Chapter Text
The day his father sees it, he’s told never again. “You do that one more time, boy, and I’ll tear those eyes right outta your head.”
Obito is a genin, fresh from his first mission in the war, his uniform covered in the blood of his teammates. It slides down his arm and soaks into his glove, where it makes its forever home as a stain on his wrist. He leans heavily in the entryway, dragged inside by his father’s harsh grip.
“Do you want to end up like your mother?”
His father doesn’t ask if he’s okay, or how he’s holding up. All he can do is shut his mouth and shake his head, obeying when he’s told to wash. The water dilutes the evidence of his first battle as it circles the drain, a tint of pink, not the harsh red forever burned behind his eyes, and he wonders if, when he wakes up tomorrow, everything will go back to normal. As the shower spray falls across him, and as he cleans the open sores on his skin, he breaks down and cries. He cries, and cries, because if he doesn’t do it now, he won’t ever have a chance.
The nightmares that chase him are a secret. He doesn’t confide in his father, because he knows that if he tries, he’ll be mocked. You’re weak, Dad would say, you’ve always been weak. This is what our village has come to after ousting the traditions of the Bloody Mist.
When he drinks, Dad tells stories of his graduation exam. How the adrenaline felt as he faced off against those children who were once his classmates, how he retched when he saw his best friend’s body sinking into the marsh with a kunai through her eye. The smell as he sat for days, hiding in a mound of corpses, lying in wait for the last remaining examinees to wander close enough to snare.
Obito doesn’t share that at night, he dreams of the moment he failed his team. He sucks in his tears, buries them deep, pushes back all those demands that he fix his wretched self, and plugs his ears to the lectures of how his weak generation is the reason their village is losing the war. You’re soft. It’s because of kids like you that this country is rotting from the inside.
He hides those nights where sleep won’t find him, the intervals between one restless moment and the next, when he looks in the mirror and stares at the red that once stained his clothes, made permanent in his eyes, like those memories he cannot shake.
Kiri doesn’t like Kekkei Genkai. For a while, they lived in rural Water Country with Mom, thinking it was safe. It wasn’t. Not for long, certainly not forever. He was there the day they came for her, he saw it and watched and did nothing as his father covered his mouth and held him still, as they took her from him.
Kiri’s ANBU did not connect her to the father and son living nearby. His parents’ marriage was unregistered, and as far as the government was concerned, he was just another orphan of war taken in by a man with no one left to carry his name. There were hundreds like that, after all. The body count of the war was just as high as every other slaughter in the Bloody Mist.
He blinks, the red fades, but the memories remain. For every person who sees, another body is added to the mound at his back. No one knows, no one has to.
To maintain his peace, he’ll earn the name of the Bloody Mist.
On his tenth mission as a chūnin, he goes down. The concussion is bad enough that he vomits when his squad reluctantly carries him to the nearest stronghold, and it persists when he’s brought home with some of the other soldiers. For minutes, hours, days, something feels off, like he’s somewhere he shouldn’t be. Like this isn’t Kiri. But the mist is unmistakable, circling the air like a wraith.
They call in someone from Torture and Interrogation. Obito sits in his hospital bed as he’s questioned for his name, his family, his shinobi identification number. Age, sex, medical history. They don’t have his records, and don't recognize him. But the interrogator’s genjutsu prevents lies, and as he recounts his place in the village, T&I kicks up a fuss.
There was a fire in the records room. A team of unidentified ANBU snuck into the village and blew the Mizukage office to hell and back. Though the damage was contained, a host of important documents are now ash, forever lost. They determine that his files, too, must have been lost, because his sharp teeth mark him as Kiri-born, and their jutsu confirms that every word he speaks is true.
He doesn’t tell them that he’s met them before, that the interrogator’s assistant is a friend of his father’s, and that they’ve been over to his house several times in the past. It’s the concussion making him think these things, confusing them with different people. That’s the only way it makes sense.
When he asks if his father will visit, they look between one another and explain, almost clinically, that the man he claims to be his parent has been dead since the Second Shinobi War. It’s the concussion, they say. You’re just confused.
But his father’s words burn like acid in his head, and he knows that what they’re saying isn’t true.
He says nothing. Questioning authority in the Bloody Mist is no different from setting one’s neck on a guillotine.
The Mist wills it, so Obito is an orphan.
Kiri continues to lose ground in the war. By now, Konoha and Iwa are squaring off on the bloodiest battlefronts, and the Mist is hardly considered a threat. Its forces wane, the body count too high. The now-defunct graduation exam ensured that only the strongest of warriors became shinobi, and squandered their numbers in the process. Kiri’s shinobi forces have always been lacking when compared against the other Five Great Nations, comically so, and despite the beliefs of the older generation, a few prestigious elites rarely out-perform a sea of soldiers. The logic of the elders just doesn’t add up, never has, and now that tradition has been ousted, genin and fresh chūnin make up the bulk of Kiri’s forces. But still, those old fools on the council, and perhaps even the Mizukage, himself, prioritize the survival of its elite.
Obito sees more classmates die with every dawn. For each squadmate that falls and friend whose life bleeds out of them like ink on a page, it gets harder to wake up the next day.
Lying in his sleeping bag, he stares at the stars. It’s been three hours, and though his body is tired and his mind is worn, as the last on his team with a still-beating heart, he needs to get up. Five hours until rendezvous. Get up, food pill, scout. Spotted Iwa in the area, they’re based somewhere nearby. Squad 31 will be taking provisions over the border from Kannabi Bridge, and you’re the only one left. Get them to the front line.
But he’s weak. His arms shake when he pushes off the ground, and shivers wrack his body. It’s been three weeks of ferrying supplies along their cargo route, three weeks of switching from one team to the next as enemy forces ambush their caravans. The Kannabi Bridge trade route was once Iwa’s territory, up near Kusa, but Kiri has a foothold in the area now and has been using it to push them back. It’s a well-known passage, and they know it won’t be long before one of their enemies takes it from them, so they’re making use of it while they can.
He stretches; his muscles scream. Rubbing his sore eyes, blinking away the fog settling over his thoughts, he makes his rounds. There are sounds of a skirmish nearby, the crunching of leaves underfoot and the unmistakable thunk of kunai eating into tree bark. It’s close, too close to the bridge, and if it’s not dealt with before the rendezvous, it could affect their supply chain.
Rolling his eyes, he concentrates chakra into his optic nerves, the world crisp and vibrant, and pulls his blade from its sheath.
He wears Mom’s gift now, in the heat of battle, because the dead tell no tales.
No one will know, no one has to.
Fucking Iwa. Fucking Konoha. Fuck both their villages, and every sage-damned shinobi who ever set foot in them.
He’s weak in earth release and hangs back as the Iwa-nin draw the Leaf squad into a rocky cavern. It’s obvious to anyone with eyes what they plan on doing here. While the Iwa-nin are distracted with their little Konoha infestation, he suppresses his chakra to a whisper of what it would otherwise be and snakes behind them, keeping to the trees, melting his body into the puddles and sliding through the waterlogged ground. Yesterday’s heavy rainfall works to the advantage of Kiri-nin, and the two four-man cells take no notice of him. They’re fixated on their prey in the cave, two members caught inside with the enemy, waiting to pick off anyone who makes it out alive. Obito doesn’t mind being ignored.
His hands glide through the water’s surface, chakra pulsing through his blade, and slit the first shinobi’s Achilles tendon. The man goes down, a shrill scream drawing the eyes of his teammates, but before they can act, three of his poison-tipped senbon make contact, and already their muscles are failing.
For the rest, all he has to do is lean into his mother’s gift.
Obito flicks his chakra blade, flecks of blood leaving spots of colour in the puddles, and heads to the cave. There’s shouting—arguing— we have to go —and he tilts his head, confused that a warfront team could be so carelessly loud, like a squad of fresh genin. It doesn’t matter. There are two Iwa-nin inside, and he counts three voices screeching from within. He scratches his head, the front of his vest soaking in the blood of the shinobi he felled, and supposes he can wait for them out here. Pick off the survivors, just as the Iwa-nin would have done. With them dead, there should be no interference with today’s supply run.
The ground shakes. The screaming turns frantic. From his vantage point, Obito sees the way the rocks above the cavern disappear beneath its roof, and understands. Well, if they all get squashed, that makes his job easier, doesn’t it?
It goes quiet. The rocks settle, but they’re not stable, and that roof will finish caving sooner or later. No one has run out yet, so either they’re dead or pinned, and Obito wonders if he might aim some jutsu at the precariously-sitting rocks up above and wash his hands of the matter. As he weighs the pros and cons of not being able to confirm his body count on such a high-importance mission, he hears something. Wailing, choked back and quiet, muffled behind hands. Crying on a mission? Maybe they are genin, after all.
His stomach knots.
“Shut up! I’m not abandoning you!”
It seems not all of them are pinned. Someone is, and the rest are staying behind. That’s foolhardy, and it almost gets a laugh out of him. They would risk their mission objective to comfort one crushed teammate, really? Their lives, too? This keeps getting easier and easier.
There are whispers then, echoes that don’t quite survive beyond the mouth of the cave, and Obito leans in to listen. Unfortunately, Mom’s Kekkei Genkai doesn’t do jack shit for his hearing, and the words are nothing but white noise to the creaking and groaning of the settling landslide. Footsteps bounce off the cave walls, and Obito sinks into a puddle as the bodies of two young shinobi flee the cave with tears in their eyes, back to their objective, ignorant of the corpses Obito dragged into the brush. It’s likely that Konoha sent this team to collapse the bridge, so that sucks. He can’t get a good look at them from the limited view of the puddle, but they seem to be physically fit, and neither are limping. The two remaining Iwa-nin must be dead. That leaves one more.
The Konoha-nin will die on his own. It doesn’t matter. Obito’s main focus is swinging back around to stab his chakra blade straight through the necks of the two who fled.
I’m not abandoning you, the teammate insisted, but he’s gone and left, hasn't he? He left his comrade to die like they always do, because shinobi are cruel and war is brutal and living is hard. They’re disposable, after all. Worker ants in a colony of thousands.
I’m not abandoning you, but he lied, and he did, and that would be the last thing his teammate ever knew.
I’m not abandoning you, then Obito emerges from the puddle, his liquid body settling into flesh and bone.
I’m not abandoning you, so he takes his first step, those words spellbinding, as though they came from his own throat.
And enters the cave.
Stupid dry fucking cave. Stupid fucking Iwa. Konoha-nin, those pieces of shit.
So, the cave collapsed. He had the time to duck and roll, placing himself in an alcove before everything came tumbling down, but now his damn leg is caught in the debris, and he doesn’t know a single earth jutsu. The ground is dry, especially considering yesterday’s rainfall, so there isn’t enough moisture to draw upon and move through as he did outside. He can form beads of water, but even if he made suiton bullets, they wouldn’t be large enough to displace the stupid fucking rocks on his stupid fucking leg.
What a dumb move. He must have been possessed to pull something so unhinged. What was his plan? Haul a half-crushed enemy out of a cave so he could properly kill them in the daylight? How would he have even unpinned them, and why bother? Now, that kid’s teammates are heading for Kannabi Bridge three hours before the caravan is set to arrive, and they’re going to either ambush the supply cart or blow the whole damn pass into next Sunday.
Obito drops his face into his hands and groans. He kicks his good leg out in frustration as his father’s venomous words snap back at him, you’re such a bloody fool.
From somewhere to his left, a wet cough echoes.
His eyes widen, his hands fall. He listens closely to the uneven, stuttering breaths of someone else in there with him. But the scary thing about caves is that they have no light. Not one stray sunbeam hits his face, and all that exists is inky black. He can’t see his hands, much less the other person he’s suffering alongside. But they’re alive, whoever they are. They’re alive, trapped in here just the same.
They’re an enemy, and he has to kill them.
But his leg hurts and hurts and hurts, and his heart is thrumming unsteady patterns in his chest from sleep deprivation. Obito thinks the cut on his thigh is infected, too. He got it in the confrontation that took his team from him two days ago. And if this enemy hasn’t moved yet, they certainly won’t now.
Another cough. Obito sighs.
“Who’s there?” The voice is young and weak, croaking. It sounds like something is applying pressure to his chest, and he can’t get enough air. “Ah… you came back. Idiot.”
Obito says nothing to keep from breaking this kid’s delusion, because the peace of dying among comrades is greater than dying with your enemy.
“Did Rin get out?”
He continues to say nothing, growing restless in his silence, until finally, he leans into the lie. “Yeah,” he says. “Rin’s gone. It’s just me.”
The boy doesn’t call him out on the tone of his voice or his manner of speech. Maybe he wants to believe in the lie, too. “Good. She can still finish the mission.” A long, quivering breath breaks up his words. Then, “You shouldn’t have come back.”
“Agreed,” Obito mutters flatly. “I really fucked up there. Don’t know what got into me.”
A wet laugh is his reply, and though it comes from a dying Konoha-nin, it eases his nerves. Calm sweeps over him, the steady drip of water bouncing off the walls. Caves are always so creepy because sound reverberates off everything and it’s hard to pinpoint. He’s made camp in them a few times while on or near the frontlines, and—
Drip, drip.
There’s water nearby, after all. When the cave collapsed, some of the rainwater collected on the higher platforms could have been displaced. Even if it sinks into the dirt, he can pull it out again. The problem is whether it’s close enough to utilize.
Alright, okay, breathe, Obito, you stupid piece of shit. Now that he’s calm, he remembers the chakra blade at his hip and unsheathes it. The alcove is too narrow for him to get a full swing, so he won’t have the momentum to break the rocks, but as he presses chakra into it, it glows. Soft, watery blue. His chakra is like Mom’s, and Mom’s always reminded him of the sea. It settles the butterflies in his stomach, those sparks of nerves that tether shinobi to their failures.
It’s not as bad as it looks. His leg is mangled and his foot is caught, but if he can get it out, he can splint it. Obito has soldier pills in his supply kit, and the necessary first-aid on hand. It’ll last him eight hours, at which point he’ll be at the stronghold and among medics. Yeah, okay, sure. He can break his body for now, and piece it back together later. This could be so much worse.
Another cough reminds him that it is. He wonders if the Konoha-nin’s lung has been pierced. Death will come for him soon, so Obito shouldn’t worry.
The issue is getting his leg out, and then finding safe passage from his alcove to an exit. First, he searches for water, and of course, sees nothing. It must be beyond the wall of rock, which is great perfect fan-fucking-tastic—
A wheeze, a shift, the sound of the boy trying to move.
Obito flares his chara blade to the left, but there’s only more rocks. There’s a barrier between himself and his fellow failure. “Save your strength,” he calls, his words little more than filler. “You’ll only die faster if you move.”
The boy breathes for a bit, as though catching his breath. “That might be nice. Hurts like a bitch.”
Obito snorts.
“Are you hurt?”
He’s in the middle of unsealing his field kit when the words catch his ears, and he stops, trying to peek around the wall of stone. If he pushes chakra into his eyes, he could see without the chakra blade, but it would burn through his reserves faster. That can come later, when he’s actively trying to leave. “Not terribly. My foot is caught, and my leg’s a bit mangled, but I can set the bone and splint it. The problem is unpinning it from the stone.”
There’s nothing, and he wonders if maybe the kid went and kicked the bucket while he was talking. Then, quietly, “A clone?”
“Not enough room,” he sighs. “I’m stuck in a small recess in the wall. I wouldn’t even be able to stand.”
“What—” Another cough, wet and raw and choking. It takes a moment for him to recover. “What about a transformation?”
Obito clicks his tongue, wishing he thought of that. But as he analyzes the space and the precarious placement of the walls, he dismisses the idea. “The cave isn’t stable. If I move my leg carelessly, it might be enough to send this part of the roof down on me, and then I’ll really be stuck.”
“So, you need to switch it out with something…”
“Right, yeah.”
He’s bemused to find the Konoha-nin aiding in Obito’s efforts to escape when his own situation is so dire, but honestly, the kid has probably given up. If he can save his teammate, this liar who he thinks came back for him, then maybe he can leave in peace.
But this liar did come back for him, and isn’t sure why.
“What do you have on you?”
“Nothing big enough,” Obito affirms as he reads through his scroll. Shit, but it hurts. Wow, sage, that’s bad. At least it’s keeping him alert. Pain is grounding in a way nothing else is. “Rations, field kit, first-aid kit,” he grimaces when he remembers his empty canteen and skips over it, “spare leg wraps, kunai pouch, signal flare, chakra blade—”
“Chakra blade?” The voice is hazy, but he hears another shift accompanying the question. “Since when do you fight with a sword?”
“Since now,” he mutters, “shut up. Anyway: two spare uniforms, twenty-seven paper bombs, a senbon pouch, and,” an Uzumaki-style silencing seal, “that’s it.” If he hints that he has supplies from Uzushio, this kid will know exactly where his loyalties lie.
The Konoha-nin hums, then turns and spits at the ground. Blood must be gathering in his mouth now. How did he fall? If he’s lying on his back, he could drown in it. Not a pleasant way to die. “The first-aid kit. What about wrapping your uniform around it?”
Obito considers this, unsealing it, emptying its contents back into the scroll, and rolling his pants and shirt around it. He frowns. “Not ideal. The tin will bend too easily, and even with the padding, it’s not the right shape. I’d get maybe two seconds before the whole thing goes down.”
A soft tsk fills the air as the boy clicks his tongue.
Obito stares at the first-aid kit peeking out from beneath sleeves and pant legs, and tilts his head. Drip, drip echoes in the cave, too indistinct for him to follow, and beyond that, the soft sounds that water likes to make as it moves. Drip, drip, and these sounds are too distinct for a bit of wet earth or mud. Maybe they’re looking at this the wrong way: they can’t keep the cave from collapsing. If they want to get out, they’ll need to break through the stone, and that will destabilize it again. What it’s sounding like, to Obito, is that his first instinct, the one he so easily dismissed, might be their best shot.
“Let’s try a different approach: is there any water near you?” Obito asks.
“I… think? I can’t see.”
Right, fair. He doesn’t have a chakra blade. It’s hard to tell direction in a cave because of the way sound bounces.
There’s a space between two of the rocks that leads to where the Konoha-nin is pinned, which is how his voice is carrying through so well. Obito wedges the blade through it, offering him its light, his chakra coils steadily feeding into the hilt. There’s a gasp, small and short, and the sound of more painful movements.
“There’s… yeah, there’s water. Right next to me.”
Excellent. “How much?”
“A small stream. It looks like there’s a cavern below this one. I think it was unearthed by the Iwa-nin.”
“Right, okay, good. You’re losing your light privileges now.” He pulls back the chakra blade and drags his body as far as his leg will allow, grits his teeth through the pain, and reaches his hand through the small opening, coaxing the water forward. It’s hard, right on the edge of his range and so damn weak, but it does heed his call, steady and slow, and he stamps down his excitement. There will be time to celebrate at the stronghold. “What’s your status?”
“I’m fine.”
“Answer the fucking question.”
A long, burdened pause. Wheezing breaths. “I’m—stuck. My legs, my chest. I can’t feel my left side, and I’m… If you move me, I might bleed out.”
So, he’s dead, wasting his last moments on the well-being of his fake teammate. Obito bites his tongue and continues pulling water through the hole in the wall, gathering it in a cocoon, holding his hand seal steady and firm. Then, as the alcove fills with water, as it takes up the little air they have left— air, we need air, we’re trapped, we’ll suffocate—
I don’t want him to die like that.
All at once, the water smacks against the dirt, floods the passageway, and Obito sinks with it. He flows through the puddles as they waterlog the ground beneath, and the cave shakes, trembles, groaning awake like a sleeping giant, and comes up through the hole to the open space on the other side of the rocks, where the Konoha-nin rests. Obito can’t see, his chakra blade inactive as he weaves through the water, but he feels the way the puddles disperse around something, crashing into the boy’s side and thigh.
Obito’s arms break through the earth, wrap around the boy’s shoulders, and drag him down.
They follow the stream as fast as Obito’s bleeding chakra reserves will allow, and come up just beyond the cave, far from the corpses of the Iwa-nin and the trail of death he left in his wake. He pulls himself through first, then eases the broken body through the barrier carefully, unsure of its state, or if the boy even survived the trip. They're soaked, fabric clinging to their skin, and the boy coughs up a mouthful of water.
Obito could have given him warning. Then again, everything was coming down by the time Obito’s leg came free.
He sets the wheezing, gasping boy down by the stream and analyzes him carefully. The kid is young, a few years younger than Obito is, or maybe he's just small. Either way, he looks like a ghost, between his pale hair and paler skin. There's a deep gash bisecting his left eye, blood mixing with streaks of water across his face. And oh, no, he's not doing well at all. Multiple lacerations catch Obito’s eye all down the left side of the kid's body, and his limbs are mangled, gnarled things. Yes, he's bleeding out, but not as alarmingly quickly as Obito would expect.
The Konoha-nin opens his good eye, a smokey grey, clouded with pain. A cloth mask rests around his neck, stained black from all that blood he hacked up.
The medical supplies come first. Obito compresses whatever wounds he can, starting with the deepest, and says nothing as he stitches flesh together piece by piece. The kid’s on his own for whatever internal damage he undoubtedly has, but Obito can give him a better chance at survival.
In the back of his head is a warning he can't shake: the mission comes first, the mission is in jeopardy, this kid’s team is going to lose them the war.
Obito fucking hates Konoha.
The boy watches, silent, and after a minute, declares, “We’re out.”
“Yeah,” Obito grunts, already over it as he threads sutures through torn flesh. “Now shut up.”
The boy does not shut up. The boy is defiant. “You don't know suiton.”
Obito looks up, his hands pausing for just a second. He finds it curious that the kid still believes him to be a comrade, even out in broad daylight. But then he remembers his concussion, and all those words he never shared with a father who was long dead.
“I sure hope I do,” he retorts, almost teasing, “because it's my best affinity.”
The boy’s brows knit together, but he doesn't say anything. Then his eye finds the symbol of the Mist engraved on Obito’s hitai-ate, and widens. He sees now who it is he helped, this liar who pretended to be a friend while robed in the uniform of an enemy. Obito doesn't care; he has a team to crush and a bridge to save. But guilt won't let him leave just yet. Not like this.
Fortunately, the kid’s lungs are fine. He must have been having trouble breathing because his ribs were compressed, maybe even broken. But now that they’re out, his inhales don’t sound as desperate.
“A henge?” the boy wonders cautiously.
“Believe what you want,” he says as he pulls apart the damaged skin of the boy’s left eye with his fingertips. It's nasty underneath, the eye is undoubtedly blind, and there's nothing he can do about it. He's not a medic. There won't be any saving it.
After doing what he can, Obito turns his efforts to his own leg. He slips off his glove, places it between his teeth, closes his eyes, and sets the bone. His teeth ache from how hard he bites down, stifling a cry, and he blinks away tears as he splints it. Next, a soldier pill, swallowed dry. He shudders, waiting for it to kick in. There’s one more pill left in the bottle; his jōnin commander took the other two before her death.
With a forlorn sigh, he holds it up to the Konoha-nin. “Open your mouth.”
The boy looks at it, and his once open trust is now buried, slowly coming to understand that the shinobi he’s with is not an ally. Obito won’t blame him if he refuses. “A food pill?”
“Soldier pill,” he corrects. “It’ll make you feel like you can take on the world. Want it?”
Kiri’s soldier pills pack more of a punch than the ones offered by its enemies; they numb pain so completely that even soldiers on the brink of death will rise again, and completely restore chakra. But the pain they’ll be in after eight hours, the sheer exhaustion that will overcome them, isn’t worth it.
This, he doesn’t tell the kid. He’s a liar, after all, and if luck isn’t on his side, the Konoha-nin won’t last the eight hours, anyway.
The boy opens his mouth, and Obito offers him the pill. He hasn’t moved since he came up from the water, and maybe he can’t. Maybe Obito fucked up and paralyzed him. There’s nothing to be done.
His body tingles, energy surges through him, and it’s time to move.
Obito unseals his signal flare. This will draw both friend and foe, so it’s rarely ever utilized, but Obito has scouted this forest all week and knows that the only people in the area were the camp of Iwa-nin, now very dead around the front end of the once-cave. With luck, the Konoha-nin’s teammates will take notice and fall back, choosing their friend over their mission.
The Konoha-nin sees what he’s about to do and tenses. “No, Obito—”
Why does this kid know his name?
When the mangled lump of human tries to get up, it pulls at all his fresh stitching and bandages, and he fails. Instead he nods to the scroll at his hip, his arms too unresponsive to pull it free. “Hiraishin kunai. Embed it in a tree, and Sensei will come. Less dangerous.”
His words are slurred and sloppy, and he needs more help than Obito can give.
But a Hiraishin kunai? The only shinobi known to use those is—
This is the Yellow Flash’s subordinate.
Cautiously, Obito pries the scroll free of the boy’s belt loop and unseals the Hiraishin kunai. He holds it, staring at the three-pronged teeth of its blade, and drops it in the dirt. A sole grey eye follows it, wide and shaking. But Obito doesn’t grab it, nor does he embed it in a tree.
“I don’t feel like dying today,” Obito says, winding back his arm. “Call him yourself if you want, but leave me out of it.”
He throws the flare, and plumes of red smoke fill the sky. The boy is left with his superior’s kunai next to his immobile left arm as he struggles to reach for it.
Obito hopes, somewhere deep inside, that he survives.
They’re blowing up the bridge. Obito hangs back, crouched in the trees, numb to what should be a screaming pain in his leg. He can’t make out their faces and doesn’t bother pushing chakra into his eyes for a better look. There’s no point.
He’s faced with two options: kill them, dispose of the explosives, and hope he can manage it all before their teammate calls upon the Yellow Flash; or go to the supply cart and reroute before Squad 31 is noticed.
No one outruns the Yellow Flash. Both options will end in blood. The enemy is right there; the supply cart is an hour and a half away by foot. This is the only bridge within two days’ travel, and without it, it would take Kiri four times as long to aid its soldiers.
Kannabi Bridge sits over a ravine. The Konoha-nin are tagging paper bombs to the legs of the bridge, their feet stuck to the sides of the gorge. For the hundredth time today, Obito melts into the water upstream and approaches one of the nin from below. A boy, maybe Obito’s age, with dark hair and deep blue clothes digs into his pockets for yet another round of seals. He’s crying, blubbering like some academy-fresh genin out in the world for the first time.
The girl stands higher up, close to the top of the bridge. She notices the signal flare and calls down to her teammate. “It’s from the direction of the cave!” she yells, her eyes switching between the smoke and her comrade. “Do you think…?”
The boy scrubs his face with his sleeve, his back to Obito, and crushes the stack of seals in his hand. “We’ve gotta check. We can’t just—we just… we left him there, Rin. We left him, a-and what if he’s alive, and…”
They agree to go for him once their objective is complete. Obito bemoans their dedication, and waits for them to go back to tagging the bridge. When their backs are turned, he rises from the riverbed, the raging rapids deafening the enemy to his movements, and shoots spikes of water at the wall of paper bombs. The boy snaps back to look at him, but Obito has already reached him, dragging him l into the water. He pushes the Konoha-nin down, his grip crushing as the boy struggles.
A familiar red stares back.
He watches as a stranger wearing his own face drowns.
They come up downstream. Obito drags the body of his enemy by the collar onto shore and settles on the rocks, arms slung over his knees as he catches his breath. Now and then, he observes the boy carefully, remembering the ghost stories his older cousin used to share with him before bed, they say everyone has a doppelgänger. How much stock he should put in that, he doesn’t know. Regardless, the bridge is safe; with the paper bombs wet and tearing, they won’t detonate. What remains on the girl’s person isn’t enough to down the fortified structure of Kannabi Bridge, and with one teammate well-crushed and immobile and the other here with water-filled lungs, Squad 31 should have no trouble taking out the last remaining threat. Now, Obito needs to heft himself up and try to make it back to the rendezvous point before time is up. If that pale-faced ghost he left behind happens to call the Yellow Flash, so be it. They’ll all die. At least he can say he tried his best.
A wet cough cuts into the serene white noise of the rapids, and Obito hangs his head. Or not.
He’s gone soft, sparing two lives in one day. His father would seethe if he knew—if he ever knew, if he was anything more than Obito’s delusion. The Bloody Mist still stands because it’s as ruthless toward itself as it is its foes. A Kiri-nin’s kindness is in the speed they kill, not the lives they spare.
And yet.
The Konoha-nin vomits. Water, first, then the rations he had for breakfast. Groaning follows, tired and heavy as the boy rolls onto his side and tries to get his limbs under him.
Obito sighs. “If you play dead, I might spare you. If not,” he waves at the unrelenting current, “into the water you go.”
The boy stills, only just now realizing he’s not alone, and slips his shaking fingers into his kunai pouch. Obito feels eyes on his back, analyzing his standard-issue uniform, getting a feel for who it is threatening him. “Kiri?”
Obito snaps his fingers, keeping his eyes forward but his senses trained on the enemy, and points back at him. “Kiri.”
There’s still water in his lungs as the Konoha-nin sputters and chokes, taking in big gulps of air. “You’re working with Iwa?”
Obito scoffs, rolls his eyes, and doesn’t think about the heat gathering around the cut in his thigh or what it means. It’s been spreading quickly since the cave, radiating out.
Konoha must not know that Kiri has a foothold in this area, that they’ve taken Kusa and set up a base there, or that they’ve steadily pushed Iwa back. Their Intel is outdated, meaning Kiri might be able to get one over on them if word doesn’t spread. He files this away for when he retreats to the stronghold.
The Konoha-nin rises on unsteady legs, kunai drawn and level, and when Obito looks back, familiar red eyes lock onto him. Chakra ripples along his optic nerves as he matches the threat. Two black tomoe draw patterns as he stares at this trait he’s only ever seen in himself, differing from the three in his own eyes. His is incomplete.
The boy startles upon seeing Obito’s face. “You’re—”
Obito makes the first move, his senbon shooting out, narrowly blocked by the boy’s clumsy efforts, and they match each other’s movements too well thanks to their shared Kekkei Genkai.
Obito retreats to someplace far away as they clash, muscle memory propelling him forward. The boy lacks experience, as though he’s new to war, like this hell they live isn’t their every day, and like mercy is something they can have. Step by step, Obito pushes him back, drawing his chakra blade from its sheath.
Because failure is only an option in death.
Because the Bloody Mist doesn’t show mercy to its own, let alone an enemy.
Because if Kannabi Bridge falls, more of Obito’s comrades will die.
Because this boy has seen his eyes.
No one will know, no one has to.
It takes four minutes to pin the teenager to the ground, half a second to reel back his arm, and one more for his blade to eat into his double’s chest. The scream torn from the enemy’s throat like a death thrall rings terror through his mind, sounding so much like his own.
The Konoha-nin leaves him with a parting gift. Before he can pry his sword free of the bones and muscle that grab it, the dying boy draws one last breath, and a windtunnel of flames marks all he can see.
He can’t get away.
Later, he would learn that this jutsu is called The Great Fireball.
Obito wakes to failure, raw and stinging like the burns on his skin, in a room that smells of sickness. Fallen comrades are strung along the ground, tucked into thin futons as the short-staffed medic-nin hurry across the floor. Dozens of voices moan and speak and cry, and his head throbs almost as badly as his body burns.
Beside him, his father sits, legs crossed and back to the wall, an arm draped over his knee. His eyes find Obito, tired and piercing.
Six months have passed since he was convinced his father was dead. Yet here he is, crushing Obito under his endless disappointment, for his generation is weak and Kiri will fall and all of it is his fault.
It must be a concussion. The delusions have returned.
They say they found him in Kusa, that they suspect he was a prisoner of war, but it doesn’t line up with his memories. He thinks of the pale-faced Konoha-nin in the cave, the way his torn flesh sewed together with Obito’s well-practiced field aid, and of the doppelgänger who taught him to fear fire. The water-logged paper bombs, the three-pronged kunai he left in the dirt, a signal flare blowing red smoke through the sky. The last Kusa-nin he encountered was three weeks prior when they slaughtered the small village’s border defence force and carved out a stronghold among their corpses. Kusa is a small, weak village that the big five easily exploit, no different from Ame or Tani. He may have been found there, but he was not imprisoned.
“What happened?” his father asks, the first two words he’s said to his son in six months, and Obito bites his tongue. Kannabi Bridge fell.
But he doesn’t know how.
