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She is sixteen and she will die.
Sixteen isn’t young for a shinobi, not in wartime. But she’s not exactly old either, and there’s so much she wants in life that she hasn’t gotten a chance to live yet. She wants to live past the war. She wants to actually properly meet Senju Tsunade and study under her. It’s been important logistically for the best medics to stay spread out in the war, but there’s so much she could learn from her once this is all over. She wants to research diseases, because there’s still so much nobody knows with all the effort going into learning to heal traumatic injuries from combat. She wants to have a family some day. She’s always loved kids and always planned on having some of her own some day. She wants to watch Minato Sensei become the greatest hokage Kanoha has ever seen. She wants to finally see under Kakashi’s stupid mask.
But, there’s a seal inked onto her skin, made purposefully imperfect so that it won’t hold the sanbi for long. She is the student of Namikaze Minato and one of the best medic-nin in Konoha (which makes her one of the best medic-nin in the world) and she knows there is nothing she can do to fix the seal, probably nothing anyone can do, and certainly not in time. So she must die.
There is also some sort of compulsion seal written where she can’t see, probably on her heart. It compels her to return to Konoha and will not allow her to take her own life directly. Thankfully Kakashi is here.
She is sixteen and he is thirteen and he must kill her.
There are many times when three years seem like nothing. Times when Kakashi seems so much more experienced and so much more skilled than she is, times when his quick mind makes connections and concocts strategies in a way that’s breathtaking to watch, times when he takes the lead effortlessly. This is not one of those times.
He looks so very small as she explains to him. So very small and so very young. And she hates this. She hates everything about this. But she’s always been the sensible one, always known what needs to be done and made sure it was.
“So you have to kill me,” she says, and her voice is absolutely firm.
“No,” he says, his eye wide and full of stubbornness and panic, “No. There has to be another way.”
“There’s not,” she says, “There’s really, really not. I have to die. I’d do it myself if I could, but I can’t.” She wants to say he has no right to be so upset about it. She’s the one dying. She’s the one who got captured like some kind of silver screen damsel and then stuffed full of malevolent chakra beast so that she can’t even be rescued properly.
“That’s ridiculous. Nobody has to die,” he says, in his “I am a genius and obviously know better than you” tone, “ You can’t just give up on living. We’ll figure something out. We can wait here, I can tie you up if I have to; Minato Sensei will find us eventually,”
Obito always hated that tone, even she had found it annoying sometimes, especially when he inevitably turned out to be right. But he wasn’t right this time, he was emotionally compromised. (He always had been emotionally compromised, that’s what had drawn her to him to begin with, what had made her want to hug him and wrap him in soft blankets and never let go. It was what Obito had never understood, how deeply, intensely Kakashi mourned and fractured and cared. That day, Kannabi Bridge, hadn’t been about rules versus teammates, it was choosing between his father and his friends, and in the end Kakashi chose the living over the dead. And then Obito had died for her, had died for them. He’d made Kakashi promise, because he knew she would always look after him anyway, she’s a medic, that’s her job. And now she has to protect him and he has to kill her and she’s not sure which of them that’s more unfair to. She suspects it might be him, but she doesn’t want to die .)
“There’s no time!” she says, “The bijuu will escape and I’ll die anyway and so will a lot of other people, even if we’re not in Konoha.” So will Kakashi, first of all, and she can’t, she can’t die knowing she’s killing him.
“At least let me have a look at the seal.”
“ Kakashi .”
Kakashi is better than her at seals in general, but this is a seal inked onto a human person, locked into her chakra network, it’s biological, medical. She knows a lot more about this sort of thing than he does, and he knows it. There are no brilliant plans inside his head, no way out of this. He’s just arguing to argue, because he doesn’t want this. Well tough, does he think she does?
“ Please,” she says. And it’s Not Fair that she has to beg for her own execution.
“I can’t,” he says, a small, broken sound. Thirteen really is so very, horribly young.
That’s when the Kiri nin arrive. They’re only attacking Kakashi, of course. She tries to get them to fix the problem but all that does is distract Kakashi, the idiot, trying to protect her. They’re outnumbered and there’s blood everywhere, and Kakashi opens Obito’s eye, and she can feel the sanbi screaming inside of her.
Something most people don’t know is that when Kakashi uses the sharingan he can’t see out of his other eye, the sharingan sort of overrides it.
The kiri nin won’t kill her and she can’t kill herself, and Kakashi will never, ever kill her willingly. She does not want to die. It’s worse this way than it could ever be in straight battle, horribly intentional and unfairly certain. But she is more than brave enough for death. She knows that he will never forgive himself for what she is about to do, he promised Obito and he probably cares about her more than he cares about the whole rest of the world, minus Minato Sensei. Certainly more than the village that killed his father. He will hate himself for this for the rest of his life, but she is practical. She does what needs to be done. And the village matters more to her than his feelings.
She comes out of his blindspot, the sound of chidori tingling the air, and the last things she sees are his eyes blown wide, red and black and gray. She sees in that split second, through the brilliant searing pain, as they fill with shock and pain and horror, but not a hint of betrayal or blame. And as her life blinks out, she’s a little ashamed of how relieved she is of that.