Obito liked Minato-sensei.
He was a great teacher and one of the strongest shinobi in the village. He was funny and treated their team to dinner sometimes and, best of all, Minato-sensei didn't treat him any differently from anyone else - unlike most people Obito knew, his own parents included. He didn't have any favorites on the team, even though Kakashi was a genius and made chuunin at six and blablabla.
But sometimes, Obito really questioned the man's sanity. And now, as he stood in the middle of a dark, dank forest that stretched for what seemed like miles in every direction, was one of those times.
"Er, Sensei?" He hollered, cringing back from a hissing spider, "are you really sure this is a good place to train?"
"Of course! I trained here with Jiraiya-sensei back when I was a kid." The man shouted back, a wide grin on his face. "Don't worry about the spiders, Obito. They're not poisonous. Probably, anyways."
Obito paled, then turned vaguely green. "Probably?" He yelped, a look of pure horror on his face as he looked upon the hulking arachnid with growing unease. It was bad enough that they were the size of his hand. Now they were poisonous?
"Shut it," Kakashi growled as he elbowed his way past Obito without warning, sending the other boy skidding dangerously close to the glaring spider in the process. "You're already a crybaby. Don't tell me you're afraid of spiders too."
He turned red in anger. "I'm not a crybaby, you bastard! And there's nothing wrong with being afraid of spiders!" Not when they had inch-long fangs, Obito decided, especially when they had inch-long fangs.
Kakashi made a disparging noise. Obito gritted his teeth. "You little -"
"Calm down," came a soothing voice as he felt a hand rest gently on his shoulder. "We're a team, right? We should be fighting our enemies, not each other."
Obito gazed at perfection - or, as people who weren't Uchiha Obito knew it, the face of Nohara Rin. He stared, mouth open. Her eyes, he thought dreamily, her smile...
"Hn," Kakashi said, "Obito should be to blame. After all, he was the one blocking the path because of a spider."
"It wasn't just a spider," he argued. That thing was to a spider as that damned Torah was to a normal cat.
"Oh," said Rin, "do you mean that spider there?" A flash of grey metal, a thunk of steel in wood, and then Rin was over at the spider-tree, gingerly wiping away insect juices from her kunai. Obito stared in shock, first at Rin, then at the large arachnid corpse still clinging to the trunk.
"Nngh," he managed. Rin beamed back. "It's alright, Obito," she reassured him, "it's nothing to be afraid of."
He blushed scarlet red. Alright, to be scared shitless in front of that bastard Kakashi was one thing, but for Rin to find out...
Sensei's cheerful blonde head poked out from a few dozen feet ahead, standing out amongst the dark green and brown that made up the forest. "What's taking you all so long?" He shouted at them, "We're going to need all the time we can get to train, considering that our mission's next week."
"Got it!" Obito took off running.
He was actually pretty excited for the mission his team would be undertaking next week. It was an important one, that was for sure. From what his parents had told him at the dinner table, the only reason a chuunin team had been assigned, instead of one of all jounin, was because of the presence of the Yellow Flash of Konoha, Namikaze Minato. Sure, it was dangerous, but Obito saw it only as another opportunity to prove himself to the clan, the village, and (he blushed) Rin.
Obito didn't really see how the mission could go wrong. He had the legendary Yellow Flash on his side, and Rin was a really badass medic-nin (and spider-killer, he decided), and even though Kakashi wasn't someone he liked being around for more than five seconds at a time, Obito had to admit that he was pretty good.
Besides, when had anything exciting ever happened at a bridge?
"Did anyone else hear that?"
Rin frowned. "...I do hear something, Sensei. It sounds like... talking?"
There shouldn't be anyone else on the training grounds. Kakashi knew for a fact that Minato-sensei had made sure personally that the section of the Forest of Death his team would be training in would be completely and utterly empty.
But there was the distinctive sound of human voices coming from some distance away. Maybe some extremely foolish genin. Or a jounin who had somehow missed the notifications. Nobody else would be stupid enough to wander into the Forest of Death. Or, perhaps...
"Sensei," he said out loud, "I think we should investigate." Enemy nin were always a possibility at this point in the war.
"I agree, Kakashi-kun," Sensei said, a look of concentration on his face. "Hm. I'll take the lead and you three act as back-up. Don't attack without my signal. If anything happens, make your way back to the village and inform the Sandaime of whatever happened."
He nodded, and had to stifle a groan when he saw Obito Uchiha staring at Sensei with wide eyes. Seriously? How had the boy ever gotten to chuunin rank if he could be unnerved by this?
Kakashi slid a kunai out of his pouch and followed Sensei into the forest, mindful for any branches or leaves that might draw unwanted attention to their group.
It was time now. Team Minato was now so close to the speakers that they could almost tell what they were saying - only, the little bits that Kakashi managed to hear were nonsense. Sensei narrowed his eyes and peeked through the foliage, and then frowned. It was too thick to see through.
Sensei gestured toward the source of the voices and Kakashi nodded in understanding. Minato-sensei was going to confront the speakers head-on. They had the element of surprise on their side and from the sound of things, the fight would be four against two.
The older man burst through the bushes and out of sight, kunai in hand. Somehow, he managed to rustle only a few leaves as he passed. Kakashi heard a sharp intake of breath - Sensei was shocked, for whatever reason. There was no time to think - his teacher could already be under attack. He dove forward, knowing that his teammates would follow.
He had been expecting a lot of things. Menacing enemy nin engaging in battle with Minato-sensei, some incredibly stupid jounin at their training session - but this was not what he had expected at all. Kakashi's eye twitched incontrollably. Seriously? His team had been tracking a pair of horny civilians?
He wasn't called a genius for nothing. One of the pair was obviously not shinobi - he was clad in purple robes and looked more like a performer in a theater show than anything. Instead of a hitai-ate, he wore a purple headband. The other, however, almost fooled him at first. Wearing a jounin vest and uniform, he looked like a jounin of the village - until Kakashi caught sight of the obviously fake hitai-ate on the man's forehead, imprinted with a symbol that did not belong to any hidden village.
The fact that neither of them seemed to notice his team's arrival only cemented his suspicions. Any trained shinobi would have attacked by now. He groaned inwardly. Civilians.
Kakashi couldn't see much of either man's face - he could only see the back of one, and the other one, the one being (he blushed) pressed to the trunk of the tree... his face was blocked by his... companion.
Next to him, Obito stared with a look of confusion on his face. Kakashi fought the urge to facepalm. Obito was an idiot, yes, but it wasn't until their team's introduction to Jiraiya-sama that it became apparent just how.
The Toad Sage was an extremely powerful shinobi... but a huge pervert as well. The man had tried giving them some books he had written - Sensei had grabbed them out of his and Obito's hands as soon as he saw them - and dragged the two boys to "train" - that is, to ogle girls at the local bathhouse.
Kakashi reddened at the memory. That... had been educational, at least for him. He was no stranger to the matter of the birds and bees, but Obito... The Uchiha had simply stood there awkwardly when Jiraiya-sama had beckoned him to the peephole, looking completely and utterly lost. A round of intense questioning later, an incredulous Jiraiya had shooed him away.
Apparently, Obito's parents hadn't felt the need to tell him anything about human sexuality. A chance remark from a classmate had lead him to believe that kissing couples were in fact eating each other's faces, in the most literal way possible. And after seeing the large wooden bat that Obito owned, the one he kept as a defense against "face eating zombies", Team Minato had tacitly agreed to keep him the way he was as long as humanly possible.
No doubt his teammate had no idea what was going on before him.
Kakashi shot Minato-sensei a pleading look and the man, looking very awkward, walked over and tapped the black haired civilian on the back. Said man turned, stared, and let loose a spew of obscenities.
His eyebrow raised as the man ranted somewhat nonsensically - and then stared when he was called a bastard. Did he know the man? Kakashi would certainly remember meeting someone like him, considering the obvious whorl shaped scars that marred the entire right half of the man's face. Even Sensei looked stunned at the sheer rage the man exuded.
Then Sensei had said a single word that turned Kakashi's stomach upside down - "Sakumo?"
Kakashi started and followed the older man's stare to the other man, the man whose face had been previously hidden. His kunai dropped from nerveless fingers.
No, it can't be...
Silvery white hair a shade that Kakashi had seen on only two people his entire life, one of them being himself. And the face, the one that had haunted his dreams and had caused him to don a mask just to escape from it. The last time he had seen that face, its owner had been bleeding out from a self-afflicted stomach wound in their home.
Shock turned into pure, mindless rage. His fingers shook as he drew out a kunai, accidentally cutting his finger on the blade - a rookie mistake, one he hadn't made since he had died. He barely felt it.
"You bastard," he hissed, and lunged.