Summary: Instead of waking up on a battlefield as shinobi from all the nations stare at him with fear, he awakens to bird song and a cool spring breeze curling around his frame. MadaTobi Time Travel fix-it

I'm not starting another madatobi fic without finishing my kitsune!madara fic what are you even talking about? hahahahha...

ab·solve

((ab·solve

/əbˈzälv,əbˈsälv/

verb

set or declare (someone) free from blame, guilt, or responsibility.))

i. (is it all an illusion)

Madara does not see what he has become for a long, long time.

He would like to shove all of the blame onto Zetsu's immoral shoulders, but he knows he can not. He knows that it was his insecurities that drove him further into depression; his own volatile nature that made all those around him wary and distrustful.

He was the one that ordered Hashirama to kill his brother or kill himself. He burned with grief and he uttered the harsh words that almost ended the last line keeping him afloat. Madara stopped him, sure, told him to forget it.

Yet Madara still burned on the inside. He smoldered as Konoha took form around him. He breathed pain and carried the weight of broken dreams on his shoulders. He felt like a forgotten toy as everyone managed to move on without him. As his clan grew, as couples got married and children were born, he remained stagnant in a depression of his own making.

He burned himself with bitter hatred and Zetsu didn't have to lift a finger until the very end. Madara doesn't know himself as well as he thought he did, not after Zetsu's many manipulations, but he likes to think he never would've left Konoha if he had been left to his own devices. He can see himself living in seclusion at the very back of the Uchiha clan; retired from shinobi work and clan responsibilities. He could've drunk himself to death that way, lonely and unfulfilled without a single sympathetic soul in sight. Instead, he found that damn stone tablet and he read it. He read it and he believed in some nonsensical dream that he could one day have Izuna back.

He was a fool.

He believes everything is his idea, that he has the world in his grasp and that they don't even realize it. He finds Obito and he knows that this is the piece of the puzzle he was missing, the general that will lead his army to absolution.

Madara thinks about that little boy now. That little boy who was loud and determined and so in love with his best friend that he pushed himself beyond his limits in the hope that he could return to her just that much sooner.

He pictures Obito and he wants to slit his own throat in at the disgust he feels for himself.

He remembers the looks he received before he left the village. The wary hesitance that the village handled him with. He can picture the suspicion that flowed through his clan as his mood grew darker and darker. He can see the moment when clan children stopped coming up to him, gapped-tooth grins on display. He can pinpoint the moment Kagami, the little boy who used to smile so sweetly up at him, hesitated to approach him.

Madara had sneered at them all, enraged that they would suspect him of something untoward. That they would hesitate to let children around him in fear of what harm he might cause them. He would mutter to himself at night, still angry after another day spent under scrutiny. He didn't like being watched with suspicion, but their heavy gazes were nothing next to the idea that he would hurt kids.

Madara wanted peace to protect kids; the very idea that he would stoop so low was absurd!

And yet, while Madara had stewed in his futile hatred, he had done the exact thing he had been accused of all those years ago.

Madara never hurt Kagami or any other child while he was in the village, but he definitely hadn't held back on Obito. He had dragged that boy from under that rock and he had nursed him back to health. He had calculated how to heal him, how to get him strong, and then he had told Zetsu to break him.

All Obito talked about was returning home and Madara needed to teach him that there was no home left to return to. The day Obito returned covered in blood and broken, Madara felt so smug he actually laughed for the first time in decades.

Madara had become the monster he had always refused to believe he was.

Then he dies because he was old and he awaited the moment Obito and Zetsu resurrected him. He wasn't physically awake, no consciousness to really speak of, but he had brief moments of awareness that spoke of something else beyond death. It was during one of these odd aware moments that Madara caught a glimpse of his future.

Time isn't real; not to the dead, anyway. Time is not linear and it repeats and loops back on itself. When you're dead, there's no reason why you can't view these twists and turns, caught in the current until its natural end.

It's when Madara catches a glimpse of an adult Obito next to himself that he truly understands the impact of watching the future unfold before his eyes.

Her name is Kaguya and she snuffs the life out of Madara with something as simple as a thought.

Her plot is revealed to the large mass of shinobi facing off against her and Madara watches as what he thought to be salvation is secretly damnation in disguise. He sees Obito make his own decisions for the first time in decades and he sees the power of reincarnation at work when two brothers stand together instead of apart.

He sees all of his hard work go up in ashes and he realizes that none of it ever really belonged to him. That he had chased a silly dream on the words of a false tablet and a will that wasn't even his own.

Madara doesn't see the destruction he has caused until it is too late; he is dead and now he wishes he would stay that way in fear of the future he sees before him. If he was resurrected, he can not guarantee that he would remember any of the things he has become aware of while dead. What if he forgets and he follows this broken path? Madara will go down as the villain of the story he was just a footnote in.

Madara, for the first time in years, is scared.

:D yes? D: no? :{| mustache?