The masked stranger’s sneering voice: Hero of the Sharingan.
Because you-
Because Rin-
Because-
The lightning in his fist crackles, fizzles out. Its dying protest licks up his arm, setting his nerves alight, but he doesn’t flinch. The feeling is as familiar to him as breathing.
“Kakashi,” Obito’s low, rough voice echoes in the empty-dark void of the Kamui dimension. “Kakashi, it doesn’t have to be this way.”
There is a mad sort of plea to be heard there, plain as day. Kakashi watches as the man who used to be a dead boy twists himself up, grasps for words, chokes on too many and not enough of them. Kakashi stills himself, hands at his sides, takes a breath. He takes another breath. He takes another-
“How do you think it should be?” Kakashi asks him quietly.
The question stills Obito completely. He takes a breath. He takes another breath. He takes another-
“Aren’t you… tired?” Obito asks him, taking a single half-step forward into his space. He takes another when Kakashi doesn’t move, when his fingers don’t twitch, when the only sign of life is the flicker of his mismatched eyes following Obito, and the soft rise and fall of his chest. “Don’t you want this… don’t you want all of this to stop?”
Taking stock of himself, Kakashi thinks: Yes. Yes, I’d like it to stop. His body aches, feeling as though every last drop of blood has been wrung out of him like filthy water and replaced with sand. The gifted eye throbs in his skull. He bleeds sluggishly from a dozen different cuts, and Obito’s hands settle heavy on his body, one on his shoulder, one on his waist. Kakashi blinks at him; the placement is like a mockery of defibrillation. His heartbeat is unsteady where it pounds away in his ears. Maybe he needs the shock to keep him alive.
“I do,” he answers him honestly. Obito’s answering smile is twisted by the scars on the side of his face, bright like a boy he used to be for only a moment before the smile disappears as Obito pulls him into a hug. The man’s body is sweltering hot like a furnace, and Kakashi struggles to breathe in the face of it, in the crush against his ribs, neck, shoulders.
He’s still until Obito releases him, babbling: “I knew I could convince you Kakashi, you’ve suffered so, so much, endured and committed such atrocities, and you were so good, I knew you’d want to forget, I knew you’d-”
Kakashi doesn’t step away, still held strong in Obito’s grasp, but his hands press against his chest until Kakashi has drawn himself away enough to look him in the eye. Slowly, painfully, he tells him: “I don’t mean like that, Obito. I mean that I want you to stop.”
“No,” Obito barks, his grip on Kakashi growing painfully tight. “No, no, no. You idiot, I’m offering you- I’m offering you happiness, I’m offering you a chance at a better, kinder world, I want. We can have whatever we want, if you just stop being stubborn-”
“What do you think I want,” Kakashi asks him flatly, willing himself not to tear himself out of Obito’s grasp, so still it's as if he were already dead.
“You… you want to be happy, don’t you?” Obito asks him, desperation growing in his voice. “That’s all anyone wants. To be happy, just to be…”
“I was happy,” Kakashi whispers. In his mind's eye, outlined in perfect-sharingan memory: Gai’s hand curled around his own, Zabuza’s hand hot against the small of his back, breakfast and second breakfast and getting tangled in sheets, the hard collision of bodies in a spar with Sakura, with Naruto, with Gai, with Yamato, with Zabuza and Sai and “Before this, I was ha-”
“You weren’t happy!” He sneers in his face, fingers digging into flesh as if their intent was to find bone and drill into it. “How could you be happy, after everything you’ve done? After everything they made you do, after- After what you did to Rin? How could you?”
“I don’t know,” Kakashi answers him honestly, his voice tight with pain. Obito asks him like he’s begging for a secret Kakashi doesn’t know how to give him- he has no idea how to be happy, he just knows that his life … wasn’t so bad after all. Obito asks him like he is wondering where Kakashi might have gotten the audacity to be happy, like he thinks he deserves such a thing. Kakashi doesn’t know that either. He thinks it might not be about deserving. He thinks he doesn’t know a thing at all. “I don’t know, Obito. Is that the point of all of this? To make…” he pauses, fumbles- he’d almost said ‘yourself’, then ‘me’, but he settles on: “us happy? What do you-”
“To make everyone happy,” Obito snarls. “I’m going to fix it for everyone, everyone gets the life they want, no more pain, no more suffering, no more-”
“Choice?” Kakashi mutters.
“Fuck you,” Obito shoves him, and Kakashi falls flat on his ass, lightheaded from the proximity of a strange body and the sudden lack of a familiar one. “You think you get to judge me? Where have all of your choices led you? Here?” He laughs: a cold, bitter thing, sharp in its contrast to his near-begging the moment before. Then he gasps, falls to his knees on either side of Kakashi’s thighs and throws his arms around his shoulders again, burying his forehead against the hollow of his throat. The weight of him against his chest and atop his legs is wholly unfamiliar, the wrong shape and the wrong density. Kakashi aches, wishes he could twist away from him, turn his gaze from the madness on display before him, stop himself from understanding it completely. The Obito that Kakashi knew was less than half the size of the man that sits astride him now, the Obito that Kakashi knew had never clung to him like this, like a scared babe, like a desperate lover, like a hot shadow of Zabuza holding him close whispering he thought he’d died, he thought-
Obito hasn’t stopped speaking.
“-you see? We can have Her back, Kakashi. She’ll tell you, She’ll tell you anything you want to hear. That She missed you, that She forgives you, that She-”
She. She. Kakashi’s tired brain finally makes the connection. “Rin?” He interrupts, his voice almost confused. “Do you think this is what… what she’d want for us, Obito?”
“It doesn’t matter Kakashi, She’s fucking dead because you killed Her, you bastard, you-” Obito’s hands grip his throat but don’t squeeze. His gaze darts off to the side, and then he moves them to hold Kakashi’s jaw. “Sorry, I’m sorry. Kakashi, look. I can fix this, I can fix all of it, and She will be so pleased to see all of us together again.”
“It won’t be real, Obito,” he whispers. He doesn't struggle. He forces himself to hardly react at all. If he doesn't react, maybe it isn't real. Or maybe if he keeps himself from biting Obito's scalding fingers off, they won't have to kill each other, and Kakashi won't have to know what his blood tastes like.
The man’s brows furrow. “What does that matter? It’ll feel real, it’ll…It’ll feel better than real, and it’ll be so real to us that there will be no difference between. Between reality and the dream, it’ll be perfect.” The tips of his fingers dig into Kakashi’s jaw, and behind his ear. Nausea rises in his throat as he recognizes an echo of the boy who died, the boy who-
Those who abandon their friends are trash.
Everyone gets the life they want.
The boy who didn’t change enough, for all that he did change. The boy that died to make Kakashi what he is today: friend-killer, the copycat, hero general senseiloverfriend. Man, alive. No longer an island. “What use is a dream, when it becomes a violation,” he asks after a moment, his voice so quiet that Obito has to lean closer to hear it. He reaches up and settles his palms on either of Obito’s cheeks, blinking up at him. “Obito, this is no better than a mercy killing- everyone goes to sleep, and then what? We all waste away, starve peacefully? Unaware of our own deaths, but-”
“If that’s what it- what it takes for peace,” Obito stammers, his mismatched eyes wide at Kakashi’s cold palms on his face. “I… I just want you to understand the kindness, Kakashi. I don’t want to have to kill you because She would be mad at me, and I-”
“She? Rin? She’d be mad at you for killing me even in your perfect dream world, where nothing bad has ever happened-”
“Don’t be an idiot,” Obito replies, brows furrowing, “Of course not then, but until then. She wants you to be happy just as much as I do, that’s. That’s why I’m trying to make you understand, Kakashi. I want you to do this with me, and my people just aren’t reliable- they keep on leaving without saying goodbye.”
Flatly, Kakashi murmurs: “Without saying goodbye, eh?”
Obito digs the tips of his fingers into the bruised space between Kakashi’s ribs, hard enough to make him wince. “Pity doesn’t suit you, you know,” he snipes, “You never did wear it well, even when we were alive. Ha. Without saying goodbye– the pair of you left me under that rock without so much as a backwards glance, the first time. And then when you killed Her, and She died, She left us both without a word.” Rin’s face, blood streaking from her mouth. Kakashi wonders if pointing out her final word was only Kakashi’s own name would make the situation any worse than it already is. “Sensei, too. Most of my useless organization, especially. Ha. And you.”
Obito’s hands trace up Kakashi’s sides, down his arms, and settle on his wrists. Kakashi’s palms still rest on his cheeks.
“The people in my life leave me because they don’t understand my cause. They’re not interested in helping me.” He sighs, sadness weighing visibly on his shoulders. “That’s the nature of things and people, isn’t it? The thing I’m trying to change… But it’s okay. I’ll forgive all of them for running away from me. I’ll forgive you, too. I won’t punish them, I’ll welcome them into our beautiful dream with open arms, because I’m a generous man-”
“Obito,” Kakashi shakes him with the grip he has on his face, his voice tight. “Do you see her? Do you see Rin?”
“Of course I do,” Obito’s eyes trail over Kakashi’s shoulder again, and then lock back on to Kakashi. “She’s always with me. With us. Don’t you see Her too?”
“...Yes,” he confesses begrudgingly. It’s true enough, when he can hardly go a month without dreaming about the wide-eyed look she’d given him when he’d put his fist through her chest. “I see her too.”
“And if… if you’re both here…” Obito’s voice grows sorrowful, “And we aren’t dreaming, we aren’t in our perfect world… that means I’m being punished, doesn’t it? Seeing you, fighting you, making Her frown at me like that… It’s my punishment.”
Punishment for what, Kakashi doesn’t ask. “Maybe,” he says instead.
Obito’s hands slide from his wrists to rest atop his own thighs, still straddling Kakashi’s extended legs. He stares down at his hands for a moment, brows furrowed. Wretchedly, he whispers, “I don’t want to be punished anymore, Kakashi. Living in this torment, knowing I couldn’t save Her, and that I couldn’t save you, it’s a failure of the highest order. I’ve been twisted and broken and humiliated and h-handed this fate that I can’t escape-” He blinks, reaches up, settles his hands on Kakashi’s face. They hold each other. “But. If this is my punishment, I just don’t know why… it’s so good to see the two of you.”
Kakashi’s stomach twists. He doesn’t look behind him, because he knows there is no one but the two of them in this dark little corner of nowhere, the place they’ve sent each other to die.
“I should gut you like a fish,” Kakashi hisses half-heartedly.
“I know,” Obito presses their foreheads together, his breath blowing across Kakashi’s face like a volcanic wind. He doesn't draw away from the wash of heat because he won't let himself. It hurts. It's supposed to hurt. “I- I know. Kakashi, you have to understand that I. I didn’t want to. To do all of that. I didn’t want to do any of this for myself, Madara, he–” His eyes slip closed. “I was so alone, and hurt, and afraid, and they put me back together wrong, Kakashi. They put me back together wrong and I couldn’t help you and Rin when you needed me, and She died, and you were awful, you were awful to look at, to witness… They used me, used my helplessness and my rage, and I wanted to be used because I just wanted to stop… feeling like this.”
“Ah. So they’re to blame for all this?”
“No, not… Not all of this,” the other man murmurs weakly. “I knew better, with Sensei. I shouldn’t have done that. It wasn’t his fault that you killed Her.”
Ah. Of course. The mysterious Uchiha alleged to have been controlling the Kyuubi that night. Obito feels bad for what happened to Minato- what about Kushina? What about every other person that died that night? Do they even register?
“But Kakashi, if I hadn’t, they would have given up on me and left me to rot. I barely knew who… I barely knew what I was, then. I would have wasted away.” Obito cajoles him: “That’s not what either of you would have wanted, right? If you knew I was alive, if I could come back to you, if I could help you…” He shakes his head.
If, if, if. Obito, alive this whole time. Waiting to be saved. How could he have known? How could he not have known?
“And is what I’ve done so bad, compared to those bastards that came before us? The Kage that sent their people to slaughter, the councilors enriching themselves in wars they don’t have to pay for in their own blood? Why should I be a monster? Is my obscenity any worse than theirs?”
Is there any point to the observation that Obito quite likely enabled a fair bit of warmongering and slaughter himself, if the rumors about the Mizukage are to be believed? Or Danzo and Itachi, and the massacre? The countless other lives wasted and destroyed in his quest for a perfect world, what about them? Didn’t Danzo truly believe he was doing what was necessary to protect the village? The questions choke him. Arguing is senseless, he thinks. Obito is still long lost to him in his own little mad world.
He sighs then, softly, his hands stroking over Kakashi’s cheeks. “It doesn’t matter, Kakashi. They’ll forget all of this- they won’t even know who I was, when they’re living their perfect dream.”
“I thought you said you were coerced into all of this, Obito,” he can’t keep the acid out of his own voice.
Obito flinches.
“Of course. I told you, Madara… Zetsu… Their machinations were thorough. I’m not them, I never was, but… They’re watching me.”
“We’re alone-”
“They’re watching me. Everyone else has failed them, Kakashi, so they’re watching me because they want me- they need me to succeed. They want this perfect dream as much as I do, to see the loved ones they lost once more, and they need me to- so they keep me on a leash, they watch, they won’t let me-”
“Obito,” Kakashi finally drops his hands from his face to his collar and shakes him carefully, grits his teeth when Obito’s wide eyes focus on his own. “They can’t see you here, it’s just you and me. It’s just us-”
“No! No, you don’t understand, as soon as we leave they’ll be back, they’ll watch me, they won’t let me stray from my path…” his hoarse voice is breathless, beginning to fade, and tight with fear and fury until he visibly stitches himself together, takes a breath. “I could… I could go. I could go somewhere, and I could… live in the trees, and I could have a garden, and i-it would’t be perfect, but Rin would… maybe She would forgive me for good enough, and… I could be happy. I could bear it.”
“And what about what you’ve done to me, Obito?” He’s implied that all of this was done for Rin and for him, though Kakashi can’t tell if Obito believes he’s a dangerous animal to be euthanized or a broken beast in need of rehabilitation. “What about Minato-sensei, what about Kushina, and their son. What about your family? You’d bear all that weight?”
Obito shakes his head, slowly. “I… Killed them. And I let you die a thousand small deaths, after that first one.”
“If you think so,” Kakashi’s voice remains flat. He hides his fury, his fear, and his hope.
“I… I ruined you. I couldn’t save you, so I ruined you. I turned you into… I turned you into this.” His fingers dig into Kakashi’s jaw.
Kakashi doesn’t need to ask if he’s really all that bad, because he knows that he is. But is he really so pathetic? Does every damned one of them think of him as a lamb gone to slaughter?
“And then… the world, the harm I’ve caused hunting the tailed beasts… I’ve hurt so many people,” Obito’s fingers trace the edge of his mask, and his gaze fixes at the base of his throat. Kakashi makes a noise of assent, and Obito’s expression softens, saddens. “Minato-sensei… The people of the Leaf, the Uchiha, the people of the Mist, the Rain… People who loved me, and people who never knew me at all. I did it, it was me, it was… I could feel the weight of it, but I did it anyway for the sake of our. Of my dream.”
“Yeah,” he murmurs, cold and calm. “There’ll be an answer for the things you’ve done, Obito. There has to be. You don’t… The death, the suffering, the pain and the fear- I don’t think you understand, I don’t think… I don’t think you could live with yourself if you did. But there’s no way past it, you’ll have to face it, and you’ll have to answer.”
Obito nods, wavers, and nods again, more determined this time. His voice brightens with fervor: “I’ll make it right, then. I could surrender, dedicate myself to service, try and fix… Kakashi, I’d accept any punishment, if it– if it means dying, or apologizing, or… I’ll make it right, I swear I will.”
For a long moment, Kakashi lets the quiet between them stretch. Both of them are panting, their breaths uneven and pained. He doesn’t know what’s happening anymore, doesn’t want to let himself hope, doesn’t want to say the wrong thing to twist Obito back into the shape he’d held before, violent and bitter and cold, but he has to ask: “Do you think you’ll let yourself try?”
Obito is silent for a long moment. He stares hard at Kakashi’s throat, and then at his mask. He tucks his thumbs under the edges and pulls it down, slowly, around his chin. Kakashi holds perfectly, utterly still. The other man’s gaze sharpens, and he whispers, “Your nose… you’ve been bleeding.”
“Yeah,” he agrees. “You guys have been kicking the shit out of me.”
Obito’s hands run once more down his sides, pausing on the sticky points of his flak vest where he’s been sluggishly bleeding. “Does it hurt? I’m sorry, Kakashi, I never wanted to hurt you, I should have been more careful, and I should have-”
“Stop,” finally unable to stand it anymore, Kakashi pushes at him, twisting and shoving until Obito is no longer sitting on his legs, until his hands aren’t brushing over his sides, until they sit shoulder to shoulder against the strange nothing-wall-shape of the Kamui dimension. His arm presses to Kakashi's right shoulder. “Just– just stop, Obito. Sit with me, okay. Just. Sit here, with me, please.”
The following silence is deep, and heavy. Their ragged breathing fills out the bottom of it, but there’s still so much space to go.
“I’m tired,” Kakashi confesses to him. “Of the… great, sinister plans made by great, sinister men. Things that need to be justified. Things that need to be explained. Lies that need to be told. I’m tired of lies, Obito. I want my life to be my own.”
Obito turns to look at him. His gaze feels like a physical weight.
“I’ve made choices that were never really choices, Obito. Many of them. Bad choices, worse choices. I’ve cheated, and lied, and killed at the behest of others because I wanted to serve a purpose greater than myself. I’ve been good. I’ve been better than good, I’ve been perfect.”
“They hate you for it,” Obito mutters, sulkily. “I hated you for it, too. Being perfect, I mean.”
“When you are small and stupid,” Kakashi continues as if he hadn’t spoken at all, “It can feel like a blessing to be the perfect vessel for another’s wishes. You’re still… still grateful for your own devotion, to be molded into the shape you’re told is right. The wrongness of it doesn’t make you ache, because you don’t know any better. But as much as they define that perfection, that servitude, they don’t realize that… they’ve begun to rely on us to bend to their will. They don’t know what to do when we refuse to perform as expected.” He shifts, hisses through clenched teeth. “Ah, fuck. Does it even matter now?”
“What do you mean?”
“I think… well. Shikaku and I have been trying to shove the hat at each other since Tsunade started hinting she wants to retire,” he mumbles into his knees as he draws them to his chest. “And Shikaku is… so it’s just me.”
“That won’t end well, Kakashi,” some of the feverishness creeps back into Obito’s voice, and the hairs at the nape of Kakashi’s neck prickle. “You have to- it won’t end well at all, because you’re not…”
Smart enough. Kind enough. Good enough. Right enough. Enough, full stop. You were made wrong, made violent, made cold. You don't have what it takes to do the right thing. You have nothing at all.
“Yeah, it never does end well. How could it?” Kakashi sounds almost amused. He’s spent five years trying to convince everyone he’d make a terrible leader, but no one else has stepped up to the plate. But he’s bound to his duty, isn’t he? To do the best that he can for the people he cares for, and that includes-
Abruptly, he continues: “You know, Obito. It might be easier if you were… there.”
Obito turns to him, stares at the side of his face. His expression is unreadable. When Kakashi turns to look back at him, he bends his neck, leans closer, and presses their lips together. Revulsion and fear twist in his stomach. He thinks he almost wants to lean into it, but Kakashi holds himself perfectly still again. He doesn't kiss him back. Obito’s hand cups his jaw. His mouth is clumsy, inexperienced and lava-hot against Kakashi’s. After a moment, he draws away. Something awful and afraid and animal twists in Kakashi’s chest. He continues as if the other man hadn’t just kissed him once he finally draws away, and Kakashi can breathe again.
“I can’t promise you anything,” he says quietly. “They’ll hate you, you know, for the things you’ve done. They’ll want to put you on trial. They might even want to kill you, and I can’t honestly say I don’t think you deserve it.” But it isn’t about deserving, is it? There's no such thing as getting what you deserve. He sighs. “But, Obito, if you come with me I’ll… I’ll speak for you. Even at the end of the world, among the rubble and the bodies you’ve piled up. I’ll speak for you.”
Silence reigns between them for a moment.
“Why… why would you do that, Kakashi? Drag your name through the mud with mine, for what?”
“Because… you mattered to me,” Kakashi lets his gifted eye slip shut for a moment. It throbs dangerously in his skull, watering. Obito’s eye. Kakashi doesn’t look at him. It feels like a revelation to himself, like mourning the man next to him is entirely separate from mourning the boy he’d promised a future to twenty years ago, even though he's certain that it isn't. “I think you still do, even if I’d be better off if you didn’t. Because I don’t want to kill you, and I don’t want to die. Because we’re… tangled. Pieces of ourselves lost where we shattered on impact together. If we tried to put all of them back, we’d… lose track of what belonged to who, you know. But we can take the time to figure it out, if you’ll let us.”
“Come… with you,” Obito repeats, as if trying the words out for himself. Kakashi makes a noise of affirmation. “And these people, they’ll all hate me? They’ll want to punish me, won’t they?”
“Hate comes with the territory,” Kakashi mutters.
Obito flings himself to his feet. The line of his shoulders is agitated, his expression twisting from thoughtful to… something else. “Right,” he says. Kakashi’s eye slips back open, throwing the world around them once more into sharp relief, into perfect burning recall. “Of course I’ll go with you. Ha! In chains, right? Because you’re so forgiving, so gentle, moreso than me.”
Kakashi’s stomach sinks. He struggles to his own feet, tenses as Obito stalks toward him and clenches his fists in his collar.
“I’ll abandon my great dream, my plans for world peace, to sit at your side like a fucking pet and watch it all burn, watch you continue with your struggle to do the right thing even though you have no fucking idea what the right thing is.” Obito shakes him, and Kakashi settles a hand at his wrist. “I’ll get on my knees and I’ll beg for your fucking forgiveness, shall I? Beg for the forgiveness of the hypocritical people of this imperfect world. And you! You’ll sit on your throne, and you’ll deign to forgive me?”
Irritation spikes in his throat. “There’s no throne, and it’s not about me–”
Ignoring him, Obito shoves him away and begins to stalk around like a caged feline. “And if I’m really lucky, maybe you’ll lower yourself, prove how merciful you are, all because of this child. Naruto. Some optimistic idiot you’ve forced yourself to believe in when you have nothing left– when you never believed in me at all.”
“I said I would speak for you–” in part because Kakashi has built his life around believing in Obito, the things that he believed before. In the things he believes now, twisted and bent into something terrible, but not quite strayed from their true purpose.
“And if they let me live, what then?” Obito snaps, throwing a punch at Kakashi’s head. Kakashi weaves out of the way, hands at his sides. “I spend the rest of my life laboring to make amends? To beg forgiveness from the real people? A never ending punishment? The hope that one day you’ll forgive me turning into a noose you can use to destroy me? Hoping for mercy you will never show me? Do you think I’m deluded? Is that all you have to offer me?”
Obito punctuates his sentences with punches and kicks, and Kakashi weaves, dodges, ducks. “It’s a better ending than this,” he tells him, breath growing short with pain and exertion once more. His sluggish muscles come back to life at the promise of a fight.
Leaping forward, the other man grips his arms and digs his fingers into the meat. “But this isn’t the end, Kakashi! You don’t get to tell me when it ends– this is our beginning! If there’s only one thing that’s true about this life, it’s that there is no change without suffering, and wouldn’t you say I’ve suffered? Haven’t I suffered enough? Don’t I deserve to–”
“It’s not about what we deserve, Obito,” his voice is uneven, but he keeps it quiet. He shakes Obito’s grip from his arms, and when Obito grabs his collar and yanks him close and presses his lips to his once more, Kakashi doesn’t drag himself away. He’s pliant, almost soft underneath Obito’s hands and his mouth, opening up for him to cut his lips and tongue on Kakashi’s teeth. Kakashi doesn’t close his eyes, not even when blood fills his mouth. He watches the frustration build in Obito’s expression, turning hungrier and hungrier the more Kakashi folds for him.
Kakashi. Pushes him away.
They stare at each other.
“What is it then,” Obito' has blood in his mouth's teeth are red-black, like his blood has already started to rot. Kakashi licks his lips, tastes iron on his teeth and tongue. “If it’s not about what we deserve, what is it?”
“You and I are crawling maggots,” Kakashi informs him, “Dreaming of having wings like a fucking fly. We've been told a thousand stories by the birds that descend on us, who come down to eat us while we dream.”
Obito’s shoulders slump, his expression breaking, shifting into a snarl.
“All you ever do is… Mock. All you have to offer is– you’re nothing. You’re broken, you’re a fucking carcass, a puppet.” Obito’s hands tangle in his own hair, and he hisses: “I hate you. You’re fucking pathetic. Nobody knows you like I do, nobody has seen you the way I’ve seen you, broken down and built back up so many times that there’s nothing left of you at all, you empty thing. I- I hate you!”
“Ah,” Kakashi says, for lack of anything better to say. He’s ruined this completely, though he isn’t sure where he went wrong in the course of this conversation.
“Shut up!” A black steel rod grows from Obito’s palm. “If you ever loved me at all, you would have found a way to save me from what I am. You wouldn’t have let any of this happen. If it had been you– you wouldn’t have fallen for all this, right? You’re too smart for that. But I’m not. I want this perfect world, I believe in it–”
Whatever it is that he's feeling, because he doesn't know, he swallows. All of this talk of peace; there is no brighter future, not for beasts like them. Still. He can try to make it easier. For Naruto, for Sakura, in the faint hope that they'll be able to make a better world themselves. Together.
“I’m not very smart at all,” Kakashi interrupts him softly, electricity crackling once more beneath his skin. “Because I can only see one way to save you from what you are. I am a killer, and all I have to offer you now is death.”