The three words—'Obito is dead'—did not echo. They simply landed in the center of the room with the final, silent weight of a tombstone being set into place.
For Renjiro, the world did not shatter; it crystallized, freezing into a diamond-hard clarity where every sensation was razor-sharp and unbearably precise.
He did not gasp, or cry out, or slump. He became a statue, his newly restored Sharingan eyes wide and unblinking, fixed on Minato's grief-shadowed face. The vibrant crimson of his irises seemed to darken, absorbing the dim light of the room without reflecting it.
His first, instinctive thought was not of the boy himself—the loud, clumsy, hopelessly idealistic genin—but of the man who had trusted him with that boy's life.
Fujioka. Obito's father. His former squad leader in the Police Force, a stern, traditional Uchiha with eyes that had seen too much compromise and a heart that clung fiercely to his only, struggling son.
The memory was visceral: the smell of old paper and polish in the Police headquarters, the weight of Fujioka's hand on his shoulder, a grip that was both an order and a plea.
"You have a good head on your shoulders, Renjiro… watch out for Obito for me. The world won't be kind to a boy like him." He had given his word. A quiet, solemn promise between shinobi, one he had believed he could keep by sheer force of will and foreknowledge.
Now, that promise was ash. The internal monologue that followed was a silent, furious scream. 'I promised to protect him… and now Madara probably has him. He's not dead; he's been harvested. A broken, malleable pawn plucked from the rubble and taken to that underground tomb.'
The lack of a body was the tell. If Minato had returned with a corpse, if there had been something to burn and bury, Renjiro might have been able to convince himself the future had truly diverged into an unknown, perhaps even safer, path. But this? It was similar to what he knew was to come.
Kushina's voice, softer now, pierced his frozen state. "Renjiro…? You didn't know?"
He slowly turned his head toward her, the movement mechanical. "I returned to the village only this morning," he said, his voice sounding distant, as if coming from the end of a long tunnel. "My first and only stop before here was the Hokage Tower. Lord Third did not see fit to include the casualty list in his… welcoming remarks." The bitterness was faint but unmistakable. This was the second place he'd visited, and it had become a chasm of bad news.
He shifted his gaze back to Minato, the analytical part of his mind forcefully engaging, compartmentalizing the shock and guilt to be examined later.
"How?" The single word was a demand, flat and hard.
Minato's shoulders slumped almost imperceptibly. He walked further into the room, the warmth and safety it had represented moments ago now feeling like a cruel illusion. He leaned against the wall, as if needing its support to recount the tale.
"It was during the general retreat, after the war's end was declared," Minato began, his voice a study in controlled grief. "Kiri forces launched a coordinated, surprise attack across multiple fronts. My team was with Commander Isao's unit. When the ambush hit, Isao ordered them to break away—to find an escape route, draw some pressure off the main group." He closed his eyes briefly, the image clearly painted behind his lids. "They were pursued. Relentlessly. Driven into rough terrain near the border. There was a massive kinetic clash; the shockwave destabilised the entire cliffside above them." He opened his eyes, the blue within them clouded. "A landslide. Kakashi and Rin survived by sheer luck, sheltered in a crevice. Obito was… caught in the open. Crushed under the main fall of rock. By the time the Kiri forces withdrew… the body was unrecoverable."
The room was a vault of silence after he finished. The only sound was the faint, persistent hum of the village evening beyond the walls. The story was neat, tragic, and militarily plausible. It was also, Renjiro knew, a perfect cover story for an abduction.
Internally, Renjiro's mind was a tempest of cold, rational horror.
'This is exactly what happened in the original timeline.' The specifics were altered—the enemy time was Kiri, not Iwa; the terrain a landslide, not a cave-in—but the architecture of the event was identical: separation, pursuit, catastrophic geological collapse, a missing body.
He had spent years, ever since awakening in this world, operating on the assumption that his presence was a stone thrown into a pond, that the ripples would distort everything. He had expected the world to punish his arrogance, to become unpredictable, a chaotic storm where his future knowledge would be useless.
But this… this felt different. This felt like the universe had corrected itself. As if certain events were anchor points in the stream of time, weighted with such narrative or causal mass that they sank to the bottom, immovable, while the superficial currents of circumstance—which village, which jutsu—simply flowed around them. The thought was terrifying.
If Obito's fall was fixed, what else was? The Nine-Tails Attack? The Uchiha Massacre? A new resolve, cold and sharp as a surgeon's scalpel, formed in the wreckage of his assumptions.
'If tragedies repeat themselves… then passive observation is a death sentence. I need to interfere more directly. I need to test the boundaries of these "fixed points," see which ones can be shattered and which are made of bedrock.'
Kushina broke the silence, her voice thick with a sorrow that was both personal and communal. "That poor boy. And Fujioka… to not even have a body to mourn. It's the cruellest part."
Minato nodded, a flicker of anger breaking through his composed grief. "I scoured the area myself once I reached them. For hours. There was no sign. The rockfall was… total." He clenched his jaw, the muscle ticking. "The only logical conclusion is that Kiri shinobi retrieved it during their withdrawal. A trophy, or… something worse."
Renjiro found his voice again, aiming for a tone of consolation, though it rang hollow in his own ears. "You did everything you could, Minato. I can't imagine how difficult this is for you, for your team."
It was Kushina who answered, her gaze dropping to the floor. "Rin is holding on for Kakashi's sake, but she's breaking inside. And Kakashi…" She shook her head, a gesture of helpless sorrow. "He's taking it worse than anyone. He's just… shut down."
This surprised Renjiro. Kakashi, the stoic prodigy, the perfect soldier, was known for his emotional detachment. For his grief to be visibly worse than Rin's, who felt everything so deeply…
A cold knot, separate from the one already tightening around Obito's fate, began to form in the pit of Renjiro's stomach. A premonition, ill-defined but chilling. He looked at Minato.
"How has he suffered 'too much loss already'?"
Minato turned his full gaze upon Renjiro, and in the Hokage-to-be's eyes, Renjiro saw a depth of pity that made his blood run cold.
"Because he lost Obito," Minato said, his voice dropping to a heavy, mournful register, each word measured and deliberate, "and Hiro."
He paused, allowing the name to hang in the air, a second tombstone.
"Hiro's death, in particular, has crushed him."
The world did not freeze this time. It stopped. The ambient hum of the village vanished. The light from the lamp seemed to stretch and distort. The air turned to glass, and Renjiro was trapped inside it. He could hear the frantic, thunderous drum of his own heart, but he could not feel his breath draw in. All the careful compartments in his mind blew open at once.
Hiro. Hatake Hiro. Not just a comrade. His best friend. The brother he had chosen.
'Dead?'
The word had no meaning. It was a sound, devoid of sense. It was an error in reality's code.
His lips moved, but no sound came out at first. He tried again, and a broken, choked whisper scraped its way past the constriction in his throat, a sound so small and devastated it seemed to suck the remaining warmth from the room.
"H-Hiro… is dead?!"
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