Death was supposed to be painless.

She thought it would be quick, a swift demise whether she was old and wrinkled or young and bloodied. That's the story her mother comforted her with when she cried in the face of death as a child.

But it hurt, it set alight every nerve in her body when the tendrils of Kakashi's chidori pierced the flesh of her chest. It hurt to look at him for a final time.

The pain did not ease after death. Her skin was icy against the burn of her chest, and the wound itched and throbbed with her every movement. And, gods, the revelation after her killing was nearly painful.

Knowing Obito was alive when she was not.

His body twisted like the trunk of a tree, face pulled into a snarl that was unlike anything she had seen of him before. And when he holds her body and cries, she cries with him, for him, for Kakashi. For their broken, bloodied team.

In the aftermath, she wanders the streets of Konoha.

She avoids seeing Kakashi, for watching him lost and alone makes her wound ache and alight with new pain. But she picks up word of him from the street. From Gai-kun and Kurenai-chan, they're worried.

She is too.

But she drifts, and she finds herself at the Uchiha manor one drizzly night.

The house is cold and his room colder, a thick layer of dust covers his belongings. She doesn't doubt that his grandmother hadn't touched the space in the years between her and Obito's deaths'.

On his desk sits several sheets of parchment, dusty and sprawled across his desk. She recognizes the familiar scrawl of his writing. It's thin and messy and several sentences are scribbled out, but it's eligible. She has to choke back tears as she begins to read.

Dear Rin, it starts, I've been meaning to tell you this awhile—

It continues, and she recognizes it as a love letter. But Obito has never been a master of words, his metaphors are awkward and his sentences stilted. He isn't much of a romantic, but his words are full of a passion that is wholly Obito's and it's genuine and sweet and that wound in her chest aches just a little bit more.

The letter is cut abruptly off by splotches of ink spilt across the parchment, it bleeds heavily onto the paper below.

And that's when she notices.

A loose team photo is laid under the letter. The ink has claimed the portrait below in its merciless conquest, it streaks across Obito's old genin photo until he is hardly recognizable beneath the bottomless black.

The gape just above her breast flares in pain, and it is all she can do to scrabble away.

Rin leaves the manor that night, and she does not return.