Chapter Text
Sitting still while a gaggle of handmaidens primped and pampered Madara in preparation for her wedding, she thought back to when she had first gotten engaged, nearly seven years earlier. Nothing that had happened since then could really have prepared her for this moment. Certainly not the inauspicious reason for that engagement, or the events immediately following it.
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Something that was seldom spoken of, but nonetheless happened in rare cases, were the murders of daughters in noble families for the sole purpose of stealing their bride price. And, given that the bride price, once paid to the girl’s family, fell to the closest living female relative should the girl die before she was wed—a tradition that presumably had started out as an incentive to persuade a mother into having a second daughter, as a replacement bride, but had over time drifted away from that—it was usually the mother that had the most to gain from such heinous crimes.
Myoko, the firstborn daughter of the Uchiha family, was promised to the heir to the Nara clan, an equally prominent family and well known for their high intelligence, so Uchiha Haruka didn't dare to be rid of her too directly. Instead she ensured that the contract stated that Myoko would be fostered with the Nara until she came of age to marry, and then, once her daughter was settled with the Nara family, she tried to arrange accidents, making sure the blame would fall on another family if the hired mercenaries failed to keep it secret. However, after the first attempt, the Nara were on their guard, and Haruka was soon forced to stop her covert attacks lest they catch on who was truly behind them. The loss of that bride price stung.
With her second daughter, Haruka would not make the same mistake.
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When Madara was eight, her older sister got engaged, and moved out to be fostered with the Nara until she was of age to marry. Madara had known this would happen, but it still pained her to watch the caravan depart, not knowing when she might see her nee-san again. If ever.
At first, Madara’s mother was pleased with this arrangement, but as time went on, Madara caught her ranting to her favorite handmaiden, Ami, about how paranoid the Nara were, and how difficult it had been to even get someone close to Myoko. Madara was ten and hiding behind an embroidered silk curtain when she heard her mother outright tell the maid in a hissed whisper that her attempts at killing Myoko had failed.
Now, Madara was not stupid, and knew that her mother had never been very fond of her daughters—instead spending all her time doting on little Izuna, the only boy—but still, to go from mostly ignoring or disparaging them to trying to have Myoko killed? Madara didn’t understand. Not at first. But then she herself was promised to one of the Inuzuka clan—engaged to be married to the second son of the heir when they both turned fourteen—and she learned about such things as dowries and inheritance rules, and suddenly Haruka’s motive became clear. There was no deal for fostering this time, and this worried her.
Madara was eleven the first time her mother tried to kill her.
The attempt had been clever, made under the guise of Haruka teaching Madara about the Uchiha properties, necessitating them riding in a palanquin between estates. When Madara had objected that she would not need to know about the Uchiha properties, since she would not be remaining an Uchiha when she got married, her mother had changed her excuse, saying that it was not whose estate they visited that mattered, but rather that Madara know the general rules and responsibilities that came with her role in the household. Haruka also added that riding the palanquin for such extended time was good training, with the excuse that Madara would have to ride in it with grace and poise for her wedding journey, to not shame the Uchiha family.
During one of the stretches of rough and uneven terrain, the palanquin had wobbled, probably something Haruka herself had been familiar with, having traveled that road before. And so, as Madara tried to sway with the palanquin, her mother had suddenly fallen against her, pushing Madara out of the open side of the palanquin, tearing the flimsy curtains and tumbling down an incline. It was pure luck that she rolled just twice, straight into a large shrubbery that cushioned her fall. A few bruises and scrapes from the branches were far less injuries than one should reasonably expect from such a drop.
Given that Haruka had been adamant about using the palanquin, and that she had equally been adamant that they should not have too many people in the retinue, lest it would make Madara feel awkward about the audience—Something Madara couldn’t make herself believe her mother actually cared about—it didn’t take her much time to connect the dots. Her mother had just tried to kill her.
The second attempt was made with poison a few months later. Madara had a persistent cough, and the physician had given Haruka a small dark-amber colored vial of cough syrup, telling her to put no more than a drop from it into a cup of water for Madara to drink each evening. Once more it was pure luck that saved Madara, because she had coughed just as she was about to grab the porcelain cup her mother held out towards her, hand slipping and dropping the cup, spilling the contents all over the tatami. And when her mother poured her another cup, Madara caught sight of her in the mirror, trying to pour more out of the vial only to have to shake it to get a single drop out. It wasn’t until later that it occurred to Madara that it made no sense that the vial should be empty already. Unless… Had her mother poured it all into that first cup?
Sure now that her mother truly intended to take her life, Madara sat quite still in her bed. She didn’t know what to do, or who she could trust. Her father was away, serving in the Emperor's army as a general. His visits at home were few and far between, and Madara had no way of knowing when he next would make the journey. Nor did she know of a way to contact him. Usually she would send a letter alongside the other mail gathered for him once a month, but she could not trust that her mother wouldn’t read her letter, and it was two weeks until the next batch of mail would be sent off.
If Haruka was getting impatient, she might try again before then. And Madara could not rely on luck. It had already saved her twice, that she knew of, but her mother only needed to get lucky once, then it would all be over for Madara. No, she needed a different plan. And the simplest way to stay alive would probably be to run away. Maybe she could hide in a monastery or something? Not that she knew how to find one, but weren’t they usually placed high up in the mountains? Quietly, Madara started packing what she thought she might need for a long trek.
Before Haruka could try again, as soon as her cough had finally let go, Madara ran away from home, slinking out under the cover of the night, only the light of the full moon to guide her steps through the forest.
Unfortunately, she did not truly have any experience roughing it, always having servants close at hand to smooth the way for her and hand her everything she might need, and Madara quickly realized she had packed a lot of things that were of no help. Only two hours away from the estate, she was so tired that she had to sit down. Deciding to repack her things, and discard the items that only weighed her down, she was clever enough to hide them underneath the thick carpet of moss. Then she started moving again.
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Unfortunately for Madara, Haruka, once it was discovered that Madara was gone, when she had not shown herself for breakfast or lunch, sent her best huntsman, one Hatake Sakumo, after her. With his pack of trained dogs he could easily track her, and he found the things she had discarded less than ten hours after she had passed by that spot. Gathering everything up, to hand it to the Lady Uchiha, Sakumo kept going, feeling worse and worse about the task he had been given—To kill the young girl, and cut out her organs as proof.
It was a grisly task, and not something the Lord Uchiha would have ever requested from Sakumo. But the Lady was made of different cloth. Cold and calculating, she had somehow decided that her daughters posed a threat to her, and had been determined to get rid of them both. Oh, Sakumo had no proof, but he had once, when the women had been drunk, heard two of the Lady’s handmaids whispering rather loudly about the failed attempts on young Myoko-chan’s life.
Fortunately, the Nara had thwarted these attempts, and pushed the marriage forward. Myoko-chan was now a Nara wife, written out of the Uchiha family book and into the Nara one, and it seemed Haruka-sama had given up on killing her—something Sakumo was very relieved to figure out, because if she had been caught, that would mean a potential wide-scale clan war, and with the Lord away in the south with the majority of the young men of the clan, that could have been fatal for the Uchiha as a whole, and their servants and guards alongside them. Including Sakumo himself, and his wife and young son.
But Madara-chan would not be as lucky as Myoko-chan had been. She had not even met her intended yet. And the more Sakumo caught up to her, the more he was fretting. There was no way he could bring himself to kill an innocent child, yet that was his orders. So, how to get around that?
By the time his dogs had the poor girl surrounded, Sakumo had a tentative plan.
He brought a terrified Madara-chan with him deeper into the forest, sat her down in a lean-to he had built for hunting, left his dogs to guard her, and headed to the nearest small village, purchasing a peasant dress and a few accessories. Returning to the girl, he told her to remove anything that could reveal her rank—clothes, jewelry, hairpins, even her underwear. As he stood with his back to her for her privacy, he kept talking to her, telling her that she had to make sure nobody suspected she was a noble. If they did, rumors would quickly reach the Lady Uchiha, and that was the last thing Madara needed if she were to survive. So, on his orders, she took off the expensive silk clothes and put on the coarse hemp clothes, then she took down her elaborate hairstyle and tied it back in a loose low ponytail before covering her head with a plain scarf. Once she slipped on the roughly made geta, and Sakumo had smudged her skin with a little bit of dirt, just enough to make it look like she had a tan, she really looked like a peasant girl.
While Sakumo bundled up her old stuff, leaving her only with things that it made sense for a poor peasant to have, he told her that her new name was Dara, and started to give her instructions on how to behave as a peasant, to further reduce the chance that she was caught. He kept on instructing her while he led her deeper into the forest, avoiding any villages they came near, and even mostly staying off the roads, only quickly crossing them in a few places. He had a destination in mind where nobody would question the appearance of yet another poor child.
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By nightfall, she was nauseous with exhaustion, and Madara’s feet ached from the unfamiliar shoes in addition to being unaccustomed to walking so far, but she kept silent. She had to believe the Huntsmaster wanted her well. Why else would he bother leading her so far away? If he intended to kill her, it would have been easy to do that in the forest when he first found her, and simply bury her under the roots. Unless he was afraid of turning the tree into a Jubokko? But that required more than one dead body, didn’t it?
Still, she had followed him this far, surely out of Uchiha lands by now, so she just had to keep going. Had to keep faith.
Fortunately, after leaving his dogs in a clearing not far behind, he stopped for the night in a small hamlet deep in the forest. Sitting on the edge of an engawa, a half-asleep Madara heard him talking to someone just inside the biggest house there. She could only catch snippets, but it seemed the Huntsmaster was telling that person that Madara’s parents had died from a disease, and her relatives didn’t want another mouth to feed, so if they needed another worker, Madara could do it in exchange for a bed and food. There was also something about her constitution being too delicate for something, but that she could handle housekeeping or tending to crops.
Eventually, a stern-faced woman came out of the large house together with the Huntsman and led Madara to one of the smaller buildings. There she informed Madara that, “This house is now your responsibility. Keep it clean and tidy, cook for the boys living there, and mend their clothes and whatever else is needed to keep the household functioning. I will send over one of the older girls tomorrow to go through everything with you. For now, there is a bed in the attic that will be yours. You can reach it by the ladder in the kitchen. The boys all sleep in the back. Do not disturb them when you enter.”
Too tired to ask any questions, Madara just nodded and found her way to the small cot tucked away above the kitchen. She soon learned that this was the best spot in the house, because the heat from the kitchen rose up, keeping it pleasant even during winter.
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Outside, Sakumo had accepted a few coins for the girl and quickly departed, not wanting to appear emotionally invested in the girl in any way. Hurrying back to pick up his dogs again, he then continued along the fastest route towards the Uchiha main estate, but he paused along the way and killed a deer. Using the blood of the animal, he soaked through several items of clothing that had been Madara’s before, to give further proof of his deed. Then he butchered the doe, cutting out its heart, lungs, and liver.
He let his dogs eat their fill from the carcass before he weighted down the remains and sank them in a pond nearby.
Timing his return so that it was still early but staff had started to move about, he made sure he and his dogs were seen. Especially the dogs, with their bloody muzzles and paws. He took them to the kennel and locked them in, planning to bathe them later. But first he took the small bundle of clothes that contained the doe entrails and carefully made his way to the walled-in garden where Lady Uchiha usually took her morning tea. He waited until her servants had been dismissed, then he brought her the lungs, heart, and liver, as promised.
He later learned that Haruka had them cooked and ate them, presumably to steal Madara's vitality and youth. By then, a quiet kind of stalemate had settled between him and her. Sakumo was illiterate, and wouldn’t have been able to sneak in a letter among the mail to the Lord Uchiha even if he could write, which meant that if he were to tell the man about what his wife had attempted to do—and had done, believing it was Madara’s remains she desecrated—he would have to say it to the man himself. Except, Lady Uchiha somehow always had a task for him whenever word reached them that Lord Uchiha would be returning home for one of his infrequent visits. A task that inevitably took him away from the household for however long Lord Uchiha’s visit lasted. And, with his wife assigned to Lady Uchiha’s rooms, and a young son to care for, Sakumo did not dare displease the Lady by being too blatant in his attempts. His only consolation was that Madara seemed safe where she was.
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On her first day in her new home, Madara was woken up very early by voices from the room below where she slept. Fearing what would happen if she was thrown out, she had hurriedly checked her clothes, tied her hair back, and put the scarf back on to keep flyaway hairs out of her face. Then she climbed down, meeting her charges for the first time.
In the house alongside Madara, seven small boys lived. She was slightly horrified when she learned that they were miners, in the cobalt mines owned by the Hagoromo. Most had been sold by poor parents, but some had been orphans, picked up in big cities and promised a house and food in exchange for work. With few to none other options, the children had to agree in order to survive the winters.
However, the work was grueling, and dangerous, and many did not survive for long. If you became crippled and unable to work, the Hagoromo had no more use for you. Suddenly the mention of Madara’s allegedly poor constitution made more sense. The Huntsmaster must have made sure she would not be sent down into the mines to work. He must have struck a deal with the matron, that Madara would be essentially the caretaker and cook for that particular house. For the seven boys living there.
She barely had time to learn their names before they had to hurry outside as a bell rang. Their shift at the mines were starting, and her job caring for the house and the crops would also start then. In addition, the next day she would be expected to wake up before them, to ensure they had a proper meal before going off to work. Madara had no idea how she would manage that, as she felt dead tired right then. Though, she had arrived sometime during the night, so maybe it was not so strange? She would just have to try to go to bed earlier.
Without really knowing what to do, Madara had started out by familiarizing herself with the house, memorizing where everything was, and guessing at tasks based on what she’d seen the servants at home… Her previous home… had done.
By noon, another girl came by, introducing herself as Hana, saying she had been tasked with teaching Dara what to do. It was a good thing she was there, because Madara would not have been able to guess even half of the things by herself. There was laundry, which involved fetching water, boiling water, pouring water, soaking clothes, using her hands and a small brush to scrub out stains as best as she could, then wringing up the clothes before hanging them to dry.
She got a short break for a light meal after that. Then there was tending to the small garden, where herbs for both food and healing were grown. After that, Madara had to clean the house, which mostly consisted of dusting off any flat surface, wiping down the table and counters, and sweeping an inordinate amount of blue grainy dust out of the house. The planks of the engawa were dried and cracked, warping slightly. The upside was that the dust could easily be swept down between the cracks, disappearing underneath the house. She had no idea what the dust was, but it explained why most of the pathways in the little village had a bluish tint to them. It had to be something from the mines she assumed. Something the boys dragged in with them.
When all of that was done, it was time to help out in the communal fields, weeding and watering as best as she could. And when she finally thought she might be able to sit down, it was time to start preparing dinner. Hana helped lay out all the things she had to cook, telling her the order to prepare the things in so they could go into the stew at the right time, but she could not stay, as she had a house of her own to tend to, and while the other tasks could be put off for one day, dinner could not.
In the end, the meal was edible, and that was the best that could be said for it. The boys did not complain however, but Madara still felt like she had failed, and swore she would do better.
And she did. Over the years that followed, she fell into a routine, and the tasks that had been exhausting when she first got there felt easier and easier. She could tell that her body had changed, grown stronger and leaner. A few of the girls had taught her a few tricks as well, just in case some of the older boys ever got any ideas about her, and Madara took to that like a duck to water, quickly becoming proficient in self-defense. To the point where some of the other girls seemed to befriend her simply to use her as somewhat of a shield against the older boys.
Fortunately, none of Madara’s boys ever showed tendencies like that. Whether that was because they saw her as a sister, or whether they were just better mannered and more disciplined than those other boys, she wasn’t sure, but she was glad for it, since she had to share the house with them.
She did also get to know them much better, and learned a little of their pasts, before they had ended up with the Hagoromo like her.
The oldest of the boys was Torifu, who claimed to be related to the Akimichi, a vassal clan to the powerful Nara family. He was almost the same age as Madara. A year younger at most.
The next one was Homura, a quiet boy who didn't speak of where he was from. He did however have a pair of glasses, which was unusual, and expensive, and Madara suspected the only reason they had not been taken from him was the long crack that ran across one of the lenses.
Then came Koharu, a boy that Madara eventually discovered was a girl in body, but he still insisted that he was a boy. Given that Madara was not sure whether this was a way for Koharu to avoid attention of the bad kind, or if Koharu really felt like a boy, she decided to not mention this to anyone else. Koharu could keep living as a boy. It made no difference to Madara in any way.
One of the smallest there, but still not the youngest, Kagami was someone Madara suspected was from a poorer branch of the Uchiha, or maybe even a bastard son of one of her closer male relatives. He himself had no idea where he came from, as he’d been too young when he got there. But he did have some features that reminded Madara of her younger brother and some of her cousins. There was no way for her to prove her suspicions though, so she kept them to herself.
The next two boys were almost always together. Hiruzen, the oldest of the two, who claimed that he had family somewhere out there, but that an evil aunt of his had sold him to the Hagoromo to pay for her gambling debt. And Danzō, who insisted he was a true son of a noble family, but with his father away on a trade-journey, his stepmother had seen fit to be rid of him to put her own son in as the heir. Danzō said he had run away to avoid the assassins. Madara sympathized with him.
The last one was called Kakuzu. Two or three years younger than the others, he was a boy with several nasty scars on his body, suggesting abuse rather than accidents.
They had all been aged between seven and eleven when Madara came to work there. She was barely twelve at the time.