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He watches the steam weave and wave from the tub, droplets falling down the side, one, by one, and one. They never meet. They move alone, fast at first, until they reach their finality, and they resist. All that waits for them is a fall and fade into the dust, forgotten, not even a reminder to remain.
He began slow, but he’s ending fast.
He was alone, but he had an army.
He doesn’t resist, as he sees his end.
No-one will know his name, as they fade, fade, fade away.
He’s already meant to be dead. The consequence of what he does now, means nothing. The mark of his existence is meaningless because it has already been scrubbed, scratched, and ripped him in two.
The two people he only ever loved.
Two. Two.
He looks away, feeling.
What, he can’t discern. Feeling isn’t meant to exist, that’s for the past and future, but it’s beginning to persist. It holds onto him with a vision of two. The one’s he left behind. One just a name in stone. The other just- just a-
Obito breathes hard as he touches the stone wall of the cave, his fingers curling, nails scratching. He ignores the marks above and below, the frequency of their scores growing and compacting. But this would be the last time.
Every mark echoes that same sentiment. He can say it. Why can’t be believe it .
He looks down.
The orange mask stares up at him, one eyed. Cracked, marked. Grounding. He steps back from the wall, flecks of dirt falling from his fingers. The mask has been his face for years, but looking down, from up, it feels like it never belonged.
No-one ever belonged on this face and this body. No name fit. No face.
No-one.
There’s a voice that denies and says he lies.
You were born Obito. You’ll die Obito.
He pulls off a glove. And then another. Fingers run over his right hand, kneading his mismatched flesh. He bores a nail into the lines that separates the First’s cells from his flesh.
There is no pain there anymore.
Obito thinks. He thinks back to when the boulder fell, crushing, mashing, pulling at his flesh and cracking his bone. A shudder creeps across his arm, his fingers twitching. A phantom, just like everything else that’s ever made him feel in his life. Intangible.
Tangible.
He stands tall as he unwraps the scarf, around, around, until it falls at his feet, pooling heavily, as if it knew. Next, fell the layered armour from his arms, his legs, breathing the dust at his feet as they hit. They were decadence more than anything. There was so little need for them.
Or anything.
He glances to the neatly folded blue material on the shelf before him.
It, held need. Symbol. Just about his only left in this material hell, that was ready to be freed.
Fingers touch the high neck of his top. Then they move up. And up. They press against the square of his jaw, feeling the only patch of skin that was ever really exposed when he lived as Tobi.
When, he lived.
Sometimes he remembered when the band would slip at his forehead, the air parting his messy black hair.
What would his skin feel like in The Dream? Would the wind feel raw and untested when the clock ticked one?
He pressed against that small patch of skin again, scolding his idiocy. Of course it wouldn’t. The Dream was his creation. His. His. It was his dictation and drive; his want and will; his only reason left.
Left.
His top met the floor, covering scarf and armour, pillows of dust snaking his legs before he pushed off his trousers and unwound the bindings at his calves.
Obito closed his eyes, a hand idly sliding up, and down his arm. Nudity, didn’t fit. He didn’t know where to look, despite the only eyes and body here his own. But it had never truly been his own since his rescue. Pieces of his flesh and bone remained, attached to survival.
There were times he wanted to let go. But he couldn’t. Something always wouldn’t let him. His body, his memory, someone else, something else.
Anything else, but him.
He was glad of it now as he breathed in the dawn of war. For The Dream was the right way to let go.
At last.
He opens his eyes, and for a moment, he doesn’t feel alone.
The tips of his fingers are the only thing he can see in the mirror. That, and the light from the sconces. Tiny katons lit the candles. He only needed to take a step to the right, to see more.
But a step to the right, would unwind. Would undo.
He steps left. The water should have cooled enough to bathe. He touches with a tip of finger, then toe. Then the water surrounds him, the dust from earlier that painted his legs, washes free and rises to the surface of the water, scented with rose.
Her clothes used to smell of flowers, a winding spell she’d leave in her wake as she ran.
And a sprig of pine.
He always smelled of the woods, shreds of it stuck in his hair, falling into my palm as I played with it.
Prick, prick, the sprig bounces against his skin as it skims the surface between his legs. He’s sitting up at first, then not, as back meets metal, and he sighs, sagging into the scented sublime, for the very, last time.
Drip, drip, fall drops from his fingers as he lifts his hand, high, watching the water fall from his hand, his arm. He submerges it again. Then both, splaying fingers across the bottom of the tub, feeling the specks of dust settled on the metal. Then himself, dousing his whole body and black, dusty hair in the warm, scented water. He sits for a moment, eyes open, feeling every which way his chakra moves beneath his skin as he’s submerged. It feels different beneath the water, like it has to change the way it breathes, moves, exists within the weightlessness that surrounds, clipping away, life.
He can hold his breath underwater longer than most. He tested it once. An hour, before a memory pulled him back to the surface. If it didn’t, he wasn’t sure he would have ever come back up.
Lifting his head, he breaks free of the bath‘s surface, spraying he dry ground with a shower of water. He still stares down, down at his hands, mismatched, pushing at the metal floor of the tub.
Up, up, it doesn’t take him long to touch what barely ever is, his length already half-way there by the single thought, alone.
It’s never a single thought.
But he stops, pulling away abruptly, as he closes knees, to chest.
He’s been touched before. But before was insignificant. Most, he didn’t even know their name. Except one. But they were dead now. Like everyone else.
But one.
He relaxed his legs, knees dipping beneath the surface as his back moulded against the metal. It was rare he took a bath, preferring to shower, the speed, the necessity, the need for nudity so brief. But today - today was different, in nearly every way.
A hand dipped beneath the water, breaking the rippling surface, and once more, he reaches out to touch. And this time, he does.
The nerves on his right hand are gone. It always feels like someone else, like this.
Toes press against the end of the tub, curling over the edge as he slides his hand down once, laboured, languid, as if remembering what he has to do.
It’s okay. His body dictates, guiding his hand, simply, as it slinks an inch down, down beneath the water, in pleasure.
He’d rarely thought of this as pleasure, though. That word is too kind. Lust, maybe. Desire hovered between the two, depending on how loud, how proud, how much he just, wanted.
There was no-one else to hear him. No-one else to witness the fall in his guard. No-one to wear his weakness.
So he was loud.
Loud, and lascivious, his voice dripped against the walls as he pulled on his length, lathered in water, in flecks of rose petal, in strands of soft pine, caught between skin and shaft. The water splashed against the walls of the tub, over his skin, catching the ends of his hair as he moved. As he breathed.
Toes curled around the lipped edge of the tub, harder.
Fingers sunk into his thigh, scratching.
If someone asked him, what did he think of as he did this, he always had that answer ready. A past conquest - nameless, faceless, with the physical memory and motion tethering his hands to their duty. The finality, the fruition of his plan and the power that sat in the palm of his hand, commanded.
Rin. And what she could have been.
But not today.
For another answer - the truth - sat on his lips as a needy name, never spoken in life, only leashed in lust. He moved before his eyes, muted, a mirage, the motion slow and unending, the images feathered on the edge of his vision, endlessly, by his Sharingan.
“Kakashi,” he cried, pledging his name to the water, the walls, the lights that seemed to flicker as he breathed, as if they knew he’d birthed their fire, and would end it.
He’d watched him before, before he became Tobi. And then when they met again as Konoha nin and Akatsuki, it had been... years. Time, had always felt loose to Obito. Pushing, pulling, stretched and clawed until the next thing he understood, the man before him, was Kakashi.
Obito twists, turns, arching against the water as his hand moves faster.
He wonders if Kakashi really knew who he was beneath that mask, that facade that hid so loud. Obito felt the connection of eye, to eye. He always did. No matter if the steps were far, or near. But he often wondered if because he knew the other lived, he sought, he felt.
Kakashi knew he was dead. He sought nothing. He felt...nothing.
I feel nothing.
His back pushes off, away from the tub, his head falling back, back, bathed in the lick of the candlelight as he moans, and groans, and breathes, tasting the form of Kakashi’s name upon his lips, and wondering how it might taste on his tip.
That mask, he has to imagine what sits beneath now he was older. He’d visited Konoha again with Kamui. Watching, waiting, eyes trailing and tracing each and every way Kakashi moved and lived. But it was always like he knew there was something there, just out of reach, watching. So it remained.
Obito imagines what it would feel like pulling it down, crinkling the soft material to folds against that sharp jaw, to his neck, pushing, pushing it all off muscle that is defined and lined as if crafted by the hand of a god.
A god. He imagines what he might look like on his knees, looking up, at him. Worshipping, his mouth bared, but now too masked by his length that he devours, strands of his grey hair cascading across Obito’s thighs, like discarded cloud. He remembers a mole just above his jaw.
He wonders what it would feel like, pressed against his thigh.
Fingers sear into the tub as his hand quickens, tightens, pulling, pulling, wishing, wanting, breathing, begging that this hand wasn’t his, that when he opens his eyes, he’s not here.
“Kakashi,” he whimpers, he pines, as his orgasm leashes his body. He falls against the side of the tub, trembling, eyes closed, biting the top of his hand.
I feel everything.
His breath fogs the metal.
His breath doesn’t feel real.
What will you feel like in the dream?
Opening his eyes, he sees his new mask staring back, the tomoe curved around the eyeholes, perfectly. He’d painted them himself. No-one else’s hand would do.
He tastes blood. Pulling away he realises he’s broken skin on his hand. He stares for a moment, lapping the weep of red before he stands abruptly from the tub, ignoring his shaky limbs. Damp prints follow him as he finds the towel and quickly dries, back to mirror.
Once, he stayed, doused in the afterglow of sex with a - the word partner isn’t right. Distraction. Indifference. He’d enjoyed his Tobi persona. Eventually. Once, he let him see his face. But he hadn’t cared, because he didn’t know who he was. He was exquisitely careful with his Sharingan around him, and the lie, remained.
Everyone had lies, in there. Some were built on them. Some, it was all they knew. Some chased them. Some ran. The rest, didn’t care.
Once had been enough with anyone else that wasn’t Kakashi. Even then, there were days he thought that once was too much. It felt too much like pleasure - and pleasure is something you feel and fondle, and touch and treasure, and laugh and love, and - and-
He throws the towel to the floor.
His breathing is regulated at last, but it still feels like - it still - it still feels.
Obito draws a numb finger along his lip, wiping away a drop of water that falls from his hair. He licks the pad. It still tastes like him.
There’s nothing left, but to dress for war.
One foot first, then another, he ties his trousers neatly at his waist, the sensation of material different against each side of his body. He’s never gotten used to it. He thinks, he could have, if he hadn’t resisted. At first, he didn’t. For he had been given a gift, yes?
Only now did he truly see the price, in the end.
The end. Or the beginning.
He pauses as he lifts the heavy, blue kimono, the mantle of the Uchihas, drenched in blood. Two remain. Only one really should. He sometimes wonders how far Itachi would have been able to go without his help that night. Would it have changed him more, to have taken blade to all? To have taken sweet Izumi’s life by his own hand instead?
Doubtful, he thinks, as he traces the Uchiha crest, stitched neatly. Perfectly. Itachi had a way, too, a perfect way of detachment, from his duty. He knew what needed to be done, and he did it.
Obito lifts the kimono over his head, letting the heavy fabric fall where it may. Arm, arm, it glides onto his body like it’s forming onto his skin, for his skin, there, and then. He’d commissioned a tailor especially to make this. It was their last job.
Even before I wear you, you’ve shed blood.
Nothing has ever fit, so well. So intimately. So, final.
One hand slides down an arm. One hand, down the other.
He breathes, rolling his neck, side, to side, feeling the edge of the collar brush against his chin and damp hair.
The obi drapes between his arms, touching his bare feet and for a moment he thinks about turning to face the mirror. But he’s practiced this enough, blind. Around it wraps, settling it comfortably at his waist, just above the parting of the robe, its edging finely detailed with silk. Clever, remembered hands twist and tie the back of it, the lengths of it measured perfectly by touch and practice alone. Obito has learned to live alone, relying on no-one and nothing but these hands.
Tucking the end of the obi in, he wished time, made it easier.
Time, made it harder. For time, brought them back together. Time, made him remember. And time, broke, what he had thought fixed.
The sandals slide on, the wrappings twisting comfortably around his thick calves. Gloves stretch on, one by one. He sees a smear of rose petal against a finger. He touches it to rub clean, but pulls away at the last second, and hides it beneath the other glove. The leather squeaks as his fingers stretch, kneading beneath their new home.
Obito reaches for the mask. Black, white, its pattern styled after the shape of a Sharingan. For so long he disguised being an Uchiha. For so long he didn’t care about being an Uchiha, except - except what these eyes gave. And these eyes were going to give the world not what it deserves, but what it needs. And only someone like him, can.
What was wrong that the world saw that it was someone like him, even if they never see, him.
He slides the mask on, tying it above his neck, the ribbons long and soft against his skin as they fall, fall.
Obito breathes deeply, the smell of the mask, of the paint filling his nostrils, pleasantly. The weight of it sits against his skin, comfortably.
And at last, he turns to face the mirror.
He doesn’t see Tobi. Nor Madara. Not even, Obito.
Who are you, now?
Obito closes his eyes, and sees the only thing left he really wants to.
Kakashi.
Opening his eyes, he stretches out an arm, his chakra chain extending towards Madara’s gunbai.
There’s nothing left now, but war.