"Get down, motherfucker!"
For Obito, who had grown up in the prim and impeccably proper corner of Konoha known as the Uchiha district where coughing in front of the wrong person could warrant a formal censure—who, as an orphan, couldn't imagine having a mother let alone fucking one—this word was shocking. Enough to jolt him out of his frozen position and turn his scandalized face towards the smoking delinquent who had uttered the foulest thing he'd heard in all his eighteen years.
"What?" Obito squeaked.
A kunai skimmed his cheek and impaled the tree behind him.
"Get the fuck down!" the Hokage's son yelled, lunging forward and yanking on Obito's ankle. They fell hard onto a patch of brambles just as a barrage of shuriken hit the same tree with a resounding thud.
The Hokage's son spat out his cigarette. "You fucking idiot." Then he tore himself free of the thorns and flew at the enemy with a pair of glowing knives in his fists. Obito rolled himself upright, wincing as the cut on his cheek was ripped open by the branches, and scrambled to perform a jutsu—any jutsu.
But the Hokage's son was in the way. Obito struggled to keep the pocket of burning chakra in his throat as he desperately scanned the brawling trio of ninja for an opening. He was standing there with his thorny cheeks blown up like a pufferfish when he heard the light pitter patter of footsteps behind him. He choked back the unfinished jutsu and frantically ducked under the sword that came whistling at his neck.
One moment he was fending off a sword with a kunai, and the next he was being thrown forward and hitting the ground with his face. Dazed, he wondered who was pouring that high-pitched screech into his ears. Someone grabbed the back of his collar and pulled him roughly to his boneless feet. Obito blinked a few times to clear his foggy vision and immediately wished he hadn't.
The Hokage's son was angrily mouthing something that looked extremely unpleasant. But the only thing coming out of his lips was spittle. That was odd. He'd been speaking so eloquently just a few moments before.
"What are you saying?" Obito asked, brows furrowed. "Why can't you talk?" Nothing. He stopped, cleared his throat, and tried again. "Hello?" Still nothing. If there weren't going to be any aural consequences, then…
"Motherfucker?" Obito tried, tasting each individual letter.
The Hokage's son apparently decided that sign language was the way to go. His open hand flew into Obito's face. Hard. Sound came rushing back in, accompanied by a troupe of flashing lights and all the terrible pains that adrenaline had mercifully hidden. Nausea came too, folding Obito in half and forcing him to his hands and knees. He retched violently, voiding all the contents of his body, and continued to retch long after there was nothing more to eject.
"—standing there like a fucking deer!" Obito heard distantly above him as he resigned himself to convulsing for the remainder of his miserable life. He was fairly certain someone—probably an Akimichi—was attacking his head with a hammer. At least he was too exhausted to cry.
"Don't fucking cry," the Hokage's son muttered irritably. "Goddammit." Another cigarette materialized in his mouth, which he lit with a spark of chakra. He exhaled a noxious plume of smoke as he examined the pitiful sight before him. "Look, kid. I'm sorry for slapping you—and for yelling—but you were high off your rocker." He paused to nudge Obito with his foot. "You alright?"
Obito, still struggling to catch his breath, tried raising a thumbs up but he couldn't quite figure out where up was. So he settled on grimacing as politely as he could.
"Yeah, you're full of shit. C'mon, kid. There's a cute medic nin back at camp," the Hokage's son said, digging his hands under Obito's armpits and scooping him out of his vomit.
"Don't," Obito whimpered as he was flung over a hard shoulder like a sack of rice.
"What was that now?"
"Her name is Rin and she's my girlfriend. An' we were all in the same class so stop calling me kid," Obito slurred. He almost choked on the stench of stale tobacco and sweat clinging to the man carrying him.
"Oh." The Hokage's son sounded genuinely surprised. "What was your name again?"
"Obito. Ucha Tobito an I'm gon take your dad's job one day."
The shoulder supporting Obito's gut stiffened before its owner replied shortly, "My name is Asuma and my old man's been dead in the ground for a while. You can join him there with that fucking deer act." He cleared his throat and muttered, "But I guess if you survive your own stupidity, you can come by my hookah lounge. That's where I'll be when this is all over." His hand waved vaguely at a charred corpse leaning against a tree which bobbed cheerfully in and out of Obito's blurry vision. "Hopefully not there, you know?"
With the gravel cleared from his throat, the Hokage's son-Asuma, Obito reminded himself-sounded kinder. Younger, maybe. "Hookah?" he wondered aloud as his brain sluggishly processed Asuma's words.
"Good shit, man."
"Oh," Obito mumbled agreeably. Then he fainted.
We didn't know it at the time, but the first impressions we made on our first day in our first year left indelible marks on the way we were perceived for the rest of our lives. Most of us were too shy to stand out, but we all remembered how Obito had acted that day.
He was different from the very beginning. We couldn't help but notice the way he kept tugging irritably at his high collar, the way he squirmed in his new shoes. We stared enviously at the shiny new goggles dangling from his ungrateful neck. We saw the crisp, ironed folds in his new shirt. Our shoes were falling apart. We were dirty, wrinkled, threadbare in comparison. And Obito just looked like another spoiled clan brat.
They lined us up and had us run a circular track. Obito was one of the only ones who ran by himself. He was a quick runner and almost immediately opened twenty, thirty, forty meters between him and the rest of us. But truth be told, Obito ran alone because no one wanted to run with him. The only student ahead of him was Kakashi, who ran alone simply because no one could keep up with his effortless glide.
We all watched from the back, giggling as Obito huffed and puffed and sweated like a pig, spoiling his new clothes with his wild charge as he tried in vain to catch up to Kakashi. It wasn't even close. In the end, Kakashi sailed blithely through the finish line, slowed to a jog, and yawned. A book materialized into his hands as he strolled around, supremely unaffected by the wheezing noises coming from the clan brat.
Obito shuffled painfully past the finish line and fell on the grass, wheezing and clutching his side. The rest of us came in at a leisurely pace, not wanting to look so stupidly desperate like Obito.
As soon as the last straggler made it across, they took us to a field and instructed us to divide ourselves into two teams for a game of dodgeball. We looked skeptically at the audience of masked, hooded figures observing us from the side. But Asuma and Kakashi just shrugged and started a game of rock-paper-scissors. Most of us pretended not to be too interested in the picking process and we chatted amongst ourselves in hushed tones as we waited. Mostly about Obito.
"Look," someone whispered, "he's so confident he's gonna be picked first."
"He's so full of himself," another muttered.
It was true. Obito was standing with his hands on his hips, face beaming as he gazed expectantly at Kakashi and Asuma. His face was flushed and he was panting a bit. We knew it was left over from the run, but he looked like a dog begging for a treat.
Kakashi won first pick. He folded his arms and considered each of us in turn. Even the boys who'd been kicking pebbles at the girls stopped and waited. His eyes lingered on Obito who grinned even wider and began rocking back and forth impatiently on the balls of his feet. Still looking at Obito, Kakashi opened his mouth and called, "Kurenai."
Kurenai blushed. Asuma scowled. The girls giggled. The boys silently prayed Kakashi would pick them too. But the real prize was Obito's expression when Kakashi raised an eyebrow at him and returned to his book. Only then did the smile slide off Obito's face. His mouth quivered and his lower lip jutted out like a big, fat slug to soak up the sudden storm of tears and snot.
Obito wasn't the second pick. Nor the third. Nor the fourth. Nor the fifth, sixth, seventh. And so on and so forth until Obito was standing by himself, glaring at us with red, watery eyes. He looked round and round, searching every face for sympathy. But Asuma crossed his arms and very deliberately continued to smile in Kurenai's direction; Kakashi's face remained hidden behind his book.
Finally, one of the hooded figures came to prod Obito's trembling back, pushing him forward until he was within the general radius of Asuma's team. Apparently satisfied, the hooded person turned and left Obito to look timidly at his unfortunate teammates who were huddling closer together to form an unbreachable wall.
Asuma sighed and muttered something under his breath that sounded suspiciously like "Crybaby."
Someone snickered. Obito stiffened. We all watched him carefully to see if he would start crying. Even Kakashi poked his head out of his book. And so we all saw Obito bite his lip and look fiercely up at the sky. But it was all in vain. As soon as the first tear rolled down his cheek, Obito blushed a deep red and kicked the ground.
Asuma shook his head.
Kakashi's team won.
She was there when he awoke, carding a gentle hand through his hair. "He's nice," she remarked.
"Who?" Obito asked a bit too quickly and loudly, bolting upright. He immediately regretted the woozy feeling that overcome him.
"Your friend."
He stared at her blankly.
"Asuma," she supplied.
"I—yeah. He's nice," he mumbled, looking away.
"What's wrong?"
"Nothing. Nothing… You weren't there. You don't know-" he choked on the thought. Crybaby. It was all so stupid and childish. "Never mind." Obito blinked hard to clear the despicable tears forming in his eyes. Her hand withdrew from his hair and he just barely caught himself trying to catch her before she left him.
But she didn't, and her hand lit up with a familiar chakra that illuminated her smile. "It's okay," she whispered. "You can tell me when you're ready." It wasn't just her glowing hand that brought him relief.
"I-okay."
