Characters: Mito
Summary: Ten things no one living knows about Uzumaki Mito.
Pairings: Hashirama x Mito
Author's Note: Just thought I'd write something about Mito. Feedback would be appreciated.
Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto.
1
The union of Senju Hashirama and Uzumaki Mito was not an arranged marriage; it was a love match. They met in Uzushiogakure while Hashirama was trying, exasperatedly, to win an alliance with Mito's grandfather, and by the time negotiations were concluded, there was nothing that would have been able to keep Hashirama from marrying Mito; the fact that marriage between them was dynastically convenient was only a happy coincidence.
Hashirama took care to ignore the anguished screams of the clans who had allied with him who had had marriageable daughters.
2
After she was forced to seal the Kyuubi within herself, Mito never really felt safe anymore.
No one ever dared breathe a word against her, being the Shodai's wife, but everyone she met besides Hashirama and Tobirama looked upon her with wary, at times unwelcoming eyes. There was no love left for the Hokage's wife, now that she was the vessel of a demon. Everyone expected her to lose control and pounce upon them with a fury of bloody chakra.
Though she supposed she should have expected it, the glaring proof of the fickleness of the Konohagakure villagers still hurt her.
When her husband died, Mito moved to a small house on the outskirts of the village. She knew that no one would welcome her presence in their lives anymore.
3
Tsunade's father was not the only child Mito bore. After Senju Hironobu, she gave birth to three more children, two daughters and a son.
None of them lived to see adulthood. One of the daughters was kidnapped and murdered as an infant, and the other two died in battle in their teens.
4
What no one knows about the circumstances of Mito's daughter-in-law's death is that Mito was directly responsible for it.
Tsunade was five when her mother is killed. Mito had noticed something odd about the woman's behavior and took to tracking her movements. One night, Mito caught her sneaking out of the village.
What Mito watched was the fair-haired young woman slipping into the arms of a man bearing an Iwagakure hitai-ate. The two were full of kunai before they ever knew what hit them.
Mito never told Hironobu what happened, never told him what happened that night, and no one ever found out. She could not bear to tell her beloved son that his wife was cheating on him, and when he married again so many years later, to a much-younger woman, and they had Nawaki soon after, Mito eyed the young woman and prayed she wouldn't be like her predecessor.
For the rest of her life, Mito would wonder about Tsunade, though. Look at her and never be sure what to make of her granddaughter—or if she was even her granddaughter at all. Tsunade, after all, showed no sign of inheriting Hashirama's Mokuton, and bore no resemblance to her father.
But for all Mito's suspicions, for the sake of everyone's happiness, she never said a word.
5
Ten years after Hashirama died, when Mito was still a relatively young woman, her erstwhile brother-in-law tried to arrange a marriage between her and the Kazekage.
Mito made herself so unpleasant throughout the procedures that the Kazekage, though recognizing what she was doing and was secretly amused by it, felt obliged to decline her hand in marriage, saying that he didn't think that the two of them would have gotten along at all.
Oddly enough, Mito and the Kazekage continued to get along fairly well even after that.
6
As a child in Uzushiogakure, Mito would spend many summer hours when not at her studies on the shore, picking up shells, dipping her toes in the water or swimming out so far that it would take her a seeming eternity to swim back.
She used to imagine that if she swam far enough, she could blink and not be able to see Uzushio anymore, that she could just swim forever until she found small, sparse islands and would make her new home there, where there was no strife, no war. Mito was the sea's child.
Years later, when the village Hashirama had built no longer welcomed her and was rotten to its core, Mito longed for the smell of salt air again and wished her breath would hold long enough for her to swim to the bottom of the sea, where no one would look at her and see the demon's host.
7
The Uzumaki clan were, at their peak, half-immortal. No one knew how they accomplished this, but the Uzumaki were believed to be the children of an elder race, not really human at all, for the strongest among them could live for centuries. Among the Uzumaki, for full-blooded children childhood lasted for at least thirty years.
Mito should have been one of these. She should have been. But the chakra required to cage the Kyuubi drained her of her vitality, and robbed her of long life.
When Kushina came to her, Mito should have appeared as a woman in her twenties, instead of an old crone with thinning hair.
8
An orphaned Kushina came into Mito's care when the child was about five years old. The blood of the Uzumaki, Mito knew, was relatively thin with this girl, but it still ran, and the girl seemed somehow so much stronger and vital than the villagers of Konoha.
Mito hated to admit it, but she felt so much more a grandmother to Kushina than she ever had to Tsunade and Nawaki.
9
Contrary to popular belief, when Mito learned that the council was essentially plotting to kill her and damn Kushina by transferring the Kyuubi into her, she did not simply lie down and die. Instead, her reaction was a bit different.
Mito had hoped that, when she died, she would at least have the comfort of being able to take the Kyuubi with her, because of a jinchuuriki dies, usually the beast within them, no matter what its power, die with them. In private, she expressed her wish the council, and told them, in no uncertain terms, that if they attempted to do this to Kushina, they would regret it.
What Mito was told finally illustrated for her just how far she had fallen in the village's esteem.
She was told that she would agree with them and she would die, and that she would do this because there was no one to stand up for her. Mito was a foreigner and moreover a jinchuuriki; therefore, no one would care if she were to die.
Also, they outright told her that if she didn't comply, they would simply kill Kushina and find another child; Kushina being a foreigner and a refugee, no one would bat an eye if she died either.
The truth was made very clear to Mito.
She had no choice but to comply.
10
What Mito told Kushina on the last day of her life was a lie.
No host would ever be truly loved or accepted by their village; more often than not, those who claimed not to hate a jinchuuriki nor fear them could quickly find their feelings turning to hate and fear if provoked in the right way.
And in truth, Mito had come to hate Konohagakure.
It was all a lie.
But what could a white lie hurt, if it gave a terrified girl some comfort?