Chapter Text
Death, Obito Uchiha had decided somewhere in the wreckage of his final moments, was supposed to feel like something.
Not like this.
Not like warmth.
He had expected cold. The particular cold of absence, of cessation, the cold Rin must have felt when the blade went through her chest all those years ago. He had expected darkness, or perhaps light, or the indifferent void that swallowed shinobi the way the earth swallowed rain. He had expected Rin, her face turned toward him the way a flower turns toward the sun, her voice saying his name the way no one had ever said it before or since.
What he had not expected was noise.
A wail split the air, thin and furious and bewildered, and it took him an embarrassingly long moment to understand that the wail was his own.
The indignity of it was almost worse than the dying.
. . .
The first years were a particular species of torment.
He remembered everything. That was the cruelest part, not the helplessness of an infant body, not the humiliation of being unable to feed himself or sit upright or communicate in any language this strange new world seemed to understand, but the remembering. Behind eyes that could barely focus on the blurry face hovering above him, a mind that had contained Madara's ambitions and Rin's laughter and decades of blood-soaked shadow played its memories on a loop, relentless and precise.
You should have died, he told himself, in the quiet spaces between sleeping and waking that infants seemed to inhabit more than the waking world. You were supposed to die. There was supposed to be Rin.
There was, instead, his mother.
She appeared above him like something from a fever dream. Chestnut hair that caught the light and held it warmly, and a face so finely and softly drawn it seemed less like something born than something composed. High cheekbones, a mouth that held its sadness gracefully, eyes the particular blue of still water that watched him with an intensity that unsettled him even through the fog of his new existence. She was beautiful the way old paintings were beautiful, in the way that made you feel slightly unworthy of looking.
She had not passed those eyes to him. Nor that hair.
Whenever his mother held him near a mirror, what looked back was a different kind of face entirely: the same delicate architecture, yes, the same fine-boned softness of feature, her cheekbones, her jaw, the clean sweep of her brow, but rendered in a starker palette. Hair black as ink. Eyes dark and still and oddly penetrating for an infant, catching light without giving anything back. He had inherited her face the way a translation inherits its source text: faithful in structure, altered in every surface detail. The colouring, clearly, had come from somewhere else. From someone else.
His mother's name, he gradually gathered, was Isadora. Isadora Fawley. The name surfaced occasionally in hushed phone calls she made from the hallway when she thought he was asleep, and once on a letter she held for a very long time before folding it with extreme care and putting it somewhere he never found. It suited her. There was something in it that matched the slightly formal way she moved through the world, as though she was always faintly aware of being observed.
She was also, he gradually came to understand, absolutely lost.
Not emotionally, or not only emotionally. She was lost the way someone is lost when they have been dropped into foreign territory without a map and have decided to say nothing about it. She approached the gas hob with the suspicion of someone defusing an explosive. She studied the washing machine with the focused, reverent attention of a person facing a puzzle they have decided to take seriously. She stared at the television remote with an expression she almost managed to keep neutral, and when the neighbour upstairs showed her how the intercom worked, Isadora had thanked her three times with the sincere relief of someone who had been quietly worried about the intercom for some time.
She was discovering this world alongside him. Learning its rules, its rhythms, its unremarkable daily miracles, at the same pace as a child who had only just arrived in it.
For a long time, that was the only thing that made him willing to keep opening his eyes in the morning.
. . .
The flat was small and perpetually cold in the way London flats seemed to commit to philosophically. Three rooms, four if you counted the bathroom. The wallpaper had been fashionable approximately forty years prior and had spent the intervening decades quietly losing the argument. The radiator knocked and sighed and occasionally produced heat as though pleasantly surprised to find itself doing so. Outside the single window in the main room, London pressed in grey and indifferent and vast.
His mother worked. She worked the way people work when they have no choice in the matter: early shifts, late shifts, double shifts at the supermarket two streets over that left her coming through the door with her feet near-silent on the lino because she was too tired to lift them. She always stopped in the doorway, though. Always, before she put down her bag or took off her coat, she found him with her eyes, and the expression that crossed her face when she did, relief softening into something warmer than relief, made something tighten in Obito's chest he had no adequate name for.
He had loved people before. He had loved Rin with the ferocity of someone who understands, bone-deep, that some things are more precious than survival. He had loved Kakashi in the manner of old wounds that never quite close. He had loved Minato-sensei with an admiration he had spent decades trying to corrode into resentment, and largely failed.
This was different. This had not been chosen or constructed from shared history and the particular alchemy of being young and afraid together. It had simply arrived, the way breathing arrived: automatic, unasked-for, impossible to stop.
He did not deserve it. He had been the architect of catastrophe, had turned grief into ideology and ideology into carnage. He had earned his death with compound interest. And yet here she was, pressing her lips to his forehead with the desperate tenderness of someone holding something they were frightened of dropping, and here he was, and apparently the universe had formed views that differed substantially from his own.
He resented it for approximately six months. Then he stopped, because resentment required a kind of distance he could no longer maintain.
. . .
He catalogued the world with the patient precision of someone trained from childhood in intelligence-gathering, and found it was thoroughly ordinary.
More modern than anything he had known, certainly. The technology was staggering in its mundanity, extraordinary things treated as furniture, as background, as unremarkable as the air between them. But there was no chakra in it. Not in the woman upstairs who argued with her husband every Thursday with operatic consistency. Not in the man at the corner shop who slipped sweets to Orion that he pretended not to notice his mother could not quite afford. Not in the children who began appearing in his life with the inevitability of phenomena no one had asked for.
Everyone was ordinary. Magnificently, almost poignantly ordinary.
Good, he thought, with a conviction that surprised him with its depth. Let them stay that way.
He had seen what power did to people. He had been what power did to people. This world, for all its smallness and its grimy London particular-ness, was safe. Not perfectly safe. But safe in the way that mattered, which was that no one here was going to level a village because someone had looked at them wrong. He liked it. He was mildly annoyed at himself for liking it, but there it was.
. . .
The power announced itself for the first time when he was four years old and furious.
A boy from the floor above, older and considerably larger, with the particular confidence of someone who had learned early that size constituted an argument, had cornered him in the building's narrow back passage. He had said something about Orion's mother. About the hours she kept, and the uniform she wore, and the way she sometimes forgot to look where she was going, which apparently struck certain people as a valid source of entertainment.
Obito had been remarkably controlled about it. He had breathed, calculated, reminded himself that he was four years old and that dismantling a child twice his size would alarm his mother and draw exactly the kind of attention he was determined never to invite.
He held this control right up until the boy shoved him into the wall.
The drainpipe beside the boy's head crumpled inward like paper.
The boy ran. Orion stood alone in the passage, looking at his hands, at the twisted metal, at the space where cause and effect had just produced something with absolutely no business existing in a world without chakra.
He went inside. He sat on the kitchen floor with his back against the cabinets, a habit he appeared to have carried across death and reincarnation, because enclosed spaces had always made him feel, in some quiet way he had never entirely examined, less exposed. He thought, with deliberate care, about what had just occurred.
It was not chakra. He reached for the familiar current of it and found nothing: no coiled energy, no meridians, no residue. But something had moved through him, something with its own texture and weight, something that had responded to emotion the way chakra responded to intention.
He spent the following months learning to reach for it.
It was not chakra. He confirmed this within the first weeks of careful experimentation, mapping the energy's character slowly, the way you map unfamiliar terrain. He moved small objects: pencils, coins, a mug that cracked and made him feel guilty. He moved larger ones. He attempted ninjutsu next, running through the hand seals from muscle memory, and felt nothing but the distant shape of technique without the current to drive it. Genjutsu yielded the same hollow result.
He hesitated before the last thing. Almost reluctant. Then he reached behind his eyes with the particular interior gesture that had once been as natural as breathing, and felt the familiar unmistakable shift.
The Sharingan opened.
He sat very still. The room resolved around him in hyper-clarity, every crack in the plaster rendered with the Sharingan's characteristic too-real precision. The tomoe rotated in his field of vision with slow, idle purpose. He checked the second eye. It activated cleanly. Both eyes, both working, both his.
He deactivated them and sat with that for a long while.
So it had followed him. Across death, across worlds, through whatever mechanism had decided that Obito Uchiha had more living to do, the Sharingan had apparently been considered essential luggage. He found, somewhere under the weariness, the faint ghost of something that might have been amusement.
He trained quietly and without fanfare, in the disciplined repetitive manner that looked like stillness from the outside. He extended the Sharingan activation for longer periods, building the tolerance his new body required. He practised reaching for the other energy, this not-chakra, this wordless force that lived in him like a second heartbeat, extending it, withdrawing it, testing its edges with the systematic patience of someone who had always understood that mastery was just a name for accumulated repetition.
He was careful. He was discreet.
He had not, it emerged, been quite careful enough.
. . .
His mother appeared in the doorway of his room on a Tuesday evening, still in her uniform, a cup of tea forgotten in her hand. She was staring at his eyes. Her face had drained to the colour of the wallpaper.
The cup struck the floor.
The sound she made was not a scream. It came from somewhere further down than screaming, formless and raw and entirely unlike the composed woman who pressed her lips to his forehead each night and studied the television remote with quiet determination. She pressed both hands over her mouth, and Orion, who had crossed the room without thinking, gripped her arms with small hands to keep her upright.
"Mum." He kept his voice steady. "Mum. Look at me. It's me."
She slid to her knees and he went with her, and she wept with an abandon that told him plainly this grief had been sealed up for a very long time and had been waiting for something, anything, to break it open.
"Not possible," she breathed, between sounds that weren't quite breath. "It can't be, it can't—"
"Mum." He kept one hand firm on her arm. "I got powers. I've had 'em for a while. I can move stuff. Break stuff sometimes too." He kept the sentences short, the words simple, the tone unshaken. "I didn't say nothing 'cause I didn't want to scare you. But I won't ever hurt you. You know that, don't you?"
She pressed her palm to his cheek, fingers trembling slightly, and looked at him with eyes ruined by crying and still more present than eyes had any right to be. She studied his face, the face she had given him, the colouring she had not, and something moved across her expression that he couldn't quite name.
"I know," she said at last. "I know you wouldn't." She drew a shaking breath. "That's not why I'm frightened, my love."
She pulled him closer instead of rising, as though her legs had simply decided they were done with the business of holding her upright for the time being. They sat together on the bedroom floor, his mother's back against the bed frame, Orion tucked against her side with her arm around him, and she was quiet for a long moment, composing herself in the way she always did, incrementally, vertebra by vertebra.
"I need to tell you some things," she said at last. "Things I should have told you sooner, perhaps. Things I thought I could keep away from us." She paused. "I was wrong about that."
"Okay," he said simply.
She looked down at him. Then she began.
"I'm a witch," she said, and the word sat differently in the air than ordinary words, heavier, or perhaps just older. "I was born a witch. My whole family were witches and wizards, going back centuries. Pureblood, they call it, meaning there were no ordinary people, no non-magical people, in our family line. My family were very proud of that." Her mouth curved, not warmly. "The Fawleys. An ancient name. It meant something, in our world."
"Your world," Orion repeated.
"There is a world," she said carefully, "hidden inside this one. Wizarding Britain. Its own streets, its own shops, its own government. Its own rules. Most people in this world, the people around us here, the neighbours, your friends at the park, they don't know it exists. They're called Muggles." She said the word gently, without contempt, unlike how he suspected it was often said. "That's what I call this world sometimes. The Muggle world. Because I grew up separate from it, and it took me a long time to learn how things worked here." She glanced around the flat with an expression of rueful familiarity. "The kettle. The television. The underground map."
"The washing machine," Orion offered.
She laughed despite herself, a small fractured sound. "Yes. Especially the washing machine." She pressed her lips briefly to the top of his head. "You noticed."
"I noticed everything," he said, and left it at that.
She was quiet again for a moment. Then: "I went to school at a place called Hogwarts. A school of magic, somewhere very old, very large, full of moving staircases and talking portraits and all manner of things that would have seemed extraordinary to you once, I suppose, though perhaps less so now." She considered him with those blue eyes. "I was there for seven years. I was good at it. Potions, especially. Defence against the Dark Arts." Something shifted in her expression. "The Dark Arts."
She unfolded her left arm slowly and turned her wrist over, and he saw it then, the mark on the inside of her forearm, faint enough that he had never noticed it in ordinary light, but undeniable now: something serpentine worked deep into the skin, coiled and still, radiating an aura he recognised the shape of even if the specific flavour was new to him. Dark. Purposeful. Corruption that had dressed itself in belonging.
"I took this mark," she said quietly, "when I was seventeen years old. The Dark Mark. It means I pledged myself to a dark wizard, a very powerful, very terrible man who called himself Lord Voldemort. His followers were called Death Eaters." Her voice did not shake, but it was careful, in the way that careful voices conceal what they cannot afford to release. "I was not, I want you to understand this, I was not a cruel person. I was not someone who believed that Muggle-born witches and wizards were lesser. I was not what most of his followers were." She paused. "But I followed him anyway. And that is not a small thing. I know that."
Orion said nothing. He waited.
"I followed him," she said, "because someone I loved followed him."
The room was very quiet. Outside, a car passed, and the radiator made its contemplative knocking sound, and his mother gathered herself to say the rest.
"There was a boy," she said. "In my year at Hogwarts. He was not like anyone else I had ever met. Brilliant in a way that was almost frightening. Private. Difficult to know. He came from very little, which was unusual in pureblood circles, and it had made him careful in the way that difficult childhoods make people careful. He never spent anything he didn't have to, including himself." She looked at her own hands. "He was obsessed with magic in the way some people are obsessed with a language they taught themselves in secret. He loved it. It was the only place he had ever felt he truly belonged."
She fell quiet for a moment, and something in her face went far away.
"He had a friend," she continued. "A girl, also from a non-magical family, also Muggle-born. He had known her before Hogwarts. They had grown up near each other, and she had been his first real friend, perhaps his only one, for a long time. He loved her." Isadora's voice was even, now, the way surfaces are even after a great deal of deliberate smoothing. "He loved her very much, and she loved him, but not in the same way. She was kind to him. She never stopped being kind to him, not even when he gave her reason not to be. And eventually she chose someone else. Married him."
She stopped. Orion waited.
"He never got over it," she said simply. "I don't say that cruelly. I don't think he was capable of getting over it. She was the first person who had ever looked at him like he was worth looking at, and then she looked at someone else. He carried that for the rest of his life." She let out a slow breath. "I was a fool," she added quietly, without self-pity. "I saw a brilliant, closed-off, lonely man, and I thought I could be something to him. I thought nearness might do what time couldn't. I thought if I followed him far enough, he would eventually turn around and see me."
She said nothing for a while.
"He never did," she said at last. "Not really. There were moments, a few months where I thought, but he was always somewhere else, behind his own eyes, loving someone he couldn't have. And I—" She stopped herself. "I had taken the Mark by then. I had followed him into things I cannot undo. And then he left. He simply stepped back, one day, quietly, without drama, the way he did everything. And I understood that whatever I had imagined between us had existed almost entirely in my own mind."
Orion felt something settle in his chest, not pity exactly, but something adjacent to it. He thought about what it must have been like, to love someone who was looking through you at someone else. To give everything for a person who was already entirely spent.
"You didn't know," he said. "You were a kid."
She looked at him with an expression that held too many layers to name. "I was seventeen. Old enough to know better, in some ways. But you are right that I did not fully understand what I was doing." She touched his cheek briefly. "And then I discovered I was expecting you, and he was gone, and the world I had made for myself, the choices I had made, they suddenly looked very different from the outside."
"What'd you do?"
"I panicked first," she said, with a short, honest sound that was almost a laugh. "Then I thought. I had a cousin. My cousin Elodie was the only one in my family who had never cared about blood status or the Dark Lord or any of it. She thought I was making a terrible mistake from the very beginning and she never stopped saying so, even when my family disowned me for seeing things differently than they did. She was the one person who never turned away. She helped me disappear. She knew people, had contacts in the Muggle world, helped me establish a life here. A new name. This place. The job." She glanced around the small cold room with something that was not quite contentment but had made its peace with itself. "It wasn't much, but it was ours."
"She sounds good," Orion said.
"She was," Isadora said softly, and the tense told him everything. "She was extraordinary. She wrote to me sometimes, even after I came here, carefully, nothing that could be traced. She told me what was happening in the wizarding world, who had died, who had survived. She told me about the prophecy."
Orion went very still.
"She said there was a prophecy," his mother continued, "made before you were born. About a child. A child born at the end of a certain month, to parents who had defied the dark wizard three times. This child would be marked by him, marked as his equal, and would have a power he did not know. And one of them would have to destroy the other in the end, because neither could live while the other survived." She pressed her lips together. "Elodie told me there were three boys born that month who fit the prophecy. A boy called Neville Longbottom. A boy called Harry Potter." She paused. "And you."
Orion said nothing.
"You," she repeated quietly. "I was very careful. Nobody in the wizarding world knew I was pregnant. Nobody knew you existed. Elodie made absolutely certain of it." She looked at her hands again. "The dark wizard chose the Potter boy. He went to their house on Halloween night, when Harry Potter was barely a year old. He killed the boy's parents. And then he tried to kill the child, and his curse rebounded. Nobody knows why. He was destroyed, or something close to destroyed. And Harry Potter lived, with a scar on his forehead in the shape of a lightning bolt, and the whole wizarding world celebrated and called him the Boy Who Lived."
She said it without bitterness, which he thought took some doing.
"And Elodie?" he asked.
His mother was quiet for a moment. "Her letters stopped," she said, "about a year after that. In the middle of a war, people stop writing letters for two reasons: because they decide it is safer to stop, or because they no longer can." She did not finish the sentence. She did not need to. "I haven't heard from her in years."
The flat held the silence.
"I'm sorry," Orion said.
"Thank you, my love." She looked at him for a long moment, really looked, the way she sometimes did, as though trying to memorise him. "And now you understand why your eyes frightened me."
He held her gaze steadily. "Because of Voldemort."
"He had red eyes," she said. "I only saw him twice, and both times from a distance, but red eyes, yes. And if anyone who knew him were to see you, if anyone were to see a child with red eyes and think—" She pressed her hand firmly against his chest, over his heartbeat. "I cannot have anyone connect you to him. Or to me. Or to your father."
Orion looked at her for a moment. Then he said, plainly: "That man's not my father."
Something moved across her face.
"The man who left," he continued, "he's nothing to me. He's not my dad. I don't care what his name is or what he looks like. He left you on your own, and that's all I need to know about him." He said it without heat, matter-of-factly, the way he said most things. "So whatever he is, it's got nothing to do with me."
Isadora looked at him with something in her eyes that he couldn't quite categorise. "You don't want to know?" she asked carefully.
"No," he said. And he meant it. Not because the answer didn't exist, it clearly did, and somewhere in the back of his mind the analyst in him noted the description: brilliant, precise, private, obsessive, potions. But because wanting that answer felt like a door he did not need to open. Not today. Perhaps not ever. "You're enough. This is enough." He glanced around the house. "This world is enough. I like it here."
She stared at him.
"You're five years old," she murmured faintly.
"Nearly five," he corrected.
"Nearly five," she echoed, and made a sound that landed somewhere between a laugh and a sob. She pulled him against her and held on, and he tucked himself into the hug with the ease of someone who has decided that some things are simply not worth resisting.
Then, after a moment, her voice lighter, fragile with the effort of lightness: "Nearly five, and you talk like a middle-aged man. Are you an old soul, then?"
She was obviously teasing him now. He could hear the smile in her voice.
"Mum," he muttered, his voice slightly muffled by her shoulder.
If you knew.
He said nothing else. Just let the words sit there inside him, private and precise, while outside London continued without comment.
"I won't use the red eyes again," he promised eventually. "Not where anyone can see. I'll practise in my room, okay? I'll be careful."
"Orion—"
"I just wanna be able to protect you," he told her. Very simply. "That's all. In case something comes."
She held him tighter. Her hands pressed flat against his back, one between his shoulder blades, the way she held him when she thought he was asleep and she believed he couldn't see her face. He could always see her face.
"Nothing is going to come," she said firmly, as though conviction alone could make it true. "We are nobody here. We are ordinary. We are safe."
"Yeah," he agreed, which was not the same as yes.
She pressed her lips to the top of his head and stayed there for a long moment, breathing.
He looked out the window from where they sat on the floor. The London sky was the colour it usually was: neither quite grey nor quite anything else, hanging over the rooftops with supreme indifference to whatever was happening beneath it. Pigeons. A television aerial. The distant sound of a bus.
I don't need their world, he thought with the clean certainty of someone who has survived enough to know what actually matters. She doesn't need it either. We've got this one.
The Sharingan he would keep like a weapon in a sheath, present, folded away, waiting for a day that might never come and for which he intended to be ready regardless. The other power he would learn, quietly and carefully and alone, until he understood every edge of it. And he would watch this world of hers, this unremarkable modern world with its indifferent sky and its knocking radiator and its supermarket uniforms, and he would make certain that nothing came for her from any direction without first going through him.
He was nearly five years old. He was a dead man in a borrowed body in a world that didn't know what chakra was. He had crossed the boundary between death and life and arrived, inexplicably, here.
He could work with this.
Rin, he thought, and the thought was gentle now, a door left ajar rather than a wound, a candle kept rather than a fire fed. I don't think I can reach you from where I am. But I think I'm meant to stay. I think there's someone here who needs me to stay.
He had not forgiven himself. He suspected he never entirely would, and perhaps that was right, perhaps some debts were not meant to be cleared but simply carried, held carefully so they did not crush you.
But for the first time in either of his lives, he did not resent the burden.
Outside, London continued without comment. The radiator knocked twice, as though punctuating something, then fell quiet.
Isadora Fawley sat on the bedroom floor of a cold Muggle flat in South London with her arms around her son, who had ink-black hair and dark eyes that she now knew could turn red, and who had just told her, in the serious unhurried way he said most things, that she was enough.
She held on for a very long time.
To be continued..