At the very top of the Hokage tower, Madara had a spectacular view of the village on one side and the omnipresent loom of the cliffside on the other. It was his favorite place to be save for his bed which was shared with the comforting omnipresence of his wife.

There was a light rain misting across the village and a damp chill in the air behind it. The grey sky cast a dullness over everything, but Madara was able to appreciate the beauty in the brewing storm.

As he sat there, leaned against the railing, he surveyed the village, marveling at how far they had come in the last ten years. The residential district was booming now, civilians bursting from the seams. After the war had conclusively ended, many civilian families sought protection in Konoha's walls. The village's reputation as a safe haven pleased Madara.

There wasn't much these days that displeased him, if he were honest. Sakura had been able to awaken his Rinnegan many years ago, and with that ultimate power he had the strength to protect everyone in Konoha. Nothing threatened him or his family or his village and that peaceful utopia he'd once dreamt up with Hashirama on the cliffside had become a reality.

"You know mom doesn't like it when you come up here during thunderstorms," said a familiar voice behind him.

Cursing at having been snuck up on, Madara tossed a kunai in the direction of his stealthy, nearly ten-year-old son. The boy deflected it with a kunai of his own, his face drawn into a serious pout.

"Chikyu," Madara admonished. "What your mother doesn't know won't hurt her."

Chikyu dropped down from his perch on the tower's spire, landing in a puddle near Madara's feet. "Mom's right," he said, his dark eyes glowering. Though Chikyu had his mother's eye shape and heart-shaped face, his charcoal eyes and raven black hair were entirely Uchiha. "It's dangerous for you to be up here. Even if you managed to survive a lightning strike, you'd never hear the end of it."

Madara glared half-heartedly at his son.

"She's looking for you," Chikyu said, ambling back toward the tower's railing. "I won't tell her where I found you," he added before disappearing over the edge of the railing. Madara watched as he leapt toward the Uchiha compound, his dark silhouette bouncing from rooftop to rooftop.

A peal of thunder rang out across the trees. Madara glanced up at the darkening sky. He could see a crescent moon lurking just beyond the rolling clouds. Soon it would be covered with swollen clouds and a burst of heavy rain would pounds against the streets.

Perhaps he'd better get home to his wife and children.

/

The house was nearly silent when Madara entered. Only the lilting rain provided any sound, but Madara could sense a few resting bodies in his home. A trio of black cats skittered down the hallway as he made his way past the foyer.

Chikyu was holed away in his room. Hoshi, who had just recently turned eight, was in the kitchen chomping mindlessly away on rice pastries. Tsuki, who was proudly five years old, was humming softly from the comfort of the master bedroom.

Quietly, Madara slipped past the kitchen, down the hallway and into the bedroom where he found Sakura curled up on the bed. Her eyes were closed, though Madara could tell that she had only just dozed off. In her arms was cradled their youngest boy, Kusei, who was not quite two years old yet. Tsuki sat near Sakura's feet, running his tiny fingers over Sakura's swollen belly.

"Dad!" Tsuki exclaimed as Madara slipped baby Kusei from Sakura's arms and brought him over to his crib.

"Shh," Madara chided. "Your mother is trying to sleep."

More quietly, Tuski repeated himself and tugged on Madara's sleeve. "Dad, will you help me with my kunai practice now?" he asked while Madara placed the sleeping baby down and swaddled him in his blanket.

"Are you crazy?" Madara teased. "In this weather? We'll practice first thing in the morning."

Tsuki groaned. Madara tousled his hair affectionately. He plopped himself down on the bed beside Sakura and let out a tired sigh. Tsuki climbed onto the bed and leaned his back against Madara's. Sakura's swollen belly twitched, so Madara brought his palm to her stomach to feel his baby girl kick.

"When will the baby be here?" Tsuki asked.

"Any day now," Madara replied. "I'm sure your mother will be grateful to have another girl around."

"You think we are too much for her?" Tsuki asked. Madara could feel him curling against his side, warm and heavy with sleepiness.

"Don't be ridiculous," slurred Sakura, who absently raked her fingers through Madara's hair and then dragged him closer to kiss his forehead. "I never met an Uchiha I couldn't handle."

"And we're not an easy bunch to manage, I bet," he murmured, his eyes fixed on her moving belly. "Tsuki wants to know when the baby will be here."

Her hand came up to cover his, moving it across her round stomach. "By the end of the week for sure," she said. "Are you excited to have a little sister, Tsuki?"

"Not really," Tsuki said. Madara felt his tiny shrug against his back and laughed. "Girls are yucky."

"Am I yucky?" Sakura asked.

Tsuki gave another tiny shrug. "You're not really a girl."

Sakura let out an offended scoff as Madara laughed, pulling the blankets up tighter around the three of them. He could hear Kusei's soft snoring from the crib and the heavy pounding rain against the window.

And not a trace of darkness was in his skull.

/

It was easy to grow accustomed to life as Hokage. With Sakura by his side he felt more confident in his decisions, yet more critical of himself. He found himself constantly working on ways to improve life for her, to bring her the luxuries of the life she left behind for him. In turn he found himself always coming up with new ideas for the village, new ways to make life better for everyone.

Slipping into the role felt right. Once he'd thought that he was ill suited for it, that it was a desire for power that drove him to want the title. He realized now that his motivations had changed. Where once he craved power for power's sake, now he felt only determination to protect those under his care.

Sakura referred to this as the Will of Fire. Madara preferred to think of it as a natural instinct to protect.

Whatever it was, it sharpened Madara's senses as he sat in his office chair, facing the window. A pinprick of chakra caught his attention, something unfamiliar, something right here inside the Hokage tower.

Curious but not alarmed quite yet, Madara rose to his feet. The village was still dark, though the sun would begin to rise any second.

A sparkle of strange chakra hovered somewhere nearby, elusive, blipping in and out of Madara's sensory reach. Growing more concerned, Madara wandered out into the hallway, trying to catch this disappearing chakra.

Something about it was familiar in a hard to determine kind of way. Though he had no reason to be trusting of whatever this foreign chakra was, he felt a warmth in it that kept him from panicking.

He rounded the corner of the hall, following the chakra until he found himself climbing the rungs of the ladder that lead up onto the roof. Blazing with curiosity, he stepped out onto the roof, his Rinnegan scanning for whatever was amiss.

His gaze landed on a pack, a leather drawstring pack the likes of which he hadn't seen in over a decade.

"What's this?" he asked himself as he cautiously reached for the pack. His heart leapt up into his throat as he neared it and saw a note pinned to the front.

"Sakura," it read. He plucked the note from the pack, his fingers trembling. The words were scrawled hastily on the gridded paper, but Madara recognized the Hokage's seal at the bottom immediately. It was from Tsunade.

"Sakura," he read from the note. "I hope this reaches you. If not, I'll never know. We managed to get a read of your current reality thread for a brief moment and used it to send your pack to you. Well, Shizune did most of the work. There are a lot of things I wish I could say, but unfortunately I don't have time – we could lose your thread at any second. We all love and miss you, Sakura. We hope you are safe."

Tsunade's seal and signature adorned the bottom. His hand still shaking, Madara lowered the page and glanced down at the pack. Sakura had told him years ago what she'd put in there, and he'd long since forgotten. Except for one thing. His Rinnegan. He knew the Madara from Sakura's reality had left these behind and Sakura had stolen them.

With no small amount of trepidation, Madara crouched down and un-cinched the pack's closing. It was stuffed to the brim with all sorts of books and papers, jars, medical equipment, inoculations for well-known diseases.

At the bottom of the pack, Madara felt the cool glass jar that must have been what he was looking for. Slowly, he pulled it out of the pack and into the burgeoning morning light.

Two purple eyeballs floated listless in the jar's liquid. Madara swallowed the lump in his throat as he stared at them. The sight of them made him very uneasy, and for a brief moment he wondered what he should even do with them now that he'd already awakened his Rinnegan in this reality.

And then he was struck by a marvelous idea.

/

Sakura's face was grim as she read the note, her eyes shimmering with unshed tears. It had been over a decade since she had seen her friends and family, and Madara knew she must have missed them. At least this was something, though Madara hated seeing her upset like this.

She reverently removed each item from the pack, cooing and delighting over each one. Madara had replaced the Rinnegan inside before he'd handed it all over to her, and now he watched her pull them from the pack with rapt attention.

The very last item in the pack, she set it down on the kitchen table and flicked her gaze up toward Madara who stood beside her.

"Maybe Chikyu can use these when the time comes," she suggested, her voice tentative as she gauged Madara's feelings on the matter. He could feel her chakra nascent beneath the skin of her fingertips, which were pressed delicately to his wrist.

He shook his head. "These Rinnegan aren't as powerful as the ones you awakened for me," Madara said.

"I suppose so," she agreed. "Perhaps we'd better just hang onto them for now?"

Madara shook his head again. "Do you think you could wield them?"

Sakura's eyes widened with surprise, her gaze drifting up from the jarred Rinnegan to her husband's face. "Me?"

"Yes, you," he said, smiling as he sat down at the table beside her. "I think the colors might suit you."

She gave him a disapproving look, appearing quite flustered. "It could be dangerous," she said. "I don't have the bloodlines required to—"

"Nothing is really an obstacle to you, is it, Sunflower?" he teased. "Imagine my wife, the matriarch of the Uchiha clan, wielder of the Rinnegan. It makes perfect sense, doesn't it? You have more working knowledge of the doujutsu than anyone else. These are technically your eyes, anyway—"

"Technically they are yours," she argued.

"And since everything I have is yours, that means they are equally yours," Madara bartered.

Sakura looked pensively down into her lap, her lower lip worried between her pearly teeth. "I'll think about it," she said, her gaze flicking one last time to the jarred eyes on the table. She then blinked and looked back up at Madara's face.

"I can't believe Tsunade-sama managed to get this here," she said, her eyes glazed over with nostalgia. "The note said they managed to get a read on this reality. What do you think that means?"

Madara shrugged. "Maybe the moon guided them?" he suggested.

Sakura didn't look so sure. "After all these years?" she asked. "It just seems strange. I wish she'd had the time to write me a proper letter."

Madara hummed in agreement. "Ten years have passed here since you arrived," he said. "How many years do you think have passed in your reality?"

Her brow furrowed and she tossed him a confused, curious look. "If time moves at the same rate as it did when we were separated, then probably around forty years," she explained.

They both fell silent, their eyes on the pack and its contents spread all over the table. It was as much a mystery to them as the moon had ever been, but instead of fear and uncertainty, warmth and love exuded from it. Madara felt a burst of affection for Tsunade, who cared so deeply for her pupil, and then for Hashirama, whose radiance was somehow contagious and genetic, and then finally for his wife. He reached for her hand and brought it to his lips.

"I bet they miss you," he said softly and then kissed her palm. "Should I feel guilty for stealing you away?"

Sakura demurred and Madara did feel a stab of guilt when a wave of pained wistfulness flitted across her face.

"I do miss them very much," she confessed, "but I never could have been happy anywhere but by your side."

She rose from her chair and skirted around the table's corner to sit against it, her leg brushing against Madara's, her swollen belly between them. She slipped her hands into his and then brought his fingers to rest against her temples. Her palms pressed against the back of his hands, holding them against her face.

"Whenever I miss them too much," she said, her voice catching on emotion, "whenever it hurts, I just think of you. You may not even know it, Mada-kun, but you take away my darkness, too."

Madara had been blessed with the privilege of being her husband for an entire decade now, but she still found ways to send his heart into a whirling frenzy. Using his grip on her face, he pulled her forward into a series of soft, dreamy kisses.

He could have held her like that for hours, kissed all her pain away and reminded her just how much he loved her and why it had been worth it to give up her previous life.

They were interrupted, however, by a slew of familiar chakra signatures.

"Eww!" screeched a chorus of children as they paraded into the kitchen and dumped their backpacks onto the floor.

With a grin, Madara pulled away from his wife to glance at his unruly children.

"Come tell us about your day at the academy," Madara said, giving his wife's rear a firm pinch as she began to clear the items from the kitchen table. "Hoshi, you've been preparing for the Chuunin exams, haven't you?" A more controlling and strict side of him wanted to train Hoshi for the exams himself, but to Madara's pleasant surprise, Tobirama had acclimated well to his role as academy instructor. It sometimes even seemed like Hoshi was his favorite pupil.

As the children began to gather around the table, Sakura bustled around the kitchen to prepare dinner. Madara eased back in his chair with a contented sigh, listening to his sons argue over who was better with their fireball jutsu. His eyes lingered on his wife's body.

She looked glorious when pregnant, and she nested hard. It was feverishly that she tended to things, wildly that she made love to him. She was always cooking and cleaning and nursing. Pregnancy made her tongue sharper and her tolerance for Madara's antics much lower, which reminded him of how hostile she had been when they had first met. He'd missed their flirtatious banter, and Sakura never seemed truly annoyed with him.

Kusei began to cry from the other room, so Madara rose to his feet.

"I'll get him," Hoshi said, glaring at Chikyu as he shoved his chair away from the table. Madara's gaze flicked between them. He could see now that they would be good brothers and great rivals.

Hoshi disappeared and Madara found his gaze back on his wife's rear. She tended to something on the stove, and feeling his gaze on her she turned to look at him. Her face was radiant, her eyes focused pinpoints of warmth on his face. She smiled – a sight he could never tire of.

"Can you come stir this while I chop the vegetables?" she asked.

He went to the stove, obedient, lured by his wife's beautiful body. His hands found her ass, then her waist. He bent down and kissed the side of her neck. When he pulled away, Sakura reached up and pulled him back down by his hair. He chuckled and pressed another kiss to her cheek and curled his palms around her belly.

"You're about to pop," he murmured, reaching for the spoon over Sakura's shoulder. "You know what that means?"

She stood in the circle of his arms, probably melting in the heat of his body and the stove and her looming belly. Her feet shuffled; she twisted around to face him, mindful of the boiling pot behind her.

"We'll have a daughter?" she asked.

He smiled. "Yes, we'll have a daughter," he agreed. "And that means we can try for another boy."

Sharp pain radiated in his ribs. Her eyes blazed fiercely as she pulled her hand away from him. He winced for her benefit, though he was sure she easily saw through it.

"As if I need more boys!" she shrieked, pushing out of the cage of his arms to fetch vegetables to chop. Madara watched with amusement, keeping his eye on the pot on the stove. He wouldn't mind having ten daughters if they all turned out like their mother. He glanced down at her belly, which was rather in her way as she sliced carrots.

His daughter was in there. So far all of his children had come out with dark hair and dark eyes, though their resemblance to their mother was still apparent. He wondered, though, if he might have a daughter with pink hair or green eyes. Would she perhaps look a bit like Madara's mother, whom he could hardly remember at this point?

A flare of his wife's chakra commanded his attention.

Sakura dropped the knife in her hand; it clattered to the floor dangerously close to her bare feet. Her knuckles were white where she gripped the countertop.

"Baby?" He bent down and grabbed the knife from the floor and tossed it into the sink. His hands were on her a second later, whirling her to face him. "Are you going into labor?" he asked. Her eyes were squeezed shut and he'd done this enough times to know she was bracing against the pain of a contraction.

The silence in the kitchen told him that the children were alerted as well. A glance over his shoulder confirmed that they were all looking at their mother, even Hoshi who had returned with Kusei on his hip.

"You guys ready to have a sister?" Madara asked.

/

Arashi Uchiha was the first Uchiha to be born with pink hair. Though the thought had perturbed him as far as it related to his sons, he was absolutely delighted that his angelic daughter was born with the cotton candy colored hair he adored so much on Sakura.

Sakura, too, had been greatly amused, though the shade of pink was far darker than hers, and the baby's eyes were even darker than Madara's – black as night.

She was a feisty baby, which Madara hadn't even imagined possible. Though his boys could be rowdy, Arashi was something else entirely. As a baby, she cried often, demanding to be held, commanding all the attention in the room.

As a toddler she was a nightmare, always getting into messes, destroying her brothers' things, disappearing in those brief moments when no one could keep their eye on her. She grew into a brash girl, both roughened and spoiled by her lot of older brothers.

Sakura, who seemed to thrive having a daughter, mentioned in passing that she felt bad that Arashi would have trouble dating when she came of the age. Being the daughter of the Uchiha patriarch and having four older brothers made her seem like a bit of a risk.

Madara shuddered at the thought that men might one day want to defile his little girl. He was secretly pleased that dating her would seem daunting.

So it was to his utter horror that Arashi grew older and blossomed into a young woman who was strikingly similar to her mother. How could he have presumed that any children of Sakura's would come out anything less than stunning? His sons, too, were handsome – the best combinations of Sakura's natural beauty and Madara's aristocratic features.

Arashi's beauty was an exotic kind, but it wasn't the only thing about her that came from Sakura. Arashi's skills as a shinobi rivaled her older brothers'. Her determination to prove herself was so overwhelmingly strong that she had awakened her own Sharingan at age three without Sakura's help. She had beaten Kusei in a heated spar and been so proud of her victory.

Sakura found this concerning, especially at her young age, but Madara knew that his daughter was something special. She was advancing quicker than her brothers, learning not just the Uchiha clan's techniques and skills, but also Sakura's chakra control and medical techniques, which none of his sons had any interest in learning.

She was becoming formidable, and now at age seventeen she was beautiful. A true danger indeed, just like her mother. Secretly, Madara admitted to himself that Arashi was his favorite child.

And so when he'd heard that a boy was interested in his daughter, he felt a slew of negative feelings that he'd been able to repress for decades before. Rage, dread, fear, anxiety all swept across his skull like a chilling wave.

Sakura refused to give up the boy's name, knowing what Madara might do, but sleuthing up that information had been easy. Chikyu had been all to eager to explain that it was Hashirama's oldest son that had expressed interest in Arashi.

Madara, still dressed in his Hokage robe and hat, had marched straight down to the Senju compound to demand an explanation from Hashirama.

"What does your pervert son want with my daughter?" he barked, flinging his hat into Hashirama's chest.

"The same thing your pervert ass wanted with her mother, I presume," Hashirama teased, snatching the hat from Madara's hand. "Come on now, she could do much worse. Nikko is an ANBU captain and—"

"He's nearly ten years older than her!"

"So?"

Madara pouted, crossing his arms over his chest whilst giving Hashirama the driest of glares.

"If I tell him to stay away from her, it will only make him want her more," Hashirama cautioned. "Besides, you don't even know if Ara-chan is interested. The problem might solve itself."

Madara didn't like the sound of that, but it had been a while since he had seen Hashirama and he suddenly found himself comforted by his company. It had been ages since he'd been to the Senju compound, and there was something inherently cozy and serene about Hashirama's front porch.

Without asking permission, Madara sank down into a rocking chair and heaved a sigh. Hashirama took the chair beside him and they both gazed out into the early evening sky. Their friendship had never faltered over the years. Even through their downs their bond was unshakable, and Madara couldn't help but wonder how things had all gone so wrong in Sakura's reality.

"When we were just boys," Hashirama said, his gaze still up on the sky, "talking about creating a world with no war, a village of peace, I never expected all this."

Madara nodded and a comfortable silence settled around them for a moment.

"Did you accomplish everything you wanted, Madara?" Hashirama asked. "You've got your gorgeous wife and talented children, a sprawling compound, the title of Hokage, the Rinnegan, and a village full of happy people. Is there anything you're missing?"

The question caught him by surprise. He felt lacking for nothing, he thought. As long as he had Sakura, he had everything. He owed all of it to her, and over the years he'd learned to be grateful for that instead of afraid of it. She was here, after all. Perhaps this world may have turned out differently if he'd never found her, but he had.

And he felt confident that life could go on without her. He'd been filled up by her infectious joy and unconditional love. He may not have survived without it, but he could survive now knowing that it had been wholly and completely his for so many years.

"I wish Sakura was here," he mused aloud.

Hashirama laughed.

/

It was only three short years later that Arashi and Nikko had a child. Though Madara had been adamantly against their relationship from the start, he had warmed up to Nikko once he saw that Hashirama's infectious warmth had obviously spread to his children as well.

Madara could never complain about the gentle grace and affection that Nikko showed his daughter. Besides, Nikko had many Uchihas to answer to if he ever broke Arashi's heart.

And while Izuna had initially been disgusted that the Uchiha bloodline was going to be mixed into the Senju's, soon they all realized that this union of clans was a good thing. They were a more powerful tie this way – the Uchiha princess the matriarch of the Senju clan.

Shortly after their baby was delivered (Madara's first grandchild thanks to his sons' focus on training rather than marital affairs), Sakura brought it to him, swaddled in cloth. Arashi and Nikko were sleeping in the delivery room while Madara peered down at the little blonde haired, blue-eyed baby peeking up at him.

"You now what they named her?" Sakura asked, grinning as she sat down beside him, her leg pressed warmly against his.

He glanced at her and shook his head.

"Tsunade."

With a grin, Madara cradled his granddaughter in his arms as Sakura rested her head against his shoulder. Her chakra was low, though she said the delivery had gone very well.

"Tsunade-chan," he said with a laugh, shifting the baby against his chest. Sakura laughed, too, and they both reclined back against their chairs, enjoying this moment with their first grandchild.

"You're going to teach her medical nin-jutsu, right?" Madara asked Sakura, his eyes still on little Tsunade's face.

"Of course."

Madara grinned. "Then someday you're going to get to explain to her that she actually taught you everything you know," he said. "Which means she indirectly will have taught herself everything she knows."

Sakura gave him a dry look. "Hey, I learned some stuff on my own," she said, then peered down into the swaddled cloth at the baby's face. "I wonder if she'll be anything like my Tsunade-sama."

Madara wrapped his free arm around Sakura's shoulder and pulled her closer to him. "I can't wait to find out."

/

AN: Hashirama and Madara share a granddaughter. How fucking cute is that.

Anyway, that wraps this bad boy up! This has been BY FAR my favorite fic to write, and obviously my most popular as well! I'm really glad you guys have enjoyed it. Your comments make me feel like I could just float right off the ground, so thank you.

I'd really like some constructive criticism on what the WORST parts about this fic were. You guys are always so nice and sweet, but knowing what I could improve on will make the next fic even better. Please let me know what things I can work on in the future, or what things you just didn't like in general.

And thank you all so much for taking the time to read this obnoxiously long fic. It was a blast to write.