The Hayashi family lived in a modest house on the eastern edge of the village, close enough to the main shopping district to be convenient but far enough from the center to be affordable. Obito had studied their address for three days before working up the courage to make the walk, and even now, standing at their front gate, he wasn't sure he was ready for what was about to happen.
Kenji Hayashi had been nineteen when he died during Pain's assault on Konoha. A chunin with dreams of making jonin before his twenty-first birthday, known for his skill with earth-style jutsu and his habit of bringing flowers to his girlfriend every Friday. He had been defending a group of civilians when Deva Path's Shinra Tensei had caught him in its destructive radius, his body found later in the rubble of what had once been a residential block.
His parents had responded to Obito's letter with a single line: If you want to apologize in person, we'll hear what you have to say.
Not forgiveness. Not even acceptance. Just a willingness to listen, which was more than he deserved and possibly more than he could handle.
Yamato stood beside him at the gate, close enough to intervene if things went badly but far enough away to give the illusion of privacy. They had discussed the possibility that this encounter might turn violent—the Hayashi family had every right to their rage, and Obito had no intention of defending himself if they chose to express it physically.
"You sure about this?" Yamato asked quietly.
"No," Obito replied. "But I need to do it anyway."
The front door opened before he could knock, revealing a woman in her fifties with graying hair and tired eyes. She studied his face for a long moment, her expression unreadable, then stepped aside to let him enter.
"Mrs. Hayashi," he said, bowing deeply. "Thank you for agreeing to see me."
She didn't respond immediately, leading him through a small hallway lined with family photographs. Obito caught glimpses of Kenji at various ages—a gap-toothed child, a serious-looking academy student, a young man in his chunin vest smiling beside his girlfriend. A life documented in images, a future that had been cut short.
The living room was simple but warm, furnished with well-worn pieces that spoke of a family that valued comfort over appearances. Mr. Hayashi sat in an armchair by the window, his face bearing the kind of weathered dignity that came from a lifetime of hard work and honest living. He didn't stand when Obito entered, didn't offer greetings or pleasantries. He simply watched, waiting.
"Please sit," Mrs. Hayashi said, gesturing to a couch across from her husband's chair. Her voice was carefully controlled, neither warm nor hostile. Professional, as if she were conducting a business meeting rather than confronting her son's killer.
Obito sat carefully, his hands folded in his lap to keep them from shaking. The silence stretched between them like a chasm, filled with everything that couldn't be said and everything that had to be.
"You look smaller than I expected," Mr. Hayashi said finally. His voice was gravelly, roughened by years of construction work and recent grief. "All this time, I've been imagining some kind of monster. But you just look like a man."
"I am just a man," Obito replied. "That's what makes it worse."
Mrs. Hayashi's composure cracked slightly at his words. "Don't," she said sharply. "Don't try to make us feel sorry for you. You don't get to be the victim here."
"You're right. I'm sorry."
"Stop apologizing!" The words burst out of her with volcanic force, months of suppressed rage finally finding release. "Do you think saying 'sorry' fixes anything? Do you think it brings our son back? Do you think it makes the nightmares stop or fills the empty space at our dinner table?"
Obito absorbed her anger without flinching, letting it wash over him like a tide he deserved to drown in. "No," he said quietly. "I don't think any of that. I know there's nothing I can say or do that will repair what I've broken."
"Then why are you here?" Mr. Hayashi asked. "What's the point of this visit if you know you can't fix anything?"
It was the question he had been dreading, because the honest answer sounded selfish even to him. Why was he here? Was this really about the Hayashi family's need for closure, or was it about his own need to be seen as someone trying to make amends?
"Because your son deserves to be more than a casualty report," he said finally. "Because Kenji Hayashi was a real person with a real life, and the man responsible for his death should have to acknowledge that. Should have to see what was lost."
"Tell us about him," Mrs. Hayashi said suddenly. "Tell us about our son. If you're so concerned with acknowledging who he was, prove it."
The demand caught him off guard. He had expected accusations, condemnations, perhaps physical violence. He hadn't expected to be asked to demonstrate knowledge about a stranger's child.
"I..." he started, then stopped. "I don't know anything about him beyond what's in the casualty reports. His rank, his assignment during the attack, the circumstances of his death."
"Then you don't know anything that matters," she said, her voice dripping with contempt. "You know statistics. You know data. You don't know that he wanted to open a flower shop after he retired from active duty. You don't know that he helped his grandmother with her garden every Sunday. You don't know that he was terrified of spiders but would still capture them gently and release them outside because he couldn't bear to kill anything unnecessarily."
Each detail hit him like a physical blow. This was what he had stolen from the world—not just a life, but a specific life, with specific dreams and fears and quirks that could never be replicated or replaced.
"You don't know that he was planning to propose to his girlfriend," Mr. Hayashi added quietly. "Had already bought the ring. Was waiting for the right moment, the right words. She still has it, you know. Refuses to return it to us. Says it belongs to her even if he never got the chance to give it to her properly."
"I'm sorry," Obito said, the words feeling ash in his mouth. "I'm so sorry."
"For what?" Mrs. Hayashi demanded. "For not knowing him? For reducing him to a number in your grand scheme? For taking away his future without bothering to understand what that future might have held?"
"For all of it. For everything."
She stood abruptly, pacing to the window where her husband sat. For a moment, Obito thought she might ask him to leave, might decide that this conversation was too painful to continue. Instead, she turned back to him with something that might have been desperate curiosity.
"Why?" she asked. "Why my son? Why anyone's son? What could possibly justify what you did?"
The question he had been asking himself for months, the one that had no satisfactory answer. How did you explain the logic of pain to people experiencing its consequences? How did you make ideology comprehensible to parents who just wanted their child back?
"I convinced myself that I was saving the world from suffering," he said slowly. "That the current system was fundamentally broken and that only complete destruction could pave the way for something better. I thought that temporary pain in service of permanent peace was justified."
"And now?"
"Now I think I was lying to myself. I think I was in pain and I wanted the world to hurt the way I was hurting, and I dressed up that selfishness in philosophy to make it seem noble."
Mr. Hayashi was quiet for a long time, studying Obito's face with the intensity of someone trying to solve a puzzle. When he spoke, his voice was thoughtful rather than angry.
"Do you have children?" he asked.
"No."
"Then you can't understand what you took from us. You can't comprehend the weight of loving someone from the moment they draw their first breath, of watching them grow and change and become themselves, of seeing infinite possibility in their future. And you can't understand what it means to have all of that ripped away by someone else's ideology."
"No," Obito agreed. "I can't."
"But you're trying to," Mrs. Hayashi said. It wasn't quite a question.
"Yes. I'm trying to understand. I'm trying to see each person who died as an individual rather than a casualty. I'm trying to feel the weight of what was lost."
"Good," she said, surprising him. "You should feel that weight. You should carry it for the rest of your life."
The conversation continued for another hour, painful and necessary and utterly without resolution. The Hayashi family told him about their son—his dreams, his fears, his relationship with his girlfriend, his plans for the future that would never come. They showed him photographs, shared memories, painted a picture of a young man who had been loved completely and lost too soon.
In return, Obito offered nothing but acknowledgment and apology. He didn't try to explain his actions or justify his choices. He simply listened, absorbed their pain, and accepted his role in causing it.
When it was time to leave, Mrs. Hayashi walked him to the door. Her husband remained in his chair by the window, staring out at a garden their son would never help tend again.
"This doesn't change anything," she said quietly. "You being here, apologizing, trying to understand—it doesn't bring him back. It doesn't make us hurt less. It doesn't earn you forgiveness."
"I know."
"But it's a start. A beginning. Not of forgiveness, but of... acknowledgment. Of seeing you as a person rather than a monster, which somehow makes it worse and better at the same time."
As Obito walked away from the house, Yamato falling into step beside him, he felt fundamentally changed by the encounter. Not healed—there was no healing from something like this—but altered. The weight of individual grief was different from the abstract guilt he had been carrying. Heavier, more specific, impossible to rationalize away.
"How do you feel?" Yamato asked.
"Like I'm beginning to understand what I actually did," Obito replied. "Like the real work is just starting."
That night, he wrote letters to seventeen more families, each one an invitation to a conversation he wasn't sure he was strong enough to handle. But strength, he was learning, wasn't the point.
The point was showing up anyway.