It remains that way until the night the Nine-Tails breaks free.
As they stagger out of bed and flee their apartment, ANBU come to greet them: first to confirm the Three-Tails is not breaking loose as well, then to verify Obito is in no shape to be puppeteering the attack (without chakra and without functioning eyes, he is still the only Uchiha to have controlled a Tailed Beast in recent times), and finally to take them both into isolation.
Not to safety, quite. Their priority is not the preservation of at least one jinchuuriki, and they do not dare deploy one Tailed Beast when the other is running wild; instead, they are focused on keeping Rin and her sealer away from any potential foe behind this disaster, lest the second step be to set free the Three-Tails and seal Konoha's fate.
And so they wait and tremble in darkness as the earth shakes, humiliated by their own impotence, and wonder if there will be a Konoha to come back to.
There is, when they are finally permitted to emerge. But, frankly, Obito is in better shape than it.
The weeks that follow are ugly ones. Many clans have lost members; several lesser ones were snuffed out. The infrastructure lies in ruins. Orphanages, still heavily laden by the war, now overflow with screaming children whose parents will never come. Civilian trade is disrupted; all ninja not in deep cover have been recalled, further damaging Konoha's wounded finances. Other villages send "aid" in what are insultingly obvious covers for espionage missions, the heartfelt attentiveness of vultures. It would be bad enough, if that single night had only been a microcosm of the war; instead, Konoha's sudden weakness threatens to birth on another.
Even what good news there is carries bitter irony. Obito finds himself the most popular of all Uchiha; in the turmoil and paranoia after the calamity, he alone has an ironclad alibi that night, and he alone is untouched by the suspicions that swirl around his entire clan. The instinctive suspicion of him rebounds, and suddenly they hold him up once again as a hero, the student of the late deified Minato, the Uchiha whose loyalty is unimpeachable and sacrifice for the village unquestionable.
(He thinks of telling them Konoha had stopped mattering to him at that point, and he did it all for Rin. He is not that foolish.
It was enough that, when Rin broke down one night and, through incoherent tears, apologized for all he had given up to save her, he had told her that he had done it for her sake, and would have done it again.)
Now the hopeless cripple is an emblem of what can be expected from all shinobi; he overhears the increasingly-common shouts that if Uchiha Obito could give up his sight and his body for the village, the people can give more of themselves for Konoha. He doesn't flatter himself that it's a natural sentiment. The same ANBU who took them to a safe site continue to monitor them, and an old man, with the mannerisms of a common villager, sidles up to him one day and asks him to kindly give a speech to raise morale.
He replies that the only speech he'd want to give would be to beg children not to become ninjas; if he thought they would listen, he'd have given it already.
He has it indicated to him that this would be an extremely bad idea, and he would be very well advised to give a speech to raise morale. If he were alone, he would do as he liked and damn the consequences; then again, if he were alone, he would have taken one look at the devastated Konoha and turned away, and at first laughed, then wept.
He is not alone. He does as he is told.
Rin can barely be with him in this time; every medic-nin left alive in working incessantly, and she returns to their tent (pitched in the middle of a ruined training-ground, along with a sea of others) only to sleep. He would have time to mind tht more if his newfound master did not see fit to run him like a dog. Obito Uchiha, symbol of proper shinobi sacrifice and Konoha's unbreakable spirit, tours daily the worst-affected areas and spouts wise platitudes and moving anecdotes of his own recovery, assuring the wounded and mourning boldly and vapidly that they, too, can find light after darkness. The more wide-eyed, the more hopeless, and the more desperate look to him, clinging to his artificial, carefully-scripted, spoon-fed speeches as though his words truly could lead them out of despair.
The entire village acknowledges him now. They hold up his name above all other Uchiha. No one remembers the name of Hatake Kakashi now, first one of many war dead, and now entirely swept aside by this new tide of death.
If he could go back and meet his twelve-year-old self, he would very calmly walk up to him, listen to him discoursing on all his dreams, and punch him squarely in the face.
Rin was the only one of those dreams that meant anything, in the end. Fittingly, she's the one that takes longest to come back to him, when at last Konoha is through the worst of the crisis and something like order is restored. For a few weeks, they do nothing but spend every single moment possible together, reaffirming that, no matter what the devastation, they still have each other.
Then there is another issue.
They know what the maiden name of the Hokage's - the old Hokage, now that Saritobi has resumed his former duties - wife was, even if the rest of the village seems oblivious. They know when the seal on a female jinchuuriki weakens - they were told when they applied for permission to marry, and were granted it under the condition that they would never have children. They wonder, really, how most of the village thinks the old Hokage had a newborn infant, his umbilical cord freshly cut, so readily at hand, much less one with a shock of blond, bristly hair and a surname identical to that of the Hokage's wife.
Neither of them can quite fathom what failure of intelligence - either military or cognitive - has kept people from realizing, as clearly as though it was shouted from the rooftops in every ninja village in the land, that Uzumaki Naruto is Namikaze Minato's son. Konoha is a large village, and the rest is explainable as coincidence, but - did he have to be given his mother's surname?
Nonetheless, they have not, and the information cannot be propagated: the child of the Yellow Flash, the last of the Uzumaki, and the jinchuuriki of the Nine-Tails together is too fantastic a target for enemy villages and missing-nins alike to resist. That's the excuse for permitting their ignorance.
Permitting his treatment, however, is another thing entirely.
The first either of them came across him was when Rin was treating injured children and came across an infant crying from dehydration, unheeded, and left to fester in his own filth.
After immediately rectifying the issues, she demanded immediately to know why no one had attended to him in the several hours he must have been in need. Her colleagues had avoided her eyes. It had taken a full three minutes - a long time, in that harried ward - for anyone to admit why.
To give their cowardice the slightest benefit of the doubt, perhaps they had suddenly grown worried what "Konoha's tame jinchuuriki" (to use her new epithet in the propaganda lately pushed out) might do in a situation in which they urgently required medical attention, if they saw fit to admit they would not offer a jinchuuriki the slightest care if their situations were reversed. That may have had something to do with the way they hastily offered apologies, and swore it wouldn't happen again.
The second time was when Obito was visiting an orphanage, telling them all how even orphans could dream of one day being heroes of Konoha (and how that made him sick) when, in the middle of his speech, he had heard an infant wailing. It was not an uncommon sound; what was uncommon was the way nobody moved to attend to it.
Without his knowing it, his reaction would be the same as Rin's had been, and the reaction to him would be the same. And the promises of better treatment would be just as false.
After further encounters, and comparing notes, they come to the conclusion that someone has to act, and, with no one else assuming responsibility, the duty falls to them. Minato taught them and cared for them once, however he neglected them later; with the villagers doing their best to murder his son through sheer neglect, it's their duty to care for the child.
Damaged as they are, they are the last people who should be taking care of a child. But even they would be better for an infant than no one at all.
With the solemnity of people signing their own death-warrant, they submit their request to adopt him and wait for a response.
The old man comes to visit. For no other reason than appearances does he continue to appear a common villager; they both know he is not. He calmly inquires what might have made them decide to meddle in the affairs of the jinchuuriki of the Nine-Tails.
Rin hints their connection to the boy might be a different one.
He accepts that calmly and asks what might have given them that impression. Once Obito outlines it, he grunts and says "Hiruzen" always was a sentimental fool. (The Hokage will receive that part of their later report with a puff on his pipe and a comment that his esteemed colleague also remains unchanged. He will never actually name his "esteemed colleague"; nor does Obito even know his name, after taking orders from him for weeks.)
Nonetheless, he says, sentiment means nothing to shinobi. Do they have a better reason?
Indeed.
Lonely children love those who love them, Obito says. Raise a jinchuuriki without love, and his loyalties will go to the first person to show him kindness. If that person should not be from Konohagakure...
More than that, Rin says, a child deprived of the concepts of care, connection, or human contact during crucial developmental periods is unlikely to ever understand thoss concepts. If the boy grows up hated by the whole village, the concept of loyalty to the village might be wholly alien to him. An ordinary ninja so deprived might shirk from becoming missing-nin out of fear or lack of imagination; a jinchuuriki, and one with the blood of one of Konoha's greatest geniuses...
Still overly sentimental, the man says, but with some validity. He, however, has been forbidden from applying proper conditioning.
(The Hokage will comment dryly that he did indeed not wish for Minato's son to become accustomed to killing before he could read.)
Sentiment, Obito says, teeth on edge, is what made him a "hero", and got Rin back to Konoha alive.
The man says nothing. Something about his face, perhaps, makes Rin place a hand on Obito's arm and squeeze hard.
If he needs to be clinical, she says tightly, it's a choice between Naruto being raised to control the Nine-Tails, educated at home as well as the academy, and with firm loyalty to Konoha, or being left in ignorance, running wild, and without loyalty to anything in the world.
Without clear vision, Obito knows nothing except that, for a time, the man sits in silence. At last, he rises and departs, remarking only, without turning around, that deviation from what they have proposed will be seen and punished.
A week later, they have the boy in their arms.
As Rin places the child into the crib - the first decent bedding the infant has ever known - Obito puts an arm around her shoulders and looks down at the yellow-and-pink blur before them.
Do you think we'll be enough?
He turns and looks her in the face. For a moment, he feels a pang that he cannot see her features, even staring her in the eye; it's all right, though. He has the memory.
Her face was the last thing he ever really saw.
We'll have to be enough.