This epilogue was not planned. Nevertheless, it exists now. Is it actually still an epilogue if it's longer than the main text? And because I'm writing this, it's going to be Founder centric, I'm not sorry. Oh yeah, and don't forget: Fuck Hagoromo, he sucks (purely because Tobirama roasted him for being late, and Hagormo screwed up the ultimate answer to that. You know, "A wizard (Sage) is never late, Frodo Baggins (Senju Tobirama). Nor is he early; he arrives precisely when he means to." There will be POVs for Kakashi, Hashirama, Tenzou, Mito and Tsunade.

Epilogue: Madara

"Protect our clan."

Those had been Izuna's last words. Madara had tried and he had sacrificed a lot for it. Even the only person who meant something to him in the end.

How could he have been so idiotic?

Now, standing in front of the ruins of what had once been the home of his clan, he could only curse his past self even more. If he was to believe the words of the boy at his side, then he himself had sown the seeds that had ultimately led to the downfall of the Uchiha.

He had been given a second chance and he had wasted it in destroying all that he had once lived for. But there was still a way to fulfil Izuna's last will. He didn't want to screw it up again. To die twice and then still make the same mistake would be phenomenally idiotic indeed, and he wasn't Hashirama after all.

"What a pile of rubbish," Obito commented. "But it's just like them not to clean up here after Itachi and I were done with the clan."

Sasuke gave him a scowl. Madara had quickly learned that Sasuke didn't really seem to know any other facial expressions either.

"You're a kinslayer," Sasuke accused Obito, not for the first time. "And I have long thought my brother was despicable. But you hadn't even held a particular grudge against the clan, and yet you wiped it out. And worse ..."

"Stop it!", Madara interrupted him harshly. He silently asked Izuna to be patient with these two hotheads. Otherwise he would indeed end up as the last Uchiha. "You are behaving like little children. I don't want to hear any more of this."

"Oh yeah?" shot back Sasuke. "You're just a corpse and should have been dead a long time ago."

Madara placed his scythe clearly visible in front of him. At least with Obito, it still made an impression. "By ancient clan law, I am still the leader of the Uchiha, and if you doubt that, you are welcome to try your luck against me in battle. Until then, you are to obey me."

Now Sasuke scowled at him, but thankfully kept his sassy mouth shut. Madara looked down at him just as darkly. As long as this boy just didn't open his mouth, the resemblance with Izuna was striking, and so far that had been the only thing that had prevented Madara from strangling him. Sasuke's attitude was nerve-wracking, and Madara was really not known for his patience with naughty children.

Not only had the Uchiha district been pushed to the outskirts of Konoha at some point in the past, but it hadn't even been rebuilt after the village had been destroyed. Madara had been given a brief history of what had happened since his second death, but was still piqued to see how little Konoha appreciated one of the founding clans. If they had truly honoured Hashirama's memory, they would not have dared to do so, coup d'etat or not. One of the things he now had to fix while he still could.

Unfortunately, that meant knocking some sense back into the last two Uchiha still alive. If he looked at Sasuke and Obito like this, it was going to be a challenge on par with founding the village.

"Lead us to the shrine, Sasuke," he ordered. He remembered perfectly well what the village had once looked like. He knew the streets in his sleep and would be able to walk along them blindly. But many years had passed since then and Konoha had been rebuilt many times. There was not much left of the Konoha he had helped found.

This time Sasuke complied without a snide comment. He unerringly led them through the rubble of what had once been his home. His face did not betray what was going through his mind at that moment. If Madara was completely honest with himself, he felt sympathy for the boy's fate. So much had been taken from him and he had had no one by his side to guide him through this difficult time. And the only person who could have done that was also the one who had taken all that away from him.

In the end, Madara had been right. Hashirama's dream had taken a dark turn, just as he had foreseen. Perhaps it would have been better if the Uchiha had left after the village had been founded. But things had turned out differently, and now they had reached this point. They had one last chance to get everything back on track.

While they walked through the ruins of what had once been a proud and powerful clan, the memorial service for all the heroes who had died in the war was taking place at the other end of the village. No one had brought it up openly, but Madara still knew they didn't want them there. Well, he had better things to do anyway. Rebuilding a clan, for example, and this time he would make sure they all learned from his past mistakes. That was his form of redemption.

If it weren't for the huge seal stone lying here, Madara would never have guessed that the Naka Shrine had once stood here. There really wasn't much left of Konoha after Nagato had finished with the village.

Sasuke released the seal and the stone slid scrunching to the side. They descended into the darkness of the secret chamber. The seals that had been set into the walls had been able to withstand even the destructive fury of the Shinra Tensei, if only because the shrine was far from the epicentre.

With a quick katon, the fire bowls were lit. Madara turned to Obito and held out his hand. "Eyes here."

"Weren't you taught as a child to say please and thank you?" retorted Obito.

"You too are welcome to try your luck against me in battle, but you should know even better that I am stronger," Madara growled impatiently. "So give me back those eyes now, that was the deal. They're mine anyway."

"You'll get them. But first I want to read what it says," Obito objected.

Sasuke had already begun to decipher the inscription on the stone tablet with his Mangekyō. He had furrowed his brows into a concentrated frown, but Madara knew his eyes still wouldn't be good enough to decipher it all.

"It still doesn't make sense," Sasuke finally said. "I thought the Mangekyō would be enough to read everything. That's how it was with you, wasn't it? That's how you figured out how to obtain the Rinnegan in the first place, isn't it?"

"That's right. After over ten years of brooding over this gibberish," Madara said. "And even then, I wasn't fully sure of some of the details."

Obito was able to decipher the inscription with the Rinnegan he had received from Madara. "What kind of out-and-out nonsense is this?" he observed. "That's where this Hagoromo has really encoded his message in such a way that you need the Rinnegan to read that he warns against obtaining the Rinnegan."

It was the first time since he had received the supreme eyes that Madara had laid eyes again on the stone tablet that had ruled his life for far too long. He couldn't pass up the chance to actually see it for the first time.

He knew the inscription inside out. And that was why he now saw immediately where Zetsu had deceived him. That slimy little creature had managed to cleverly manipulate the inscription in such a way that Madara's Mangekyō had not been able to see through the deception. With the Rinnegan he could, and so for the first time he saw the stone tablet in its true form.

He also saw that some lines had been added after his first passing. He stepped closer to decipher them. Then he clenched his hand into a fist as he read what was written there. The secrets of his body, and that could only lead to one conclusion.

"Tobirama, you fucking bastard!" he hissed. That bastard just couldn't let it go! If they weren't already dead anyway, Madara wouldn't feel bad about bringing Tobirama to justice for it right then and there.

But that would have to wait for now. "Are you finished?" he wanted to know from Obito.

In reply, Obito took a small bag out of his pocket. In it he had kept one of Madara's eyes, which he had taken back from Nagato. He handed the bag to Madara, who threw it and its contents into the fire. It hissed and crackled. The plastic charred and the flames licked at the eye. It quickly burst open and melted with a hiss and an unpleasant smell.

"The other one too," Madara ordered.

Obito grimaced unwillingly. "Unlike you, I have a living body that can feel pain."

"For which you have Hashirama to thank, remember," Madara reminded him. Only Hashirama had been able to save a dying man who had had his heart ripped out of his chest, and even for him that had been a challenge beyond compare. "But you also have the Mokuton, as I do now, and with it healing abilities, albeit limited compared to Hashirama. Now give me back my eye or I will take it."

"Yes, yes. I'm doing it, old man. Don't be so impatient. It's not like you have all the time in the world," Obito grumbled to himself.

"You have your experience with plucking out eyes," Sasuke interjected flippantly.

Madara turned to him threateningly. "What was that just now?"

"Those aren't even your eyes," Sasuke clarified. "You ripped them from your brother when he was dying."

Madara took a deep breath and then a long exhale, remembering the reason he was doing all this. "Whoever told you that made-up bullshit was an idiot."

"Itachi certainly wasn't an idiot!" fumed Sasuke. Like a petulant child.

"Izuna had given me his eyes willingly!" snarled Madara back. "Anyone who says otherwise should burn in hell! How would your brother even know?"

Wordlessly, Sasuke pointed at Obito. "I suppose he got it from him. And he, in turn, could only have learned it from you, after all."

Madara's murderous gaze turned to Obito. Obito turned pale. "You were always so vague about the matter, so I never divulged any details to Itachi either. What he made of it was his business alone!" he defended himself. "He had the Mangekyō too, didn't he, so he probably made some of it up."

"Stop blabbering stupid stuff like that and hurry up," Madara reminded him.

Obito still wasn't too keen on having to remove his own left eye, but eventually he complied. That had been the deal, part of his punishment for what he had done. The Rinnegan had to be destroyed and could no longer exist in this world. It was too powerful and too dangerous a weapon.

"What is it with your eyes, anyway?" asked Sasuke Madara.

"I am Edo Tensei, nothing will remain of my eyes if we dissolve the jutsu," Madara replied. "The Rinnegan, which Obito is about to remove, would have been able to properly revive me, as was Nagato's and then Obito's job in the first place, but it wouldn't have been able to restore my eyes. So I would still have needed my original eyes. Which we're burning now, though, which is why it won't matter anymore."

"You bastard had wanted to sacrifice me," Obito growled.

"Be glad it didn't come to that," Madara countered. "It's not like I gave you any warning then, after I pulled you out from under that rock."

Obito gritted his teeth while simultaneously heating a kunai in the fire.

Mito had placed seals on all three Uchiha, sealing off much of their Chakra. They possessed only a fraction of their actual strength, and that too had been part of the bargain they had made while still on the battlefield. The seals would weaken over the years, but they had no intention of letting Edo Tensei last that long, so in Madara's case it didn't really matter. He would not be able to use his eyes. Kind of a humiliating feeling to be so weak, but he would be able to bear it.

Obito hissed in pain as he removed his eye with the kunai. He had wrapped his other hand in healing Chakra, which he also immediately held to the bleeding eye socket. He cursed profusely and threw the eye into the fire.

And with that they went, the most powerful eyes the world had seen since the days of the Sage of the Six Paths.

Madara turned to Sasuke. "Now, you tell me what you're really up to, child."

Sasuke looked at him in surprise, as if Madara had caught him stealing candy. Then he quickly found his way back to his usual scowl. "I'm going to be Hokage."

"Applause. Get in line, the list of candidates is long and you can all be told by Hashirama what a shitty job it is," Madara said, unimpressed. "Now you tell me what's really behind this."

Sasuke jutted his chin. "You and Hashirama, you failed. The village had been supposed to be a framework for all the clans to come to peace, but the opposite happened. The fighting only got bigger and more devastating. Itachi opened my eyes, his way of life showed me what it really means to be Hokage. The Hokage is someone who protects the Land of Fire from the shadows, and that was exactly what my brother did. Itachi was the true Hokage.

What this world needs is a revolution. And not old people who should be dead by now but just won't stay dead. Itachi had been forced to step into the shadows and take all the hate upon himself. He had been made an outcast and a criminal, and yet he protected the village in secret. The very village that had forced him to murder his own clan.

Itachi has taken all the hate and darkness and shouldered it alone, because that is what it means to be Hokage. Once I am Hokage, I will burn out the darkness of all the villages and unite them all. Only then can true peace reign."

For a few moments there was nothing but the crackling of flames. Obito was silent, looking back and forth between Madara and Sasuke. Sasuke had the nerve to withstand Madara's gaze. Madara crossed his arms in front of his chest.

"Now you listen to me carefully, you little shit, because I'm not going to repeat myself," he said. "First of all, you should never take anything that comes out of Hashirama's mouth at face value; I had told him from the beginning that his Hokage idea was bullshit. Secondly, you are more alike me than you might think. That's why you're going to look very closely now. And you too, Obito."

With those words, Madara put a genjutsu on them both. Words didn't have too much effect on Sasuke, but pictures would. He started with Iwagakure and the massacre he had caused there. An entire clan wiped out, the streets filled with blood and ashes and a village in turmoil.

"The Hagoromo were an old enemy of the village," Madara began to recount. "In the early days of the village they attacked us and Hagoromo Daisuke, their leader, had even had the audacity to steal an Uchiha's eyes. I couldn't let that stand and we went to battle with them. They were defeated and joined Iwagakure, but Daisuke's son couldn't get his mouth full enough. He demanded compensation or the eyes his father had stolen and I had retrieved. I suggested a third option, namely to wipe out the whole clan. Hashirama, of course, voted against it, and since he was already Hokage by then, it naturally came to pass as he wished.

It's true that the villages should have been the framework that would lead all the clans to peace, but I saw even then that it couldn't work. Old quarrels still existed and past enmities could not be overcome just like that. That is why I set out alone to do what I thought was right. None of the Hagoromo survived that night.

But I also did it to send a message: that from now on, everyone had to bow to Konoha's power. There was no one who could stand in the way of Hashirama and me. No one. Like you, Sasuke, I thought that the only way to peace was through a dictatorship, and so it came to pass that I wiped out the Hagoromo clan, down to the last child."

He changed the picture and now showed them scenes from his childhood and youth and was not afraid to present them with the most gruesome details. He began with his dead mother and brothers. "Kou was eleven, Kuro and Togakushi just two. Senju Butsuma, Hashirama and Tobirama's father, had killed them while they were gathering herbs not far from our settlement. That same year, my father had Butsuma's wife murdered in childbed and actually targeted his sons as well. They escaped him, but Itama and Kawarama still died similarly young. My father killed Butsuma in front of his sons and for that Hashirama killed my father. And these are just the things our families had done to each other.

We had made peace because things could not go on like this. In the end, there would have been no one left to fight. But at some point I had lost sight of the reason for our peace and had thought that wiping out the Hagoromo would be the solution.

It wasn't, as it turned out. I simply did what we had actually wanted to leave behind. I managed to decipher the inscription on the stone tablet even without the Rinnegan, and so I developed the Moon Eye plan. A true dream that would create a perfect world, or so I thought. But as it turned out, that too was a farce.

Hashirama says a lot of stupid things, but he was right about one thing: a dream is a dream and not reality. That's why he had killed me, because the reality had been that I had betrayed him. A dream world is not real and it can never be.

Nothing in this world will bring Rin back to you, Obito, or Itachi to you, Sasuke. Nor will I ever see my brothers again in this life. That is the bitter pill we must swallow. But what we can do is remember the real people and keep their memories within us. As long as we do that, they are not dead. I had to die twice to finally understand that."

Madara pointed to the pictures of his dead father, ripped apart by Hashirama's Mokuton, and the far too small bodies of his brothers. "Look closely, Sasuke. This is the darkness you want to shoulder. But darkness gives birth to nothing but more darkness. You want a tyranny under your sole leadership, but can you really call that peace? You cannot force people to find happiness, they have to find it themselves. You can pave the way for them, but they have to walk it themselves.

If you still want to tread that path now, then know that I will not hesitate to kill you here and now with my own hands and revive you with Edo Tensei until you too finally understand."

Sasuke stared at the pictures Madara showed them, memories from his first life when the world had been all war and suffering. Children sent into battles far too young and slaughtered by adults. Hardly any had ever reached adulthood. Sasuke knew the story of Hashirama, but he had not seen it with his own eyes.

"All right, so be it," he said finally. "It had ironically taken another war to finally unite all the villages. I'll go Itachi's way to ensure in secret that it stays that way. Let that big mouth Naruto become Hokage."

Madara looked to Obito. Obito returned the look from his now single eye.

"I really haven't missed your monologues," Obito said. "And certainly not your permanent pining for Hashirama."

"Don't make me regret pulling you out from under that rock," Madara threatened.

He dissolved the genjutsu and they left what was left of the shrine. Sasuke walked silently ahead. Madara wasn't sure if the boy had now finally understood what so many had been trying to tell him, and decided he needed to keep an eye on him some more.

Once outside, they were already met by Kakashi. With his hands in his pockets, he leaned against what had once been a wall. What had Obito always called him? Bakashi? Madara could guess where that came from.

Kakashi looked at Obito and his empty eye socket. "So the eyes are destroyed, as we discussed," he stated. Then he turned to Madara. "Shodai-sama wants to see you at the Hokage office."

Great. Madara had hoped never to have to see this place again. He had hated sitting in that office with Hashirama, Tobirama and Mito.

"I'll be right there, too," Kakashi continued. "But, um ... Obito, could I talk to you first?"

Obito pressed his lips together and avoided Kakashi's gaze. "I suppose so," he murmured.

Sasuke apparently felt he no longer needed to grace them with his presence and strolled off. Madara decided to get it over with quickly, whatever Hashirama wanted from him, and left as well.