After leaving the Hokage's office, the rat who had once been known as Uchiha Fugaku found himself being carried to one of the veterinary offices that were attached to the Inuzuka compound. He'd heard the Hokage's orders in regards to him, and wasn't happy about them. Not at all. He had a chance for survival though, since he still had one trump card left to play. During his time as a rat, he'd learned through trial and error that he could successfully do one low level jutsu per day without passing out from Chakra Exhaustion. After carefully considering the number of D and E ranked Jutsu available to him, he decided to Henge himself into his former self, and use the element of surprise to enable his escape.

The instant he was pulled out of the rat ball that the Uzumaki brat who was dead the next time he saw him had trapped him in, he gathered his chakra and did the necessary handseal.

"Hey! Look! It's doing a jutsu!" one of the ANBU said as he did so as if such a thing were an interesting novelty.

A moment later, it appeared to the pair of ANBU who had been assigned to dispose of him as if his former self was sitting on the table he had been set down on, and glaring at them.

"I hated that bastard. Gas it!" the other ANBU said a second later when he realized that Fugaku sitting there and frowning at them was the entire show.

Fugaku only had time to widen his eyes in shock before the first ANBU reached through the illusion, grabbed him by the scruff of his neck, pinned him down on the exam table, and stuck a needle into his rump. He was down for the count almost immediately, and several minutes later, he found himself to be small, blind, and apparently not in the afterlife yet. Much as it had been more times than he could count in the years since he'd died as a human. For some strange reason, most everyone else seemed to blame him for the massacre that had led up to this. Or, at least that's what it seemed like at times based on how they treated him.

He would have his revenge though. One day, those ANBU whose scents he was reasonably certain he remembered would be regretting crossing him. Then, they'd be regretting being born in the first place. The fact that he was about one one-hundredth their size didn't matter to him in the least.

Yashiro squirmed slightly as the female who'd given birth to him weeks earlier licked his head and tried to flatten the spiky thatch on top of it in order to make it presentable, having given up on the stove and the home-cooked meal she'd been trying to prepare for some strange reason. Four years and counting of being a rat, and he had still to get used to this part. Every time his new 'mother' tried to make him presentable, it looked like he was being attacked by a giant rat.

His little phobia didn't help in this situation either.

He tended to avoid mirrors like the plague, but a bit of self examination had revealed that his fur was as gray as his hair had been before he had died the night Itachi and some stranger who had also been Uchiha had run through the district slaughtering everyone. It was the same with every life since then.

Waking up to discover he was a rat following the slaughter of his clan had been unpleasant to say the least, especially since the first time, he hadn't known what had happened, and there had been a creeping horror as the wrongness of waking up to discover he was completely blind and helpless had hit. Then came the gradual return of his eyesight, and the discovery that he wasn't a puppy or a kitten as he had half expected to be after he'd felt all the tiny squirming bodies that surrounded him and the uncontrollable instinct that had led him to the large warm something and the sustenance it had offered.

Back then, his mother had been an ordinary grey rat who'd been living in a dumpster behind the Senbei shop, and he'd thought he'd been alone because he had not yet connected with others of his like. It was only later that the Uchiha had started giving birth to Uchiha further confusing family ties as several Uchiha became the children of a sibling or a cousin or a distant ancestor whose name would've been long forgotten if it weren't for the genealogical charts that were quietly mouldering in the Library, and distant ancestors became the children of their descendants.

Fortunately, one's sex tended to remain constant, otherwise things would become even further confused. Though there were rumors...

A sudden slam towards the front of the house that Yashiro's new mother had moved them into startled him out of his musings on the past. Following the slam there was a yell of "Shoes!" and a tearful sounding apology. As he was wondering if what was happening was what he thought was happening, the female nervously looked over this, her latest litter, and hastily lined them up in the middle of what looked to be the living-room as if for inspection.

"Look Naruto," a boy he realized was Sasuke said in a voice that was obviously meant to be comforting, but sounded a great deal out of practice in that area. "Someone heard about Obito and decided to bring you a new friend to keep you company until Obito returns."

"Really?!" an over-loud voice exclaimed, and suddenly something massive and orange with blond hair and blue eyes knelt down in front of the group and started examining them.

Without warning, the very same hands which had dumped a bucket of chum on him several years earlier when he'd been on patrol in that neighborhood that had the home of the woman who hoarded the meanest and most vicious cats in existence grabbed him, and eyes that had lit up in laughter as he was nearly torn to shreds by about a thousand felines examined every inch of him.

"I want this one!" the voice which had cruelly taunted him as he had been rescued by his partner who'd had to drag him to the hospital where he'd been given a series of painful shots exclaimed, finally confirming what he'd thought all along.

He was in Hell.

Mikoto who was still disappointed over the fact that she'd been unable to turn the stove on watched as the Uzumaki boy whom she'd been hoping would become friends with her son one day picked one of her children up and started to play with him. Rather than actively participating in the game, the son who had been picked up had done its best to play dead as if he were hoping that the boy would lose interest in him.

As for Sasuke...

Sasuke was standing back watching the show with his arms folded across his chest, making no moves toward meeting any of his younger siblings. If she had to guess, she'd say that Sasuke wasn't interested in any of them, and the only person in the room he was showing any interest towards was the Uzumaki boy who was now wearing the crest of the Uchiha clan for some reason. The way Sasuke was looking at the boy reminded her of the protective manner in which Itachi had watched over Sasuke when he wasn't looking. Especially towards the end.

Well, that hadn't gone to plan...

As Obito lay there snuggled between his new siblings who were likely also aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, and great-grandparents, he dreamed. Rather than being a pleasant dream of the time Kakashi had caught the chicken pox and it was just him, Rin, and Minato-sensei, it was the nightmare from shortly after he died.

He'd been looking up at two faces, both of them rather old. One of them mentioned him having similar abilities therefore being valuable or something. He blinked, and then there was only one face, a face that had belonged to an ancient old man who'd looked like a child molester or something. He had a panic attack or something when he'd seen the scythe the old man was carrying, and it had been hard to breathe, and he'd been unable to breathe no matter how much the creepy old man tried to get him to calm down and do so since it felt like he'd torn something when he had pulled away from him, and the next thing he knew he was sitting beside a fire. Sitting on the opposite side of the fire had been Hatake Sakumo who had explained to him that he was dead, and that they'd be stuck there until Kakashi arrived.

Not wanting to get lost if he wandered the afterlife with one of his eyes gone, he'd remained by the fire. For a while it was fine, then it got boring, and then he'd finally heard all of Sakumo's stories at least twice, and then he'd started wishing he'd been anywhere but there.

After that, he'd first woken up as a rat.