Might Guy was not built for lingering.
He had laid his flowers, pressed his hands together, said what needed saying to his father's name in the stone. That was the full measure of the visit. He was not a man who confused staying longer with feeling more deeply.
He turned to Kakashi. "We're both Jonin now. Want to spar?"
Kakashi shook his head without looking away from the memorial. "Give me some time alone, Guy."
Guy opened his mouth. Something crossed his face — not quite argument, something more considered than that — and he reached out and grabbed Kakashi by the shoulder instead. One firm shake. The kind that doesn't ask for a response.
"Look forward, Kakashi. Both of them — neither Rin nor Obito would want you stuck here." He let go. "You keep standing in front of this stone like it's going to tell you something it hasn't told you yet."
Kakashi started to answer. Guy was already gone, long strides taking him down the path, green a retreating point in the afternoon light.
Kakashi turned back to the stone.
He stood there for a while, his gaze on two names in particular. Then, quietly, almost too quiet to hear: "I just can't see the future, Obito."
He said it the way you say something you've been carrying for a long time — not dramatically, not reaching for effect. Just putting it down for a moment, because the weight of it was there and there was no one to pretend to.
Obito had told him he would be Kakashi's eyes. That he would see the future for them both. Kakashi had held onto that as something, and he was not entirely sure anymore whether he was holding it as comfort or as accusation. Most days he couldn't find the future at all. Most days he couldn't find the next step. He was a Jonin now, technically. He had the rank. He had not yet worked out what to do with it.
I'm lost on the road of life.
He said it sometimes as a reason for being late. People assumed he was joking. He was not entirely joking.
What Kakashi did not know — what he had no way of knowing — was that in the grove along the path behind him, someone was watching.
Uchiha Obito stood very still between the trees, his mask angled toward the memorial stone, and heard every word.
Can't see the future?
His chest moved with something that didn't have a clean name. The voice coming from the figure at the stone was Kakashi's voice — older than he remembered it, flattened by whatever the last several years had done to it — but recognizably Kakashi's. It reached through the distance and through the years and through everything that had been decided and resettled and hardened since Obito had last heard it.
He wanted, for a moment, to walk out of the grove.
He didn't.
"Your hands are stained with Rin's blood," he said softly, to no one. "How can you see the future with my eyes?" He let the words complete themselves in the air between the trees, then added, even more quietly: "Kakashi."
He had not come to Konoha with a particular plan. He had been restless after Black Zetsu's departure — unsettled in a way that moving helped more than stillness — and with Kamui now fully usable as an infiltration method, there had been no practical barrier to coming. So he had come. Not to do anything. Just to walk through a place where he still had memories, to see the bridge and the corner buildings and the ramen stand where things had been uncomplicated.
In those places, he could almost feel her. Like she was still there, living inside everything that had happened before.
He watched Kakashi take two steps closer to the stone and lay his hand against it. Against the names.
"Obito, Rin." Kakashi's voice was quiet and forced into something that wanted to be cheerful. "Good news. Minato-sensei and Kushina-nee-san are going to have a baby. A boy, probably. I thought you'd both want to know."
Obito went very still.
The information arrived and immediately began rearranging things.
Minato. Kushina. A child. Eight months.
He remembered Kushina clearly — the way she had always insisted on being called sister, the particular brand of her affection that was too loud and too warm and not asking your permission about it. She had fussed over him before the Kannabi mission. He had been a little impatient about it. He was not impatient about it now. He missed it in the way you miss things that were ordinary when they were happening and become irreplaceable only after they're gone.
Kushina had never done anything to him. Not one thing. She had been completely, straightforwardly kind.
"I hope he grows up right," Kakashi was saying, still talking to the stone. "Becomes a real ninja. I'd like to be his teacher, someday."
Eight months.
Obito's mind had moved ahead of his emotions and arrived somewhere cold and clear and horrible.
He knew what Kushina was. He had always known — Minato's wife, yes, but before that, or alongside that, the Nine-Tails Jinchūriki. It was not a secret that had been kept from Minato's genin team. And the knowledge he had absorbed from Madara — years of accumulated strategy and precedent, force-fed into him in that cave — had included the specific mechanics of what happened to a Jinchūriki during childbirth. The seal weakened. The tailed beast's containment became unstable. For a window of time, the beast was closer to the surface than it ever was otherwise.
That window was the opening.
He was aware, in the same moment, that Kushina would die if he took the Nine-Tails from her. The extraction didn't leave the host intact. It couldn't.
He pressed his hand against the mask over his face. His palm was shaking.
Rin's world required all nine tailed beasts. He had known this for a while, in the abstract, without having fixed on a specific sequence or timing. He had not let himself think too directly about the Nine-Tails, because the Nine-Tails meant Kushina, and thinking about Kushina meant arriving at this exact place, at this exact cost.
Rin's face. Kushina's voice. Rin's face. Kushina's voice. The two of them took turns.
He stood there in the grove and let the conflict run until it exhausted itself.
When it was done, his hand dropped.
His eyes, which had been pressed closed behind the mask, opened again. The quality of what was in them had changed. The trembling had stopped.
I'm sorry, Kushina. He found the thought carefully, held it as gently as he could. You didn't deserve any of this. But I am going to do it anyway. When it's done, when the world is made, you'll be there too. Everyone will. And then I'll tell you I'm sorry face to face. And maybe that will mean something, or maybe it won't. But I'll say it.
"Kushina," he said, quietly, to a woman who could not hear him. "Sister."
He looked at Kakashi one more time. Kakashi was still at the stone, no longer talking, just standing.
"Thank you for the information, Kakashi," Obito said softly.
Kamui activated. His outline unraveled. And he was gone.
In the moment after he disappeared, Kakashi's head came up.
He turned and looked at the grove. His eyes moved across it without finding anything. He stood that way for a moment, not entirely satisfied that there was nothing to find, then decided it was nothing and turned back to the stone.
He looked at the two names for a little while longer. Then he turned and walked away without saying anything else.
The street was busy in the comfortable, ordinary way of a village that had recently come out of a war and was remembering how to be something else. Kakashi moved through it without particular direction, and then remembered that he was running low on ninja tools and changed course.
The main store of Konoha's largest ninja tool chain occupied a corner of one of the central market streets. The shop had its own history, if you were inclined to trace it — founded by a civilian at the very beginning of the village's existence, passed through the family's generations, the name changed once along the way, the business growing outward until it had a presence in markets as far as Daming City. The owner was not a shinobi and had never been one. He was simply very good at what he did, which was understanding what shinobi needed and having it available.
Kakashi pushed through the door.
The owner was behind the counter with an infant balanced against his chest, talking to a boy whose back was to the door. The owner looked up when he heard the entrance bell and broke into a broad smile.
"Kakashi! It's been a while."
"It has." Kakashi looked at the baby. "Is that yours?"
"Just born." The owner looked down at the child with the expression of a man who has discovered something he didn't know he was capable of feeling. "Her name's Tenten. Beautiful, isn't she? She'll take over the business someday — I'm already certain of it."
Kakashi looked at the baby's face. She was small and pink and completely unimpressed by her surroundings. "Good name," he said.
He would turn out to be right about the business, as it happened. But that was years from now.
"Here, hold her." The owner extended the child toward Kakashi without much ceremony.
Kakashi glanced down at his hands.
"My hands are a little dirty," he said. "Better not."
The owner laughed and assumed this was some kind of joke about having come from training or a mission. He pulled the baby back cheerfully and said they'd try again after a proper wash.
Maybe I can't wash them clean enough for that, Kakashi thought, and didn't say it.
The boy at the counter turned around.
He was young — young enough that the word hardly covered it. Maybe six or seven, with dark eyes that were observant and serious in a way that most children's eyes were not yet. He was neatly dressed. He looked at Kakashi with the specific quality of recognition that comes from having genuinely paid attention to someone over time.
"Kakashi-senpai," he said. "It's been a while."
Kakashi looked at him and smiled, small and genuine. "It has, Itachi. It has."