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The first time Madara visited the Senju family home, he didn’t realize that he would be seeing this exact same picture every time he walked through the door for the next two years.
He had met Hashirama Senju in the first semester of college when the other young man had tripped on his own feet and spilled the contents of his knapsack over Madara’s head. They had chatted over an apology lunch and somehow become best friends in the space of an hour. It probably had to do with Hashirama’s well-practiced ability to let Madara’s bristly personality run right off him. It set the tone for their interactions from then on; Madara snarked and Hashirama cheerfully bulldozed over him with smiles and inescapable hugs.
They sat next to each other every Monday and Wednesday and ate lunch together every Friday when their schedules matched up. Yet it took until the end of the semester for Hashirama to invite him over. They had partnered up for a class assignment and it would be easier to work from home than use the shitty computers offered by the campus library. Hashirama offered his home as a base station on the condition that Madara was fine with his younger brothers running around and being noisy. Having four brothers himself, Madara was certain he’d be able to ignore the ruckus.
Upon entering the home, the first thing Madara noticed was a head of white hair just visible over the back of the couch, right in his line of sight. The television was playing a commercial he’d seen a hundred times and turned up louder than would usually be polite, yet barely audible over the childish laughter from another room. Hashirama barely seemed to notice and Madara got the impression that this was a rather usual thing in his household.
“I’m home!” His friend called in a cheerful voice. The figure on the couch raised a hand briefly.
“Yes, I heard you,” they called back. Their head did not turn and they said nothing more.
Hashirama ushered Madara in to the house, leading him through the kitchen and babbling about his ideas for their project. Madara peeked sideways as they passed the living room to get a better look at the one who had mostly ignored their arrival, stunned almost in to missing a step at what he saw.
The white color of his hair belied the age of the boy, who looked only a few years younger than Madara himself. His skin was an exceptionally pale color as well and his face was marked with three lines of red ink – either he had tattoos or someone had gotten bored and played with markers. One leg was curled beneath him but the other stretched out to show off its incredible length. Standing, he would likely be quite tall. His cheekbones were chiseled and his jawline to die for but he kept his face trained forward to the television, expression passive.
Madara only stayed for a couple of hours until Hashirama declared that he would need to start dinner for his younger siblings. He declined the offer to stay but peeked in to the living room once more as he left. The young man there hadn’t moved so much as a single inch, still staring blankly at the too-loud television.
It became a pattern so familiar that it came to be something he expected. He asked Hashirama in class the next day and learned that the one on the couch was his eldest younger brother, Tobirama. Every time Madara visited the Senju household, without fail, Tobirama would be seated on the living room couch staring blankly at the television. Some days it was too loud and some days it was at a more acceptable volume. It took a few times for Madara to realize that the days he kept it too loud were the days that the younger siblings were being noisy in another room and he wondered why the idiot didn’t just turn on the closed captioning.
It took almost seven months for them to interact directly. A new semester had started and Madara had come to pick his friend up for a morning class. Upon bursting in to the bedroom he had found the idiot naked in bed with his girlfriend Mito. He was still dry heaving when he stumbled back in to the kitchen and when he glanced over in to the living room – as had become his habit – he saw Tobirama’s smile for the first time. The younger man was laughing at him.
“Did you know she was in there?” he demanded. Tobirama chuckled, a low rumbling noise that made Madara’s stomach flip over.
“I assumed so after hearing the way they carried on all night.”
“You couldn’t have given me a little warning?”
“And miss your reaction? Nonsense.”
Madara huffed and barely resisted stomping his foot. “You’re not even looking at me, how are you supposed to be enjoying my reaction?”
“Idiot. Why would I look at you?”
He gaped, his mouth working silently as he tried to find the words for just how much of an ass this guy was being. He seemed to know it, too, if the smirk on his face was anything to go by. Moments later Hashirama came stumbling in to the kitchen, still pulling a shirt over his head and spouting awkward apologies like a very sorry fountain. Madara allowed the distraction, turning away from one brother to berate the other. Mito swept in to the room as they bickered, entirely unbothered by the situation, and set about preparing toast.
After that Madara felt free to interact with Tobirama more often, although most of their conversations degenerated in to a trading of pointless insults. Tobirama tended towards insults highlighting Madara’s general mental abilities – or lack of. It infuriated the Uchiha how much he let the younger man’s words get under his skin but he never backed down, always giving as good as he got.
He spent more than a year draping himself across the back of the Senju’s brown leather couch, murmuring heated insults in Tobirama’s ear interspersed with the occasional heartfelt conversation which always left him thinking. It came to a point when he had to recognize that he dropped by to see Tobirama as much as he did Hashirama. And yet, not once had he ever seen the stuck up idiot deign to look away from the television. That face of his could be completely stoic or incredibly animated depending on what show he was watching or what they were discussing but never did it face him. Madara wondered whether Tobirama had an obsession with his shows or if he just thought everyone else that far beneath him.
It wasn’t until Madara had known the Senju family for two full years that he figured out what was actually going on. School was out for the summer and Madara had already decided he’d had quite enough of his family. Hashirama had always told him that if he ever needed a place to go he was welcome at their home, and so he found himself digging for the key hidden in the garden and letting himself in to the Senju home at four o’clock in the morning.
He was almost surprised not to see Tobirama in the living room, even though he knew that was slightly ridiculous. The other had to sleep at some point. He just couldn’t remember ever being here without seeing Tobirama on the couch, head trained on the television. He often had a book in his lap or a small stack of them to one side, perhaps a laptop open across his legs, yet his location never changed. The couch almost looked empty without Tobirama’s lanky form sitting on it.
Madara wasn’t really tired, despite the late hour. He’d been keyed up all night listening to his younger brothers’ sleepover friends giggling and shouting. The noise had been so irritating that it had actually driven him to leave home, so sitting quietly in the Senju’s kitchen was actually rather pleasant. He raided the cupboards for a snack and fiddled with the games on his phone while he waited for the sun to rise and the members of the household to discover his presence.
The first to wake was Butsuma. He was a quiet man, the quiet of bottled anger and loneliness. He apparently had been this way since his wife’s death giving birth to their youngest son. Butsuma stopped in the doorway to raise an eyebrow at him, then walked past without a word to grab an apple and storm out the door. He’d been leaving the raising of the other children to his eldest for years now, the asshole.
The next to arise was, surprisingly enough, Tobirama. Madara watched him come in to the room with unabashed shock on his face. He’d never so much as seen the younger man stand up, let alone walk around. He’d actually started to think he might have some sort of disability in his legs. Yet here he was, waltzing in to the kitchen with no trouble at all, heading straight for the cereal cupboard and running his fingers across each box until he finally chose one that appeared to strike his fancy.
Madara sat still while Tobirama took down a bowl and poured himself some cereal, reaching behind himself to place it on the dining table without even looking. He placed the box back, grabbed a spoon, then turned and sat down at the table to eat. He sat himself down right across from Madara, sat up straight and looked him right in the eye, yet said absolutely nothing as he munched away, a tiny frown creasing the space between his eyes. Madara had never felt so uncomfortable in his life. The other was just…staring at him. Silently. And eating. What the hell was he supposed to do?
His jaw opened several times, searching for something to say, but closed it each time without anything coming out. After a few successful attempts at making himself look more like an idiot than usual he settled for simply staring back with a scowl. Whatever Tobirama’s problem was he would surely speak eventually. Or, so Madara hoped.
A few minutes and half a bowl of dry cereal later a shuffling noise drew Madara’s attention to the doorway once more. Hashirama stumbled in to the kitchen with a jaw-cracking yawn and arms raised above his head, eyes closed with lingering sleep.
“I forgot the milk again,” Tobirama grumbled in place of a greeting. Hashirama chuckled through the end of his yawn.
“I’ll get it,” the elder offered. He rubbed at his eyes as he walked, then when they blinked open he stopped between one step and the next. “Madara?”
Their guest opened his mouth to answer but was distracted by the way Tobirama stiffened in his chair, his back sitting up impossibly straighter. “What?”
“Uh…hi?” Hashirama waved, a little bemused. “When did you get in?” Madara shrugged.
“Middle of–”
“Holy shit!” The moment he spoke Tobirama jolted in his seat as if frightened, his hands knocking the cereal bowl in to his lap and his face going even whiter than usual. He leaned as far over the back of his chair as he possibly could like he was trying to get away from something. “Fuck! Could you make some noise or something!?”
“Are you trying to tell me you had no idea I was here?” Madara exclaimed incredulously. Tobirama gripped the edges of the table, visibly trying to calm his racing heart.
“Not when you’re so quiet!”
“You have been staring straight at me for the past ten minutes! Awkwardly, I might add! How did you not see me?”
Tobirama clenched his teeth and growled as his face rapidly turned a similar shade of red as the tattoos that he bore on his face. “I am blind, you asshole!”
Absolute dead silence filled the kitchen. Madara had never felt more like a piece of trash than he did right at that moment. He trembled from head to toe with a multitude of emotions running rampant through him, each vying for attention, until he simply shut down and sat there like the stupid worm he was.
“Did you not know that?” Hashirama asked quietly after a long time had passed. Madara shook his head while trying to shrink in to his chair.
“No,” he whispered. “I didn’t.”
“Surely I mentioned it at some point?”
“No. You didn’t.”
“Huh.” Hashirama scratched at his head. “Neat.”
Tobirama made a vicious expression of anger, whipping his head to the side to point it in his brother’s direction. “Neat? You never saw fit to mention I was blind leading him to think god only knows what for two fucking years and all you have to say is neat? So help me brother the next time I see Mito I am going to tell her where you really bought her that necklace from!”
“What!? No! It’s not that bad!” Hashirama pulled frantically at his hair and looked to Madara. “Is it? What did you think!?”
“I…don’t know. To be honest I had started wondering if perhaps you were physically unable to stand. Although that theory always had a few holes in it. The lack of wheelchair accessibility or the wheelchair itself, that sort of thing. I thought you were just…arrogant? That you just didn’t bother to look at people when they talk to you?”
Hashirama let out a bubble of laughter. “He doesn’t. And it’s still rude.” Tobirama crossed his arms in a slight pout.
“I’m not going to see them, why should I look at them?”
“Because it’s polite, little brother!”
“But I will hear them better if my ear is turned towards them. Is it not more polite to actually listen?”
Madara sank further and further in to his chair. Tobirama was blind. And he himself was an idiot for never considering that as an option. He had started to think he knew Tobirama pretty well and now he felt as if he knew very little.
The two brothers continued to bicker back and forth until their other siblings drifted in for breakfast. Itama took one look at Tobirama covered in the remains of his breakfast and began to snigger behind one still-chubby hand.
“It’s a good think you forgot the milk again, huh?”
“Shut up!”
Madara tried very hard to convince the ground to open up and swallow him. Miraculously, both of his friends appeared to have let the matter drop for now. They allowed him to sit and pretend he didn’t exist until everyone had eaten their morning meal. After that Itama left to run down the road to his friend’s house and Kawarama ran out to the backyard to play with his spade and brushes. He so enjoyed playing archeologist in their old sandbox.
After Hashirama had thrown all the dirty dishes in to the dishwasher he headed back upstairs to get dressed, leaving his best friend and his brother alone once more in an abandoned kitchen. Madara swallowed audibly, just waiting for some snide comment from the one he had been unintentionally rude towards. It surprised him when none came.
Instead, Tobirama looked as if he were curling in to himself defensively, as though bracing himself for some verbal blow which wasn’t coming. His forehead was creased in a frown and he was still leaning away as far as he could. Madara drew patterns on the tabletop awkwardly.
“Well?”
His head snapped up when Tobirama finally broke the silence. “Well what?”
“You must have something to say about all this. Go on then. Get it over with.”
“Uhm…” He rubbed at the base of his neck, thinking hard. “I’m…sorry you’re blind?”
“You’re – what?”
“What?”
Tobirama’s bottom lip pouted out again in confusion, though he couldn’t possibly be more confused than Madara felt.
“That’s it?”
“What did you want me to say?”
“To be honest, something snide.” Madara watched him take a deep breath in, releasing it slowly. “I enjoyed our fights because you never held anything back. You never treated me any different – but I thought you already knew of my condition. To find out now, well, I assumed you would have something to say. Some…change of opinion.”
Madara shrugged, then winced when he realized the other couldn’t see the gesture. “What opinion do you suppose would change? You haven’t changed yourself, I’ve just gained a bit of knowledge about you that I did not have before.” He grinned, slipping in to habit. “Doesn’t make you any less of an ass than you already were.”
It was a risk, a particularly risky risk, but it paid off immediately. The tension seeped out of Tobirama’s shoulders and he dropped his head back with a barking laugh.
“Fuck you!” the younger man retorted with glee, deep lines of relief painted across his face.
He’d been worried that Madara would treat him differently now, the older of the two could tell, and he was more than happy to alleviate those worries. Sure he felt dumb for not noticing or even considering it despite the evidence that pointed that way. Sure he had a little extra sympathy and a little extra admiration for the other now. None of that changed the fact that Tobirama was obviously competent in his everyday life and being blind did not bother him, so why should it bother Madara?
Tobirama turned away and stood from his chair to hide the lingering grin, making his way over towards the couch. Madara followed behind him.
“So, why do you spend so much time sitting here?” he asked. Tobirama gave a scoff.
“Because it’s comfortable and I have everything I need here. I can listen to the television. I can read my braille. I can use my computer. I’m blind, not useless. And I just so happen to find this the most comfortable spot in the house.” He stopped walking and half turned, presenting the side of his face to Madara the way that he had for the entire two years they had traded friendly jibes back and forth. “Why? Don’t tell me you had another assumption about that.”
“Perhaps I just thought you were lazy,” Madara said teasingly. He watched Tobirama’s eyebrows twitch upwards.
“If anyone is lazy it is you,” he offered in return.
Madara huffed out a low laugh. “That one was weak.”
“It’s a little hard to concentrate when you’re standing so far in to my personal space.” And indeed he was. Madara’s feet had carried him over to stand only inches from his younger friend. “Care to tell me why you find it necessary to stand so close?”
“Something I’ve meant to do for a while now.”
He did not give the other time to answer. Before Tobirama even had a chance to open his mouth Madara had swooped down and pressed a kiss to his lips, trying to communicate more than a year’s worth of frustration over bad attempts at flirting and terrible conversation skills. The younger man was so shocked he stood completely still, his unseeing eye wide and his eyebrows riding so high on his forehead they were preparing to merge with his hairline entirely.
Madara held the kiss for as long as he dared then pulled away and skipped back out of range. Tobirama reached out an arm to try and snag him but just missed, fingertips just barely brushing the edges of his sleeves. Then his brows finally made their way back down only to furrow in to a frown while the corners of his mouth turned down.
“What the hell was that?” he demanded. Madara gave a nervous laugh.
“Never had the guts to do that because I thought you’d see me coming and hit me. But I know you can’t see me now so I thought, why not?”
“Get. Back. Here.” Tobirama growled each word like its own separate sentence, his one hand reaching out like he thought Madara would step close enough to get himself killed. In fact, Madara was only a few steps beyond those reaching fingers, his weight held on the balls of his feet as he prepared to dart away if necessary.
“Not a chance!” he said. “I’m not looking to die thank you. You can’t catch me, Senju!”
Tobirama lowered his hand and balled his fists in irritation, shifting his weight. Then he began to walk in the direction of Madara’s voice, speaking in an ominous tone. “You think I can’t? Do you truly think so little of me? Catching you would be–”
His sentence cut off with a quiet cry of dismay as his foot caught on the edge of the rug between kitchen and living room, pitching him forward. Madara watched as though in slow motion, his brain kicking in to overdrive. He couldn't let a blind man fall!
With barely a thought he had thrown himself bodily across the room, catching Tobirama in his arms before he could fall too far. He helped the younger back to his feet and steadied him, only for pale hands to suddenly snap up like vipers and grasp double fistfuls off his hair.
“–too easy.” Tobirama finished his sentence with a victorious smirk and Madara understood that he’d been had. Tobirama hadn’t fallen. He’d been living in this house since he was a child, walking over that rug every single day. There was no way he would trip on it. He sighed, trying to decide whether it would be harder to talk his way out of this or peel the fingers out of his hair.
To be perfectly honest, neither option seemed very doable at the moment. He was starting to think he should have said his final goodbyes to his family before leaving last night. Obviously he was about to be brutally murdered by the most gorgeous asshole he’d ever argued with.
Or, so he thought. There was no word great enough for the surprise Madara felt when Tobirama used the grip on his head to pull him down for a second kiss. Somehow he was even more surprised that the other actually participated this time, tracing a tongue along the seam of his lips and plunging inside his mouth the moment he parted them. Madara moaned softly. If this was all some sort of strange hallucination he hoped to never go back to reality. Especially when he caught Tobirama by the hips and received no protest to the way his hands immediately started wandering around behind.
“Ew, ew, ew! Come on!” The moment was ruined by the return of Hashirama, now standing at the end of the hallway with his hands up defensively like he was trying to ward the scene before him away through sheer force of will. Madara growled.
“You took long enough to change,” he sneered. “If you were going to dawdle that long could you not have at least dawdled a little more?”
“What are you two doing?”
Tobirama sighed, not relenting his grip on Madara’s hair in the slightest. In fact, his fingers seemed to flex and pet at the silky strands. “Madara was just enlightening me about how much of a non-communicative idiot he is.” Madara gave an offended squawk.
“Excuse me but if you felt the same you could have done something about it too!”
“Shut up and kiss me again you overgrown child.”
“Guys?” Hashirama’s plaintive voice cut in. “I don’t…I don’t really want to watch you two flirt and stuff…”
“How rude of me.” Tobirama stepped away from Madara at last, who only just barely contained his whine of disappointment. His hands loosened their hold on long black hair – only to reach down and grasp Madara’s hand instead, turning to walk away and pulling the older man behind him. “You and Mito are discreet enough to contain your activities to your bedroom. It’s only proper I afford you the same courtesy.”
Madara and Hashirama made similar choking noises at the same time, both of them a little thrown by the younger man’s gall. Madara, however, had absolutely no plans to stop whatever was happening. He heard his friend whining behind them as he was led down the hall and up the stairs, in to one of the bedrooms he’d never had cause to enter before today. He barely even bothered to give a perfunctory look around now as Tobirama led him unerringly towards the bed. He could look around later; he had more important things going on at the moment.
Tobirama pulled Madara down on top of himself as he fell in to the pillows, immediately drawing him in to another kiss. Hands wandered, explored, caressed, until they found their way inside shirts and down the back of waistbands. Madara huffed when Tobirama squeezed his ass.
“Took you long enough,” Tobirama growled against his mouth. “You’ve made me wait, Uchiha.”
“Could have done something about it yourself, Senju,” Madara repeated himself breathily, entirely too distracted by the hand that was now massaging, brushing teasingly closer and closer inwards towards more interesting places.
“Shut up and get naked. We have a lot of catching up to do.”
Madara’s laugh was cut off with a choked moan as teeth bit down in to his neck but the grin on his face stayed as he followed orders and went to with a will.
He almost couldn’t believe it was happening but, in retrospect, he really should have seen this coming.