Aiko/Tobirama Valentine's special 4/4

Part 4 

Aiko didn't actually like living in the brand new Konoha. It felt wrong and a little creepy. She wasn't sure how much her input had changed things, so she had tried to stay out of discussions about zoning and layout. She was mostly counting down the days until her term of service to Izanami was concluded and she'd get her payoff: transportation home.

It was still eerie to walk around. She didn't know if it was more painful to notice the familiarities or to be bothered by the differences. She had an inescapable creeping fear in the back of her mind about what she might have changed for her timeline when she finally got back.

Ah, bad thoughts, bad thoughts. Bury ‘em deep, girl. 

The Hokage Tower didn't bother her. She hadn't felt weird about digging her nose around in that discussion because she'd spent time there in multiple Hokage’s tenures. She had put in her own decór once. 

Hashirama had ended up the Hokage in this iteration of things as well. But this time, Madara also had a crucial role as the clan representative. That meant that the Senju had to go through him for any requests. They hated it so visibly that it went a long way to sooth the appearance of favoritism from having a Senju leader. If Madara didn't raise a Clan issue to the Hokage's office, the Hokage was never going to weigh in on it. They clearly had a system worked out for managing public perception that called upon Madara’s theatrical talents. It was a whole fucking mood.

Aiko made her way to Hokage Tower early one morning, angling for the entertainment of a screaming match over the allowed shrubbery or length of garden paths or some shit like that. She'd heard that Senju Toki was going to petition Madara for something, and it was almost certainly going to be messy. It was warfare by extremely petty proxy and it was one of the few luxuries that made living in Konoha worth it.

“Aa! Aiko-Ise-sama,” called out a familiar low voice. “Good morning.”

She stopped mid stride and gave Tobirama a much kinder nod than she would have before their joint mission. He was obviously on his way to some kind of social appointment, dressed down from the armor she expected to see on him.

‘He looks more human that way,’ she thought idly. “Good morning, Tobirama-san,” she greeted. ‘Not like a picture in a history book or some asshole on the other side of a fight.’

“You seem well,” he said politely. He stopped a few paces away. She caught the barest hint of the scent of the broad green leaves that surrounded the Senju homes and the ink that was always under his fingernails. “Are you also heading to the gallery? Morishita-sama will be delighted to have such a guest.”

…They had a gallery? Someone had an art display? Who was Morishita-sama? Clearly it was someone important.

She smiled brightly up at him, taking care not to lift her face too much and therefore acknowledge their ridiculous size difference. “Yes, would you escort me?” Aiko said, because the idea of saying ‘no I was going to watch Madara and your second cousin scream at each other’ was a little embarrassing, somehow. It was less cultured, so far as entertainment went.

Tobirama inclined his head solemnly. “I thought that you might be interested, after your patronage of the local artist in Nukuzaki,” he said. They fell into a relaxed pace, Aiko taking his cues as to their route. 

“I am a big fan of the arts,” Aiko said. She meant it as a joke, but then she actually thought about it. She’d spent a lot of time and effort on flower arrangement with Ino and Lee. She’d painted with Sai; she had gotten into furiously fun arguments about color combinations with Naruto. Whenever she had money, what did she do with it? Buy pretty clothes, metal work, and books.

Huh. Maybe she did like art.

While Aiko was busy grappling with the realization that she wasn’t an uncultured rube the way she felt inside, Tobirama had continued to talk.

“I understand that this is a series of landscape paintings, commemorating the local area,” he explained. He did not seem to notice that the other people on the streets were staring at the unusual sight of the two of them walking together. 

Ah. Aiko internally calibrated to see a lot of trees, the mountainside, and probably the plains area that might never see conflict exciting enough to make it the desolate valley it truly deserved to be (sad). 

Huh. Maybe she would be doing the landscape artists of Fire Country if she just went ahead and did the massive damage that Hashirama and Madara probably wouldn’t get around to in this timeline.

The art gallery turned out to be a few minutes’ walk away from the main administration tower. She remembered seeing it but had never had a a second thought about what might be inside. When she entered she looked around with a little curiosity but followed Tobirama on his straight path to an open door near the entrance. She caught sight of another gallery room bursting with flowers on the left but Tobirama didn’t slow.

An older woman dressed in sombre grey looked up from a desk immediately inside the door and smiled at them. She had them sign a guest book that already had entries from 8 people on the same page and then walked them to the side room even though there were paintings on the wall right past her desk. Aiko let Tobirama take the social lead, mostly nodding and mumbling the correct polite things. Apparently the lady was the artist’s sister. The man himself was barely visible at a small table in the inner gallery, giving some kind of demonstration of painting strokes to an elderly couple. A single flower laid on the table, apparently his model.

While Tobirama and the lady conversed, Aiko turned to examine the actual paintings. To her eye, it was oil painting, not water colors. They were actually good. Her first impression was that the colors were kind of boring. Some of the paintings were entirely grayscale. But the more she looked, the more she noticed subtly building color.

“I only use four colors,” offered the artist. Morishita, apparently. He had walked up and was standing with his hands behind his back.

…Huh. Aiko looked over and counted more than that easily. White, black, brown, pink, red, green, and yellow. “What do you mean?”

He seemed delighted at the question and pulled out four depleted tubes of paint. “Red, yellow, blue, and sepia,” he explained. “The white is the paper.”

Aiko felt her eyebrows shoot up and she looked back at the painting she was in front of again, noting just how fine the lines of white on leaves were. The planning that required was definitely beyond her artistic abilities. And wait, she got how you made green with blue and yellow, but what was the pink?

Somehow she ended up in conversation with Tobirama of all people about this. They moved through the gallery debating techniques and then somehow wound up talking about fuinjutsu painting strokes. They left the gallery a cheerful hour after their arrival and went to the Senju main house so that Tobirama could show her the apparently so-superior brush that he made according to Mito-sama’s specifications. Aiko sat in their front room while he went in to retrieve the tool and took the chance to look around.

Mito had left her mark on the space since she had moved in. The frame of the house was all Hashirama’s medium toned wood with theatrical swirls of homemade woodgrain. The fresh-smelling tatami was tightly woven and banded at the ends with orange fabric from Uzu, and they matched the seating cushions around the table that Hashirama had obviously made.

The only touch of Tobirama in the room was the tiny ink painting of a cat on cheap paper in pride of place in the huge tokonoma.

Aiko pressed her lips together when she saw that and choked down a laugh. She was weirdly touched that he’d kept it. He had framed it, even, and somehow it had been bound around the edges with another traditionally patterned fabric.

When he came back in his gaze immediately tracked hers, landed on the cat painting, and flicked back to her. His lips twitched upwards and he said nothing about. He settled onto the cushion across from hers and laid out the little fabric roll he had brought. Aiko watched him carefully unclasp and then unroll it to reveal a small collection of handmade brushes. 

They talked for long enough that he ended up realizing he needed to offer tea. She trailed him to the kitchen and talked his ear off about his current sealing project while he boiled water. They drank all the tea over sketches and diagrams. Mito arrived home with an attendant and her painted eyebrows shot up her forehead to see them together in the front room. She left again and Aiko all but forgot about the interaction. 

She only left after their second pot of tea, when the afternoon bells rang and Tobirama regretfully admitted that he had an appointment he must keep. She walked home to her shrine, mind buzzing with theory and feeling unusually warm and content. Around her, Konoha was just Konoha. She forgot to feel out of place in the crowd.

Tobirama was surprisingly easy to talk to. She sort of regretted that she hadn’t been doing this every day since moving into the same area. 

Without really thinking about it, Aiko found herself making plans to visit him again and show him a seal she had learnt from Jiraiya that could connect to what he was currently doing.