charlottedabookworm:

@blackkatmagic – I blame you for this. I reread your fic ‘One is for Sorrow’ and got so many Tobirama feels that I had to write something. The title comes from the Dan Brown quote “By its very nature, history is always a one-sided account.” from the Da Vinci Code. Hope you like it. Tell me what you think.

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They say that history is written by the victors. It’s the truth if a fairly civilian one. In the shinobi world, history is more often written by the survivors.

And, by a quirk of fate, the Uchiha Clan survived for far longer than the Senju Clan did.

(If you asked a hundred people present at an event about said event, then you would get a hundred different answers. They might be similar, but no two answers would be the exact same. Different things like height and age and upbringing all affect how a person views an event or action. Those raised together are more likely to have similar viewpoints)

History says that Senju Tobirama was the beginning of the downfall of the Uchiha.

(By the time of his death, the Uchiha far outnumbered the Senju. Is it any wonder that history would be recorded as they saw it?)

History says that Tobirama hated the entirety of the Uchiha Clan.

(A partial truth. In his youth, yes. Of course, he did. As a child of constant war, with the Senju and Uchiha being pitted against each other over and over, he was raised to hate them. He was raised with the face of an Uchiha being synonymous with the face of the enemy – the enemy who killed his brothers – the entire clan was. But this wasn’t one-sided, the Uchiha hated the Senju just as much as they did them.

But as he spent more time on the battlefield, as he grew older and wiser, that hatred became indifference. The Uchiha were powerful and skilled, yes, but they weren’t the only enemy. He even began to look forward to clashing with them – Izuna became a valued rival to test his skills against. Tobirama had felt a flicker of guilt and regret over his death but put it aside, it was war and he would do anything to protect his family.

That had never changed. And when, after it’s founding, Konoha became his family – it became his to protect. And that included every person, every clan, inside its walls)

History says that he didn’t trust the Uchiha.

(Forgetting that Kagami was both his student and his friend. That he would take tea every fortnight with a retired Uchiha kunoichi while they grumbled about their students and their antics. That half of his research team, recruited by him personally, were Uchiha and the most of the other half were Nara. That one of the original twelve, hand-picked, members of ANBU who guarded with the villages deepest secrets was an Uchiha.

Ignoring the fact that Tobirama had handed over internal security of the village to the clan as a whole to deal with. That he trusted them to protect both the civilians and the shinobi inside of the village walls.

While at first, yes, he was suspicious he quickly grew to trust the clan.

In fact, Madara was the only one that he didn’t trust fairly quickly. Madara who was obsessed with revenge to the point of being half mad. Madara who was the last holdout in his clan to agree to peace. Who demanded that his brother kill himself for the sake of peace.

[Who became his friend over long years of shared exasperation over Hashirama’s antics. Who was his complete opposite in so many ways, yet so similar in some many others. Who was one of the best sparring partners he had ever had and could keep up with him when talking about jutsu creation. Who he had to learn to trust and was better for it. Who could have been something so much more to him if they had just had the time. Who they lost to the madness that haunted the Uchiha clan like a shadow]

Madara who betrayed the village [betrayed him] in the end anyway)

History says that he isolated the Uchiha, that he purposely put them in a far corner of the village away from everyone else.

(The Uchiha isolated themselves. Just like every clan in the village did – aside from the Nara, Akimichi and Yamanaka. Generations of war aren’t forgotten over the course of weeks, even inside the village, the trust between the clans was tentative. Clan compounds were safe havens for the clan shinobi – a place of familiarity and safety during those early years when the village was being built.

History forgets that the clans chose their own lands inside of the walls.)

The Uchiha say that he had planned to kill them.

(A truth. If only barely half of one.

As the Hokage and the counterbalance to his brother’s idealism, Tobirama had plans for the extermination of all of the clans, major and minor, in Konoha. Hidden away and written in code – the clans themselves had provided the plans for the compounds – they were for his eyes only.

Konoha was his home. It was his family and it was his to protect. As much as he would have liked to think the best of his people, he was both a genius and a pragmatist. The plans were never intended to be used. But if a clan intended to betray Konoha then he would take action.

Even if it pained him to do so)

History portrays Senju Tobirama as a cold man. A genius, yes, but one who kept to himself. A man who had never trusted the Uchiha and worked to isolate them from the village for its protection. To the Uchiha, Tobirama was the equivalent of the monster under the bed. To the village, he was their Nidaime Hokage.

(Senju Tobirama was genius. His skill with suiton manipulation was unparalleled. He was skilled with a blade and one of the fastest men alive. He was one of the greatest shinobi of Konoha. He was a Senju. He was a Hokage.

He was a teacher. He created the shinobi academy so that children had a proper education and were older when they went out onto the battlefield. He created the ANBU to try to rehabilitate suicidal shinobi. He had a soft spot for children. He loved his clan and his village. He was a scientist. A man who, in another life, would have been perfectly happy to live his life in a lab. He created hundreds of jutsu – some legendary, some simple, some forbidden. He developed a space-time fuinjutsu while barely into his twenties.

He was a boy who lost both of his brothers to a war that was fought even though nobody could remember how it was started. He was a boy who grew up far too soon, who would do absolutely anything in order to protect his loved ones. He was very much a man of his time and his upbringing. He died to protect his students and his village.

He was a human being and he made mistakes.

History tends to forget that)