(b)
Madara watches as a large tawny hawk perched at the top of a dead snag tears the spinal column from a still-wriggling fish. The wet ground is flecked with gore. Madara's eyesight is impeccable now. He has not seen so clearly in a very long time.
4.
The tent, hastily assembled in the aftermath of the battle, is littered with scattered armor and mopped-up blood and cloth and stray bandages. Medics run back and forth, tending to the shinobi who remain. They don't really need so many witnesses, but it turns out a lot of people wanted to see real, physical evidence of peace.
(Hashirama knows that the war was over the moment Madara seized his hand, but no matter.)
The truce itself is a far cry from the ceasefire agreement that Hashirama had once spent months meticulously writing and rewriting. It is scrawled down hastily on a torn scrap of paper and Madara bleeds all over the corner as he's signing it but it's there, and the thing is proofread and sealed and witnessed and it's done. It's done.
Senju and Uchiha alike breathe a collective sigh of relief.
Hashirama sends everyone who's still there home after that. He's in a sort of daze, and he can't seem to bring himself to deal with people right now. There's still plenty of work to be done, anyway, and it's best to get everyone out of the way before they start—he and Madara need to refine the terms, to divide up territories and designate neutral ones, to settle the matter of reparations, to figure out how the hell they're going to actually build this village of theirs. What would Butsuma Senju say if he could see this? Hashirama feels giddy and defiant and shaky, but maybe he just needs to eat. Or sleep. Or both.
Tobirama barely knows what to do with himself.
He paces back and forth across the tent, his chin sunk into his chest, stealing the occasional glance at both of them—Madara half-propped up on the cot with blood matted into his hair, Hashirama perched next to him transcribing the truce onto a cleaner scroll. Hashirama looks up from his work and watches his brother's progress across the tent, frowning.
"Tobirama," he says.
Tobirama stops.
Hashirama holds out the newly updated truce. "Bring this to the compound, will you? Before too many absurd rumors start to fly."
Tobirama is silent. He shoots Hashirama a look that clearly reads, And leave you alone with him?
"Go on," Hashirama says. "It's all right. Take the message to the compound. They'll want to hear it from you."
Tobirama hesitates, one hand on the tent flap. His eyes flicker from Hashirama to Madara.
"The medics are still here, anyway," Hashirama says, although they've made themselves scarce; half the Senju medical unit is out on the now-abandoned battlefield, gathering more supplies from the corpses. The remaining handful of medics in the tent look—well—wary. They kneel by Madara's feet, unwilling to meet his eyes directly.
Madara is injured, though, and silent. Worse than the silence is the blank fear, the deceptively serene sense of quiet dread radiating from him. They both watch Tobirama go, still silently sitting in each other's company. Hashirama has never seen him like this before—has never seen him look so lost. Madara always looks like he knows precisely what he's doing even if he doesn't really; even while they were enemies, Hashirama had always admired him for that. Now Madara's shaking slightly on the cot, gloved hands twisting in his lap, mouth set in a grim line. His eyes are glassy, unblinking, completely emotionless.
Really he looks about as tired as Hashirama feels. But for Hashirama it's a good sort of tired, a sort of satisfied exhaustion. Bitter, yes, from all the casualties up until this point—but still. Hashirama is ready to sleep for about thirty years. And, better yet, he feels as if he can sleep now. Something about the pair of them in their tent together is overwhelmingly safe and calm and comforting; it's Madara, it's his best friend and they're no longer at war and his presence is different now, just a little bit, now that these are Izuna's eyes in his skull—but Madara doesn't have enough chakra to activate his sharingan right now, much less the mangekyou, so it's barely noticeable. It's Madara. It's him and it feels like coming home.
The silence wears on them both after a while. Hashirama knows Madara is looking at him and then looking away, but neither of them want to speak. What do you say to someone you've been waging war with for most of your adult life? Hashirama has never been in this situation before—never imagined Madara would let this situation happen.
Madara breaks the silence first.
"Your hair's gotten longer," he says. The Senju medics are still hovering around him with gauze and bandages, hesitant to touch his skin.
"Yours too," says Hashirama, acutely aware of how pitiful this contribution is.
"But I see your dress sense hasn't improved at all. Enough," Madara says to the swarming medics, snatching his bloody arm out of their reach. He looks about ready to breathe fire again.
The medics retreat, and Madara's face softens. Or, rather, the angry fire in his eyes fades away, and that horrible emptiness settles in again. He gives a quiet whispery sigh, and Hashirama moves closer to him, gesturing towards his bad arm. "May I?" he says quietly.
Weary, Madara nods.
Hashirama closes his eyes. He can feel Madara's chakra give a dark hot flicker as he touches his arm with the tips of his fingers. Healing has always come naturally to Hashirama; it's logical—it's right. He can feel all of Madara's jangled nerve endings, his firing neurons, the stale blood pooling underneath his skin where he was hit. His chakra maps out like the canopy of a tree, following the framework of his blood—arteries flowing to thousands of blood vessels to countless tiny capillaries, many of them damaged and crushed. Hashirama lets his own chakra seep slowly into Madara's bloodstream; this isn't the most conventional or efficient method of healing and he knows it, but he wants to be thorough; he wants to feel every bit of Madara he can reach, if he'll let him; he wants to reassure himself that Madara is complicated and miraculous and alive, right now: his lungs working, muscles layered on bone, his heart beating securely within his ribcage, every cell in his body thriving and healing and pulsing with life.
As he works he feels Madara's heartbeat slow to a more relaxed pace and it fills him with profound relief to know that Madara is calmer now at least partly because of his actions. At one point Madara actually makes a small satisfied sound in his throat, and then tries to pass it off as a cough. Hashirama laughs quietly at the familiarity of the noise, pressing his fingertips gently to Madara's sides.
Madara's heartbeat speeds up again almost immediately, and he winces as Hashirama applies his palm to his ribcage.
"Oh—don't," he says. "Don't waste your chakra on a fractured rib."
"Don't be ridiculous," says Hashirama. "It's completely shattered. A fragment could puncture your lung." There's a snapping sound, and a buzz of chakra, and the rib is whole again. Hashirama splays his fingers across Madara's chest, feeling for more damage, but Madara draws back, curling in on himself, crossing his arms and bringing his knees up to his chest. When he speaks next, it's oddly strained.
"Wait," he says, and Hashirama takes his hands off him immediately, lets his chakra fade back into his palms. Madara clenches and unclenches his fists. He takes a breath. He takes another.
"Just," Madara says, looking very lost again. "Just—keep going. The way you were before."
Hashirama flounders for a few moments, trying to remember where he left off. "Right," he says. "Well…"
He removes Madara's gloves, as gently as he can, watching his face for signs of distress—something that says don't touch me anymore, don't sit next to me while I'm so vulnerable, don't look at this side of me—and hoping (rather selfishly, he admits) that he won't see any doubt in Madara's face. After all, Madara was the one who pushed him away, the one who denounced their dream first. But he also remembers how Madara had reached up despite the pain and stopped Hashirama's kunai from hitting its mark; he remembers the desperation on his face, how Madara's gloved fingers had crushed his own.
Madara is watching his face again, looking into his eyes, his own eyes feverishly taking in every single inch of Hashirama as if he's afraid he'll vanish the instant he looks away. He winces as the gloves come off.
"How are you feeling?" Hashirama says.
Madara scoffs, eyes half-lidded. "As if any second now, I'm going to wake up and we're still going to be at war with each other," he says.
Hashirama lays his hand on top of Madara's and gives his fingers a little squeeze. He hasn't seen Madara with his gloves off for the better part of a decade, and for a moment Hashirama thinks that his hands look pale and foreign without them. He has such lovely hands, though, all scarred and spindly, with deft calloused fingers. His fingernails are chipped and caked with blood—it must be old, and it's not his, Hashirama can tell—and one thumbnail is missing entirely.
Hashirama concentrates, and Madara's thumbnail slowly regrows. Madara stares at it, blinks several times, and Hashirama realizes that Madara has never seen his chakra at work like this before—for years and years now Madara has only seen deadly green branches plunging into flesh, gouging skin and twisting bones apart; now Hashirama is healing him and his chakra is no longer a force of livid destruction.
(And, Hashirama remembers, fire gives way to new fledgeling forests.)
"Hashirama," Madara says abruptly, sounding dazed.
Hashirama smiles on instinct. "Hmm?"
"I—we're doing this. This is real. We can—" He gestures wordlessly for several seconds, staring at a spot somewhere past Hashirama's shoulder, but Hashirama understands. "This is—this is hundreds of years of war, and we just—" He gives a sort of weak, humorless laugh. "Imagine if our fathers could see this."
Hashirama grimaces, but his eyes are lighting up. So they are still on the same wavelength, after all. "Don't even say that," he says, "the shock would probably kill them all over again."