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Obito can’t see. One of his eyes is being crushed beneath an uncomfortably large rock and the other is now acting as a memento for his teammate. This is fine. He’s dying, after all, and even if he hates the endless black pit that his end brings with it, there isn't anything he can do. So, he cries. Like a baby. He cries because he didn't want to be left behind. Kakashi is finally starting to feel like a friend and he thought that maybe, with their newfound teamwork…
He wants to go home. To Konoha. To his friends. And it—it isn't fair. Why now?
Obito wants to live.
Above, the rocks slip. He sucks in a breath and braces for impact, but they don’t hit. He waits, all tense and wincing preemptively, but all that falls are tiny particles of rock and dust that crumble against his chest. Pinned and blind, all he can do is accept his fate.
Great. So he’ll starve out here instead.
Eventually, footsteps bounce off the cave walls. Someone breathes in long, calming breaths, as though trying to settle a racing heart. Obito listens. Shuffling, the rustle of hands through a bag. He can feel the heat of another body by his side.
One of the Iwa-nin? Should he play dead?
Something is pressed against his lips.
"Bite down."
Obito weighs the pros and cons of obeying, but he has no fight left in him. He's weak and tired. All he wants is a moment of peace. When his lips part, the thing against them is pushed into his mouth and he latches onto it with his teeth. Leather?
"This is going to hurt. Try not to scream. It's over for the both of us if there's another cave-in."
Before he can ask, white-hot pain shoots through his leg and he bites down hard against the leather strap in his mouth to fight back a cry. Getting crushed wasn't as bad as this. He feels tears bead down his face from his emptied and crushed sockets but he can hardly register them behind the burning make it stop make it stop make it stop.
Something gives and Obito can't feel his leg. The impossible ache is soothed by something cool and foreign, and his muscles start to relax.
When that pain finds him anew, he blacks out.
Obito opens his eye to—
He… opens his eye.
He can open his eye.
He can see .
Obito stares out at a cave wall. It's like looking through a fog. Everything is blurry around the edges, as though he's looking through the lens of a dream, and he has to squint to make out shapes. The rockfall above has been cleared and he can see the sky dark with night poking through the harsh edges of the stone. He thought that he lost his eye when the rocks fell, but it's working now.
There's someone next to him. He blinks bleary-eyed at the stranger, but he can't make out details yet. Is his vision damaged, or is this something else?
A blob vaguely shaped like a hand reaches out to him and he tries to swat it away, but his arm doesn't listen. Soon, fingers are on his forehead, cool against his skin.
"Your fever's gone down some," the man says. He has a lazy, calm manner of speech. "Looks like you'll live to see another day."
Obito squints at the spectre hanging over him. "Who are you?"
"Oh, you know," the stranger waves, "just a good Samaritan, here to lend a hand." A pause. "Too soon?"
He doesn’t understand. Not at first. Then, like the crash of a wave in the middle of a storm, it hits. He looks right, too tired to keep his head up, and sees the stump where his arm used to be. Even despite this, he tries to move the fingers of a right hand that isn’t there, but nothing happens. Well. It’s hard to be mad. There was no saving it, he knows, his bones fragmented by a force that he couldn’t escape—one that should have killed him. Surprisingly, there’s no blood. Well. Not on him, anyway; the ground is stained with a crusty brown that used to be red and Obito doesn’t want to think about how all of that used to be a part of him. He wonders where the arm was tossed to.
And the leg. He doesn’t need to look to know that it’s gone, too. But hey, he’s alive. Somehow. Over half of him made it out all thanks to this strange man whose image is growing clearer with the passing seconds. Now, he can make out unruly silver hair and a grey eye on a pasty face. Dark clothes, almost like shinobi fatigues, but Obito can’t yet tell what village this stranger hales from.
The man digs through a bag on the ground, fishing out a flask and wiggling it between his fingers. “Thirsty?”
Obito licks his lips, dry and cracked, and nods. Soon, a strong arm is supporting his head as he takes greedy gulps of cool water. He damn near drinks the whole thing before the lip of the flask is pulled away, leaving his parched throat feeling less like sandpaper. “How long was I out?” he manages, his voice just as gravelly as before.
“Three days,” the man says. “Give or take a few hours. Maa, it’s about what I expected. You’ve expended a lot of energy to keep yourself alive. Not dying is surprisingly labour-intensive.”
“Why’d you help me?”
“Don’t you know what a good Samaritan is?”
Obito eyes the stranger as his head is set back down. He realizes there’s something soft supporting the back of his skull, like a rolled-up shirt or blanket. Moving feels like far too much effort, even if he still has one working leg and arm, so Obito passes the time by watching his saviour. The man rifles through more of his things and next he pops out some food pills, giving one to each of them. Within the hour, Obito’s nauseous hunger starts to fade.
There’s a glowing green light against his shoulder that he watches with mild curiosity, thinking back to the last thing his left eye ever saw, Rin’s fingers painlessly digging around in his skull. Despite how time-sensitive the operation was, she took the time to anesthetize the area so he wouldn’t have to feel it.
This bastard didn’t bother with that, but Obito can’t complain. It doesn’t hurt as much now, at least, and the healing aura is proof enough that he’s still being cared for.
“You’re a medic-nin?” Obito wonders off-handedly.
“No,” is the answer. “But I like to pretend.”
How reassuring.
“A student of mine is a medic,” the man continues offhandedly as he presses gloved fingers against Obito’s stump, tilting his head down to get a good look at the healing injury. Medical ninjutsu is great, but it’s not like it can seal up massive damage like this with a few runs of chakra. It’ll take time before Obito heals. “I picked up some things here and there, you could say.”
“And I suppose she didn’t teach you about anesthesia?”
“Ah…” The man smiles sheepishly, his face clear enough now that Obito can make out his guilt, even behind the mask that covers the bottom half of his face and the hitai-ate crossed over his left eye. “I apologize for that. I’m flirting with chakra exhaustion right now and don’t have any extra to expend if I want to keep moving.”
Oh.
Blinking away the fuzzy lines of his vision, Obito can see just how sickly pale the stranger really is. The visible square of his face is enough to see how haggard he is, only fairing a little better than Obito, himself.
“It’s fine,” Obito says. “It doesn’t hurt much anymore. Um… thanks.”
The man only smiles. He takes a warm cloth and cleans the injury, mindful of the sewn-together threads of Obito’s flesh. Then, once everything else is in order, he fits new bandages over the stump. He’s surprisingly meticulous for a non-medic, which makes Obito wonder if he’s had to patch up his teammates out on the field.
Then, the man moves to the stump of Obito’s leg and the process is repeated.
Eventually, Obito gets bored. When he gets bored, his mind starts to wander. “Are you gonna take me back to your village for my Sharingan or something?”
The man sighs. “No, Obito.”
“How’d you know my name?”
There’s another vague wave. “You look like an Obito.”
“Do you know how suspicious that sounds?”
“If I were saving you for your Sharingan, it would make more sense to just take the Sharingan itself, wouldn’t it?” He’s diverting. That, too, is suspicious. It’s probably best not to poke the hornet’s nest, though, when this man is the one keeping him alive. “That would certainly be less of a hassle.”
“Well, maybe you don’t know how to remove it,” Obito shrugs, wincing and regretting it immediately. “Or you don’t have a seal to preserve it. Or, if you want it, maybe you need someone else here to transplant it.”
“Obito,” the man sighs again, and again he uses a name that he shouldn’t know. “If I took your Sharingan, I’d be dead from chakra exhaustion by day’s end. Your eye is useful, yes. It’s not useful enough to bleed myself dry for.”
Hm.
Obito can almost see clearly now as he stares toward his leg and the man sitting there, caring for his injury. The hitai-ate covering the stranger’s right eye might mean that he can’t use it, or that it’s not there. If a non-Uchiha possesses the Sharingan, they can’t turn it off, right? But he could replace his damaged eye with Obito’s… no. No, he couldn’t. It’s not the right side.
“What’s your name?” Obito asks instead. “It’s not fair that you know mine, but I don’t know yours.”
The man stills only for a moment. Then, as he’s reapplying bandages, he hums. “Call me Hound, I suppose.”
“That’s not a name.”
“Maa, what’s in a name, really?”
Obito gawks openly at the arm Hound is proudly waving above his head. It’s some hard substance, jointed to the teeth and very, very fake. He should be grateful that it’s not the flesh-and-blood arm that must have been tossed out of the half-collapsed cavern they’ve made their temporary base. But more than anything, he’s just confused.
“Why do you have a prosthetic?” Obito asks flatly.
Hound’s crescent-eyed smile grows more aggravating by the day. “Because it pays to be prepared.”
“It’s… in my size,” Obito observes, deeply disturbed.
A shrug is all he gets. “There are a lot of child soldiers these days. I have a leg in here, too, somewhere… A-ha!”
Sure enough, he pulls out a pale white leg, fully jointed, from the sealing scroll he has open and flat on the cavern floor. They’re both, disturbingly, pairs for the limbs that he’s sorely lacking. Does he trust Hound to properly hook them up to his chakra network? No! Not at all! This man has stayed with him across the three days that Obito’s been awake and has gotten increasingly sickly with each passing day. It’s because he’s using more and more chakra to heal Obito. The rest Hound needs to recover just isn’t being met and, in fact, is actively being ignored. If he tries to fit those prosthetics right now, he’ll probably die.
“You won’t be able to use them until you’re fully healed, unfortunately,” Hound laments as he seals both limbs back into his scroll. “At your current rate of recovery, in a few days…”
Obito frowns. He has enough mobility now to prop himself against the wall, so he’s using it for support while sending a telepathic message to his saviour about how stupid this is. His current rate of recovery is only due to Hound’s constant care, which is draining the man dry. But when he told Hound that he could recover fine on his own, he was dismissed.
This man has a death wish and Obito doesn’t know why.
Hound looks a lot like Kakashi. Eerily so. He’s probably a Hatake. Kakashi’s supposed to be the last to carry that name, but the clan is old and it’s not impossible that branches of it are still scattered across the Elemental Nations.
Obito chooses his words carefully. “Even if we can attach them, it’ll take time for me to adjust,” he says. “Can we maybe… move, instead of sitting out here like this? I miss my friends.”
Hound watches him for a long, long time, and nods. “Okay.”
Obito doesn’t like being treated like a sack of rice, but he’s long since stopped protesting. He stares out at the trees, slung over Hound’s shoulder like luggage, and their travels are slow-going. It would probably help if they could keep to the roads, but they’re still in a war zone and neither of them is in any shape for combat. Hell, Obito can’t even stand.
Hound wears a variation of Konoha’s standard-issue fatigues, the symbol of the Leaf proudly brandished across his forehead. Obito’s never seen him around the village before, but it’s not like he knows much of the workforce, so he doesn’t think anything of it. Apparently, there’s been another Hatake right under their noses all along. A black fingerless glove helps velcro Obito to the shinobi’s back because Obito’s missing half the limbs needed to offer support. Pale, long-healed lines pattern Hounds fingers, scars of years out on the field. They’re the same kind Minato has, from rocks and bark, wood and trees. The sort you get from just existing in nature.
When they stop and Obito’s dumped against a tree, his saviour lets out a loud, exhausted breath. The bubble of a stream fills the air as the Hatake, probably one of the oldest of Konoha’s shinobi still alive, takes the time to rest. Even without two days of healing rounds, Hound’s reserves are as dry as a desert and all this moving and lifting isn’t doing him any favours.
They refill their flasks by the stream and set up camp. The sun is low now. They could probably make some more distance between now and sunset, but it’s better for Hound to rest when he can. Before long there’s a fire, another food pill popping into each of their mouths, and their sleeping bags are laid out side-by-side. Still, the sun is up. Hound goes about removing the dressing on Obito’s stumps, his empty grey stare drawing the boy in more as they spend time together, as though there’s a thought in his head needing to be voiced that he can’t find.
“They’ve fully closed,” Hound says, passing his hand over the strangely sensitive skin that’s freshly grown over Obito’s wounded shoulder. “It’s safe to attach the prosthetics.”
“Safe for me,” Obito corrects. “You’ll die. Rin says it takes a lot of chakra to connect the pathways to new limbs like that. Oh—Rin’s our medic.”
“Maa, it’s no trouble. Better to get you walking on your own two feet so I don’t have to carry you. Not to be rude, but you’re heavier than you look.”
There’s no arguing with this guy. Soon, Obito’s being fitted to a pale, puppet-like leg that’s limp against the ground. He’s never seen a model like this before. It’s sleek and lightweight, almost brittle-feeling as Hound secures it to his body. The arm is no different. Once it’s in place, it feels like there’s nothing there at all. There’s a question of quality in here somewhere, but he doesn’t bring it up.
Obito finds a familiar leather strap between his teeth. Apparently, the pain of tethering these things to his nerves and chakra systems is painful enough that he might clench his jaw, hurt his teeth or bite his tongue. More than that, he’s worried his saviour will keel over from chakra exhaustion without successfully connecting the prosthetics and he’ll be left with no help in getting home. His concerns don’t last long.
Pain is an all-consuming devil and Obito’s thoughts are paperwhite.
The petal-soft purples of an early night are just dark enough to freckle with the oncoming stars. They stare up, short-breathed and lifeless, with their backs pressed into the dirt steps away from their perfectly-laid sleeping bags. A weak fire sputters at their feet, cheap threats of starvation unaddressed as Obito’s chakra network learns to extend beyond the self. Eventually, as the last threads of a burning star fizzle out behind the silhouette of the trees, his body balances it out. Like magic, his chakra sends signals to his brain, you are whole again.
Obito doesn’t know why he laughs. He marvels as he calls out and his right arm obeys, the heel of a cool-to-the-touch palm pressed firmly against a closed eye, and he laughs at the way the fingers curl into his hair, digging at his roots.
When the electric fire of his nerves fizzles down to a persistent buzz, he gets the will to roll onto his side. A pale statue bleeds through shadows cast by the pile of charred and sparking logs that define their camp. Hound is a still, lifeless thing, but there are still breaths large enough to move the front pouches of his flak vest. Obito pokes his cheek with a cold finger, the fabric folding beneath it as the man’s head falls left and grey meets black.
“Oh,” Hound says flatly, “it moves.”
Obito arches a brow. “So do you. I’m shocked.”
“Me, too.”
They fill the night air with the laughter of two tired souls who can’t find the jokes in their own teasing remarks.
“I want ramen,” Obito declares after hours of nothing, not even the warmth of a sleeping bag there to offer comfort. It seems like the right thing to say. Kushina would be proud. “Tonkotsu ramen with eggs and extra pork. Enoki mushrooms. The works.”
Hound hums, watching the stars with hands folded one over the other across his stomach, ever so pleased with himself. “Teuchi makes the best chashu pork belly.”
“You eat at Ichiraku?”
“Maa, Obito, what do you take me for?”
“A suicidal, chakra-depleted nutjob.”
Hound opens his mouth to say something, but only crickets break the air, carried on the wind hitting against the trees—wind that’s smothering their already very tired campfire. Bemoaning his fate, Hound drags himself upright like a puppet with half-cut strings and holds his hand to the starving embers between the logs. He thinks better of it, the logical half of his brain reining in his impulses, and stokes the fire the old-fashioned way, like a civilian who’s never so much as uttered the word Katon.
“Everyone eats at Ichiraku,” he says, long after their conversation is out of mind, defending himself against an accusation that no one has made.
There’s something funny about a man so done with the world still clinging to words long forgotten between them. Well, Hound’s pretty funny in general. The sort of man whose existence doesn’t make sense and whose every action is lined with otherworldly wrongness.
Ichiraku has existed for three years, now. It’s relatively unknown and Kushina is the owner’s number one customer, which is the only reason Obito knows it at all.
Like a pool of ink blooming across a blank page, these fragments of wrongness are painting a picture not even Obito can ignore. But he will. At least for now, he can cover his eyes and plug his ears and play pretend for some useless piece of time that only they share.
He steals looks, though, at this strange man who carries so many more years yet feels like an old friend.
Obito’s new trauma is being guided by his hands to walk again like an infant just learning to toddle. The prosthetic is a shaky, chattering wrongness against his body, so paper thin that it may crumple into dust if the wind blows southerly, and he anticipates the moment it will bend and break. But Hound is there, guiding him through steps, and he tries to be okay.
The extension of his chakra network offers no support as he still needs to will himself to control these new attachments to his body. With enough time and practice, moving these false pieces of self won’t cause him to struggle. All of these efforts will burn their way into muscle memory until they’re as automatic as moving the originals they’re replacing, but until then, Obito looks like a frog trying to fly.
Hound does not laugh. He’s patient and fond like a father watching his son take his first steps and all Obito can do is flush an embarrassed red and swallow his pride.
They’ve entered Fire Country, so travelling the main roads is back on the table. This is the only reason Obito can practice at all; the forest floor is too hard to conquer with his weak little limbs and his flailing and falling.
When Obito sinks to the ground in defeat, there’s no one to complain he isn’t trying hard enough, or that his poor effort is the reason that they’re getting nowhere. Hound is there, crouched beside him, a gloved hand smoothing comfort across his back as he pants against the labour of using this strange man’s oddly specific gifts.
“You’re doing well, Obito,” Hound says. His voice is like a steady-flowing stream, long and soft and cool to the touch. “Let me take over from here.”
Obito sulks. He sulks because this stupid man hasn’t had proper rest in the two weeks they’ve been together but Obito is in no position to complain or lighten Hound’s load. He can’t even hold himself up.
“When does it get easier?” he asks like a child to an older sibling, putting more trust in this person than he probably should.
Hound hums, hefting his burden onto his back and wrapping his arms around a mismatched pair of legs. “Soon,” he says, “or eventually. At some point, probably.”
“You’re entirely unhelpful.”
“Maa, Obito, you can’t rush these things,” Hound chastises. “You’re not recovering from a paper cut. Your dominant hand, a leg, and half your field of vision—that’s a lot to adjust to. If it takes weeks or months or years, well. That’s only natural, isn’t it?”
It is. He doesn’t like hearing it, though. In his head, he’d take a few days to adjust and run back home faster than sound. The real world doesn’t take his ideals into consideration when it slaps him in the face with the truth.
Obito’s cheek nestles against thick strands of silver hair, his chin curving along the padded sleeve of Hound’s shoulder, and he continues his sulking from a higher vantage point. Travelling merchants pass by them as they walk, wishing them safe travels. Obito locks his arms, one real and one fake, around the neck of his saviour. Begrudgingly, he admits that it’s easier on both of them with all of his limbs intact.
Hound has not asked after his eye, so clearly not a casualty to the cave-in, and affords him what little privacy can still exist between them. But all it does is drive home the theories flickering through his head like moths to a flame.
“What happened to your eye?” Obito asks somewhere between noon and evening. They’re only a few days out of the village now, their trip made infinitely longer by their endless struggling and setbacks. Hound is only now getting some colour back in his skin. Maybe this isn’t the place or time to invade this man’s privacy when he’s been so respectful of Obito’s, but it’s all he needs to prove his theories correct.
Hound sets him down in a field for their afternoon food pill, rummaging through the pouches at his belt for the small container they’re housed in. Real food feels like nothing more than a dream. It’s been so long. “I lost it in the war.”
In an impulse he doesn’t even register, the grip of Obito’s flesh-and-blood hand finds the outer folds of Hound’s hitai-ate. Hound, crouched before him and still, meets his eyes evenly.
“Can I see?” Obito asks, his mouth bitter with the instant regret hanging off his tongue.
“Of course.”
Obito gently slides the fabric upward, as though the friction from his efforts will scratch up the soft skin beneath. The headband pushes Hound’s hair until it’s level on his forehead, leaving in its wake the slow reveal of a dark scar vertical over the eye, a single straight line that matches perfectly to a wound bloody and permanent, drawing a path across a teammate’s face.
Obito knows this scar, and he can see the shape of the eye beneath the skin.
With even more hesitance, he presses his fingers to it, following its travel down Hound’s face, and fills the stillness with his breath.
He wants to ask, Did you do it, Kakashi? Did you see the world with my eye?
But he doesn’t think he’s supposed to know, and he doesn’t want to ruin anything.
They eat their meagre little food pill with eyes on the passing clouds.
“When we get back to the village, let’s get ramen,” Obito says. “Tonkotsu ramen.”
“You’re still craving that, are you?”
“Maybe if I actually got to eat I’d have moved on.”
“Maa, Obito, I’m doing my best. At least we’re not starving.”
Obito knows. He grins, staring at this old friend and new stranger, met with suspicion. “So, Ichiraku?”
Hound hums, throwing his hands behind his head and closing his eyes. “We’ll see.”
On the day that the village comes within sight, Obito is taking baby steps on his own strength. Hound is still there, ready to catch him if he falls, but he’s determined to walk this final stretch on his own. He takes one step, then another, the towering fortress of Konoha’s outer walls his target. He can see the guard station waiting there, his finish line, small flecks of movement growing ever-near in his pursuit and morphing into bodies tangible and real. Flak jackets, Konoha blues, the cutting red of the Uzushio swirl, all hallmarks of home and a promise to see his precious people.
Three steps, then four. His knees buckle under the weakness on his right but he steadies himself and marches on. Faces, now—the familiarity of the gate guards sends his heart soaring.
By the time he falls before the guard station, panting with effort and surrounded by the scattered shinobi guarding his home, Obito looks back and realizes that he’s alone. His fellow shinobi are pressing him for answers that mean nothing to him as he looks from one direction to the next for his support, constant and there for as long as he’s needed.
But Obito is alone.
When he’s admitted to Konoha Hospital and the Hokage notified of his return, when his team all flood his room, Rin crying into his shirt and Kushina crushing his healing body with the force of her love, Minato rubbing his back, Obito thinks back to that strangely off vision of the future who helped him here. There’s a fear that he imagined it all, but the prosthetics are proof enough that his memories are real.
He wonders if they’ll ever get their ramen. His only answer is the uncomfortable presence of his final teammate leaning somberly against the wall, one bottomless right eye fixed eternally on Obito’s broken body.
A hitai-ate slanted over the left.
Kakashi is a silent statue in a room filled with tears and snot and a million questions that Obito doesn’t know how to answer without them thinking he’s mental. It’s only after Obito asks for some peace and quiet to rest that they all file out, wishing him well.
“Kakashi?” he calls before the door slides closed. “Can you stay?”
There’s a spectre of regret seated next to the bed now, sunken and sagging like a wilted flower, shrivelled like a dried-out husk of a human. Somehow, this image fits Kakashi perfectly.
“Can I see?” Obito asks. He won’t wait for Kakashi to get up the courage to speak because if he does, they’ll probably be voiceless into the next century. To the questioning look he gets, he taps the skin beneath the hollow socket of his left eye.
Careful and slow like a mouse trying not to stir a sleeping cat, Kakashi pushes his hitai-ate level on his forehead. Beneath it, a neat dark scar cuts a line through his cheek and, moments later, the perfect red of Obito’s Sharingan stares back at him from a foreign face. He can’t hide his grin. Even knowing that Kakashi won’t have the chakra reserves to see that eye to its fullest potential, it makes him happy to see it. His gift is a connection they both share, impossible to deny and carried with them always.
“Rin did a good job,” he says after a while, throwing his arms behind his head and sinking back into the pillows his loving team filched to build him a throne against the headboard.
“Do you want it back?” Kakashi asks.
“What?! No. It’s yours, Bakashi. Don’t give away gifts like that—it’s rude!”
“But…”
Obito thinks back to Hound and wonders how this angsty, self-loathing sadsack ever becomes the cheery, lazy, I’ll-do-what-I-want-and-everyone-else-can-deal-with-it shinobi who gifted him a new life. But even as he thinks it, even as he wonders, he’s excited by the prospect of seeing that change for himself.
“We left you behind,” Kakashi says, hanging his head and folding his hands in a white-knuckled grip at his knees.
“It was all you could do.”
“It wasn’t. We should have—”
“C’mon, Kakashi. We both know there weren’t any options.” He sighs, scratching his head with his still-awkward prosthetic. He isn’t looking forward to re-learning fine motor functions with that arm. “You protected Rin for me and you saved the mission, so thank you.”
And thank you, he wants to say, for coming back.
“We thought you were dead.”
Obito laughs. He knows he shouldn’t, but. “Honestly, I probably should be.”
Kakashi winces. It makes him feel bad, which is a new feeling in and of itself because Kakashi wincing and Obito feeling guilt over this emotionally-stunted killing machine is—
But Kakashi isn’t like that. He’s never been like that. He tried to be, tried to follow the rules and push back his nature, but it just wasn’t in him. Because even when he knew he was falling into the same trap that his father had, he came back.
Twice, even.
“Thank you,” Obito says again, and behind it is every word he never got to say. With his flesh-and-blood hand, he reaches toward his teammate, two fingers held out in waiting, and smiles. “For everything.”
Kakashi stares long and hard at that hand, his brows knitted together, a soft pair of mismatched eyes tracing patterns on Obito’s skin. Wordlessly, he takes the hand, their fingers interlocked. Confrontation becomes reconciliation. Despite everything, they’re here together as comrades.
Alive.
“Kakashi?” Obito asks sometime later, staring at the clouds through his hospital room window.
Beside him, Kakashi is flipping idly through a book. “Hm?”
“When I’m discharged, wanna get ramen?”
His teammate gives him a suspicious look.
“Tonkotsu ramen,” he grins. “With extra pork.”
Kakashi taps his book absently against his knee as he thinks, the perfect image of a hard-at-work shinobi in a completely irrelevant context. “Teuchi makes the best chashu pork belly…”
It’s like seeing an old friend again, isn’t it?
“Ichiraku, then.”