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Touka can pinpoint the exact moment her world shatters.
It just... happens. Without warning, without word, as she’s fuming at her stupid, green clan head for mourning an enemy and, more to the point, blaming her favorite cousin for defending his life.
She’s not even aware of it, is the thing. Senju fall like leaves in this war, but by some miracle none of Touka’s precious people have died by her side. Her parents, of course, when she was too young to remember, and besides that countless aunts and uncles and cousins and kin, but--
None of hers since she was old enough to fight beside them, old enough to let her chakra cloak her in anger and take outlet for her rage at the tides of their unstoppable foes on the battlefield.
She can pinpoint the exact moment her entire world shatters, and it is a star winking out instead of going supernova. Had it been anything less than what it was, she might not have noticed-- too far away, too miniscule on the grand scheme of things, but it isn’t and he’s not and then he’s NOT and--
Hashirama, for his part, is subsumed by grief and anger. He sees her face lose all of it’s color, to become the bloodless visage akin to the once-friendly face he’s forced to fight, and he feels his brows raise in confusion as she cuts off mid-tirade and so far as he can tell, stops breathing.
There is a tapestry of warmth around Touka and she only realized too late.
Never was she more than average as a sensor, rare as they were. Never could she pick out more than the direction of someone, and only then if it was someone familiar, and Tobirama despaired of her even as he dedicated countless hours to teaching her.
Tobirama!
There are not words. Grief rises in her like a tide, bile in her throat, skin numb and cold as the presence that has existed forever on the edges of her awareness is snuffed out like a candle.
Before, she would not have recognized the constant press of sensations. It was as normal to her as smell, as touch, and she’s never really noticed how everyone feels different to a sense she can’t name.
She notices the absence, though; notices from a hundred miles away with her head snapping to his direction as a bit of the tapestry of sensations that has always been weaved around her is replaced with emptiness , everything familiar about him gone in an instant , everything she knows as ‘little cousin’ ripped from the world.
Touka feels it the instant her brother BROTHER is no more of this world and Hashirama doesn’t grief rises like a tidal wave in her, at first a shock, a swell of disbelief but quickly--
Quickly it is a wave higher than the great trees are tall and it meets the barrier of her skin and clashes against it, fills her and is too much, too great, too--
Nothing, there is nothing without--
Tobirama!
Her body screams with every iota of force it can muster; her thoughts don’t form words because she is screaming, screaming, her entire being is screaming and there is no focus in her beyond the void where his clever-water-river-wet grass used to be, where her cousin used to be, and he is gone, gone--!
From far away, muffled as if underwater, she hears Hashirama’s voice. It sounds as if he’s been yelling but she’s been beyond the ability to hear him, until his hands touch down on her shoulders and he shakes her, shakes her but.
There is confusion on his face, a marked lack of understanding where his world should be torn asunder as much as hers and it is not.
She sees the face of her clan head who has let this senseless war go on for too long and--
Has lost her her little brother.
A wordess howl of rage rips from her throat, rips with blood and the sting of it can’t catch her, can’t be but a drop in the ocean of pain that suffuses the whole of her being, and she reaches with claws instead of hands for his throat.
With Tobirama dead, no one in the clan is faster than her.
Tan-dark-leaf-unfurling sunshine disappears from her tapestry, and she will mourn it later, but the thought is too distant to even notice, too small in the enormity of what has befallen her.
Tobirama is dead , and no one in the clan is faster than her.
There is no pity in her for a useless idealist of a clan head who lets the children of the Senju die to merciless blades of Uchiha murderers.
Again, Touka is roused from the unseeing depths of her loss, this time with a drop of red in the sea.
The Uchiha.
Of course they must be responsible, no one else could match Tobirama--
Her Tobirama! --
On the field of battle.
Abstractly, she’d known it was the war, had taken Hashirama’s throat out for this senseless war, but to think that her brother’s killer’s were now standing over his cooling corpse, were now satisfied with the empty shell of their second greatest enemy--
Now the reality of it shoves into her mind, parting the tides of loss, pulses with a new feeling, a red, red haze that seeps into her blood, and this is more familiar, this is-- the rage, the blind hatred, the anger of a thousand mothers sending their sons off to a hungry war, a battleground thirsty for blood, and the helplessness because it would never, never stop.
Red beats a tattoo on Touka’s heart, replaces the numbness in her fingers as the personal loss of Tobirama blends with the overpowering hatred of this clan feud, this mindless battle that churns on through generations and demands more and more tributes of innocent children and the ones who fight for their loss, an endless cycle of how dare you, how dare you.
It claws at her heart-- Tobirama, TOBIRAMA!-- and she can barely think through the sheer razor of the pain of it.
Finally, finally, she stands from her knees and no one has come for Hashirama’s body, no one has come to try and stop her. Finally, she realizes that with her little cousin gone she has become the best sensor of the Senju, the best sensor in the world, and no one will be coming.
Because no one knows.
That is another layer of grief, if a more distant one, that no one in the clan knows that Tobirama died, that no one knows he-- he... left.
That he went nearly a hundred miles to the east in the span of an afternoon, without a mission, and gave her a note to leave for Hashirama.
There is a note tucked in her sash that she hadn’t read out of loyalty and now she knows it tells her that her baby cousin had gone to die, much good that it had done her.
Maybe if she had read it, had reacted in time, she could have stopped him. Maybe if Hashirama hadn’t shouted on the field of battle at the only brother he’s got left that Tobirama had ruined any chance for peace--
Maybe if she killed every crimson-eyed Uchiha the pointless war could stop at last: the solution Hashirama was too kind or to weak to see.
There is: her naginata in one hand, wood sturdy but not grounding; a useless kimono that she carefully takes the note out of, leaves it safe next to the last clan head; and the blood of one cousin spilled moments after the blood of another, to appease the monsoon inside her that only grows with the tribute.
Her grief rises like a tsunami and she does not fight it as it consumes her.
-
Senju Touka cleaves a swath of destruction across the countryside.
Senju Hashirama could have done it, they know, had he not been forced to engage his mirror in Madara. Uchiha Madara could have done it, they know somewhat more bitterly, if Hashirama hadn’t been there to stop him and steal his focus.
Either of them could have cut through the ranks of the other’s clan army had they not had each other to contend with.
No one knows that Hashirama purposefully engaged Madara, fought him to a draw as their clansmen fought around them, dozens dying a day for his goal of everlasting peace.
Tobirama took that secret to the grave.
Some, if asked, might have realized that Tobirama could do the same if he were of a mind to, if he’d not had his mirror in Izuna. And Izuna could have certainly taken down a good portion of the Senju forces-- they knew that much, had always breathed easier when the clan head’s second took to battle like an unstoppable river, with a lake’s worth of water to bring to bear.
Touka, at the time Tobirama slew Izuna, had quick been rising through the ranks.
She was a terror, a demon with a naginata, and a warrior few of the rank-and-file Uchiha could match. She had trouble only with their numbers; could fight almost anyone one-on-one and come out triumphant.
Madara knows Hashirama.
Madara knows him in a way Touka was never really able to understand. Tobirama told her brief summations of their relationship, of Hashirama’s dream for peace, before Itama died and, she had assumed, that dream quietly died with him.
Peace could only be achieved when no more Uchiha could raise steel against the children of the Senju.
Madara knows Hashirama, though, and Tobirama had given her a week.
“A week,” He’d said, the time until she should give the note to Hashirama. She’d smiled with him, and laughed with him, and ignored his troubled eyes as he walked to the border to die.
A week is how long it would have taken Hashirama to realize his brother was dead, because he certainly couldn’t tell just from the hole in the world Tobirama’s lack of presence caused, the obvious and physical and immediate wrongness of it.
Tobirama was good with words in a way Hashirama never could be; penned documents and treaties and asuaged Batsuma when he had been alive; talked Hashirama down from fits of stupidity, talked their armies into hope and determination.
There is no way he’d sacrifice his life for Hashirama’s peace without setting the terms, without securing some admission from Madara that this willing death-- a brother for a brother-- would even the score.
“I come unarmed,” She can picture him saying, and the idea of him and his voice and never hearing or seeing him again tears raggedly at the hole in her chest, and he would have. Would have gone without a sword in his hand to die.
“Hashirama doesn’t know I’m here and won’t for a week at the least. I come alone, and unarmed.”
The thought of her cousin kneeling in the dirt to be killed--
She breathes, but doesn’t try to cool the rage, the winds of it that hurl her onward.
Madara, who knows Hashirama, who has been given a week, did not see her coming.
She flew through the trees and into the compound, a ghost in the evening twilight, and she crashed wind into fire without regard for chakra exhaustion, for how much she had to use, without carefully rationing it for enough jutsu to last a battle and see her home.
Senju Touka avenged her brother’s death from four foot away, cold steel in his killer’s throat and flames licking his clanhome away.
After that, it was easy.
After that, nothing and no one could stop her.
She waded through the foot soldiers, heedless of burns and cuts and other injuries that might stop her, on any other day. Jutsu she would dodge, wounds she would nurse, a piece of a whole with a part to play in an army.
Now she was alone, and the blood felt like fire spilling from the scores, and the novelty of feeling something when her heart was Tobirama’s body cooling in the forest, had her laughing, not with humor, and soon she had to chase down the remnants of the clan because they had stopped charging her, instead turning to flee.
Her dress had burned mostly away at some point, though she hardly noticed, and the moon hung high in the sky for all the good it did; she had no use for it’s light, because the entirety of the Uchiha lands were on fire.
She spared no child, no mother, no infant in their cribs. She wept with the necessity of it, somewhere deep in her bones, or at least she thought she might, someday.
The elders came last, and she had started with the patrols in the woods and worked her way inwards after Madara, so they were defenseless like Tobirama had been and kneeling just the same.
She took their heads and tied them together by the long beards, no woman among them, and for proof tied in Madara’s long mane as well, hardly recognizable as the same person with no eyes and nothing from the neck down.
It is this bundle she takes to her own clan, and throws at the feet of her clan elders.
They speak of using her, of excitement, of forgiving her for Hashirama’s death if she does this with the Nara, the Yoshagoro, the Yamanaka.
If she starts and ends wars with every ninja clan in the world.
So she kills them as well, and that’s when Mito finds her, teeth bared at the edge of the world-- or what feels like it to Touka-- and standing over the useless old men with a worn bladed staff and charred remnants of raiments sticking to her skin in some places.
For her part, the Uzumaki princess is wide-eyed.
She’d found her husband, body cooling next to the suicide note of Tobirama, and of course she had been angry, of course she had grieved.
Only, that grief had felt like a betrayal, because some part of her cried out in relief. It meant a failed treaty with the Senju, it meant her husband was dead, it meant she no longer had to mother Hashirama like a suckling babe as he dreamt of peace yet let his people die, the good and subservient wife who never disagreed with her husband when it mattered.
Now, the Uchiha are dead, their leaders’ heads on the floor at Touka’s feet, and Touka herself is... resplendent.
Her grief is a terrible thing, worn like a challenge and palpable, stretching across the room to give Mito no doubt as to why she’s done what she has, why she tore the world apart and watched it burn.
And seeing her, above the elders who had determined the terms of her marriage, the elders who egged on a war and refused Hashirama and looked down their noses at her-- clan wife, princess, to the Senju the two were one in the same, where in Uzushio Mito was understood to be the heir to all that they were , her mother’s daughter, the next in line to lead a people who bowed to no one and cowed under no force and shaped the world around them.
It had slowly started becoming apparent that these elders had no idea what they had agreed to in the marriage treaty, no idea what they had received , and as they and Hashirama failed to send her to the frontlines of war to drown their enemies in blood, Mito had grown frustrated.
She’d captured the god of destruction in her soul, had surpassed all in the line of Uzumaki before her, and still the Senju smiled at her like the clanwife instead of the maelstrom.
Now, Senju Touka stood above them and her skin was dark, darker than Hashirama’s, with cuts and bruises and dirt in every wound, burns the only thing keeping her clothes molded to flesh. Her hair was falling from her wrappings, her blade was wet with blood in her hands, and beyond the fact that she looked like some taste of home in this foreign land--
Mito felt something in her shift, some barrier unwoven, and blinks as a quiet voice in her mind whispers: Oh.
Before her, a woman with dirt-smeared, sweat-smeared, smoke-seared skin yanks her blade out of the corpse of an old man who gave Mito nothing but disrespect, amber-brown eyes landing on Mito and not softening.
This time, louder, something sits up inside Mito and says: OH.
Oh, indeed.
Mito opens her mouth, and what follows is:
“Marry me?”
Which is not quite how she’d meant to phrase that, and she backtracks with as much dignity as possible-- she’s willing to renegotiate the marriage contract if they’re willing to fucking read it , and Touka is the obvious next choice for leader of the Senju, no matter how the dead men on the ground would have objected to the idea, and--
“Yes.” Says the wild-eyed woman in the pool of blood, and her voice is ragged yet brokers no argument.
“I’ve burned down the Uchiha and I’ll burn the entire world. I need to reshape it, better, where no children fight and die for old men’s grudges. Will you help me?”
Serious eyes stare her down, but there is no hesitation in Uzumaki Mito.
She steps over the bodies of the men who tried to stop her, the fools who had no use for an unleashed hurricane, a maelstrom in human form, the princess of the land of whirlpools where no man has ever ruled.
“It is what I was born to do,” Says Mito, and she can see it now, how she was near her destiny but never touching it, frustrated beyond the telling of it, on a path that led to stagnation and death.
There is a name for a grouping of Uzumaki women; a name that spills like blood and laughter on the streets of her village, like crimson hair and chakra and fearlessness.
They are called a devastation, and Touka doesn’t quite count, not yet, not before the marriage is signed in seals and blood-- as Hashirama never consented to do-- and then Mito will finally be part of a devastation once more, far from home, maybe, but she set out to fix this world and now, finally, she can.
Deep in her soul, the god of destruction laughs, pleased.