⤷ comet of ash, uchiha obito
— In which, a little girl's sunlight returns as void.
uchiha obito x fem!reader
— cw; mdni, angsty, mentions of death and mourning, grief, stalking, unhealthy relationship, ig unrequited love?, canon-typical violence and war themes, canon divergence, childhood crush tragedy
— a/n; obito's reveal ruins my day every single time and i still wrote it anyway :)
The memory of him lived in your bones, in the phantom warmth of sun-drenched afternoons and the ghost of children's laughter.
It was one of those hazy, golden memories from before the world had taught you about chakra, kunai, and death. You were small, knees perpetually scraped, watching from the edge of the training ground as the older kids hurled shuriken with impossible speed. The white-haired prodigy, Kakashi, was a blur of cold efficiency. The gentle girl, Rin, always offered you a sweet when she noticed you staring.
But it was the other boy you watched. The one who tripped over his own feet, who shouted his dreams of being Hokage to an uncaring sky, who got into loud, heated, one-sided arguments with Kakashi. Uchiha Obito. Even then, with a child's simple heart, you were captivated. Not by perfection, but by the sheer, stubborn force of his spirit. His kindness was a clumsy, earnest thing, helping an old lady with groceries one minute, vowing to protect his friends the next. His teasing was endless, directed at you sometimes, a familiar face in the crowd. He'd ruffle your hair, call you "pipsqueak" and you'd beam, never irritated, only thrilled by the attention.
It was doomed from the start.
To him, you were just a cute kid Rin liked. To you, he was the sun.
You loved him. A quiet, steady, utterly hopeless love that took root before you knew what the word meant. It weathered his graduation, his team assignment under Minato, his public pining for Rin, and her quiet sighs for Kakashi. You watched it all from a few steps away, a background character in the epic tale of their youth. You saw them leave the village, bright and whole, and saw them return, quieter and dimmer, each time.
And then, the news from Kannabi Bridge.
Kakashi returned with a Sharingan and a silence so deep it seemed to swallow sound. Rin was gone soon after, a tragedy trapped in political crossfire. Minato and Kushina were extinguished in a single, horrific night. The world you'd watched from the sidelines crumbled, and the boy at the center of your childhood was declared a hero, his name carved into the stone with the others.
You mourned Uchiha Obito in your own way. Not with Kakashi's jagged, guilty grief, but with a soft, enduring ache. You tended the memory of him like a small, sacred flame. When you graduated, when you became Chūnin, when you carved your own path to become a Jōnin of formidable skill, that flame stayed lit. It was in the way you sometimes saw a flash of unruly black hair in a crowd, in the way you defended the Uchiha name when it fell into disrepute long after the massacre, in the quiet understanding you shared with Kakashi, one of the few living threads left from that time. You were his anchor to a self before the guilt, he was your living connection to him.
But memory is not a one-way street.
You didn't know he watched you sometimes.
In the market, buying flowers for the Memorial Stone, a strange stillness would prickle your spine, too cold, too alert. In your apartment at dusk, shadows seemed to hold their breath, lingering a heartbeat too long before dissolving back into ordinary darkness. At night you'd wake up with the inexplicable sensation that someone had just stepped out of the room.
You blamed it on nerves. On trauma. On the shinobi's curse of paranoia.
Only, it wasn't paranoia.
From his void, Obito watched. It was fascinating. It was a perverse validation. In a world that had moved on, one heart remained steadfastly, foolishly, his. A tiny, warm light in the absolute cold he'd embraced. He never intervened. He never revealed himself. He simply…observed. A ghost tending the living who tended his ghost.
Now, years after tragedy had hit Team 7, the world was ending on a muddy, corpse-strewn plain. The Fourth Great Ninja War. You fought with the ferocity of someone defending a ghost, your techniques sharp, your strategy flawless. You fought for the living, but a part of you, the little girl on the training ground, fought for a memory.
Then came the masked man. The architect of this nightmare. You clashed with his forces, heard the reports of his terrifying power, and the hand he had in shaping the war. You fought alongside Kakashi, Naruto and Gai, a strange, intense fight of Kamui, Raikiri and more, that seemed to have no end.
As the fight continued, you saw the cracks in Kakashi's composure, a confusion that went beyond tactical analysis.
You didn't understand. Not until it happened. Or maybe, you were just too terrified to acknowledge the horrifying possibility that Kakashi and Gai were weighing.
It was Naruto, of course. A blazing, defiant rasengan that connected not just with the mask, but with the fabric of your entire reality. The mask shattered.
Time slowed, thickened like syrup.
The black hair. The set of the jaw, now carved with scars and hatred. The face, older, twisted by cosmic bitterness and a pain so deep it had curdled into madness…but undeniably, horrifyingly his.
Obito.
The name didn't leave your lips. It evaporated on your tongue, a silent scream that shattered your internal world.
"Is that you, Obito?"
Kakashi's voice sounded far away, like someone calling to you from underwater.
Your heart hammered like a trapped bird. No. No. It couldn't be. It was a trick. A sick, genjutsu trick.
The battlefield noise faded into a high-pitched whine. Your knees, which had held you steady against armies of Zetsu, felt liquid. The little flame you'd carried for a lifetime didn't go out, it exploded, consuming everything in a silent, invisible firestorm.
Every memory rewrote itself. The cheerful boy was this specter of ruin. The kind eyes that had crinkled with laughter now glared with millennia of malice. The dream of being Hokage had curdled into a dream of universal genocide. The love you'd nurtured, was now a monument to your own pathetic foolishness.
You saw Kakashi staring, broken, at the living ghost of his guilt. Saw Naruto's confusion, Gai's shock. But all you could see was the ghost of the boy you once loved wearing the face of the monster who had orchestrated the Fourth Great Ninja War.
The war raged on around you. But in that moment, standing amidst the chaos, you weren't a Konoha Jōnin. You were that little girl on the training ground, watching the sun fall from the sky and realising it had been a comet of ash all along, its warmth just a memory, and its true destination was always to burn your whole world down.
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