Sleep, Obito discovered, was another form of interrogation.
During the day, he could maintain some control over his thoughts, could direct his mind toward practical matters like answering questions or cataloging the extent of his physical healing. But in the darkness of the medical tent, with consciousness fading and his defenses lowering, the dead came to visit.
They didn't announce themselves with dramatic flourishes or supernatural manifestations. These weren't the theatrical hauntings of ghost stories, all chains and moaning and dramatic revelations. Instead, they simply appeared in the spaces between sleeping and waking, standing at the edges of his vision like patients waiting to be seen.
The first to come was Yahiko.
He looked exactly as he had in life—young, passionate, orange hair bright even in the grey landscape of Obito's dreams. He didn't speak, didn't accuse or condemn. He simply stood there, watching with eyes that held more disappointment than anger. The boy who had dreamed of peace, whose death had broken Nagato's faith in the world, whose body had been desecrated and used as a weapon against everything he had once believed in.
"You never knew him," Obito tried to tell himself as he jerked awake, sweat cooling on his skin. "You only knew what Nagato told you."
But that was a lie. He had studied Yahiko, researched him, learned everything about his dreams and ideals so that he could better manipulate the grief of those left behind. He had known exactly what he was destroying when he corrupted Nagato's interpretation of his friend's legacy.
The second night brought Rin.
Not the Rin of his memories, the girl he had idealized and held up as justification for everything he had done. This was Rin as she might have been if she had lived—older, wiser, marked by the natural progression of a life he had never allowed himself to imagine for her. She looked at him with infinite sadness, not for her own death but for what he had become in its aftermath.
"This isn't what I would have wanted," she said, her voice carrying the weight of years that had never been. "You know this isn't what I would have wanted."
He woke with her name on his lips and tears he hadn't realized he was capable of shedding burning tracks down his cheeks.
The third night, they began coming in groups.
The Uchiha children first, too young to understand why they were there but old enough to remember the fear in their final moments. Then the jinchuriki—Yugito, Yagura, Roshi, Han, Utakata, Fuu. The tailed beasts themselves, ancient and wise and broken by his ambitions. The countless unnamed victims of the Fourth Shinobi War, soldiers and civilians alike who had died in service to his twisted vision of peace.
They didn't all speak. Most simply watched, their presence a weight that made breathing difficult and thought nearly impossible. But their silence was more damning than any accusation could have been. They had trusted in a world that could be better, and he had used that trust to destroy them.
By the fourth night, Obito had stopped trying to sleep entirely.
Instead, he lay in the darkness, staring at the ceiling of the medical tent and trying to count the dead. Not the strategic casualties or acceptable losses that he had calculated during his years as the masked man, but the individuals. People with names and families and dreams that had ended because of choices he had made.
The number was incomprehensible. Thousands upon thousands, spanning decades of manipulation and violence. The Kyuubi's attack on Konoha alone had killed hundreds. The Uchiha massacre had eliminated an entire clan. The Akatsuki's hunt for the tailed beasts had claimed jinchuriki and their protectors across the elemental nations. And the Fourth Shinobi War...
He stopped counting when he reached ten thousand. Not because the number stopped climbing, but because his mind simply couldn't process the magnitude of what he had done. Each digit represented dozens of lives cut short, families destroyed, futures that would never come to pass.
How did someone carry that weight? How did anyone continue existing with the knowledge that their choices had caused such suffering?
The rational part of his mind, the part that had once been capable of strategic thinking and long-term planning, suggested that dwelling on individual casualties was counterproductive. The dead were dead. Guilt served no purpose except to paralyze. If he truly wanted to atone, he should focus on the future rather than the past.
But the boy he had once been, the one who had cried for Rin and dreamed of protecting his precious people, that boy recoiled from such cold calculation. That boy demanded that he remember, that he face each ghost that came to visit, that he acknowledge the full scope of his crimes without the comfortable distance of statistics.
On the fifth night, as he lay staring into darkness thick with the presence of the dead, Obito finally understood something that had eluded him during all his years of planning and manipulation: the true meaning of hell.
Hell wasn't a place of fire and demons, wasn't some supernatural punishment waiting in an afterlife he wasn't sure he believed in. Hell was this—being forced to exist with perfect clarity about what you had done, unable to forget or rationalize or escape into comfortable delusions.
Hell was being alive when everyone who should have lived was dead.
A sound from outside the tent made him turn his head. Footsteps, careful and deliberate, approaching through the predawn darkness. For a moment, he wondered if the medic-nin had noticed his sleeplessness and come to check on him. But the pattern was wrong—too heavy for Yuki, too purposeful for a routine patrol.
The tent flap moved aside to admit a figure he recognized immediately, despite the darkness.
Kakashi.
His former teammate looked as tired as Obito felt, grey hair disheveled and his visible eye shadowed with exhaustion. He moved with the careful quiet of someone accustomed to moving through hostile territory, though whether he considered this tent enemy ground or simply neutral territory was unclear.
"Can't sleep either?" Kakashi asked, settling into the chair beside Obito's bed without invitation.
Obito considered lying, considered maintaining the facade that he was coping better than he was. But what was the point? They were past the time for comfortable deceptions.
"They come at night," he said simply. "The dead."
Kakashi nodded as if this was the most natural thing in the world. "They always do."
For a long moment, they sat in silence, two broken men sharing the weight of different but equally crushing guilts. Kakashi carried the deaths of those he had failed to save. Obito carried the deaths of those he had chosen to kill. Both were haunted by the same fundamental question: what did you do when the weight of the past made the present unbearable?
"How do you stand it?" Obito asked finally.
"Some days I don't," Kakashi admitted. "Some days I wonder if the dead wouldn't be better served by me joining them."
It was perhaps the most honest thing anyone had said to him since he had awakened in this tent. Not reassurance or condemnation, but simple acknowledgment of a shared burden.
"But then morning comes," Kakashi continued, "and there are still people who need protecting. Still missions to complete. Still a future that needs building."
"Even when you don't deserve to be part of it?"
"Especially then."
Outside, the first hints of dawn were beginning to lighten the sky. Soon the camp would wake, and the day would bring new challenges, new questions, new reminders of what he had done and what he had failed to prevent. But for now, in the grey space between night and morning, two ghosts of Team Minato sat together and shared the burden of surviving when they shouldn't have.
It wasn't forgiveness. It wasn't redemption. It wasn't even comfort, exactly.
But it was something. A beginning, perhaps, of learning to live with the weight of the dead without letting it crush what remained of the living.
As the sun rose, the ghosts began to fade. They would return the next night, and the night after that, and every night for the rest of his life. But now Obito knew he wouldn't face them alone.
It was a small thing, barely worth noting in the grand scheme of his crimes and the long road ahead.
But it was enough to make him want to see another dawn.