Chapter Text
Fuinjutsu was deceptively simple. It appeared as tidy lines, elegant angles, all sharp precision.
It's difficult. Madara isn't used to difficult. He hasn't had to try very hard at learning anything since he surpassed his masters and entered the battlefield. But fuinjutsu is not easy. It takes time, it takes patience. And it it is not something that his Sharingan can copy.
He cannot give himself better penmanship. He learns that fairly quickly on. He cannot copy the markings exactly as Mito does them. While fuinjutsu is damn near an exact science, it is just as similarly an art.
"Your katons and your brothers katons do not form the same way," Mito says, lifting one fine eyebrow at him. "You are of different minds and of different bodies. Fuinjutsu is the same."
She is a good teacher. She patient but will not suffer his foolishness. They have only been learning for two days, and that much is apparent. She watches with arched brows as he writes and rewrites his name, curves through old prayers and rhymes he remembers from his childhood. She has him write the entire alphabet forwards and then backwards, then all over again until the feel of a brush in his hand becomes less foreign and more like a weapon.
She actually smiles at him when his fingers slide down it, searching for the familiar finger handle that one would find on a kunai.
Uzumaki Mito's smiles are rare and hard won. Madara doesn't earn them often. He isn't focused on that. More than anything, he needs to know the basics. Izuna and Nadeshiko had all but leapt on him like hungry lions, demanding Mito's knowledge after he left her when the morning was full and heavy in the sky.
"Careful," she instructs him, reaching out to snatch at his sleeve. The rush of the movement makes Madara pull back. His paranoia has kept him alive this way for years. But Mito reaches forward, snatches his sleeve and drags him back. He can feel the heat of her fingers where they bunch into the fabric, just barely keeping it from dipping into the ink.
"Sloppy," Mito says, clucking her tongue at his work. "You can do better."
Not 'do better', but 'you can do better'. As if she was aware of his limits, of his capacity as a student or as a shinobi. It makes Madara wonder if she has talked about him with Hashirama, and what Hashirama had said to her, if anything.
He is not only here for the sake of peace, for the sake of Izuna, but because he is a shinobi and he knows that one does not simply give over basic knowledge of an entire kind of shinobi art just to make amends for one nearly lost life. Uzumaki Mito is offering too much, and all of the Uchiha know it.
The elders had insisted he take her lessons precisely because of that, and also to gain her knowledge. And though it has only been two days, Madara has not been able to glean much.
Uzumaki Mito is a terribly focused woman. She is sharp and unforgiving of foolishness. She is careful when explaining things, methodical in her approach. Madara can tell from the way she behaves, the way she nitpicks his movements and the way she moves herself that she is a master of fuinjutsu.
Her entire body follows when she uses her brush, or her fingertip. Her shoulders curve to follow her characters; she leans onto her hip so that she may bend her elbow just a little bit more to get the 'flicks' that she demands Madara both practice and spontaneously write.
She tells him that accomplished fuinjutsu masters can begin and end a seal with the same brush stroke. This is the kind of fluidity that Mito has. He has never seen her fight, but Madara knows that if she is even half as sure with a bladed weapon as she is with fuinjutsu, she must be deadly. She wields her brush like Tobirama holds his sword, like Hashirama uses his Mokuton, like the Uchiha had katon and the Sharingan.
It's an extension of herself. A well used tool and a perfect weapon.
She is particular. She demands he scrap his paper and start over if he does something wrong, but encourages him to follow his messy lines wherever they take him. He feels foolish when she demands that of him, like he is a child sullying fine paper for fun.
"Spontaneity is the lifeblood of fuinjutsu," Mito insists, cocking an eyebrow as Madara listens to her instructions to scribble. "Even the least attractive lines can be salvaged into something powerful."
Madara wonders which ugly lines produced the Naibu Shikai on Mito's forehead. He doesn't say it out loud. He doesn't have a death wish.
Even here, as his teacher and yet his captive, Uzumaki Mito is in perfect control of herself. Even the blind could see it. She is all tightly controlled power, poured easily into her at birth, then honed, sharpened, polished, perfected until it shone. She holds her strength like there is no weight to it, and yet with all the gravity in the world. It is as if she knows she is something great and terrible.
She is nothing like Hashirama, whose power always sort of embarrassed him, even when he needed to use it to protect those he loved. He is nothing like Madara, who knew himself well enough to see that he could be boastful, prideful.
No. Uzumaki Mito is steady. A perfect neutral. As if she is at peace with herself and the world around her. Madara supposes that has something to do with fuinjutsu; she is always stressing the importance of balance in sealing.
He learns at her knees in the early mornings. It does not feel as though he is learning much. He is here to be taught fuinjutsu, but also to glean her broader reasons for being here in Uchiha territory. Uzumaki Mito is not tight lipped, but she is not prone to offering information.
"Why did they let you come here?" he asks.
She says nothing, only goes about the exercise. She is to create a seal with the tip of her thumb, and Madara is to mimic her movements without looking down at his own paper.
"They did not 'let' me do anything," she replies. "I am an Uzumaki despite my marriage. I come and go as I please."
Madara wants to snort. He had little knowledge of how Uzushio operated, but Mito spoke like she was an Uchiha woman. She was just as sharp, and speaking with her was always like walking on a knife's edge. You were never quite sure if she was teasing you or not, but you were always aware when she was taking you seriously. She expected to be taken seriously in return.
It was terrible, really, how much she reminded him of the camp women he had lain with.
Uzumaki Mito was sharp eyes and wicked smiles. She was close, but terribly untouchable. Dangerous because she knew herself intimately, because she left no room for anything other than what she wanted of you. She was uncompromising, with a devastatingly dry sense of humor.
And she was Hashirama's wife.
"They didn't fight you?"
Mito does not shrug. She dips her finger again in ink, and Madara copies her. He has learned by now that ink is only one part of fuinjutsu; that it was equally ink and blood and chakra. Every fluid of the body could be used in a pinch, but blood was the strongest. It was what tied together shinobi and their summons, and it was what held the chakra together to the ink.
"They thought to," she muses. "But Hashirama agreed that I ought to come to right Tobirama's wrong."
Madara tries to think of that, of Hashirama putting his full weight behind his wife's decision. Of him being a supportive, loving husband. It makes Madara's stomach turn. Instead he hums and follows the gentle slope of Mito's forearm by mimicking it with his own. There was no use thinking of things that he couldn't control.
"You're a natural," Mito says, and Madara's eyes can't help but leap up at her when she says it. He has only known her for a few days, but he can tell that she is not the type to give out compliments.
She is looking pointedly at his work, but then her eyes flick upward and steadily hold his. It was rare, to find people outside of the Uchiha clan that willingly looked directly into their eyes. Hashirama always looked Madara in the face. He had never given Madara any reason not to.
"Hashirama told me to expect as much," she says, explaining herself. "He told me to expect much of you."
Madara lifts an eyebrow, stubbornly trying to squash the lifting feeling in his chest. So Hashirama did have faith in him. Did speak about him, positively to his wife. That was - that was good news.
"Oh?" he asks.
Then something in Mito's expression shifts, goes sly and easy. She looks, Madara thinks, exactly like a cat with a field mouse between its paws.
Her gaze travels then, down the exposed skin of his throat, over the broad lines of his shoulders. Down his arms where he is holding his finger devastatingly tight to the piece of paper beneath it. Her gaze lingers on his thighs before it travels back up. Madara's Uchiha honed sense of his internal temperature tells him it's a small miracle he isn't bright red at the moment.
"He told me how attractive you were," she says. "But I had to be sure for myself. He's known you for years, so he's bound to be biased."
She cocks her head minutely, looking at him through the pretty sheaf of her red hair.
"He wasn't."
Madara swallows hard around the lump rising in his throat. Around the heat pooling in him. He manages to get through the rest of his lesson with Mito without choking on his tongue, and then he is running.
She was flirting with him. Or else, she was lying to him. If she was flirting, then Madara had to wonder if Hashirama knew of his wife's proclivity for infidelity. Then, if he had known, Madara doubts that Hashirama would have sent her to Uchiha territory in the first place.
If she was lying, she had little to gain from it, other than to confuse Madara. And what good was that, when he still held her life in his hands?
And if she was telling the truth, it meant that she found him attractive. What's worse, it meant that Hashirama found him attractive. And was that what this was all about? Saving Izuna's life to lure Madara away to be a pet at the foot of their bed, a lover that lived down the hall to be called in whenever one was away?
Madara has watched Hashirama for as long as he can remember. Even when he had that ridiculous bowl cut as a child, he was wonderful to Madara. When he grew into his face, when his hands got longer, when his hair got longer -
And Mito was - Mito was the culmination of every woman that Madara had ever slept with. What did they want from him? To save Izuna's life so that Madara would feel grateful, so that he would crawl into their bed and be passed between the two of them until they tired of him?
Madara has to stop himself from taking the unintentional insult wildly out of proportion. In all likelihood, Hashirama had only held a passing attraction for Madara in the past. He had told Mito about it when he was telling his wife what to expect from the Uchiha. Nothing more, and nothing less.
Madara breaks out into the early morning sun, bypassing Kou as he enters the underground prison to bring Mito her breakfast. He belts across their land, trying to get to his brother. Izuna has always steadied him, and his brother will help him drag away his thoughts on Uzumaki Mito and her black lines and the curve of her in front of him, and Hashirama, far away, always out of Madara's reach.
He resolves not to think about it.
His dreams say otherwise.
He is underneath the wide expanses of a brown body, dark hair falling over its shoulders to pool around Madara's neck. And he can feel - Sage above and below he can feel the blunt pressure of someone's cock teasing at his hole.
His breath comes out in a short gasp when it breaches him, when it presses in, the slide too slow and too delicious, and when his hands reach up to hold onto whoever his fucking him, the person's head lifts, and Hashirama is staring down at him.
There is devotion in his eyes, and it is terrible. It makes Madara quake, makes his stomach do terrible things inside of him. And then Hashirama is moving, pressing his hips forward in shallow thrusts that catch along Madara's rim.
Hashirama catches Madara's mouth in a slow slide of lips and tongue, burning down Madara's throat when Hashirama rears back to place his kisses there. There's a dip in the bed above Madara's head, and then Hashirama is moving his legs, hooking them on his shoulders.
Above Madara's head appears a pair of creamy white thighs, bisected by long black lines. The pussy above his face is covered with fine red hair, and right on the clit is a faintly glowing purple circle.
Madara moves his chin upward before he can stop himself, and Mito sighs above him. She smells like musk and ocean air, and he hums against her wetness, licking flat, broad tongued lines from her tight pink entrance to her glowing clit and back again.
Hashirama's pace is slow. Terribly slow, as if they have all the time in the world. And they do. They are in a grove of fruit bearing trees, all ripe with spring and harvest time. The world around them is heavy with perfume.
Mito grinds down on his face, just as slowly as Hashirama fucks into him. Above, he can hear the sound of one mouth meeting another, and then he is painfully hard, cock jumping against his skin.
Mito reaches down her hand to stroke him, her fingertip pressing gently at the head and drawing beads of precum down the shaft. Madara bucks into her grip, and Hashirama follows his movement. He bottoms out in an achingly smooth drag, one that leaves Madara moaning against the plump wet curve of Mito's pussy, slick with his spit.
It feels like it will never be over. Like there will always be Mito above him and Hashirama inside of him, but also him around Hashirama, and him pressing into Mito.
It almost feels like making love.
He finds it hard to face her after that.
The third day he goes into to see her, her eyes hang on the lines of his mouth for longer than they have to. He would say something about it if it didn't feed his dreams, the ones where she is between his knees and still in total control, dragging his orgasms out of him even after he's soft and weak in her mouth. Or the ones where he is between her knees, licking at her until she is raw, while Hashirama feeds her his cock.
The dreams are vivid and intrusive in his daily life. Madara wishes he could shove them into the back of his mind when he goes to see Mito, but they always make their way back to the forefront of his mind.
In his sleep, the lines of Mito's seal are always activated. They are long and stark against her skin. They help her see into him, help her pull him apart into her hand, onto her breasts, into her mouth. He never dreams that he is allowed inside of her, but sometimes he dreams that he is allowed to watch as she straddles Hashirama and slides down onto his length.
He dreams that he can see the line of Hashirama's cock low on the taut skin of Mito's pubic mound, too large for her but somehow nestled inside. He dreams her mouth slack with want and Hashirama's tight with restraint. He dreams her cunt spasming around him, spilling, creaming in thick white waves of their combined orgasm, or spraying, shouting as she does when she pulls off his cock.
The fourth day, Madara makes such a severe mistake that he drags his brush far down off the edge of his paper. He had been watching Mito too closely, too carefully observing the sliver of skin exposed at the throat of her kimono. He wondered what it would be like to press his own mouth there. To bite until her flesh blossomed red as her hair, to leave a necklace of claiming bites.
He hasn't had such dreams since he was fourteen, and woke up still trembling in his orgasm. His mind was much less inventive then; it had only been of him rutting against Hashirama, the both of them fully clothed.
Now his mind runs away with him.
Mito clucks her tongue at his terrible mistake, but her eyes are narrowed on the jolt of the brush off the page and then up once Madara had realized that he had been drawing on a hard stone floor.
"You're distracted today," she says, though she does not look at him as she says it. She cranes her neck to see more of his mistake, and Madara aches to put his fingers there, not to choke her, no, but to trace the slope of it, to finger the thrumming veins beneath the skin. "Have you not been sleeping well?"
Madara swallows, but doesn't stammer out an excuse. Mito doesn't press.
"My brother is an insomniac," she continues. It's a rare piece of information about herself, one that surprises Madara. Mito isn't the most forthcoming. She preserves to be cryptic and vague. It's part of her terrible allure, one that Madara feels foolish for getting caught up in. "He does some of his best designs when he's trying to fall asleep, or to stay awake."
Madara nods, the motion jerky and awkward. Mito rights herself to look at him, dead in his eyes, completely unafraid. It's terrible how that sends a jolt through him, too. People only looked the Uchiha in the eyes when they were sure they could kill the Uchiha in battle. Madara can't tell if Mito thinks that highly of herself, or if she has a death wish.
Maybe some combination of the two, or neither.
"You ought to try drawing when you're awake at night," Mito says. She offers him a new kind of smile, one different than the sweet ones that are so clearly born of being taught politics from a young age. This smile seems wicked. Deadly at the edges. "Unless you already have another way to occupy yourself."
"You have a husband," Madara snarls, snapping before he can stop himself. "He is my friend."
A terrible word to spit, when you want more and your friend does not.
Mito looks at him, her expression open. Innocent, as if she hasn't just suggested that the head of the Uchiha clan masturbates himself back to sleep when he can't get his eyes to stick shut.
"I don't know what you're implying," she says. "There are many ways one can occupy themselves. Card games. Reading. Fuinjutsu."
Madara simmers and tries not to break his brush in two in his hands. It infuriates him, how he can go from perfectly at ease with Mito to devastatingly attracted to her, to annoyed all within the span of moments. He thinks it has something to do with her being his best friend's wife. And his also, unfortunately still breathing attraction to Hashirama.
It's a terrible combination of feelings, and a combination that he knows will never be resolved. Madara is no fool. He'll likely be married off to some Senju girl, probably Hashirama's vicious cousin Touka if Izuna wasn't first. It would further strengthen ties between their clans now that the fighting was supposedly coming to a close.
It would tie up his life perfectly. It made him want to tear his hair out.
Madara isn't quite sure of what he wants out of this situation. His pride refuses to let him warm Mito and Hashirama's marriage bed, but his dreams refuse to let him stay anywhere else but squarely in the middle of it.
"Why are you even here?" he asks, still seething, albeit a bit more quietly.
Mito gives him a considering look before she twirls her brush in her hand and carefully lays it back down on her piece of paper. All of it was plain, the better to keep Mito from actually creating something that would kill Madara while they were unsupervised. Madara was not foolish enough to think that Mito couldn't kill him with her pinky finger and the inkwell, iron bars be damned. The plain paper being present instead of fuinjutsu paper was only a formality.
She looks at the mark Madara made on the ground, copying the way it jutted just so where he had accidentally dragged it off the paper and onto the floor. She mimics it all on the paper below her grasp, hardly bothering to check and see if her own matched the original.
She didn't have to. It did.
"I'm investigating," she finally says, setting her brush to the side.
Madara narrows his eyes, immediately suspicious. But Mito doesn't do anything other than look at him.
"Investigating what?"
The look in her eye now is not coy or sly or wicked or dangerous. It is open, which is perhaps worse than all of that combined.
She mouths the word so she does not have to say it out loud. So that if anyone is listening in on them, they will not hear it.
You.
Madara rises to his feet before he can stop himself, rage and embarrassment making his shoulders shake. He is not prone to losing his temper, yet here he is like a child before a rampage.
"You insult me," he says, hands balling into fists, where ink smears in with his sweat. "You insult your husband - ,"
Mito looks terribly collected, despite what she is accusing him of. It serves to make Madara all the angrier.
"What are you investigating for?" he demands. "And to what end? Tell me."
Mito doesn't even have the gall to look chastised. Instead, she appears to be amused.
"For my own benefit," she replies. "And for the benefit of my husband."
Hashirama sent his wife to heal his brother and to spy on Madara. The breach of trust is stark, snapping something tight within him. He has always considered Hashirama his best friend. To be betrayed like this - intentionally, no less -
"To. What. End?" he grinds out.
She waits until he is nearly spitting mad before she answers.
"To gauge your interest."
"In. What?"
She levels him with a steady glare, but Madara does not feel moved. He doubts even Amaterasu herself could make him budge now.
"Come back tomorrow," Mito says, "and I will tell you."
"She infuriates you," Izuna deadpans, rolling his eyes, "but show me what she taught you."
Izuna is getting stronger every day, pressing forward to walk longer, eat more, to stay awake and alert for as long as his body will let him. Madara wants to chastise him for moving too soon, for pushing too hard too fast, but Izuna won't listen to him. He rarely listens to Madara. Usually it's the other way around; though Madara is the firstborn, he defers to Izuna, heeds his council.
His little brother is smart. Terribly so. And Madara is so grateful that he's still alive.
"You don't care," Madara says.
Izuna shrugs his shoulder, staring at Madara's sketches and half formed seals before slowly copying them down himself. He's been working on his calligraphy more studiously than Madara has, which doesn't come as a surprise. Izuna is a terribly good student, but only when he cares about the subject. Besides, he had been the first to request Mito's services as a teacher.
Madara wonders, absently, if her flirtations would have fallen on Izuna had he been her pupil. Something like jealously tells him Mito is a harlot, but something like pride tells him Hashirama only spoke about him and not his brother.
"I don't," Izuna chirps, voice mild. "Most people infuriate you. You're easily infuriate-able."
"That isn't a word."
"I just made it one."
"You're insufferable."
Izuna smirks at him, looking up from his calligraphy to do it.
"Thank you for proving my point."
It's the fifth day after Mito's arrival, and little has changed. Madara has a glancing grasp of the art of fuinjutsu though Mito continues to run circles around him. He's no closer to figuring out why exactly she's here. But his brother is alive and he has an heir, so he supposes he should at least be grateful.
If his dreams weren't still so persistent.
"How do you do that?" Madara asks, tilting his head over Izuna's shoulder.
He's holding his sleeve up the way Mito sneers at when Madara does it, but he's managed to perfectly copy Madara's work without lifting his brush.
Izuna shrugs. "I'm a natural genius," he says, grinning and showing his teeth. Madara scowls and shoves him, but Izuna rocks with the movement and laughs.
It's the closest they've been to normal in days. It's no surprise that they're interrupted. It is a surprise that it's Nadeshiko doing the interrupting.
She's certainly gotten bolder in the days since Madara named her his heir. He's fairly sure she's secured a set of rooms for herself in the main house, and has taken to ordering people around as if she's been trained to do it her entire life. Though, in a roundabout sort of way, she has been.
There's little mirth in her gaze when she comes in now. Rather, she looks severe, even the soft curls of her hair doing nothing to make her more feminine and less frightening.
"The Senju are here for their lady wife."
Her voice is clipped and toneless. Madara rises to his feet and Izuna isn't far behind, but Nadeshiko puts up a hand to stop them.
"You're in no state to meet them now," she says. "We make them wait while you get dressed."
It isn't a suggestion or a request. It's an order. Madara narrows his eyes, but he defers to her judgment. It would be good, to make the Senju sweat for a minute. And it would give him time to stop the hammering of his own heart.
The only Senju that would be coming for Mito would be Hashirama.
Nadeshiko is already dressed in sharp Uchiha blue, with brighter red and gold accents to harken back to her standing in the temple. Her hair is decorated with fine pins, keeping it up and out of her eyes. Her face is painted, her lips are red, her eyes lined. She looks as if she's been dressed resplendently since the morning. Madara belatedly remembers that she's getting married soon, and that she's probably been attending her husband's Hyūga family, little of it that there was considering his Byakugan-less eyes.
Nadeshiko ushers a servant into Izuna's room to help him dress before she turns on her heel. Madara follows her back into his own chambers, where she brusquely goes about picking his robes.
They're all in a rich Uchiha indigo, deep and dark as the sky at night before Amaterasu peeks over the horizon, and they're etched in with red and white to echo the highly stylized uchiwa on its back.
He lifts an eyebrow at her choice, but the look on her face shushes him into following her lead. He allows his younger sister to help dress him, to tie him into his clothes, to smooth his hair back into a tight low tail that makes him look more stately and less like a barbarian.
"Give them nothing," Nadeshiko says, voice low and sharp, "nothing but what they deserve."
He nods at her, because he knows she is correct.
When they leave his chambers, Madara takes the lead and Nadeshiko defers. She stands to his left as they stalk down the corridors, and he is glad for it when Izuna emerges from his room, similarly dressed in deep blues and takes up his position at Madara's right.
He feels invincible for precisely as long it takes for him to see Hashirama again.
Tobirama is there with him, which tempers some of Madara's leaping heart. They are dressed well, too, in the red-brown colors of the Senju, the ochre of the earth. They bow as Madara and his siblings enter and stay with their heads lowered until the three of them are seated as well.
"Hashirama," Madara says, greeting the Senju brothers. "Tobirama."
They look up as one, Tobirama's red eyes wary and Hashirama's guileless.
"Madara," he says, smiling. Then he turns to Izuna, and his gaze is immediately relieved. "Izuna. I'm glad to see you're well."
It's painfully obvious that he doesn't know who Nadeshiko is. Tobirama's confusion is something that Madara wants to revel in; Hashirama's, however, is not.
"May I introduce my younger sister and heir, Uchiha Nadeshiko," Madara says. "Nadeshiko, here are Senju Hashirama, leader of the Senju and Senju Tobirama, his second."
Nadeshiko inclines her head politely, her dark eyes intelligent.
"Your battle prowess is legendary, Tobirama-san," she says, and damn is she good. "Hashirama-san, I have heard much about you as well."
Tobirama prickles, but stays silent. Hashirama tries for a smile.
"Good things, I hope."
Nadeshiko hums, but says nothing in response. Hashirama's smile falls, just a little bit. It hurts Madara more than he was expecting it to.
"What is your business here?" Madara asks.
Hashirama has the decency to look sheepish.
"I have come to retrieve Uzumaki Mito," he says. "My brother and I, well, the three of us agreed that it would be best if she were sent here to offer to heal Izuna. She told us she needed five days to do so, and now we have come to bring her home."
Madara can hear it in the slight tremble in Hashirama's voice; he isn't telling the whole truth.
"Your wife was sent for when you arrived," Nadeshiko says, jumping cleanly into the conversation. "She will be with us shortly."
Hashirama's shoulders relax. He looks visibly relieved.
"She mentioned," Madara says, hands purposely relaxed on his knees, "that she had been sent here to investigate something."
It's news to Izuna and Nadeshiko, but they are too well trained to show it. Tobirama's eyes land on his brother so briefly, if Madara had blinked he wouldn't have seen the quick exchange between the Senju brothers.
"Ah, yes," Hashirama replies. "I had told her - I had hoped she would."
Madara lifts an eyebrow, ignores the way betrayal sinks in his stomach like a stone.
"To what end?"
It feels like the ninetieth time he's asked, but Hashirama denies him the way his wife did.
"I think it would be best if she were here to explain it as well."
Madara nods curtly. Another witness wouldn't kill him. Let his siblings see what sort of people the Senju were, sending spies in the forms of pregnant wives to do their wickedness when they supposedly wanted the war over.
So they wait. It takes little time for Mito to arrive, Haru and Kou flanking her. She enters like every bit the regal woman she is and sits at her husband's left. She is not behind him, the same way Nadeshiko is just behind Madara. No, Mito sits on an even plane with her husband.
She had said, hadn't she, that she belonged to herself.
"I think it's time we explained ourselves," she says, cutting right to the point, without greeting anyone in the room, much less her husband. "We are all aware of the circumstances that brought me to the Uchiha. We are all well aware that my healing Izuna where Tobirama nearly killed him would have been enough to end this war. We all similarly know that my insistence upon teaching the Uchiha fuinjutsu was well outside of my obligations, in terms of blood rights."
Madara nods; they are all, very well aware.
Mito licks her lips and Madara cannot help but track the movement with his eyes. Cannot help but feel Hashirama in the room, how every space he occupies somehow ends up smelling of sandalwood.
"In Uzushio, it is common for one woman to take two husbands, or for one man to take two wives."
Madara stops listening. He feels as though he must be dreaming.
"Politically, this is usually done to unite three families, while also keeping them distinct. It is more often done for love. I understand that it is not common here in Fire Country, but in Uzushio, it is common courtesy, when three people find each other - appealing."
His mouth is dry. He feels like a fool. He had known. He had known hadn't he? Why hadn't he listened to himself? Why had he continued to go back to her, even though he knew? Why didn't he trust himself?
"In terms of the Uchiha and the Senju, marriage would be the best way to end the war," Mito continues. "But marriage would combine the families, which I am sure would cause a civil war. By introducing a third party into a marriage between the two clans, the families may remain separate and still produce heirs."
Madara grinds his teeth, his jaw locking furiously into place.
"No marriage would be more important, symbolically or otherwise, than with the heads of the Senju and the Uchiha," she says. "A marriage that would allow the respective clan heads to continue leading their people."
Which wouldn't matter because even if he did get married, Nadeshiko would still be his heir. Even if he had children of his own, they would still take power after she did. Which didn't matter because this wasn't happening.
"I came to investigate any possible willingness for such an arrangement," Mito says, clearly commanding the room. "And now that my investigation is complete, I have a proposition."
She moves forward, eclipsing her husband until she is between Madara and Hashirama, bridging the gap between them but making it impossibly wider with her foreign ways, with her foolishness, with her conviction that this will solve their problems.
Madara looks at her, then looks at Hashirama, who is only looking at him, hope awash in his eyes. Madara realizes with a sinking feeling, that Hashirama shares his wife's conviction.
"Uchiha Madara," Mito says, "I would like to offer you my hand in marriage, and the hand of my husband, Senju Hashirama."
He presents the foolish proposition to the elders shortly thereafter, once the Senju are settled in guest housing befitting their status.
Madara assumes that the elders will find all of this rather insulting. That they will insist he turn out the Senju on their asses, to refuse this proposition the way Madara has blatantly ignored requests for his hand since he was old enough for them to be made.
He doesn't count on their speculative glances, their murmurings of Uzumaki chakra reserves in an Uchiha child, in an Uchiha heir learning the fuinjutsu that made Tobirama too fast for even a Sharingan to catch. He should have guessed that this, too, would go wrong.
The elders say yes before Madara can say no.