HEED LIKE FIRE AND THUNDER

"We really can't emphasize enough how much it means to get help on this. We aren't entirely sure what happened with the computer systems," the young woman explained to him, the glint of her hitai-ate illuminating her throat from the bright lights of the hallway as she led him down a corridor to a firm oaken door; "But it really handicapped us. We…have a lot of these records still, of course," she added hurriedly at the sharp glance he gave her, "It's just that. Well."

Stepping into the cool dark of the storage room needed no further explanation, and he could only exhale a disappointed, "Ah," upon full entry.

She smiled, abashed, even as she began to pull the door closed behind her. "Again, really, really appreciate it. If you have any questions, feel free to flag me down, but until then…I'll leave you to it!"

When Tobirama had heard that there had been issue with information, his steps had taken him instinctively to the archives, to the halls of the office of the Hokage that he had walked so often, only to find that he had not traced the steps of these new buildings, and had not made the acquaintance of those who would allow him entry.

Breaking in would have been childs play, but when there was such a crisis, it seemed to defeat the purpose.

He reached for the nearest item, a box of scrolls, and immediately found himself enfogged by decades of dust, spluttering and coughing and squinting.

And, when his vision cleared, a sigh.

He'd wanted information.

The sound of wrapper crinkling in the air was a distinct one, something that carried along even across generations. In his time, there had been brittle paper, leaf wrapping, or if the item was particularly meaningful then it was tenderly covered in furoshiki in silks, cottons, linens.

Now, here, and for this purpose, it was foil - or, it was…similar?

The flicker of light caught the inside of the foil packaging as the child tossed it to the side carelessly, stepping out of the shop to fan the printed cards within. His grin broke excitedly when he saw his friends, waiting outside for him anxiously with wide eyes, expectant.

"You wouldn't even believe it if I told you."

"Dude, you can't be serious."

"Reverse holo."

"No way!"

The flurry of activity that burst at this proclamation, as though it had been the fiber holding them in place, and they gathered at his back to hover, seeking out the promised treasure.

"I didn't even know they made that one!"

"I have four of the Common version, but this is nuts!"

Tobirama bent at the hip, fingers coming together over the flap of the wrapping, and the children glanced over their shoulders at him, curious at the flare of his chakra to announce his presence.

"You dropped this." His tone was clipped and cool, and the narrowing of his eyes indicated that he knew as well as they that it had not been accidental - even still, he extended the wrapper for the boy to take.

A pause, then a scoff. "Whatever, old man."

The streets looked different at night. Different from how he recalled them, different from the blanket of the endless inky sky above them and the swirl of the cosmos to blanket them from the chill of the wind; different from the austere darkness of the village when it had merely been walls and pillars. There was light, there was activity and movement, and it was normal for there to be as many people abuzz and about as there were during the daytime, without any improsperous intentions.

It was something that he could not shake, Tobirama being a hopeless insomniac as he had always been. There was a comfort to the black ichor of the sky above, to the clear silence that wrapped around him if he chose to pace the streets in dour sentinel - nothing quite like the thrum of bodies bustling through the street, moving from this shop or that food stall.

If times had changed, the safety of the night was the clearest indicator. Much as he wanted to bemoan the lack of quiet, it was an easy trade to make for peace. For the people of the village to feel so secure amongst themselves to take the threat of night and offer it a saucer of sake and some tempura.

He declined, holding a hand to stave off the gauzy breath of strangers, and continued on his way, focusing more sharply on the crisp crunch of gravel beneath his feet, trying to find some avenue of the village that ran uninhabited in this moment, the twists and turns of this new metropolis something that he was not sure that he would ever grow used to.

The rains had not been so plentiful in the days prior, but he still felt the coolness of mist rising - was this the side of the village nearest the river?

He turned, glanced over his shoulder as though that might orient himself from the scope of the buildings, and shook his head. Perhaps it was not so strange, the light coming down in broken and uneven streams, scattering and refracting in the gentle moisture that clung to the street now.

Lifting his gaze, Tobirama saw through the haze the outline of a figure, still against the light of a streetlamp, and he frowned, steps stilling. He had not felt them, and yet…

At the exhale of their breath, he narrowed his eyes.

“Are you…all right?”

It had been ages since he had set foot on the shores of Uzushiogakure. Granted, it had been ages since he had set foot anywhere, deliberately, and he noted the change of the world around him with every step that he took in any direction - some good, with approval and satisfaction; others with a less kind eye, critical - but none grabbed the heart in his very chest and squeezed with such fervor as the seafoam that lapped at his feet and mingled with the sand in the Land of Whirlpools.

It was…a ruin…

What once had been at the height of its strength, a village of skilled sealers and hearty souls, now there seemed merely detritus and driftwood, stone crumbling and wood rotting, heavy rains and the eponymous whirlpools dragging those who would seek to set it right to equal ruin.

Tobirama sucked in a breath through his teeth, picking his way along the shore, hugging the outcroppings of caverns and cliff-face as best he could.

If ever there was a jutsu that could not fall to the wrong hands, or worse indeed, to be lost to time, it was one of these - nothing quite like his own machinations, his latenight scribbles tried and tested and refined until determined to be too foolhardy for anyone without as cool a head as he, theirs was a village of seals, of protection.

“Listen, I’m tellin’ ya -”

“Yer insane, it’s clearly-”

Voices lifted above the quailing silence of the beach, and Tobirama frowned, coming to a crouch at the round of a bend, allowing the foliage of dense jungle to swallow him momentarily while eyes sought out what his senses could feel, those blackhearts that had come here to pillage.

It had been impossible not to seek out, upon receiving news. That he was not the only one, the only man out of time who found himself roaming the earth once more, was a danger to heights that those who walked their streets so calmly could never have understood. Even, perhaps, those shinobi who had earned their mettle - they could not understand, either, he thought, and he would never have wanted them to, the kind of world that he had found himself forged in, the one that had been filed down through the crash of his wave against it to something more civilized, more refined.

By design, the warring states had created monsters of the children it had chewed up, and corpses of those it spat out. It was no longer a time for those monsters to find a home on this earth.

It was not so difficult to find the reports and to narrow down the area most concentrated with them, if any - while to an outside eye they might have seemed scattered at first, he noted that the reports had fallen within the borders of the Land of Fire (this could have been merely politics, although it was his understanding that there had brokered a peace between the two nations lately, untenuous and no longer as fraught as it had been in his time).

He made a sign of focus before him and concentrated, felt outward to understand where to start. It was not in his interest to leave any of them unchecked, but he knew, too, that as he was now he could not be in multiple places at once.

A grunt.

Was even this dampened, the Sense that allowed him to feel the unique chakras around him?

It was one thing to understand the rhythm of the song, the patterns of sounds strung together in something classic and tender, but when presented with the child, the gentle reverberations of the melody that rumbled from his chest did nothing to soothe the maelstrom of caterwaul. A pinch formed in his brow at the sound, washed out and drowning out every other attempt at calm.

The mother looked at him sympathetically, but she too looked paler around the edges, a creature that only faintly suggested at existing and if blown over would crumple to dust.

“You are kind to offer, I know you’re almost there,” she said, and it was the least true anyone had ever been with him.

Tobirama grimaced down at the bundle in his arms, not so willing to give up - not merely for her sake, or his own, or their poor neighbors. When he looked down at the screwed up face, at the leak of salty tears down chubby cheeks, he could not help but see any number of faces, brothers who had never made it past screaming.

“I had hoped,” the mother continued, as though attempting to pierce through the veil of noise, “that Hokage-sama might have something in her repertoire to allow him to be still - some sort of jutsu…”

Her voice cracked in tandem with her smile, and she pressed her face into the cup of her hands.

“Sorry, I know it’s terrible, to want Hokage-sama to perform jutsu on my baby just so that I can get some sleep, it’s just been…”

It was movement that called to him then in those early days, far more than anything else. Far different from the brief glimpse of re-life that he'd been given in someone else's body mimicked to his own, using his own jutsu, there was something that called to him then to push, to press, to find the limits of this thing that he could not name.

Tobirama ran. He ran through the dense canopy of the Leaf, and burst through the vast plains of Grass, and the rain spattered against his cheek like an old friend, the resonance of water humming within him. It was life, as it had been, and as it should have been - but there was yet something wrong with it still.

He pushed off at the apex of a step, vaulting over one puddle, two, landing gently on the balls of his feet for the briefest instant before the rush of the river, feeling without deliberation the surge of natural energy - not chakra, something more primal than that, that he understood as deeply in his core as his brother may have - and allowing it to propel him forward -

Tap tap tap -

Across the series of lily pads the dotted the surface of the water.

It brought a smirk to his face that, despite the frogs themselves slipping from the surface beneath the water, there was naught a ripple underneath.

And then, with a final step to the other bank of the river, he squinted through the white water, felt the thrum of human chakra cleaving through this natural energy like a dull instrument, and he frowned.

"You know, under these markings, you have really incredible bone structure."

"You shouldn't be speaking."

Tobirama did not look back from where he stood, arms crossed off to the side of the side. The weight of his kunai pouch on his thigh was a comfortable and familiar friend in this moment, as with many others - they weren't special, no jutsu engraved upon them, merely the cool steel and sheer mettle of hand to hand combat.

The songstress smirked, sipped on the tea that her mates had prepared for her the moment the croak in her voice had shattered the illusion that they had woven, the gossamer of a genjutsu immaculately constructed fraying from within and worn, until the pale world underneath revealed itself once more. She tilted her head as though considering something, and hummed an experimental note.

From the corner of his eye, Tobirama noted the flicker of golden light in the middle distance, narrowed his gaze upon it until the girl's companions rushed forward.

"Hey! No way, you can't be pushing yourself like that."

"The show isn't meant for just two people - "

"You make it sound like we wouldn't know what to do without you - "

" - I mean we wouldn't, but that doesn't mean that you can - "

" - No, she needs to rest - "

"I was just saying," the songstress said softly, making a sound that Tobirama could never hope to emulate, something gentle and quiet that vibrated its sound little - some manner to rest her vocal chords, he supposed - but that rang as clear as if they had all been speaking normally. "That our friend over there has really great cheekbones, doesn't he?"

A beat as they all swiveled their heads as one, taking him in like carrion birds.

He cleared his throat, uncomfortable. "No."

It should have been simple as that, but the single sound, resonant with all the might he could muster as former Hokage, only seemed to delight them more.