Hashimada minibang — Day 1: Creation/Destruction
Notes: Caption from Naruto, chapter 623 (mangastream’s translation).
Hashirama opened his arms, as if trying to embrace the world, mountains, clouds and rivers, all in one go. The sleeves of his light kimono rode up his arms as he shouted at the top of his lungs,
“This is where our dream will come true!”
He was smiling so brightly that Madara’s heart could only return the sentiment. It wanted the same thing: a place where there would be no more fighting, a place where the two of them could protect their last surviving siblings from the harshness of their way of life, a place where they could just be Hashirama and Madara, with no family names and no long bloody history attached keeping them apart.
For now, they were two teen boys, standing atop of the world, on the hill that they had come to call theirs, with nothing but the sun and the endless blue sky standing over them to cast judgement.
Elated that their dream was just around the corner, mere moments away from becoming a reality like Hashirama had declared, Madara turned to look at the valley beyond, where their future would one day be built.
He expected to see the a rippling sea of evergreen treetops, swaying in the breeze, extending from the bottom of his and Hashirama’s hill to the shoulder of the next, before the edge of the horizon cut the vision short. There would be white and brown patches peeking through, in places where the forest was not thick enough to hide the roofs or façades of the new homes that they would build for their clans.
It was not houses that he saw, nor did the landscape before him feature any kind of green. It was all grey and black and the sterile brown of a freshly dug graveyard.
Charred husks of trees surrounded a clearing where nothing grew. Rocks blackened by soot jutted out of the dusty ground, shadowing tombstones scorched by some past destruction. On the edge of that clearing, caught between the branches of a tree and the wind blowing freely across the valley, fluttered the tatters of a familiar red-and-white banner.
“Isn’t it wonderful, Madara?”