Warnings: Heed T, or PG-13 guide. Darker themes.
Mild hints of spoilers for Naruto founders' flashback chapters. Canon-compliant.
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Part II
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Forward .
Spiral
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Fuinjutsu was good not just for steel and stone. Reworking the seals meant being able to seal many more things—like raw chakra. This epiphany led to months searching for the right books and scholars' literature, the knowledge that her predecessors had lost*, the classical education that her father had scorned, the information that Mito realized she could only get at the Daimyo's court. The former Daimyo's son had married, with two concubines, but that did not mean he did not still burn with lust for Mito.
She let his lingering gaze caress her back so long as her face was buried in a newly purchased scroll.
At court, she turned her other men's secrets into her own. These secrets she turned into power. She turned this power into chakra. Mito deposited her chakra into a small diamond crest* on her forehead.
Fathomless. Bottomless.
Mito would not die in battle, and the Uzumaki clan would not be forgotten.
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The world was full of irony, Mito discovered at nineteen.
After brutal years of twisting arms and legs and beards, making business deals with numerous other shinobi clans, numerous merchant funders, legions of countryside farmers and fishermen, Uzumaki Koumizu passed away and left behind the only legacy that still loved him and his memory—Whirlpool Village.
Mito's surviving brother, the youngest and always physically weakest of her three, inherited the title of clan leader—a title that, after Uzumaki Koumizu's death, actually carried influence beyond their little pureblood Uzumaki clan.
Uzumaki Kenka was smart and frighteningly practical, but he was not especially good at fuinjutsu. He had neither the old clan leader's charisma, nor his daughter's unique chakra signature and popularity among their Daimyo supporters.
Mito loved her brother with the same love she had once loved her father, with a fierce, forced loyalty that ran thicker than water and could only be proven with blood. She loved enough to kill for him. Was that love?
Anyhow, Kenka hated her.
(She knew that.)
He also became the one to free her.
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Her brother had not spoken of any marriage prospects since their father's death. It seemed like he was just now becoming aware of his sister's usefulness. Or he was waiting for the right moment. Mito would bet her right hand on the latter.
"His name is Hashirama. Sources tell me he will be a good match. But before any formal arrangement, you will want to meet him, first."
Mito considered the arrangement. This was fine. Six of her other good matches had already turned out to be good targets.
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Her late nursemaid's freckle-faced, wide-eyed niece took out the two softly coiled buns and brushed out Mito's smooth, straight scarlet hair by candlelight. The unspoken weight of the Whirlpool princess' last day in the Uzumaki clanhead's house settled over the room.
"Mito-sama…"
"Call me onee-san*. Mito-sama makes me sound old," Mito objected, voice curt with unnamed emotion, as she tried to not look into the eyes of the little girl who wanted to be her. A brutal, weeping part of Mito wanted to slap the adoring expression off of the girl. There was no reason to ever want such a thing.
"Mito-sa—Mito-onee-sama… are you sad to leave?"
"No. The world is an exciting place."
She was surprised by the amount of truth in her impromptu reply. It had been meant only as a way to appease the fears of a young girl who had not yet been thrust into the shinobi world. Uzu Village, despite being poor, was now a proper haven. It required fewer sacrifices from its inhabitants.
"I'll miss you brushing my hair every night, though," Mito smiled, and, on a whim, activated the fuin seal on her sleeve to produce a shiny jade pendant. It was a gift from her late second husband. It would sell for a lot of money.
"For you and your family."
Truth be told, marrying her off to their Senju allies was the greatest compliment to her skill that her brother could pay her. This was a good way to send her far away, and build his own popularity among the Uzumaki clan and the new people who were settling in the village. She knew he felt threatened by her, a mere woman. This meant Mito was powerful. Mito searched herself and realized she was not scared. In fact, she was eager to leave for Fire Country.
(Not because the Senju were still at war with the Uchiha. Not because Mito's heart was, also.)
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Mito supposed she could do worse, but still… she was Whirlpool's princess, and all this guy could do was make crude wooden sculptures (which, by the way, did not sell well in this economy).
He was no mere merchant. In fact, he was a terrible merchant, with no business sense and an uncanny ability for getting suckered into bad deals. So this was Senju Hashirama, dressed up as a wood carver peddling on weekends at the market square. The calluses on his hands and the lightness of his movements spoke of years of shinobi training. He was likely here for information as well—markets carried all the gossip and tidings of the region. No ninja could be this simple.
In disguise herself, Mito sidled up to him in the market square and poked around for some answers, some defining traits, trying to read him. After one meeting, he gave her a first name. After three meetings, Mito had amassed a small collection of badly-carved wooden Buddhas, two of which he'd given her for free.
"Don't you have any other talents?" she asked him once, to which Hashirama surprised her completely by curling into fetal position and (crazy or not, she could have sworn…) summoning an actual dark cloud to rain over his body.
Here was a different sort of mystery man.
Mito had no clue how to act around this particular sort, so she fumbled her way around his easygoing nature with just the right bit of her honest character. He seemed to put up with her practical cynicism, which came out at all the intervals where other customers (like middlemen peddlers) would cheat him of his products and end up taking home all his decent carvings for a pittance. If Mito had a coiled spring for a heart, she thought it would have burst from stress, for each time Hashirama's cluelessness at business caused him to earn not a single penny.
The best thing about Hashirama, Mito decided, would have to be that he was likely not hard to kill and make it look like an accident.
As a potential husband, Hashirama was not unattractive, really. He had smooth good looks. He had (and here Mito laughed at the irony, come back to bite her) dark hair and dark eyes. Yet, the Senju's smile was bright as the sun, in sharp contrast to that red-eyed boy long ago. The more times Mito saw Hashirama at Fire Country's small fledgling markets, peddling strange, many-armed figurines, squandering his earnings by gambling at the dice booth, arguing with his brother, Tobirama, who came along sometimes, the more Mito realized he was nothing like any man she'd met before.
It wasn't his niceness or pleasant demeanor. Plenty of people hid shrewd plans under those, and it was practically a kunoichi's first-day exam to put on a winning smile. If she had to pinpoint something, it would probably be the ease to which he gave her information.
(Only one man had ever come close—and that was only after he had disemboweled her first and only lover.)
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On their twenty-seventh meeting, Hashirama gave her something more valuable than a first name.
He gave her his last name. And it was a valuable one, too. One that Mito already knew, yes, but one that he had no means to know that she knew. Here, it was the intention that counted. A shinobi that gave his last name was either a moron or a friend. A friend. Now that was one thing Mito felt uneasy about; the closest thing to friends she'd had growing up had been the Uzumaki girl cousins who'd tried to bribe Mito, the clan head's daughter, for extra food and rope. Non-Uzumaki members were not friends. Men were not friends.
"I'm actually Senju Hashirama," he grinned. "We meet here all the time, and you help me sell my sculptures, so I thought you had the right to know. And you are?"
"Tsunade* Mito," Mito laughed lightly. "A nobody. Your name, however… I think Senju sounds familiar?"
If he caught her half-truth, he didn't show it. "Your name is beautiful," Hashirama grinned. "Does your family live near the coast?"
"You could say that. We were poor, but we could somehow feed ourselves because of the ocean," Mito kept her voice light, amiable. "I can't say I like the taste of fish anymore, though. That's why I moved out here."
Hashirama looked thoughtful. "I see."
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Unlike her assignments as a teenager, Mito didn't visit the Uzumaki clan leader anymore. Not that she needed to, in order to receive her assignments. In a short year's time, the entire clan now had more than enough money to send carrier birds to deliver messages to their forces throughout the land. Mito herself was stationed in a market town near the heart of Fire Country, day by day learning more about the Senju, and Hashirama's family.
Hashirama was to become clan head, and sometimes she would catch hints of coded conversations from him and the thinly-disguised Senju Tobirama about their recent skirmishes with the Uchiha.
To be honest, Mito had allowed herself to be positioned only for the chance to get back at the latter clan. She could be patient.
One day, a swallow swooped from the sky and deposited a small note at the window of her small, rented shack.
"Come back" it read. "The Uchiha and Senju are going to war".
And the Uzumaki are going to help the Senju.
That was the unwritten conclusion hanging in the air.
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It's not an alliance until someone dies.
That was the age-old mantra spoken among shinobi*. No clan could be sure of the fealty of an ally until that ally was willing to lay down a life or take a life, because the price of one person's life was the worth of one person's trust. Because, when the shinobi in the front lines turned their faces away from their allies, bared their backs and went to battle, trust and the willingness to die by a stab in the back meant the same thing.
"That naive child of a clan head does not understand! The Uchiha must pay for their crimes to the Uzumaki." Kenka's fists clenched white, and Mito thought to herself that her brother was not like her father. Her father loved aggressively, passionately. Kenka hated aggressively, passionately.
"And yet, in the heat of battle, this Senju bastard refuses to kill Uchiha Madara! Can this alliance prosper with a damn pacifist as leader?"
Her brother made no move to continue. Kenka was angry, not stupid. He knew that the Senju were strong, and Senju Hashirama was the strongest. Strong shinobi could afford to be merciful. Somehow, it was a trait that none of the men in her family had ever possessed.
"Senju Hashirama is a gambler," Mito said impassively. She'd seen his obsession with dice. "He wants to grasp at a different future."
Hashirama was gambling on a ceasefire with the Uchiha, she knew. Mito wondered if the happy-go-lucky man knew that he was hurting others in the process. The Senju were hurting clans like the Uzumaki, who would follow the Senju to the grave with bonds of what Kenka thought was mutual hatred for the Uchiha.
Senju Hashirama was a gambler. Maybe he was better at it on the battlefield than with money.
And maybe he was not. Mito wondered when Hashirama would risk this alliance with the Uzumaki for something he felt was more valuable.
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They came back from battle with wounded men and dead women, more of them Uzumaki than Senju. That was not the Senju's fault, but her war-eager brother had led their clan far ahead in the charge, where as Hashirama had pulled back.
Mito came back physically unscathed, since her mission had been to watch the village in her brother's absence. However, she did return to Fire Country with a heavy heart for the future of the Uzumaki-Senju alliance.
Just when she thought things could not become worse, it was Tobirama who found her stash of kunai, sandwiched between her left-third drawer and a fake bottom panel. Apparently, he'd done his share of snooping in Mito's absence (apparently, it had only been Hashirama's presence that had stopped him from snooping before, but Hashirama had gone to battle as well).
Tobirama had actually been pragmatic and reported to his older brother first thing. And so, here stood Mito, in front of her rented house, with Hashirama, Senju clan heir and arguably the most powerful ninja alive, staring her in the face.
Hashirama actually laughed, before exclaiming, "So you are a foreign kunoichi after all!"
Mito felt another uncharacteristic bout of hysteria as she considered banging her head against the nearest sharp edge.
He seemed to read her expression in the split second that Mito's eyes flashed, defiant and beautiful, and another chuckle escaped his mouth.
Mito caught herself, and tried to reverse the damage.
"I don't know why you would think that," she hedged. She was about to spin her reverse psychology when Hashirama started laughing even more raucously, as if he found the whole thing hilariously funny. Whether it was bitter or absolutely insane laughter, she did not know.
"It's just, I don't know a single babe that hasn't gone into the kunoichi business! If it's henge, could they fix me up, too? I've been told I'm not very stylish. I mean, I used to have a bowl cut ahaha."
Mito considered running away. She also considered telling him that she was an Uzumaki. After all, they were allies? Hashirama probably kept an (awkward, strained) correspondence with her brother, but now that she was all but cut off from the family, Mito did not want to return in any way—even in just acknowledging her name.
"So what's your real name?" his question cut into her thoughts.
She could lie.
"Don't lie." Hashirama said right then, as if he could read her mind.
So what if she did.
"I know kunoichi and liars are, like, the same thing…" Hashirama continued. He grinned guiltily, as if he thought that he was insulting her. As if he thought her feelings mattered.
"…Everyone know that," he mused, brushing away an errant strand of ebony hair. Hashirama looked tired and hopeful. "But I'm trying to change that in my new village."
And Mito froze.
She'd heard this before.
She's heard this before, damnit.
"Uzumaki Mito."
It tumbled out before she knew it, like the first, fat raindrop in a hurricane that no one expected.
There. The truth.
And yet, Senju Hashirama's eyes were suddenly hard.
This was the first time she'd spoken truth to the man she was committed to marry, for the sake of another Uzumaki man she was committed to protect. Mito had thought (foolishly hoped) that he would forgive her for three months of lies.
"I suppose we'll be married, then," Hashirama murmured.
(As if he didn't want to marry a liar.)
And Mito realized, as the chill crept up her spine, she actually wanted this man's good opinion. Not as a Senju ally. Not as a tool for self-benefit. That scared her.
"I suppose we will," Mito echoed, her tongue tasting of acid.
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To be continued
Note on Clans and Characters:
The Uzumaki and Senju clan are supposedly "really tight". In my fic, I had it so that Mito's father and Hashirama's father would have gotten along beautifully, sharing the same morals and goals. However, I think there can still be mutual distrust and hard times in their "alliance", which is why daughters are offered up in marriage. In monarchic Europe, marriage was not between just chummy-chummy lineages, but also between those that disliked each other, in hopes of building mutual gain and bonds for the future. This is the reasoning behind Mito's brother choosing Hashirama for her.
In case it wasn't clear, the relations between Senju and Uzumaki were strained at the time of Hashirama's ascent to clan-head because of the differences in how to treat the Uchiha. The Uzumaki clan hated the Uchiha, because they'd just nearly had their entire clan wiped out by Sharingan-users. There was also historical enmity between the Senju and Uchiha. Hashirama frustrates both his Senju father (deceased in this fic) and Mito's brother because of his relationship with Madara.
As for Mito, she doesn't know that Madara and Hashirama know each other. The reason she was called back home was to watch the village in Kenka's absence.
Hashirama likes to gamble, since he recollects in NARUTO that he was the one who instilled that bad habit into Tsunade. Also, I figured I would make him a "sucker" of sorts, just like Tsunade, who was also bad with money. Hashirama is an interesting mix of serious and light-hearted, naive and stubborn, merciful and unforgiving. He puts himself and his "own" people on a higher standard of morality-that is why he would probably not want to choose a wife who was like Mito, who lied as a means to an end.
I get a bit irked when fanfics introduce the founders, Madara, Hashirama, and Mito... as saints or devils. I don't believe in portraying Mito as an angel of sorts, who Hashirama and Madara clamored to protect and love because she was so perfect and morally good in such a sinister age.
I actually think it would be a special tenacity and resilience, practicality and adaptiveness, which would make Mito so successful as a kunoichi. In this fic, at least, her wisdom and love are learned through hard life experiences and mistakes.
Asteriks* Glossary
1. The knowledge that her predecessors had lost: just as in Japan's warring states era and any other period of civil war, there was a lot of culture and history that was lost in the process. In this setting, I have the Uzumaki clan under the leadership of dominant, militaristic and pragmatic male leaders much like Hashirama's Senju-Papa, as portrayed by Kishimoto. As for why there is so much fuin culture and the Uzu clan shrine later in the manga... I actually plan to have Mito reinstall this preservation of history. As you can see, she is a bright cookie, and is working to make fuinjutsu more powerful.
2. Mito's diamond-shaped crest: She has one in canon. It is unknown whether or not it does the same thing as Tsunade's, but I think it's fitting that, as a fuin/seal jutsu specialist with special chakra, she would have some functional use for the diamond. Generations of people mimic each other...
3. Tsunade, the name: A whimsical shout-out to Hashirama's granddaughter. Wouldn't it be funny if the name Tsunade was something Mito came up with? Also, TSUANDE means mooring rope. This explains why Hashirama thinks of the ocean, and fishing and boating.
4. Onee-san, -sama: I do not use Japanese in my fics unless they actually serve a purpose. Here, the honorifics are meant to imply the status and age of Mito, in comparison to the others in her clan. Her maidservant is technically a relative, but any younger girl can call an older girl "Onee-san", to mean "big sister". The "-Sama" suffix is meant to show reverence, usually in referral to a person of higher status, or someone much older and wiser.
5. It's not an alliance until someone dies: I made this into a sort of shinobi catch phrase because this is the moral test that Madara pulls on Hashirama in their NARUTO battle. I figure there must have been some historical prevalence to Madara's idea.