Here, in this graveyard that Obito's created, the bodies are still fresh.
Here, they're buried in blood rather than dirt. Here, some of them are still alive, faint gurgling and laboured breathing hammering in Obito's ears. Here, their gravestones are made of wood, and protrude from chests rather than from the earth.
Here, Rin is small and frail and unmoving in Obito's arms.
Her fingers are cold now. (Hours have probably passed, but right now, time feels like a trivial, distant concept.) The blood on his hands has long since hardened and cracked, while the pool of it around him has thickened and congealed, the smell disgusting and festering and also barely noticeable, barely noticeable because—
His eye. He wants to turn it off.
Why, why, why did it have to make everything so—clear? His eye burns into him the sight of the slight trickle of blood from Rin's lips, the slow bleeding of crimson across her shirt, the torn tissue and cracked bone and gaping hole in her chest, and he wants it to stop, just stop stop stop—
But his mind is cracked and the pieces falling into a void, part of him shattered and gone the moment Kakashi had stabbed a hand through Rin's heart. He can't turn his eye off. It's beyond his control, requiring a precision far greater than the dull, barely-functioning numbness of his mind.
So he shuts his eye.
—And sees Rin's betrayed face, choking out Kakashi—sees the Kiri nin's look of pure fear as Obito had shoved a wooden pike through his neck—that slight, terrified glance downwards that is now forever burned into Obito's mind—sees the deaths, all the fifty-something lives that Obito had taken away, him, Obito, impaled bodies and crushed throats and speared lungs, all on replay in his mind in perfect detail and perfect horror.
He opens his eye and feels his sanity slipping away.
From one of the twisting, macabre trunks of intermingled wood and flesh above, a drop of blood falls squarely onto Rin's cheek. It trails down her purple clan marking.
Something in Obito stirs and sickens, and then, it's suffocating. The blood. The bodies. Her body. The cold, bright, mocking moonlight, pounding down on him, painting everything in crisp, clear detail. The feeling of Tobi wrapped around him like a coffin.
"Get off me," he says suddenly.
Tobi doesn't move. "Are you ready to go back to Madara now?" it asks instead.
"Get off me," Obito repeats, louder this time. There is an edge to his voice, an instability to the pitch of his words that hints at madness.
Artificial beings, of course, aren't very good at picking up subtle human cues.
"Madara says that you shouldn't—"
Obito rips off one of the curling, white extensions whispering into his ear and chucks it into the distance. He lowers Rin to the ground—gently—and then jerks to his feet and tries to ignore the wave of nausea making his head light and his vision unfocused.
Tobi falls silent, maybe thinking that this means Obito is done grieving and ready to go.
No.
No. Rin is—is dead. Obito is not done grieving, never will be, and he is not ready to go.
At least, not to where Tobi thinks.
He focuses on his eye and wills himself to disappear, to make this blood-stained world go away. He tells his eye to let him vanish. Fully, this time. Only him, this time.
Reality blurs and Obito concentrates and Tobi cries out, and then Obito finds himself sucked away, out of this hell and away from the stifling air of death and bodies and blood.
His feet land on something cold, hard, and gray, what looks like concrete but feels infinitely smoother. He sucks in the air, its freshness a stark contrast from the air two seconds ago, which had been so saturated with blood that Obito had been able to taste its metallic tang on his tongue. A slight shiver runs through him, the air cold on his bare chest. But Tobi is gone now. Obito exhales and focuses on calming down the slight tremors running through his body.
"Oh, there's another one," comes a distant voice from behind him, a voice that sounds horribly, horribly familiar.
Obito whirls around and stares at a carbon copy of himself.
The other Obito gazes back, a bitter smile on his face as he approaches. A few gray blocks behind him is—is a group of even more Obitos.
What—
"Welcome to the party," the other Obito says. "We're all from, well, different worlds. But this… gray… middle dimension is the same one we all share." The Obito comes to a stop before him, and his face tightens. He points to his own, still-activated Sharingan, which to Obito's unease has an odd, jagged black pattern. "One of the other Obitos says that it's called the Mangekyō. And that we got it because Rin died."
Obito can only nod numbly, because it has been a long, long night.
Other dimensions. Other versions of himself.
Sure. Why not?
It was no harder to accept than the idea of her being dead.
The other Obito tilts his head towards the group off in the distance. "C'mon. It's not good to be alone." His voice is soft, piercing, and far too understanding.
Again, Obito can do nothing but nod and walk forward, his steps robotic. He can barely process it all anymore. His adrenaline had long since faded, and it's all he can to do keep his body upright and moving—his limbs are finally beginning to feel the strain of all his earlier fighting, and his mind is just… blank. Maybe alarmingly so, but he can't bring himself to feel too worried about it.
He glances to his left. The other Obito's face is stained with tracks of dried blood and dried tears, the right side scarred beyond recognition and left eye missing. It's awful. Hideous. Obito wonders if this is how he himself looks. There had been no mirrors in Madara's cave, and blood, no matter how pooled, didn't have great reflectivity.
The other Obito notices him watching. "Yeah. We look awful." His lips curve in a mockery of a smile, expression too twisted and miserable to really even play at looking happy. "Not that she's around to see it, anymore."
Obito's breath hitches, and he freezes for a millisecond in his step.
Rin, wrapping gauze around Obito's hand, her eyes shining and sincere, I'm looking after you—
Rin, laughing and turning to him with a grin and a promise, let me see how you save the world, Obito—
Rin, blood trickling out her mouth, eyes wide glassy horrified, Kakashi—
Obito forces himself to put one foot in front of the other. "Don't—don't talk about her," he forces out.
The other Obito's smile goes out like a candle. He opens his mouth, and almost closes it. Finally, quietly, he says, "Sorry."
They jump from one solitary gray block to the next. Part of Obito wonders what's in the gaps in between, if they even have an end, in this seemingly endless dimension. (Part of him wonders what would happen if—if he just lets himself fall down.)
(No. He's not that far gone, yet.)
They come to a stop before the other Obitos sitting on the ground—almost a half-dozen of them—and there's a brief lull in the low murmur of conversation. A loose spattering of heys and hellos sound out, and Obito is certain this must all be a dream.
(They all look exactly like him. The blood, red brown black, the scarred bodies, white white bone-white, the eyes, white red black Sharingan—no not that don't think about that—)
His legs turn to jelly, and he crashes to the ground. He takes a steadying breath and wills the lightheadedness to go away.
One of the Obitos to his right looks at him. Obito notes how his scars only cover a quarter of his face rather than half. "It's okay," the less-scarred Obito says, sounding hollow. "We'll get through this. Together."
Obito looks away from the haunting expression on his own face. Mirrors. He doesn't like mirrors anymore.
"How?" The question tears its way out of his throat. Unpleasant visions flicker at the back of his mind, a single spoken name away from exploding to the surface. He counts the number of storm-gray monoliths in the distance. One, two, three, four. He counts his breathing. In, out. "I don't think I can," he says, slightly steadier.
An Obito on his left speaks up. "See?" This Obito's voice is jagged, desperate. "He agrees with me. I can't—we can't—Rin—" Collectively, everyone flinches. The Obito inhales sharply, and quickly says, "And remember the genjutsu Madara showed us?" There's a deep, raw longing in his tone that reverberates with Obito to his bone.
Obito doesn't remember Madara showing him a genjutsu, actually. But he does remember Madara's words. And White Zetsu's words, clear as day in his memory.
"'In a dreamworld, you can do whatever you want,'" he murmurs. "'Even… bring the dead back to life.'" He's only testing the words on his tongue, but—but these words sound nice. And he thinks that maybe, just maybe, he would be willing to do anything for those words to come true.
The desperate Obito turns to him and clings onto his words like a starving prisoner to scraps. "A world of winners. A word of peace. A world of love," he repeats. And his eye burns into Obito's, iris ringed with wide, wide white, at once so sharply focused on him as to make Obito's stomach twist, yet glazed with the faraway memory of a genjutsu that Obito doesn't remember—but wants to, now.
Obito swallows. He doesn't know what to say.
Another Obito, this one with a long, still-bleeding cut on the left side of his face, balls his hands into fists. "But Kakashi's still alive! And Sensei, too. Weren't we planning to go back to them, to go back to—to Konoha?" Here, his words trail off uncertainly.
"Kakashi," comes a snarl from the far left. With a chill, Obito realizes that this Obito is in possession of both his eyes. "Not him again. All that bastard cares about are stupid rules and missions. First he abandons Rin, then he kills her! And you want to go back to him?"
"How can you say Kakashi only cares about the rules?" the first Obito, the one who had greeted Obito, says angrily. "For the rest of us, he lost his eye trying to save her at Kannabi Bridge!" The second Obito that Obito had talked to, the less-scarred one, murmurs in agreement. Most of the others, including Obito himself, watch on in uncertain silence.
Two-Mangekyō Obito's face twists. "I don't know what this sob story is that Minato apparently told all of you that night, but all I know is that Kakashi left Rin to die—" here, his words tremble with anger or grief or both, "and then he killed her with his own hands."
"And all I know is that Kakashi was at my side every step of the way to saving Rin," the first Obito says vehemently. "And there's no way he would've broken his promise to me and killed Rin without a reason! I trust him!" His face is a picture of revulsion as he stares at Two-Mangekyō Obito and shakes his head. "How could you?" he grinds out. "You're a hypocrite. You're not me."
"Kakashi deserved to die," spits Two-Mangekyō Obito, his eyes red and black and blazing with adrenaline that's somehow still unburnt. Even though his gaze isn't on Obito, Obito's entire body goes cold.
He had… killed Kakashi.
Obito—Obito had thought about it. It had crossed his mind when he had seen Kakashi lying there, still and unconscious and right hand drenched crimson. But then he had remembered Kakashi's tears, Kakashi's promise—and had known that there must have been other factors at play.
And he hadn't had the strength of will to see another teammate die.
But this Obito—this Obito hadn't had any qualms.
You're not me, Obito wants to say as well.
But—aren't they all Uchiha Obito?
A new voice speaks up.
"How could you say that," whispers another Obito. This Obito is hunched in on himself, his knees up to his chin. He lifts his head by a fraction, single eye hooded. "I would—" his voice cracks, "I would give anything to undo what I've done."
The less-scarred Obito's expression softens by just a touch, though it's still grim and unforgiving. "You killed him in the heat of the moment. Now you'll have to live with the consequences."
The other Obito raises his head a fraction more. "Any of you could have done the same," he hisses in a low voice, hands curling tightly. "Any of you—you're all me, I couldn't—I didn't—"
He lapses into silence with a horrible, broken exhale that sounds too much like a sob for Obito to not feel sick to his stomach.
The broken Obito, Obito dubs him dully.
The Obito with the long cut on his face, who had been so uncertain, asks just as uncertainly, "Now what?" Obito finds himself wondering the exact same question.
Four voices speak out at once.
"We bring Kakashi back to Konoha," say the first Obito and the less-scarred Obito.
"I'm going back to Madara," say Two-Mangekyō Obito and the desperate Obito.
Obito swallows and stays silent. Broken Obito is hunched with his head in his arms, and gives no sign that he has heard them.
"Why would you want to stay in this—this hell of a world?" the desperate Obito asks. "In Madara's genjutsu, everyone will be happy and alive!" His gaze grows distant and his voice grows soft. "I—I was Hokage. Rin was the head of the hospital, and Kakashi was my advisor, and we were celebrating my—"
"I can't believe you," the less-scarred Obito says, eye tight. He stands up, and Obito flinches at the sudden movement. The desperate Obito frowns at the interruption, his own eye narrowing as well. "I'm going to go get Kakashi, and then I'm going back to Konoha."
The stagnant air shifts over Obito's skin, and then their group is one Obito short.
Two-Mangekyō Obito jumps up. "I'm leaving," he says forcefully, wildfire in his eyes and an air of overpowering determination and anger that cloaks him like armour. Obito marvels at how this Obito is somehow able to push away the grief and shock that's currently smothering his own mind like a dense fog.
Then, their group is two Obitos short.
The first Obito pulls himself to his feet. He looks down at the rest of them, and he bites his lip.
"Don't go to Madara," he pleads. He looks at Obito, then at the Obito with the cut across his face. "You guys are me. I know you want to return to Konoha! Even if… she's not there, Kakashi and Minato-sensei still are! We can still be happy this way."
"But the only way to be fully happy is in Infinite Tsukuyomi," Desperate Obito shoots back.
"It's a genjutsu. A dream. It's not real!"
"Maybe it's not really, really real." Desperate Obito takes a deep breath. "But it's still the only reality that I'm—that I'm willing to accept."
The first Obito's lips are set into a straight line. "Is that all you can accept? What about a reality where you can really, truly be friends with Kakashi? After all this time?"
"What about a reality where Rin can be alive?" Desperate Obito's voice trembles.
Obito's throat closes up.
Rin, handing him his Academy entrance papers with a smile brighter than the sun, do your best, Obito—
Rin, taking his hands in hers, words strong and heartfelt, it's a promise—
Rin, blood trickling out her mouth, eyes wide glassy horrified, Ka-ka-shi—
Kakashi. Maybe Obito could have been friends with him. Maybe he could have been friends with the Kakashi that had rescued Rin and promised to protect her.
He couldn't be friends with the Kakashi that had put a Chidori through Rin's heart.
Obito couldn't be friends with this world's Kakashi. Obito's Kakashi was the Kakashi that had fought back to back with him at Kannabi Bridge, the Kakashi that Obito would be friends with in a better, happier, more real world.
A world where Rin would be alive, too.
The epiphany hits Obito like a sharp blast of wind, and the fog over his mind clears. Suddenly the air around him no longer feels so heavy and suffocating. He brings himself out of his thoughts, back a little straighter, now.
"—that's what makes this world worthwhile," the first Obito is saying heatedly, and the Obito with the cut on his face goes still.
Obito blinks, disoriented. What had he said? He hadn't been listening—
The Obito with the cut on his face gets to his feet.
"You're—you're right," he says, to Obito's mild surprise. "I—I wasn't thinking properly. I should have considered that, and… you're right."
Hesitation briefly flickers across the face of the desperate Obito, but just as quickly, he's resolute again. "Fine. You two can go back to that hell," he snaps. "But I'm going to create a better world."
"So am I," Obito says, speaking up at last. His voice is low but determined, and to his relief, doesn't waver.
The first Obito looks down at him, and purses his lips. "We'll meet again," he says. "Till next time."
"Till next time," Obito repeats.
Obito watches the two figures in front of him distort and swirl, and then it's just him, the desperate Obito, and the broken Obito who are left.
Mere seconds after they've gone, the brief lull of silence is interrupted by a noise in the distance. Obito turns his head, and his Mangekyō allows him to see what would otherwise have been too small and distant to discern. Himself—the less-scarred one—carrying Kakashi, whose chakra system is sluggish and faint.
A moment later, and they're gone again.
But Broken Obito's head jerks up. "Kakashi," he breathes. His eye is wild and wide and desperate, and in this moment, the title of "Desperate Obito" seems to fit him far better than the other Obito. He lurches to his feet and looks around frantically, black spokes in his eye spinning.
Obito shares an uneasy look with the desperate Obito. A look that says, he's lost his mind. And comes with the realization: And he's me.
Then, from somewhere behind, there comes another noise. Something thuds to the ground, loud and clumsy, accompanied by the sound of heavy breathing. Desperate Obito's breath audibly hitches, and his eyes lock on something—someone—behind Obito.
Broken Obito, who shares Desperate Obito's line of sight, has frozen too, spellbound by whomever it is that has just arrived. And with eerie synchrony, blood drains from their faces.
Obito frowns. Had one of the other Obitos returned? But something sharp and uneasy coils in his gut, something that tells him it's more than that. He turns around.
His heart nearly stops.
It's another Obito, alright—but more than just that, because in his arms is her.
Is Rin.
And with the Sharingan's aid, it's all too easy to notice—impossible not to notice—that this Rin somehow possesses a veritable ocean of chakra, wild and intense and barely contained.
And she's alive.
Obito's mind goes completely blank. All he's able to do is breathe "Rin," her name tentative and feather-light on his tongue. Vaguely, he registers that two other voices have whispered the same name with him.
While one more voice says in a panic, "Who are you?"
But Obito hardly hears it. In a heartbeat, he's flown over to kneel down at Rin's side, and gods, she was alive! The ghost of a smile tugs at his lips, and then it breaks out into a full, wide smile, stretching his face and cracking the dried, caked blood on his cheeks. An elated laugh bubbles up out of him, and he outreaches a hand.
It's slapped away.
"Get away from Rin," the new Obito hisses.
Like being woken up from a pleasant dream with a bucket of ice-cold water, Obito recoils, his smile and his euphoria instantly evaporating. For a brief, wonderful moment, the world had seemed a little brighter, a little less gray.
Now, everything is twice as bleak as it was before.
Obito gets to his feet and stumbles backwards, the new Obito glaring at him with narrowed eyes as he does so. On his right, Desperate Obito wordlessly shrinks back as well, his head dipped down. Broken Obito is lingering a ways behind, his face shadowed and obscured behind the long fringes of his hair. Obito hadn't even realized they had been standing there with him. He wants to laugh, and cry, and shake himself for being so stupid, for being such an idiot.
This Rin isn't his Rin.
This Rin isn't his Rin.
He had almost deluded himself into thinking he could just steal someone else's happiness, as if he was the only Obito that deserved it, as if he wasn't just one of dozens, hundreds, maybe infinite numbers of other Obitos. As if just having Rin back would somehow miraculously put an end to everything wrong with the world, as if Rin being alive would erase the fact that he had buried a field in the blood of six dozen ANBU and watched Kakashi stab lightning through his best friend.
But it's okay, because he'll have his own happiness soon, his own world with his own rules where everything would be perfectly perfectly perfect—
"Who are you?" the new Obito—the lucky Obito—repeats, forcefully. Though his question is loud and strong with bravado, it's undercut by the slight tremor in his voice.
Obito glances at Desperate Obito, who's staring at Rin, still. And Broken Obito isn't even looking at her—he's not looking at anyone. So Obito speaks up.
"Our Mangekyō Sharingan lets us come here." His words are mechanical, and he feels like he's reading from a demented script. "We're from different worlds. Similar, but… different." And he's unable to keep the bitter envy out of his voice. "So far, your world is the only one where she hasn't died."
Obito watches the new Obito's expression shift with realization, his posture loosening—maybe in sympathy—and then tensing again. It doesn't matter. Obito doesn't care. His eyes drop down, instead. Down to with her slow, steady breathing, the hole of charred fabric over her heart, the impossibly whole and unblemished skin underneath.
She's alive. She's here. She's—
It doesn't matter.
Obito rips his eyes away and takes another half-step back.
The new Obito stares at him, then at the others. "I'm sorry," he says, voice more subdued.
The empty platitude falls flat and useless. Desperate Obito gives a strangled laugh, and this time, it's the new Obito who shrinks away.
"I'm… going to go, then," the new Obito says, falteringly. "I need to get Rin to the hospital, so when she wakes up they can—" He sees the looks on their faces, and clamps his mouth shut.
"Where's Kakashi?" the broken Obito asks abruptly.
Obito reads the answer on the new Obito's shuttered face seconds before he gives his reply.
"Dead." New Obito doesn't elaborate. Obito doesn't expect him to.
But Broken Obito's shoulders hunch. "I see," is all he says. He turns away from the rest of them.
The dimension falls silent. Obito doesn't feel like making eye contact, which probably means that none of the other Obitos feel like it, either. The silence is awkward and heavy, until finally, the new Obito shifts, standing up. (Obito can't help but notice the way he pulls Rin in protectively against his chest, her head tucked in just under his chin.)
"I'll be going now," he says with finality. And his and Rin's form start to spiral inwards to his spinning Mangekyō.
Desperate Obito stirs. "Me, too." His eye flicks to Rin, before quickly looking away again. "To a better world," he adds softly but fiercely, a promise to himself. He gives Obito a final look, not happy or nice or even slightly optimistic, but… assured. Like how Obito used to glance at Rin and Kakashi before they moved out into formation, a lifetime ago.
The desperate Obito disappears. The new Obito disappears. Suddenly there's nothing left but Broken Obito's ragged, too-loud breathing, and Obito's jagged, too-loud thoughts.
Obito takes a slow breath. He should get going as well.
Far away, there's yet another flare of chakra, this one accompanied by the light sound of feet hitting the ground. And then another flare, a slight ways apart.
The first Obito, Obito thinks distantly. And the one that had the cut on his face. He watches them carry their respective Kakashis to head back to Konoha, and he reminds himself that he could never be happy with something fake.
But strangely enough, this is what makes the broken Obito spin around. He staggers towards them, then breaks out into a run. "Wait," he cries.
No sooner does he start running are the figures already gone.
Broken Obito stands there, suddenly trembling, and as vicious as the Obito with two Mangekyōs had been, this Obito is just as… just as pathetic, and Obito can't believe—doesn't want to believe—that this could have been him.
Obito gets to his feet. He makes his way over to where the broken Obito is standing, a terrible patchwork of grafted flesh and shaking limbs.
"Hey… Obito," Obito says tentatively, and it feels so strange to call out his own name like that. He stretches out a hand to place on the other Obito's shoulder. "Are you—"
The broken Obito whips his head around, and Obito recoils at the sight of that still-spinning eye.
"Take me with you," the broken Obito pleads. "Please." And his voice cracks again.
Obito stares back, frozen. His hand slowly drops to his side.
Of course. That was—that was possible, wasn't it? For him to bring along another version of himself back into his own world, just as the others had been able to bring along Kakashi.
At his silence, the other Obito speaks up again, as if he might be able to convince Obito if he just kept talking. "I don't want to go back to Madara," he says. Desperately. "I—Kakashi said, he said that he would uphold my wishes and be my eye, he promised and said that he would change, but I kil—" he chokes on the word. "I didn't mean to, I shouldn't have, but Tobi—Tobi said Kakashi saw me, and Tobi—I couldn't control myself, the wood just—I swear, I didn't mean to, I didn't mean to—"
Obito hates it, hates how pitiful this other Obito looks, hates how it looks on his face. He hates how his lip wavers, how his eye waters, how the scars twist a heartfelt, pleading expression into something wretched and pathetic.
He hates him.
Obito takes a step back. "Get away from me," he says roughly.
Broken Obito's rambling come to a freezing halt. His eye burns, wide and betrayed, into Obito's. "What?" he breathes.
Obito takes another step back. And another, until before he knows it, he's stumbled to the edge of a deep, sharp precipice.
"What's wrong with going back to Madara?" he asks, trying to stay calm and sensible. "You'll have them back, that way. Kakashi, and—and Rin."
The broken Obito staggers towards him, his crushed expression so intimately familiar that Obito loathes it. "I don't want a dreamworld! I want the world I could have had—was about to have—with a—a friend."
"You can have that, too. You can have anything in a genjutsu! Just—stay in your own world!" Obito tries not to panic at the sight of the other Obito slowly approaching.
"Please," the broken Obito begs. And he steps closer, and closer, and his hand is reaching out—
Obito's heart beats faster as he realizes what this other version of him is trying to do. He jumps to another block, leaving a safe gap of a chasm between them. Frantically, he wills his eye to take him away, take him away now—
The world in front of him twists and blurs, and he sees the broken Obito race towards him, feels fingers on his wrist—
He crumples to a hard, stone ground.
There is no second Obito tagging along with him.
A heartbeat of silence, one that pounds loudly in Obito's ears, and then—
"Oh, he's back," comes a high and whimsical voice from behind him.
"Obito is a good boy," rasps another, echoing across the cave.
Obito raises his head.
From his wooden throne, Madara stares down at him, face cold and impassive. "I take it you are ready to begin."
Shakily, Obito gets to his feet. He takes a deep breath, and gazes right back at Madara.
"Yes. I am."
A/N: I know I promised to update Space-Time Apostasy by the year's end, but I had to get this thing out first. Sorry! It was going to be a oneshot, but at this point I think it's more likely to end up as a three-chapter fic. Thank you so much to Starship Phoenix for beta-reading, as always!