A/N: Madara's dream never changes, but his worldview does. A lot.
I
At four-and-a-half years old, Uchiha Madara is not really sure what "peace" is. But his mother always talks about it, tells him stories of when the shinobi clans didn't fight, when the world was at rest like the surface of a midnight pond.
Madara thinks, then, that this must be peace: a lazy, summer afternoon, curled up by his mother's side, time trickling by ever-so-slowly, a sense of quiet in the air.
Madara is happy.
To be really happy, though, he thinks that he wants to be a shinobi. Strong. Brave. Like his father.
He tugs on his mother's hair. "Mother?"
"Mhmm?"
"What if—" he takes a deep breath, "what if I become the strongest shinobi, in the whole world? Then I could make everyone stop fighting. And be happy, instead of sad."
His mother laughs. "I'm sure you will become very strong, Madara. But remember, strength isn't everything! Never forget the importance of trust and cooperation. When you make a friend, that's how your fighting will stop, you know." She ruffles his hair with a smile. "And be happy, instead of sad."
Madara furrows his brow. Why did his mother always have to correct him like that?
"Just watch. I will become the strongest!" He scowls up at her. "I'll make the biggest fireballs ever made, and have the best Sharingan, and be even better than Father!"
She smiles again, but this time it seems a little sadder. Madara isn't sure why, though.
"Let me tell you another story," she says suddenly, pulling him in closer. "A story of a time before war existed. How does that sound?"
Madara's scowl softens. Those stories were always his favourite. "Alright," he says grudgingly.
One day, though. One day, he would change things.
II
Peace is the overwhelming sense of quiet contentment that Madara has whenever he's with his little brother.
It's the only time, really, that Madara thinks he feels that same sense of serenity again. Izuna is two years old, and Madara is six. Izuna is the remaining bright flame in Madara's life now that his mother is gone.
(Dead.)
Izuna is always smiling, laughing, carefree. Madara remembers when he was like that.
(Before the night of the raid when Father and his men had been away and Mother had been—)
Izuna, whom Madara loves more than anything else in the world, and he swears that this time, he'll protect his little brother.
(Keita and Hotaka and Azuma had died of factors outside of Madara's control. He tells himself this every night.)
Madara watches with a small smile as Izuna tries to balance a stack of rocks. With the addition of a third stone, the structure comes tumbling apart. Izuna giggles, and Madara's smile grows a little wider, too.
Madara has found peace in his brother, and nothing—nothing—will take that away from him.
III
"Peace? Peace is not achievable, Madara." His father yanks the shoulder plate off one of the dead bodies and hands it to Madara. "The Senju and the Uchiha will always be at odds. Shinobi and shinobi will always fight, because at the core of human nature is fear, suspicion, and resentment."
Madara nods as he stares out at the field of dead bodies. The Uchiha had won this battle overwhelmingly. It had practically been a massacre.
Somehow, he can't bring himself to cheer and celebrate like Father's clansmen.
Was all this fighting really necessary?
He looks down at the symmetrical half-moon spirals etched on the piece of armour. Senju.
"Can't we talk to the Senju? Negotiate a truce?" He hesitates, realizing his words are hovering dangerously close to the brink of treason. He pushes forwards anyways. "They… can't be all terrible, right?"
His father snaps his head down to give Madara a sharp look. "Those are a child's words, Madara. You must learn that the world—and the people in it—are cruel, selfish, and unforgiving." He narrows his eyes. "Learn this well, or it will one day be your downfall."
Madara nods again, brows furrowed. He is already eight years old. And he knows, knows, that the world is not a rosy paradise where strangers can laugh together and opposing clans can intermix.
But at the back of his mind, a tiny voice insists that there must be a way. A way to end all this fighting, end all the fear and hate and pain.
"Madara, you are strong. I have no doubt that you will become one of the greatest shinobi of your time." His father pauses, and his eyes harden. "And one day, you will become the Uchiha clan head."
The air suddenly feels stifling on Madara's skin. But his father continues on, as hard as iron.
"Cultivate your strength and train diligently. Forget these childish fancies of yours. You will be the key to our clan's victory over the Senju, and there is no room for dreaming in times of war."
"…Yes, Father."
The Senju shoulder plate clatters to the ground.
IV
"Of course peace is possible!" Madara's new friend throws his arms out to the sides. "You just need to find other people like you who are willing to change. To compromise, and take risks. And—this is the most important part—to trust others." He ends with a firm nod and that burning look of determination in his eyes that Madara admires so much.
"My father always says that to trust is to be blind," Madara says, pursing his lips. He skips another stone across the river. It hits the other side just barely.
Hashirama hums, skipping a stone of his own—it reaches the other side with ease, of course. "Well, I guess it's difficult to trust people, especially in times of war. But this fighting will never end, otherwise."
Madara rolls another stone between his thumbs. "I…" He hesitates, wondering how much he can reveal. "Alright, I suppose it's fine if I tell you," he says finally.
His friend quirks an eyebrow, full attention now on Madara.
"…I'm going to be clan head one day," Madara admits. He fingers the stone in his hand. "I suppose that puts me in a good position to make change, but at the same time…" He grimaces, chucking it out at the river where it lands with a splash. "If I put my trust in the wrong person, my whole clan will suffer the consequences."
To his surprise, Hashirama laughs. "You, too? I'm going to be clan head as well, someday," he clarifies. The spark in his eyes returns full force, and he grabs Madara by the shoulders. "This is perfect, Madara! Our clans could form a truce! We really could start a village of our own, like we've always talked about!"
Madara grins at his friend, who's practically vibrating with excitement. He listens absentmindedly as Hashirama babbles on about alliances and villages and mission ranks and academies.
Who would have thought? Madara swears that it must have been fate that brought him and Hashirama together. He can almost feel it, hanging in the air—the sensation of change on the horizon.
They would revolutionize the shinobi world.
V
Peace.
Peace was a lie, a hollow dream that lived on only in the minds of children and fools.
Madara had been a fool.
A fool to think he could find happiness in this world drowned in blood.
A fool to let his guard down, even for a second, around those thrice-damned Senju.
A fool to have let his one remaining brother slip through his fingers.
Dark clouds hang low over the field. Madara's clansmen stand behind him, silent and grim.
Droplets of rain fall on Madara's face and speckle the casket in front of him. Fitting, that the skies should weep too, because Madara feels as though his whole world has shattered into a million pieces.
He blinks the water out of his eyes.
Senju Tobirama.
Madara will annihilate him, eviscerate that piece of vermin Senju filth who dared run a sword through his brother's stomach. Madara will kill him, and his brother, and the rest of that vile clan.
He clenches his jaw. Things never changed. The world was an endless, meaningless cycle of blood and tears. Death after death, an eye for an eye, until everyone he loved was dead and the whole world was blind.
Madara will only be adding to the endless cycle, this he knows with a bitter irony. But how can he let the Uchiha be humiliated? How can he not avenge Izuna's memory? How can he let his clan's sacrifices, his father's words, his brother's gift, all be for naught?
He places a hand on the wooden casket in front of him. He feels the grain under his fingers and the rain on his face and the growing blaze of white-hot fury in his chest.
He turns around to face his clan. A shock of murmurs run through the crowd, whispers and awed faces and palpable fear in the air.
Madara's eyes are bright red, spinning with a three-spoked pattern of the likes which the world has never seen before.
"We have all lost those we care about." His voice burns, but his words fall glacier-cold from his lips. "We have all lost brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers. We have lost, and suffered, and grieved, thanks to the Senju." He spits out the word like it is rotten.
Madara stares into the eyes of each and every Uchiha.
"But we, we will ensure that they lose everything."
VI
Blood.
Uchiha blood.
His men, reduced to mere bodies littering the ground, all dead dead dead and it's his fault—
—He loses focus for just a split second.
But that split second is all the two Senju brothers need.
The ground. It's cool and hard, a small mercy after eight hours of battle.
He chokes out a bitter laugh as Hashirama pleads with him yet again to forget their clans' past enmities and to form a village, to form peace.
He laughs, because what kind of fool begs so desperately with a dying enemy? What kind of fool hopes to gain a man's trust while having murdered his four brothers and hundreds of his clansmen? What kind of absolute fool would then sacrifice himself at the command of a half-dead enemy?
…
Hashirama.
Hashirama would do all those things, and more.
And the realization hits Madara that his former friend is truly someone he can trust—a fool, a damned fool—but in the best way possible.
And then he thinks, Why not?
He has nothing, nothing, to lose.
He has lost all of his brothers, his clansmen have either deserted or been killed, and the Uchiha whom remain now stare at him in fear and resentment instead of awe and trust.
The Uchiha glory is no more. His clansmen know it, the Senju know it, even the feudal lords that supply them their coin know it.
He knows it.
If his father were still alive, the man would strike Madara and denounce him as his son. Madara can all too easily imagine the look of scathing disgust that would be on his father's face.
Because in a way, he is giving up. Letting Izuna's death and the hundreds of other Uchiha lives sacrificed be in vain.
But if anyone can ensure that the last vestiges of the Uchiha are not completely eradicated, if anyone could forgive the Uchiha of their own blood-stained ledger, if anyone could somehow salvage peace out of this chaos—it would be Hashirama.
Against his better judgement, against everything his father ever taught him, he reaches out and takes Senju Hashirama's hand.
VII
"Real peace, Madara, can you believe it?" Hashirama laughs, and the sound is breathless, full of pure wonder and joy of the likes which Madara has only ever seen in children and his fool of a friend. "A village, all our dreams—finally real!"
Madara gazes down at the village hidden in the leaves, and he smiles, just a little.
And he dares to hope. Just a little.
VIII
But as is always the case when he dares to believe that things might take a turn for the better, everything soon comes crashing down.
Although, in this case, it is more reminiscent of the slow chipping away of a mask, wherein Konoha's claim of "peace" is in reality nothing but barely-suppressed animosity and blatant prejudice.
Madara recalls the clan meetings. Dirty looks, his clansmen would complain. Hiked prices. Poor business. Cold treatment.
He recalls the council meetings, where the clan heads would vote on village matters. "Fair", "unbiased", Hashirama had insisted. But of course. It was fair that it was always Uchiha land repurposed for training fields and newcomer clans. It was unbiased that the Hyūga, Akimichi, and Sarutobi almost always voted against the Uchiha.
He recalls Senju Tobirama, and the man's thinly veiled disdain. Always watching him with those narrowed, distrustful eyes, with his cold words and even colder stares. As if the Senju were so morally superior to the Uchiha, never mind that Tobirama himself had murdered Izuna in cold blood.
This is not peace.
This is a farce.
Madara closes his eyes for a brief moment. When he opens them, they are red.
The stone tablet in front of him is tantalizing.
Yin and yang, it reads. These opposing two acting together obtain all things in creation.
Uchiha and Senju, Madara translates mentally. If he can acquire the chakra of both, he will be able to obtain all things in creation.
Even peace.
The fault, he realizes, was not in the goal, but in the method.
He reads about the eternal dream, about Infinite Tsukuyomi, about the Rinnegan and what is necessary to achieve it.
He reads about salvation.
And in the bitter, near-resigned depths of Madara's mind, a new purpose flames into existence.
IX
"Peace will never be stable with Uchiha like him at our backs," snaps the voice. "Brother, why do you insist on giving him so many chances?"
Madara leaves the roof of the Senju compound. He feels no need to hear more, because he has heard plenty enough.
X
"This village is a mockery of peace," Madara says to his clan gathered in front of him. "There is no happiness to be found here. There is no justice. No goodwill. Can you not see how the village detests our presence, shuns us at every turn?"
He stares at them, eyes piercing even without his Sharingan activated. His anger is tangible in the closed confines of the shrine room, and his clansmen are pale.
Madara is disappointed beyond measure to find that not a single Uchiha has the courage to look him in the eyes.
"I am leaving," he spits out.
Finally, finally, his clan starts to rouse, a few mutters and hushed whispers and darting gazes that almost makes Madara want to incinerate them all at their sickening display of cowardice.
"Which of you will join me?"
No one speaks.
His lip curls in disgust.
Was this what the Uchiha had become? Declawed, defanged, sedated pets of the Senju?
His own family, his sisters and brothers, were siding with the Senju over him. They would rather live as the lapdogs of their former enemy than follow their own clan head.
Don't they understand that he is trying to save them? No one has the Uchiha interests more at heart than Madara, no one wants to bring the Uchiha name back to glory more than Madara does.
Izuna. Izuna would have listened to him, Izuna would have stepped forwards.
But Izuna is dead, and all that is left are cowards and Senju sycophants.
Madara leaves in a swirl of smoke, and hopes that his clansmen suffocate on it.
XI
He had given Hashirama's "peace" a chance. He had given cooperation, forgiveness, and trust a chance.
It had failed.
The moon is bright. The village borders are still. Madara cloaks himself in a light genjutsu, heaves his gunbai onto his back, and walks out the gates.
No one stops him.
XII
"Madara, this is madness! Peace was your dream, just as much as it is mine!"
"It still is," Madara shoots back. He is standing with one hand on his gunbai and the other forming half a seal, ready whenever Hashirama is. "But your method failed—any method dependent on human benevolence will inevitably fail. Look at what good your village has done! Instead of battles between hired clans, there is now war between nations. How can you defend your 'peace' knowing that it has killed thousands?"
Hashirama grits his teeth. "We're at war only because the other villages have yet to trust Konoha. But I'll broker an alliance. There will be peace talks in a week's time. The fighting will stop, and this time for good."
"'This time'," Madara repeats, his mouth twisting. "When will you learn, Hashirama? Fighting never stops. Alliances, treaties, truces—they are all temporary. Like light and shadows, war is inextricable from humanity. Conflict, peace… it's an unending cycle."
"Only because you've given up hope! Can't you see that peace was right at our fingertips?"
"Me, given up on hope?" Madara's eyes blaze with anger. "No, it's the cowards who have given up that turn to hope for empty solace and false comfort. Hope means nothing. And I have never given up."
"Then why did you leave?" Hashirama cries out, his voice strained. "Why have you come back as an enemy of Konoha, when you yourself helped build this village?"
"For my dream. For peace."
"What are you talking about?!"
Madara slams his hands together in a seal, and his eyes spin with red.
For Infinite Tsukuyomi… the Rinnegan… your cells.
"You'll see," he says instead, and his words are buried under the rumble of his Susanoo and the roar of the Kyūbi. Madara knows his old friend would never accept a world of dreams.
Hashirama's eyes turn cold, even as they morph into a warm amber, red markings emerging around his eyes. "So be it," he says, and all traces of pleading or grief disappear from his features. A colossal wooden golem rises out of the ground, large enough to rival Madara's Susanoo-clad Kyūbi.
The fight begins.
XIII
"Peace… that is your will, correct?" Its voice echoes oddly, the first voice besides Madara's to grace the cavern in many, many years.
Madara nods at the newly-formed black entity before him.
At last, he thinks, with no small amount of satisfaction. Someone, something, that he could rely on to carry through his plans. It had taken nearly fifty years, to awaken the Rinnegan and summon this manifestation of his will, but it had finally happened.
He still needs to wait. But he has plans, now, plans he can finally put into practice: give his Rinnegan away so he could be revived at the height of his power, find someone to act in his stead, extend his life with the Gedō Statue while he waits for an opportunity to arise.
He places a hand on the base of the Gedō Statue and activates the Preta Path. The following rush of chakra is exhilarating—something of which the likes he has not felt for decades.
"Infinite Tsukuyomi," Madara says to himself, his voice cracked and dry from disuse. "A new world… a better world."
"Yes," the creature rasps, its eye glowing. "A world of peace, not war. Of truth, not lies."
And the beginnings of the Eye of the Moon Plan creep into motion.
XIV
"You were right. About this world. About peace. About all of it." The boy drips blood across the ground as he approaches. His cloak and his hair are saturated a dark, sanguine red.
So is his eye.
Madara does not outright smile, but he tilts his head ever so slightly. "Oh?"
The boy exhales, jagged and sharp. "Tell me about this dream world of yours."
XV
True peace is as close to realization as it has ever been.
The boy, Madara is certain, will play his part. Madara hears the hate that laces Obito's words when they speak of Kirigakure in their plans. He sees how enraptured Obito is by Madara's simple genjutsus, how eager the boy always is to learn more about Infinite Tsukuyomi. He knows that Obito has latched onto their plans with all the broken desperation of someone with nothing left to lose.
Obito is just like him, now. And perhaps it shouldn't be surprising that the boy is so malleable, so easily manipulated—the boy was an idiot from the start, and it's almost more surprising that Obito has taken to Madara's ideals as well as he has. Obito will be a fine puppet to take up the name of Uchiha Madara and act on his behalf.
Even so, Madara has no delusions of having Obito's unwavering loyalty. The boy will doubtless try to betray him, somewhere down the line—perhaps when he is a little older, a little more confident, a little more arrogant.
But Madara does not make his plans carelessly. He has fail-safes for fail-safes, contingency plans within contingency plans. The army of White Zetsu, the loyalties of Black Zetsu, the seal over Obito's heart, the hidden abilities of the Rinnegan that he has studied to mastery. Even if events derail to the worst possible scenario, Madara is nigh positive that he is prepared for it.
He curses that the Rinnegan took so long to awaken, and it frustrates him to no end that he is too old to take matters into his own hands. Even with the incarnation of his will to oversee his plans, the only person that Madara can truly trust—trust beyond a doubt—is himself.
Still, he is practical. And rationally, he knows he will be coming back.
With that in mind, Madara grabs his kusarigama and, in one clean motion, severs the cables connecting him to the Gedō Statue. He settles down on his wooden throne, feeling the chakra dissipate from his cells.
His eyes close.
XVI
Madara wakes to a bright, open desert and an audience of thousands. It is nearly the exact opposite of what he had grown used to in his last sixty years of life, but he takes the change in stride, untroubled.
More bothersome is the dead, unfeeling body that he has been summoned in. He wonders what that brat Obito had done in his absence.
But for the moment being, he shakes the displeasure off, because he is back, and young, and powerful, and the army of flies before him that dare stand in the way of his peace shall learn that they must suffer the consequences of their defiance.
He jumps down from the cliff. Though the pale faces and sharp scent of fear brings back nostalgic memories, his eyes still narrow.
Because these shinobi are not here for his salvation. They are here, with their quaint uniforms and drawn weaponry, for a battle.
Very well, then.
If a fight is what they want, then Madara is all too happy to dance with them.
He rushes through the battalion of ten thousand strong, tossing bodies and slashing throats with rhythmic ease.
Peace is war.
Madara remembers the old ways of thought. Peace is impossible, his father once lectured. But his father was narrow-minded, a traditionalist and warmonger, justifying spilled blood with false maxims.
Madara remembers the new ways of thought, as well. Peace through trust, peace through cooperation, Hashirama always used to espouse. But where had that gotten him? To three shinobi wars and an early grave. The Warring States Era all over again, but magnified tenfold.
But most of all, beyond philosophies and ideologies, Madara remembers—understands—reality. He understands that the world is senselessly cruel and indiscriminately painful, and he has plenty of experience to speak for it. His mother. His brothers. Izuna.
Peace is a lie.
Even Obito had realized it, even Hashirama had seen it. In the end, for shinobi, life was nothing but a series of black despairs where you could only lose and lose and lose, until you lost yourself in the emptiness.
Peace is a never-ending failed cycle of broken promises and desperation.
Madara's way will be different. His way is the only way. Unlike his father, Madara is determined to change the status quo and create peace where none existed before, and he knows that he can. And unlike Hashirama, Madara understands that mankind is unreliable—that there is no one he can trust except himself.
But peace is mine, and I will make it, control it, shape it into my own.
These are truths that both his father and his former friend ignored, and now Uchiha Tajima is a name no one remembers and Senju Hashirama is a name hated by roughly four-fifths of all shinobi.
Peace is elusive.
He calls on a second meteor to come crashing down, and he sees the despair on their faces as death approaches.
But I am here.
His lips curve upwards.
Peace is here.