"Not here," Obito says with a frown.
That is the only warning Kakashi gets before the Uchiha's eyes swirl into black on red, a pattern that he recognized from the Mangekyo that had been in his head for close to two decades.
"Kamui."
Kakashi's eyes widen in shock as the world distorts around him, a nauseating twisting sensation at his navel. Before he can react otherwise, the familiar sight of Konoha had been replaced by an endless landscape of monochrome cubes and fathomless chasms.
He blinks, genius mind quickly slotting together the pieces he had been handed. "…Aa. So, this is the other dimension, Obito?"
The boy nods, his Sharingan deactivating. "We can be sure of its security. It's connected directly to my Sharingan, so only you and I can access it."
Kakashi had never thought much of the mirror side to his Mangekyo abilities. But then again, he had never expected to ever see the other eye in action. "Just you, now," he notes.
"…Yeah," Obito agrees, with a twist of his lips. "…For now."
There is a promise in his words that Kakashi ignores. He bends over to press two fingers on the strangely cool ground, wondering briefly just how this place came to be. What kind of material was this?
"That was pretty careless, Obito," he says lightly, getting up. "There were a few dozen people around us. Any of them could have noticed our disappearance."
"Damn it, Kakashi," says the other with a sigh, though the lack of actual anger in his tone betrays his harsh words. "You're still looking down on me, huh? …I'm not an idiot."
"Then -?"
"Genjutsu. I had my Sharingan activated, remember?" Obito shrugs. "Anyone who had the two of us in their vision now remembers watching us walk away in the direction of the Hokage Tower."
It is a casual reminder that the person in front of him is not what he seems. In his youth, Obito had never been particularly skilled at genjutsu – the precise manipulations so important for its success was lost to the brash and impulsive boy that Obito had been. It seems that that had changed over the years, along with everything else.
Kakashi accepts it wordlessly. "Maa, Obito... any reason that you are so paranoid about spies, when we're in our own village?"
"You're lecturing me on paranoia, Kakashi? Now that's a first."
He looks at the Uchiha pointedly.
"…I don't know how far Danzo's reach is, at this point," Obito admits after a moment.
"Danzo?" Kakashi knew of the elder who had been a teammate of the Sandaime, who was unknown to most of the shinobi in the village just because of how unobtrusive he was. In fact… he knew a lot more than that, due to his own long acquaintance with Tenzo and Sai. He just wasn't sure how Obito did.
"The Uchiha Clan massacre took place on his orders," Obito reveals, without the bat of an eyelid. "I would rather him not find out about our… situation – at least, not until we want him to."
That… was surprising. Kakashi blinks slowly. "Aa? Orders?"
Mentally, his thoughts are already whirling. Kakashi was well aware of the more morally ambiguous part of his village, more so than his blonde, Hokage aspirant of a student ever knew – would ever want to know, in all honesty. ROOT was horrifying, but more because it was an outright challenge to the authority of the Hokage than because of the age of the recruits, or because of the brutality of the training program.
Kakashi himself had become a soldier at age five, after all.
If Danzo – a Konoha elder – had ordered the execution of an entire clan, especially the Uchiha – a founding clan, then there must have been a reason. Unbidden, Kakashi remembered the frosty demeanor of Obito's clan on one of his rare occasions venturing into the district. Of course, it could be because of his eye, but…
"The Uchiha Clan began planning a coup against the village after the Kyuubi attack," is all that Obito says, but it's enough for Kakashi to click together the pieces.
A thirteen year old Uchiha Itachi, caught between his Clan and the village, between war and peace – even one built on the blood of his family. The dual blows of the Kyuubi attack and the defection of one of its oldest clans… well, the other villages would have been drawn like sharks to blood.
Still, one question remains - the dispatching of a thirteen year old – however skilled – to murder such an elite clan was… questionable, regardless of the reasoning. What if Itachi had died in the attempt? Or, if he had been captured, or regretted his decision, or any of the dozens of possibilities that could have arisen… war would have been imminent.
Not to mention, there had to have been another option to deal with the situation other than outright slaughter. Such a one-dimensional approach spoke of fear – and outside manipulation.
"Maa, Obito… didn't you mention that you were involved in that?" He says lightly.
The Uchiha grimaces. "…Yeah. Most of that – that was me. All that Itachi was responsible were his parents and –"
"And Sasuke."
"…Yeah. And Sasuke."
It's an oblique enough reference to how Itachi had traumatized his younger brother for life, setting him on a path to vengeance.
Kakashi pitied the man, despite the hours of torture Itachi had inflicted upon him, but he by no means respected his actions. Not when he destroyed Kakashi's team by mentally breaking Sasuke all over again, destroying any bit of normalcy the boy had managed to regain in his months on Team 7.
Even though Sasuke had been a former student for longer than he had ever been Kakashi's actual student, he still felt protective over the kid. It was all he could to quell the inexplicable anger that came with the knowledge that Obito had been a part of that Massacre, had played a role in creating the mindless avenger Sasuke become.
Kakashi remembered the carnage that had been left in the wake of the Uchiha Massacre, had even thought, looking at the corpses, that the killing blows were too emotional to be Itachi's work. Back then, he had taken it as a sign that Itachi had been hiding more than Kakashi had ever known.
But now, it made a horrifying kind of sense.
"…Your clan sure misjudged you, huh? They thought you were weak, but in the end, you had the power to kill them all. You proved them wrong in the end… didn't you?"
The split second before Obito grabbed him up in the air by the chest straps of his uniform is all the time he had to regret the words of impulse that had come out of his mouth.
"I-It wasn't like that!" Obito says weakly, eyes wide.
Obito's iron grip brings back unpleasant memories, and Kakashi barely hears the words coming out of the boy's mouth over the overwhelming need to get away.
"I was part of the ANBU assigned to investigate the aftermath," Kakashi says softly. "I saw those bodies, Obito."
The moment Kakashi feels a slackening of Obito's grip, he takes advantage of the miniscule increase in freedom of movement to elbow the other boy in the face.
But before it hits flesh, Obito's other hand is already up to block the strike.
Kakashi only has enough time to blink once, realizing for a second that Obito seemed just as surprised as he did – muscle memory, perhaps? – before he twists and kicks, and this time the blow connects.
Obito yelps in surprise as the force of Kakashi's foot sends him stumbling back a few inches, but in the seconds between, he automatically yanks down on the jounin's still outstretched leg, sending him crashing down on the strange ground.
And, just like that, they're trading blows.
It's all taijutsu, thankfully – in fact, it reminds him somewhat of the old days of Team Minato, during which Kakashi and Obito would often end up grappling in the dirt, completely undignified, as Rin shouted at them, obviously annoyed, to 'get up and stop being idiots already, Minato-sensei's going to show up any minute now!'
But, at the same time, it's clearly not a brawl between two preteen chunin.
Whoever had trained Obito over the years, had done so well. Obito is fast, his movements lithe and calculated in a way that spoke to thousands of hours of training. He moves to kill, but what would normally be mortal blows are dulled to bruises by the lack of physical strength of a child's body.
So does Kakashi, because ANBU rarely had place for mercy or a soft touch.
Still, he is momentarily surprised that Obito could keep up with an ANBU Commander (albeit one in an unfamiliar preteen body) in terms of speed and experience – and then he remembers that no, thirteen year old chunin Obito could never had been able to, but the Obito who had been the leader of a band of S-ranked missing nin certainly could.
Kakashi takes advantage of a second-long hesitation and sweeps Obito off his feet with a chakra-enforced circular kick.
The Uchiha slams onto the ground, face first – and Kakashi hears a familiar crunch of cartilage – but pulls Kakashi down with him with a single hand, in an unexpected display of strength.
Ironically, the next few minutes consist of some of the most undignified brawling that Kakashi had participated in since the age of eleven. There was a lot of squirming involved. Probably some head-butting.
Most definitely hair pulling, and, Kakashi admits, just one case of –
"…That… was ridiculous," Obito complains between gasps for air, voice congested as he covers his bleeding, broken nose with a single shaking hand. "I can't believe you bit me. Kakashi, what the hell? …How did you even do that with your mask on?"
As it turns out, regardless of the amount of training, an untrained preteen body just couldn't sustain certain fighting styles for long.
Kakashi sits just a few feet away from him, panting equally loudly – though in a bit more dignified way, he would hope, glancing over at Obito's practically hyperventilating form.
He shrugs at Obito's question. Kakashi could finish a bowl of Ichiraku's within seconds; this was nothing. "…A shinobi never reveals his secrets."
"Secrets, my ass. What's really a secret is what's behind that mask of yours –"
"It's just my face. Nothing else."
Obito pauses. "…No huge lips?" Kakashi shakes his head. "Buck teeth? An extra eye?" He tries.
"I have a mole," he offers.
"I can't believe this," Obito groans after a moment of stunned silence. "Twenty years of wondering why a guy covers half of his face since the age of five, and it turns out that it's because of a mole."
"Maa, I didn't wear my mask just because of a mole. I have a mole, yes, but the reason I wear a mask is completely different. Give me some credit, Obito."
"Then why -?" The Uchiha groans again. "…You're terrible, Kakashi."
Their impromptu spar seemed to have lowered tensions a bit. The banter is ridiculously easy to fall into, and it is just as easy for Kakashi to forget just who it was sitting a few feet away from him.
But judging from Obito's sudden silence, his teammate had also found it no longer possible to ignore the metaphorical large, pink elephant in the Kamui dimension. An awkward silence prevailed for a few minutes.
"Danzo and Orochimaru both need to be taken care of. I wasn't lying when I said that the village will face many enemies in the next few years," Obito says finally, after a very long pause – during which, any kind of humor had been leeched from the air around them. "But… no matter what, I won't be one of them. Not this time."
"You and the Uchiha Clan –"
"I had no right," his teammate interrupts, voice grave. "They only turned against the village because Danzo rightfully suspected an Uchiha behind the Kyuubi attack. When I returned… I did so to stoke conflict. I didn't expect Itachi, but –" He grimaces. "It was an unexpected upside."
"Why the Uchiha?" Kakashi asks, eyes narrowed.
"…There were many reasons - I was so caught up in my Madara persona that I wanted revenge on the Clan, I needed bodies for experimentation, and... you're right. It wasn't the main reason, but I did hold a grudge against the Clan myself." He swallows, and looks away deliberately.
"But to tell the truth, I was… very insane. I didn't take Rin's death well, and I never did get over it. Back then, I took any excuse I could to kill and hurt, any way I could take revenge on the world that took Rin away from me." Obito shakes his head, as if trying to clear the memories from his head. "Now... I don't have anything against my clan, not anymore."
The mention of Rin's death makes Kakashi's heart feel heavy in his chest. "You were the one who killed the rest of those hunter nin, weren't you?"
He still remembered those lakes of blood, the bodies ripped apart by the roots – and what that meant, Kakashi didn't particularly want to think about – as if by a feral animal, and most of all – "…Why didn't you kill me too? It wouldn't have been hard. I… killed Rin, after all."
"Don't lie to me, Bakashi. I know that Rin was the one to kill herself, even if she used you to do it." Obito shrugs weakly. "Besides, you're my teammate, Kakashi. Even before… I guess I knew inside that you wouldn't have done it for no reason."
He lets out a breath he didn't know he was holding. He had always thought…
"You said that you won't be one of the village's enemies. What if Rin dies again?" He asks. "What if you get another chance to make that perfect world you mentioned… Obito?"
"I still won't," the Uchiha says, with just the slightest hesitation. And then, a bit more sure, "I won't. I'm not stupid enough to want that fake world, not after everything that happened… Not even if Rin dies again. I made a promise to Sensei. And… he made a promise to me, as well."
"Oh?"
"If I break my promise, he'll end my life in a way that even Madara can't find a way to bring me back." Obito says it with utter confidence.
Kakashi blinks. If he was any better adjusted, he would find it horrifying that Obito seemed ridiculously happy at the prospect of being completely and utterly destroyed if he so takes a single step down a different, darker path.
Instead, he 'hm's'. "You want me to make that promise to you too, huh…?"
Obito doesn't reply. "Maa, Obito. I think you might be overestimating me here. I'm just a lowly jounin sensei."
The other boy groans at that. "…Lowly jounin sensei, my ass," he mutters. "The last time we fought, you Chidori'd a fist-sized hole in my chest."
"I… what?" Kakashi had been in the process of pushing himself to his feet, but now he stares at the Uchiha incredulously. "I killed you?"
"You wish, Kakashi." Obito looks at the blood on his hand with confusion, as if surprised at why his nose was still bleeding. "No, I – agh, I got better."
Kakashi offers him a hand. Obito blinks and smiles, before allowing himself to be pulled up with his non-bloodied hand.
"Unfortunately, Chidori isn't exactly in my repertoire now," Kakashi offers.
"…Yeah, about that." Obito wipes his hand on his jacket, leaving rapidly browning streaks on the navy blue cloth. "Most of my abilities stem from my Mangekyō. With it, I'm pretty much untouchable. Not even Minato-sensei could defeat me now, when I have both of my eyes."
He points to his eyes, crimson Mangekyō rotating lazily. "My eyes are connected to each other. That's why the only way to defeat someone with one of these eyes… is to have the other."
Oh, dammit. Now he knew where Obito was going with this. Kakashi eyes Obito warily. "I'm not going to take your eye, Obito."
"Why not? You know you won't be able to fight at full capacity without it."
"I'll manage." The power of Obito's eye was incredible, but it wasn't worth the price he had paid to get it.
Obito groans. "Don't be ridiculous, Kakashi. I've been working with a single Sharingan for two decades – you'll save me a lot of trouble adjusting. And, since we have four working eyes between the two of us this time… it's not like I'll be half-blind."
"It's not that," Kakashi mutters.
Really, it wasn't. Over the years, Obito's Sharingan had been a simultaneous boon and curse. The abilities of a regular Sharingan was ridiculously useful, and that didn't even include the dimension warping powers of the Mangekyō. But at the same time, it was a symbol of his failures, all of which had been etched into his memory because of the eye. Obito smiling through the blood, Rin's blank wide eyes, Minato-sensei and Kushina's broken corpses in the wake of the Kyuubi…
It wasn't particularly logical, but Kakashi didn't want that eye in his head – even if its original owner was alive and well.
To his dismay, Obito doesn't relent. The Uchiha's eyes narrow at him, his annoyance almost palpable. "…Dammit, Kakashi. Just take my eye. I need someone who can do whatever's necessary… and has the ability to do it. Besides…"
Obito's eyes glint. "You're the only one of us here who isn't permanently dead. I don't know why we're all here, but if it gets reversed somehow… I still want to see the future with you, got it, Bakashi? We both know I'm not going to make Hokage. But you will, and I want to see it."
Kakashi exhales, a hand raised to his nose bridge. "I have no idea what you're talking about – I'm not the future Kakashi that you know," he says weakly. "And even if I get resurrected somehow... I'll still have your Sharingan -"
"Remember why I gave you my eye in the first place?" Obito presses on. "How can we beat Madara if you can't fight at full strength? How are we going to protect Rin?"
Kakashi winces. There was no way Obito would have known, but Rin had said something similar to him the first - and only - time she caught him trying to cut out his eye.
"I can manage -" But even as he says it, he knows he can't say no – not when Obito had whipped out that particular trump card. Judging from the triumphant grin on Obito's face, he knew it as well.
Kakashi sighs, and puts a hand to his forehead. "...I hope you have a plan for this, Obito. Your clan wasn't exactly happy about me having your eye the first time around."
Obito waves a hand dismissively. "I know how to deal with them, don't worry about it. All we need is a medic nin who's willing to do it, and we can just ask Rin in a few -"
He blinks. "...Shit."
Kakashi glances at the darkening bruise on Obito's face, the brown streaks of dried blood on his clothing, his obviously broken nose. He knows without looking that he himself has a spattering of scrapes and bruises underneath his clothing.
"Maybe Rin won't notice?" He offers.
Obito puts his face in his hands with a groan.
Rin wipes the sweat from her eyes with a single hand, breathing heavily. It had been a while since she had last been assigned to do the 'menial labor' portion of volunteering at the hospital. For much of the past year, she had been healing actual patients.
She had made a lot of progress in the year after Obito's 'death.' There wasn't much else for her to do, with Team Minato in an uneasy limbo after the loss of a member. Obito had been the motivation for her to dive back into her studies with renewed vigor - if only she had known much more advanced medical ninjutsu techniques back then, could she have been able to save him?
A loud noise from overhead startles her from her memories. She blinks at the urgent cry of, "Code Blue, floor five, room 39!" which repeats three times in short succession, before cutting off.
A patient needed immediate medical attention - and judging from the lack of footsteps, they would soon end up as one of the many casualties of Konoha's wartime shortage of medic nin.
After Tsunade-sama's departure from the village, the hospital had struggled to maintain its quality of healthcare. Less and less shinobi had completed medical training, due to the incredible chakra control necessary for the mastery of medical ninjutsu. It didn't help that wartime had depleted the existing ranks - medic nin were, of course, the first targets of any enemy.
Rin drops the heavy box she had been hauling and runs for the stairs.
She's halfway to the fourth floor before she remembers that she wasn't cleared to deal with code blue emergencies - that would be in roughly three months' time - and she wasn't supposed to have that kind of capability.
It would be difficult to explain if she was discovered, and was it really worth this to save the life of someone who probably died in their original timeline?
She knows the answer even before she finishes considering the question. Of course it was. It was the responsibility of a medic nin to save lives. Rin would deal with the consequences later.
Rin sees the door wide open, but there's no one inside - her suspicions had been correct, then. She grits her teeth, scans the hallway for any witnesses. There's no one on the floor - judging from the commotion going on downstairs, a team had just returned from their mission gone awry.
The figure in the bed is seizing, mouth a dark hole in a bandaged face as he gasps desperately for air, each breathe shallow. Rin bites her lip - at a glance, she can tell that the man is undergoing respiratory failure, possibly from some injury to the chest?
But she needs to get closer, needs physical contact in order to do an actual diagnosis. She glances one last time at the open door - no chakra signatures approaching, nowhere near, thankfully - and steps forward.
Two fingers on skin is enough, luckily enough - Rin isn't sure if there was any other area of the man's body not covered in bandages that was large enough to make contact with.
She narrows her eyes, focusing chakra in her fingers - and her eyes go wide.
Burns, multiple cracked ribs, maybe even some broken... No, even worse. Rin swears under her breath. Flail chest - several adjacent ribs had been broken in multiple places, to the point that the chest wall was now moving independently. If any of the broken ribs makes contact with the lungs - or even, the heart -
Chakra scalpels form around her hands automatically.
It's a delicate operation - Rin tries actively to mend the bones, because while intubation could allow for proper ventilation for the patient, medic nin had access to methods that civilian doctors did not. She wasn't even sure if the hospital has the equipment to spare, and she would most definitely attract attention for asking.
She heals several contusions of the lung that would have killed if left untreated, and hisses when the man shudders under her.
Rin does her best on the ribs, but there's a limit to her abilities. Her future mentor had commended her on her innately superb chakra control, which was probably the only reason that she had been able to transplant Obito's eye, but she was no Tsunade.
Finally, she pulls away with a gasp, satisfied with the knowledge that her patient wasn't going to die in the next few hours - not until perhaps his next mission, in fact, if all goes well.
Still, it's more of a chance than he had before her treatment.
She lifts her head - and freezes, at the dark eyes regarding her with surprising clarity, considering their owner had been minutes from death just seconds earlier.
Rin pastes a blank smile on her face before she whips around and walks to the door, heart hammering, praying fervently that her features wouldn't be particularly memorable to the man. There were plenty of brunettes at this particular hospital after all.
The moment she's out of sight, she breaks into a run. She doesn't stop until she's back on the ground floor, trying to look as innocent as possible.
"Yo, Rin!" Shouts a voice, from right by her ear.
She whips around with a squeak, and slumps in relief. "Ah, Genma-kun! I didn't expect to see you today."
"Yeah... our team got back from our mission early." The boy shrugs. "Ebisu's waiting to get his broken arm healed, but it might be a while. Sometimes, it sucks not having a medic nin on our team."
"I think I can heal a broken bone, if he needs it," Rin offers. It would be ridiculously easy considering what else she had to deal with over the years, but she doesn't voice that out loud.
Genma shakes his head, senbon in his mouth swaying from side to side. "Eh, you know how Ebisu is. It's all by-the-book for him. Though, speaking of by-the-book..." He glances around, eyes narrowed. "Are your teammates here, by any chance?"
"Um... I'm not sure. I told them to meet me here, but it's been a while... why?"
"Well, if Kakashi was hanging around here, I wanted to warn him that -"
He's interrupted by a loud thud from a supply closet, just a few feet away. They blink and turn to stare as one.
"Good job, Obito," comes Kakashi's voice, distinctively exasperated, from inside what Rin remembers to be an incredibly tiny space, indeed. A minute later, the door slams open, and Rin's missing teammates practically roll out of the closet.
Obito pushes himself up with both arms, taking in his surroundings carefully. "...Yeah, it is a good job, Kakashi! This is the right place, so shut it!"
"What the hell?" Genma whispers from next to her. "Did they - blotch a Shunshin, or something? How did they end up in there?"
Rin blinks, and realizes that she has no idea. "I... think so. Er, Kakashi? Obito?" They both turn to look at her, seemingly oblivious to the amount of whispering onlookers. "There's a lot of busy people in here... I think we should all go outside."
Both boys nod, and within seconds, they disappear in identical puffs of smoke, just as Genma says, "Actually, I don't think that's a - oh, shit. Damn."
A few seconds later, Rin hears a very loud and very enthusiastic, "Yosh!"
Genma hangs his head in defeat. "...I guess we should go and make sure that our teammates don't kill each other," he says regretfully.
[A/N: Argh, looks like Gai has to wait another chapter to make his debut. The reason for that is, I want to work with some outside POVs for that particular part, and I don't want to add another few thousand words to this chapter, which is already the longest in the fic so far.
I'll post the bonus (I changed my mind on which to use, just because the progression of the plot so far didn't really work for what I had in mind) with the next chapter, which should be up within a week - since, I have a basic idea of what I want to write... unlike for this chapter. Sorry for the long wait, by the way. The Danzo-ROOT conversation kind of fell short when I did some canon reviewing and realized that Kakashi had a very good idea of what Danzo was up to with ROOT (but didn't tell anyone about it? I'm not actually sure about that part, darn it Narutopedia.) So the conversation ended up going another direction.
I actually know nothing about medical procedures, which probably shows. I also like the idea of Rin being friends with most other people in her generation, just because she's so darn nice.
As always, feedback and concrit are greatly appreciated!]