He couldn't move.

Except for the third and fourth finger on his left hand; he could twitch them a little bit because there was a small void between the rocks there. But he shouldn't have been able to do that. His spine had to be fractured in a hundred different places. 'Fracture' didn't really grasp the scope of it though, 'pulverized' was more accurate.

He had some sense of time, because in the day time, the rocks around him would get a little warmer. That's how he knew that time was passing, too much time, and that he wasn't buried very deep. If someone were to try, they could probably dig him out in an hour or two. But nobody was there. Nobody had been there for... weeks?

Because they thought he was dead.

Because he should be dead.

Why wasn't he dead?

He should be dead, but more than that he wished he were dead. If he were dead, that would be the end of it. If he were dead, his body would be an empty shell with no feeling. There wouldn't be the constant pain. The constant feeling of being crushed mercilessly under stone, unable to move, unable to breath, unable to just die.

It was like a cruel joke.

It was morning, the rock entombing him had just started to warm up in the speckled sunlight, when something changed. At first he thought it was insects, crawling across his skin, but then he noticed that it didn't feel like little running feet, and there was a symmetry in the touch. Hands, it felt like a pair of hands ghosting over him, up over his cheeks and towards his eyes. Eye.

They paused for a moment and then there was a strange voice. 'Still warm?'

Another voice, or maybe not, murmured, 'He's alive?'

One hand moved to his neck and after a moment the first voice said, 'There's a pulse.'

'Impossible. He's been here for weeks.'

He twitched his fingers, the only movement he could make, the only response he could give to the odd presence that seemed completely oblivious to the rocks.

'We should tell him,' the first voice said firmly.

He twitched frantically, but as abruptly as the presence had come, it disappeared, and it was silent again.

The rocks grew slowly warmer. He'd probably just imagined it. No one was coming for him. No one had reason to come. He was useless anyway. A second-rate shinobi. Disappointing. He should have been a genius, but he wasn't. Nobody really needed him. He was expendable. Nothing special. Just a dumb kid.

Then there were sounds. Sounds of movement, of rocks scraping against each other, of voices above him. Was it another hallucination?

Suddenly, his left leg was freed from the agonizing pressure of the stones. And then weight came off of his shattered pelvis. The boulder that crushed his right side from thigh to head was rolled back and suddenly air rushed into his crushed lungs, even as smaller pieces of rock were being lifted off his left side.

He started coughing and gasping desperately for that air that he had been unable to reach for so long. He was so caught up with his rediscovered ability to breath that he was barely aware of the other weights being carefully removed from atop his body.

'Well well well,' a voice was saying somewhere near him. 'That's a hell of a thing.'

'A most peculiar mutation,' one of the voices from earlier noted.

'A useful one,' the other voice added.

'Very,' the newer voice agreed, and hands were carefully pulling him away from the rocks. Soon he was being lifted, cradled against someone's chest. 'I am very glad to have found you, Uchiha Obito,' the voice said in a way that might have made his skin crawl, if he weren't so relieved to be hearing any voices at all. 'You and that most exceptional body of yours will be a great asset to me.'

His lips formed a circle and he struggled to make a sound. 'Wwhhho?' he whispered.

'Uchiha Madera,' the voice sounded like it was being spoken through smiling lips. 'But I suppose you can call me "Uncle" if you like.'

He was sure he'd heard that name, but Obito couldn't quite remember the context as the last lingering threads of consciousness broke and plunged him into blissful, empty sleep.

...

A/N: Kinda sounds like an opening, doesn't it... I don't know if I'll write more or not, I'm not really that sure where to take it past setting up the premise.