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Overturn

Summary:

The wind moves through his dirt-streaked hair as he looks out on a broken village. His life must be quickly coming to a close now, each second bringing him closer and closer to the end he's desired for years. Giving up isn't so difficult when there's nothing left to fight for.

Then Obito tells him he's only one suitable for the job.

And fighting isn't so much a choice as it is something he's flung into head-first, his last decision ripped away from him in its entirety. But if he doesn't have a choice, he might as well try his best now that he's here.

Notes:

Just a warning, there is some mention of death/wanting to die in this chapter here. Mostly because this is a pile of angst and I'm seemingly incapable of writing anything that isn't at least a bit angsty.

On another note, the chapters for this probably won't come out too fast because I'm working on a couple of other projects at the same time as this. (Mostly because I've found that if I only focus on one thing then I last a few chapters and then I die out. Which is not what I want to do.) In case of curiosity, these projects are Tear Us Apart and a fantasy/adventure m/m original fic. But I do have a fair bit planned and I'm excited and I hope you enjoy! <3

Chapter 1: silence can be kind

Summary:

"And silence, like darkness, can be kind; it, too, is a language." -Hanif Kureishi

Chapter Text

A broken mirror hangs on the wall across from him, reflecting his image back at him as something scattered and disjointed. He has done his best to ignore it, just like he ignores the ragged edges of the blanket and the branches weaving through the hole in the living room wall, slowly making it larger. But something about it has him dragging his gaze back to it every now and then, despite the uncomfortable churn of his stomach.

Perhaps it’s the spotty patches of hair growing along his jaw. He rubs at it, the bristly hairs rough against the palm of his hand, and squints at himself. Letting his facial hair grow had never been a good idea in the first place, but the effort of cutting it now is too much to deal with.

His hand drops and he picks himself up off the floor.

If he lets himself look at this ragged place in the daylight long enough, he’ll start to see bits and pieces of Sakura lying around. Not paying much attention had been simple when the sun was hidden over the horizon, but now the first rays of sunlight are starting to shine through the dirt on the windows. Shadows and his imagination are far more limited than the reality right in front of him. Picture frames lay on the floor, pink hair and green eyes smiling up at him through broken glass, alongside two older figures, all of them long since dead.

A simple sentence leaves his lips, releasing the seal sloppily scrawled across the living room walls, and the last piece of evidence that he fought back is gone. He closes his eyes, too tired to grimace, and slowly forces himself to leave.

This house was meant to be his goodbye. The only place more suited to goodbyes would be the Uchiha compound along the edge of the village, but nobody bothered rebuilding it after Pein’s attack. Now, he lingers in the street with his hand on the Haruno household’s battered doorknob and waits for something, anything to happen.

Nothing does.

No one walks through the streets. There is no lingering scent from any number of food vendors that once filled the streets, attempting to lure him inside. No figures move just out of sight or on rooftops, shouting and silent alike. No crows caw as they wait for someone to abandon their food, and no breeze ruffles his hair like an old friend. All that’s left now is his memories of what this place once was and the worn wreckage that was left behind sometime over the years.

“I hope you don’t mind that I’m leaving so quickly, Sakura-chan,” he says to the closed door, his voice rough with disuse. “You’ll see me soon anyways.”

He can’t help but linger, not just at Sakura’s door, but in the village as a whole.

The tree he used to sit at in front of the Academy is wrangled and overgrown, smelling strongly of ash and dust. It feels incomplete with half the building that made up most of his childhood in pieces, rotting desks visible through broken walls. Nothing is left of the attached Hokage’s office at all, just long-gone shards of wood and glass, and a crater in the ground, not unlike the five gaping holes in the Hokage Monument.

By some misguided miracle, Ichiraku’s is still intact. He runs his fingers along the counter, thick dust wiping away. There is no smell of freshly cooked ramen here, no heat radiating from the behind the counter, but he still can imagine all of that. If he just closes his eyes, he can be sixteen all over again. Sixteen or twelve or four as he shares a grin with Teuchi and Ayame. A craving for ramen creeps up on him, as it does from time to time, making him move on from this hollow shell of a building. There isn’t the time or the means to make himself food.

The rest of the village is much the same.

He doesn’t so much as try the stairs in his old apartment building in fear they’ll break under his weight.

The Hyūga compound is torn apart, not by any fighting force, but by nature itself. Vines and branches creep between its planks and boards, reclaiming what was once its own in a fate more fitting than most of the village.

Not even the walls have stopped the Forest of Death from expanding and so he walks around its edges before going to sit in front of the Memorial Stone. Moss grows along its edges, the carvings dull from neglect. He can’t make out any of the names written on it, even though he tries. When he leaves, two Konoha hitai-ate sit in front of it, one with a deep groove right through it and the other worn around the edges.

That is the last place he plans on visiting.

His steps feel heavy as he makes his way towards his final destination, the point of this all. The path up the cliffside is nearly unnavigable between the parts that have given away and the loose rock beneath his feet, but he doesn’t stray from his path. Chakra steadies him but before long, he gives up on the path entirely, walking up the cliffside until he gets to the top.

The expanse of blue sky is nearly as breathtaking as the village once was. He sits on the edge of the Monument and takes both in. From this height, the full extent of the destruction is impossible to see, the details fading away into a village overtaken by nature. There aren’t too many more trees than there used to be, but the buildings are no longer as distinct between them as they once were. All he can really see is bright and expansive and alive.

He carefully unwraps the clothes binding his wrists, releasing seal after seal. With each of the five gone, he can breathe a little bit deeper and the fresh, earthy air of his home fills his lungs. The Will of Fire may be burnt out, but this is still Konohagakure.

With this, there will be peace, however artificial.

With this, his home will be reclaimed by nature in its entirety.

All he has to do now is wait for Madara to notice his chakra, as much of beacon in this empty world as anything else can be. Then he clears his mind of everything, a feat nearly impossible by the standards of his teenaged self, and watches the white, fluffy clouds.

Before long, someone’s chakra becomes apparent, bee-lining towards him. It is part heavy and rageful, and part not quite alive, and it makes him take notice for the first time in too long. The amount of dissonance in that chakra is too much to be anyone other than Obito, nevermind that he thought Obito died nearly a year ago.

If anyone were to survive, it would be him.

The afternoon disappears before his eyes as he tracks the chakra through the forest and then the village, steadily getting closer. His eyes are closed when Obito makes it up the broken path, not even the sound of a single footstep to mark his arrival.

“You’re disgusting.”

“And you’re dead. Doesn’t make a difference now, does it?” he asks.

Obito doesn’t react, his tone devoid of all emotion. “Dead men can’t do anything. You’re disgusting because you gave up so quickly.”

Some dark thing burns in his chest and he reaches for support past his own abilities, half-expecting his anger to be pushed towards rage.

It isn’t.

It isn’t and his attempts to reach for Kurama’s chakra leaves him flailing. That’s what truly makes him angry, his hands clenching in his lap.

The words echo through his head over and over again, as if he hasn’t told him himself the exact same thing since Konoha was attacked. All Obito’s words change is that someone else is finally telling him the truth. More people than he can count are dead, not even a grave to mark their passing, and he’s the one who didn’t quite try hard enough.

When he opens his eyes, the sky is just as clear as it was before. Konoha still stands below him, withered and broken. The only difference is that Obito stands behind him with gaunt cheeks and greasy hair that immediately reminds him of broken mirror in Sakura’s apartment. For the briefest moment, he cares about how ragged he looks, before it’s drowned out by the swimming feeling in his chest.

“Yeah, I gave up,” he says, spitting out the words. “There’s nothing I can do about that now. Everyone’s still dead. Kakashi-sensei, Sakura and Sasuke, your precious Rin - they’re all dead and they’re not coming back, because this isn’t some dream.”

“You’re not wrong, Uzumaki,” comes the simple reply.

He pushes himself up at last, his face twisted into a scowl. The only thing stopping him from attacking Obito here and now is the chakra on the horizon, getting closer by the second. Today will be the end of things, but it won’t be with Obito, and it won’t be before he’s gotten one last shot at Madara.

All Obito does is stare back at him. There is no flinch or kunai resting in his hand, no reaching towards the kunai pouch on his thigh. His skin sags around the scars entrenched in the right half of his face, never less shocking than the first time the mask was pulled away. A dead body might actually be more responsive to his anger, but the affirmation still hangs between them in a voice just as thick from disuse as his own.

“Right now, all you can do is throw yourself into some senseless, stupid death.” Obito raises a hand to the scarred half of his face as he activates his Sharingan. “But who else won’t screw things up beyond repair.”

“Hey! What do you think you’re doing?” he asks, on the edge of panic.

“It’s not a compliment. My options are myself, you, and the psychopath who screwed everything up to begin with.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I can move things between dimensions. Time is dimension.”

That explains nothing and everything.

Nothing in that he still doesn’t understand where Obito is going with this. Everything in that it means there’s some plan, and he’s learned not to trust an Uchiha with a plan.

Understanding what’s going on has never stopped him from charging into a fight before. He shoots forward, chakra gathering in his hand rather than a kunai. Obito doesn’t dodge, doesn’t activate his ability to jump into another dimension, just lets out a stuttering breath as a fist plunges into his shoulder.

The world narrows down to that one fist. He watches the blood gather around his wrist with wide eyes, leaving himself open to an attack without care or notice.

“Well,” Obito starts, a hazy film coming over his eyes, “I wasn’t going to survive this anyways.”

“I-” Obito grabs his arm, holding it in place, and that is almost enough to force him back to reality. Almost, but not quite. “Use someone else as your guinea pig.”

“Can’t.”

There is no opportunity to pull away before the edges of his perception twist.

First comes the nausea, the upturn of his stomach that he’s experienced more than enough from fighting alongside Kakashi-sensei and against Obito. Then the ground beneath his feet disappears and he expects that to be the end.

Then his very existence starts to churn.

Every molecule of his body screams out in pain, arranging and rearranging themselves. There is pain, and it consumes him.

There is no relief, no beginning or end.

There is no way to open his eyes, to smell, to scream himself bloody.

Coming back to reality is jarring, the ground too solid underneath his back. His eyes are squeezed shut when he feels the soft breeze, then he lets out a quiet, ragged breath as he realizes he no longer has the energy to scream. Then the wind on his cheeks registers, a stark contrast to how still the world has been since Madara destroyed everything he held dear.

Feeling the wind through his hair is third on his list of things he’s missed about the world before Madara, right after everyone he cares about and readily-available ramen.

This must be the afterlife.

His eyes slowly open to overcast skies and they take a long moment to adjust to the darkness. Every inch of his body aches but it’s simple to forget about that when a raindrop lands on his cheek and then another and another until it’s steadily raining.

It washes him of the remnants of Obito’s blood on his hand, just as it soaks the ground beneath him. Only a good scrub will truly remove the dirt hidden in the crevices of his body, but already he feels cleaner as he lays there, lightly laughing to himself. This is already so much better than everything he imagined about the afterlife.

Then he rolls over onto his side. His laughter stops abruptly, because all he can get himself to do is look over the edge of the Hokage Monument.

Faint light radiates up from Konoha. It is too dark to make out any details, even as countless windows are lit from inside in the way only a village full of people could manage. Pain forgotten, he pushes himself up and looks out at a thriving village. There’s the outline of the Academy close-by, the windows of the Hokage’s Office bright without even curtains to block people from looking inside.

He lurches forward as a sob takes him by surprise, tears hidden by the rain. The light is only just necessary to notice the tens of thousands of people gathered so close and he doesn’t know how he missed the buzz of activity. Their chakra shines even brighter than he thought possible, drowning him in his awareness of their presence.

This is far more his home than the husk of a village he left behind.

This is what he fought all these years for.

What he gave up on.

Whatever Obito had planned, it had failed.


Obito drops to his knees and clutches at his shoulder. Already, he can feel himself start to shake, his vision blurring now that he has nothing to focus his strength on.

It will only be a matter of time before Madara arrives. There is no way he could have missed the burst of chakra from him and then Uzumaki when the jutsu found Obito lacking. Madara must be furious about being kept from his goal after so long being impossibly close to it. Obito can’t find it within himself to care.

He’ll be dead by the time Madara gets here.

The last of his strength gives out on him and he falls to the side, numb to his elbow digging into the ground. Everything is so cold. Cold and dark, just like being trapped in that rockslide all those years ago, but Obito can’t bring himself to regret this decision.

Maybe he will meet Rin and Kakashi on the other side. Already, he can picture Rin’s face just beyond his reach. She will scowl at him when he sees her, almost certainly punch him before she pretends to ignore him for who knows how long. Obito has never screwed up quite this badly before. He hopes that she will smile at him eventually, even if forgiveness is beyond his reach.

Kakashi is the one who will forgive him immediately, no matter how stupid that decision will be. No, Bakashi forgave him all those years ago, kunai lodged into his heart.

But that will never happen now.

Obito manages a sliver of a smile as his eyes drag closed, the expansive blue sky and his ruined home forever the last thing he sees. Not that it matters much when he sent Uzumaki Naruto back in time.