Sleep, when it finally came, came wrong.
Itama had managed to drag himself into the hollow beneath a slanted root system not shelter exactly, but something that felt like it, which was close enough. Takeshi's fire had burned down to a low pulse of orange and red, throwing long, restless shadows across the ground. The forest was cold in that specific way forests get after dark, damp and close and indifferent.
He'd meant to just rest his eyes.
Instead the pain took him under.
He was on a battlefield.
Not the clearing somewhere older. The kind of place that existed before maps named it, before anyone thought to keep a record. Rain came down in heavy gray sheets. The ground was mud and steel and things he didn't want to look at directly. Somewhere in the fog, someone was screaming a sound that started human and ended as something else.
He looked down at his hands.
Blood. Warm. Fresh.
He turned, and there was a boy.
Senju armor. Dark hair. A face that stopped him cold because it was his face, his own features, his own eyes, except those eyes were open and empty and staring at nothing the way eyes do when there's no one left behind them. The boy was dead. Chest caved in, ribs showing white. Dead for what looked like a while.
Itama backed away.
He hadn't done this. He knew he hadn't done this. But his hands were covered in it and the boy looked exactly like him and the rain kept falling and
"You're already dead, Itama."
He spun. No one there. Just the mist rolling between the trees, thick as wool. He turned again. Again. His breathing had gone ragged, the way it does when your body knows something your mind is still catching up to.
He started walking. Had to walk. Standing still felt dangerous in a way he couldn't name.
The fog shifted. Shapes resolved in the half-dark figures in Senju armor, lining both sides of his path. He knew these faces. That was the thing that hollowed him out completely. He knew them. He'd trained beside them, eaten beside them, watched some of them die on days that blurred together now. They stood motionless, looking through him, their faces blank as stones.
One of them had a hole where her chest used to be.
One of them was still burning.
He kept walking because there was nothing else to do.
The mist ahead brightened or no, not brightened. Oranged. Firelight, advancing. A silhouette stepped out of it: an Uchiha, Sharingan spinning, saying nothing. Just watching him the way you watch prey that's already been caught.
Itama reached for a kunai.
His hand closed on air.
"Too slow," the figure said.
He reached again. Nothing. He looked down at his hands bare, useless, shaking.
"Too weak," said another voice, from somewhere behind him.
Then the ground moved.
Hands came up from the earth not slowly, not dramatically, just suddenly there, the way the worst things are. They grabbed his ankles. He pulled against them. They were stronger. The soil started opening beneath him and he couldn't stop it, couldn't find purchase, and the screaming he could hear was his own
His mother's face.
Just for a second. A flash of it, the way you see light through a crack.
Soft eyes. The specific way she'd looked at him when he was small and frightened and she was telling him without words that he was allowed to be both of those things. Blood on her lips just a trace, wrong and out of place and her voice, barely there:
"Don't forget who you are."
He came back to the forest like a man breaking the surface of cold water.
Gasping. Upright before he knew he was moving, one hand clutching his chest like he could hold his heart still from the outside. The stars were there. The canopy. The low fire. His own breathing, which was too fast and too loud and refusing to slow down the way he needed it to.
He sat with it for a moment. Let the trembling work through him.
Takeshi hadn't moved. He sat a few feet away, forearms on his knees, watching the embers. He didn't turn around.
"You saw?" Itama asked. His voice came out ruined.
"Heard," Takeshi said. "You talk when it gets bad." He was quiet for a beat. "Cry sometimes, too."
Itama said nothing. The shame was there hot and immediate but he was too exhausted to carry it very far. He let it sit.
"The dead visit everyone eventually," Takeshi said, and there was nothing lecturing in his tone. Just the flat acknowledgment of someone who knew it firsthand. He picked up a branch and set it carefully into the coals. "Especially if you've been living close to them."
"I didn't choose to be out here."
"No." Takeshi watched the branch begin to catch. "Nobody picks it. It just finds you."
Itama drew his knees up, wrapped his arms around himself. The fire's warmth reached the surface of his skin but stopped there, unable to get any further. He thought about his mother's face the way it had appeared at the last second, like a lifeline thrown into deep water.
He closed his eyes.
The second time was quieter.
Hashirama stood on a cliff edge, looking out over something vast and gray and churning below. His back was to Itama. Tall, broad-shouldered, the silhouette Itama had looked up to for as long as he could remember. But when Hashirama turned, the face was wrong not unkind, exactly. Distant. Like looking at someone who had aged too fast in all the invisible ways.
"You were supposed to stay behind," Hashirama said. His voice had that strange dream-quality, like it was coming from several places at once.
"I wanted to help," Itama said. He reached out. The distance between them didn't change.
"You only made it worse."
Thunder somewhere. Then Hashirama's mouth filled with blood not violent, just there, suddenly, the way things in dreams skip steps and he tipped backward off the edge and disappeared into the dark below without a sound.
Itama lunged forward.
He was in the forest again.
He didn't scream this time. He just sat there, shaking, staring at his hands real hands, unbloodied until he believed they were his again. The sky beyond the canopy had begun its slow shift toward gray. Not dawn yet, but the suggestion of it.
He didn't try to sleep again.
He sat with the fire and let it do what it could, which wasn't much. His mind moved through the images the boy with his face, the hollow figures, his mother, Hashirama falling not trying to make sense of them, just letting them pass through. Takeshi sat nearby and said nothing, which was exactly what Itama needed from him.
At some point the cold got worse before it got better, the way it does in the hour just before the light comes back.
Then Takeshi rose.
"It's time."
Itama got up. Slowly, stiffly, the night written in every joint and muscle. He stood there for a moment in the pale gray light, letting everything settle back into its proper place inside him.
He was afraid. He was still afraid of the road ahead, of what the dreams meant, of whether the version of Hashirama in that nightmare had been saying something true.
But he was standing.
That was the only answer he knew how to give.
He was a Senju, and the dead had come for him in the night and he had woken up anyway, and he would keep waking up, and that would have to be enough.
The fire behind him breathed its last.
He walked forward into the gray.