[Dream] Fireleaves
Hashirama has no desire to stay in this maze of sleeping wraiths.
But they aren't always sleeping when they dream. Some of them dream while seeing the world with open eyes, spending each moment trying to burn up all the ghosts and legends and lies written in scrolls planted in the roots of a tree.
(Madara'd tried so many years ago, to cut down that tree before it took root, to slice through the earth and all the mud, tilling dirt to uproot his own blood from the poison poisonous poisoned truth wrapped up in colorful packaging that looked like hope and peace and dreams of a world with no more war. But he knew far too well the kind of illusion they all believed in, so stupid, blinded by one thousand hands placed over eyes that had long stopped seeing. They'd lost their vision, lost their sight, lost the fire and their pride, and look at where their eyes are now. Ash, dirt, and dust.)
So when the air expands and shudders with hums of chakra filled with leaves, filled with wood and water and earth, earth, earth, and the sound of one thousand hands walking through empty halls, he knew without knowing, saw without seeing, who it was.
But it isn't Madara, but Tobi, who appears before him now.
When he appears, Hashirama does nothing but simply look. Waiting. Watching with the stillness and poise of old trees. He could wait like that forever, it seems, take root in the hallway and grow deep there, silent and steady.
It's violent, that kind of silence. And if you listen too closely, it can kill you.
Madara remembered when silence was the only calm before a war, the kind that lingered between the stretch of a battlefield, thick and filled with tension. It was enough to open your mouth to drown on it. Breathe it in so it fills you. So you know it before you kill it with a battle cry, sounding the trumpets and the wardrums in the distance of times so old. Times filled with love and hate and jealousy and spite and everything that came in between, spilling into the silence and making it, creating it. (Silence is never silent, except for after your ears have turned to dust. It's anger and passion and need and everything else. It's you and me and this, too. What you don't remember. What I do.)
Only words could be more dangerous.
Words filled with trust-me smiles, before it stabs you in the throat. Words that plugged up the ears, deafening them to truth. Words that circled around silence, of everything that went unsaid. Words only Madara had denied, because he knew it was there. That silence. Hidden deep under the roots. Waiting to kill.
(And it wasn't insanity, but love that did it. Blind and deaf though they were, they were his and he was theirs, and he wanted to save them, take them out of that circle. Out of that place that would kill them. Out of the words that filled them with hope too false.)
Through the hole cut into Tobi's face, he looks out at the world, at the false prophet standing before him, young and strong and still so very much alive. Maybe time had rewound itself and thrust him back in place, or maybe they were standing out of time and place.
(He failed.)
A red and black eternity swirls into place with a shuuuush. He doesn't say anything. He shouldn't have to.
Hashirama waits in the silence, feeling the patterns of it ripple around him, like the eddies of fire. Heat radiating off the man in front of him. He doesn't need to see that eye to know who it is, to know this power intimately as he knows a brother.
The silence has a weight of its own, something oppressive and accusing. Hashirama bears it stoically, considers the origin of that anger, that hate, or not hate, but something raw and hurt like an animal in a trap, ready to lash out at anything that approaches. Anything that breaks the silence.
"Madara." Hashirama breaks the silence for him, speaks with the low, calm, assured tones of a commander, even when faced with a dead man. The duplicate of a dead man.
These walls and their dreaming maze have left him ghosts to face, he'll face them.
They'll cut him down if he doesn't, even though he's one of them.
They're vindictive, ghosts. Filled with spite and venom. Haunting every step.
Madara had lived with them for the past sixty years, seeing them everywhere in a life that was no longer his. A life taken away from him, plunged into legend. A life that was not a life, but a history dragged into the present, where it stayed and lingered and grew old. But it would always be young in a mind whose blade had only grown sharper with time, like the memory of Hashirama's voice that still sounded the same after all these years. Not eroded. Not faded. Not dull.
(He still remembers how he sounded when he laughed. It was like spring, warm and filled with so much life.)
His hand slides up and drags down the face that isn't his. His own, still young and unchanged, like the way Hashirama says his name. As though it belongs to him.
(Once upon a time, it did.)
"Hashirama." It's quiet, the way he speaks, because if he speaks any louder, his voice will ignite into flame. And he knows too well the danger of fire so close to wood, how easily it catches.
"You've changed." Madara's face is the same, for the most part, but all the same, Hashirama can see the change. In his eyes, in his stance.
Feel it. Changed in little ways over a long time, so he's very different from the man Hashirama recalls, while still being the same. More controlled and contained, but less humane, less sympathetic.
Just these shifts that Hashirama can sense, these eddies and swirls in Madara's rhythm. Hashirama is attuned to life, not just trees, but the patience of trees allows him to see what others would miss. Allows him clear thoughts, clear observation of this man.
"Not, I think, for the better." There's sadness in his tone, real regret there. A friend stands before him, someone he had to kill--failed to kill, and that was a failure in two ways. It left Madara alive with himself and his twisted loyalty, his sense of betrayal, and left Hashirama's own people ignorant of a threat.
But at the moment he mostly feels the first part of the failure, the failing of a friend. He couldn't save this man, and he couldn't release him from his suspicions, his anger, his loss, and so here Madara stands, a wraith. Hashirama can face up to his failure, at the very least.
But even before that, Hashirama failed this man, failed to bring him the peace of the forest and the shelter of trees. Madara has, it seems, always been his largest failing. The one who matches him, but the one he can't quite stand shoulder to shoulder with. Perhaps fire and forest never were meant to have any lasting friendship, but Hashirama has never been one to trust fate; life is what you make of it. A seed will grow even in hard soil, if nurtured. And fire is changeable, by its nature.
Certainly, flame can consume the forest, but it can also warm homes, and light the watch towers.
But it would be the forest that held its rule, growing strong on the warmth that fire gave, drowning out the light with leaves and bark, until the fire was smothered out.
Madara had watched with rising desperation as the trees grew up all around them, stabbing roots into their warmth, sapping away at all their strength, until all their light had been taken; stolen from eyes that no longer belonged to them, but to the thousand hands that planted down the trees, which jailed them in with solid strength and wood so thick, no amount of flames could burn through their prison.
(He's trapped here in it too, with a tree that's locked in his skin. Raised with thick, gnarled scars, forming a misprision of leaves. It's rooted in his chest and spine, right over the space of his heart. He should have died when it was planted, had the single leaf that should have done it not fallen errant from its branch. Missing him.)
With a tree planted firmly in his fire, it was obvious, natural, that he would grow with it, changing with the weather and the times. He'd grown older, sharper, smarter. Stronger than he ever was before. Strong enough that he could now face down the man responsible for the ghosts that chased his every step, ghosts that would never rest, ghosts he couldn't kill again, when they were already dead. Killed by the tree they warmed. Killed by the tree they served. Killed by the rot and decay. By the sickness that blinded each and every single one of them. And by the time they noticed the rot, slowly creeping up towards their branch, it was too late to cleave the branch from its trunk. Too late to unroot themselves when they'd grown into leaves. And leaves could only do so much. Even with stems of fire.
(He'd accepted a young fireleaf's proposal, because it was his duty. He accepted his proposal out of love. He loved them more than anyone ever would or could. They were his fire of his fire, blood of his blood, beautiful and shining and glorious and so precious, he could never imagine how they would be able to live chained, enslaved, brought down to knees and into mud, living in soil, dirt, and the shame of their defeat. He had made them. Created them. Given them life and pride and all their triumph, promising them a kingdom of light. They were his, as he was theirs, so he would save them from the tree before the rot could kill. Save them from themselves before it consumed. Slice them down by their stems. Separate them from the dying branch, take them far away from there. And watch them fly. Fluttering in the summer winds that carried them to the heavens he had promised so long ago. They could live amongst the stars, now. At least there, they would finally know what it meant to be free.)
Madara's eyes cut harsh, black burning in pools of red. He draws in a breath and holds it in, trying to calm the fires that rage with the memory of all those falling fireleaves. With the memory of his brother's face. With the memory of when they last stood across a valley of the end of Madara's life and the beginning of Uchiha's decay. That Hashirama can stand there and tell him how he's changed, looking at him with eyes like that, eyes filled with so much regret, when regret came far too late, it is all Madara can do to slowly, audibly exhale.
"You should have killed me when you had the chance," he grinds out through his teeth in a tense breath filled with a fire that clenches painfully in his chest. "So I didn't have to see how your peace would order the massacre of my clan."
"You should not have left your people." Hashirama says softly, sadly, just watching, stillness in his very center. Rooted where he is, roots stretching back across time--so many decades for Madara, a handful of years for Hashirama. And memories that well up in him like sap in the spring, hot and rushing and unfurling like leaves in his mind.
Memories of fighting, the rush and roar of battle, memories of dying friends, of tense campaigns, memories of building houses, and council meetings, and taking Madara's hand in truce, and standing shoulder to shoulder with the younger man, feeling the swelling of a dream of forests realized. A dream of fire, sheltered under tree shade.
It's still his dream, the Uchiha are still his restless firepeople, but they lack the strong leader they need, they lack the guiding spark--they aren't tree people yet, and without Madara to show them the way to be treefire, he doesn't know how this will end, he hopes it will end well.
He knows now that it won't.
"You should never have left them in the first place. It should never have been just my peace, it should have been ours." He believes that, it will be something he regrets to his grave. That he couldn't make a peace that Madara could accept, that Madara could not trust him, that it would in the end come to exile and bitterness and conflict. "But should will not fix things, should will never bring back the dead." Should, and could, would have, if only, recriminations and hindsight were not useful, were only good for reflecting on in the hopes of making better choices for the next time. It did not mean that the loss should be discounted, but Hashirama had to move on, to see the future, instead of the past. He wished Madara could do the same. Even if Madara's past was Hashirama's future, or his children's future, the future of his people, it was still, to Madara, the past.
"Tell me how it happened." It's a command, a demand, still he's a leader, a commander, someone who does not so much ask, as tell. It's not impolite, simply his manner. That slight abruptness he has always had, rough as bark. Because, because for all the need to look to the future, he still wants to know. He has a melancholy need to hear it from Madara, to hear how Madara tells it.
There's a silence that grows between them, one filled with anger, heat, and too much tension. It's quiet, the way it slips in, rising fast like the tides of the sea. And when it falls, it plummets hard, crashing down on the rocky shores of a river they once called hope, when they were still young and green and thought they could conquer the world.
(They thought they could live in the sky, amongst the clouds and the stars, like the gods. They would grow wings and take flight, soaring through space; high, high above the earth, without anything to tether them to the ground. And they had lain in the sweet meadows between the wars, looking up at the bright summer sky, dreaming of the stars and flight. Of cutting away what held them down and kept them trapped. They could be free up there, if they could fly.)
Their dreams had fallen like leaves when the roots came up and closed them in.
"How dare you, Hashirama," Madara hisses, words filled with fire, filled with steel. There's no laughter here or games like the ones he plays with the rest of the world. No deceit, no lies, only war. "You dare accuse me of leaving my people when it was yours who ordered their executions? An entire clan, Hashirama, an entire clan! Women and children and infants too! I could've chosen to never fight you and stayed and it wouldn't have meant a thing! It would've still been the same conclusion I predicted from the beginning when I objected this truce. I knew it was coming -- I saw it all along, and no one listened. Not my people whose ears you poisoned with your ridiculous idea of peace, and not you, who seemed to believe in the infallible, perfect nature of your precious village!"
His words are hot and loud like the fire in his blood and in the air, sizzling across the stretch of this new battlefield.
Hashirama dissolves like dust before his eyes.
[ Fire burns low and slow, flicking orange and red over walls drenched in shadow. Madara's eyes seem to glow, kaleidoscopic red and black when he finally opens them and sits up, red silk pooling around his naked waist, as he presses fingertips against his temples. Even in the dim light, the scars that riddle his body can be made out. One of them looks like a tree. It's right over his heart. ]
[credit| Hashirama is played by hara for narudressroom; slightly edited]
[ooc: Sorry for the confusion -- this entire dream is actually from Madara's POV so no one actually gets to see the mask that he takes off. Only that he takes off a mask, but it's not clear what said mask looks like. When he wakes up, everyone will see his face. ]
But they aren't always sleeping when they dream. Some of them dream while seeing the world with open eyes, spending each moment trying to burn up all the ghosts and legends and lies written in scrolls planted in the roots of a tree.
(Madara'd tried so many years ago, to cut down that tree before it took root, to slice through the earth and all the mud, tilling dirt to uproot his own blood from the poison poisonous poisoned truth wrapped up in colorful packaging that looked like hope and peace and dreams of a world with no more war. But he knew far too well the kind of illusion they all believed in, so stupid, blinded by one thousand hands placed over eyes that had long stopped seeing. They'd lost their vision, lost their sight, lost the fire and their pride, and look at where their eyes are now. Ash, dirt, and dust.)
So when the air expands and shudders with hums of chakra filled with leaves, filled with wood and water and earth, earth, earth, and the sound of one thousand hands walking through empty halls, he knew without knowing, saw without seeing, who it was.
But it isn't Madara, but Tobi, who appears before him now.
When he appears, Hashirama does nothing but simply look. Waiting. Watching with the stillness and poise of old trees. He could wait like that forever, it seems, take root in the hallway and grow deep there, silent and steady.
It's violent, that kind of silence. And if you listen too closely, it can kill you.
Madara remembered when silence was the only calm before a war, the kind that lingered between the stretch of a battlefield, thick and filled with tension. It was enough to open your mouth to drown on it. Breathe it in so it fills you. So you know it before you kill it with a battle cry, sounding the trumpets and the wardrums in the distance of times so old. Times filled with love and hate and jealousy and spite and everything that came in between, spilling into the silence and making it, creating it. (Silence is never silent, except for after your ears have turned to dust. It's anger and passion and need and everything else. It's you and me and this, too. What you don't remember. What I do.)
Only words could be more dangerous.
Words filled with trust-me smiles, before it stabs you in the throat. Words that plugged up the ears, deafening them to truth. Words that circled around silence, of everything that went unsaid. Words only Madara had denied, because he knew it was there. That silence. Hidden deep under the roots. Waiting to kill.
(And it wasn't insanity, but love that did it. Blind and deaf though they were, they were his and he was theirs, and he wanted to save them, take them out of that circle. Out of that place that would kill them. Out of the words that filled them with hope too false.)
Through the hole cut into Tobi's face, he looks out at the world, at the false prophet standing before him, young and strong and still so very much alive. Maybe time had rewound itself and thrust him back in place, or maybe they were standing out of time and place.
(He failed.)
A red and black eternity swirls into place with a shuuuush. He doesn't say anything. He shouldn't have to.
Hashirama waits in the silence, feeling the patterns of it ripple around him, like the eddies of fire. Heat radiating off the man in front of him. He doesn't need to see that eye to know who it is, to know this power intimately as he knows a brother.
The silence has a weight of its own, something oppressive and accusing. Hashirama bears it stoically, considers the origin of that anger, that hate, or not hate, but something raw and hurt like an animal in a trap, ready to lash out at anything that approaches. Anything that breaks the silence.
"Madara." Hashirama breaks the silence for him, speaks with the low, calm, assured tones of a commander, even when faced with a dead man. The duplicate of a dead man.
These walls and their dreaming maze have left him ghosts to face, he'll face them.
They'll cut him down if he doesn't, even though he's one of them.
They're vindictive, ghosts. Filled with spite and venom. Haunting every step.
Madara had lived with them for the past sixty years, seeing them everywhere in a life that was no longer his. A life taken away from him, plunged into legend. A life that was not a life, but a history dragged into the present, where it stayed and lingered and grew old. But it would always be young in a mind whose blade had only grown sharper with time, like the memory of Hashirama's voice that still sounded the same after all these years. Not eroded. Not faded. Not dull.
(He still remembers how he sounded when he laughed. It was like spring, warm and filled with so much life.)
His hand slides up and drags down the face that isn't his. His own, still young and unchanged, like the way Hashirama says his name. As though it belongs to him.
(Once upon a time, it did.)
"Hashirama." It's quiet, the way he speaks, because if he speaks any louder, his voice will ignite into flame. And he knows too well the danger of fire so close to wood, how easily it catches.
"You've changed." Madara's face is the same, for the most part, but all the same, Hashirama can see the change. In his eyes, in his stance.
Feel it. Changed in little ways over a long time, so he's very different from the man Hashirama recalls, while still being the same. More controlled and contained, but less humane, less sympathetic.
Just these shifts that Hashirama can sense, these eddies and swirls in Madara's rhythm. Hashirama is attuned to life, not just trees, but the patience of trees allows him to see what others would miss. Allows him clear thoughts, clear observation of this man.
"Not, I think, for the better." There's sadness in his tone, real regret there. A friend stands before him, someone he had to kill--failed to kill, and that was a failure in two ways. It left Madara alive with himself and his twisted loyalty, his sense of betrayal, and left Hashirama's own people ignorant of a threat.
But at the moment he mostly feels the first part of the failure, the failing of a friend. He couldn't save this man, and he couldn't release him from his suspicions, his anger, his loss, and so here Madara stands, a wraith. Hashirama can face up to his failure, at the very least.
But even before that, Hashirama failed this man, failed to bring him the peace of the forest and the shelter of trees. Madara has, it seems, always been his largest failing. The one who matches him, but the one he can't quite stand shoulder to shoulder with. Perhaps fire and forest never were meant to have any lasting friendship, but Hashirama has never been one to trust fate; life is what you make of it. A seed will grow even in hard soil, if nurtured. And fire is changeable, by its nature.
Certainly, flame can consume the forest, but it can also warm homes, and light the watch towers.
But it would be the forest that held its rule, growing strong on the warmth that fire gave, drowning out the light with leaves and bark, until the fire was smothered out.
Madara had watched with rising desperation as the trees grew up all around them, stabbing roots into their warmth, sapping away at all their strength, until all their light had been taken; stolen from eyes that no longer belonged to them, but to the thousand hands that planted down the trees, which jailed them in with solid strength and wood so thick, no amount of flames could burn through their prison.
(He's trapped here in it too, with a tree that's locked in his skin. Raised with thick, gnarled scars, forming a misprision of leaves. It's rooted in his chest and spine, right over the space of his heart. He should have died when it was planted, had the single leaf that should have done it not fallen errant from its branch. Missing him.)
With a tree planted firmly in his fire, it was obvious, natural, that he would grow with it, changing with the weather and the times. He'd grown older, sharper, smarter. Stronger than he ever was before. Strong enough that he could now face down the man responsible for the ghosts that chased his every step, ghosts that would never rest, ghosts he couldn't kill again, when they were already dead. Killed by the tree they warmed. Killed by the tree they served. Killed by the rot and decay. By the sickness that blinded each and every single one of them. And by the time they noticed the rot, slowly creeping up towards their branch, it was too late to cleave the branch from its trunk. Too late to unroot themselves when they'd grown into leaves. And leaves could only do so much. Even with stems of fire.
(He'd accepted a young fireleaf's proposal, because it was his duty. He accepted his proposal out of love. He loved them more than anyone ever would or could. They were his fire of his fire, blood of his blood, beautiful and shining and glorious and so precious, he could never imagine how they would be able to live chained, enslaved, brought down to knees and into mud, living in soil, dirt, and the shame of their defeat. He had made them. Created them. Given them life and pride and all their triumph, promising them a kingdom of light. They were his, as he was theirs, so he would save them from the tree before the rot could kill. Save them from themselves before it consumed. Slice them down by their stems. Separate them from the dying branch, take them far away from there. And watch them fly. Fluttering in the summer winds that carried them to the heavens he had promised so long ago. They could live amongst the stars, now. At least there, they would finally know what it meant to be free.)
Madara's eyes cut harsh, black burning in pools of red. He draws in a breath and holds it in, trying to calm the fires that rage with the memory of all those falling fireleaves. With the memory of his brother's face. With the memory of when they last stood across a valley of the end of Madara's life and the beginning of Uchiha's decay. That Hashirama can stand there and tell him how he's changed, looking at him with eyes like that, eyes filled with so much regret, when regret came far too late, it is all Madara can do to slowly, audibly exhale.
"You should have killed me when you had the chance," he grinds out through his teeth in a tense breath filled with a fire that clenches painfully in his chest. "So I didn't have to see how your peace would order the massacre of my clan."
"You should not have left your people." Hashirama says softly, sadly, just watching, stillness in his very center. Rooted where he is, roots stretching back across time--so many decades for Madara, a handful of years for Hashirama. And memories that well up in him like sap in the spring, hot and rushing and unfurling like leaves in his mind.
Memories of fighting, the rush and roar of battle, memories of dying friends, of tense campaigns, memories of building houses, and council meetings, and taking Madara's hand in truce, and standing shoulder to shoulder with the younger man, feeling the swelling of a dream of forests realized. A dream of fire, sheltered under tree shade.
It's still his dream, the Uchiha are still his restless firepeople, but they lack the strong leader they need, they lack the guiding spark--they aren't tree people yet, and without Madara to show them the way to be treefire, he doesn't know how this will end, he hopes it will end well.
He knows now that it won't.
"You should never have left them in the first place. It should never have been just my peace, it should have been ours." He believes that, it will be something he regrets to his grave. That he couldn't make a peace that Madara could accept, that Madara could not trust him, that it would in the end come to exile and bitterness and conflict. "But should will not fix things, should will never bring back the dead." Should, and could, would have, if only, recriminations and hindsight were not useful, were only good for reflecting on in the hopes of making better choices for the next time. It did not mean that the loss should be discounted, but Hashirama had to move on, to see the future, instead of the past. He wished Madara could do the same. Even if Madara's past was Hashirama's future, or his children's future, the future of his people, it was still, to Madara, the past.
"Tell me how it happened." It's a command, a demand, still he's a leader, a commander, someone who does not so much ask, as tell. It's not impolite, simply his manner. That slight abruptness he has always had, rough as bark. Because, because for all the need to look to the future, he still wants to know. He has a melancholy need to hear it from Madara, to hear how Madara tells it.
There's a silence that grows between them, one filled with anger, heat, and too much tension. It's quiet, the way it slips in, rising fast like the tides of the sea. And when it falls, it plummets hard, crashing down on the rocky shores of a river they once called hope, when they were still young and green and thought they could conquer the world.
(They thought they could live in the sky, amongst the clouds and the stars, like the gods. They would grow wings and take flight, soaring through space; high, high above the earth, without anything to tether them to the ground. And they had lain in the sweet meadows between the wars, looking up at the bright summer sky, dreaming of the stars and flight. Of cutting away what held them down and kept them trapped. They could be free up there, if they could fly.)
Their dreams had fallen like leaves when the roots came up and closed them in.
"How dare you, Hashirama," Madara hisses, words filled with fire, filled with steel. There's no laughter here or games like the ones he plays with the rest of the world. No deceit, no lies, only war. "You dare accuse me of leaving my people when it was yours who ordered their executions? An entire clan, Hashirama, an entire clan! Women and children and infants too! I could've chosen to never fight you and stayed and it wouldn't have meant a thing! It would've still been the same conclusion I predicted from the beginning when I objected this truce. I knew it was coming -- I saw it all along, and no one listened. Not my people whose ears you poisoned with your ridiculous idea of peace, and not you, who seemed to believe in the infallible, perfect nature of your precious village!"
His words are hot and loud like the fire in his blood and in the air, sizzling across the stretch of this new battlefield.
Hashirama dissolves like dust before his eyes.
[ Fire burns low and slow, flicking orange and red over walls drenched in shadow. Madara's eyes seem to glow, kaleidoscopic red and black when he finally opens them and sits up, red silk pooling around his naked waist, as he presses fingertips against his temples. Even in the dim light, the scars that riddle his body can be made out. One of them looks like a tree. It's right over his heart. ]
[credit| Hashirama is played by hara for narudressroom; slightly edited]
[ooc: Sorry for the confusion -- this entire dream is actually from Madara's POV so no one actually gets to see the mask that he takes off. Only that he takes off a mask, but it's not clear what said mask looks like. When he wakes up, everyone will see his face. ]