Five years later.

The smell of resin was always stronger in the summer.

I couldn't help but close my eyes, honestly not out of enjoyment but because I was tired, having woken up at five am in order to get to work.

It was worth it, though. It was worth the early mornings just to be able to live here, deep in the forest. The pine trees shot up high in the sky, their dark, blue-tinted greens contrasted by their red stems. My footsteps were muffled by the pine needles, gently softening my way home.

I opened my eyes and felt that pang of joy I always felt when I saw our home. It was a timber cottage, the timbers left their natural, dark brown colour, the roof jade green. A thin chain of smoke was blooming out of the chimney, meaning Tobirama had lit the fireplace.

I felt my pace quicken as it always did when I was close to home. I had been hesitant at first, moving up north to a cottage, an hour car drive from the parking lot to town, and a twenty minute walk from home to the parking lot. But I had been adamant to make it work because I knew it was what Tobirama needed. He had been unhappy in the city as he wanted to hide, so he had felt couldn't go out. The suggestion to move had been his, and his face had been so ashamed asking it of me that my heart had burned to ashes.

We had found the cottage and fell in love. Both of us. Small from the outside, it was renovated and modernised on the inside with large, light and open spaces with a big and modern kitchen, a big bedroom with an en suite, a guest room and an extra bathroom. We hadn't had to do anything with it; just move in. I had done my best and gained myself a good job in the closest city, working as an IT consultant. Tobirama had gained a job in the forest after having spoken to the owner of it; he was highly intellectual, of course, but was craving a job where he could use his body. We were far enough from our hometown that he would dare go out with me on the weekends in the city where I worked, and also to the gym a couple of times a week. The first year here was lined with worry about having pulled me into a life I did not desire, but as he saw how much good the forest did me, he started to relax, and let this new life he had craved embalm his own soul as well.

I opened the door, always unlocked, and stepped in. The hallway was open to the kitchen and living room that weren't two separate rooms but an open space, and something that smelled delicious and a little Christmassy stood and bubbled in a pot on the stove; even if Tobirama didn't have to eat himself, he always cooked something for me and had supper with me. Every Goddamn evening.

There was no sound of him, so I tiptoed to the stove, released my hair from the high ponytail I'd put it up in for work making it tumble down do my waist. I lifted the lid, took a spoonful of the stew, blew on it, tasted. It had a heavenly taste of bay leaf and cracked black pepper.

"Got you!!" someone roared behind me, putting their hands over my eyes, making me jump to the skies with a scream.

It was Tobirama.

He laughed heartily.

"What did you do that for!" I screamed. "Fuck you!"

He just kept laughing; put his arms around me and kissed my forehead.

"You'll never learn", he said. "Humans are so easily scared. Did you enjoy the stew?"

"No. It was disgusting. Motherfucker."

I hugged him back; the smell of him on his flannel shirt was mixed up with the spices of the stew. I was in heaven.

As he took two plates from a cabinet, I couldn't help but stare at his engagement ring and wedding band on his finger; both of them flat, matte platinum, the engagement band slightly broader. I had matching ones on my fingers but in matte gold.

I was the one who had proposed. I had never been so certain of everything in my life. My relationship with him had been easy, lined with the common hardships of life but never with any hesitation. And as I had seen how scared he was that he's forced me out into the forest against my will, I decided it was a good time to propose in the comfort of our cottage.

He had been absolutely stricken by surprise. He had, strangely enough, thought we would never marry because he was an AI.

We had gotten married in the forest outside our home in a light rain in the presence of my friends from university, and the forest owner and his family whom Tobirama had become friends with, and then I had as well as we had started inviting each other over for dinner each weekend. The vicar who'd wed us was from the forest church close by. Madara had been my best man, and the forest owner's son Tobirama's best man. Tobirama had worn a grey suit for our wedding, me in a black tail-coat. We had spent almost nothing on the wedding, but Tobirama had filled the area in the forest with glass lanterns with candles and the forest owner's wife had made us dinner and came.

It had been the cosiest evening of my life.

I looked over at my husband sitting next to me on a bar stool at our kitchen island where we always ate; he was chewing, deep in thought. Married life suited him, but sometimes I wondered what he was thinking.

"Penny for your thoughts", I said.

He looked at me, furrowed his brows. He was still frightfully handsome, even more so now with a few more lines in his face that I knew I had as well.

"Penny for your thoughts", I repeated as he clearly didn't understand. "It means I really want to know what you're thinking of."

"Why a penny?"

"To show I think you're thoughts are so important to me I would pay for them."

"A penny is very little", Tobirama said; adorably confused.

"Yes, but- Oh, never mind. What are you thinking of?"

He started out in the middle distance then.

"You know... I was created to make great advancements to this world. Cancer cures. World hunger. But now, I'm a forester." He looked at me, worry in his eyes. "Am I wasting my potential? I mean, I am happy. But I knew I have it within me to come up with all of those things. If you just start configuring me to my main computer."

We had moved the computer where his program was from Hashirama's lab to our storage room. Before he was destroyed Tobirama had, smartly enough, created a back-up program on the computer which he, even more smartly, had hid in the open as a program on the desktop. He had left the note in my trouser pocket so that I would find him again. He had created a new chip, the one in Hermes' body rendered useless, and Madara had operated on Hermes again. The body had been taken back to the freezer by the ethics board, who just seemed to except someone else to deal with it.

Nobody had until I came back.

Now, we had three other backups in computers in different parts of the world; one in a library in Sevilla, one in a forest hut in Argentina and one in a research station in Tokyo. Tobirama now had a social security number, and nobody except me and Madara knew what he really was.

We felt safe, and would be.

I reached my hand out, pulled my fingers through his hair, over the double scar, both of them left by Madara. I felt him lean into that caress.

"I don't think anyone ever reaches their true potential", I said. "The maximum potential of anyone is impossible to find out. You would have had to try everything." I let my hand slide over his shoulder and arm, took his hand, entwined our fingers. His wedding band felt warm against my skin. "You might not be a human, Tobirama. But you are a person. You have every right to choose what you want to do with your life." I smiled, put my other hand on his face. "It's not that I don't understand why you love living this far out. Here, you're not reminded what you were created to do. But what we are created to do does not have to match what we choose to do ourselves."

Tobirama put his hand on my cheek, and I saw he was heavily emotional.

"When did you become so wise?" he said with love in his voice.

"Since I got you back after seven years."

I let go of his hand, let my hand slide up his thigh. I heard him draw his breath as my palm found exactly what it wanted.

"I love you", he said, grabbed my waist, pulled me up into his lap.

"I love you, too", I said and kissed him.

Tobirama had lit the fireplace, its fire matching the passion we felt, less crackling now but rather solid, like amber created by the resin on the trees in the forest. And I felt that the man I made love to, warm and alive with a beating heart was him, no part of him affected by anything other than his own experiences as he had asked me to stop the configuration between his chip and the computer long ago. He was above me, his eyes never leaving mine, and I was breathing in steam from his body created by the exertion and the fireplace and the love between us.

He did all sorts of things to me, and I did all sorts of things to him.

When he had finished with me, and I had finished with him, we lay in our big bed in the glow of the fireplace, loving each other.

When I fell asleep, I would still struggle with the PTSD, but not as much as before. The nightmares were there, but not as often.

And when I woke up in tears because of it, my husband would be there to do all of those things that I needed right then.

300 years later.

It took him a few years to admit he'd planted the tree at our meeting place in order to mourn me.

I think he was ashamed, I was deeply touched by this.

We talked about it a lot. What would happen when he died. My body could die as well, but me as a program would remain. I had tried to avoid the subject, but of course it would be fruitless because we talked about everything in the universe so it would have to happen sooner or later.

I had loved the man. God, I had loved him. Of course, we struggled with what many couples struggled with at times. Economy. Social life. What sofa to buy. But it had all been lined with a deep and mutual respect.

So I had told him I wanted to die with him. And he had refused, saying that would be murder. As I knew he would said.

Agreeing to keep going as a computer program was the only lie I ever told him.

When Izuna Uchiha had died, of old age, I had planted his tree next to mine. And when Hermes' body had died, also of old age, I had deleted myself so I was no longer in the world.

And now, over two hundred years after our deaths there were two trees on top of our hill, one bigger and stronger than the other, but the other also standing strong.

Izuna never found out I would do this before he died.

But in this way, we would touch atoms forever, though our branches.

Even if the brilliant and kind mind that had been my husband, and the experiment that had been me, no longer existed, and never would again.

Which was exactly the way we wanted it.

And the way it should be.

All of it.

End.