Uchiha Tobirama has always been rather unusually interested in religion, for a shinobi. It's not a practical thing, not something that'll help you win a fight, and shinobi often scoff at debates about ethics and the nature of the world and what path we're on... Even the superstitious ones favor shrines to spirits known to watch over their family.

She's always liked the rhythm of a monk's life. She'd escape to the small, single temple in Konoha, fleeing the shadow of her siblings, and she'd talk to the monks, there. (After everyone died, after Jakuan defected in Jakkou's wake, like their family hadn't been torn apart enough already... Well, she's not part of the order or anything, but the monks hadn't begrudged her a tendency to sleep on their grounds.)

So Uchiha Tobirama knows, as much as anyone can, what the Pure Land should be like.

It's peaceful. That's... Accurate. There's soft moss under her, and the air is cool and heavy with mist, and there's a stream running to her left, trickling down rocks to join a river whose gentle song could easily lull her to sleep. She thinks she hears a waterfall somewhere nearby. Something beautiful, surely, to explore when her wounds have healed.

(There's no marks on her projected body. No sign of the blows that killed her, the searing pain that ripped her apart - she'd expected it to be faster, she'd been a fool - )

 

Tobi sits with her knees pulled to her chest, her chin on her crossed arms, and stares down toward the river, gaze blank and expression dazed.

(The wounds on her soul are so much worse.)

 

You're not supposed to be alone in the Pure Land. Those who've gone before should meet you to lead you across the border. Sometimes one person, sometimes several, sometimes many. Even if you had no one in life - blood looks out for blood, and surely some ancestor or another will come. It isn't just the desperate hope of people scared of death; it's happened before that the monks have spoken to the dead, that the dead have been brought back to life. Rare. A thing of myths, she'd have said, if she hadn't seen the journals and records with her own eyes.

 

Tobi stares into the mist over the river, and not a single member of any family she's ever had the most tenuous claim to appears.