A/N: Intended to be read after chapter 83

"All my friends think you're vicious,

And they'll say you're suspicious,

You keep dreaming,

And dark scheming,"

-I Feel Like I'm Drowning, Two Feet

Kisame was cruel and like all mist-nin, had an innate desire to spill blood.

This is who Konoha said he was.

He was motivated by self-interest, by a willingness to burn himself and everything around him if it meant winning a fight, especially a good one.

This is who Suna said he was.

Like all mist-nin he knew nothing of loyalty, had no cause to fight for, but like a domesticated fish didn't know anything but his bowl.

This is who Iwa said he was.

Kisame thought of who the world said he was while he waited beneath a square roof, Samehada at his side, quivering and annoyed at the feast he'd denied her.

Bandages were slowly unraveling on the floor, but he paid it no mind.

He'd sent a summon to seek out Madara. It would be unusual to him because Kisame was never the one to initiate contact, and so he'd come.

A little over half a year didn't seem like a long time to know someone, but for mist-nin who lived bright, short lives, it was decades.

The canals on either side of him drained into a sewer through a round grate with bars too close together for anyone, even the most malnourished baby, to fit through.

Didn't mean people didn't try, but that was what the hunter-nin were for.

Drops of water steadily dripped around him from the mist condensed on the bricks above him. It and the rushing water were the only sounds around him.

None of the other hidden villages had gotten it quite right.

Before he met the hatchlings, he might've said that Konoha had gotten the closest. He did love to fight, to spill blood and have his own spilled, that was true.

But now, with water dripping on his shoulder and Samehada shivering at his side, he thought Iwa had it right all along.

No, he didn't trust the one with the purple eyes. No more than he trusted that a stone-nin would share a friendly drink with him.

He didn't care about any of them beyond the missed potential for a good fight.

What he'd never say outside the safety of his own head was that hearing what sounded like the truth had shaken something loose in him. It was the same something that had him stop and listen to Madara.

He'd only ever say it was curiosity. Nothing more, nothing less.

The difference between the two was that no matter how he twisted her words, he couldn't figure out what she wanted from him.

Madara wanted his power, wanted him at his side rather than against him because he was a threat.

Kisame didn't mind this, because he was a threat.

He couldn't say he knew much about Madara beyond, vaguely, his appearance thanks to the Valley of the End in Fire. The Academy hadn't been for history, other than a brief overview, and he hadn't ever been to the library.

That was for the scholarly types, not the ones bred for war like him.

But if Madara was some old man who wasn't in his prime anymore, he supposed it made sense.

If he wasn't Madara at all he supposed that too, made sense.

Doubt was as much of a companion to him as Samehada.

It wasn't swirly eye's words that led him to this moment, but the questions that swam in his head after.

Why would she ever think he'd believe her over Madara?

Why had she looked at him so intensely, but at the same time like she was older, much older than her body, and knew more than he did?

He supposed she could just have that kind of charisma like he'd heard about the Yellow Flash, or she could be a deception specialist and playing the long game with him, with the end goal of course to swing the rebellion to Terumi's side.

But that was just a guess. The facts were that she hadn't asked anything of him and had agreed to stay until he came back.

The facts were that he'd looked into her spiraling eyes and been rattled, down to his core.

It felt like a bee sting waiting to happen, should Madara make her right, but that wasn't the issue.

He'd been stung plenty of times before. No, it was that if Madara had lied to him about something as simple as his name, how could he trust anything else that had come out of his mouth?

Kisame grinned, because it was all he knew how to do.

He'd grinned as he dismembered and sliced during the war, and grinned as he cut down his mentor, the man who taught him everything he knew.

What did she gain, when it was him who would have to deal with being stung yet again?

He became aware of his summon's fin in the water beside him for a second before she disappeared under it, a little blue thing he'd named Koukakurui because sharks, by design, were not made for identities.

They were made to eat and kill and fight and then be eaten.

Any of his summons could do what Koukakurui did and he wouldn't notice the difference.

The air in front of the grate began to wrinkle and spin, growing wider and longer like a seam in reality, and out stepped Madara Uchiha.

His mask gleamed white through the shadows and the mist, even when his dark cloak made him look like just another part of them.

"Lord Madara," Kisame greeted automatically.

"Kisame," Madara returned as the seam closed behind him. "What do you have to show me?"

"It's not like that. I have a favor to ask you. I'm afraid it couldn't wait."

Madara tilted his head, encouraging him to go on.

"Let me see your face," he requested. "You have my trust, my loyalty, but if you truly want me to devote myself to carrying out your plan until my last breath, it's only fair if a little of that trust is returned, isn't it?"

In the silence after, the last of the bandages unraveled on the floor.

Suna, he thought, had been the most wrong. He didn't fight for his own interest because he liked to but because for so long he'd had no other interest to fight for.

"Is that all? To call me here for such a thing," Madara finally said, lightly admonishing as he reached up and undid the strap holding his mask in place, freeing some of his spiky hair. He let it fall off his face and caught it with his other hand.

The second difference between the hatchling and Madara was that Madara had been watching and studying him through Lord Fourth long before he'd revealed himself.

Kisame studied him.

Sure, he looked old. He wasn't Elder Genji, who'd been ancient his entire life, but he wasn't young. He had lines of sagging skin on his forehead, around his mouth, and bags under his eyes. Only his left eye was open.

He looked like that monument of him.

"I've never understood the fascination with my face," Madara said, lifting the mask back up.

Kisame raised Samehada towards him, and Madara paused.

"One more thing," Kisame said. All he had to do was touch Samehada and Kisame would apologize, would tell him everything he knew about the hatchlings, and then he'd go hunting.

Madara looked at him, the mask held over the right side of his face. "Have I lied to you before and I can't recall it? Do I have so little of your trust that you see this as necessary, Kisame?"

"Do this for me and I won't stop or tire until any task you ask of me is complete. I'm not only giving you me, Lord Madara, but my will and soul as well."

No henge or genjutsu would survive contact with Samehada.

All he had to do was give Samehada the lightest, barest touch—

"Who have you been talking to, Kisame?" Madara made no move to come closer, staring at him through a narrowed eye.

Kisame kept grinning and felt something else rattle loose, something in his chest.

(He never ever wanted it to end this way, but he was cursed)

"So, you have found someone? Someone who knows of me, yes? If they were able to drive you to this, they must," Madara said, still casual, still not moving closer as he fit the mask back onto his face.

Kisame lowered his head.

No one would ask to see someone's face if they didn't already know what they looked like, right? No one would gamble on reliable, faithful Kisame questioning them further, right?

Samehada's mouth shot open as wide as it'd go, shaking and screaming Kisame's intent and sudden bloodlust at the masked man.

Calmly, the masked man adjusted the strap on the back of his mask. "There is no path left to you but the one at my side," he said. "If your heart still truly desires an honest world, you, even with all of your power, cannot make it happen alone. This reality will not stand for it. You don't have to trust me, or even like me, to help create the reality I promised you, your world without lies—"

Koukakurui shot out of the water, mouth open to bite his arm or shoulder, and the masked man turned in one motion, his eye spinning red, a black rod shooting out from his sleeve. In the next moment his arm was raised, catching her midair and impaling her on the end.

The ground where Kisame had been had cracked inward.

The masked man's gaze swung to him, red eye spinning and spinning as Kisame swung Samehada with the intent to cut him in half, as pieces of broken concrete were still falling into the hole he'd made.

With the grate behind him, he couldn't dodge in any normal way.

The masked man leapt back, releasing the rod as his back phased through the grate, and Samehada's scales shredded across the front of his body, devouring the chakra he was using to turn his stomach intangible and filling the air with his blood.

The masked man skidded back through the grate, his intangibility returning the second he stopped touching Samehada, and stopped, almost curiously, to touch his wound through the tear in his cloak.

Unsatisfied with the snack of chakra, Samehada clamped down on the bars and began tearing them apart.

Kisame, never losing his grin, calmy reached down with his other hand and pulled a handful of massive wooden spikes from his abdomen. It was all that'd saved the masked man, pushing him back enough to avoid a fatal wound.

The man masked held his bloody fingers up to his face and examined them. "Very well," he said, shifting his gaze to Kisame. "If you want to live in Hell, then I can't stop you."

Before he could put his massive chakra to use, the air rippled and twisted in front of the masked man and he was gone.

Samehada paused. Losing interest in the bars, he released his blade to allow her to lick the blood off the walls.

And Kisame was left with a sting in his heart and his favorite summon dead at his feet.

.

.

.

Obito Uchiha knew he relied too much on kamui.

But it failing him twice among the long, long list of times it'd saved his life made him dismiss what happened. He'd suspected, but hadn't had the chance to test out until now, that chakra absorption had and would pose a problem for him anyway.

He pulled the last stitch through the torn, serrated skin of his stomach and turned his thoughts elsewhere.

Kisame was a threat, but it wasn't so much him that he was worried about, but who he'd met with, who he'd spoken to who could've predicted how he'd act.

Who knew that he was not Madara Uchiha.

Not... Madara...

Obito cut the thread off at the end and grabbed a roll of bandages.

Impossible, he thought.

Why would she, who cared for nothing, come to Kirigakure? But who else could it be?

Behind him, sitting motionless on a stone slab with his back to him, was Yagura. His feet were submerged in a canal but he was incapable of feeling the cold. He did nothing but breath in and out and stare, sightless, at the water.

If Yagura were needed, he was sent for, and only then did Obito animate him. It'd taken a long time to give himself the freedom for Yagura not to need to appear every day, for his decisions to take root and destabilize Kiri enough for him to slip away and not be missed.

He bandaged himself quickly, barely even noticing the pain of it.

The question shouldn't be why, but what would he do about it?

He couldn't understand what drove her actions, why she refused to stand with him when her eyes had held no love for this reality.

He couldn't understand the choice his Master had made by giving those eyes to her.

What had his Master seen? What was he missing?

Obito looked up suddenly.

Black Zetsu was in front of him, by the doorway. It didn't take any form, like a rippling puddle that stood upright, staring at him with yellow, unblinking eyes and a frown that showed its teeth.

"It's her, isn't it?" it asked.

"What is it?" Obito asked instead of answering.

Black Zetsu only stared at him, its frown growing wider. "Her friends killed White Zetsu. He was with you since your rebirth. Doesn't that upset you?"

Obito pulled the bandages tight enough that he was forced to focus more on the pain than the question and said nothing.

"And, since you left Spiral to preserve Madara's body and watch the eyes, you have no idea what she's been doing this whole time. You don't know what paths she has or hasn't awakened. Doesn't that grate at you?"

Obito tore the end of a bandage in two, looped one strip through another part of the bandages, and tied the strips together.

"And, and, because of how hard you've been preparing for the future by crippling the hidden villages, you've let things get out of control in the present. That's why I've been spying on Kiri and not them. Doesn't that seem backwards?"

Obito didn't look up, but Yagura made the bird sign. Yagura inhaled as he turned, and Obito held down his first aid box as a powerful gust of wind rattled through the room.

When he looked up, Black Zetsu was gone.