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Wrong.
Tobirama never thought it was wrong.
He wakes up with hands on his body, sweat-stuck skin, and his stomach seizes, a frantic clench of muscles, a beat of revulsion. His brother is stroking his hair, lips upturned – playful, almost, uncanny-bright in the persistent, early-morning darkness. Chaste – it’s quite nearly chaste. He’s up on his elbow, palm cradling Tobirama’s skull where it used to be soft, playing some mindless game with his other hand draped across his stomach.
“It’s just me,” Hashirama promises, and Tobirama forces the tension out of his body with an exhale. It’s been a while since Hashirama has had time to waste with him in bed – he bullies himself into appreciation with all the grace of the half awake, letting his head fall back into his brother’s palm.
It’s peaceful. It’s just the two of them.
“Were you dreaming?”
Tobirama fixes his focus to the ceiling. There’s nothing to see, it’s still early. Why is his brother up so early? Why is he?
“No.”
“It sounded like you were” Hashirama dips forward into the crook where Tobirama’s neck meets his shoulder, laying claim with the blunt of his teeth. Into the too-thin flesh: “It sounded like you were enjoying yourself.”
“Did it?” His brother’s breath adds to the tackiness of his skin. He smells like the morning – too sour without sun. Tobirama’s first memories were of loving the dark – a solace from an all-consuming light which seized his senses by the throat. It was what he knew to be comfortable.
“Why were you enjoying yourself without me?” Hashirama is practically purring, rolling half onto his stomach and half onto Tobirama’s. They’re pressed together, ribs to ribs, slotted like the rungs of a ladder, dovetailed. The hand in his hair turns to a vice grip. Tobirama lets out a breathless little sound, conditioned for this. Braced for this.
Hashirama dresses him up just so he can unwrap him again, layer by layer, teeth and hands.
Tobirama wakes up with his brother between his thighs, dark head ducking in the amber light of afternoon. It hurts with its intensity, too bright and too much after so long – a sort of pain that flirts with the knife’s edge of pleasure, but he wants it over with all the same. At times like these, he forces himself lax and open, tracing the wood grain of the ceiling with his gaze. Hashirama grew the bones of this house – sometimes, when he works too fast, the grain is thinner than it should be, starved of water by how it has been forced to grow too quickly. Tobirama probes at his own chapped lips, mindless. There’s a dull pain in his stomach – it takes him a minute too long to place it as hunger, and the moment he gives it a name, it becomes sharp enough to steal his attention away from the situation at hand.
“I – Anija, let me up, I’m hungry,” he says without thinking. When was the last time he ate?
Hashirama’s eyes are dark, darker than his hair, endless chasms like holes punched into his face. He smiles, magnanimous, nods, and grabs the base of his cock, moving to straddle Tobirama’s chest with his legs flung wide.
He’s big. Every part of him is big. Tobirama is intimately familiar with the mountain range of his brother’s shoulders, the thick cords of muscle that make up his thighs. He imagines his ribs bending inwards with the weight, breath forced to escape by any means possible. Hashirama swallows up all the air in the room, burning and bright. His stomach squeezes.
“Open up.”
It is suddenly very hard to move his jaw. Hashirama helps him along with his thumb on Tobirama’s bottom lip, coaxing himself inside.
Tobirama wakes up to find himself seated at his own kitchen table. His food is partitioned the way he likes, all kept separate. There’s something in the back of his throat – rice? He coughs, once, in an attempt to clear himself out. Twice. Takes great gulps of stagnant water that’s been sitting for far too long. Wasn’t he hungry? His food is only half eaten, the same amount subtracted from every section the way it looks when he eats his way through the rotation – methodical, apparently, even without his conscious input. He invents the memory of it – himself, alone in his kitchen, back to the door. He works with the precision that is present in everything he does.
It sounds right, at least.
He swallows. Calmly stands, bends at the waist, and coughs up his dinner into the sink, heaving like a willow in a fitful storm.
Tobirama wakes up with his brother’s spend on his face, sticking his left eye shut. There are tears in the corners of his eyes, unbidden and base. He’s stiff, as though he’s been kept still for a very, very long time. He’s stiff, but only in the wrong places. His body creaks when he moves, blunt pain stabbing up his spine in warning.
The skin of his stomach is taut in all the wrong ways – he tries not to pick, not to linger, not to peel at the crust, knowing that it’ll be his undoing. It's the glue holding him together, for now.
He is alone again, as he was at his kitchen table, but this time, he’s sprawled in some approximation of relaxation with no one to witness his pantomime of seduction. Realizing this drives him further taut, a thousand conflicting urges transmuted to electrical impulses, spasming in the flex and twitch of his fingers. His throat is hoarse, but not sore. That’s odd. That’s –
Tobirama wakes up with lips on his skin – no, he’s staring at a treaty, he thinks it’s a treaty – the letters sway. It’s too dark to read by. His jaw is loose, mouth dry where it’s been hanging open. His face is clean. It’s not waking up so much as surfacing from cool, deep water, time gone loose and butterfly-wing-fine, coming apart at the seams. He inhales as though the breath is his very first, trying to anchor himself to where he sits.
His brother must be here. His brother has been here, always, no further than an arm’s length away. His brother is so far away all the time, as simultaneously constant and distant as the sun, and Tobirama needs him like something caught, hopeless, in his orbit.
Tobirama wakes up – no, he’s been awake – his hands – are those his hands? Someone’s hands are trembling on the desk. He feels wood. Is it really dark? He can feel his brother’s hands on his ribcage, his brother’s hands on his back, his brother’s hands creeping into every private crevice that he has left, plundering all that he has to give. His fingers jump violently, palms spasming. He is cold sweat and all that it holds together, solid ice, too warm. The world tilts on its axis, swaying and lazy, summer, autumn, winter, spring. Winter, his winter, the furthest point from summer, hot and bright. He's frozen in placid water. He knows it surely, all at once – he won't melt again, not this spring. Summer can't reach him here.
Tobirama wakes up. The ground falls out from under his feet. He can feel his brother’s hands.
“Anija –” dry, dry lips cry out without his permission, all traces of panic as distant as the stranger using his mouth. “Anija.”
His brother is there, once, twice, ten times. He’s ten years old with hair cropped to his ears. He’s ancient, rooted to the ground by the net-woven remains of their forebearers. He’s swimming into focus, expression blurred and inscrutable, identifiable only by his hair. Dark, dark hair, fine as spider silk. It’s all he can see.
The world jams back into place, stuck shut like a faulty door.
“What – what’s?”
“Breathe,” Hashirama says, funneling his overabundant intensity into Tobirama’s pores where they’re connected skin to skin. “Breathe,” he says again, as if it’s the easiest thing in the world. All the wind in the world, the gentle sun, the crashing tide – Hashirama pours it into his skin, into his face, healing and destroying all at once.
“I – I think I’m sick, Anija, I’m sick, I’m sick –”
“Breathe,” says Hashirama. Muscle, blood, sinew, and bone.
The words reach him.
Tobirama has never known to disobey.
There is nothing, when Tobirama awakens. A clean white void. A slate wiped clean. The sun is rising – early morning. He can’t see it properly. There are two of him, it seems, one looking inwards and the other looking outwards, the uncanny union of slate and sunlight, drifting motes of dust, nothing at all and the impossibility of everything.
His first-second self has skin that is too cold. His second-first self is too warm – hot – warm – it’s as though he’s boiling – he’s almost cold – as though he’s freezing. He is not one, and he is not the other, and he doesn’t care about any of it. He’s drifting between time itself – he is the air, and the ground, and himself, and the white, white blankness. He wonders at his brother, the common thread, weaving him together and rendering him apart. He is paralyzed. It’s quite nice. Should he find it so nice?
There is a touch to his cheek, scalding-hot, and the likeness of his brother invades both sets of eyes. Inevitable. He moves to sit up, a sluggish shuffle upwards, and is stopped. He blinks, bleary-eyed still, and tries again before noticing the resistance, how it grips him by the throat just as it has him by the wrists, both of him, all of him.
“Shh,” Hashirama urges before he can panic. “You were trying to hurt yourself. I can't let that happen.”
The press of lips to his forehead is gentle and lingering – a balm of poison, such sweet relief. Tobirama doesn't remember it, doesn't quite believe it, but he's too tired to kick up a fuss.
– He had locked himself in his lab for two weeks, telling himself it had nothing to do with hands on his body or the lack thereof. For two weeks, he submerged himself in his own silence and rote procedure and clinical detachment, the pressure of chakra coalescing around his hands, circulating through his core with a dull roar. Hashirama had found him, of course, and he had been hoisted over a shoulder, dragged to bed, fucked to sleep, told that he was only hurting himself. On two hours of sleep, it had been easier to agree than it might have been otherwise.
– He had tried to run away, before he knew better, when he was a boy, white-hair and gangly doe-legged. He had packed a bag carefully over the span of weeks, hidden in a hole he'd dug himself and wrapped in waxed paper. He had drawn the most recent maps from memory by moonlight-silence broken by brother's in-and-out rumble-roar. He had stolen handfuls of rice, here and there, all in preparation. He'd woken up one morning with the sense of something missing, and he'd slipped out of their shared bedroom on silent feet. The earth was cool and damp beneath his hands, lodging underneath his fingernails, packed tight. Earthworms writhed and squirmed over his fingers, muddy like the stone in his stomach.
There, where his supplies should’ve been, was a sprout, already germinated – all tender stink of fresh life and supple bones, waxy green and new-growth yellow. He took the sign for what it was: a kind hand on his shoulder to lead him in the right direction – a hand that would tighten into a fist, regardless of whatever stood in its path, should he disobey further. Hashirama was still asleep when he slipped back into their room.
Both Tobiramas pull and pull and pull some more, with shoulders and elbows and wrists. Something seems to shift out of place, and he can feel his heartbeat in his wrist, his brother's chakra around the edges, coaxing, let me in, let me in, let me in, unrepentant. He only has enough wherewithal to panic, to string his defenses up, taut. There’s a put-upon sigh. He drifts some more.
Tobirama wakes up with the kunai knife already pressed to his stomach, with manacle-iron hands around his wrist, gazing into his father’s eyes.
“Let me die with honor,” he finds himself saying. “He’s going to kill me. He’s going to be the death of me. Let me.”
“Tobirama,” there is no gentle teasing in that voice, no room for argument. It’s Butsuma’s voice, Butsuma’s face. Butsuma is back, but the bone was never set, it’s grown into itself, it’s blood to blood and bone to bone.
“He’s killing me,” Tobirama whispers, a confession. “Forgive my weakness. This is all that’s left. For the honor of our ancestors –”
“Tobirama,” Butsuma snaps. There’s something in his eyes that Tobirama has never seen before, frantic even through all his steel.
“Let me!” He shouts, surprised at his own volume. His throat is sore, bark-rough, every bit as chapped as his lips. “Let me, I’m useless now, if he needs to fuck me he can fuck me when I’m dead just as easily, I –”
– There is wood straining his jaw apart, holding him to the floorboards. He aches.
Tobirama wakes, certain he will never truly surface again. In the mirror, Hashirama is brushing his hair, hair down to his shoulders. His yukata is open across his chest, a single layer, something easy to dress him in. His fingernails are neatly trimmed. There are new lines beneath his eyes, and Hashirama hums a lilting tune like nothing he’s ever heard before as the light fractures into splinters.
There is something filling his chest, swelling and smoothing over the pained creases, if only for a moment. Hashirama is entirely focused, wholly devoted, eyes downcast with his attention on a snarl. He works over it with his long fingers, patient, sure to not pull. He’s lanced through with gold, kintsugi sunshine, summer, a love so harsh it burns and peels everything it touches. Tobirama smiles, to think it may be the last thing he ever gets to see, this catatonia in service to his brother.