Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto.

At times, I imagine you are Atlas,

Crushed beneath the weight

Of the heavens you were cursed to hold.

-(p.d)

He doesn't want to be here. Not really. The sea air smells like salt and brine and it is pungent and sharp, cutting. He doesn't enjoy it. Nor does he enjoy the sound of gulls overhead, the sharp crash of water onto the sand and the rocks, the low droning sound of a storm off of the coast. It is a strange and inhospitable landscape, far from the forests that he calls home.

He can concede that there is a wild beauty to it, the clear blue water mirrors the blue of the sky, but he does not have to enjoy it.

"Niisan." Izuna says, from his side. "We're close aren't we?"

He shifts on his feet. "Yes." They are indeed, close to Uzushiogakure.

"Then we should go across?" Izuna asks.

Uchiha Madara sighs. "No." The whirlpools around Uzu are notoriously difficult to predict or control. He would not dare risk it, not when Izuna couldn't even see the whirlpools much less know where to step ahead of time.

"Then why did we travel all this way? If you aren't going to meet your bride, what's the point?" Izuna is still standing blankly, facing the sea, and the crashing of waves.

And that is the eternal question isn't it. Why did Uzumaki Ashina contact him with a marriage offer? And why did he decide that traveling to Uzu would be a good idea?

Uzumaki Kanae. He turns the idea over in his mind. The younger daughter of Uzumaki Ashina. The younger sister of Hashirama's prospective bride.

And here his thoughts again, turn bitter. Must it always be a comparison between him and Hashirama? But he is here nonetheless. Here because the clan demands heirs, and the Uzumaki are a powerful clan, with powerful skills.

Below them, on the sand, a young woman drags herself out of the waves, and stands there, barefoot, wringing out her long red hair, a length of rope tied about her waist.

Madara sets a hand on his brother's elbow, and guides him down to the beach. "Do you know how we might find passage to Uzu?" He assumes that she is from Uzu, assumes it by the length of her red hair, by the way her clothing is ill suited to fighting. A light blue half length kimono and knee length leggings are not war clothes after all, and she didn't even wear arm guards.

This is still a dangerous length of coast.

She dresses like a civilian.

She turns pale green eyes up to him, and blinks calmly. "Perhaps." She examines the two of them with care. "And who are you two?"

His free hand clenches slightly. "Not your business." He wants passage, not discussion.

She shrugs calmly. "If you insist." She bends, and gathers a length of rope in her hands, pulling closely, and a very small boat breaks the surface, its hull gleaming dully in the weak morning glow. She hums as she dances back into the shallows to drag it onto the beach.

"Niisan." Inzuna says at last, after another ten minutes of this. "Stop being like this." He turns towards the direction of her humming. "Miss? I'll tell you who we are."

She turns back to his younger brother, jade green eyes dancing, a small smile on her lips. "Oh. So you must be the reasonable one." She giggles, and it echoes sharply over the rocks and the sound of the waves. "I know who you are, Uchiha-san."

"Then you must be?" Izuna comes to crouch beside her, even though he can't see much of anything.

She flips the rope over her shoulder, and scours the bottom of the hull carefully with a handful of sand. "You can call me Shiko." At Izuna's raised eyebrow, she clarifies. "It's short for Arashiko."

"Little Storm." Madara says at last. So this girl is an Uzumaki then or at least, affiliated with the village that he is to enter.

She shrugs. "Yes. It is what Chichi calls me."

"We're here to see Uzumaki Ashina-dono." Izuna says cheerfully, his voice deceptively light. "Do you know him?"

The girl shrugs again, flipping her hair over her shoulder. "I can't really say." She flips the boat over. "Can anyone be said to really know anyone else?"

"I assumed you were from Uzu, Arashiko-san." His brother's still speaking to her, but Madara's getting a little impatient.

They are too visible like this, on this bare strip of sand, between the sea and the sky. "Can you take us to Uzu?"

She shoves the boat back into the shallows, right side up. "Get in the boat, Uchiha-san." The boat will fit two.

He doesn't want to get in, doesn't want to trust this dingy boat and this half wild girl-child, but she raises one finely arched eyebrow at him, as though skeptical of his understanding of the world, and he steps in. You won't find me weak.

Izuna fumbles slightly, but Madara offers him a hand, guiding him over the ledge.

"Uchiha-san?" The girl leans closer to Izuna, a hand raised towards the black band of cloth over his eyes. "Are you?"

"Blind, yes." Izuna smiles politely. It's a sore point, sore indeed for the both of them, given that his eyes are in Madara's head, but the girl doesn't mention it again. Instead, she turns away without saying another word.

"How," Madara interrupts the silence for a moment. "Are you planning on getting across the sea?"

She laughs, and it sounds like gulls and the crash of waves. "How do you think I got here, Uchiha-san?"

She takes a running leap at the water, the rope still wrapped around her waist, and the boat shudders out to sea.

In the deep blue of the water, all he can see is the bloody streaks of her red hair beneath the surface, as they skim over the top of the waves.

They'd passed around the storm still rumbling off the coast, and another coastline is in sight.

She takes the boat straight to the rocks, and disentangles herself from the rope casually. There are no people there to greet them.

She shakes out her hair, and bends down to twist it into a single bun over her head. "Come along, Uchiha-san." She says, something like amusement twisting through her voice. "We shall go and see my Chichi, yes?"

And suddenly every piece clicks into place. "You are Uzumaki Kanae." He says flatly.

And his venture here, to this strange land, with these strange people is even more outlandish.

Uzumaki Kanae is not beautiful, or demure. There is something about her that seems too sharp, as if the artist had used up all of his color on her hair and eyes. It leaves the rest of her pale and faded, her chin pointed, and lips thin.

She is small and slight, and her cheekbones are sharp enough to cut stone on.

She looks like one good gust would blow her over.

Uzumaki Kanae looks like nothing more than an ungainly girl-child.

"Yes." She says, looking up at his eyes without a hint of fear. "And you are Uchiha Madara."

"But you said that you were Arashiko." He can hear the frustration in his brother's voice. "And now you acknowledge that you are Uzumaki Kanae?"

"Chichi calls me Arashiko." She says and walks on, towards the houses that seem to rise out of the earth, slope roofed, painted in brilliant, bright colors. "I did not lie to you, Uchiha-san."

The streets are bogged with spring mud, and Uzumaki Kanae sets a small hand on Izuna's elbow to steer him clear of puddles. "My apologies, Uchiha-san." She says, with little fanfare. "It has been a snowy winter. The streets are not yet packed well."

Madara is more interested in the way the houses seem close together, a permanent sort of residence.

He wants Konoha to look similar in ten or twenty years. There are children racing through the streets, elderly men and women sitting out on stooped porches. The roofs are shingled, the businesses prosperous.

It is a peaceful sort of place then, this Uzushiogakure.

It is unlike the warzone that he'd left behind.

His greatest dream is to build a place that looks like this.

"And here we are." She offers, sliding the screen door aside, and stepping into a courtyard.

"Kanae!" An elderly woman moves towards them, her age doing nothing to slow her steps. "I told you that today was the big day! How could you go running off-"

"Obaa-san." Uzumaki Kanae says, long sufferingly, he likes to think. "They are here already. And they would have left if I didn't head out to greet them this morning."

It is only then that the older woman looks up at them. Her green eyes are no less sharp than her granddaughter's, he notes almost absently.

Somehow, this bleak, barren landscape encapsulates immortality.

The people here weather, but time seems as slow as molasses. He'd never seen quite so many elderly men and women in his life, but here, in Uzu, they seem so normal.

A commonplace occurrence then. It makes him uneasy.

"You're Uchiha Madara, then?" The elderly woman asks, a hand on her hip. "Hmmph." She turns back to her granddaughter. "Well, what are you waiting for? Ashina-kun is waiting to see them."

Kanae hids a smile behind her hand. "Of course, Obaa-san. I shall bring them to Chichi directly." She does not mention that they would probably have already arrived before Uzumaki Ashina had they not been stopped.

"How old is your grandmother?" He asks as they walk. The woman had looked no more than fifty, fifty-five, perhaps if he is being generous.

"She is seventy seven this year." She replies, as if she'd not shattered his entire worldview.

"Seventy-seven?" Izuna asks, unable to hide the tremor of surprise. "That is a great age indeed."

She muffles a giggle. "Tanaka-san is the oldest person on the Island, and he is a hundred and thirty-eight this year. Obaa-san's young compared to him." She glances over at Madara, curious. "And how old are you?"

"Twenty-four." He replies, and says nothing more. A hundred and thirty-eight. He cannot even possibly conceive of a person being that old. It is beyond fathoming, how one would live to such-But they have no war here. A treacherous part of his mind whispers. It is possible to simply keep on living.

"Do you not fear being...attacked?" Izuna asks, his voice nothing above a whisper, but it is shaking with something. Something like awe.

"By Tanaka-san?" She tilts her head back, and laughs as she pushes open another door. "He might be an old grump, but he's not in the habit of attacking his clan head's children." She slides over the wooden floorboards, still barefooted, and down the long hall. "Chichi!" She calls, freely, laughingly, as if there's no respect she must offer, to her clan head, and to her father. "The Uchiha are here."

The man behind the tea table is again, strangely young-looking, but Madara's learned better than to assume his age by his appearance. "Uchiha-dono." He murmurs, dark eyes flashing. "And your brother, do sit."

Madara carefully guides Izuna towards the tatami mats. He inclines his head to towards the seated man respectfully. "Uzumaki-dono."

Uzumaki Kanae fades towards the door, but Uzumaki-dono evidently has remembered that his daughter ought to be more presentable. "Arashiko." He murmurs, a heavy frown on his lips. "Where are you going?"

The girl blinks once. "Pearl diving, Chichi." She turns, long hair falling like a curtain over her shoulder. "It might be the last time I ever enjoy the activity." Her words are resigned, nothing more. "After all, there are no oceans in Fire Country."

And then she vanishes out the door.

"My apologies, Uchiha-dono." Uzumaki-dono sighs. "She is young still."

"Yes." Madara replies. "She is young." Younger than he expected, when the missive had arrived, asking that he consider Uzumaki Ashina's younger daughter.

"If she were any older, she would not be willing to leave with you." A pale pink eyebrow rises. "And I assume you have no desire to live among us."

The man speaks as if he has already accepted the marriage offer. He has not.

And he has less and less intention to.

Hashirama had thought it a good plan. Then we'll really be brothers, you know? A blinding smile, a nudge towards a response.

He did not want to be Senju Hashirama's brother. He wants-well, it matters little what he wants. The clan wants its heirs.

"I have no intention to accept." He says, and that is a bad thing to say, but Uzumaki-dono merely smiles.

"Then why, if you have no intention to court Kanae, are you sitting before me?"

And isn't that the million ryo question? Why is he here, if he has less and less intention of marrying the girl?

"Forgive my brother." Izuna raises a hand, and gently feels around the table for the teacup. "Of course, he doesn't mean that." His elbow jabs Madara in the thigh.

It's clearly visible to Uzumaki-dono, but Izuna doesn't know that.

For not the first time today, Uchiha Madara wonders if he should have just left his younger brother at home.

The answer is still no.

"Well." Uzumaki-dono rises at the end of their conversation. "I will let you rest before the festivities tonight." He straightens the collar of his haori. "I suggest you speak to Kanae before she leaves with you."

He understands now, why the Uzumaki offered.

Uzumaki Ashina does not want to offer him his younger daughter. Not truly. It is clear in his every action, that he doesn't want to. This is a man who has already given up one daughter, and his actions state that Uzumaki Kanae is his adored youngest child, his 'little storm.'

It is also clear, that despite the peace in Uzushio, it is a fragile one indeed. They have little agricultural capacity here.

It has left them with persistent rice shortages.

And Uzumaki Kanae's sharp lines and faded edges makes so much sense.

Her face had been angular, and pointed. He had not thought hollow, had not thought perhaps, hungry, but he should have.

He's seen plenty of hungry children. He did not think that Uzushio, this timeless and barren land would house more of them.

He'd thought that peace would solve the world's ills, and yet-

And now Uzumaki Ashina, the most powerful man in Uzu is willing to trade him a child to feed Uzu itself.

"Niisan?" Izuna asks from next to the desk in their suit of rooms. "Have you come to a decision yet?"

And curse him. "No." Madara says, flatly, and turns to slide open the door. The rice paper over the windows is double layered. The wood is dark, and lacquered. The vases are delicate, molded with swirling patterns.

There is a strange array of seals painted onto the floorboards, which are smooth and polished.

The sheets on the beds are crisp, and the whitest he's ever seen outside of a noble compound.

Everything about this set of rooms screamed opulence.

It is hard to imagine that amidst all of this the entire island is starving.

The door opens onto a smooth path, hewed out of the stone itself, and far away, they can hear the sound of the gulls, and the waves.

"Wait here for me." He says to Izuna, though he is loathed to leave his brother. They will not harm him.

They still need my answer. It does not settle the unease in his heart, but this is a village. This is an honest to goodness peaceful village.

He wants to see how it runs.

He is an oddity here. Not because of his dark hair, but because he is still wearing heavy armor. The children that run about, laughing in the streets wear little more than half length kimono or haori. They show no fear at the sight of an approaching stranger.

But they also do not greet him.

There is no tension in the air, no person on edge.

The stone mason keeps carving his blocks, red hair pulled messily up in a hightail. The old man mending nets in the morning sun doesn't raise his head when Madara passes.

A teenage laundress glances at him curiously before turning back to her work.

In the schoolyard, an middle aged man with a high forehead lectures a pair of misbehaving children.

Everything about this place sets him ill at ease.

He tells himself that he is looking at the village design, looking at the structures of daily life, finding housing plans for Hashirama to copy when he finally returns to Konoha, but he wanders out towards the sea instead.

The shore on this side of the Island is rocky, and he glances briefly at the shallow pools of water between the stones as he passes them.

There are shells, seaweed swaying gently with the pounding of the waves. An eight legged creature scuttles out of his sight when he stands too close.

For the second time that morning, Uzumaki Kanae breaks the bleak nature of the landscape before him. The first thing that he notes off in the distance, is the red of her hair.

She's sitting on the rocks. He does not have to go. She hasn't looked up. He can pretend that he did not see her. She can do the same of him. He travels towards her, as if pulled by the tide.

She is humming some ditty or other that he is unfamiliar with, but can hear indistinctly over the sound of the sloshing water.

"You are far from your residence, Uchiha-san." She observes when he stops a few feet from her, pulling a handful of shells from a bucket.

She pries one of them open with a curved single bladed knife and hisses with disgust. "Useless again." She tosses into a second bucket, which is filled with broken shells and slimy innards.

"And you are?" He crouches down beside her.

The air reeks of the sea, of brine, of something pungent beneath the surface.

He's never liked fish, but these shells smell very badly indeed. He's not quite sure what she is doing, prying them open. Her hands are covered with the slime, and the loose, dirty liquid from the shells stain her arms up to her elbows.

"Harvesting pearls." She replies, pulling another shell from the bucket, and gutting it smoothly with the knife. "It's a thankless task." Once again, she tosses it into the discard bucket.

"I have decided." He says all at once. "You will be...going with me when I leave." Izuna would not be applauding his tact. He was supposed to say that he wishes, although that is not the right word, would never be the right-Hashirama. He thinks. Why did you choose a woman from here?-to court her.

She raises one red, red, brow at him. "You have decided?" She murmurs. "I didn't know you had a choice."

He narrows his eyes. "I had a choice." He replies, brusque. Clipped.

He had no choice. Hashirama would have been disappointed. The clan would attempt to find him someone else. He would leave those happy children behind to starve.

He ignores the voice that tells him Hashirama will not let those children starve.

They are after all, kin of his wife.

"Well, then." Her voice is deceptively mild. "You must call me Kanae then, Madara...sama, if we are to learn to live with each other." She rolls his name over her tongue like it is a strange, foreign object that ill suits her lyrical interpretation of the world.

Perhaps it is.

"Learn to live with each other?" He sits down on the rock beside her. "What is there to learn?"

He has decided that he will-marry. As far as he is aware, the district will be big enough that there will be no need to speak consistently afterwards. "You will be an Uchiha. That is all." And this will be a marriage of clans.

"What makes an Uchiha, Madara-sama?" She asks him, green eyes flashing. "Is it their famous red eyes?" Her eyes are following his every move, so much more disconcerting than any of his relatives.

He grunts, but says nothing.

"What does an Uchiha woman pride herself in?" She's contemplative now, red hair spilling over a shoulder, tapping her fingers against her thigh. The shells are forgotten. "Does she fight beside her men?"

Her half length kimono and knee length black shorts seem to be mocking him. It's not appropriate to show so much skin, but this seems to be normal here. Children, young men, young women, they went barefoot, without floor length robes.

It's clearly not meant to be distracting. His eyes trail up over her wrist and down the length of her leg. He reminds himself that he ought to be looking at her face.

"You will not be fighting." He replies. "An Uchiha woman does not fight." Good God. Talking to this girl-child hurts his soul.

He does not think why this is so. He does not remind himself that Uzumaki Kanae is a young woman, not a girl.

"Well, that's nice." Her tone as she examines her cuticles implies that this idea is anything but nice. "I do not much fancy being an Uchiha after all."

He is about to open his mouth and tell her exactly what he thinks of that statement, but she's flipped her knife into the air, watches as it spins lazily glistening in the morning sun, before catching it, the blade between two fingers. "I understand though, that I have no choice in this matter." Unlike you. Her words seem to imply. "So you will have to tell me about yourself."

Uchiha Madara closes his eyes, and prays quietly that his life might still find some small resemblance to peace after this. "No."

"No?" She pries open another of those foul smelling shells, and cards her fingers through the innards as if that would transform them from gray goop to an iridescent gem. "Well, I shall tell you about me then." She continues on, in a rather meandering tone. "My name is Kanae. I enjoy the color blue. In my spare time, I am a seamstress."

This is such a mundane list of facts that it makes him regret ever coming to speak to her.

"-have any dreams, Madara-sama?"

He blinks. "Hn."

She swings her feet back and forth, leaning back on both her hands as she stares out into the foaming gray waves. "You have to have some sort of dream." She says, quiet, gently assured.

Hokage. Peace. Hash-His thoughts come to a grinding halt. "That is no business of yours."

"I thought maybe," She smiles, but it doesn't reach her eyes, and she doesn't look at him. Her head's bent over the shells again, knife flashing quickly through the sequence of motions. "That one of us could have a dream." For a long pause, all the sound he hears is the clatter of broken shells as she tosses them, one by one, into the discarded bucket. "One dream that doesn't die."

Despite her chatter, he knows nothing about her really. "And what is to say," he says, after a moment's thought "That the dream won't be yours?"

She picks the last shell out of the bucket. "I will be leaving with you." She says, and her knife pauses without prying it open. "And afterwards, I will have no dreams." She pulls the two halves open, and digs something out. "After all," She smiles at him, and it's mocking and rueful. "An Uchiha woman does not fight." She dips her hand in the water, and swirls it around, rinsing the grime away.

It's a strange dream to have. What does she have to fight for? But he hasn't really the time to wonder. She offers him the pearl. "Welcome to Uzushio, Madara-sama."

It is brilliantly red, as bloody as her hair.

But the most ironic part of this whole thing is that it is shaped like a teardrop.

For the first time since he can remember, he throws his head back and laughs until his lungs are drowning, until he feels the stitch in his side. What are the chances?

A.N. This, is somehow, a rabid plot bunny that will not leave me alone. The basic premise is that the Uzumaki have the bright idea of marrying their clan head's younger daughter off to Madara after they marry Mito to Hashirama. Of course, then Madara sat up in the back of my head and demanded that this be written in his point of view rather than Kanae's so...

At any rate, the timeline, since Kishimoto is eugh on timelines, is nonexistent. I've wreaked the canon timeline already. Izuna is alive. Konoha is a thing. I know in canon those two did not exist simultaneously. That and there's a surprising lack of Warring Clans fanfictions that do not involve time travel.

I'm just hoping that by writing this, I can somehow exorcise the thing for a bit while getting back to the next chapter of Bloodless.

~Tavina