Rin can only be Rin if she’s still breathing.
Kakashi can only be Kakashi if he’s protecting her.
I don’t feel pain. I don’t feel anything.
When the chirp of a thousand birds fades and there’s only Kakashi’s name ghosting from Rin’s lips, the entire glade is silent beyond those three whispered syllables. Obito watches her body slip off Kakashi’s hand, blood and viscera dripping from the bloody hole carved into her chest—
Dead she’s dead it’s all your fault you didn’t save her—
And as Kakashi falls seconds later, Raikiri spluttering out with the last of his chakra, Obito takes a deep breath then lets it all out. In another world, he lets the White Zetsu warp him into the midst of battle, Sharingan shifting to spin with the Mangekyō now that his dreams had been crushed in front of him. In another world, he surfaces from his bloodlust to cradle Rin’s body and let the last of his heart shatter when he feels the utter emptiness within her.
In another world, this is the moment Uchiha Obito ceases to be.
But in this one…
“Another failure,” Obito mutters, tossing the blackened heart away and plunging his hand into another chest. Ignoring the screams of the dying shinobi with practiced ease, he squeezes the new heart thoughtfully and hums, hand flickering a weak green before his chakra settles again.
“Your project will result in failure,” the White Zetsu says by his side, though it doesn’t move to stop him—not with the stump of its arm still a stump despite its regenerative abilities. “Madara-sama—”
“Told me about this, so I have to fix it,” Obito replies with steely conviction, hand glowing a brighter green under his hard scowl. “You’re just a chakra construct—you wouldn’t understand.”
Because there were medical ninjutsu that could replace organs, wasn’t there? And hadn’t great medic-nin like Tsunade-sama performed miracles far greater than reviving one shinobi? It’s just one heart, Obito tells himself, humming under his breath as he sizes up the heart and the hole in Rin’s body.
It’s also just a few thousand destroyed nerves in Kakashi’s arm, too—but he’s alive, if heavily sedated and locked up in a room for now. It’s a different room to the ones the Kiri nin are in, if only because Kakashi’s is actually semi-comfortable and doesn’t involve much in the way of irregular mind-fucking. Obito needed those hearts and arms intact, after all, and something about outfitting them with Zetsu growths like his own seemed inadvisable.
So here he is, perusing the kinjutsu scroll he’d stolen a few hours back and re-reading the section he needs for implanting hearts. For all that his life had fucked him over, Obito had been pleasantly surprised by the functionality of his Mangekyō Sharingan—and maybe Konoha will hate him when they realize he’s behind the theft, but it’s not like they’ve noticed yet.
Warping in and out had rather handily bypassed all the traps for conventional entry. The intangibility had been a bit of a bother to figure out at first… but with Rin’s life and Kakashi’s arm on the line, anything was possible with just a little extra effort.
And he knows they looked down on him, once, Kakashi moreso than Rin. Poor Obito, they must’ve thought, unable to manifest his Sharingan, laughably late to everything. It’s an ache festering in the pit of his stomach—
But if Rin’s not alive for Obito to air his grievances to, if Kakashi can’t fight him on equal ground without his arm—then what’s the point?
“Obito-sama,” the White Zetsu tries again, and Obito extends a hand to it before warping it away.
“Rin can only be Rin if she’s still breathing,” Obito breathes to himself, hands coated in blackish-red and wreathed in green. “Kakashi can only be Kakashi if he’s protecting her.”
Minato-sensei, he thinks distantly as he begins pumping his hand around the still-bleeding heart, we’ll be back before you know it.
And so Obito works patiently and quietly, to the distant screams of tortured Kiri nin and the utter silence of Rin’s unbreathing body.
By the time Rin’s breathing again and Kakashi has two whole arms, there aren’t any Kiri nin anymore. There’s very few White Zetsu too, and no shinobi come near Obito’s place of residence with all the random kidnappings that’ve been reported in the area—
But they’re alive. A little pale around the edges and with a bit of flaking here and there—because Obito hadn’t been good enough with Kakashi and he’d stopped breathing for some time, after the first unsuccessful operation—but the reincarnation kinjutsu he’d eventually stumbled upon had worked handily for that.
“Rin,” Obito breathes, brushing shaking hands through his crush’s paper-dry hair.
“Kakashi,” Obito whispers, after he’s switched to holding his rival’s corpse-pale hand.
“Everything will be like it should be,” he laughs through his tears, carefully hugging their deformed bodies as they breathed beneath his touch. “We’ll go home to Minato-sensei and he’ll tell us we did a good job… you’ll fawn over Kakashi, Rin, and then Bakashi will call me an idiot for being late…
“Tell me—tell me everything will be okay again,” Obito sobs into their shoulders, “please, everything will be okay again…”
And as paper gives way to cold flesh, the final two shinobi he’d sacrificed to try and bring Rin and Kakashi back whole revealing the beginnings of necrosis… Obito sobs in a room of corpses, clutching his team members that aren’t his anymore, and doesn’t stop until his is the only breathing he can hear.