A/N - This fic roughly ties in with Such Little Words, though you do not have to read one to understand the other (there are a few minor differences in how I set things up, as well). It's definitely another angst fic, too. No clue how to summarize it.
The statues at the Valley of the End evoke the most painful, and the most true, of memories, as Hashirama and Madara at once build and destroy everything they understand. Mild HashiMada. Rated T for implications of sex and that's about it. I wouldn't say this is a pairing fic.
What Time Forgets, the Heart Remembers
by PikaCheeka
"He may even have known (him) that well by then, who had not changed until then and so would in all probability not change later, and he who could not say to his friend, I did that for love of you; do this for love of me. He couldn't say that, you see - this man, this youth scarcely twenty, who had turned his back upon all that he knew, to cast his lot with the single friend whom, even as they rode away that night, he must have known, as he knew that what his father told him was true, that he was doomed and destined to kill."
- William Faulkner
-ooo-
"He'd be angry, you know. You once told me that he hated the idea of his face carved in stone." Mito smiled as she said it. Not discussing him only made things worse, made her husband more sad, as she had realized early on in their marriage. It was better, somehow, to speak of him casually, as if he were simply an old friend who had moved on.
Hashirama didn't smile back; he rarely smiled now, as the years wore on and the lines on his grow deepened. "He died angry with me. He will ever be angry."
"Time heals all wounds." She didn't believe it, knew he didn't believe it, but she hoped. He deserved better than a slow death such as this.
"Only because time forgets them."
-ooo-
He wished it had rained that day, so that the morning, bright with sunlight trapped in a light mist, would not have seemed to mock him as it did. He wished it had been night, so that he could not properly see his face as he turned away, could not see the pain that was worse than the hatred. But no. Madara had left at dawn, perhaps hoping to leave before Hashirama was awake, but in the end unable to go without seeing him again. Or perhaps Hashirama had only awoke earlier than normal that morning because somehow, deep in his heart, he knew what was coming to pass.
Madara had stalled too long, pausing by the door to leave a final memento of his existence, a leaf with a neat hole burned through it, too perfect to resemble the one he had once held when he had stood by Hashirama and named the village, as if to mock the impossibility of their dream. He had stalled, and when Hashirama had stepped outside, followed his chakra trail to the edge of the forest, he found his partner waiting for him.
He pretended not to be interested in his arrival, his grey eyes of a practiced hardness that Hashirama knew masked something entirely different as he slid off the stone he had perched upon. "You're an early riser today."
There was no need to point out that it was not so much earlier than when he normally awoke, not more than half an hour, and Madara, who had passed in and out of his bedroom, as if he had lived as much in his physical home as he did in his heart, many times over the years, knew this full well. Though there had been many mornings when he had impatiently waited for Hashirama to step outside, and still more mornings when he had been awoken at an unpleasantly dark hour by the other man at his door, Madara had only stayed the night once.
Perhaps that was why Hashirama had awoken early. Because he had known from the moment that Madara had acquiesced for the first time to his invitation to remain until morning the night before, and in doing so finally giving in, sacrificing what he had withheld from the other man for so many years, that this was not the beginning of something, but the end.
"Are you leaving?" It was a stupid response, so empty that Madara seemed taken aback by it.
"Yes?" It came out as a question before he could correct himself. "I am."
"You're not coming back."
"I can't. You know this. We can't be together here." He paused. "I'm not like you and I won't accomplish what I need to. If I stay." He spoke haltingly, as if he had rehearsed for weeks and forgotten his lines when they needed to be said.
Hashirama frowned, not yet sad, only confused and angry as he remembered their fight last year, immediately after he'd been made Hokage and Madara had deciphered the stone tablet. This man who he had sacrificed so much more, this man who had sacrificed absolutely everything for him, had finally reached his breaking point months and months after he'd begun to crack; or had it been sooner? Maybe Madara had always been apart from him and he had been too blind to see it. "I don't understand."
"No. That's the problem, isn't it?" He stepped forward several paces, close enough for Hashirama to smell the faint scent of smoke. "You loved me, but you never understood me."
"I still-" Madara cut him off, abruptly reaching out, touching his face. It was then that Hashirama realized that he had removed his glove at some point, as if he had decided even before this conversation that he would do this, and he resisted the urge to grab that hand, to feel those thin fingers twined between his again. Had it really only been a few hours ago that he'd felt this warmth beneath him for the first time? The thought brought with it a bitter taste; he knew it had at once been the first and last time. Madara's final gift to him had in the end hurt far more than he had likely intended. Hurt both of them.
"Don't." He spoke softly, his eyes clouded and, to Hashirama's surprise, confused. "You need to stop feeling that way. You cannot follow me where I am going. It's better we end this. End everything. Forget me."
"What if I stop you?"
His fingers pressed against his mouth a moment before he stepped back. "You'll have to kill me."
-ooo-
"I won't kill him."
"You will if he returns. You will have to. You know this and have known it for years ever since our father declared it when we but children. The world has changed but that fool has not and it is now your duty to keep order." Tobirama waved his hand vaguely as if to dismiss his brother then.
There was nothing to be said for it. Because he did know. It might not have been when his father had told him, but instead it had been when he had first held that stone in his hand, when he had looked down and seen Madara's frantic message to him that he would die if he attempted to cross the river to him. He had known then because he had known fully in that moment how much Madara loved him in all his fatal desperation, how much Madara would continue to be haunted by him, and he by him, in all those years that they waged war against one another. Madara had turned his back on him that day, but the words on the stone had given his heart away.
That was when Hashirama had fully realized that he would be the death of him, and it was a moment that he remembered deep in the recesses of his heart forever. No love so strong as that existed without the price of blood.
-ooo-
He did not cry.
He did not cry when he stabbed him, did not cry when he whispered in his ear the words that Madara had dared him to say so long ago, that this was his dream and his alone, that there was no place for them, and did not cry when he stepped back and watched him fall. Those few words destroyed them both, because Hashirama had to kill himself on that same night that he killed his partner who had so abruptly turned against him on that ugly and vibrant dawn so long ago now.
Or had it been sooner? He found himself wondering again. Had things ever changed or had this always been the way of things, the two of them doomed to part in fire and fury? Perhaps Madara had only changed once, moving fluidly into the darkness that cloaked him so well, and all of his warmth thereafter had only been a mask, one that Hashirama had failed to see beneath. Because, he admitted, he had never really understood Madara; he defied understanding, a flitting shadow with no real form, impossible to grasp and even more impossible to love.
There had been no body to bring back, at least not one worth bringing back. Those were his words. He didn't need to search for a body, as he knew it was there. He'd left Madara, turned his back on him as he lay choking on his own blood, writhing around the sword shoved though his back, into his heart and out of his chest again. Hashirama had stabbed him from behind, and he had left him before he breathed his last. It was cowardly, despicable, but it was the only way he could himself survive that night of darkness and rain, a darkness and a rain finally reflecting the hollow cruelty of the moment.
He would not cry for months. He only cried on the eve before his wedding to a girl that he did not love in any intensity, when he fully understood that Madara was gone forever, for if alive, he would surely come back for this, if only to ruin it. Madara was dead by his own hands. He had known this, had always known this.
He had never quite been able to forget.
-ooo-
Tobirama, as well as much of the village, resisted Hashirama's desire to erect the statues at the waterfall, now known as the Valley of the End. They said there was no need for it. Madara did not even deserve a grave, much less a monument. He'd attacked the village, killed civilians within it, and very nearly killed Hashirama himself, all for some inexplicable, selfish, and deeply emotional reason. Madmen were best forgotten, was the consensus.
But Hashirama had insisted, and eventually, with the assistance of the charismatic Sarutobi Sasuke, the people had given in. He could have his statue, though he did not need his grave, too; the statue was far from the village, easily forgotten as time went on, but a grave was harder for the people to ignore. Statues far beyond the outskirts of Konoha were rarely seen, just as Madara's name would be seen less and less often in the histories of the village as time passed.
No. Madara did not need to be remembered like that. And perhaps, as some villagers began to believe over the years, he had never existed at all. After all, there was no body. The Hokage hadn't brought one back, though he swore on his very Hokage seat that the Uchiha was dead.
Dead by his hands at the valley, but dead by his heart nearly two decades before, when a rock skipped across that same river with a simple message that lay him bare forever.
-ooo-
The statues had startled Madara, even though one of his creatures had told him of them, had dragged him forth from his cave long enough for him to take the painful journey to the edges of Konoha. Things were no longer easy for him, and though he could walk, could even defend himself, the rattling in his chest had not ceased since that day, as if the chakra he'd stolen from Hashirama had not saved his life, but damned it.
He had never expected to see Hashirama again. Returning to the village, to the outskirts or in disguise, several times shortly after his supposed death had been enough. He'd seen him move on, seen him with children and grandchildren, seen enough to believe he'd been forgotten as time passed. It was easy to forget the dead, especially when you did not care enough to try to forget, as he believed Hashirama had not. He had taken with him no reminders, no small portraits, though several had been done of him, one even of both of them, and he had believed he would simply never see his face again. But these statues, immense as they were, were unsettlingly lifelike, and he felt himself suddenly flooded with a sense of awe and dread; this was the face that he had so desperately tried to forget, that he had loved for all this time.
But perhaps what made him more uneasy was his own visage, facing Hashirama, his hand uplifted in a sign of companionship, a sign that they had never used in their final battle. His own statue was on equal ground to the Hokage's and nearly perfect in its formation, from the discrepancy in height to the way one side of his mouth turned down slightly more than the other and his eyes sunk deep into his face. No-one but the Hokage himself could have designed these; no-one knew his body so well.
Madara frowned a moment then, not understanding the outfit his own statue wore. That was not what he had worn at the valley
He has forgotten, he realized with a shock. This was a foolish monument of nothing, made only to show off the glory of Konoha's leader.
Cursing himself softly for being too weak now to use his Susano'o, being too weak to destroy what Hashirama had built to mock him, he lowered his gaze a moment. When had he seen that before? Parts of his memory had failed him, the damage to his heart all those years ago, the mental trauma of his first death, too much for the more fragile of memories his mind held. So much time had passed, so much time to forget, to erase what hurt, or at least that was what he had always told himself, as far back as when he was a child of the belief that killing Hashirama would erase him from his mind.
No. He knew, he remembered. The kimono given to him on the anniversary of the village founding. He'd never worn it, finding it impractical and of questionable ornamentation, and Hashirama had laughed it off, unphased by, or perhaps only used to, his outward ungratefulness. And while he had stubbornly worn his old priestly regalia, a sharp reminder that he was Uchiha and he was apart, at the anniversary celebration, Madara had kept it, laid it out often, considered it, unsure of how to handle such a rare gift. He had nearly taken part of it with him when he'd left, but in the end took nothing but the clothes on his back, his weapons and his bitter rage.
This is how Hashirama wanted to remember him, radiant and glorious, not in the ragged and worn robes, the tarnished armor, he wore to his final battle, but in an outfit for an emperor. It was not who Hashirama wanted him to be. It was who Hashirama saw him as, had always seen him as.
And suddenly he understood, the tears coming to his eyes unbidden, tears he had not felt for decades and believed he would never feel again.
What time forgets, the heart remembers.