A/N: Hey look! Lying author tells lies!
So, I was writing the final chapter, the Valley of the End, all dramatic, and I was like, 'wait, according to my evil conspiracy theory timeline, Mito should be pregnant right now. And Hashi should know about her affair. What went wrong?'
So I wrote another chapter to be in the middle. And this is it. Since the last chapter is already half written, I should finish this soon (and yes, I said that last time, and I'm a lying liar who lies, yes, yes. But trust me. Just do).
Thanks to everyone who has reviewed or placed this on alerts so far! It means a lot to me.
Chapter 3: Tobirama's Mistress
"You want to know why it is necessary that someone carry this burden," Mito Uzumaki says. "You want to know, also, why it is you who has been asked to do this. I will try to answer you."
Mito speaks to the girl keeling before her without frivolity, with the formality of a woman used to communicating about life and death. If there is one virtue of shinobi society it is that they never lie to children solely for the sake of some imagined preservation of innocence. A ninja is a ninja, however young.
Appreciating this straightforwardness, and a little calmed by it, Kushina nods. She will listen.
"Someone," Mito goes on, "Must be a prison for the fox in order to keep safe the rest of the world; not just this village; all the villages. The nine-tails causes chaos and destruction; it tempts people. Power always tempts people, you know."
She pauses, briefly, thinking of a young Uchiha with wild hair, long ago; the first in a lineage of men who would try to wield the kyuubi like a weapon.
"If the fox is contained, Kushina, then its host can direct it; keep it under control. And human greed can be met with human strength, too. I have been offered riches and power by many nations in exchange for fighting in their wars; I have refused. And that is where you come in; a jinchuuriki must be strong and brave, and also able to judge the difference between war and peace; between a liar and an honorable shinobi."
The girl looks up at her and asks the question Mito has been waiting for.
"But how can I be happy? You say I have to be strong, but how can I be that if everyone hates me, if I don't have anything to fight the kyuubi with myself?"
There is silence in the shady room, with its hangings and broad bed. It is heavy silence, bearing the weight of sincere inquiry. A question has been asked.
In the lattice of her past scattered with bright memories, Mito looks for an answer.
The night after Tobirama kisses her, Mito sleeps beside the place in her bed where her husband should be and turns duty over and over in her mind.
She wants Tobi in a way that she never wanted Hashirama, and the pull of attraction is both frightening and oddly right.
She is also afraid, or perhaps cautious; wary of disappointing the people who trust her. But, in this village where she is the Hokage's wife before she is a woman or a kunoichi, Mito is lonely. However, she was lonely within her own clan, too; she has been lonely all her life. That is the point.
Tobirama is the only person Mito has ever known whom she could say anything to. They began with one secret, one hidden thing shared, and now she cannot live without him. He is not a duty; he is a pleasure, only. She has never had anything without a tinge of obligation attached.
Mito lies in her bed and, like a good diplomat, a negotiator between right and wrong, weighs the options. She weighs her own suffering beside what Tobirama is to her; she weighs her duty beside what she wants.
Mito spends the next day dictating letters to the new Kazekage and the factions which oppose him, the rippling lines of politics and faux-patriotic argument standing in stark contrast to the social undercurrents of her village.
She occupies her mind with all the extraneous phenomena of her job, and comes home late that night to find her bed empty once more.
To be Hashirama's wife is to deal in economics and appearances, the passion of a community and the opinions of a scattered world.
To be Tobirama's mistress, she decides that night, finally coming to a reckoning of her choices- would be to enter another sort of world- one which the women of her clan had transferred in their gossip, one which she has never stepped into. Mito has stood to one side, always, considering the muddle with a kind of detached non-interest.
What it would be like to be in love with Tobirama Senju is an unknown thing. The Hokage's wife flees the idea, appalled.
But Mito; Mito wants the knowledge.
On the third night, confident that Hashirama will not be home until dawn, Mito slips out of her house and into the silent streets of the sleeping village, on her own journey.
When Mito climbs onto the sill of Tobirama's bedroom window, traps greet her, as she expected. She avoids the shuriken which whistles past her head, leaps to the floor in a dive over a tripwire and holds up her hands in a gesture of appeasement.
"Tobi, it's me," she says; just to be sure he has noticed. There is a proverb about what happens to people who wake sleeping tigers, but to disturb the rest of a powerful shinobi is infinitely more dangerous.
"Mito," Tobirama says, dropping the kunai he is holding. Her eyes scan the tousled strands of his hair in pale moonlight, the way he looks, still poised for battle, clothed in nothing but sleeping trousers, eyes wide.
"Hashi's not home," she says, succinctly. "I thought you might appreciate the company."
"I've been wondering if I would ever see you again."
She gestures with one hand, indicating her presence.
"Well, I'm here now. You haven't frightened me away just yet."
He smiles; a sideways quirk of the lips, almost contemplative.
"You are not quite what I expected you to be, Mito Uzumaki."
"What did you expect?"
He stands like a cat, poised in the dark, and his eyes watch her. She thinks, then, that what he says next will be another kind of undercurrent; more serious than it appears.
His voice is low, almost husky.
"I thought my brother would marry a modest girl with a powerful clan and a mediocre mind. That's the ideal in a political alliance, you know. And then I met you, at the wedding. You were so young, and yet older than I was, in some ways…"
"I defied your expectations?"
"Maybe. You dressed like a modest girl, as expected, but you ran the household like a kunoichi waging war. Your clan is strong, but you are also strong; stronger than I am, in some ways. And you told me that your husband was sleeping with Madara Uchiha as if you were reporting plumbing issues."
He stops, having taken a step towards her. They are closer, now. She smiles.
"Everything was just another problem to me, for a long time."
"Am I just another problem? I might create problems; I have a knack for being involved in them."
"Do you think this is a bad idea?"
Tobirama shrugs.
"It might be. But the inhabitants of a shinobi village live at war. We could be dead tomorrow. Maybe that's what my brother is thinking, wherever he and Madara are tonight."
It happens so fast- they both move forward, and there is no space to be apart.
"I didn't expect your hair to be red, either," Tobirama murmurs, his fingers tangled in it. "I didn't expect to fall in love with you."
Mito's hands splay across his back, feeling warm skin and the thin lines of battle scars. In the back of her mind, the Hokage's wife with her etiquette asks what Mito is doing, there in the dark with her husband's brother.
Tobirama kisses her, soft at first. In their tangled progression towards the bed he steps on the handle of his dropped kunai and swears, but it does not matter.
The Hokage's wife asks questions. But Mito has the answer, because love is clarity as well as undercurrents.
The answer is: she is learning a new thing. A new way of being. And it is worth the risk. She has learned that from Hashirama; the worth of love.
Five months pass in Konoha; in the shinobi village with its politics and its secrets.
Mito's life seems made up of mirrored surfaces. There are the hours of her work, her duty. There are the hours spent with Hashi; their relationship (once like that of friends who do not spend much time together) now grown silent. She wonders if he should be told of her affair and he wonders if she knows of his; if she will speak of it.
Then there are the hours stolen with Tobi in the dark. She learns quickly, or so he says sometimes with vanished breaths, his hair a riot of moonlight. He tells her, one night, that he had barely believed her when she said that Hashi hadn't touched her. "I couldn't imagine anyone keeping their hands off you," he whispers, the sometimes-noble flatterer. Every day she managed to forget the subtleties of him, until nighttime offers sudden recollection.
There is another night, too, when Mito tries to coax out of him the choices he had to make in doing this.
"Why?" she asks, lying beside him, watching the way his eyes look, half-lidded, satiated and drooping towards slumber. "Why sleep with your brother's wife?"
He frowns briefly; he does not like hearing labels used for her, even when they are entirely accurate.
"Because," he says at last, "Although I love my brother, he is nearly a madman. And this is his village. His child, his wife, his family; Konoha is all this for him. It used to make me jealous. But then I started falling in love with you, and I wasn't thinking about how you were his wife. I was thinking about how you were someone else who was alone."
Mito smiles.
"So you're with me because your brother likes peace and Uchiha men more than he likes you?"
He swats at her half-heartedly with the hand she is not holding.
"I'm with you because you are clever and beautiful and you make me happy, foolish woman. My brother is… hard to understand, sometimes. But with you, I think I know what makes him do the things he does. What makes him love the village, and Madara."
And then, because he is tired and Mito has unfairly asked him questions after sex, Tobirama's eyes close. She doesn't make him keep talking. Mito merely falls asleep beside him, wondering which of them had to make the harder choice, in the end.
Five months of broken mirrors. And then, two weeks in which Mito's suspicion begins to grow, germinating in her subconscious, flowering in her dreams and driving her, at last, to make a discreet visit.
One morning, Mito goes to see one of the Uchiha women, asking for advice. The irony is killing, but many desperate, childless wives are found among this bloodline-encumbered group of shinobi. Money is there to be made, and experts with the knowledge Mito needs abound.
Questions are asked, examination occurs, and news is delivered. It is all pleasant enough. The dark-haired Uchiha woman who at last offers a diagnosis is somewhat puzzled to see how terrified the Hokage's wife looks, when she is told.
An hour later, Mito stands in her kitchen waiting for Hashirama to come home, a woman frozen in time, lit by the afternoon sun. Her hands are already making themselves comfortable across her belly; some protective instinct, perhaps, or it might just be paranoia. Nothing shows, yet. She has nearly three months before anything does, but a façade can only go on so long.
Mito is not sure how she feels. This, this lack of surety, has never happened before; even in the furtive concealment of the preceding months, she knew that she loved Tobi and that it would be dangerous to sleep with him. Then, it was merely a matter of reconciling the perils with what she wanted, however hard the choice.
Now… now Mito is standing here, pregnant with her lover's child, waiting for her husband to come home.
What will she do with a baby? What does anyone do? She has so many duties already… and what will she tell people, tell shinobi, tell her child when it grows old enough? Her husband is a man with a kekkei genkai, a unique genetic code. This baby will never be a wielder of Mokuton, and while that may be excused on counts of chance inheritance what if it looks like Tobi? People will guess. Her clan will guess; her mother will, and all the careful concealment of time will come crashing down.
Hashirama walks into the kitchen and is met with late afternoon sunlight and the flaming red of his wife's hair, the worry on her face. He is tired (he sleeps little, nowadays, and Madara demands ever more of him) but anxiety is infectious. He has never seen Mito openly distraught before; he wonders if this is the day that they finally talk about their marriage (or their lack of one).
The first Hokage stands in the doorway, passive, prepared. He is ready to deal with his own sins; his own secrets.
Instead, Mito turns around and says in a quiet voice,
"I'm pregnant with your brother's child."
It is a straightforward statement; somewhat dramatic, but it conveys the point.
For a long moment, Hashirama is silent. He has never been a man to react instantly to any news; verbal outrage or shock is foreign to him. He thinks about what his wife has just told him, all its implications. Then he asks,
"Do you love him?"
Mito almost laughs. It is not the thing for a cuckolded husband to respond with, but it is perfectly appropriate for Hashirama.
"Yes," she says, "Yes."
Hashirama's eyes are lit with molten gold in the sunlight, like illumination after rain. He is, she reflects for the hundredth time, a very handsome man, although there are no laugh lines around his mouth, no marks of humor such as her own lover bears.
"You know about Madara?" he asks.
She nods.
"I know. I've known for a long time, in a roundabout way. Tobi affirmed it, and then he told me it didn't matter. He said he understood having someone for yourself; someone to hold on to."
Hashirama looks at her with the infinite grief of a man who wants to be jealous but cannot muster the self-righteousness.
"I wish I could have made you happy," he says, "I wish it. I wish it so much that it would be easy to loathe my brother for being successful in my place."
"I hated you," Mito says, simply. "I hated you for a long time, in fits and starts. Under the surface, for a moment at night, I hated you. But if I live as if your loving an Uchiha was my fault I'll never be anything but bitter. Forgiveness is always a little selfish, in the end."
She looks at him.
"What will we tell people?" she asks, and the question is an enormous relief. Now, for the first time, she and Hashirama are co-conspirators, allied in their secrets. If they cannot be husband and wife, at least their lives will intersect here, over this child.
"We will tell them the truth," the Hokage answers. "That I am glad to raise a child in this village, a child of the Senju and the Uzumaki. I may be a terrible husband, but I can at least be enough of a father- even a false one- to make up for that."
Then, at last, Mito does laugh. She laughs until she cries, collapsed on the kitchen floor in a heap of mirth, because this is all so strange. By all the laws of narrative and human foolishness she should be angry, Hashi should be angry, Tobirama should be deeply anguished by this whole affair. Instead, the only one who is angry is Madara, somewhere, and he is always angry over one thing and another, being who he is.
Instead of what, according to all the warnings of her mother, should be happening, Mito is not steeling herself to give birth to a baby alone and undefended. Her husband, who, it occurs to her, is naturally inclined to teach and care for anything which grows within his area of duty, will be, if not the father, at least the parent of this bastard child. Her lover, whom she must tell, oh, dear, she must tell Tobi, will probably be pleased not to have to hide from his brother any longer.
It is so ridiculous that Mito laughs, overcome with mirth in front of the bewildered Hashirama. It is all so ridiculous. So silly. And, quite possibly, it is all right.
But it is only all right for a while; for a week, for seven days, for what seems so short a span of time.
There is only space in the speeding onrush of the world for Tobirama to rejoice, for the Senju brothers to have one last layer of understanding, for Mito to come to terms with the fact that this offspring of hers is going to have a very complicated upbringing. There is space to breath, but that is all.
And then, triggered by fear for his war-weary clan, jealousy over Hashirama's capacity to balance emotion and responsibility; triggered by his own pride, Madara Uchiha leaves the village. He flees, towards the border, towards the place which history will name the Valley of the End.
And Hashirama does not even have time to tell his wife or his brother where he is going. He merely begins to run, chasing Madara, chasing the precarious, fragile world he has built and a universe of battle.
Mito, walking out the door of her house under the bright sun, sees her husband with flying hair and panic in his eyes run past her, towards the forest, out of the village.
She stands in the doorway, suddenly afraid; something has gone wrong, she knows it. Another test has arrived. Maybe the greatest one. Maybe the end.
