Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto. Beta'd by UmbreonGurl, drowsyivy, Fishebake, and aflowerydeath.
"How do we forgive ourselves for all of the things we did not become?"
— Doc Luben, 14 Lines from Love Letters or Suicide Notes
She is a strange woman, he thinks as he watches her rise to go, wooden porch stoop creaking as she passes over the graying boards to return to the house. Someone who notices the details is rare, and yet though he had felt no special regard from her beyond her vague interest during their conversation, she'd seemingly seen so much more of him than he had of her. She is strange enough for that.
As she'd just told him, no fool.
He is not used to being the less perceptive one. He is not used to being the observed instead of the observer.
There is no danger here that he is aware of. All about, in the houses built into the mountain, the clan is, for the most part, falling asleep, chakra signatures softer than they are when people are awake. But still he is wary.
That is only his nature.
He is wary, that is all.
It is beautiful here. The river water is so very clear this far upstream, and there is a simple rustic beauty to the wooden houses with their gray slate roofs, the streets dusty with black earth, the pastures, the cattle, the sheep, the paddies and the grain fields, the trailing wisteria and vineyard grapes. He'd only seen wisteria blooming in noblemen's gardens before. It takes too long to flower for planting it to be practical when the camp moved every few years, and the countryside burned often enough to strip the flowers from the landscape.
It looks almost like something out of a nobleman's hanging scrolls, a painting of country life — simple, idyllic, idealized.
But here, here it looks as though it has always been this way, always been peaceful, if imperfectly so.
She'd been right to say that they are not wealthy, for though the wood is fine, the houses here show signs of age, of patched places where the roof tiles have worn thin, of clothing more often spun of rough wool and furs than cotton or silk. Her own hair had been left loose and free without ornamentation and there'd been wooden geta on her feet.
The few hair ornaments he'd seen were made of either bamboo or wood, but for the most part, though the living spaces are by no means crude, there's a lack of anything extra.
No ornamentation, no fine spices, no gaudy shows of wealth and prominence.
Her hand dipped candles had been made of lard, instead of wax.
She'd not seemed like a liar, but he knows well the ability to mislead without being untruthful. Omission is as much a falsehood shinobi employ as anything else. Perhaps she is inclined to agree. Perhaps her clan comes in peace.
It doesn't make staying here without danger.
Still, the hour is late and he rises to head in to his guest room. It...feels like he is intruding upon something in that room.
It looks lived in, settled, personalized, like the owner had just stepped out for a moment.
He hears the pattering of small feet and the uneven gait of — ah, a wolf dog following a child — feels the bright flame of one signature and the languid ease of the other before turning a corner and nearly bumping into the child.
He catches her by the shoulder before he notices the cropped mane of silvery gray hair.
The large gray dog behind her growls. She growls right back.
Honey brown eyes blink up at him with rapidly growing confusion. "Who're you?"
The child who'd mistaken him — her name is Hokime — he drags it up from the depths of his memory.
"A visitor," he says. "Who are you?"
He'd thought her one of many children, but then a normal clan child doesn't often have leave to wander about a clan head's house after dark. Who is she really?
She frowns up at him, a child's pout on a child's face. He's not...entirely used to this, but it's not terrible. "Live here," is all she says. "You didn't answer the question."
"Senju Tobirama." He considers her for a moment, considers the two red tattoos on her face. "And you are Inuzuka Hokime?"
She does not deign to give this not-question a response. Clearly no one has asked her this before. Instead she follows him down the hallway until they get to the door. "You're staying in Uncle Kyoryu's room."
Uncle Kyoryu.
"Is he… out?" He half fears the answer.
Hokime takes him by the hand. "He wouldn't mind. Haha-ue says that he liked to share."
A chill passes through him. Of course, this is a family house. This is a clan who does not often see guests. Why else would there be four rooms to spare?
"And whose room is that?" He asks of the one across the hall. Anija was staying there.
"Uncle Shinta's!"
"And that one?" The one next to Anija's. Currently housing the Uchiha. Well, no, actually the Uchiha is currently in Anija's room. Tobirama ignores any and all ideas of what the Uchiha may or may not be doing in Anija's room.
"Jiichan and Baachan!"
"And that one?" Toka is staying in that one.
"For visitors."
He looks around this house, at the rooms that used to belong to other people, and breathes out. "I see." He sounds faint, even to himself.
"Are you okay, Tobira-san?"
He'll be sleeping in a dead man's bed.
"Yes, thank you."
He steps into the room in a haze. The candles cast a heavy shadow over all the corners of the room. There's a bookshelf under the window, several scrolls left there haphazardly, plate armor hung on the rack in the corner, a chest of drawers he is sure is filled with personal items, a katana slung across two hooks, a wakizashi beneath it.
It looks like Inuzuka Kyoryu just stepped out for a moment, for a mission or perhaps to work the fields. Tobirama half expects someone to step through the door any moment now, chakra bright like wildfire, a crooked half smile tugging at full lips and laughing pitch dark eyes.
It's like he's breathing ghosts.
What right do you have to stay here? the whetstone leaning against a wall asks him. What right did you have to threaten my sister with war if she would not bend?
What right? What right?
What right?
"Tobira-san, you don't seem very okay." Hokime-chan has followed him into the room, her eyes still following his every move.
He...hasn't much of an idea what to say. Rarely is he asked to deal with children, and certainly not children as young as age five.
He doesn't remember...do five year olds...what do children talk about?
"I'm quite alright, thank you."
She sits on the floor by his side, clearly not bothered by his armor, or his chakra, or the kunai pouch still clipped to his thigh. "You're very unhappy." She seemingly ignores his attempts to convince her that he is fact, fine, not in need of any extra attention at all.
She pats his knee with a small hand as if that makes it all better. "Don't worry, Tobira-san. It's very safe here."
"Safe?"
She looks at him as though he must be rather slow on the uptake. "Of course. We aren't like people who live below, you know."
People...who live below. She must mean... "Hokime-chan, I live below."
She pouts at this. "Well, you're clearly different." As though he's exempt from whatever madness it is that plagues the clans who do not...live on Mount Hoyoken. How odd.
He hasn't much idea how to respond to this, so he does not.
Still, she does not go away. "Are you a Hatake, Tobira-san?"
Hatake. "Is your father a Hatake?"
"Uh, huh," she nods, slightly absently, a little bit sad. "But he hasn't come home for a long time now."
He feels...a mild twinge of irritation at this. What sort of irresponsible man had a child, out of clan, and then does not bother returning home to visit?
The child clearly knows and misses him.
"No, I am not a Hatake," he sighs. "I am a Senju."
"Does that mean your chichi was a Hatake?" She stares at him, a smile on her lips, stars in her eyes. "Then we'd be the same!"
What the— he'd just said—
The Inuzuka is a clan where women rule.
He...perhaps...hadn't quite understood what that meant.
Yes, Inuzuka Komari is a clan head.
Yes, in most clans, leadership would always fall to a man, but he'd thought…
It was just a singular woman who ruled the clan, not that the natural inheritance of things had been flipped on its head.
"No, my father was a Senju."
Her face falls comically at this. "Why are there so many Senju?" she mutters from one corner of her mouth. "Why not Hatake? He's got white hair too."
He looks at the sulking little girl on the throw rug before him and wonders… "Do all people with white hair have to be Hatake?"
She casts him a glance as though he really might be slow in the head. "Of course! Or they've got Hatake chichi!"
"I...see."
The laws of inheritance must work in strange and wondrous ways in the Inuzuka Clan then. She does not seem particularly bothered by his lackadaisical commitments to this conversation.
Then, she doesn't seem particularly bothered by much of anything at all.
"So what do you do, Tobira-san?" She scoots closer, leans against his leg, her head on his knee, playing with a bit of string between her hands.
"What do I...do?"
Somehow he doesn't think "I kill people for a living" would go over particularly well with this child of peacetime rice fields and a porch filled with wisteria.
"Uh-huh!" She continues in her rambling. "Like how Koza-ji is the Speaker and Kota-ji's a merchant's guard!"
Rarely has he been tongue-tied, more often than not, his enemies accuse him a quick and cutting wit, but confronted by this small child's conversation he is nothing less than tongue-tied.
"I like to write seals, in my spare time." If he didn't live a life of blood, where would his road have taken him?
He doesn't know.
"Seals?" The string in her hands morphs into a different shape. "What are those?"
Ah. Something he can actually talk about.
As it is, apparently children do not care about the technical nature of sealing, for Inuzuka Hokime skips out of the conversation soon after.
But she leaves him wondering.
What would he have done with his life if he hadn't been a shinobi? Does he even know?
What does it mean that his life is so intrinsically tied to blood and killing? Does he know how to be anything else?
And all around, the dead man looms.
He does not sleep that night.
The morning comes, sunlight gold dancing on dust motes. He blinks the fatigue from his eyes, his hands clasped loosely on the table before him.
He is eager to be gone.
The dead man who this room belongs to had haunted him all night. He's not normally so prone to emotional wastage or imagination over the fate of the dead, but this house seems quite literally empty of people who ought to be here.
There are only three human chakra signatures in the entire house:
Inuzuka Komari-san, Kozashi, and Hokime-chan.
Death lingers in his breath, and even if he's no stranger, it doesn't mean it doesn't turn his stomach.
There's a certain lack of humanity in someone whom death does not bother.
He knows the whispers, has heard them when people thought he was too injured, or too busy to pay them mind.
And that is only because his face is colder than the rest.
Ah, but—
But beside Anija, all men look cold.
And he is not a particularly warm hearted man.
"Tobira!" Anija's pounding on the door. "Are you awake?"
He rises, legs gone numb and therefore stiff, to open the door. "I would be now, even if you didn't—" His gaze falls to the lightening bruise on his brother's collarbone before he jerks his thoughts away.
Nothing happened. Clearly.
"Tobira, you look terrible." Anija leans in closer, questions all alit in the fierce maelstrom of his chakra. "Did something happen during the night?"
Well he could hardly say I was overcome by the dead man haunting this room where every breath felt like breathing in particles of someone else. Anija wouldn't understand it, likely hadn't even felt it or thought about the bed in which he'd spent the night. Anija never does.
That's no fault of Anija's really. It's a kinder life not to know.
All he says is, "It was a bad night. We ought to finish what we came here for."
Inuzuka Komari is likely ready to sign a treaty.
Best be ready to read the fine print of what she has to offer.
He does not see Inuzuka Komari or her silver-haired child for some months after leaving the mountain.
Instead, his days are taken up by building up the backbone of Konoha. Where to place a newly joining clan so that they are not directly next to their most hated neighbors, where to put down new paved roads, where to leave the paths as just beaten down dirt, how to make sure that each house is connected to the central water system, all the little city planning details that Anija let fall by the wayside.
He wants there to be some sort of standardized learning for the children, beyond whatever parents and elders and siblings might be teaching them.
He wants some form of standard hierarchy for the able bodied shinobi, wants to build so much.
What can he do to centralize administration? What can he do to improve the lives of people who do join Konoha?
And if what pushes him harder than he was pushing himself before is a voice in the back of his head that sounds remarkably like — What can Konoha offer my people that Okami has not already offered? — that would be his own personal affair.
If meeting Inuzuka Komari has unduly affected him, beyond anyone else he has ever met before, that is his own affair.
Her words have reached under his skin and prodded at the most sensitive parts of him.
That challenge, it burns him.
The mere implication that he has not done enough, that he had to resort to threats of force to make a clan bend to Anija's wishes? It is not to be borne.
It is as though she'd looked right through him and pushed a grain of sand into the part of his soul that would irritate the most, and now it smarts and stings.
So he spends the winter building, building, building.
He pushes himself further, and further and yet still further because she'd seen his complacency, forced him to threaten instead of cajole and he could hardly bear that light mockery she'd made of the city his brother had been willing to kill himself to realize.
It is not to be borne.
So when the Inuzuka arrive in the spring, it is to a changed city, to paved streets, orderly markets, to neighbors putting up new buildings faster than people could move in, to ground pipes being laid for the city sewage system just as fast as the earth could thaw.
It is a crowd, muddy from the long road, that treks its way through the gates. And if he searches a little bit harder for the feel of Komari's chakra...if he is ill prepared for Kozashi to be leading the party…
"Tobira-san!" The squelch squelch squelch of small feet bouncing their way towards him at breakneck speeds do barely anything to prepare him for the small blur that nearly flies into his middle. "Tobira-san, I missed you!"
Blows have a hard time budging him, but the absolute force of nature that is this small child nearly knocks him back to sit in the dirt.
Anija is muffling a laugh, but he's more concerned with the squelching noises Hokime-chan had been making. "You missed me?" He holds her up so he can examine her more closely.
She hangs there in the air with his hands holding her under her arms, legs swinging briskly back and forth...incidentally kicking mud onto the front of his shirt.
"Uh-huh." She seems not at all bothered by his routine examination of her, as though attempting to locate somewhere where she might be injured beyond giving it up as a bad job. A brain injury, he thinks, half hysterically. It must be that. "Who else would talk to me about this squiggle joining to the other squiggle to make a big even longer squiggle?"
Behind him, Anija doubles over with laughter.
Somehow he suspects this will be a common occurence from now on.
"I'm not too gone to be healed, am I? I'm not too gone am I?"
— Alice Notley, In the Pines: Poems
A.N. In which Tobirama is overdramatic, Hashirama is oblivious, and Hokime finds a very very sad man who needs some cheering up.
At this point, the regularly scheduled fanfiction has fallen behind in order for me to support my indulgences. As it is, need I say more about the state of my life? All I can say is that Senju Tobirama is still banging pots and pans together in my head demanding to be heard and written, so we continue this.
Thank you so much to everyone who reviewed, favorited, and followed. You all make this journey so much fun.
~Tavina