Summary: ."Until Minato and Rin and stupidstupidstupid Kakashi, no one had bothered to shed blood for Obito either." —His team was awesome. They put the 'fun' in 'dysfunctional'. Obito-centric. Explores his life as a brother, an Uchiha, a shinobi, a teammate, and a friend. Obito still insists that he is awesome.
AN: ATTACK OF THE LONG TITLES! 8D
...er.
Obito-centric fic. Hope you'll like it. (:
Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto, so I write fics. And I enjoy doing so. ^^
The only stuff I own is all that's based on imagination/speculation. Yup.
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Fragmented Glimpses of Life and Death through Orange Goggles
Uchiha Obito did not believe in fate.
He did not need to believe in irony, though, because he knew it was real and it made up a good chunk of his short (but still quite awesome!) life.
Obito insisted that he was awesome.
He always insisted that he was awesome.
Obito was the direct descendant of Uchiha Izuna. His older brother was actually his half-brother.
His half-brother was directly descended from Uchiha Madara's father (who was Uchiha Izuna's father too, but it seemed that Uchiha Izuna was always so much less important, of course). No one else knew, and no one else cared.
Obito knew, but he really did not want to care about lame and irrelevant stuff like that.
Blood was blood, right? It's all Uchiha blood in the end...
Somehow he never remembered the respected clan leaders – and former clan leaders – by anything other than their full names.
(They always seemed too impersonal for anything else.)
Other ninja said it was sad the poor kid never made it past chuunin.
The clan said it was a waste of their doujutsu, for he never made it past the first-tomoe stage.
Uchiha Obito told himself it was so damn unfair his brother never made it past eighteen.
Obito himself only managed chuunin too and did not even live past thirteen, but at least he surpassed his brother in one area – he obtained one tomoe in one eye and two in the other.
He told himself it was because his Sharingan was activated out of a need to protect others, while his brother's was attained out of desperation.
Stage one-and-a-half was not much to be proud of, not that he cared.
(He thought he probably hated the Sharingan anyway.)
The clan said his brother's lack of power – small chakra reserves, low strength and stamina, and lack of mastery over their Kekei Genkai – caused his death. ("A disgrace to the Uchiha, would have died sooner or later...")
Other ninja said the poor kid's horrible injuries did him in.
Uchiha Obito believed the accursed Sharingan killed his brother.
"I am Uchiha Obito of the Uchiha clan! I will surpass you as soon as I awaken this Sharingan!"
Obito did not think his life was a lie. He hated the Sharingan and how the Uchiha clan viewed it as the mark of power, strength and intra-clan status, yes, but he still wanted to attain it. He was just waiting for the right time and the right reason – to protect the people he cared about.
In the Uchiha clan, it was believed that activation of their infamous kekkei genkai depended purely on one's strength. Only those with high-level Sharingans would be truly strong, and of course those people were the future leaders of their most powerful and esteemed clan. But Obito disagreed.
If he did activate and use his Sharingan, then it would be for a meaningful purpose. (Something awesome!) What was the point of being strong for oneself and oneself only? That would not be true strength. (That's not awesome. Suckylamesucky.)
So he wanted the Sharingan to prove a point. He would prove that he could be strong, and he would be stronger than any Uchiha before him. And it would be why and how he used his Sharingan which matter, not how well he could use it.
It was the perfect rebellion. Obito would live how he felt he should, clan traditions be damned.
(He never liked the selfish bunch of prejudiced elitists much anyway.)
Minato-sensei once remarked that if a ninja only wants to become strong for his own benefits, then his goals and achievements would never be more than the barest minimum.
"Because when you want to protect others, you have to keep growing stronger and stronger. For there is no limit to how much you can care for your loved ones and thus you can only keep pushing yourself, striving for more... just to be strong enough to keep them safe and well."
That was when he realised that selfishness, greed, and desperation would never get anyone anywhere.
Sensei was awesome!
It was kind of (reallyreallyreally) sad his brother never got to know someone that awesome.
He remembered once, Rin had remarked, "We help someone, and they help us back, so we keep one another alive in this crazy bloody war."
He always knew Rin was smart. Not only was she smart, but she was also the nicest and kindest person he knew...
"Even if the person doesn't help us back, at least we've done something good, right?"
Obito wished Team Minato could go home together, because he would then be able to grumble at Kakashi about how his Chidori jutsu looked way too badass and cool and even matched his silver hair – and it was not fair, because how many ninja had awesomely cool one-shot-kill jutsu the same colour as their hair? Then Rin would blink, glance at their extremely blond sensei and start giggling, Minato-sensei would sigh and chuckle embarrassedly and Obito would splutter in surprise at them both. Kakashi would snort, but Obito knew he would be smiling because his mask would twitch slightly. Very slightly.
Obito would laugh, too.
He barely managed to keep the wry grin off his face, and murmured reassuringly, "It's all right, Rin."
But then Rin and Kakashi would leave, and there would be nothing to laugh about after all.
Obito had laughed bitterly in his mind when he told Kakashi to go save Rin and give up on the stupid mission already!
He distinctly remembered another time, another place where he was so, so mad at Hatake Sakumo for aborting his mission and causing Obito's brother's team to end up walking straight into a trap.
Obito did not hate Kakashi. He was an awkward boy and he knew it, which was the only reason why the two always ended up exchanging nothing but annoyed insults.
(Kakashi was awkward too, but he was just that much better at hiding it.)
(Which was actually really unfair, too, Obito decided.)
He did not shift his anger at Hatake Sakumo to his son because Uchiha Obito was awesome and awesome people had better ways of dealing with grief. There was no hate between him and his (somehow) best friend, only a strange mix of sympathy-envy-respect-sadness that made up their comradeship.
One day, Uchiha Obito would meet a man with silver hair and an equally silver ponytail who would tell Obito he was so, so very sorry. Obito would eventually forgive him when he sees another boy with pale blue goggles and spiky black hair waving at him.
"You're early, brother."
"So are you."
Obito hated rocks. They took his brother, and they kept him from going home with his team.
Not to mention getting squashed by many, many falling boulders was not fun dammit!
Rin was so sweet and kind and caring, Minato-sensei was so smile-y and cheerful and friendly – not to mention a scarily skilled ninja – and Kakashi was always such a genius and the best at everything... they were all that his brother was not.
He wondered if that was why the more time he spent with them, the more like his brother he became.
"Obito, you're late again!"
Obito's brother was always late, but never by more than an hour. He never gave excuses either, just said he was sorry and stared with that apologetic, bewildered and almost panicked gaze. It was a gaze that became emptier and emptier, yet at the same time more and more desperate...
Obito was forever late by unbelievable lengths of time, and he always had an excuse.
"Ah, sorry... I had to rescue a cat from a tree..."
He took pride in his crazy excuses (or the craziness of his excuses – same thing in the end, he supposed), but there was one particular excuse he had to give credit to Kakashi for.
"Sorry, I got lost on the road of life..."
"Why do you always wear those weird goggles?"
"I like them."
Obito's most prized possession was his pair of goggles.
His brother wore the exact same pair, only with icy blue-tinted lens, to protect his eyes.
(The eyes his own mother almost gouged out.)
(She was aiming for Obito.)
When they brought his brother's goggles back, the glass was cracked.
If he squinted, the crack kind of looked like a three-bladed shuriken. If he squinted harder, the glass actually looked orange, no, more like red—
Oh. That was blood.
(His brother's blood? His own blood? Who knew – and who cared anyway. It's all Uchiha blood in the end.)
He saved his baby brother's life by snatching him out of his mother's grip, barely a minute after he was born.
The scar below his eye never actually faded, but... at least he kept Obito safe.
Better my face than his neck, he decided.
And he knew – had those scarlet-painted nails scratched any higher, he would have been be blinded.
The next day, he bought himself a pair of goggles.
The two of them were... an odd pair of brothers, to say the least. They were not constantly at each other's throats like most siblings, yet they seemed to interact very little – because Obito was never clingy, and his brother did not dote.
Instead, they had a strange kind of mutual understanding which neither ever spoke of.
Even though they were not really "close", both cared deeply for the other.
When their father was drunk, yet again, the older boy would sit silently on the porch and Obito would join him.
And they would simply appreciate each other's companionship.
"Always take good care of your eyes," his brother instructed seriously. "'Cause eyes are important, in general."
In general, not in specific.
"Okay."
"Well, I'll be going then."
"Alright. Good luck, and see you."
"Bye."
We most sincerely regret to inform you...
"Did you bring back the body?"
"I'm very sorry, the poor boy's body was completely smashed, we could only retrieve his headband and his goggles—"
"Did you even bring back the eyes?"
"What?"
"Did you bring back the eyes? Well?"
"...How can you—!"
"Then stop wasting my time."
The clan head slammed the door.
Obito wanted to scream.
...has died in the line of duty.
That day, Obito shattered his brothers' goggles. He smashed them against the table, again and again, until one crack grew into many, became a fragile spiderweb of connected breaks...
Maybe some of the pieces flew into his own eyes.
Maybe some remained in the goggles, even after he had the lens changed to a forcefully bright and heart-wrenchingly happy orange...
His eyes had bled, then.
They almost thought it was Mangekyou Sharingan blood.
Obito knew it was tears.
For Obito cried so much and so often it had to be something different, something special for his brother.
(After all, it was all Uchiha blood in the end...)
No one else had bothered to shed blood for the dead teen.
Until Minato and Rin and (stupidstupidstupid) Kakashi, no one had bothered to do so for Obito either.
Aside from his brother, Kakashi was the first – and last – person to injure an important organ for Obito, or so he insisted on believing.
(Because the bitter bitch who died during childbirth, cursing him and his father and nearly blinded his brother in her mad fury could never compare to the friend who saved him many-many-many times over, lost his eye and nearly died, the idiot-genius-asshole.)
What Obito did not know was that his death left gaping holes in his teammates' hearts.
If he had known, he would have said he was sorry.
Despite being an Uchiha, Obito's affinity was not fire. It was wind – and not very strong, either.
('Man, so much for "Uchiha blood"...')
But who said you could not create fire with wind?
Wasn't air essential for a flame to burn?
So Minato-sensei trained him. He found out for yet another time that Sensei was awesome.
Obito decided he liked burning and melting stuff, especially dangerous pointy weapons travelling in his direction. Fun.
...Too bad rocks were never flammable.
Damn. Not fun.
Obito knew he was being unfairly biased against Iwa and Iwa-nins, but it was just a tiiiny little bit difficult to be fair under his circumstances. In any case, he was a ninja. In a war. And war was never fair...
Neither was life. (Nor death, for that matter.)
Obito loved his team. Really, he did.
"We put the 'fun' in 'dysfunctional'~!"
That must have been why he could let them go, let them leave him because he just wanted them to live so much longer.
'I'll be waiting for you guys, but you'd better make me wait way longer than I've ever made you. Payback, you know? 'Cause even though I'll miss you all like hell I don't want to see any of you here anytime soon. Not until you're all old and wizened and utterly ancient. And then I'm going to laugh and laugh and laugh at how stupid you look, heh!'
A bittersweet smile formed, slowly.
'...I'm sorry I can't spend more time with everyone.'
Kakashi had better stop moping. It was way too depressing and, of course, depressing was not awesome!
'You've all became family to me, and you'd better live and live well, okay?'
('Cause I'm Uchiha Obito who's really damn awesome and you won't ever stand a chance of matching my awesomeness if you just flop over and die, you know.)
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A/N: Hope you liked it? -prods fic with foot- Hope the language quality's okay...:/
A lot of it is based on my imagination. XD Especially all that Obito's brother backstory...