He'd been coming here every day for eight years and the place hadn't changed once.
Hashirama closed his eyes in the laboratory and opened them on the water – black water under a black sky and no horizon between them. The surface held his weight without so much as a ripple, solid under his sandals and stretching out flat and dark and still in every direction.
The Void Dragon lay ahead of him under a stack of red torii gates that rose in tiers, each one larger than the last, their pillars sunk through the water and anchored by root networks that spread beneath the surface like veins. Living wood tendrils covered every part of the Dragon's body, wrapped around its limbs and its torso and its neck in overlapping layers, and the bark was so thick with seal script that the characters bled into each other at the edges. The tendrils held. The gates held. The script crawled along the grain in its slow loops and refreshed itself and kept crawling.
He walked over and sat down cross-legged at the base of the nearest gate and put his palms on his knees.
"Morning," he said.
The Dragon's head was pointed at him. It was silver and smooth and completely blank. It didn't move.
"Or evening," Hashirama said. "I honestly have no idea anymore. The Webway's light cycle is close to Terran standard but it drifts, and Malcador says they're fixing it, but the Mechanicum people can't agree on whether Old Terra's day was twenty-three hours and fifty-six minutes or twenty-four hours flat. They've been arguing about it for three months. Three months over four minutes. I brought it up with Malcador and he gave me that look. You know the one."
He scratched the back of his neck and waited, out of habit, for a response that he knew wasn't coming.
"Anyway," he said. "Batch Sixteen went in yesterday. Forty embryos. We pushed the tenketsu formation sequence back six days so the chakra system starts building after the nervous system's already in place instead of competing with it. The idea is that the body won't fight something that shows up after the foundation's already set."
He pulled a leaf from between his fingers – he'd been carrying it from the garden and hadn't noticed until now. He turned it over and looked at the veins. "Fourteen weeks until we know if it worked. Fourteen weeks of waiting and checking monitors and pretending I'm not holding my breath every time a technician looks at a readout."
He set the leaf on the water. It just sat there on the surface and didn't move.
"Fourteen failures so far," he said.
He rubbed his face with both hands and let them drop.
"But I watched Batch Fourteen go. Three of them made it to thirty-two weeks. One of them held stable pathway function for eleven straight days and I thought, all right, this is it, this is the one. And then the core fluctuated and the conversion process ate through the surrounding tissue in six hours and the monitors went flat and I just stood there."
He looked at the Dragon's blank face.
"When Mito and I worked on her seal, the one that held the Nine-Tails, it took us two years to design and six months to put down and it worked the first time. First try. Because we understood every piece of it. I understood the bijū's chakra and Mito understood her own circulatory system and we understood how the two would interact because both of them ran on the same physics. Physical energy and spiritual energy and the thing you get when you put them together. Every variable was known."
He picked the leaf back up and held it between his thumb and forefinger. "Here, I understand my half and I'm guessing at the rest. And the gap between knowing and guessing is the gap where those kids in the tanks die."
He flicked the leaf away and it skidded across the water and came to a stop ten meters out.
"Right, professional update over; personal update." He shifted his weight and leaned back on his palms. "Kei figured out water walking yesterday. Sort of. He got about three steps in and then he launched himself sideways into Yua and they both went under. Daichi stood on the bank with his arms folded and said, 'I'll wait until they're done.' He's seven. Reminds me of Tobirama, actually. Same energy. Same absolute refusal to participate in anything that might get him dirty."
He sat forward and rested his elbows on his knees.
"They called me Father again. All three of them. Yua started it about a year ago. She'd been saying Sensei like I told her to, and then one day she just switched, and Kei picked it up, and Daichi picked it up, and I corrected them a few times and then I stopped because every time I said 'I'm not your father, I'm your teacher' they'd get this look on their faces and it made my chest hurt. So I stopped."
He clasped his hands together and looked down at them.
"I had kids. Did I ever mention that? Two daughters. Tsuruko and Hanako. Tsuruko was the older one. She had Mito's face and my hair and a temper that didn't come from either of us, just something she was born with, and she could punch through a training post by the time she was nine. Hanako was different. Quiet. She liked calligraphy and pressed flowers and she could sit in one place for three hours doing a single character and only move her wrist. I used to watch her work and she'd get annoyed because my breathing moved the paper."
He rubbed the back of his neck. “Tsuruko had my granddaughter, Tsunade. She inherited my gambling problems.”
"I don't know what happened to them. I died. I got brought back for a war that shouldn't have happened, and then I'm pretty sure I died again, and then I woke up in Red Hope. I remember everything about my old life." He let out a long breath through his nose. "I remember all of it and then there's a gap and then there's Terra, and I've stopped trying to figure out what's in the gap because it doesn't help."
He stood up and walked a slow loop around the nearest tier of gates, trailing his fingers along the red wood. The seal script crawled under his fingertips and the wood hummed against his skin, low and steady.
"Batu thinks I should stop coming here," Hashirama said. "He says talking to something that doesn't talk back is a sign of 'spiritual imbalance,' which, as far as I can tell, is a White Scars way of saying 'you're being weird and people are worried.' I told him I talk to my plants too and he said that's different because the plants grow when I talk to them. And I said maybe you'll grow too if I keep at it, and he gave me that face he gets when he can't tell if I'm joking. Which is, quite frankly, most of the time. Eight years and the man still can't read a punchline."
He stopped walking and leaned his shoulder against the outermost pillar.
"The kids are doing well, though. Yua's chakra control is clean. She can hold a leaf on her forehead for twenty minutes without it moving. Kei's got the biggest reserves of the three but absolutely no discipline, and his control gets better when he's interested and falls apart when he's bored, which is about what you'd expect from a boy who'd rather chase beetles than sit still. Daichi's in the middle on everything but he's the most consistent. He never has a bad day. He just shows up and does the work and gets a little better and goes home."
He pushed off the pillar and started walking back toward his spot.
"I started them on nature transformation last week. The chakra paper-test, which I had to make from scratch. Man, that brings back a lot of memories. I think a lot of the young ones had chakra paper, but us old folks had to make do with guessing–mostly meditation–to figure out our chakra nature."
He tilted his head and looked at the Dragon's face – the smooth silver plane that showed him nothing.
"You want to know what the hard part is? It’s time." He rubbed his jaw and let his hand drop. "I'm not aging–thanks to you. I'm going to look like this forever. A thousand years, ten thousand, a hundred thousand, however long it takes for something to actually kill me."
He looked down at his hands and turned them over and looked at the palms.
"The kids will grow up. They'll get older and they'll age and I'll watch it happen as I watched Mito get older, except this time I'll watch it over and over and over because there'll always be more of them and I'll always be here."
The gates hummed their low note.
"Mito used to fold paper cranes," he said. "Hundreds of them. She'd hang them on strings in the bedroom window and the breeze would turn them and the shadows on the wall looked like birds."
He walked over to where the leaf had skidded to a stop earlier, picked it up, and carried it back. He folded it in half, carefully and precisely.
"I miss her," he said. "And the girls. And the village. And the sound of the river by the Hokage tower and the way the light came through the canopy in the mornings. And Tobirama's terrible personality and his brilliant mind. And Madara."
He set the folded leaf on the water. "Yeah. I know that one's complicated. I don't care that it's complicated. He was my friend before he was anything else and the friendship was real even if everything that came after went to shit."
He leaned back on his palms and looked up at the black sky.
"And here I am."
He sat forward and clasped his hands between his knees.
"I wonder sometimes if any of this means anything to you. You're older than this galaxy. You were watching stars burn and die before the first cell divided on whatever rock eventually spat out the species that named you. The stuff I talk about – kids and flowers and dead wives and a village in the trees – it's probably so far below your threshold that it doesn't even register. I'm a bug on a branch to you."
He shrugged. “But that’s kind of the irony with weakness and limitations: it forces you to be creative with what you have. In my world, even a weak shinobi can kill a stronger one if they prepared properly. I guess that’s kind of what happened with you.”
He turned his back on the gates and took a step toward the empty dark.
His foot touched the water and the water moved.
It was small – a tremor through the surface that sent a ring expanding outward from where his sole pressed down, and the edge of it caught the red glow from the gates and carried it out in a thin bright line. He stopped walking and looked down at the ring and watched it spread and reach the gates and pass through them, and on the other side the water rippled.
Hashirama went very still.
He turned his head and looked at the Dragon.
The head had moved. The featureless silver face was angled differently now, tilted down a fraction, pointed at the spot where his foot had pressed the water. The seal script on the nearest tendril had changed its speed, crawling faster along the grain, reacting to something inside the bindings that had shifted.
The Dragon's physical energy pulsed. One pulse – controlled and brief, a single deviation from the constant output that Hashirama had monitored every day for eight years without variation. The pulse ran through the seal architecture and hit his own chakra system as a pressure behind his sternum that pushed outward for one heartbeat and then stopped.
The head finished turning and faced him.
And then the Dragon spoke.
"Why are you here?"