Chapter Text
Obito woke up dead. This was an issue. The whole gimmick of death was that you did not wake, so clearly, somewhere along the way, something went very horribly wrong.
He was there again. Most of his nightmares were about that cave, the musky smell of over-saturated earth, hearkening back to those days when he was bed-bound, injuries too fresh and severe. Night and day were meaningless then, so far from the mouth of the cave that there was no air flow. It was only after Kiri, and after Rin, that he reintegrated with the world enough to learn the date.
Six months. Six months in that rotten, stony hell. Six months, and then ten years. Ten years, and more.
The promise of the Pure Lands was too good for a place like this. Ergo, this must have been purgatory. He was stuck here, now until the end of time, because he made a few questionable decisions in life.
He heard something around the bend at the end of the tunnel. It sounded distant, but he was too familiar with caves to trust his ears. The rock was thick enough to distort sound; even noise from right around the corner could trick someone into thinking it was far-off.
The darkness of a cave was true dark. It was more than rural nights on empty land, when at least the stars could orient you. Caves didn’t offer that mercy. A light source was to a caver what oxygen was to a diver, and before his accident, it was hard to understand the gravity of complete darkness. The forest could be dark at night, sure, when clouds were out and no stars shone above. But the cave was black. He could wait ten, twenty, thirty minutes for his eyes to adjust, but they never would, because there wasn’t so much as one ray of sun that pierced that sage-forsaken tunnel.
Not until Gramps, at least. Madara, who put fixtures along the wall and would light oil lamps when he needed to traverse his domain. Obito was fortunate enough to open his eyes after Kannabi Bridge and see the ceiling of the cave above. He could look down at himself, at the wreckage of his body, and soak in the reality that if Madara’s experiment didn’t pan out, he would never make it home.
It was later, after Madara’s death, that Obito faced that blackness for the first time. He entered a cave no one tended, the flame burnt out in the fixtures and nothing visible beyond its entrance. He stepped in, beyond the touch of sunlight, and found that he couldn’t see his own hand in front of his face. That was what death looked like.
The sound repeated, a breathy, rhythmic gasping that felt forever out of reach. Obito listened to the random echoes and tried to track them as he moved through the cave, one hand on the tunnel’s wall. Soon, he found light, the barest shade of warmth that soothed the shadows. The cavern opened to an old bed, an oil sconce, and a boy lying flat on the cold earth.
Obito stared down at himself, this creature of healing scars and overgrown hair, and turned around.
Death was easier to face than what awaited him here.
As he left old history behind, he couldn’t close his ears to the boy’s breaths.
“I’m getting better at this.”
Obito stilled. There were zetsu in the room, encouraging his rehabilitation.
“I’ll be healed up soon, just you watch.” The smile was so clear in his voice. “Then I’m going home. Bet everyone will be shocked. They must think I’m dead, right?”
Obito rooted there, reliving those words, and knew what came next.
The boy couldn’t hear him, not that he expected anything else. For a while, Obito loitered around the tunnels, passing his hands through stony walls and rickety furniture with the hope of catching something on his fingers, but he was little more than a phantom. He could try until the sun burnt out, but it wouldn’t amount to much. While the ghost of his past struggled to walk across the room with the help of the zetsu, Obito stared at the floor. If he could faze through walls, then why did he obey gravity? Should he not fall through the cave’s floor?
And then he did.
Obito fell endlessly through the rocks.
During this fall, as true darkness encompassed all he could see, he wondered. Up until then, what was different? What ripped him from the laws of physics?
Perspective. It took him maybe two minutes to piece together: Obito thought of himself as a ghost, and so he behaved as a ghost. He thought himself beyond mortal law, so he was.
Fixing this problem he created for himself wasn’t easy, because there was that thought in his head now that this would happen again. He tried tricking himself into a human mindset, my feet should touch the ground. It wasn’t strong enough. Logic didn’t work, because logic was one step left of purgatory, where everything stood still and nothing was right. After long enough of that, he decide not to care. What difference did it make if he was buried in the earth or suffering old history with his past self? The result was the same.
Obito walked the earth like a staircase.
It happened after three days of continuous falling. At some point in his descent, he reached his breaking point and took a step. It hit rock. Even though the rest of him continued to faze through the earth, that one point of contact was all he needed, and he climbed.
Logic was whatever he decided it to be. The earth was a staircase, of course. When he chose to think of it like that, it was so.
Two days later, he reached the surface. Obito came up at the mouth of the cave, a bit off from where he started, in the grassy plains of Mountains’ Graveyard. The sky was a dull grey, threatening a storm, and he held his hand out in wait of rain. He wanted to feel it on his skin, the jolt of cold, the weight soaking into his clothes, bogging him down. How long had it been since he last felt the rain?
Instead, the clouds hung heavy and low, dragging through the sky, and he flipped them off. The whole of limbo was mocking him, apparently.
Inside the cave, the boy was resting. It was the middle of the day, but there he slept, dead on his feet and still covered in bandages. Some of his scars bled, some oozed. It was months before Obito truly understood what his prosthetics were and what they meant, and by then, he was too numb to care.
Obito swiped his hand at the boy’s shoulder, but couldn’t connect. He stayed there ten whole minutes, trying to convince himself that he was permeable, but it didn’t work when he fell through the earth, and it didn’t work now. If he forced himself to think it, then a part of him was still thinking the opposite. How else would he know to try?
It hurt his damn head, and he wondered if he should care.
He spent the afternoon wandering the sconce-lit tunnels and stood before a large statue he knew too well, its eyes unlit as they always should have been. Madara slept nearby on an old, weathered chair, his body hooked up to the statue like a lifeline. He was not the presence Obito remembered from childhood, or the perfect image of war he reunited with in later years. Paper skin hid prominent blue veins, wiry hair uncut. Broken nails curved along the bony fingers that loosely gripped the arm rests, and rattling breaths echoed through their stone prison.
Obito stood there, watching. He reached with his prosthetic hand, and it passed through Madara’s.
When he was little, Granny took a lot of naps. She was always tired, told him that he would get like that, too, when he got to her age. Every day, several times, he would crack open her bedroom door and listen for her rattling breaths. If he couldn’t hear them, he would tiptoe inside, right up to her bed, and watch her chest move. He never knew what he would do if one day he opened that door and didn’t hear the rattle or see her breathe, and it scared him to think about.
Granny was all he had, all he knew, ever since he was six years old and at his parents’ wake, when an old lady he never met sat down with him. She greeted the mourners and taught him how to do the same, and when they all left, when the ceremony was over and the two of them were alone, she took his hand and walked him through the streets. They were going to the Uchiha district, she told him. He would live there with her. She named the people they passed and told stories of them, how the couple selling jewelry owed her dinner for watching their son when they left for Wind last month, and that one of the fishmongers was known for up-charging when his competitors’ stock ran low. That the little girl playing on the training grounds was his second cousin, and the old man on his porch defected from Kiri. She told him all those stories until his legs wouldn’t carry him anymore, and he was lifted into her arms, laid against her chest, his eyes tired from crying and his throat sore. They got sweets. A whole basket’s worth. She bought fresh dango, and manju, and all sorts of things he didn’t know the names for, and he fell asleep there on her lap, his empty dango skewer tight in his fist.
Madara was dying. It would be months, but not longer. He was older than Granny, and a lot more frail, but there was no one to take care of him. Not that he deserved it. He got what he was owed, wasting away in that filthy hideaway, cowering amongst the zetsu, baking in his delusions. Madara was not Granny. He did not heal a broken child’s wounds, but tore them wider and poured in salt.
Madara deserved everything he got.
But his hands were so similar to hers.
Obito left. It was hard to watch the parallels as the days went on, the boy rehabilitating his failed body, eyes ahead on a future he wouldn’t reach. He lived it for himself and didn’t need to see it again. Because the day would come when that boy would be indistinguishable from himself, when his spirit was crushed and his voice quieted, and he was released from one spell only to fall under another.
He kept to the southern road and filled his days with walking. The perks of being dead included, but were not limited to: existing beyond fatigue; not feeling hunger or needing sleep; and never having to stop for rest. There would occasionally be wanderers or travelling merchants along his path, and he would raise his arm in awkward greeting, but no one saw him. They would pass their carts through his incorporeal body, or would bypass him altogether, and he would look back for just a moment.
Excluding however long he had been dead, Obito hadn’t travelled by foot in years. Kamui was a convenient crutch for someone whose Sharingan did not degrade, and after Madara’s death, he abused it. For as long as he had been somewhere before, he could teleport there, so Obito would cut out the travel time and move quickly from one point in his plan to the next.
Kamui did not heed him. Obito was dead, and the Sharingan were gone. So, he walked. The longer he walked, the less he thought about walking, the more he noticed the birds in the branches, and the squirrels with their sharp talons anchored in tree bark. Wind rustled the leaves, and for a moment, he thought he could feel it. It lasted only as long as it took to open his eyes. But it got easier. Sometimes, he thought he could smell the grass, or feel the ground beneath his feet, and when he realized that he couldn’t, he would fall once again through the earth.
There came a small village along his path, and he walked through it. Farmland marked its outermost borders and children played in the streets. He watched as a boy with civilian-level chakra fought his way up a tree to reach its fruit, and listened to the little girl at its roots yelling at him for being dumb and stupid. When he slipped, he managed to catch himself on one of the branches, and the girl bawled her eyes out. They still ate the fruit together.
Obito didn’t remember many villages. Though he kept Kiri under his thumb, it was rare that he spent any length of time there. Konoha was but a memory, and Ame was not a space that he knew well, no matter how often he frequented it. Was that how they all lived? Had he lived like that once before?
He didn’t know.
His feet brought him to Konoha. There stood its gates, guarded by shinobi in green flak jackets, branded by the Leaf on their foreheads and the Uzumaki on their sleeves.
Obito turned around and kept walking. Konoha was not the place he wanted to spend his forever. While his pain settled and his fury smoothed over, that village was no better a place than what he thought it was as a boy. The system was flawed, and they were trapped in it.
This world killed Rin. Konoha killed Rin. The endless conflict, the erasure of the self, those futile wars that they did not start—it all took her from him.
But this time, he looked back. Travellers were checked in at the gate, wheeling carts through and bearing heavy luggage. He could make out buildings that no longer existed after the fox attack.
He took a step.
And fell through the earth.
After much cursing, he took another step and passed through the gates.
Obito expected to stay a day, maybe a week in that village. Already he was bitter, seated on a public bench and watching the goings on around him, listening to the chatter carrying on the wind like a song. To a foreigner, Konoha might look peaceful, with chatty civilians in the market square and the many pubs growing lively in the evening. There were plenty of restaurants, parks with play equipment to keep children busy. But the more you looked, the easier it was to spot the flak jackets proudly worn by the village elite. The bulk of Konoha’s workforce were shinobi, after all. The civilian population was there to keep the village running: to man shops, provide services, grow food. But it was shinobi work that kept their community afloat.
The endless wars were his breaking point, but they were not the shinobi world’s only sin. He was too young to understand before, and too close to the source to notice. All those people were under the Hokage’s thumb. Pawns, nothing more—bodies to throw at any perceived threat.
Obito looked at his hands. He wasn’t any better, was he? For all that the members of Akatsuki were his comrades, they were pawns, too. He didn’t bat an eye when they died.
Annoyed, he stood up. The crowds were loud, the evening sun setting low. The last thing he needed was to be out on the street when the sun set, to see the reality of Konoha’s system in the masked bodies of ANBU as they leapt between rooftops, fanning out to act upon Hiruzen’s will. He considered spending the night in an inn. The first one he tried was fully booked, and he didn’t feel like intruding on passing merchants and travelling couples, so he dragged himself back onto the road and searched for another.
In the light of the book shop’s window, right across the street, he saw her.
Rin.
She was smaller than he remembered. When they were kids, she was always one or two centimetres taller, and she’d tease him for it endlessly. But as he stumbled across the path, pressing his fingers to the glass—solid beneath his hand—she only came up to his chest.
Rin stood in line at the register with two books held tight. The spines looked the same, and he watched as she came up to the clerk and set them down on the counter, fishing through her wallet for coin. She said something, and Obito tried to copy it with his Sharingan before remembering that it was gone.
He read her lips, ‘Thank you. Have a good night.’
She left the shop. A bell chimed on her way out, hanging above the door, and she looked both ways down the open road. When she stepped out, it was through Obito, a cold rush spreading through his body.
“Rin,” he called. His voice didn’t reach her.
He walked with her anyway, his hands in his sleeves, eyes on the passersby. This was a version of his friend that he never got to see. He tilted his head, trying to read the spine of the book through the dark, but her fingers were splayed across the title.
“Another medical text?” he wondered. Rin had been studying since their pre-genin days. All she read was textbooks and fairytale romances, really. “Why two?”
She was so small. So young. Konoha didn’t see that; it put a weapon in her hand and sent her to war. Wasn’t that fucked? Obito held his first kunai when he was six. Before he knew the world, he knew how to fight. They were trained to kill first, and learned death second.
They passed a mother and her two kids, both hanging off her arms, one of them practically being dragged, begging for a toy displayed in a shop front. He pointed animatedly at the robot figure in the window, its bright colours washed out by the falling sun. What did childhood look like for them? How old were civilians when they first learned how to brandish a weapon, and at what age did they know how to kill?
Obito realized, as he left the mother and children behind, that he was alone. Rin was halfway down the street, still clutching those books to her chest like she was smuggling contraband.
As kids, Obito would walk Rin home from the academy, or from their training sessions after joining Team 7. He resolved to do so now, even though there wasn’t much he could do in the way of protecting her. But Rin didn’t go home. Half an hour later, they stood in front of the Hatake estate. It sat on the rural edges of Konoha’s walls at the heart of a big, empty field that was once farmland. A lone scarecrow sat in the tall grasses, half-drowning in weeds, and Obito stared at it as Rin stepped through the front gate and knocked on the door. She waited there a moment, knocked again, waited. Nothing.
Rin hung her head, a curtain of brown hair blocking her eyes, and crouched. She set one of the books down on the front porch, mindful to keep it near the wall, and stepped away.
She waited one more minute, but no one came.
She left.
Obito watched her go, then crouched to read the title of the book, The Tale of the Gutsy Shinobi. He looked up, following her retreating back as she disappeared behind the privacy wall.
The door opened, yellow light saturating the porch from inside the house. A long shadow stretched from it, and in the doorway stood Kakashi, rimmed in a golden halo. He stood there for a moment, his eye falling to the offering left on his porch, and picked it up.
The door slid shut quietly, leaving Obito in the dark.
Obito stood up, dusting the non-existent dirt off his incorporeal pants, and stepped through the door. Another benefit of being dead was that nowhere was off-limits, and the wards placed on the house meant little to him. It wasn’t his first time in the Hatake estate; several times, when they were little, Kakashi shared meals with them. They gathered around a kotatsu in the winter and would entertain each other’s company for an hour, all because Kakashi made too much food. It was Rin’s idea that they check on him. He was all alone, after all. Like she was. His father died, and Konoha saw it fit to treat him as an adult.
The estate was in worse repair than he remembered, with patched-up rice paper walls and creaking floors. He stepped through the genkan and poked his head around the corner to find his teammate curled up on the edge of the couch, his legs crossed and the book set on them.
If Rin was small, Kakashi was tiny. It was only now, seeing him like this, that Obito understood how young their captain was that day. Kakashi read the title of the book, then flipped it over, brow furrowed. There was a sickly sheen to his skin, a dark under-eye that spoke of sleepless nights and long hours. His hitai-ate was slanted, protecting him from Obito’s burden, and even that looked too big for him.
Obito sat on the floor in front of the couch and crossed his legs, watching. Kakashi opened the front cover and began to read while old conviction plucked at Obito’s nerves. Seeing his teammates like this, he understood why things turned out the way they did. Because Obito was small, too. He was just as young as Rin, lived the same conflicts as Kakashi. He was a boy they called an adult, who never learned to grieve.
Obito still couldn’t grieve. He never did. Instead, he balled up his sorrow and wrapped it in denial. Convinced himself that he could fix it, that Rin could come back and the world would change if only he helped it forward.
Because that’s how children think, and Obito was a child.