Where the Sun Meets the Horizon
Author Note: This is a hurriedly written entry for 'pikacheeka's competition on tumblr. I apologise for all the allegory. Also warning for cannibalism. Also does not really abide by canon because I don't really buy into the Romeo and Juliet re-enactment.
His brother's eyes are like the sun dipping down to kiss the horizon in a great swathe of light, bleeding the battlefield red and casting great shadows on the dead.
And so it is no great surprise when Hashirama says, 'You have beautiful eyes.'
Ironic that Hashirama would find death and loss beautiful when even his mere breath could stir up dead roots and spring blossoms from the wintered earth.
The Senju clan is standing on the other side of the clearing, watching and waiting, no doubt expecting him to leap up and maul their clan head.
But he cannot. His own clan is behind him, hungering for a peace he does not want.
Izuna, he thinks, Izuna, they have forgotten your sacrifice. They have forgotten their dead. But I have not forgotten mine.
But if Hashirama wanted to reduce this to an exchange of war talents, then he would oblige him.
'You have strong hands,' he says, thinking not of the handshake that morning which had sealed the alliance, but of past battles and the feeling of fleeting phantom hands of wood brushing against his neck.
They are kneeling now, and he has a brush in his hand. He's not sure how they got there but he's dipping his brush in ink and writing his own name in staggered strokes next to Senju Hashirama's pristine calligraphy.
And just like that, with his clansmen at his back, their gazes heavy and hungering, the era of peace has begun.
War always felt more real than peace.
The first time he sees sign of Hashirama is in the fattened apple cheeks of a dead Senju boy.
It was after yet another battle, and he's still licking blood off his lips and trembling with the dying shocks of battle fervor, when he stumbles across it. He kneels, intrigued despite himself at the face of the corpse.
He recalls the softness of those cheeks, ripe and round like the sun ballooning in the sky. Odd, that the Senju had enough food to feed even the children who were not yet important enough to be fed when even the men had but scraps to warm their bellies.
He recalls the ridges of Izuna's spine, the bruises where skin stretched too tight over fledgling bones, and feels particularly vindicated as he starts chopping the corpse into little bits.
This could be mutually beneficial.
They wouldn't go hungry for a while.
The first time he sees Hashirama is across the battlefield, nestled in the centre of a forest of great trees eclipsing the sun as they swallowed up the ground.
Immediately, as if the earth had split open and the core of the world had placed itself in the body of this one person, he was drawn forward by sheer gravity.
He's charging before his eyes have even flared red, besieged on all sides by whipping branches, but he only has eyes for the boy whose whole being is alight with starlight and the minstrel's song of spring.
There's a moment- as there always is- when their eyes finally meet and the air folds in on itself, time suspended and he feels like he's drowning in a golden web cast by the interweaving of their souls. His blade makes a notch in the skin of the boy's neck, and in turn a branch hurtles past him, wood brushing and scraping like a palm on the back of his neck.
The moment ends, the branches twisting around his arm, and he has to scrabble with his own hands to break free.
Later he will not remember the rest of the battle. He will only remember how a dash of sunlight had lit those eyes up with flecks of gold. His brother will bandage up his hands which had been torn open at the fingertips when he freed himself, all the while with an indescribable expression on his face.
He will think that despite his torn fingers, he is glad he had left his mark in blood on the extension of the boy's soul.
Senju Hashirama is a name he casts in blood into his memory, even years after he comes to associate blood with sacrifice.
He knows war by hunger and he knows hunger by the valleys of Izuna's ribs, by the splay of his own fingers as he tears into splintering wood, and now by his own gaze on Hashirama's face.
They're battling again, and it seems like all they've ever known is the give and take of battle. But it doesn't matter because battle is where humans are truest, when masks are torn down by bloodlust and the fever pitch crescendo of instinct.
So really, it doesn't matter that they've never spoken a word to each other.
They know each other by the sun and the earth and the blood that knits the two together.
They are binary stars, drawn together by the sheer weight of desire and chaotic personality.
Izuna dies in winter, when food is even more scarce than usual and hunger is a prerequisite for life.
In any other season, he would have built him a pyre and sent him off him a blaze of fire, but it's winter and-
'For the clan,' Izuna says, smiling as if it's spring and the sun is still ripe and he still has his eyes.
And so he does, all the while thinking, for the clan I will sacrifice even my blood and flesh.
He dreams of a towering pyre that eclipses the sun, the day set alight like it's sunset as smoke filters light in red.
He dreams of wood burning and he doesn't care whether it's his dream or Izuna's.
The clan has forsaken him.
They have forgotten physical hunger and now hunger for peace with the clan who has starved them of their lives and of their dead.
They have forgotten Izuna who had forgone the afterlife for their sakes, whose own flesh had ripened their bellies and sated their wretched hunger, and this is how they repay him.
He had thought that hunger had burnt the fire from him, but fire cannot destroy fire, and so he rages, turning into an inferno of seething hatred and rage, a blistering star of scorned wrath.
But he remembers that in his last moments, Izuna had smiled and said, for the clan, and he cannot deny his brother this.
'Madara,' Hashirama says, as if the taste of his name has always been on his tongue.
Hashirama, he does not say in reply, but the name is ashiver in the air, sweet and ripe like the gold where the sun has barely begun to touch the horizon.
Hashirama is holding out his hand.
He thinks of soft cheeks and a golden cage closing in around him as a wooden palm touches his neck, of gravity and hunger, of the Mangekyou and the smell of burning wood. He thinks that perhaps they all mean the same thing, that they're a repetition of a fate he cannot deny.
He thinks of sacrifice and blood on snow in the depths of a starved winter.
But now spring is staring at him expectantly and he knows that every path would only have led here.
The illusion of peace takes hold better than any genjutsu could.
So he takes that hand and the world shakes as the sun sinks into the horizon.
They're standing at the top of a mountain, looking down on the neat rows of buildings making their village.
'So what do you think of Hokage?' Hashirama's smile is a spill of light on his bare skin.
Fire Shadow, he thinks as the sun casts a gentle light upon their village, and he feels buoyed by the heat of it, the hope of their people crested in this one title where the sun leaves its mark on the earth with the will of fire.
'Fitting.'
And in that moment he feels like the sun, breathing life and warmth to a whole world.
In a few months, this too will end. He will realise that the fate of binary stars is that one will always lose its light to feed the flame of the other, and he will refuse to be the one who loses.
But in this moment, he is merely the sun dipping down to kiss the horizon in a great swathe of light.
END