Nostalgia

2 Years ago

Obito Uchiha had a weird life. Officially he was dead, yet he couldn't even die to a stab to the heart. He was technically a chunin, yet he was stronger than most Kage. He pretended to be a dead man whilst being another dead man, lied so often it was second nature, and spent half of his life as a plucky kid and the other as a desolate ruined monster.

Let it not be said that Obito didn't recognize that he was as peculiar as a man can be, but what was even more peculiar was how his all of his meticulously created plans had come crashing down in a single horrid day. Sasuke Uchiha had died, one of his eyes stolen, and instead of Itachi continuing to be a good member of Akatsuki he had gone and killed their leader.

And so Madara came out from a vortex intent on gaining something from this loss. Across a battlefield of grey rubble, the remains of the section of the hidden rain Itachi had demolished, he saw the Uchiha still cloaked in the robes of the organisation he had just ended.

"Itachi." Madara rumbled with his deep, commanding, legendary voice.

The Uchiha betrayer looked up at him with Rinnegan. A setback, Madara thought, but not one he couldn't repair. Itachi continued to stare with killing essence imbuing his very thoughts, the chakra swirling behind his eyes swirling with a mad darkness. "Madara." He returned, as terribly polite as ever.

"As much as I wish to reprimand you for your actions, Uchiha, I must admit you are advantaged here. You have the rinnegan-"

"Which you want." Itachi interrupted. "In fact, I think you need it. And if you try to fight me, I will destroy both."

Madara shook his head. "No. You need them to revive your brother, don't you?"

The question was rhetorical. Obito knew the abilities of the rinnegan from his master's teachings, and he had theorized that someone as in tune with the mangekyo as Itachi would instinctually know how to revive others with the power of the rinnegan.

"And you think you can beat me?" Itachi pondered.

Behind his mask Madara sneered. "I know I can, child. But I want allies and though you cannot be relied upon to be protected I know that attacking you is as terrible as a mistake I can make. I want your brother alive as much as you do. But I can offer a trade."

"What kind of trade?"

"And eye for an eye." Ironic, considering Itachi's late brother's drive for revenge. "I give you a replacement sharingan and you use Izanagi to circumvent the death that the rinnegan revival will bring you."

Itachi looked up for a moment, his eye lids closed, clearly thinking through the many possibilities that this choice presented. Madara was a genius, but not like Itachi. He was a genius of technique and subterfuge, rather than planning. That much was obvious from the wreck upon which he stood.

"Then we will trade. I will hand you the spare rinnegan and you will hand me the sharingan." He decided.

Both men walked towards one another, so sedate it could be mistaken for a meeting. Their steps were so much slower than each powerhouse was capable of, but they did it anyway, knowing that any stray move would be a declaration of war in this feeble armistice they had cast.

One hand stretched out with a purple steel ringed eye, the other with an active red splotched with 3 tomoe. At an unsaid and unseen signal both men reached, placing their hand on their respective eye.

Then a rod of chakra pierced Madara's heart. Ah, Obito thought. He should have known that was Itachi's plan from the start.

He stepped back with the rinnegan still in his hand. "Fool. A stab to the heart cannot-" and his speech was interrupted by coughs of blood from his pierced lung. "-Kill me!"

Itachi looked amused, as much as one could with a straight-lined mouth. "I know that now, but I do wonder…"

Obito was about to leave, but this statement confused him. "Wonder what?"

"I wonder why there was a seal on your heart."

And with those words a headache came full force, and with it, emotions he had pushed under for 2 decades.

He retreated into his vortex in a single second, knowing his former partner would capitalize on his mental decay. Inside Kamui, gloved hands gripped around a masked face as he screamed in pain, unimaginable and incomprehensive. Obito ripped the mask of yet it still hurt, the guilt and pain and fear pressing into his face like an elephant's stomp.

He had killed Minato, didn't he? He massacred a clan, he even killed children. He was a monster, and that would be fine because his drive to give reason to that death would still exist, but it didn't. Who he was and why was impossible to reconcile, and it hurt.

But the worst was that for some reason, he no longer cared about the death of Rin Nohara. When he thought of her and his childhood self, it mattered as much as an old grandmother that died in his youth, and that scared him.

Because who was he now?

…

Now

Sasuke returned from Kamui with a shifting of the chakra. He nodded to Obito before using a medical scalpel and some flesh manipulation in imitation of the Asura path to take out his eye from its socket. He placed the red, bloody orb into Obito's hand, whilst Obito handed the rinnegan to Sasuke, a weird mirror of what interaction with Itachi had lead to this moment.

"What did the Hyuga heiress say?" Obito asked as both men slotted the dojutsu holders into their skulls, Sasuke's purple and red eyes now gleaming in the evening sky. It had been easy to use Kamui to sneak back into Konoha, and he had borrowed Sasuke it so he could talk to an old classmate. Now they were sat on his sensei's head. The one he had killed.

"Not much. She dislikes Naruto, that much is clear, but she is desperate, I think. I should be a missing-nin traitor to her, but instead of attacking me or running away she simply talked. I think she was as scared as she was interested."

"Interesting."

Sasuke nodded. "Indeed. How long until we can attack?"

"A few months at most. Kiri is at breaking point, Iwa is easy enough to manipulate, and Kumo will jump at an opportunity for war." Obito responded, his words not muffled by the white ringed mask he was wearing.

"So all we need is chaos in Konoha."

"Exactly."

The there was silence. Most of their conversations ended like this, Obito noted. Sasuke would finish and the two broken men would stand, looking away from one another.

It was frustrating that the Hokage was so imbued with strength. Frustrating for both of them. Obito's agenda and politics would be much harder to achieve, and Sasuke still felt a latent inferiority to his former teammate that was hard to ignore. Even with the training they kept up there was a limit to their strength, whilst it seemed the jinjuriki only got stronger. There has been a Madara-esque thought regarding his wife, the Kazekage's sister, that taking her hostage and using her to bargain would help them immensely, but it would only backfire. They would still have to kill Naruto, just that he would maybe be a little angrier, not that it would matter.

As much as Sasuke hated it, there was only one way to beat the Uzumaki. After, revolution, as he called it. The plan was politically minded and intricate, something Obito admits he couldn't have come up with by himself. Similar to Pain's objectives, they would manipulate the elemental nations to collapse. Most ninja would die, and with it, a new world where Sasuke would control most of the power in it.

Sasuke moved away with the use of his space time ninjutsu, unique to his chakra and version of the rinnegan that Obito could never replicate. Obito used his own, Kamui, to leave in pursuit of the Uzumaki who had concluded his meeting with the Hyuga after a half hour.

In contrast to his spiritual counter, Naruto's plans were boorish. Simply become Hokage and not much more than that. It reminded him of his child self, and the brutality and endless drive with which he pursued it reminded him of his Madara pretender self. Both were naïve and ignorant of a true purpose and seeing that same type of person in the blond intensified the man's disdain for him. Doing all for personal enjoyment when it will be fleeting Obito could only see as pathetic.

As he watched the Uzumaki enter his house and greet his wife, he thought on why he had changed so much. It was a shame Itachi, the man who had gifted him this freedom, was foolhardy enough to fight the Uzumaki. Had he waited he might have been able to master his eye completely and Obito and Sasuke would be by his side, but he underestimated Naruto and didn't trust the former Madara enough to ask him to help (Peculiar since he left Sasuke with him, but Obito understood that as Itachi knowing Madara wouldn't let go of a potential ally in the Uchiha, especially when he had none.) When Sasuke heard the news he was supposed to be happy, but his mangekyo sprouted, and his mission became clear.

Obito was not a good person, he knew, but it surprised him that when he saw the Uchiha lose himself to madness his heart bloomed a little bit. Rin was a peculiar part of his brain. He assumed his feelings of grief and guilt around her never faded because the real Madara had sealed his heart to prevent him from moving on. For so long his every walking memory was of the injustice of her death (Thinking of her as a teammate and then later as a child, hypocritical considering how many he had killed) yet now he had no thought of her. She was irrelevant, just another young corpse from which the tree of Konoha sprouted from, and the only thing important that could come from her death was the destruction of that system.

So if he had to kill more Rin's, so be it. He was already evil, why not taint his soul some more?

His vortex began to swirl once more as he decided to leave, but as his vision darkened, he heard the wife talk in a low, unsure way.

She was pregnant. Yet Obito didn't care. If she died, that would be just another corpse on the pile.

…

He was here again, Sakura noted. A couple days after the previous was an anomaly, but not one she didn't expect. Who knows, maybe one day he'll come talk to her every day and they'' drink tea together like old friends.

Sakura sighs and leans back in her chair as the Hokage nears, placing down her newspaper, filled with the same old propaganda. "What do you want?" She asked, absent mindedly.

"My wife is pregnant." Naruto said, straight to the point.

Pink eyebrows shot up. "Temari?"

"Yeah, I didn't get another wife dumbass."

Sakura laughed. "I wouldn't put it past you."

Naruto's face twisted in anger at the barb, but he shook his head and continued. "I-I am going to be a father. And I don't know why but I'm scared."

Sakura nearly groaned. No, she in fact did not want to give a therapy session to the man who tried to kill her. Was his standards for conversation really this low?

"Relax Hokage, you can't be any worse than your own dad."

Naruto looked unsure. "What if I am?"

She smiled. "Well, not much I can do, is there?"

Again, Sakura picked up her magazine whilst sipping cooled water. She ignored the man in front despite the immense presence he always emitted. Part ways she wondered whether that was intentional or not.

Then a thought came to her. "Funny that you're going to have a kid whilst I never even got the chance."

She manages to catch his reaction to that, and though it is muted from when he was a kid, she still sees the tell-tale eye rise and focusing of his eyes that tell of some sort of excitement. Perv.

"You're a virgin?"

She nods. "I'm guessing someone like you wasn't even before you got back to Temari."

He scowled a little, uncomfortable. She found that interesting. "What was your first time Naruto?" She asked.

Red and purple eyes looked up as if deciding if what he was saying wasn't a little too risky. "She was my age, I think. Found her in a bar. She was cute and I was drunk and 18 so we-"

Then he stopped. Sakura laughed. "And you were supposed to be with Temari?"

"She didn't follow me out of Suna." He shook his head. "I guess if I died, I wanted to at least have had sex before."

"Naruto. Does she know?" Sakura asked, trying desperately to unravel this evil pathetic man.

But surprisingly he nodded. "I told her a couple months back. She got mad and shit, told me she was saving herself for me but she got over it."

"Huh." She spoke. Dead end.

"Really? You? A virgin?" Naruto asked again.

Sakura snorted. "I'm a workaholic, not a whore."

"Do you think Ino's a whore?"

"Don't you dare call her that." She said, speaking a threat she knew she couldn't do anything about.

"Just saying, a lot of people say she gets around town a lot. I thought you two'd be similar since you were friends."

"Are friends." Sakura emphasised. "And yeah, she did do some… Things at the clubs when we went out but then I got saddled with the hokage position and suddenly I was too busy to get my back blown out! Shocker." She said, pouring a flask of sake into a shot glass and downing it, slamming the flask on the table when she was finished.

"Kinda sad." Naruto said, with that same annoying perverted gaze.

Sakura knew she shouldn't but since she already was knee deep in shit and gore she may as well dig a little further. "You know, since you already cheated on Temari once-"

"Don't." The Seventh Hokage said, his chakra pressing on her back hard enough for her to forget breathing for a second. She hacked for air as the pressure reduced and she laughed breathless laughs.

"I was joking-" She coughs. "- learn how to take one."

She regains her breath and continues.

"You know Naruto, here is something I keep close to my chest because honestly, it's better for me that only I know. It's that you haven't changed."

He looked at her confused. "Of course I have."

"Not fundamentally. You're still the same Naruto from before, just more honest with yourself. You're brash, you seek out power, you have ambitions, you're a massive pervert. Really the only thing that changed is your desire to kill people. They think you had a point where everything changed but nothing did. You were just honest with yourself."

Naruto looked like he was going to deny everything, but he stopped. "You know, you're right. I had a dream before I woke up in that hospital bed after Sasuke had stabbed me in the chest."

"The first time, not the second right?" She asked, downing the flask of sake.

He ignored her. "I dreamt of this vision of me, but he had red eyes and black irises. He looked a little like an evil version of myself." Sakura guffawed but he ignored her again. "He spoke to me and said he represented the hate I had for Konoha and how I had rejected him for too long. And I think I hugged him."

"Ah, I get it, so you gave yourself a little self-love and that eventually lead to you deciding to kill me." Sakura joked. "Some people always have the darkness required to hurt their friends, and in the end, you were one of them."

The blond scoffed. "We weren't friends."

"Not then maybe. But for at least a little bit we were proper teammates, going on missions and helping people. I miss those days. My hands weren't nearly as bloody and half of us weren't dead."

"Do you blame me for that?"

Sakura nodded. "For betraying me, yes. Kakashi already wasn't doing well before you tried to kill me but once you did you drove him off the deep end. Sasuke though…"

She hesitated maybe a little too long. Memories of feeling foolish for ever caring for him and then when Naruto betrayed her too hating herself for ever liking either of them. Honestly she found it hard to trust any man after they and Kakashi had abandoned her. Romance wasn't on the table for a kage she told herself but she knew she couldn't stomach trusting someone like that.

"Sasuke needed to die. So thanks for that."

Naruto looked at her with chakra enhanced vision looking more surprised now than when she had given him the hat. "Wow. The great Sakura Haruno thanking her arch nemesis."

She rolled her eyes. "Not all sunshine and rainbows dumbass. I wanted to kill him myself. I don't know if I could have but you took that away from me."

And for a little Naruto was silent. He simply looked into the distance at the blue cloudless sky above, before leaving without another word.

Something was coming, she could feel it. She wondered if Naruto did too.

…

A/N: New chapter. In case you were wondering, no, Naruto isn't checking Sakura out. Sakura just thinks he is because she had a negative view of him which allows her to bad faith his every action. He still feels guilt about technically cheating on temari because he loves her, just so you know. Sakura provokes him because she is bored as shit and despises him. The offer is mainly because she thinks he will refuse.

Obito in this chapter. So I can introduce him and why he is working with Sasuke openly. This is also sort of an explanation on what happened to black zetsu (he got offscreened.)

Big things happening soon, so expect something like that. Ok, remember to review, bye.