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“You’ve come to kill me.” Butsuma rasped, tilting his head to dab his bloodied lips against his stained futon. His words are matter of fact– casual, almost, were it not for the time and place. Were it not for what he’d merely stated.
Tobirama tensed, the acknowledgment of his subterfuge pulling instincts taut along his shoulders. Then he eased. It was not his father he was trying to deceive. The hour was late, somewhere around when night became morning. The house was quiet, his father’s minders having dismissed themselves and retired to the annex.
His brother was in the capital, announcing his soon-to-be succession. Tobirama, himself, was part of Hashirama’s delegation—surely asleep by now, or at least deep meditation, with his brother snoring an arm’s length away from him.
The Tobirama that stood before Butsuma now, a clone.
“Yes.” Tobirama replied, measured and certain, as he was taught.
His father closed his eyes and let his head settle back against the pillow, humming his acknowledgement. “You were always the clever one.”
He braced for… something. For Butsuma to plead for life, for argument, for him to call out to his attendants or fight back, or, or, something more.
“I’m dying,” Butsuma continued, sensing Tobirama's hesitation where once there was certainty. “Just not fast enough for either of our tastes.”
Something rotted inside his father. It ate away that proud shinobi until all that remained was paper thin skin and mottled bruises. Once, Butsuma stood tall; muscled and fatted, the stature of a man who not only survived in war but thrived. Now, flesh clung to bone. A threadbare kuromontsuki draped across its rack and left for the moths.
Suppuration of the blood, the Nara physician had told them.
Senju Butsuma would die slowly in the shell of his greatness. Devoured not by Uchiha flame but bed sores. He'd either suffocate from his own whitened blood or be drowned by his lungs. Slow, agonizing, shameful.
Tobirama still stood, watching. An imperceptible crease to his brow was the only change in demeanor.
Butsuma laughed, an ugly heaving thing that devolved into a retching cough. Dull blood spattered across his hands, his sleeves, his quilts as he recovered himself. Each pant and huff exhaled a haze of red with it. Rotting indeed.
“Where did your motivation go?” His father smiles when he asks, paled and blood speckled. It is not unkind. Nor does it hold any warmth. “If I thought you held any love for me, I'd be touched.”
With a trembling hand, Butsuma beckoned. And despite himself, Tobirama obeyed. As if he were still a boy, still a blade in Butsuma’s grip. He eased to his knees beside his father’s deathbed, both hands on his lap, and watched.
“You are right to fear me, but not if it will stay your blade. We want the same thing.” Bustama wet his lips before continuing. “Our esteemed elders have spared no expense in prolonging my life. They need me to temper your brother’s idealistic fantasies.”
“But I am tired.” There’s a sudden power to his voice, Butsuma almost snarling despite his withered breaths. “Denied the death I am owed a hundred times over, kept as a pet to corral their clan head, all so I can, what? Rot into my own floodboards? They’d see to it that my legacy is of a stained tatami mat, nothing more.” Bony hands knot into the quilts beneath them, twisting, working cotton weave over gnarled brittle nails.
“I don't care what that boy does. I don't care if he damns the Senju, I don’t care if he’d let it all fall to ruin. What do I care about their pride if they’ve deprived me of my own?”
Tobirama said nothing, made no movement as his father spoke with rising passion. His breathing agitated now, labored. Instead, he took note. Hashirama did still defer to their father. Often. His succession was not yet final, but in their father’s illness he had taken over most duties. The elders, then, were so keen to keep Hashirama’s voice neuter that they sought out any treatment available for an incurable disease.
It explained paying the exorbitant fee for the Nara physician–a neutral clan often unwilling to deal directly with Senju or Uchiha– and the recommended medicines. Tobirama was under the assumption it was his father that ran from death.
Loose ends to tie up later. He would not suffer any threat to Hashirama.
Butsuma’s rage quieted. Glassy eyes stared up to the ceiling, the whites of them soured with blood. His body heaved and Tobirama remained still.
“Grant me death by blade, at the very least. Let me mistake this for mercy.”
Tobirama set his jaw, and nodded once. He retrieved a kunai with slow, telegraphed movements. He felt strange. For all the ways he thought this confrontation would go, this was not one he had considered. He didn't feel sad for his father, he didn’t feel guilt or sympathy. He pitied him.
His father’s gaze shifted back to him, regarding him with an unusual softness to his eyes. “I always thought it cruel, that you would have her face and yet wear it so heartlessly.”
Cruel, Tobirama’s mind echoed as his father’s admission rattled, like telling your son for the first time in his life that he looked like the mother he never met. To give it as insult. He blinked past the confession. After everything that happened in this hour, Butsuma still reached for a weapon when backed into a corner. He couldn’t dwell on it, not when his father’s dull eyes watched to see if his blade had struck true.
He brings the kunai to his father’s throat and Butsuma raises his chin in kind.
“Tobirama,” He did not want to heed to his father; his fingers itched, desperate to claw back some of the catharsis he had hoped to get out of this. Yet he yielded anyway, kunai ghosting against fragile skin. Butsuma wet his lips once more, swallowing down bloodied phlegm and spit, as his gaze returned to the ceiling. “You are all he has. Put nothing before him. Not hate or love. Not even the clan. He is a softhearted fool that the world is eager to devour.”
As if his loyalty to his brother was ever in question. He’d give his life, if he must.
The words linger for a moment, then another. Tobirama waited to see if his father would offer anything else, but nothing else came. Seconds more passed, then the kunai parted Butsuma’s throat.
A breath caught and lost to the strangle of blood. Then a panicked seizing of the body. Then stillness.
His intention had been suffocation. To smother Butsuma so that his death could be blamed on his wasting. Yet he could not deny his father the honor he begged for. He'd already seen the man brought low by disease, sitting in his own filth and reeking of stale sickness. The alibi would hold regardless. Tobirama, a week’s travel away, accompanying his brother, watched by the countless eyes of the capital. Their father, murdered in his sickbed.
Only once the body began to cool did Tobirama rise to his feet. He swiped the kunai against his sleeve–habit, more than necessity. Soon the blade and himself both would disappear.
Perhaps it was mercy.
Tobirama stepped away from Butsuma’s corpse, then he was gone.
–
In the lavish confines of imperial accommodations, Tobirama tore out of sleep with a startled noise. All the emotions his other half had the luxury of coping with one at a time over the last hour became his to cope with all at once. He choked on something like a sob and doubled over the side of his futon, away from where his brother lay sleeping a few feet away.
His hands knotted and twisted into his soft bedding, grappling for some kind of grounding. Butsuma was dead but, but. His mind reeled, he pressed his face to cool silk and fought to breathe. Maybe the reincorporation of clones needed more work, this was, too much, he couldn’t–
“Tobi.” Hashirama's voice was close, thick with sleep.
Tobirama tried to quiet himself, maybe his brother hadn’t fully awakened, maybe he could still go back to sleep. He forced sobs into shaking breaths and tried to organize his thoughts. He'd departed from the clone halfway through the journey to the capital. Three days separated their consciousness, but that shouldn’t matter. Then why– why did it hurt, why did he feel so… so much?
“Tobi.” Hashirama was firmer this time, more lucid, once more interrupting his spiraling. His brother moved somewhere behind him. The futon beneath him shifted, then was pulled back, taking Tobirama along with it. Before he could think, or move, or perhaps attempt to save face, Hashirama found him.
Broad hands stroked down his back, their warmth seeping through fabric to skin. When they pull him close, he goes willingly. For maybe the first time since they were children–when four became two–Tobirama accepted Hashirama as he pulled him into the warmth of his layered duvets.
He still made strangled, ugly sounds. Not quite cries, but not quite anything else. He did not mourn his father, he did not mourn what he had to do. Hashirama cooed softly, shushing Tobirama's stuttering breaths as he worked to tuck his baby brother neatly against his chest. Calloused hands pushing hair away from tear soaked cheeks.
He mourned his own softness, maybe. If he could be a mother’s daughter, instead of a father’s son.
Cruel. To wear her face and feel nothing.
He does not temper the wretched sound he sobs into his brother’s shoulder.