apodyopsis

Er, in which Hashirama gets friendzoned.

When he is sixteen, Hashirama finds Madara beautiful.

It's not the type of beauty he's used to. Madara has clawed his way through the same wars and has battle-worn scars littering his body to prove it, visible under his shirt when he stretches his arms to the sky before they spar. It's only at sixteen that Hashirama realizes he suggests these spars for one reason.

Strike at his left arm and maybe he'll lower his guard enough for me to confirm if I've got the curve of his leg. Twist around until he leans back and I can see that slight scar that wasn't there before.

It's strange. Wrong. He knows he shouldn't. But he dreams

~o~

and his dreams are lucid with all the stunning clarity of a thousand suns of light as his fingers curl into the slight hipbones below him, testing, pushing, skittering over the pale skin that threatens to break under his still-fragile fingers.

"Idiot Senju. Why am I so weak in your mind? Why can't you dream of us fighting instead of fucking?" Madara whispers against the shell of his ear, a breath that lights a fire along every one of his nerves.

Hashirama feels Madara's eyes on him as he moves, moves down, trails his hands across every plane of skin he can reach, draws the map of his body to the blank sheet of his mind.

He reaches down with one hand. Strokes himself. Watches Madara watch. Clothes are unnecessary in the realm of the mind. Knowledge is unneeded, undesired. It falls of the edge of the world along with everything else between their limpid forms, redolent of harsh words and harsher looks. Replaced by the bare tilt of Madara's chin below him.

"Is this weakness?" Hashirama asks before he takes him into his mouth.

He doesn't think it is weakness, this liquid beauty that only he can ever see. The wish to consume Madara's every breath, to own the pleasure struck form below him as he strokes himself in time, like clockwork with less style and more art. A coveted fixation that persists into every fiber of his life.

"Is this what you actually want, under that old-wise-man person you pretend to be?" Madara asks as Hashirama's tongue moves steadily over his cock, carving a slow burn along another country of the map he's memorized with his eyes. "So you're a full-blooded boy after all, though a little weird in preference."

"It's amazing," Hashirama notes as his lips dart away and take a bridge of clear white strands with them, "how you can still speak like this."

Madara hisses, slips his hands into lengthening brown hair, pulls his friend's warm mouth back over him. "You're just a friend, you know. And a troublesome one, at that."

"Ah, but I'm your only friend."

And he pulls up, thrusts the mere friendship from Madara's lean form, takes his mouth more gently when he lies over the sheets, panting, gasping with the height of desperation along the rooms that belonged to the middle of nowhere.

Dreams are not reality

~o~

but it still amazes him how much can carry though like gold dust speckling his lashes when he wakes in the mornings, remnants of fantasy that take their piece of his mind and exert their ownership of his existence. Madara sits beside him on the wet grass after their spar. Bare hints of corded muscle are visible where his shirt hangs tight with sweat.

"I can stay a little later, today," he remarks as he drags a cloth over his forehead. "There is only Izuna, and he keeps secrets well."

This is how Madara tells him of his father's death. When Hashirama saw him first, the boy of eight years had a father and three elder brothers and one younger brother. Now, he has one younger brother, because it is worse for the Uchiha than it is for the Senju who bring the nearly-dead to life with their touch. Sometimes he thinks it strange that their friendship is built on secrecy, but the thought never lingers.

Without the secrecy, they would have no friendship.

Hashirama reaches out to set a careful hand on his shoulder. "Then maybe we can begin drawing structural plans for the village."

"Ridiculous amounts of ambition will get us nowhere," Madara scoffs. "First, we must gather the outer clans and send them our ideas."

"Of course."

Can a friend ever be a person

~o~

he dreams of this vividly?

Or can this person ever lower himself to the position of a friend?

Madara writhes in a pleasured fury under his touch.