Characters/Pairings: HashiMito, Madara
A/N: I don't know why, but I love Mito. I have absolutely no explanation, except that maybe it's that she's a near-absolute blank slate and that means I get to play with her. A lot.
Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto.
Mito has always been strong, always steadfast in the face of whatever hardship may confront her. She has never known any other way, for she is taught none in Uzushiogakure and she is expected to learn no other way than sheer, overwhelming strength.
What she is used to is the hardship of learning new seals and signing new contracts (each one seems to require more and more blood from her, as if the contractors are getting more and more greedy and see her as an easy target), studying the kanji, using the special ink and expending chakra in practice, smiling to see the results of her work before passing out on the ground.
What she is used to is swinging strokes with kunai or wakizashi or taking a few senbon and seeing how they fly. If they hit their target, good enough; if they don't, she had best move fast, or she'll be dead.
What Uzumaki Mito is used to is the expenditure of genjutsu. No one told her it would be easy and she does not expect it to be. Genjutsu is an even more fickle monster than sealing; if she does it wrong, she may sleep for days with no method sufficient to rouse her.
What Mito is not used to is the fire and the agony of locking a bijuu within her flesh.
It is a split-second decision, one Mito will regret for the rest of her life. She watches her husband battle and lose against the Uchiha and his monster, and she remembers her seals, the immaculate lines, the firm kanji, her own determination to always be right and always be strong.
She steps forward.
A bijuu was never meant to be encased inside of a human. Especially not a bijuu such as the Kyuubi no Kitsune. Mito burns, she screams, and all the while she manages to keep a look of consummate indifference to her agony, to the fact that a monster is tearing her skin apart from the inside out and remaking it in Its image—even if there is no difference in her appearance in the eyes of anyone else, Mito can never look at herself afterwards without seeing something ugly, something dirty. Her fingernails still seem like delicate shells to the outside world but Mito sees curved claws in their place.
Afterwards, in what should have been the safety of their small home, when the one who has caused all this misery has come and gone, Mito, cursing the folly and the disgrace of her weakness, drops to her knees by the man who is her husband, who is on his back and incapable of rising.
The wakizashi clatters to the floor like a metal waterfall.
Hashirama reaches for Mito's normal—clawedclawedclawed, that's all she sees now—hand to encase in his own, and smiles weakly up at her.
"Well Mito, do you think we've the last of him?"
Uzumaki Mito, white-lipped and trying not to scream, can only shake her head No.