Author's Notes:
Life sucks. Then you die. Then you get brought back to life, because life wasn't done making you miserable yet.
~oOo~
Chapter 8:
Hold On to What's Left
~oOo~
Mikoto sat silently next to Kushina. She already knew Minato was dead. But what about...?
The Copy Wheel, unfortunately, for all that it could read the finest details of body language, was useless as a conversational guide. Not that Mikoto would turn it on here and now, even if it did help. The Copy Wheel was a weapon, bared to kill or intimidate. Never for precious moments. (The great irony of her bloodline, and maybe the source of the Curse of Hatred some elders still whispered about, was that, since the Copy Wheel was a weapon and handled like a weapon should, Uchiha could barely remember their most intimate moments, even as they had perfect recall of every fight and every failure.)
"Did the baby survive?" Mikoto finally asked.
Kushina's face darkened. Oh damn.
"They took Naruto away," she grumbled.
Mikoto blinked. "They're alive?" She really did go with "Naruto"?
"I didn't get to hold him for sages knew how long, then I get three minutes before passing out anyway," Kushina said, sitting up straighter and getting louder as she went on. "Then as soon as I wake up I still can't hold him because 'nobody's ever made a living sacrifice that young' and 'we have to make sure the seal will hold'! Bullshit! I'm a seal master; that seal is good because I say it is!"
Kushina was yelling now, but Mikoto wasn't surprised. Her friend had never bothered hiding her emotions. (Mikoto sometimes wondered if all Uzumaki had been like that, or if Kushina was simply Kushina.)
She hurt for her. Kushina had been talking about starting a family since Mikoto first met her. And Mikoto remembered how she felt when she'd had Itachi, how she'd treasured those first few moments with him more than anything. (She'd let Itachi hold Sasuke only in the face of disaster, and even then, only because she knew Itachi already loved his new brother dearly, and would die for him the same as her.)
"Kushina?" a woman said close to them. They both looked up at her.
Kushina grunted. "You're alive, Biwako."
Mikoto wasn't surprised that Lady Sarutobi had been assigned to Kushina tonight. Despite what many would've assumed, Tsunade had apparently been put on guard duty. For all her medical skills, the Slug Queen was a combat medic and woefully unqualified for what many medic ninjas referred to as "domestic medicine"—in short, stuff like pregnancy and childbirth.
"You and Naruto were the only ones targeted in the initial attack," said the older woman. She'd helped Minato save Naruto from the curse tag, though Kushina hadn't been around for that. "Naruto's already survived a curse tag, and he's survived the Nine-Tails' sealing just fine," she said, smiling.
Kushina looked relieved. Then annoyed again. "Can I hold my baby now?"
"In a moment, yes."
"Ugh, thank-fuckin'-finally."
~oOo~
Kakashi sat up.
His first thought was Obito.
You're a failure in every way that matters.
Obito was right. Kakashi was trash that deserved to die.
Yet Kakashi was alive, and in a hospital. Glancing around, he saw there wasn't much room. He saw a curtain very close to his bed, separating him from the other patients he could hear. Hospitals usually tried not to cram ninjas together with too many others—it was one of their privileges over civilians. That he was stuck in what was probably a full room said a lot about how much damage the Nine-Tails had done. He saw a card propped up on the simple wooden chair next to him, stamped with what he recognized as the official seal of the General Secretary. He picked it up and read.
Hey, Kakashi.
I'm sorry I couldn't be there for you. (Not when you were attacked—I'm not much of a fighter. I mean, there, right now.) Admin keeps other ninjas from running around like chickens with their heads cut off, and right now we have so very many headless chickens running around. Just know that I love you very, very much and I'm thinking of you every moment I'm glaring at a genin for not moving fast enough. So all the time, really. I'll try to see you tomorrow, okay?
FYI, your mission to protect Kushina is complete. She survived. I hope you enjoy being an "uncle" as much as she'll enjoy being a mom.
Don't be too hard yourself.
Love you,
Mom
Kakashi choked. Don't be too hard on yourself. Then again, you're a failure. It was too much. He wanted to feel both. He'd fucked up, now he was fucked up. He wanted his mother's lifesaver and his almost-brother's anchor together.
"Son?"
Kakashi started at his father's voice. Sakumo was standing next to the hospital bed, looking at him.
"I'm surprised you came," Kakashi said before he could stop himself.
"The Fire Shadow ordered me to ensure your safety against Leaf's attacker," father said.
"Oh."
Kakashi looked disappointed. Sakumo was in turn disappointed with his son. He thought he'd raised Kakashi to understand that duty came before your own wants. Sakumo had gone to his son as ordered by the highest ninja in the land, and Kakashi, of all people, should've understood that fealty was more admirable than any personal motivation. Not only that, but the Fire Shadow's orders had satisfied multiple duties at once—being a ninja and a father—making it the ideal action. It was how Sakumo strove to live.
Kakashi was rubbing the bandage where his teammate's eye had once been.
"Son?" Father asked, "are you alright?"
Not really. The earthly weight in his left socket was gone. An unearthly weight remained.
He rubbed harder, staring down at the card in his lap.
"Could you just..." Kakashi began. "Just go away?" Sakumo's presence was one weight too much. He couldn't bear it. They'd both let their friends die even as they succeeded in nothing that mattered. I don't ever want to be like you but I already am.
Kakashi was a mess. He wanted to be okay. He wanted to hate himself. He didn't want to look up at his father. He wanted to see the hurt in his eyes. He just kept staring at Mother's card. Two years ago, he would've never wished to hurt his father. Now he wanted to know that father could feel something. Now he wanted to hate himself for wanting to hurt him.
Father was gone. Thank fuck for that.
He hoped it hurt. That was what trash deserved.
~oOo~
Rin woke up. Someone was poking her shoulder. Obito, of course. He'd done it often enough, on mornings after missions, back when they were fresh genin and she'd try squeezing in a few extra minutes of rest after an exhausting mission by "accidentally" overdoing a sleep technique the night before.
That'd been a long time ago.
They'd fallen asleep leaning against the wall, leaning against each other. She pulled away from him to look him over. His arm had completely healed and the hole in his chest was gone.
"I see you're okay," she said.
"I guess... you are too?" said Obito. He looked at her chest, where the hole in her clothing showed where the hole in her body had been. When he looked her in the eye again, he had a pained look on his face.
"I'm sorry," he whispered.
"I suppose self-loathing is an improvement," rumbled the Three-Tails.
"How would you know?" Rin said internally. It'd saved her life twice but that didn't mean she appreciated being forced to carve out her best friend's heart. "Can you feel loathing now?"
"Hatred turned the Great Sage's children against each other. It untamed the tailed beasts. The pain they wrought is burned into the world, into me. Into those cursed eyes. Into that living curse. Of course I feel it."
"Why do you care?" she asked, now genuinely curious. Did it care? Was that why the monster had helped?
"Little girl, I care only for a world where I can wander the sea without some human, consumed with wrath, looking at me and seeing only a weapon."
Well okay then.
Rin waved her hand, glowing green with chakra, over where Obito's injuries had been. He really was fine.
"We need new clothes," she said. Among other things. She was already making the list in her head. It was a handy distraction from the bigger problem of what on earth were they supposed to do now? "Do you think it's safe to go back?" she asked Obito.
"What?" He wasn't sure what she was talking about.
"I don't know if I—the Three-Tails—actually killed the living curse thing," she said. "I kind of don't want to get stabbed again." If the look on his face was anything to go by, Rin was handling her injury a lot better than Obito was.
"You did not," said the Three-Tails. "It escaped."
"Is it close by?" she asked it.
The ocean sloshed for a moment, and she got the impression that it'd shrugged. "This is a separate dimension. All I can feel is you two and this dire plain of rocks."
She sighed. Oh, well. "Obito, we can't stay here forever."
Moments later, they warped into her room. Obito never let go of her hand, while Rin, fascinated, passed her limbs through everything within reach. As he'd told her, he could extend his dimensional phasing to anything he was touching, and he'd immediately phased them out as soon as he'd warped them, warily sensing for the living curse.
He closed his eyes, appeared to concentrate for a moment, then looked at her. "I can't sense it. But it'd felt like all the other Zetsus, so I'm not sure." His brow furrowed. "I can't feel any Zetsus now."
"It ate them," the Three-Tails said. "And it's not here."
"How do you know?" Rin asked it.
"You think I couldn't feel it happening last night? How did you think I knew it was time to run?" it answered. "Madara birthed it with his death. A tyrant of his caliber would never let dying stop him from ruining the world."
Rin shared this with Obito. They were careful anyways.
Without the Zetsus powering the lights, they both used lighting techniques. Obito had never learned the modern Fire Lamp technique, and Madara had apparently been too old and reclusive to know it himself. Teaching Obito now was shamefully easy—with the Copy Wheel, he only needed to observe her signing it once—but it still felt comfortingly familiar to her. He wasn't embarrassingly behind anymore, but she was still reminded of her team.
Obito was more cautious than she'd ever seen him, never letting go of her hand, phasing them out at every dancing shadow his Copy Wheel caught. He claimed the Copy Wheel let him see chakra—not through walls or even thick mist like a Hyuuga could; it was just a very soft glow to him—but he was still scared beyond all reason.
Obito refused to say why. He didn't want her to know what the Black Zetsu had said. I will always be there.
While Obito was being paranoid, Rin was much calmer. She didn't trust the Three-Tails itself, but she did trust its fear of Madara and whatever curses he'd carried. If it said the living curse wasn't around, it wasn't around.
She let herself reminisce about her former team. Holding hands like this was common, despite Kakashi's (and apparently his father's) insistence that it was unprofessional. It was one of the more obvious signs of the sort of casual intimacy long-time comrades shared with each other. Rin was hard-pressed to think of any long-time three-man team who weren't seen, at some point, holding hands or casually leaning into each other. Touch was a sign of trust. But for painfully professional ninjas like Kakashi and Sakumo, physical contact was used mostly for violence, or in a violent context. Even after Obito's death, Kakashi had never seemed to shake that sad idea. He'd learned to act silly, but not touch freely. The old Kakashi had seen Obito's easy acceptance of physical contact as another sign that he was unfit to be a ninja. In the old days, the fastest way for a fight to start would be for Obito to thoughtlessly brush against Kakashi in cramped quarters.
Obito stopped moving. He looked at her nervously.
"What is it?" she asked.
"Rin, can I ask a favor?" he pleaded.
Rin glanced over his shoulder. There was an entire wall of eyes. Just Copy Wheels, in square, liquid-filled containers stacked floor to ceiling, covering an entire wall. It creeped her out.
The surgery table he was standing close to made it worse.
"Nope," she said. "Since you're done jumping at shadows, I'm going to eat, then I'm going to shower, then I'm getting clothes that don't have a big hole in the chest." Then maybe later, when she wasn't starving and grimy, she'd hear him out.
A half hour later and sages be damned that wall of eyes was still creepy.
"You sure?" Obito asked nervously.
"I'll be sure once you tell me what this is about," Rin said firmly. This couldn't be good; Obito was dancing around the subject.
"I need you to..." he started and stopped. "Could you put Kakashi's eye back into me?"
She stared at him. "You took your eye back?" He hadn't mentioned that. There were a lot of details he'd skimmed over.
"Yeah."
"And you want me to transplant it back into you."
"Yeah."
"Why?"
"Because." He swayed nervously from side to side. "Because—because it's all I have left of him. Of Kakashi."
She wasn't sure what to think about that. It was a sweet gesture, honestly, but also silly and more than a little creepy when she thought about it. So, like a metaphor for post-death Obito, really.
Obito wasn't sure what else to say. He wished he could explain it with something dramatic. Sworn revenge, or a reminder of what was important. But the truth was, he just missed Kakashi. He missed him so much he was going to shove a dead boy's eye into his face. The loss hurt so badly and it was the closest he could ever get to being with Kakashi again.
Rin nodded. "Get the eye," she said, "and I'll try to find what I need here." She eyed the room dubiously.
~oOo~
For Rin's part, it'd been a lot less stressful than last time, when Obito was half-crushed by a boulder and Kakashi was lying next to him on unstable ground. That'd been a classic battlefield surgery—hurried and brutal. It'd also been her first operation that didn't involve simply administering drugs or healing with chakra.
This time, Rin could indulge in a more formal kind of professionalism. Experience and circumstance were on her side now, and she found herself far more satisfied with the result.
"Well?" she asked when Obito sat up from the operating table. "Can you see fine?"
She was pretty sure he could see, but there was always a gap between what the healer knew about the patient's body, and what the patient themselves actually felt. (She'd also skipped any bandages or recovery time and had simply healed him directly. That was less of an option on the battlefield, where triage and combat demanded she preserve her chakra. Again, circumstance was on her side this time.)
He frowned. "It hurts." It felt like when his Kaleidoscope had first awakened. Before Rin could ask for any details he rushed to the closest mirror.
"Obito!" she cried out. "What's wrong?!"
He stared at his—Kakashi's—eye in the mirror. It was clearly still a Kaleidoscope. But instead of three hooks, there were six, overlapping each other to form a smooth inner circle and a sharply-ridged outer circle. It looked like two of his Kaleidoscope's pattern layered on top of each other.
It was his eye—his own eye.
The Kaleidoscope is born through loss alone. The Eternal Kaleidoscope needs more: for the receiver to lose yet more and the giver to sacrifice everything for them. Its nativity is a single act that encapsulates both in one moment.
He was rubbing both his eyes now because he was crying. He was so confused. Memory told him Kakashi had been a jerk. But Rin told him that Kakashi had loved him, in a way, after he'd died, and his Kaleidoscope told him that Kakashi, ultimately, had freely given his greatest possession to him.
In the corner of the room, unnoticed, a White Zetsu melted deeper into the earth.
~oOo~
White Zetsu re-merged with Black Zetsu. White Zetsu could travel more easily than itself, and it could suppress its life force and chakra to match the surrounding environment. And since it carried no real will of its own, it leaked no killing intent.
It was much harder for Black Zetsu to hide itself—it held a power the White Zetsus didn't possess, and Black Zetsu wasn't sure if Obito could tell the difference already. Certainly the Three-Tails could sense it. Madara had had a great deal of trouble tracking down all of the tailed beasts back in the day, as some could apparently detect curses, including the Curse of Hatred he'd carried. Black Zetsu didn't doubt they could also detect living curses like itself.
Madara hadn't planned on Obito gaining the Eternal Kaleidoscope. He'd planned on Obito reclaiming his other Kaleidoscope, yes, but not for it to transform. The issue was not the Eternal Kaleidoscope itself, but what it could become.
The Samsara Eye. It was supposed to only be born from the merger of the Sage of Six Paths' two bloodlines. The cycle of reincarnation that brought the Sage's two warring children into conflict again and again would end with the victor devouring the flesh of the loser. If the victor was the true heir of the Sage of Six Paths—an Uchiha and wielder of the Eternal Kaleidoscope—they gained the Samsara Eye, a heavenly mandate granting ultimate power and dominion over the world.
Obito couldn't have it. Madara's own, original eyes had a seal preventing them from ever being used against him. Obito having his own Samsara Eye, outside of Madara's control, would make him a dangerous wildcard. The Samsara Eye could counter any curse, including the very Curse of Hatred that drove Obito towards the Eye of the Moon. And as a true owner of the Samsara, Obito could overpower the servant Madara had lent his original eyes to—borrowed eyes could never beat an original wielder.
If Black Zetsu couldn't destroy Obito's Eternal Kaleidoscope, it would have to gamble on the Samsara Eye simply never forming. The White Zetsus were very weak derivatives—copies of copies of copies—but Obito's body was special. Obito's plant half had been grown directly from some of Hashirama's original flesh, and combined with Madara's own blood and bone. Would the Eternal Kaleidoscope react as if Obito was a genuine merger of Indra and Asura's reincarnations, rather than the artifact he was?
~oOo~
Obito had disappeared into Authority again. It frustrated Rin. He'd been so open in those minutes after the surgery, telling her what his eye's new form meant, telling her how much he missed Kakashi and Leaf.
Then, he'd turned inward and left, saying only there was something he needed to do. She didn't have time to ask if it was something he needed done, or Madara needed, before he warped.
Rin wasn't idle. She was preparing to leave. She'd been trapped under this sage-forsaken mountain for almost a year, and refused to stay any longer. She may not be able to go home—not with the Three-Tails flaring up under the stare of the Eternal Kaleidoscope and certainly not with the boy who was Leaf's most-wanted in her company—but she sure as hell wasn't going to spend the rest of her life here. For one, she hadn't seen the sage-damned sun in eleven months, and if she spent any longer without seeing it, she really would give in to the Three-Tails, just to blow out the whole mountain and stand in some sunlight.
(The cranes' homeland of Kushiro Marsh had always been a welcome break, but they never let her stay for more than a couple hours. Worse, time and weather differences meant it was always either overcast or twilight at best when she visited. Leaving Madara's mountain meant sun and freedom in a way nothing else could offer.)
She'd just finished packing for the two of them when Obito appeared again. "Well?" she asked, "are you done moping?"
"I wasn't moping," he said. "Madara's plans were kept in God's Authority. I needed to go over them."
She shoved one of the packs into Obito's arms. "You don't 'need' to review Madara's plans because you won't be doing any of Madara's plans."
"I won't be. But that Black Zetsu..." he said, "I think that's the 'guide' Madara said he'd leave me, after he died."
She looked at him questioningly. "A guide?" she asked. What else about the Moon's Eye did he never mention?
"There're a lot of details I never shared. And a few Madara never did. I think I only know most of his plans, but Black Zetsu probably knows all of them," he said. "If I don't follow them, Black Zetsu will."
Rin nodded. "So we're going to sabotage them?"
"Yeah."
"Where do we need to go?"
"Hidden Rain."
That was... interesting. "As in, the country run by an isolationist tyrant? The same tyrant who repelled all of the Three Greats?"
"There's a rebellion growing there. It's led by the man Madara gave his eyes to."
"What?" she said flatly.
He shrugged. "Yeah, those eyes you saw him use were just spares from the medical center we were in. But the real set, his Samsara Eyes—"
"Wait, wait, wait," she said, holding her hand up to stop him. "Obito, what the fuck, you're my friend, and I'd fight by your side any day, but—'Samsara Eye'? We're ninjas, we don't run blindly into danger if we can help it. So help me. What are all the details of Madara's plans?"
"I'll explain on the way," said Obito, clearly antsy. He was already reaching out to her, Authority swirling around him.
"Good," she said, then turned and walked in the other direction.
He blinked. "Where're you going?"
She looked at him over her shoulder. "We are running to Hidden Rain. On foot. It rains there every day, every year. I'm not leaving this sage-forsaken cave just to warp right there and spend another year without the sun. So we're running. In the daytime and everything."
"But if we take too long—"
"It's not literally Madara," she countered, pivoting to face him again. "You said it yourself: it's a guide. You're supposed to be the one actually doing all the big stuff. If it could do everything by itself, why bother training you?"
Obito winced. He didn't like the idea that Madara had only seen him as a tool. He'd been the best teacher Obito ever had.
~oOo~
Over the next week, word spread that Obito Uchiha, the worst ninja ever born to the Uchiha, had almost destroyed Hidden Leaf. Many blamed the entire Uchiha clan, because of course they did. Such people soon found the full weight of the military police crushing down on them. Fugaku made sure of it. The Uchiha were the military police. They kept the other ninjas in line, and that included doling out punishments for baselessly slandering another clan.
It incensed Fugaku that so many ninjas could be so petty. Besides, how were the Uchiha supposed to know that Obito—stupid, talentless, softhearted Obito—, of all people, would betray Leaf? Honestly, if the Uchiha wanted to betray Hidden Leaf, it wouldn't have lasted the night. It would've been levelled before sunrise.
~oOo~
While she was waiting in the Fire Shadow Tower, Kushina rattled off all the candidates for Fifth Fire Shadow in her head. Sakumo was more than capable but unpopular with the jounin. Tsunade was already head of Hidden Leaf's Medical Corps and the Senju clan, and had no interest in anything that would take her away from that. Jiraiya didn't trust himself with that kind of responsibility. Nobody knew what Orochimaru wanted, but he seemed to enjoy his freedom as head researcher and feared right-hand-man of the Fire Shadow. ("Most of the power with none of the accountability," she'd heard Jiraiya grumble about him once.)
It was petty, but Kushina wasn't exactly flattered. Nothing like knowing you were the fifth one down the list.
Or sixth? She glanced at the one other person with a serious shot. Dan Senju, husband of Tsunade Senju. One of the heroes of the Second Ninja World War.
Kushina was screwed. No way was Tsunade not going to throw her weight behind Dan.
He caught her glancing at him. "For the record, Kushina," he said, "if you become Fire Shadow, I would be honored to serve under you." Not a hint of mirth in his eye.
Shit dammit. Did he have to be so nice about it? This'd be so much easier if she could hate her rival.
"Yeah," she said. "Me too. I mean, I'd be honored to have you as Fire Shadow, too." She'd be sour about it, but it wasn't like Dan was a bad choice.
Dan had meant what he'd said. Was she the best possible leader for Hidden Leaf? Probably not—that'd be Tsunade. But he also knew that she loved the village and hated war—two qualities that went a long way as far as he was concerned.
True, Kushina was notorious for her attention span—sometimes focusing on a single task for hours, then spending other hours unable to focus on anything at all. She also could not. Sit. Still. (As her constant shifting in her chair and perpetually bouncing knee attested to. Dan had learned to ignore it, though that didn't stop the stream of people asking her to stop.) But he knew she'd make a fine Fire Shadow. Any of the candidates would, really. Dan was honestly pretty flattered to be held at the same level as them.
Kushina shifted, switching which knee she was bouncing. It was enough to rattle chairs several feet away. What had she been thinking about? Oh, yes. She was screwed.
Even without the Nine-Tails she could kick the ass of everyone not on the shortlist, as well as give a serious fight to anyone on it. But her actual combat record was thin. As a living sacrifice, she'd been Hidden Leaf's trump card. It was a good thing for the village that she'd never been needed that way, but it was bad for her, because she'd never been given the chance to shine on the battlefield like Minato had. Sure, she was famous now, thanks to being revealed as the lover of the popular Fourth Fire Shadow. (Yes, they'd been seen together for a while now. But there was a big difference between "being seen dating" and "raising a child together".) And she was respected, now that every ninja—not just jounin and above—finally knew she'd been keeping the Nine-Tails at bay for the past 18 years. But that meant diddly-squat if none of the voting jounin believed she could lead them as an army, and run them as a state.
She was also a foreigner, and with the infamous Uzumaki red hair, there was no hiding it. Kushina remembered hearing that Mito, the First Fire Shadow's wife, had also lost her shot at being Second Fire Shadow due to being a foreigner.
Fuck. This was so unfair. She'd spent fifteen years yelling at people that she'd be the next Fire Shadow for nothing.
"I'm surprised you came here without Naruto."
She blinked at Dan. "What?" She'd been grumbling to herself so hard she hadn't really heard him.
"Your kid's only a week old. I'm surprised you're willing to come here without him," Dan said.
"Oh. Yeah, the hospital won't let him out until they're a month old. I guess nobody's ever been made a living seal that young, so they wanna make sure he's super-okay before letting me take him home."
This was actually a welcome break for her. She'd barely left the hospital for a week now, only leaving for an hour once a day to keep up with politics. Specifically, the politics of her being the next Fire Shadow.
~oOo~
It'd taken them a week to reach a village Obito had actually heard of. If they'd just run directly to Hidden Rain, they would've already been there, especially if they'd kept the standard ninja pace of 400 miles a day. Instead, Rin took her time, stopping in every village they came across, not-so-subtly reveling in the look elders gave her when they saw the Nohara clan marks on her face, eagerly offering her services as a medic to them.
Rin still wore her forehead protector, Leaf symbol proudly displayed on it. Obito didn't have his anymore—Madara had either thrown it out or the Zetsu that rescued him had left it behind in the rubble—but he was still obviously not a civilian. It occurred to him, repeatedly, that he should get a mask, because while word still wouldn't have spread out here yet—perhaps it never would, given how poor the roads seemed in these parts of Marsh Country—Obito was still acutely aware that he was a rogue ninja now. He'd be on the first page of every bingo book by the end of the month.
To his great distress, Rin insisted on stopping by the former Hidden Marsh Village.
The invasion and genocide at the hands of Hidden Stone, Cloud, and Waterfall had left the Land of Marshes with no daimyo and no ninja village. Barely a tenth of its civilians had survived, and barely a twentieth of its ninjas.
There were just enough ninjas left these days—only a few thousand, compared to over a hundred thousand before the war—to keep it from completely imploding into something worse than the Warring Clans Era. Most were descendants of the few hundred or so survivors from the war. Rin didn't see any. She and Obito were the only ones walking on water.
Hidden Marsh Village was called South Marsh now. Built up from many small, manmade islands over the centuries, it housed a quarter million people in the heart of Marsh Country's famed inland marshes. It was the second-largest city in the country. It still felt very small.
Rin had been preparing herself, but she was still heartbroken. Marsh had been devastated, then abandoned by its neighbors. The promised reparations, signed into the Second Shadow Treaty, had simply stopped after a few years. Nobody outside Marsh cared.
"There it is," she said, grabbing Obito's hand.
"What?"
"The Shrine of the Crane Sage!" It was the first time she'd smiled all day.
The original shrine had been destroyed in the war. This was just a replica, rebuilt using the memories of the handful of survivors. It was the last of the original Hidden Marsh buildings rebuilt before the reparations stopped coming.
"You wait here," she told him, letting go of his hand to walk inside. Obito was grateful she let him wait outside. He wasn't a Nohara, and he had no history with Marsh Country. He knew vaguely about the Crane Sage, founder of the various Marsh Country clans, but it didn't really mean anything to him. This was Rin's thing. He didn't really get it— his clan was great and powerful and undefeated—but he understood it was important to her.
It'd been sunny a while, but that seemed to have ended. He stood and idly watched the rain pass through himself. His right Kaleidoscope gave him seven and a half minutes of ethereality before wearing out, devolving to the normal Copy Wheel to recharge. That was an improvement over five minutes before. He knew now his eyes were stronger when together. His left, the Eternal Kaleidoscope, gave him fifteen minutes before reverting, and while he couldn't focus it on himself, he could focus it on the things around him, turning the raindrops themselves into ghosts and letting it all pass through him.
If his right Kaleidoscope let him personally phase and warp, then his left projected those abilities onto others, even from a distance. He'd already warped the head of a reed into his personal dimension. It occurred to him that he could rip someone in half that way. It obviously wasn't something he'd tried on himself when he'd only had his right Kaleidoscope. Had Kakashi figured out everything he could do with his Kaleidoscope? Probably. Kakashi was a genius, while Obito needed the inherent knowledge his bloodline provided to understand it.
It was weird though. Since he'd left for Hidden Rain, his Kaleidoscope didn't show him anything. He still saw fine with them, everything that made them a potent weapon still there. But the vision was missing. He tried imagining one—he wanted to want something, wasn't that the same? But mostly—
"Hey Obito!" yelled Rin, grinning as she ran down the steps of the shrine. She stopped in front of him, then saw his expression.
"Are you okay?" she asked, concerned. Obito had been even more quiet than her on this detour, and definitely much quieter than he used to be before... Well, before Madara made him attack Leaf.
He seemed to seriously consider her question, like he wasn't really sure.
"Yeah, I'm fine."
She looked doubtful.
"Sorry, I'm just tired," he explained. "I'll feel better tomorrow."
Mostly, he just felt empty.
~oOo~
Author's Notes:
Yes, 400 miles a day—thirteen-ish hours a day, running at about 30 miles per hour. I went with 30mph because, in the original series when Naruto and his team ran to Hidden Sand after Gaara was kidnapped, it took two days to get there. Using my arbitrary scaling for the official maps, I'd put the Hidden Sand and Leaf villages at about 1,000 miles apart, so two days works out to a rushed schedule of a little more than 16 hours per day at about 30mph.
That speed is only slightly faster than the current world record for fastest sprint (almost 28 miles per hour by Usain Bolt), but since they're ninja, they can keep that speed up indefinitely. It's not necessarily their top speed, since pushing themselves further would cut into their chakra reserves, plus they'd need more breaks and be completely spent by the time they arrived anyways. I mean, how else do you explain ninjas, in the original series, chasing after opponents for hours or even days, then still being able to go all-out in combat? (The downside of this is anytime you have to retreat. Even if you can run on empty as long as you need to, you still can't refill your reserves unless you drastically slow down or stop completely.)
For the record, the Land of Marshes doesn't exist in the original series. But the peninsula country where the Mountains' Graveyard (where Madara trained Obito and Obito kept Sasuke after his fight with Itachi) is located was unnamed, so I felt I had free license to fill in its backstory.
