Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto. Beta'd by drowsyivy and UmbreonGurl. Next Update: Wednesday!
His visit brings his mother much elation. She hurries out to see him, turning him this way and that before taking in the sight of the hair stick Hisa had given him, and nods firmly to herself. "They are treating you well, then," she says, mostly to herself.
"Haha-ue," he protests, more out of obligation than anything else. "What harm could've ever befallen me?"
Life among civilians is unusual in that way. Harm comes from unexpected places. Slights made from words and careful exclusion instead of anything physical.
Harder to decode for him, since he has not grown up speaking this language, but Hisa is more than fluent in the language of silence and spaces, enough that she has done the speaking for both of them, explaining to her peers what exactly had befallen for her to end up married to the youngest son of the count of a shinobi clan.
He still doesn't know what exactly she has done to make people who had once looked at him at least a little sideways to accept the explanation without much fanfare, but considering that the men he has interacted with in recent days seemed pleasant enough to him, it seems as though he has been accepted.
Perhaps it was the stabbing.
They, none of them, speak too fondly of the Senju these days.
He beckons Toraki-kun forwards. "Haha-ue, this is the little cousin I wrote to you and Chichi-ue about. He hopes to further his schooling in Yanai, and Ikame-ji has said he is willing to host him."
"Oh, I see." Haha-ue smiles and takes Toraki-kun's arm. "Come, child, come to dinner with us. I know for a fact that my husband has missed talking to young men about their studies in recent years. Our grandchildren are too small still to have learned any of the old masters with any complexity, and our Izuna-kun…" Here, Haha-ue casts him a fondly disapproving glance. "He is not much one for literature, I'm afraid."
"But—" Toraki-kun glances over at him. He knows what Toraki-kun is about to say, but he can't let that particular bit of news break to Haha-ue from the lips of someone not him.
"Haha-ue." He cuts in. "Haha-ue, how could you shame your littlest like this?"
It is true that he didn't learn to read until he was seven, and Chichi-ue had taken the matter of his illiteracy into his own hands, and it is also true that he has never much been one for the moral texts or the old masters — honestly, he still prefers reading novels if he has to read anything — but that doesn't mean he has no aptitude for scholarly learning whatsoever.
And besides, he has the Sharingan.
If his studying for the exams doesn't go well, he can just brute force his way through the memorization and regurgitate it for the exams.
Haha-ue laughs at him. "Oh, Izuna-kun." She shakes her head. "Of all of your brothers, you are the littlest and least studious. Surely, you don't blame an old woman for unmasking you in front of someone littler than you?"
He makes a face. "Who said Haha-ue was old? I'll show them old. Haha-ue, you're the most beautiful woman in Tohoku; you can't be old."
This provokes general amusement and merriment, and serious matters are set aside for the moment.
It is mid afternoon by the time Chichi-ue frees Anija for the day, and the first thing that Anija does is come to see him.
He sees the spiky hair coming up Ikame-ji's front walk and goes out to greet his fourth brother. "Anija, I'm home!"
Anija bear hugs him, picking him up bodily and spinning them both around once before setting him back down. "I've missed you, you brat," Anija mutters before letting go of him.
"Calling me a brat isn't going to help you." He pats Anija on the back in lieu of a hug. "In any case, I've been told very strictly to invite you back to visit. Momo-ko misses you and your piggy back rides. She says my back is too bony."
Anija stares at him for one shell shocked moment before he laughs until he cries. "Too bony! Serves you right!"
He jabs Anija in the side with an elbow, causing his brother to fold like a snapped tree. "In any case, I had something rather serious to talk to you about. If you don't mind, we should adjourn to your room, or to the mountain with the hawks?"
Anija glares at him balefully for half a moment, still wheezing from having all the breath knocked out of his lungs — he possesses a pair of very sharp elbows, and he is not afraid to use them — but nods. "That's for the best. I gathered there were things you didn't write to Chichi-ue or Haha-ue about."
"However did you guess?" They walk side by side, settling back into the rhythm of their childhood.
He's missed this too, however much he doesn't want to admit it.
"I don't know." Anija grins, a quick, brief thing. "Maybe because you've never been able to write a decent report of all the important parts of your time away in your life?"
Anija collects his hawking glove, chooses one of his prized hawks from the mews and they head out together, up into the forest on the mountain.
"So, what was it that you wanted to tell me without Chichi-ue or Haha-ue hearing?"
"I intend to take the imperial exams." He has a year to study before they arrive.
"You?"
He wishes Anija sounds less shocked, but given his past history of being unstudious and unrepentant, well…
He's not exactly surprised, but he wishes it is less obvious.
Chichi-ue and Haha-ue will likely be very surprised to hear it as well.
"Is there a reason I can't?" He turns his head to the side. "It's not as if I'm stupid."
"I didn't think you were," Anija struggles to find the proper words for it, slightly shocked by his willingness to speak so plainly. "You're not stupid, Izuna. I just didn't expect it. You never liked to study, and you've also never expressed any interest in serving in government either. Why do you want to take the exams?"
He thinks about it, standing there under the pine trees, needles under his feet. Thinks of the way his father-in-law had laid out paintings and poetry, never able to lift his head against the rising flood.
Thinks of the way Hisa had looked, the limitations and sorrows of their circumstances for not having been born to power.
"You saw the power His Majesty wielded." Long have the Uchiha been reclusive, not meddling or participating in events at court. For the first time, he suspects that such seclusion, while it had left them less scrutinized by those with more power than they, has also left them vulnerable to whatever opinion His Majesty wanted to have about them. "I would not like to be the Senju," he says, one hand balled to a fist. "Unable to even argue when someone else brings charges against them."
It is not that those charges hadn't been true, and it is not as if he specifically regrets that they had been brought against the Senju.
But such power without direction could've left his family suffering far more than what had befallen them.
His Majesty had penalized him and him alone.
But if someone were to complain…
How long could that hold?
"You do not have to carry that burden alone." Anija's hand finds his shoulder. "Just because you've left home doesn't mean you have to do everything yourself."
"I must." Because he is no longer a child, and because he has chosen his path, and it seems as though the road leads to the capital. "My wife deserves a clan title."
He had to ask Hiko about the whole affair, since he had never had the cause to question which rights and privileges were awarded based on which titles and how one might acquire one.
The Daimyo is the only man in the whole country capable of creating a new clan and bestowing the title.
And short of extraordinary service to the country — which he does not qualify for, having been recently punished and barred from holding arms again — the only route to a clan title is to take the first spot in the Imperial Exams and ask.
This chance would not come this way again for another four years if he missed it now.
What I will leave to my children.
What I will earn for my elders.
What I will win for the woman who walks beside me.
Anija snorts. "Is it really that important?" They hear the scream of a rabbit out in front, and Anija races forward to retrieve it before coming back to him. "The Kawaguchi are rich, Otouto. You could do nothing and still enjoy leisure for the rest of your days."
You don't have to work, the look in Anija's eyes says. Why suffer for this when you don't have to?
But he does have to.
He does have to.
"It is to me." It isn't about money or leisure, but something deeper than that runs beneath his blood. Pride is a deep thing, and having it means much to him.
The future of a family.
The future of a house.
The weight of a name, all of these things that pride supports the foundations of.
"Think about it." He sets a hand on Anija's free arm. "We are not demons or monsters, but in our long absence, others might conspire to paint us in their image. We cannot live in seclusion now that it is safe again for us to travel without paying the price for isolation."
Anija nods, eyes far away in thought. "On that matter, you are entirely correct." The hawk circles back, talons empty, and Anija lifts an arm to provide it a perch to land. The hunt is over. "I'll see what I can do."
He helps Anija by carrying the rabbit, and together, they head back down the mountain towards the house.
He meets Cousin Yakushi and several others in a bar later that evening. They're all his agemates, mostly, or a little bit younger, all unmarried bachelors, though he suspects, not for much longer for some of them.
"I'm looking for people to come with me to the capital." He doesn't open with much teasing.
Once perhaps, he might've had the patience and the humor for it, the witty back and forth and beating around the bush until Yakushi throws a cup at him — which he would have to catch — before he gets to the point.
But then, maybe recovering from a stabbing changes that about a man.
Life has become both immediate and long term in ways he'd never considered before.
"The capital?" Suisho asks him, more shocked than anything else. "Izuna, you know that we don't go there. The—"
The feud, he'd been about to say, prevented your oldest brother from ever taking the Imperial Exams.
"The feud is dead." He might've been more than a little angry to find Senju Hashirama in his house, but he can admit that logically, the man has never killed a single one of his relatives — no, the one who had run around killing relatives more often was Senju Tobirama, who seems to have since repented and hasn't been sighted for some time now. "And I intend to move to the capital to live there. If there's anyone else you all might know who'll want to see the world, or at least, a different city, tell them to let me know."
And he can admit that he'd been a bane on the Senju for a long time now as well.
But now that there exists word from the Daimyo himself that this feud is ended, well…
It is not necessary to merely live in their ancestral lands, is there?
And seeking a position in government through the exams would no longer be as dangerous as it had been before.
"Izuna." This is Cousin Tanigawa, speaking slowly. "That bastard stabbed you. Are we just going to let that go?"
And yet an eye for an eye…
And the whole world goes blind.
"And that bastard," he grudgingly admits, "came back and unstabbed me. Or I wouldn't be sitting here."
Hisa had had to twist Tobirama's arm for it, and the Daimyo had very nearly wiped all the Senju off the face of the earth to get it done, but eventually, Tobirama had come back and unstabbed him.
Which, very grudgingly at the very least, deserved his acknowledgement if not exactly his gratitude.
Yakushi sighs. "We should thank him for that, at the very least, if nothing else he did was ever good."
"What are you planning to do in the capital?" Kusatsu steeples his fingers, thinking. "And what would that mean for us if we move there with you?"
"I plan to earn the position that Togaku-nii never got to see." A clan name for his wife, a government job for himself. "But more importantly, though I no longer wear the name I was born with, I do not believe that the wider clan should be so avoidant of capital politics."
And whichever relatives that come with him, well, he suspects there's plenty of politics and business to be done in the future that will benefit all of them.
He'd seen the power of the Daimyo, who — being an old civilian man, had never figured much in his planning or consciousness before, but with a single written note had made powerful men bend.
The man who could decree the death of whole clans cannot be avoided or ignored like they have ignored court for as long as he remembers.
If, perhaps, his father-in-law had decided to hire Senju instead of Uchiha, and he had stabbed Tobirama instead of the other way around, his family might even now be the ones without titles or power having only narrowly dodged extermination.
Or, because they have no medics, they might all be nothing more than a grave.
The thought does not sit well with him.
Hisa had told him that Chichi-ue had knelt when the imperial decree came for him, and he who had always seen his father as invincible had found the idea so intensely uncomfortable that it had haunted him uncomfortably for several days afterwards.
In any case, being so long absent from court has caused them problems, and though he has not been able to persuade Chichi-ue to entertain the idea of visiting winter court himself, he has managed to persuade Anija, which perhaps is the more important part, since Anija now will certainly inherit Tohoku.
Anija will go to winter court and come visit him in the capital if he manages to secure a position working there.
And if he can bring more of his cousins and a wider range of relatives with him to the capital, well, all the better for it.
"I'll go with you." Yakushi sets his bowl down. "If you're going into the snake pit, you'll need someone to watch your back; what with that civilian woman you've married being so small and frail, you'll need someone to make sure the house doesn't fall afoul of armed robbers or other bandit rabble."
A murmur of quiet agreement follows, a few nods and firmer looks between various cousins are exchanged.
And though he does not believe that Hisa is small or frail, it is as much a concession as he is going to get from these men. Yakushi at least, had meant his words with good will rather than any intention to slight her.
Besides, they'll learn all about the tiger's claws in due time.
"I heard from Yakushi that he's moving." Chichi-ue's voice drifts out to where he is trying to tiptoe slowly down the walkway back to his room one late evening well into his stay here. Soon, he will have to leave again, this time for much longer than before.
He straightens out. "I," he says, turning towards Chichi-ue, who, though leaning against one of the red pillars seems to almost fade into the evening shadows, chakra no louder than a whisper, "may have encouraged him."
"I thought it might be you." Chichi-ue sighs, though the slight smile that wreathes his lips and the slight crinkle of fishtail wrinkles around his eyes are fond. "You've brought back a bevy of new ideas this time, haven't you?"
He slumps, shamefaced. So Chichi-ue had also heard what he told Anija then. He shouldn't be surprised. It would've been too much to ask for Chichi-ue not to comment on it, and here in this house, Chichi-ue still knows everything. "I have been most unfilial by going behind your back to spread word of it."
"You're young," Chichi-ue says, uncrossing his arms. "And you've grown up to be a man with your own life and family. Of course you'd think differently than you were when you were a child." Slowly, Chichi-ue pushes himself away from the pillar. "Come into the courtyard and have a drink with me, Izuna. Tell me of your thoughts. Yes, even the ones you think I will not approve of, because you are no longer a child trying to run away from whatever you've broken this time."
He feels the claws of self consciousness grip him for a moment, suddenly aware that though he is now twenty-six, far older than he was when he first left home and also the last time he fit himself into a mineshaft to hide from the world, that he is still as transparent as a little boy to his father, whose eyes see everything.
"I want to give her everything," he admits, sitting down at the stone table. "Everything that she could hope for or want."
"And your wife wants a clan title and a husband working for the daimyo?"
That is not exactly what Hisa wants, though he struggles to articulate it. "It's hard," is what he manages to say. "To be civilian, and clanless." Kept out by greater forces, walls built high so that only precious few could ever enjoy the garden within.
And he believes that she deserves such things, deserves all the things that noblewomen raised by large households and powerful families could offer them.
And he believes that she deserves such things under her own name, and not the one his father would have given them.
"She is an ambitious woman," Chichi-ue observes, gently swirling sake in his wine cup, "if she could persuade you to do something you so dislike."
How can he explain that it is not only for Hisa? How can he give words to what he feels at all?
The Uchiha clan is old, and he has only ever been a small part of it, never destined to carry much of the weight of leading it, youngest and most shielded of all of Chichi-ue and Haha-ue's sons.
"It wasn't Hisa who suggested this to me." The idea is his own. She'd never asked him for it. "Chichi-ue," he turns to face Chichi-ue fully this time, and knows that he and his father share many of their features, too similar sometimes for their own good, "have you ever looked at the world and wanted to build something to leave for your children?"
A corner of Chichi-ue's mouth turns down, amused. "What do you think I have left you?"
"This is what I want to leave for my children." A title. A name that could protect them. Another line in the family book, so that they would always know where they came from, where no one could look down on them for their background.
"Ah," Chichi-ue says, understanding at last. "This ambition is yours."
And if it is not his father's blessing he receives, it is something of equal value.
He carries it with him as he travels homeward bound with Hiroto.
It is enough.
He knows that she played the qin, since she's played it once for his parents, much to his mother's delight, but he had found the erhu in its case behind a bookcase and asked after it. "Do you play?"
Like many things, he has grown away from assuming that it belongs to her.
The peach tree outside, after all, was her mother's. Any number of little things in this courtyard were also once the property of Hiwara Maki, a woman he has heard little about and never met, though her presence looms large in the house. Maybe she'll say something like "it used to belong to my mother. I haven't looked at it in a long time." And then she would grow sad about it.
The kitchen has warmed a bottle of rose wine for them for the evening because their other work is done, and Kuma sets out a plate of flaky osmanthus pastries. He and Hisa sit outside in the garden courtyard, she with the erhu, he with his qin.
"I'm actually more fond of it than the qin." She picks it up, a small, amused smile on her lips. "It has a lovely sorrow."
The erhu sings with a soulful, almost human voice.
"You would," he says. They stand there, with linked arms in the early summer evening.
"You sound so unsurprised, danna." Her response is dry and half cutting, but so fond that it warms him.
"What, that you enjoy things more sorrowful than lively?" He prods her cheek. "Anyone who has known you for longer than two days ought to know that."
She does not laugh, but she does smile, a light huff of a thing. "There's more sorrowful music in the world than there's lively music."
"Not true! There's plenty out there that isn't sad."
While it is true that there are plenty of sorrowful songs abroad in the world, there's no small number of popular, upbeat folk ballads he's heard playing in teahouses, sung on street corners, shared by scholars and business men, and popularized by the famous singing girls and dancers of entertainment establishments.
He's heard plenty of happy music and tells her so.
"They do not often play teahouse music for me, it is true." She considers it, head tilted to one side as she nibbles on a pastry. "I have not often had the chance to go."
"Did you want to?" Of course she hasn't had much of a chance to go.
The daughters of wealthy, upper class men, be they merchants or literati or shinobi or nobles, are carefully kept behind high walls and only travel with an escort.
They are kept away from the terrors of the outside world, the dust and the knocking of elbows with strange, unrelated men.
Hisa has handmaids to make her purchases, run her messages between households, report back to her on the goings on of the outside world, and men in her father's employ to go about managing her affairs outside the household if she needs to deal with the outside world.
Her circle of guests and social gatherings is carefully curated, never a foot set out of place — and Hisa is less closeted and more daring than most.
However.
The standards for married women are far different than the standards for unmarried young women.
Hisa can now go to teahouses and restaurants if she so chooses.
"Perhaps." She pauses there for a moment, half eaten pastry and pastry dust on her face. "Would my danna like to come with me to a teahouse?"
"If my wife would like me to go?" He watches as she plays a few notes, fingers gliding up and down the strings of the two stringed fiddle, notes sliding and blending into one another in a way that they could never do on the qin.
The erhu sings with a sorrowful voice.
"The Butterfly Lovers." He recognizes the song, having heard it once in an opera while he was escorting the pampered son of a literati gentleman. The man had wanted to stop at every opera house between Yanai and Mutsutari, and since his father was paying for it, Izuna had let him.
"Yes," she agrees and stops after a very short segment.
She waits expectantly for him to pick a tune.
He pauses for a moment, thinking over the repertoire that he's collected from his days traveling with the aforementioned son of a literati gentleman, and strums a more lively, marching tune. This one, at the very least, was one of the few operas he'd actually enjoyed while being forced to keep watch, though the colorful flags and fake weapons of the performance had made it hard to concentrate.
"The Heroes of Mount Hari." She smiles. "Bold of you to choose a war song, danna."
Mount Hari, to the extreme north of Fire Country, had been an outlaw land of thieves and bandits not long ago, though the recent excursions of the imperial guard up that way seems to have curtailed the worst of the crime.
Then again, he has only ever heard of this from stories and news whispered on the wind. He certainly hasn't been that far north.
"It is an outlaw tune," he agrees, letting the music come to a close.
She leans her head against his shoulder, looking up at the moon. "Are you sure about taking the exams?"
His hand finds her hair, still bound and pinned up tightly, and the slightly sharp and hard ornaments within. "Yes, I'm sure."
He knows the length of it now, long enough that it almost trails on the floor.
Another Confucian tradition. Every hair and every breath was given by one's parents, and one rues the day one has to part with either.
"There is no shame in deciding not to take the exams." No shame, perhaps, but no honor either.
His education had been impeccable, though he did not value it at the time. "I want to give you this, at least." He had arrived with nothing much except his own belongings and himself, and he cannot live forever on the kindness and charity of others.
"Thank you," she says. "Whether you succeed or fail, I thank you."
"Mmm," he hums. "Don't thank me yet, Hisa-koi."
He has not yet achieved anything. Gratitude given too soon may yet lead to regret.
He rises, looking up at the moon.
Maybe she is watching them after all.
Hisa has requested to see him perform a set of barehanded kata, and though he has not practiced in a long time, he is excited to do so.
His Majesty may have had his sword melted, and by that, barred him from every holding a blade or hiring himself out as a shinobi ever again, but he is still culturally shinobi, having been born so and raised so, and such cannot have the shinobi subtracted from his substance.
He can still honor this part of the traditions he was taught at least.
One step forward, hands pressed together before his stance shifts, and he draws his hands back as fists.
A chained set of three punches, an arm movement to sweep away a blow, two steps forward with two punches made in conjunction, a sudden turn where his fist would've slammed into the side of an enemy's skull…
And because he has not done this set for some time now, he wobbles.
He reaches for his chakra to steady himself and—
It snaps.
And the shock of the sudden pain as though something has run into his side makes him cry out.
"Izuna!" Hisa's there to catch him, arms about him as he thuds into her like so much dead weight, left side suddenly completely without energy.
"Hisa," he gasps, cloth crumpling beneath his right hand. "Hisa, I—"
"What's wrong?" she asks him, scanning his face.
He half shuts his eyes, the light from the lanterns suddenly blinding, vision slightly blurred. "I don't—"
I don't know.
Barely half a thought forms before it scatters like someone has tossed a rock into a still pond, ripples thrown up without rhyme or reason, random, scattered.
He breathes.
He breathes, and the pain recedes, though the weakness remains.
He'd been fine, except for—
Chakra.
Where is my chakra?
He'd felt weaker for the first few days post being healed by Tobirama, but that had gradually receded until he'd forgotten about it.
And then he had been busy preparing for the wedding, speaking to Hisa, proposing, and then after marriage he'd spent his time working on civilian matters, only using chakra for little things like lighting lanterns and amusing Momo with little sparks.
Had this been the first time he'd tried to draw on chakra more seriously for so many months?
It had.
"Chakra," he rasps. "There's something wrong with my chakra." He hates this weakness, doesn't understand where it has come from.
But he can barely move.
He hears her heartbeat, feels the rise and fall of her breathing and matches his breath to hers.
In. Out. In. Out.
Inoutinoutinout—
He breathes.
He breathes.
Hisa's expression hardens into steel. "Kimei!" she calls, arms suddenly tight around him. "Aka!"
It is Kimei who arrives first.
"Go fetch Jizen-sensei." Hisa does not let go of him, the only thing that keeps them both upright.
Kimei's eyes fall on him for less than a moment before she picks up her skirts and hurries away, footsteps clattering, unnaturally loud.
Aka next.
"Find Hiroto to help me help Izuna back in."
Aka nods. "I'll go immediately, Hisa."
"And if you can, find Uchiha Yakushi. He needs to go fetch me two people immediately." These words are added almost as an afterthought, but the blade in Hisa's voice reminds him that it is anything but an idle threat.
Hiroto arrives some time later, though time passes both fast and slow for him, so he does not know exactly when Hiroto does.
He ends up inside and remembers little after that.
Yakushi returns with both Senju Hashirama and Senju Tobirama by dawn the next morning, clearly haggard, out of breath, and exceedingly out of patience with both of them.
"Look," he snaps as he shoves the door open. "I don't care what you say about that bastard's healing skills. Izuna's never had a history of illness like this before, and you're lucky I didn't go immediately to Lord Kusakabe's estate to have him report your clan for foul play and let His Imperial Majesty clean you up."
"That's enough, Yakushi." He manages to push himself into a sitting position.
All night, he had thought this over.
Tobirama, while a bastard, wasn't dumb.
He had to have known that if he didn't do the healing correctly, the hammer of royal discontent would come down and smash the Senju to bits.
This is something else, then.
Not foul play from the Senju side. Much as he loathes to trust them, the Senju household does not comprised entirely of senseless fools. Something as foolish as this does not strike true.
Hisa turns to both the Senju brothers, her nod of acknowledgement civil but extraordinarily chilly. "You promised me something, Senju-san." Her gaze holds Senju Hashirama's. "If something were to go wrong with your little brother's healing of my husband, you would give me your life."
The look that crosses Hashirama's face borders a little bit on panic. "Can we talk this over? Tobira-kun swears that he did it correctly."
"It's been months," Tobirama mutters. "You can't be serious that whatever has happened to him now is my fault?"
"Nothing has happened to him for months." Hisa's tone is pleasant, armed with claws and teeth, and her smile looks like a maneater's. "Until last night when he used chakra and immediately collapsed. The doctor I consulted could find nothing wrong with him, but since the last thing to happen to him was you, I'm afraid I have to consult you for answers."
Tobirama steps forward cautiously, a scowl carving its way deeply into his features. "Now I have to play the free medic again." He scowls more. "Your arm, Uchiha. Might as well start with checking your pulse."
"Kawaguchi," he responds, careful to keep his tone pleasant. "I'm no Uchiha these days."
The flabbergasted look on Tobirama's face is worth it, for all that it makes his vision swim to exert the effort.
He sticks out one arm.
Should it come to the worst, he's sure he can manage to at least blind Tobirama before he gets killed, even as miserably ill as he is.
Tobirama scowls more and sets two fingers over his pulse.
"Careful," he manages, "keep making that face and your face will stick like that."
Though, maybe Tobirama's face has already stuck like that, and he doesn't have any other expressions to be had.
The sudden plunge of the other man's chakra is cold, and he rips his arm away with a hiss.
"What are you doing?" Tobirama snaps at him. "Get back here. I can't check you without chakra."
"What sort of devil are you?" Even now, he feels the cold traveling slowly from his wrist up his arm. Soon, it will touch his heart.
He shudders, slapping his other hand on his chest just over his heart and forces his chakra to beat the cold back.
The effort makes him break out into cold sweat. The Senju brothers exchange a glance.
Yakushi starts towards them threateningly.
"Get him out of here," he mutters. "He's more of a detriment than a help."
Yakushi angrily bundles Tobirama, still protesting, out the door.
Hashirama approaches, slowly and more cautiously, though Yakushi glares balefully at him as well. "No one's ever had that reaction to Tobira's healing before. Not even when he was still learning."
There is not even a shred of deceit here, Hashirama's face genuine and open. Lies cannot hide so easily from an Uchiha, though learning what is the truth when it is not offered is still a hard task.
"I believe you." The feeling of malaise has already started to recede. Chakra is at the root of it, both his use of it and Tobirama's use of it, but he cannot understand why exactly. "It's not as if you want to die."
No one knows why.
Chakra, at the heart of it.
He has lived for several months now, not particularly interested in using chakra in any serious capacity, and in fact had not since his last fight with Tobirama, but this knowledge that he might have to put it away for good…
No, best not think of that.
Not now.
Not now.
Hisa sits down on the edge of the bed, the back of her hand against his forehead. "Are you sure?" she asks. "I still think that perhaps we should not have let them leave."
Yakushi had said the same thing.
Yakushi had said the same thing, but—
"Neither of them knew what was going on." He breathes out slowly and keeps on breathing. "It wasn't as if we could get useful information out of them."
He hadn't wanted to continue looking at Senju Hashirama's distressed face either.
Anija would be so upset.
Both because he is still unwell and because that would mean that Anija would have to stop being friends with Senju Hashirama once more.
He wonders when he started to care about whether or not Anija is friends with any Senju in this way, worrying that Anija would be hurt by the idea of not being friends rather than how to get Anija to stop.
"My parents must not know of this." His hand finds hers and squeezes lightly. "It would only worry them."
Hisa is silent for a long time, lost in thought. "I will let the household know." She lies down beside him, resting her head on the other end of the wood block pillow facing him. "Izuna, I worry."
He shuts his eyes. "It does not seem like it will kill me if I leave my chakra alone."
Her hand settles over his heartbeat. "What if it gets worse?"
He opens his eyes again and stares at the canopy, draped silk all around them. "We will cross that bridge when we get to it."
She'd pulled him from the brink of death when he had lost all hope before.
If he is a twice lived man, then he can come back from this as well.
At least, he can only hope that he can.
A.N. Apologies for the slight delay in getting this chapter up. There's been several things that have happened since I got home from school and finals, but I am very happy to tell you all that my mother has not suffered a cancer relapse and thus the health crisis is more of a scare than we thought earlier this week.
This is a double update day, so hop on over to 'Scraps' to check out Chapter Four regarding Hisa's parents and their backstory if you are so inclined.
I'm also part of a writer's discord server! Feel free to join us to write/chat/poke around at: qhZRKqH.
Thank you all so much. I really appreciate it.
~Tav (Leaf)