He wakes up again, on the same day as the last attempt at living his life again, and is surprised that somehow he's now the kunoichi on Team Minato. At first he's caught up in just freaking out over the differences in the team dynamic, between Rin-chan and Rin-kun, and Kakashi's weirdly not-quite-polite treatment of him, but what throws him off the most is that he has to compensate for every one of his movements in a body that is balanced entirely wrong and that makes him feel like he's been hit with a particularly screwy genjutsu.

It isn't a genjutsu that he can dismiss, if it is one at all, and Obito has no goddamn idea how he survives the mission when he's almost terminally distracted by constantly freaking the fuck out. Mostly in his head, granted, but Sensei can probably see it.

He dares Sensei to try and "understand" being turned into a thirteen-year-old girl. Because the second he does, Obito is going to completely flip his shit.

Interestingly, the Iwa-nin are still men (which means it's just him and Rin that're off, great), but they also elect to try and grab him instead of Rin. This is the kind of thing that convinces Obito that the shinobi world is absolutely sexist, and that Iwa-nin are complete morons, because Kakashi disembowels Taiseki within fifteen seconds while Rin-kun valiantly struggles to keep Kakkou from stabbing him in the back. For Obito's part—and he hasn't even bothered to learn his name in this new world because he feels like that would be acknowledging that he basically has (reincarnation-induced?) gender dysphoria—he catches Kakkou in the face with Kamui and calls it a public service.

As the now-headless corpse hits the ground, Rin catches his (her?) arm and says, "Orihime-chan"—Oh, you're fucking kidding me, Obito thinks—"that was…when did you activate your Sharingan?" He sounds stunned. Male-Rin is doing an excellent fish impersonation, Obito thinks distantly.

"What was that?" Kakashi demands, and there's an edge in that voice that tells Obito that he's worried. The whole situation feels wrong.

"Mangekyou Sharingan." Obito says, numb. He doesn't want to talk about this; he just wants this stupid fucking mission over with forever and he wants to kill Kakkou all over again, despite the fact that it doesn't really make any sense to do so. He needs an outlet for his frustration, though, and they're not going to hit any more point defense forces until the bridge itself. Argh.

On one hand, his teammates thankfully don't ask any more questions, apparently chalking the whole thing up to shock or maybe "that time of the month"—which is a thought that makes Obito kick Kakashi in the back of the knee when he realizes it—and the rest of the mission goes okay.

Relatively, anyway. Obito still kills more than twenty enemy ninjas with Kamui intangibility and a pair of kunai, but his teammates are okay and he almost thinks he can deal with this shit by the time Sensei pops up again to check on his minions.

The fact that his Sharingan jumped two levels from where it ought to be if he'd legitimately activated it on this mission doesn't seem to bother Sensei much. Guy-Rin and Kakashi seem to have convinced him that the situation was way more dramatic than it actually was, and Kakashi's comment about women being overemotional makes Obito threaten to castrate him with a pair of senbon.

Okay, so making all of his teammates wince at once is kind of neat. He doesn't plan on making a habit of it, even if he's apparently restricted to a female body this time around (and all of the problems that come with that, oh shit), but it's still funny.

Puberty sucked the first time through, but being a girl made it suck more. Tsunade did come up with a technique that made it possible to essentially put menstruation on hold, which Obito doesn't actually remember probably because of its irrelevance to his old life, but his sanity degrades the more he dwells on the issues of "becoming a woman." He's a graceless and distinctly unfeminine kunoichi with the Mangekyou Sharingan at thirteen and a load of Clan baggage that comes with that. He doesn't exactly spit in his parents' faces when they start drawing up marriage plans and not-so-subtly encouraging him to retire early, but he might as well have by Uchiha standards. The situation deteriorates.

Especially after it eventually comes out that Kakashi has a crush on him, a little after Obito turns fourteen. So does Rin-kun, incidentally, but Obito freaks out slightly less over that. No matter what, he is not dating his best friend.

Obito finds out about this after the third time he witnesses a pair of older Uchiha bachelors—Yoshi and Matsu, who are equally stupid no matter where or when he sees them—and Kakashi get into an argument over "Orihime-chan." He cracks Yoshi and Matsu's heads together and has Kakashi explain, at length, what the hell is going on. He doesn't like the explanation, though it makes sense in this twisted reality, and decides that Kakashi probably doesn't deserve to get knocked on his ass for trying not to be a chauvinist pig. They drop the idiots off on Fugaku's doorstep and head off to their team meeting as if nothing happened.

Obito still does his best to beat the crap out of Kakashi just on principle when it's their turn to spar. He's going to catch up to or surpass Kakashi sooner or later, kunoichi or not, and the prodigy steps up his game as well. They're leaving Rin in their dust in everything but medical ninjutsu, but Obito has a leg up on that, too.

(He has officially learned more in a couple of months than he ever did from the Academy about being kunoichi, which scares the hell out of him.)

When he finally does get kicked out of the Uchiha clan, it's only after a particularly bitter argument between him and his parents. His father is every bit as bullheaded as ever, only now it's focused on Obito's kunoichi status and apparent clan responsibility to pop out grandkids with strong Sharingan genes. While the exact content of the argument is different, this is basically a variant on Obito's original reasons not to inform anyone other than his team that he ever activated his Sharingan. While it is possible to come up with, say, a Caged Bird Seal variant for the Sharingan, and Obito thinks that his clan might decide that the only solution is keeping him captive through fuuinjutsu, he doesn't care.

His clan stopped being his family a long time ago.

"You are a capable kunoichi, Orihime," his father says, which is the closest thing to a compliment Obito has heard from the man in years and it's not even addressed to the right person, "but you need to start thinking of your future."

"And what kind of future is that?" Obito shoots back, standing up and looming over the table despite being slighter and less intimidating than he's been in ages. But he has the Sharingan now, even if he's not using it. "I'm going to make jounin and I'm going to protect Konoha if it kills me!"

"This clan is your family, Orihime," his mother says. "You have a responsibility to us, too."

He wants to laugh. He wants to laugh so badly that he's shaking, backing away from his parents like he's never seen them before in his life. They're not even his, they're Orihime's, and he's not even sure what his female clone would have done in this situation. He just knows what he is going to do, and the rest of the world's going to have to live with it.

"No." Obito says. "You haven't seen what I can do, what I'm going to be. I can't stop now!"

His father is the same in all worlds. He's caught up in the clan and politics and the shame of having a "weakling" for a child, while his mother's been disappointed in his—in Orihime's—failure to show off the Sharingan or master the higher levels of his clan's fire jutsu, and they're both so blind that Obito wonders how he could have possibly thought he knew them. Or that he wanted to. Now that she can actually make a difference, they want to forcibly retire…her?

Ah, fuck, it's starting to get internalized.

"I won't be tied down by the clan just when the village needs me the most!"

Her father has been dismissive and disapproving for years. Snide comments are his sole method of communication. Her mother just ignores everything.

It's the first time her father's ever tried to hit her. Tried, because Orihime/Obito is very, very good at using her/his Mangekyou Sharingan by now and her/his father's hand simply passes through her/his head.

Obito, having partially shoved the "Orihime" persona back into a mental box, flees while his parents are still reeling in shock.

Obito moves in with Kushina for a bit. He doesn't know the other kunoichi that well, relative to Sensei or Kakashi or Rin-kun, but it's just a temporary situation until he can get his own apartment set up.

When he finally moves into his apartment, he opens his door the next day and Kakashi is there, holding a potted plant.

"It's a housewarming gift." Kakashi says bluntly, without being asked.

"…Okay?" Obito says, and takes it. Kakashi disappears after, apparently leaving the fate of the plant solely to Obito. He puts it in his new window-box garden since he's probably going to be gone frequently and Konoha weather is generally better for bamboo than the inside of an apartment is. Sensei helps put up security seals, which Obito resolves to learn this time around, and Rin shows up with a bunch of herbal remedies and salves that are probably a lot stronger than the kind Obito can afford on his now-reduced income.

It seems to be going okay, in a kind of numb way, until Kushina decides to confront Obito on "playing with boys' hearts."

Kushina has a record of being the same way, but now that she's officially in a relationship with Minato, she pretty much has the high ground. He wonders briefly if Orihime spent any of her time flirting with her male teammates, then resolves never to think of it again. Apparently, being deliberately obtuse and deaf to his teammate's attempts at earning his approval because of something completely alien to Orihime (gender dysphoria, again) but very relevant to Obito…is somehow considered being a tease? It's news to him.

Ugh.

The stupid, annoying, and mildly horrifying part is that the "Orihime" part of him actually is attracted to guys. Specifically, to her teammates, and the boys have noticed the shift in behavior. Most people don't go from "blushing fangirl" to "apparently asexual (due to severe gender issues)" overnight, and sooner or later his team is going to freak out over it. Well, maybe. Rin isn't really given to freaking out as a rule, Kakashi is…Kakashi, and Sensei is pretty good at rolling with the punches. It is kind of important to the dynamics of their team, though.

Obito hates that he's stolen her life, but he hates it more that he's living it.

Nothing happens on the tenth of October that year, oddly enough. Aside from Naruto being born, which means everyone is distracted by the baby and there are a few more intermittent kidnapping and assassination attempts. Obito kills most of the conspirators offhandedly—he's a lot better at Kamui than the other Mangekyou Sharingan techniques and it doesn't kill his eyesight nearly as quickly—and earns a nickname for him/herself: the Phantom Princess.

Obito would have preferred if they left the "princess" part out of it, but nicknames are things other people give you and Phantom Obito technically doesn't exist in this world. Kakashi gets his dad's old moniker, the White Fang of Konoha, mostly due to mistaken identity and the fact that Kakashi still swings his dad's tantou around, and he joins ANBU.

It's like he's magnetically attracted to black ops.

By the time they're seventeen and all jounin, most of the romantic triangle bullshit on Team Minato is officially put on hold. Orihime might like Rin-kun and Kakashi-kun, with emphasis slightly more on the former, and both of them like her back, but Obito isn't Orihime and ignores any and all of his teammates' attempts to get "her" attention.

By the time they're twenty-two, Naruto's running around as the village's eight-year-old golden boy and driving the chuunin completely crazy with his antics. In the intervening years, there have been a few drunken confessions and make-outs and all sorts of shenanigans that make Obito consider finding the inventor of the hangover and killing him, and the whole situation is more muddled than ever. Obito and Rin are both medic-nin (which means that Rin is an actual medic and Obito is a field medic who works in the hospital a lot), which means they see each other mostly during coffee breaks and Kakashi mostly when he comes back from a mission with most of his blood missing, and the atmosphere is thick enough to cut with a kunai. Kakashi finally quits ANBU when Obito convinces him to stop trying to kill himself, which means more alcohol is involved and more awkward things happen.

Then the Uchiha clan is revealed to be plotting a coup. Technically, Obito isn't supposed to know about the mission to cut said conspiracy short and, as a member of said clan by blood if not by anything else, would have been included in the casualty list if Danzou had any say in it. Sensei tries to talk the clan out of it, Root tries to talk the clan into it, and eventually the whole thing explodes into an intra-clan civil war.

Or it would have, if Obito hadn't quietly poisoned Danzou as well as Hotaru, Homura, and every Uchiha clan elder who was on board with launching a coup several weeks before the massacre was due to happen. He pins the whole thing on Orochimaru and possibly Sasori via creative use of the Mangekyou Sharingan, and while everyone else is confused and scared by the implication, Obito merely tries to avoid thinking about it.

At least Itachi doesn't have to do it—he'd overheard that much while using Kamui to get around undetected, and decided that sparing his cousin the guilt was the best he could do.

Obito keeps that secret close to his chest until the day Kakashi enters Team Seven—seriously, he seems destined to get the same kids every time, since Obito had outright refused to be a jounin sensei despite being one of the very rare jounin-ranked kunoichi not named Kurenai—into the Konoha Chuunin Exams. Orochimaru is dangerous, yes, but Obito knows that he can take the man down as long as he can catch him by surprise. Sensei could, too, but…

It's when he's in the middle of coming up with excuses that he decides he can't trust his own judgment anymore. So he goes to the Hokage's office and requests a private meeting.

He doesn't say anything about his old lives, because no one would believe him anyway, but he uses the experience he gained there in order to point Sensei in the right direction. He leaves a deliberate hole in the story as far as the assassinations are concerned, since Shisui doesn't need any more trouble as clan head and Itachi sure as hell doesn't need to know that his once-favorite cousin chose murder as a solution to a problem that ought to have been talked out. Sensei doesn't call him on it, but everyone starts preparing for Orochimaru's invasion anyway. He confesses to pretty much everything else, though, such as the various problems he's been having with his teammates that have devolved into some kind of nameless clusterfuck of a thing, as well as whatever foreknowledge he has about Konoha's enemies is still relevant.

Orochimaru dies at Sensei's hands. Kabuto is taken out by Rin-kun, with points for the assist going to Gai. Kakashi has a list of kills as long as his arm, including the notorious Sound Four, and Obito thinks that he's killed more Oto-nin in twenty-four hours than he's killed Iwa-nin in his entire lifetime. They're basically cannon fodder despite their loyalty to Orochimaru, and only Kimimaro actually gave him any trouble.

Kamui is remarkably difficult to get around, even with such a powerful kekkei genkai.

Obito isn't actually sure if he dies, the day after the Exams, but he sure isn't Uchiha Orihime anymore. Obito kind of hopes that the Phantom Princess manages to figure out what the fuck to do with the rest of Team Minato, and that she isn't too confused when she wakes up. Maybe the memories will carry over and spare her some of the drama Obito started.

Good luck, kid.

He wakes up on the day of the Kannabi Bridge mission again.

At the first sign of Iwa-nin, he immediately kills both of them with Katon: Karyuu Endan despite the risks. Rin isn't kidnapped, which is a relief in a distant sort of way that tells Obito that he's actually going insane by inches. The next day, they manage to destroy the bridge despite the fact that the site is crawling with Iwa-nin, but both of his teammates spend the mission not-so-subtly trying to figure out what the hell changed between Point A and Point B, and Sensei isn't remotely happy with the sudden change in his formerly goofy student. It's not actually impossible that Obito has been replaced by a spy, from Sensei's perspective, but in fact he's just so tired of this bullshit that he'd rather slaughter more than three dozen Iwa-nin than deal with them normally ever again.

Obito spends the rest of the war as a part of an ANBU infiltration team, despite never actually joining and possibly over Sensei's objections, but when he faces Shimura Danzou and forcible recruitment by Root after a successful mission, he isn't able to keep it together anymore.

He thinks that dying in the black blaze of Amaterasu flames ought to at least make it stick.

The bridge, again.

This time Kakashi dies trying to save him from something he would have seen coming, if he'd been able to think past the shroud of why does this keep happening to me.

(no no no NO)

Obito massacres the reinforcing Iwa-nin until can't anymore because he's finally run out of targets, after rescuing Rin on his own and tearing Kakkou and Taiseki limb from limb. At thirteen, he doesn't have the chakra reserves to survive spamming Kamui for more than a few minutes, but he makes them pay.

He dies later, while Sensei's demanding that he stay awake and he realizes that he can't follow that order.

He remembers dying. It happened (again), it's over (oh nothing so easy), and he can move on (if wishes were horses).

So when he blinks up at the sky (again and again on and on forever) and sees those same stars in a silver steam above his head, he comes to the conclusion that he's in hell. He doesn't want to see this again—he doesn't want anything to do with this doomed world—and is about to turn his eyes from it and just shatter. He's had enough, he's sorry, he just wants to go home—

And he can't.

Can't turn his head. Can't flex his fingers. Can't move a muscle. He can't even breathe on his own, only feel his lungs expand and contract entirely separate from anything like his control.

Chill seeps into the back of his mind.

He hears his own voice saying quietly, timidly, "I know teamwork is an important thing, but Kakashi's always calling me a lazy idiot. Even though people think I'm some kind of elite shinobi because I'm an Uchiha, it's not the same to him. I know Kakashi's an amazing person, but…he's kind of an uptight asshole."

No.

Sensei's voice says, "Kakashi is the son of the genius shinobi Hatake Sakumo, who was feared as Konoha's White Fang. Compared to that name, even the Sannin aren't half as feared or honored. That's public knowledge, right?"

No!

This can't be happening!

But it is. He's back, again, and this time it's obvious that he's not the one in control. He's not sure how this will go, but he already has an inkling of the way this is going to go (I'll be your good eye) and wishes he could get enough air to scream.

Thirteen-year-old Obito is not an especially competent shinobi, even by the admittedly low standards set by now-thirty-year-old-and-ethereal Obito sixteen years ago. No Sharingan, no genius-level intellect, and an admittedly shallow pool of available techniques mean that he's the weakest link in the chain in his role. Rin is an excellent medic. Kakashi is a pretty good leader and a talented jounin, if young enough that experience was a problem. Obito's dead weight.

Obito remembers being a ninjutsu specialist. Probably half of his entire repertoire was blatantly stolen from somewhere else, and he isn't ashamed of that. He was good at what he did and made sure to spread the secrets of his enemy's jutsu as much among Konoha's elite as possible, in order to keep people alive. But he also knows that it took time to amass that many techniques and that the miniature copy of him leading the way is not going to have that long.

Rin gets kidnapped (again).

Kakashi loses an eye (which is new but unsurprising).

Obito gets crushed by a rock (which explains the phantom pain from failed attempts).

He expects it to end there, with his half-flattened corpse being an object of interest for rats or perhaps particularly stubborn Iwa-nin. Maybe the Sharingan—well, the other one, anyway—will end up being dissected and reassessed and maybe the war will drag on for years with even more ridiculous losses. Maybe Rin won't die this time around. Maybe Kakashi will end up becoming famous as a non-Uchiha user of the Sharingan. Maybe they'll get over his loss and get married or something. He just doesn't know, and it's not like he's really going to live to see it.

He's therefore extremely surprised to find that his mini-self actually makes it.

He's even more surprised to find out that his miniature clone has successfully attracted the attention of one Uchiha Madara, who is supposed to be dead.

Obito-the-Elder is simultaneously trying to and trying not to listen to him. He feels like he needs to know the details, of this Moon's Eye plan and the way the elder Uchiha had reverse-engineered the Rinnegan (and wasn't that just a wonderful kick in the teeth) out of his Eternal Mangekyou Sharingan and a smattering of Senju DNA. He needs to know how the fuck Madara plans on reviving the Juubi, Gedou Mazou or not—because, frankly, the only reason for it to exist is either as a toy for a Rinnegan-user or a container for the bijuu. He doubts Madara, who is probably more than ninety years old and hardly less canny than he's ever been, is modest or sane enough to know that the Juubi is not to be toyed with.

Obito remembers the Naka Shrine. He can't show anyone its contents except in the case of Sharingan-users, but as the head of the Uchiha clan (how is it a clan if there are only three members left), he'd figured enough out from its tablet and the testimonies of the youkai who'd been there when the Juubi had met its end. The statue has "bad news" written all over it, down to the weird chakra-thrumming cords attached to Madara's back, and he can't figure out how to tell Obito-the-Younger a goddamn thing.

That thing is supposed to still be on the moon.

What worries him is that the other version of him seems to be listening.

Obito-the-Elder is old enough to know that the shinobi world is fundamentally broken. It's been broken since long before even Madara was born; back through the bad old days of clan wars and even to the time of the Rikudou Sennin, when the Juubi roamed free and the best anyone could say about the era was what they didn't say. Even the ninja villages are just ways for humans to impose a veneer of civilization over a world that's only known what peace is for maybe sixteen years at a time and, if Kagome's stories about her childhood are true (that miko is a living fossil), they've missed the goddamn mark a hundred times over.

Obito-the-Younger doesn't know any of that. Even if history had been his best subject at the Academy, shinobi history was full of holes where classified or just unpopular history had been discreetly removed. It was hard to notice unless a student went by dates, and even those were sometimes misleading. Basically, propaganda is the name of the game and only those old or intelligent enough to notice tended to even spot the threads.

So, when Madara says he wishes for a peaceful word, Obito-the-Younger agrees.

Somewhat unsurprisingly, Obito-the-Younger has some trouble getting around at first. With two limbs replaced by strange grayish substitutes that bleed orange sap instead of blood, rehab is slow going. He's helped along by a pair of creatures that make Obito-the Elder wish he could narrow his eyes (but they're not his anymore so he can't), who look like prototypes of a strange shinobi he's seen before.

Zetsu, right? He was a Kusa-nin at some point? It's starting to seem less and less likely.

Still, Obito-the-Younger seems to get along with them. Madara is dying of old age anyway, so it's unlikely he'll be under the older Uchiha's thumb for too much longer.

Eventually, Obito-the-Younger leaves. He's accompanied on this maiden voyage (back to Konoha as a plant person) by the two proto-Zetsu things, and it takes Obito-the-Elder a while to figure out what path they're using. It takes him longer to guess how many days (weeks/months) he's been trapped in this hidey-hole, speaking to one other person and two not-quite-people and living in a virtual echo chamber because everyone has the same goddamn opinions.

He realizes the when and where when he hears the sound of the Chidori screaming through the air, of Kiri-nin and Rin's shout of desperation, as glimpses of shadowed masks flicker in the gap where his other eye's vision ought to have been. It chills him to the bone.

Obito-the-Younger rushes out of the forest at the exact moment when Kakashi's Chidori puts a hole through Rin's chest.

Obito-the-Younger snaps. He shrieks in rage, and Mokuton from that transplanted arm means that the enemy shinobi—Kiri ANBU—are thoroughly ground into pulp by the time Rin's lifeless body is cradled in his mismatched arms. His vision, already twisted through the Sharingan, does a second turn and then he knows that the Mangekyou has taken form. Kakashi is slumped over on the ground, out cold, but Obito-the-Elder nonetheless is sure that the Mangekyou in that eye is active as well.

Obito-the-Elder doesn't feel his younger self's anguish, but his is more than enough even though it's dulled by repetition. Rin's dead again, for the same reason as before and by the same hand. If he didn't know that Rin survived once—that he'd married her in the life he remembers and wishes he was still living—he thinks he'd have gone insane. Last time, he came very close, but he hung onto his humanity by his goddamn fingernails and he did his best to fulfill her wish. He died then, to protect Sensei and Kakashi and the entire village, and even if he'd been afraid that didn't mean he regretted it.

Obito-the-Younger doesn't. He doesn't acknowledge anything but the corpse in his arms, ignoring his unconscious ex-teammate and the bodies of the enemy ninja. Obito-the-Younger's world was very fragile. Now it's broken.

When Obito-the-Younger returns to Madara's hideaway, his older self is not surprised. Disappointed, but not surprised. He tries not to be surprised anymore. But it seems that his younger copy has one last surprise in store for him.

Obito-the-Younger masters his remaining half of Kamui. He takes Madara's techniques and knowledge for his own. When the older shinobi dies, there are no tears, and Obito-the-Elder waits in the corner of their shared consciousness and tries and fails to get through to his younger self. It's like they're different people now.

Obito-the-Younger becomes a monster.

He's Tobi now.

Tobi haunts Konoha. He hovers around the memorial stone, perhaps because Kakashi appears here so very often, thinking that both of his teammates are dead, when in reality one of them has turned into a homicidal maniac.

"Kushina-sama is going to have a baby. Oh, Rin, I knew you wanted to be here for it…"

Obito doesn't know what to think of it all until Tobi walks right through a barrier seal (oh mother fuck I did the same thing last time) and uses Kamui to wipe out two entire squads of ANBU. Then he moves in on the safehouse in the hills, and Obito suddenly knows exactly what Tobi is planning. He wants to scream, but there's no one who can hear him, and he can't even look away when Tobi snatches the infant Naruto out of the cradle and immediately threatens to kill him.

He would have succeeded, too, if Sensei hadn't figured out there were exploding tags on Naruto's blanket. Sensei disappears, and Tobi grabs Kushina while he's gone.

He takes Kushina to a sealing array (FUCK NO GET AWAY FROM HER). The Kyuubi is extracted. And just like that, Tobi turns the goddamn thing on Kushina. Sensei saves her, thank the merciful kami, but Tobi just points it at Konoha instead.

Obito has never wanted to kill someone this badly in his entire life, Pain included.

A lot of things happen in quick succession. As the Kyuubi approaches Konoha, Tobi and Sensei fight. Tobi's control is broken, and he leaves, but Obito knows how the story goes next.

Sensei uses Shiki Fuujin and seals the Kyuubi into Naruto. Kushina can't survive after the Kyuubi's removal, and she dies too. Naruto grows up alone, unless Kakashi steps in, but he's so shit at interpersonal responsibility I bet the answer's still going to be no.

Tobi departs. He heads instead to Ame, where he creates Pain from the wreck of Akatsuki and Hanzou and Root-raised ANBU and Amegakure. Somehow, Obito has stopped being surprised—it almost makes sense that Tobi would be this vicious, this ambitious. He's looking at all of his own personality traits turned inside-out, after all. Or maybe just turned to evil.

He turns Kiri on itself, hitting the Yondaime Mizukage with the Mangekyou and letting the village turn itself into the Bloody Mist. In doing so, he picks up Hoshigaki Kisame—apparently, he's been a disappointed idealist all this time, and eventually becomes Tobi's only confidante other than Obito, who would really prefer to be his murderer instead. When the Kaguya clan attempts to assassinate the Mizukage, Yagura, it gets itself slaughtered down to a single surviving child in retaliation. When Momochi Zabuza tries a coup, he's chased out as a missing-nin and traitor. Obito wonders if Tobi is doing it to avenge Rin, but he can't exactly ask.

Obito grows quiet as the years pass.

When the Uchiha clan back in Konoha begins to bristle at being treated less than fairly, as much because of Councilman Shimura Danzou as their own arrogance, Tobi needles them onward. When it almost looks like the clan elders have succeeded in pushing them into it, Shimura Danzou convenes with Utatane Hotaru and Mitokado Homura and they order the Uchiha Massacre. Itachi carries out the hit on his immediate family, but Tobi is there every step of the way to reduce the rest to corpses.

Obito doesn't think Tobi notices the way Itachi is crying toward the end. He hopes he never does.

Tobi collects what seems like dozens of Sharingan eyes. He shares some with Danzou, and the man places them in a grayish limb that resembles Tobi's so much that Obito knows they got the idea from the same source: Madara.

Obito wonders, briefly, what Kagami would have thought if he saw his old teammate steal his son's eye, and decides not to think on it. Shisui's Mangekyou is hideously dangerous in the wrong hands, being oriented toward genjutsu in general and undetectable mind-control in particular—thank the merciful kami that Itachi has the other one.

Tobi doesn't know that last part—Obito just knows Itachi (mostly) and Shisui (less so but he used to call Kagami ojisan and mean it) a little too well, and Danzou just enough.

Time moves onward. Tobi reinvents Akatsuki from the ground up, turning it into the refuge for S-class missing-nin that it was once upon a time. Pain and Konan are there, more as relics of a bygone age than anything, while Kisame joins because he follows Tobi and Itachi follows because he has no choice. Orochimaru comes and goes, eventually chased off by Itachi and meaning that Sasori (Kakashi's dad killed his parents) needs a new partner. Itachi forces Deidara into the role, student of the Sandaime Tsuchikage or not. Kakuzu is already there, sort of like an old vase in a house that has a million of them already and no one really knows where any of them came from, and keeps killing his partners until Hidan shows up. Zetsu comes along more because he likes Tobi than anything, and with Madara's will carrying on as the new Black Zetsu while White Zetsu remains the same idiot as before, they're only there to help him succeed.

Their new mission is to capture the Bijuu. Each two-man pair is assigned two bijuu, though Konan is exempt for a reason no one knows. Tobi doesn't care, relaying his orders through Pain, who seems to think that creating a super-weapon through Tobi's plan will end all war. He doesn't understand a thing. For a child of a warzones, he's naïve.

Of them, only Kisame and Zetsu are loyal. The rest of them are distracted (Kakuzu, Deidara, Sasori, Hidan), or depressed (Itachi, Konan, Pain), or actively plotting to steal power for themselves (Orochimaru). Obito hates every last one of them, and he's pretty sure Tobi does, too.

Sometimes he wonders if Tobi even thinks before running off to cause more pain. Not often, though—nearly thirteen years in this hell has convinced him that his opinions don't matter and that there are no options left.

Obito wishes he could close his eyes to the world and run away, but Tobi won't let him.

Sasori dies. Deidara is in need of a replacement teammate, so Tobi joins his own goddamn organization and pretends that there's anything like a soul left inside his body.

I'm here, I guess. Wonder what that makes him.

Then another problem comes to his attention: Itachi's dying.

It's not obvious, given the younger Uchiha's downright ridiculous skill and power (even if he's still afraid of "Madara"), but Obito didn't train to be a medic-nin for nothing the last time around. Obito doesn't want to see him die—he's the only sane relative left, it seems—but when Itachi feels death's presence creeping around, he speeds up his plans. And Obito knows that Itachi always has a plan, especially for the kid brother he left behind in Konoha.

Even if Sasuke's a missing-nin too.

In the meantime, Tobi takes on the Sanbi. Obito wonders if he bears any kind of grudge against it, but Tobi lets Deidara take it down and doesn't seem to mind, just babbling away like usual and making "Deidara-senpai" attempt murder on a daily basis out of sheer annoyance.

Sasuke kills Deidara. Or at least Deidara kills himself and fails to take Sasuke with him. Given how twisted the youngest Uchiha has become over the years, Obito's not sure it's really a victory.

Tobi appears in front of Naruto's team, seemingly to taunt them, and makes a mockery of their attacks. None of them have the slightest clue how to deal with him and Obito wants to reach out with his Sharingan and trap Tobi in one side or the other. Then rip him in half. Tobi orphaned Naruto, not to mention causing more trouble in one lifetime than Madara's managed even in his extended one. He has no right to get in their way!

He distracts Team 8 and Team Yamato long enough for Sasuke to confront Itachi. Itachi dies.

Tobi turns Sasuke into a monster, too. It only takes him a few dozen sentences.

And at the same time, Pain finally moves. Jiraiya's dead, and Konoha is flattened by the Six Paths of Pain. Tobi doesn't care all that much, so Obito never sees the full list of the dead, but he can damn well guess. The village is still a bloody crater, and the Fourth Shinobi War is right around the corner.

(He's surprised when Konan says that Naruto got Nagato to turn back to his oldest philosophy and revive the dead, but it's the only good news he's had in ages and he clings to it.)

Obito wishes he could retroactively kill Tobi. That he'd really died in that rock-fall so many years ago. Or that he'd never been caught by the rocks at all. He's not sure.

Sasuke formally joins Akatsuki and goes after Killer Bee. His new goal in life is to burn Konoha to the ground (missed your chance you brat), killing everyone more thoroughly than Pain had, and to do that he seems to think that he needs Tobi's assistance. Even when he fails to capture the Hachibi, the attempt pisses off the Raikage badly enough to pursue a vendetta that carries over to the Five Kage Summit.

Danzou is there instead of Tsunade. Obito worries, briefly, and mourns.

Tobi confronts Danzou's bodyguards and kills them both, though Torune manages to stick those hellish kikai into his artificial limbs and start disintegrating them, which leaves Tobi sidelined when Sasuke confronts Danzou.

Sure, he tries going through the other four Kage first and gets his ass thoroughly kicked, but Killer Bee's survival throws the Raikage off and Zetsu distracts everyone else.

It's the first time Obito gets a clear look at Danzou's…Sharingarm. Fuck if he knows what to think after actually seeing it other than that it shouldn't exist. He's not prepared for the Izanagi—the ability to turn reality into genjutsu and genjutsu into reality, at the cost of an implanted Sharingan per usage. Somehow, this seems to translate as "I do not need to dodge" in Danzou's head, and it doesn't take a genius to realize that Sasuke is perfectly willing to simply keep killing him until Izanagi runs out permanently. All the seal work or moral quandaries in the world won't stop Sasuke either—he stabs right through the Uzumaki girl on his team, simply to wound Danzou after the Izanagi has run out and even despite the thick black seal paralyzing his body.

Obito wonders where the fuck his formerly-adorable little cousin got all of these dick moves from, aside from Orochimaru.

I hate this world so, so much.

Danzou, in his last few moments, rips the Sharingan-laden arm off in order to keep it from consuming him. He also destroys a Mangekyou Sharingan—Shisui's, Obito realizes numbly—and neatly deprives Tobi of a very powerful asset.

After that, it's a question of who can fuck up the world first.

Kabuto pops up, for some reason—Obito resents him with the dull, persistent hate of someone who's officially run out of any more room for things to waste active anger on—and through a general haze of despair he realizes that Tobi and Kabuto have mutually incompatible goals. Tobi wants a new world order, determined by him, and Kabuto just wants to use the rest of the planet as his personal playground like Orochimaru used to (when did he even die anyway). Still, Tobi sends Kabuto to figure out where Naruto and Killer Bee got off to when he wasn't paying attention and possibly capture them, but Kabuto comes back with Yamato and Anko and Obito wants to kill him all over again.

Anko is drained of all her chakra, and the Curse Seal she carries is used to obtain Orochimaru's chakra. Yamato is hooked up to some sort of cloning device (why is the other me such a piece of shit) in order to…basically mass-produce Zetsus. He doesn't understand why until he sees Kabuto use Edo Tensei with the Zetsus as sacrifices.

When Kabuto uses Edo Tensei to bring Madara back to life—at the peak of his power, in fact, and with the Rinnegan fully formed in both eyes—Obito can only think that Tobi is going to blow a fuse.

He doesn't, but Tobi and Madara get along even less than Kabuto and Tobi did before.

So, there's an army of (famous) undead shinobi, versus the combined forces of the Five Elemental Nations. The Edo Tensei constructs range in power from Haku and Zabuza (Naruto remembered him as a friend) to the fucking Sandaime Raikage. Merciful kami, Obito wishes Tobi was still vulnerable to heart attacks and other spontaneous hiccups of critical internal organs, but being half-Zetsu himself had neatly sidestepped that issue. This entire situation is so fucked up and he wants it all to end.

It does. Eventually.

Kakashi has the Mangekyou and Kamui, though he's not as adept at using it as Tobi is. They fight, flipping back and forth between the hollow world and the real one in order to keep fighting each other instead of leaving Tobi vulnerable to Kyuubi-synchronized Naruto. Tobi thinks he can take Kakashi, and might even be right.

The Juubi's massive body sprouts additional bodies—clones—to deal with the oncoming threat of the New Sannin—Naruto, Sasuke, Sakura—and snaps like some mad dog. Its seven-tomoe Rinnegan glows gray-purple against the night sky.

Obito doesn't know what Tobi is thinking, but his reactions slow, and Kakashi eventually punches a thoroughly lethal hole in his torso. He warps out of the hollow world, choking on his own blood, and screams as Madara overwrites the White Zetsu half of Tobi's body. It's a horrible sound, audible across half the battlefield, and Obito knows exactly what Madara's going to do even if Tobi can't think about it, or anything at all.

Found you.

Then the Juubi, formerly so focused on crushing the Shinobi Alliance, whirls around to face him. The place where its Rinnegan eye should be, seven tomoe spinning, has been replaced by a massive golden eye with a pupil like a single slash of a knife. It lunges, ignoring commands and requests and even the attempt at intangibility, and bites Tobi in half with its misshapen flower-pod of a head.

Obito has never wanted to thank a bijuu before, but he does it anyway.

I reject your reality and substitute my own.

Uchiha-san.

Uchiha-san.

Obito?

TIME

TO WAKE

UP