Obito's Fall
The sky bled fire and ash as Obito ran, the crack in his mask spiderwebbing out, pulsing against his temple. Kamui flickered at his fingertips, space twisting around him in a desperate lurch. He stumbled once, twice, breath hitching as he clawed at the seals, forcing the jutsu to form. But inside, deep in his chest, he already knew.
It wouldn't be enough.
The Kyuubi's roar ripped the air apart, tearing through stone and bone alike. Obito pressed his hands to his head, gasping, but it wasn't just the sound—it was the voice inside, sliding through the cracks of his mind.
"Obito…"
The whisper was soft, almost amused.
"You were going to change the world, weren't you?"
Obito gritted his teeth, shaking his head hard as if that could dislodge it. Rin's face flashed behind his eyes—soft, wide-eyed, fading with blood on her lips. Kakashi's voice followed, raw with guilt. Minato's hand on his shoulder, steady, proud, long gone.
The Kyuubi's voice slid in, a curling echo.
"Those who abandon their friends are worse than scum."
Obito's hands balled into fists. "Shut up—"
"I'm going to become Hokage someday!" the Kyuubi sang in a perfect mockery of his younger voice, bright and eager. "I'll show them all!"
His stomach twisted. His legs staggered. The Kamui distortion buckled around him.
"You don't know me!" Obito roared, chakra surging wild and desperate.
But the Kyuubi only laughed, low and smooth.
"You don't know me," it mimicked, the voice warping between his child-self and his cold, masked sneer. "You don't know what I've lost, what I've sacrificed."
Obito's chest heaved, eyes wild behind the cracking mask.
"I'll create a world without pain… without war…" the Kyuubi murmured, dripping the words into his ear like honey. "I'll bring them peace."
His heart slammed against his ribs. Rin in the sunlight. Kakashi's turned back. Minato's warm hand. Madara's cold smile.
"No," Obito gasped, voice cracking, forcing chakra into trembling hands.
The ground beneath his feet dissolved. The burning village fell away.
He was somewhere else.
The scent of grass and rain filled his nose, the sharp metallic hiss of lightning splitting the air. His heart lurched—he knew this place. His feet stumbled across memory, his eyes dragged to a battlefield he had buried deep.
And then he saw her.
Rin, drenched in rain, eyes wide, mouth parting in a soundless gasp. The flash of silver behind her — Kakashi's arm driving forward, Chidori screaming, lightning crashing between his fingers. And Rin…
Rin smiled.
"Kakashi…" The word never reached her lips, but Obito felt it, saw it, as if the Kyuubi placed her thoughts in his mouth, her final heartbeat in his chest.
"I love you, Kakashi."
The blade pierced through.
Obito screamed.
The battlefield shuddered and shattered into ash, the world twisting back into ruin and fire. His knees hit the dirt, fists slamming into the ground, chest heaving in broken gasps.
And then the Kyuubi spoke.
"Such a sweet thing, that moment. Did you feel it, little one? That last, trembling flicker of her heart—not for you, but for him. The one who drove the lightning through her chest. Oh, how perfect. Love blooming as the body breaks, forgiveness spilling as the blood runs dry. And you… all you were left with was the echo."
Obito's voice cracked, raw with fury. "Stop—stop—"
But the Kyuubi's voice only softened, dripping like oil into his mind.
"You shaped a world from a girl who never reached for you," the Kyuubi murmured, soft as velvet, cold as the sea. "You burned it all for a love that never knew your name. And for that…"
The earth shook. Kamui faltered. The Kyuubi's tails lifted.
"… you have given me a feast no god could refuse."
Obito barely had time to lift his head.
The tails slammed down.
Space cracked open, the jutsu tore like paper, the mask split in half. For the briefest heartbeat, his eyes reflected a boy, not a monster, not a shadow—just a boy, reaching. Just Obito Uchiha, stranded in the ruins of his own making.
And then there was no more sky, no more earth, no more breath.
Hiruzen's Despair
The streets burned. Smoke wrapped the village in a choking shroud, and through it, Hiruzen forced himself forward, his staff flashing with chakra as he dragged villagers from crumbling buildings, struck blades from desperate hands, pulled sobbing children from their parents' corpses. His voice cracked from shouting orders, his chest ached with every breath, but still he moved, still he saved, still he fought.
And then, inside his skull, soft as a lover's whisper and cold as the grave, came the voice.
"Akemi."
His arms froze for the briefest instant. The girl pressed against his chest, her small hands clutching his torn robes, face wet with ash and tears.
"Daisuke."
The chunin he had just knocked unconscious to keep his trembling hands from cutting his own throat.
"Riko. Aya. Junpei."
A thin tremor lanced through his chest. His grip tightened on his staff. His eyes swept the street: the boy curled against a shattered wall, the woman sobbing into her bloodied hands, the old man clawing at his face as if to rip the visions free.
"Sora. Kenta. Kaoru."
One by one, the Kyuubi named them as Hiruzen reached them, as he shoved them back from collapse, as he yanked their hands from weapons and led them, stumbling, toward the edge of safety. It spoke without hurry, without malice, only vast, unshaken recognition, as though it had always known these names, long before Hiruzen had ever worn the Hokage's hat.
His fingers tightened, whitened on the wood of his staff. His heartbeat stumbled hard in his chest. He forced his feet forward, chakra crackling around his legs as he vaulted a shattered wall and tore two civilians apart before they could crush each other against stone. But the voice slid deeper, curling around the raw edges of his mind.
"You call yourself the Professor."
His foot caught on rubble; he stumbled, caught himself.
"You have studied your books, your histories, your strategies. You have traced the pattern of men and nations."
His staff swung hard, cracking the wrist of a jōnin who had raised a kunai against his own brother. Hiruzen caught the man as he fell, drove chakra into his spine, stunned him, pushed onward. His breath hitched in his throat.
"Explain me."
Hiruzen's vision blurred at the edges. He clung to muscle memory, body moving where his mind had begun to fray. Three civilians dragged from the collapse of a merchant's stall. Two shinobi torn apart as they strangled each other in the mud. A child caught just before he hurled himself into the fire.
And every step, every life, the voice counted.
"Akemi. Daisuke. Riko. Aya. Junpei. Sora. Kenta. Kaoru."
No hesitation. No falter.
"You hold their hands. I hold their hearts."
A chill slid down Hiruzen's spine, cold even against the furnace heat of the burning street. For a breath, for a flicker, his knees bent, his shoulders shook. He wanted to reason, wanted to push his mind into the familiar habits of study and comprehension, to find the edges of this thing, to shape it into something knowable. But it was like trying to study the sea while drowning in it.
The Kyuubi was presence. It was witness. It was the long memory of hatred, wrapped around every soul Hiruzen touched, waiting behind every crack in the world.
"They were never yours to save."
He hit the ground, knees jarring on the stone, chest heaving, vision narrowing as his chakra pulsed outward in one last surge to fling back the clawing hands around him. For a moment, the night shrank to the taste of ash in his mouth, the weight of his own breath, the sound of his pulse in his ears.
And then, shuddering, trembling, burning from throat to fingers, Hiruzen rose.
"Not yet," he rasped, voice cracked and raw. "Not… yet."
"You will survive this night, Hokage, and I want you to — oh, how I want you to, because you are the finest gardener of hatred I have ever known. You plant peace with one hand and war with the other, you water the fields of grief with sacrifice, and you tend to your people so beautifully, so faithfully, that they can't help but bloom into blood. Every peace you build feeds the hatred I am, every quiet you fight for only makes the next scream sweeter. So live, Hiruzen Sarutobi. Live, and do what you do best."
It had marked him.
Forever.
Minato's Fracture
The storm roared outside the barrier, and inside its flickering walls, Minato Namikaze knelt beside his wife and son, hands moving in a desperate blur of seals. His breath came hard and sharp, sweat cutting cold trails down his face as he forced his mind to stay on the pattern, the formula, the last fragile chance they had to survive. Kushina trembled behind him, arms wrapped around Naruto, her chakra already thinned to a flicker. Minato clenched his teeth, the words of the seal clawing at his throat, and forced himself not to look back. He had to hold. He had to focus.
Then the voice slid in.
"Ah, Fourth Hokage. Yellow Flash. Hero of Konoha. Killer of thousands."
Minato's hands faltered for a heartbeat. His jaw tightened, his fingers pressed hard into the next hand sign.
"You call yourself a man of peace. Tell me, when you tore through Iwagakure's lines like a blade through silk, when you scattered their sons across the battlefield like broken leaves, when you painted the stones with blood — was that peace?"
His chest hitched; the memory struck without warning. The Iwa front, the flash of kunai, the cries behind him, the silence that followed. The men he had killed before they could blink. The families left waiting for soldiers who would never come home. His breath came faster. He forced the next line of the seal out between his teeth.
"There are good men," he rasped under his breath, his voice shaking. "There are good men. There are men who fight for peace."
"Yes, yes. Like you." The Kyuubi's voice was velvet over steel, smooth and cold.
"You come like a lightning flash, like a streak of yellow fire through the eyes of your comrades. How they love to watch you work, how beautiful you are when you dance through the battlefield. So bright, so brilliant, so clean. They cheer your name as you carve men open and call it salvation."
Minato's fingers slipped; the ink trembled across the ground. He bit his tongue hard enough to taste iron and forced his mind back to the seal, back to the chakra flow, back to the only thing anchoring him between his family and the storm outside. His chest heaved. His vision blurred at the edges.
Minato's shoulders trembled. He felt Kushina's faint, shaking breath behind him, felt Naruto's soft, hiccuping cry, felt the raw edge of his own breaking heart. His voice cracked open.
"There are still good men."
"And how many more must they kill to stay good?"
The seals blurred under his fingers. His body shook. His mind reeled, flickering between the battlefield, the faces, the fall, the roar. For a breathless instant, he felt the weight of every life his hands had ended pressing down on his chest, the battlefield's silence rolling up to swallow him whole.
"You are no different from the men you call monsters. You are only faster, more elegant, more loved for it."
Minato gritted his teeth until his jaw screamed, poured every last ounce of chakra into the seal, shoved the spiraling tide of horror down beneath his ribs.
"I will still believe in them," he whispered, a shudder running through his arms, "even if I am the last fool left."
The Kyuubi's laugh was the sound of mountains splitting apart.
"Then burn yourself to ash for them, little fool."
The last seal flared to life. The barrier trembled. The storm outside rose to a final, deafening crescendo.
Minato closed his eyes, felt his son's warmth one last time, and let the world crack open.