Author's Note: Originally crack, but took a dark turn. Somewhat darker than I'd usually go, but... it was fitting. Requires a certain amount of suspension of disbelief.

Warning for gore. (And a character guessing somewhat wrong with limited information, but getting close enough to the truth anyway.)


"We have shed the skin of the snake. We are no longer the Hebi. From this day on, our team... will be the hawk. We are the Taka. Taka shall have but one motive. We exist..."

Tobi watched in anticipation...

"...to tell Madara to fuck off and die."

...wait, that wasn't in the script.

Sasuke turned to him with a crazed smile more suited to the Nine-Tails than a human face. "Amaterasu wasn't all my brother left me, it turns out."

Tsukuyomi?! Curse the little brat.

"Of course, someone as spiteful as you probably has a suicide bomb readied, so I'm afraid I didn't take the chance to kill you. It's for Itachi's sake alone that I don't take the loss and accept my death as the necessary price for yours... So thank him. He's the only reason you retain your aged hide... for now.

"I'm curious, Madara, though I won't be around to hear it in person - why, precisely, did you think I was too stupid to accept you and Itachi might be liars? Your tale about Itachi's true motivations was plausible enough - it's the best explanation I can devise for why he threw the fight, and I couldn't deny, after replaying it in my mind, that he did.

"But everything he said about you rang true as well. You are a bitter, defeated dog, and you did set the Nine-Tails on Konoha." Sasuke laughed in his face. "You're a liar that makes my old teammate Naruto look subtle. You went straight from bragging of your initial use of the Nine-Tails against Konoha and whining about how we had become ungrateful, pathetic 'Senju lackeys' to claiming the second Nine-Tails attack was a spontaneous natural disaster and putting on airs about how tragic it was that it caused Konoha to turn against us. My brother told me as much as he could, all right - he told me our clan was slaughtered by a blood-crazed lunatic who hated us all for being pathetic and weak, and massacred us to test his own ability. The only lie is that he claimed that lunatic was him."

Suddenly, there was a sword in his guts. In real life, he would have been able to phase his way out of it... but the genjutsu didn't allow for that possibility, of course. How annoying.

"Retain a bit of your dignity and ritually disembowel yourself, Madara," Sasuke hissed in his face. "Formally apologize for what you did to our clan, and face all of those awaiting you in Hell like a man. Because, otherwise, I will come back for you when I've mastered my new eyes, and my brother's final gifts. We all will - we who studied under Orochimaru, who could keep a man alive far, far beyond what his flesh should have been able to bear. And disembowelment will be a sweet kiss compared to what we will do to you. I will avenge my clan ten-thousandfold upon their killer. That hasn't changed. I just now know that I had the wrong man."

And Sasuke's grandiose little speech dissolved into the regular white hellscape of a Tsukuyomi vision. Tobi yawned at whatever dramatic teenage torment Sasuke had no doubt devised for him. He didn't know what real suffering was -

"Oh, and Madara?" Sasuke's voice remarked from everywhere and nowhere. "Itachi was a master of Tsukuyomi... and when he passed his ocular jutsu to me, he passed the knowledge of his special variations along with it." The voice paused, as though shrugging. "I have no idea what you'll undergo here, to be honest. But I do know it will be your ultimate hell. Enjoy."

The last word was punctuated by the sizzle of electricity, and something horribly hot and moist engulfing his forearm.

"O...Obito..." Rin gasped, staring into his eyes. "Wh... why..."

"Rin?" He shook his head desperately. This was wrong, this was all wrong, it was Kakashi - "I didn't-"

And then the pain in his heart became a physical one as thrumming energy tore through his chest, and Kakashi was weeping as he looked Obito in the eyes; Obito opened his mouth to speak, but only blood came out.

And then it became a veritable orgy of blood and lightning: the world exploded into a kaleidoscope of the Chidori ripping through Rin's chest from every angle, her weeping face drooling oceans of blood, his forearms coated in her innards, his own innards filled with Kakashi's sizzling chakra, voices screaming that it was all his fault, taunting that Kakashi had killed Rin and she still loved him more than she ever would have Obito, laughing that all the powers in the world wouldn't make him any less of a useless failure, that he'd made himself into the villain not for the sake of creating paradise, but in order to flee the knowledge that he was a fuck-up incapable of doing a single thing that was good -

Fuck Itachi, fuck Sasuke, and fuck that entire fucking clan. He regretted nothing except failing to stab Itachi in the back once they were finished and finishing off Sasuke right after. He'd remedy that the moment he got out of this genjutsu... if only he could fucking concentrate for a fucking moment without Rin and Kakashi's mocking voices filling his head...

At least it would only be seventy-two hours... it would, wouldn't it? That was the typical subjective limit for Tsukuyomi, the eventual Infinite Tsukuyomi aside... and Itachi hadn't worked out a way beyond that, surely?

Surely?

As the latest iteration of Rin pulled her way up his arm and tore out his throat with her teeth, he wondered if his sanity would even last long enough to find out.


Author's Note: I originally had Sasuke specify 'seventy-two hours of hell', but then I read that one character in a light novel suffered the bizarre fate of living out a full life under Tsukuyomi in the span of a few moments and dying as she died of old age within the illusion. I somehow suspect that's noncanon, but it would be odd for a revenge fic to entirely rule out the possibility of Obito being trapped within his personal hell for the rest of his natural life.

The major suspension of disbelief is that Obito doesn't break the genjutsu the moment he realizes he's under Tsukuyomi, but I suppose it's the usual unspoken part of the ninja rules of engagement that says you can't interrupt a foe while he's monologuing. (I suppose it could be rewritten so that he doesn't realize he's under genjutsu until it's too late to break free, but that would suffer its own issues with suspension of disbelief.)

While Obito didn't release the Nine-Tails with the intent of framing the Uchiha clan and setting them up for elimination, he acted suspicious enough in his "Madara" monologue to Sasuke that Sasuke thinks he did. Oh well, he only masterminded the creation of Pain and Akatsuki, the unleashing of the Nine-Tails, the corruption of Kiri, etc. Sheer dumb luck that he got blamed for the one conspiracy he didn't mean to set in motion...