It's terrible, the sensation that comes with certain choices. They burned, from the inside out, like an acid destroying a person one little bit at a time. The thing is, there's a kind of awareness during the moment when such a choice is made, a certain feeling of dread and heaviness that tells you that you've chosen wrong.
And you can't turn back.
You can never turn back when one of these choices is made. Instead, you have to live with the certainty that you chose wrong, that you've irreparably closed a door behind you and you can never go back through it, because it locked behind you. You have to find your way on a path that suddenly feels wrong. You have to live with what will become of you, no matter how beautiful or terrible that being will be.
The moment that Obito got up from the field where Rin died was one of these moments. He had two choices. He could go home, or he could go back to Him. He chose Him. He turned away and left Kakashi to the rain, secure in the awareness that the other teenager wouldn't die, that he would be safe now, even if he'd ruined Rin, had killed her, meaning to or no. He let anger and grief make his choice. He let himself feel it all with the wrong parts of his heart.
And he could have turned back. He could have turned around and gone back, but he'd made the choice. He'd taken the first few drops of poison, and he knew he would never purge them, so he kept walking. Every step had felt like a stone tumbling down on his soul, carving a new scar to match the ones on the surface of his skin, to mirror inside what he was on the outside.
It hurt.
It made the pain sink deeper inside him in a way he'd never felt and the steady chant telling him it was wrong wrong wrong only kept deepening... until he was back to Madara, to that cave, to the place where everything had been on an edge he hadn't known existed until he fell.
He wanted nothing more than to sob, to scream and cry as he had before returning, but he hadn't been deafened while he'd been in the cave before. He'd heard the mad schemes and heartless dreams that didn't lead to anything wonderful, and still he'd come back. He'd chosen to make it his own. He knew that no matter how fast he ran, he'd never get back to that field in time to go home.
He knew he'd left the choice in puddles of blood and mountains of bodies and he couldn't take it back.
So he didn't run back. Instead, he listened, and he walked the path he'd set his feet on.
That was the first time he'd felt that feeling, that terrible, horrible feeling that he'd chosen wrong. It wasn't the last. No, he had so many.
The next was the one that truly destroyed everything he had left. That destroyed his chances in a way he hadn't seen with the first choice, because somehow, some way, he'd still had hope. He still had something to hang onto that he hadn't even realized was so important to him.
Innocence, hope, optimism. It was all wiped away with one question. A question that somehow, he hadn't expected, and because of that, hadn't expected to have hurt.
"Are you Madara?"
He wasn't that good of an actor. Was he that angry, that filled with rage and loss and everything that such a question would inspire that his own sensei wouldn't know him? Was a mask truly enough that someone who had known him for years didn't even see him, didn't even consider him?
No, the first thing that his sensei reached for was a man that was supposed to be decades dead, not his student who could have, and had, miraculously survived.
It made him make another choice that he shouldn't have. Until that moment, he was just playing, to angry and sharp and deadly, but playing all the same. And then that. Why would he stop for that? Why would he do anything but rip everything in his path to shreds and make the person who hurt him clean it up?
He'd known that they'd be fine, that if the Kyuubi was just put back inside Kushina that everyone would live. At least, everyone in his small collection of loved ones would live.
So he left.
He let his sensei clean up the mess, somehow holding onto a degree of faith that he hadn't known he even could possess as he went to Kiri to stay, to truly start his work. He'd thought that the man would do the smart thing, would put the Kyuubi back, to save Kushina, and no one would have died.
Instead, days later, he heard that the Yondaime was dead, having sacrificed himself to 'kill' the Kyuubi.
He raged, only then recognizing the source of the dread, the beating on his instincts that told him no, that it was wrong, that he would regret. And there was no way to take it back. He could do nothing now, could save no lives.
Instead, he could only dig deeper into that path he'd set himself on months before on the day Rin died. He could only wrap himself in his anger and rage and barrel forward, tearing apart everything in his path until he could put it back together again in a way that fixed everything.
Kiri got the brunt of his rage and grief, shredding and destroying with thoughtless intensity until he left a wake of blood behind him, on his hands, though they hadn't held a single blade of the carnage. It hadn't helped, and he'd spiralled.
He'd fallen farther and farther only to be pulled up short by someone having faith in him, a Kiri nin that had faith in his vision somehow, and that his destruction was leading to something wonderful. So he pulled back, making room for further choices, for true choices. To breathe.
Next time there was a river of blood, it was mostly by his own hands, a choice that he made to save someone a heaviness on a soft heart for the first time in so many years. The ache, the weight, was so much lighter, the dread a softer ache, a drop in a sea of poison, when he told the boy, the child who had made him feel welcomed in his own family, that he was Madara. It was a needed evil, a choice he made to preserve something for the first time in a long time.
It was still a mistake, but by that point he'd grown so used to making the wrong choices that he could do nothing more than keep going. There was no going back. Too many lives had been lost and there was nothing he could do for them but to honor them by not having them being a useless mess of sacrifice. He would give them a place in the world where they would live again.
Broken dreams built on broken promises and someone who had died far too soon, leaving behind the bloodied hands and broken heart of a stranger that he didn't recognize anymore when he looked in the mirror. It was part of why he wore a mask, that, because he didn't recognize himself, and he didn't want to tempt others into trying to see someone who wasn't there anymore.
More bad choices followed, more moments where he knew that he'd failed, that he'd passed up an opportunity, but they spaced out further and further, until he finally wasn't sure that he had any left to make.
He thought he made peace with them.
And then, one day, a day of blood and death and destruction that was based around futile, terrible dreams that he only believed in because he had nothing else... he had another choice to make. A choice all his own, to redeem his life for some paltry moment of worth, or to throw himself away one last time, to die a traitor's death by falling to the ground when there was nothing else in him.
He couldn't go out that way though. He'd never been able to go out that way, and after having to look back over everything he'd lost, everything he'd destroyed... he couldn't do one more. He couldn't accept just one more.
So he chose to save Kakashi. He chose to save something instead of letting it slip through his fingers when he could see what it should be, when it was something he could feel in his bones was something he could do, he should do.
And there was no dread. There was fear, so much fear for what he was walking into, for what his reception would be, but he was giddy, and light, and it was like someone had finally given him an antidote to the poisons he'd been drinking so heavily of for more than half his life.
It almost hurt as much as being run through, that respite, that moment of fleeting mercy where he finally felt he'd made a right choice.
But it wasn't another drop of poison tearing scars into his soul... and that's what mattered. His stupid teammate, the last person he loved in the world, would carry on, and for once, for once, he didn't have to worry about how terrible the path that followed a choice he made because of love would be.
Because even if he died... it was a good choice, and that was more important than anything.
He could feel it.