Three days after the verdict, they moved him to civilian quarters.
The apartment was small and spartanly furnished—a single room with a bed, desk, chair, and washbasin. The window was barred and faced an inner courtyard rather than the village proper, but it let in natural light and fresh air, luxuries he hadn't fully appreciated during his time in the medical facility. More importantly, it represented something he had never expected to have again: a place to exist in the world of the living.
His escort was a chunin named Yamato, whose wood-style abilities made him uniquely suited for containment duties. The man was professional but not unkind, explaining the rules and restrictions with the patient thoroughness of someone accustomed to dealing with dangerous individuals who might not remain dangerous forever.
"You'll have a two-hour supervised walk each day," Yamato explained, checking the seals on the window one final time. "Different routes, different times, to prevent patterns from forming. A guard will accompany you at all times—sometimes me, sometimes others, depending on schedules."
Obito nodded, trying to process the concept of scheduled freedom. For so many years, he had moved through the world like a shadow, appearing and disappearing at will, traveling between dimensions as easily as walking through a doorway. The idea of supervised walks on predetermined routes felt surreal.
"The villagers know you're here," Yamato continued. "There was an announcement yesterday, explaining the terms of your sentence. Most people are... curious rather than hostile, but there will be reactions. How you handle those reactions will determine how much freedom you're eventually granted."
The first walk came that afternoon.
Stepping out of the building felt like surfacing from deep water—the sudden assault of stimuli almost overwhelming after days of confined spaces and controlled environments. Sunlight on his face, the smell of cooking food and blooming flowers, the distant sound of children playing. The ordinary sensory landscape of a peaceful village, the kind of place he had once sought to protect and later sought to destroy.
Yamato walked beside him, close enough to intervene if necessary but far enough away to avoid the appearance of a prisoner being led in chains. It was a careful balance between security and dignity, though Obito suspected the dignity was more for the benefit of observers than for him.
The first person to notice them was an elderly woman hanging laundry in her garden. She looked up at the sound of footsteps, her expression shifting from casual curiosity to shock as she recognized his face. The wet sheet she had been holding dropped back into the basket as she took an involuntary step backward.
Obito felt the impact of her fear like a physical blow. This woman had probably lived through the Kyuubi attack, had maybe lost friends or family to the Nine-Tails' rampage. She was looking at the face of the man responsible for one of the darkest nights in Konoha's history, and her terror was completely justified.
He looked away, unable to bear the weight of her gaze, but the damage was already done. Word would spread quickly now—the war criminal was walking the streets, breathing the same air as decent people, existing in spaces where children played and families felt safe.
"Keep walking," Yamato murmured, though not unkindly. "Don't dwell on individual reactions."
But how could he not? Each face they passed registered some combination of recognition, fear, anger, or morbid curiosity. A group of genin stopped their training to stare, their sensei quickly ushering them away with sharp words about minding their own business. A merchant closed his shop's shutters despite the afternoon hour. A mother pulled her child closer, whispering urgently in his ear about staying away from strangers.
The worst were the ones who stared without flinching. These were the people who had lost someone to the war, whose grief had crystallized into cold hatred. They looked at him with the kind of calculating anger that measured the distance between his throat and their kunai, weighing the satisfaction of revenge against the consequences of action.
"I should go back," Obito said quietly. "This isn't fair to them."
"Fair to who?" Yamato asked. "The villagers? They have a right to know who's living among them. You hiding away doesn't change that."
"It would be easier—"
"Easier for you, maybe. But part of this process is learning to exist in the world you helped break. That means dealing with the consequences of your actions, including how people react to your presence."
The logic was sound but felt cruel. Every stare was a reminder of what he had done, every flinch a fresh wound in his already battered conscience. He had known intellectually that people would fear and hate him, but experiencing it firsthand was different. It was being confronted with the human cost of his choices in the most immediate possible way.
They turned a corner and nearly collided with a young couple pushing a baby carriage. The woman looked up with a smile that died instantly when she recognized Obito's face. Her husband stepped protectively in front of the carriage, his hand moving instinctively toward the kunai pouch at his belt.
"It's alright," Yamato said quickly, his voice carrying the authority of his position. "This is an authorized patrol. Please continue with your day."
But the damage was done. The couple hurried away, the woman glancing back repeatedly as if afraid Obito might follow. Their infant, blissfully unaware of the tension, gurgled happily from the safety of the carriage.
"They have a baby," Obito said, his voice hollow. "They looked at me and thought about their baby."
"Yes," Yamato confirmed. "They did."
"I tried to kill a baby once. The Fourth Hokage's son. I would have killed him to get to the Nine-Tails if I'd had the chance."
"I know."
The simple acknowledgment was somehow worse than anger or disgust would have been. Yamato's matter-of-fact acceptance of this truth forced Obito to confront it without the buffer of defensive reactions or justifications.
They completed the circuit in relative silence after that, though Obito was intensely aware of every person they passed. The baker who clutched his rolling pin a little too tightly. The academy students who whispered among themselves, their eyes wide with the kind of morbid fascination children showed for dangerous things. The retired shinobi who tracked their movement with the predatory awareness of someone calculating threat levels and response times.
By the time they returned to his apartment, Obito felt emotionally flayed. The simple act of walking through his former village had been more exhausting than any battle he could remember. At least in combat, the hatred was clean and immediate. This was something more complex—a mixture of fear, anger, curiosity, and disgust that followed him like a miasma.
"How often do they do this?" he asked as Yamato checked the seals on his door.
"Every day," Yamato replied. "Eventually, people will get used to seeing you. The shock will wear off, the fear will diminish. But it takes time."
"How much time?"
"That depends on you. On whether you give them reasons to trust you or reasons to fear you more."
That night, alone in his small room, Obito sat by the barred window and looked out at the village lights. Somewhere out there, families were sitting down to dinner, children were being tucked into bed, couples were sharing quiet moments before sleep. Normal life continuing in the wake of extraordinary trauma, people rebuilding their sense of safety one ordinary day at a time.
He was part of this place now, whether anyone liked it or not. Not a shadow moving through dimensions, not a masked figure manipulating events from the darkness, but a man with a face and a name and a terrible history, trying to figure out how to exist in the light.
The weight of their stares would fade with time, Yamato had said. But Obito suspected something else would take its place—the even heavier burden of earning the right to be seen as something other than a monster.
It was a burden he had chosen to carry, but that didn't make it any lighter.
As he lay down to sleep, Obito found himself making a silent promise to the faces he had seen that day. He would find a way to deserve their tolerance, even if he could never earn their forgiveness. He would prove that Naruto's faith and the village leaders' mercy hadn't been misplaced.
It would take time. It would take patience. It would take becoming someone worthy of existing among the living.
But for the first time since awakening in that medical tent, Obito thought it might be possible.