Senju Tobirama "二代目火影" (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
tobirama) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
el_musebox2015-09-07 06:43 pm
tobirama) wrote in el_musebox2015-09-07 06:43 pm
Entry tags:
Raising up your dead...
Characters: Izuna curseofhatred & Tobirama tobirama
Verse: TBD
Status: Closed Log
Warnings: Edo Tensei should really be warning enough. Gratuitous amounts of angst and feels.
Anyone who met Senju Tobirama almost universally agreed that the man was a genius in his own right when it came to creating jutsu. He’d always been a creative sort of man prone to living in his own head. Outside of the few people he chose to associate with such as his brother and a few members of his family, he wasn’t exactly the type of man who enjoyed the company of others.
His own unstable upbringing in the midst of a generations’ long conflict had taught him that forming emotional bonds with others was usually a wasted effort because chances were they would die relatively soon. The life of a shinobi was a perilous one at best with death as their ever present comrade waiting to sweep in from the wings and claim their lives.
But these days, life was a little more settled. Peace had been reached between Senju and Uchiha and together his brother and Madara had set out to build the village they’d dreamed about as children. Tobirama did what he could to support his brother’s dream because he genuinely did want to see it come to fruition.
Madara of course was continuously contentious about his presence which in a way, the albino ninja could understand. He harbored his fair share of anger towards the Uchiha for all of the Senju blood they’d spilled and the idea of being forced to work with the man who’d killed his last blood relative would have been unconscionable to him as well.
Izuna’s death hung between them like some impassable chasm but the sad truth of the matter was…things were even more complicated than Madara or even Hashirama suspected. He’d never meant to kill the Uchiha on that fateful day. Wound him, yes so that he would be forced to retire from the field of battle and perhaps force him out of the conflict for a few weeks. Tobirama hated crossing swords with Izuna because each time they fought, he knew there was the risk that this time, one of them would slip or one of them wouldn’t be fast enough.
That day, he’d been faster than Izuna and according to Madara, it had taken him the better part of a week to die. The Uchiha spared no details telling the Senju how his last surviving brother had slowly drowned on his own blood from the wound Tobirama had given him and inwardly, he’d felt as though he were bleeding on the inside as well. Because Izuna had gone to his death with a secret and it was one Tobirama would keep himself till he too met his final end. A secret so shameful he couldn't bare the idea of anyone knowing it.
A secret which could very well destroy him if it ever came to light, one which made his current course of action absolutely idiotic and he knew it. Yet he couldn’t stop himself.
In the last years of the conflict between Uchiha and Senju, Tobirama had found himself fraternizing with his mortal enemy. What had initially started as a violent rivalry had turned into something more until he’d finally found himself doing the very last thing he should do.
He fell in love with the enemy.
And then he’d killed his lover on accident and had to live with the consequences. But he’d never been very good at just accepting things as they were. Tobirama was the type of man who if he found a problem he couldn’t surmount, he would keep trying until he’d found a way of either working around it or under it but no matter what, he rarely just accepted things as they were. His clever intellect which often was the bane of his existence came into play here.
He’d first gotten the idea for this particular jutsu when he’d been just a callow young boy shortly after Itama’s death. The constant loss of his kin had made Tobirama question the very foundations of life and death and how exactly he could bypass that problem as well. It had been more of an intellectual exercise more than anything else and he’d never dreamed as a young boy that he might someday figure out a way to bypass death itself and summon the dead back to life.
But he’d gotten older and more clever in his jutsu as the years went by but even he’d been stymied for the longest time about how to complete the jutsu and had put it away once more. Izuna’s death had inspired him to go back to his old notes and rebuild things nearly from the ground up once more. Even working obsessively on the resurrection technique, it took him years to perfect things and dozens of failed attempts. No one else had ever succeeded in what he was attempting a part of him knew deep down that there was a reason for this.
That this particular jutsu in the wrong hands could be devastating. If he’d had any sense, he might have abandoned his work but the need to see Izuna again, to hear him speak and yes...a part of him wanted to return what he’d stolen from Madara…all of that spurred him onwards. One of the first things Tobirama had done once the groundwork for Konoha was complete was carve out a place for himself deep inside what would eventually become the monument mountain. He needed privacy to conduct his experiments and quite frankly, the things he dabbled in wasn’t for public consumption. A simple hiraishin sigil made it so only he could gain access to the laboratory hidden deep inside of the mountain and a large part of his free time was spent there.
He knew Hashirama worried about him but his brother was well-used to Tobirama’s sometimes obsessive fixation on creating the jutsus that swirled around in his mind and simply let it go without comment save for the occasional reminder he needed to sleep and eat more. How could Tobirama do that when he was so close?!
The DNA he’d needed to complete the jutsu had been surprisingly easy to come across thanks to his own sentimentality that had him holding onto the blankets they’d most often used for their illicit trysts. He’d found plenty of long black strands of hair among the folded up bedding he’d kept locked away deep at the bottom of a trunk but Tobirama hadn’t wanted to risk squandering it so he’d stuck to using other people until he’d perfected the summons.
Now he used a few of those precious strands of hair as a marker for the jutsu and poured his chakra into the freshly drawn ink on the stone floor.
The day he’d finally cracked the final solution on how to bind the souls of the resurrected to corporeal form, he’d very nearly broken down right then and there because the price to be paid…the sacrifice necessary was terrible and beyond the pale. But he’d always been good about selectively ignoring his own particular moral compass if the situation called for it and finally…Tobirama chalked up the price to be paid in the life of an enemy-nin to be a necessary one.
After all, the man had been an enemy of Konoha and would have done his best to harm the very thing Tobirama was trying to protect.
He’d been taking lives since the age of five so in the end…it hadn’t been very hard to sentence the enemy ninja to death but Tobirama had to admit…he hadn’t been prepared for the screams of terror and pain that had escaped his unwitting victim. But he also could not let empathy stop him when he was so close to attaining his goals so he’d continued on with the experiment heedless of the sounds coming from a man slowly suffocated in the façade necessary to bind the spirit’s soul to. Finally, blessed silence fell about the laboratory once more and Tobirama stepped back a few steps as the jutsu finished wrapping around the now still body of the Cloud ninja. Already, the darkness of his skin was being replaced by a more familiar pale, milky hue and the hair grew out long and black in those familiar spiky strands of inky darkness he knew so intimately. Soon enough, the Cloud-nin’s rough-hewn and craggy face was replaced by the dark more delicate and handsome features of his dead lover’s and Tobirama felt something tighten around his heart.
The albino ninja had dreamt about this moment for years and finally, it looked as though it was going to come to fruition. How had he forgotten about the delicate arch of those dark eyebrows and ridiculous length of those lashes? He’d thought he had a firm mental picture of what Izuna looked like trapped forever in his mind’s eye but the years had dulled the details after a while and now he was remembering all the tiny things he’d found so pleasing in his lover’s form.
With his heart seemingly caught in a painful vice grip, Tobirama forced himself to stand there still and straight and wait the seemingly interminable eternity to discover if his jutsu was going to function as it should.
curseofhatred & Tobirama tobiramaVerse: TBD
Status: Closed Log
Warnings: Edo Tensei should really be warning enough. Gratuitous amounts of angst and feels.
Anyone who met Senju Tobirama almost universally agreed that the man was a genius in his own right when it came to creating jutsu. He’d always been a creative sort of man prone to living in his own head. Outside of the few people he chose to associate with such as his brother and a few members of his family, he wasn’t exactly the type of man who enjoyed the company of others.
His own unstable upbringing in the midst of a generations’ long conflict had taught him that forming emotional bonds with others was usually a wasted effort because chances were they would die relatively soon. The life of a shinobi was a perilous one at best with death as their ever present comrade waiting to sweep in from the wings and claim their lives.
But these days, life was a little more settled. Peace had been reached between Senju and Uchiha and together his brother and Madara had set out to build the village they’d dreamed about as children. Tobirama did what he could to support his brother’s dream because he genuinely did want to see it come to fruition.
Madara of course was continuously contentious about his presence which in a way, the albino ninja could understand. He harbored his fair share of anger towards the Uchiha for all of the Senju blood they’d spilled and the idea of being forced to work with the man who’d killed his last blood relative would have been unconscionable to him as well.
Izuna’s death hung between them like some impassable chasm but the sad truth of the matter was…things were even more complicated than Madara or even Hashirama suspected. He’d never meant to kill the Uchiha on that fateful day. Wound him, yes so that he would be forced to retire from the field of battle and perhaps force him out of the conflict for a few weeks. Tobirama hated crossing swords with Izuna because each time they fought, he knew there was the risk that this time, one of them would slip or one of them wouldn’t be fast enough.
That day, he’d been faster than Izuna and according to Madara, it had taken him the better part of a week to die. The Uchiha spared no details telling the Senju how his last surviving brother had slowly drowned on his own blood from the wound Tobirama had given him and inwardly, he’d felt as though he were bleeding on the inside as well. Because Izuna had gone to his death with a secret and it was one Tobirama would keep himself till he too met his final end. A secret so shameful he couldn't bare the idea of anyone knowing it.
A secret which could very well destroy him if it ever came to light, one which made his current course of action absolutely idiotic and he knew it. Yet he couldn’t stop himself.
In the last years of the conflict between Uchiha and Senju, Tobirama had found himself fraternizing with his mortal enemy. What had initially started as a violent rivalry had turned into something more until he’d finally found himself doing the very last thing he should do.
He fell in love with the enemy.
And then he’d killed his lover on accident and had to live with the consequences. But he’d never been very good at just accepting things as they were. Tobirama was the type of man who if he found a problem he couldn’t surmount, he would keep trying until he’d found a way of either working around it or under it but no matter what, he rarely just accepted things as they were. His clever intellect which often was the bane of his existence came into play here.
He’d first gotten the idea for this particular jutsu when he’d been just a callow young boy shortly after Itama’s death. The constant loss of his kin had made Tobirama question the very foundations of life and death and how exactly he could bypass that problem as well. It had been more of an intellectual exercise more than anything else and he’d never dreamed as a young boy that he might someday figure out a way to bypass death itself and summon the dead back to life.
But he’d gotten older and more clever in his jutsu as the years went by but even he’d been stymied for the longest time about how to complete the jutsu and had put it away once more. Izuna’s death had inspired him to go back to his old notes and rebuild things nearly from the ground up once more. Even working obsessively on the resurrection technique, it took him years to perfect things and dozens of failed attempts. No one else had ever succeeded in what he was attempting a part of him knew deep down that there was a reason for this.
That this particular jutsu in the wrong hands could be devastating. If he’d had any sense, he might have abandoned his work but the need to see Izuna again, to hear him speak and yes...a part of him wanted to return what he’d stolen from Madara…all of that spurred him onwards. One of the first things Tobirama had done once the groundwork for Konoha was complete was carve out a place for himself deep inside what would eventually become the monument mountain. He needed privacy to conduct his experiments and quite frankly, the things he dabbled in wasn’t for public consumption. A simple hiraishin sigil made it so only he could gain access to the laboratory hidden deep inside of the mountain and a large part of his free time was spent there.
He knew Hashirama worried about him but his brother was well-used to Tobirama’s sometimes obsessive fixation on creating the jutsus that swirled around in his mind and simply let it go without comment save for the occasional reminder he needed to sleep and eat more. How could Tobirama do that when he was so close?!
The DNA he’d needed to complete the jutsu had been surprisingly easy to come across thanks to his own sentimentality that had him holding onto the blankets they’d most often used for their illicit trysts. He’d found plenty of long black strands of hair among the folded up bedding he’d kept locked away deep at the bottom of a trunk but Tobirama hadn’t wanted to risk squandering it so he’d stuck to using other people until he’d perfected the summons.
Now he used a few of those precious strands of hair as a marker for the jutsu and poured his chakra into the freshly drawn ink on the stone floor.
The day he’d finally cracked the final solution on how to bind the souls of the resurrected to corporeal form, he’d very nearly broken down right then and there because the price to be paid…the sacrifice necessary was terrible and beyond the pale. But he’d always been good about selectively ignoring his own particular moral compass if the situation called for it and finally…Tobirama chalked up the price to be paid in the life of an enemy-nin to be a necessary one.
After all, the man had been an enemy of Konoha and would have done his best to harm the very thing Tobirama was trying to protect.
He’d been taking lives since the age of five so in the end…it hadn’t been very hard to sentence the enemy ninja to death but Tobirama had to admit…he hadn’t been prepared for the screams of terror and pain that had escaped his unwitting victim. But he also could not let empathy stop him when he was so close to attaining his goals so he’d continued on with the experiment heedless of the sounds coming from a man slowly suffocated in the façade necessary to bind the spirit’s soul to. Finally, blessed silence fell about the laboratory once more and Tobirama stepped back a few steps as the jutsu finished wrapping around the now still body of the Cloud ninja. Already, the darkness of his skin was being replaced by a more familiar pale, milky hue and the hair grew out long and black in those familiar spiky strands of inky darkness he knew so intimately. Soon enough, the Cloud-nin’s rough-hewn and craggy face was replaced by the dark more delicate and handsome features of his dead lover’s and Tobirama felt something tighten around his heart.
The albino ninja had dreamt about this moment for years and finally, it looked as though it was going to come to fruition. How had he forgotten about the delicate arch of those dark eyebrows and ridiculous length of those lashes? He’d thought he had a firm mental picture of what Izuna looked like trapped forever in his mind’s eye but the years had dulled the details after a while and now he was remembering all the tiny things he’d found so pleasing in his lover’s form.
With his heart seemingly caught in a painful vice grip, Tobirama forced himself to stand there still and straight and wait the seemingly interminable eternity to discover if his jutsu was going to function as it should.
I want you to know that I almost started crying writing this...
Hashirama's words fell on deaf ears, for both of them. Izuna thought it was a sweet sentiment, a sentiment his younger brother -- Izuna's own lover -- would never share. There was no room for the Uchiha in that life, no space carved out in Tobirama's life; he ranked low on the list of priorities.
I will go out proud. I will not shame my clan, and I will not shame Madara. I am a strong Uchiha warrior. I will not show them how much this hurts.
"I don't forgive you," he whispered, knowing those words would wreckdestroymaim. Absolution was something he wasn't granting him, and the twisted part of him realized that Tobirama would live with those words forever, haunting him. He would die knowing that he killed Izuna not once but twice, and his lover didn't forgive him. He would come to the Pure Lands knowing that Izuna was there, nursing wounds that were old but never fading.
The word, kai, hung in the air, and he could feel it, feel the light inside of him, could finally feel that papery skin starting to flake away. He looked down at his hands, staring at the halo of luminance, feeling his grip with the world, with this dead body he puppeted becoming thin, loose. His strength was fading fast; he didn't have long.
Maybe it was crueler that he did have time than if he didn't.
He looked to Hashirama, face grim. "My brother is a good man," he whispered. "I don't think you can kill him, but if you have the chance, I ask that you don't. Spare him. He...deserves peace. He deserves happiness. And don't tell him I was here. It...would pain him to know that he couldn't see me himself."
Slowly, he turned back to Tobirama, and he hated it, hated looking at him, hated the way his own eyes were watering, the tears that started to slip down his flaking cheeks. Betrayal burned as much the second time as it did the first, that searing in his chest, the kind that beat against his ribs, that clutched his guts. Lips parted, closed, and parted again.
"You spoke of my curse, Tobirama," he whispered, "but you have it as much as I do. Look what you have done for what you think is love: murder, lies, breaking the laws of nature. Look at how you killed what you used to hold at night. It will never leave you; this will follow you no matter who you touch after me. It will follow you to the Pure Lands."
Those pale, glowing fists shook at his sides as he raised his tear-stricken face. "Your curse was far worse than mine could ever be, Tobirama. Especially because this is simply who you are at your corrupted core."
Who's cutting onions in here.
After all, as he’d said…he’d killed him not once, but twice. Sure, you could argue whether Izuna was truly ‘alive’ but it didn’t escape the fact that he was still sending the other man back to the Pure Lands against his will.
The film of tears in his eyes threatened to obscure his vision and burned fiercely. Tobirama blinked furiously in an attempt to clear his vision because he had to watch this. This terrible act he’d perpetrated on the other man.
Ironically enough, Hashirama looked more upset by the proceedings than his brother did. But then, he’d always been freer with his emotions. Unlike Tobirama, he’d never seen the point in hiding what he was feeling under a mask of icy indifference. “I want that too, trust me. I just want Madara to have the same thing.” He assured Izuna somewhat weakly. What more could he say to the man but that?
Tobirama met those hurt and angry eyes unflinchingly as Izuna’s hurtful words spilled over him in a venom-laced wave. The tenuous control he had on his own emotions threatened to shatter but deep down…he knew Izuna was saying nothing but the truth. And that truth was hurtful but it didn’t change the facts. He’d had no illusions about the morality of his actions and no doubt would have to face gods only knew what once his brother discovered just how perverse his jutsu truly was.
In that moment, he wanted nothing more than for a sword to come flying down from the heavens to impale him and put him out of his misery. But that was too easy, wasn’t it? Tobirama approached the rapidly disintegrating Uchiha whose corporeal form was flaking away like dried paper. Even though he had no right to, he still reached out to try and touch that tear-streaked face.
“You’re right, about everything.” He didn’t try and defend himself which made it worse in its own way. Tobirama knew in his heart of hearts that there would never be anyone else. How could he risk it when his own heart was prone to the same kind of poisoned, obsessive love that would put an Uchiha to shame? He was tainted…cursed just as Izuna had said. “I will still love you until the day I die. And if I’m allowed to enter the Pure Lands then…”
Those accursed tears were back again and it made his vision all watery and unsteady. “…you can kick my ass from here till eternity. Or until the next life where maybe we won’t be so cursed.”
Kick them out!
But it was a Senju that didn't turn them in, didn't hurt either of them when he had the chance. And that... that had to mean something.
But Tobirama agreeing with him, touching him, Tobirama crying, he wasn't prepared for that rawness, for that. "Don't," he whispered, but he didn't push that hand away, even leaned into it, leaned into the last warm thing he would ever know. The last person who would touch him would be the one who betrayed him, and he wasn't sure if that was fitting or cruel.
But still a life where they weren't so cursed, one where they wouldn't have to kill one another, where they wouldn't have to put the needs of others before their own, that sounded nice. Pleasant. And maybe they deserved it. Maybe they had earned it with the way this had played out.
Or maybe they were soulmates, tied together, destined for this hell every time. Izuna didn't know anymore.
"That...would be nice."
His eyes closed, the tears thick in his long lashes. The light was brighter, and no matter how much will he put forth, no matter how much he wanted to staystaystay, it was impossible; the void wanted him, and that was a stronger pull than anything he could grip onto.
Maybe one day, someone else would pull him from the Pure Lands and give him a body. If Tobirama could do it, so, too, could another wise person. Maybe this wasn't the last time Tobirama would see him. Maybe his brother would find a way, and maybe...maybe...
"I am tired, Senju," he whispered, his eyes opening half-way. "Leave me to join the ranks of ghosts that haunt you, please?"
And the light turned blinding, the paper flakes fluttering everywhere as his soul left the body and started to ascend. Somewhere beneath, he could hear the thud as a corpse fall to the ground, wasted and lifeless with its strings cut, and that would be another crime Tobirama would have to answer to. Izuna tried not to think about the fact that he had rode in that; flesh was flesh, bodies were bodies, and here was little more than that.
No, he didn't worry, because his gaze was on Tobirama, knowing that the pain he saw on the man's face would be a poor escort to the Pure Lands.
I hate myself for loving you, Tobirama. And you will never know how much I feel both.
no subject
But what right did he have to take such liberties considering what he’d done to Izuna? A part of him wished they just might have the chance at a second life somewhere and the chance to find happiness. Tobirama had never been a particularly religious man however and he didn’t know if he even believed in such things.
Yet this jutsu of his had at least proven the Pure Lands existed right? That a spirit could be dragged back to the world of the living from that realm so what more proof did he need? Perhaps he would need to revise his whole thinking on the subject. “Yes, I’d like that.”
A new life with the chance to finally have his lover at his side without a war or their clans threatening to rip them apart sounded almost too good to be true. But considering his sins, Tobirama didn’t know if he’d even be afforded such an opportunity or if he’d be doomed to wander the Naraka instead of ever even reaching the Pure Lands. It was a risk he’d taken the moment he’d decided to create his jutsu.
He found himself drifting ever closer, the distance between them melting away without conscious effort on his part. His thumb lightly brushed the tears clinging to those dark lashes as Izuna’s eyes finally drifted close.
Hearing that quietly whispered comment about how tired he was, Tobirama thought his heart might break again. He could sense the end was near and that Izuna’s time on this plane was up. Desperate now, he tried to capture the Uchiha’s mouth for one last kiss and for split instant, he was able to brush his mouth against that familiar mouth.
But then the jutsu was released and the façade was released as the light emanating from Izuna turned dazzlingly bright. It blinded Tobirama briefly and had him pulling away in surprise which was perhaps for the best. The poor Cloud ninja who’d served as the sacrifice for the jutsu dropped like a marionette who’d had its strings cut.
Tobirama looked up with an agonized look on his face as he struggled to blink through his tears to make out the form of what he could only say was Izuna’s spirit dissipating into the light. He didn’t do anything so trite as to reach out for him or to try and pull him back because it was a futile gesture.
But then Izuna was gone and the light faded rapidly away leaving him in the middle of his brother’s office with a dead corpse he needed to explain away to a brother who would no doubt be disgusted by his actions. His heart felt so heavy and like it had been shattered into a million pieces though so it was hard to even concentrate on what lay ahead for him.
“Tobirama…what have you—“ Hashirama started to say only to find himself cut off abruptly by a sharp gesture from his brother.
“I will clean up the mess.” Was all Tobirama said as he knelt down to pick up the body of the dead Kumo ninja.
“We need to discuss this!”
“I know, Anija. Just…let me clean up this mess first, please.” With that, Tobirama focused his chakra and honed in on the mark he had carved into the walls of his hidden laboratory. But he knew he couldn’t hide in there and that eventually he’d have to face his brother.
There was so much he had to answer for.