Reborn

“I can fix this.” Kakashi says, determination lining his face.

“How?” Hiruzen rhetorically demands, hand curled tightly around his pipe. The Hokage hat is shadowing over his face.

“I’ll deem both as my apprentices. That way we can still be a unit without a third member, and I can carry further surveillance on the seal.” Kakashi brokers, ready to sprout Konoha laws that he had painstakingly memorized when he had been obsessed with the rules. Hiruzen clears his throat to cut him off before Kakashi can say anything more.

“I cannot keep covering for you like this, so I will ask: what are you willing to give up?”

Kakashi opens his mouth-

☁☁

The double doors to the Hokages office open, allowing Kakashi to see his students peering at him. 

“This mission is being labeled as classified.” His hands rest upon their shoulders as a myriad of emotions look back at him. A brewing storm quaking in the wake of censorship, as oceanic blue eyes well up with tears that prickle at their nose. Kakashi notes how distant his other apprentice is, a set of onyx eyes blankly reflecting his own image within the dark iris of his new pupil. 

Tightening his grip, he pastes on a fake smile. 

“You both know what that means right?” His question is rhetorical, as both the boys wilt under the imposing aura he is emitting within the Hokage Tower. They are both well versed enough in the ways of the judicial system on Konoha that they don’t answer. Naruto bites his tongue, opting to look down at his ragged sandals that are becoming too small for his cramped feet. 

“I trust that both of you will uphold this professionalism until the proper amount of time has passed, but until then, you are not to discuss any of the details of what transpired during the mission. A breach of this confidentiality will be taken as a leak to National Security and won’t just end in an infraction.” 

“We get it.” Sasuke snips, sulking and bitter as he stuffs his hands deeply into his pockets. Kakashi notes the new behavioral pattern, as he lets his grip go slack, sliding his hands back to summon the small paper slips he had also gotten from the Hokage. Sasuke eyes the paper slip distastefully while Naruto blankly looks at the fuzzy printed paper form. 

“Its standard evaluation and practice when a traumatic incident occurs within active service.” Kakashi cranks his neck as he explains pushing the slips into the surprised hands of his students. The grip from Sasuke's trembling hands easily rips the thin slip of paper, veins bulging. “Since you guys are now my apprentices, I am your legal guardian as well as your captain. I scheduled you both to one session with a friend who owes me a favor. You can talk about the very basics of the mission, nothing that will compromise any national or international data, but this is also going to act as your mental evaluation to get back onto the field.”

Finally, Sasuke erupts, oddly Naruto remains mute. 

“This is ridiculous! I do not need some phony doctor telling me that I am worthy enough to fight my own battles!” Sasuke snaps, composure completely gone as he continues his verbal rampage, “I am not weak, I am strong enough to endure what has happened. This is bullshit!”

Naruto finally snaps into action, anger making his whiskers turn a shade darker. 

“This is nothing to you?” His voice is wobbling, a wet quality that makes Sasuke shut up briefly when Kakashi and Sasuke both notice the tears that run down Naruto's face as he struggles to regain his composure.

“Sakura died! She died trying to protect your body from being killed off by those bandits Gato hired-”

“Naruto.” Kakashi cuts in, seriousness brokering no tone for argument. Sasuke tsks, gritting his jaw and looks off to the side. The loud commotion had brought unnecessary attention towards all of them. Eyes may be watching, and not Hiruzens. Kakashi immediately tries to dispel the turned heads away from them in the Hokage Tower.

“No! I won’t do it.” Naruto rebels, his stance prideful and fierce as he looks up into Kakashi's sole eye, “you said that teammates who abandon their teammates are scum, to completely forget about Sakura and not be able to talk about her would be the same thing! So, what are we?” 

“It’s not like that,” Kakashi starts before Naruto cuts him off. 

“It is! How can you even try to reason that this is any different.” Naruto blubbers as hot tears and snot run down his face as his clawed hands messily wipe away at his face, “How can I dare claim to be Hokage when I can’t even save Sakura? She died and I didn’t even realize she was gone until after the battle was over. What does that say about me? Do I even deserve to be a ninja?” His clawed hands protectively shield his face as ugly sobs wracked his body, the bright boy terribly macabre. It makes Kakashi distinctly uncomfortable, a smaller part of him feels sadness that he has become so used to loss that it has permanently tainted his outlook on life. On death.

Even Sasuke looks briefly uncomfortable with the open display of vulnerability. 

“...You don’t have to forget her and trust me on this when I say I do understand. I understand completely to lose someone on your team, but you cannot talk about it.” Kakashi firmly states, the most serious he has ever sounded with the two of them. The way Sasuke’s eyes widen is testament to how different his demeanor is, rather than his lackluster stance.

“There are different ways of honoring their memories. Ways to make them proud,” Kakashi confesses, the guilt beginning to gnaw at his twisting, squirming insides as he lies through his teeth about healthier forms of grieving, “as long as you remember them, you will always carry on with them.”

Kakashi is trying his best to put on his best front, remaining absolutely calm in front of the boys despite how harshly Naruto’s words had gotten to him. Hazy memories of orange goggles and teardrop moles blister underneath the surface of Kakashi’s tightly sealed subconscious. He cannot unbury it. Not now. Not ever. An odd smile pulls across his masked face as he looks down at his two new apprentices, it feels plastic and wrong. He hopes it looks natural. 

“So, let’s stop by the hospital after we all get a good rest, shall we?” Kakashi suggests, desperation coming close to bleeding out into the surface.

☁☁

Staring daggers at her frozen toes, she wills herself to move her feet. Nothing happens. Her bladder begs her for release, clenching, no longer doing the trick as her body screams at her to go to the bathroom. Sakura cannot move her legs. She can’t get up to go to the bathroom, she needs to ask for help. Embarrassment floods through her. She feels like dying inside, but it is better than getting a kidney infection. Swallowing down her pride, her dying dignity, she clears her throat lightly. It gets the job done, the rolling cart she is riding in slowing down to a stop. 

“I need to go to the bathroom.” Her voice is soft, her face pink like her hair. 

Awkward silence hangs in the air between them.

“Oh.” The man said softly, turning to face her. Sakura avoids his gaze with all her might, feeling too exposed in this task. The man doesn't seem to mind, in fact he slowly pulls the cart off the downtrodden path they had been traveling upon so that he can position the cart away from the road. His touch is gentle, a light pressure that avoids agitating her wrecked body. Sakura still clenches her jaw to quell the rising blush flushing her pale neck red. A small spark of anger lights up in Sakura's chest, as he puts her against the skinny tree. She's useless. This time, there is no need for the cold reptilian voice to brush up against her mind to tell her this fact. The humiliation is heavy enough to cause Sakura to try to move on her own. 

She takes her shaky hands, using the protruded roots to try and move her body. Quickly realizing, she doesn't have the strength to move her own body, Sakura muffles a scream. Emotions begin to bubble up to the fragile surface, compartmentalizing tactics rapidly falling apart as Sakura is being forced to face the fact she may never be able to move her legs.

The ruffling of clothing pulls green eyes clouded with tears for a desperate aversion to focus all her energy on the fully clothed man. He is moving the hay around, beating the black cape to remove any potential straw lingering onto the woven fabric. His gloved hands scruffle up the thick bundle towards his chest as he begins to talk to her.

“Do you need help?” It’s a quiet offer, none with any hint of annoyance and condensation. Almost entirely professional to Sakura’s ears. The sweltering heat of her emotions froth over towards the surface as Sakura bites out, “yes.”

His boots don’t make a sound over the dry leaves that had shed themselves, a technique that only higher-level ninja used. Her green eyes flicker up towards the orange mask, a sole onyx eye concealing anything that Sakura cannot read. He holds up the cape as he supports her weight gently placing his hands under her armpits to hold her up against a withered tree. Sakura stares down at her useless feet. The bark hurts her spine, causing her to whimper.

A dry branch snaps within the mucky foliage.

“Well, well, well,” A thick burly accent says, “look’a what we got her'.”

Obito didn’t expect there to be any survivors from the massacre that occurred on the bridge, but he was wrong. Sticking to the more hidden roads had been a mistake, he acknowledges, as the foul stench of not bathing for months wafts off the small group of bandits and cheap mercenaries that stand threateningly in front of the stolen cart.

“Looks like we get to rob a cripple today boss.” An oily man with red hair glees, hands eager to go towards his rusty sword. His thick tongue wets his fleshy lips, clothes dirtied from mud and grass from camping in the woods. The man with rotting teeth elbows him harshly, spitting onto the ground while staring at Obito. The chains clattering against each other as the man with rotting teeth shows his sickles.

“We gotta get into the graces of the new Lordship since those bastards killed our only way of coin.” Their leader snarls, a scary light entering his angry eyes as he stares down Sakura. Sakura doesn’t remember him but knows that he was probably one of the few that was able to get away from the bridge that day. His knuckles crack in fury.

“Hand ova everythin' youse got.” A man with rotting teeth demands the black sheen of decay visible within his mouth. Obito's onyx eye quickly glances back to see if Sakura is okay, his orange mask expertly hiding his facial movements. She is terrified, her face pale as her upper body twitches in poorly concealed anxiety. Her constructed movements as she struggles to even move away from the bandits, their attention is drawn to her odd posture, how she can’t bend forward to even push her legs away from them. Obito doesn’t need to face them to see the thoughts that are stewing in their dim heads. 

☁☁

Obito beat mindlessly.

It showed in the way he swiftly carried out violence. He was a professional, he had made death come quickly to the first bandit in his sight. It was so seamless, that Sakura could hardly believe what had just happened before her eyes. Throwing his gloved hands out fluidly, a twin set of kunai settled into his hands as he jumped into battle first. Obito lunges for the first bandit's unprotected mid-section, using both kunai to effectively gut him. Knowing that it isn’t enough for death, Obito substitutes himself behind the man with red hair. He finds he doesn’t care to know the man’s name. All he can hear is the boy inside him screaming and Madara words hacking him to pieces. His head feels a little scrambled, eye throbbing as his bloodline spurs to life. Raspy words filling up his brain as he isn’t quite done yet, ordering him to get rid of all his obstacles.

Swiftly dropping the other kunai to the ground as he swirls around, twisting his body like a fevered dancer, Obito slashes upwards in a wide arc. The kunai hacks into the soft flesh of underdeveloped muscles and thin clothing. A piercing howl escapes the thin lips of the second bandit, his dirty red hair caked onto his sweaty face as Obito continues to lash out again and again, hacking away into the bandit’s stomach and chest. So caught up in the moment, he refuses to pause to see the timorous bug-eyed girl trying to drag herself in the damp foliage of Waves' thin trees. The kunai quickly finds itself into the throat of the red-haired bandit. An odd gurgle coming from the fallen man, as his blackened fingernails hopelessly grip the wound to stop the oxygen and blood from escaping.

A familiar rage overcame Tobi, a war dance that he has been entangled with since he was a boy, fuels him with a rush of adrenaline that pulses eagerly into his veins. Tobi is made of fire, he is blood and death and gore, he thinks as his gloved hand smashes in the last bandit's face. The blood splatters onto his mask, fist drenched with blood. Tobi loses track of how many times he has pummeled his fist into the caving face of the forgettable bandit he is holding up in a tight grip. 

Rubbing his thumb over the knuckles of his gloves, not to clean them, but to add more room for the impending beating he has in mind for the foes who remain still and shattered on the floor. Within the static of visceral gore, blood and steel is the flickering glitch of a girl with purple marks on her face screaming at him to stop, the crunch of shattered bone and cartilage mutes out any wails calling for him to relinquish the fervor of his dance. 

It isn’t enough for him.

Letting go of the corpse with a caved skull, Tobi begins to make his way towards the bandit who is trying to fake their death. The clattering thump of a clacking skull and wet flopping of bodily fluids doesn’t deter Tobi from continuing onwards in his violent spree. Eyes trained on the breathing bandit, Tobi wonders why he was so lazy in gutting him. Tobi would make it painful; he concludes as he twirls around another hidden kunai in his confident grasp. He would hurt them the way the world had hurt him, how the world had-

Someone clutched onto his leg. Looking down he sees almond shaped eyes, sand crusted hair and a soft blemished face gazing at him panicked. The tremors that wrack her body pull at his form fitting pants, but this was not a place of good intentions. Tobi analyzes the primal discomfort distorting the faces of the bandits, his eye catching the faint spasms of muscle as their chests stopped moving altogether. Everyone but him was petrified.   

The steam that emerges from their warm bodies as their lingering heat escapes into the cold mist does nothing to help the atmosphere of his graphic conquest. His kunai is drenched from butchery, tendrils of rich crimson falling off his obsidian kunai as it lazily hits the forested floor. 

Sakura can hear the quiet drops hitting the ground. The sheen of blood coats his gloves, an overwhelmingly acidic smell accompanied by the tang of copper and shit as Sakura witnesses the man stand sinisterly above the bandits who had made the unfortunate mistake of trying to rob them. Shell-shocked, her mind quickly re-evaluates who she is with. What made her so special that she hadn’t met the same end?

An itch tickles her thoughts, prodding to get out. The words are on the tip of her dry tongue, as he slowly turns to face her. His macabre mask is sprinkled from the ensuing violence, red seeping from the cracks of the orange mask. It looks ghoulish, it reminds her of her favorite color. Red. A cheerless color burning with intensity as it looks back at her. The itch in her mind blossoms into fruition, a memory searing into the lids of her skull like hellish flames. 

Pomegranate red eyes blaze as malevolent stars. 

She rediscovers the man's name. 

“Obito?” She whispers in disbelief and fear, eyes wide as the unlocked memory resurfaces. Obito recoils, as if doused in cold water as the grip on his kunai weakens in response to his name. The sweltering stench of gutted bowls immediately begins to simmer into the thickening mist filled air. A malevolent star bursts within the confine of the mask, shedding light onto the immense power Obito holds. The lack of sun makes their crown of inky black hair shimmer navy blue, the intense spikes reminding Sakura faintly of prickly thorns. 

Pomegranate red eyes blaze as brightly as embers, the attention suffocating.

She throws herself towards the discarded kunai that is within her reach and points the blade towards him.