Chapter Text
Naruto oversaw the Uchiha swapping eyeballs, faintly disgusted but also horrifyingly curious as he ran glowing green fingers over bandaged eyes. They needed both Uchiha at their best and that meant having the eternal mangekyou.
With the unlocking of the mangekyou itself being trauma based, it carried over when Madara woke up. The eternal mangekyou however needed "stolen" flesh. Sacrifice. The surgery was necessary if the brothers wanted to keep their eyes intact.
Picking Obito up on the way home was unexpected and involved a lot of fast talking from an as-close-to-apologetic-as-possible-Madara, while dodging raikiri from a traumatised Tobirama and much exasperated judgement from Hashirama and Izuna watching on the sidelines. There was a wealth of explanations about this Zetsu figure and his manipulations made much more apparent looking back.
"Uchiha are melodramatic and crazy" Tobirama repeats in lieu of greeting as they arrived in Hiruzen's office, dropping a sealed to the gills Obito on the floor. They ignore the suddenly tense Anbu, or the way Hiruzen starts hacking around his pipe, having inhaled wrong with their sudden appearance.
"Tell me about it," Sakura muttered, eyes glassy and distant as she thought back to the shenanigans of the past four months.
They made it in time to exactly the day before the chunin exams. Sakura had been put through the ringer by the genii younger brothers, picked apart and rebuilt over and over again, pushing her physical body to its limits while they nurtured her talented mind.
They both had practice teaching, one as Itachi with both Anbu and Sasuke, and the other as Tobirama with Kagami, Hiruzen and Danzo. They knew how to utilise their genius minds to pick apart weaknesses and find strengths and then create training regimes for it. They had, between the two of them, more than average knowledge over most of the ninja art forms and the skills to pass it on. Sakura had been in good if merciless hands, broken and reforged over and over again through blood, sweat and so many tears.
Madara and Hashirama were mostly left to their own devices the entire time. They knew themselves and what they should be aiming for, going through a cycle of extreme sparring and extreme resting in an effort to train their bodies back to some semblance of their past selves.
"Team 7 will be joining the chunin exams," Tobirama said with a laidback grin that they never would have seen on his older self but is now becoming more and more the norm with this one. "We'll also be moving to the Hatake compound. All 6 of us. Obito requires intensive care. The senju compound is technically not ours by blood anymore and the Uchiha compound is about as traumatic a place as we could pick."
"And Sakura-chan?"
"My parents sent me to the academy with plans of me marrying into a rich shinobi line. I disagreed. As a genin I can choose where I want to live from now on and I choose to stay with them," she said flatly, voice booking no arguments.
"Very well," Hiruzen nods. "Do you have plans on who to... Share your unique... Circumstances with?"
"Tsuna-chan definitely," Hashirama said with a smile.
"The little brat," Tobirama said fondly. "Someone needs to go explain to her that it isn't her fault. It was all Danzo. Dan and little Nawaki and every single misfortune that's befallen the mighty of Konoha. All from one power hungry leech that had once been my student. I have... Failed."
"You're fixing it." Another thing that's changed. It was roundabout. An agreement of his failures still, but a reassurance and a reminder that he's rectifying things. What's the biggest change, perhaps, is their relationship with each other. Because the reassurance came from Madara of all people.
Being thrown into this new life, sharing the same experiences and the same memories though from different faces gave them an inexplicable bond. They only had the four of them. Only they could understand everything from old grief to the identity dysphoria and the frustration of catching up to what they know, what they remember they could be. And that had a way of building a bond nothing else can.
They're not suddenly the best of friends. The past hurts are still there and will probably bubble up in the most unexpected of times. But they're better. They all have each other. They know they do.