***
Hence to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting.
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War (trans. Lionel Giles)
***
The Kaguya compound had walls made of sun-bleached bone.
Or they did.
The famed unbreakable bone of the Kaguya had eventually splintered under the infection of Hashirama's mokuton. A field of white, sharp enough to cut the leaves landing on them, stretched across the ground at his feet, glittering in the afternoon sun.
What remained of the Kaguya, their women and children, and those too maimed to fight, watched him from the middle of it. A few weapons, more farming tools, shook in their hands.
No one had attacked him yet, but he could understand that. It was shocking to see the mokuton in its element, and since Madara was the only opponent that required his full effort, only Madara, and a handful of his clansmen, unfortunate enough to be close by, had seen anywhere near the full extent of the mokuton.
It was a good sign, Hashirama thought. They are wary, their surprise lends more to curiosity than fear, and the innate desire to destroy anything scary.
Hashirama likes to assume the best in everything. Madara says it's his worst quality. So does Tobirama, and yet the two of them don't get along at all.
Some things, even Hashirama would never understand.
But he had plans. There would be time in the future to deal with those two stubborn people. Hashirama was going to be at their wedding, even if he had to drag them both kicking and screaming to the altar.
It would take years to plan the wedding anyway. There were long traditions in the Uchiha of weddings, and the Senju had their own practices that couldn't be ignored. Not to mention, Madara and Tobirama came from important bloodlines, and the wedding would likely involve the whole village.
It would be an event.
Perhaps the event of the year.
It would take years to plan. The Inuzuka might even want to incorporate some of their traditions, since the village was supposed to include everyone.
Did the Kaguya have traditional wedding practices? All the clans had developed surprisingly different wedding traditions despite their shared origin.
They must, he thought, and crossed his arms, frustrated that he couldn't remember. How much easier it would be if he could just memorize everything the way Madara did.
A quivering young woman finally stepped forward. A rusted sword held aloft by white knuckles. "What do you want, Senju?"
Somber and bothered by his lack of knowledge, Hashirama took a seat amid the shattered bone. "Tell me of your wedding traditions."
***
"Look, just stop being so fucking stubborn!" Madara growled, kicking aside a log that had once been part of the compound wall. A woman screamed, grabbed a small child, and fled further back to where the rest of the Hagoromo were huddled. "You're just going to starve if you stay here. Unless bandits kill you first."
"You're here to kill us!" Kanna shrieked, looking around at her destroyed home.
"I'm here to save you!" Madara shrieked back, frustrated and tired and worried about his own blood back home.
She chucked a rusted bucket at his head, and he didn't even bother to dodge.
It bounced off and fell to the ground with a thud. "Mature."
Kanna let out a hiss of pure outrage.
***
Lord Akimichi doesn't answer Mito. A veteran of battle and politics, he doesn't have to. The Akimichi are no slouches on the battlefield, as much as they've avoided most of the clan wars of the last few decades. They are still a noble clan, and they must answer to the Daimyō just like the rest of them.
The line behind him answered for him, a ripple of chakra flaring to life down the ranks like someone had dropped a match in dry grass.
Not that there was any around anymore.
Tobirama's never going to light another fire in his life ever again after this summer.
Mito's fan snapped open.
The first chain came out of the ground in front of her so fast that the Hyuga in the front rank didn't see it until it was already wrapped around their ankles. There was another wave of chakra as their Byakugan came alive, mouths open in shock as the ground they were standing on stopped being solid.
The answering chakra from the Uchiha Sharingan made Tobirama's head ache, and he had to take a breath and a second to calibrate his senses before they were completely blinded.
"Well," Izuna said and flung himself forward cheerfully. "Negotiations are pointless anyway."
"That's not the lesson here!" Tobirama admonished and chased after him.
Fucking Uchiha.
***
"I see." Hashirama nodded in understanding.
Chie's eye twitched. "You see?"
"Yes," Hashirama swore solemnly. He wasn't sure how Madara would take a bloodletting at his wedding, and Tobirama definitely wouldn't allow an animal sacrifice…though maybe a human one. He was weird that way.
Chie glanced uneasily at what was left of her clan. "I'm not sure we have anyone willing, able, to enter a marriage." Most of the women were no doubt widows by now, if Hashirama hadn't felt the need to stay behind and protect his clan, but several were pregnant, some were injured or ill, or hadn't entered their last marriage willingly and wouldn't want another.
Hashirama blinked. "Huh?"
Chie stared at him.
Hashirama stared back.
"You want one of us to marry into the Senju, yes? To secure an alliance." Chie paused. "Why else would you be asking about our wedding traditions?"
"For my brother's wedding!" Hashirama gestured vaguely back in the direction of the Uchiha compound.
"You want one of us to marry the Ghost?" Another woman gasped, horrified.
Hashirama managed to be confused and offended at the same time. "My brother would be an excellent husband!" He would not, if Hashirama were honest with himself. Tobirama would only be a good husband for a very specific kind of person. But Hashirama would go to his grave defending his perfect brother. Then he realized what she'd actually said. "Ah, but no. He's taken."
Or he would be.
Hashirama beamed then, a few leaves sprouting out of his hair before he could stop them. "There's no need to marry to join us. We are welcoming everyone."
***
"All our fighters went with the attacking force. There's no one left to fight." Kanna snapped, because she was certain her clan would never accept defeat while alive.
Especially not against the Uchiha.
Madara, with a low-grade headache born from annoyance, but otherwise uninjured, sighed. "I don't care."
Kanna scoffed. "How can you not care? We'd just be extra mouths to feed."
His eye twitched. "You can't learn to fight? Don't you sew? Or cook?"
Kanna sputtered, and Madara had to remind himself that not all the clans maintained the same social practices. Some of them were surprisingly backward or old-fashioned. A far cry from the Konohagakure he remembered in that first life with Tsunade at the helm.
She probably would have dragged the Kaguya and the Hagoromo into modern times by sheer force, too, but according to Hashirama that wasn't this time.
Everyone had to want it.
Madara rolled his eyes. People only wanted what they thought they could have and there were far fewer dreamers among them than Hashirama imagined. He and Madara would not have had to hide for so long if there weren't.
***
This thing about battle, that few who haven't been in it understand, is that it doesn't happen all at once. It is one long, continuous slog, at least not for the foot soldier doing the actual fighting.
It happens in pieces. Ebbs and flows like the current. A moment of intensity here. A moment of recalibration there. Good soldiers, the ones who have been to hell and back already, know how to capitalize on the pause. To take the opportunity to catch their breath when they can.
Tobirama never learned that. For better or for ill, he's never needed it. He clocks them, he can't help it, but he doesn't stop, he doesn't slow.
Izuna doesn't seem to either. The Sharingan allowed the Uchiha clearer sight than most, and they were skilled enough to take advantage.
Before the fire, before the compound, before his brother walked out of their father's house and took the future they knew with him, Tobirama knew how battles went. The opening clash, the first wave of bodies, sacrificial more often than not, or the young and brave and brash. A moment for each side to calculate the day's risks and how the day will end.
The fighting always got uglier after that.
Most of those battles were fought in open fields, or forests, the mountains in the north.
It's rare for a shinobi to fight pitched battles with walls at their back. When do they ever have a large enough force for that?
Even assassinations in clan compounds were smaller forces sneaking in and out. And if they got caught…well, it was a one-sided battle.
A short one.
He'd protected his fellow shinobi, but he'd never fought with a compound of civilians and wounded behind him.
They had three hundred and four healthy shinobi between the Senju, the Uchiha, the Inuzuka, the Aburame, the Namikaze, and the Hatake.
The Uchiha and the Inuzuka apiece were worth five, which Tobirama only gave begrudgingly, and the Senju, Hatake, Namikaze, and Aburame three, with obvious exceptions.
They had another two hundred and twenty-six on the walls and in the rear of the main force.
On any other day, it would be a respectable force.
Any other day, and their victory would have been assured.
But today, across a plain of cracked, black lava rock that Madara made, in a war Madara and Hashirama started, while Madara and Hashirama were somewhere else.
Tobirama snarled and cut through an attacking force of Hagoromo.
He was going to kill them both.
He ducked a blade, felt the sting as it clipped his arm, and caught a Senju falling to a Kaguya bone spear from the corner of his eye.
He's going to live, then he's going to kill them both.
***
The Kaguya hit their line like a landslide. Bone erupting from their skin in ways Mito had never seen before, and so hard that even her chains struggled to break it.
They laughed as they cut down Mito's shinobi, and they laughed as they were cut down. It was a madness she had never seen before. The clans in Uzushiogakure, even the most violent of them, were not like these war-obsessed people who bathed in blood and worshipped the gods of war before any others.
She had thought the stories that made their way across the ocean were exaggerated.
Clearly, they were not.
"Tobi!" Her head snapped around at Izuna's roar, and she saw Tobirama throw himself to the ground without thinking as a fireball the size of a house passed over his head and crashed into a line of advancing shinobi.
Mito sent her chains after it with a snarl. She was not going to allow Hashirama and Madara's younger brothers to die on her watch.
But the enemy keeps coming. Some of them still burning as they threw themselves at Mito's lines.
The water in the air condensed. Mito hauled Izuna behind her as Tobirama's hands blurred and his signature water dragon came to life.
Her father would have loved that if he ever got the chance to see it. She could practically feel Izuna rolling his eyes as he muttered, "Show off," as the dragon grew to huge proportions before flinging itself at their attackers.
Tobirama's frown suggested he wasn't entirely pleased with the result, but it managed to sweep the Kaguya line back thirty paces and into the charging Akimichi behind them.
She has to admire whatever strategist the Akimichi have with them. Not only did they put their clan in the rear, where they would take less damage, but their particular bloodline limit made them especially skilled at withstanding force of any kind.
The Akimichi expanded, and the water broke around them like boulders in a river.
***
On the wall, Namikaze Mina, the only strategist agreed on by Mito, Izuna, Tobirama, and Tsume, pressed one hand to her enormous stomach and the other against the wooden wall driven deep into the ground.
She was not a sensor. Not like Tobirama and Madara, but the Namikaze were messengers long before they were shinobi, and they still passed down those first teachings.
She could read the ground, the trees, the air as it shifted, affected by the rising chakra.
She could feel the left flank thinning where the Hyuga were making headway. She tells Kurama, not that the fox, curled small and annoyed on the parapet beside her, particularly cares. The only human he seemed to show any fondness for was Madara.
Which was fitting since they seemed to share the same personality.
She adds, "Tell Mayu." And prayed.
The demon fox looked at her like she'd asked him to fetch.
"Please," Mina added, very politely given the circumstances.
After a long moment, the fox rolled his eyes and stretched, tongue lolling out, before he finally leapt over the edge of the wall with an offended huff.
Mina sighed, but the relief a moment later when the left flank stopped thinning was enough to chase away the residual annoyance.
A festive howl rose from Inuzuka Mayu's ninken.
***
"I fail to see why you're arguing with me," Madara snapped, temper flaring.
Kanna sputtered, waved a hand at the general destruction of her home. "You expect us to believe that our lifelong enemies suddenly want peace? We've been killing each other for generations." She took a deep breath and massaged her temples. "Not only that, but you think everyone will just live together peacefully? Crammed together in one compound?"
She sounded insultingly doubtful. "The Uchiha and the Senju managed it." Albeit a tad violently, but what family didn't want to smack each other around every once in a while. "Besides, we're going to build a village."
"Oh, wonderful, a village full of people who want to kill each other. So much better." She said sarcastically, but in her heart, her willingness to argue was waning.
A village sounded nice. Impossible, but nice. People to grow beside and lean on. She'd never consider that one of them might be a Uchiha or a Senju. That her children might grow to depend on the Sharingan for protection instead of waking screaming from nightmares of it.
Madara, whose instinct for weakness of any kind was finely honed, sensed her wavering and pushed. "A new dawn," he tells her.
***
"A new day," Hashirama tells Chie and her brethren. "Where your children will grow up safe. Without the constant threat of war."
***
"Where you will be surrounded by allies." Madara insisted.
***
"Where there will be peace."
***
Tsume doesn't fight like a shinobi. Tobirama had never seen her fight up close before.
She was, he realized with dawning apprehension, one of the Inuzuka who was on the battlefield the least during the clan wars.
Which seems to explain how all of them survived the Inuzuka for this long.
She cut a path through the Hagoromo with just her hands. Her nails gone long and black, and she doesn't even bother to try to dodge the few that are fast enough to get a jutsu off before she cut them down.
There's a smear of blood on her mouth that isn't hers.
She catches his eye and grins. "Eyes front, pup!"
He turns just in time to put a kunai in the throat of a Nara whose shadow had been creeping up his heel.
Behind him, Tsume laughs.
He hates her.
Almost as much as he hates Hashirama and Madara for getting them all in this mess.
***
It takes an hour for them to start losing.
Impressive, given the odds they were fighting against.
Their line has bent back toward the walls, but hasn't broken. The long-range specialists on the parapets have made the attacking clans pay for every step closer.
Hatake Gin and Hijikata hold the center, back to back, their swords moving so fast the blood doesn't even have time to land.
But there are only so many of them.
And there are so, so many of the others.
Mito is a storm of chains and papers at the heart of it all, white kimono gone red to the waist, and she hasn't stopped moving once.
She hasn't stopped crying either, though Tobirama doubts anyone else can tell through the sweat and gore covering her.
He can taste the salt in her chakra. The princess is strong and determined, but she was not prepared for this.
No doubt she feels her cousin's absence even more now. Behito had been at her back every day since she left Uzushio, and now there is a hole behind Mito, next to Nadeshinko, that both women are filling with fury.
Tobirama puts himself there because someone has to, and because his brother loves her.
As much as Hashirama can love anyone that isn't Madara.
And because, somewhere in the last few months, she's impressed Tobirama in a way that very, very few ever have.
"You're in my way," Mito snaps, not even looking at him.
He caught a Hyuga by the hair and snapped her neck. "I'm exactly where I should be."
The corner of her mouth twitches. "You sound like Madara." Look at her picking a fight.
"Take that back," Tobirama snarled and would never admit to the smile tugging at his bloody lips.
***
Izuna hated being cornered. It happened, it was inevitable, but it wounds his pride more than most other things.
The Kaguya leader is enormous. A mountain of a brute known for being as aggressive in his compound as he was on the battlefield.
He plows forward, like the wounds he's already sustained mean nothing, and Izuna tries to take the brunt of him to spare the rest of his people.
Two younger Kaguya flank him, children, the whole damn point of Madara and Hashirama's dream, grinning with the same wild, blank joy.
Madara and Hashirama may not believe someone can be beyond saving, but Izuna doesn't share that delusion.
His Sharingan throbs, spinning so fast it's almost made them both nauseous, but it refuses to stop. Just as desperate to protect as he is.
A bone spear comes for his heart, but Izuna is not just Madara's brother.
He was trained by Madara. The greatest living shinobi, because as nice as Hashirama's dick is, Izuna isn't giving him that title yet.
His left hand is already curling, the hand signs already formed by the time the bone spear detaches from its source. Chakra screams down his arm in a way it never has before. Crackling. Singing.
The song of thousands of birds.
Sparrows, he thinks. Based on the tune of the song.
Madara had warned him about this jutsu. He knows where his brother got it, because the Sharingan knows, but he's willfully not knowing it.
The night Madara pulled him aside, pressed his forehead to his and said, "Look," and Izuna had.
Seen the boy with silver hair and a holy gift, a handful of lightning, and a heart full of hurt.
Just in case, Madara had said.
Paranoid old man, Izuna returned, but he'd memorized it.
Of course, he had.
The lightning goes through the bone spear, splintering it in the air, and then past it into the Kaguya clan leader.
His face goes slack with shock as it burns through him. Izuna was close enough to taste the fear in his sweat.
When the man goes down, the two boys beside him scream and lunge, too angry to do it with any skill.
Izuna had a moment to regret that he was going to spill a child's blood, again, and then a blur of black and red hit the boys from the side and slammed them into the dirt.
Izuna didn't have to look closely to know they weren't going to get up again.
She disappeared back into the battle before Izuna could say anything.
Not that he was going to.
It's not Izuna's responsibility to argue with the devil.
Across the battlefield, Hatake Gin, mid-swing, snapped around at the smell of lightning.
***
The wall came down a few hours later.
A sudden, sick lurch in the blood wards like a misstepped step on flat ground. Explosive tags, a specialty of one specific Nara Tobirama was going to hunt down before this was over, went off all at once along a twenty-foot stretch of the wooden wall.
The attacking forces poured into the gap like water, and it took Tobirama, Izuna, Hikaku, and a dozen others five full minutes of the ugliest fighting of the day to stem the tide.
***
Mina knows the moment she hits the rubble that something is wrong.
She rolled on instinct to protect her belly and rolled right out of the compound.
As soon as she was still, a severe rolling cramp tore through her, and a heavy pressure started to build in her pelvis.
Oh.
She looked down, watched in horror as her water broke, and soaked her legs and boots.
Please, kami, not now.
But the child doesn't care. Nor does nature, which, once it has begun, only stops of its own accord.
She dragged herself to a fallen log and got her back against it. Through the dust and smoke, she can see the battle swirling twenty paces away: Nara, Yamanaka, Hagoromo, and the flames of the Uchiha. Somewhere close by, a man was screaming orders in a voice she recognized.
The contractions come fast and strong with little warning.
Much too fast for Mina to be able to do anything but try to breathe through them. They're faster than they're supposed to be. Her own mother was in labor with Mina for two days before she finally came into the world, but Mina has seen enough births to know she's already approaching the end.
It's not right. No matter how much she tries to focus on the battle, the waves of pain are too much.
She wants Kenzo, who's somewhere on the battlefield.
She wants her mother, who's long dead now and wouldn't have been terribly sympathetic anyway.
She bit down on her arm to keep from screaming.
A shadow fell over her, and a fear she'd never felt before overcame her.
Pale eyes. Veins standing out around them like cracks in porcelain.
A blade already slick with blood.
She recognizes him.
Hyuga Hiro. He sat across from Madara during that disastrous first meeting and seethed every time Madara opened his mouth.
He stares at her stomach.
Mina reached for a kunai and found, too late, it was gone, but just as he lifted the blade, a second erupts through his chest.
Behind him, revealed as his body tips sideways and collapses, is another Hyuga.
A woman.
A mother, Mina thought, an instinctive assumption she would never have made any other time.
Another contraction racked her body.
Another Hyuga shinobi slid to a stop next to the female, a snarl on his lips.
It dropped off when he realized what was happening.
The female Hyuga cocked her head to the side, putting out a hand to stop him from doing anything. "It's in a good position. You should push."
Mina stared up at her, then at the battle around them.
Where was Kenzo?
She didn't want to have her baby without its father.
She doesn't want to have her baby just to see it killed.
The newest Uchiha captain, Ren, landed between them in a cloud of smoke and flame.
The Hyuga stumbled back in surprise, but they still didn't attack.
More of them gathered, enough that Mina knew Ren wouldn't win, though the other woman didn't look like she was going to back down.
A contraction came on so strong Mina couldn't help but scream.
Half the Byakugan on the field were on her.
Then, all at once, the other Hyuga stopped fighting. The sudden loss of their force stalls the rest of the battle in confusion, and Mina realizes she has to push or her child will never live at all.
Ren seemed to decide that the labor was the bigger concern, because she turned her back on the Hyuga and knelt to help deliver Mina's baby.
If the pain hadn't been so bad, and she hadn't been so desperate to find Kenzo, Mina would have been at least a little embarrassed that she was bare-assed and spreading her legs in front of at least a hundred shinobi.
But she wanted her baby out, and Ren was there, firm and calm, and Mina knew what had happened to Ren's only a couple of months before.
"Push," Ren ordered as the Hyuga began to drift away.
Not just away from Mina, she realized distantly, away from the entire battle.
They were withdrawing.
Mina pushed, screamed.
Then a thin, furious, entirely new voice cut through the air.
Piercing and young, it carried through the battlefield, silencing everything else.
***
Kenzo realized what it was before anyone else.
The sudden, visceral fear that his child was now in the world, and his wife would be exhausted and undefended.
No one stops him when he sprints across the battlefield.
The battle slows around him. A huge water dragon chases a large force back from the walls of the compound.
A fireball answers from the other side of the battlefield, and for a moment, it looks like all that fighting from the last decades is back. When it was the Uchiha on one side, and the Senju were on the other, and there was nothing but a no man's land of blood and hurt between them.
Tobirama is almost surprised. He felt the change in the chakra when the Hyuga pulled back. The Kaguya and the Hagoromo didn't stop, but the others took note and started a slow withdrawal, colored with hesitation and confusion.
The Kaguya and the Hagoromo don't seem to take notice. Lost to the battle fugue that made them so dangerous, but alone, they are far too outnumbered to do anything but die to a man.
The Kaguya laugh as they fall.
The Hagoromo don't make a sound.
No one offers them a chance to surrender. There is a time for mercy and a time for mercilessness.
By the time the sun begins to descend, it's over, and Tobirama isn't sure how they made it, but they did.
He finds Mito and Izuna, pale with exhaustion and leaning against one another, not far from Ren, Kenzo, and Mina.
And the baby who hasn't stopped screaming since he came into the world.
No one has the energy to do more than nod when he joins them and slumps down in the dirt.
The wall will take weeks to repair, and the blood wards even longer.
He caught a faint glimmer in the air as the wind picked up.
Madara felt the air go still while they were still miles away.
He can find Izuna, because he always knows where Izuna is.
He finds the rest of his clansmen, his heart falling when he realizes who is missing.
He finds Tobirama, bright and burning like the hottest flame.
He finds Mito and her remaining cousin and the Namikaze and…
Oh.
The little one. A tiny spark, so small anyone else might have missed it.
Namikaze Minato's grandfather.
***
Hashirama nearly falls over in relief when he identifies Tobirama's chakra signature strong in the distance.
Kaguya Hotaru, eight months pregnant, shrieked in surprise as her nails broke skin. The youngest widow in the Kaguya clan, she'd tried to insist on walking and only made it a couple of miles before her legs gave out. She tried to refuse, but Chie had been able to talk her around. Not all of the women were eager to find out if their husbands somehow survived, but most of them seemed to at least want to know one way or the other.
He sensed Madara approaching from the direction of the Hagoromo compound. He couldn't tell if anyone else was with him. Madara's chakra was so all-consuming, and Hashirama wasn't skilled enough as a sensor to be able to see through it.
But at least, Madara was okay.
He changed direction, just enough to meet with Madara before they reached the compound.
The remnants of the Hagoromo and Kaguya avoided each other when they finally met on the road, but they seemed to find common ground staring at Hashirama and Madara as they hugged in relief.
Probably because they hugged a bit longer than most while Madara whispered assurances that most of their people had made it, and Hashirama successfully restrained himself from saying "I told you so."
It still took another day of walking to make the compound. It rose out of the black rock just as the sun hit its highest point at midday, and the stench from the piles of corpses was high.
They made a big show of opening the compound gates, despite the fact that there was a giant hole in the wall right next to it.
Chie and Kanna shared a wary look. Somehow, it was more or less impressive than what they'd started to suspect, and the people in it were the same.
Most of them hadn't slept since the battle ended. Between treating the wounded, trying to repair the wall, and standing guard in case the other clans decided to turn around and try again, the dark circles under their eyes and the dried blood gave them quite a frightful appearance.
Hotaru, in Madara's arms now, straightened. "Put me down."
"What? Why?"
"Uchiha."
"No. It's too far, and the ground is uneven."
She gave him the exact same expression his mother used to get before she won an argument with his father. "I am Kaguya." She announced, very calmly. "I will walk into my enemy's house on my own feet, or not at all. You can put me down, or I will grow a bone through your arm."
Sulking, Madara dropped her. Hotaru huffed and straightened her clothes.
Two steps in, she stopped and scowled. Madara and Hashirama hovered at her shoulders, radiating smugness as they waited for her to fall.
It was enough to keep her walking.
***
Tobirama sensed them first, to the surprise of no one.
He'd been waiting, watching since the battle ended, tracking their approach and counting the signatures that increased each hour they moved closer. He knows exactly how many are coming with them. Knows their women and children and a few shinobi too wounded to fight. They're ragged and wrung so thin that they feel like ghosts next to Hashirama and Madara.
And then they're there. Just on the horizon.
Tobirama found himself pushing the gates open himself, not bothering to stop and think what the Senju and Inuzuka and Hatake, all filthy and exhausted and grieving, would think of him.
He needed to see Hashirama, see that his last brother was okay.
He needed to see Madara, even though he had no idea why.
And then he does. The others gathered behind them.
The first thing anyone sees, after a night and morning of trying to comfort the wounded and the dying and the scared, is a heavily pregnant Kaguya woman, walking, while Uchiha Madara strolls along beside her with a Hagoromo toddler on his shoulders and Hashirama on her other side, walking backwards and no doubt singing the praises of this non-existent village to a group that looked like they'd run the moment he stopped looking.
"Are you out of your mind?" The Uchiha midwife came through the crowd like a typhoon with murder in her eyes. Old Keade was right on her heels. "She's ready to drop, and you let her walk?" She seized a sputtering Madara by his ear.
"She made me!" He shrieked. "Yell at her, not me!"
"Brother, honestly," Izuna said with deep disappointment and a wicked gleam in his eye that said he knew exactly what happened.
The rest of the Kaguya and Hagoromo survivors watched in fascination as Madara's clan yelled at him, and he yelled back.
Until Hashirama bounced over to defend him, and they started yelling at him, too.
Kanna and Chie eyed one another in the midst of it and nodded politely when Mito joined them. "Welcome to the Sakura Alliance."
"That's really the name?" Kanna raised an eyebrow.
Mito gave her a wicked smile. "It's fitting, don't you think?"
All three of them watched Izuna and Tobirama browbeat Hashirama and Madara into apologies for things they hadn't even done.
"They're fucking, right?" Chie asked, watching Hashirama cling to Madara.
"Have to be," Kanna agreed, watching Izuna pull Hashirama's hair.
"Don't tell them that," Mito snickered, watching Tobirama glare at Madara as he demanded to know why there was a Hagoromo on his head.
And then Hashirama climbed onto a pile of rubble from the wall, dragging Madara with him. "Everyone!" He spread his arms wide, and flowers sprouted from his hair. "The Kaguya and the Hagoromo are part of the village now! They'll have homes and lands and seats at the council table, the same as everyone else inside these walls!"
Madara eyed the giant hole in the compound wall.
"Their children will train beside ours. Their dead will be honored beside ours." His voice caught, the tears started. "Now, we are all one family!"
Madara rolled his eyes heavenward for help.
One of the Kaguya shinobi, too wounded to fight, turned to Hatake Gin. "He didn't ask about this."
Gin snorted. "He didn't ask us either."
One of the Hagoromo, "He do this often?"
"Every day," Renji admitted, tired. Uchiha Kasumi leaned against him, dark circles under her eyes.
Someone pulled out a flask as Tsume's booming laugh broke the silence. "Sounds good to me!"
No one who'd been at the battle was willing to argue with her.
"You're going to get us assassinated," Madara hissed as Hashirama threw an arm around his shoulders and the flowers in his hair started to spread.
"Nonsense," Hashirama argued cheerfully, "Let's break out the wine and everyone will be happy!"
That, finally, got a cheer.
Only Tobirama couldn't bring himself to join in. The relief he felt at the sight of Hashirama was nearly enough to take him off his feet.
The sight of Madara was….
Tobirama wasn't supposed to feel that way about anyone, and yet…
How quickly things had changed. The realization left a bitter taste in his mouth. Battle exhaustion left him with little energy for anything, including denial.
This time last year, Tobirama had been his father's right hand in the shadows, trying to figure out how to convince Hashirama to stop his foolish meetings with Madara and save their clan, and now he was almost as happy to see Madara as he was to see Hashirama.
It felt like a betrayal, even though he knew it was irrational. He'd missed Madara more in a day than he'd missed his father at any point in his life.
He was as much a traitor as Hashirama now, so it was a good thing their father was already dead. He would never have shown Tobirama the mercy he showed Hashirama, and he'd have shown the Uchiha far less than they'd shown the Senju.
It seemed, impossibly, that Hashirama and Madara were succeeding at their hairbrained scheme, and now Tobirama found himself at a crossroads. For once, he had no idea which road to take because all of the options seemed equally shrouded in darkness, and even his mind couldn't parse a clear path.
Could Hashirama and Madara truly succeed in building their village? Could they bring peace to the shinobi clans of the Land of Fire?
Izuna was laughing, head thrown back and an arm slung over Madara's shoulders, the other over Hashirama's as Mito looked at the three of them fondly.
The little Hagoromo boy was clinging to Madara's kimono while his mother and a Kaguya woman were nodding at something Hatake Gin was saying.
The earth was shifting beneath his feet so quickly that Tobirama didn't know if he could keep his footing. What if he couldn't change? He still hated the Uchiha. Frustrating, annoying, impulsive, bloodthirsty bastards that they were.
What if he was the one who ended Hashirama and Madara's dream?
What if he was the one who helped them succeed? Kami knew neither of those idiots knew how to design a sewage system, balance clan accounts, or establish trade deals.
It was wiser, sometimes, to go with the tide than to fight against it. Tobirama had mastered every jutsu put before him; he could master the world changing again.
***
"The old order changeth, yielding place to new."
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, "Morte d'Arthur"
***