Worth It

A/N: Kakashi and Obito as roommates, however briefly. At least, that's what it started as.

This story takes place in the same timeline as The Promise, where Obito survives the Kusa mission. You don't actually need to read that story to understand what's going on here, though, since none of the OCs or InuYasha characters are really important here.

Italics indicate flashbacks.

Two.

Rin whacked both boys over the head with a clipboard as soon as she was sure they wouldn't die from it. Since they were in a hospital and she had used their own medical records to hit them, she was probably a better judge than most.

"Rin-chan, that hurt!" Obito wailed, clutched at his bandaged head.

Kakashi swayed a little before collapsing back onto his pillows with a groan. He really didn't need another headache on top of his chakra-exhaustion one.

"How could you be so stupid?" Rin shouted, looming over them both. "Kakashi-kun, Sensei even told you not to use that jutsu again until he said so!"

Kakashi stared at the ceiling so he didn't have to look her in the eye.

"Are you two trying to kill yourselves?" Rin demanded. "Sensei had to go out and drag you two back in when you both fainted on the way back, and Yuugao thought you were both going to die. What do you have to say for yourselves?"

"We didn't die." Obito offered.

Rin frowned at him and he fell silent. When she spoke again, she looked and sounded horribly upset. "Look, just...don't do it again. Don't ever do that again."

"I'll try not to, Rin-chan." Obito promised. It was really all he could promise—in the shinobi world, risks simply had to be taken. There was no way he'd be able to promise her he'd never get hurt again and actually keep it.

Kakashi looked over at her and nodded. "I'll keep him out of trouble."

"Good." Rin said firmly. "Otherwise I'll drag you both back to the hospital myself."

It was the first evening of what would be a very, very strange arrangement. Frankly, neither boy really knew why he was so willing to put up with the other, but both of them had theories.

For one thing, Obito had been thrown out of his clan home for concealing the fact that he had activated and fully developed his Sharingan (not that he'd actually cared much at first, given that he barely spent any time among the members of his own clan anyway) and then being defiant about it. He'd been given two days to get his things and get the hell out. It was almost inevitable that he would have left eventually, over one argument or another, but no one on Team Minato had thought it would happen barely a week after he turned fourteen.

Except Kakashi, apparently. It turned out that the white-haired teenager had expected something like this, and ended up volunteering his apartment while Minato and Kushina tried to get their new house in order. Fugaku had really picked a bad time to throw Obito out—particularly considering that everyone on Team Minato was having their own housing problems save Kakashi.

There was also the possibility that Kakashi was slightly paranoid about his friend's safety, but no one mentioned it.

Obito kicked off his sandals by his teammate's front door and dropped his backpack by the wall. Then he looked around, pushing his goggles up on his forehead. "Your apartment is tiny."

"Thank you for stating the obvious, Obito." Kakashi said dryly, but without any particular annoyance. His apartment was tiny—too small for an adult, but just barely enough room for two rather small teenagers. Nearly everything in the apartment—from the fold-away table to the futon rolled up in his room—could be compacted. Half of the jounin's worldly possessions could fit in a closet or medicine cabinet in a bigger home, but he didn't really care. "You can put your stuff over there."

"Okay." Obito promptly threw his pack across the room, where it rolled to a stop against a stepladder.

…It was really not better to think about the past, particularly in the case of one Hatake Kakashi, but it really did say a lot that he'd actually needed a stepladder in an apartment this small. Obito wondered just how long Kakashi had been living alone, and then swiftly killed the thought before he could say something stupid.

Kakashi rolled his eyes and retreated to what Obito figured was the bedroom. Obito shrugged to himself and began to explore.

Obito thought that the entirety of the apartment could fit in Itachi's room. And he was all of four years old. Oh, sure, everything worked in its crammed-yet-orderly kind of way, but even Kakashi's obsessive organizational tendencies couldn't make up for the fact that there just wasn't a whole lot of room.

"The futon's laid out." Kakashi announced from the bedroom. He poked his head out and spotted Obito looking around his kitchen like it was some kind of foreign country. "What are you doing, Obito?"

"Trying to figure out where you keep the bowls." Obito's stomach growled. "And food, too."

"…I need to go shopping." Kakashi muttered, walking over open one of the cabinets. A large cup of instant ramen fell out and Obito caught it. Kakashi pulled out another one. "Usually I have a few vegetables around, but we were on that mission for a little too long. I had to throw them out."

And then my clan threw a fit and you haven't had any time since, Obito thought but didn't say. "It's fine. We'll just go tomorrow. I still have enough money coming in through that one B-rank to afford to pay for my own food."

"Good, because I'd hate to think I have to find a way to fill a bottomless pit." Kakashi said, his voice strangely flat.

"…was that a joke?" Obito asked incredulously.

Kakashi rolled his eyes again and turned away, putting a battered old kettle on the stove to boil water. Obito peeled the lid off of the cup ramen, snickering. Kakashi probably wouldn't ever really have a sense of humor, but the poor kid tried.

Kakashi added the boiling water to each of their cups in turn and for a while they sat at the table, bored out of their minds as they waited the required three minutes. Well, maybe it was just Obito. Kakashi had that whole "S-class shinobi discipline" thing going on and Obito was hungry.

"Did you bring at least a few changes of clothes?" Kakashi asked after a while.

"Yeah." Obito said. He glanced at his cup, watching the steam drift off it. "Man, I feel like I'm gonna die of a sodium overdose or something just from eating this."

"We'll put you in detox later." Kakashi replied. He pulled the lid off of his cup and started prodding at the noodles with his chopsticks just as the nearby alarm clock went off. Since he didn't actually bother to turn the timer off for slightly too long, Obito did it for him by smacking it into a wall, where it bounced off and landed somewhere in Obito's pack. At least the alarm was muffled.

Even under Kakashi's glare, Obito just shrugged. "Bottoms up."

Obito's entire cup was gone in all of thirty seconds of frantic slurping. Later, Kakashi would theorize that being an Uchiha gave a person resistance to heat in general and having their taste buds burned off in particular. The white-haired teenager stirred his own noodles once, watching Obito sprawl across the floor like it was actually his apartment, not Kakashi's, before shaking his head and pulling his mask down. He was hungry too.

"Man, you look weird without that mask on." Obito said from the floor. Only he wasn't on the floor anymore, he was actually sitting at the table again like a civilized person (for all of two seconds). He lobbed his cup at the trash bin and managed to make it. "For a while there I didn't think you had a mouth."

There was a lot to say to a sentence like that, most of it sarcastic. "Believe it or not, Obito, you actually need a mouth to eat. And to talk. What, did you think I absorbed food from the ground like a tree?"

"More like through the air. Though your tree idea explains why you never complained when it rained." Obito countered cheerfully.

"You're a moron." Kakashi said flatly.

"And you've got no social skills." Obito shot back.

Kakashi slurped his noodles so he didn't have to reply. While he didn't hate the Uchiha anymore, their personalities conflicted quite a bit. Arguments were just a part of their lives. It didn't help that sometimes it seemed like Obito was doing everything in his power to make Kakashi want to strangle him.

Obito yawned. Then he winced, glancing down at a bandage wrapped around his calf.

"Is that scratch still bugging you?" Kakashi asked. Except it wasn't really a scratch—scratches tended not to be made by blades the size of the entire leg, after all.

"Could be worse." Obito said nonchalantly, since he knew that he hadn't managed to reopen his stitches—the lack of gushing blood was a testament to that. "At least Rin got around to looking at it before the shouting match with Fugaku. Otherwise he would've just killed me right then and there. The man's like a shark about blood in the water."

Kakashi raised an eyebrow. "Believe me, Obito, if he'd tried to pull that off with Kushina right there, she would've ripped his head off. Not to mention Sensei arriving..." And I'd shove a Chidori down his throat. Screw the consequences.

"I think I'm the first Uchiha to actually flat-out disobey the clan like that." Obito mused. "I wonder if they'll try to make me go back."

Kakashi said nothing.

"I hope not." Obito muttered.

Kakashi glanced at the wall clock. Eleven thirty. He had to be up and prepared for team training tomorrow at eight. So did Obito, but he was a goofball with way too much energy to begin with. Then again…Sensei was being a little stricter about the whole training thing than usual. If they started out tired tomorrow, it would only get worse.

Kakashi drank the last of the broth in his cup and tossed it in the trash. "I'm going to bed," he announced. "You?"

Obito nodded. He grinned suddenly. "I call first dibs on the bathroom, though." And he was gone before Kakashi had finished clearing the table off. Considering that he wasn't particularly fast in actual combat, Kakashi could only blink at the empty space where his teammate had been.

In retrospect, Kakashi should have known that adding another person into his tiny apartment was going to cause some problems. Among other things, he discovered that in his bedroom, the acoustics made Obito's snoring much louder than usual. Or maybe Kakashi's mission-based ability to sleep regardless of background noise was deserting him.

On the next futon, Obito rolled over.

Kakashi sighed and tried not to think about how tired he'd be in the morning. It would only get worse if Obito suddenly developed a habit of kicking.

Almost as soon as he completed the thought, Obito kicked him in the kidneys. Kakashi sat up, glanced at his temporary roommate, and whacked Obito over the head with the nearest pillow.

Three.

"Obito-kun."

"Fugaku-sama."

Fugaku's voice was stiff and formal. He didn't look like a man to be argued with. "It has come to my attention that you have activated your Sharingan. When was this?"

Obito tried his best not to get angry. Finally, the head of the Uchiha clan actually bothers to acknowledge his existence, and it's about eyeballs. Still, he knew better than to lie to a jounin who didn't like him all that much. "Months ago, Fugaku-sama."

Fugaku's tiny eyebrows shot up. "What were the circumstances involved?"

"Classified." Technically, anyway. Once the war was over the mission records would probably be easily accessible to someone like Fugaku, who could claim that because Obito was a clan member he had a right to see them. It was just the way politics worked. "Sorry."

"Why did you conceal this from the clan?" Fugaku asked.

Obito, if he was being entirely honest, would probably have said that he was testing the clan to see if they would even notice their outcast gain power in leaps and bounds. He didn't like the idea of being the odd man out among the Uchihas and never had, but there were some things that couldn't be helped. Obito had been an outcast since he was six, when he had first entered the Academy without any family training because his tutors had decided that he was hopeless.

Given the Uchiha reputation and Obito's naturally brash personality, the entire situation had just gotten worse. He didn't exactly blame Fugaku for any of it—it had been a difficult time for the man, since Itachi had just been born then, but it still was a nail in the coffin of Obito's relationship with the clan.

Finally, Obito said, "It didn't seem important."

Oh, sure, Obito had managed to put himself on nearly even footing with Kakashi in straight taijutsu, but that didn't say much when the jounin's skill was in ninjutsu and the entire point of the Sharingan was to predict enemy movements. It wasn't that big of a boost in the earlier days.

Then again, Obito also knew that his standing in the Uchiha clan would have changed entirely if he'd just told them to start with. He just wasn't sure if he wanted it to change. He'd been the pariah for too long to go back. Particularly not for a clan whose top priority seemed to be eyes instead of people.

Fugaku clearly didn't like that answer. "Obito-kun, as a member of the Uchiha clan you are expected to maintain the honor and dignity of the clan. You are also expected to put the clan before yourself. We are your family, after all."

Liar! Obito thought but didn't say. They'd given up on him years ago. "My apologies, Fugaku-sama, but that's in the past."

A lot of things happened at once just then. Kakashi came running up behind him, snarling something about hospitals and why you weren't supposed to just run away from them when you left your best friend with the freaking medic. Kushina appeared not long after, apparently chasing Kakashi for pretty much the same reason. Rin trailed behind them both, fuming. Then the insanity of his life slammed into the harsh borders of reality.

None of them were really sure what happened then, but suddenly Obito and Fugaku were both glaring at each other (slightly off-center, since neither wanted to be hypnotized by the other) with their respective Sharingan eyes active.

"No one ever begins with a fully evolved set of eyes, Obito-kun." Fugaku remarked.

"I know." Obito kept his eyes locked on the man's left ear. "I started with two in each. When I went on riskier missions, I had to be stronger and faster to protect my teammates. If I told the clan, I'd be recalled. I couldn't let that happen."

"I see." Fugaku's voice was solemn. Obito braced for the inevitable. "You have two hours. Gather your things."

He'd declared that his loyalty to the village surpassed what he should have had for the clan. To the head of the damn clan. He'd gone too far.

"Hold on one damn minute—!" Kushina began, but Fugaku cut her off with a sharp, "Since Obito is no longer a member of the Uchiha clan, he will be required to leave clan premises and find his own lodgings. The nobility can't relax its standards, even for him."

Rin grabbed Obito's wrist just as Minato poofed into existence right next to Kushina's left hand. She looked like she was about to strangle Fugaku, though she was slowly reconsidering with her lover right there. That would mean witnesses.

Fugaku opened his mouth to say something, but Minato interrupted him just as the man had done to Kushina mere moments before, with an even, "Fugaku-sama, I'll be taking my student now. Please don't go out of your way for our account."

Rin and Kakashi had succeeded in dragging stunned Obito out of the danger zone.

Minato's razor-edged smile could have frozen a bijuu in its tracks. "Have a good afternoon, Uchiha-sama."

"You didn't have to come along, Kushina-neechan." Obito said as they wandered through the marketplace the next day. He was carrying a backpack full of vegetables and balancing a container of tofu on his head (because he could), trailing slightly behind Kakashi and Kushina.

Kakashi, laboring under the weight of several fish and every type of stupidly heavy food he'd ever heard of and wondering how the hell he was supposed to fit any of it into his refrigerator, merely grunted.

"Think of it as an apology for how long it's taking Minato and me to unpack." Kushina said easily. She carried two jugs of soy sauce under one arm and a sack of rice over the other, but she didn't seem to mind. The redhead shuddered theatrically before adding, "The house…isn't really fit for human habitation right now."

The phrase "rodent infestation" was a bit of an understatement for the new Namikaze residence. For once, Kushina had been forced to get an exterminator to look at the place, and she and Minato were staying at a hotel until the house was finished being fumigated. It would take a while.

"It's fine." Kakashi said. He glanced at the heaviest object weighing him down—a two-foot-long tuna. "Why do we need this much food anyway?"

"Oh, some of it's for you two." Kushina said. She gave a little chuckle, "But the rest of this is for a birthday party. Mikoto-chan's is coming up."

Obito twitched. While he didn't exactly mind Fugaku's wife, the reminder still ached.

Kushina seemed to realize this after a bit of a delay for her brain to catch up with her mouth. It happened sometimes. "Oh god, Obito-kun, I'm so sorry—!"

"It's fine, Kushina-neechan." Obito said, wincing inwardly. "I mean, this is kind of new…"

"Obito, I was about two seconds from punching Fugaku in the mouth yesterday." Kushina said sharply. "Don't make excuses for my stupidity." She sighed. "But I still owe Mikoto-chan a few things. She's been my friend since before she married that old stick-in-the-mud."

Come to that, Kushina had never really been sure why Mikoto had married Fugaku to begin with. It was all very mysterious.

"As long as we don't run into trouble here, I think I can take it." Obito replied. He was still balancing the tofu container on his head, so he shrugged very carefully.

"Same here." Kushina muttered. She huffed, looking away from a pair of patrolling Konoha MPs, who were nearly all Uchihas anyway and had been sending withering glares in their direction. "If one of them tries to give you shit about anything, just let me know."

Kakashi mentally agreed, and added, But I'll be able to get them first. I'm faster.

Sure enough, the little pests appeared eventually. Fortunately for them, Kushina was arguing about the price of some trinket inside a maternity store and couldn't see them. Unfortunately for them, Kakashi had managed to drop all of his burdens on the bench and was leaning against a nearby wall when they started in on Obito. The white-haired teenager narrowed his eyes when the pair of genin-level punks walked right up to Obito and started talking. Kakashi was already contemplating murder.

"Well, if it isn't the disgrace," said the first one. "What's it like being a commoner, Obi-chan?"

"What the hell do you want, Hiro?" Obito usually didn't start off rude. It just happened the longer a conversation went on. But now, he was perfectly justified. "And you brought Matsu with you."

Kakashi felt himself growing still more irritated.

"I heard you pissed off Fugaku-sama. Did he smack you around a bit, at least?" Hiro was, frankly, a prissy little brat Kakashi barely remembered from the Academy during his extremely brief stay there. He was supposed to be a chuunin already, but he'd failed the Chuunin Exam three times by sixteen and Kakashi had heard that his jounin-sensei was pretty much giving up on the entitled brat.

"I heard your sensei had to bail you out." Matsu added maliciously. "Still hiding behind him, Obi-chan?"

"Dunno about that, Hiro-chan, Matsu-chan." Obito's smile was twisted. "Why don't you try finding out? Or are you afraid of your little loser of a second cousin?"

He wasn't so much picking a fight as answering one. But he still shouldn't have responded—not while weighed down by a heavy backpack and playing tricks with tofu. Oh, sure, maybe Sensei could have pulled it off, but Obito had never been the most talented or most sensible of Uchihas. Or of all the chuunin in Konoha, now that Kakashi thought of it.

Ah, well. Time to step in. "Obito, shut up."

Hiro whirled on the spot to find the shorter Hatake giving him a death glare. He grinned, proving once again that nobility meant that all the intelligence had been bred out of the clan. Hiro was too stupid to even count as cannon fodder. He was just a target.

"It's been a while, Kaka-chan." Hiro said, grinning. Kakashi just gave him a level stare.

"It has." Kakashi agreed mildly. "I'm amazed that they actually let you out without adult supervision, Hiro. Or did you run away from your babysitter again?"

"Big words coming from a brat." Hiro said, scowling. Then a sudden grin lit up his face, and Kakashi knew that, whatever else Hiro said in the next few seconds, there would be a fight and the Uchiha would probably end up dead. Hiro didn't have the intelligence to know when to stop taunting people. Or to pick his targets. "Or the son of a coward."

What.

"No more big words, Kaka-chan?" Hiro thought he'd won. He didn't see Kakashi's stare as the omen of death that it was. "I wonder what Sakumo thought right before he died?"

What.

"Did I hit a sore spot, Kaka-chan?" Hiro went on, grinning stupidly and maliciously all at once.

WHAT THE HELL?

"I'm going to give you one chance to take that back." Kakashi said in a deceptively calm tone. I am not going to beat them to death. I am not going to beat them to death. I am not going to…well, maybe a little. "If you don't, you won't have long enough to regret it."

Hiro laughed. "What are you gonna do, Hatake? Cry at me?"

"Are all Uchihas this stupid?" Kakashi asked rhetorically. He had enough of a hold on his temper to do that, at least. Obito was already getting up to start the melee. "Need I remind you that I was promoted to jounin for a reason? Most of these reasons are derivatives of the fact that I kill people for a living."

Hiro paused as though this had just occurred to him. Apparently the idiot could be taught. It was a bit too late, though. Kakashi had a long, slow-burning fuse, but that made it all the more impressive when he did finally blow up at someone.

"And on my last mission, I was ordered to assassinate a local daimyo in Taki." Kakashi continued coolly. "Guess who my partner for the mission was."

Almost involuntarily, Hiro and Matsu looked at Obito. The other boy's Sharingan was active and spinning rapidly. The other two had probably never seen one on someone who wasn't willing to put up with their idiocy.

"That was why he's now listed as Copy-nin Obito." Kakashi went on. "And why I'm Konoha's White Wolf."

Obito gave a fake cough that sounded a lot like, "Second Coming of the White Fang." It was quite an impressive one. Kakashi glared at him.

Matsu, always slightly slower on the uptake than anyone else in a given conversation, scowled and said, "Yeah, right. I'd like to see you prove it, Hatake."

Obito shrugged. "Ladies first."

Matsu threw the first punch and Hiro quickly backed him up. There was little that they hadn't been trained to do together. It was just a pity that neither of them had any trace of talent whatsoever.

They were almost comedy in motion. Even Obito at age nine could have outfought them both. Blindfolded.

"This is just sad." Obito muttered when he and Kakashi ended up back-to-back for a split second. "Was I ever this bad?"

"Maybe when you were five." Kakashi allowed, shoving a clumsily-thrown punch out of line and making Hiro slam into a nearby wall. Obito sidestepped and Matsu managed to break his fingers on the bench from before. Then it was just down to using enough shinobi wire to truss them up like chickens ready for the pot.

"What the hell is going on here?"

The shout seemed to be coming from several directions at once, and when Kakashi and Obito looked up, there were indeed several different adults standing around and looking angry. There were two Uchihas, a Yamanaka, and, most terrifying of all, Kushina.

Kakashi always found it interesting that, in a shinobi world, the accounts of who started what and who's actually to blame were a little different than usual.

"Kakashi, you're not supposed to play with the stupid Uchiha genin, remember?" Kushina said disapprovingly, crossing her arms.

The tallest of the Uchiha pair sputtered. Kushina had made it very clear what side she was on.

Kakashi said nothing, merely staring right at the Konoha MPs and daring them to say something. Their stupid genin were fine, barring self-inflicted injuries and wounded egos.

"Oh, Hiro and Matsu just wanted us to show them a few new taijutsu techniques." Obito lied brightly. "Only they were a little excited, so we had to start a bit early…"

"A likely story," scoffed the shorter Uchiha. Kakashi honestly couldn't remember who he was supposed to be. Yukio? Yuri? Yoshi? Something like that… "I should take both of you brats in."

Kushina rolled her eyes. "I don't know if you've noticed, Uchiha-san, but both Kakashi-kun and Obito-kun outrank these two. You're going to have to take it up with Hokage-sama."

"Oh, you can rest assured we'll follow up on this," said the short one. He puffed up like an arrogant rooster.

Kakashi decided that he didn't like them much.

Fugaku was there. That made everything about ten times worse. Obito made sure to stand as far away from the man as he could without seeming rude, which meant that he was counting on Kushina and Kakashi to stand between the clan head and him. If Fugaku noticed, he didn't give any sign.

"…So, these two genin walked up and started throwing insults?" The Sandaime might have been about to retire, but he was still as sharp as ever. The two Uchiha genin flinched. "Is this true, Matsu-kun, Hiro-kun?"

Kakashi nodded.

"And you, Obito-kun?" Sarutobi asked.

"According to them, I'm a disgrace to the Uchiha clan." Obito said evenly. "So I asked if they were really going to push it and find out."

Fugaku's eyes narrowed. Neither Matsu nor Hiro had shown the potential to ever activate their own Sharingan, if they even had the gene for it. To go up against a chuunin with a fully-developed one was one of the stupidest decisions they could have made.

"That was when I stepped in, Hokage-sama." Kakashi said.

"So they started in on him, too." Obito added.

Correction: they had found another, even dumber option. There was a reason Hatake Kakashi had made jounin at thirteen.

"I see," said Sarutobi. "Inoichi-san, is this all correct?"

Yamanaka Inoichi was also there, having been a witness to the event and being a member of the Torture and Interrogation Department in any case. Sure, they probably wouldn't be dragged down to Ibiki over a street fight so minor as to be nearly nonexistent, but the thought was still rather worrying.

So instead they just had their minds poked at by a Yamanaka. The Hokage could tell when people were lying most of the time, so Inoichi only had to perform a general reading that had taken him about two seconds to analyze.

The blond man nodded. "They started going back and forth for a while, but that's the gist of it."

"I would like to know what was said, Hiro-kun." Sarutobi said after a moment, leaning forward.

Hiro said nothing.

Matsu looked away.

Kakashi wanted to punch both of them.

Sarutobi sighed. "If it was sufficiently out-of-line that you can't repeat it to me, Hiro-kun, I'm afraid that punishment for this fiasco will fall squarely on you and Matsu-kun."

Fugaku glared at both teenagers. And he'd thought they'd have restraint as genin. Apparently not.

"Both of you will be required to pay a fine of five thousand ryou and are hereby restricted to D-ranked missions for one month." Sarutobi informed them. "Also, Uchiha-sama is responsible for your probationary period and is free to elaborate or expand upon your punishment as he deems fit."

Aside from being under Fugaku's eye for a month, it was pretty much a slap on the wrist. Kushina leveled a glare at the two genin and the unspoken threat was made clear. And then there was what their own clan would do to them when they found out how badly they'd screwed up…

Obito was suddenly glad that he wasn't really an Uchiha anymore. The clan reminded him of a school of piranhas.

Right before he left the room to deal with the genin, Fugaku turned to Obito. "Obito-kun."

"Yes, Uchiha-sama?" He really had to bite his tongue more often…

Fugaku seemed to sigh. "Be more careful." And then he left.

Obito stared after him. …What the hell was that all about?

"We still need to finish shopping." Kushina said. "Thank you for sorting this out, Hokage-sama." And just like that, she dragged both boys out of the room in a blur of red and left the two Konoha MPs from before to sweat it out in front of Sarutobi.

"I'm amazed that didn't end in violence." Kushina said later. They were sitting in the park after having dropped the various food items off at both the redhead's hotel and Kakashi's apartment, and were enjoying the late afternoon sun. It helped that Gai wasn't anywhere in the area and therefore rocks weren't exploding into gravel.

"I'm amazed Sensei didn't suddenly show up in the middle and start threatening people like last time." Obito said.

Kakashi said, "I think he's on a mission. Rin went with him."

"Oh. Was that why training was canceled?" Obito asked with a yawn.

"It wasn't like he was going to hand you over to Tsume for the afternoon." Kushina said, shrugging. "He's going to be gone for the rest of the week, I think. This means I get to have a huge hotel room all to myself." Her grin was downright evil.

Obito, who was wondering if there were any other Uchihas stupid enough to pick a fight with them and realizing that there always were, said nothing. He was a little distracted.

"Speaking of…" Kushina eyed the two of them speculatively. "How are you two holding up as roommates? You aren't have any problems, are you?"

"Not really." Kakashi said. Except for the bit where Obito kept waking him up in the middle of the night via kick to the ribs. He was either going to have to move the futons around or strangle Obito to get some peace.

"It's been okay." Obito said.

Kushina smiled. "Good!" She paused. "Actually, I have to ask—when did you two start getting along? There used to be a phase where Minato spent half his time wondering if you two were going to kill each other."

Both boys thought about it.

"It was the mission to destroy the Kannabi Bridge." Obito said, looking down at his feet. Kakashi looked away. "Sensei was off on his own mission for a while and Kakashi was team leader. Rin got kidnapped by Iwa-nin and…well, it got worse." Missions tended to. "Stuff happened."

"Never mind. You don't actually have to tell me the details if you don't want to." Kushina said quietly. She ruffled Obito's hair. "I'm just glad you two are getting along."

"Okay, Kushina-neechan." Obito said, relieved.

Kushina hummed to herself briefly. "Well, I should be getting back to the hotel before someone tries to steal my stuff. See you two later."

Kushina had a mission later that week. It was a rescue mission—apparently, Minato's team had managed to get bogged down outside of Kiri when facing down way too many summoned creatures. Minato had been stretched thin for three days and was rapidly running out of chakra when the squad had managed to get a messenger out.

Kushina had taken Yamanaka Inoichi, Nara Shikaku, and Akimichi Chouza with her. Obito never quite figured out what happened, since the exact details were classified, but apparently all of the enemy soldiers surrendered rather than face the petite redhead in a bad mood.

Kushina was mysteriously nominated for promotion to jounin a few days afterward.

One.

Dammit, dammit, dammit! Kakashi, where the hell are you?

The situation had gone from bad to worse rapidly. Normally Obito wouldn't have even been put on an A-rank mission with Kakashi, since he was a chuunin. But apparently the white-haired jounin had put in a request for someone with a Sharingan and Obito's number had been called. Why it was him of all people, rather than one of the other Uchiha, Obito didn't really know.

He'd hoped it was because Kakashi wanted him along, though. As a friend and a trusted comrade.

For one thing, he wasn't sure he could keep up, even with his Sharingan at the level it was.

WHAM.

Then again, Obito thought as his opponent smashed into a wall, it is nice to be able to avoid getting turned into a smear on the ground. In its own way, the Sharingan was keeping him alive long enough for Kakashi to actually show up and help him. It hadn't helped him with the first round much, though. Obito had the senbon stab-wounds in his legs to prove it.

"Katon: Goukakyuu no jutsu!" It helped that his opponent was going for strength over speed. That burn had to hurt.

Obito ducked under the enemy chuunin's leg when the man tried to aim a kick at his head, and jammed a kunai into the soft spot on the side of his knee. There was a lot of screaming and blood and pain. Obito silenced him with a slash across his throat.

For a moment, Obito stood over the body of his fallen enemy, panting and wondering why it had all gone wrong. His eyes ached. Stupid mission, stupid late Kakashi, stupid goddamn Taki-nin and—

"Obito, move it!" And then Kakashi was there, followed by some other crazy person in a mask and he was bleeding from a slash across the back and suddenly Obito was so angry he could hardly think. The protective rage wrapped around him in a warm, bubbly haze so strong that even his wounded legs refused to complain.

Kakashi whirled and lashed out with a kunai, but it was too small when the other guy was wielding a katana and Kakashi was out of position. Obito closed the gap even though he knew the enemy was at least as strong as that pair of Iwa-jounin from the Kusa mission and that they were probably going to die. He didn't care.

Something gave.

He could see the path of the sword. And if he could see it, he would make sure Kakashi got away safe. Obito refused to accept anything less.

He pulled Kakashi back, using the other boy's shoulder as a lever and throwing himself forward with reckless abandon even as the jounin swore at him for being an idiot. He and the enemy locked gazes.

And then the world seemed to tilt. Obito didn't know what he was doing. He was just shoving chakra toward his eyes and trying to come up with some kind of genjutsu that would actually work on a jounin. He'd never been good at genjutsu.

The man collapsed with a little sigh.

"What the hell just happened?" Kakashi demanded, scrambling to his feet and spinning Obito around. "Obito, you—you goddamn moron! Don't ever do that again."

"I wasn't going to let him kill you!" Obito shot back. He was shaking from the sudden burst of adrenaline and the cold hollow left after his anger had deserted him, and he felt like a complete weakling.

Kakashi glared at him for a long while before giving a sort of grunt. "And you think I'd be happy if you managed to kill yourself doing it?"

No, he wouldn't. But the rest of the thought cut itself off. This was because, at about that moment, Obito realized that he really shouldn't have been standing when the pain finally hit. Apparently the katana hadn't been dodged completely. He felt his legs give out from under him.

Kakashi caught him and pulled Obito's arm over his shoulders. The Uchiha wasn't really sure if he'd be able to walk under his own power, so he didn't bother to complain. "Don't ever think you need to kill yourself for my sake, Obito."

"Kinda hard to think when I get that mad, Kakashi." Obito said, closing his eyes and deactivating his Sharingan. He felt horrible without his chakra reserves at, minimally, half-capacity. He was practically out.

"Then don't get that mad." Kakashi suggested. He started walking, dragging Obito along. "We still need to meet up with that scout team."

"Yeah." Obito said.

"…Are you crying?" Kakashi asked after a second or two.

"Maybe." Obito admitted. Kakashi didn't actually need the answer—the Uchiha had had tears running down his face when he'd jammed that kunai into the enemy's eye, and all of them had been angry ones. Then later, relief.

Kakashi made a noncommittal noise.

"…Wasn't Genma on it? The scout team I mean." Obito asked, sounding unfocused. Chakra exhaustion was already setting in.

"Raidou too, I think. And maybe Hayate, I guess."

"Isn't he eleven?"

Kakashi shrugged, pausing to consider his teammate. "Obito, I'm going to have to carry you at least part of the way."

"Go ahead." Obito mumbled. "Ow."

Kakashi sighed and hefted his teammate onto his back. Piggybacking was awkward for the carrier and probably not the best use of energy when they were about to drop anyway, but a fireman's carry would probably have Obito doing something stupid within two minutes. With any luck, Obito wouldn't remember most of this when he woke up.

"Hey, Kakashi…" Obito's voice was muffled. He was talking into Kakashi's shoulder.

"What?" Kakashi responded.

"Did I complete my Sharingan?"

Kakashi, who had a sudden vision of a red-eyed boy staring at him like was both terrified that he'd lost a friend and relieved that he actually hadn't, said, "Yes."

Fugaku never struck him from the records. Later, they guessed that the man had known that Obito would come back to the clan eventually, just probably not the way he had.

The head of the Uchiha clan was a young man. He was somewhat rude, brash, and the most teamwork-obsessed Uchiha to ever live. He was a proud jounin of Konohagakure, a happy husband, and a teacher to a trio of chuunin he loved (to drive insane). He looked after his cousins whenever he could, pulled pranks on the village whever he felt like it, and brought his friends back from the brink of despair whenever they needed him.

His name was Uchiha Obito. And he was one of those few, those happy few, who could look back on his life and say honestly, "It was all completely worth it."

A/N: One of the lingering questions about this scenario is, "Where are Obito's parents while all of this is going on?" The answer would be, "Indisposed." I actually have no idea how presumably-loyalist Uchiha would react to that kind of defiance from their son, but I imagine that disowning him is the least they could do, since it was the head of the clan who officially threw him out.

I also doubt that Obito would be so un-Uchiha if he had a good relationship with his parents, assuming they're both alive.

I'm borrowing part of Fugaku's characterization from some of the more…disciplinarian interpretations of Hiashi that I've seen. I honestly think they have a lot in common, aside from the fact that Hiashi managed to live to see the start of the series and the Hyuugas never plotted a coup. They have their own problems.

And he's not totally evil, anyway.

The tea kettle Kakashi used is technically a tetsubin, and mostly used in traditional houses to boil water for tea. I think that Kakashi would have inherited something like that from his father, and he's very practical for a shinobi—if it ain't broke, don't fix and/or replace it.

Also, soy sauce is freaking heavy.