Morning spars become the new regular.
The first rays of dawn shining over the cliff-side above them, air still carrying the last of the night's chill. The bite of it is always enough to chase away any lingering tiredness from the early hour.
It feels somehow more intense than it typically does. He suspects she finds it as invigorating as he does. By the time they finish, the sun is shining and he can see the sweat on her brow. She's smiling and from the edge it takes when she turns to him, his own face hides little.
Occasionally, they have an audience. Some of the local children, orphans, he suspects, by how early they're out, gather to watch them from a mostly-safe distance at least once or twice a week. One of them bears the Uchiha crest on his back and looks at Izuna with stars in his eyes.
Eventually, the children work up the nerve to speak to them and slowly, some of their sparring sessions become training sessions, too.
The discovery of her competence is the one that forces him to realize how much of his own reluctance to recognize her better qualities has been chipped away.
Hashirama and Madasra will be gone a week, meeting with the Shogun of the region to go over the finer details of establishing a hidden village with him. Tobirama will serve as the interim Hokage, and with his plate already largely full establishing the academy which is due to open at the end of the season, Izuna will be kept busy handling clan and civilian affairs. Mito will step in to handle anything they don't have enough hands for between them.
However far they've come, he's seen Izuna's temper, seen her impulses, and the thought of Uchiha madness always lingers below the surface. He doubts her ability to lead well, but she surpasses all expectations and he would have to actively pursue his own ignorance not to see it.
The anticipation is that they will merely keep things stable—they still argue enough it's difficult to imagine they'll get far, left to agree on things—but she takes the time to sort out the tasks that even Tobirama knows his brother does not have the hand for.
She has a keen eye for their taxation system and when one of the clans raises concerns over the fairness of it, she balances the tariffs well to ensure that no clan can accuse them or each other of inequity, even managing to find money to allot to the resources provided to the new shinobi academy and village orphans.
It's not an excess, but it's enough to allow him to circumvent some of the issues he'd run into with his plans for the academy and finalize things enough that he only waits for Hashirama's word when he returns to break ground.
They clash over what, exactly should be done with the village orphans. As it stands, any not formally taken in have been more or less left to themselves. Madara and Hashirama haven't laid much ground on the issue, more focused on the urgency of politics and resources, and it's something they've both had a hand in while their brothers work elsewhere.
He feels the orphaned children should be housed together, she argues that if a child comes from an established clan they should stay with them. In the end, it's a matter they don't settle before their brothers are back. He thinks the final say will be out of their hand until Hashirama gladly hands the task over to them, seeing the progress they've made, though Tobirama thinks it's quite generous to call it such.
"Keeping them apart only lends itself to further discord."
"So you'd rather deprive them of the only family they have left?"
"The children we're discussing are the ones who weren't taken in by anyone else in their clan, it's clear they won't be given the support they need there. Why not allow them a chance to find it in their peers?"
"It's a fair point, I won't deny you that, but I cannot insist on something for one that I don't for the rest, and Uchiha children cannot leave their clan when they're too young to properly defend themselves. If you ask the Hyūga, they'll feel the same. Where is the sense in a system that will cause unrest in two of our strongest clans?"
Agreeing is somehow even more difficult when they both concede to fair points.
It's another week before they manage to find a relatively satisfying middle ground. When a child is orphaned, their clan will have the first option of finding a family among themselves to take them in and if one is not found, they'll be moved to orphan housing with the other children, where they can at least live with safety measures set by the village in place.
She has one stipulation, and that is that orphaned children with kekkei genkai be assigned to jōnin from their clans when the time comes. She insists that if they have no one at home to teach them how to use their particular skills, the guidance of someone well versed in them is not optional, it's a necessity. He acquiesces.
The context of her insistence makes it all the more surprising when she encourages Kagami to train more with him. He hears the way she whispers to the small boy from across the clearing.
"You have as much to learn from your enemies as you do your brothers."
"Tobirama sensei is my enemy?"
"No, but he's wonderful practice for one, I promise. He's great at it. Just remember, you need to learn what you can from skills that oppose yours, not just those that are similar."
Afterward, he seeks her out and she explains that it's no loss to the boy's training as she's begun to meet with him twice a week to better develop his dōjutsu skills. It's impossible to think how she's managed to find the time and he must show his surprise—it's become infuriating, how she always seems to see what he's thinking—because she tells him she meant it, training with a Sharingan user is vital for him and he has no one else to teach him.
She's convinced that with the right development, he might be the strongest Uchiha after she and her brother. Neither of them has time to teach at the academy, but in a few years' time, when the village is more firmly established, it's not difficult to think who he might be assigned to when he graduates.
"I'll admit, his skills in dōjutsu have advanced with incredible speed, now you've begun helping him." She pauses when he says it.
"You let him practice on you?"
"He's only a child, I cannot ask him to train without using his eyes when he's just learning to control them."
"You're fond of him." There's something in her tone that makes it feel like she's said something he hasn't heard.
"So are you."
"I am." He can't place the look she gives him, but it's a long one. "You're his favourite, though." The thought pleases him.
"At least there is one Uchiha who likes me best."
"At least there is one Uchiha you like at all." The sharp ache that follows her words informs him of a truth he hadn't thought to examine within himself.
When he retires for the night, a gash in the wood catches his eye. He runs his finger along it, feels the rough texture under the pad of his thumb, and thinks that he can still taste her on his tongue if he closes his eyes.
What happened that night doesn't happen again and he thinks just as the liquor made him reckless enough to offer, it must've made her foolish enough to accept.
He'd tried to push the encounter from his mind when it became clear it was a one-time occurrence, but every time he enters his room he's haunted by the sight, the sound, the scent of her. It lingers on his mind at the most inopportune times and sometimes he swears she knows exactly what he's thinking of. Another reason to avoid her eyes.
He never avoids Kagami's eyes when they spar and Kagami never seems to expect him to, not yet aware enough of the threat he poses to become one. Like many Uchiha children born during the war, his eyes awakened early, but he's still learning what he can do with them.
"Remember," he cautions the child, "your eyes count for nothing if your enemy is too quick or too clever to be caught in them." Kagami is panting hard enough Tobirama half-expects him to vomit, but he's grinning ear to ear. His will to train never seems to run out.
He's felt Izuna's approach for long enough that he doesn't startle when she speaks from behind him. He hasn't yet told her that he's begun making his own time to train Kagami outside of their morning sessions, but he'd felt obligated toward him after what she'd said.
"You'll have to find someone else to teach you cleverness, Kagami."
"Izuna sensei!" He straightens excitedly at the sound of her voice, bounds forward a couple of steps before stopping and swaying in place only to throw himself to his knees and empty his stomach onto the ground. Neither of them is teaching him in any official capacity, but he's taken to calling them both sensei and Tobirama consistently finds himself unprepared for the affection it spurs in him.
Izuna is wounded on a mission. It's minor, relatively speaking. The laceration is clean and shallow enough it won't do damage if it doesn't become infected, but while her recovery is assured, the toxicity of the blade means even with Hashirama's help, it heals slow. When Tobirama suggests that he might bring some of her work home so she can rest without falling behind, she laughs in his face. Even at his own expense, any time he makes her laugh without bitterness he feels inordinately pleased with himself.
She cites the damage it would do to her pride to have become so soft that she rests over a scratch, as she calls it, and informs him she's spent more than enough time recovering from various injuries over the last few months and will not allow this one to slow her step as well.
Even injured, she is a better opponent than all but his brother and perhaps hers as well, though he has rarely been the one to come up against him and cannot say for sure.
He tries to call the spar to a close when her shirt catches and he sees the blood pouring down her hip. It's clear her wound has opened, hidden by her dark clothes until now. She doesn't allow it, keeps pushing, trying to strike him until he's forced to disarm and pin her. It's not easy, but with her injury, it's no great struggle, now she's fatigued. She looks more upset at having been pinned than having been re-injured.
When she refuses to give, he digs his fingers into the open wound on her hip and feels himself swell when she shudders. He's horrified, shoving her back hard and dropping into a crouch, trying both to put distance between them and hide his—condition, from her.
It's not a new thing to find her—interesting, but he's always controlled himself well, save for their wedding night. This, he reasons, was bound to happen if they continued on sparring with as much focus on taijutsu as they often do. It's physiology, he reasons, not wanting to imagine himself the type of man who might like to hurt her without reason. His blood is pumping, and a moan of pleasure is not so different from one of pain. It'd been easy to get his wires crossed, caught in the moment.
Why, then, is he unable to shake the sound from his mind? Nor her face when she'd made it? The way the sound had shaped her lips?
His dreams hold the answer. Every night for the next week he is plagued by the phantom feel of her skin. The weight of her rearing up against him as he pins her down on the battlefield and takes what's his. The soft haze of her hair falling over her bare shoulder as she bends to thank him for it. In his dreams, he is exactly the type of man he's sworn to her he is not, will not be, and he wonders if any man has ever felt so cursed to want his own wife.
Each night, she allows him to press his hands over her wound and push his chakra in to burn the poison out. Allows him to clean and dress the area in the same way she'd have flinched from not so long ago.
Does my touch still sicken you? He wants to ask. Do I still make you hate yourself?
•
Izuna is no fool.
She knows the fine line between violence and arousal, knows that the tight curl in her stomach when they spar isn't always anger—isn't only anger—and she's known for a while. A simmering undercurrent of lust she might have explored earlier if the man causing it didn't disgust her.
Therein lies the problem.
He is thoughtful, in his own way. Steady and even-tempered—except where she is concerned. He's kind and doting as he's capable of being with Kagami, despite the Uchiha crest across his back. He doesn't treat her like she's delicate, never pulls his punches or allows her an easy win. He can be cruel when it's warranted, when his hand is forced, but he never relishes in it.
She no longer finds him abhorrent.
She hates him, of course, but only in moments. It doesn't simmer in her bones and make her blood boil to think of him touching her. Or perhaps it does, but the colour of the flame giving rise to the heat has changed.
It causes enough strife in her mind to make her head ache. There is no one whose touch has caused her more pain or pleasure, together or apart, and the more she understands his character, the less she feels she understands her own feelings on it.
Izuna is not unaware of the complexities of one's character when forced to realize the worst of themselves through war. It would be too hypocritical to be so. She's well aware that they've grown up with the lowest, most vicious sides of each other and that convincing themselves that was all there was of one another had been necessitated by the context of the strife they'd been raised in.
What she struggles with is reconciling the version of him who trains an Uchiha child without being asked and offers her pleasure with no regard for his own with the version of him who put a blade through her side and took everything it was within his capabilities to do so from her on their wedding night.
Part of her will always be cautious against taking the next step, allowing any further modicum of trust in him than her situation demands, but she can see that he's trying in earnest and sooner or later, she will have to take her own steps forward if they ever hope to meet in the middle.
•
She stands in the threshold and he thinks he must be caught in a lucid dream wherein she's come to ask for her pleasure once more. Her voice brings his feet back to the ground. He can't identify the expression she wears. That's no coincidence, he's sure.
"I thought I might sleep here, tonight."
"Of course." His throat is dry when he speaks.
"This isn't an invitation." Her voice carries a firm caution, but does little to diminish the hope it might become one even so. He admonishes himself for it and finds doing so just as useless. "My room has become more a study than a place to sleep. Do you mind?"
"Never." It's too earnest, but it's already been voiced. "It's meant to be your room, as well."
She stays again the next night, the one after that, and the one that follows still. On the fourth, he has her personal things brought and a sturdier desk sent to the room she now uses as a study. His room becomes theirs once more and she sleeps soundly beside him.
A/N: I'm going to be posting a little remix companion piece to this story. It won't be everyone's thing, essentially just bunch of Very Dirty alternate/re-imagined versions of scenes that could have panned out much differently, but I figured some of you might enjoy reading it at least half as much as I'll enjoy writing it 💫