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Your brother is dead.
With an all-too-familiar pair of orange googles in hand, you stand at his funeral, your own pair of crimson eyes shining bright and pooling with endless tears. They were fixated on the sight before you, watching carefully how the empty coffin, the coffin intended to keep the body of a mere child lost to the war, was lowered into the ground to be buried forever as a crime of war. A headstone would soon join the gruesome sight, a name inscribed that had not yet lived out his story, his storybook barely even begun and cut too short by a sacrifice he should not have been forced to make.
On your shoulder lays a hand of comfort, one belonging to a girl with short brunette hair and a pair of identical purple stripes decorating her tear-stained cheeks. Rin wears a smile that is supposed to be comforting above anything else but falls flat by the way the edges of her lips tug downward, unable to hold themselves up. She too is consumed by the sorrow haunting her, more tears decorating her lashline, threatening to fall at any moment.
From behind the two of you come chocked sobs. They wreck your heart, your grandmother’s pained cries echoing in your mind like a broken record. Her face is buried in her hands to hide the frown she is wearing, a desperate attempt to hold onto her sanity somehow. Her frail shoulders shake with every noise of despair falling from her lips, the weight of losing most of whom she loved a too heavy burden to carry for the elderly woman.
Your brother is dead. It is a fact, one that you cannot change, one you are confronted with every day you walk past his now empty room, the door standing slightly ajar because he always forgot to close it behind himself.
During the whole funeral, there was only one to make no noise. A boy with unruly silver hair stands a good distance away from the grave, or so you noticed immediately. His hitai-ate sat crooked on his forehead, covering what you knew to lay beneath, the Sharingan eye he had received from your brother. Underneath his mask, his lips were twisted into a heavy frown, one that is slightly visible from the outside. He did his best to compose himself and to stand straight at the funeral of the boy he did not manage to save, of the first person he lost on a mission he led.
His single charcoal eye was trained on the girl with a similar build to Obito, on you.
Your brother was dead and Kakashi feels like it is his fault.
“My nii-san sometimes overestimates himself, can you make sure that he comes back?” With a wide-eyed gaze, not the slightest of hints of a Sharingan in your eyes yet, you had stared up at him, all hopeful. He had never agreed to anything, even as you begged him to do so, worry evident on your features.
Still, he had failed. Instead of returning with your brother, he had returned with your brother’s eye, replacing the one he lost in battle. A pair of goggles had dangled in his hands, the glass broken in and bloodied, a solemn expression telling you more than a thousand words.
Your brother is dead. He won’t be coming back.
Kakashi had seen the realization set into your eyes as his blond sensei delivered the news to your anxious form, the hope gleaming in your eyes dying just as your brother had hours before. The moment your suddenly crimson eyes met his own mismatched pair of charcoal and crimson, a shiver ran down his spine. From the distance away, he could see your mouth open to say something, though nothing came out except for a choked noise from the back of your throat.
He turned his head away immediately, the words dying on his tongue. He wasn’t sure what it was that he should do. Should he apologize to you for causing your brother’s death, and tell you how sorry he is? Or would you yell at him, unable to look him in the eyes, in one of Obito’s eyes.
The regret is heavy in Kakashi’s heart, etched forever into the surface of his organ, Obito’s last words to him in his mind replaying in a loop every time he laid eyes on you.
“Make sure that they will be alright.” And so Kakashi promised, he vowed to protect you from everything evil, to keep your heart from breaking as it did the day your older brother died.
Seeing you crying hysterically at Obito’s grave day by day without pause, your breath heavy as you beg for him to come back, to return to you, to tell you that all of this is just a sick joke and that he isn’t dead, the sight pulls at his heartstrings. To see you mourn the loss of your brother so heavily, the fact made him feel guilty, the feeling churning uncomfortably in his stomach.
Obito was gone.
Obito was dead.
Obito would never return to you.
You only ever see Obito again in your darkest nightmares, your deceased brother as the starring figure of your deepest fears.
In your nightmares, his figure appears with the right side of his body completely disfigured, the skin scarred beyond the point of recognition. It is an image your mind had conjured up on its own over time, based on the tale of his heroic sacrifice told you, twisted by the stories making their way around Konoha. When you reach out to touch his skin, your own gently brushing across his scarred, it feels cold, dead. The stench coming along with your vivid imagination is unbearable and allows for bile to crawl up your throat. His corpse, that is what he is to you now, is rotting before your inner eye for years on end, teeth falling apart the moment he opens his mouth to call out to you.
Never does he speak more words than the childhood nickname he always called you affectionately. His hand with every finger sticking into another direction, broken beyond repair, then reaches out to you, the skin practically flaking off with every move he makes into your direction. You take a step back from his figure, his name falling from your lips.
The corpse before you is not your dear brother and would never be. In his eyes lays an intensity he only had when speaking about his three favourite topics: his ironically undying love for Rin, his ambition to become the Hokage, and to one day beat his silver-haired rival. Only in your nightmares, his eyes are a shade of crimson that brings along a metallic taste on your tongue at the sight of the Sharingan swirling in his dead eyes.
Your Obito never did possess the Sharingan past its first stage, he was a boy who yearned to be recognized as part of his own clan. The eyes staring at you in your countless nightmares aren’t your brother’s, but rather the ones of a silver-haired you know.
At one point in your life, the Sharingan you have once seen swirling in Hatake Kakashi’s eye had become synonymous with the eyes Obito could have had. Had he not died so young, that is.
Standing at his grave every day, you have become accustomed to the presence of a certain silver-haired. Sometimes, the two of you exchange friendly small talk, mostly initiated by the man who carries a horrifying amount of guilt in his heart, and exchange stories about your brother. It helps ease the pain, talking to Kakashi about Obito. No longer were you on your own processing the tragedy surrounding your childhood, mourning the boy who both of you had lost too early.
Talking to someone helps you heal, it brings you solace about what could have been and isn’t meant to be. You don’t feel as alone in your struggle anymore, especially after the untimely deaths of Rin and your grandmother, there is still someone by your side, keeping you somewhat sane as your mourning faded into acceptance.
Your brother is dead, and you would never see him achieve his dreams. Never would you see him profess his love to Rin, and either have it be reciprocated or be rejected. He would never have a chance at becoming Hokage or beating Hatake Kakashi at one thing at least.
Or so you had been foolish to think.
Your pain had been all for nothing.
Around you raged the Fourth Shinobi War too many years later, countless lives already sacrificed for the restoration of peace.
Now the same face both you and Kakashi have once mourned daily stood before the two of you as the initiator of said Shinobi War, a mocking smirk playing on his scarred features. If it wasn’t for the hints of a glint in his eyes and the tuff of raven hair sitting atop his head, even you would have trouble recognizing your own flesh and blood. Your brother.
Obito is here.
Obito is alive.
Obito never died.
Instead of returning home to you, returning home to your heartbroken grandma to be a family, he had long ago fallen into a path of darkness, the very same one had always vehemently promised to defy. His features once painted in hope of becoming the Hokage of the very same village he now to bring under his forceful control, those very same features are painted into a harsh scowl, one that reeks of anger.
You feel utterly betrayed.
The only thing keeping you somewhat steady on your feet is the grip Hatake Kakashi has on your shoulder, his hand resting there with a harsh squeeze. It brings you down to earth, out of your spiral of inevitable madness created by the gleam in the eyes of the unrecognizable mad man before you.
You turn your head toward the silver-haired man, looking up at him all wide-eyed, an expression all too similar to the one you had on the faithful day, his expression mirroring your own. His mouth feels dry as he stares at you and as he swallows harshly, he feels the bile crawling up his throat.
His mismatched eyes, ironically enough more familiar than the maniac eyes of your supposed brother, travelled over your features to take them in. And just for a moment, Obito’s betrayal is pushed into the back of his mind, simply forgotten.
Instead, there is just you.
There is the way your brows are drawn into a harsh furrow, almost coming to meet in the middle, and the way your skin glistens from the beads of sweat forming on your forehead. Tears decorate your Sharingan eyes and your lips are twisted into a frown, one he wishes he could wipe off and replace with the smile you always wear when speaking of your brother.
Once, Hatake Kakashi had promised Uchiha Obito to take care of his little sibling.
The day said Uchiha turned out not to be dead at all, Kakashi determined that it was your older brother all along he had to protect you from.
The way you squeeze his shoulder back, a grim smile you managed to muster up staring back at him, that brings Kakashi out of his stare. It is not only he who had been betrayed by the supposed death of Obito, no, more so, it is a fate both of you are forever burdened to share.
It is a burden neither of you had ever chosen to carry.
The moment you meet your dear brother’s gaze you realize that Uchiha Obito is many things. He is a boy who died too many years ago in a war that shouldn’t have been his to fight, and the man that came out of what should have been an honorary death. Above all, however, no matter how this battle turns out, you know that Uchiha Obito is a traitor and never coming back to you.