Characters: Hashirama, Madara
Summary: Hashirama does not believe in Fate, at least not the way it's being presented to him now.
Pairings: None
Author's Note: Just a short one. I had an idea in my head and wanted to get it out in visual form—you all know the story.
Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto.
One is the oil that sparks a flame, the other the water that gives life to the trees fire seeks to destroy. Natural, that eventually their opposite natures would lead them to this point. Hashirama still wishes he could have saved it, all the same, and he denies to anyone who asks that it was all inevitable.
Madara says with that ugly twist of the lips that this was fate and all of this was meant to happen. He looks at Hashirama with red on black eyes gone completely mad—Or were they always this way, and I just couldn't see it before?—the mortal flame within all but gone and the hellfire being fanned feverishly into ignition. Hashirama frowns, stares at Madara, long and hard, and almost shouts back that it's not fate, before the heat chokes his throat.
It's not fate, Hashirama wants so badly to shout as the wind picks up.
Senju and Uchiha are not always fated to meet on opposite ends of the battlefield.
Hashirama doesn't believe in fate; he doesn't think that anything in life has ever been pre-ordained. He looks at the future as an open road with no bars on the bath whatsoever; whatever path Hashirama wants to take he will take, and hang Fate and all of His friends. Hashirama is not chained to any sense of fatalism; sure, he thinks that some things were meant to happen, but he doesn't consider himself bound to any one path.
And Hashirama knows that this, Madara staring at him with crazed eyes, did not have to happen.
Madara, on the other hand, touts fate and is unafraid of flaunting his belief in it. He says that it was his fate to be Hokage, and he will be, some day soon, whether Hashirama likes it or not. He says that the village has tried to take from him his rightful place and that he will take back what is his.
Not over Hashirama's dead body.
I don't understand you anymore. Hashirama honestly doesn't know whether Madara actually believes any of what he's shouting and whispering or if it's just some sort of ruse to hide a larger plot; Madara's always been fond of obscenely complex schemes and plotting, ever since they were children, so Hashirama wouldn't put that past him.
Hashirama will never let Madara have Konohagakure. Not like this, and not to a man who has completely lost his mind. In his mind he has visions of Madara razing the village to the ground and he knows he can't let Madara have it.
So they fight, oil and water.
And even though Hashirama doesn't believe it had to be, he wonders if, perhaps, Madara is right, and this was fate after all.