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Most kids have at least one flower tattooed somewhere on their skin by the time they leave the academy. They’re faint, usually, from passing crushes that left as quickly as they came. Some are a little darker, from crushes that lasted a few months. The darkest among their classmates' are Rin’s, near-opaque roses Obito knows he put there.
Obito’s never had any. Never awoken with flowers painted on his skin, nor spotted them inked there at the end of the day. Not even a single translucent petal. It’s just another thing that marks him a failure, that tells him he’s less-than.
He does his best not to let it bother him, tries to make Rin fall for him like he fell for her. Fails, and sees the evidence in his blank skin.
Getting put on Minato-sensei’s team is both a blessing and a curse. A blessing, because he and Rin are on the same team, and a curse because-
“You’re holding them wrong.” Fucking Bakashi’s on their team too.
Obito’s eye twitches, but he doesn’t respond further. He knows Kakashi’s just trying to get a rise out of him, dammit!
He continues his practice, grinds his teeth in frustration when his shuriken hits just outside the target again.
—
The shuriken hits the target, directly in the center of the bullseye. Obito throws his head back, lets out a triumphant shout that bleeds into gleeful laughter.
“See that, Kakashi?” He says, never one to miss an opportunity to gloat. “Got it in one shot .” Take that, you pompous brat.
He turns around to see Kakashi’s glorious pissed-off expression, but there’s a strange expression on his face. If this were anyone else, Obito would say he looks gutted , but this is Kakashi, so the expression’s gone as soon as it came, transforming into a pissed-offedness even more extreme than Obito’d been expecting. Obito’s victorious grin grows and Kakashi manages to look even more pissed off.
It’s a good day.
—
Obito doesn’t notice them until he’s stepping out of the shower, rubbing a towel against his hair to try to dry it as fast as possible. He’s going to be late to training, he knows, if he doesn’t hurry.
Then, he sees himself in the mirror and freezes.
There on his neck, painted in orange and black, are flowers. They curve from the back of his neck, curling around the side so as to be just visible from the front. The most striking thing, though, is just how stark they are against his skin. They’re nearly as stark as Rin’s, and Obito’s been pining for her for years, slowly falling deeper the whole time. For these feelings to have gotten so strong so fast is unprecedented.
Obito finds himself tracing his fingers lightly over the mark, relishes the sight of his no-longer-blank skin. He catches sight of his wondrous grin reflected back at him, can’t help it.
Because… because someone out there is sitting there and thinking of him, someone looked at him and fell a little bit in love. And that’s—no-one’s even had a crush on Obito before, and whatever the person whose love is painted across his skin is feeling, it’s certainly a bit more than a crush. The flowers are near-opaque.
…Obito’s late to training. He’s distracted the whole time, too, so he does far worse at even things he’s usually good at. He can’t bring himself to care, even when Kakashi’s barbed comments are far more frequent and vicious than usual, not when there’s someone out there with feelings for Obito.
A part of him hopes it’s Rin, but when he proudly shows off the flowers, she looks happy for him. He knows she would tell him if it were her. Kakashi, on the other hand, looks so pissed off. Hah! He’s probably pissed off that Obito’s flowers are starker than his!
By the time training’s over, Obito’s grin’s still bright as ever and he’s practically vibrating with the need to escape and run to the library. He can’t wait to know the meaning of the flowers inked across his neck, can’t wait to know a little bit more about the person who put them there.
He’s off as soon as Minato-sensei dismisses them, taking the rooftops and moving as fast as he can. He’s giddy . There’s really no other word for it, though Obito knows just the kind of faces the other Uchiha would make at the idea of such a thing. He can’t bring himself to mind all that much, not when someone loves him enough for it to show on his skin.
They’re Lillies, he finds out. Four orange Lillies, starting at the nape of his neck and making their way around the side. Their meaning, though—hatred. Hatred and contempt. That someone could love him enough for flowers to paint themselves so opaquely against Obito’s skin, but have that love defined by contempt? It’s utterly bizarre.
A part of Obito despairs at the knowledge; he’d already known that it wasn’t Rin, knew that Rin’s feelings for him were strictly platonic—only had that confirmed when she saw the flowers—but this is firm confirmation of that. Obito’s not sure Rin hates anyone at all, and for her to hate someone she loves is laughable.
Which leaves the question of whose flowers are on Obito’s skin unanswered and without leads. He doesn’t have any friends outside of Rin, and the only people he spends significant time around are his team. Maybe someone from the academy that saw his training? Like, who grudgingly respected him or something only to get those feelings turned on their head when they saw him in training yesterday? He had done particularly well, he thinks, grin widening at the memory of that perfect throw.
He supposes there’s no way to tell for sure.
He’s still grinning when he falls asleep.
—
“If you can’t figure it out on your own, I’m not going to help you.”
“But Rin, how am I supposed to know who’s in love with me?” Obito whines, undeterred in the face of her exasperation. Her expression’s still fond, so he knows he hasn’t actually pissed her off.
Still, she refuses to say another word on it, and he pouts until their training starts. He does his best to keep it up during training, too, shooting Rin as many pleading looks as possible, but she expertly pretends she can’t see them. He has to give up about halfway through the day, because Kakashi is unrelenting in their spars, and he can’t afford the distraction (not that paying attention does anything in the face of Kakashi’s inhuman speed and skill, but of course Obito wouldn’t admit that aloud on pain of death).
—
“Kushina?”
“…Obito.”
“Who’s in love with me?”
Kushina laughs so hard she chokes on her drink and has a coughing fit. She doesn’t answer the question.
—
“Minato-sensei, can I ask you a question?”
“Sure?” Minato-sensei says, smile easy on his face, and Obito feels triumphant because Minato-sensei will definitely crack.
“Do you know whose flowers these are?” Obito asks, gesturing to his neck.
Minato-sensei’s face goes pale, his mouth clamped firmly shut. He shakes his head, still white as a sheet, and walks away.
Obito stares after him, unsure of what else he can do in the face of a reaction like that.
—
When Obito finally cracks and asks Kakashi, Kakashi just looks at him like he’s an imbecile (more than usual, which is quite the impressive feat) and walks away. It’s reassuringly normal, after the disaster of the previous two.
—
As the months go on, the flowers grow gradually starker, are accompanied by more and more flowers—geraniums, clematis, and amaryllis are painted delicately to fill the space between and around the Lillies. By the time Obito’s thirteen, the flowers have grown to cover most of the left side of his neck, and some of his shoulder. Every time he sees them, every time a new flower is added to the garden on his skin, he finds himself grinning.
At some point, they surpassed the opacity of even Rin’s from Obito, and Obito finds himself wondering just how deeply they must feel.
Every time Rin smiles, the world seems to light up. Every time she cries, Obito knows that he would do anything to make her feel better. When she looks at Kakashi with that blush, it feels like his heart is ripped from his chest. He wonders how it must feel for this person, when they see how Obito looks at Rin. How they must feel knowing Obito loves Rin. It makes his heart hurt to think about.
He’s still curious of course, still wants oh so badly to know who put them there. He hasn’t a single clue where to look though, can’t think of a single person it could reasonably be, so he’s stuck at a complete standstill. He’s sure that whoever it is would say something if they wanted him to know, but that’s not enough to satiate Obito’s desire to see who could feel so strongly for him.
Their team grows closer over the years, too.
Rin’s still an angel, still perfect and wonderful, though she’s far more willing to kick his ass should need be.
Minato-sensei tries his best. He’s around less and less, as the years pass. They’re chuunin, now, and he tries his best to still be there for them even though it’s not required of him. But Minato-sensei’s one of the best shinobi in the village, a powerful jounin and known Hokage candidate, and the village cannot afford for him to babysit people who should, by reason of rank, be able to care for themselves.
Kakashi’s still a dick, though that was hardly something Obito expected to change. He’s… less so, though, more willing to work together and more likely to lay off if he knows Obito’s genuinely upset. He still has the emotional range of a teaspoon, of course, but he’s been using it more to actually make the team work, so Obito can’t begrudge it all that much.
It becomes more and more clear, as the time passes, just how big the disparage of skill between Kakashi and him is. Obito’s always wanted to be Hokage, wants to be the strongest shinobi their village has to offer, but it’s hard to keep sight of that when his teammate so clearly outranks him not just in literal rank but in skill. It’s not helped by Rin’s crush on Kakashi. Obito’s self-aware enough to know that that’s a big part of why he can’t get along with Kakashi, but the blame most certainly cannot be placed on his shoulders alone when Kakashi goes so far out of his way to antagonize Obito.
Still, their team functions much better than it used to, even if Kakashi has yet to get the stick out of his ass.
—
After Kanabi bridge, it’s hard to remember his team. Hard to believe that any of it was even real, when he’s surrounded by the darkness of the cave. When all he can feel is the chill and the damp and the pain. When he’s down an eye that he doesn’t regret giving away. Throughout all of this, it’s the one thing he doesn’t regret. This way, at least, he’ll be remembered. He’ll have helped the village in some way even in his death.
Because he is going to die here. Of that, at least, he’s sure.
Madara rambles a lot. Most of it’s meaningless, but he’s made his plans for the future abundantly clear, as well as what he’s willing to do to get it. Obito wants no part of it, wants to go back to Konoha and his team and forget this horrible cave and that horrible voice, speaking of death and destruction and world peace , as if they can somehow coexist. As if the only way out is to live a falsehood.
—
Obito tries to escape, once. Forces himself up on alien limbs, wrong and strange and not his own . (He tries not to think about it. Every time he does, he wants to throw up.) He doesn’t get far before Guruguru catches him, drags him back. Obito has not seen anyone so mad as Madara was when he was dragged back, hopes he never has to again. It was a strange sort of anger, a vivid rage made all the sharper by the grin that had accompanied it.
Obito does not try to escape again. Knows he won’t make it far, knows Madara will not show mercy a second time. Will gouge out his remaining eye, at the very least.
—
It is strange, how one can cling to hope. How, even trapped immobile in a cave with half his limbs not his own, Obito can hold on to the belief that his team will come for him. That Minato-sensei will burst through the rock and hiraishin him to safety any moment. Or maybe that he’ll wake up and this will all have been a dream. That he’ll open his eyes to a hospital bed, having gotten a bad concussion at the bridge and passing out from it.
—
It’s strange, too, the ways boredom can creep in. He’s in pain all the time. It’s excruciating, to have half of him be something else, attached haphazardly to keep him alive and nothing more. Beyond that, even, he’s constantly cold, the dampness bone-deep with the exhaustion. Even still, he finds the time to be bored. He can’t move, not well (not without alerting Guruguru or Madara), so he’s limited only to his thoughts.
He takes to thinking about the flowers inked across his skin. They’re still there, he knows, though he cannot see them. If they had been on the other side… well, it’s really not worth thinking about.
He wonders. Contemplates. If the person could fall further for him without being around him, could it be that there are more flowers than there were? Obito hates rush of hope the idea gives him, hates that he knows it’s futile. Wishes, fervently, that the flowers had been somewhere easier for him to see. Were they nearly anywhere else, he would be able to see them, albeit not well in the darkness of the cave. It would be a good reminder, he thinks, that the outside world’s still there. That there was a before, when there was more to his world than the dark and the damp.
—
When Guruguru tells him his teammates are in danger, lets him leave, Obito can think of nothing but seeing them again. He’d settle for one of Kakashi’s more biting insults at this point.
The scene in the clearing makes his breath catch in his throat. It’s not just the enemy nin, not the completely hopeless fight, but the sight of his teammates again, bruised and battered and exhausted but alive .
He sees Rin waver, sees the way Kakashi’s limbs shake with the force of his exhaustion, and Obito’s moving before he has any say in it. He takes out the nin closest him with his right arm sharpened as best he can, and Rin’s eyes widen in shock when she sees Obito. The moment of distraction costs her, though, and she takes a severe blow that sends her to the ground.
In the moment, all Obito can think about is oh god what if that killed her, I’ve only just seen them again it can’t end like this-
And his right arm reacts, branches growing and expanding out , and in the blink of an eye all the enemy nin are dead, corpses hung impaled by the wood.
Obito barely spares it a thought, though, too busy rushing forward towards Rin , because he needs her to be alive.
Then, Kakashi’s in front of him, holding a kunai in a hand that trembles almost imperceptibly. “Stay away from her.” His voice remains impressively flat, eyes steely in a way they only ever are towards their enemies.
Oh. Obito releases the mask, needs Kakashi to understand, needs to make sure Rin’s alive.
“I need to-”
Kakashi stumbles back as if burned, eyes wide and filled with far too much emotion to be deciphered.
“Obito?” Kakashi’s voice shakes almost painfully, but Obito can’t spare him the thought, is already rushing past to make sure Rin’s alive .
There’s a long gash running down her side, but when Obito checks her pulse it’s still there. He lets out a breath he hadn’t known he was holding at the knowledge. His relief is gone almost as soon as it came as he stares down at her in panic; he doesn’t know how to fix this. Doesn’t know what to do , how to stop her from dying when someone with the proper knowledge could save her.
“We need to stem the blood flow,” Kakashi says from beside him, seeming to have decided to shelve the whole Obito’s alive actually thing for the moment. He brings out the roll of gauze from his pack and presses it down over the wound, and Obito takes the clue and helps.
Once they finish treating and bandaging the wound as best they can, Obito and Kakashi hover awkwardly over her prone form.
“She should be fine, bar an infection.” Kakashi says, and Obito looks up to meet his eyes.
Kakashi’s openly staring, eyes roving over Obito’s form as if trying to memorize him. Obito knows he looks different, knows (if from touch alone) that his face is heavily scarred, knows it’s even worse across the patchwork of his body, but it still unnerves him for Kakashi to stare so openly.
“Could you not ,” Obito can’t stop himself from snapping.
“Sorry,” Kakashi says, not seeming sorry at all. Then, he sways slightly on his feet before he can steady himself. Obito curses himself for not noticing the erratic movements of Kakashi’s eyes and resigns himself to dealing with a wounded, passed-out teammate and a chakra exhausted one.
“Go the fuck to sleep.” Because there’s not much else they can do until Minato arrives, and because Kakashi won’t be much help in this state anyway. Besides, they can wait for the inevitable conversations about what happened to Obito for when Minato’s there too.
—
Rin’s fine. She recovers faster than she was expected to, even.
Obito gets to see her hatred for the first time when he tells them about the cave, about Madara (his voice shakes and the words stick in his throat, but it feels good to get it out there), and she swears to track down and skin Madara alive.
Kakashi doesn’t look all that much more calm, and there’s a strangely malicious smile on his face as his fingers twitch to reach for a kunai.
And Minato-sensei—Minato-sensei looks tired. The exhaustion seems bone-deep, and the man seems to sag with it. He pulls Obito into a wordless hug, and Obito can do nothing but return it.
—
They’ve all changed in his absence. There’s something tired about Minato-sensei that wasn’t there before, and Rin’s been tempered to a knife-sharp edge. She’s still kind, still hopeful and cheerful, but there’s something about her that speaks to newfound confidence. It’s a general wouldn’t-pick-a-fight-but-would-absolutely-win-one energy that suits her rather well.
And Kakashi—Kakashi’s practically unrecognizable, at least at a surface level. He’s still a bastard, still rude and far too honest, with net-zero social skill and an emotional range that seems somehow smaller, but now he smiles. A lot. Hell, he makes jokes, and slacks off, and doesn’t seem like he’s taking anything seriously. Plus, he seems nigh-addicted to Jiraiya’s fucking porn series, which he reads in public. He’s also late to things. Never in his life would the Kakashi Obito knew from before have allowed himself to be late. Hell, Obito can remember a great number of times Kakashi berated him for being late by even a second.
All this considered, it would only be logical that their team would be broken. That they would no longer fit together even as haphazardly as they did before Kanabi. Instead, they fit together better. It’s like the time apart has sharpened and dulled just the right edges so that they’re no longer constantly hurting each other and butting heads.
They still argue, still piss each other off at every opportunity, but now it’s genuinely fun, with Rin taking part rather than having to play mediator between him and Kakashi. Hell, a glare from her is sharp enough to have them both shutting up.
Obito find himself attached at the hip to Kakashi, somehow. It starts when Obito’s fifteen, roughly a year since his return, and Rin takes on an important role in the hospital. She’s well set to become the hospital’s head, and is more than terrifying enough to make it happen. Hell, she single-handedly rewires all of Obito’s transplanted parts, enough that they no longer hurt or lag, that they feel almost indistinguishable from his original limbs.
Minato-sensei’s Hokage, too, got the position while Obito was gone, so he has even less time to spend with their team than he had before.
It leaves Kakashi and him alone, for the most part. A team of two, whittled down in the best possible way.
Obito finds that he doesn’t mind Kakashi so much anymore. Relishes in their banter now that it’s lost any real intent to hurt, now that there’s an underlying understanding that they would both die for the other in a heartbeat. Of course, Obito would kill Kakashi for a potato chip, but the point still stands.
And then Kakashi starts wearing the fucking sleeveless shirt. It’s skin-tight, too, of course, because Obito really can’t catch a fucking break. Because Obito has eyes, and it’s not like he didn’t know logically that Kakashi was attractive, but now Kakashi’s fucking hot, and Obito’s forced to spend all day in close proximity to him.
He very firmly pretends he doesn’t notice the ranunculus that appears on Kakashi’s shoulder just after Obito’s little realization. So far as he’s concerned it didn’t happen. Whatever do you mean, knowing look from Rin, that’s been there since we were kids (he can feel her judgment in the force of her stare).
Obito’s own flowers are practically a garden by the time he’s sixteen. They’re painted all across his skin, making their way down his left arm and up to curl underneath his jaw. When he finally saw himself again, after his return to Konoha, it was after psyching himself up quite a bit. He knew, of course, that he would be heavily scarred. It only made sense. What he hadn’t expected was how much the flowers had grown, ripe with meanings of despair and mourning but there, and more opaque and vibrant than Obito thought possible. It makes it considerably easier to look at his own body, when he knows someone loves him that much.
When he’s seventeen, one of the flowers wraps its way around and imprints itself across the alien flesh that makes up nearly half of him. He almost cries. He hadn’t thought that was possible, had thought the flowers would only be able to ink themselves into his normal flesh. It’s as good an indication as any that the limbs are part of him, that he’s more whole than he’d thought.
He’s eighteen, and he’s not in love with Rin anymore. He feels guilty at first, finds her and apologizes and gets laughed at in the face. He would be hurt, but the laughter is immediately followed by her sitting him down and gently explaining that she’s glad he’s moving on, glad he can love someone who’ll love him back. She also makes a few subtle comments about him and Kakashi that he resolutely pretends he doesn’t hear.
By nineteen, he and Kakashi have become two of the most feared shinobi across the nations. The war is over, has been for years, but the other shinobi nations still whisper their names in fear and awe. He finds their names in a Kiri nin’s bingo book, each listed as S class and highly dangerous, and he smiles.
Obito’s twenty and he’s completely and utterly fucked. It’s one thing to have an attractive teammate, another to have a teammate you’re attracted to, but being able to see it painted on their skin as you fall in love with them is its own special kind of hell. It would be easier if it were just about Kakashi being attractive, but it’s not, because Obito can’t stop noticing things. They’ve long since moved in together; it’s really not worth having separate apartments in the jounin building when they’ll just end up in the same one every night anyway. It far from helps Obito’s predicament, because now Obito gets to see things about Kakashi. Gets to know what he looks like early in the morning on a lazy day, tired and languid and content. Wants to know more. Wants to know what Kakashi looks like when he’s just been kissed, when he- Obito tries not to think about it, because considering those things is its own genre of torture.
His self control is pretty good, he thinks, newly twenty-one and so in love it’s no longer funny. That single ranunculus has grown into a garden on Kakashi’s skin, vibrant and opaque as those on Obito’s. Frankly, Obito thinks he deserves an award for not breaking down and kissing the shit out of Kakashi by now. Rin only looks exasperated, tells him to get it over with already, so Obito gives himself the pat on the back.
Twenty-two is a year of many errors, but kissing Kakashi is not among them. Because Obito finally knows what Kakashi looks like when he’s just been kissed, and it is glorious. Because he’s young and dumb and in love and Kakashi’s been painting a garden across Obito’s skin since he was eleven.