Rain Country --- Akatsuki Base
The base was noisy.
It was always noisy now.
Before the scroll appeared, Akatsuki meetings had been tense and efficient --- people who did not particularly like each other tolerating each other because the mission required it.
Now they argued constantly.
Hidan was loudly insisting that the scroll's claim that his ranking evaluation had called him honest was the highest honor ever conferred on any living shinobi.
Deidara was loudly insisting that the scroll's assessment of his art was accurate but its assessment of his tactics was an outrage. Mm.
Kakuzu had retreated to a corner with his spreadsheets and was doing financial modeling on what a 10th-place Most Dangerous Organization ranking was worth in terms of future bounty leverage.
Konan was sitting quietly by the window.
Nagato was sitting quietly by the wall.
They were doing their thinking in the same space without crowding each other.
They'd been doing that for twenty years.
Tobi was standing near the back of the room.
He was not doing anything visible.
He'd been doing nothing visible for approximately four hours.
Nobody paid much attention.
Tobi doing nothing was Tobi's default state as far as anyone knew.
But Konan had been watching him from the window.
She noticed things.
She noticed, specifically, that he was too still.
Tobi's usual stillness was performed --- the stillness of someone playing a character and making sure the character looked appropriately dim.
This was different.
This was the stillness of someone who had received information and was sitting inside it.
She didn't say anything.
She watched.
The message had come through Zetsu two hours ago.
Five sentences.
In a code only two people in the world knew.
One of them was Tobi.
He'd read it once.
Then he'd burned the paper.
Then he'd stood in the back of the room while everyone argued and thought about what the five sentences meant.
The first sentence told him Madara was aware of the Kaguya timeline.
The second told him the sequencing needed to change.
The third told him what needed to stop.
Or rather: what needed to not start on the original schedule.
The fourth told him that Madara wasn't abandoning the plan.
Just adjusting it.
The fifth sentence was the one he was still sitting inside.
You started as someone who wanted to save people. I know that. Start there.
That was the fifth sentence.
Madara had written it.
Which meant Madara had thought it.
Which meant something about Madara had shifted enough to write it.
Tobi turned this over.
Madara knew what he was.
What he'd been.
What he'd become.
He'd built the frame Tobi operated in.
He knew every piece of it.
And he had written: you started as someone who wanted to save people. I know that. Start there.
Not follow the new orders.
Not redirect the plan.
Start there.
He thought about the scroll's evaluation.
He'd read it from a distance.
Hadn't acknowledged it in the chat.
Hadn't acknowledged it to anyone.
But he'd read every word.
The distance between who he was and who he became is the largest recorded gap in this world's history.
He'd stood with that for two days now.
Largest gap.
He knew the starting point.
He remembered it clearly.
More clearly than people might expect.
He remembered being twelve.
Running late to everything.
Making promises he was always slightly behind on.
He remembered Kakashi and Rin.
The specific warmth of being part of a team.
The way Rin used to leave him food when he stayed late on missions because she knew he'd forget to eat.
He remembered being under a boulder.
The sound of rock settling.
The calculation that happened in the space between heartbeats when you understood you were about to die.
He remembered choosing.
Take my eye. Use it. Live.
He'd meant it then.
He'd meant it completely.
There had been nothing complicated in it.
Just --- take it, go, be okay.
He thought about the scroll showing Kakashi using that eye.
Kamui.
Saving someone's life.
He'd always known Kakashi had it.
He'd watched from the shadows for years.
He'd never let himself look directly at what that meant.
The scroll had made him look directly.
He gave that up to save Kakashi Hatake.
He had.
And then Madara had found him.
And then the plan.
And then years of slowly becoming the plan instead of a person who had chosen to give his friend an eye.
Largest gap.
He thought about Nagato.
About the version of Nagato who had existed before --- before Pain, before the jutsu, before all of it.
The version who had wanted to protect people.
Who had seen clearly that the world was broken and had tried to fix it with the wrong tool.
He started as someone who wanted to save people.
That starting point doesn't disappear.
The scroll had said that about him.
Obito.
That starting point doesn't disappear.
He turned it over.
He thought about the boy in Konoha.
Naruto.
Who had trained for ten hours today on a split training post.
Who had asked do I have to do it alone and accepted no as a complete answer.
He thought about what it would look like to start from the starting point.
Not undo everything.
He couldn't undo everything.
Some of it was burned into history now.
But start from there.
The twelve-year-old boy who had meant it completely.
Who had given everything because it was the right thing to give.
What would that person do now.
He already knew.
He'd known since the second sentence of Madara's message.
Since the part about the sequencing.
He looked across the room at Nagato.
Nagato was reading something.
The scroll's evaluation, probably, which he'd been returning to since it first appeared.
Nagato felt the look.
He looked back.
They held that for a moment.
Nagato said, carefully: "Are you alright?"
Tobi was quiet.
"I have to change something," Tobi said.
Nagato waited.
"The timing," Tobi said. "The plan. The original sequence." He paused. "It's wrong."
Nagato was still.
Reading him.
"Wrong how?"
"Kaguya wakes up before the plan reaches its conclusion," Tobi said. "And then there's nothing left to conclude the plan on top of."
Nagato absorbed this.
"How do you know?"
"I know things," Tobi said simply.
Which was true.
He'd always known things.
He'd kept all of it behind the mask.
"...What needs to change?" Nagato asked.
"The attack on Konoha," Tobi said. "Not cancelled. Delayed. And the extraction sequencing for the Tailed Beasts --- same. The Kaguya problem has to be addressed before any of it."
Nagato looked at him for a long moment.
"And you're telling me this because?"
"Because you're the leader," Tobi said. "And because---" He paused. "Because the scroll said something about you."
"I read what it said."
"The part about the disease being real," Tobi said. "It's true. You saw it correctly. The world is broken the way you said it was." He paused. "The cure is wrong. But the diagnosis was right."
Nagato was very still.
"I know the cure is wrong," Nagato said. "I've known it for a while."
"I know you have."
"Then why---"
"Because knowing something is wrong doesn't automatically tell you what's right," Tobi said. "We stopped at the diagnosis. We thought the knowing was enough to justify the doing."
Konan, by the window, had stopped pretending to look outside.
She was listening.
Nagato looked at Tobi for a long time.
"What are you suggesting?" he said finally.
"I'm not suggesting anything," Tobi said. "I'm telling you the timeline changed. And I'm telling you that I received---" He paused. "I received information from someone I trust. Who says the sequencing needs adjusting."
"Someone you trust."
"Yes."
Nagato looked at him.
At the mask.
At the stillness behind it that was different from usual.
He thought about twenty years of working with this person.
Of never quite knowing who was behind the plan and who was inside it.
He thought about the evaluation.
He started as someone who wanted to save people.
He thought about Jiraiya's message:
You stopped looking for the next chapter.
He thought about Konan, who had been standing by the window looking at him since the scroll closed.
"Okay," Nagato said.
"Okay?"
"Tell me what needs to change." He paused. "All of it. Not just the sequencing. All of it."
Tobi looked at him.
"That's going to be a long conversation," he said.
"I know." Nagato looked at his hands.
At the wasted, thin hands that barely worked.
At the years written into them. "We have time," he said. "For now. Use it."
Tobi was quiet for a moment.
He thought about the starting point.
He thought about a boy under a boulder who had meant it completely.
"Alright," he said.
He came and sat across from Nagato.
The room was still loud around them.
Hidan arguing.
Deidara counter-arguing.
Kakuzu calculating.
None of it mattered for the next hour.
Just two people who had started from the same starting point and gone very far in the wrong direction, sitting across from each other in a rainy country base, trying to find the way back.
Konan sat down beside them.
Nobody asked her to.
She didn't need to be asked.
She was always there.
That was always the whole thing.
Group Chat:
[Uchiha Obito: ...]
[Uchiha Obito: Kakashi.]
The chat went very still.
Everyone who was watching --- which was everyone --- saw Obito's name appear.
[Kakashi Hatake: ...I'm here.]
[Uchiha Obito: I read the evaluation.]
[Kakashi Hatake: I know.]
[Uchiha Obito: All of it.]
[Kakashi Hatake: I know.]
A pause.
[Uchiha Obito: I'm not --- I can't undo things.]
[Kakashi Hatake: No.]
[Uchiha Obito: But I'm changing the sequencing. Of the plan.]
[Kakashi Hatake: ...Okay.]
[Uchiha Obito: The Kaguya problem first. Before anything else.]
[Kakashi Hatake: Okay.]
[Uchiha Obito: That's all I can say right now.]
[Kakashi Hatake: That's enough.]
A long pause.
[Uchiha Obito: The eye.]
[Kakashi Hatake: Yes.]
[Uchiha Obito: You used it well.]
[Kakashi Hatake: ...]
[Kakashi Hatake: You gave it to me.]
[Uchiha Obito: I know.]
[Uchiha Obito: I meant it. I want you to know I meant it.]
Kakashi read that.
He set down his book.
He sat in his apartment in Konoha and looked at the wall and didn't say anything for a moment.
[Kakashi Hatake: I know you did.]
[Kakashi Hatake: I've always known.]
The chat remained very quiet for a long time after that.
Nobody filled it with noise.
Sometimes the right response to something was to give it room.
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