Obito had been acting strangely, ever since their entire team had somehow returned to the past. Anyone else might have wrote it off just as an effect of the unexplained resurrections and time travel that had affected them all.

But Rin knew Obito. She had always been able to read him, partly because Obito was practically an open book in that aspect, partly because she had known him for years. They had been friends throughout the Academy, and had even been put on the same team. In the end, the only secret that had been kept between the two of them... had been Obito's apparent infatuation for her, which had apparently been obvious for years -at least, for everyone other than Nohara Rin.

But now, Obito's grins looked fake. Before, they would spread hugely across his face, almost visibly brightening up his surroundings with the sheer power of his joy.

When he had explained that he had survived Kannabi Bridge and, had in fact died years after the mission... she had believed him instantly. He was still Obito, true, but he wasn't the same Obito she had last seen crushed under a few tons of rock, gaping eye socket from where she had taken out his eye. This Obito was a more mature and darker (crueler) version of the boy who had sacrificed his life for his teammate.

(Not that this meant he wasn't still her best friend, because no matter what, he was still Uchiha Obito.)

The suspicions she had were confirmed the moment Obito caught Minato-sensei in a genjutsu, with Sharingan containing three tomoe - mastered Sharingan, she realizes. Rin reacts on instinct, leaping forward with a, "Obito -"

"It's fine, Rin," says Minato-sensei, straightening up with a small smile on his lips. "Obito just wanted to tell me something."

Just a few seconds had passed in between those moments, but Rin remembers, from the Academy: a skilled genjutsu user could make years pass in a single second.She hesitates before nodding, and then takes a step back.

Obito wipes at his eyes, his Sharingan already deactivated. "Rin, Kakashi," he says, voice hoarse, "there's a few things I need to tell you guys."

"...Even more?" Rin can't help but quip in an attempt to hide her nervousness. "Obito, you just told us that you survived having half of your body crushed, because Uchiha Madara saved you! I don't know if I can be surprised anymore, after that."

"Ehe... a lot of weird stuff happened happened in the shinobi world after you - that you don't know about, Rin. And actually... in the months after you 'died' as well, Kakashi!" Obito explains, scratching the back of his head, a familiar gesture that seemed utterly at odds with the 'new' Obito. It was as if his personality had almost completely reverted back to the one that Rin was familiar with...

...What had Minato-sensei and Obito talked about, anyways?

"You outlived me?" Kakashi asks blankly.

Obito tenses slightly. "...Actually, when I died... you were still alive, Kakashi. Like I said before, Nagato - you know him as Pein - brought back everyone he killed during his attack on the village. You were among them. In fact... Minato-sensei was briefly alive as well, but he had been brought back with the Edo Tensei."

She blinks. "Obito, was I - ?"

"...No, you weren't," the Uchiha replies, his tone darkened.

"That's a relief," Rin says, as brightly as she could. "...Then I don't have to worry about doing things I don't remember doing! It would be embarrassing if my future self did something that I didn't agree with."

Obito grins weakly. "...You always look on the bright side of things, Rin."

"Though... I can't believe all of you guys are so ahead of me!" She says, half-teasingly. "I mean, Kakashi's thirty, and Obito - you're even older. I don't think I ever expected to get stuck on a, team of old people!" Obito and Minato-sensei twitch almost simultaneously, and Rin struggles to hide her grin.

Kakashi's eyes crinkle, however. "I might be thirty, Rin," he says, completely seriously, "but I'll have you know - I'm still young and hip on the inside!"

Her jaw drops. "K-Kakashi!" She exclaims, and then she can't hold in her laughter anymore. "Y-You sound like Gai!" Just the thought of her green jumpsuit wearing classmate nearly sends her into another fit of laughter, and then she imagines Kakashi in the outfit - bowlcut and all - and she chokes. "...Kakashi, please tell me you didn't start dressing like him in the future."

He smirks - smirks - under his mask. "Maa, Rin... I do have to keep up appearances. I am his Eternal Rival." With a start, Rin realizes that she can hear the capital letters. Oh Kami, she thinks, I thoughtGaiwas the only one who could do that. But then, that meant - was Kakashi - was he serious? The hilarity of the moment quickly transforms into horror.

"K-Kakashi," she says slowly. "You're joking... right?" Rin glances at both Minato-sensei and Obito in hopes of dispelling her nightmare. "...Right?"

Obito has a hand over his face, an aura of embarrassment almost visible around him. Minato-sensei, on the other hand, seems caught between laughter and horror. "I don't remember -" He starts. "That is - Kakashi wasn't dressing up like Maito Gai the last I remembered... but maybe he started after… I mean, he had more than ten years of time to -"

Slowly, Rin rotates to face Kakashi again. He gives her a completely innocent looking eye-smile.

...Suddenly, she regretted all those talks (or rather, sessions of mutual complaining) with Obito about how Kakashi would really benefit from a sense of humor. She's taking that back. She's taking allof it back.

"Oi, Kakashi!" Obito shouts, finger pointed angrily. "Stop messing with Rin and Minato-sensei! I know you don't wear that shitty jumpsuit - you just wear the jounin uniform like every other jounin, I saw!" Then, in calmer tones, "Don't worry, Rin - he's just being Bakashi."

Kakashi blinks once, the only sign of his surprise, before continuing, apparently nonplussed, "Maa, you don't know for sure though. I could have been wearing my special, personalized jumpsuit under my uniform. Are you telling me that you've never heard of the infamous Blue Beast of Konoha?"

Obito blanches with alarming alacrity. "K-Kakashi, you bastard -" He manages, before the two launch into a sort of bickering that would not have looked out of place during the time when they were actually thirteen (or younger, in Kakashi's case.)

Just being Bakashi, she thinks suddenly, and it hits just how much things must have changed in the years she was - she was dead, because the Kakashi she thought she knew... would not have made jokes like this. He was her teammate and she loved him (maybe a bit more than just platonic) but of everything that Kakashi was known for, a sense of humor was not one of them.

Her boys... weren't boys any longer, even if Obito was acting (for whatever reason) like he still was. They were adult men now, fully experienced shinobi - and she was still a teenaged girl, left behind in their wake. It was ironic how, at least in terms of mental age, Minato-sensei was now the second youngest on the team.

Still, she puts on a smile. "Obito... didn't you say you had something to tell us?"

Her teammate freezes, about five seconds away from tackling Kakashi onto the floor. "...Yes. I do." A shadow seems to pass over his face, and when he looks up again, his eyes are more serious than she had ever seen on Obito's face. "If we want to keep ourselves from dying, again... we will need to overcome powerful enemies."

"The Iwa nin," Kakashi offers, suddenly serious as well. The sudden change in demeanor of both of her teammates is... well, confusing. "The Kiri nin who captured Rin. The Kyuubi. Orochimaru, and if we can manage it... Danzo. And after that... Akatsuki and its leader."

Before Rin could react out loud - Orochimaru, like... the Sannin? And wasn't the Kyuubi sealed in - Obito grimaces. "Yes and no. Most of those can be traced back to a single power - Uchiha Madara."

Kakashi's eyes widen in shock. "Then, the Kyuubi - the Akatsuki -"

"But - he's the man who rescued you," Rin says, stunned.

"That's how I know," Obito says blankly. "Uchiha Madara is not a man known for his benevolence. When he saved me... he had ulterior motives. He wanted a successor, to carry out his plans to fulfillment. A perfect world, with no hurt or loss... that was what he wanted, but in order to get it... he was willing to wage war against the whole world."

In one shining moment of clarity, Rin understands - why her best friend was so different, why he had been so reluctant to share details of the future, why he had never came back -"You were his successor," she says out loud.

Minato-sensei, who had been so quiet the entire conversation, moves to put a hand on Obito's shoulder. He looks at her and Kakashi silently, and his eyes are pleading.

Obito is quiet for a long moment. "I - I fell into his trap. He let me out, after months of recovering, with the knowledge that my teammates were under attack. But by the time I got there -"

No, Rin thinks. Obito couldn't have been there - she would have noticed him, surely? Even with the nauseous burning of the Sanbi in her belly, whose presence was so overwhelming that she - despite all reason - felt as if she could feel it even now - she would have noticed Obito. Because, the alternative - the alternative was that... when Rin had launched herself in front of Kakashi's Chidori -

"You saw me kill Rin," Kakashi says, and there is a tone in his voice that Rin had become all too familiar in the aftermath of the Kannabi Bridge mission. Self-hatred, and lots of it. "That's why you -"

"No," says Obito with a shake of his head. "I was... blind, I suppose, to reality. I always had been, but Madara used that flaw of mine to his advantage. He was the one to engineer Rin's capture - he wanted me to see her -" his voice breaks, even as Rin's eyes grow wide at the revelation of the man behind her suffering. "It wasn't your fault, Kakashi. I never stopped to question the circumstances, so I just followed him and..." He grimaces. "And, I fucked up the world in the process."

He continues, without giving either she or Kakashi a chance to interrupt. "After Madara died, I took up his name. I was the one to have unleashed the Kyuubi on the village. I was the perpetrator of the Uchiha Clan massacre - though, the circumstances for that are rather... complicated. And... Kakashi, the leader of the Akatsuki wasn't Pein. He was just a figurehead - I had been giving him orders for much of the past decade."

For a long moment, Rin doesn't know what to say. Obito's future deeds were horrifying – the Uchiha Clan massacre? Unleashing the Kyuubi on the village? – but she had no idea what to do with the knowledge. The events weren't real to her, not unlike the events of Konoha's founding almost a century ago, as she learned in the Academy. Objectively, she knew it happened – but she hadn't been there, had not seen the events personally.

No… she had died before she had the chance. And, according to Obito, if she hadn't died then… none of that would have happened.

Which meant, as shocked and horrified as she was… it didn't do much to change her perspective of Obito. She couldn't see him as anything other than her best friend, especially not as the murderer and traitor he claimed to have become.

But Kakashi – Kakashi had experienced all of that firsthand. That, on top of her knowledge that Kakashi and Obito had never gotten along, not until Obito had died – or 'died', as it was –

Rin whips around to where she knows her teammate had been standing, but there's no one there. "…Kakashi?"

As one, the remaining three members of the team turn to silently look at the open window. A single bird made its way across the clear sky, cawing loudly. A single dark figure leaped from roof to roof, growing ever distant.

"…I'll go after him," says Minato-sensei after a brief pause. "Obito, Rin – Go explore the village, familiarize yourself with it. It's likely very different from the last time either of you have seen it."

Without waiting for a reply, he jumps out the window. In a blink of an eye, the blonde has disappeared from view, heading to wherever Kakashi had ran off to.

"Rin," Obito says, haltingly. "Rin, I –"

"Don't worry, Minato-sensei will talk to him," she tells him, not nearly as confident as she tries to sound. "…Come on, Obito! Let's get out of here already. I can't believe we got stuck talking here for more than an hour!"

"…Yeah," he agrees, with the slightest hesitation. "Yeah, let's go."

Almost instinctively, Kakashi makes his way to the Memorial Stone. For close to two decades, the memorial had been a second home. In fact, he knew for a fact that he spent more time standing in front of that massive black rock than in his actual apartment.

When he wasn't on a mission, Kakashi visited the memorial nearly every morning. He would spend an hour or so telling Obito about everything that had been happening in the world. More time than he spent talking to Rin and Minato-sensei, he had to admit, because in the end… Obito had been his greatest failure.

He imagined that he enjoyed his tales of Team Seven, of boisterous Naruto and stoic Sasuke and Sakura, who just never gave up. In his darkest moments - as he desperately tried to close up a gut wound in the aftermath of a mission gone bad, as yet another friend died because of his mistakes, as he sees Naruto bleeding out on the ground from what could only be a Chidori inflicted wound – he thought that he could hear Obito talking to him.

/ "Dammit Kakashi," his personal specter of the past said with a long suffering sigh, as Kakashi pulled his mask down and spat out a glob of bloody spit to the side. "I wanted to see your face, but not like this. Come on, Minato-sensei and Kushina-nee are still waiting for you back in the village! Don't let them down, alright, bastard? As if a measly kunai – or uh, four of them, I guess – could get you."

"I-It's okay, Kakashi. It wasn't your fault. These things… they just happen. Sensei will understand, alright? Don't feel guilty about this!"

"Sensei and Kushina-nee…" A swallow. "Huh, I guess I'm not the one everyone's waiting for this time. But Kakashi… Don't you dare come early, alright? I swear, Rin's punching her fist into her hand really hard, and I'm kinda scared… "/

He knew perfectly well that it wasn't healthy to hear dead people talking to him. But neither was it healthy to model every part of his life after an idealized version of a deceased thirteen year old boy, but Kakashi had done that as well. For years, he had internalized every part of Obito's advice, his ideals of teamwork and friendship. He had viewed every situation through the lens of, "What would Obito have done?" and every failure with the shameful knowledge that, "Obito wouldn't have failed."

Obito wouldn't have let Rin die. Obito wouldn't have let Sasuke leave. Obito wouldn't have let Naruto grow up alone. Obito wouldn't have been such a horrible sensei that his students would only achieve their full potential under others.

In short, he had put the boy on a ridiculously high pedestal, and with Obito's revelations, that pedestal had cracked badly.

It was clear that Obito had switched his loyalties back to Konoha – if he had still wanted the bijuu, Obito would have taken down both him and Rin with the element of surprise, and have gone after Kushina immediately. So, he wasn't a danger.

But that wasn't the point. The point was, after all those years… faced with a Uchiha Obito who wasn't a thirteen year old, octogenarian serving saint – and, in fact, was a thirty-some year old traitor/missing nin/leader of the fucking Akatsuki – Kakashi wasn't sure what to do. With the concrete knowledge that no, Obito wouldn't have done any better (and in fact, hadn't done any better) and had also been changed by the realities of the world – particularly knowing that he himself had a very large part in it –

Kakashi felt like he had the rug pulled out from under his feet, the foundations of his world shattered beyond recognition. For so long, this Memorial Stone had formed the cornerstone of his existence. Now, it was stripped of the very names he had always came to see. Uchiha Obito. Nohara Rin. Namikaze Minato. Uzumaki Kushina.

"Somehow," says Minato-sensei from behind him, voice low and calm, "I knew I would find you here."

He doesn't jump in surprise. If anything else, it was just a little – jolt, he decided. He just wasn't used to Minato-sensei's stealth entrances, not after so many years. "Oh?"

"You came here every day for months after Obito's funeral. After what happened to Rin, you started again. It was a safe assumption."

"I did, huh?" Kakashi turns with a sigh. "…This is about Obito, isn't it."

"You did make a very dramatic exit," Minato-sensei observes mildly.

Well, yes, thinking back… yes, he did. But in that moment, he had been less concerned about that, and more about the implications of what Obito had said, and the sudden need to get out –

"I know that Obito's on our side," he says. "I won't go after him for revenge, if that's what you're thinking."

"Actually, I was wondering about something else. I only remember up to my own death, of course, but… from what I remember, Obito's death changed you greatly. In the week after his funeral… you came late to everything. With the most ridiculous excuses, too." Sensei shakes his head. "I don't know who you thought you were fooling - Rin and I both knew you were here, at the Memorial Stone."

"…But it was more the principle of it, wasn't it, Kakashi? Obito was late all the time, so you were too. Obito always had terrible excuses, so you did as well."

"Sensei –"

"Obito isn't the same as he was as thirteen, Kakashi. I don't know much about the new Obito. I highly suspect that Obito isn't very sure himself." Sensei sighs. "The dead are constant, but the living is always changing, Kakashi. This is a truth that we need to accept."

True, much of him was moored in the past. It seemed that, ironically enough, it was being in the past that would let him to move forward.

Kakashi nods, and turns away from the Memorial Stone.

[A/N: So, super long author's note:

I struggled with Kakashi's reaction quite a bit. My first few hundred words included physical harm and a whole lot of anger – which, I feel, didn't really fit. Yes, he fought and tried to kill Obito during the FSW, but that had been a matter of life and death. He definitely had issues with doing it. In different circumstances, I feel like he would have time to deal with the emotional/mental fallout from these revelations.

Sorry about the long wait! I've been having very sporadic Internet, so it took me a while to get this chapter written up and updated. Thank you for all the reviews! The suggestions all of you gave me have been really helpful, and will come up in the next chapter, which – as you may have guessed – has more to do with the interactions between Team Minato and the rest of the village.

I'm also going to have some bonus chapters, posted for every review milestone the fic reaches - partly because I want excuse to explore more of this verse, partly because I really would like more suggestions and feedback. Did I do a thing right? Did I do it wrong? What could I do better? Etc. They'll be non-canon, a lot less serious, and will probably include a lot of additional time/dimension travel (I'll also be taking suggestions for these, though I do have an idea for the first bonus chapter.) They'll also be slightly less than the length of a regular chapter – that is, 2-3k words. So - something to look forward to, I guess.

But yeah, please hit me up with any suggestions or feedback! I'm not sure about, well, basically everything to do with Kakashi in this chapter, so if any of you have advice on that, I would seriously appreciate it. Anyways, I'm trying to get all the exposition/talking parts of this fic done ASAP so we can move on to the actual plot progression.]