[Dream] Fireleaves

[parousian]

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. ]

Comments

[callmelegion.livejournal.com]

[ Pain does not want to see this, nor feel it. (Itachi's dream was bad enough; this is an electrical sodium shot to the nerves, crystallizing inside of him the fibers of his long dead self . . . and selves: the suffering, and a dream deferred, the loss of hope, and those things which you wanted to take root which did not) Trees fall before fire. Dreams fall before the dawn light. Madara is there, now. In that cold place of dim flames. Pain knows that place. Waking to nothingness. The dreams of the past blowing away behind you. What-could-have-beens.

(If the world were what it is not; but the world will forever scorch away the trees of your native land -- drown them, perhaps, in the endless rain, in the floodplain, where the crops no longer grow. Where you are a leader, alone. With others, but in your torment . . . alone.) ]

The dreams of the gods and the immortals . . .

[ Pensively. ]

Always the most forlorn dreams, of all.

[ He is not merely referring to the literal, physical dream -- as presented by the Hitomi, but also to that which the years have tried to bury and oppress. ]

[parousian.livejournal.com]

[ Madara dislikes the feeling of eyes under his skin, eyes that look and actually see. He likes it more when a haze lingers in the air, myopic like the kind that rises in heat and disappears when you step too close and try to close your fingers around it; old smoke that slips through grasping hands, changing shape each time the wind blows (like the clouds that moved across the summer sky all those years ago) and chokes the lungs when you breathe it in. ]

Few understand.

[ Pain's words are unwelcome, but Madara accepts them just the same.

(How high the sky once seemed, fingers reaching towards limitless blue where they lay in high grass swaying with winds and dreams. One day, Izuna, your eyes will fly.) ]

private;

[monocled.livejournal.com]

Ah, there's a lot going on there, isn't it? You seem to carry a lot.

[sips some tea]


People to end to underestimate things that put down roots. I'm glad you don't.

private.

[parousian.livejournal.com]

[ A frown. His face is uncovered, to keep his identities separate. He'd gone and rewatched the dream and while it was clear he had taken off some kind of mask, it certainly wasn't clear what the mask looked like. ]

Who are you.

private;

[monocled.livejournal.com]

Cho Hakkai. [smiles pleasantly]

And you are... Madara-san?

Private

[parousian.livejournal.com]

[ Madara knows this man is not from his world. But he is friendly with Konoha, he has seen through comments.

Just as well.

He breaks into a smile. ]

My, aren't you taking rather familiar airs with someone you have only just met. Is this normal etiquette for your world, Cho-dono?

Private

[monocled.livejournal.com]

I meant no offense, Madara-san. It seems natural that I should talk to the other people who were spirited away under such unusual circumstances. [ He really seems to have no problem with the idea of being friendly with everyone. By now it's obvious that certain groups don't get along, but Hakkai's uninterested in taking sides until given a reason to, since he has only one side's word on the other to judge them on. ]

Private

[parousian.livejournal.com]

Well, aren't you a friendly one. How lovely.

[ He sounds and looks amused. This man must come from a world where family names do not matter at all. ]

I suppose you prefer "Hakkai-san"?

Private

[monocled.livejournal.com]

Things go more smoothly if everyone gets along.

[ And while it's possible he notices that amusement, he remains as innocuous as ever. ]

Whatever you're most comfortable with, of course.


...Was I improper in addressing you? I apologize.

Private

[parousian.livejournal.com]

Oh, it doesn't matter.

[ A wave of the hand, flippant. ]

You are only trying to be friendly, after all.

Private

[monocled.livejournal.com]

I am. [ And it's the truth, after all - he really is trying to be friendly. It's simply the easiest way for him to relate to people. ]

How long have you been here, if you don't mind me asking?

[crazysnakelady.livejournal.com]

[ Anko had dropped the Hitomi when she'd picked it up, when the hot rush of (someone else's) hatred had shocked through her. She doesn't want to feel this dream--with its bleeding and smoking blacks, it might just burn her up from the inside out. Instead, Anko pensively chews on a knuckle and watches, watches the struggling of the giants of her world, figures of legend, stone monoliths come to life in all their terrible and terribly human glory.

This is who and what Anko is up against, she and Konoha, and she reaches out and turns the Hitomi over, so she can't see any more. ]

private

[necro-fantasia.livejournal.com]

[The dream is a shot of poison straight into her veins - she feels it pounding there, as a roar in her ears, as a sudden chill in the tips of her fingers, as a white-hot blur burned into the edge of her vision.

It isn't the hatred. Yukari has felt that before, staring her foe straight in the eye and feeling contempt wash over her like a wave of nausea. Nor the violence, for Yukari remembers being crouched behind rocks and trees in the battlefield, that silence, that waiting, the slow suffocation it brought.

It isn't even that love. That feeling, having something that belonged to you so much that you belong to it, that sense that it was a part of you as much as your own body. She knows that as well, feels it constantly in the back of her mind, and sometimes, under the right circumstances, she feels it welling up in her, a warmth that drives out even the smallest chill.

It's -

entire clan, Hashirama, an entire clan! Women and children and infants

- the despair, having lost everything. Everything. Done. All the love, all the cultivation, all of it. And that despite her (no, his, this was about him, this wasn't - it had nothing to do with her) best efforts it had all -

could've chosen to never fight you and stayed and it wouldn't have meant

- been worthless, in the end it meant nothing. Nothing.

Yukari thinks, suddenly: this is me. In days or weeks or decades, this is going to be me, raging at some god, uselessly, with Gensokyo gone, the border collapsed, my people scattered or dead. Overtaken, smothered by the crawling weed of humanity. That dream she'd had in Meiji 17, all of the beauty of it, nothing.

She bites down on her lip until it bleeds, to keep down the urge, which rises in her throat like bile, to scream her throat raw.]

- - -

[It is half an hour before Yukari responds to the dream. Her face is without expression entirely, but her lip still slowly oozes blood. Her tongue laps out to lick it clean.]

That one. Hashirama. Who is he?

[A pause.]

Is he here?

Private to Yukari

[parousian.livejournal.com]

[ He is the beginning and the end, the past and the future-present; stories passed down from generation to generation of a hero shining brightly in the hearts of leaves that worship lies of peace; the first Hokage who brought prosperity and ended those chaotic times of war, paving the way for villages to rise around the world, and for so many to fall in shadows unseen and unheard by anyone who wasn't there to watch them drown in pools of blood, disintegrating into dust (a boy once stood on riverbanks with no name and took another's hand in his and spun dreams out of thin air; we will conquer the world one day, he said over bites of winter melon that tasted like hope those days in the sun, before blood ran between the teeth and across the tongue) like the legend Madara once was, save for the statue that bears his face, crumbling and forgotten in a valley of ends.

(Everything Madara hates and everything he loved smolders in the ruins of dark lights and bright shadows; dreams spoken on riverbanks, dreams of a sky that could've belonged to them and once did.)

Uchiha's pride flew in the air when they stood across battlefields.

Everything I hate and admire the most--

He closes his eyes and remembers even when he tells his mind to stop; his memories are old and too many and he wants to say enough, you've had enough. But it is hungry, memory; ghosts lingering at the edges of his life, eating up the past even when it's too much. Izuna chases a dragonfly and his laughter is as bright as the blade he wields on the battlefield when it slices through a Senju throat. One thousand hands in war, one thousand roots rising out of soil. They were so beautiful then, the fires of his clan, blazing as clearly now as they once did, seen only by him.

Madara looks at her and sees the blood. ]

You're bleeding, Yukari-dono.

[ He doesn't answer her question. ]

Private to Madara

[necro-fantasia.livejournal.com]

[The back of her hand goes to her mouth, drags along her lips. She examines it, seeing the blood. She feels nothing in particular about it.]

It's nothing.

[She pauses. He didn't answer her question. She wants to know very badly who that man is, but she can't, she won't ask again. Still, she wants to know. There is a fire in her, and she feels like knowing would fuel it, and she wants it to burn, because that hatred feels better than the sick feeling of defeat. She hates that man, despises the son of a bitch, not even knowing him, because how dare he, how dare he pass judgement, what the hell does someone like him - does anyone - know about how awful it is, how terrible it is, to love something that much, and then to -

Either way, she can't ask. She has no idea what to say. She knows how she feels - she looks at the screen, her stare not wavering, and she feels this: I understand how that is, to love something like that. To be unable to lose it and still be the same person.

And also this: How is it you can live? How is it that your heart still beats after losing that? Is it even within the realm of possibility that I could survive such a thing? And if I did, what would I become?

She cannot express either of these things. There aren't any words which are proper for them. So instead, she says this:]

I believe I have some understanding of what you mean when you say your world was one filled with oppression.

[Another pause, long enough to be uncomfortable.]

And I realize what it is you mean when you say you want to remake the world in a different way.

I... [A long, shuddering breath.] Well. You and I are not in the same situation. Not yet.

But as long as I remain here, not with my people, it may...

[She isn't sure what she's trying to communicate. But having seen what she's seen, she feels she can't just remain silent. She tries to think of something else, something that would make a bit of sense, but instead she shakes her head, frustrated, and hits 'submit.']

Private to Yukari

[parousian.livejournal.com]

[ Madara hears the fear of loss in her voice, the kind that only exists because she has not yet suffered the loss, or tasted the strain of wood closing in, taking away the sky. She imagines what it must be like, a loss so great not even time can mend the gaps and fill in the absence. She imagines because she doesn't know the scent of Uchiha fires burning in winter, how it clung to the nostrils and warmed the chest or hands stretched like smiles reflected in their distant glow, gathered about stories and dreams and wishes shared under the stars.

She cannot understand, doesn't, and never will. She is not of the same blood, of the same kin. Doesn't understand red and black and the power that comes with it. The pride. ]

You and I are not in the same situation, so you do not understand. I will ask that you do not pretend to.

[ He has no sympathy for her. He lost his people the moment they fell to the sweet nothings that fell from a false prophet's lips. ]

Re: Private to Yukari

[necro-fantasia.livejournal.com]

I didn't mean to imply that I understood your pain.

[He's right - she doesn't understand at all. Doesn't understand how someone can live with nothing left but ghosts and hatred. Doesn't understand why they would do so, why they would continue to struggle when there was nothing to be gained. Yukari is always striving against something, always playing games, some of which are even quite serious, but she never plays a game which cannot benefit her in some way.

Madara is looking to change the world, to remake it, but Yukari can only wonder why. Does he believe that he can rebuild what he's lost? That he can replace the thing he'd loved? It's incomprehensible to Yukari, the idea of filling in that hole with something new. She certainly couldn't do it - the loss of Gensokyo would cut clean through her, tear her in half, and anything she tried to fill herself with would just pass through like sand in a sieve.

Or was that not his goal after all?

It may be, Yukari thinks, that in the end all Madara has left is his desire to destroy the thing that destroyed him, to remove the source of the corruption that tore down his life. To burn it down to its foundation. She can't imagine anything more sad, or more terrifying, than a life consumed with that purpose. But somehow the idea that he might instead be trying to erase the loss with new life seems - wrong, somehow.]

I don't understand that. And I don't understand what it is you're after, either. [Her voice almost a whisper.] What it is you could be looking for, having lost that.

[clayfireworks.livejournal.com]

[Deidara seems a bit--disappointed, maybe. So that kage was an Uchiha, if he was even a kage.]

Tch. Too many damn Uchiha left, un.

[parousian.livejournal.com]

What has Uchiha ever done to you?

[clayfireworks.livejournal.com]

Ask that darling prodigy, un.