Time Heals All Wounds

Summary: The day Tobirama died happens earlier, during Hashirama's time as Hokage when they are at war with almost every new village but years after Madara's death. Only he didn't die. He somehow ended up in a time not his own and met a familiar face he though gone forever. Can he get back? And what of his new friend?

"Tobirama?" Said man looked up from the last of the paperwork he had to deal with from his relatively short stint into the future - he'd been gone about four to five months in this time, as opposed to the barely two months he'd lived in the twenty first century - to see a strangely hesitant Madara standing in the doorway of his home study, some grass blades and even a few sticks and leaves still clinging to his wild hair from spending the afternoon with the children. The older male couldn't help but smile, as the teen was looking nothing like the battlefield fire demon that he actually was. It was indeed rare that Madara looked his own age, but right now, he looked like the seventeen soon to be eighteen year old that he was.

He beckoned the Uchiha in, setting aside his paperwork in favor of his precious friend. If it were anyone else, he would have continued working while simultaneously giving a part of his attention to the other person. He was perfectly capable of multitasking, after all. But this was Madara. Tobirama was already of the opinion that he had been put in second place enough during both of his lifetimes and he refused to add up to it. "Is there something I can help you with? Or did I forget myself again and it's dinner time? Is tonight a night we agreed to watch a movie?" They didn't do it every night because, despite the amount that Madara had managed to pack into his devices, there were still limits, especially for foreign ones that required subtitles, that apparently took up a fair amount of memory space by themselves. Tobirama doesn't pretend to understand it all that much but he knows what takes priority in his friend's life and that will always be the teen's music and then books. Movies and TV series weren't nearly as important. So they agreed to only occasionally watch anything, TV series usually once a week so as not to forget the plot and movies only when they feel like it. It's been a working system so far.

Tobirama wouldn't mind tonight to be one of those nights. It would help stir his mind away from the frightening and heart-wrenching revelation he had earlier today. He'd really rather not contemplate those revelations, thank you.

The look on Madara's face when he came to sit in the visitor chair in front of Tobirama's work desk, though, suggested that a rather heavy topic was about to be breached. Tobirama straightened in his own chair as concern and wariness already settled into his heart even before Madara spoke. 'Please don't let Toka's fears be right,' he prayed to the gods he didn't believe in even as he made sure he appeared confident and approachable. He really hoped he was right and that Madara won't leave but ... He honestly wouldn't begrudge him if he did want to. Toka was right about the treatment he received, after all. "Is something the matter, Madara?" He asked carefully and nearly had a heart attack when the teen looked away.

But Madara looked back before he could start freaking out. "No one in the village wants me back. I want to know why they hate me so much."

Red eyes blinked, their owner surprised by the blunt statement and the demand for an answer. He was not expecting that. Tobirama wasn't sure how he was supposed to approach this situation. "What makes you think that?" He asked carefully and winced at his own stupid question but scowled at the look Madara - rightfully - shot him for it.

"You means besides my eyes and my senses?" The teen asked sarcastically and only huffed when Tobirama's eyes narrowed further. Madara crossed his arms and almost looked like he was pouting, but only almost. "I have ... enough of my old memories to know that they fear my power and that they don't trust me. That's already enough for hatred in most cases, I guess, but on this scale? To the point they'd evict me from the village if they had the power to? That doesn't make sense! What did I do? Why have I earned such treatment?"

Those were legitimate questions. If only Tobirama knew the right way to word the answers. "What makes you think you earned it?"

"Are you going to answer all of my questions with more stupid ones? Because if that's the case, I'll go ask Kurama. I'm sure he'll give me some answers."

The Senju winced at that even harder. Oh, Kurama would most definitely answer all of Madara's questions, most likely in a manner that will make the teen want to leave Konoha for good and never want to have anything to do with them again. It wouldn't even need to be lies. The truth was damning enough as it was and they'd have nothing and no one but themselves to blame. If anyone even did.

"Listen, I'm not stupid and I don't plan on leaving, if that's what has you staying your words. I know I'm not wanted nor welcomed here and that people hate me - you had a kunai at my neck when we just met, for Tsukuyomi's sake, Tobirama, and you weren't even sure if I was the person you wanted to kill! You were concussed and lost enough blood to not even be sure where you were let alone who I was! - but I want to know why. So I am asking you, my friend, who will hopefully answer me without bias or any bullshit. Can I trust you not to lie to me?"

"Of course you can!" Tobirama all but cried out, insulted, before he realized he'd have no other choice now. "It may have something to do with the ... thing you said might have taken over your will and controlled you and ... some things it might have made you do that we didn't know were not your own actions."

The Uchiha frowned. "Explain."

'Well, that certainly sounded like the old Madara,' Tobirama thought in wry amusement, remembering a time when such a tone would have made him bristle, even if only internally because he'd never grace the Uchiha with a true reaction. Now, he was just glad for it, relieved, even. "A few yeas before your death here, you ... left the village, pretty much for similar reasons for which you are asking these questions. I may have contributed to it some, since I indeed did not trust you. Your past self was unstable from grief and no one had offered to help you, him, whatever through it and so Uchiha Madara left the village that had been his dream and his to name. Then you came back with the Kyuubi and you ... He ... There was an attack. Hashirama intercepted it. A fight erupted. He won. He-"

"He killed me from the back." Tobirama's head snapped up to look at the teen from where he had, at some point, unconsciously lowered it in a grief he had not been prepared for. "So everyone just went back to the old status quo? Or hate me because of what my past self did when he attacked? Good to know."

"How much of your memories do you actually have, Madara?" He asked cautiously and watched with suspicion as Madara shrugged casually.

"The war woke up a good number of them but there are so many that I apparently need to process them little by little every day. It's frustrating but probably the safer option than if they all rushed back at me all at once."

Tobirama pondered the teen for a moment before making a suggestion. "The Yamanaka specialize in jutsus meant to navigate and guide the mind. I'm sure we can arrange something for one of them to help you recover your memories quicker-"

The suggestion wasn't even all the way out of his mouth when he trailed off as his desk cracked in two from where Madara had unexpectedly slammed a fist onto it. He stared wide eyed at the flash of panic that went through Madara's eyes before the black depths were overtaken by the vermilion of the Sharingan, going as far as for the tomoe to bleed into the combined Mangekyo pattern as Madara's chakra surged with his rage.

"None of those mind-raping mongrels will come anywhere near my mind, Senju, or so help me, I will place them in Tsukuyomi until their minds snap."

Tobirama winced at the descriptive before the insult and remembered that, during the warring era, the clan hadn't exactly been all that ethical about the way they got information from their captives. But Madara was such a powerhouse that it was easy to forget that, at some point, he had been a child and it would have been far too easy for someone to capture and invade his mind for vital information about his clan. And everyone and their mother who had eyes that functioned could see how far Madara was willing to go for the good of his clan, no matter how much the Uchiha shunned him.

"I apologize-"

"I should have thought better than to suggest it so callously," the Senju interrupted the just begun apology when he saw how guilty Madara looked when his rage and - apparently, terror - simmered down. "Do you actually remember why you had such a reaction or was it instinctive?"

Madara chewed on his lip for a second before nodding. "I was ... six, I think, almost seven. My father sent me out on a mission. I was supposed to put traps on the road between our compound and the roads that the Kaguya Clan liked to attack, to make sure they never go our way. Yamanaka territory is somewhere in between. My senses still weren't quite well developed, or at least I didn't have much control over them. They caught me from a distance while I was sleeping."

Tobirama held back the bile that wanted the climb into his mouth from his stomach. At six, not even he or Hashirama had went out on missions. Seven was the youngest a Senju was sent out of the compound, especially alone, which only happened after a child hits double digits. Madara had been far too young and it sounded like that was far from his first mission.

Hadn't Madara already been a proficient figure on the battlefield by the time he met Hashirama? Many a Senju soldiers had whispered in terrified awe about Uchiha Tajima's eldest son.

"When I woke up," Madara's voice drew him back to the story his friend was telling him. "I was in a cell, but it wasn't like the ones in the Uchiha Compound. There was a chair there with some constructs meant to hold my head in place and there were three Yamanaka around me, digging around in my mind. Or trying to. Apparently, three were needed just for the amount of chakra I posses and the Sharingan had kept my mind protected so far at that point but those defenses were cracking as they learned from their failings. I panicked."

Tobirama thinks he remembers old rumors he heard about a big fire that nearly swallowed the Yamanaka Clan whole. It had been late autumn, a strange time for a fire since everything was wet from the rain. The Uchiha had been blamed of trying to start a massacre, or so some of his uncles and aunts whispered among themselves, unaware of the young half-Hatake child whose ears could perfectly well make out what they were saying. Perhaps they weren't all too wrong, though it was a Uchiha and it had been self defense. Though, in many ways, that's even scarier. Madara had been six.

Tobirama would have been ... four an a half, almost five himself. Fuck.

"I killed the three of them and anyone else who tried to trap me again. My chakra was ... all over the place, so they couldn't trap me a second time. I came home two weeks late and father nearly punished me until he heard about what had happened. He had been this close to starting a war with the Yamanaka," Madara trailed off with a bitter chuckle. "Mother had actually went on a war path. She never attacked but her presence at their gates alone had been enough to send the message."

'That would explain why the Yamanaka hadn't been heard from for over a year,' the white haired man mused to himself. "Uchiha Ryukyu was a force to be wary of."

"No shit. Our entire clan feared her and revered her in equal measure. They'd been thrilled with how much I took after her, in the beginning. But later ... Well, you probably know better than I do. My memories of Konoha itself are still sketchy at best."

Tobirama kind of wished it would stay that way. Madara wasn't aware of even half of how his life had been here before he had left. Children had feared him because of how their parents had viewed him. Some of the older kids still did. Toborama would rather have Madara frustrated with half memories or no memories of his past life at all than to have the teen remember children bursting into tears if they walked too close to him. "It will all come back in due time, I think. If you are more comfortable without anyone assisting in speeding up the process, then no one will pressure you. Though, if you want, we can make up a sparing schedule. A session once a week might do us both some good. For once, all of this office work has been a true nightmare."

Tobirama didn't usually hate paperwork so much and he'd never minded staying in the office for as long as it took to finish his work. He was used to holing himself up in a single room and doing monotonous tasks until completion or keeping his focus sharp for as long as it's needed. This was, perhaps, the first time it was all so tedious to him. Hell, he even cut his time in his lab short, most days! And he knew exactly why he was doing it. For once, after years of living alone, there was someone waiting at home for him, usually with some new delicious dish for him to try. Madara didn't stick to the dishes of this era and instead experimented with all the ways he can use katon jutsus to make the food he usually had better technology to prepare. Tobirama didn't usually eat more than necessary, far too used to the warring era where they were always a step away from rationing rice - at least until Hashirama grew into his Mokuton and learned how to grow their food at thrice the faster rate - but ever since he started eating Madara's cooking, he was always happy to eat. The teen thoroughly abused this by forcing Tobirama to take lunch bentos at work. Toka, Mito and Hashirama still stared at him every time he absently took out the bento at around noon and started munching on whatever snacks or outright meal his housemate had prepared.

He'd yet to allow any of them to take a taste.

Then again, they've yet to ask.

"Sparing sounds nice. I haven't actually spared with anyone since I got back. Well, aside from Toka-sa- Toka those first few weeks. She's been too busy since." The hasty correction of his error didn't fly over the Senju's head and he had to smirk. Madara had far too easily dropped the '-san' when he had asked but he still had moments like these with the others he interacted with on a daily basis, barring Hikaku and Kagami. Tobirama was not entirely sure why that made him so smug but he didn't question it.

Besides, it seemed like everyone was now competing for a bit of the teen's time and attention. Tobirama obviously had much more important things to worry about than the satisfaction he felt every time Madara slipped into formality with one of his family members, barring Tsunade for obvious reasons.

"Though, are you sure you can keep up, Senju?" That had Tobirama looking at Madara a bit strangely because that had been ... almost a purr. Was he ... Was he teasing? Sure, they teased each other regularly but it was still mostly Tobirama that teased the teenager.

"Shall we see, Madara?" Tobirama returned with a wicked grin, already anticipating tomorrow. He's not even sure if it's because of the upcoming spar or the possible memories it might uncover. He meant it when he said no one will pressure Madara into uncovering more of his memories but the fact remains that there still might be someone or something out there that was a danger to them all, especially Madara, who had already been attacked once. Tobirama wanted to find out what that danger actually was so he can protect his friend. He'll do whatever he can to ensure that they don't lose him this time, be it to foreign, outside threats or to the spiteful and fearful villagers within Konoha's walls.

"We have a deal, then. Now, put those things down and treat me to dinner. I feel like inarizushi," Madara commented, already heading out of the office, carding fingers through his hair to get rid of the nature that had decided to make a home in his wild mane of hair. Tobirama's grin turned into a fond smile and he easily complied, going after his friend at a faster pace to catch up. Once within reaching distance, he batted the gloved hands away and gently carded his own through the - surprisingly soft - mess of hair, much more effectively clearing out all the leaves, twigs and blades of grass. The Uchiha stilled under his ministrations enough for him to finish before shaking his head like a disgruntled dog and then marching right out of the house, head held high as he started leading the way towards his preferred dinner dish.

Tobirama grabbed his wallet and followed. Madara's face always lit up in the most adorable way when he got his favorite food, after all. He was glad Madara wasn't going to let the villagers' behavior affect him and Tobirama won't let it affect their meal, either.

Even if he has to sick Kurama on them.