Chapter Text
When Tobirama was born, it was in the middle of a war torn clan hall, in the midst of screams and cries and death soaking through the cracks in the flooring. People fight to survive, not live, because it is the era of war, the era of survival, where weakness is nothing and killing is everything.
His brother is chunin, almost jounin, all his promotions on the battlefield with blood on his hands and death in his eyes, the clan heir and the best of the best. He controls the trees, they follow his commands and grow and stretch and tangle wherever he wants them to. Tobirama has wandered into the Senju forest before, he's seen how enormous the trees are, and they've all been coaxed into existence by his miracle of a brother.
Tobirama is hidden in the shadows of his sibling, close and never two steps behind but never an equal, not with the years of survival and killings and experience between the two of them.
But one thing that many people forget about Tobirama, one thing that many people don't even know about, period, is that when Tobirama was born,
The trees talked and the plants sung.
They told stories and whispered tales of a girl with hair golden as the sun and eyes blue as the sea walking amongst them, in a place where nothing was everything and all the rules were flipped overhead. There were no rules in that place, madness was madness and everyone was allowed to be a little bit mad on different scales and at different times.
Tobirama had white hair and eyes as red as those of the Uchiha clan (which was an insult to most, because it was the Uchiha after all) but they saw him as always.
Appearances had never mattered in Wonderland, and masks were something some people wore on a regular basis. Tobirama had white hair and red eyes and they saw him as once a girl with golden hair and blue eyes.
The Senju clan forgot that the trees and plants and all the foliage imaginable had come alive that one not-that-special day of Tobirama's birth, but the birthday boy hadn't.
His brother could control the trees, could command plants and shift them to adhere to his wishes, but he could do more.
Animals and plants were under his rule, willingly, and he was someone who once roamed Wonderland.
That, in itself, gave him status his entire clan could never dream of.