Hashirama Senju was fighting with his brother.

Hashirama Senju rarely fought with his brother, which was strange seeing both of them had a temper, and an incredible conviction of being in the right, whatever opinion they held. A hard, non-desirable feature in a person that neither of them cared to fix.

Now, they were fighting over that exact reason; both of them believing they were in the right, and the other in the wrong. 

"We are not supposed to interfere with the happenings of the world!" Hashirama's brother, Tobirama, said darkly. "It will have consequences!"

"But this is a happening of the world!" he said. "No matter if I created a detour in the timeline or not, it must have been fate seeing it happened!"

Tobirama sighed, hid his face in his hands. He couldn't argue against what he had just said, Hashirama knew. It didn't satisfy him as much as he had thought it would. 

"What you have done is just so reckless", Tobirama said, much quieter now, admitting defeat. Hashirama felt relief because it meant they could stop fighting; he loved his little brother and hated fighting with him. "It's so wrong, so selfish, so utterly void of defence, so-"

"I know", Hashirama interrupted.

"Knowing you're selfish doesn't make you less so, unless you use that knowledge to be less selfish."

At this, Hashirama couldn't help but smile. He reached his hand out, and his little brother took it. Hashirama's white robe, indented with golden embroideries, contrasted Tobirama's dark brown one with silver threads nicely. They wore each other's colours, Hashirama's robe matching Tobirama's short hair, Tobirama's robe matching Hashirama's long. 

"Please, just give me some time. Just give me some time and I will make him want to stay here."

"Even if you make him want to stay here, it's still wrong because it will have been by your manipulation."

"You're impossible, brother", Hashirama smiled.

And finally, Tobirama smiled back, and Hashirama hoped that was a token that everything would be all right. 

Hashirama walked through the corridors of the underground. 

One would expect the corridors of the underground to be cold, stony tunnels, but they were not. They were vast, open, elongated hallways with high ceilings, its walls made of mirror glass, reflecting the lights put on the ground in a way that made each corridor brighter than a comet passing the planet.

Hashirama knew these corridors by heart. He was 4,6 billion years old, even if he himself had no way of measuring time, and had lived in these hallways throughout his life, although on earth only for the past 4,5 billion years; for the fraction of a billion year before that, he had drifted in these hallways throughout the skies. Hashirama had little memory of this.

He walked to the hall where he had captured his prey, the beautiful Madara. The first thing he saw when he came into that hall was the flower. 

Hashirama had been watching Madara for a long time. 

He had lived underground for a long time before he found the black-haired man, searching for meaning. He had contemplated if the feeling of passing time should be considered a sixth sense just as sight and hearing and scent and taste and sensation, because heaven knew he had felt the passing of time. It was meaningless agony.

And then one day, he had finally found that meaning he had so desperately been searching for.

Hashirama had placed many of his mirrors on the surface, or rather, he had asked Tobirama to do it for him seeing he himself never went there. Half of them were on land, and the other half were placed in the ocean, some deep within it, some just at the surface.

One such mirror was placed on the shore of a beach on the North Pole. And one day, when Hashirama had looked into the one underground mirror that looked out through all of the mirrors on the surface, bored out of his mind, he had seen Madara's face reflected in it.

Hashirama had found Madara's beauty striking, almost painful. It was one such beauty that would have humans start wars, if humans had existed at that time. It was one such beauty that the starts would go out for, if that was what he asked of them.

Hashirama knew that he could not lose track of the black-haired man. He asked Tobirama to set up mirrors wherever Madara went.

"But don't let him see you!" Hashirama warned, afraid that the black-haired man would figure out he was being watched and thus avoid the mirrors and Hashirama's longing gaze.

"I will do as you desire for now, but I must warn you", Tobirama said. "Nothing good could come out of this. You can't be together."

"Why would you say that?" Hashirama whispered.

But Tobirama only shook his head and walked off.

For a long time, Hashirama had followed the black-haired beauty through the mirrors, asking Tobirama to put up more and more. Finally, there were so many mirrors that Hashirama didn't have to ask Tobirama to put them up any more; there was one anywhere Madara went. And that was lucky, because Tobirama would have stopped agreeing to setting them up for much longer.

"You're obsessed with that mirror", he had complained once as he had walked in on Hashirama looking through the one underground mirror. "It's going to destroy you."

Hashirama hadn't even turned to look at Hashirama.

"I'm going to take him to me. I am going to take him to me to our world. I'm going to make him love me."

"It will destroy you", Tobirama had repeated. "Both of you."

Hashirama hadn't taken notice of this new piece of wording. Both of you.

He remained completely unaware of Tobirama's deep secret.