Naruto One-Shot (Yaoi)

Ascetic

By: Quillslinger

Ascetic

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

-o-

His first memory is of hunger:

A deep wrenching ache coring at the inner walls of his flesh, always begging for relief but nevertheless cannot be acknowledged, not when it is so starkly reflected in the pale, drawn faces all around him.

The economy of war is a lean science, with no room for imprecision and leniency. A child caught sneaking turnips before dinner can easily be put to death, head cracked open and bloody on a river stone and left for the mouths of roving wolves.

On the battlefield, it is a disgrace to feel pain, and within the fort, it is a disgrace to feel hunger on an empty belly. Courage is a commodity. When the blade writes the rules, the gods favor the richer man.

-o-

The man they call Senju Hashirama, he thinks, cannot have known hunger, and yet his courage shines out from behind his dark eyes like a gem at the bottom of a moonlit well. Courage untested is but an untempered sword, but Hashirama's courage bests him time and time again, so that time and time again he finds himself gasping in the dirt, an iron tang coating his mouth.

The taste of blood. That is Madara's second memory, reinforced each time that the scion of the hated Senju strikes him down.

In disbelief, he takes refuge in what he knows. He starves himself further, hoarding up this poor man's gold, shores up power until his body is crackling with it, threatens to split even as he stretches himself thinner and thinner, rice-milk skin over iron bones.

But still it is not enough, and soon he is back where he started, choking on dust as his enemy walks away from him, long hair like a stroke of ink down his back, dark against the red of his armor.

He never turns around, never looks back at his fallen opponent, and more than even the humiliation of defeat, it is this casual arrogance with which Hashirama confidently turns his back on him that has Madara's vision filming over with rage.

Again and again, they rise and fight, and again and again, he loses and falls.

-o-

One day, insane with lack and incomprehension, he utters a useless question, "Why?"

Unthinkably, Hashirama looks back at him then. His face is impassive, but something like an afterthought passes darkly through his eyes.

"Because," he says, after a moment, "you do not see."

When he puts it like that, it's really quite simple.

Madara may be the strongest of the Uchiha, but that doesn't make him any less prey to their curse. Already his time is running out: each day spent on the battlefield is one less day he will spend in the world of light. He has, so to speak, yet to make the ultimate sacrifice.

He rakes his fingers into the dirt, cracks his bloodied mouth and sucks in a sour breath, and with it, overwhelming esurience. Not enough. More must be given.

His first memory is of hunger; his second, blood. Like twin streams, they crawl through the veins of his life, and the perfect junction where they meet is the occasion of his eighteenth birthday, when he howls with a famished grief as the taste of his brother's blood fills his mouth.

Such is the price to pay for sight.

-o-

Strong now, and emboldened with insidious guilt, he shelves his doubts and rises to fight once more. The changes are immediate, and his rival is quick to notice. From that point on, their battles unfold on even terms. He triumphs almost as often as not, and even when he falls, Hashirama never takes his eyes off him.