Part 10

Heroine.

They did call her that. Mito heard about it two weeks after they returned to Hidden Leaf. Two weeks after she and Hashirama had buried Madara in the valley where the confrontation had taken place, high on the peaks of the surrounding mountains. Two weeks after they entered the village again and were greeted by cheers and jubilant salutations which promptly fell silent when the people realized what was missing. Who was missing. Two weeks after they told the council the lies it wanted to hear, and the Uchiha realized they had nothing to fear if they kept their heads low and their profile clean. It made her furious just to look at their smug faces, the way they bowed and "yes, Lady'ed" all her words. Those were the people who had willingly conjured the nine-tailed beast, who had intended to destroy everything she held dear. Those were the people who sought war and destruction rather than peace and happiness, all for the sake of a name and a legacy. Uchiha. On some days she hated them, and their name. But it had been his name, too, and his pride and strength. How could she hate something that had been important enough for him to die for? For Hashirama's – and for Madara's sake – she kept silent.

(Madara had taught her hate, and selfishness, too.)

Two weeks after Madara had bled out underneath her fingers she crossed the street, Reika so small and so beautiful beside her, and realized people were pointing at her. The lady who sold her nashi bowed deeply and refused to charge her. And Hashirama came home in the evening and looked at her as if he was about to cry, and told her the Council wanted to honor the two of them for their fearless fight.

She did not attend the ceremony.

…

Madara's absence was a physical thing.

Hashirama missed him everywhere: in the office, at the training grounds, at home. Mito was there, cool and collected, and perhaps she was angry at him that he had so willingly gone out of his way to accommodate what she only referred to as the Great Uchiha Treachery, but only when nobody else was present. He missed their discussions, even their arguments, the nightly watches, their morning sparring. He missed opening his eyes and finding Mito pressed against his chest, Madara on her other side, and the way their hair – black red black – mingled on the pillows. He missed him during day and night, at council meetings, dinners and during diplomatic events. Merely being close to Mito felt like he was betraying his friend. Looking at Reika, seeing the wonder Madara never would see again… It was impossible.

He wondered whether a part of him had not died, as well.

And Mito could see it; he read it in her eyes. She knew what he thought when he stumbled into the bathroom from their bed, knew what he dreamt of when he woke up gasping for a person that was not there anymore. Sometimes he thought she had to be in pain, too, but he could not bring himself to care. Madara. There was a hole that could not be filled anymore, a loss that would not ever be compensated for. Differently to Mito, Hashirama did not care what the people said, did not care for the lie the Uchiha forced them to live. It was not the lie in itself – it was the fact that he was living with its consequences. The one thing everything came down to was the fact that Madara was dead. It did not matter whether they badmouthed him, pushed all the blame onto his shoulders. Madara would have been able to live with that, he had been strong. He also did not care for the faces that looked at him from across his desk, the people that plotted his ruin while they bowed and nodded and generally pretended to be a part of his village. It was the fact that Madara was not there to argue against the Council along with him, the fact that he was forced to go on without him. Because life went on (how could it, why did the world not come to a screeching halt, why did the trees still bloom and the children still laugh and mankind did not shatter from the loss?) and the Uchiha bowed to his leadership (for how long, Madara would have been able to tell but he had not been able to stop them, either) and the Daimyo hired shinobi and the surrounding villages requested treaties and trade agreements and diplomatic functions.

On the other side of the bed, Mito laid, still and cold as a statue. There used to be warmth between them, nothing was left now. Hashirama pressed his eyes shut and tried to ignore the ghosts of a touch that still flitted over his skin.

…

It was of no use, she knew very well.

It never had been Madara that connected them, it had been her, or so she had to believe because otherwise everything she had believed in throughout the last eight years would turn out to be a blatant, terrible lie. It had been her that bridged the distance between two very different men, she who had given them the opportunity to get to know each other on a far deeper level of understanding than had otherwise been possible.

And so she suffered, too, because the house was empty without him in a way nobody could fill, not even her daughter. Without Madara, Hashirama was a ghost of his former self. There was a tea cup that never would be used again, and a chair nobody sat on. A side of a bed that was repeatedly refused to be used. It was more than she could bear.

"Talk to me, Hashirama."

His eyes were overflowing with desperation. She had never thought of him as a child before but that moment he seemed like one: hopeless, small and terribly lost. She turned away from him because she could not stand it. His sadness was too much to bear, it added to her own despair and made it heavy and cold and oppressing and she could not breathe anymore.

"Talk to me," she still demanded, trying her hardest not to let her voice crack and failing. "Because it cannot continue like this."

I cannot go on like this.

He did not answer. Silence hung over them, heavier than the mountain stone from which his face had been carved. Darker than a moonless night, colder than ice. Mito closed her eyes and tried to accept the fact that he would not talk to her. He would not say anything, falling into the silent despair that surrounded them like death deeper and deeper. It hurt, knowing Madara never would walk through the door again, more than she ever would have thought anything could hurt after the loss of her home. Pain was nothing one got used to, only increased the moment she had thought she had mastered it. Whenever she thought she should be able to continue on – because Madara would have wanted it, too – the pain increased thousand-fold because not only Madara but Hashirama had left her.

"I have renounced their status as special police force," a voice behind her said, silent and choked with grief. "They pretended they understand, but they started plotting behind my back the second I dismissed them."

Mito balled her fists, felt her nails dig into the flesh of her hands. The seal on her stomach burned, she could hear the kyuubi growl in fury. It was encased safely but that did not mean it never fought, did not mean she slept deep and peacefully. There was an empty side in her bed these days and a voice in her head that laughed at her futile attempts to uphold normalcy. And, the worst: a growling, thundering challenge from deep within herself, pooling like blood-red chakra, burning her from the inside.

"You are in control of the nine-tailed beast now." She did not say we. "They will bow to your power. Do not give up that easily." Empty words that once had not been the mere phrases they now were. "You have to think of the whole village. It needs you. The people need you. You cannot give up."

"I do not know whether I have the strength to continue on."

Fire burned up inside her, and it had nothing to do with the monster inside her. She whirled around, her fists still clenched, her eyes sparking flames.

"You do not know whether you have the strength?" She repeated incredulously. "Are you out of your mind? If he heard you speak like this-" She choked on his name alone, unable to say it. "He would have laughed, and would have beaten you until you would have been unable to stand. He would have told you there had been a time when your strength kept him upright, laid foundation to a village, and that what you are doing now is nothing but groveling in your own grief!"

Shocked at her own outburst, she clapped a hand to her mouth. Hashirama stared at her wordlessly.

"Please," she begged him silently as soon as she had gained control over her voice again. "Do not let this be the end. There is so much you still have to do. He would want you to go on, more, he expected you to do so. You were the same and the opposite, and he never would have wanted you to stop living without him. I know there is not much I can do, but please. Please do not give up."

She had clenched her eyes shut at the end of her speech. She did not want to see understanding in his eyes, or resolve, she wanted it there but not to see it. Hashirama needed to pick himself up, he needed to go on and live, and if it meant she was no longer needed so be it. He could look at her in whichever way he liked to but if it was without love she did not want to see it. Swallowing, she tried to chase away the tears that threatened to come. She had not cried, not since he had died. The hard knot in her throat grew, made it impossible to breathe. Only when Hashirama's hand touched her face she realized she already was crying. His hand touched her lightly, wiped away a few tears, and then withdrew. Forbidding herself to open her eyes, she listened to his steps recede down the corridor.

…

Tobirama did not know half of the truth. Still, he seemed to see much clearer than Hashirama had thought he would. It was disheartening, seeing his little brother so grown up and responsible, and Hashirama almost forgot that Tobirama had seen war and fights, too.

It was just the normal feeling of an elder sibling towards his baby brother and for a second he wondered how normalcy could have found its way back into his world.

"They are dangerous," his sibling declared, eyes blazing. "I do not believe you for a second when you tell me Madara betrayed Hidden Leaf. He simply would not. Whatever they did to cover this up, it will not hold forever. The Uchiha are plotting your fall, Hashirama, and you cannot simply sit and watch them completing it."

"That is not what I am doing," he answered, painfully aware that it did look as if he was.

"Then what are you doing?"

As it was, it was a good question.

"They might be defeated for a few months, even for years," Tobirama told him quietly and with a face so serious he thought he did not recognize him. "It might take them five years, perhaps even a decade. But they will rise again. It is in their genes. They fight with the same cold heart that makes them such brilliant warriors. They fight because it is their life. And…" He stopped short, clearly distraught. "They hate you, Hashirama, for what you have done or not done, it does not matter. And Uchiha carry grudges. You know that."

"We renounced their status as special force. They have not been offered the joint leadership for Hidden Leaf again, and we have taken pains to separate them from the Hyuuga, on which they had a devastating influence. What else are we supposed to do?"

And here Tobirama, the brother with whom Hashirama had always shared everything, caved. His head fell and his shoulder slumped, and he looked terrifyingly exhausted.

"I do not know."

"Well," Hashirama said as he sorted through the piles of paper on his desk, almost to himself. "I do not know, either."

There was a lot he did not know these days.

…

Mito was not sure when it had started.

The howling and prowling of the kyuubi seemed far and distant, but it was there. It grew in intensity every night, or so she thought. In the beginning it had manifested in nightmares, dreams of the Valley of the End, as they now called it, in blood and fire and bottomless fear. And in Madara, always Madara, with Hashirama's eyes on his other side watching her and pleading her to save him. Madara calm, Madara anxious, Madara teasing, Madara arrogant and hateful and so, so protective. Then the nightmares turned into daydreams until she could hear the burning red hiss of the beast even during the times the sun was up, and then it started to change her.

The sheets were completely ruined, singed and bled through, saturated with dark-red, angry chakra. It is just as well, she thought, that Hashirama did not share a bed with her anymore.

Sealing Master, a voice mocked her, and she tried. The seals bled from her like dribbling ink, blue and black and red, staining her hands and her skin and her dreams. She came to the point she was unable to sleep because she had to concentrate on imprisoning the beast inside herself. Her own body felt like a vessel full of poison which she had to isolate as to not intoxicate her environs. It was a struggle first, and then an uphill battle; and it turned into her dying fight. Mito was not stupid. She saw how the power she needed to control the monster inside of her was leaching from her strength, but there was no other way to keep the kyuubi chained and caged. In her nightmares the beast laughed at her. It was there, constantly. It could be patient. There it was, waiting for her to give up, waiting and waiting and waiting. It had all the time it wanted to have. It was Mito who was running out of it.

Glancing into the mirror one morning accidentally she realized she had not looked at her own face for a long time. She paused, accessing, then, in one angry movement, scrawled a seal across the mirror glass. Her skin ripped open, red blood sprayed over the reflecting surface. The world went still, punctuated only by the dull rush of her own blood in her ears and the pain that emanated from her right hand. Without her make-up and her seals she was haggard and worn, not old but a woman aged before her time. Ugly. Her hair was thin and splintered, there were dark rings underneath her eyes and lines that had not been in her face before. Her lips were bloody and bitten, pale – she hated what she saw, the truth revealed behind the mirror. Seals would only keep her beautiful on the outside. Madara, Hashirama – everyone who saw her like this would think her unappealing. Unsightly, even, and she flexed her fingers to slam her fist into the mirror.

The glass shattered under the power of her seal and her anger, and the kyuubi laughed.

She went out of her way to exhaust the bloody chakra that flowed through her veins that night, beating a simple flock of wood in the same manner she had seen children do in order to train. After a few minutes her hands were full of splinters and tears ran down her cheeks. Mito focused her chakra and continued on, in her red and white robes, strands tumbling down from her intricate hair-dress. She was not sure whether it was because she looked beautiful but inwardly felt old and ugly, or because Hashirama refused to look at her, or because Madara was gone, or because there was a raging fire inside her she could not put out that was threatening to burn down everything that was left of her life. They were not there, not anywhere, even Hashirama was out on some or another diplomatic event. She slammed her chakra into the pole again and again until it burst, and then she continued with the next one until she collapsed in an exhausted faint. At the end of it all, she still heard the nine-tailed beast growling in her dreams, still felt its poisonous strength. The kyuubi was patient.

…

"Esteemed Fire Shadow."

The man looked more than nervous, he seemed terrified. Outside, the winds herded clouds of dust through the streets, Hashirama was glad he would not have to leave the building in order to reach his room. Sunagakure was a harsh city. It was getting later and later. Madara, he thought with a flash of pain, would have ended the fruitless discussions far before they could have branched out like this. Mito, on the other hand… He frowned.

"I do not make a habit of killing the messenger who bears bad news, Yoichi."

The messenger cast down his glance, signaling his news indeed was of the worse character. A stab of anxiousness added to his previous pain. He had meant for his words to lighten the mood rather than for creating a darker atmosphere.

"What is it?"

"A falcon just arrived from Konohagakure. Hokage-Sama, your wife…"

Someone upset one of the heavy chairs; it tumbled to the ground in a shattering noise. Hashirama found himself on his feet, advancing on the messenger. To his honor, the man held his ground.

"She attempted to murder the Council, Sir."