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Izuna sat at the swing and closed his eyes, idly listening to the sounds of children playing on the park as he did so. No one came over to bother him and he did not try to go over and speak with anyone else.
He was okay with that.
He always thought of himself as a quiet and harmonic person. Being left alone allowed him time to think and he had always appreciated being given time where he could allow his thoughts to wander. It was time he often allocated to reflection, improvement, and relaxation. All three were very important things, and he rather enjoyed letting his mind drift after a long day of training with his brother, boring clan meetings or fighting.
Only these days he did not do any of that.
Lately, he simple sat there, trying to figure out some important questions that were bothering him.
But he still could not find himself close to an answer.
Why am I alive?
Where am I? This is not my home.
What happened to Madara? Where is he!
Where is my brother!
Why am I a baby? I am not supposed to be a baby!
Somehow, he had been reincarnated. He did not know how or why, only that he had woken up one day in a body that was not his own. The body of a baby.
Well, now that he put a little thought, "waking up" in this new life did not happen immediately. There was no sudden burst of consciousness—one moment thinking he was a baby and the next finding he was a completely different person. It wasn't like waking up from a dream either—the slow wishful wakefulness after a good night's sleep that keeps one's eyelids heavy and gives one's mind a tired restfulness. Waking up, perhaps, was not even the best of terms to describe remembering everything he did as Izuna.
It was a process.
Yes, this was a much better term to describe what happened to him.
It had started with emotions first.
Pride
Love
HATE
Joy
Exasperation
FeAr
They had crowded him at the oddest times of day, be it when his new mother or brother held him in their arms or when one of his many aunts came to take care of him. Then came the images. Faces, mostly, of people he could not quite remember. Then there were sounds —clanging of weapons, rustling of leaves, soft voices singing lullabies, tortured screams— that he heard at all hours of the day. It went on and on like that until he was suddenly being bombarded by memories of all kinds.
He saw war, death and love.
I love you otouto, never forget that.
You are the most precious thing I have, Izuna.
Don't you dare die on me! Please!
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Train with me, nii-San
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You can't trust the Senju.
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His new body had been just a month or two more than a year old when 'Makoto' remembered that he was 'Izuna' and he had spent much of his time since then wondering how that was possible.
Makoto knew he had died. He knew this as a matter of fact. The same way you know the sun is there but you do not need to watch it. He could remember the battle that killed him all too well.
He had nightmares of his own death. He could remember the Senju blade still in his chest and his big brother crying and trying to help him. Nevertheless, he always woke up and both the blade and his brother were missing.
Those memories crowded him every night.
The way he had fallen to the ground, choking on blood next to his brother. The way he had died, fighting side by side with the person he admired and loved the most. The way his last words were a curse full of hatred against the Senju and the Shinigami's peaceful embrace.
That should have been the end.
But It wasn't
And three years had passed since he had "woken up".
He did not know why he had been reborn. It was like…like… How does someone gain the privilege to be reincarnated? Or, to make his special circumstances clearer, gain the privilege to be in another body and the opportunity to start a new life with adult memories and a life's worth of mistake? That was something he often asked himself.
But there was never a clear answer.
How it felt, it took him a few weeks to realize what had happened and it hardly mattered if he accepted it or not right away. He had the rest of his second life to struggle and accept and embrace who he was.
He was now a baby.
In another time, by the looks of people and their weird clothes.
At first, he thought that it could be karma, that it was Kami's punishment for him. A person that died consumed by the curse of hatred. His last words were a curse instead of a blessing for Madara. A balm for his last brother. A forgiveness that they hadn't gotten peace, yet. A demand, even, that Madara not let him die in vain.
His last words were supposed to give hope to Madara, hope to achieve their dream.
Not hatred.
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But Madara had gotten his village, hadn't he?
Madara had achieved their dream, right?!
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It was a cruel sort of irony that he would be stuck living in the same village his brother and Hashirama fought so hard to create.
The same village he refused to create because he feared that it was a trap of the Senju.
His eyes lingered for a moment on the Hokage Mountain; their stern faces were constant on the horizon. He could not help but feel mad every time I saw the second face on the cliffside. The bastard. It was some kind of grim reminder and bad joke.
Madara's face should be up there.
This village was his dream too!
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Izuna wanted to break stone, since there was no Senju bastards left to kill.
Someday I should try to persuade that whiskered kid to help me vandalize the monument. Izuna thought with a mischievous smile on his face as he remembered the first time he saw a little mob of people, chasing after said kid.
That kind of thought were something frequent. However, Izuna always tried to remind himself that his petty revenge against Tobirama could wait a little.
The bastard was not going anywhere.
Because death people cannot escape.
Izuna knew, he already vandalized his tomb two times.
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Izuna was fairly certain that as a baby he had terrified a good number of people. He was mainly taken care of by his mother —a kind women that went by the name of Amane— a teenager brother and his many aunts. Moreover, he had seen a number of them watch him with concerned expressions. It simply was not normal for a baby his age to be so intelligent, self-aware or to wake up at the middle of night screaming because of nightmares from a battlefield a hundred years gone.
I am a little worried, my baby keep having those nightmares. His new mother said more than one time.
Izuna felt sorry, it was not his intention to worry his new family so much.
But he could not help it! He was a traumatized seventeen-year-old guy in the body of a toddler. Damn.
"Uchiha Makoto!"
Izuna opened his eyes and smiled as he saw the face of his brother.
His brother's cheeks puffed, as he usually would when he was annoyed. "Were you listening to a word I said?" he asked. But Izuna knew he was faking annoyance.
Therefore, he shrugged. "I guess not. Was it important?"
Letting out a little laugh, his brother started to push him on the swing.
Makoto had always been an odd one.
Just like Itachi.
"So… will you tell me about what were you thinking? Your face looked like if you were trying to unravel the secrets of the universe… or plotting revenge"
"Maybe I am," Makoto answered with a mysterious tone on his voice before taking out his tongue.
Just like his last life, he had a brother in this one, too. A brother by the name of Shisui.
"Kids these days have no respect for their elders," Shisui pouted.
"How old are you?" He asked, raising an eyebrow.
"Old enough to kick your ass, shrimp" his brother started to push him even harder on the swing.
"HEY!"
Shisui had always taken care of him whenever their mother was busy.
According to him, their father died while his mother was pregnant, during some kind of disaster with some kind of tailed beast. Therefore, Shisui was the person with whom he spent most of his time, as their mother was always working in order to provide her family.
It never mattered how tired he was, Shisui always had time for him.
When he was one year old, he could remember his brother coming into his room with wide eyes filled with affection, only to sit by his crib and whisper bedtime stories to Izuna's toddler form.
There were nights when Izuna had nightmares, so Shisui spent the entire night there, doing nothing more than tell him stories about his day and things he wanted to do with Izuna when Izuna was older.
Mako-Chan, I can't wait for you to grow up!
He was a great brother and a very sweet boy. He had a sort of softness about him that often reminded Izuna of Madara's rival, Hashirama, something he once would have hated and now clung to. He was also like his little cousin Kagami in many of his mannerisms, if not less prejudiced against people outside the clan. It was nostalgic and heartbreaking all the same, and Izuna could not help but let his heart endear itself to the boy.
He could see just how much Shisui loved him and it was a beautiful thing to watch.
Days slowly turned to months and months turned to years. The time they spend together slowed when he graduated from the Academy when Izuna was three. Instead, they changed to spare hours spent walking through the Uchiha Compound streets and visits to the park on a nearby hill. Izuna treasured these moments even more once Shisui started going out on missions, despite the fact that Shisui had a few more months yet before he would be allowed to take on anything more dangerous than chasing a cat.
One day, Shisui would go on a mission far more dangerous than chasing a cat and one day he might not come back.
So Izuna treasured the time they spent together, no matter what they did during those times. Be it reading from the old scrolls in the Uchiha libraries, wandering around the backstreets of the compound, or late night story telling over hot chocolate and smiles.
At age four, nothing too exciting had happened in Izuna's life. The most exciting thing to look forward too was the times Shisui occasionally took him to the park on the hill. It was fun, in a way, to lose himself in the facade of a child and pretend that he was 'Just little Makoto' rather than an S-rank shinobi reborn in the body of one of his descendants.
It let him wonder if this was what a real childhood was like, he thought to himself as they were playing on the swings.
No worries about endless war.
No more innocent blood spills.
A perfect world.
A world were sons could bury their fathers and no fathers had to bury their sons.
This was the dream of his family. The dream the Uchiha fought so hard to achieve for countless generations and so many died without seeing it come true.
And he was granted the privilege of living that dream.
Maybe, being reborn was not that bad.
Today, Shisui told him that he would met his best friends little brother.
So you could say that Izuna was a little more excited than usual.
But then it hit him. A chakra he had been searching for, even if he had not realized it.
Madara
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