My prompt for myself: Hurt-comfort post Mogamiland where Mob runs to Reigen. Somehow it turns into badtouch. For hurt-comfort reasons ^_^

Which. Of course ended up with Mob trying to coerce Reigen into sex. I'm 99% sure that's not what I meant to write.

He's been restless, tapping fingers and clenching toes. He's been looking out the window, and it's been raining – not the way it threatened to back in Minori’s head –

Constant glazed-gray overcast, humidity that he could feel in his elbows and knees and the webs of his fingers and–

It's been quiet. He catches glimpses of himself in the mirror and he's still not getting taller, but he aches. He strains his eyes trying to make out shapes in the dark, late at night, and tries to pick sounds out of breath and silence that never stops humming. He doesn't sleep. The worst is over and he can't exhale.

—

He's been quiet. He's been remembering how to breathe without any relief left to tide him over, without that dense weight knotted up in his chest.

—

He’s in Reigen’s apartment, and the lights are off, and Reigen is using a chair as a bedside table.

“Sorry for the mess,” he says, as though by reflex – it must be reflex, because there’s no mess, barely anything that says anyone lives here at all except the dishes in the sink and the smell of stale cigarettes. Reigen curses under his breath. His back is turned, and he’s filling up a kettle, turning on the stove.

“You shouldn’t stay here long. Your parents will worry.”

“They won’t. They know I’m staying overnight.”

“I – I didn’t say you could stay overnight, Mob, get that out of your head.” Reigen sounds tired. Worn and rumpled and untidy. He doesn’t sit, idling around his apartment, not looking at Shigeo, and it aches like something that shouldn’t be hollow in his chest. He smooths a hand over his face, smiles like a cornered animal. It aches.

“I’m staying.”

“Stubborn.”

Shigeo has never wanted much.

Shigeo gets the things he does want.

Shigeo wants Reigen.

Shigeo is in Reigen’s apartment, and the kettle is shrieking, and he’s sitting on Reigen’s hips. The lights aren’t on. It’s late evening, hot summer, sticky tension winding hot. Reigen’s head is turned to the side. He’s thrashing.

“The kettle, Mob,” he says, stumbling over himself. “Tea – tea, you want tea, right? The k-kettle,” Shigeo grinds down, hard. Rolls his hips, inexpert, misses, down to bone. “Mob. Mob, get off, I’m serious, I’ll fire you, I’m not kidding, get off of me get –”

And then their mouths are crushed together, city lights through the sliver between curtains, heat and heat and heat, bloating skin, Reigen bucks, slams his head back onto the floor, groans and tapers off into a sob. Shigeo can’t stop now. He can’t. The pressure is building in his stomach, and he needs this, and Reigen can give him what he needs.

“Mob,” he tries where their lips are mashed together. “Mob, Mobmobmob, Shigeo, Shigeo. I’ll let you – I’ll let you, let me get up. I need to take the kettle off the stove.”

There’s something swooping in his stomach, something roiling and surging, motion sickness. His senses are sharper. His vision is clearer. Reigen is tensing, wrists, legs, he’ll run, Shigeo can see it trailing behind his eyes, infrared.

“I’m sorry. I can’t,” he’s horribly breathless, stretched between Reigen’s wrists and hips, the bony lines of him through too much fabric. His gakuran is riding up. There’s a sliver of stomach showing, flushed skin. Reigen is enjoying it, he realizes – he’s hard, pulsing into Shigeo’s inner thigh. His cheeks are ruddy, his hair is a wreck, his pupils dilated, his breath coming shallow. His blood is shrieking. The kettle hovers off the stove, perfect, pin-drop silence, a climax in its own right.

“Shishou,” Shigeo whispers into the new silence. “You want –”

“– I want you to get up.”

Reigen is tactfully looking at nothing, and there’s nothing left in his voice. Shigeo is perched, precarious, straining to stretch across Reigen’s narrow hips which dig into his thighs. There’s Reigen’s saliva in his mouth, Reigen’s sweat on his body. He wants everything, blood and bone. He wants Reigen to want him the same way – he wants Reigen to own him, and he wants to be owned.

They’re suspended together in the nothing of the apartment, ten seconds, then twenty. Reigen doesn’t soften.

“You said you’d think about it,” Shigeo says.

“You’re in middle school.”

“Nobody has to know.”

It starts with a touch to his shoulder through the stiff fabric of his gakuran.

They’re on a job. Reigen is speaking, gesturing with one hand and grounding himself with the other perched by Shigeo’s neck.

Reigen probably doesn’t even notice he’s doing it – his hand is casual, those long fingers draping down against his collarbone, and heat races up Shigeo’s spine before he can process the what-when-why. His breath hitches. Something clicks in his throat. He swallows. His vision ripples like liquid summer. It’s over – and it can’t have been more than five seconds, and Reigen looks at him like he missed something important, “were you listening, Mob?” All chiding, that voice he uses just for Shigeo.

“No. Sorry.”

It smells like ozone.

—

And so it’s different.

Everything is the same except for the placement of things, slotted together wrong. Heat up and down his spine. The noticing, insufferable and involuntary – Reigen’s hair like a beacon, Reigen’s long fingers, Reigen’s smile, Reigen’s eyelashes, Reigen’s –

It settles behind his ribs, in front of his heart, wrapped around his lungs and constricting his breath. It sparks on his skin, stinging embers. It’s dangerous, unwieldy, and unnamable. Nausea. Double vision. He thinks he might die, curled up on his futon after skipping dinner, letting it wash over him in heady waves. He can’t stop it. His things are floating, the closet doors gusting open as if in gentle breeze. He presses his fingers to the places Reigen has touched a million times – shoulder, upper back. It’s dark and he can’t see. It’s dark and he can’t think.

—

Summer means more time at the Spirits and Such, sitting at the little desk he keeps forgetting to say he outgrew. His knees knock up against the underside. He imagines cold wafting up from the tile. It’s oppressively hot, cramped, it smells like bodies and the city with the window cracked open. The lights are off, because Reigen says that it keeps things cool.

“Did you bring your homework?” Reigen asks.

“It’s summer.”

“Well, that doesn’t mean you should be slacking off. Summer,” Reigen gestures ambiguously around his office. “Is just another chance to get ahead. While your classmates are out wasting their lives, you’re giving back to your community. And doing your summer homework.”

Shigeo nods, even though Reigen isn’t really looking at him. He doesn’t have summer homework.

Reigen leans back in his chair, feet jutting out the other side of his desk. There’s a sliver of negative space between Reigen and the table, between Reigen’s crossed ankles. “Not a lot of business lately, huh?”

“No.”

“Well, don’t worry. I’m sure we’ll get some soon.”

It’s not quite dark, but it’s dim enough that there aren’t shadows. They’re flat and undefined in the hot, hot office, Shigeo and Reigen, Reigen and Shigeo. Shigeo is wearing his shorts, sticking to his chair, hands sweating on thighs.

“Mob?”

“I’m here.”

“Where else would you be?”

Shigeo shrugs. Reigen still isn’t looking. His eyes are fixed on the ceiling.

“You don’t have plans for the summer, right?”

“No.”

There's a canon gender version but I got further with this one.

She's been waking up wet, staring at the muddy-gray ceiling in her room, not wholly awake or asleep. She's been pawing at herself through her underwear until she feels tight and ready to snap. She's been sweating. It runs down the notches of her spine, soaks through her uniform.

It's almost summer. Life is a lucid dream. She touches herself in the bathroom between classes.

He stopped touching her when her breasts started to grow in

—

She’s sitting on Reigen’s desk, precariously, drawn up close to the far edge. Her breath is caught in her throat, lodged so it’s almost-painful, sugar-sweet with something that fizzes in her veins. Reigen is staring at her, incredulous.

“Mob. Did you need something?”

Her fingernails slice down into the meat of her palms. She wants and wants and wants, and somewhere, want ends and need begins.

She leans forward. Tips back to where she was. Shakes her head. He must feel it – the office is small, the air is humid. She's clammy, palmsweat aerosolized – it's everywhere. Her jaw is tight. Her throat clicks, dry.

“Sorry.”

See? It's always the dialogue that trips me up.

Deidara’s first court-mandated therapy session falls on an overcast, balmy Thursday in June. It’s hotter than the steam out of a teakettle, a thousand degrees warmer than what should ever be tolerable, and his ride’s driving on an expired license with the back doors duct-taped shut. Two blocks from the shrink’s, Hidan cuffs him on the shoulder, laughs spit-spray into his face, and shoves him out onto the street before swerving back down the intersection against the flow of traffic, wheezing out exhaust into Deidara’s face as a final fuck-you.

“Piece of shit,” Deidara hollers, only narrowly avoiding a fate as roadkill.

“Headcase,” Hidan calls back, laughing raucously as he disappears down some industrial side street, and then he’s gone. Deidara would make an attempt on his life if he didn’t know better.

He sweats the rest of the way to the office. It’s not even late June – it’s just about a month after his eighteenth birthday, and the fact that what he did is considered a federal crime but the heat isn’t just goes to show that nobody has their priorities straight. His jeans stick to his legs. He weighs about a million pounds by the time he staggers into the office, and he already knows he reeks. It’s nine in the morning, he’s running off of two hours of sleep, and he stinks of exhaust and sweat. If this is what the next three months are going to look like, he’s just about ready to put on a face and promise that he really regrets it. He feels half dead.

He’s late for his appointment, but they still have him out in the lobby, staring down the clock. The receptionist is a massive fucker whose name badge just reads “Hiruko”.

And the cut content:

“So, what made you decide to become a shrink, hm?” It’s Deidara’s first day of court-mandated therapy, and, if he plays his cards right, he thinks it could be his last.

Hidan cracks the hunk of junk open like an egg twice a month before taping it back together, good as new. It rattles on the highway and screams in the dead of night. The car is practically a performance art.

His guy is an uptight-looking piece of shit wearing an earth-tone cardigan and sitting with his legs crossed. He has the face of an angel and the straight spine of a Catholic schoolteacher, but his honey-eyes are all his – they’re like nothing Deidara has ever seen before.

I originally tried writing this for an exchange, but it was so tailored to my own fetishes that I never put it out there. A good portion of it is stream-of-consciousess.

He wakes up to a hundred and twenty dollars in his PayPal, plastered to hell and back with his tongue glued to the roof of his mouth.

—

He's living off of ramen, but he's found old money in a beige cardigan. He's fifty, but the magic of plastic surgery has immortalized him as a fifteen-year-old with cherub cheeks and cherry-red hair. Sasori, his beautiful benefactor, is a man of specific tastes. He'll pay Deidara five hundred dollars to poison himself and wank on camera. To a man who's stunted himself from cup ramen and rice and beans, it seems like a damn good deal. It's not like he'll die, he’s too pretty and too young. Sasori wouldn't kill him. Sasori sends the poison, curated to Deidara’s exact measurements and metabolism. It's an injection – lucky Deidara isn't squeamish about needles. It's a prick to the forearm, and the effects are almost instant – cottonmouth and nausea, he's not sure how he's ever going to get it up. It's hard enough just getting the camera on, he's clammy and shaking and oh – is this fucking Viagra? No way Sasori made him inject fucking dick pills – but he really feels like he's about to puke all over himself and he has a raging erection and suddenly the world skips forward two steps like a faulty record and he's palming himself, his fingers are spasming and his teeth are on edge and Sasori is expressionless on camera, and Deidara is wondering, can he even get it up anymore? Does botox stunt your dick? But now he's thinking about Sasori’s dick, how it would be small and pretty like the rest of him, like his thin-boned wrists and trim ankles, like his long fingers that he keeps clasped together in his lap. He's wondering how those fingers would feel along his soft palate, reaching in and scooping, hollowing him out. His strange benefactor is inscrutable. His arousal is making him nauseous and his nausea is arousing, the snake is swallowing its own tail and it's triggering its gag reflex. He swallows convulsively. “Heel,” says his Sasori, profoundly brutal in his cruelty. Deidara's throat flutters like wingbeats along the inside of his neck.

—

“I'm seeing him tonight, hn,” Deidara says, cocky. His head is tipped into his hand, hair spilling over his shoulder. “I barely have to do anything, he just pays me. The other day I woke up to a hundred and twenty bucks in my account.”

“For being a camwhore?” Hidan is standing at the counter, pouring water from the kettle onto their noodles with excessive vigor. The water splashes out onto his arm, flecking freckles onto uncanny skin. Deidara saw him reach into a boiling pot, once.

“It's not like that,” he protests, not knowing why he bothers. Bothering anyway. “Camwhores can be just anyone, but he picked me, hm?”

“Yeah, whatever. Don't make too much.”

—

The call connects. He's sitting in the most presentable corner of his room, widthwise on the double mattress on the floor. His blinds are askew in all directions, his clothes are all over the floor, and it smells like armpit, but Sasori doesn't need to know any of that.

Deidara sets his shitty laptop right at the edge of the mattress, flush with a shallow drop. It's asking for trouble, but he's not exactly drowning in the acres. It's enough room to sit cross-legged in soft sweats with a sagging waistband, perfectly poised to show off a square of stomach, and, if he holds his breath, the abs he's been working on. The bottom half of his face is all that's in the frame of the new webcam. He smiles, half out of spite for the time Sasori called him lopsided.

“Hey, Danna,” Deidara says, coy. Sasori is seated at a desk, all poise and decorum in a beige cardigan. His eyes are half-lidded, honey-brown and glossy, lips a pouty cupid’s bow that Deidara goes just a little bit crazy for. “Ready to see more?”

“Do you have the kit?”

Deidara’s stomach swoops, low heat gathering down low. “Why couldn’t you get off to normal shit, hm?”

“You know what to do,” Sasori refuses to rise to the bait. He blinks, slow and placid, probably more plastic than man. He’s never seen Sasori get his dick out.

Super sweet and vanilla. I wrote this for a prompter during Rare Kink Bingo because I thought the kink was super cute, but then I remembered that incest is. Rightfully a pretty big squick for a good portion of people and I didn't have their explicit permission to write incestuous pairings. Because of that, this fic has never seen the light of day.

Tobirama wakes up before the sun with his brother’s face plastered against his bare chest. Their home is quiet, and, for once, there is nothing to be done but savor the pleasant ache of last night’s union.

Hashirama is peaceful when he’s not pretending to snore – his sleep is deep and sound, rumbling like distant thunder, breath like spring breeze. His lashes cast long shadows across his cheeks, his skin is soft bronze, and he’s lacking the lines that their father had at his age. His hair is splayed across them both, trailing off the futon and onto the floor, and his leg is slung over Tobirama’s. The weight of him is a comfort that Tobirama has come to depend on for a steady sleep. Hashirama presses him into the earth, a reminder of how firmly he exists, tethered to this village that they’ve made together. Tethered, more importantly, to Hashirama, his brother who loves like breathing.

Tucking them still closer together, Tobirama draws his hand through his brother’s hair, arranging it into some semblance of proper order. He digs his nails into Hashirama’s scalp, returning each hair to its place with the patience of a man who has all the time in the world. The dark strands pool like ink between his hands, an endlessly unspooling shadow. Hashirama’s hair never tangles, not really – it’s fine and glossy, impossible to keep tied back, and knots fall out as easily as more deliberate styling. Because of this, Tobirama is able to make it into whatever pattern he wants, coaxing out whorls and whirlpools without fear of consequences.

It’s drowsy perfection. His mind doesn’t wander, and his breath comes deep and slow. He fades in and out of rest, the sun rising all the while. In the soft, hazy space behind his eyelids, he imagines their hearts beating in sync, a steady stream of blood to circle between them every place that they’re touching, and affection blooms. He closes his eyes to brace against the torrent of it, this love sure as blood.

He’s able to sense the exact moment when Hashirama wakes up. His pulse spikes as soon as Tobirama stalls in his caressing, but Tobirama says nothing to affirm that he knows. After all, it’s rare to get Hashirama so pliant without a spar, a big meal, or an indecent amount of consecutive orgasms. Thus, in lieu of greeting, Tobirama listens to his brother’s chakra ebbing and flowing with the steady pulse of his heart, hoping that his heartbeat speaks for his own state of mind. They’re a quiet, synchronized loop, an inseparable pulse.

Blood pools, and Hashirama thickens against the bend of his knee, skin soft and hot where they touch.

It’s gentle and slow in the watery light of morning – Tobirama’s hands through Hashirama’s hair, harsh breath ghosting across Tobirama’s chest, clumsy, rolling hips, and his brother’s strong heartbeat, alive.

Tobirama is different.

Hashirama only notices after the Madara and the river, after the attack and after one too many losses that he can’t take. As a candle on a dark night, cutting through his haze of amorphous grief, there is Tobirama – Tobirama who is different, different in a way that, once he notices, he can’t unsee.

His first realization comes like this: it starts with the press of his brother’s legs under the table when he’s sitting in seiza, spine rigid. Tobirama never used to squirm, but now he arches his back on the zabuton, carefully – an attempt to evade notice that magnifies the movement tenfold in Hashirama’s periphery. Lifting his chopsticks to his mouth, his eyes go glassy, shoulders shuddering. Hashirama tracks the line of movement – curious, perhaps too curious for his own good – as Tobirama’s thighs angle towards each other, crushing together, the mounting pressure unmistakable. He begins to slide, quickly slipping into a jerky motion that Hashirama only catches out of the corner of his eye. His muscles flex, and Hashirama makes out a fine sheen of sweat along his brother’s jaw. Tobirama’s chopsticks hang on his bottom lip for a second too long, fingers twitching. A grain of rice sticks to the corner of his mouth, lips ever-so-slightly tense.

He comes back to himself in an instant, swallowing too fast and choking on his half-chewed food. The grain of rice falls to the ground, forgotten. Now, with all eyes on Tobirama, Hashirama puts his observation on hold and takes the opportunity to fuss unimpeded.

Hashirama is not the only one who notices. After the meal, Butsuma takes his younger brother by the ear without a word, disappearing into the study with discontent written plain across his features. Hashirama winces and flees, setting their futons practically on top of each other in case Tobirama needs comforting overnight, and then he waits as sunset comes and goes, tracking its rosy fingers across the ground until it’s stained the red of blood in water. His duties are forgotten in favor of the anticipation that precedes Tobirama’s silent footfalls.

Tobirama comes back late. He’s small and hunched abnormally, presence minimized to a shadow with a shock of white hair. Without a word to his brother, he hauls his futon over to the other side of the room, lying with his back to the wall.

“What’s wrong?” Hashirama asks, shuffling over on his shins and landing heavily in the negative space left behind by his brother’s crescent moon. He doesn’t miss the flinch that Tobirama suppresses when Hashirama feathers his fingers over the hair on his brow.

“Nothing. Go to bed, Anija.”

Hashirama settles heavily as his brother’s reflection, curled tight around some invisible presence. It’s less than a minute before he turns again, settling onto his stomach to kick his feet, arms splayed out in front of him.

“I’m going to fall asleep right here, and I’m going to snore really loudly unless you tell me what’s wrong.”

“You don’t snore.”

“I’ll start. You know I will.”

This seems to give Tobirama momentary pause. His shoulders loosen by a fraction. Satisfaction curls its fingers into Hashirama’s heart and squeezes.

“Chichi-ue will hear.”

“That’s why you should tell me what’s wrong.”

Tobirama grits his teeth, a slow grind that Hashirama swears he can almost hear.

“You’re the worst.”

—

Every time Hashirama checks, his eyes are open, glinting faintly, a preternatural reflection of light that he cannot seem to find the source of.

Uneasy, Hashirama falls asleep.

—

Similar realizations trickle in, as disconcerting as the shift of the air before a storm. At one point, Hashirama finds his brother in the library, mouth a perfect circle – when Tobirama notices him, he nearly drops his book, hand flying up to grip the edge of the table. Hashirama gives a cordial smile, a silent reassurance that he saw nothing out of the ordinary.

Tobirama’s sash is undone, ends hanging down over his hips, framing his waist. He re-ties it when he thinks Hashirama isn’t looking, standing awkwardly to go, scarlet from his forehead to the point where his neck disappears into his clothes. Hashirama notices the way his steps drag. A limp. His brow furrows.

—

It’s not fascinating so much as it is distracting. When he thinks about how Tobirama is different now, little room is left for anything else. He begins his morning by discreetly tracing over the lines of Tobirama’s back as he dresses, cataloging the way that muscle is beginning to lend definition to his form, checking for discolorations. At mealtimes, he makes sure that Tobirama is being fed enough, nurtured properly.

With Tobirama in mind, he pours his single-minded focus into the change, probing and feeling for the roots of it.

He watches his brother move – reserved, always reserved, his careful footwork when they train. The Senju clan doesn’t specialize in water natures, so he adapts and adjusts other techniques for his own use. He’s clever – always has been – but there’s too much going on in that head of his. Sometimes, Hashirama deigns to reach inside and shut him off, as easily as he can blow out a candle.

Tobirama comes away from it sweaty, clothing loose for ease of movement. He talks in brief to a second cousin, head bowed, before hopping up onto the walkway that leads between the buildings, hurrying with a single-minded focus to his next destination – the library again, if Hashirama were to venture a guess.

With nothing better to do, Hashirama trails behind, footsteps light. Two can play this game of gentle footfalls, roof to roof – or, rather, they’ve each played it before.

He keeps waiting for Tobirama to notice him. He expects his brother to take in the color of his clothes from the corner of his eye, maybe, or from a flash of movement. He wonders if it’ll be his chakra – it’s what tends to give him away – too hot, too loud, too obvious.

Tobirama passes the turn-off for the library and keeps walking. He doesn’t even glance at Hashirama, crouched up on the eaves.

Instead, Tobirama ducks into one of the central buildings – their home. It’s odd of him to be back so soon. Hashirama wonders if he’s changing, sweaty as he is from sparring. He hesitates, scales tipping back and forth in his head. [extrapolate]

Keeping to the balls of his feet and the tips of his toes, he follows, pausing only when his brother’s silhouette becomes clear through the door to their bedroom. The lines of his figure are clean, unimpeded by clothes. Hashirama can make out his shoulders, trim but wider by the month, and his arms, thin with knobby wrists, usually hidden under several layers.

It’s out of character for him to strip so fast, or to not notice Hashirama tailing him, or to disappear into their home at this hour. For the first time in however many years, concern for his oldest younger brother’s well-being cleaves him in half, prickling his skin over with gooseflesh from the roots of his hair to the soles of his feet. Though Tobirama has learned to look after himself, he made an easy target when he was younger – small and sickly Tobirama, Tobirama who walked late and talked later, Tobirama with the red eyes, Tobirama who had to be taught how to smile. With the image of mottled bruises on porcelain skin behind his eyes when he blinks, the door is open before Hashirama can think twice, the overwhelming urge to make sure his brother is safe clouding his reason.

He stops in the doorway.

Tobirama stops on the floor.

—

Tobirama comes back late, tread all but silent as he ghosts through their ancestral home.

This doc was titled "Symptoms of Rot"; definitely in line with my pretentious naming conventions.

From this angle, Tobirama is all together, aside from the fact that he is still decorated with sleep at such an hour, the slanting sun slanting in across the floor. His hair is tousled and he sits, unmoving, framed against the window. His hands are folded in his lap. His blanket is trailing from his shoulders, hiding the fact that his back is proper straight, only curving slightly where it meets his hips. He sits with his heels tucked up against his behind.

“Good afternoon, Tobi,” Hashirama greets. He comes to sit next to his brother, resting a hand on his thigh.

Tobirama is quiet, today – contemplative. Hashirama has always thought there were too many thoughts in that head of his, chasing each other's tails in a mad logical scramble, the likes of which Hashirama isn’t cut out to give half a mind to. He’s nice like this, smooth and blank, a slate wiped clean. It reminds Hashirama of his brother in his infancy, warm and staring as though he could deign to drink the world in through his eyes – and then as a toddler, quiet, little hands gripping the hems of Hashirama’s robes, next to inseparable.

He never minded then, and he never minds now. Caretaking is part and parcel with being an older brother, he’s always thought so, and Tobirama is so pretty when he doesn’t have to think, soft and warm and open.

Hashirama’s hand slides up his brother’s thigh, parting his robes where they’re tied too loose. His blood warms, heartbeat becoming distinct.

He has to chide himself, biting his tongue before leaning forward to leave a chaste kiss on his brother’s cheek.

“Now, Tobi,” he fawns. “Let’s get you away from the window. You’ll burn, you know.” His brother’s skin is soft, softer than ever, now, when he lets Hashirama rub oils and creams into his skin, gentling over years of worry. Soft and pale as fresh milk, easily burnt.

What sort of brother would Hashirama be, if he stood by and watched his brother burn?

He maneuvers Tobirama upright – Tobirama moves like a ghost, feet barely touching the floor as he drifts, unmoored and leaving no trace. Hashirama sits him down at the bureau. The mirror is covered with a length of cloth, dark blue and silkscreen-printed over with geometric patterns that please Tobirama more than his appearance.

“Good,” Hashirama praises, stroking his brother’s hair in absentminded reward. Skin-to-skin contact helps, he knows – it brings him to lucidity, sometimes, almost as often as it makes his eyes go glassy. Tobirama is more sensitive than he lets on – he likes his hair to be stroked, hates the way it makes him sound his contentment low in his throat. Hashirama knows exactly how to work the machine that is his brother’s body, knows what needs oiling and what is rusty, knows more, perhaps, than Tobirama himself.

Hashirama smiles, adjusting the blanket around his brother’s shoulders with the fondest care. Tobirama doesn’t have to care, when he’s like this.

—

His brother says nothing in return, but it’s what he’s grown used to – coaxing out the words. It hurt his heart, in the beginning, his mouthy brother, shattered into fragments.

It’s easy to bend Tobirama, to twist and mold him into whatever shape he likes.

Come to think of it, the machine analogy wouldn't work. Bear with me, it's a draft.

Prompt: Hashirama’s attention is divided. Is this the perfect future everyone’s wanted? Basically, past Hashirama DEFINITELY fucked his otouto <3 and they still do but less and less and Tobirama covets that sweet sweet anija loving. He doesn’t exist as his own person. Everything he does is in complement to his brother. He’s used to being Hashirama’s shadow half. Brocken heart.jpg

This doc is titled "Last Line of Defense", which I think is adorable in the context of the fic.

From the window of the Hokage Tower, Tobirama watched the Uchiha walk alongside his brother in the newly-paved streets of the infant village. Uchiha Madara was dark-haired and wild, barely contained within the cage that Tobirama had made for him out of a carefully-written treaty, and he walked like a tripwire – loose ease ready to be pulled taut at any moment.

There was no lost love between them. Tobirama knew Madara as a distraction to Hashirama, nothing more – he told himself this to assuage the boiling hatred that stirred in his gut when he watched them resume their saccharine charade. Old friends. Equals. Even without a Sharingan, Tobirama could see through it, because it was plain as day that a handshake would never be enough to sweep the deaths of friends and family under the rug, and likewise that Madara could be allowed to walk free, tasting sunlight, smiling, permissive and fond.

The way Tobirama saw it, Madara deserved to lose a brother. He deserved to lose a brother and then some. However, Tobirama wasn’t sure what he'd done to deserve losing a brother.

—

The Senju were scattered in homes across Konoha – it made more sense than having a clan compound to be isolated within. All that Tobirama had in mind when designing their primary residences was that, if it came time to fight again, they’d be able to defend Hashirama’s dream from the Uchiha. With that in mind, it would make more sense for them to sleep in different houses – or at least different rooms – but Tobirama allowed himself this one final indulgence.

Hashirama came back late with sweet breath. He nudged his head into the space between Tobirama’s neck and shoulder, inhaling long and steady, like coming home.

"Were you out with the Uchiha again?" Tobirama demands as if he hadn’t been finely tuned to his brother’s chakra – it was in case something happened, first and foremost, but also because he couldn’t sleep without being tethered to it.

"Eh?" The pause, strung out, lapsed from simple comprehension to admission of guilt. "No."

"You’re an awful liar."

"Mm," Hashirama nuzzled his nose against his brother’s pulse point and slung an arm out across his chest. "We’re allies. You should try to trust Madara."

"You trust too easily. You compromise your safety by drinking with him."

Hashirama was only intoxicated because he willed it so.

"Tobi . . ." The God of Shinobi drew out the syllables like a child. "I can defend myself. And if I ever can’t," Hashirama squeezed Tobirama’s cheek. "You’ll defend me."

Tobirama set his jaw. "Against Madara?"

"Madara will never hurt me again," Hashirama said with simple, drunken conviction, and Tobirama would’ve given the world just to have believed him.

He turned into Hashirama’s hold, resting his chin on his anija’s head. His hair was soft and scented like the forest after a thorough rinse. The stretch of looking up made it hard to swallow, but he kept them in place as a matter of principle.

—

In their teenage years, Hashirama had given more freely. If you had told teenage Tobirama that his brother was capable of learning even a modicum of decorum, he would have used his carefully budgeted annual laugh without further hesitation.

They had started their arrangement after Itama had been slain. It was a day that should’ve been cold and dark. It was not. It was springtime, the river swelled with snow melt. The weather was pleasant, edged with a slight, invigorating chill. Tobirama still remembers what it had felt like to witness his brother’s death with his senses open for battle. The familiar chakra poured out like bleeding yolk from a cracked egg. Itama was brought to his knees by a grown man with red eyes and a cruel twist to his mouth. Tobirama had seen it, though he could do nothing to stop it, and Hashirama had cried like the sky splitting open to rain and rain.

Tobirama was still young enough to get away with haunting Hashirama’s threshold in the wake of a nightmare, and so his anija had invited him in. Hashirama had cried freely into his brother’s hair, grasping his arms and face as though to memorize in case he passed as well. In the murky hours of the early morning Tobirama had vowed to be stronger – ironclad. There was no room for emotion in the shadow of Hashirama, so he would be his brother’s counterweight instead.

The rest was history. Tobirama had never left. Hashirama insisted on keeping him close. They slept tangled.

Some things did change. Hashirama, Tobirama learned, never sought privacy for his self-ministrations. He would lie flat on his back and take his pleasure when he needed it, pupils blown, suspended in warm brown irises that Tobirama could see the whole world in.

I feel like I discovered a gem. This is so complete . . . good groundwork and pretty fucking coherent for one of my drafts.

Prompt: Illness play . . . HSRM could heal his brother but there's a lull in work so he (probably consensually) induces illness instead so he can take care of his baby brother 💞💞 he cares for him and gets him off and

OR, BETTER YET, Tobirama orchestrates this situation by poisoning himself for sexual reasons. “Why can't Hashirama just heal it?” because that would ruin the fun of playing human doll with baby brother. Plus, if Tobirama really wanted to be better, he could easily heal himself!!

If I hadn't been writing this on the tail end of bronchitis I probably would've been able to do a better job. Inc'est la vie, maybe I'll come back to it :3

His skin is hot to the touch, it has him buzzing below the surface, rising and falling in time with the roaring tide of cicada song. His bones ache, his teeth ache, his throat aches when he swallows. He’s sticky with fever sweat, tacky and cold, waxy and hot.

Hashirama, of course, will take any opportunity to shirk his duties to Konoha – he sits back on his heels, dutiful and diligent, soaking the cloth for Tobirama’s forehead damp again and soothing his chakra across chapped skin. He's a vision, backlit by summer sun from beyond the throes of fever. He shimmers and warps like a mirage.

“You need to take better care of yourself,” he says.