Disclaimer: Kishimoto owns Naruto. I just like to fool around with it.

Notes: Here you will find a collection of ficlets and character snapshots. My goal is mostly to explore Tobirama's personality, but any canon character with whom he might have come into contact is fair game. I will state right away that since this is essentially a writing exercise, I am open to taking requests for characters or situations, provided that they fit the molds of what was described above. I'm marking the fic as complete, because each chapter will be self-contained and I have no idea how many of them there will be in full. I'll just keep writing them until I'm satisfied. Cheers!

Summary: Tobirama's thoughts on Hashirama. (Because no one's a bigger closet fanboy than him and he should really get that underlying hero-worship checked by a doctor sometime.)

Of Gods.

Hashirama never understood it.

He did not understand it when he was three and the only one who could calm down a fussing Tobirama. He did not understand it when he was four and his toddling brother developed the uncanny ability to always find him, no matter where he was or who might be near him. He might have understood it when he was six and his father declared Tobirama the most gifted sensor ever born to the clan, but he missed his chance then. At ten, when he was put in charge of his own squad of Senju ninjas, he was still clueless. And at eighteen, when his father died and he ascended to the position of leadership among the clan, it became inevitable that he would never understand just how different from everyone else he was.

He spoke of equality, that every person on earth suffered equally, and that therefore ninjas had the capacity to come together as one, bonded by their experiences, to put an end to all wars. They could live in peace and harmony, if only they understood that everyone else was the same as them.

Tobirama recognised the lie that hid inside that truth clearly. Hashirama's was a beautiful idea, powerful enough in its simplicity to draw all sorts of people around it, and his older brother believed in it with all his heart. But he never let himself see how everyone who deposited their faith in that idea looked up to him and was instinctively following his lead. They were not living by it, they were living it through him. He never understood how separate he stood from the rest of the world, how he belonged to a category of his own, apart even from his own family, and Tobirama had long decided that he would not be the one to cut his brother's wings by showing him the reality of those who lived down on the earth.

God of Shinobi, the people called Hashirama. The man who would become first Hokage usually brushed aside the title, convinced that it was a fabrication of storytellers who wanted to embellish their history books. He never understood the truth in it.

Gods were not gods by choice or through flattery. Rather, they were: their actions, a consequence of an unrepeatable nature; and their nature, as grand and unapproachable as a forest fire clearing the path for the fragile lives that would be dragged by the momentum of its wake.