Connecting hollows (Tobirama x Madara)

1. Reluctancy (Madara)

One common misconception about me was that I never swore. That was false.

I did swear. A lot, actually. But I didn't do it out loud but in my head.

When doing that, I imagined the swear word, or words, plural, were a part of the evil in the world, and by restraining myself from letting them pass my lips, I caged that part of evil inside myself, made my body a prison for it. I imagined the swears to be masses of black that were then prevented from going out into the world to run havoc due to the border that was my skin.

I should be full of black by now.

That evening in particular, my bodily prison had filled up with a lot of black masses. So much so that I was afraid I wouldn't have room for any more, that I would explode. What would happen then? Who would take over and become a prison for all the world's evil if it wasn't for me?

Tobirama... Tobirama would.

But he wasn't part of the story yet. Or at least, not part of my story. In that moment, I didn't even know he existed. Thinking that thought retrospectively was always such a strange thing to me. I wished that younger me, pre-Tobirama me, could have felt the comfort of knowing he would show up. It would have spared me a lot of pain. 

But as it was, I didn't know that. So I closed my eyes, wrinkled my brows to prevent tears from falling down my face, and leaned my forehead against the cathedral wall.

"Father?"

I jerked and turned around. A young, blonde police officer stood before me, holding out a mug with something steaming coming out of it. It was a different officer from the one who had given me the blanket I had over my priest robe.

"Thank you", I murmured, my voice raspy from the held-back crying.

"It's chamomile", she said proudly, her ponytail swishing behind her as she stepped towards me to hand over the mug in a way I had read wasn't created by the movement of walking per se, but something girls did on purpose because they thought it was fun. The thought made me smile a crooked smile in the havoc of it all. "So you won't be prevented from sleeping."

"Thank you", I said again, blew on it and drank, my rings glittering in the soft lights of the vast cathedral as my hand moved up. I didn't like tea, but I didn't have the heart to tell her.

Nor did I have the heart to tell her that there was no chance in fucking hell I would be able to sleep tonight no matter what fucking tea I drank. 

One terrible crime committed by the now-former deacon of the biggest, most famous and most well-visited cathedral in the country had been the reason behind the police officers that evening. But this time, it wasn't because of the former deacon. It was because of the public rage his crimes had caused. 

That deacon had been caught grooming about one hundred children. The magnitude of it was unbelievable to everyone in general as it made the global news, but maybe to the catholic church itself in particular; how could it have missed something so vulgar and forbidden happening within its very walls? It hadn't been hard, obtaining as many children as the deacon had obtained, seeing how large the attendance to that particular church was. Every child that attended it in the name of Catholicism had been taken under his wing, making parents believe that their child was particularly loved by God while in reality, it was the sick deviance of one man.

The public rage this had caused was justified. But something had happened with these particular riots. They didn't slowly die down the way riots usually did. Quite the opposite, in fact. It had become country-wide, then continental, then even global, and each riot seemed to spur the next in a way that was hard to grasp. In their anger and forceful will to protect children, the people involved, and they were many, had gone from peaceful protests to fist-fights. And the church that was most badly affected was the one of the former, now-arrested deacon...

And that church was now mine.

At the age of thirty-two, I had been made deacon of the cathedral after him. An exceptionally young age to become a deacon, everyone would have said and then celebrate me for it, if it hadn't been for the fact that everyone knew that the reason I got the job was that nobody else wanted it. And the reason was what had happened yesterday that had caused the arrival of the police.

I walked around my cathedral, so vast it was actually several cathedrals built into one. If you decided to have a wedding there, you had to choose between eight different altars. As I walked, I touched the wood, the stucco works, the paintings, my heart aching. Last night... Last night, the protester had broken in during a worship service I lead, screaming and holding banners, and then started beating up people in the back rows before I had even had time to process what was happening. Beating up innocent people, that had nothing to do with the crimes of the former deacon. 

I went to that part of the church now, the main part. I looked up at the altar, where I had stood chanting, then down at the last few benches that only yesterday had been a crime scene. I walked over, caressed the dark, well-used but smooth and polished wood, imagining the people who had sat there, so few compared to the usual attendance seeing many had lost trust in the catholic church and this cathedral. But there had still been so many that I had been responsible for... A teenage boy who had come every Sunday for a few weeks now, always coming up to chat shyly afterwards... A single mother and her daughter... An elderly lady and her husband who always dressed up before attending...

For some reason, it was thinking about the elderly couple that finally made the tears I had held back yesterday in front of the police appear on my face. I closed my eyes to them, let them wet my long, black lashes before cleaning my face. I hissed, pulled my fingers through my short, coarse, black hair that definitely needed a trim as I could hardly see, but how could I do something as trivial as going to the hairdresser in a time like this? I imagined the screams of the mother, the daughter, the teenage boy. But there had been no sound from the elderly. They had simply been too frail.

I leaned forwards with my hands on the back of the bench, clenching it, the metal of the many rings I always wore groaning against the wood. My shoulders started shaking as I cried silent tears for that couple. For the silence emitted from them as they were beaten up. For the sight of them being carried into different ambulances. I had been close enough to see the man's hand twitch, reaching for his wife, but he had been too weak to lift it properly. His wife, on the other hand, had been unconscious.

A pair of light, thin arms grabbed me from behind. A soft face being buried into my back. A heavenly sigh and suddenly, all was a little bit more right with the world.

"Izuna..."

"Hi", he said, his voice muffled as he hid his face on me.

My little brother... I had insisted on taking him with me as a trainee as the one condition for me accepting this position. They hadn't even told me off for not seeing it as a privilege to work for God; they knew that I was their last chance of getting a deacon to this cathedral and they knew that I knew.

He was silent, not forcing me to say anything which was one of my favourite things about him. I stayed in that position, my back to him, hunched forwards, with his arms around me as he hugged his lithe body towards my tall, muscular one.

And finally, I felt I could talk.

"They were screaming at me. That I had facilitated for a paedophile to-" I swallowed. I could have just continued the sentence when I spoke again, but that didn't feel right. I felt like I needed to say it in its entirety, at least once. "That I had facilitated for a paedophile to groom and rape children."

There it was, and it felt like a fucking knife to the heart. Like another black mass to fill my skin, my hollow body.

"You know that it's not true, Madara", Izuna said. 

"I know, but..."

"But what?" Izuna asked when I was unable to continue.

I finally turned round to him. He immediately reached up, having to stand on his toes to be able to dry the tears from my face, then fixed my robe, brushed it off. I took a light hold of his frail wrists, stabilising myself.

But what could I say, really? That I shouldn't have taken the job even if it would just have gone to someone else, to stand a point, to prove my stance?

"Let's go to bed", I just said instead.

Izuna agreed, albeit reluctantly.