(A/N: I'm back from the dead. Sorry for going MIA. Life happened: got cancer, fought it, and won. I'm cancer-free! I tried to have the entire 3rd ACT written before posting, but that would have been a while due to my low energy levels. Regardless, glad to be back, and hope you enjoy the chapter!)
(A/N: Words: 3400)
Madara doesn't mind the mildew anymore.
Not really.
It's just there now, like old company. A smell that clings and never leaves, sinking into the fabric of his clothes, threading itself through his hair, latching beneath his nails.
It lives here.
In the damp. In the walls.
In him.
At first, it made him gag (not that his pride allowed him to admit that unfortunate fact). It had taken him months to get used to. Now, thankfully, it's just another part of the silence.
The cave is always wet. Always dripping.
The rocks above him sweat, one drop at a time, hitting the stone with a sound that's not quite rhythmic enough to count as music but too annoying to ignore.
Like a slow clock measuring the time of a man who no longer bothers keeping track.
There's moss all around. A slow, creeping kind. And the ground beneath him is uneven. Cold. Slippery in places. Alive in others.
Sometimes, he dreams the earth will open up and swallow him whole. He thinks he wouldn't fight it. Not anymore.
But it's quiet here. And in the quiet, there are no wars. Just the memory of them.
He's hunched now. That's new. Or maybe it isn't, maybe it's been years, and he's only just noticed.
His spine curls like old paper. His fingers twitch when they close.
How ironic.
Once, he had a name like thunder. Once, his name made men freeze.
Flinch.
Pray.
Beg, even.
But now he is old. And his name, a memory of what once was.
He sits upon his throne of stone and moss, and he doesn't think of that.
He just listens to the drops of water and the hum of the Gedo Statue breathing behind him, if one could call it breathing. It is more like the sound of something forcing a man long past his time to stay alive.
Its spine is inside his. Its roots wrap around his nerves like vines. There are days when he feels it more than others. Days when he wakes and his limbs don't quite belong to him. Days when he moves, and it feels like the motion comes from somewhere else.
From something else.
He doesn't know if that means he is becoming the statue, or it is becoming him. It doesn't matter really. This is the path he chose. Or perhaps the path that chose him.
Once, he fought for something, he thinks. He must have.
He remembers fire. Not the flame kind. The inside kind.
The kind that makes one move even when they are broken. The kind that feels like belief.
He remembers him, too.
That idiot with tree bark for morals and eyes full of impossible dreams.
Madara says his name sometimes, in the dark, when Zetsu is gone running his errands, just to see if it sounds the same.
It doesn't.
It echoes too much, like everything else.
There are things he doesn't let himself remember.
Not fully.
Like the way the river felt decades ago. Cold and rushing. Loud and alive.
Or the way Izuna looked when he laughed with his whole face.
When he was still whole.
Madara tells himself he is fine. That it was all necessary. That their sacrifice was just a common occurrence for people like them. That peace does not come without blood.
But some nights, when the world is quiet enough, and the mildew smell is so thick it coats his tongue, he thinks about the things he gave up.
About whether the vision of peace he is preparing to build is still worth it.
He does not answer.
There is no one to ask. Not anyone who matters, anyway.
Only the stone. Only the moss. Only the mildew.
-ooo-
Konoha.
The name, for the briefest moment, used to mean something to him.
Once, it tasted of hope. Of peace and possibility.
Now, it tasted like ash. Thick on the back of his throat, and bitter in the corners of his mind.
(Madara thinks, sometimes, that even the air changed after they gave it a name. Like the moment it was christened, the soil curdled beneath their feet. Like a curse passed down in syllables: Ko-no-ha.)
It had been different… at the beginning.
Two kids, knee-deep in river water, talking like fools about a future that didn't yet exist. Building their village first in dreams, then in dirt, then in stone.
Believing that if they just wanted it enough, if they just gave enough, lost enough, broke themselves enough…
Peace would be real.
It was not.
He believed in that dream with a deep kind of violence. With unrelenting hunger. With the kind of belief that bends a person's spine until it snaps under the weight of it.
And even when the cracks started to show––in the village, in the people, in himself––he still tried to hold it all together.
Tried to believe in their vision. Tried to shape it with his own two hands into something real, something lasting.
But no one looked at him and saw a builder.
They saw a threat.
A warning.
A mistake.
He remembers the way their eyes followed him. How their voices softened when they spoke of Hashirama and sharpened when they spoke of him.
How even some of his own kin, the same kin that had marched beside him through blood and fire, began to flinch at the sound of his name.
Too angry to be Hokage.
Too proud to lead a village.
Too unwilling to forgive.
That's what they whispered, like cowards behind closed doors.
Did they forget the forgiveness Madara gave Hashirama's lessor after he ripped Izuna from the world?
Did they forget the way he buried his grief beneath stone and silence, so the clan would not fracture?
Or was it that they chose to forget?
Madara remembers, though.
He remembers everything.
Every night spent on watch while the others slept, blade in hand and blood crusted on his skin, fighting off the sleep he hadn't gotten for weeks.
He remembers wrapping his clansmen's wounds with torn sleeves and shivering in the rain while others huddled warm beneath tarp too small for more bodies.
He remembers Izuna coughing up blood and apologizing for not being strong enough. For leaving him alone in this war-filled world.
He remembers carrying dead children, no older than eight, off the battlefield, too young to even understand what they were fighting for.
He remembers the hunger.
The cold.
The silence.
The guilt.
The loneliness.
He remembers bleeding beneath his armor, ribs splintered and lungs screaming, and still rising again––because if he fell, they all would fall.
He gave them his body.
He gave them his mind.
He gave them his soul.
And when that was not enough––when peace demanded more––his brother gave his life, too.
Izuna died protecting the clan. And Madara lived. He lived so they could survive. And still they whispered of him as a monster. Still, they turned from him.
Still, they forgot.
They saw Hashirama as the savior because Hashirama smiled like a fool.
Madara did not smile. He endured. That was his crime.
He tried, even then, to pull his clan back. To make them see the light.
To understand that what they were building towards wasn't peace. It was submission wrapped in prettier cloth. It was Senju law in Uchiha mouths.
But no one wanted to hear it.
Submission feigned as peace was too sweet a lie, he supposed. Too easy to swallow.
He brought the problems he had to Hashirama, but his old friend did not want to hear them. Not when Tobirama, that demon in sheep's clothing, was whispering poison in his ear.
Too proud. Too unwilling. Too afraid to ever trust the bloody Uchiha.
Madara had forgiven him. Tobirama had not.
He concealed his hatred behind honeyed words and polished rhetoric.
And those fools fell for it.
The trap was already sprung, and they called it a new beginning. The village fell in love with the dream.
The same dream Madara had bled for.
Sacrificed for.
Given everything for.
So, he left.
Because staying meant drowning.
Because staying meant watching them turn his dream into something he couldn't recognize.
Because staying meant swallowing the slow rot of betrayal with every breath.
He would have stayed if Hashirama had asked him to.
But he didn't. Not that Madara told him he was leaving, either.
Sometimes he thinks back to that final fight with his old friend. Not back to the pain. That was as familiar as breath, and light, and death.
But the look in Hashirama's eyes. It was warm, yet sad. Like he didn't want to kill the man he called his best friend.
But he would. To protect their dream.
Madara doesn't hate him for it. He never has. Not even now.
Hashirama was one of the only people who ever truly saw him.
Not as the clan heir, taught from birth to lead and protect the clan.
Not as the warrior, or the elder brother who always stood at the front, always protecting. Not the Uchiha. Not the curse.
Just Madara. The boy who skipped rocks poorly across rivers and spoke of a village, and of peace, and of futures that didn't end in graves.
Hashirama died not long after.
But Madara died twice.
Once beneath his best friend's hand.
And once beneath the weight of everything he had once dared to believe in.
-ooo-
Madara came back to life thanks to Izanagi. None the wiser.
He crawled his way through death and decay. Through the last breath of hope he'd buried somewhere deep in himself, long before his body ever gave in. With the flesh of Hashirama clenched tight between his teeth.
He used that flesh, those stolen cells, and fused them with his own.
He waited and watched. Endured through it all, until, after years of silence and solitude, the Rinnegan bloomed behind his eyes, just as the ancient stone tablet in the Naka Shrine had prophesized.
The Gedo Statue wrapped its claws around his spine, now allowing death to take him until his plans were fully prepared. Until his pieces were all in place.
He gave too much to allow for death to take him prematurely.
Days bled into years. And his mind, so sharp once, began to slowly drift.
His reflection became unfamiliar long ago. He was no longer the man he knew, but a husk of it. His skin was like old parchment, and his eyes were hollowed under the weight of unwept tears.
The world moved on without him.
There was a new Hokage.
And a new war––two of them, actually.
New graves were buried in turn. But the hate was the same.
It always was.
He watched the pattern return like the tide and the moon.
A new generation came. And like those before them, they were sent off to die with their village's symbol stitched proudly onto headbands, soon to be stained red.
Peace was bartered with blood and sacrificed on altars of greed.
The dream that Hashirama worked so hard for all those years had failed.
But Madara didn't blame him. He had long since learned that dreams die with their dreamers. And the cycle would continue until his plan was enacted.
The village they built with their flesh and blood had become nothing but a graveyard within a fence with tall walls.
The Uchiha were disillusioned, lured by a false sense of peace.
They were watched and catalogued like slaves without their knowledge, praised when needed, and distrusted when not.
Peace, they called it.
But Madara knew better. He does not feel special that his eyes see more than theirs. After all these years, he barely feels human.
But, he supposes, that is to be expected, all things considered.
After an unknown amount of time, his eyes eventually opened slowly, landing on a little black book with white pages and black ink within.
Most were unaware that Madara was an avid reader, though he was not one to share what he did in his limited free time.
(Hashirama knew, thought. He was always more aware than he put on, that woodpecker. Sometimes, back in the village, years and years ago, when it was quiet and the sun had yet to awake, and Madara, like usual, could not sleep, he would find a pile of books at his doorstep with a handwritten letter from Hashirama.
It did not say much, really. Just that he found some things that Madara might enjoy. And of course, just like Hashirama thought, Madara always did–
Not that he told him that, though.)
Madara would read everything from philosophy to jutsu scrolls to battle formation, studying the information and cataloging it among the decades of scrolls he had already memorized.
One thing he did not read, however, was… fiction.
Fiction was fake. And a waste of time for a man who had none to spare.
However, that all changed ten months ago when Zetsu brought him this book.
At first, he thought nothing of it, setting it aside for other texts he deemed worthy of his attention. But after finishing the stack, his eyes began to wander and eventually, Madara decided… why not?
The book was not big. It fit neatly in the palm of his hand, spanning no more than a couple of hundred pages. There was no fancy cover with elegant letters and loud colors.
Just a regular black cover, now creased at the corners with wear.
Its title read:
Black and White
By Apollo
It was plain and undistinguished. Forgettable, even.
Madara did not expect much from it. But as he began reading it, he quickly realized it was not plain at all.
It opened, unusually, with a poem.
And the moment his eyes passed over the first stanza, he felt something shift inside him that he remembered locking deep ages ago. It was so subtle and so small he almost missed the feeling.
Madara found himself leaning forward, his thumb pressing harder against the page, as though trying to anchor himself in the physicality of it. As though the words might slip from the paper if he did not hold them down.
There was a strange heat behind his sternum. A pressure, not a pain. Not exactly. It was something softer. Something that he'd not felt in decades.
He read the poem again.
Then again.
Then again, slower.
His Sharingan had long since activated, memorizing every word. Every line. Every crease of the page.
The lines were not long or complex. Nevertheless, they made his blood run cold, and his heartbeat quicken.
It was the sense of recognition within the words that held him.
A degree of intrigue at how deeply the words seemed to know him. As though someone had peeled into his brain, layer by layer, and written down the thoughts he'd locked tight and buried deep long, long, ago.
And no matter how many times he returned to the beginning, the feeling never faded.
It was a poem that knew exactly what he knew.
It was a poem that made him feel.
It was a poem that went like this:
—
they will not tell you
that peace is built
from the teeth of children
—
they will not show you
the pile of shoes
left behind
by the ones
who never made it home
—
but i will
—
because i was there
when they carved the word "honor"
into the soft chest
of a fourteen-year-old boy
and called it his duty
to bleed for men
who never learned his name
—
i watched
as his fingers
twitched
searching for someone
to hold
while he died
—
and no one did
—
i saw mothers
sew jackets and coats
so their sons
wouldn't die cold
and then tuck goodbye letters
into their lunches
because they knew
they would never see them again
—
i saw a ten-year-old child
carry his brother's body
for three miles
because someone told him
the smell of his corpse
would alert the enemy
—
i heard
the whisper of a dying boy
ask if he was still allowed
to be scared
and no one answered
because everyone else
was already dead
—
they called it sacrifice
like that made it beautiful
like that made it holy
—
i call it
a machine
that grinds up names
and spits out statues
—
do you know
what it means
to be remembered
only after you're gone?
—
it means
they will tell stories
about your courage
and forget
the sound you made
when the blade slit your throat
—
it means
they will give your mother
the remains of the jacket
and coat she sewed
still wet
with your blood
—
and expect her
to say thank you
—
it means
your story
will be rewritten
with cleaner words
until the war
that killed you
sounds like mercy
—
and you—
the one who lived—
will wake up
every day
with the guilt of surviving
what your brother did not
—
and they will call you
ungrateful
when you cry
-ooo-
Madara ended up devouring the book.
He's lost count of how many times he's read it now; sometime after the hundredth time, the numbers stopped mattering. If he had to guess, he'd place it somewhere near a thousand.
But guesses are for uncertain men, and Madara has never been one of them.
Still, the pages blur together with such familiar weight that it feels like the book has fused to his bones. Each reading gives him something new.
There are depths to the story that defy reason and logic. That strips away everything from the war-hardened man and leaves only a… mirror of him as a kid back in the icy-cold river with Hashirama throwing rocks and dreaming naive dreams
Madara saw himself in the characters—saw Hashirama, too.
One character, Kurotsuki, was a shadow.
Born to live in the dark. A son born to war. He never smiled. Not unless it served a purpose. Not unless it was expected of him. He carried duty on his back. He was a poet too. Writing lines of the most beautiful things he's ever read.
The other character, Hikari, was light.
A girl who laughed too easily. Who burned too brightly. Who spoke of futures Madara had long stopped believing in.
Where poems riddled Kurotsuki's chapters, paintings riddled hers. Art so beautiful Madara had to activate his Sharingan to make sure he wasn't in a genjutsu.
Unbeknownst to him, he became obsessed with the story and the characters within.
He waited months for a second release, but none came. Ten months passed, and there was no release! It was as if the author vanished after teasing their readers, trapping them in their spell, never to release another book again.
If it were not for his plan and condition, he would have left the cave to track down the author himself. But alas, he was trapped in this cave while Zetsu scoured for the perfect pawn—
There was a shift in the air around Madara, and from the corner of the cave, something peeled itself from the stone. It was a white smear against greys and blacks and greens.
"Madara-sama!" Zetsu said. "I finally found the perfect Uchiha to carry out your plan!"
Madara did not speak, nor did he allow the flicker of disappointment reach his face that he had hoped, foolishly, that this time Zetsu would say Apollo released the second book in the series.
"Oh, and here!" Zetsu dug into his chest and pulled something free. "It's a new book from—"
Madara moved before the words finished tumbling from Zetsu's mouth. In a blur, his hand shot out, and the book was gone from Zetsu's grasp.
He ignored Zetsu's grumbling entirely as he turned the book over in his hands.
Grey
by Apollo.
His breath caught involuntarily.
His thumb moved, almost reverently, to the edge of the cover.
Beside him, Zetsu curled onto a nearby boulder and opened his mouth. "About the Uchiha—"
Madara lifted a single hand, fingers steady, and silenced him with one flick.
"That," he said, voice hoarse and hollow, "can wait."
His fingers turned to the first page.
This, he thought with the slightest smile on his withered face, cannot.