Chapter 509: Kakashi and Obito
Kakashi felt as though the universe had played an enormous joke on him.
A cruel one. An absurd one. One he could not find the ground under.
The mirror's images had stopped moving, but what they had shown was burned into him as though it had always been there. Combined with everything Obito had just said, the truth was assembling itself piece by piece into something Kakashi had never once imagined.
Obito had not died that day.
After Kannabi Bridge, he had been pulled out of the rubble. Saved by the old man who called himself Uchiha Madara, kept alive in a darkness where no light reached.
And then -- he had watched Rin die.
He had watched Rin step into Kakashi's Lightning Blade.
From that moment on, the boy who was always late, always smiling, always talking about his comrades -- that boy had died.
What replaced him was someone else. A man behind a mask, nameless, moving through the dark under a borrowed legend. The one who had orchestrated the Nine-Tails attack. Who had been directly responsible for the deaths of Sensei and his wife. Who had thrown Konoha into hell. Who had spent more than a decade submerged in shadows with blood on his hands.
Kakashi's gaze moved to the number floating above Obito's head, glowing in its dull red.
9.3.
The mark of the profoundly guilty. The Pure Land's final verdict on a soul. Behind that number: acts of violence, lives extinguished, families destroyed.
The Fourth Hokage. Kushina. Every Konoha shinobi and civilian killed that night under the Nine-Tails' claws.
And more still -- people Kakashi did not know by name, had never met, but who had been real and were now gone.
The person responsible for all of it -- was someone Kakashi had called a hero. Someone whose last wish he had sworn to carry forward. Uchiha Obito.
Kakashi felt he should be angry. He should be demanding answers. He should close the distance and grab Obito's collar and shout every question that deserved to be shouted -- why did you do it, why did you kill Sensei and his wife, why did you try to destroy Konoha, why did all those people have to die.
But he found that he could not move.
Images kept breaking across his mind. The first one: the young Obito's face. "Someone who breaks the rules is trash -- but someone who abandons their comrades is worse than trash!"
Those were words Kakashi had carried for his entire life. The belief he had used to navigate everything that came after.
The second image: that night like a nightmare. The Nine-Tails rearing over Konoha, its eyes bearing the pattern of a Sharingan as it screamed. Tailed Beast Balls swallowing houses whole. People running in every direction, the air filled with crying. Konoha shinobi falling in blood. His sensei spending his life to seal the beast, leaving behind a newborn.
A sight Kakashi had never been able to set down.
The boy in the first image had pressed an eye into Kakashi's hands and said: watch the world for me. The killer in the second image had used that same eye to destroy the world his sensei had died to protect.
How could those two things exist in the same person?
They crashed against each other inside him, tearing at each other, reducing everything to noise. All the memories. All the guilt. All the years of carrying something with no resolution. Now they were shards, cutting through him from every direction.
And then there was nothing. Just empty space where the thoughts had been.
When Kakashi finally managed to speak, his voice came out dry and uneven.
"That can't... that's not..."
"I don't believe... how could you..."
"Stop it, Kakashi." Obito cut him off.
"Back then -- after Rin died -- the whole world was just hell to me. There was nothing there. The person you knew, that identity --"
"I abandoned it."
Obito looked at Kakashi, and he watched Kakashi's entire body give one sharp, violent tremor -- starting at the shoulders, moving down the arms, reaching all the way to the fingertips.
Obito had come here prepared.
Prepared for Kakashi's rage. Prepared to be questioned, to be yelled at. He had even prepared himself for Kakashi to close the distance and use his hands. All of that -- he deserved.
But Kakashi did none of those things.
His head was down. And when he spoke, his voice was barely there -- the sound of something close to breaking -- but without a single trace of anger in it.
Not even a trace.
"But if it really was you that day..."
"Sensei... he didn't recognize you?"
"...No." Obito's voice dropped low. "He didn't. Sensei and Kushina -- they never recognized me. Not until the end."
Minato had died without knowing.
Without knowing that the masked figure who had controlled the Nine-Tails was his own former student. So Sensei had died with the honor of protecting his village intact.
Not with the despair of having been betrayed by someone he had loved.
Obito did not know whether that was something to be grateful for, or something to grieve.
Kakashi said nothing.
His hand rose slowly and settled over his covered eye. That eye. The one hidden under his headband for more than a decade. The one that had been watching the world in Obito's name.
"...That eye you gave me... you watched me use it to fight, to protect Konoha..."
"I'm not taking back something I already gave." Obito cut in. "Don't ask me about that."
His face had gone dark, brows drawn together, the line of his mouth pressed rigid. He was being blunt, and his voice was impatient, but what moved through his eyes was far more complicated than anything his words were carrying.
Because Obito was the one who had done wrong. Obito was the one who owed the apology. Whatever questions Kakashi had, whatever anger, whatever pain -- those were things Obito deserved to receive.
Not things Kakashi deserved to feel.
"...Kakashi, this is reality." Obito's voice dropped lower. "I am someone who committed crimes."
"I betrayed Sensei. I betrayed you. I betrayed... Rin. I betrayed everyone who ever believed in me."
"And what I believed in... was a lie that nearly destroyed the world."
Kakashi's eyes had gone red.
His fists were clenched. The part of him that had always managed to hold things together, always found a way to keep going without falling apart -- it was all coming apart now, and he could not find a way to hold it.
His hero had become a killer.
The person he had remembered his entire life -- the one who had pressed an eye into his hands and said watch the world for me -- had been the same person who destroyed the world his sensei died protecting.
If Kakashi had still been a child, he would have broken down completely. The way he had broken down when he lost Obito, when he lost Rin, when he lost his sensei.
But he was not a child.
"I'm sorry..." Kakashi's voice had gone nearly silent. "If I had been able to save Rin back then... none of this would have..."
"Don't apologize to me." Obito's voice came up sharply -- cutting him off with something close to roughness. "Rin doesn't want to see this from you."
He looked straight at Kakashi, and for the first time something moved openly across his expression -- a real crack in the composure he'd been holding. "Kushina wouldn't want to see you apologizing to me either. I hurt too many people."
"What I owe -- I don't know how many lifetimes it would take to pay it back. I don't have the right to call myself your comrade anymore."
He said it and lowered his eyes.
He thought that was the end of it.
He thought Kakashi would go quiet, would turn away, would look at him one last time with that expression that couldn't be named, and then disappear into the Pure Land.
But.
"That's not true."
Kakashi's voice came.
Obito looked up.
Kakashi was looking at him. His visible eye was red, holding tears that had not fallen. His voice was rough and broken and came out in fragments -- but underneath it was something that would not bend.
"I'm not going to say you're not my comrade."
He took a slow breath. "Because the you who gave me that eye -- is always going to be a part of me."