Hashirama tips his head back. Hashirama probes with soft fingertips that press against his soft palette and make his head go fuzzy. He lolls into the contact, and then catches himself and snaps rigid.

When he squeezes his hands into fists, they flex against unyielding wood, the only part of him showing. The rest is cocooned, folded up into his brother's embrace. It feels like suffocation.

He catches his bearings the best he's able to – his head is buzzing. It's something meant to calm him, he thinks – maybe an aphrodisiac, with the way his blood feels electric-warm, throat sweet. His eyelids are heavy and his bones itch.

“Good morning,” Hashirama greets, upbeat as always. He's four shapes – face, hair, and eyes that catch on murky light. Weightlessly suspended, it's like being caught underwater, just for a second.

Through cotton-mouth, Tobirama recites his usual demand, although the heaviness he puts into it is a stone that has been sanded by time. “Let me go.” Curt, straight to the point. Hashirama doesn't play at pity today, he just leans forward, dusting an electric kiss over his brother's eyebrow.

Yes, Tobirama thinks. Definitely an aphrodisiac. He’s hardened past the point of comfort in his wooden coffin, and he grits his jaw in an attempt to dispel it. If he could just redirect the blood flow –

“Did you sleep well, Tobi?” Hashirama asks, cheerful. He tucks a stand of hair behind his brother's ear. It's grown long again since he's been in captivity.

Hashirama pouts. It's unbefitting of the clan head, the Hokage, the god of shinobi.

“What did I do to earn your silence?”

“Let me go,” Tobirama repeats. He tenses his arm to the extent that he's able to, knowing full well that it's not enough.

(It will never be enough. He cannot escape Hashirama, and he cannot escape Hashirama's influence.)

A leg would be better, easier, but he doesn’t have much of a choice.

“You know that I can't do that,” Hashirama's mouth tightens a bit. Some dormant art of Tobirama – perhaps the one part of him that Hashirama has been unable to kill and resurrect – twinges at the way his brother's face twists. He buries it in a shallow grave of its own. “You can't survive on your own anymore. I’m just looking out for you.”

Some years ago, Tobirama would've called him mad, spitting in his face. Some years before that, Tobirama would've appealed to the logic that had died and been buried with their younger brothers. In the softly shadowed time before even that, he would've silently complied, understanding that Hashirama held his best interests in mind. He would've gone pliant at the first press of lips, completely lax at the seeking tongue. Remembering is like looking into a room shrouded in gauzy curtains.

He curses his naivety, and he curses his devotion to his family, but, above all, he curses himself, for being unable to die properly once and for all.

He still goes pliant at the first press of lips. There's an aphrodisiac in his veins, and he's unsure why Hashirama bothers wasting his warmth and life on what is cold and dead.

(He remembers snowmelt off of the mountains, sapping spring warmth with enough raging force to haul along a felled tree. It's been a long, long time since he saw snowmelt, mountains, or springtime, but a felled tree is still the first thing he sees every morning.)

His brother's mouth is soft and all-conquering. When he doesn't get his way, he switches tack until he does. He draws his tongue across Tobirama's teeth, utterly pointless. It only goes to show he has all the time in the world to waste, idling.

“Tobirama,” he says to spit-slick lips. To add insult to injury, he's patient, as if speaking to a newborn who couldn't hope to understand him. “Won't you call me ‘Anija’ again? Say ‘Anija’.”

He names the tension despair. He's feverish, pupils dilated, breaths shallow. His brother, the perpetrator, is no better off, working himself into a temper.

“Say, ‘Anija, I love you, thank you for keeping me safe. Thank you for always looking out for me’.”

The ravings of a madman.

“Tobirama, please. It's been so long,” their foreheads knock together with enough force to scatter the few, fleeting thoughts he has left.

(In the brief lull of peace, when there was time for such things, they kept koi in the inner courtyard. They were regal and lazy the majority of the time, but when they were set on something, they would throw themselves, bull-headedly, forwards, or disperse all at once.)

“Don't you love me?” Hashirama pleads. “What more do you want?” And then, in anticipation of Tobirama's next words, “don't, don't, I can't. I can't bear it, Tobirama.”

If Tobirama gives an inch, Hashirama will take a mile. Even if it hurts his wooden heart, there is nothing left to say.

Still, their family is all the same, right down to the very last peacetime fish, bloated on the surface of the pond on a hot summer day that threatened to spill over.

(What Tobirama wouldn't give to bloat and spill over, anything, anything –)

“Let me go.”

Hashirama's disappointment is every color –

“All I've done for you.” Is black. “Do you remember the funeral?” Is blue. “I wanted to kiss you with him right there. I wanted to take you on his gravestone.” Is filthy, lurid red.

– Hashirama kisses like he's losing his brother all over again, grasping, consuming. With the buzz at a fever pitch and needy hands in his hair, Tobirama comes against unyielding wood. It must be springtime for his brother to be worked up like this.

Afterwards, Hashirama lets his swaddling fall away, taking him in his arms. Tobirama's muscles are atrophied, his skin cold and bruised like overripe fruit. What’s left of his legs are stumps – he’s easier to carry, this way, and less likely to get away. He’s nude. In the past, it would’ve bothered him.

(Sometimes, it still bothers him. Still, there’s nothing he can do about it. He's been stripped of his dignity and buried like a seed. Does Hashirama expect him to germinate, sprout, and flourish?)

“See, you do love me,” Hashirama continues his monologue. “You came so quickly this time! Just from kissing! That’s my otouto.” His arms are secure where they’re wrapped around his brother. He’s being held like a baby – one arm under his rear, one arm around his waist, a point of contact ending at the midpoint of his back. As they pass through the chambers, the light takes on a new quality. His brother is rendered in soft bioluminescence, green as the bottom of a river. There are crows feet at the corners of his eyes, but a crease between his eyebrows as well. He’s well put together, the curtain of his hair hanging long down his back. He always dresses in a simple yukata for his visits, exposing a V slice of his broad chest. His features are square and reliable. He looks like their father did right when he woke up – tousled, but dignified.

Subterranean chambers give way to the steamy heat of a spring. Hashirama has already prepared a simple wooden bucket for washing, a brush, various vials, their contents vastly varied, and that beloathed basket woven from Hashirama’s bedside rushes.

“I know you don’t like it, Tobirama, but it’s the easiest way,” Hashirama rambles, setting Tobirama down as gently as he can. He treats his brother like something liable to break – a dandelion, maybe, wont to scatter to the wind. Tobirama says nothing. Hashirama’s guilt smells like the sweet loam of decay. He lifts the basket into the water before undressing.

“Isn’t the water nice?” He asks, toeing the surface. “It’s the perfect temperature, isn’t it? I checked earlier. It should be just right – although maybe a bit warm for you, since you run cold. If you get too warm, just lift your arms out of the water. The stones shouldn’t be hot.”

Some part of Tobirama wants to scream, but then Hashirama would rush to comfort him, smothering him in an embrace and whispering a hundred different apologies into the soft skin below his ear. He would take Tobirama to his bed of soft moss and stretch out beside him, speaking frankly to a brother who died long, long ago.

(He still speaks of village matters, from time to time. He reports on the health of his wife and children. He no longer speaks of Madara. “A new ramen shop started up,” he had said the other day. “It smells wonderful. I’ve been thinking of taking Mito there, what do you think?”)

This next part is the worst – worse than coming untouched, worse than being carried like an infant, worse than being mothered, worse than even the basket. It’s the part where Hashirama lays his hands on him, hands burning with the same sticky potential as a fetus, or the heat of fermentation, smoothing down Tobirama’s chakra pathways through his bruised-fruit skin, paying no heed to the stench of rot.

He imagines that, if he were to cut through his skin, he would see the hundreds and thousands of fibers connecting the forest floor, mycelium in place of nerves, taproots for his veins, tree bark for his bones. On the surface, he’s as soft as a fallen peach.

Worse still is the way that Hashirama chants under his breath, eyes glassy and far away. His hair pools out in the water, forehead pressed into Tobirama’s stomach, the lip of the basket listing horribly. “I love you,” he says, unhinged and lovesick. “I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you.”