Published: 5/31/2016

昨日 (中編)

yesterday (chuuhen)

Despite everything, Hashirama never hated his father—not then, and not ever. Not even after he took away his best friend and then killed the other. It was strange, but it was also not, because when Hashirama looked deeply at himself, he could see his father. Had things gone another way, he knew he could have been just like Butsuma: made cruel by the cruelty of the times, clinging desperately to the ones who were left, lashing out with wild fury at anyone who approached.

Butsuma never told his sons his story, but still, Hashirama understood. He understood when he became the leader of the Senju and led men out to die, and he understood when he held his own children for the first time. But, perhaps more to the point, he had known one thing even back then, when he had still been a boy: even heartless men like Butsuma had things that were precious to them.

Hashirama didn't know if Asuna would have actually killed Tobirama, had he not appeared when he did. Even Asuna didn't know herself; when he asked her, she merely said, "Maybe. I didn't have many options." But Butsuma hadn't cared to give her the chance, and he had been more than ready to choose between her life and Tobirama's. For a man whose number of sons had, at the time, only recently been halved, it probably hadn't been much of a choice at all.

In the aftermath of the fight, Hashirama was sent out to scavenge the ruins of the Momiji compound for any usable medical supplies. Though Tobirama's injury wasn't fatal, it was not insignificant enough to be called trivial; that much was obvious just by looking. With the Senju clan's superior medical knowledge, it would be fine to move on by tomorrow evening, but until they returned to the compound first aid would be a critical concern.

"She was a worthier opponent than I expected," Butsuma murmured, examining his son's leg with a look of muted respect. "But you did well, Tobirama. Good job."

"Yes, Father," Tobirama said through gritted teeth. Even to him, the praise felt misplaced. He wasn't sure how any shinobi would feel proud after hearing a scream like that.

Hashirama, while he was investigating the abandoned compound, was able to learn much about the Momiji clan. Though the place was utterly empty of people, their remnants still lingered, even if they were obscured by layers of dust and decay.

It was immediately obvious why he never suspected Asuna came from a shinobi family: her family was hardly shinobi at all. The halls of the main house—the one that Tobirama and Butsuma had found her in—were nothing like the spartan halls of the Senju compound's. They were decorated with paintings and folding screens and vases of flowers—though the flowers, as expected, had long since wilted. The whole place was warmly decorated and crowded with all sorts of little trinkets and baubles. Almost everything seemed to be a product of the clan itself; all of the art and even the pottery was signed by people surnamed Momiji.

The Momiji clan, it seemed, had been full of fantastic artists. The paintings held both brilliant landscapes and scenes of daily life in their frames. Great mountain ranges and sunny forests were punctuated with snapshots of wet laundry drying on clotheslines, boys playing with wooden swords, and young people clustered together, singing and strumming on lutes. The folding screens told stories, too, of seasons changing, or of imagined lives. One of them depicted two children growing up, falling in love, and starting a family; another just down the hall started with an old man alone in his garden at dawn and ended with him wading into a river in the dead of night. Scrolls and poems and ink paintings hung on the walls of almost every room that he entered. Some of them looked amateurish, at least to Hashirama's untrained eye, but most of them didn't; they looked very skilled. It was evident that what energy a Senju would have put into training, a Momiji poured into the arts.

Artifacts of their lives were scattered everywhere, and Hashirama felt every inch like the trespasser he was as he rummaged around in search of supplies. He opened a box in one room and found several beautiful hair combs stored with gentle care; he opened a drawer and discovered a stash of secret letters hidden between stacks of socks; he opened a chest and beheld a rainbow of summer kimonos, yukatas just like the kind Asuna wore.

The attack must have occurred right after a meal. There were trays, tea cups, and empty lacquer dishes standing on various side tables throughout the entire house; one of the plates still had chopsticks laying across the bare skeleton of a fish on it. The accompanying bowl's bottom was coated with a hardened layer of leftover miso.

There was no infirmary in the main house; the compound's clinic, it seemed, laid elsewhere. Hashirama went from one end of the building to another and found an exit through an enormous hole in the wall; when he emerged, most of the buildings were crumbling in some shape or form. It was there that the charring and abandoned weapons appeared. There were a few shuriken lying about, and several arrows were still lodged in the ground and walls. When he went a little further in, Hashirama came across an enormous spray of dried blood staining the side of one of the houses.

He gave up his search when he went inside another half-annihilated building and found the first room he entered strewn with sheets of music and broken instruments. There were shinobues and biwas scattered on the floor; a single koto was sitting in the shattered remains of a wooden stand near the window, split into two splintered halves.

After that, Hashirama met with Madara again at the riverside. Butsuma tried to kill Izuna; Tajima tried to kill Tobirama. The older brothers intervened, and then they parted from there as enemies. Hashirama's heart felt raw with loss, and after everything was over and he was sitting back at home again, staring up at a moonless sky, he wondered how on earth he would tell Madara now how Asuna had died.

Madara didn't learn of it for a long time. It was only several months later, during a lull in a heated duel with his former best friend, that Hashirama managed to get out between panting breaths, "I need to tell you something."

"What?" Madara asked, similarly winded. His face was inscrutable to Hashirama's eyes, but he thought he detected a faint hint of anxiety in Madara's gaze.

"It's about Asuna," Hashirama muttered, suddenly finding himself unable to look anywhere but at the ground in front of his feet. "...She's dead."

"What?" The moment of incredulity was brief, and the demand for an answer was quick in coming. Madara jerked forward. "What do you mean?!"

"My—Father, he…" Hashirama swallowed, and then steeled himself and looked up. "Father killed her. Because he thought she was a spy."

Hashirama never knew what went through Madara's head after that. He didn't know if Madara charged at him with a yell of fury because he blamed him, or just because he was angry and there was nothing else to be done. But they fought again and traded the most vicious blows they had to date, and both of them went home that day with matching gashes on their shoulders. It was almost poetic, Hashirama thought mirthlessly. Matching wounds for the matching tears in their hearts, inflicted on each other by each other. Asuna's death was just a twist of the knife.

Years passed like that, and though the fighting never ceased, time took the edge off the pain. Hashirama became absorbed in the matters of his clan. They fought with the Uchiha again, and then with the Hagoromo; there was a hapless skirmish with the Shimura, a tense standoff with the Sarutobi, and then battle again with the Uchiha. The previous generation began to grow older, and talk of a new clan head began; Hashirama was put forward as a candidate, and he was highly favored for the position. He was leader of the Senju before his twentieth birthday.

He didn't know what to make of it. Everything seemed to be changing all at once, but at the same time, nothing had changed at all. Clans were still fighting. Shinobi were still killing. Children were still dying.

What was the point of it all?

It was during that period, though, that two of the most marvelous events of his life occurred. One, he took a group of Senju shinobi down to the coast to meet with the Uzumaki, where he encountered Mito; two, he found Asuna while traveling there.

Halfway through their journey, Hashirama and his men stopped at an inn town along the Naka River. The people there held no love for shinobi; it was a town made up of survivors who had been displaced by the ninjas' endless fighting. But business was business, and they were not turned away. It being the first occasion of the whole trip they would not be camping, the shinobi celebrated by eating well and ordering numerous drinks. Hashirama sat up with them well into the night, and the innkeeper grudgingly bought out entertainment in the form of storytellers and music-makers.

After several rounds of drinking, a man began singing, and the sound of a koto dipped in from the background. The song it played was not a particularly sad one, but Hashirama found himself feeling melancholic anyway. He usually did when he heard the koto; it made him think of days long past, and of the experiences he'd never had the chance to have. Holding in a sigh, he had his neighbor pour him another drink and looked over at the performers.

Hashirama blinked a few times. Wondering if he was not drunk, he leaned forward with wide eyes, staring at the woman sitting at the Japanese harp. Her hair—her face, her profile—

It was her. She looked up in between notes, and their eyes met. Hashirama recognized the gaze of Momiji Asuna instantly; a shiver of nostalgia, a sensation of years-old familiarity, ran down his spine.

He spent the rest of the night staring at her with unconcealed intensity. When they noticed, his men began teasing him mercilessly, nudging him and whistling and laughing, but he couldn't bring himself to care. When the performances finally ended and she got up to leave, he stood up and went after her, heedless of their hooting. The inn's staff glared suspiciously at him as he passed.

She was waiting for him just outside. She had recognized him too, despite the changes the years had wrought. Asuna confessed later on that she had seen him and half-wondered if he wasn't someone else; perhaps a closely-related relative who bore him a close resemblance, or something similar. Even though she had recognized him almost immediately, she told him, she almost hadn't been able to reconcile the image of the skinny preteen boy with a bowl-cut to the charismatic, long-haired, muscled man drinking with his troop of Senju shinobi, sitting miraculously in her employer's inn. Added to that, his voice had become unrecognizably deep.

Asuna, on the other hand, had changed very little. Indeed, Hashirama thought, she looked like she had been frozen in time. Aside from a taller height, a slightly more filled-out figure, and a slimmer face, she looked largely the same as she had when they had been children. Her hair was just same, as was her style of dress; she was even wearing the exact same wooden hairpin she had always worn, those seven years ago. There was a faint line on the skin of her forehead, peeking out from under the very edge of her hair—a scar?—that he did not recall being there before, but that was one of the only differences he could find.

"Asuna?" he asked, very softly. The crickets were chirping, and a single cicada was wailing somewhere in the darkness. "Momiji Asuna?"

"Hashirama?" a quiet, disbelieving voice answered. Hashirama felt himself begin to tremble as he stepped forward. The moon, round and full, vanished behind the clouds before emerging again, casting pale light down onto the dirt road below. The figure standing before him lit up.

Hashirama found himself seizing Asuna's arm and pulling her into a bone-crushing hug. "Unbelievable," he breathed. "You're alive."

"How are you here?" Asuna asked into his chest, muffled voice filled with incomprehension. "How can you be… here?"

"How can you be here, my friend?" Hashirama found himself laughing, relaxing his grip and holding her out at arm's length with his hands on her shoulders. He grinned so widely he thought his face might split, and tears sprung to his eyes. "I can't believe it. You fell to your death… and you're alive."

At that point, Asuna began to do something Hashirama had never seen her do: she began to cry. First, it was just a small sniffle—a hiccup—and then she was burying her face in her hands, sobbing.

"Hashirama," she gasped, and then repeated, "Hashirama. I…"

Hashirama began to cry too, but it was a laughing cry. The contagious kind, because after a minute, Asuna began to laugh too, as runny-nosed and tear-smeared as she was.

Asuna, Hashirama learned that evening, had survived her fall by dislocating her shoulder and breaking three ribs by falling on as many trees. She had grabbed onto one of the boughs sticking out from the cliff face, broken it, hit another one, and then gone careening through the canopy, colliding with a number branches. Her fall had ended in the deeper end of the Naka River. She was lucky, she said, to not have hit her head until she'd been swept downstream a ways. She would have drowned while unconscious otherwise.

As it was, she had been pulled out of the river a few miles north of this very inn town by a pair of fishermen, who had mistaken her for a corpse. The people here had been kind enough to care for her while she recovered, and then to give her work once she was well. Since then, she had been working at the inn, helping with the upkeep for her lodgings during the day and giving performances for pay at night.

"They're good people, even if they're cagey. I'm sorry for their hostility," Asuna apologized on their behalf. She twisted her fingers together as the moment of levity faded. "But they… they've lost a lot. And… they don't like being reminded of it."

Concern was plain on her face. Hashirama knew that look well. It was the look the Senju wives made when their husbands went out to war, when men long-separated from their brothers paced and waited for word of their siblings' safety, when children at home waited by the door for their parents, while their in the field anxiously waited to return home...

"I understand." Hashirama nodded. The destructive lifestyle of shinobi hurt everyone, the innocent most of all. A sober moment passed; then he looked at Asuna shrewdly.

"...No, they don't know about me," she muttered, having caught the meaning of his gaze. "They just assumed. That I was like them, I mean. And… well, I just never told them."

Just like you never told us, Hashirama mused. He didn't reply right away; instead, he put a hand on her forehead and swept back her hair.

It was a scar.

"Am I a coward?" Asuna asked in a whisper as Hashirama let out a long, unhappy sigh. He and Madara had often admired Asuna's fair, unblemished skin together as children, privately and without her knowledge. She had been nothing like their clans' kunoichi, who were just as pockmarked and scar-ridden as the men were. Where they had had the reminders of conflict carved into their very beings, she had looked like peace. She had had the skin of a girl who didn't fight.

She never told anyone she was a ninja, and who could blame her? She didn't act like one; she didn't want to. She'd tried to live outside of her shinobi heritage. Most of the Momiji, Hashirama knew, had.

"I don't know," he murmured after a while, letting his arm drop. He was quiet for a long moment, considering. Then he said, "But I know I have been."

Asuna stared up at him as he stepped back and regarded her gravely.

"I've been running away," Hashirama told her, clenching his fists. "I realize that now. I've had the power to change things for a long time. I just didn't want to face the truth."

"What changed?" Asuna asked, uncomprehending but willing to take him at his word. Hashirama had always loved that about her, too. She believed in a way no shinobi ever could. He put his hands on her shoulders again and smiled.

He couldn't undo her scars, but perhaps he could undo them for all of the girls—for all of the boys, for all of the children—yet to come.

"The truth faced me."

The next day started with screaming.

The shinobi were downstairs in a flash, where the innkeeper's wife was hurling baskets—both empty and filled—at someone outside the door.

"You little hussy!" she raved, hair flying free of its holder as she thrashed her arms. "You slut! You whore!"

Hashirama went still as he saw who was outside, weathering the assault. Arms raised over her head, Asuna ducked and dodged and cried, "Obasan, it's a misunderstanding! A misunderstanding—"

"You were my daughter!" the woman shrieked back. "I made you my own! I let you take Miwa's place! How could you do this?!"

The hysterical woman screamed and yelled until she staggered; then her husband caught her, and she collapsed into his arms, sobbing. Red-faced, the innkeeper faced Asuna.

"After years at our table, enjoying our hospitality," he began stiffly, voice quivering with rage, "receiving our love, living together with us—you've betrayed us. With a ninja man. With a shinobi!"

"I didn't! I would never!" Asuna pleaded, hands clutched together. "It's not like that!"

"Do you think I'm deaf?" the innkeeper snarled. "Do you think I haven't heard these men nattering all night about you and him? Do you think we didn't see you together outside, talking—" his face contorted with disgust— "holding each other? I'm not stupid, girl!"

"Ojisan, let me explain," Asuna begged. "I should have told you—I know—but it's not—"

"What is there for you to tell me?" Setting his wife down, the innkeeper marched forward and shoved Asuna's shoulder. She staggered back like she was made of straw. "More lies? No. You will never have my trust again. Get out."

"Ojisan," Asuna whispered. Tears gathered in her eyes. "Ojisan, no. Please—"

"Don't call me that. Get out!" The innkeeper spat at her feet. "Never show your face here again."

Hashirama set his face like flint when the man turned and faced him. The Senju men shifted behind him.

"Shinobi, you are no longer welcome here," the innkeeper said. "Pay for your stay and leave us."

"Very well," Hashirama replied evenly. He wasted no time in drawing his money pouch from his belt; after he picked out the ryo owed, he dropped the coins on the counter beside him like stones, letting them clatter and spin and roll. "We gladly depart."

There was absolute silence as Hashirama motioned his men forward and strode past the innkeeper. They exited; the door slammed behind them.

"Asuna," Hashirama murmured to the woman still standing frozen on the road, staring blanking at the shut door before her. He touched her arm gently.

"It's our fault," Nisuke said, and his bowed with shame. "We spoke unnecessarily. We shouldn't have—"

"Peace, Nisuke." Hashirama held up a hand. "It's not your fault. It was a misunderstanding." He looked to Asuna again. "Wasn't it?"

"A misunderstanding," Asuna echoed. She lowered her head and stared at her feet, lip beginning to tremble. Then she put a hand over her mouth and turned her face away.

"Asuna…" Hashirama sighed.

The Senju shinobi looked on with stricken faces as she tried to muffle the sound of her crying with her hand. Finally, after what seemed like a small eternity, she turned back to Hashirama.

"I have no family left," she said, and her cracked like a heart breaking.

Hashirama, for a moment, was struck dumb. There was a desolate pause. But then determination welled up within him, and he put a hand on her shoulder again.

"No," he said.

A look of confusion formed on her face. "No…?"

"No. You do have family left. I am your family. We are your family," Hashirama said firmly. He turned to his men. "Do you see your sister here?" he asked. "With my authority as head of the Senju, I make it so. Momiji Asuna is a daughter of this clan. You are to treat her as your own flesh and blood."

There was stunned silence. Hashirama's gaze hardened.

"She is your own blood. Swear it!"

The Senju shinobi straightened, shoulders snapping up. "We swear!" a chorus of voices cried.

"Good." Hashirama nodded, satisfied. He faced Asuna again.

"Hashirama, I…" she began, utterly baffled.

"Let me do at least this for you, old friend," Hashirama interrupted her. "You have suffered on account of the Senju enough. Let me make it right."

Though Hashirama had never been given the opportunity to study Asuna's crying face as a child, he found that now they were adults, he was learning quickly.