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Half Light (Obito/Ino)

Hello! I have talked a lot in the past about ObiIno and how much I like that ship. This has been written since June and I am so excited to be able to post it finally! Originally written for a zine, and published now in honor of ObiIno Month over on the Ino Supremacy Discord server. I am extremely proud of how this first part has turned out. Please give it a read if you're open to trying a new rarepair! <3

Summary: "Even a salted earth could grow fertile and flourish again, with time."

The war is over, and there is no one left to hate, no matter how hard he tries.

Rating: T (for now, but will be bumped in part 2)

Read it on AO3!

xxx

There were creatures swimming in the bilge water puddle in the corner of Obito’s cell. Nothing to be concerned about, just mindless slime eons away from developing brain cells and sentience. He couldn’t even see them, only their proliferation: jade and spongy, a stench of ripe, fetid rot. A whole colony of mold things thriving in a dark, dank shit hole. Existence for the sake of itself, no higher purpose.

Obito watched them all day and all night. Sleep eluded him, had for years, and the four concrete walls whose cracks he’d memorized discouraged its visit. Kakashi came when his duties permitted, but he always brought more promises and reassurances and left them behind when he departed, old candy wrappers licked clean of their sugar. They lost more of their sweetness with each successive visit.

A single drop of water sent a tidal wave rippling through the slime kingdom. It settled again after a few seconds, placid and hardly changed. The scars on Obito’s face itched. Somewhere far away, he could hear people moving around. Must be morning, shift change. Another day he didn’t bother to count, same as the last. Maybe Kakashi would visit him today, or not.

Obito lay back on his cot and turned on his side so he could watch the murky puddle in the corner of his cell. Peace, he thought, was awfully quiet and still.

And that was fine.

It was fine now.

He didn’t sleep.

xxx

In retrospect, perhaps, he ought to have recognized the signs of an oncoming tsunami, but retrospect was nothing but a future excuse for present parochialism. Surely after everything, Obito should have clocked his own dismal patterns.

It began with a girl, a tremor deep and blue, heralding a cataclysm neither of them expected. But that was the thing about waves: they birthed in trenches, in darkness, and they swelled to crashing when they finally touched the light. But by then it’s too late to stop them.

When she walked into his interrogation room dragging a palpable weight like no one had told her their side had won the War, Obito knew the rip tide had already ensnared him.

“Hands.”

Blindfolded to spare her any Sharingan trickery, he gave it his best approximation and dragged his chained arms across the table.

He guessed she must be a Yamanaka. There was no reason to drag him in here and dress him up in chakra-sapping irons other than guaranteed results. What they hoped to find rifling through his grey matter that he hadn’t already told them, that Kakashi hadn’t already vouched for, he couldn’t say. So he said nothing, resigned to just let it happen, like everything else.

She didn’t give him any warning before she began, and Obito was sure he seized. But his body was far away now, his eyes no longer blinded as he opened them to a darkling sky over a sprawling graveyard. Despite the gloom, his Sharingan illuminated names and dates carved into each grave marker.

The soil was moist and overgrown with dewy grass under his knee. He could smell the crushed blades underfoot and feel the epitaph carved into the granite tombstone (what an incredible technique). Shisui’s name glowed with light as he traced it, and when Obito closed his eyes, he could see Shisui smiling, hear him laughing at some silly pose Obito made while covered in potato starch in Shisui’s kitchen as he taught the kid how to prep chicken for karaage.

(“Obito-nii, you’ve got some on your nose.”)

(“Do I? You mean, right here?” Obito rubbed his hand all over his nose until Shisui burst out laughing.)

(“Idiot! You just made it worse!”)

“Oi, we’re not here for you to reminisce. Get up.”

That foreign voice in his head ripped him from his thirteen-year-old body as if she had doused him in ice water. Obito yanked his hand from Shisui’s memory marker and looked up to find a stunningly beautiful blond woman. Her imperious stare muddled when they locked eyes, and it was in that moment that he remembered her. She’d been in his head before, twice in fact.

Yamanaka Ino.

Sakura’s friend. She’d lost her father in the War. He’d felt the power behind that pain when she cleaved a hole in his head and trepanned herself inside to stop him from killing Naruto.

“That looks like it was a bad one,” Ino said, her voice tight.

Obito touched his face, and his fingers came away wet with tears. He could still smell the memory of the cooking oil from that perfect moment with Shisui. “No, it was the best one.”

Ino pursed her lips and looked away. When she spoke again, it was with steel and certainty. “I can find what I need on my own, but it would be faster if you pointed me to it. They told me you were cooperating, so.”

So, it wasn’t a request.

Obito rose and wiped his eyes on his sleeve. He could feel the scrape of the dyed Uchiha wool upon his skin, it was so vibrant and real. He spent a lot of time in his own head, but it had never felt like this, like reliving. “Your technique is remarkable.”

“I know that,” she snapped. “Now, if you don’t mind.”

Obito heard her dismissal for what it really was and decided not to push her. But he held on to that sharp little hook that wanted to all the same, something to spear his curiosity upon later. He snapped his fingers and conjured a flame to light their way through the ossuary of his life. “Follow me.”

xxx

Obito didn’t sleep much that night after Ino’s interrogation, but when he did, he dreamed of Shisui in vivid color. That surge of blue before the crash, where gravity can’t catch you and everything isn’t perfect, but it’s possible.

And when he awoke, his breath came short and his eyes were wet, and his lips throbbed around that unspoken name that had hooked something still wriggling for its life in the pit of him.

Yamanaka Ino.

He watched the slime creatures persist in their hateful little corner as he waited for the guards to bring him back to her interrogation room.

xxx

Whatever she asked for, he showed her. The Kannabi Bridge, Rin’s suicide, Madara’s manipulation, all of it. And the more he pieced together the serrated edges of his life, the more disgusted he grew with himself.

Killing Itachi’s teammate to make him tap into his power.

Murdering the Uchiha Clan and sparing Sasuke only to sink another hook into Itachi.

Minato and Kushina.

Konan.

None of them touched his heart like that memory of Shisui had. He simply accepted the atrocities he’d committed, sane or not, and waited for her to ask to see the next one.

At some point, she lost whatever stolid patience she’d been holding on to. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

Obito was taken aback at her venom. Aside from that very first session when she’d caught him crying over Shisui’s memory, she’d been nothing but clinical and detached watching the grotesque visions of his crimes replay before her. Now, her star-blue eyes boiled to behold him, and her painted lips twisted in a snarl like this was personal.

He considered her question, and he felt that hook dig in marrow-deep. He smiled wryly. “I think, by now, you oughtta know.”

Levity was the wrong decision, insofar as wrong meant her fist in his face. He went down hard, caught off guard and shocked to feel that his lip was split and bleeding in a figment of his imagination. Ino’s rage was real enough. It shimmered around her and cast a pall over the mausoleum they’d staked out for today’s interrogation. It was all his memories of the War interred in a white marble sarcophagus, organized chronologically by increasingly unhinged bloodshed until Naruto clocked some sense back into him.

The poetic irony made him want to smile some more.

Ino’s tears, angry and sharp to the scent, did not. “How can you just watch all this and feel nothing? You know this is your fault, right? Top to bottom. And you just stand there like it’s nothing to you?” She got down on her knees and grabbed the collar of his fine, dream yukata, shaking. “They’re all dead, and you’re fucking smiling.”

The memory palace shimmered around them, in tune with her emotions giving it shape and structure. It was like experiencing an earthquake where the walls collapsed but the floor held strong underfoot.

Obito didn’t smile as he took her wrists in his hands and held on. She was so close he could see the violet fissures in her irises. “Yeah, they’re all dead.” Her wrists were thin in his large hands, so small for someone capable of so much. “But I’m still here. And ain’t that a hell of a punchline?”

Ino’s tears were a sight, the flush of her anger even more so. It was more than she’d given him since they were enemies on the battlefield and he was actively trying to kill her comrades. How she could hold on to such passion after losing so much made him stare right back.

For her, as for him, the War had never ended. There were still bodies to bury and secrets to exhume. But Obito had long given up any desire to win.

“Your father,” he said. “He died in the War, yeah?”

She shoved him hard onto the marble floor.“Don’t you dare talk about my father.”

Her knuckles were white and shaking under his thumbs. She was on top of him now, pinning him down. He wouldn’t resist. Even if she conjured a knife to gut him, he wouldn’t fight her. Could he die in his own mind? He supposed he’d already done that once before, so how much worse could it be this time?

“Ino,” he spoke her name aloud for the first time, and she heard it. Strange in his voice. Husky and trampled, like he’d survived a drowning, but barely. “I can’t give you back what I stole from you. But I can give you anything else you want. Just ask.”

She bared her teeth at him. “How about I ask for your life? Will you give me that?”

“Anything,” he said, meaning it. Wishing it.

It wouldn’t be so bad to die at the hands of a beautiful woman who knew him, knew everything. It was more than he deserved.

She shoved him hard against the floor, and he was once again amazed at how real this all felt. Better than any genjutsu. Her long bangs tickled his face as she leaned over him. If these were different circumstances where he wasn’t a former war criminal responsible for her father’s death, he would think she meant to kiss him.

“No. I’ll never ask you for that. I want you alive and walking the streets of this village where everyone can see you. I want you haunted.”

Obito didn’t have the breath to refute her. There was only her, only him, and the tidal abyss into which they had plunged, and he had never planned on fighting.

She pushed off him, dusted off her skirt, and winced at the drawers each holding the human cremains of the War’s victims. Obito’s victims. He didn’t move from his sprawl on the pristine floor.

“We’re done here,” Ino said. “I’m not spending another second in this fucking charnel house.”

In his eternal weakness, Obito wished he could follow her out of this place and never look back.

xxx

When Morino Ibiki himself came to Obito’s cell a couple days after Ino’s final interrogation to tell him he was being released, Obito’s only surprise was for how quickly the Jounin Council had come to a decision. As arguably Konoha’s top enemy of the state, Obito had at least expected a day in court, some backroom negotiations, angry pride on the line.

“That was fast,” he said, sitting up on his cot.

Ibiki pursed his lips. They were fat lips, two pink worms trapped too close to each other and very unhappy about it. He’d been a weird, unpleasant kid, and he’d grown up to be a weird, unpleasant man. “It would’ve gone faster. Yamanaka made a compelling case for you.”

Obito found himself without words to respond to that. What could he even say? What did it mean? Why would she… After everything she’d seen—

“You’re a son of a bitch, Obito. You know that.”

It was that ugly honesty, brutally delivered, that Obito found he could respect. “Yeah, I know.”

“Don’t fuck this up like you have everything else you ever did.”

Obito prayed to all the gods that had forsaken him years ago that he wouldn’t.

Ibiki waited for him outside his cell while he lingered a final moment. He had long ago committed this tiny room to memory, and he knew these four walls and their mildew musk would stay with him until the end of his days. He cast a last look at the slime proliferating in the corner puddle. The microbes would no more sense his absence than they had his presence. That thought made him immensely sad.

“Or I could just leave you here, if you prefer?” Ibiki said gruffly.

Obito went with him.

“Yo.” Kakashi was waiting with a full squadron of ANBU when Obito and Ibiki emerged from the bowels of Torture & Interrogation’s headquarters. He looked so out of place in the Hokage’s robe he’d donned over his typical Jounin uniform. Swimming in it where Minato had worn it with grace and presence.

Haruno Sakura was with Kakashi’s entourage, politely professional as she intercepted Obito. “I’d like to do a quick check-up, make sure you’re all clear.”

Clear of what, Obito couldn’t fathom. He was not sick with anything her medical ninjutsu could possibly heal. But he had learned quick enough that it was best not to argue with Sakura, so he let her push him into a private office to examine him.

She asked him to remove his shirt, and he obeyed. Sakura had seen him wearing far less before, and she didn’t flinch at the trenches of scar tissue bisecting him. Her hands were small and cold when they touched his bare chest and scanned him with chakra. Most things about Sakura were small, but only her hands were cold. He wondered if Rin would have turned out something like her if she’d lived to reach twenty-one. Small, tranquil, and hands like winter iron.

Sakura’s eyes flickered to his as she worked. “Naruto wanted to be here for your release, but Kakashi sent him on a mission to cool off. The debate got pretty heated.”

Obito imagined that was putting it mildly. “I hurt a lot of people.”

Sakura didn’t try to deny it. She just continued to work on him. Then, softer: “If it wasn’t for Ino’s testimony, I think you would have been stuck in that cell for another six moons.”

He grasped her wrist gently and waited until she was looking right at him. “Why?”

“Because that’s her job. She finds the heart of people.”

“The heart.” He tongued around the word like a bloody hole in his gums where a rotten tooth had once lodged.

“You were used, Obito. Split in two. And I think, after we learned the truth about what happened to Itachi, a lot of us weren’t willing to let the village fail you too. Not when you’re clearly trying to make amends.”

She removed her hands from him, job done, and Obito felt the tug on the hooks under his skin waking him up. Sakura was already upright and handing him back his shirt when he put the image of Ino out of his mind, where her specter dwelled now among the graves, seeing all and sharing nothing.

“I’d like to,” he said, never more sure of anything in his life.

Sakura heard something of his conviction. Her smile was sad, but it was hopeful too. Yes, he decided as he followed her back outside. Rin would have shared your faith.

After all, Kakashi had passed down a part of their shared legacy to Sakura himself.

“What an honor guard,” Obito said after Sakura departed and he fell into step with Kakashi. The ANBU squadron took to the rooftops, out of sight but never far.

“Well, you’re the better shinobi, so I have to compensate with something.”

“Don’t say things like that.”

“Like what?”

“That.” Obito gestured at all of Kakashi. “Self-deprecating shit. You know. It’s not you.”

Kakashi’s gaze niggled, like a tickle in his back Obito couldn’t reach. “Guess not.”

It was awkward walking through Konoha side by side with Kakashi. For one, he was the Hokage now and stuck out like even more of a sore thumb than usual in his office’s raiment. For another, he was walking alongside a former war criminal who had orchestrated the ruin of this very village not once, but twice. Obito was plain and understated in grey ninja gi, but the scars on his face mapped the holocaust of his life’s poor choices and made him a moving target for the scorn and suspicion of the very people he’d forsaken. No one approached them as they made their way past restaurants and clothing stores, around the Academy building and through the heart of downtown. But they stopped to gawk and stare, to whisper amongst themselves.

And Obito realized Kakashi’s game. “You want them to see me. Us.” He grabbed Kakashi’s elbow and stopped them in the middle of the street to make Kakashi look at him properly.“Why?”

Kakashi still wore his mask even all these years later, and he was just as difficult to read. Obito wanted to shake him. “You know why.”

He knew why, and it was a stupid reason. “This won’t change anything. You know that. My face—” he touched the web of bumpy ridges over his cheek, “my face is literally the face of the enemy. I’m their boogeyman. I always will be. None of this matters.”

Around them, people had stopped to gawk. “It matters to me. It matters to Sakura, and to Naruto, to Sasuke and the other Jounin who voted to acquit you.” Kakashi took Obito’s wrist in his hand and revealed his face. “There are a lot of people who want to see you atone, but they also want you to live. We’ve all had enough of death.”

Obito might have laughed in his face for that one if his heart didn’t hurt thinking of how Kakashi’s team must have advocated for him to a room full of angry Jounin. After everything he’d put them through, especially Naruto. So he didn’t laugh. He didn’t argue. He just rubbed his eyes to stave off the tears that wanted to fall, but they didn’t. “Yeah,” he said, reedy. “On that much, we agree.”

When Obito realized where Kakashi was taking him, though, he faltered. It had been decades since he’d last set foot on his ancestral lands. He wouldn’t welcome him here, if he had any say in the matter.

Kakashi noticed his hesitance. “Sasuke suggested it.”

That did the opposite of making Obito feel any better. “The hell he did. After everything I did to him—to Itachi, I can’t—”

“You can. You will. This is the deal. Sasuke’s on mission outside the village more often than not. Someone has to look after this place.”

Obito curled his lips in a sneer. “So, what. I’m his chief of staff now? His valet to shine his shoes and polish his silver while he’s in Oto doing fuck-all?”

Kakashi actually laughed. “Would it make you feel better to know you’ll get a stipend?”

“What do you think?”

Kakashi put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed. “I think you have a second chance to lay your ghosts to rest. No one will bother you here. You’ll have free rein of the estate. Obito.” Kakashi brought his other hand down on his shoulder, caging him in. “I want you to live. So please, live.”

Obito couldn’t very well argue with that, so he accepted the keys and let himself inside the hollow halls of Sasuke’s home and marinated in the silence for a few heartbeats. Alone (ostensibly, though the ANBU guard would surely be lurking about monitoring him), he touched his hand to the wall in the entrance hall. Cold. Wood. Smoothed from years of people catching their balance to turn the corner to the foyer.

He wondered about the slime in his cell. If a cleaning crew had power washed it out of existence by now, sanitizing the cell for its next inhabitant.

The Uchiha Compound was quiet as a crypt, and Obito treaded lightly through its halls, careful not to disturb the dead.

xxx

He didn’t get out much, though not for lack of wanting. It was a strange predicament Obito found himself in: the haunted walls full of dead bodies drove him out, but the living equally shut him out when he escaped into town. No matter where he went, Obito was a pariah in his own skin.

All his clothes were branded with the Uchiha crest. Dead men’s clothes. He suffered it as long as he could before he couldn’t stand the sight of himself in them without wanting to throw up. It would be worth the stares and the whispers to be able to dress in something that hadn’t once belonged to someone he’d murdered.

But when he arrived at the tailor this fine, sunny day, he noticed several familiar faces in the window—Yuuhi Kurenai, Maito Gai, and Ebisu. They had Kurenai and Asuma’s daughter with them, a toddling little thing being fitted for a kimono. Obito made the mistake of staring too long, and Kurenai startled to see him watching them through the window.

Obito was out of there so fast he didn’t even hear Gai calling out to him. Kakashi was one thing; no matter what Obito did, he was fairly certain Kakashi would stand by him until they both burned. But the others, those who’d once called him a friend before he killed their lovers and crippled their bodies, suffered no such delusional loyalty.

He couldn’t face them. Not like this, without warning. He’d just come back later, kill a bit of time until they left.

Feeling quite sorry for himself and also rather embarrassed, Obito ducked into the first shop he came across after he’d stopped literally running from his problems. Immediately he was struck with a heady euphoria. Roses and honeysuckle perfumed his every breath, instantly soothing. Monsteras and calatheas and alocasias made a wilderness of the little shop, their fleshy leaves thick and vibrant green and sprouting from giant, ceramic planters glowing in royal blues and shiny blacks.

Obito scanned the maze-like interior packed from floor to ceiling with green and flowers, overwhelming. Ever since his rebirth under Madara’s care, he had found himself drawn to flora in all her forms, a side-effect perhaps of Senju Hashirama’s cells that had remapped his broken body and filled in his craters.

A neon philodendron hung several feet down a nearby shelf, its leaves bright and limey, hearts that fell in a cascade like a woman’s long hair. He traced the tender leaves with his fingers, reveling in the sparkling life he felt teeming within. If he closed his eyes and breathed, he could imagine a sort of peace here, surrounded by green and listening to the sound of running water from a fountain in the wall.

He wandered deeper into the shop, past pothos and begonias, bromeliads and daffodils, touching their petals as he went. But it was the sight of the woman re-potting a bunch of hydrangeas that stole his breath.

Beautiful was his first thought as he watched her deft hands work the soil and the roots, tucking the plant into its new box as if it were precious. Her blond hair was long and thick, her frame slender and fit, and she moved with a surety in herself that announced confidence, boldness.

Oh, fuck, was his second thought when he recognized her.

“Welcome to Yamanaka Flowers! How can I help…”

“Yamanaka Ino,” Obito said, hoarse.

Ino was flushed from her work and speechless as she stared right back. It only lasted a moment, though. That dewy serenity she’d found tending to the plants morphed into the cold, hard bitch-sona he’d come to know well from his own interrogations.

“Uchiha Obito.”

She was tense, a thread pulled so taut it would unspool and eventually snap. Obito had not anticipated meeting her again, she who knew every rotten abscess, every gangrenous wound upon his soul.

“I’m sorry,” he said, which could not possibly be enough, but it was all he felt was appropriate to say to her now.

Ino didn’t accept his shitty apology. She didn’t rage at him, either. She just continued to stare at him, as if she couldn’t understand how slime like him had managed to slither his way into her shop uninvited, and then she laughed.

It was not a kind laugh. “You’re sorry.”

Obito stepped closer, suddenly desperate for her to believe him. “Ino, please, I only—”

“Shut up.”

Obito stopped in his tracks. Ino removed her soiled gardening gloves and tossed them aside. He had never in his life been so unsure of how another person would react to him. Even Madara had had a certain cadence about him, manic and aggressive, but consistent. Ino was an unknown agent.

But he had to know.

“I’ll go,” he said calmly. “But before I do, I have to know why you did it.”

“What did I do?”

“You vouched for me. At my trial.” Then, as an afterthought (or an excuse): “Sakura told me.”

“Did she.”

Obito thought about the muck in his old cell then, how it had shuddered at the impact of a tidal drip in its puddle, and wondered at the wreckage it had endured. He clenched and unclenched his fists, but Ino faced him as cold as porcelain. “I don’t understand why you did. You saw everything.”

“Everything,” she repeated. “Yeah, I did.”

(“I want you haunted.”)

Was that really why? Her threat loomed large, a tumor in his heart fed daily by the silence of the crypt that was the Uchiha estate and the distant looks from the people he’d once called friends before they turned their backs and he’d shoved a sword through them.

And yet, he didn’t believe her. That anger, that venom she’d afforded him when she first began their interrogations wasn’t gone, but it was buried under something denser. And it scared him—what could weigh her down more than grief? Than vengeance?

He reached for her, and like a threatened animal, she tensed. Her steadfastness made him shrink before her, cautious. “I’ll go. You never have to see me again. Just, please. Tell me why.”

She watched him intently, her star-blue eyes murky with some unknown emotion. She was more raw in person than she’d been in his mind, and he didn’t know what to make of that. “You really think I owe you even that much?”

“No. The opposite, really. But I never believed in quid pro quo. I’ll leave on your word, even if it means I’ll die never knowing why.”

The emotion he’d noticed wavering in her gaze steeled now, and she was in his face in a flash with her fist in his shirt front. “Stop that.”

“Stop what?”

She shook him hard enough that he bit down on his tongue. “That,” she snarled. Snarled, like a beast. “Playing the martyr. If you wanted to be mourned, you should’ve just died with the rest of them.”

He dared not resist her as she pushed him against a shelf and rattled a few pothos in their planters. “I’m sorry—”

“Stop. Fucking. Apologizing.” She punctuated each word with a slam against the shelf, and this time a planter did fall. Obito snatched it before it could shatter on the floor on reflex, but a bit of soil spilled out of it and jostled the leafy plant. Ino didn’t seem to notice at all. “I’m sick of hearing it.”

“Then tell me what you want.”

(“I want you haunted.”)

He winced. Haunted he was, by his crimes, by the deaths of his comrades, by this woman who’d peered inside his shattered mind and leeched him of all his secrets. So haunted he couldn’t sleep at night under the shockwaves of her crawling into his head and unwrapping him before her.

She was looking at him strangely now, searching his ruined face for something. “I want my dad back.” Tears in her eyes, but they didn’t fall even as she clutched him harder like she meant to exhume him from his own flesh. “I want to hear him laugh again. I want to ask him what I should do when the elders of my clan come to me demanding I take a husband, churn out an heir, make some new political alliance.” She squeezed her eyes shut. “I want help, and he always knew how to help me the most.” When she looked up at him again, it was with an exhausted resignation glimmering with the last vestiges of her anger. “But I don’t have him anymore. All I have is you, and I can’t even hate you.”

Obito was so stunned by her honesty that he didn’t know what to say. The planter grew heavy in his hand, so he set it on the shelf next to him. Ino’s wrists were thin, but they were also warm under his fingers when he allowed himself to touch her. “You can, if it helps. I can take it. I’ll take all your hatred if it’ll help you.”

“Stop it,” she said, making him wonder if he would ever do anything right for her, and at the masochistic desire he felt to keep trying. “I hate that about you the most.”

“What?” Their voices were low now, intimate.

“That you’re a kind man.”

Kind was the last thing Obito felt these days. Even if the things he’d done had not been his choice of sound mind and conviction, he’d still done them. Her father, among so many others, was still dead. Obito was still here clinging to someone who saw no point in running from him because he couldn’t even be the cruel monster she needed him to be.

“I don’t know how to forgive you,” she confessed.

“You don’t have to.”

“I shouldn’t want to, either.”

“Ino…”

Her name in his voice broke her out of the spell this strange conversation had cast upon them both, and she pulled away. Madly, he tried to hold on, wishing she’d stay. He couldn’t remember the last time someone had held him like she just had, mighty yet impotent in the face of what to do with him beyond feel.

“Please,” he said, nearly desperate as she receded from him. He didn’t even know what he was asking for anymore, only that whatever her word he would swallow it, thorns and all, and bind himself to it. Of all the people he’d hurt and of the very few who had helped him anyway, Ino rose giant.

She put a hand on her hip and looked back at him over her shoulder. “That pothos you knocked over. I’m billing you for it. Don’t let it die.”

Later, when Obito was back at the Uchiha Compound still wearing a dead man’s clothes and staring at the little plant Ino had forced him to adopt, he considered her directive. She’d never know if he neglected it, forgot to water it, even dumped it into the trash. No one would. No one dwelled here but him now, and no one had visited in a very long time.

He dug out an old watering can from Mikoto’s gardening shed that looked to be about as old as Sasuke, cleaned off the dust under the outdoor spigot, and filled it with clean tap water from the kitchen sink. The pothos didn’t need much; it was still quite small. But he showered it until water drained through the hole in the planter and set it back on its new perch in the kitchen window.

Its leaves were glossy and smooth under his fingers. Thick with health even after the tumble the plant had taken. It would grow well and strong under the morning sunlight, with a little bit of care.

Obito smiled in the stillness of the Uchiha Compound. He felt the weight of ghosts at his back, their hands upon his shoulders, as he often did living here among his butchered kin.

“A life,” he said.

It had been a long time since he’d nurtured one of those. But perhaps that was the trick of it—nurturing. Slime could proliferate in weak light and stagnant water, but it would always remain slime. Even a tidal wave’s crashing was a forcing function, if such function was to rinse foul bones and scour them with salt, leaving nothing but raw roots behind.

Even a salted earth could grow fertile and flourish again, with time.

Alone in this huge, empty house with nothing to keep his attention but a precious, little plant entrusted to him by the woman who’d given him back his life, Obito had nothing but time.

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