Chapter Text
Although midwives and expert Uzumaki relatives alike seemed confident she had approximately eight to ten weeks left, Mito looked ready to pop by mid-July.
Mito had only ever been half a dozen centimeters shorter than Tobirama, but she’d also been much lighter of frame. The dramatic change in circumference as the weeks progressed left Tobirama in wary awe. She did not envy the added size and discomfort as Fire’s infamous summer heat and humidity began climbing; her respect for the indomitable Uzumaki spirit grew apace with Mito’s belly!
In the back of her mind, Tobirama had known that comments on her own flat abdomen were likely to make a resurgence the nearer her sister-in-law’s due date drew. They had, after all, spiked following Mito’s initial announcement. With Madara still refusing to cede ground on the marriage front, and with her and Izuna’s treaty-desired children as nonexistent as they’d been when the agreement was first signed, it was inevitable.
The inevitability didn’t make it any more pleasant for Tobirama to endure the barbs of the Elders’ critiques. Or any elders’ critiques. Or those of her same-aged peers. Especially not when this budding thing between her and Izuna was so devastatingly fragile. Not when waking to an arm over her or a forehead settled between her shoulder blades or a kiss to her neck or fingers brushing aside her hair still felt as unsteadying as it did right.
Unfortunate, then, that Izuna’s defenses of her were sprouting unintentional barbs of their own.
The first time he’d shut down one of his clansmen on her behalf, Tobirama had been stunned. Support for her at the expense of blood family—no matter how distant—had surprised her. To an extent, it still did. Izuna could deflect more kindly if he chose, but he chose instead to grow increasingly combative, even when he was not the one being directly scolded.
Something about the complete perversion of the roles and expectations they’d both had hammered into them from infancy—them forming a united front, his defense of her in general, the defense being against fellow Uchiha, the topic of the defense being their hypothetical children—never failed to take her aback.
Yet, in the wake of their confessions and in light of Mito’s ever-approaching due date, a new part of Tobirama’s gut now curdled at those same defensive shut downs. The first time her smug surprise had been chased by a sour sting, she hadn’t understood it at all. It took an hour of self-reflection after the second time to begin to understand.
Izuna defended her, yes—but from slights and accusations that were largely because of him.
Charitably, Tobirama knew she had agreed with his unspoken yet painfully obvious wishes at the time: avoiding pregnancy had made sense. Having mutually beneficial sex was not the same as having children. Amidst the maelstrom of their opinions of one another, they hadn’t even been able to acknowledge the care they’d come to feel for each other until recent weeks. Bearing children in less-than-ideal circumstances was always meant to be Tobirama’s lot in life, but it certainly wouldn’t have helped them sort through that situation any more easily.
But therein lay the issue. Tobirama had long accepted the near-inevitability of children with Izuna, even when he hated her and she clung to apathy. Then recent weeks happened. Those were not their feelings now. Clearly, those had not been their feelings for some time. That changed the landscape of any future childrearing rather drastically.
Despite that—and despite the growing number of barbed comments levied at them—they hadn’t revisited the topic of children since early autumn, when Izuna had inelegantly sought guarantees that she’d never fall pregnant.
Her belly bubbled with the same jittery anticipation, wariness of irrevocable change, and stabbing intrigue over the unknown that it always had when thinking about children—not entirely unlike the way she’d felt before her very first mission or taking her very first life. But it bubbled in a different way at the thought that Izuna could prevent her from ever experiencing that terrifying yet tantalizing unknown.
Besides which, if she never fell pregnant, accusations of barrenness would never cease. And it would be his fault.
…
……
Those are the thoughts burning and revolving in her mind like a supercharged record player the evening Tobirama speaks out of turn.
She has spent the day helping Hashirama with taxes owed to the daimyō, Izuna tending to clan duties with Madara. It has been one day since she sped her monthly bleeding as usual and two days since Elder Sakiko raised a condescending brow and expressed her gratitude that their allies’ fields were proving more fertile than Tobirama’s own. Tobirama has prided herself on brushing aside such insults since adolescence, and Sakiko’s was no better or worse than any other she’s heard. So, she has no excuse when, after Izuna complains about the spiteful old bat while describing his day, she replies with a delayed and unprompted:
“Children.”
The singular word doesn’t quite register in her own ears.
Izuna pauses, chilled soba dangling a few centimeters from his mouth, and furrows his brows. Tobirama is staring vacantly at the table and doesn’t notice at first. It’s not until he repeats back, “Children?” that she looks up at him and sees.
She considers dismissing the inexplicable outburst or at least dodging the unhelpful, half-formed thoughts behind it by perhaps telling Izuna only of Sakiko’s latest offence. Then she stops considering it. It hasn’t yet been two months since they started sharing his room, but she is already tired of her maddening thoughts.
“Children,” Tobirama agrees, forcing past reluctance into resolve.
Izuna looks wary for all of a second before he scowls. “Did she say something again?” He pops the noodles into his mouth. “I swear, I’ll stage a public dressing-down—”
“No,” she interrupts. “That is—yes, she did complain again a few days ago, but, no, she is not exactly the reason I said ‘children.’”
Izuna is back to looking wary. Suspicious, even.
Tobirama thinks that’s an unpromising sign.
“What about them?” he asks. “In general, or the ones you spend half your time training?”
“Our own.” The words only stick a little in her throat, only taste a little absurd on her tongue.
Izuna’s stare is a solid thing, and it takes far too long for him to say back, “… Our own.”
She nods once.
His whole body stills as he glances down toward where her stomach disappears below the table edge. Intent eyes widen before shooting back up to hers. “You said you wouldn’t…” His voice falters.
“I did say that, yes.” Tobirama frowns at the stab of hurt she feels at his priorities laid bare. She is not pregnant, but would it be so awful if she was? “No, I am not currently with child.”
Surprisingly, he does not look comforted at her reassurance that they’ve continue to stave off parenthood. No sound escapes Izuna’s mouth, but it shapes the word “currently” back at her.
“Do you… want to be?” Izuna asks with the air of one forced to cross river ice of indeterminate thickness.
Tobirama can read neither fear nor relief in his face or voice, only uncertainty. She wishes she could. The question is difficult enough—the primary reason she’s been unable to work through this topic on her own. A million reservations cling to what she knows would be an easy answer otherwise, and she’d be grateful for an indication of his stance.
She lowers her eyes and asks, in lieu of answering, “Do you?” She stays looking down only for a moment; she must see his honest reaction.
Izuna’s face is frozen, eyes wider than normal but not enough to qualify as shocked. Then, after another moment, it all moves at once: he blinks, his mouth works uselessly, his nose scrunches slightly, his eyebrows crease, his head shakes faintly, and he braces his hands on the table to push a little backward.
Whatever Tobirama expected, it wasn’t this. Surely a simple yes or no requires less theatrical confusion, even from an Uchiha?
She expects what comes out of his mouth even less.
“You’re the one who made it perfectly clear you’d use jutsu to never let yourself get pregnant,” he says—he accuses.
Does the jolt Tobirama suffers stem more from surprise or irritation? She doesn’t know.
“Because you asked after it, making it perfectly clear you wanted a guarantee that there’d be no undesired consequences,” she accuses right back.
Now Izuna looks wrongfooted. “That’s not why I asked!”
She raises a skeptical brow.
“It’s not!” he insists, just shy of glaring. “I asked because I didn’t know what you wanted! You might’ve agreed to sleep with me—and you might’ve said you agreed to the contract’s expectations—but that didn’t mean you wanted to fulfill that part of it. I would’ve gone along with whatever you said!”
Tobirama’s skepticism turns to incredulity.
… Had they managed to completely talk past each other on this, too? Almost immediately after clearing a misunderstanding born from that exact same behavior?
“But you’ve always appeared so uncomfortable around children.” Surely the truth of that conversation was more complex than blanket acceptance of her own decision! “Especially outside the structure of training.” She pushes down the bit of her that still flutters strangely when she thinks of Izuna’s ease with little Satomi.
“Because kids are weird and bratty. I’ve never been good with them.”
Now Tobirama can’t help pointing out, “You are fine with babies.”
He shrugs in an exaggerated sweep. “Babies can be annoying, sure, but at least they make sense. Toddlers too, before they can speak and give you actual sass, anyway. They’ve got a limited set of needs; figure out what it is they’re crying about, address it, and you’re good. Way more predictable and easy to handle than those brats who hang around you all the time.”
Tobirama could not possibly disagree more, and would have told him as much if she wasn’t distracted by his grumbling:
“All reinforced by Kagami giving me ‘Baby’s First Murderous Glare’ for, like, a year after that whole fiasco. Still gives me the stink-eye, too, tag-teaming with that little Hiro brat. Even gets that Sarutobi brat in on the action sometimes.”
Why Izuna allows himself to be so goaded by children less than a third his age, she may never know. It never ceases to confuse, amuse, and exasperate in equal parts.
Still, Tobirama shakes her head. Has the room transported into some alternate dimension? She’s theorized they must exist beyond the summoning realms. If not for how normal the griping is, she might believe it.
She maintains, “Nothing you’ve ever done has suggested you’re open to the idea of children.”
“And?” Izuna demands. “It’s not like you’ve ever talked about it before yourself.”
Tobirama grips the table, lest it decide to slip away with the rest of everything that made sense mere minutes ago. “So… you are open to it?”
The irritation Izuna wears slips back into hesitance. “As— As much as I always have been, I guess. Or…” He pauses and looks away. “No, that’s not true. More than that,” he admits as he looks back.
Are we really having this conversation right now? his eyes plead.
“Do you want them?” Tobirama presses, realizing that she’s asked the wrong thing. She figures that’s answer enough to his unspoken question.
A warbler whistles as it flies past the window.
Izuna leans forward, then back, then simply slouches. Indigo-clad shoulders raise and lower in a much more subdued shrug. “I don’t really know what to say to you. Whether by your hand or someone else’s or in an effort to save Madara, I kind of spent a lot of my life thinking I’d be dead sooner rather than later and in no position to have them. And I thought it was kind of stupid of him, but Madara was always against me getting married unless I actively wanted to, especially after Hotaru died—peace accords notwithstanding,” he says with a bitter smirk.
Tobirama’s chest twists at the familiarity of the taboo admission, and even more so at the familiarity of what he says next.
“Other than that, I was mostly just… resigned to it? I went from youngest of five to second oldest. I never should’ve been the clan heir, but once I was, the expectation was marriage, even if it was to some trophy wife whose only job was making more backup heirs. Between that and the reduced life expectancy, I never gave it much thought.
“Then I was married to you, and the Elders could have whatever hopes they wanted, but a quiet little wife happily pumping out spare heirs was so far off the table it wasn’t even funny.” He makes a vague, fan-like gesture with his hand, as if that can encompass how personally opposed to it he once was. “Even when you let me touch you, it wasn’t on my mind until afterward. And when you said—” He stops. “When I thought you said you wanted to keep yourself from getting pregnant, I just assumed it was because you didn’t want to have mine.”
Although Izuna lapses into silence, Tobirama doesn’t speak because he hasn’t arrived at an answer yet.
“Which, I guess I was pretty relieved. Not like I wanted to worry about that on top of everything else I was worrying about. But, also…” He shrugs again, almost too slightly to notice. “I don’t know.”
Ah, she thinks. He didn’t plan to arrive at an actual answer.
“Do you think you would ever want a child?” she presses again.
“Children,” he corrects immediately, then freezes, eyes going wider. “I-I— I mean, that’s— I wouldn’t want to be a single child, so I wouldn’t want to have a single child. I know that much.” The last four words are grumbled at the bowl of soba. “I had four brothers. Mom probably only had that many of us because of how many young shinobi are killed—and Dad needed ‘backups’ as the clan head—and I know that’s probably not so much a problem with Konoha and the training systems—and, okay, that’s probably not a great reason to have kids now that I’m thinking about it—”
Tobirama is sure her own eyes must be wide.
“… but I… I still wouldn’t want…” Izuna fumbles his words as he meets her stare.
Knowing Hashirama’s constant (if trying) presence and having experienced the warmth of Kawarama and Itama huddling with her, she couldn’t imagine being on her own. She slides her hand halfway across the table despite the fact that Izuna’s aren’t anywhere near there to grab. “I understand. I had three siblings of my own. I would prefer to have multiple children as well.”
Another noisy warbler dives near the window.
From Izuna’s expression, one might think she whipped out an unfamiliar, potentially hazardous seal. “Do you mean hypothetically, or…?” He glances at the tea he hasn’t touched since the beginning of the meal, then back.
That is the question, isn’t it? Tobirama has, however, always known the answer. It is everything the answer entails that still fills her breast with trepidation.
“… I would prefer to have multiple children,” she repeats, more slowly.
“So…” A light dawns behind his eyes, bright with nerves. “You do.” He needlessly waves a restless hand. “Want them.”
Hearing it spoken so plainly sends a visceral pulse of panic through her, making her hasten to clarify, “With caveats, of course—stipulations.”
If I am allowed, she would add, if she wasn’t both afraid to verbally acknowledge the possibility and relatively confident Izuna would not deny her.
Izuna says nothing. One sculpted brow raises a smidgeon and he angles his face to the side nearly the same slight amount in tentative search of elaboration.
“The marriage contract itself already holds one: the decision to permanently retire from field work is mine and mine alone, even with children. I know that adds additional planning, especially around multiple pregnancies. I…” She stops, considers things she’s considered a thousand times, and picks her words. “The number may be inauspicious, but I’m willing to follow in my mother’s footsteps; I would carry four pregnancies to term if fertility issues do not preclude it.”
Izuna’s jaw does not drop all the way, but she suspects that’s only because the surprise has truly paralyzed him.
She takes advantaged of his stunned silence to state her other immediate stipulations. “Relatedly, I expect neither you nor any Uchiha to forbid me from participating in missions while pregnant, for as long as pregnancy does not impede my abilities or threaten fetal health.
“I would also expect at least a one-year period between each birth and the next pregnancy, without complaint or pressure, only to be modified at my own discretion. I believe that would be best for maintaining my skills.
“And”—Tobirama’s voice peters out in the face of the condition that risks direct conflict with her marriage contract—“I expect not to bear the full burden of childcare. My comfort is the inverse of yours; I find infants uniquely stressful. Since you expressed general comfort with them, and since it would become increasingly difficult to remain well-practiced while tending to more and more children, I would expect you to provide equitable childrearing as a father.”
Izuna mouths a silent “father” after she finishes.
The Uchiha seem fairly community-oriented in their childrearing, which gives her great pause considering her ongoing standing with most of them—but if Izuna exerts his contractually-won authority over childrearing decisions to her benefit, that will lessen her worry.
Finally, Izuna reaches for his cup. He simply holds it, fingers fondling the porcelain. “This is… a lot to digest. Twenty minutes ago, I thought children were off the table. Now you’re saying you’ve basically planned a contract for how to have four of them?” Though disbelief dominates his expression, the glimmer of what she thinks is fondness reinforces his next words. “I only realized I loved you a couple months ago.”
Impulsivity, Tobirama cannot help thinking. That, and, The Uchiha are rubbing off on me in more ways than one. If she’d controlled her own impulse to speak, Izuna would still think children were off the table.
Despite the tension, she thinks the truth is preferable.
“I thought we’d have more time to ourselves before bringing a baby into things,” he says. His lack of smile or even lowered eyebrows make his inflection ambiguous.
“We need not bring one into things right away,” she assures him. “I don’t disagree that more time finding our own normal would be valuable. Simply knowing it is on the table will help me weather the Elders’ comments. Besides,” she adds, “though I doubt fertility will be an issue, pregnancy may take a while even if I stop using that monthly jutsu.”
That the cup doesn’t shatter under the force of Izuna’s grasp as it grows knuckle-white is impressive. The intensity behind his gaze strengthens too. However, both lighten when he asks, “Why do you doubt that?”
Tobirama blinks. She grabs her own cup as a crutch and to stave off an immediate answer. “There is a nonzero chance we conceived that very first time.”
If not for the misused menstruation-easing jutsu, they might have already had a child by now.
The white-knuckled grip is back. All he says is, “Ah.”
He is right, though; it is a lot to digest. Tobirama has been working through it her entire life, with heightened focus since agreeing to the marriage proposal, and more focused still these past few days. She cannot begrudge him his time to think, especially when she is content with simply the knowledge that it will happen someday.
Tobirama coaxes him into resuming complaints about the Elders and their role in his trying day.
Izuna very clearly recognizes the diversion for what it is, but he’s back to the full fervor of criticism soon enough.
Though cooled with time, Tobirama’s tea feels somehow warmer than usual as it travels down and past her chest.
~*~
~*~
They do nothing that first night.
Izuna was too wrung out from his day even before Tobirama shattered his sense of normalcy once again at dinner. Now he can’t even fathom anything other than sleep once they are cleaned and lying in bed.
No. No, that is not entirely true. Izuna fathoms plenty of things other than sleep. Primarily, he fathoms what Tobirama would look like if she were as pregnant as Mito.
He’s not sure how he feels about the mental image. Strange things stir in half a dozen different parts of him, particularly in combination with the revelation that, save for a few different choices, he might have been a father right now.
Plus—four children? Four? It’s been just him and Madara for so long. It’s been just Hashirama and Tobirama for almost as long. He’d thought she might never want children under the Uchiha banner, so how could he have even contemplated that number?
Then it comes back to picturing her with a rounded belly. It's inescapably captivating in its alienness, its illicitness. He’d probably feel like a child again, stealing a forbidden snack or sneaking into his parents’ personal weapons stashes, if not for the fact that this is—as was just made abundantly clear—not off-limits to him.
But much like a dog that’s caught its own tail, Izuna doesn’t know what to do with it. Hell, he hadn’t even been trying to catch his tail in this analogy. Other people had talked about tail-catching—had pressured him to try catching it when he wasn’t interested—but it had never been his goal.
A pregnant Tobirama…
(He gets little sleep that night.)
~*~
Izuna gets little sleep the next two nights too, but he curls close to Tobirama in a way he wasn’t ready to that first night.
~*~
The next night is different, because there is no turning back, Izuna realizes. Not after seventy-two hours of thinking almost near-constantly of Tobirama and children that are his own, and what having children meant.
It’s been a day longer than that since last they made love, and it’s gratifying to see that she, too, is eager to discard clothes and rectify that.
But it’s different, somehow. It’s different, knowing—
Izuna groans his pleasure when they join.
—knowing that something more could come from this than their mutual enjoyment, than the expression of passion that may not be clear in other forms.
Izuna had never once lain with Kazane and so much as entertained the idea of pregnancy, and he certainly never did with Akehito. He’d never thought of it in private, never intentionally gotten off to the fantasy of her or anyone else carrying his child. If anything, it’d always been a way to tamp down on lust; the nebulous concept of fatherhood unfailingly inspired detachment or outright trepidation.
But Tobirama’s pulse thrumming beneath his thumb where he grips her wrist too tightly—the taste of her skin beneath his lips where he groans into her collarbone, presses kisses to her jaw, steals her breath directly from its source—the heat and pressure of her thighs where they grip him in a delicately balanced embrace that both wants him closer and to not impede his motions—the maddening flutter of her inner muscles as she helps them work toward completion—!
Those aren’t nebulous. They are achingly, groundingly real.
That image that’s haunted him these past three days could be real, too.
The desire to bring it to fruition manifests suddenly, stabbing and all-consuming, complementing the early crests of impending orgasm. His sharingan manifests with it.
“What…?” Tobirama gasps, startled and delectably breathless, as she’s jostled in his abrupt attempt to hook his right arm under her left knee.
He fumbles less when hooking his left arm under her right knee, catching and accounting for any resistance with his sharpened sight. “I should be as deep as possible.”
Tobirama is silent aside from labored breathing.
The flushed, unsuspecting shock on her face as the significance slowly dawns only adds fuel to the raging fire that’s sparked unexpectedly inside him. He knows he’ll be revisiting that particular memory often, long after he’s had his fill of trying to recreate it in real time.
They jostle again as Izuna scrabbles to regain effective purchase after rolling her lower back into its new angle.
“What part of ‘no suspected fertility issues’ did you not understand?” she asks.
“I thought efficiency appealed to you.”
“It does, but—!”
His first thrust in this new position pushes a cut-off, startled wheeze from her lungs that sets his mind ablaze.
~*~
Tobirama would’ve thought enthusiasm stole all sensibility from Izuna had he not offered that coherent rejoinder.
If nothing else, his enthusiasm—and the apparent reason behind it—has stolen her breath. Pleasurable aches radiate from deep within her, and she decides that she herself would be utterly senseless if she attempted to speak through this. Senseless and superfluous. The intense glare of his sharingan bearing down on her can surely read her emotions in the way her muscles twitch. Doubtless their observations are as astute as ever despite the frenzied motions of their owner’s hips.
The angle of Izuna’s thrusts, the sensation of him so wholly crowding her, and the sounds of his fervently exerted breath more than make up for the abrupt change in position that previously pulled her back from her precipice.
It feels somehow wrong that her nerves explode no more violently or profoundly than they have before despite the profound (if sudden) difference in intent behind what they’re doing.
Izuna’s groan sounds almost wounded when he releases into her. He presses and holds himself so tightly against her that she’d fear folding in on herself if she had the clarity of mind to do so.
Izuna eventually frees her legs, which has the dual benefit of letting them rest comfortably against the bedding and saving her from confronting the growing embarrassment over the absurd position she’d simply accepted—(enjoyed!)—without protest. She still has an awkward amount of time to contemplate it, though, as Izuna presses his forehead to her sternum and burrows his arms about her in an embrace sticky with already-cooling sweat. Although she cannot quite wrap her head around what just happened, she tentatively wraps her arms around him in return.
Only once they’ve both caught their breaths does Tobirama find her voice. She tries to summarize the whirling thoughts in a palatable way.
“I didn’t think you were so eager for a child,” she says at length, for lack of better choice.
Izuna partially lifts his head. His eyes are black once more, but no less penetrating. She’s almost grateful for the discomfort of his chin that grounds her against the rawness of his confession: “Neither did I. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since the other day, but it was nothing like this. I started to really think about what it would mean if it took—really think about it—and … I wanted it. Needed it.”
Her breath catches.
“I want to see you pregnant,” he continues without a single waver, like it’s a completely normal statement instead of one that was thoroughly unimaginable this time last year. “I want to see you getting round from a kid we made and know that you wanted me to do that to you. I want to see you with a baby suckling at your chest and know it’s mine.”
Then, at last, his expression cracks. “Thinking about it set me off, I guess. It felt so real, and I wanted it right now and so badly…” He looks even more sheepish. “That sounds kind of fucked up, doesn’t it.”
Were he anyone else, Tobirama might agree. His confession holds echoes of the exact domestic possessiveness she’s dreaded since the moment her mother and grandmother and aunties first explained her future duty as a wife.
Izuna is not “anyone else.” He never has been.
“It doesn’t,” she assures him, fighting a flush. “It is… novel, still, accepting that I’m content—happy—to have your child. But it occupies my thoughts in strange and demanding ways too.”
Izuna’s arms tighten around her and he shifts upward for a kiss.
“So much has changed in what feels like no time at all,” she says.
“It’ll change more if there actually is a baby,” he says more calmly than she’d have expected.
She can only nod.
Almost all of what has changed has been for the better. Surely this will be the same.
~*~
~*~
Six days later and in flagrant disregard for the days’ tiring work with the clans and the muggy July heat that might otherwise dissuade unnecessary rigorous activity, they have two more impassioned nights (and one impromptu after-spar evening) under their belts.
(Very necessary rigorous activity, Izuna would argue.)
Tobirama is fifty-fifty on whether he’ll be more or less inclined to initiate a third after the news from Hokage Tower that she has to share.
The opportunity comes sooner than expected, as they both return home for a late lunch.
She waits until the soba noodles Izuna favors in summertime have been cooked and placed in cooling water before announcing, “The Dōzaki are insisting on my presence for their September tour. They’ve offered a ridiculous sum on top of the existing payment to secure me. Even though it means I’ll likely miss Mito’s delivery, we would be fools to refuse it, so I accepted the mission with Hashirama’s blessing.”
She waits another few moments before turning sideways.
The jut of Izuna’s lip and the tension in his brow are exactly as Tobirama predicted they might be in the event he chose childishness over outright anger.
Izuna is as aware of the details of the month-long mission as she is, so he doesn’t ask after them. Instead, his first comment—so dejectedly petulant in tone that Tobirama thinks she could have accurately guessed his pout even if she was blind—is, “Why didn’t Hashirama tell me?”
Something in the questions tugs at a petulant corner of her, too. Any kindly explanation slides off her tongue, replaced with, “Because I am not a child who needs your permission to be handed assignments.”
Izuna’s nose wrinkles in more authentic consternation. There’s a brief moment when he starts to raise an eyebrow—a shadow of argumentation she’s seen on too many faces, most of them under the age of sixteen—but it lowers as quickly as it raised.
Wise choice, Tobirama thinks at him. Bringing up Madara’s right to oversight—which she knows is what crossed his mind—would have been an awful tactical decision.
“I was in their office earlier. She could have at least mentioned it,” he complains nevertheless.
“By pure coincidence, I was with her when the courier arrived with the message and proposed bonus. She could not have.”
It’s like a forge fire being doused, but only for a few seconds. Izuna’s banked expressions twist back into genuine upset, their displeasure much more honed. His dark gaze cuts her with its hurt. “We’ve barely had two months to…” He doesn’t finish the thought, simply nods toward the back of the house.
Tobirama thinks of the futon upstairs that remains rolled with disuse since that first night in Izuna’s room—only a fraction of the time they’ve spent at each other’s throats or in obligate tolerance.
“I know,” she says.
“And only just last week…”
She thinks of the fervor he’s reached each time they’ve made love since the discussion, and she tamps down the surge of heat and disappointment. “I know.”
Izuna stares at her as if willing her to unspeak the news. Then he glares at the bowl of soba as if it is responsible.
“The tour isn’t until September,” she takes pity by reminding. “That’s still a month and a half’s worth of attempts.”
When Izuna slides his gaze back onto her, there’s a determined, almost warning glint to them.
“Remember: I would not cancel my commitment even if pregnant,” she warns right back. Better to snuff out such dangerous thoughts at first sign.
“Obviously. That was one of your stipulations. I know my mission parameters.”
Tobirama cannot quite fight the embarrassed heat that framing inspires. The cold soba doesn’t help at all.
~*~
~*~
(Izuna boasts an impressive mission success rate, and he has zero intention of failing this one.)
~*~
~*~
Izuna maintains his enthusiasm straight through the end of the month and into the next one. The eye-roll-inducing possessive embraces and kisses he’s taken to giving her in front of those like Nara Shikamura and Sarutobi Sasuke ramp up in tandem, to the point Tobirama feels compelled to comment.
“Surely you aren’t insecure in your claim? You are already bedding me near nightly.”
“Not just at night,” he agrees, chipper. “But they don’t know that.”
It would be frustrating—if not downright insulting—if not for the fact he’s fully aware of the immaturity of his actions and relishes her reactions.
Relief for time bought before irreversible change and disappointment over further delay both clash inside her when she is forced one mid-August morning to tell him, “My bleeding came.”
Izuna has just finished pouring their tea while she settles onto her zabuton after her detour to the restroom. “Your—?” he starts, then freezes. He is more subdued when he says, “Ah.”
Though the morning light and birdsong are both bright and cheery, the kitchen feels dimmer.
“What’s one more month?” Tobirama offers in conciliation. For a moment, the disappointment wins over the relief.
Several long seconds later, Izuna shrugs one shoulder, still belabored by the sudden shadow. “Nothing, I guess.”
She attempts lightheartedness. “Then there’s no need to look so dejected, is there?”
“There isn’t,” he agrees. “Might even be for the best with your mission coming up. I was just remembering something Elder Kagetsuna said way back when we first started regularly sparring—some awful garbage about your womb being infertile ground for Uchiha seed.”
Tobirama’s lip curls involuntarily, to what should have been her mortification. Were anyone other than Izuna there to witness it, it might have been. She won’t speak so rashly as her expression. “An uncouth but unsurprising sentiment from the Council. Albeit one you maybe have already disproven, given it’s not impossible our very first coupling bore fruit.” She pauses, considers not raising the issue, then chooses to anyway. “Which is also the more appropriate metaphor.”
Izuna comes entirely out of his melancholy with a confused frown. “What do you mean?”
“I understand popular parlance likens the process of conception to the sowing of seeds in a fertile field. However, that has bothered me since the day I learned the biologic truth of the matter as a child. Seeds are only produced after successful fertilization has occurred, in the fruit itself; the nearest equivalent to a seed in any plant-based metaphor should be the resulting zygote, not the initial sperm, and certainly not its role in the act of copulation itself. That is more the equivalent of pollen being introduced to the stigma and its path to the ovum, the successful combination of which produces the full fruit and its seeds.”
Izuna stares. His eyes have gone glassy. “Is this what the Senju of the Forest spend their time thinking about?”
Tobirama rolls her eyes. “I can hardly speak for all Senju. It’s never detracted from my training or studies, but, yes, I admit it crosses my mind whenever that idiomatic expression is uttered in my presence.”
“So, according to you, I’m not sowing anything.” The lively spark is back in his eye. “I’m pollinating you.”
No matter how ridiculous it may be… “That follows from the more accurate analogy, yes.”
Izuna mumbles a thoughtful hum into his tea. The sound and accompanying expression promise one or more headache in Tobirama’s future.
~*~
~*~
Izuna delights in keeping their intentions secret in plain sight of Madara, who believes and disbelieves in equal measure that Izuna has developed a vested interest in gardening.
“What sorts of plants are pollinated this late in the season?” Madara demands when he declines dinner in lieu of ‘urgent pollination business.’ “And why is it so time-sensitive? This isn’t some unhinged genetic experiment Tobirama’s got you wrapped up in, is it?”
It’s some kind of genetic experiment involving Tobirama, Izuna thinks but keeps to himself, lest he give the game away prematurely.
He does not delight in fending off Hashirama’s bright-eyed interest once she catches wind of it. The less said of the multiple times he has to decline her enthusiastic offers of help—sometimes with Tobirama’s utterly unamused judgment in the background—the better.
~*~
~*~
Senju Sahoma comes wailing into the world the morning of September third, three days before Tobirama is set to leave and some three weeks before the best Uzumaki experts predicted.
“Determined to meet her aunt,” Mito claims, although it’s more likely to do with the potency of Hashirama’s chakra interacting with the jutsu. She looks resplendent, sweat from the labor still darkening her hairline and her shoulders sagging with exhausted relief, but glowing with a profound joy that Tobirama isn’t sure she’s ever witnessed. The unabashed happiness she’s seen in Hashirama over the years is incomparable, just as it is to the elation Hashirama herself exudes now as she introduces her daughter.
Sahoma is a tiny miracle—a living testament to the limitless potential of science, fūinjutsu, and ninjutsu alike—and even those who still curl their lips at the oddity of Hashirama and Mito’s situation cannot keep hints of warmth from their otherwise disapproving faces when she is presented to them.
The only thing anyone finds any fault with is Sahoma’s hair.
(Excluding, of course, the Elders’ disappointment that she is, in fact, a she. They were never advised of this biological inevitability, and Mito knows they would not be comforted by any assertions that Sahoma might someday decide that “she” was never an accurate descriptor at all.)
(Tobirama is startled at how readily Madara and Izuna accept Mito’s musings. She’s even more startled to learn their acceptance is rooted in personal experience. She still knows practically nothing of their older brothers, and, for the first time, guilt nags at her.)
Sahoma’s unremarkable brown hair is neither the brown-black of Hashirama nor the dusty brown of Kawarama and their mother. Hashirama laments the loss of the Uzumaki red, but Mito assures her there are ruddy strands mixed among chestnut, although both are sparse.
Tobirama does not often hold babies, let alone newborns. When she takes her niece in her arms, a part of her vehemently protests. Such a delicate, innocent thing should not be handled by the likes of her. Another part flares with a longing that pounds dull and deep all the way to her marrow.
This is precisely why Konohagakure exists.
She realizes belatedly that this was part of Hashirama’s awe, and she’s certain the thought occurs to Madara when she eventually passes Sahoma to him. The Bane of Shinobi paints a much more absurd picture holding a swaddled babe than Izuna did the first time she saw it.
Not a single bit of the picture Izuna paints now is absurd to her. All it does it set that pang of longing reverberating in her chest.
~*~
~*~
“Wouldn’t it be nice if she grows up with a cousin close in age?” Izuna breathes into Tobirama’s shoulder between nips two nights later. He slips his hand past the growing part in her yukata to cup a breast.
“They’d be near a year apart at least at this point. And I think we’ve passed the right time in my cycle. If I’m not already pregnant, that’s unlikely to change.” Nevertheless, she leans into his touch and helps slide both sleeves the rest of the way off.
Izuna wonders vaguely how much he should be worrying about this cycle. He’s never spared it any thought before. He doesn’t spare it more of one now, either; there are more pressing matters.
“It can’t hurt to try,” he insists.
Her assent is little more than a permissive hum, but it’s more than he needs. Even if there’s zero chance of anything additional coming from it, he’s not about to pass up making love to his wife one—two—three more times when she’s leaving for a month tomorrow morning.
~*~
~*~
Izuna sees her off with a kiss. Its sincerity bears no resemblance to the ones he gives to taunt Shikamura and his ilk, and that makes it more embarrassing to have their siblings witness. Tobirama wishes desperately that Mito had taken the healers’ advice and stayed home rather than insist on Sahoma being there to see her off too.
As Tobirama turns her back on them and the collage of loving happiness, amicable exasperation, and fond disappointment that they make, it strikes her that if Sahoma is why Konoha exists, then this is what Konoha is.
Her happuri and its humble leaf sit lighter than ever on her proudly raised face as she races to meet up with the Dōzaki, her fellow shinobi of multiple clans behind her.
~*~
Tobirama could call the mission uneventful and be honest. She could also call it uneventful and make a complete liar of herself.
Ostensibly, the mission is uneventful. She was hired as part of a protective escort, and the clients remain unassailed for the entirety of the trip. Everything she was explicitly contracted to do goes off with nary a hiccup.
However, halfway through the tour, the reason why she was requested last minute so adamantly becomes clear.
Tobirama plays along with the foreign shinobi who pulls her aside in one town. She lets him test her resentment for being “sold against her will” to the enemy, for being sacrificed for her sister’s dreams, for being forced to share her home with ancestral enemies, for having to toil diligently to circumvent pregnancy for nearing two years. The lattermost, he stresses with sympathy, cannot be kept up indefinitely.
She acts just the right amount of cautious yet intrigued to ensure continued contact. If an enemy of Konoha is foolish enough to approach her as a presumed weak point, they deserve everything coming to them after being played like a courtly koto.
The as-yet-unnamed enemy’s lack of accurate intelligence is especially amusing to Tobirama in this instance because of the second reason that the trip is not as uneventful as the mission itself.
Her monthly bleeding does not come the week when it should.
It does not come the next week, either.
Nor the week after that.
She has no words to describe the frightful, enthralling anticipation that grows each day she remains without even the faintest cramping or spotting.
Cannot be kept up indefinitely, indeed.
Tobirama has had multiple assignments this boring, it’s true—but none have managed to be this tension-filled at the same time.
~*~
~*~
Tobirama walks into Hokage Tower one month, one week, and one day later, armor clanking and happuri gleaming, hair wind-blown and skin lightly flushed from hours of travel under the blazing sun.
Izuna’s chest twists and lightens when her discerning red eyes lock on him, and it’s startling how relieved he is despite never having had reason to worry. She is, without doubt, the most arresting thing he’s seen in that entire time—twice as beautiful as he remembers—and he’s grateful he happened to be in the Tower lobby at exactly the right moment.
(That she immediately assists in diplomatically berating the Hyūga demanding an unscheduled afternoon audience with Hashirama is also a relief. It makes his chest swell further.)
He steals a kiss once Tōchi’s been sent on his way, awkward mismatch between her armor and his casual clothes and all.
He’s eager for her to finish her debriefing—and not so eager to admit he’s taken three separate courier assignments in her absence as an excuse to spend less time in an empty house—but he has to pretty himself and make a dinner meeting with the Utatane, Nohara, and Hatake. He’ll need to be content with the brief contact and rewarding softness in her expression for now.
~*~
Call him an oversentimental fool of an Uchiha—which Tobirama has, albeit less kindly, on multiple occasions—but Izuna has no designs on his wife tonight. The agriculture meeting ran long, and he’s looking forward to plastering himself to her back and burrowing his face in her hair and nape all night.
(That’s something he can do now, something only he can do, something only he has earned the right to after fifteen years—!)
His plans might have been innocent, but that doesn’t stop him from grinning or his pulse from quickening when he finds her sitting expectantly in the middle of their futon, wearing a loose Uchiha-indigo haori, instructing him not to dress for sleep yet.
The innocent plans certainly don’t stop him from drawing out the peak he brings her to with his mouth, and they definitely don’t stop him from giving himself a bruise with how quickly he gets on his back when asked, before she can change her mind…!
(Tobirama can go on as many missions that require horseback riding as she wants, Izuna decides.)
She’s a damn vision atop him. The newness of it makes it infinitely better: every novel sensation translated into twitches and bitten lips, every crease of her brow as she works out how best to move or position herself, every dawning of enlightenment or triumph when she tries something and finds success. She is a scientist at work, and Izuna has never been so happy to be on the receiving end of her experiments.
In the moments after they’ve come, he drinks her and the whole situation in. Tobirama braced backward when she came, so he still has a completely unobstructed view of the muscled plane of her belly. He slides his grasp upward so he can run his thumbs over it. It’s easy, now, to imagine it expanding with life. Those imaginings keep his arousal in limbo despite just coming.
Izuna’s never experienced whatever emotion it is that first seems to stop his heart and then send it racing when she straightens some, studies the intensity of his gaze on her abdomen, and announces her bleeding is almost a month late.
~*~
(Izuna brings her to climax twice more, once with his mouth and once from atop her in a much more familiar position. The former gives her only brief pause, the latter an excuse to quip that he can’t get her more pregnant—assuming that’s truly what she is.
At that point, his heart and head are both still so full that it’s almost a miracle he can quip back the same thing he told her before she left: “It can’t hurt to try.”)
~*~
~*~
They don’t entertain the idea of telling anyone until they’re more certain of the viability.
Tobirama finds herself in the Senju District more than ever, helping with Sahoma. For the first time in a long while, she feels guilty about withholding personal information.
She feels a little less guilty when another pregnancy-related drama involving the Senju and Uchiha unfolds without warning the day after Hashirama’s birthday.
The Uchiha Elders—who have been steaming over Madara’s continued defiance, Izuna’s continued childlessness, and their own stunted influence—arranged a marriage between Hikaku and an affluent silk merchant’s daughter without consulting anyone.
Madara and Izuna are livid. Hikaku, too, is upset, but he reasons it’s not worth a public schism in leadership or the reputational damage to the clan for breaking an agreement they themselves arranged.
A scandal that encourages the other party to demand dissolution, on the other hand…
Tōka makes quite the scene storming the Uchiha District, demanding Hikaku take responsibility for knocking her up. She made the decision to enact this harebrained scheme herself, so Hikaku is almost as dumbfounded as his clanmates when she turns up yelling on his doorstep.
An Uchiha midwife under mangekyō genjutsu confirms Tōka’s story.
Both Uchiha and Senju Elders are mortified and spitting-mad in turns, flinging accusations of bloodline theft and woman-stealing that infuriate both clan heads after two and a half successful years of alliance.
The Kinukawa do, in fact, pull out of the arrangement. However, a rather large purchase of silk bolts and a priority trading partner clause is all it takes for Madara to smooth things over.
This is fortunate, because there’s little else to be done about it from the Uchiha’s standpoint. They cannot knowingly risk the birth of an out-clan sharingan. Keeping track of bloodlines would have been easy enough if they’d quietly foisted Tōka onto another man for appearances’ sake, but the scene she caused makes that infeasible.
Tōka privately assures them she’ll claim a miscarriage sometime after the wedding—sure to be without ceremony since such scandalous behavior shan’t be publicly encouraged! She claims no regrets. Shacking up with an Uchiha is all the rage, after all—and she might even have a kid for real someday; it’d be a crime to deprive the next generation of their pettiness and style (or so she asserts).
Tobirama thinks Tōka and Hikaku are lucky that any scrutiny of or fallout from the fake pregnancy’s fake complications will likely be overshadowed by her own situation, assuming there are no real complications with hers.
~*~
Two missed bleedings turn into three. The worst Tobirama has to show for it are a few bouts of mild nausea, a marginally increased tendency toward headaches, and a slight uptick in her number of bathroom breaks. The lattermost was the most surprising; she’d assumed that symptom wouldn’t start for months.
(Izuna also swears her nipples are getting darker, though she doesn’t quite see it nor understand the causal link.)
As three months begin the trek toward four, she knows the time to enlist a medical confidante draws near. Besides which, her belly has begun to show, at least when bare. She finds herself increasingly hopeful for amorous encounters (another symptom?), and Izuna never fails to study her stomach when indulging.
Knowing the choice will soon be taken from her—and more confident in the viability after a complication-free first trimester—Tobirama decides it is time to tell their family.
For all of fifteen seconds, they argue who should be told first. “Madara is the head of the clan” and “Hashirama is my actual blood” both lose to the obvious answer, which they reach simultaneously: a sibling dinner announcement.
They briefly consider the dinner already planned for Madara’s birthday, but that is nearly two weeks out. The months of silence have eaten at both of them; the sooner they can unburden themselves, the better.
There is an opening in everyone’s schedule five days out. Rather than raise suspicion by hosting, they ask Hashirama to host as usual.
Dinner proceeds uneventfully in spite of the nerves that sprout under Tobirama’s skin. Sahoma was still wide awake when they first arrived. Neither she nor Izuna had been shy around her, but the interactions now imbue an edge of finality to the information she plans to share—and to the situation in its entirety. Speaking it aloud to another person feels like it will make the intangible tangible.
Tobirama curses the influence of her husband and his clan; she clearly conceals less of her preoccupation than she’d have liked, because Hashirama keeps visibly appraising her. Toward the end of dinner, after Sahoma has been put to sleep a second time from waking midway through and demanding feeding, and after they have all but finished their dessert of fresh fruits, Hashirama can no longer contain herself.
“You’re not getting sick, are you?” she asks around a bit of kiwi. “You’ve seemed a bit off for most of dinner, not to mention odd the last few days.” Genuine concern oozes from every pore.
Mito looks at her consideringly, and Tobirama is grateful that at least she was none the wiser.
Madara looks much the same as always: vaguely suspicious. He glances toward the communal food bowls—some of which she’d helped prepare—and Tobirama wants to scowl at his priorities.
Instead of scowling, she turns her head to catch Izuna’s attention. She finds him already looking sidelong at her, awaiting her permission.
They don’t nod so much as tilt their chins a few millimeters.
It’s enough for Mito’s curious gaze to turn sharp.
“Not that I don’t love you enough to want family dinners more often,” Izuna prefaces with a nod at his brother, “but we asked for a reason.”
Mito’s gaze turns downright piercing. Her lips are already beginning to curve upward.
“I did think it was weird, coming from you,” Madara mumbles.
“And what reason was that?” Hashirama asks, painfully earnest.
Tobirama feels warm fingers thread between and around hers. A strangely thick sensation dominates her chest.
She takes a breath and opens her mouth.
“I am pregnant.”
There. It’s been said. There is no taking it back and no denying what she’s been experiencing these past few months in secrecy with Izuna.
Their table is the picture of stillness for all of five seconds until—
“You are?” Hashirama exclaims, surging dangerously over her empty bowl but not fully leaping across the table. Yet.
Madara’s wide-eyed, gob-smacked expression is one Tobirama thinks she’ll enjoy recalling. For a moment, she wishes she shared their dōjutsu so that the memory would stay pristine.
“How far along?” Mito asks. Next to Madara and Hashirama, she looks as though Tobirama has only announced a second round of dessert.
“Going on four months,” Izuna answers on her behalf.
“So far?!” her sister cries.
“My estimates could only be off by a week or so. I’ve never self-diagnosed pregnancy before, but…” She hesitates. Glances furtively at Izuna, even more furtively at Madara. “The window was rather limited ahead of the Dōzaki escort,” she finishes a bit more softly.
Hashirama is undeterred by the additional information, but Madara’s eyes shoot to Izuna. Mito lifts a hand to hide her laugh.
Madara chastises Izuna for not telling him sooner, Mito asks questions about how the first trimester had progressed, and, at one point, Hashirama begins crying—about what it means for Tobirama and Izuna’s relationship, about how overwhelming it is to see Tobirama become a mother (and herself to become an aunt!), about how excited she is for Sahoma to have a cousin (who will be as close as a sister!), about a generation that will never have known their clans as enemies flourishing in Konohagakure.
Tobirama could do without the waterworks, but she concedes each point. She has invented nearly a hundred jutsu already, from simple elemental techniques to bending space to imperfect-perfect clones to recalling souls from the Pure Lands, and each has left her floating with triumph and vindication. Yet not a single one produced the exact bubbly quality the fills her with the weight of secrecy lifted and good news shared.
~*~
When they return home, she confesses how much she enjoyed Madara’s stupefaction and how she already wishes she could relive it.
“What would you give me to grant that wish?” Izuna asks. His eyes flash red, exactly as they did at dinner, unbeknownst to her.
Tobirama ought not encourage such blatant bribery, but there’s no regret when she humors him. “Nothing I probably wouldn’t have given if you’d asked nicely anyway.”
Izuna grins, and he goes about collecting his prize.
(He still asks nicely.)
~*~
~*~
In the coming days, Tōka and Hikaku learn they’ll be getting an extended cousin.
Toward the end of January, when Tobirama’s adoption of looser-fitting clothing threatens to become conspicuous and when Tōka’s lack of growth would soon become equally conspicuous, they inform the clans at large.
The Uchiha Elders are in turns livid and relieved and at a loss.
Livid, because they announce it right after Tobirama returns from a three-day sensitive courier mission that would have taken anyone else five times as long—which therefore commanded nearly thrice the price tag—and how could you let her do that?
(“Let,” he scoffs.)
Relieved, because Izuna has finally managed to put a child in her.
(“Finally,” he scoffs again, as if he wouldn’t be the envy of every Uchiha man for taking less than three months to pull it off.)
At a loss, because Madara refuses wives and Hikaku was ensnared by a Senju and it’s looking more and more likely that Senju blood will pump through the very heart of the clan.
(“They literally asked for this.”)
Back to livid, because how could you not inform us until more than halfway through the pregnancy?
(“I wouldn’t have told them until we already had a baby crying in our hands, except it’s dangerous to keep healers and midwives in the dark.”)
… Also livid because he was very clear that he wouldn’t deny Tobirama’s request for Senju healers to take point. The Uchiha hadn’t demanded midwifery among the medical knowledge shared in the initial treaty; while Tobirama was happy to have the Uchiha involved as a learning opportunity, she did not want them in charge.
In that ongoing flurry of emotions, Tōka’s faux-miscarriage announcement that follows mere weeks later is easily buried.
~*~
Amidst the chaos, Izuna receives an early birthday gift the likes of which he’s never experienced: a flutter of movement beneath his palm while he’s sucking his way down Tobirama’s throat. It bears no resemblance to the muscle twitches he sometimes elicits.
For a while now, Tobirama’s felt gas-like movements and dull pangs. They know these must be the precursors of the full-blown kicks that Mito previously shared with them and which excited women always chatter about. This is the first he’s been able to feel them too.
It turns Izuna off of the planned activities, but he’s more than satisfied falling asleep with his hand pressed to her belly, hoping to feel it again: new, unique life that he has helped to create—that he has helped to create with Tobirama.
Maybe the pretentious scholars in the capital have words for situations such as these. Izuna doesn’t bother trying to find them.
~*~
~*~
The months move quickly and slowly both. Too much and not enough happens.
Tobirama grows, as does her niece—a preview of what awaits her.
Another island in Water suffers an attack by the Three-Tails.
The formal academy finally comes to life, offering supplementary education to the youngest among them and pairing small teams of the older children with consistent mentors.
More women around the village announce pregnancies: a whole generation of post-war children on the cusp of existence.
Her unnamed contact reaches her twice. With Hashirama’s, Madara’s, and Izuna’s oversight, she lays the groundwork for Izuna’s eventual abduction and her eventual double-crossing of the would-be saboteurs.
She learns that Hikaku’s finer appreciation of the male form is shared by his distant head family cousins.
(She learns Izuna had a first love, and it was not Kazane. She learns his loss coincided with the gaining of a mangekyō, but that it was not the cause; Izuna is not ready to share all the details just then.)
Izuna learns of her abandoned attempts at reanimation. He is drunk when he asks, sober when he asks again the following morning, and he looks at her funnily for three days after, but he never recoils. Instead, he calls her insane and unfathomable and maybe a bit disturbed—“But then, which of us isn’t?” he concludes. Then he calls her too clever for her own good, a dangerous kind of obsessive, and a number of other insults-hiding-compliments that put any worries she’d had to rest.
They pass the point where Tōka’s pretend tragedy inspires fear of a real one.
They discover one night that, although Tobirama hasn’t leaked any of the colostrum the midwives warned she might, she’s certainly producing it. Izuna is fascinated, but neither wants to risk future supply or quality for the actual babe—and neither is willing to ask a third party about this—so he errs on the side of disappointed caution.
Sleeping becomes a bit of a struggle. The fetus seems to favor nighttime, and Tobirama worries a sleeping jutsu may have unintended consequences. Later, sleeping on her back becomes uncomfortable—luckily, she already favored side-sleeping—and moving from horizontal to vertical positions takes more effort than it ought to for a seasoned shinobi. So does picking up dropped writing implements in her lab, or a sheet of notes blown astray by a spring breeze, or kunai scattered during practice or sparring, though she does increasingly less of that the nearer June draws and the looser her pelvis seems to become.
(Izuna learned quickly that undue assistance netted himself no gratitude. She is grateful he is a fast study.)
On the subject of projected delivery dates, the Uchiha are overall pleased. The nearer a birth to the summer solstice, the more auspicious. It is unlikely she’ll make it that far—even the latest estimates only barely cross into June—but Tobirama and Izuna allow them their fantasies.
~*~
She does not make it to June. Tobirama thinks the Elders might even prefer that, in the end; to come within hours of the prized month but fail to cross the threshold must surely indicate Senju inferiority, must it not?
Tobirama has just left the house, intent on a day holed away in the Tower’s archive, when she thinks she’s progressed from occasional leaking to a complete loss of bladder control. It takes only a few more moments to realize the unsettled stomach that’s plagued her since the previous night’s dinner—another mild symptom she’s enjoyed the past few months—is actually nascent contractions. She has not peed herself; she is leaking amniotic fluid.
This is happening.
She changes into fresh bottoms, adds a lining to protect against further leakage, and leaves a second time, intent now on the Council Hall that Izuna had left for only minutes before she herself had departed.
Izuna is still greeting other branch patriarchs when she arrives. Tobirama takes only a moment to appreciate that half of the faces are neutral or even positive when they turn to her, and she’d wager a few of the other half are more upset at the rude interruption than at her herself. In the next moment, she approaches her confused husband.
“I will stop by the Tower to inform my sister, then I will head to the Senju District and central hospital to inform the medics,” she tells him.
He blinks at her, furrows his brows, and twists his head a centimeter. Then his eyes shoot wide and dart toward her small globe of a belly. “Right now?” His voice hitches. Despite having had some eight months of forewarning paired with a rapidly decreasing number of days that labor could begin, Izuna looks like he’s taken a paralyzing lightning attack after being walloped by a wall of earth.
“Not for some time yet,” she assuages. “Contractions haven’t begun in earnest, but it is only a matter of time. If the medics wish to accompany me back home, they can. If not, you can fetch them when the true time comes.” It may yet be another day before the babe makes its appearance; she prefers not to waste their time or hers.
“I’m gonna be a father,” Izuna whispers in awe and terror both, although this, too, has been known for just as long.
“Yes. But I’m going to leave now.” This was not the space nor audience to lose their heads around, especially when they might have a long wait ahead.
~*~
~*~
Izuna feels his brain falter in real time. It takes until Tobirama is almost at the door for him to shake off the full extent of his stupor and excuse himself from the morning’s proceedings. (Small mercies that no Uchiha in their right mind would begrudge a father attending the birth of his child.)
He catches up to Tobirama and assures her he’ll fetch the Uchiha healers from the hospital. He doesn’t dare suggest he’ll fetch everyone, no matter how he itches to send her home to relax; supposedly activity helps the process. Plus, not overstepping her autonomy helps his process of not having a deadly wife glaring at him day in and day out. Izuna might love picking a good, pointless fight, but he also loves not being murdered in his sleep. He’s smart enough to know which outcome he’d face right now.
Both sets of specialists tell them to cool their heels until the contractions are defined, persistent, and spaced only several minutes apart.
Izuna returns home and does his best not to annoy Tobirama as she paces and adds the finishing touches to the room that was once her bedroom, which she’d prepared for this very purpose weeks ago.
He has had missions turned sour that were less taxing on his nerves than this maddening wait in the liminal space between phases in their lives. How is it they can stand balanced on this precipice and still eat a mostly normal lunch?
It’s early afternoon when Tobirama crosses the threshold the healers and medics gave.
Grateful for something to do, Izuna hurries to get them and to update their siblings as promised.
There is still a torturous wait. How Tobirama can stand being poked and prodded and infused with chakra while Tsuru and Sueko take instruction from Senju Naeki is beyond him.
As the process drags on, even self-discipline as ironclad as Tobirama’s cannot hide the discomfort. His clanswomen nonetheless express amazement at how well the Senju’s techniques siphon off the worst of the labor pains without impeding contractions or Tobirama’s finer muscle control. As it turns out, some of those techniques were derived from Tobirama’s own unrelated research.
Hashirama arrives and is summarily dismissed. She’s relegated to camping out next door with Mito and Madara, where they can be quickly summoned. Unlike Hashirama wanted for Sahoma’s birth, Tobirama has no interest in adding more busy bodies under their notably smaller roof.
For all that Izuna ferries glasses of water back and forth—“Hydration is important,” all the healers agree—he feels useless. The most recent time he can recall feeling this way also involved Tsuru: sitting at Madara’s side that awful birthday evening, waiting for an antidote to take effect.
He hates the dark direction that association takes him.
“You were not useless in getting me to this point,” Tobirama says dryly, half smirking. “And you are not uselessly hiding away as most husbands do.”
Most non-Uchiha husbands, anyway. Months earlier, Naeki had been affronted to learn Izuna would be present. It’s Uchiha tradition, however—and denying a sharingan-bearer the right to immortalize his child’s first breaths would be a grievous insult.
Still, Izuna resents his helplessness.
It’s not until the sun has long set that Naeki goes from coaching his wife through various squats, twists, and lunges for “improving positioning” to instructing she push.
Tobirama does not cry out in the way most have described—she somehow restrains herself to grunts and groans and clenched teeth—but the sheen of sweat she develops, and the way her muscles twitch, and how bone-crushingly tight her grip sometimes gets when she takes Izuna’s hand or arm, tell the truth of it. She’s broken bones, been stabbed, been electrocuted, experienced many a lab-related pain, but this is pain of another kind and which she has no experience managing.
They bring water for cleaning and cooling. They bring towels for sweat and blood. They take turns running chakra scans and position Tobirama for better access to check progress. (The way whole hands seem to disappear when they do churns Izuna’s not-delicate stomach.)
Very little warning precedes Naeki announcing a head—then announcing it’s free—and then asking for a gentle push, gentle!
Izuna glimpses something pinkish and wet, but it’s obscured by three bustling women, even with his tomoe spinning into place.
Tobirama had been braced against the wall, but Tsuru begins help-forcing her onto her back among the nest of cushioning. It takes a moment for Izuna to register the only sounds are harried murmuring, labored breathing, and the rustling of fabric.
Where are the wails?
“Is it okay?” Tobirama speaks over his heart-stopping realization.
No sooner does the bottomless pit open in his stomach—there’s a reason the baby is concealed, there’s a reason they cut the cord to move it away so quickly, the pregnancy and labor were too easy…!—than a hitching cry splits the air.
“He’s perfectly fine—just a bit of fluid in the airways that needed clearing,” says Naeki, in a voice that belies her outward calm, as she rubs at the squalling form.
Izuna thinks the shock of her statement is the only thing that staves off a heart attack, because it stops his racing pulse in its tracks.
He.
Izuna has a son.
He looks at Tobirama and sees the same dawning awe stealing any pretense of disciplined neutrality.
They have a son.
Before they can grow too livid about being denied a clear look at the new life that they made (no matter the cleanings or important medical attention being paid!), Naeki and Sueko split apart. The latter bears precious, partially swaddled cargo.
They’ve missed June by a hair, Tsuru advises—not unkindly—as Sueko does the honor of presenting her new secondary clan heir to his mother.
Izuna could not possibly care less.
The squirming, wailing creature placed on Tobirama’s chest is beyond critique. A head full of wispy, wet swirls of black, alternately plastered to precious, paper-like pink-purple skin or sticking up where the healers’ cloths have dried it. Both they and the skin look soft and ephemeral, even under the bits of whitish something left behind by the first, rough cleaning. The hastily cut and tied umbilical cord is an alien thing that might otherwise be unsightly, yet all Izuna can think while looking at it is how it nourished the little one and joined him to his mother these past nine months. The scrunched, discolored little hands and feet and face look too fragile to possibly be finished—too fragile by far for the world of shinobi—and yet they are so, so perfect.
Tobirama’s arms wrap around their son, longing and tender and so tentative that Izuna knows she, too, is picturing everything else those arms and hands have wrought, contrasted with something so pure, so far removed from the animosity that had seen his very parents chasing each other’s deaths instead of new life.
There is still work to be done: afterbirth to pass, bleeding to staunch, healing to jumpstart, a first nursing to initiate before the hour is up, a messenger sent next door to inform the others. But as Izuna lowers to his knees and places one bracing hand on Tobirama’s shoulder and the other atop her own hand, where his fingers can brush feather-light against warm-cool skin that’s only faced the air for mere minutes, none of it could seem less important.
All too soon, the cries soften; the comfort of a mother’s warmth begins to soothe. Izuna can’t decide whether he misses the proof of healthy lungs or whether he’s fallen more in love with this even softer vision of innocence.
“Have you decided on a name?” Naeki asks.
Izuna snaps his head up, ripped from his affection-filled haze. The way she, Tsuru, and Sueko stare only at him chafes despite every other cell in his body seeming to soar in speechless awe and elation both.
Naming is, apparently, unusual for Senju women to have any real say in. Uchiha lines are less strictly drawn here, but they’d assumed this was yet another sphere where he’d assert spousal authority.
Not so.
Izuna finds Tobirama’s bright, exhausted eyes.
They discussed this at length. Two deliberate concessions to Senju head family naming convention: the final character masquerading as an echo of the late Uchiha clan head’s name, the middle character appealing to the clan’s fire mastery despite its homey connotations. One explicit acknowledgment of unity that also serves to obscure the middle character’s clear Senju influence; when heard aloud, the pair coincidentally echoes another of Izuna’s late family members—the part his second-oldest brother had retained.
Tobirama nods once then lets her gaze settle back on the impossible being that’s been placed on her chest.
Izuna takes his hand off Tobirama’s shoulder and places it squarely on his son’s back. It shakes less this time.
“Kuroma,” they say in perfect, unplanned unison.
Uchiha Kuroma.
Their unifying little hearth fire.