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After months of nothing but worrying rumours and fear spreading across Fire, there was finally a lead to act on. Not that the conclusion had been much of a leap to make in the first place.
Who else but the Senju could be responsible for the impossibly invasive trees overrunning the fertile lands along the Naka; who else but Senju Butsuma spiteful enough to cut off his own nose as long as it meant suffering for his enemies, too?
After the man had been beaten back by Madara’s own father in their last big skirmish, it had only taken a few months for the freshly won territory to become completely overgrown to a point where even the river itself became inaccessible. By now, the stretch of land had fittingly been dubbed the Forest of Death because no brave soul who entered had yet returned.
Although it wasn’t the Uchiha who paid the blood-price.They were trained from an early age to avoid suspicious forests, to withstand luring whispers in the dark, when their eyes lost sight and shadows crept in. It was the Senju who felt safe in the very same environment that ended up dropping off the face of the earth one after another.
The consensus across all clans was that the Senju had done something ill-advised, and it backfired horribly, dragging most of their clan down until little was left but a few straggling civilians desperately trying to care for the children too young to have been caught by the ominous lure that those capable of wielding chakra had reported before they went out to explore and never returned.
As much as the Uchiha in general had initially crowed in delight about their enemies succumbing to their own hubris, the mood swiftly changed when it became obvious that whatever it was that had picked off the Senju didn't care to stop when their blood eventually ran dry.
Beyond the hungry forest, though, Madara worried for two Senju in particular who had already been unaccounted for even before the strange happenings started. And while Hashirama might truly have been disconnected enough from news if he happened to be busy drinking and gambling his sorrows away—as he was prone to do every once in a while—there was absolutely no chance that Tobirama wouldn’t have heard about something picking off his clan one by one.
There was even less of a chance for the impossible man to take such an offence lying down.
It was this fierce protectiveness that had first caught Madara’s eye, but now he couldn’t help but wonder what it might cost Tobirama—cost them—if truly tested. He knew better than most just how cruel a father Butsuma could be, and while Tobirama was a formidable shinobi in his own right, he was too faithful a son to truly oppose his father.
Although-
When they had last managed to carve some time out for themselves—had laid in each others arms at the edge of a hot spring hidden deep in the mountains of Iron, snow piling up around them without the cold ever touching them—Tobirama had, for the first time, truly entertained Madara's and Hashirama's old dream of peace, of a shared village.
And what it would take to make it happen.
Truthfully, even before Tobirama had laid out the likely cost in detail—personal and financial alike, not even to speak of the political favours they'd need to cash in or burn—Madara hadn't thought about the village with as much fervour as he used to. All he'd need to die a happy man was a cease in hostilities so he'd have a chance to bring his heart into his clan, make Tobirama an Uchiha in name and his in the eyes of the gods and their families.
But as Tobirama pointed out, neither would happen with Senju Butsuma alive.
Madara pushed the thought away and concentrated on his surroundings instead. As much as the Uchiha relied on their eyes and the full moon provided enough light to properly see even without the aid of the sharingan, now it was his ears that he needed. And he could not allow himself to be distracted by the memory of his lover's voice echoing at the edge of his hearing.
He closed in on the Naka from a distance until, finally, he caught the tail-end of a wordless call carried upon the rushing waters that had once been calm enough to swim in.
Just as the rumours had claimed, the river was swollen and uncharacteristically wild, and at its edge, silvery trees carried crowns of red leaves as far as Madara could see. According to the reports on his desk, their wood was deceivingly soft—as could be expected of such an impossibly fast-growing plant—but they had not been cut back from the fertile soil after the first attempt saw red sap well up like blood, and it scared the civilian workforce away.
Staying away from the river and out of sight of anyone who might try to observe the overgrown land and the natural border it created, Madara followed the luring call further upstream. His breath turned to little clouds—puffing from his nose as the temperature dropped despite the late summer season—as Madara made his way deeper and deeper into the eerily quiet forest until, at long last, he broke through silver-red foliage and found himself in a wide clearing that was familiar but not.
Despite the strange trees all around, Madara knew deep within his soul that this was the place where he first met Hashirama. This was their place, the beginning of their friendship and their shared dream of peace—the beginning of an end to the wartorn era as the clans knew it.
The night's sky opened up above his head and below his feet, where the light of endless stars reflected on the still surface of a lake that, for all accounts, shouldn't be here. And while it shouldn't be too difficult for anyone with a somewhat solid grasp on Doton to stamp out a new bed for the river to fill, the sight was still suspicious enough for Madara to sign a quick Kai, slightly relaxing when he found the vision in front of him unchanged—found it true, rather than the product of a genjutsu.
Before he could properly examine the scene, a shift of light caught Madara's attention, pale moonlight filtering through a thinning cloud and falling upon a creature that could've only been born from it—red eyes the sole speck of colour set in a pale face framed by silver hair.
Tobirama.
The sudden onslaught of crushing relief made Madara's head spin, and in a moment of forced clarity, he could acknowledge just how weighed down by his fears he truly had been. It didn't matter, though. Not now that his lover was back in his line of sight, almost within reach. If Tobirama was alright, then he didn’t need to worry about Hashirama either—there was no doubt that that particular Senju was built to survive anything and everything.
Madara left the cover of the trees and took a few staggering steps forward, hand half-raised to touch upon a beloved face sorely missed. Instead of meeting him halfway, though, between one blink and the next, Tobirama had stepped back towards the shore.
Never before had the call of his element made Tobirama turn away from Madara's touch.
Without conscious thought, Madara pulled his chakra from where it was coiled up and hidden deep within his pathways and sent it out to sweep the immediate area, looking for something, anything, that could explain the odd behaviour.
He was intimately acquainted with the feel and flavour of Tobirama's chakra, both of them sensors to a degree it left them prone to communicate via chakra almost more than their words. Both of them curious enough that it had made them creative in just how far another's chakra could be tracked until they knew each other's pathways inside and out, until there was no space left between their bodies and souls, their hearts.
Madara knew Tobirama, on any possible level, but-
Tobirama stood there, right in front of his eyes, and Madara couldn't catch the slightest hint of his chakra. The body at the lake's shore was utterly empty of a proper pathway system, not human but a distortion, a- Mirage? Or a mirror, like the stars on the ever-still lake. The lake that, just as the forest surrounding it, seemed to be devoid of any life but Madara himself.
Madara sent out another sweep of chakra, tried to look deeper without taking his eyes off the perfect mirror of Tobirama's face, but nothing registered to his senses. There was only a faint response, close by but distant—slow and numb and other in a way that Madara needed a moment to realise why it felt so familiar regardless. When he did, though, he couldn't keep his eyes from looking past Tobirama to seek out its source.
Hashirama.
There was no body, nothing that reminded of a human at all. There was only a bowed willow tree at the lake's shore, long branches hanging into dead waters. Still: Nothing would ever be able to change his friend's signature in a way that made him unrecognisable to Madara, not when, at some times, the other's chakra felt more familiar than those of his own family—resonating deep within his soul where nothing else had ever reached.
Not until he’d met Tobirama, that was.
"He didn't want me to be alone," Tobirama sighed before looking away and continuing even more quietly. "After Father left me here."
There was a clear disconnect between the moment when thin lips shaped the words and when they reached Madara's ears. But just as Madara was about to question it, something else occurred to him. With a sense of foreboding, Madara looked into the lake, following Tobirama's gaze, and just like the stars, Tobirama's face was reflected on the surface.
No.
Under the surface.
Set in a painfully familiar face, lifeless red eyes peered up from underneath clear water. The deathly-pale whiteness of Tobirama's skin a stark contrast to the willow tree's brown roots winding around his legs and weaving between his fingers as if trying to hold on to whatever they had been able to reach, careful not to cause any more harm than had already been dealt.
Madara's sharingan flared to life, searing the image of his broken heart into his memory.
Where Tobirama's limbs seemed to have been spared, it only highlighted the cruelty dealt to the rest of his body. At his back, broken rips fanned out like a mockery of stunted wings—white bone tapering out into root-like tendrils that buried into soft mud, anchoring Tobirama's body to the lake's ground. At his front, a stylised tree was painted—carved—into his chest, red branches reaching as far up as his face, three lines slashing cleanly into his chin and cheeks with a precision that couldn't be anything but intentional. Malicious.
There was no doubt in Madara's mind that Tobirama had been alive when someone—Butsuma, most likely— had taken a blade to his skin and cut him open, broke him open, and mutilated him in a way that felt nothing but personal. Even so, the worst injury to witness was the swollen burn mark on his forehead.
Madara was met by the design of his own mangekyou as big as a coin—as big as the forged token he had gifted his love when he'd known there would never be anyone else for him—burnt into flesh like one would mark cattle.
Or a traitor.
Madara took a step back, only to stumble over one of the white roots riddling the clearing, growing outwards from Tobirama's body within the lake as if it were its heart.
"Don't be afraid," Tobirama soothed with a strangely echoing voice, feet not disturbing the smooth surface where he now stood above his own body—reflection layered upon truth, distorting both without diminishing either.
Under the full moon's light and with his sharingan active, Madara noticed something in the air that he could not properly parse. Shadows crept where they did not belong as light did not break as it should; it made the eerily silent forest seem almost alive, and Madara could feel the hairs on his neck rise despite his mind still reeling from the gruesome sight underneath still waters and his love’s unbroken image mirrored above.
Without a conscious thought, tomoe bled together as his mangekyou blossomed to life, and everything Madara thought he knew fell away into nothingness as Tobirama—no, the creature—continued to hold his gaze under the light of a red moon.
What had been a mirror of how the broken body underneath used to look, undoubtedly human in nature, had changed with a blink of Madara's eyes. It could still have been beautiful in its own way—a twisted form of kintsugi in the flesh—if it weren't for the seeping darkness growing from the cracks in bone-white skin like inky tentacles scenting the air, the void-like sclera surrounding red irises that lost all pretence of humanity.
The sheer otherness was highlighted by the horns bracketing the burn mark of Madara's mangekyou on either side, growing out of the creature's forehead not unlike the build of an oni mask.
Not a creature then. A demon.
Where Madara's reflexes usually tended to opt for fight, he was just unsettled enough that this time, his body was primed for flight instead. Rather than a daring escape, though, Madara almost lost his footing when he stumbled over another root. What had been a soft, mossy shore before now resembled a wriggling mess of white roots which—underneath the red moon—almost looked like the twitching entrails of a freshly gutted man.
He would have fallen if not for the soft give of silvery bark underneath his hand when he caught himself against one of the mysterious trees that had definitely been further away from the lake when he first joined the demon wearing Tobirama's face.
Despite his instincts screaming at him, Madara couldn’t suppress the morbid curiosity that rooted him in place and made him look up slowly along the bark. Truth be told, he wasn't even surprised when he found a structure vaguely resembling a horrendously disfigured face right at eye-level—the mouth a gaping knothole, while bulging buds of a flower like Madara had never seen before marked where the eyes would be. The poor soul must have wound themselves in agony, because like with the other trees, this one's trunk had a sinuous quality and thick twin-branches reaching for the sky like a plea, before they branched off into slimmer ones in a grotesque mockery of hands carrying blood-red leaves.
Madara had no idea how he'd missed the signs before, how he hadn't seen the trees for the forest, but now that he had, he couldn’t help but acknowledge that the new Forest of Death was aptly named, even if Forest of the Dead would probably be more fitting. There was no doubt in his heart that he had found the missing people.
There was little doubt that he'd join them.
Strangely enough, the thought didn't entice the level of panic or grim resolve he would have expected. There wasn't a single spark of defiance within his soul, as his ears were filled with the lure of Tobirama's voice in the distance despite the demon standing right before him.
"It was supposed to be my sentence and salvation all rolled into one," it murmured. "My forgiveness."
Under the haze distorting Madara's senses, the familiar timbre burrowed into his ears and captivated his attention as it layered in the air and created an eerie echo all by itself.
"What for?"
Nothing Tobirama could have done would have made him deserve this. Any Uchiha knew that the Senju buried their dead and planted trees atop their bodies to keep the memory alive. To leave Tobirama here, for all intents and purposes rotting in still waters, was plain cruelty.
No wonder he hadn't been able to move on.
The distorted image of Tobirama stepped closer, black-veined hand reaching out and cradling Madara's face with a gentle touch as cold as death itself. It didn't seem to move a single muscle, but as tiny roots emerged from the void lurking underneath the creature's skin, Madara felt the faintest caress of his cheek, soft as a butterfly's kiss.
And not unlike a butterfly’s proboscis, they syphoned Madara's chakra where they touched upon his skin, replacing it with something different that felt alien and familiar at the same time. Old. Dangerous.
Parasite.
"I did not betray you," Tobirama’s voice breathed in the space between them. This close, Madara could almost imagine his clear rainwater scent underneath all the sweet rot clogging his nose. "Neither when you met my brother and became his friend, nor when you met me and warmed my body with your own, carved a place out for yourself within my heart, ignited a fire within my soul."
Red-on-black eyes were mesmerising as Madara's mangekyou seared every single instant of this moment into his brain before it flickered out from the lack of chakra reaching his eyes. Madara refused to blink, fearing this tangible memory of Tobirama would vanish into the night if he dared to let it out of his sight, and with his burning eyes, the colour blurred together until it appeared almost violet under the silvery moonlight.
"I haven't been warm in so long," Tobirama murmured, leaning in so closely that the clouds of Madara's warm breath were sucked between pink lips seemingly without thought. Madara became dizzy with the realisation that it was his breath within Tobirama's lungs, warming him from the inside out.
Like the well-trained lover he was, Madara flared his chakra because Tobirama had always enjoyed the sensation. This time, though, it didn't seem to diffuse and warm the air surrounding him but was almost violently sucked out, leaving his head dizzy from the sudden lack to a point where it felt as if dream and reality overlapped. Tobirama's beautiful face was suddenly tarnished by creeping shadows and smudged lines on his forehead cracking and bleeding as if to part and reveal a third eye in the shape of Madara's own.
It was as baffling as it was concerning, if mostly for the state of Madara's own mind that he came up with hallucinations like this. As he tried to reach out with a soothing touch, he found himself stuck in place, utterly captivated by Tobirama's presence and the small smile playing in the corner of loving eyes and sorely missed lips.
"Won't you stay with me?"