem of his outer robe. His face drains of color and fills with horror.
“I’m going to bring you to your room.”
Tobirama tries to answer. He means to say yes. Or no. Or wait. He is not certain which. What comes out instead is a ragged sound that tears deep in his chest and leaves him standing there with his mouth open.
The whole hall hears it. Hashirama steps forward then, slowly enough to be seen, and lays one hand against Tobirama’s shoulder.
The contact is gentle. Tobirama folds.
His body seems to lose the memory of how to remain upright: knees giving first, then his spine, the last rigid line of his neck. Hashirama catches him before he strikes the floor hard, one arm braced around his back, the other trying to shield his head from the stone. The motion jars the cut along Tobirama’s side and white pain bursts behind his eyes.
Then he is on his knees, half in his brother’s arms, and breathing has become impossible. The sob that rips out of him does not sound human. It echoes against the high rafters. Somewhere nearby there are more gasps.
“Tobirama. Tobi.”
Hashirama keep saying his name. Never calm down or be still. Only his name, over and over, as if it is the only safe thing left in the language.
Tobirama clutches at him with blood-slick hands. Hashirama looks up, over Tobirama’s bent head.
“Out,” he says.
The word cracks through the hall. The servants scatter at once, chairs scraping, guards retreating out of sight. Within moments the hall has emptied itself of everyone but the two of them and the old house steward, who hesitates near the doorway with his face gone gray.
Hashirama keeps his voice even. “Water,” he says to him. “Clean cloth. The physician. And no one tells Father before I do.”
The steward bows quickly and vanishes. Hashirama looks back down.
Tobirama is shaking so violently now that his teeth knock together. His hands have fisted in the front of Hashirama’s robe, smearing blood into the woven fabric. His breathing comes in short, trapped bursts. There are tears on his face, from pain or horror or the body’s own revolt against too much of both. Hashirama slides one arm beneath his knees and lifts him.
After that, the world loses its edges.
Tobirama remembers the movement more than the path itself. The steady rise and fall of Hashirama’s breathing beneath his ear, the hard line of his brother’s shoulder braced against his cheek. Somewhere a door opens. Somewhere else it shuts.
He keeps his eyes open for a little while. The ceiling drifts above him in long wooden beams.
The room is warmer than the hall. Hashirama lowers him onto something soft. A mattress. Blankets bunch beneath his weight. Panic claws through him suddenly, because the softness feels wrong after the churned dirt of the clearing.
Hashirama is there at once. Hands at his shoulders, careful and warm, and Hashirama’s voice close enough that Tobirama can feel it.
“It’s me.”
Tobirama goes still. His breath shudders on the way out. He keeps his eyes closed.
His outer layers are stripped away one by one. Fingers at knots and ties stiffened by dried blood. Cloth dragged wet and warm across his skin. The sting when alcohol finds split flesh. The pull and pressure as the wound at his side is examined, cleaned, stitched, bound.
He wants to apologize for every flinch. For the blood. For the trouble. For coming back like this and making Hashirama look at him.
Nothing coherent reaches his mouth.
At some point there are other hands in the room. Older hands. The physician, or one of the senior attendants. Tobirama can tell them apart from Hashirama only because Hashirama keeps touching him between each intrusion. The murmurs around him remain muffled. He catches only pieces.
“... deep enough to...”
“...fever, if—”
Then the room narrows again, and the others are gone.
Water passes over his face. Over his hands. Over his mouth where the skin split and crusted there. Each pass comes away with less blood than the last. Tobirama can feel it happening in reverse, this attempted undoing: the massacre reduced to washwater gone pink, to linen stained and removed.
He feels Hashirama pause at his hands. He feels Hashirama begin to wash between his fingers.
The tenderness of it is unbearable. Tobirama swallows, hard enough to hurt.
“I’m sorry.”
The cloth stills. Tobirama does not know if Hashirama heard him. He hopes he did not. He hopes no one ever hears him say it, because the apology is too large and too useless.
“You have nothing to apologize for.”
Tobirama forces his eyes open.
Hashirama is kneeling beside the bed, sleeves rolled past the elbow, forearms streaked pink where the washwater has dried and been replaced and dried again. There is blood on his robe, on his arms. Tobirama’s lips move. It takes two tries to make the rest of it come out.
“I tried.”
Hashirama closes his eyes. When he looks at Tobirama again, his face is so devastated that Tobirama nearly looks away.
“I know you did.”
He sets the cloth aside. Reaches up and cups Tobirama’s face in one damp hand, thumb resting just shy of the bruise at his cheekbone.
“It isn’t your fault.”
The words should not matter. They change nothing. The dead remain dead. He shakes his head anyway.
Hashirama’s hand tightens minutely.
“It isn’t,” he says again, and there is steel under the grief now. “Do you hear me, Tobirama? It isn’t your fault.”
The insistence is fierce, dangerous, almost a command in its own right. Tobirama sees the moment Hashirama pulls himself back from that edge, sees his jaw tense. Instead he bends and presses his forehead carefully to Tobirama’s. Tobirama lets himself lean into it. He can feel the damp heat of Hashirama’s skin, the faint tremors. He wants to stay there. Wants, absurdly, to fold himself into that single point of contact and go no farther into the day.
Tobirama’s eyes slip shut.
The exhaustion isn’t gentle. It drags at him in sudden, ugly plunges, then releases him again before he can fall. Each time his body loosens, his mind catches on a sharp edge and hauls him half back to waking.
Sometime later, after the lamp has burned low enough, Hashirama lies down atop the layered furs beside him. Tobirama turns toward the faint warmth at the other side of the bed. Sleep takes him by degrees, uneven and mistrustful.
In the hollow place between one breath and the next, that warmth vanishes. It is enough that some buried, vigilant part of him stirs. In sleep he feels rather than hears the withdrawal. Tobirama drifts, suspended and unmoored. Time loses shape.
When the warmth returns, it does it as quietly as it left. A depression in the furs. The faint smell of cold night air clinging to wool. Something else beneath it, metallic and thin, so familiar by now it has soaked itself into the weave of his life. A hand comes to rest briefly over his hair. Tobirama keeps his eyes closed and lets the rhythm of his brother’s breathing pull him under again.
Morning comes gray and quiet.
When Tobirama surfaces the second time, the room is filled with thin wintry light. Hashirama is still there, asleep beside him, one arm flung loosely across the furs. Tobirama lies still for a long moment, studying the slow rise and fall of his brother’s chest, the faint lines already forming under his eyes. The ache in his side has dulled to a distant throb. The blood is gone from his skin.
He turns his head toward the narrow window. Outside, the peaks stand indifferent against a pale sky. The bells have not yet begun to ring.
In the quiet hours of that same morning, Senju Butsuma is found dead in his chamber.