The Mythic

by Tavina

That one where Kanae is a siren who has wandered up the Nakano river, and Madara is the one to rescue her. Featuring: Blacksmith!Madara, Siren!Kanae, and Pastor!Hashirama. A wild AU of the Sunfall/Moonrise universe. European fairy tale. MadaraxOC. Implied former HashiMada. HashiMito.

Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto.

---

An apology to Pencap: I'm not sure if you're ever going to read this again, and I do understand that it's pretty unlikely, but I don't know how else to contact you, so I'll write out my apology here. I'm sorry I didn't credit where your poem came from. I know you said that it was fine to keep it up, but I feel bad about it, so I'm not going to.

I'd seen it on pinterest where it didn't link back to an author, but that's also no excuse as a literal google search of the first line would have given me where it came from. I'm not sure why I didn't since I normally do. These are excuses of course, the thing is that I didn't. I understand that seeing your own work used as a part of someone else's is incredibly awful. I'm sorry.

Anything further would be excusing myself more.

~Tavina

---

She'd come from the sea. Madara thinks, almost fondly as she sits humming over her embroidery late one winter evening when the snow piles outside the windows and the fire cracks and pops. He's staring absently into the flames, as they flicker and dance, throwing shadows over his walls.

And in her humming is the weight of the ocean, the sound of the waves, rocking him closer to dreaming.

She'd come from the sea, and she stayed. That is what he is truly fond of.

"Tell me, Madara," She asks, voice wrapping around his shoulders, smooth as honey, rich as silk. "What are you thinking of?"

He turns lazily to look at her, with her long loose hair curling gently into spirals, her sea green eyes, her small amused smile which revealed the points of her teeth, the way her hands in some lights would still look like claws, and sighs, a hand reaching out for her. My lovely wife.

"I was thinking of you. Of you and the sea."

"Did you think I might return to it?" She's set the sewing down now, and her bare feet patter over the wooden floorboards. "You know I love you too much to ever leave you." Her breath fans over his ear, and her lips pepper his neck with idle, pensive kisses.

Her voice is liquid silver, pure and sweet, but he knows better than to believe her overly much.

"Do you?" He murmurs, even as she leans over his shoulder to kiss his chin, his pulse, and finally his heart, her fingers wandering aimlessly over his stomach. "Won't you leave if I were no longer so interesting?" He surrenders to her play, to her idle caresses and sweet words.

Like so many men before him, he drowns in her voice.

He likes to think that only he could have ever compelled her to stay for so long. That she will stay until his bones are dust beneath the earth, and then perhaps she'd return to the sea.

She'd come from the sea, and she stayed because she'd found him more interesting than her fanciful pursuits beneath the waves.

She'd told him so, laughingly last year at the Mayfair after the children in town had strung her hair with flowers. You land people are always so interesting and bold. He'd been drowning in the oceans of her eyes.

"I don't believe I can be more interested by anything." Her voice has changed. It's no longer attached to a magical cadence, no longer silver, closer to human. "Madara?" She touches his cheek, and he opens his eyes. She's no longer smiling when she climbs into his lap, looping her arms around his neck, her head against his chest. "I will fade when you die." She tells him gently, without magic, without glamor, with only truth. "We shall leave this world together, you and I."

"Mmmm." He wraps an arm around her waist and pulls her closer. "It won't be for many years yet."

She laughs, clear and sweet. "It will be the blink of an eye, Madara. Though yes, for you, there will be many years yet."

He shifts, and the fire burns low. Her hair seems as dark as blood, falling gently to the floor.

She sighs, content in her possession of him.

His mind falls back to tracing old memories.

---

It had been a cruel summer in Konoha Village, and no one knew it more than Madara Uchiha, who was kneeling in front of the latest of a long line of graves in the pouring rain.

Izuna. The latest death had been Izuna.

He didn't know if his grief, and it truly was grief, for his brother's death was because he loved Izuna, or if it was because he simply couldn't accept that he was the last survivor of their small family. If it was because he was selfless or selfish.

It's all Tobirama's fault. He thinks uncharitably, as the heavens opened and wept, the clouds rolling above dark and heavy.

He can acknowledge that the accident had not been entirely Tobirama's fault. No, Izuna had had-

Had, had...

He's been in the rain so long that he's about numb. The rain that falls is cruel, cutting, and cold, just like his mood.

"Madara." He knows that voice. Knows it well.

"Go away." He doesn't want to speak to Tobirama Senju. Doesn't want to see the regret, the mourning in the other man's face, doesn't even want to hear the man speak. Doesn't.

Does. Not.

"I just wanted to say-" The bastard need say nothing.

"Go away before I kill you." His grip tightens on his ax. Tobirama Bastard is unarmed he's certain. He could probably get several good swings in before Tobirama thinks to run.

The thought of hacking Tobirama to pieces is a tempting one. Hadn't Izuna been-

But no. That is a dangerous thought to think.

"Alright. I was just going to suggest that you get out of the cold, or we'll have to bury you too." Tobirama backs away, feet squelching through the muddy earth. "But of course you'll never listen."

"Like I'd give a fuck." He'd rather be buried than kneel here, and wonder why he wasn't in the woodlot when Izuna di-when the incident occurred.

No. He'd been the most negligent of brothers. He'd been reading, been dreaming, been fanciful and fancy and considering expansions when Tobirama had appeared back from his clearing all bloody and ghastly pale, gasping words that had made no sense whatsoever.

I deserve to be there in your place.

You deserve to be alive.

The wind picks up, howling over the cemetery. The rain is so heavy that he can barely make out the name carved on the cross. Izuna Uchiha.

His knees are fused to the earth. The mud is red like blood.

It helps that the sky is weeping. It helps to hide that he has no tears left to shed.

He'd picked Izuna out from the wreckage. Had held him as the blood just wouldn't stop. Had been there for Izuna to forgive Tobirama for the moment of stupidity, for the ax buried in Izuna's stomach, for the felled tree right behind them.

Tobirama had only been trying to help.

It had been an accident.

It had been stupid.

They'd both been better than this on a normal day. Nobody ought to have left an ax blade up on the ground where someone could trip and fall on it.

The weeds had hidden the blade from view. Of course, Tobirama had no intention of pushing Izuna onto the ax.

Izuna didn't even blame Tobirama for it.

It doesn't really matter. Izuna is still buried.

From somewhere in the distance, to the west, there is a sharp crack, and then the roar of water over the floodplains.

And though Madara wouldn't mind if he caught a chill and died right here and now, the thought of drowning, no.

He's a coward. He doesn't really want to die.

The dam's broken upstream, and pretty soon this entire field will be covered with enough water to wash practically everything away.

It takes both hands clinging to the stone cross for him to claw himself into a standing position against the rain, and the mud. His black pants are mud-stained, and his shirt is splattered.

It is red enough to be blood, and he almost wretches. You're still holding your brother's body.

You promised your mother that you'd take care of Izuna on her deathbed, but look at you now, you selfish pig. Still caring for no one but yourself.

Still, still, he has no desire to drown.

Gathering his cloak about his shoulders, he turns to trudge back to his house.

The water overtakes him before he gets to the edge of the field, and the rain's really too heavy for him to stop-it's already up to his knees-but something bumps against his leg, and when he moves a hand to brush it away, it is soft like flesh.

For one horrified moment, his mind presents him a picture of Izuna's rotting corpse come free of the earth somehow, back to blame him, but he shakes that thought free.

He's holding a hand.

It is attached to an arm, which is attached to a torso, which is...a young woman, with mud-stained bloody hair, floating face down in the water. Her dress is equally stained, and waterlogged to the point of near translucence, so faded he isn't even sure what color it is anymore, but that doesn't matter.

He's about to dismiss her as a corpse, but no, a pulse flutters weakly against his fingers when he touches her wrist.

And goddammit. If he's not willing to drown, he's not about to leave a woman out here to drown either especially one that's already halfway there. Death's cut down enough with his scythe this summer. No need to make someone's precious daughter another victim when he can still do something about it.

He drops his ax.

He can always find another, and a life is more important than a piece of wood attached to hammered sharpened metal anyway.

He turns her over, gathers her limp frame in his arms, and hoists her body over his shoulder.

And this causes him to sink deeper into the mud, and they've got to hurry or he'd be swimming back to his property, but no, he's unwilling to drown.

The rain is still heavy, but they are both equally drenched.

She coughs, lungs gasping for air, and he considers that it might be easier for her to breathe if she wasn't slung over his shoulder like a sack of meal, but the water's up to his hips now, and getting more insistent with every passing moment.

It really doesn't matter in the long run, he thinks, as he hauls them both up over the embankment and onto the paved road. It only matters that they get to the house before the flood really happens.

By the time he crosses his threshold, his fingers are blue and cold, and he can no longer feel his feet.

He tears the cloak from his shoulders and throws it over a chair. The woman's shivering, but he isn't feeling crass enough to remove her dress just yet.

Before he saves someone else, he might as well make sure that he isn't getting pneumonia. He sets the woman who is still limp and mostly unresponsive, though breathing, onto a chair, and busies himself with stoking the fire and lighting the one in the forge. Then he retreats to his bedroom.

He pulls off his shoes and socks and peels the light cotton shirt and pants from his frame. He wraps himself in a blanket, and pulls out the second one-It's Izuna's-Izuna didn't need earthly goods anymore, and whoever the woman was out there, she clearly needed one to keep warm.

It does no one absolutely any good at all to be stingy.

He strides across the room in five decisive steps and wraps the blanket around the woman's shoulders.

Her hair, which he'd assumed to be mud-stained and blood-soaked, is actually faintly red from what he can now see in the light of the flames.

Which is strange, because now that he examines her more closely now that he has the time, he can say fairly safely that she looks like no other inside the village.

Only Hashirama's wife, Mito, has red hair, and she might bear a faint resemblance to this woman, but hardly, not actually. Mito Senju is a beauty with dark expressive eyes and a heart-shaped face and a small waist.

The woman before him has sharp cheekbones, a pointed chin, and skin as pale as snow, a small mouth, thin lips. Her long lashes shine brilliantly rose-gold in the firelight, and she is small and frail looking with bony shoulders.

The dress dripping on his floor is a pale green, patterned with red spirals like swirling water.

She looks decidedly foreign in a way that Mito Senju does not.

Well, no matter. Surely she is still somebody's daughter, and as soon as she awakens and recovers she'll be on her merry way to wherever she was going before she nearly died here in a field just outside of Konoha Village.

She coughs again, shoulders shaking, expelling more water onto her lap.

"I realize you were drowning, woman." Madara mutters under his breath. "But do at least try to not catch pneumonia."

Her eyes fly open, a hand over her mouth as she continues to cough. "Excuse me?" Her voice is sweet, almost a song, and the golden notes of it fall over the room.

She turns toward him, and his heart stutters.

Her eyes are the palest green, shot through with gold, and so large in that small face that he is certainly seeing things.

"I said." He repeats himself, with a shake of his head. Clearly addle-brained among other things. "That you better make sure that you aren't about to catch pneumonia, because I am not taking care of you."

She frowns, only slightly, a small downturn of her lips, no more. "What exactly is this pneumonia you speak of, my savior?" Her voice is still honey sweet, still a soft song playing with his head, and he has no idea why.

He doesn't care for women normally. They always spoke in tongues, much like this one.

It really is too much to ask for God to grant him easy miracles, let him do good deeds that cost him nothing, wasn't it?

"A sickness." He crosses his arms, and examines the woman before him with ill grace and a mounting headache. "And your savior has a name, use it."

She blinks at him slowly. "I see." Her lips curl up into a small smile, but her eyes are laughing at him. "Forgive me, savior, but you have not given me a name to use."

So she isn't someone from Konoha Village then. She isn't even from around these parts if she doesn't know the surly forgemaster or his little...brother.

He turns away from her to check on the fire in the forge. Now that they are no longer about to die or fall deathly ill, there's no reason to exhaust the wood supply. "Madara Uchiha." He shouldn't be so rough, he ought to see a good deed through to the end, he ought, he ought, but he's so sick and tired of everything.

Now that he's not about to drown, he's considering that grave again, and it looks more delightful by the minute.

If only he could lay his head down to rest. If only he didn't-If only Izuna-

"Then this one's name is Kanae." There's a small hand on his shoulder. He hadn't even heard her move. "But really, Savior, you look tired." A hand against his temple. "Perhaps you should rest?"

He knocks her hand away, and whirls around to face her, rising to his feet, arms crossed. "Don't touch me." It is an inappropriate response to her concern, but the last person to touch him had been-been Izuna.

And he is too drunk on grief to care that he might be frightening her. She doesn't know of his temper, doesn't know that he is grieving, doesn't know anything about him.

She calls him Savior with a soft touch of reverence, but surely now she knows that he's hardly nice.

She'll be calling him a monster soon enough. Pitiful motherless boy. He'd learned his father's trade. He'd supported his younger siblings.

And one by one, each one of them had died.

Cursed. He's cursed. Every person he touches turns to ash and ruin. Every person close to him dies in some sort of cruel fashion.

"Alright." She's still smiling, the blanket still over her shoulders. Her dress has stopped dripping. "But Savior Madara, you really do look terribly tired, wouldn't it be better to rest?" Her voice slithers through him, and wraps down around his bones.

He is so tired.

So very tired.

He sways and knows nothing more.

---

He wakes the next morning to the birds singing outside his window, to the gentle patch of sunlight on his face as his curtains are opened, to strange and unusual Kanae humming quietly, bare feet dancing over his floorboards.

"Where are you from?" He is fairly certain that most women do not act like this with people that they've never met before. Fairly certain, but seeing as his interactions are limited, not positively.

She blinks and tucks a strand of bloody hair behind her ear. "I don't-" Her eyes have a faraway look in them. "I would rather not say, Savior Madara. It is not a place to return to. Not for me as I am now." And he doesn't know really, what her family's like. Perhaps she's a married woman, she didn't give him a family name last night.

But then, if she is or if she isn't, she looks like she's running from something bad.

It's not his place to judge her. Some men beat their families. It happens. Some women run from men that do. It happens.

Really, it isn't even his place to consider what her past was like.

"So where are you planning to go?" He is being rude. He's lost all the manners that anyone has ever taught him. His mother would be displeased. Izuna would-would have clocked him over the head, and told him to be kind and gentle to the lady, that he's being insufferably awful.

Big Brother, be kind to her, she probably doesn't have anywhere else to go, and you know that you can very well support another person.

You need someone to talk to, or you'll go mad from all the silence at the forge.

"I...don't know." She stares down at her hands. "I'll, I won't stay long, Savior Madara."

He drags himself into an upright position. "Just Madara." He half growls in her direction. "Your insistence on calling me Savior Madara is making my head hurt."

"I'm sorry." She seems...a little abashed. "I'll try not to call you that anymore." And suddenly she's kneeling by his bedside, holding his hand. "But I really am grateful. I know you don't want me here." Her words are a deluge, so heavy, almost as bad as the flood last night. "I know that, and I'm very sorry to impose, but I truly don't have anywhere to go, and you are my savior, and I'm sorry, but I'll do anything just don't-" Don't turn me out, please. I haven't anywhere to go right now.

Please.

And he'd helped her last night. Why can't he help her in the morning? Who knows what a woman might face out in the world all alone beyond the edges of Konoha Village?

At least if she stays here with him, there'd be no one that dares to question her virtue after everything blows over. His honor is ironclad and forged as fine as the swords he sells.

Besides, her unnaturally large eyes are filled with tears that threaten to spill over.

He pulls his hand away from hers. "Oh don't look at me like that." He mutters as he crawls out of bed. It's time to attempt to figure out how to face the day, how to actually survive life without- "I was only asking you because I needed to know that you weren't about to go someplace."

"Thank you." Compared to her previous chatter, the two simple words come as a surprise. Perhaps she is made of surprises, this Kanae of no family name.

"Well?" He pauses at the door of his bedroom. "Are you just going to keep kneeling there, or are we going to figure out what to eat?"

He will admit, privately, in the recesses of his mind, that he is a terrible cook and that on no account should he be allowed anything more strenuous than plain boiled noodles as a kitchen task.

It had always been-

That thought is swiftly murdered as soon as it forms. Ah, but murder calls to mind red, and red calls to mind blood, and-

He's leaning against the kitchen table, stomach trying desperately to turn itself inside out.

"Madara?" Her hand rubs circles over his back, slow and careful as if she is no longer sure that he can stand her touch. Oh, what was it that he'd said to her last night? Don't touch me, that was it.

It seems so far away and strange now.

"I thought you said we were figuring out what to eat." She says after his stomach settles into an uneasy peace, and he makes sure to stare at anything except his hands.

"No." He picks up his now dry cloak, and throws it over his shoulders. "I said we were figuring out where we were going to eat." He strides towards the door. There is an inn that he knows, down by the main street of Konoha Village. His purse can stand the price of a meal, even if it is for two.

At least, until he figures out what to do with his life, and whether or not he wants to simply catch pneumonia and die, or perhaps be crushed by an ox cart, or something.

And in that case, he wouldn't need the money anyway, given that he has no next of kin. Presumably, this can wait until she leaves.

She has not been following him, he realizes. "Well, come along then."

"Where are we going?" She still has bare feet.

I'll have to find her some shoes. "Down to the village." It is...good to narrate what is going on. It makes the thoughts a little more bearable, less awful, if only a shade or so better. "There's an inn that accepts coin for food."

"Oh."

It's only about halfway to the village that he realizes, one, the flooding had been worse than he thought the night before when he made it out of the rain, and two, by taking her into the village he is acknowledging...her existence in his life.

He is horrified with the first realization, and completely in denial about the second.

Toka Senju and her husband, Choban Akimichi run the singular inn down in Konoha Village. And so, therefore, that is where Madara Uchiha fixes his course with Kanae trailing behind him.

There are fewer signs of the flood the further they advance into Konoha Village. Still, the signs of heavy rain are everywhere. The cut of the raw earth here where the water's past makes the jagged cracks look like a wound. He does his best to ignore the blood red earth moving sluggishly down the street.

"Woman." He raps on the open door of the inn. "Breakfast for two."

"Madara Uchiha!" Toka Senju's wiping down tables by the counter of the bar, her back to the door. "You know you're not supposed to delude yourself about-" She turns and pauses mid-sentence.

"Woman." His headache is really intolerable. "I said breakfast for two." Don't you Madara Uchiha me.

"Madara?'" Toka sets her rag on the table. "Who is that behind you?"

"Oh, I'm Kanae." She dances forwards just a bit, so that she is no longer behind him. "Savior Madara said that we were going to eat breakfast here."

Toka raises an eyebrow. "Savior Madara?" She doesn't sound impressed. Madara himself is likely to agree with her. That title is not the least bit impressive.

"He saved me from the water yesterday." Kanae doesn't seem to notice or care much about Toka's skepticism. Instead, she fills the room with her idle chatter. "And he's been ever so nice ever since, you know?" She doesn't wait for Toka to respond. "But of course, you know that already. You seem to know Savior Madara quite well. He's a very kind man, saving women from floods and all."

"I...see." Toka wipes her hands. "Why don't you sit, while Madara and I discuss something behind the counter, alright?"

Kanae seems content enough to sit and hum quietly in a chair. Toka draws the curtain behind the counter and pins him with a heavy, furious glare. "What have you done, Madara? Where is that girl from?" These questions don't exactly blindside him, but they do make his headache worse. "Do you-"

"Madam Innkeeper." Kanae pulls open the curtain, all traces of her earlier childishness gone. She's so clearly serious now. "He hasn't compelled me to do anything, really, and he's been quite kind thus far. Don't blame him." Her green eyes are wide and earnest. "Please."

"He has to answer for his actions." Toka has a hand on her hip. "And at this moment, it seems like he's taking advantage of you."

Kanae frowns, and a shadow draws across her face. "Mister Madara is certainly not taking advantage of me." She turns to him. "Madara." Something about the way his name rolls across her tongue is faintly electric when she doesn't call him Savior Madara. "I think we should go somewhere else for breakfast."

And he's inclined to agree with her. For some strange reason, Toka's forgotten about his iron forged honor on the relationship between men and women. It really doesn't matter if Kanae of no family name acts like in strangely childish ways, or at least, it shouldn't matter. "Do you cook?"

She blinks. "Yes?"

"Then we will have to go to the market." He offers her an arm this time, cognisant of Toka's glare resting on the space between his shoulder blades.

If looks could kill, he'd be dead and buried, rotting beneath the earth. It wouldn't be a bad thing honestly.

It really wouldn't.

They end up in the market half a mile further down the road.

"Hot pies! Meat pies!"

"Get your cloth here!"

Kanae has let go of his arm, and spins around, eager, like a small child seeing the sights for the first time. Something about her wonder seems so, so much freer than he's been in a long time.

As a child perhaps, he'd held the same sort of wonder that she shows so freely right now when coming to the market riding on his father's shoulders, but that was before his father started the feud with the local pastor, and their family had been barred from the church.

And then Father had died, and Gin had died, and Mother and...and now he is alone.

And for a long long time, he hadn't cared to feel any sort of wonder.

"Have you never seen a market before?" Konoha's market is boisterous enough, but it is hardly its largest size today, or of the same hustle as the market in the Capital.

"I haven't seen something like this on-" She pauses mid-sentence. "I haven't seen something like this before."

It had not been what she'd wanted to say, but he suspects that whatever she'd wanted to say had to do with her past, and that he is not going to bother thinking about.

"I'm not going to ask you about why you ended up floating face down in a flood." He mutters and takes her hand. It's to prevent them from being separated in the crowd. He tells himself this, but dig too deep, and he doesn't believe it.

It would be hard to lose her red hair.

They are in the middle of picking up salted fish and cheese when they bump into the pastor's wife. Mito Senju is haggling with an old woman over the price of barley, and Hashirama likes barley tea. He knows this.

He knows it far too well.

He tries very hard to drag Kanae away from the flowers, because he has no desire to speak to the pastor's wife.

Hashirama's wife.

No thank you.

"Brother Madara?" Mito Senju seems to have seen them.

Well damn.

"Sister Mito." The words are more or less sawdust in his mouth. "I am busy this morning. Good day." And he does his best to pull Kanae along with him.

This trip has gone on for far too long, and he is hungry.

"Wait!" She calls after them. "Who's that with you, Brother Madara?"

He doesn't bother to respond. Hashirama's wife from a fishing village off the coast barely has the right to call him brother, and he doesn't have to pay attention to her.

Kanae doesn't ask him about it, just holds onto their basket and skips ahead, all the way back to the house.

"It's a great pity that I'm not, that I'm not, It's a great pity that I'm not the wife of Phaidin."

The tune is one that he does not know though it is sweet and cheerful. "Who is Phaidin?"

"No one." She skips merrily into the house, and sets the basket on the kitchen table. "Breakfast will be ready soon." She pushes him away from his kitchen with big eyes. "It won't take long, but there's no need for you to wait around for me."

"Alright." Perhaps he ought to accept that what happens in the kitchen is magic, and therefore the dominion of a witch instead of a man.

He still has a commission for butcher's knives, and after that, he needs to work on the twin swords for the king's son.

It's a while later. He's not sure exactly how long later. The forge is a timeless place, but surely it's not that long later when Kanae calls him back to the kitchen table.

There are seven dishes on his table, and there is no way that she'd made them all.

He doesn't even own half the spices he smells.

Mint. Thyme. Oregano.

Clove. Cinnamon.

Black pepper.

Food for a king's table in his house.

"I made the fish, and then a soup, and then sweet tea, and porridge and eggs and cut cucumbers and jam with bread." He had not been away long enough for this.

It looks real enough, and there isn't illegal meat on his table. "When did you have time to make this?"

She blinks. "Just now." And maybe this is normal, although he very much doubts it, so he sits down.

"Thank you for cooking." He does not say grace. As far as he is aware, he doesn't mind the church, and the church doesn't mind him.

He hasn't lived within the dictates of the church for most of his life anyway. Not since Father had a falling out with the former pastor. It doesn't bother him overmuch.

Halfway through the morning meal there is a knock on the door.

He pushes his chair away from the table and rises to check if there's a new commission for him. Honestly, he would prefer more work. Work is a distraction. Work prevents him from considering, considering the future beyond the span of a few days or a few weeks, or anything except the end of the next project.

It prevents him from having to think of the long and lonely years, of the lack-of Mother, of Gin, of Otaro, of Inabi, of now, Izuna.

Work prevents him from visiting the graves as well, from dwelling on the past. Unfortunately, while work keeps him from thinking, the face at the door does nothing but make him think. "What do you want?" It is not enough to have robbed him of a brother. Tobirama Senju with his stupid white hair and gray eyes must conspire to rob him of a peaceful breakfast as well.

"I needed to say that I'm sorry for your loss." Blood roars in his ears. The ground seems fluid, swaying. "It was an accident. I truly don't know what we were thinking-"

The audacity to-He has a hand fisted in Tobirama Bastard's shirtfront in an instant. "Did Hashirama put you up to this?" Years of backbreaking work at the forge means that he is easily able to drag the other man closer through the sheer rage that he bleeds as easily as blood., as easily as Izuna had bled because of this worthless swine before him. "I don't need your pity!" He roars, and the house itself seems to shake.

Tobirama pulls himself from Madara's grip, his arms crossed, and scowls. "I wasn't trying to pity you. I was trying to tell you that I wanted to make it up to you somehow."

"And what about what I've lost?" That he thinks anything could make up for Izuna's loss, Izuna's life, Izuna's death. "Can you return him to me? Can you turn back time, bastard? Can you die for him?"

Tobirama flinches, but his scowl carves its way deeper. "You're not the only one who has lost, Madara Uchiha. I've lost a brother too. Everyone in Konoha Village has lost. You're not special, but you're the only one who turned out so bitter."

"I don't give a fuck about your stupid losses." He's rubbed raw and the voices in his head howl for vengeance. His hands ball to fists. "Does it look like I give a fuck to you?"

Tobirama takes a step forward, fists raised, face twisted and Madara also takes a step forward, fury howling in his heart.

Afterward, neither he nor Tobirama could say for certain who had thrown the first punch. They are only a tangled mess of limbs and flailing fists.

He wants to choke the apology from Tobirama's throat, and then he wants to light it on fire and watch it crumple in the forge. If he kills the cause of Izuna's-maybe he wouldn't feel the heavy press of his own guilt, maybe he'd be able to forgive.

They roll through the mud, and it stains them bloody. Tobirama knees him in the stomach, and he responds with a punch to the face.

"Are you crazy?" There are bruises on Tobirama's neck in the shape of his hands, but it's not enough, though he is viciously pleased.

Madara staggers back, and Tobirama claws his way to his feet, knuckles dripping into the earth, hair stained. It could be mud. It could be blood. Madara would prefer it to be the second.

He lunges forward, but this time, Tobirama is ready. The fist catches him over the eye, and he has to step back, the pain bruising him for the moment.

Rage is a heady motivator though, and through the pain he can still see Tobirama's stained white hair. There is red at the edges of his vision.

His fist connects across Tobirama's jaw. There's a crack, his hand explodes with pain, and Tobirama spits something into a hand, but he doesn't care about that. Tobirama is beneath him, and he can't stop, can't stop punching, can't stop hitting, doesn't want to stop.

"Stop!" There's a hand on his elbow, another catches his wrist. He knows that voice. "Brother Madara, please, I know that he has hurt you, but he is the only little brother I have left. Please, by the mercy of the Lord, spare his life."

"Return me Izuna, and I'll spare his life!" Damn Hashirama for coming here. Devil take his meddling do-gooder soul.

"Brother Madara, please. I know you to be a man of reason. You were my friend once. There's no reason to turn from the lord. Look back and He will always show you the way." Those earth brown eyes. They are not what snuffs out his rage this time.

Especially since Hashirama gathers his brother and leaves far more quickly than he ought to, his steps hastened by fear.

It is the gasp from his doorway, the young woman hurrying over bare feet squelching in the mud, the small hands touching his rapidly swelling eye, his still bleeding nose, the concern for a stranger in pale green eyes that stops him. "Mister Madara, you can be angry another day." She pulls him back to the house, and suddenly, he is wretchedly tired.

There isn't much of a point to the whole affair. Killing Tobirama would not bring him a moment's peace, or Izuna back from the grave, or win Izuna's forgiveness.

It is not Tobirama that Izuna cannot forgive.

She pushes him into a chair, and he lets her do it, too undone to protest. His hands tremble. He'd nearly killed a man.

He'd never liked Tobirama Senju, but he'd known the other man since they were both children, and there had been times where he'd wanted to hit Tobirama, but he'd never tried to kill him before.

His anger is well known in Konoha Village and beyond, but his temper had never been so black as to nearly beat a man to death in his own front yard before.

He'd never been so angry as to wish that Hashirama's pious soul join the ranks of hell with himself after death before either.

Kanae rummages through the cabinets, searching for something.

"The bandages are in the third drawer down." It's where all the medical supplies are. His throat is dry, parched, and the sentence works its way out like hooks and thorns, each word painful.

"Oh, I see." She absently throws a strand of hair over her shoulder, and opens the drawer. She returns to him, her bare feet pattering on the floorboards. "Mister Madara, you've hurt yourself." Her fingers brush his brow, over his swelling eye and split lip.

She is frowning.

"It doesn't matter." It doesn't matter really. She'll be alright in another couple of days, and she'll move on, and then perhaps by the end of winter, he'd freeze to death in his house.

What did it matter if Tobirama had gotten a few good hits in too?

"No." She smiles, but her eyes are sad. "It matters to me." She is hardly as childish as she acted or seemed, and easily prone to being concerned about other people's affairs. He is as much a stranger to her as she is to him.

"I didn't frighten you?" He'd nearly committed murder today. She'd been running from something, someone that she is afraid of. It stands to reason that she should be afraid of him, not standing here, smoothing medicinal paste over his eye.

"You seem more concerned about what you've done that men who like to kill." She's holding his bruised and bleeding hand in both of her own, eyes downturned and her red lashes long against a face so pale. It would be a sharp, angular face full of harsh lines and rigid forms, but her lips and her eyes lend it a sort of gentle frailty. "So no, I'm not afraid of you."

It is strangely comforting to hear.

She wraps his hand, singing quietly. "It's a great pity that I'm not, that I'm not. It's a great pity that I'm not the wife of Phaidin."

"Who is Phaidin?" It is the second time that she has mentioned being the wife of Phaidin.

"Phaidin isn't a real person." She blinks slowly, her hands warm against his face. "Phaidin is just a name that little girls like to use back-back home, because the name rhymes with the words of the song."

"Really." He has never heard of this particular ditty that she speaks of so earnestly before, and had further never heard of anyone named Phaidin.

"Yes." She tucks a strand of hair behind her ear and continues singing. "It's a great pity I'm not, that I'm not. May the wife that he has die."

And he is perfectly certain that he has never heard this song before, because it's a far more bloodthirsty ditty than any he's ever heard, especially for little girls.

How far away did she come from? How far has she run, and how is she still afraid that someone would find her?

It is only later that he thinks to remember that his wounds did not hurt afterward, that the swelling of his eye receded, and he did not bleed further, that every bruise she touched faded unnaturally quickly.

But he shakes it away. In the grand scheme of things, it is hardly important if his guest has effect on his injuries.

---

A month passes, and summer slips into early autumn. Kanae has yet to leave his house and doesn't entirely show much inclination to. She has mended his shirts and made his meals and tended to his garden and cleaned his house, and it seems that everything she touches turns to gold somehow.

The apple tree which hadn't held fruit past July in years seems content to bear far more apples than there had been flowers in the spring. The well, which always had been murky and unpleasant after a flood, gave forth water as clear as a respectable spring. The old wooden floorboards positively sparkled, so much so that he'd caught sight of his own reflection one night while removing his boots.

It was a novelty that he doesn't think had ever occurred before, not even when Mother had still been well and the house had been new.

And she still managed to cook food that smelled of spices he did not keep in the house, and sing songs that he'd never heard of before.

The more he tells himself that he shouldn't question it, the more his tongue bursts with questions to ask. None of these remarkable feats had even thought to occur in his presence before he'd pulled her from the floodwaters, but none of them are things that she could possibly be responsible for.

Except the food, but he isn't one to question to origins of good food, as long as it keeps the King's venison from his table. He hasn't quite sunk to lawlessness just yet.

A large part of him wants to ask, wants to know for certain one way or the other, but he can't manage to form the questions.

There is always a small voice wondering if perhaps his good fortune, once identified, would promptly vanish in the morning light should he mention it.

He had been planning to head around to the back of the forge to check on one of the valves connected to the bellows, but he happens to turn back this morning.

She's washing dishes in the tub, up to her elbows in soap suds and the sleeves of her now quite faded green dress are tied out of the way high up on her arms. He fishes his coin purse out of his pocket and holds it out to her. "I was thinking you could buy some cloth to make yourself a new dress."

She blinks at him. "It's alright, Madara. You don't have to spend any money on me."

"You were planning on staying weren't you?" And as soon as the question is out of his mouth, he curses his own tongue's betrayal. So foolish a man doesn't deserve the least bit of good. "I meant it as..." He trails off. He knows exactly what he means it as, but he doesn't the least bit want an answer to his question, because definition is sometimes worse than vagary.

Kanae giggles, but she does rise, rinsing off her hands and looks up at him fondly with those pale green-gold eyes. "If you don't mind me, I will intrude upon your life until the spring."

Spring then.

She can go at late spring, and he'll find some other way to occupy his time rather than listen to her sweet silver voice as he worked the bellows and hammered out steel.

"Then take the damned purse." His arm is getting tired.

She covers her delighted smile with a hand and a nod. "Thank you very much then, Madara."

And as her bare feet skip down the garden path he remembers another thing. "And get yourself a pair of shoes while you're at it."

Her laughter rises in the golden morning light, pure as silver bells.

His mood is passingly good. She'll be here until the spring. He goes to check on the valves.

It is mid morning, and he is in the middle of making a new set of hinges for the Inuzuka Houndmaster, working with the chisel when he is interrupted by the door opening, two sets of feet, and an argument.

"I must warn you that you should tell the truth before we speak to Brother Madara." It sounds like Hashirama at his sternest. "Did you take his coin purse? Speak truly now, Sister."

"I am not your sister." That, sounds like Kanae, more frustrated than he's ever heard her. "And how many times do I have to tell you, you strange and idiotic man, I took his coin purse yes, from his hand. He gave it to me."

It's clear that he won't be finishing the hinges until he ends the argument going on outside. With a sigh, he picks the half finished hinge up with the tongs and douses it in the water bucket. There isn't a need to bank the coals, as he hopes to be back presently.

"Hashirama." He crosses his arms instinctively as he steps out.

Hashirama is holding his coin purse, and Kanae is standing before Hashirama, with her back to him so he cannot see her face.

"Oh, Brother Madara! This is yours, I believe." Hashirama hastens to hand back the purse.

Madara very carefully, doesn't stretch a hand out to take it. His arms remain crossed. "Hand it to my guest, Hashirama. I am not your brother." Hashirama's insistence on calling everyone Brother This and Sister That got on his nerves as well.

"Your guest?" There's a crinkle in Hashirama's brow that straightens to a complete and horrified understanding. "Oh heavens! I'm so sorry, Sister." He offers the object in question to Kanae now, instead. "I wasn't aware that you were a guest of Brother Madara-"

"He doesn't want you to call him brother, Mister." Kanae cooly accepts the purse from proffered hands. "And I still have to return to the market even though you made a scene."

And then she's off again, down the path.

Madara wonders briefly, just how long she'd been arguing with Hashirama to have made no purchases whatever.

"Mada?" It has been a long time since Hashirama bothered to call him Mada, but the other man does it generally when he wants to weedle Madara into doing something.

"What?" He's really not interested in what hair-brained scheme the parish's pastor has come up with this time. His arms stay crossed.

"Who is that woman, and why is she a guest of yours?" Hashirama, oh by God, Hashirama actually looks worried.

"Does it matter?" As far as he's aware, it doesn't matter much. It's not as if he's marrying the woman, which would require Hashirama's services. And him stepping in a church, which he hasn't done in at least the past ten years. "But if you have to know, her name's Kanae." And she causes strange and wonderful things to happen and has a sweet voice like liquid silver and the most disconcerting eyes.

"Mada, how long has she been living in your house?" Strangely enough, Hashirama is still concerned about this.

He hasn't the faintest idea why. "A month." And at one point, he would have been ecstatic that Hashirama would care about him, but it's been a long time since then.

And he has work to do.

"Madara, I know you don't care much for the rules of the church." He knows exactly where this conversation is going, but he doesn't care much at all for the rules of the church or what might be right or proper. "But please-"

"Do you think I'm keeping her as a mistress then?" There's a certain amount of sardonic irony to this, because everyone knows that Madara Uchiha doesn't know the first thing about falling in love, and hasn't got the least interest in lusting after the women in Konoha Village.

His honor in Konoha Village is as well forged as his wares.

That is not up for debate today.

"No, of course not. I know that you have a heart." Hashirama's hand plays with a loose thread on the hem of his shirt. "I know you're just lending a hand and that she isn't from these parts, but please, you have to think about how other people will talk."

"I don't see why I should care about how other people talk, Pastor." No, caring about other people's opinions has always been Hashirama's dominion. "And I've got work to do."

Hashirama catches his arm as he attempts to leave. "How long is she staying?"

"Until spring." It's a good thing that he asked then. Otherwise, he'd have no way of knowing.

"She can stay with Mito and me until then." And it's just like Hashirama to suggest random acts of kindness that are so deadly prone to unintended cruelty.

"Absolutely not." He doubts Kanae would care much about being the talk of the village, given that she doesn't even seem the least bit interested in spending any time there. She seems to float through life without hearing how whispers rippled through the passersby in their wake.

Most of the whispers are about him anyway, about the curse over the Uchiha House that's killed off practically everyone of the name, of his father's folly for feuding with the Church and his folly for continuing to refuse to step foot inside even a churchyard.

"Madara, think of her reputation after she leaves here. The people in Konoha Village might not think that you've been keeping a mistress, but she is a presumably unmarried woman, and you are a certainly unmarried man. They will take it the wrong way." Hashirama is also persistent at all the wrong things, at all the wrong times.

"I don't know why I would tell anyone, if I cared very much about my reputation, Mister, which I don't." Kanae's back from the Market then, much faster than he thought she would be.

The basket's on her arm, and there's the smell of fresh bread, though she's still not wearing shoes.

"I told you to buy shoes."

She smiles impishly at him. "I did buy shoes." She holds up a pair of leather boots. "But they're for you, because your shoes right now are full of holes."

And yes, maybe his boots are not in the best condition, but he did not send her to town with his money to buy things for him. "Please tell me that you at least bought the cloth to make the dress."

She looks so amused. "Yes, of course I did, Mister Madara." She dances past him on her way back into the house. "I accepted your present, so I think you should accept mine."

"Brother Madara." So Hashirama's slipped back into referring to him as 'brother' which means that Hashirama's back to being the parish's pastor. "What would Brother Izuna think?"

And oh, that is just too rich. "Izuna." Madara pauses for a moment to catch his breath, to catch his thoughts, to catch himself from saying something far too cruel. "Wouldn't judge people based on how much they helped others."

He sweeps back into the house to tend to the fire in the forge. He's already wasted enough good coal. Hashirama leaves, he assumes, simply because this is how it goes.

Hashirama would have some sort of idea about Madara's life, and proceed to question or lecture at length. Madara would be offended, but pretend that he doesn't care. Hashirama would be discouraged and leave, and the cycle would play out again and again like idiots slamming into a wall for years on end.

His chisel hits the table and flies from his hand.

The hinge is ruined. He'll have to redo it.

His mind is too full of scattered thoughts, wandering among them does no good.

He won't be finishing this today.

He throws the useless scrap of iron back into the scrap pile and undos the apron before banking the fire and pulling his cloak from its hook. He ought to go out for a walk or something to clear his head before reworking the iron back into a hinge.

This is hardly a sustainable thought process, the idea of what Izuna would think of him, wrecking a young woman's reputation for no reason at all but the selfish desire to not be left alone in the world.

He pauses before Mother's grave first, because Izuna is still too raw a wound on his heart. "Hello, Mother." He doubts his mother wants to see her most disappointing son. "The work's been going well." A lie. "And I've been happy." Another lie. Harumi Uchiha would be disappointed in her foolish eldest son, but he has always been a liar, even in the past before he had the necessity to be. "I'm sorry about Izuna."

He kneels and wonders how he could possibly explain this terrible weight in his throat to his mother. His shoulders heave. It can't possibly be encompassed by the two fragile words of 'I'm sorry.' His eyes sting. It is hard to breathe.

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry." I broke my promise. I'm a failure, a liar,d damned to hell, burning for eternity. Oh, Mother, I'm so guilty. He still can't breathe, and it tastes like drowning.

He doesn't want to drown. He is always so selfish. He wants to live. Given the slightest excuse, the slightest reason, he clings so desperately to the driftwood floating on the surface. The water is icy, and his limbs are so heavy, but oh, God, God, he wants to live. Mother, I have his blood on my hands and it won't come off.

I'm so guilty.

He shouldn't die. It wouldn't be polite. He still has a guest in his house. Slitting his throat with a kitchen knife would hold up dinner.

A hysterical laugh bubbles up from somewhere deep inside him, and he can't stop. Not polite in life, but I try so hard to be polite about my death.

Oh. Oh. Mother, I-

"Madara?" Her small hand is warm on his right shoulder. "Dinner's ready."

He cannot bear her touch. "I told you, don't touch me!" He knocks her hand away.

There's a flash of something in her eyes. He doesn't want to see the hurt. He needs-there is nothing that he needs. It is just that he is greedy. He wants.

"I'm sorry." She's stepped closer to him, something terribly sand in her pale jade eyes. "I didn't realize you were-"

"What am I?" He asks her, breathing faint. He doesn't have enough air. The entire world seems so washed out and faded. "A murderer? Guilty? What am I?"

She's holding his forearms, face upturned to his own. Her eyes are still sad, and he doesn't know how to make them happy again. "A good man." Those three words are the heaviest he's heard all his life.

He laughs, rueful, mocking, unbearable, but his head bows forward without his consent and comes to a rest on her shoulder. "Good, Kanae?" What had she seen to call him good? "I am not good."

"You've been kind to me." Her hands are tangled in his loose hair, rubbing circles over his back, light, careful. "You haven't been cruel to anyone except that one man. A little short perhaps, but not cruel." Her voice is not entirely silver, a little normal, a little sad. "And the people in the village know you as a man of honor."

He shudders. Honor?

What honor? And yet her words are a comfort despite his inability to believe them.

"I don't know what grief you've been carrying." His head is on her shoulder, and the silver, lyrical quality of her voice is back. "But I have never seen you smile. You have never been content."

No, the man who'd fished her from the flood had been drowning himself. The irony is cruel, but that is both life and nature.

"My satisfaction should not be your concern." He is merely a stranger with whom she shares a house. His sorrow and guilt is not really her burden to carry. That she attempts to is unusual enough. That she cares to try to is far too strange for comprehension.

"I owe you a life debt." Her hands have stopped moving, and he is tired. "And I do like it when people are happy."

He peels himself off of her shoulder. It's best not to consider her words too closely. "You said that dinner was ready?"

Her relieved smile warms his heart. "Yes."

They return to the house, walking side by side.

---

A week later, he finishes the Houndmaster's hinges. Knowing the man, Kaien would forget that he'd ordered them until he is reminded by his wife or the old hinges completely break. It would be easier, Madara decides, to simply wrap up the completed work and head into Konoha Village to collect the payment from the Houndmaster at the kennels. It wouldn't take long anyway.

"Are you going into town? Kanae had been working on something, which she's wrapped quickly as soon as she saw him come in from the forge.

"Yes." He waits for her, because it's clear that she wants to come with him. "I was going to deliver the Houndmaster's hinges."

"I thought you don't normally deliver your commissions? Even the prince had to send men to come and pick up a commission from you." She's skipping, feet dancing among the leaves.

"If I don't deliver this to Kaien Inuzuka, he will never remember to pick it up." His mood is...better than it had been, better than it has been in a long time.

"Oh." She laughs without covering her mouth with her hand or trying to stifle it, and it rings out through the waving fields of grain freely. "You must give the Houndmaster great credit then."

Madara grunts. "A man has to eat." And he'd made the hinges anyway. There's no point in making an object at the forge, laboring and sweating over it, just to throw it in a pile at wait for Kaien Inuzuka to remember, because he wouldn't, and his wife is equally scatterbrained at the best of times.

"The Houndmaster is a very nice man." Kanae observes absently as she counts something out on her fingers.

"You've met?" On occasion, she goes into town without him, but she's never mentioned meeting Kaien Inuzuka before.

"He has a little boy, yes? About six years old?" Kanae stops counting, and looks up at him.

Madara nods. She must mean Shin, the Houndmaster's lame son with the twisted leg and crutch.

"Then yes, I met him." She brushes a lock of hair over her shoulder and doesn't say anything more for a moment, a paused beat, and then she continues. "He was patient with the boy though his son is so excitable."

And he supposes that it is true that Kaien makes no secret about his love for his son, whether or not the boy could use both of his legs or learn a meaningful trade, and Shin, in turn, adores his father utterly.

"Well, we'll know soon enough if you've met him." He reaches over to unlatch the gate of the kennels. "Kaien!" From somewhere beyond his line of sight, the dogs send up a series of howls, and there is a growl and the snapping of teeth.

"Well if it isn't the Forgemaster!" Kaien Inuzuka has wild spiky hair, dark eyes, a beaming smile and a booming voice. "What brings you to these parts?"

The man's forgotten, as he suspected. "I brought your hinges." He holds up the package.

There is little recognition of the object in Kaien's eyes, instead he seems to be staring at a point past him. "Why, if it isn't the Little Missy who's been teaching my boy the flute." The smile that breaks over the Houndmaster's face is smaller, but no less delighted. "Shin! Shin! Your teacher's here!"

Kanae giggles. "I'm hardly a teacher, Mister."

Madara supposes that Kanae is not so hard to recognize, but he is only here for his money. "You ordered hinges from me last week, Kaien."

The other man scratches the back of his head for a moment, thinking hard with closed eyes. "Oh, so I did." And his eyes are dark, but in the light of the noon sun, shot through completely with gold. "I'll go get the money to pay you for your work, yeah?"

On Kaien's way back into the small slat board house, he passes Shin, struggling along on crutches, and ruffles the boy's hair.

"Father!" Shin laughs and tries desperately to smooth down the ruffled locks to no avail. "Miss Kanae!" He's brought a bone flute with him. "I've been learning."

"Oh?" Kanae sits down in the dirt. "What have you been learning?"

Madara leans against the opposite wall and watches the sight with half closed eyes.

Shin plays a tune for her, all eager care and clumsy hands. He's not good, but he plays with heart, and she seems to enjoy it, nodding along.

"See, the transition here is like so." She's taken the flute from him and shows the eager boy the position of her hands and how to go from one note to the other smoothly. "Your fingers run so fast that they get tangled up with each other right now."

But strangely enough, she does not play the instrument. She doesn't coax so much as a single note from the flute.

"Oh come on Missy, that's not his only trouble." Kaien is back, movements swift and full of easy grace, like a bloodhound in the body of a man. "You'll need to play him the tune to teach him anything at all."

Shin looks up at her with large puppy eyes. "Please, Miss Kanae?"

She sighs. "Very well, but watch my hands will you?" She raises the flute to her lips.

The first note that sounds over the kennels stirs the hearts of men. The second quiets the dogs. The third shames the songbirds into silence. The fourth, the fourth pulls a sigh from his lips. He has never truly believed in a god, but this, this sounds like the choirs of heaven.

By the end of the simple ditty, there is a silence so deep that only Kaien would be irreverent enough to break it.

"Well, you're a right siren, aren't you, Little Missy." The other man wipes a tear from his eye. "I haven't heard anything so beautiful since I was shipwrecked near Uzu Town as a boy of sixteen."

"Surely not so beautiful, Mister Kaien. A woman can't possibly rival a siren." Kanae laughs, but it is a little forced, a little strained, and her heart isn't in that happiness.

And that is the last word needed to force his suspicions to the surface. Hadn't he always thought that she was just a little magical, just a little fae, just a little too unreal? Hadn't her voice always had that silvery lyrical quality?

He hadn't connected the dots before this moment, but they all fall into such horrified certainty now.

She hadn't known what pneumonia is. She isn't from these parts.

She'd come into his life during a flood. Water.

Voice.

What could she be but a siren?

He accepts his payment and takes leave of the Houndmaster. Kanae drags him about to the seamstress's, where she had taken a commission.

He doesn't pay much attention to it.

It is hard when he knows that the hand holding his is hardly the hand of a woman.

One of the fae had made his house a waystation. He doesn't know-hardly understands-what to think. What is he supposed to think? Is he supposed to speak or keep silent? She had hardly hurt him in any way. She'd been inclined to kindness so far, but if he mentions her true identity, would her so very kindly mask slip?

Is she a harmless type of fae, or is she truly a siren? And if she is a siren, what is she doing in his house?

She's noticed his silence, because on the way back to the house and the forge, she answers it with one of her own.

It is only after supper that she remarks on it. "Madara, is something troubling you?"

"You're not human." He doesn't mean to say it, but he has always had a hard time keeping control of his tongue.

She blinks. "Yes, I am not entirely human."

The shadows the fire throws over the walls is all but unmistakable. Her shadow has claws and is far too clearly defined to be a woman's. How had he never noticed? Had he always been so blind? Had she been waiting, fattening him for the eventual slaughter?

"What I do not understand," he says at last. "Is if you intend to make a meal of me, why it must wait until spring." Sirens lured men to their deaths, and then feast upon the bodies.

And perhaps she's eaten food with at him at the table, but surely he is the main course. And if they are to wait until spring, he will be a lean main course instead of a content and fattened one.

She looks hurt by this revelation somehow. "I wasn't planning on eating you." Her eyes are filled with tears. Her voice is rough and blemished, pitched too high and sad. "I was never going to eat you, why would you say something like that?"

"You're a siren." And now that word is out between them too, though she could just be lying about wanting to eat him. The fae never say what they mean. "And sirens eat the men they drown."

She shakes her head. "No." She looks so small on the other side of the table, still so human looking.

He wonders why she does not shift to her true form now.

"No, only someone who has truly fallen would stoops so low as to eat-" Her voice breaks and cracks. "You thought I was going to eat you?" A tear slides down her face, and it glistens in the firelight before it drips from her chin. He wants badly to lift a hand and wipe it away. Even now, after knowing that she's lied, and has been lying for the entirety of their acquaintance-Had she even been drowning when they met, or had she merely been waiting for someone unsuspecting to invite her into their lives?-her tears tug at him.

"I owe you a life debt. We've eaten at the same table. I am a guest in your home. How could you-" She crumples truly at last, sobbing into her hands. "I would not. I don't want to. I could never. I..."

"How can you owe me a life debt? You cannot drown." It swirls about inside his mind, a disease, a poisoned sickness that he doesn't know how to fight. "You shouldn't tell such obvious lies."

She raises her eyes, and they are dull and tired. "I've never lied to you, Madara." There's a terrible smile on her lips, as though it's a dam holding back the flood. She looks likely to burst into tears any minute. "I was really going to die if you hadn't taken pity on me." She's looking at her hands. "I can't go home anymore. I'm not a siren anymore." Her shoulders shake. "I can't go home. I'm not myself anymore."

And then she breaks, gross sobs shaking her frame, weeping for something truly lost, and gone forever.

She had not lied to him, though the past month or so does indeed feel like a lie.

He had not thought to ask his guest before tonight if she was human.

And he's opened all of her wounds, all those terrible secrets she'd been keeping behind her cheer and goodwill.

She has not been unkind to him.

I've accepted your present, so you must accept mine. In his mind's eye, he sees her impish grin as she offers him a new pair of leather boots from the cobbler.

If she'd been planning to eat him, would she need to have bought him new shoes? Would she need to have taught a little boy how to play the flute? Would she need have been so tart to Hashirama? He doesn't want to be called brother, Mister.

The accusations he's leveled at her are baseless. He rises and makes his way over to the sobbing woman on the other side of the table.

It's been a long time since he's needed to offer comfort, but it's not long at all since he's needed to beg forgiveness. He's guilty. He's always been guilty. "Kanae?" He pulls a hand away from her face, although he doesn't know if he's really, really supposed to. "I'm sorry." They are such weak words to set against the flood, too weak.

"I-" I never ought to have asked. I didn't mean to accuse you. I didn't mean to poison everything. Do not take it to heart please. He cannot apologize enough. He takes a breath and drowns in the oceans of her eyes. "Why can't you go home?" If he cannot apologize enough, then he must strive to solve the other portion of her hurt. She wants to go home-And who would not?- but she says she cannot.

She laughs, wry and rueful and broken. "I would drown. I'm not, I'm not a siren anymore."

It's the second time she's said that. He wasn't aware that a siren could stop being a siren. "Why did you stop?" If she had volunteered for it, it's clear that she's regretting it now. But he rather thinks that she didn't volunteer to be here, a human woman, that something stripped her ability to live beneath the water from her.

"I refused to marry his pompous ass." She rubs her eyes, frustration bleeding from her.

She's still too sad.

And he gives in. He pulls her into his arms. It is supposed to be comforting to be held, but given that he'd just accused her of wanting to eat him not minutes earlier, he doesn't know how comforting he really is at the moment.

She muffles a squeak of surprise, but she isn't tense, so he doesn't let go.

He tells himself that he'll let go if she starts crying again. It is a lie. He'd let go only if she asks him to. "You refused to marry his pompous ass?" He asks to distract himself.

"Yes." She sounds vindictive, and there's a hard, cruel edge of satisfaction to the single word. "I refused to wed him and he cursed me to live above the waves." Her hand grips the front of his shirt so hard that her knuckles turn paper white. "What right does he have to rob me of my home? It might be his kingdom, but when my elder brother comes back...when Big Brother comes back from the wars, he will fly into a rage, and the idiot that I did not wed will be forced to lift his curse on me."

And if she was not speaking of leaving him, this would be terribly funny. "You told a king you would not wed him, so he banished you from his kingdom? Why would you refuse a king?"

Didn't all women dream of marrying a king?

"He was sweet to me, but he was cruel to strangers. He would torment those members of the court that he did not like." Her grip loosens, and her hair spills over Madara's hands like silk. "And if he could stand to be cruel them, would he not forget himself and become cruel to me later?"

"Mmm." So she had refused the king because his temperament is fickle and cruel. "And why were you going to leave here in spring?"

He cannot expect her to simply stay in his house forever then. She had not sprung from the air with no past and no family and nothing to return to. Whatever life she'd left had been unjustly ripped from her, and she would return as soon as she is offered the chance.

But he can hope that it is later, that she may distract him from his preoccupations and his thoughts and how much he wants to-no, better not think it. Not now. Not tonight.

"Big Brother should be back from the frontlines by then." She looks up at him. "You do not want me to leave."

"No." He admits, and it's a bad thing to admit, but she knows already. Her statement had not been a question, just a statement. He might as well admit it. "But I am a stranger, and you..." He looks away. "You've given me enough."

"If you could come with me." Her hand rests lightly over his heart. Her tone is pensive. "If I could take you with me, I think you would be happier there."

He shakes his head. "I cannot leave here. My-my family is here." Their graves are here.

"You have family?" She sounds surprised. She has right to be. She's met none of them, and he does not like to speak of it.

"The town will bury me with them soon enough." Her hair is blood red, and over his hands it reminds him of the blood that he cannot wash off. Izuna's blood. It had been his negligence more than anything else that had killed-

No, better not think of it. Put it away.

The box of what must not be thought is overflowing, but put that thought away, lay it tenderly at the bottom, and find a different use for guilt.

"What?" Her hand on his cheek turns his face back so that she can look him in the eye. "You are not ill. You are not unwell. And by the standards of men, you are young yet. How can you know that you will die soon?"

He smiles. "Well, I am also cursed."

She's on her feet, hands holding his, eyes scanning his face for some sort of lie. "No, you cannot be cursed. Not you." Her surprise turns to rage, to fury twisting her features. "Who was it that cursed you? If they are dead, they can no longer curse you. I will force them to stop, just tell me their name." She looks ready to do it, to storm through Konoha Village and shred anyone who dare say that they curse him.

He shakes his head. "No one particularly." Her concern is touching, but there is nothing that she can do. "The Uchiha." He looks over the room at the floorboards she's polished, the mantlepiece, the shelves, the door to the forge, the burnished wooden table, the silver candlesticks. "This house has been cursed ever since my father broke with the Church."

"That's not a real curse." Her childish protest is sweet but still a lie and all the sweeter for it.

"Not long after he fought with Pastor Butsuma, he died of an accident at the forge, a knife had struck him while he worked." He had never told this story to anyone. "Or at least, that's what I told Mother. I found his body in the forge, the bloody knife still in his hand."

"He'd killed himself." She sounds horrified, but she does not offer him any sort of platitude. "But that was a choice, not a curse."

"You haven't heard all of it." He isn't sure she needs to hear all of it, isn't sure that he truly wants to tell it. "Mother fell sick soon after, but she didn't die, not then." He wets his lips, and wonders when the dam broke, and why he feels the need to prove the curse over his head. Perhaps it is because she does not believe him. "No, later that summer, Gin drowned in a flood. I was to watch him." And these wounds are old, these wounds are old, but they do not close or scar. No, all they do is bleed. "I was to watch him, but I could not reach him. He sank."

"Your brother?" She asks. Her arms are around his middle.

"Ah." He had not been able to save Gin, and it had taken four men to restrain him from searching the field for his brother's body with the floodwaters still about. They hadn't succeeded, but neither had he been able to find Gin. His arms had failed him. He could not swim. His mouth and nose had filled with water, and he had nearly sunk to the bottom himself. "Otaro died of the same sickness that took Mother, but I never told her of it, that he'd died the night before she did." That had been the first lie.

The first real lie he'd told Mother had been about Otaro's death. "I promised her that I'd take care of my brothers."

He has no living brothers. No parents. Only seven crosses where his family had been.

"You have been unlucky." She says and doesn't let him go. Perhaps she can sense that he is drowning and that she is the only piece of driftwood that he has to keep himself afloat.

"For them all to have left me?" He cannot believe that it is merely luck, merely a whim of fate, a dictation of the heavens. "For me to have broken every promise I ever made?" When Izuna was alive, he could tell himself that they were unlucky. When that had been, it had been easier to swallow.

But it is his fault, his fault, his fault, oh God.

"I won't-" She shudders. He feels the tremors of her shoulders. "I will won't I?" She looks close to tears again. "I will leave you, won't I? I don't want to."

His eyes fall closed. He doesn't need to see her pain as well as hear it. "That's kind of you to say."

"But when I leave, you'll, you'll..." Have nothing left. The words she cannot bear to speak hang between them, like spider's webs in the morning sun, painfully beautiful. "I shouldn't have stayed."

"If you hadn't stayed, I would already be buried." He can stand to pull her closer, a hand tangled in the silk of her hair. "That you have stayed means that I have lived."

He does not mean to guilt her into staying, not truly. "I am thankful that you have been here." He whispers the words to her hair. "But when spring comes, you ought to go."

"How can I do that?" She asks him. "How can I do that when I know that it is the same as killing you?"

"Perhaps I will be better by then." It is a lie, of course. There is no way for him to get better, no further distractions for him after that, but, he wants her to be happy, and she wants to go home. He shouldn't keep her, shouldn't have told her. "And then you may leave in peace."

He'll have to pretend. It will be a lie worth telling.

She wants to see him happy. He'll be the happiest man alive.

Tomorrow though.

Tomorrow. He is too tired to pretend to have gained a change of heart tonight.

---

They slip back into an almost tender routine while the days of autumn ruffle by like leaves on the wind. They go too quickly for him to be truly satisfied, but he takes care to smile and laugh, to be as other men are, happy.

They do not speak of the night when he accused her of wanting to eat him, or that she will leave once winter passes, or of his unstable mind.

It is better that way.

And they are almost happy.

"Is there something that I can get you from town tomorrow?" He stretches as steps over the threshold of the sitting room. The fire in the forge has been banked for the night, and Kanae sits embroidering flowers in painfully small stitches onto a dress for some rich man's wife.

She tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. "A ribbon to tie my hair back would be nice. It keeps getting in my face." She sets the sewing aside while he sits down and comes to knead his shoulders instead.

"You wear yourself out everyday." She murmurs.

He only half listens as he melts into her touch. "Mmm. There is good." She doesn't sound as though she likes the forge much, which is silly. She ought not be jealous of his occupation. "If I do not, we shall slowly starve." Her hands come upon a particularly painful knot of muscle, and he almost moans, half from pain, and half from the pleasure of leaving the pain behind. "I am a blacksmith." As his father was before him, as his father's father was before that, and so on, back seven more generations, as no one will be after him.

"I know."

He rests his arms on the table and his head atop his arms. Her hands work their way down his back. "You're beautiful." He can't see her really from where he is. She's standing behind him, but he knows that at this time of day, her hair is a soft rose-gold and that later, when the fire here burns low, it will darken to nearly black with a soft touch of blood and that in the sun, it is a brilliantly fiery red.

"Thank you." Her gratitude is quiet, but constant, water to wear down mountains.

He can pretend for a moment, that this is all he knows, all he will ever know, all that he has ever known. It is a sweet peace not made to last, but he will enjoy it while it does, because it has a final line.

He dreads the spring, the warmer days, the sweeter air, the brighter colors. He does not want this to end.

"Madara?" She says suddenly. "I made you something, since the New Year is coming soon." No one knows for certain, which day marks the end of the old and ushers in the new, but it should be soon.

"You have?" He'd been planning on purchasing her something in town tomorrow to amuse her, but what he plans to buy tomorrow is obviously not with him at this moment.

"Yes." She dances over to the cabinets, and he has finally managed to persuade her to wear shoes at last. It is a triumph to hear her footsteps ring out on his floor. "I made you a coat." She pulls out a brown paper wrapped package and holds it out to him. "I know that you have your cloak, but it's gotten so cold these days that you should wear a little more."

"The forge is warm enough." One of the many comforts of being a blacksmith, the forge swelters in both the summer and the winter. He's gotten used to it.

"Oh, I know it is, but you're going to town tomorrow." She's still offering him his present with the best of intentions, so he accepts it.

The paper is only folded awkwardly about what feels to be a heavy coat. It is neither tied with a length of twine, nor sealed shut. He raises an eyebrow. "You have never wrapped a present before."

"Paper is not something that one would find beneath the waves, yes." She raises an eyebrow right back at him, and crosses her arms over her chest. "I think I did well."

And he has to smile. "You did well." It does make his present easier to acquire. He appreciates the gesture. She has tried so hard.

The coat is dark blue and made of heavily carded wool, trimmed with a collar of dark fur. "It is beautiful." He looks back at her. "Thank you. I was going to find you your present in town tomorrow, but..." He shrugs. "You seem to have preempted me."

"It was only that you were going to leave the forge tomorrow." She says. "I couldn't let you go without a coat."

He laughs. "Do not think so much of it, I'm not so petty if you are alright with waiting another day." He'd have to find something, and it could hardly be something so small as a hair ribbon.

He wears the coat when he heads out against the wind through the heavy snow drifts. The morning is bright and cold with the occasional cloud against the sun. The snow is a pristine white, and before his booted feet pass, without a single mark.

The road into Konoha Village has been shoveled, probably by a conscription of men and boys from inside the town. For a brief moment, Madara is thankful that he does not actually live inside Konoha Village.

The winter has not prevented the bustle of people in the streets and in the market, but he's not looking for food or cloth now. There'd been a set of bone combs on display at a traveling merchant's stall for days now.

He hopes that they have not been bought already, because quite honestly, they were his intended present for Kanae.

Thankfully, they are still there by the time he finishes his affairs. "How much for the combs?" He is not the richest man in Konoha Village, but he is hardly poor either.

There isn't much that he spends his money on, after importing iron from the quarry, after paying for the horse cart to haul it to his forge.

Still, the price the merchant names is quite excessive.

"Half that." He doesn't really mean that he'll only pay half for them. He's determined to see those combs in Kanae's hair, but the merchant isn't aware.

"No less than three fourths my price, young man."

His eyes narrow. How much more can I afford to push? "Two thirds, and not a cent more."

The wizened old woman observes him with narrowed, calculating eyes. "You've got a young wife at home, haven't you?"

Madara blinks. "No."

"A sweetheart?" The old woman seems a little surprised.

"Hardly." Kanae is his friend is all. She is not his wife or his sweetheart. Still, he's not in the mood to take kindly to a stranger questioning his affairs. "Two-thirds for the set, grandmother, or I'll take my business elsewhere."

"A prickly one." She accepts his coin and wraps the combs in a square of cloth. "But fine, if you want to hide your heart, I'm not one to stop you."

He tucks the packet inside his coat and goes in search of hair ribbons.

The unsettling conversation is quickly put behind him as he makes his way to the other side of town. He needs to restock his medicinal cabinet, and he's been putting off the task ever since the end of summer.

He needs to purchase wound ointment at the Yamanaka Apothecary on the outskirts of town, set on the bend of the Nakano river. It is unfortunately close to Hashirama's house, which is why he's been avoiding the place, but really, there's no point in putting it off any longer.

He's not afraid of Hashirama's house, Hashirama's happiness, or Hashirama's contentment. His life does not depend on the other man's regard.

The morning is still clear and cold, and it is a beautiful day. It is deceptively lovely, but danger lurks under the snowy landscape.

He's walking briskly but with a false sense of contentment and security, when he hears the ice crack out on the river.

"Help." The plea's not loud, but he hears it all the same.

Out on the river, a small hand grasping, a head of blonde curls. The Yamanaka girl.

His feet move before his mind even connects the dots. A child is in the river, drowning. It will not be like the last time. He is older, stronger, no child would drown under his watch, not ever again.

The water is icy cold, but he fights his way to the struggling child. "Stay still." He tells the little girl. "It is harder to leave the water when you struggle." His free hand searches for the edge of the ice.

It breaks under his grasping fingers, slipping away from him, and the river's currents are heavy, pulling them closer to the center.

The water has cold hands, and they try so hard to drag them under.

The child is silent, in fear, shock or something else.

They sink for a brief moment, pulled by the river, but he refuses to drown.

He refuses to drown. They will not fall beneath the ice. He fights forward, hand reaching, and the ice breaks once more.

But he will not drown. He thrashes about.

His cloak is heavy, but he will not sink. Force of will.

The water will not beat him, not today, not when there is another life that depends on him.

If he were alone, perhaps he'd be content to sink beneath the surface and let the water take him. It would be a peaceful death, every last breath stolen quietly.

But he is not alone.

There is a path through the ice to the bank, and it is there that he sets his course. There is no point in trying to climb onto the ice, it will not support the weight of a child, it will not support him.

But the currents are strong, and his struggles are getting weaker, getting harder.

Every moment of delay is another degree closer to fatigue and death.

He gasps. This is not how this ends. Kanae's face reappears in his mind's eye. She is still waiting for him at home. He needs to go home.

"Oh my god, oh God, Inoyao!" The blonde haired woman on the bank has a face twisted with despair and anguish. She looks about desperately, and takes up the longest branch that she can quickly find. "Forgemaster, take hold."

Iyasa Yamanaka has always been a quick thinker if not a physically strong woman. He reaches forward, grasping, and his fingers brush the wood. Just a little further. He can manage a little further.

They sink once more, and the cloak tangles with his legs. He should have thrown it off.

It doesn't matter. He will not die. He kicks.

His hand tightens around the branch, and his efforts are joined with Iyasa's tugging.

With her help, he and Inoyao make their way to the bank.

"Thank you, Forgemaster." Her gratitude is clear, so sweetly true.

He coughs wetly. He doesn't know when the water's gotten into his lungs, but it chokes the breath from him. The wind is cutting, bitter, and he is so very frozen, so cold.

"Mama." The little girl whimpers. "Mama, I was so scared. It was cold."

Isaya bundles up her child and pulls him to his feet. "Hush, Inoyao, the Forgemaster has been kind enough to help us." She guides him with an unerring, iron strength when he stumbles, legs too frozen to walk. "I will call Inoki, Forgemaster, he will be able to help you more than I."

"Take your time." The Yamanaka are expecting their second child in the spring. It would be unfair to ask her to go faster when it is he who cannot walk. She has done enough.

Inoki appears from the house, moving at a frantic pace. "Isaya, Inoyao!" His wheat pale hair gleams dully in the sun. "My God, Forgemaster, come into the house."

And leaning on Inoki's arm, the four of them manage to make it to the house.

"Here." Izaya holds out a mug of something steaming and hot. "It's only birch tea, but you're all frozen through, Forgemaster."

The river had been icy, but he's changed into a spare set of Inoki's clothes and now sits before the roaring fire, unthawing but numb.

"Tend to your child." Inoyao has been wrapped up in a blanket and fussed over, and it seems that she finally realizes how close she'd come to death, because she clings to him like a small limpet, but Madara's not in the mood to be fussed over. Izaya knows this and moves over to Inoyao, stroking her hair and quietly humming a lullaby.

It is tuneless compared to Kanae. He'd always thought, before, that Isaya Yamanaka had a clear sweet voice.

Now that he's not dying, he's struck by a sense of space and confusion. Now that he's not dying, he can think of what he'd been thinking of before, back in the clutches of the river.

He'd thought of Kanae waiting for him. He'd cared more for that than the child who would have died with him had he lost his will and sank. He'd thought of her. He'd regretted dying when he'd never regretted coming close to death before. Why had he?

Why had he thought of Kanae and her reproachful green eyes?

He doesn't know.

"Thank you for saving my daughter, Forgemaster." Inoki adjusts the wood fire, making the flames leap higher over the logs. The Apothecary always smells of herbs and medicines, and today is no different, but it is harder to bear today, even though he is so numb and wooden.

"It wasn't much." He shifts uneasily. He's forgetting something, and it is bothering him. What has he forgotten? What can't he afford to forget?

"My daughter is worth the world to me." The apothecary loves his daughter dearly, Madara's always known that. He wasn't concerned about that. He knew that. He'd meant that his own sacrifice was small in the grand scheme of things. He isn't dead. That isn't much.

"I know." His clothing is drying by the fire. His coat drips on the floor. His coat. He's on his feet in an instant. "Where-" Kanae's hair combs. He'd forgotten about them. He feels about, a weight taking hold of his throat. Had he lost them to the river? He cannot feel the package anywhere, but that does not mean that he's lost it, does it? His hands are so horribly wooden from the cold.

His hand closes upon something hard wrapped in dripping cloth. He did not lose it then. The weight eases.

"A new coat?" Isaya asks as Inoki straightens and heads out of the house.

"Yes." He sits back down weakly, suddenly breathlessly relieved. The fire cannot make him warm. The Nakano River's got her icy fingers in his very flesh.

"It's of such fine craftsmanship." Isaya runs a hand down the sleeve. "These stitches are the smallest I've ever seen."

Now that she mentions it, Kanae's stitching is very fine.

"And the thread's so red."

The thread shines rose-gold in the firelight, and it feels like silk beneath his fingertips. Her hair. She'd stitched her present with her hair. That touches his heart, but he still can't quite feel his feet. He coughs, chest aching.

Inoki returns, logs in his arms, stamping the snow from his shoes, and shaking the cold from his shoulders. "It looks like a storm out there, Forgemaster. You best stay for dinner." The man sets the wood down by the fireside, snow melting to water.

If it's storming out, he ought to go before the blizzard gets worse, and Kanae starts to worry.

His clothing is still dripping on the apothecary's floorboards, and his arms and legs feel as though someone's lit them on fire, filled with a sharp and terrible pain.

"I'll not impose for that long." He'll leave as soon as his coat dries.

"The storm's coming down thick." Inoki responds. "It might be better for you to wait out the night with us. Our house is open to you for everything that you've done for us."

He might have taken Inoki up on the offer half a year ago. He might have thought that Izuna would be alright alone, and he would have stayed the night with the apothecary and his wife, but half a year has passed, and the thought of Kanae pacing before the door, waiting for him, is almost intolerable.

"There's no need for that." He climbs to his feet. "I'm only here for wound ointment."

His clothing dries to only slightly damp by the time that Inoki gathers his order. It is enough. He has to leave now.

"I can't let you out in this weather." Inoki looks at him, piercing blue eyes concerned somehow. "You'll freeze to death out there, and I won't have that on my conscience, Madara."

And that's also why he's never really liked visiting the apothecary. The man always wants to prescribe something when it isn't necessary.

"It won't be your fault if I catch my death of cold." He shrugs his coat on and heads toward the door. "I'm the one insisting." The need to go home tonight is persistent, stupid, but persistent.

Kanae is surely worried already, surely concerned, surely pacing before the door, trying to decide what to do.

He won't cause her a moment more of concern than necessary.

"Why do you need to go?" Isaya lays a hand on his arm. "Forgemaster, you know we don't find your presence a burden. What calls you home so insistently?"

"I have a guest." And as soon as winter passes into spring, Kanae will be going home. There truly isn't time to waste. "And it would be rude to not go home."

He pulls himself away from the Yamanaka household and steps out into the cold. The snow is thick, but his feet know the way home.

The wind howls cutting through him mercilessly.

His feet know the way home.

They know.

He cannot see the ground, cannot see his hand in front of his face, cannot see his feet. And for the first time in twenty-five years, Madara Uchiha is lost not two miles away from his home.

His breath freezes, and his foot catches on something that he cannot see.

He stumbles, a knee hitting the ice. Where am I? He is tired, and it is so very cold. So very cold.

Before his eyes fall closed, the wind's insistent howling softens, and he thinks of Izuna, of Izuna and of Kanae.

---

He floats, drifting in dark water. Strangely enough, it is peaceful, and even though he can barely feel the sun above the surface, it does not feel as though he's drowning. There is no panic here, only a gentle peace, only dark water and softly diffusing sunlight.

"He's completely frozen through." He knows this voice, but it takes too much effort to think about at the moment.

It doesn't really matter.

"What could have prompted him to lose his head like this, Pastor?" And he knows that voice too, but none of that matters.

He's taken stock of his surroundings, and he imagines that Kanae's home must look something like this, dark water, and rising spires, so long without the sun for her to be so pale.

"I don't know." Hashirama sounds tired, but Madara doesn't care for him anymore, much. The concern in the other man's voice still touches his heart just a little bit. "How could you let him leave, Brother Inoki?"

"He said that it would be rude to leave his guest alone." Madara supposes that he has frustrated the apothecary. He's exploring an underwater world, right now. He hasn't the time to care.

"His guest is still with him then?" That sounds like a woman, most likely Mito Senju, since it is not Isaya Yamanaka. There aren't that many other women who know that he has a guest.

"Well, whatever he's done, it's not something that I can cure." Old Man Nara is here as well then. Why are they speaking about him above the water? He's not ill. He just doesn't want to return to the surface.

They are all so far away, so unimportant. He touches a waving plant with a hand. It doesn't feel like anything at all. Perhaps it is simply water.

"I'm sorry." And the bell notes of Kanae's voice cuts through the water. "But someone from the village said that the Forgemaster was in the Pastor's house. You'll forgive me for trying to find my host."

Oh, yes. Kanae. He's a bit at a loss with her words. Shouldn't she know that I'm not at Hashirama's damned house?

"You're his guest then?"

There's a gasp. "You're-" Does Mito Senju know Kanae? Will she reveal who Kanae is?

Madara doesn't delude himself, the realization that there is a siren in their midst, even one cursed to be human would not be something that Hashirama would take kindly. Magic runs diametrically opposed to faith.

"Yes." In his mind's eye, he can see a small smile on Kanae's lips as she says this. "I'm Kanae."

"Do you know Brother Madara's guest, Mito?" Say no. Madara wills Mito Senju to keep her mouth shut and say nothing.

This collection of god-fearing men would not understand the fae woman so intent on pulling him from the water especially since most of her kind is intent on pulling men in.

"I don't think so." It's Kanae, moving closer, though he still can't see her. "I've come from somewhere far, and I don't have any recollection of meeting the lady before." She's still above the water, and he doesn't want her to be. She belongs here. He does not. He wants to see her, but the water which had been peaceful before now has hands and icy fingers that refuse to let him go.

His chest aches, and he coughs, a line of bubbles trailing up to the surface. Someone takes hold of his hand.

"Oh, but Mito grew up in a parish by the sea, rather far from here." Hashirama's still insistent. "Did you ever meet Brother Madara's guest, Mito?"

Kanae's grip on his hand tightens. "Mister Madara? Will you wake up?" Wake up? He is awake, it she who is far away.

"No." Mito sighs. "I haven't met her before, Hashirama. She just looks like someone I once knew."

"Give up on it, girlie. He's frozen through because of you. Even if you could get him to wake up there is no healer in these parts to save him."

Again, a reference to his apparent illness. He is not frozen, though the water is turning cold.

"I suppose that you're the healer?" Kanae's voice is still silvery, but tinged with scorn. "Because if this is the extent of your skill, I am not surprised that you think he finished." Finished?

"Sister, you shouldn't speak to your elders in such a fashion." Hashirama attempts to retake control of the situation, but she doesn't even respond.

Her hands tighten around his, and he feels as though suddenly as though the water's heavy, pressing down on him from all sides. "Mister Madara, please. You can't stay like this forever. Wake up."

Worried. Why does she sound so worried?

There is a weight on his eyelids, pressing down, which is strange because he can see the water, can see the darkness, can feel it press on him, can feel it-

The images distort, the plants fade away, but the water is all around him. He coughs, chest heaving, choking, but her hands are there, helpless to soothe the bone deep ache in his chest.

"Wake up." She whispers, and he's pulled to the surface towards the light and the sun.

She wants me to wake up. I have to.

He's coughing, choking, there's no air-

His eyes open. She is there, leaning over him, a hand holding his, the other against his cheek, eyes sad.

"Kanae." The single word rubs his throat raw. Every muscle shrieks with pain.

She lays a finger over his lips. "No talking. We're going home."

"Oh come now, girlie." Old Man Nara muscles his way to the front. "You can't move him. He'll die on the trip back to that lonely house."

Kanae draws herself up to her full height, which is no taller than Old Man Nara's nose, and glares at him until he backs away. "And he'll die here under your care, seeing how easily you gave up in his life." She's sharp, bitter, eyes narrowed, lips set in a thin line.

Something about her seems more than human at that moment.

And she denies the entirety of Hashirama's gathering.

"If I'm going to die." The words set his throat on fire, but it doesn't matter. She cannot fight this fight alone. "Then I will do so in my own bed, Hashirama."

Hashirama's face falls, but he says nothing.

His limbs don't listen to his demands. He can't climb out of bed to go with her even though he tries.

It has been a long time since he was so weak, so weak and helpless. She pulls one of his arms over her shoulders and props him up with her body, though she has no superhuman strength. She is breathing hard, just holding him upright.

"At least allow me to call the horse cart so that Brother Madara does not have to walk back." Hashirama pleads. "If it would comfort him to die in his own house, I won't stop him, but you'll need to get there."

"This is madness, Pastor." Inoki snaps angrily. "We have let the Forgemaster out into the cold once before in deference to his pig-headed stubbornness, but that is no reason to really send him to his death."

"If he wants to die, I'd say let him." Old Man Nara grumbles. "He's been the most ungodly man in the village for years. How many years has it been since he's attended a service? It is hard to imagine that he even believes in God."

"If you are willing to offer a cart to drive us back, it would be most appreciated." Kanae seems to have ignored Old Man Nara's accusations of atheism.

Perhaps since she is a siren, she doesn't believe in gods that are conjured by men's design. Perhaps she just flat out doesn't care whether or not the man she lives with believes in God.

Madara himself cannot tell if he really believes in God, only that he is resigned to burning in hell.

It is Tobirama who drives them back to the house and the forge. "You should probably tuck the blanket about you as well, Miss Kanae." She has a cloak of course, but she's wrapped him up in the blankets that Hashirama had offered without keeping a single one to herself.

He would protest this arrangement himself if the rattling of the cart didn't make him feel sick and queasy. His head pounds. His stomach rolls.

Kanae smiles, but it doesn't touch her eyes. "Just drive please, Mister. We don't have much daylight left."

Tobirama shrugs and slaps the reins against the horse's flank. "If that's what you want."

Madara doesn't remember much of the rest of the drive. He exists in a state of half-wakefulness, neither fully in one world nor the other.

Her head is the weight on his shoulder, and her arms are about him. The cart heaves and jumps, swaying from side to side.

After they stumble through the door of his room, Kanae tucks him into his own bed and cradles his head on her lap, a hand carding through his long and tangled hair. A degree of the terrible weight on his chest lifts. He is home.

This is home.

His body burns, unnaturally hot. Fever. It is the only explanation for the mournful way she looks at him, the touch of fear in her eyes, how cool her hands are against his brow. She had always been warm before.

He wonders if she'd cry for him if he died. If he can bear the weight of her tears.

If he can even live long enough to see her go.

A tear carves a path down her face. He does not have to die for her to cry for him. The thought tears at him. He's made her cry again. For the second time, he's made her cry, though she seems more hurt by this than when he'd accused her.

She holds him tightly in the dying firelight, tear tracks bright against her face.

It takes him a long time to realize that she is humming, voice lifting into song. There are no words that he can discern, just desperate sadness and a sound like breaking waves. She has never sounded so sweet, or so heartbroken.

His eyes are already closed when the note ends, and she chokes on a sob that struggles to make its way out of her throat. "Don't die."

He wants to raise a hand to comfort her, but the darkness pulls at him, and he falls.

"Have you forgotten me, brother?" Izuna sits before him with a bloodstained shirt in the woodlot. His face is cast in shadow.

"No." Madara wants to tell him, but his tongue is heavy, and he cannot speak.

Izuna sits there in the shade of the old trees, watching him with sorrowful eyes. "I suppose you haven't, Big Brother."

Izuna has always understood him. Madara unsticks his throat. "I'm sorry." He has to say it, has to feel it. He's always-it's his fault.

"Don't be sorry, Big Brother." Izuna rises and makes his way towards him. "I'm sorry I didn't get to tell you before."

Blood drips from Izuna's stomach, though the shirt isn't ripped and there's no ax anywhere. His blood doesn't even stain the grass, and the sky is an endless pale blue. It is so patently false, but then, there are plenty of things wrong with this scene.

Izuna looks no older than a child. He'd died a young man. Madara himself is no older than a child here, with unscarred hands and bare feet. "You shouldn't blame yourself, Brother. It was an accident."

"Otaro. Gin. Inabi. Mother." It is hard to look at Izuna's childish baby face, the face of a brother that he could not save. "I never did tell you that Father-"

"I know." Izuna cups his cheek with a hand no bigger than a child. The blood vanishes from his form as though it's never been there. "Big Brother, I know."

And Madara is helpless to stop him, to tell him to get away, that everything that touches him burns and falls apart.

"Brother, stop feeling sorry. We love you." Izuna's lips brush his temple, and he breaks. He hasn't cried. Hadn't cried when he found Father in the forge. Hadn't cried when Mother died. Hadn't cried when he'd failed, time and time again, Gin, Inabi, Otaro, and finally Izuna.

He cries now.

"You're so close to seeing everyone again." Izuna pulls back. "But you can't yet, promise me, you won't let go, not yet. Live, Brother. Live."

He has never been able to deny Izuna. "I promise."

Izuna smiles, and for the first time, he looks happy. "Then we'll see each other again, a long time from now. Love well."

The blue skies fade to white.

The leaves turn pale and translucent.

The ground falls away. The last thing he sees is Izuna's wide smile, brighter than the sun.

Everything bleeds into an unfamiliar white light.

When he wakes again, his fever has broken, and his body is weak. Kanae's hair spills over his chest, and in the morning light, it is a deep red with highlights of gold. The fire's burned low, and he coughs, a sudden pain flaring in his chest.

"Madara?" Her eyes are half open, and the shadows under them look as dark as bruises.

His thumb brushes the shadow under her right eye without his consent, without him even really thinking of what the gesture means. She'd always been the one to make overtures before. He'd always reined in the impulse to touch her casually.

"Sleep." It is a stranger's voice in his throat, rough and aching, but that doesn't matter. "I'll live even if you do."

She climbs onto the bed beside him and throws an arm over him, her hand over his heart, her legs tangled with his and sighs contently against his shoulder.

Each breath is painful, but something in his chest unthaws.

It doesn't matter that she has to go home later, he has this moment pressed to his heart.

Somewhere along the way, his aching soul had found a home in her care. It is why he had to go home, had to come home. The next time, he would not be lost in the storm. His heart would know the way home.

Izuna had told him to love well, and he does not know if he truly still has it in him to love as untarnished hearts might, sweet and true. He has not been without guilt, without obsession, without recklessness and fatigue warring in his blood for a long time.

In nearly twenty-five years of life, he's never had any particular desire to take part in laughter, lights, and dancing, had never been comfortable with anyone sleeping beside him.

He is a patchwork of broken pieces held together only by determination, leaving bloody footprints behind him, working because work keeps him from thinking.

Izuna had told him to love well, and he still has the strength to try. Perhaps it will be enough to try.

Perhaps it will be enough.

---

He is damnably weak. It has been a week, and he isn't capable of climbing out of bed much less work in the forge. He's barely capable of feeding himself. It is impossible for him to lift a hammer or work the bellows or anything.

It is disconcerting. It is problematic, and he cannot stand it.

"You know that you shouldn't be trying to walk around." Kanae looks up from her stitching, she'd been taking work from the tailor and earning coin, but he'd fallen earlier in the week, and now she sits with him.

It almost makes him feel claustrophobic.

He coughs, still holding onto the back of a chair. "I will go mad."

She raises an eyebrow at him. "Madara, there have been plenty of times this month when you've already acted mad. You dived into a river in the middle of winter. You walked out into a snowstorm when you could not see a foot from your own nose. And now you are attempting to walk around when you still have to hold onto chairs so that you do not tip over. Are you trying to tell me that those are the actions of a sane man?"

He frowns, and he wants badly to respond to her accusations, but he finds that he cannot. He cannot simply because there have been points in his life when he was certain that he has already gone mad. "Must you tell me that?"

He sounds so...lost even to his own ears. He can't imagine what he sounds like to hers.

She comes to stand beside him, and he leans on her instead. "No. I don't." She looks up at him, a rueful smile playing on her lips. "I'm sorry. I just wanted you to go back to bed."

He lets her do it, because honestly, does she have to look so sad? What could he possibly do from his place in bed to make her smile?

"My coat." In the confusion, he'd forgotten to give her the hair combs. "It's..." He doesn't really know where it is, but thankfully she doesn't ask him what he needs it for. "I need to give you these." He offers her the wrapped square of cloth.

She takes it, though she looks at him for a long moment. "The only present I truly needed was your life." She looks away. "About the spring..."

"Don't mention the spring." She wants to go home. What person wouldn't? If he had been cruelly barred from ever returning to this house, he'd miss it as well. He might find the house that they now share a home, but that does not mean that she does. "Open your present, Kanae."

Mentioning spring makes him tired and ill tempered. He does not have to be curt with her, but he cannot bear to think of the spring, of boughs heavy with leaves, flowers in her hair, and the inevitable day where she walks down the road and out of sight, never to return.

He does not want to think of what will end in spring.

"Alright." She says, though her face falls. "I won't mention it again." There is a long and echoing silence as they both think of what hangs between them, unspoken.

She unwraps the square of cloth and freezes. "How did you, did you know?" She's holding one of the combs up to the light. "Whalebone." She whispers. "How did you know?"

"I didn't." He still doesn't know what she's so concerned about to be honest, but they seem to have made her happy, which is all that he wanted from them. "They looked like they belonged with you."

"Mother gave me a set of whalebone combs once. I...I had to leave them when I left the sea." So he'd chosen more correctly than he dare hope. "These are not the same but..." She throws her arms around his neck, laughing and weeping all at once. "Thank you. Thank you. Thank you."

His face burns, but she cannot see it, and he cannot blame the fever, which on occasion still comes and goes. He may only blame his wild heart. "Don't thank me."

She pulls back smiling with tears in her eyes, the brightest he's ever seen her. "I must." She kisses his temple playfully and wipes away her tears, spinning out into the room so that her dress rises, and he sees that she is again, not wearing shoes. "Oh, thank you."

She quickly pulls her hair up, twisting it into one bun at the top of her head, and she slides the set of bone combs in until her hairstyle resembles a flower, all white petals and blood red center. She looks...somehow, more herself like this.

She resembles-he likes to think-a siren when she wears her hair like this.

"Do I look nice?" She asks.

Her eyes dare him to say no.

He wasn't going to say no anyway, and he opens his mouth to tell her so.

There's a knock at the door, which she dances away to open. "Don't get out of bed." She tosses the sentence over her shoulder, and it's only when she turns that he notices that a strand of hair has escaped her.

It floats about behind her as if still underwater.

His chuckles turn to coughs, which pull at his aching chest. It might be best to wait until he is well again to laugh.

"Is there somewhere I can put this, Miss Kanae?" It sounds like Tobirama, which makes his entire good mood go up in smoke.

He still has no intention of ever looking at Tobirama without giving the other man two black eyes. Izuna might have...might have forgiven him, but Madara isn't as nice or as forgiving.

He's twice as black of heart as his little brother and far more vicious.

"Oh, you didn't have to come back." She'd said come back, as if Tobirama has been around before. Madara's mood sours even further. What the hell was he doing near my house?

"I owe it to him."

He hears Tobirama's footsteps in his sitting room.

"Hmmm?" There's the scrape of a chair over the floor and a wooden thunk as though there'd been something heavy dropped. "The last time Mister Madara saw you here he nearly killed you. I don't think you owe him much of anything."

She'd remembered his rage, and she remembers it as she ought, without a hint of fondness or approval.

And he remembers as well, and the shame of it scorches even his bones.

"I killed his brother." Even if he were crueler, he'd still be able to hear the guilt and shame in Tobirama's words. "It's the least I could do."

"I'm not sure what you want me to say, Mister Tobirama." Kanae comments idly.

"I needed someone to tell." There's the scrape of a chair as presumably Tobirama climbs to his feet.

"You're the pastor's brother, aren't you?" Kanae asks without a shred of remorse or pity. "Shouldn't guilt be something that you speak of with him?"

"You're right." Tobirama's booted footsteps fade toward the front door. "I'll not trouble you further, Miss Kanae."

"Thank you for the firewood, Mister Tobirama." She come back to him, shutting the door with an airy hand, humming under her breath right up until she turns around and sees his face. "What's wrong?"

"Who was that?" He knows well who it was, but he wants to hear it from her. He hadn't seen their expressions, had only guessed at the whys and wherefores of the words they had said to each other.

He wonders if this is what jealousy tastes like, bitter to the tongue like an oversalted dish. He reminds himself that he has neither grounds nor reason to be jealous of Tobirama Senju. Kanae hadn't sounded the least bit interested in him, and Tobirama in turn hadn't sounded the least bit interested in Kanae.

His mind is making up fantasies that have no basis in truth.

"Hmmm...the pastor's brother. His name is Tobirama, I believe." She hums as she goes to pick up her sewing once more. "He was here earlier in the week too, to drop off firewood."

"I don't like him." This is a childish protest; he knows it is a childish protest, but he makes it anyway.

Kanae doesn't set down her sewing. "I know." She sounds almost amused. "You did, after all, try to kill him in the front yard."

"You were gone for a long time." He needs to distract himself from the shame, from the guilt. Kanae might not have thought it to be particularly serious, but it is. Oh, it is.

She makes her way over to sit on the edge of his bed. "You heard everything I said to him, Madara." Her eyes do not reproach him. His soul does enough of that.

"I don't like him." His tongue trips on without listening to the thoughts that beg him to stop talking, to just simply, stop.

She's holding his hand, tracing his veins in such a way that makes liquid fire run through his blood. He does not want to stop and think of what that means. "Why?" She asks, and the word hangs in the air, deceptively innocent.

It is the most dangerous question that she could ask of him. How is he supposed to explain the mess of guilt and shame and fury and blame that is his relationship with Tobirama Senju these days?

He knows perfectly well how to explain. He is just unwilling to speak through the lump in his throat, and the way it constricts, because he knows that she will think less of him after this. It would never be the same.

"I blamed him." He settles for that instead of the story, instead of what is the truth, the full truth. I blamed him for my failure. I blamed him for what was my fault. I blamed him.

"And," Her hands are still, but she's still holding his hand. Her eyes are far away and sad. "Does he deserve the blame?"

"No." The word rips something apart inside him, and he coughs, lungs rebelling, throat laced tight. Deep in his heart, the child that he used to be cries and begs him to take that word back. To deny Tobirama responsibility for Izuna's death is to accept his own role. He'd killed Izuna as much as if he'd held the ax.

"Is there someone to blame?" She must have the truth of it. She must.

She must, he doesn't want, can't-

"Yes." If no was hard, then yes is harder. He looks up at the anguish written on her face, looks up at the despair haunting her eyes, and lets go of her hand. She cannot see the blood on his hands, but he can. He can. Oh God, he wishes he can't. "Blame me."

His throat is dry. His tongue is heavy.

She's still holding his hand, and she doesn't let go. "Why?"

"I wasn't there. I knew, should have-" She's opened the floodgates, set his demons free, he's there, in the clearing of the woodlot, Izuna bleeding out underneath his hands, screaming at the sky for his own failures.

He would have died a hundred thousand deaths, would have-"Should have-" The words won't come, they are on his lips, on the tip of his tongue, but he cannot give them voice. He drowns in them.

"Should have known?" Her hands smooth back his hair. "If you were not there, and you could not see the future, how could you have known?"

"But I promised. I promised." He'd promised, and he'd failed. He'd promised, and he'd failed. He'd promised, and he'd failed. He'd promised and he'd-Izuna had said to love well. Izuna had said that he is forgiven.

It is not Izuna's forgiveness that he begs for.

"Were you unkind to him in life?" It is his own. It is Kanae's. "Did you hurt him? Did you take pleasure in behaving cruelly to your brother?"

The misery makes it hard to think. Have I ever-no.

I did not do so purposefully.

"Then you cannot have failed." He has Kanae's acceptance, but he does not have his own.

"He told me to love well." It is hard to explain his meeting with Izuna. "But I do not know-" Perhaps it had been nothing more than a fantasy created by his feverish mind, a comfortable construction of what he'd wants to be true. He wants to be forgiven. Perhaps his mind dreamed up forgiveness. "I'm tired, Kanae, old."

Her lips twitch upward, a wry smile. "You? Old?" She sits there, looking at him through a sort of bleak pain. "If you are old, then I am so ancient as to be dust in the wind. Don't call yourself that, son of man." Her head comes to a rest on his aching chest, over his heart. "The gods have been crueler to you than I thought."

This is not about God. "It wasn't fate that killed my family."

"Would the man who nearly killed himself to give me a present really try to kill a brother that he clearly loves?"

And perhaps she cannot see it, perhaps. "I..."

"Whose forgiveness are you begging for?" She doesn't ask him this exactly. She's so quiet that it sounds like she's asking herself. "Because only you can chose to live instead of merely exist."

"Ah." He wonders what he would have been had he not chosen to pull her from the water. He isn't sure he wants to know. "I've lived."

"Have you? I'm glad." And maybe that's all it takes.

"The spring." He should not be selfish. He's still too proud to beg. There is time yet. If his home is where she is, then perhaps he can still persuade her that she ought to stay. "I would prefer that you stay."

"Mmm." She sighs. "I know."

There is another knock at the door, and she peels herself from him reluctantly. "I suppose I will go and see what he wants." She makes a face. "To tell you the truth, I do not like him either."

But it is not Tobirama Senju, it is Mito Senju, with a shawl over her shoulders, and a furtive look in her eyes.

"Why are you here?" She asks Kanae even as Kanae retreats back to his room.

"I don't know you." Kanae says, but she is a bad liar. Madara can see the fear in her eyes. She is a siren without powers, a woman without a path home among strangers who at any moment might turn hostile. She has only him in this foreign land, and he is unwell. Mito Senju could peel back her mask and leave her to the mercy of those in Konoha Village. Surely, that is a cause for fear.

"You do know me." Mito frowns. "You're Kanae of the Deeps, Kanae Anharaya."

Kanae's mouth flattens to a thin line. "I am not." Not any longer. Madara hears the words echo in the silence that follows in the wake of her declaration.

"Then who are you?" Mito crosses her arms. "Who are you, if you are not the siren who has haunted the waters of Uzu for centuries?"

And with Mito Senju's words come a fresh sort of pain. Of course, Kanae is a siren. Her time here, half a year, is nothing more than an eyeblink to her long life. No wonder she couldn't possibly imagine how old he feels. No matter how he feels, he could never hope to match her life.

"I, I'm Kanae...Kanae..."

"Kanae Uchiha." It is purely presumption for him to say something like this. She is not his wife. She is not...heaven forbid, his sister or his cousin or any other relative of his, but he is the last of his name, and he can give the name Uchiha to whomever he dare please.

He just ought not have said such a thing to the pastor's wife. "Kanae Uchiha?" Mito murmurs, eyebrow raised. "This one was not aware that you'd gotten married, Brother Madara."

He narrows his eyes at the woman. It would be a bad day indeed if he is incapable of silencing Hashirama's pretty but delicate wife. "It is neither your concern, nor the church's to whom I give my name."

"I was not about to give away your secret, Kanae." Mito sits heavily. "How can I, when one of my grandfather's was your eldest brother?"

"Not my eldest brother." Kanae slaps a hand over her mouth, but her eyes are thunderous. "Don't make me angry with you, Mito."

"I will not." Mito smiles, but her eyes are sad. "I would have to tell Hashirama how I know you, should I do that." She looks away. "I married him because I love him, but no one told me that I was marrying his church as well."

"He is a pastor." Kanae moves away, back to sit on his bed. "You should have known that Mito Uzumaki."

"I just...wanted to know if it was truly you." Mito looks up, and confusion swirls in her dark eyes. "You look different, changed somehow."

Kanae turns away from her, so that she is facing Madara instead. "I'm sure I don't know what you mean." She does not want to tell Mito Senju that she has been cursed, Madara realizes. She would like that to stay between them, both the act and the reason.

"I'll not bother you further then." Mito rises and bobs a small curtsey in their direction. "I'll take my leave now, Grandaunt, Brother Madara."

"She calls you grandaunt." Madara comments, faint, head spinning while the door clicks shut behind her.

"My brother Korui was her father's father." Kanae shrugs. "Her bloodline is faint, but where did you think she got her hair from?"

"Was?" He imagines that if she'd lived for centuries, then her elder brother must have done the same.

"He died when I was a child still." In the fading light, her lips are tight, and her smile sad. "He chose the land instead of the waves. A human life with the one he loved."

Another reason why she cannot stay. He is irrevocably human, and the act of choosing him would cut her own life short. "I see." His eyes fall closed. It is better not to think of it. Best not to make her choose to stay with him.

He won't ask again.

---

His cough lingers, even as the days turn warm and the snow melts. He is beginning to believe that the tightness in his chest and the rebellion in his lungs are permanent. But while in town, he does his level best to hide it. "Kaien." The houndmaster's wife has ordered a new scythe.

But of course, he cannot expect Kaien Inuzuka to remember.

"Ah, Forgemaster!" The mud-covered man appears through the crowd of dogs and leaves them behind at the gate of the kennels. "I forgot something, didn't I?"

"You did." He's about to chastise the man, but the door flies open.

"Miss Kanae!" Shin's smile upon seeing her shines bright like the sun. "Miss Kanae, you're here!"

"I am!" She catches the boy in her arms and spins them around. "And how well have you learned since I last visited?"

"Ma says I'm better now." Shin giggles, the bright cast of his eyes shot through with gold. "But I think that's because..."

"He's a good boy." Kaien comments suddenly from under the brim of his wide hat, his face cast in shadow. Madara looks over at him, and he shrugs. "My son's a good boy."

"You love him." Perhaps Kaien Inuzuka persists in loving his son because the alternative is unthinkable.

"Ah." The Houndmaster shrugs. "It's my fault that he's got a lame leg."

No one in town had ever heard the story or ever heard the facts of how little Shin Inuzuka had broken his leg. That didn't stop the gossip from spreading. Every sort of story from Kaien's negligence to Tsuruko's absent-mindedness to a stranger's curse had been bandied about from market stalls to barrooms.

Madara shifts on his feet. What was it that Kanae said? "Whose forgiveness are you looking for, Houndmaster?"

"'M not looking for forgiveness. It's not something that I can ask for." Kaien leans against the wooden slats of the fence, his hands in his pockets. "All I can do is love him better."

"Mmm." Madara nods absently. "You don't feel the guilt of it any longer."

Kanae's showing Shin some new tune now, and he plays it back to her, clumsy and unpracticed. They smile secretively at each other over the flute for one captured moment, and break into helpless giggles.

"Of course, I do." Kaien shrugs. "But what can you do, you know? I didn't catch him then, so I shouldn't blame him for what he can't do now." He pushes himself away from the fence and takes a step forward, whistling for the hounds. "You got to learn to put the past in the past, you know? Living with it over your head all the time just means you never really live. You lose more from the future that you hide from when you keep looking back."

Living with the past over your head just means you never really live. Madara turns the thought over in his head and waits for it to settle. Was this what Izuna meant by forgiveness? He can still feel guilt, still feel the mistakes, but the future, that life is still untainted.

Put the past in the past, else he carry this weight for the rest of his life. Put it away, and maybe he can truly live.

His chest aches, but he does not cough. The time for that has passed.

He leans against that fence for a long time, waiting for Kanae to finish.

When she finally does come back to him, it's with bare feet dancing through the mud and laughter in her eyes. "Madara?"

He takes a moment to admire her happiness, the blush of rose on her cheeks, the smile blooming on her lips. "Yes?"

"Are we going to the festival on May Day?"

He blinks. He hadn't thought to go. He doesn't even like crowds or parties or any of that, but she has to have asked for a reason. "Did you want to go?"

"Madam Tsuruko tells me that there will be dancing." She smiles. "I've always loved to dance."

"Then we will go." It is only one day, at the end of spring. He hasn't the heart to tell her that she'd most likely leave before then. If she wants to promise him a day at the end of spring, then he'd hardly protest it.

"Something tells me you weren't planning on going." She takes his hand as she turns to leave. "We don't have to go if you don't like going to these sorts of things."

"I want to see you dance." Something makes him wonder if his tongue is drunk. He always seems to say things that he doesn't mean to say even if he does mean them.

"But then you would have to dance with me." She skips along beside him, oblivious to his internal debate. "And something tells me that you don't like dancing."

He'd be a dancing bear for her. "Don't worry about that." He's perfectly capable of dancing. It's just as she suspects though, he dislikes dancing.

"But don't worry." She lets go of his hand and turns into the kitchen. "If you don't know, I can always teach you."

"I know how to dance." He half growls and pulls a book from his shelf. He ought to consider expansions. It might be fanciful; it might be fancy, but to do so would not be negligent.

Her laughter follows him as he cracks open the pages to where he'd left off, that day, long ago. It is time to begin.

It is the time for dreams.

---

She refuses to let him see her new dress. "No." She frowns, but her eyes are laughing.

"Not even the color?" He asks. He wouldn't be curious unless she hid it from him. If she didn't insist on sewing it in her room and throwing a blanket over it whenever he happened to pass by, he wouldn't even give it more than a passing glance.

"No!" She giggles, pushing him out toward the door. "Never!"

"Never?" And that is a thought that touches him with far too much amusement. "Are you going to wear nothing to the festival and hide about at home?" He sighs, a hand over his heart. "I must tell you, that is so much effort to put in for an article of clothing that you are not ever going to wear."

"You're awful." She leans her forehead against his shoulder, arms flailing. "You're so, so mean."

He leans down to whisper in her ear. "You aren't dancing with anyone until I see it."

She blushes a fiery red. "Madara..." Each syllable of his name is dragged out, soft and long. He'd already thought that his name sounded electric in her voice. Now it rolls over her tongue like a prayer, a plea, and something about it cools his blood and leaves the world in sharp clarity. "You know that I won't."

He prods her cheek with a finger, amusement sparking in his heart. "I was only teasing." His hand cups her face without his consent. "You may go in anything you'd like." And no other flower would ever bloom as fair as you.

"It's a surprise." She laughs, a hand rubbing the back of her neck. "I want to look pretty."

She has always been beautiful.

"I'm sure." He steps away, suddenly uncertain about the direction of his thoughts. The direction of his thoughts...he'd for a brief moment, wondered what it would be like to kiss her smile.

Twenty-five years, and she is only the second person he'd ever wondered about.

He's been down this road before, been down this road, and it had not ended...well.

Whatever he felt about Hashirama has clearly ended.

It's best not to think about this. He shouldn't make her decision harder. She has to leave, and soon.

"What would you like for dinner?" She brushes past him, unheeding of his sudden pause.

"Will I ever learn what you do to make dinner with spices that I do not have?" He'd always wondered.

He doesn't entirely think that she'd tell him.

She blinks. "Heart." She says cryptically. "But no requests?"

"Fish would be nice."

She waves a hand as she walks to show that she's heard, but she says nothing.

---

"You've lost a strand of hair." It's the same strand that she'd been unable to capture before.

She blinks owlishly up at him. "Are you sure?" She'd been plaiting her hair up into a crown, sliding the combs in at regular intervals.

"Yes." He pulls the offending strand to the front. "See?"

She still refuses to let him see the dress. 'You'll see it when I'm done with my hair.' It feels like she's not ever going to be done with her hair this morning.

She slumps. "I swear I got that one."

"Let me do it." He pulls the bottom comb from her hair, and her braids unravel before his eyes. It has been an age and a half since he's held hair this long. It might have been Mother's, and the weight of the silk in his hands feels like water.

Fitting, for a siren's hair.

"Madara?" She leans on the vanity, propping her head up on her hands, staring into the mirror. "Have you ever been married?"

Married? "No." Why would she ever think of that? Why would she think that he knows anything about marriage?

He'd offered her his name in the face of Mito Senju's questions, but he knows nothing of that life. You do. A traitorous voice whispers from the back of his mind. You have lived it for half a year or more, and you do not want to lose it.

He gathers up the thoughts in his head and puts it away in his box. The box is overflowing, and something else even worse tries to escape, but he slams the box shut.

"Oh."

His hands are steady as they twist her hair up into a crown. She deserves a crown. "Why do you ask?"

"My hair." She doesn't gesture, doesn't shrug, but he watches her face in the mirror. There's a hint of introspection in her vibrancy this morning. "You know what to do, and you have no sisters."

"I used to plait Mother's in the morning, back when she was tired." Back when she was dying. It is better not to say.

Kanae does not apologize for asking, though she studies his face in the mirror for a long moment. He suspects that she knows.

He slides the last of the bone combs into the hairstyle, pinning it into place. "A crown for Nature's fairest on the last day of spring."

And she smiles.

He laces the back of her wine red dress with hands that do not tremble and knees that do not bend. He'd thought of kissing her, but this love does not make him weak.

He is assured even if the words would not pass his lips.

"Do I look pretty?" She asks, when she turns around. Her dress is a shade lighter than her hair at the shoulders, darkening to black at the hems. It shows her forearms, long sleeves trailing after her movements.

She looks positively indecent in the eyes of the most conservative-Old Man Nara would certainly think so-but set against her hair and pale green eyes, she looks more like a nymph of the trees than a siren from deep water.

"Beautiful." The word slips from his lips easily. "But I thought that you would have worn green or blue." She'd always worn green or blue or brown before.

"You wear black and red." His cloak is black edged with red, yes. His shirts are black. His pants are black, and his boots are of black leather.

She wants to match.

He bows, sweeping his cloak back as he's seen the king's men do. "Might I escort you, my lady?"

She sets a hand in his and hides a laugh. "If my savior wishes, to the ends of the earth."

She has not called him savior in a long time. This time, it warms his heart. As you are mine.

Their walk into Konoha Village is lined with impossibly deep purple crocuses. The trees above are bursting with leaves so dark that it truly means the end of spring.

The end of spring.

Surely, she will no longer be here at the beginning of summer. He tries not to think of it too much. The maypole stands in the village square, and the market has taken on a festive air as more vendors than ever turn out for the celebration of a new planting season.

Kanae turns around and around, the hems of her wine red dress flying up about her sandaled feet. "It is beautiful."

"Yes." He hasn't the time to glance around. Her reaction is enough.

She pulls him towards the pole. "And is this the dance that welcomes spring?" But she catches sight of something else and darts towards that.

He is at the moment, unable to keep up with her feet.

"Madara." Toka Senju appears from the crowd. "You never come to these sorts of things."

"Well," he mutters sarcastically from the corner of his mouth. "I am clearly here, am I not?"

Toka stands, a hand on her hip, a frown on her lips. "You are possessed." She shakes a finger in his direction that he barely pays any heed to. "Do not think that I have not heard about what you did." It is hardly likely that he will lose Kanae with her red dress and her red hair, even in the crowd, but it is fun to watch her marvel over wares as though she were a small child seeing these things for the first time.

She is so old and yet so young at the same time. He is so very warm.

"What did I do?" He asks. Kanae has just picked up a seashell. She turns to the little girl next to her and gestures as if to create a picture. The girl covers her mouth, but he sees the smile that they share.

Kanae always smiles in such a way that it encourages other people to smile with her.

"You walked out into a snow storm because a woman was worth more than your own life." Toka shakes her head. "I thought wrong about you two. I thought she didn't know what she was getting into. It's you who doesn't know what you're getting into. "

Madara glances sharply at her. Her words have caught up to him. "You have known how long I've wanted to die." Toka flinches as though she's been struck. She well knows the times that he's gotten drunk at her bar, and the wine had loosened his tongue. She well knows how long he's been drowning in sorrow too hard to name. "So you ought to know that I stepped out into that storm, because I didn't care much for living."

It is different now. The past has to go.

Kanae's moved onto a different stall now, further away, looking curiously at a bracelet of polished stones shining in the sun. He strides forward, but Toka catches him by the elbow.

"Madara." Her heavy gray eyes search his face, but he is impatient to be gone. "Do you know what she is?"

What, the word freezes his soul. What.

Do you know what she is?

His eyes narrow. "Do you know who she is?"

"Mito told me-" So Mito Senju had lied. How convenient for her. "That she is Kanae of the Deeps. She's not human, Madara."

Is he supposed to feel frightened? Is he supposed to be shocked and horrified? "She is perfectly human." A lie, but he is a liar by habit.

"How long did she say that she was staying until?" Toka looks about and pulls him into a quiet corner.

"The end of spring." There's no harm in telling Toka that. Whatever her fears, she can set them to rest, because Kanae will shortly vanish from this village as though she's never been. He is very careful to not think of what he will do then.

"Tonight then." Toka holds his elbows and pins him with a fierce look. "Her people will come for her tonight, when their power is strongest. You must not go with her, no matter how much she begs you to go." The thought that Kanae would beg him to go with her is preposterous. He does not tell Toka this. Let her think the worst, and let her be proven wrong, there is no problem with that. His life is shortly to be empty and cold anyway.

Tonight. He might as well stay silent, let Toka say her worst, for all she's done is worry for him, and find Kanae as quickly as possible afterward. He hasn't got much time left. It doesn't have to be tonight.

"I mean it, Madara. Promise me." Her eyes search his face for a hint of something.

He hasn't the faintest idea what. "Of course, if there is some random visitor who comes to take her away tonight and ask that I go with them I won't."

"This isn't a magic that you understand." Toka doesn't seem to have found whatever it is that she's looking for, because she sighs and turns away. "Stay safe, Madara Uchiha."

He makes sure to look as though he takes her words to heart.

He nods once curtly and goes in search of Kanae and her red dress among the stalls.

When he comes upon her once again, she's standing before a stall that sells flowers.

"Flowers for you, lady?" An old woman offers her a crown of blue cornflowers. Wealth, pride and fortune.

She laughs and takes two, setting one on her head. For the other, she turns to him and sets it on his head. "And this one's for you." She leans up to kiss his cheek, but he turns at the same time, and she freezes, their faces less than an inch apart. "I title you lord." She says at last, still staring at his lips.

"Lord of what?" He asks, breathlessly, his arms around her waist. She stands so close that he can feel her breathing. His heart drums against his ribcage, a drunken fire spreading through his veins.

"My heart." She tells him, eyes so pale a green that he could drown in them for days.

Heart. He almost sinks to his knees, but he does not fall today. Not today.

He leans forward that last half inch and kisses her smile. It is warm, and the heat of it curls all the way down to his bones.

This close, her eyes are completely green.

She pulls him closer, a hand against the back of his neck. He sighs against her lips, sliding to a rest against her shoulder as she holds him. There is no need for words.

His heart is still wild in his chest. Today, it cannot be fettered.

He has kissed a woman-no, Kanae, only Kanae-in a crowded public square, and he does not care that a village is watching.

The world might watch. He is Madara Uchiha, and he does not care.

He has no cause to be ashamed, no cause for guilt. He is lord of her heart. She loves me. The thought goes straight to his head, giddy and warm.

She loves me. This is a choice, and it tastes sweet.

"The dance!" Kaien's voice booms over the crowd. "Everyone get ready for the Maypole Dance!"

He laughs and takes her hand. "You wanted to dance."

They vanish into the crowd, spinning into the noon day sun.

---

By dusk, they are a stumbling mess on the road home. She tips forward. He catches her wrist, and sweeps her into his arms. It would be better to carry her.

"But Mada..." She sighs against his neck, her breath raising goosebumps on his skin. "I can walk."

"I don't want you to walk." It is not as if he is particularly good at walking at this moment, given that he is certain that he's not supposed to sway, but he doesn't want her to walk.

"You're happy." She observes, an arm looped about his neck, a hand over his heart, head against his shoulder. "Or at least content." Her hair's loose and free falling from the crown. There are still cornflowers in his hair, the same as hers.

"Mmm..."

She kisses his pulse, the underside of his jaw, and her lips wander up towards his mouth. "I like it when you're happy." She doesn't kiss him again, and his lips feel the loss of it sharply.

The crocuses are impossibly purple, so deep and vibrant in the dying light. Her eyes are greener than the leaves rustling in the wind above their heads.

He spins them around until they are both breathless with laughter. "You not kissing me makes me very unhappy."

She giggles and covers his face with kisses, light and airy, but still, she avoids his mouth.

"Tease." He whispers in her hair as her lips brushing his eyelid, dragging down the side of his face. Like tears, her fingers trace his jawline.

"Only because your reactions are so funny." Her words make his blood simmer, and his heart sing.

He leans down to claim his kiss. "Am I funny?"

She smiles, maddeningly, and pulls his head down and kisses him, finally. The taste of wine on their breaths mingles in the air between them. The act is heady, but he is not truly drunk even if he tingles wherever she touches. He doesn't think that she's drunk either, but still he sets her down.

"My hope." The words are easy. The admission isn't an admission at all, because surely, she knows just how much hope she's brought to him.

"My savior." They are standing in the yard now, his forge behind them.

For a moment, everything is beautiful and still.

Then it breaks.

Kanae gasps, eyes focused on something behind him. He whirls around.

There's a woman with a fox pelt over her shoulders and tanned leather leggings standing at the edge of the clearing, just outside of his garden gate. She has small sharp eyes so dark that they might as well be a night with no moon, and a pointed nose reminiscent of a fox's snout.

"Sumire." Kanae takes a step forward. "Where's Brother?"

"You need to come home, Kanae. There isn't much time. The King's furious." Sumire bounds forward, flipping over the gate with a smooth grace that is certainly inhuman and takes Kanae's hand. "Before the end of summer, you have to make it back."

"Sumi, I can't just leave." Kanae looks back at him, eyes wide and wet with tears.

His breath is frozen in his lungs. His throat doesn't work anymore. There's no air, just a dying light fading ever so slowly. The time has come for her to leave. Why had he waited to tell her? What had held him back for so long? Before the end of summer, God, before the stroke of midnight. Somewhere deep inside his mind there are bells ringing over the mountains. The river rises, but he refuses to drown.

"Kanae." His voice is far away from his ears, through deep water.

"Kanae." Why does he sound so weak? He'd promised himself that he wouldn't-wouldn't-wouldn't be so broken. God. "I..."

"I do not want to leave." She repeats. "I do not want to marry The King." She pulls her hands from Sumire's. "I will not marry him, and Brother cannot make me."

A sob breaks from Sumire's throat. "Do not, do not speak of that, Lady Kanae. Come, just come. There's no time."

Kanae takes a step back, and her shoulder bumps against his. "Sumi, I can't."

"Why?" Sumire bounds forward, closer to the two of them. "Kanae, is it because of this man? Have you forgotten-"

"No." The air is cold now, but Kanae stands tall. "He was my brother, Sumi. I know every well."

"You cannot make this choice here. You've lost who you are. You have to see-" Sumire shakes her head. "Come with me."

"I will not-"

"Go." It is the only way he can set her free. She is a siren, and sirens to not live on land with blacksmiths. She has far too much life to spend perhaps thirty years with him. He has had everything expect the summer. He splinters, the summer, the summer, but-"Go."

"See? Even the man has said so. He knows what is good, what is right."

Kanae squares her shoulders. "I am tired of other people telling me what is right." Her hand tightens around his. "Let me go into the house for a few minutes, Sumi. I'll get my things."

Everything of hers will be erased from his house.

The thought knocks the air from his lungs once more. Everything must go. Nothing gold can stay.

They step over the threshold, his footsteps sounding loud over his wooden floorboards. Hers are completely silent. His heart rate slows. His vision tunnels.

There is only the woman standing before him, her shoulders hunched.

It is hard to breathe.

"If I do not go now, he will send someone not half as kind as Sumi to drag me back." Madara doesn't know who she means by he. Is it the king, or is it her brother? She'd been so confident that her brother could help her sway the king's opinion, but that had been back when she did not want to stay.

In the grand scheme of things, it doesn't matter who it is that wants to drag her back. She does not want to go. He does not want her to go. But perhaps she'd think differently standing on the edge of the sea.

She deserves the right to chose to leave.

He takes a breathe, air rattling his lungs and tries to form the words to tell her that it is alright.

She lays a finger over his lips and looks at him with eyes without a hint of gold. "Let me finish, Madara." She turns and paces, pulling the combs from her hair as she does so. "I have to go back and explain myself to Brother. I do not know if the King will let me leave a second time, but here." She folds his hands over her combs. They are warm. "These will show you to way. If I do not return, if I cannot return because they will not let me, they will bring to you the shores of Uzu village."

He exhales. "Kanae." How will he know that she did not chose to return to her home instead of whatever life he could possibly offer her? How would he know if perhaps she finds him distasteful after she remembers that she could marry a king?

She straightens the collar of his shirt. "I will always choose you." She searches his face for something, and her face falls when she does not find it. "Believe me." She pleas.

"I believe you." His hand tightens over hers. "Three days. If you do not return to me, I will go to seek you."

She shakes her head. "It will not take three days. If I am not here by the light of the morning on the first day of summer, tomorrow morning, Madara Uchiha, you must go to Uzu Village, and you must ask for Kiko Uzumaki, my niece. Tell her that Kanae Anharaya sent you. Tell her why you are there. She will be able to help."

He nods. Uzu Village. Kiko Uzumaki. The daughter of her brother then. Mito Senju's mother most likely.

"Kanae?" Sumire's voice echoes over the walls. "It's time to go home."

"My home is with you." She squeezes his hands so tightly he wonders if his bones might crumble. They do not. Her eyes lighten, shot through with gold once more. Her voice is changing, the silver notes turning to gold. "I'm coming, Sumi."

Their hands part, and he stands a moment too long in the room.

There is a flash of light through the window.

By the time he forces his feet to the door, there is only red dust blowing in a gentle spring breeze.

Kanae is gone.

---

The air is still. His mind is quiet. There are no thoughts that run rampant. There is no storm in his mind like the day Hashirama left for Uzu. There is nothing, just the single candle lit on his bedside table, his hands loosely wrapped around her combs, watching the flame.

There's really only three parts of a candle flame, the red of the outside, the yellow of the middle, and black at the very center.

He turns the set of three combs over in his hands. She'd said that they would show him the way. She expects him tomorrow if the sun rises, and she does not return. How would her hair combs show him anything?

They are still warm in his hands, pale white bone, the only things besides his heart that tell him that Kanae Anharya had ever been here.

But she was here. She'd filled the house with her sometimes absent, tuneless humming, had mended all of his shirts, had bought him new boots, that book on the table is only open because she was here.

He is alive.

She was here.

She will be here again.

Oh, but that is where the doubt creeps in, and he reverts back to counting seconds and staring into the candle flame.

What if she no longer wants him? What if she makes the choice that leaves him alone? What if, what if, what if-

I will always choose you.

He closes his eyes and breathes out.

I will always choose you.

He breathes in.

I title you lord. Lord of what? My heart.

He opens his eyes. The candle's burned down, the last flame flickering weakly in the breeze from the window. It pales in the light of the rising sun which dyes the sky with bloody streaks. He blows it out, and a plume of smoke rises.

It is the first day of summer.

When has he ever known Kanae to be fickle? When has he ever known her to be a liar? When has he ever known her to be unkind?

She has told him already that she chooses him. I will always choose you.

It is time that he chooses her.

It is dawn, and she has not returned.

What can he, a simple blacksmith take with him to rescue a siren from the King of the Sea? He steps into his forge, picks up his hammer and thrusts it through his belt. He slips a pair of knives into his boots and pulls his coat from the peg. It still shines with the red of her hair.

And then he takes up her combs again. Even if she cannot return with him, and that thought he almost can't bear to think, he still has to return these to her.

They are noticeably colder than they were before, and nothing his hands can do will warm them.

"Take me to Uzu Village." He asks the cooling bone in his hands. It is silly. She'd said that they would show him the way. She had not said that they would literally take him there.

He stands there, in his forge, and wonders if he had not made a terrible mistake, when suddenly his surroundings slide away from him, blurring too fast to be real, and he's dumped unceremoniously in a clearing.

In the fountain of that particular clearing, not even on the grass.

He spits the water from his open mouth and drags a hand over his face to remove the water from his eyes.

"An idiot then." An old woman with fading red hair observes from her position on the porch. Her ancient hands hold knitting needles that flash in the bright light of the morning. Beyond her garden gate is the sound of the sea booming over what seems like a cliff and the cries of mournful gulls. "Couldn't even get your position right. Uzu Village is that way."

He does not like this old woman, and her disrespectful ways. Back in Konoha Village, few people would ever speak to him like this.

"This is the first time that I've traveled this way." He says, biting his tongue, because he still has to ask her for one last piece of information. That, and it even if she showed him no respect, his mother raised him with manners. "Might you direct me to Kiko Uzumaki?"

She pins him with a sharp gaze despite her advanced age and sets her knitting aside. "Who's asking?"

"Madara Uchiha." He pauses for a moment. "The forgemaster of Konoha Village."

The old woman nods and smiles a toothless smile. "And what does the forgemaster of Konoha Village want with Kiko Uzumaki?"

It feels as though there is sand under his skin. He hates the feeling, hates the disdain that drips from her voice, but he's beginning to suspect that she is none other than the person Kanae's instructed him to beg for help. "I was told that you could help me find Kanae."

Kiko Uzumaki watches him with narrowed eyes. "We don't know anyone by that name here."

"Kanae Anharaya." He does not believe that she truly doesn't know. Her eyes had widened just for a brief moment when he'd mentioned Kanae's name. "She told me that you would help me find her."

"And who is she to you, that you would want to find her?"

The word love doesn't want to dislodge itself from the gorge in his throat. "My hope." He says at last. "She said that she would be back by morning light on the first day of summer." He sounds like he's begging, but he forges on. "She said that she would always choose me."

"So King Habiki's pushed her away irrevocably." Kiko climbs to her feet. "Come along, boy."

He has no choice but to follow her into the weathered house. "Will you help me?"

"What will you do if I don't?" The words slap him in the face like a dead fish. Did Kanae really read her own flesh and blood so wrongly?

"If you do not help me, I will go by myself." This is stupid. He needs the help. He needs to beg. He has-This is no time for pride, but even now, his tongue trips and stumbles into words and actions that are just plain untrue.

"You? A mortal man, go by yourself?" Kiko turns to him, an eyebrow raised, and it is the same angle as Kanae's. The sight makes him want to weep. "Good chance of that, boy. You'll drown before you free her from King Habiki's clutches."

The thought that he is helpless-just think, again helpless like so many times before-rubs his skin raw. "Better to drown." He snaps back without thinking.

He isn't sure if he means it.

He'd promised Izuna to love well. He ought to live.

But the habit of not considering his life to be particularly dear is ingrained, deep, unyielding. It does not erase neatly.

The woman appraises him for a long quiet moment. "No one said that you have to drown." She turns away, muttering under her breath about crazy men and irritating aunts.

And he is left to stand there wondering what it truly means to break a habit or if he'd ever value his own life more than almost anyone else's.

"You'll be needing this." Kiko thrusts a pelt at him, which he opens. "It'll make sure that you don't drown." She mutters as he stares at the thing in his hands.

He's a bit at a lost as to how an animal skin will stop him from drowning.

She throws up her hands. "It's a selkie's skin, you daft boy."

That is the very last insult that he'll take from her. "You'll forgive me if I didn't grow up with the fae." He mutters as he throws the sealskin over his shoulders like a cloak.

"Tie it about your waist." Kiko picks up her knitting once more. "The palace is west of here. You'll come to it if you follow the white road. It'll take you in through the kitchen."

He nods once. The white road. He doesn't know what she means, but his accursed tongue has already done enough damage.

"The skin's effect will wear off at midnight." She sees him to the edge of her porch. "If you're still in the palace by then, you really will drown."

By the placement of the sun, it is mid morning now. He hasn't much time.

"Thank you." She'd been unwelcoming and rude, but still, according to this sealskin, she has helped him.

He'll take what he can get.

---

His mood isn't much better as he makes his way to the seashore. His boots are covered with sand, and the water squelches between his toes. He doubts that it will really get any better, seeing as the sealskin will only prevent him from drowning, not preserving his leather boots. It would hardly stop his feet from getting wet.

He pulls off his shoes, sets them aside on the shore, and stands barefoot as Kanae always does. Above him, the gulls call, screaming with voices just a little too human.

The air smells of salt, sharp with a bitter tang. It is pungent, like brine, and the foaming waves that wash over his bare feet are cold.

He doesn't want to think of how cold it will be to spend hours in the water. Still, he hardly has time to waste in standing around and dreading the experience.

He knots the sealskin about his waist and walks into the water. It sloshes past his thighs, his stomach, his chest, and finally a wave breaks over his face.

He nearly stops breathing for a moment, but there's no difference between water and air. He takes the final step, and now, he's in over his head.

There is a road of white shells leading down into the landscape of waving plants and brightly colored fish. He attempts to take another step, and his lower body moves altogether, all at once. He has no feet anymore, just a smooth black tail of sealskin.

His hands are webbed. He has slight claws on his fingers. He doesn't really want to know what's happened to the rest of him.

He breathes water instead of air.

It takes a few tries to align his body with the currents and the road now that he's suddenly lacking legs-Would it have been so hard for her to warn me that my legs would disappear-but as soon as he does, the going is easy.

He has combs to return, choices to make.

The first person he passes has the tailfin of a shark, rows upon rows of sharp pointy teeth and blue hair. She smiles at him as she brushes by and says something that he does not quite catch.

The deeper he goes, the more people he passes, the lighter it gets. Lamps are strung up, floating on lines.

By the time he comes to the palace, he's more tired than he thought he would be.

It rises out of the ocean floor, spires rising toward the surface, twisting red spirals against dark stone larger than anything has right to be.

He slides in one of the smaller doors and tries to keep close to the walls. There are so many people, every sort of tail, every shade of hair, every sort of amalgamation that he's not sure why no human has ever seen this before.

He's not sure until he remembers that to get this deep, he had to borrow something that is innately magical. He's not entirely comfortable with the logistics of it, the thought that he is fundamentally not human at the moment.

"Are you new?" There's a harried looking chef with four arms and several tentacles gestures furiously in his direction. "Because let me tell you that because Lady Kanae is back, The King wants a feast laid out for tonight."

Madara freezes, uncertain of how to respond.

"No." A hand lands on his right elbow and pulls him towards a corridor. "He's with me for the feast tonight. He's just gotten lost."

Sumire flicks her orange hair over a bare shoulder and drags him away from the kitchens, through a series of hallways and stairs and finally into a room. "Are you mad?" She hisses at him when the door shuts behind them. "Why are you here?"

He crosses his arms over his chest. "I have no idea what you mean." She can guess all she wants, but Madara Uchiha the blacksmith is human.

At the moment, he's borrowing the image of inhumanity. Ergo, he can't be Madara Uchiha the blacksmith.

"Oh, don't think I don't know who you are." She leans in close. "You're the man that Lady Kanae didn't want to leave."

He raises an eyebrow. "Do I look like a man?" He hasn't the time to waste here. He has to go find Kanae. He has to find her, has to figure out what's going on, and he has to leave by midnight, with or without her.

"Don't give me that." She bares her teeth, canines flashing in the light of the glow lamps. "You forget that I saw you. I don't forget that." She frowns. "You're here for her, aren't you." It's not a question. She crosses her arms over her chest. "You can't have her."

His eyes narrow. "You don't get to decide that." The choice is Kanae's. The choice has always been Kanae's and no king or obstruction will take it from her.

"No." She leans up so that their faces are closer together than they ought to be. "The King gets to decide that."

She pushes open the door and drags him along, far faster than they were going before.

He hardly minds. He's been waiting to see this king for a long time. A small voice in his head tells him that he has a death wish. That he should hardly risk his life for such jealousy over a person that Kanae doesn't love and has no desire to spend time with.

The other part of his mind tells the protesting voice to shut up and see what the high and mighty king thinks with a hammer slamming into his stomach.

"So you see my dilemma, don't you, Lovely Girl?" This voice drags the s of see until it is practically a hiss. Sumire stiffens, and they pause there, behind a deep purple curtain.

"All I see is that you are as unreasonable as ever." Kanae. Just beyond that curtain before is Kanae. Her voice is sweeter, more golden than ever even though she sounds so cross.

He almost pushes forward, but Sumire crosses in front of him to lift a small portion of the curtain. The man's back is to them, but Madara assumes that he is the king. He has deep blue hair, and dresses in expensive clothing that shines like gossamer. Kanae is facing them, though she seems to take no notice of the moving curtain.

She is different. Clawed hands, red feathers growing from her scalp. She's cut in sharp relief, even through the water, and there are scales spreading from below her neck up her face, gills flapping on her cheeks, her hair is loose and blooms like flowers around her coiling spirals.

He's known that she is a siren for a long time now, but knowing it and seeing it are two different things. She is different, but-If I am always your choice, then you are always mine.

Between the two of them, is another man lying still on a bed, black hair braided with feathers, gray scales on his neck, a face as pale as snow, almost deathly. He has Kanae's jaw, and lips. His clasped hands are clawed.

Madara assumes that this is her brother. He does not know why the man is cold and pale before her, why her anxious eyes dart from The King's face to her brother's to her brother's side, and then back to the King's face unceasingly.

"Surely not." The King says, gesturing to the man between them. "I just heard an upsetting truth from Sumire."

"What did you hear?" Her voice is level but distracted. She's focused on her brother. He does not respond, not a motion of a hand, not an eye twitch. Madara spares a brief moment to be grateful that he isn't dead.

He assumes that if Kanae's brother really were dead, she and The King would not be standing here, casually having a conversation.

The King picks up a brush and twirls it around in his hands. "Oh, nothing much. Just that you fell in love." Displeasure rolls in his voice like lowland thunder. "With a man no less." But all the anger's gone. The King sounds frail and sad. "Is it true?"

"I did not fall in love." Kanae takes a long step forward, her lips pressed tight. "I chose to love him." Choice. I will always choose you.

He had not made his journey without reason. Her mind has not changed. No matter what she looks like now, no matter how golden her voice, how clawed her hands or how scaled her face, she is still Kanae.

"Why?" The King's rage is back, endless and unceasing. "What could a mortal man have possibly offered you worth more than me?"

Kanae smiles, the points of her teeth shining in the dim light. "What could you offer me worth more than him?"

"A kingdom perhaps." The King snaps. You would be my queen. There'd be no more powerful woman in all the land. You'd be able to have anything you want."

"No." Kanae's eyes are almost completely gold.

From beside him, Sumire shifts uneasily, her grip loosening on his arm. "This is wrong." She whispers. Madara hasn't the energy to bother with what it is that Sumire might be wrong.

"I'd live forever at your mercy, begging you like I do now. Like I've always done."

"You-" The King snarls. He turns, and Madara catches sight of the ring of red scales over his neck He has mismatched eyes, Madara realizes, one ocean blue, the other blood red. "You're right. You live at my mercy, but even more than that, your brother lives at my mercy as well."

"My brother has nothing to do with whatever my crimes are. He has always been your loyal general, Habiki." Kanae's gills flap dangerously. Her hair swirls in a bloody cloud around her. "Punish me if you will, but leave him out of this."

The man between them is silent, deathly pale and Madara realizes very suddenly, that Kanae's brother is dying. That is why he is pale and unresponsive. That is why Kanae did not return to him.

"Everyone of your blood royts." The King paces back and forth before Kanae's brother's prone form. "Your father had an affair; your second brother married a human woman and renounced my kingdom, and your third and fourth brothers are outlaws, and now you shame me for a second time." He smiles, fangs sharp and poisonous in the lamplight.

Sumire shudders but says nothing.

There is madness in The King's eyes. "You will not touch my general. I'll ask someone else to come look at him." He brushes a strand of Kanae's hair away from her face, and Madara has the sudden urge to rip his hand off of her. She looks as though she wants to break. "He is only your half-brother, Lovely Girl. It doesn't matter much to you if he lives or dies."

"You're wrong." She's staring straight ahead. Her eyes fixed on her brother's face. The General lies still, as dead as marble. "You're wrong."

"I'm not wrong." The King floats past her, his hair floating about behind him. "Your fickle heart lies about what you love." He shrugs. "You gave up on me easily enough."

He deserves my hammer to his face.

"No." Sumire murmurs, half in shock. "No, he is changed. This is unlike him."

"I will not accept losing to a human, Lovely Girl. I will make you love me."

Madara's moved forward before he thinks of what he is doing. He throws the curtain aside without a single thought in his head beyond no. "She will never love you."

A cry rips from Kanae's throat at the sight of him, wordless and painful. She dives toward him, the water parting for her like molten steel for a hammer. His arms come up to greet her. He is is home.

"You shouldn't have come. I didn't know that there was so much." She sobs, air bubbling from her lips, but of course, here beneath the waves, there are no tears.

His arms tighten around her. She will not leave him again if he can help it. Never again. "I'm making a choice."

"So." The King advances toward them. "You are confident then, that she will never forget you, even a thousand years after your death?"

He'd wondered about that, wondered, but it doesn't matter. "I have faith." Faith and hope. He believes her words. He trusts her kindness, her care, her quiet assurances.

"Faith." Habiki-he's really not much of a king and not much of a man-laughs, a mockery of joy. "How ridiculous faith is. Faith, faith, faith. She is fickle." He gestures to Kanae with a sweep of his arm, long nails trailing through the water. "She will forget what you are, what you've done for her, everything about you in a matter of months. She's forgotten the friends of her childhood, her own family members, and her entire country. What makes you think that you are any different?"

"And if you despise her so much." The logic of Habiki's words don't quite follow. The other man is bitter and in pain, and he must therefore spew as much pain as he can toward everyone else. Madara remembers the feeling well, but he isn't being logical. This is Kanae. Worth more than the stars. How can he claim to want her love when he gives her nothing in return? "Why on earth would you want to keep her?" Kanae whimpers, her arms wrapped around him, her head resting over his heart. She sounds more broken than she has ever been, hurt, afraid, confused, and it fuels his rage further.

Madara remembers the world without light, remembers the days when pain has rubbed him so raw that he could not bear the happiness of others or any attempt to care, but Habiki seems to want Kanae's love for no other reason than he believes that he deserves it.

"She was supposed to be mine." There is a crazed light in Habiki's eyes. "I love her more than anyone. If I cannot have her, then no one ever will, least of all you."

He is delusional, to believe that such a thing is love. Lost his way. Kanae has said that he could be cruel and pompous. She had not said that her king was truly a literal madman. But perhaps that is because something has changed within him quite recently, perhaps her choice has unhinged him a little more when he is otherwise reasonable.

No. Madara decides. He banished her out of overweening pride the last time she refused him. There were fault lines within him already. This is just the latest thing to make him buckle.

"That is not love. That is obsession." He'd referred to Kanae like some sort of possession. You cannot make people your belongings.

"You stand there so assured." Habiki laughs, the sound echoing brokenly over the shell-covered walls. "Would you still accept it if she were standing here with me?"

Would he? Could he? Hasn't he already? He's accepted it a long time ago, when he thought that he had no choice but to watch Kanae return to the sea.

"If that would make her happy." He'd been willing to let her go before, but she wants to stay with him. She wants to stay, so she will, because he'll do his best to make it so.

"She was supposed to be mine!" Yet again, yet again, he calls her a possession. Yet again, she is an object to his mind.

Something in Madara's blood rebels at this definition.

"I am not something that belongs to you. People are not objects, Habiki." Kanae pulls herself away, eyes red-rimmed and forlorn. "When did you change?" She takes a step forward in Habiki's direction. "You weren't always like this."

"Like what?" There's something moving in his eyes, a hint of something vulnerable. He still cares about her opinion.

"Before you became king," Kanae gestures all about them. "You would never have cared for any of this. Before you became king, I was just your friend, and you-"

The still body on the table gasps, clasped hands tightening about each other. "Brother!" Kanae rushes forward, but Habiki throws up an arm.

"You told your father on his deathbed that you'd marry me. Are you truly faithless?" He's watching the General, watching the other man heave, something terribly bleak in his eyes.

"I was a child." Kanae moves his arm out of the way. "And it isn't me that you want to marry, not truly."

He catches her wrist. "You know nothing about me, and what I want."

Kanae pulls her hand away. "That's just it. I don't know who you love or what you want anymore. I'm not sure I ever did."

Madara's had enough of this. "What will it take for you to let her be happy?" She is not happy here, and she never will be, not with the shadow of the King over her. Not when he holds the power to threaten her.

The water all around them goes still. "I'll be lenient." Habiki allows, but his eyes are anything but. "Heal my general before the stroke of midnight, and I let you go, but know this, you two will leave my kingdom together, or not at all."

The General's struggles are getting fainter now.

Kanae's lips peel back, and her teeth are sharper than ever. "Habiki, do not make me angry."

"Habiki!" Sumire dives from behind the curtain, on her hands and knees. "Please, this is unlike you. This cruelty is not your nature. Do not banish his sister from this kingdom for a second time. It would break his heart."

Madara isn't entirely aware of what Habiki's better nature might be, but he suspects that cruelty, or at least arrogance is a part of it.

Habiki's eyes narrow. "He called my pursuit of his sister tiresome." He turns his face away, but his eyes are still watching the General. Kanae takes the moment of distraction to hurry forward, her hands glowing green. Madara moves with her. "I do not care to help him. You should be thankful that I've decided to have mercy on him."

"Mercy?" Rage makes Sumire's features sharper than they ever had right to be. "For over eight centuries, Kyoya Anharaya's fought for you. He has stood by you for far longer than you have ever deserved." Sumire clings to the edge of his robes and claws her way to a standing position. She turns his face back to watch Kanae cradling her brother. "He has always loved you, and before today, I thought you loved him too."

This close, Madara can note the veins in the dying man's skin, a pallor that borders on corpselike. There is a history here, between the King and his subjects that he does not know, but suspects that he could understand should he really put together the pieces.

It sounds too much like how he used to be.

"Silence!" He shoves Sumire away roughly, and she lands on the floor. "He does not love me." There is confusion swirling in Habiki's eyes. "No one loves me. You want my friendship for your power, nothing more."

A guard pokes his head through the door, and Habiki turns on him instead. "Get out"

"But your majesty, I heard-"

"Get out!" The guard withdraws, more quickly than perhaps is proper. Habiki's shoulders shake, and he braces both of his hands on the table, on Kyoya's other side. "And he is dying. He will leave me, as everyone else has left me. Even if he awakens again he will leave me. It is the nature of things. "

"You push us all away." Sumire stands, silver eyes flashing. "You are the orchestrator of your own destruction. Do you think he would want you to threaten his only sister? General Kyoya loves his sister."

"You said that he loves me." Habiki does not look up. He doesn't seem to be capable of responding to Sumire. Perhaps he had been a king once. He is a madman now.

"Brother has always admired you." Kanae's eyes are closed. She doesn't have to see this. This gambit isn't what she wanted. That Habiki's taken her power to choose makes Madara's heart burn. "You've given him precious little to admire in the recent years, but still he stands by you." Echoes. All of these words echoed.

Her shoulders are shaking, and Madara reaches a hand out to steady her. She smiles at him gratefully over her shoulder, but it does not touch her eyes. He doesn't know if he'd ever live to see her happy again.

"He told me that he loved you before he left for the frontlines." Sumire stalks forward, merciless. "And this is how you repay him? You force his sister to stay here against her will. You stand here and watch him die by inches. Have you no heart? Did giving you the throne cause you to forget what it means to care for other people? Where is the boy that could not bear to see anyone hurt? Where is the boy with big dreams that I supported when the old king died? Where is Habiki Ichiro?"

And Habiki breaks. He crumples to his knees, a gasp ripping from his throat. "He told you that he loved me?"

"He confessed it after I made a drunkard of him." Sumire crosses her arms over her chest.

"He-" Words seem to have failed Habiki. He sits there, arms around his knees, rocking back and forth in near silence. "He, he laughed in my face when I asked him-He, I-"

"Perhaps it was because it was so obvious that anyone with eyes could see it." Sumire stands with her arms crossed. "Perhaps it was because you just banished his sister. Perhaps it is because you are a fool. Perhaps it is because you embarrassed him. Perhaps it is because you profess to love his sister madly, and he does not want to make you unhappy." There is no mercy in the set of her lips.

"I am not-" Habiki does not finish what he wants to say. Instead, he stands, eyes narrow, lips pressed tight. "I have already offered her a way to leave my kingdom should she want to take it." Anger robs him of his breath, until he has to pause before he says anything more. "My decision is final." He turns on his heel. "She knows what she has to do."

The door slams shut behind him, sending ripples through the water.

Sumire sinks to her knees. "I tried." The two words linger heavily in the water. "But he has changed."

Kanae sighs. "I know that he was not always this way."

"From what I have seen." Madara offers. "He has always been this way." Kanae looks up at him, a question in her eyes, and he continues. "Would a man without faults curse and then banish you from his kingdom for no more reason than that you refused his hand?"

"I did so before the entire court." Kanae peels open her brother's shirt and smiles sadly at the sluggishly bleeding wounds. "He has always been proud." The water around them turns pink, and it is hard to breath knowing that they are breathing blood and water together.

The scent of it sickens him.

"That has always been a fault of his." Sumire comes to stand beside Kanae and sets hand on her shoulder. "The mortal man can see it, and so can you." She looks away, her lips pressed together. "Go, Kanae. I shall wear Habiki down with my pleas somehow."

"How could I leave my own brother?" Kanae hugs him, tightly, briefly. "I am sorry. I said that I would always choose you."

Something inside his heart falls. "I know." Something has shifted. Something has changed. "You won't be able to go before midnight."

He will drown should he remain beneath the waves after midnight. He suspects that she does not know, and it is not something that he wants to tell her. He strongly suspects that Habiki does know. He wishes to kill me.

"I will not be able to recover before midnight." She shakes her head, eyes shut, lips trembling. "But Brother, Brother..."

"Heal him." He had mourned every brother that he could not save. Had he the choice between Kanae and saving Izuna, erasing the blood staining his hands, the weakening gasps-he would not be able to make the choice. "I will wait for you."

He'd wait for the hour before midnight to leave here. As long as they both live, he'd see her again. "You will always be my hope."

Sumire is watching them as if she cannot understand what she is seeing.

Kanae steps away from him, her hands glowing green over her brother's chest. The water echoes with her humming.

Sumire tugs on his sleeve. "Come." She doesn't speak again until they are past the curtain and well into the other room. "Your sealskin fails at midnight doesn't it?" She asks, the fox pelt about her shoulders fluttering in the shaking of the water.

Kanae's humming moves the entire room.

"So what if it does?" Madara crosses his arms and tells himself that he does not care.

She grabs him by the shoulders and shakes him. "You won't be allowed out of the kingdom. If you don't go now, you'll drown."

"You say that like I should be afraid." And maybe he'd once been afraid of drowning, but no longer. No longer.

"And how do you think she'd feel, knowing that you died for nothing?"

He catches himself from stumbling. How would-"I won't be dying for nothing." Given the chance, he'd rather live. He'd rather live and have her come with him. But mostly, it is simply because he cannot bear to leave.

He steps back into the room.

Kanae's humming falls away, and she sings instead. "I cannot see the edge of the night. The wind cuts me like knives. I will not see the west sea return to blue. Cannot see the sea from the skies." There is power in her voice, love and care strung like pearls in the notes of it. It leaves Madara breathless even here, in this selkie skin under the waves. Power. The sealskin affords him the ability to live here, but it affords him no defenses to the power of her voice.

The bleeding stops. The flesh stitches together, and her brother's breathing settles.

For a moment everything is still, but then she crumples. He is too far away to catch her, but she pushes herself upright once more.

Kyoya Anharaya's eyes snap open. For a moment, everyone is still. "Lovely Girl, Sumire, and a stranger." His voice does hit irresistible notes in deep baritone, but it does not pull like Kanae's does. His icy blue eyes scan the room for a quiet moment, and his lips tilt up into a sardonic smile. "Why do I feel as though I've just come back from the realm of the dead?"

"Your heart stopped for a moment." Kanae sways, her voice tinged with relief.

It is the work of a moment to catch her this time. Her head rests over his heart, and her eyes fall closed.

Kyoya Anharaya pins him with a sharp glare. "You are not a selkie."

"No." Madara smiles sardonically at him. "How did you guess?" The man's observational skills remind him of Izuna, and shouldn't that be a wound?

It isn't exactly a wound anymore. Not an open one at any rate. More of a scar than a wound truly. More of a scar. More of the past. It no longer weighs so heavily on his shoulders.

"Selkies are not fond of sirens." He casts a disbelieving look at Madara's tail. "Besides, you are not a selkie just because you've put on a sealskin."

"Indeed." Would his tongue ever stop saying things that are fundamentally flawed and bad for what he wants? He imagines that being a mortal man isn't anything close to what Kyoya wants for his sister. "I'm a man. Imagine."

He was not expecting the laugh, not expecting the true mirth that bubbles up toward the surface.

Kyoya Anaharaya sits up. "You are the most amusing man I've met in ages." His attention shifts away, to the absence of a person. "Where is my king?"

"I told him about his crimes." Sumire takes a step forward and buttons Kyoya's shirt. "He didn't take it well."

He lets her do it without much thought. "Kanae's back." He says softly. "What crime could my king have committed?" He still speaks of Habiki like he truly has faith.

Madara finds it most disconcerting.

Sumire snorts. "What crimes can't he commit? He is the King." She looks back at Madara and Kanae. "We should go, Lady Kanae, Forgemaster."

"Brother," Kanae's holding herself upright by clinging to his clothes. "Habiki says that I am not allowed to leave."

The swirling waters still. Kyoya Anharaya's feet touch the ground. "And why do you want to leave?" It is a question to be treated seriously.

The General doesn't look pleased any longer.

"Because I-" Her voice breaks and cracks, and she looks back at her brother with eyes that are entirely green, and then she is kneeling by Kyoya's side, her hair fanning out over his lap, her hands holding one of his. "How to explain to you what I want." She says, eyes falling closed. "What has been saved; what has been changed; what has grown."

Her brother's icy blue eyes soften to water. "You have found where you want to be. And it is not in the house of our father."

"No." She whispers. "But I ask for your blessing all the same."

He traces a clawed hand down her jawline. "You are an Anharaya. We have no need for chains." He picks her up, cradling her as though she were a small child. "It is close to midnight." He says as he passes her to Madara. "You ought to go."

"You trust me?" Madara half suspects that if Kanae does leave, she will not be able to return.

"I trust my sister's judgement." Kyoya Anharaya stumbles on his way to the door, but he does not fall, legs steady. "I respect her enough for that."

Kanae falls asleep against his shoulder, hair spilling over his arms in a red cloud, face pale and slack, bruises blooming under her eyes, color fading from her cheeks.

Sumire guides him through a series of corridors. "You have two hours until midnight." She says, as she shows them to a room. "And Lady Kanae will need to rest."

Kanae is tired; he sees it in the waning of her skin. He sets her down again, but this time, he does not sway. Mayday was an age and a half ago, even if it was only last night.

"What's wrong with her?" There are icy fingers squeezing his heart, so cold that he does not know if he'd ever unthaw. Drowning means less than this. She's deteriorating before his eyes, washed out, fading.

He can do nothing. He has done nothing except divide her thoughts. He is helpless.

Again.

He had vowed to never be helpless.

He'd screamed it at the sky. He'd-

He is helpless.

"Healing the General took a toll on her." Sumire comes to stand beside him. "It will take an hour and a half for her to be able to travel again."

It feels like a loss somehow, watching her breath. She'd always been...humming, bright and vibrant. To watch her like this now, bruises blooming under her skin, color fading out with the touch of water, it is a loss.

He'd thought he knew what it felt like to lose her. Had thought he felt it when the white light vanished outside his door, and he'd been left with red dust blowing in the wind.

He'd thought he'd known it. Thought he had been resigned to the fact of it. He thought he knew-but he has never imagined her dying, never imagined her cold and pale and unresponsive and-gone. The sob rips from his throat before he even puts together a thought to think.

"She won't die. The gods have ordained it that way." Sumire seems to know what he thinks of. She's watching him with something strange in her eyes. It is all that he needs, the knowledge that she won't die. "But it will cut the timing of your departure close."

She's trying to tell him that he ought to leave. "An Uchiha doesn't bow to the whims of fate, or to the dictates of any god."

It had been that statement that had broken whatever remaining friendship between his father and Pastor Butsuma. And it is an arrogant statement, he's willing to admit.

What sort of man doesn't bow to fate or God?

"You won't run." Sumire props her head up on her elbow, and her bone digs into his shoulder. "What does Lady Kanae mean to you?"

"Hope." He's still watching her breathing, watching the idle motion of her gills.

"You are an amusing man." Sumire picks up his hand by the wrist and drops something into his palm. She closes his fingers around it immediately. "I'll believe in your hope just this once. Should the King stop you again to delay you, this should help more than the Lady's combs."

He nods. "Thank you." He still has basic decency. The round tube that she's offered him from the inside of her fox pelt has to have some sort of value, despite how cavalierly she'd dropped it into his hand.

She disappears in a swirl of water without acknowledging his words.

Well, some miracles aren't meant to last.

---

The bells strike out the time from somewhere deep inside the palace that he is not aware of.

He counts eleven chimes struck.

There is an hour or so left of his sealskin then. He feels it constrict about him. He feels it in the shortness of his breath.

He sits there on the chair beside her bed, hands clasped. Logic tells him that he should leave. That there isn't any time left, and that she'd find away back to him, that she'd understand if he left now and would like it less if he stays.

Yet he cannot leave.

And so the skin gets more constricting. And so he stays.

"What time is it?" She looks no less tired, but still, she is awake.

He smiles. "It is less than half an hour to midnight." The bells had chimed the half hour just moments before she sat up again.

She's pulling him out the door before he completely registers what's going on. "We need to go." She's not going all that fast, only another symptom of her fatigue, but he stumbles, and she turns back. "What's wrong?" There's fear moving in her eyes, ocean pale without a hint of gold. But then she understands. "The magic is failing."

He shakes his head. "No." She shouldn't have to worry. If she is tired, then they ought to take their time.

The surface isn't all that far away.

Above them, it is completely dark. There is no light, no air, and not even a hint of the moon or the stars.

"Tell me the truth." Her hands grip his shoulders. It sounds like she is doing her best to not panic. "When does the sealskin stop working? When will you drown?"

He doesn't want to tell her particularly. She shouldn't have to worry. Not about him. Not when she's seriously considered, not when she shouldn't feel guilty about her choices. Not when-Live well, Brother. We'll see each other again a long time from now.

He doesn't actually want to die.

Coward that he is, he is filled with the desperate longing to live. He wants so badly that he horrifies himself.

"Midnight." The word slips from his tongue and dyes her features with horror.

"No." She shakes her head, her grip loosening. "No." She searches his face for something, a hint of a lie perhaps.

It gets harder to breathe. He smiles.

She's dragging him down corridors without consulting him, feet flying down the shell inlaid floors, all fatigue forgotten.

"You should have said something. You should have gone. Why didn't you go?" She cracks and breaks. He hears it in her voice, in her words, the quiet despair, the knowledge that it won't be enough, that they don't have the time.

"I wasn't going to leave without you." It runs deeper than that.

He has always suspected that she has always been a gift that he has to return, had always suspected that he'd end his life alone, that he'll die by drowning, that he neither deserves nor-No. Down that path, down that road, with those thoughts is only madness.

They are out of the palace now, and she swims straight up, faster and faster.

The light of the moon casts the last few feet of water in a pale glow, the sealskin slides from his waist, falling away, his legs are back, and he is not used to the idea, her hand reaches for the break between water and air...

And it bounces back. "Kanae." It is Habiki.

Down below, the bells chime twelve.

"Let me go." He's never heard Kanae so angry.

His breath slips away from him, bubbles not quite breaking the surface. His lungs burn.

"Surely, we can discuss this?" Habiki floats forwards a few feet.

She's wrapped her arms around his neck, a hand over his mouth.

Her gills flap viciously in Habiki's general direction as her lips draw back into a snarl that showcases every one of her pointed teeth. "I fulfilled your dumb bargain. You have Brother alive again, the good that does you, now let me go."

"No." The admission shakes the water all around them. "You were never meant to leave."

"Oh." She all but snarls. "You thought of that so readily the last time when you banished me." Her rage stills the water until the only ripples are made by her trembling frame.

Even through her hands, his breath is escaping him, going upwards.

"If you claim to love me, let him go." She tries another tact, Madara has never before heard her beg, but she begs now. For him.

It sickens him, but he cannot speak.

"No." Habiki wavers, Madara sees it in his mismatched eyes. There's something like guilt in their depths. "He will not have you." If I cannot have you, then no one else can either.

Kanae screams with frustration, wordless fury echoing all around her, and the water answers her call. There's lightning in her eyes and thunder in her voice. A storm rising.

There is darkness creeping at the edges of his vision, but stars in his eyes. The surface is less than a foot away.

The last of his breath slips free of his mouth. He remembers the tube.

It is still in his hand. With the last of his breath, he throws it forward, toward Habiki. It lengthens, growing larger, pointed at one end.

He breathes in.

From the deeps, Kanae's wordless scream is answered with one rolling out in deep baritone. "Let my sister go."

Something, no, someone slams into Habiki from behind. A clawed hand reaches out for a spear. There is blood in the water, dyeing it pink.

The darkness is total. His lungs burn.

Pain blossoms over his chest, and he knows nothing else.

---

His limbs come back to him slowly. The impressions of feet and hands are a process that takes time to regain.

He is bruised. His chest aches, and his eyelids are heavy.

He's drifting somewhere, with the sunlight on his face, and the notes of a song breaks over him like waves. "I wish I was wed, I wish I was wedded to Phaidin. He's chosen to marry another and that is the cause of my raging."

"Never." The word tears his throat on the out, but it is well worth the effort. Phaidin will never marry another, so she'll never have to rage over it.

The room he opens his eyes to is brightly lit, but he can't see it because her face is over his own and the bright sun light up her hair until it shines with strands of gold and a thousand shades of red.

How he had thought that her hair is only blood red is beyond his imagining. How he had thought her not beautiful is far away and strange in his mind.

"You're awake." Her voice is golden, pure and sweet, equal parts joy, relief, and anger. "I'm not speaking to you ever again." She turns away, but still he sees the downward trembling of her lips, as if she's doing her best not to cry. "You lied to me."

The pit opening in his stomach hurts more than the ache in his chest. "You're leaving then?"

She gasps, shoulders shaking, but she does not turn around. "No." She buries her face in her hands and speaks through them. "No. I'm just angry that you didn't tell me. Scared that you came so close to death yet again."

He pulls himself up, so that he can drape himself over those trembling shoulders, but mostly only because he doesn't really expect her to be there.

He'd expected to be dead. He'd expected to no longer have a life.

He'd expected to burn, because no matter what it is that Izuna had said, it pales in comparison to the flesh and blood proof beside him. "Never?" He sounds so weak still, like a child afraid of the dark. Maybe he is afraid of the dark.

Maybe he'll always be afraid of losing. Maybe he's lost too much.

Maybe he doesn't really know what it means to trust, or chose, or accept other people's choices.

She's still here, even after he's lied, even after he's nearly died, after he chose her.

It should be enough for him, but still he begs for an answer. A dark corner of his soul is still filled with the child he used to be, begging for words, for answers, for someone to reach out, for the weight not to be so heavy, for the night not to be so dark, for people to stop leaving him.

Had he been given power, perhaps he'd have become what Habiki is.

But no, he'd been stripped of much more than that, with only hatred and stubborn pride, clinging to his rage as though it were a lifeline and driftwood.

Perhaps he'd be only that, losing the meaning of love and life had he tried too hard to hold onto water, without Izuna, without Kanae.

But he's not that. He's half hollow, filled halfway with fear and hope, and emptied with numbness and resignation.

He still needs to hear.

Still wants to know. Still can't accept-he wonders if he even knows what happiness really is anymore, if he's ever known. Wonders if the years ahead of him can teach him otherwise.

She turns to him, blinking away unshed tears, and kisses his pulse, lips and teeth dragging upwards until they tease his mouth. "Never." She sighs against his lips. "I am here to stay."

The storm inside his head quiets.

They drift.

Together.

---

Kanae refuses to say exactly what had happened after his memory ends, only that Habiki would no longer be a concern of his, and that she is returning with him to Konoha Village, which is where she'll stay for the rest of their lives.

It is why he wanders down to the beach as soon as he is well enough to walk, when Kanae's breathing is even and deep, and Kiko Uzumaki dozes in her chair still rocking back and forth in time with the waves.

His shoes are gone, swept away by the waves somehow. He hadn't weighed them down, or left them particularly far from the edge. Perhaps the tides rose and carried his shoes and socks out into the sea. It doesn't matter. The sand doesn't feel irritating to his bare feet anyway.

He takes a seat on one of the rocks. If anyone from the deeps would like to speak to him, if they truly knew everything about this line of coast, then they'd come up to speak to him.

He need only wait.

The moon plays over the dark water, which rushes on, turbulent and wild. The air smells sharply of brine, but it is no longer pungent to his nose.

It is a beautiful sight. He never would have thought so before, but he supposes that after he's seen the wonders and the horrors beneath the surface, he can no longer quite look at the waves quite the same way.

A song rises somewhere out there, far away and faint. He suspects he knows exactly what it is out there on the water, but the song does not pull at him. "You might as well stop." He will not be lured in to drown.

Perhaps it's because he's already drown, more than once. Perhaps it is because Kanae is still in the house behind him on the other side of the village.

"You're no fun." The voice is unfamiliar. There's a flash of green hair, and a splash far out beyond the range of the moon. Strangely enough, he sees it all the same.

"The Touched are never fun." Sumire laughs, and her face suddenly pops out of the water not three feet from him. "And he is Lady Kanae's now."

He's not ashamed to admit that he flinches in surprise. "She will not tell me what happened."

"She's chosen to go with you." There's nothing that says that Sumire is unhappy. "And that means that she won't set foot in the sea again." Something in his face must have given him away, because she leans in and winks at him slow and calm. "That doesn't mean we can't come to visit and eat you out of house and home."

He sputters and loses track of exactly what he wanted to ask to begin with. "As if you'd be able to."

Sumire raises an eyebrow at him. "I don't think you understand the invitation." She smiles, canines sharp in the moonlight. "Don't worry, I'm sure the General will take you up on it, just as soon as he's finished beating sense into the King."

So Habiki isn't dead then. It is perhaps a relief.

Sumire had not told him that the tube had been the General's weapon. Had not told him that it was a weapon made for killing at all.

Madara considers it for a moment and realizes that his rage seems to have vanished in the pulling of the tide song. Perhaps he was not made to be angry, and seeing how terribly he grieved death, perhaps it means that his hands were made to hold a hammer and anvil, not swords.

"It is good to know that the General is well." Is what he finally decides on saying.

"Oh, he isn't." Sumire shrugs, bare shoulders rising and falling in a casual gesture. "But he will be, so don't worry over much about that."

"Tell him that-" And what is he supposed to tell the man who loves his sister so dearly as to have broken his loyalty to his king? "That I will do my best."

Sumire nods. "You better." She tilts her head to the side, watching him. "We have long memories."

And then she's gone, and there's a red sun rising.

In the faint light, he supposes that it looks the same shade of red as Kanae's hair.

"Madara?" Speaking of Kanae, she's standing a few feet away from him, well out of reach of the waves, rubbing her eyes. "Are we going home today?" Did you get what you came here for?

He laughs. The sound is new and raw and disused. He'll learn to get used to it. "Yes."

She takes his hand, and he returns her combs.

The slide back to Konoha Village is no longer unusual.

---

It is dusk when Toka Senju charges through the door of his forge. He'd been thinking about rings recently, and perhaps it is only his fancy talking, but there is time for hope. "Madara." She says without, and her tone holds a sharp edge of danger that he is completely incapable of dealing with at the moment. "Where were you?"

"In Uzu Village." He is hardly likely to tell her that he'd been to Uzu Village, borrowed a sealskin that even now lies on the bottom of the seafloor, and been beneath the waves itself. It would confirm all of her worst fears. "I needed to ask leave of Kanae's brother."

"For what exactly?"

Well, he hadn't really asked permission for what he wants to say next, but he doesn't think that Kyoya Anharaya would mind.

"To change her name." He doesn't know exactly what he wants to do about this really, because he's not sure that he's forgiven and forgotten enough to step foot inside the church. Well, not that he hasn't been inside a church recently, he'd been inside Hashirama's house just this past winter.

He's not even sure that sirens care for churches, though he does know that Kanae's not likely to be cursed if she steps into one. He hadn't been superstitious about the supernatural before anyway, and the world beneath the waves has only proved that the fae are just as prone to folly and joy and despair and broken pride as those that live above.

"It took you a full week?" Uzu Village is only two days' walking distance from Konoha Village, which means that it isn't entirely that far. Which means according to his story, he's spent three full days on his knees in front of Kanae's brother.

"It took a while to find Kyoya Anharaya." It isn't that exactly. He wasn't there to-oh, but what does it matter? Once more falsehood, one more lie, one more thing that he isn't going to share. It's not as if he doesn't have a whole house of those.

He ought to be truly selfish for once. "I don't think this is really much of your business though." And truly it isn't.

She might be trying to help him, but it really isn't her business.

"You're different now." Toka Senju watches him with narrowed eyes. "Dear God, you might be...happier now than you used to be."

The corners of his mouth tilts down, and he resists the urge to snort. "It wouldn't take much to be an improvement from the way I've been, would it?"

And she smiles. All that she's ever wanted was his safety, his happiness. She'd worried for him. "If it takes a bit of the supernatural, I'm not going to be the one to mention it to my cousin."

She means Hashirama. And here's where his headache comes back. "I have to speak with him." He turns his face away. "Him and Tobirama." It's finally time to talk.

"Hmm." Toka crosses her arms and looks away. "Well, you'll have to go alone."

"Yeah." He throws the sketches he's drawn of rings onto his work table and walks her out. "I know that."

He doesn't wait for Toka's footsteps to fade before he heads into the house.

He finds Kanae lighting candles in the kitchen and leans against the doorframe to admire the sight. She's made far too many dishes with the scent of spices that he's getting used to, but is still sure he doesn't have.

Her hair is swept up. Her combs glean bone white.

"Are you trying to make me poor?" So many candles for one dinner. He counts at least seventeen casually. He's not even sure where most of them came from, since he doesn't know exactly how many he has, but certainly not that many.

She turns to him, mock hurt fixed on her features, but her eyes are laughing. "It's a special night." Her voice still tugs at him, even though he knows it shouldn't anymore. "Besides, burning twenty-one candles for one night will not make you a poor man."

So he's missed four then.

Well, it's not that big of a deal. He smiles against her lips. "How am I supposed to know that this isn't a habitual action of yours?"

She leans up and whispers in his ear. "You can't."

He half growls, but all she does is laugh. "Welcome home."

That night he pulls the combs from her hair and feels the silk of it wash over his hands. "What do you think of churches and rings?" A part of him wants to know. A part of him really...doesn't.

"I haven't a use for either." She says, calmly as he runs a comb through her wild riot of curls. They spiral like the designs she'd first worn, but she has a tiny fan stitched to her right shoulder now. "But you do."

"Well, yes." He sighs. "Else the rest of the village shall become convinced overnight that I am keeping you as a mistress."

"And are you?" She asks, all innocence and sugar, but he knows far better than that. "Keeping me, I mean?"

He snorts at this, chin resting on her shoulder. "More like you're keeping me." He prods her cheek with a finger. "Using my candles, fattening me with exotic spices, maybe you're waiting for the day that you can turn me into stew." His hand slides to brush a few strands of her hair away from her face.

"I would not be opposed to human marriage customs." The corner of her mouth tilts up in a crooked smile. "Or as you put it, churches and rings."

He pulls back, slightly miffed. "How old are you exactly?"

She shakes her head at him. "I'm not telling you."

He frowns and pulls a strand of her hair straight. It bounces back into those natural spirals, and it's distracting.

She turns and watches him, face pale in the moonlight, the line of her collarbone something his hands itch to trace. "Will you always be so fascinated?"

"Mmmm." He leans forward, to let her lips trace his pulse. She pulls the leather band holding his hair back away instead. "Always."

Black bleeds into red.

---

He's leaning against Izuna's grave, waiting for the sun to climb to noon, which is when Tobirama takes a break in the woodlot. There's a lot he has to say to Izuna, but the dead can wait.

He has more important things to say to the living.

"You said you wanted to meet me today?" Tobirama approaches cautiously, careful not to get within arm's reach of him. There's no ax in his belt, no weapons, nothing. Tobirama Senju's planned to walk to his death then.

He feels a slight twinge of guilt at this, that he quickly banishes. He's having this conversation today because he wants to straighten the record, so there's no real reason to be guilty.

"Yeah." And now that the other man is before him, it's difficult to figure out how to put everything into words. He might as well start at the beginning then. "Kanae told me once that you felt like you owed me." Well, that's the middle, but that's alright too.

That's the main point of contention, the thorny knot that he hasn't been able to listen to the last times Tobirama had been around.

He'd been trying to apologize. He'd been carrying his own guilt. It was Madara who pushed him away the last time, who couldn't hear it.

He'd demanded Izuna back last time, forced the sin onto Tobirama, when it might not have been anyone's sin at all.

"Yes." Tobirama hesitates for a brief moment. "I'm assuming you want me to do something."

How on earth did he guess. "Yeah." Madara pauses for a moment. How to best say this? Tobirama looks as though he's been caught by a poacher's trap. Maybe he has. "Forgive yourself." Madara turns away, the corners of his mouth turning down. No matter how much both of them need to let this go, no matter how much he's rationalized this, telling someone else to forgive themselves is a bit rich coming from him. He's never quite learned the art of forgiveness despite his best intentions. "Izuna wouldn't have-" His voice breaks just a little, but he'll break Tobirama's nose if it ever gets out. "Have wanted you to be cut up about it. It's gone, yeah? We ought to leave the past where it belongs."

"Who are you?" Tobirama's mouth hangs open in a way that's really unbecoming.

Madara reaches forward and closes it for him with just a little more force than necessary. "Close your mouth, Tobirama Bastard, you'll let the flies in." But now Tobirama's made everything a thousand times more uncomfortable so he turns and starts to stride away. "And who the devil do you think I am? You think I'm doing this for shits and giggles?" Something about Tobirama's always brought out the worst of his mouth. "I'm Madara Uchiha, bastard. I always have been."

It's summer. The sun's shining. The birds are singing. He's just irritated Tobirama Senju to no end, and Hashirama Senju has just appeared from around the bend in the footpath, panting and out of breath. "Brother Madara, please don't-" He freezes in place.

"Don't what?" Madara asks as he passes on the footpath. "Tell your brother to forgive himself? Some big brother you are."

"You're-" Hashirama's frozen for only a moment before he spins around and catches Madara by the shoulder. "You're normal again."

Madara crosses his arms, and waits for the flood. Knowing Hashirama, it's just a matter of time. "So what?"

"DoyouknowhowlongI'vewatchedandwaitedforthis?" And sure enough, it is a flood. "Ithoughtyou'dkillyourselfbeforeyoueverwentbacktothewayyouusedtobe, andohgod-" The man doesn't seem like he'll ever run out of breath. "IhavetogothankSisterKanae. Gooddaytoyoumyfriend."

Hashirama's off, feet flying faster than his words could ever spill out of his lips.

"Get used to him appearing at your house." Tobirama mutters as he returns to the woodlot. "You'll never get rid of him now."

This should cause a headache of the worst order, but it doesn't.

"Madara Uchiha." He murmurs to himself, standing in the sun. Do I even know who I used to be?

---

"The fire's gone out." She observes as she pulls away to tend it. "What were you thinking of to lose track of the time so?" It's the second time tonight she's asked him a question like this.

"Of you." He smiles. "Of you and me."

She laughs, clear and sweet, and the fire roars back to life. The years have made her more adept at lighting fires, though he still suspects that when she sings, rivers bend to listen. "You feed my vanity." She teases, finger tracing what might be a tear track from the corner of his eye to his jaw.

"You don't need me to feed your vanity." He catches her hand and kisses the center of her palm. The cool band of white gold on her finger is the envy of every other woman in town. Maybe that's what's fed her vanity. "You just need someone to eat your cooking."

She prods his middle rather accusingly. "From what I remember, you need minimal encouragement from me."

He's about to ask her when she wants to eat him, and when will he be fat enough to be consumed anyway, when the door swings open.

"Mama, it's dark and cold." Katsurou stands there, holding a blanket, feet bare.

Kanae sweeps him up, and Madara fills the brazier. Tsurou's old enough to remember not to knock it over, and it would solve being both dark and cold.

"What would you like me to do, Tsurou?" She asks. "We'll move the brazier to your room, alright?"

"Sing a song." Their boy throws his arms around her neck and snuggles close, sleepy green eyes falling closed. "Mama sings pretty songs."

And Madara is likely to agree.

The siren's call is beautiful.

---

A.N. So I'm not quite sure what to say, except that the MadaKanae alternate universe plot bunnies have been taking control of my head, and thus spawned this alternate universe from the depths of my subconscious. I imagine this being more like European fairy tale than anything remotely Japanese, which is why it has a bit of a medieval strangeness to it.

If I ever get the energy to rework this universe, I shall probably do a much better rewrite.

I claim full honors to being the first person to ever publish something with the tag Blacksmith!Madara.

And if you all have survived this long, and gotten to the end, my sincerest thanks.

~Tavina