Summary: Following "Mirror" (because it makes me lol whenever Kagami is made out to be this sweet and fluffy little boy and because the world needs more extreme-methods!Tobirama-sensei).
Kagami did not know what to do.
The small ten-year-old had come home early from training and the first thing he did was lock himself in his bedroom. He sat on his mattress and there he had remained for the past hour and a half, not even moving to change out of his wet clothes.
He stared at the dark patch on the floorboards by the window, where rain had rotted the wood, as if there he would find his answer.
For the past two weeks he had been training every day with Tobirama Senju and for the past two weeks he had done everything that he could to hurt the man. Not kill, because that would have gotten the young Uchiha in trouble with his clan in these first days of their uncertain new village, but if he could have done a little maiming that would have been just fine.
Tobirama had to have known what Kagami was doing. After all, their clans' hatred for one another was a known fact. There were no illusions that if the man had wanted to kill Kagami, he could have, but the Senju had not been trying very hard to keep his newly-appointed student from harm either and there were a number of bruises to prove it.
Kagami had thought that he had it all figured out. He hated the Senju and he had thought that Tobirama hated the Uchiha. Politics had decided that they should train together, a token inter-clan apprenticeship as a token of peace, but if there was an opportunity for an "accident" to take place, neither would shy away from it.
So why, then, had Tobirama done what he had done today?
Kagami had frozen like a genin, unable to react as soon as he had seen Tobirama's Suiton technique, that massive dragon rising from the still waters of the lake to tear down everything in its path. The boy had panicked, his mind had drawn a blank. It would have been impossible to put up a defense. If that jutsu had hit, Kagami would have been dead.
But it did not hit. Tobirama had realised that Kagami was not moving out of the way – as anyone with the slightest bit of sense would have done instinctively – and he had redirected his attack.
The water had still left Kagami drenched and he had a nasty bump on his head where he had fallen, but that was a far cry from the state that the nearest trees had been left in.
That was when Tobirama had called an end to their training session and dismissed him.
Kagami sighed. In a burst of frustration, he put his hands to his head and mussed up his hair.
Kagami knew that if the tables had been turned, he would not have shown Tobirama the same mercy. The Senju and the Uchiha were enemies! So why had Tobirama saved him from his own stupidity?
Could this truce be for real?
No. That was preposterous. Ridiculous. Impossible. Uchiha and Senju had been killing each other for centuries! But if it were true, if Tobirama and Hashirama and all those others had actually meant it when they said that they wanted to stop the fighting…
No. No no no. No way. The Senju were evil and could not be trusted.
But why had Tobirama not killed him today? No one would have blamed him. It would have been called a legitimate training accident. The whole reason why little Kagami had been placed under the Senju was that he was a nobody within his clan, the youngest of a remote branch whose ties to the main family could only begin to be properly traced four generations back: no one among the Uchiha would have protested about his death other than his sister and his mother, who were just as nobodies as him.
The whole thing was a puzzle that Kagami could not fit together.
For now, until he found an answer, he decided that he would hold back on the assassination attempts. He needed Tobirama to be alive if he were to figure him out.
And after he had his answer, if his belief that the Senju were soulless demons who deserved to die was confirmed, there would be plenty of time to go back to trying to create "accidents" for his so-called sensei.