For years the only time they were close together was when their clans met in battle. Madara thought, under the circumstances, he could be forgiven for not noticing. His soulmate tended to stay unnaturally calm during battle barring the flickers of irritation that touched them when something didn 't quite go the way they wanted it to. It was perfectly acceptable that Madara wouldn 't guess his soulmate to be part of the fighting, just that they happened to live somewhere close to the border between the Uchiha and Senju lands.

When the thought did finally occur to him, it was perhaps a little less forgivable that his first assumption featured Hashirama as his soulmate. It only made sense to him at the time: the one person outside of his clan that he had ever connected with

must