Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto. Beta'd by Petrames, UmbreonGurl, Fishebake and drowsyivy.

"I am a burden on my own heart"

— Rainier Maria Rilke, Letter to Lou Salomé

On a slightly warming winter morning, he twists another strand of her hair around his fingers, marveling at how different it could look by the way the sun hit it. He'd been invited to do her hair today, and while he could pin it up strand by strand, twist by twist, into a bun and add pins like the golden phoenixes he'd bought some two weeks ago and still hadn't seemingly found the courage to give her, wrapped as they are in his coat pocket, he didn't.

Oh, she wore the Uchiwa once, when out at an official party, and she was happy to be loved by him — she loved him, but knowing that made it different now.

To have love is also to linger in the possibility of losing it, of having it somehow torn away through no understanding of his own.

Or perhaps, now that he found some new part of his heart he hadn't seemed to notice before, he is unreasonably afraid of losing it again, for whatever reason.

So his fingers linger, even though he could very easily reach into his pocket, just the front right pocket, and pin up her hair as he would like to see it.

"'Dara-sama?" Her hand comes up to hold his wrist. "We will be late soon."

He huffs a laugh, pressing a kiss to the top of her head. "And if so, they will wait on us." He would like to see, these days, if there is anyone who would not wait on him should he be fashionably late to an appointment.

"Oh, they will, will they." She frowns, but her eyes are laughing. "When did you start to like to linger?"

"When I realized that time is a short thing." He had spent some two years in a painful haze. No longer.

No longer.

"Oh." She glances down, contemplative for a moment. Still thinking, she sets her chin on her hand, tapping her fingers against her cheek as she considers it. "It is true that we do not have forever, but no lovers ever do." Gently, she reaches out for him, and obligingly, he wraps his arms around her, still, perhaps, a little awkward in the tangible gesture of affection. "We have time enough, I think," she says.

"Mmm." He breathes out. "Perhaps we do." He is older than his father, when his father was wed, and wonders if his father had ever felt like this, if he had had the time to.

Perhaps not.

There were battles to fight and missions to complete, people to comfort, a clan to lead.

Perhaps his father had never had these quiet moments, the comfort of a desk job, and a permanent home.

And yet despite the slivers of joy that he has gathered, the rot beneath his surface still tells him that he is somehow deficient, somehow unhappy.

That thought has become easier to banish.

They stay like that for another moment more, he and Kanae and the quiet winter morning, and then he pulls away to again contemplate her hair.

"Would you like a braid?" He'd never seen her hair braided. It was always either up or hanging loose.

"If you would like to braid it, I would like that very much."

He hums, pleased with the thought of it as he gathers up her hair, deftly dividing it into three parts. "I've never seen you wear it in a braid before, so I wasn't sure if you liked it."

"I cannot braid my own hair." She smiles, covering her mouth with her hand as if confessing a secret. "It is too hard for me."

He laughs at this, as he threads a long stemmed yellow rose into one part of it, suddenly happier that Hashirama had come by with ridiculous out of season flowers from a terrible attempt to grow miniature roses indoors that had made a rosebush in his living room. He loves the man, he truly does — and isn't it strange that the thought brought no pain anymore, no feelings of inadequacy wrapped in horrid grief and guilt, but only something like a wry amusement — but whatever the mishaps, at least his heart was in the right place, and he'd sent Madara the remaining roses after he'd finished dejectedly hacking away at a perfectly good rosebush growing straight from his living room floor.

"But you manage other elaborate hairstyles just fine?" A braid is a simple thing, so simple that even he'd been able to do it as a child, although his attempts had not always panned out well, his mother had forgiven him for it.

"I cannot manage one unless I have three arms," she pouts. "They are very twisty, and I am very jealous of everyone who can make one properly."

He laughs so hard his hands shake, and one of the thornless roses slips from his grasp and floats to the floor. "Then let me be your savior, love. Never shall you fear braiding your own hair ever again."

She pouts at him, doing a reasonably fair impression of a chipmunk, even as he jokingly prods her cheek.

"My lovely wife," he says, when he'd gotten ahold of himself, "defeated by her own hair."

"My great and wise husband," she says, while trying not to laugh and failing. "Protector of simple hairstyles and eater of too many pastries."

He gasps, pretending at offense. "I am wounded to my core."

She laughs, giggly and sweet.

She slips her hand in his when they finally make their way out the door, only very slightly late despite the break they'd taken to linger.

Okui Chihaya arrives at the gates of Konoha at the fall of dusk that evening, swinging what might be called a harpoon from her left hand, a long, long length of rope in her right.

She has a smile sharp like brittle glass, hair the color of fire she wears in a loose braid, and the darkest blue eyes he's seen in awhile, blue-black like obsidian hitting the light.

There's no pack on her, though she wears a brown travelling cloak and a hood. "Mind letting me through?" she asks, words soft but still without a single ounce of give. Standing there, smiling at the gate guards, she cuts a strange figure.

Clearly a traveler even without the strangeness of her fire hair, a crooked smile tugging at her lips.

His wife surges forward to greet her with a laughing, "Chihaya-chan!"

She is tall and slender, a thousand freckles peppered across the bridge of her nose into constellations across her cheeks.

Their eyes meet for a moment over Kanae's shoulder, and she tosses him a grin and a teasing wink.

Blink and you'll miss it. He's not even entirely certain he did see it.

"Kanae-chan!" Their visitor pulls his wife into a hug, seemingly just as glad to see Kanae once more. "And Uchiha-sama."

The weight of Chihaya's gaze is a strange one, because it is at once amused and serious, as though watching him for a reaction, although he hardly has any idea as to what.

"Madara is fine." The brief cold spell had left. While the ground still froze each night, the snow had melted.

Fire Country was not particularly beautiful during this time, all bare branches with a few strangler leaves hanging wet and brown on the trees, hard earth and dead grass.

On warmer days, it thawed a bit, and everyone could slip on the sudden inch of mud.

Truly, he loves his country.

Truly, he does.

Just not always, and the wettest part of winter had always brought out the irritation in him.

"Madara, then." Chihaya smiles, a quick thing that could pass for a knife. "Why not?"

That'd been...simple. "Why not, indeed," he muses. Nearly a year now, and Kanae would not call him thus.

Madara and nothing more.

A simple request, and yet she never has.

And yet, her friend would with the first invitation.

Why is that?

When asked, she would say it was about respect, about what he deserved and what he did not, but he could not help feeling that it ran deeper.

A thought for another time.

Not when there are guests.

Not now that the snow had melted, when his relationship with his sister-in-law is mending, when he's finally found a little bit of balance, no longer teetering like a drunken man. It's been a long road home, but he's almost made it nonetheless.

Kanae chatters on asking questions about the people she knew almost faster than Chihaya could answer them.

"You are barely giving her any breath to respond." And so it was, Kanae's chattered questions too fast for any sane person to keep up with.

She pouts at him. "But I want to know!" Throwing her arms wide, she beams with the happiness that seemingly only those of Uzu could bring her. "I want to know everything! About everyone!"

"There will be time to know before we suffocate our guest with questions, no?"

Okui Chihaya was to stay for a month.

It would be long enough for plenty of conversations, of catching up, of remembering.

There would be time.

Tonight is reserved for reunions and pleasantries.

"Why are you being so logical, Madara-sama?" she asks, pretending to be offended. "I thought you didn't like that."

"I'm making up for lost time." He doesn't know what makes him say this, perhaps he has the presence of mind for such foolish quips now, now when each step is no longer accompanied by a sinking feeling of doubt. "I like to think I'm succeeding."

"But is it truly successful if you still like midnight snacks?" Kanae loops one arm through his and another through Chihaya's and continues onwards. "I do not think such things are particularly logical."

"I said I was making up for lost time." He almost smiles, almost bursts out laughing. "I didn't say I was doing it well."

It surprises her enough for laughter. Like bright gold, it rises into the evening dusk and warms some part of his heart that he didn't realize existed.

As the guest they host is from Uzu, it is only fair to invite Mito.

And where Mito goes these days, Hashirama is not far behind.

Which is very logical and reasonable.

Very logical and reasonable, except then it would be terribly insulting to not invite Tobirama.

Of course, he would rather not invite Tobirama. It didn't matter exactly that he'd found Senju Tobirama a little bit more human these days, he doesn't like Tobirama, and Izuna certainly doesn't.

But it would be rude, inviting Hashirama and Mito and leaving Tobirama to...do whatever he does as a matter of course when left to his own lonely devices.

Tobirama might not like him either, not one iota more since the day Tobirama put a sword through him, but that didn't mean social exclusion wasn't a terrible yawning chasm all the same. He'd felt the lash of disapproval baked into pleasantries before, and he isn't keen on serving the same dish to someone else.

He's twenty-five years old, not a child hiding from visitors under a pile of cats, or a teenager hiding from a princess in the painter's studio.

And the adult thing would be to invite Tobirama and make nice with him all evening.

He's twenty-five years old, so he sends Tobirama an invitation as well and hopes that this action does not end up setting fire to his own hair.

Kanae flits back and forth, chattering all the while at their guest, and he, finding himself out of place, ends up taking a seat by the window with another paper screen before him, this one blank.

There were few screens that had not been at least whimsically decorated with floral motifs and swirling patterns, but this one, the one between the hallway and the kitchen had evaded his attacks on plain screens until now.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Here he is once more, avoiding the question, by hiding behind a screen with a paint brush.

This is nice, somehow, despite being different. Change no longer hurts the same way it used to, like time slipping from his fingertips, like blood gushing out beneath his hands.

But perhaps it's only because change doesn't bring uncertainty and pain anymore.

He writes three invitations, and invites three guests, and when only Hashirama and Mito arrive that night, he finds that this does not — as it would appear — fill him with any sort of happiness whatsoever.

"Mada, Tobi said he was busy tonight." By the way that Hashirama is shifting on his feet, this is a blatant lie, and he would likely have to be three years old again to not notice it.

He snorts at this, and resolves to go out and search for Tobirama himself if he has to, inside Hashirama's own house. "And I'm the daimyo's wife."

Hashirama winces. "Mada, just—"

"Just?" He raises an eyebrow at Hashirama.

"The two of you have never gotten along before, even if I always have wanted you to." Hashirama slumps. "I've given it up as a lost cause."

There's something very deeply aggrieved in Hashirama's tone, as though he's rapidly and quickly sliding back into a depressive spiral of agonized self doubt.

Perhaps the man who he always considered exuberant wore masks to hide his scars from the war.

He doesn't know why he thought Hashirama was any different. He just hid it better, is all.

He just hid it better.

How did he not see this before? Did the haze of pain and grief really blind him so much?

"Well," he says, already pushing his way past Hashirama and on his merry way out the door. "Someone will just have to go and get him then."

The nerve of Senju Tobirama, really.

Was issued an invitation and didn't come.

The nerve of him — the man had never passed up an opportunity to antagonize and irritate him before, why start now?

His self righteous indignation at having his invitation been somehow rejected by Tobirama comes to a head as he wanders through the Senju compound in the vague direction of where he knows Tobirama generally resides.

Funny how he's never been here before.

All he knew about this place was that one, Tobirama lives here if he isn't in the Tower, and two, because Tobirama lives here it gives him a headache and he ought to avoid it.

Which is why of course, when he pushes open the door, and finds Tobirama attempting to climb out the window, that he bursts into wild laughter.

"What are you doing?" There was a time when he wanted to avoid Tobirama at all costs, but could not bear to stay silent under the acerbity of the other man's tongue, which had always cut like a sharp razor, bladed on both sides.

How the earth turns and turns everything on its head with it.

"Escaping." Tobirama deadpans as he resignedly climbs back inside the room, seemingly giving up the idea of running away. "Is there some other reason one might find to jump out one's window at the approach of an unwanted guest?"

"Is there some new reason why I'm so unwanted?" He crosses his arms over his chest, wonders when he'd put away his armor, when he'd stopped wearing the several pounds of extra weight whenever he went out of the house.

"Did there need to be a new reason?" Despite now seemingly giving up the window option as a bad job, Tobirama still hadn't closed it.

If you sail out the window and break your fool neck, Hashirama would cry over spilled milk and never forgive me for anything ever again.

He resists the urge to cover his face with his hands and sigh deeply while screaming an internal scream of passive aggressive frustration.

"I wasn't aware your habitual reaction to my presence is to find the nearest exit and make a fool of yourself by climbing out of it."

Tobirama blinks. "Why are you here?"

...Why is he here?

"I issued an invitation for you to come visit tonight." Good god, has it really gotten to this point? If his past self could see this moment, it might be cause to jump out a window himself. "And I am in the process of reinviting you because you clearly didn't get the message the first time."

"I don't want to come." Tobirama sits back down at his desk, picks up a brush and makes a great show of attempting to ignore him. "I thought I made that perfectly clear to Hashirama-niisan."

The nerve.

His eyes narrow. No, not nerve.

Tobirama's shoulders are hunched, and while he's avoiding looking Madara in the eye, it speaks more of defensiveness than anything else.

"So you're going to spend the rest of your life alone?" This room is more spartan than what he used to live in, only mildly saved by the paper it's single occupant seemingly wants to sink into. Oh, it's not that there's no furniture, because that's not the issue. It's just that this room lacks all personality, all indication that the person who lived here enjoyed living here. "Is that what peace means to you?"

Perhaps he's realized that he had no idea who he is anymore rather recently, hadn't recognized his own laughter the last time he laughed — it'd sounded so different — but clearly he didn't know anyone else half as well as he thought either.

What a difference a year makes.

"What else is it?" Tobirama jabs the tip of his brush hard onto a sheet of paper, ruining the horsehair tip beyond repair. "I wasn't aware you enjoyed my company, or anyone else's for the matter." I know better to go where I'm unwanted.

"That's such a sad life to live." Holding oneself apart from gatherings because there is no place one belonged. He'd been there once.

How strange it is that he shares more in common with Senju Tobirama than he thought.

"I don't need that from you." Suddenly, Tobirama springs to his feet, chair clattering to the ground behind him. "I don't need your pity."

"Believe me," he sighs. "If I pitied you, I'd find you someone else's party to shove you into." Oh, there's the typical migraine from being near this part of Hashirama's house. "You can come if you like, stay here alone and write on paper if you'd like as well." He turns towards the door. "Whatever it is, at least do what makes you happy. Life isn't worth it otherwise." He's done whatever he's come here to do anyway.

Best leave before he makes a further fool of himself.

And if Hashirama lights up when Tobirama ends up at the door later that night, well, he's not satisfied. He's not happy. He wants Senju Tobirama to leave his house.

There is a tiredness in his bones the following morning when he wakes. And it settles into the cracks upon his heart, no matter that he had been happy. It settles and he has no idea how to make it go away. Those cracked edges and hardened corners will never be able to mend themselves properly.

No matter that he'd been just fine.

"You're unhappy." She smooths down his collar, fingers light against his breastbone. "Why?"

"There's no reason." He breathes out. He breathes in. There truly is just...nothing he can explain. This sudden bout of melancholy is so hard to explain. "I just...am not."

She props herself up on one elbow to look at him, a hand warm against the curve of his jaw. "I don't understand."

No, how can she understand? There is nothing, nothing, that has set him off this time, except his own fool heart. It wails.

He pulls her down, so that her head rests against his chest. "Stay. Stay here please. I feel so cold."

She stays, her breath warm against his skin. "But you were happy just last night."

Her confusion is not without reason. He'd been happy, been even jovial, been in the mood to entertain guests even, in a way that he had not been for such a long time.

A rare ray of sun in a world that had been a washed out gray for so long.

So long it's been, and while he can still see the colors, they seem to have washed out of him like the tide pulling away from the shore. Suddenly, he'd tipped from happiness to despondency.

"And yet now I am not." He smiles, rue tinging the corners of his lips. "I will be happy again, I promise you."

His moods have endings now when they didn't before. They no longer drag on and on burdening him until he can think of nothing else, but still they do linger. They linger in this twilight zone, even when the sun is shining, even though she loves him.

He breathes in, "I'm sorry that you must live with me." He is sorry she has to live with this version of him, the one that has baffling moods and a tendency to slide into sadness so easily without even a good reason why. "It has to be hard." What must it be like to live with him? To see this happen, even though she cares, even though she has done nothing wrong? She has only ever offered him tenderness and understanding even when he was least deserving of it. "You only ever got half a man when you deserve the world."

Because she deserves someone without broken moods, someone who is happy and sad for reasons not a nothing pulled from the ether.

"Why are you only half a man?" Her eyes follow him, and once perhaps he would have described them as accusing, back when he did not know her. Now he only sees concern."You know I don't think of you that way."

"Because I am broken and you cannot fix that, even if you love me, and even if I love you." He laughs. A broken man with broken moods and nothing — nothing can fix that. "and I do love you. I love you because we have no past and yet we share a future. Because for me you are kind and good, and I always gravitate towards good even if I cannot be that."

He'd always gravitated towards what was light and kind in the world, even if he's been neither in a long long time.

She looks at him, long and hard, and he sees little comprehension in her eyes. "Do you understand, Kanae? It is no easy task to love me."

She'd told him that she loved him, but when will she learn that it's a task so thankless—

"What do you fear?"

The truth? "I fear the day you leave me."

"I won't leave you."

And it is not as if he thinks she lies, because she does not lie, not to him.

"Oh, Kanae," he sighs, "everyone leaves me." Everyone does in the end. He is not someone who people come to, not someone whose family is ever increasing. He's someone who's left.

She puts her head on his chest, holds him so delicately as though he might shatter to pieces in the next second. "Trust me?" She asks it of him, and he cannot deny her. The noise drags itself out of his throat, and perhaps in the language of sobs, it'd pass as a 'yes.' "I won't leave you," she says, voice feather light. "Not now," and after a pause, "Not later either."

It makes him laugh, it does, not quite happy, though his equilibrium is tender and frail in its newness. "No?" he whispers.

"No." Her answer is firm, sure, in ways he cannot hope to find himself right now.

He turns his face towards her, breathes out softly. "I trust you."

I trust you. I trust you. I trust you.

It thrums in his heart, it sings in his blood, a steady, steady beat.

It is the evening after his sudden morning descent into gloom, when he sits with Izuna out on the front porch, hands clasped around his knee as he watches Izuna play with a shogi piece. A knight, how apt. "Still choosing a position?"

"Mmmm," Izuna shifts, rolling the flat shogi piece between his fingers. "Niisan, are you happy?"

The question catches him half by surprise. "I am more alive than I have been in a long time."

"But that doesn't answer the question." Izuna finally sets his piece down, an advancement of one square forward, and one to the left. "I asked if you're happy."

"Doesn't one have to be alive to be happy?" Considering the events of the past morning, could he really be said to be happy? Perhaps.

Perhaps happiness is not the absence of sorrow, but how much his heart still sings despite it.

"That's not an answer to my question either." Izuna frowns.

Madara moves a pawn forward a space and announces the change to Izuna. "And if I were to tell you that yes, I am happy, would you believe me, Otouto?"

"I would believe it more than if you were to tell me that two years ago," Izuna counters his question with mild words, but the frown still etches lines about his jaw.

How strange it is, that Izuna, too, has aged.

They, neither of them, are as young as when they first began.

"But this answer does not satisfy you."

Izuna is the thinker of the two of them, more prone to analyzing, though that hardly meant that his brother didn't feel anything.

"It is not that it doesn't," Izuna slides a pawn forward, one space.

"But you are unhappy." Or rather, if his brother isn't unhappy, he isn't happy either.

"I couldn't help you." They've stopped playing shogi altogether now, Izuna with his arms resting on his knees, Madara with his hands clasped leaning against a wooden support beam. "Nothing I did could bring you back."

"Is that what this is?" He sighs. "You are not sad because my answers do not satisfy you, but because they satisfy you too well, and it was not your doing."

"It is not a reasonable feeling." Izuna's voice is still mild, still level and calm, but he hears the waver, the hint of breakage on the word 'reasonable,' and wonders when it started to become like this. "After all, I have only wished for you to be happy. Why should it matter if it was something I could do or not?"

Through all these long years, Izuna has been his most constant guiding light, the brother of both flesh and heart, the one he would die to protect, and still would.

"It is not because you did not love me enough." No, it would never be that. It'd not been love that began to tip his balance back to sanity. "It was never that."

"Then why?" What did she do, Niisan, that I could not?

"Show me that there was peace to be had, that we live in it now, as we will not do forever." It is perhaps this, in the end, that had broken his heart and made it new all over again, the gratitude he laces into his kisses, in the word "love," that makes her blush when she hears it. "It is not that you did not work towards peace, Otouto. It is not that."

"So that is what it is." Izuna breathes out and smiles, a touch of rue on his lips. "It is because she is from a different shore. She has lived it, and we have not."

My living hope.

"Ah," he agrees. "It is that, perhaps."

"Only perhaps?" Izuna laughs. "You are trying to recant what you have admitted to me then?"

"Well," and he laughs at this, "being loved did not hurt."

A.N. In which there is both hilarity and sadness and a serious discussion about the whys and wherefores of love.

I return! Sorry this chapter took so long, (nine months oh no oh no) but I return, and I am glad for it.

Thank you so much to everyone who's reviewed, favorited and followed, you all are incredibly amazing.

~Tavina