It started and ended with a rock.
Not even that big a rock, all things considered. Especially when an Iwa-nin was going full spiteful kamikaze and pulling an entire hill down on Team 7. Boulders ten times the size of that rock were falling and rolling around like candy. Earth elemental chakra out of control at its finest.
Small as it was, it was enough. It made the Uchiha stumble. It made him look down when he was about to glance back and see the other half of the hill about to fall on Kakashi's head. With that single bad step, his ankle twisted. Rin's hand went under his shoulder to steady him. Then there was a muffled cry – like someone trying to scream while breathless and wearing a mask - and the heavy thud-crunch-splat that cut it off. Something wet and warm landed on the back of his neck and trickled under his collar.
"Kakashi!"
Kakashi was dead, said the red blood oozing from under the landslide. Kakashi wasn't dead, replied the single twitching arm poking out of the settling wall of stone. Dust caked Obito's goggles, blinding him, clogging his nose. Obito attacked the unmoving rocks with his bare hands. Rin was crying, but Kakashi was still alive. He had to, the bastard!
The arm stopped twitching and the stillness was branded into his memory. Obito grabbed at his friend's hand with his own bloodied, ruined hands. He called Kakashi's name, screaming his lungs out at the first person to ever acknowledge his failure of an existence, even if only as a second-rate rival. He shouted for Rin and her Mystical Palm. He screamed for Minato-sensei, but he failed to miraculously materialize. Only laughter answered him.
Obito tossed his goggles away, blinking blood and tears away from his burning eyes. His vision was swimming, every blurring second branded by hot red irons in his brain. Kakashi's arm, slick and bent unnaturally. The brown and gray coats of a dozen Iwa-nins. Rin, trembling and hugging herself, her eyes fixed and vacant. He tasted blood in his mouth as it streamed down his cheeks and dripped from his wrecked hands.
The first Iwa bitch – no, not a bitch. Cunt. Better. Kakashi adores dogs – blurred in a shunshin and reappeared almost lazily behind Rin. She wasn't laughing, like some of her fellows were. Her eyes were cold pinpricks of focused hate. The hand around the kunai handle didn't move for Rin's head for a knockout blow. The tip was in the wrong direction.
And yet, she was so. Painfully. Slow.
The forest bled into a black-and-white geometry, then shifted back into focus. Obito felt the thin bone give way under the tip on his kunai. His teeth rattled around the handle as it sunk into the back of the kunoichi's skull, then her corpse dragged him to the ground in a heap.
The rest of the Iwa nins stopped laughing.
Obito twisted his head, freed the kunai with a slurping pop and staggered to his feet. He looked them all in the eye. Only one of them recognized the spinning black on crimson pupils and looked away in time.
"Come on," he growled around the handle of the blade as the genjutsu took hold of their senses. Then he went to them.
0 – PORTENTO – 0
Flames blacker than moonless midnight devoured a swathe of Konoha's forest in complete silence, challenging the foul miasma of the Kyuubi's corrosive chakra that burned into the lungs and minds of every man, woman, and child in the village. Even other fires, lit by the Kyuubi's disruptive streak and abrupt appearance, were devoured by the Undying Flame of Amaterasu, a power whose existence Obito had thought relegated to the stone tablet hidden underneath the Naka Shrine.
His naïve assumption was proven wrong by none other than a reanimated Izuna Uchiha. And now his precious people and the village were paying for it.
Kushina-nee-chan's fuin barrier failed and the flames started to spread and consume outwards. Obito could hear the Sandaime shouting for the Sealing Corps to contain the flames as titanic masses of water and earth failed to put out the black inferno. Obito didn't know who would answer the call, who was still alive and who wasn't. He'd last seen Rin shepherding the wounded to the shelters as he rushed to battle the Fox, one of the few Uchiha to do so. He hoped she was alright. He hoped Aunt Mikoto, Shisui, Itachi, and little Sasuke had already left the Clan Compound when Amaterasu immolated most of it.
The young Uchiha rushed untouched through the flames as fast as he could, shouting himself hoarse as he cradled his broken arm. His only eye throbbed in agony with the effort of sustaining Kamui. Blood seeped out of the other crushed orbit, bits of masonry still stuck in his flesh from debris he just couldn't see coming. There was no warping to where Kushina-nee-chan and Minato-sensei were, because he couldn't see or feel them, surrounded as he was by Amaterasu.
Kakashi would have found them in a flash. He was always the best tracker.
At first, he thought he was imagining the voices. Then he heard them again: a child's wails and the notes of a lullaby sung by a faint and ragged voice.
They were in each other's arms, the puddle of blood they lay in already black and dry from the heat. Minato-sensei's hold was limp, his eyes vacant and still, carrying the pain of his violent end, as if his soul had been ripped from his body. Kushina-nee-chan held a baby boy in blood-soaked swaddles, her voice growing weaker as the circle of fuin chains sprouting from her back and keeping the flames at bay grew smaller. The black flames licked at the hem of Minato-sensei's haori, consuming it.
Her eyes found his, standing immaterial against the black. "O-Obito… Please, Naruto –"
He knelt beside her, nearly collapsed actually, but the words stuck in his throat as if nailed there. He wanted to take them all, to bring Kushina-nee to the iryo-nins, bring them to Rin, but one look at the crater in her belly and at her ashen face told him it was far too late. The rest of his brain screamed obscenities at that cold clarity that was so Kakashi, but Kushina's plead silenced that voice.
His vision was blurring and he tasted salt on his lips, but he nodded at her, once, even if his mind kept asking why and how and why again. A silent thank you left her lips, then focus hardened features that were ravaged by agony a moment later. The Uzumaki's Adamantine Chains exploded outwards, pushing the black flames back for a second.
It was long enough for Obito to turn solid, grab Naruto, and warp into Kamui, before the heat could roast them both. It was just long enough to see the spark of life fade from Kushina-nee-chan's eyes. The stark geometry of Kamui's dimension spared him the sight of their bodies consumed by the Undying Flame.
0 – PORTENTO – 0
Amaterasu left nothing to bury or mourn, so the Sandaime had a new Memorial Stone commissioned for all the victims of Izuna's Attack, shinobi and civilians alike. The slab towered ten feet high over the slumped teen who'd become its most diligent visitor.
Zetsu found Obito there, derelict, dimension-jumping hobo that he had become. At first, the gaunt, tipsy Uchiha regarded the blurry venus flytrap and its dichromatic bud as just another hallucination from the Phantom Eye Syndrome haunting him with the silent faces of the dead and gone.
Then the thing started to speak.
Its words evoked a world where war wasn't a fixture of life, where Obito's parents didn't perish in the Second Shinobi Secret War, and the mission to the Kannabi Bridge wasn't even conceived. In the ideal world Zetsu wove around him, the Attack never happened, and little Naruto wasn't made into the man-prison for the Fox on his parents' deathbed. In this world that only Obito could bring about, Sasuke would grow knowing the love of his mother, not still pictures in a shrine and a name etched on the Memorial Stone.
Kakashi would live and Obito himself would be whole again, healed. His first instinct upon spotting Rin's chakra signature wouldn't be to hide like an extra-dimensional mole, but to embrace the woman who would love him back.
He only needed to put his trust in Zetsu, and the clock could be turned back, until the dull ache in his chest wasn't even a distant, foggy memory. The Kakashi-like voice of logic and reason in his head went ignored like it had since Obito had woken up in the hospital, in a futile effort to keep the dead confined where they belonged.
The last bottle of sake shattered and Obito followed Zetsu.
The cave complex under Kusa no Kuni was a riot of roots. Cocooned bodies dangled from branches as wide as rivers, and the ugliest statue Obito had ever seen was perched on top of a colossal stem decorated by a wooden copy of Senju Hashirama.
Zetsu talked on, delving into the workings of Infinite Tsukuyomi as Madara Uchiha himself designed it and how gathering all the Biju into the Demonic Statue was pivotal to bring about the illusion of the perfect world. Obito listened in a daze of revulsion and baser fascination as his guide led him to a throne at the base of the giant flowering tree; a shriveled, mummified corpse still sat there, long, pale hair parted by the roots plunged deep into his back.
An open coffin jutted out of the soil nearby, dusty and empty. Obito flipped the lid up with a kick and froze as Izuna Uchiha's name glared up at him.
His dead friends, family, and mentors looked straight back at him, shapes gaining in definition until for the first time, Obito wasn't sure where reality ended and the hallucination began. His heart beat in painful longing against his sternum. He almost reached out with a hand, starving for their touch.
Then his empty socket throbbed with phantom pain and their faces morphed in a silent, collective call for retribution, a commanding plea for him to do his duty as a shinobi and comrade.
He'd warped in and out of Kamui so many times since the Attack, to evade Fugaku's people, ANBU patrols, or Rin, that Zetsu was still droning on when Obito grabbed him and warped them both into his private dimensional backyard. A split-second later, Zetsu was alone with the fading echo of his own words as Obito warped into the Hokage's office… straight in the middle of a meeting between Hokage and Jiraiya of the Sannin on the fate of the sleeping baby in the crib.
It took over a week in the hospital's ICU before Obito was even able to string three words together after Jiraiya's snap-reaction to the perceived assassination attempt on his sensei and godson. Two more before he was fit enough to safely warp into Kamui with the Sannin and an S-rated ANBU wetwork-team in tow.
Zetsu refused to be captured. Outmatched and overwhelmed, the parasitic black half of its body jumped from the decomposing white husk and tried to latch onto Obito instead, to what purpose only the gods knew. A timely Kawarimi and the chakra leech found itself with a faceful of Toad Sage instead, and ended up obliterated as a result, Kaguya-hime's name on his lips.
And yet, when Obito led the Hokage and the Sannin into the caves, the Demonic Statue of the Outer Path had vanished, as if it'd never roosted atop the giant flower in the first place.
As the Hashirama-tree, its human-shaped fruits, and Madara Uchiha's corpse conflagrated before the tidal wave of fire and devastation brought forth by the two legendary shinobi, Obito felt no real regret for the dream of a perfect world going up in flames before him. A fragment of the boulder pressing between his shoulder blades flaked under the unbearable heat, instead, and the ghosts impressed into the Uchiha's vision, for once, didn't look upon him with condemnation, but approval. Obito found himself breathing a little easier, standing a little straighter.
This time, when the Hokage offered him the ANBU mask, Obito didn't turn it down.