Disclaimer: The characters are the property of Masashi Kishimoto and the Naruto franchise.

Author's Note: So hello! I couldn't keep away, this is Zen and it's a pleasure to meet you. Having just finished Spring of the Plague, I had the terrible urge to write some nonsensical piece of light-hearted crack, so please forgive me for this wee indulgence! I recently had an idea for something more serious, so before I start plotting that I wanted to have a bit of a laugh, so to speak, with something utterly ridiculous.

This is set around Chapter 655. Alcohol-induced out-of-characterness abounds.

Enjoy and let me know what you think! Best, Zen :D

The first step in Saving the World is to ensure the Absence of a Responsible Adult.

As in the distance the dust was swept up from the ground by great gusts of hurtling winds, and the moon shone huge and white in the sky, Minato tapped Kakashi's shoulder.

"Kakashi," Minato said firmly, "I'm going to help the alliance seal up Uchiha Madara. I want you to stay here, and do what you can for Obito. Keep him safe and out of trouble."

The Ten-tails stripped from his body, Obito lay on the ground, pale, shivering and drained. He stared upwards with his mismatched eyes, his breathing wispy. Kakashi watched him without a word.

Mere minutes earlier, a kunai had been tucked into the palm of Kakashi's hand with its tip ready and rested upon Obito's throat. Now the kunai had been put away, and Kakashi was kneeling beside him, pondering over how best to get Obito off the battlefield. Minato had surmised that Madara might try to use him again if Obito remained where he was. They had to move him somewhere, and quickly too.

The battlefield was as hot and humid as during a summer storm. The Tailed Beasts' chakra pervaded the atmosphere. Kakashi could taste it on his tongue and all that raw power made the hairs on the back of his neck prickle.

It was noisy – all the explosions, the yells, the screeches of electricity, the crackles of splintering wood, the screams of bending metal, and the roaring gush of water, but even with all that noise, they could still hear Naruto shouting his battle-cries as he gave Uchiha Madara his all.

Kakashi could see that Minato was poised on the balls of his feet, all but bouncing to run to his son's aid. Another explosion went off, and Kakashi found himself nodding: "Yes, Sensei. I'll get Obito somewhere safe."

Kakashi intended to go back and help Minato and Naruto as soon as he had set Obito down anyway. Then they would take down the enemy as father and son, and teacher and student. He looked forward to the moment when they would do so.

Satisfied that his two students had either a) grown up enough to be trusted not to do anything irresponsible, or b) was currently too weak on his own to be any cause for worry, Minato smiled, smoothed out the wrinkles in his robes as he stood up and leapt away. Papery flakes, grey and discoloured, peeled off him in his wake.

As soon as Minato had left, Obito sighed. "I don't think I'm worthy enough to meet Rin on the other side."

Kakashi rolled his eyes. The Uchihas really were something. Trapped in their lives' misfortunes; chained to their grudges and sorrows like those were the Commandments of some sad Church of Divine Angst that they were all baptised into at birth.

Kakashi pulled Obito's arms over his shoulders and lifted him off the ground. "But would you be alright with that, Obito? Dying and passing on? Do you honestly think that would make Rin happy?"

Obito shrugged. "I'm a dead man anyway. I should have just died back there under that rock and stayed dead. What can I do now but die for real?"

"You could live," Kakashi offered, as he shifted Obito's weight on his back. "Live and atone for your sins."

Obito chuckled. "You make it sound so easy."

"If you let others help you, it would be." Kakashi scanned the plain with narrowed eyes. "Can you see anywhere that looks safe?"

Obito sighed again, as though to say everything Kakashi did was a futile waste of energy and wasn't even worth talking about. Kakashi shook him. "Obito, at least help me help you get out of here."

Lifting his head, Obito looked around, then over his shoulder and cried, "Kakashi! Behind us!"

A thick black sludge was oozing out of the ground where Obito had been lying. It bubbled up in droplets, bled together into a single, quivering, inky mass, and as Kakashi watched in horrified fascination, the mound of sludge first formed a hand, an arm, and then a body, pulling itself up out of the earth like a swimmer from a pool.

It fixed a small yellow eye on Kakashi carrying Obito, and the rounded shape that formed its head split into a grin.

"Where do you think you're going?" it said, in a voice like rocks scraping together. "Obito?"

It slithered forward on its belly, its eyes unblinking, snatching at the ground with its hands.

Obito hissed into Kakashi's ear. "Kakashi, you have to run, that's Madara's will – he wants my eye – my Rinnegan eye – you can't fight it – "

Kakashi pushed up his forehead protector.

He felt the tug at his chakra, a surge of energy to his sharingan, and then a spiralling swirling of air that rushed against his face.

The black sludge was ripped off the ground with a scream of anguish, turned into a spray of thick oily drops. Spinning towards his eye, it filled Kakashi's vision with a viscous darkness that clung stubbornly to his cheeks. Then the wind settled…

And the black creature was gone.

"Oh. Right," said Obito weakly from Kakashi's back. "Guess I shouldn't have panicked."

A roar from where the fighting was taking place suggested that, if Madara hadn't already been angry enough about the state of the world, he was certainly far from happy now.

The second step in Saving the World is to find causes that could later be used to claim Impaired Judgement in a Given Situation – you know, a safeguard, just in case you Don't Save the World, or Save the World Against Majority Wishes.

All of a sudden, Kakashi felt a wave of vertigo rush to his head, and he staggered forward and dropped to his knees with a grunt.

"What's wrong?" hissed Obito from behind him. He flapped his hands in front of Kakashi's face. "Hey, Kakashi, I'm the one who's just had all the Tailed Beasts pulled out of him. You can't be sick as well."

"Ever known the feeling like you've been driven head first into a block of concrete by a massive blonde woman with a sledgehammer?" muttered Kakashi, rubbing his left eye with his knuckles. His head throbbed. "Just a moment, please."

He suddenly realised that Obito was somewhat awkwardly patting Kakashi's shoulder. "I don't know about any massive blonde woman, but I'm guessing, Kakashi, that this is your first bout of Kamui-sickness."

Kakashi looked round and raised an eyebrow. "Kamui-sickness?"

"It's like indigestion," Obito explained, his voice still barely more than a whisper. "You sucked something really nasty and unwholesome into the Kamui dimension. Now the dimension's rejecting applying its laws of space and time to it. Don't worry. It'll pass. I used to get it at the beginning with Sasuke."

Kakashi buried his pounding head in his hands, tried not to imagine some dark mass of evil bending and twisting under the strains of a whole new space-time continuum like some wriggling black octopus, and muttered. "I'm supposed to be getting you off this battlefield."

"I'm supposed to be giving up the will to live," Obito noted, somewhat forlornly. "Look, I've got an emergency cure for Kamui-sickness in the dimension. Let's call it a truce for a moment. I'll get the cure, you take the cure, and then we'll both be able to go back to what we both want to be doing. Deal, Kakashi?"

Kakashi gritted his teeth and nodded. "Deal."

The wind picked up and dust shot up into the air. When it cleared, there was a bottle made of dark brown glass in Obito's hands. There was a snake coiled up at its bottom. Obito offered it to Kakashi, who took it and squinted at the label. "Awamori?"

"Don't sniff when you open it. It's a bit old. It's probably gone like nail-polish remover by now," said Obito warily as Kakashi unscrewed the lid and peered into its contents.

"Why is there a snake inside?"

"Oh, for crying out loud! Just drink it. It honestly helps, and if you don't," Obito's tone darkened, "you might Kamui-vomit up that Black Zetsu."

The very thought of that black slime pouring out of his sharingan made something in Kakashi mew as pitifully as a kitten stuck in a boot.

The deep boom of an explosion sounded out overhead. Small stones skittered across the plain around them. Kakashi put the bottle to his teeth. "Well, we certainly can't have that."

And after Kakashi took a long swig from the bottle - and his nervous system began to ignore the pain in his head in favour of the burning sensation at the back of his mouth and in the depths of his stomach - Obito too drank, to forget about the ache in his bones from the departure of the Tailed Beasts, and all sorts of other pains and sorrows, like the course of his miserable life in general.

They passed the bottle between the two of them and the war thundered on in the distance. There, the rocks were leaping, ravines were forming, fire was raging in a brilliant inferno as had never been seen since the beginnings of the Earth, and water and sand were rushing over land and through the sky like rivers raised up into the air.

Eventually, the two were cured – of Kamui-sickness and general self-pity – and by the time Minato finally began to wonder what his two students were getting up to, Kakashi and Obito were lying flat on their backs and muttering near incoherently at the moon.

They couldn't sit straight. They weren't even lying straight. Thinking straight was entirely out of the question.

"Why," started Kakashi, "do you have alcohol in the Kamui dimension?"

"Like I said - it works for Kamui-sickness," said Obito, before adding sheepishly, "and I was thinking of opening a bottle with Rin in the New World, once we'd made the New World that is. And it would have been with you as well, actually. With the you who hadn't stuck his hand through Rin. It would have been like a party – a Welcome to a Better World Party."

Kakashi closed his eyes then slowly opened them again. "Nice of you to invite me to your party, even if it was all just going to be a dream."

"Yeah, just one huge, never-ending dream." Obito turned over and spat into the dark. "This war sucks."

"Some would say that that is rather rich, coming from you." Kakashi pulled down his mask so that he could lap at the air with his tongue, but the Awamori taste stuck to it like wool. "All wars, as you so put it, suck."

"This stupid Moon's Eye Plan," Obito continued, pointing up at the moon with an angry finger, "this stupid everything. Hey! Hey! Wouldn't it be funny if we were projecting this infinite Tsukuyomi off the Hokage monument or something! Then it would be…it would be the Old Konoha Geezers' Eyes Plan. Wouldn't that have been even stupider?"

"What if there wasn't anything to reflect the illusion off at all?" Kakashi suggested, lost in a haze of alcohol that had turned his brain to sweetly soft mulch. "Then it would have been The Eye Plan, and that sounds like some evil scheme for getting glasses users to switch to contact lenses…the Aburame clan would have had a fit…"

"Oh, I like it! The conspiracy of the evil opticians!" Obito laughed and for a moment Kakashi was seeing an altogether different boy laughing beside him, blonde and reckless and orange.

He dimly recalled that he ought to be helping said orange boy in something very important.

"Oh, yeah. Saving the world." Kakashi raised a finger and blearily blinked his eyes. "Obito, any ideas? How to save the world from the Moon's Eye Plan?"

Obito pursed his lips and scowled. "I wish it was The Eye Plan. Then all we'd have to do is kill all the opticians."

They continued staring up at the moon in quiet drunken contemplation, the sounds of people screaming and yelling and battling with forces of nature ringing in their ears.

They came to the same idea at the same time.

"The Eye Plan," whispered Obito. He turned to Kakashi with eyes wide and large. The Rinnegan glowed with an eerie purple sheen. "That's it."

"The Eye Plan," breathed Kakashi, and he nodded in understanding. "It's the only thing that'll work for sure!"

"The power of the Sharingan," continued Obito in awe at his own drunken genius, "is only fully realised when the two eyes are together and united in purpose. Kakashi!"

He held out his hand, his eyes gleaming, all weakness from having the Tailed Beasts removed forced to the back of his mind by the power of friendship rekindled (and alcohol).

Kakashi had a vague feeling that he was forgetting something, but since he couldn't remember and trying to remember took too much effort in his current state anyway, he clapped hands with the man next to him and shook it. "Obito!"

"Are you ready, old friend," said Obito solemnly, "to save the world?"

Kakashi nodded. "I am ready," he replied, equally solemn, "old friend."

The third step in Saving the World is to make sure that the world is Saved in a Manner Worthy of a True Konoha ninja: celebrating the Power of Friendship, Teamwork, and implementing a Well thought-out Plan.

If the method is especially ingenious, it may warrant an unnecessarily long jutsu christening by Namikaze Minato the Fourth Hokage.

A wind of hurricane proportions tore through the alliance, tossing ninjas and beasts about the plain and forcing even Uchiha Madara to crouch under its onslaught. A shining band of twisting silver and shadow poured down from the sky. It ran like a tidal wave to a point beyond the main scene of battle, where the band narrowed, coalesced at a point and disappeared.

When the ninjas opened their eyes and unstoppered their ears, it was to darkness, lit up only by fire and flickering chakra, and missing something of very great importance indeed.

"What the hell was that?" shouted Naruto, climbing to his feet and glancing wildly around him.

Minato looked up to the sky and delicately cleared his throat.

"I do believe," he said hesitantly, as the eyes of the alliance turned to him, "that that was the Ultra-Super-Kamui-Fusion-Power-of-Alcohol-Induced-Sharingan-no-Jutsu."

All eyes then followed his gaze skywards. Some widened with awe, some blinked in confusion. Those more quick on the ball swiftly began looking around the battlefield for the likely culprits (namely Tsunade, already cracking her knuckles).

Uchiha Madara had stilled. He was a taut pillar of barely suppressed fury. It radiated off him like heat from a furnace, or electromagnetic waves from a black hole. If a bold and suicidally cheeky ninja, perhaps Hashirama, had put a rock – no, a mountain - into the man's fist, Madara would have, first, crushed it to dust, then with the very pressure of his grip would have created the core of a new planet in his palm.

His eyes were fixed on the empty night sky above him, as were, coincidentally, the two pairs of eyes belonging to a couple of drunk ninjas who had just done something potentially catastrophic on a global scale.

"What -" Madara began, and the ninjas nearest to him would later swear that the word itself had sizzled on his lips "- have you imbeciles – done – with - the MOON?"

Minato buried his face in his hands. "I knew I shouldn't have left those two together!"

Obito and Kakashi were still lying on their backs, with the Awamori bottle (bottles - at some point they had spontaneously multiplied, as good things like chocolate wrappers and empty ice cream tubs often do) just out of hands reach.

"I'm guessing," Kakashi noted, as Madara's infuriated screams, followed by the screams of the first victim of Madara's vented fury, reached their ears, "that we're both going to get one hell of a Kamui-sickness trip in a moment."

Obito winced and rubbed his forehead. "It'll probably be nothing compared to the hangover we'll get tomorrow morning though."

"We just saved the world from the Moon's Eye Plan. It's our fault that tomorrow even exists for us to get hangovers," Kakashi reminded him. He suddenly frowned. An insistent little voice was hissing at him from the back of his mind. "Wasn't I supposed to be getting you somewhere safe then going back to help the alliance?"

"Yeah, and I think I was hoping I'd just die and leave all the mess I caused in this world for all you lot to clean up for me," Obito said, confused and gazing off into space.

They stared up at the moonless sky.

Raising their hands, they bumped their fists together at a job well done.

If you read this, The Obito and Kakashi Kamui the Moon Adventure, thank you so very much for your patience.

Best, Zen :D