FicWad

It was almost like deja vu, Kabuto thought absently as he bore Hinata Hyuuga back towards Otogakure with him, her body a soft cold weight in his arms. Another time, years and another lifetime ago, when he had carried a badly wounded kunoichi away for healing, only to leave her behind on the stadium's stone floor when duty called.

/This time, however, the story ends a little differently/, he decided, and bit back his grin.

The rain had stopped some time ago and a few rays of pale light were attempting to touch the earth before they vanished with the setting sun. One lit and silvered the fence surrounding Otogakure's latest incarnation, an ancient abbey left abandoned to the elements countless years back, a building half fallen into piles of crumbling mortar and twisted vegetation and surrounded thickly by trees.

The guards on duty waved them though as they passed; in the distance, Kabuto could see Yamada was waiting for them at the entrance to the medical wing, his bony shoulders slouched against the wooden frame of the door. Face screwed up into a tremendous frown, he alternated between checking his watch, picking at his cuticles and running a finger over the newly erupting spots that blanketed his cheeks.

"We're late, I know," Kabuto said, making Yamada jump and curse with the sudden realization he had company. "Sorry about that: I found quite a surprise laying in wait for me in the trees and took longer than I thought."

Yamada shook his head, sending his lank hair flying, and muttered something Kabuto couldn't quite catch as he held his hands out for Hinata: then he saw the forehead protector still hanging round her neck and dropped his hands.

"I wouldn't have let you take her anyway," Kabuto told him pleasantly. "And the next time I catch you off your guard, you can do night soil duty with Samenari-kun. Age is no excuse for stupidity."

"Huh," Yamada said, with a shrug and an expression that hovered on the brink of utter indifference, and Kabuto wondered again where a thirteen year old ninja of no particular talent got his attitude from. Yamada made such a show of being utterly incompetent that Kabuto had moved him to the medical service where he could keep an eye on him, and quietly had him watched while he was off-duty as well, the memory of another ninja who had suppressed his considerable talents to present the face of a failure to the world uppermost in his mind.

Now he watched the younger boy study Hinata, his lips pursed. "A Leaf-nin, sir?" Yamada's clan had borne some unspecified but deeply felt grudge against Konoha, and the teenager's face lit with a sullen joy every time they brought back a Leaf as prisoner, his expression all but begging that he be allowed to help with the experiments; Kabuto continually disappointed him by insisting that he keep to his role as orderly instead. "Please tell me she's meant for the new experiment."

"She is not," he replied blandly, and smugly watched the gleam vanish from Yamada's eyes. "She's a very special research subject, but she's also badly wounded and in need of immediate care. I need you," he said, slipping the keys for the building out of his pouch, "to go open room one for me, get my other bag of supplies out of room six, and find a robe or something for her to wear. She can't stay in these filthy clothes."

Yamada took the keys with limp fingers, snarled something under his breath that sounded like "fine, fine," and began to walk away.

"Oh, and Yamada-kun?"

He waited until the teenager had turned around to smile at him, the slow, wide smile that instantly caused gazes to drop and people near him to find excuses to be elsewhere. For all his posturing, Yamada-kun was no exception: the boy's eyes widened until he could see all around the black ring of his irises.

"No one touches her, except for me. No one goes near her, except for me, or Lord Orochimaru, should he deem her worthy of his interest. No "accidents", no poisons, no mysterious seizures. Disobey and you'll watch the next set of experiments from the vantage point of the dissection table. The same goes for anyone else in this compound. Am I perfectly clear?" He'd already lost a number of very promising test subjects because some idiots had decided that settling their petty scores was more important than their service to Lord Orochimaru, forcing him to implement extreme measures to keep future incidents from taking place.

As for the ones who had already sinned, Orochimaru cared little about what actually went on during the experiments he did not personally supervise, trusting that Kabuto would produce the results he expected and wanted, whatever the means.

One pair of hands was as good as another, after all.




Room One sat open and waiting when he finally stepped inside, everything exactly as he had asked. The robe Yamada had brought was spread out over the bed, but he put Hinata down carefully on the floor instead and bent to check first the bed, then the robe, running a hand over the bedding, rubbing the material of the robe roughly between his fingers to check for ground-in powders and searching carefully around the seams, eyes open for anything sharp or bright. He found nothing but plain bedding and heavy cotton and so reset everything on the bed, murmured "Good boy," and turned his attention back to Hinata Hyuuga.

The Hyuuga Heir was a sorry-looking sight indeed, sprawled limply on the floor with limbs askew in all directions, paler than rice paper, her clothes clotted with mud and blood, and a thousand twigs snarled in her hair. Her lips were still slightly blue. He took her pulse again, shook his head, sent her deeper into the coma.

With Hinata safely unconscious, he could began the real work. Checking his medical bag to make sure the that ink and brushes were packed inside for any seals he might need to draw, he slipped a arm under her back and lifted her just enough that he could remove her thick overcoat, made heavier by the rain and mud that had soaked and settled into it. Tossing it aside for later burning, he started to pick apart the water-swollen knot of her forehead protector, cursing softly when the fabric refused to yield to his quick fingers. He settled instead for slicing it apart with a spare scalpel, and dropped it into his medical bag, where it sank with a soft clunk among the rest of his instruments.

The spot where Togito's attack had hit home now lay bare, a whorl of red and black shouting out from her waxen skin. Kabuto touched the puncture wound delicately, then lifted his hand, sketching the lines from the poison in the air above her throat. Tricky, tricky thing. As awful looking as that wound is, it doesn't even begin to approximate the internal damage. And if the poison's settled in her eyes... He snorted, very softly. You have a horrible tendency towards serious injury, Miss Hyuuga. Lucky, isn't it, that I'm alway there to catch you when you fall?

He had just removed her boots when he remembered that he hadn't put out water for cleaning the surface dirt off her body and felt a small pulse of annoyance shoot through him at the lapse. It took a moment of searching the storage closets in the room before he found a wide, heavy bowl and a few rags that would do; he filled it from the tap in the bathroom, laid it out by the bed and resumed stripping away her filthy clothing.

Her inner layers were remarkably dry, save for where the rain had managed to get in under her collar and hem and mostly free from the mud that had coated her on the outside, but her body still bore the marks of Togito's attacks: scattered plum-colored bruises, cuts and scrapes. Several areas were sticky with blood and tried to take her skin along with the cloth when he attempted to remove it from her body, but a few passes with a water-soaked rag took care of that little difficulty..

A bath for her, he thought, as soon as possible.

Putting the dirtied rag aside, he reached for a clean one and wiped the blood off her right hand, rinsing until the water ran clear, then took it--even if one of his credos was Never underestimate your opponent/, so small to cause such gruesome damage; Oboro had been left in chunks, not a single section bigger than a loaf of bread--in his own and bent her palm upward, uncurling her fingers. He saw blackened skin at the tips, fading down to fierce red streaks that ran the length of her fingers , a cloud of tiny blisters on her palm; everything, in short, that he had expected to see. /Chakra burns. She couldn't control it well enough and it partially rebounded on her. My, my, Miss Hyuuga. In the future, you'll have to be more careful.

"Though, I suppose I can't really fault you," he said out loud as he pulled the robe off the bed and arranged it over the floor so she could lay upon it, guiding her limp arms through the sleeves. "Life and death situation and all."

Once Hinata was arranged to his satisfaction, he settled himself in a comfortable position at her head, reached out, and lightly pressed his fingers against her temples. His eyes shut, he pushed tiny threads of his own chakra through her skin, felt it settle down into the paths that wound under his fingers. Chakra had a tendency to naturally pool in any place in the body that was damaged; with her own sealed away, his would slip into her system in its place, free to roam her body's pathways without interference, catching and snagging on anything that was unnatural or out of balance within.

He didn't wait long for results. The picture his chakra spun in his mind's eye was of lacy black strands of corruption tattooed against the healthy red of living tissue, studded here and there with chips of poison that lay glittering in her bloodstream like shards of green ice. It was just as he'd feared; the poison had concentrated itself above her throat, submerging itself in the blood-vessels of her skull and winding a path along through her optic nerves, poised to attack her brain once her heart beat freely again.

But what was this? Here and there a sharp yellow energy gleamed faintly among the poisonous green; dissipating chakra that didn't belong in her system. He knew that Hinata's chakra shone a cool lavender blue, his own a bright reddish shade, so someone else had mixed in their chakra as well. And only in the areas with the poison.

Well. Not only have I caught my poison thief, it took me all of two minutes to figure out your pet masterwork, Togito-kun. Bless that fool's luck of your while you can, because if the cold hadn't slowed down the advance of the poison, I'd be sawing off the top of your skull with a rusty scalpel right about now.

Unfortunately while the technique might have been simple and obvious, ridding her of its effects was going to be a much more complicated trick. He had antidotes, but they would have to be tailored to the poison's unique blend, which would take more time than he was comfortable spending. The other option were seals and using a healthy portion of his own chakra to bind the poison molecules and lift them out of her system; a long, slow, backbreaking process, but quicker then trying to reverse-engineer Togito's poison. Seals it was.

Stretching and cracking his fingers, he decided that he might as well check on any injuries she had below the neck while he had the chance, and pulled his chakra into his right hand. Brushing it lightly over her collarbone, he felt down both shoulders, then lifted her into a sitting position and ran his fingers down over her spine, tracing the muscles of her back. He found and noted a pulled muscle lower down on her right side, then carefully set her down again and laid both hands over her heart. Only by searching very closely could he find the tiny, almost non-existent traces of the damage he had healed for her three years ago; everything else seemed normal, aside from two broken ribs. Just for fun, he pushed lightly at her trapped chakra, testing it, and was rewarded with a surprise.

Despite appearances and despite all evidence to the contrary, Hinata Hyuuga had a much larger chakra capacity than he would have given her credit for. Which meant either his information was out of date (in his opinion, extremely unlikely; he just didn't make mistakes like that) or she wasn't able to completely utilize it to its full potential and so looked far weaker than she really was. His answer came after a little more prying: some of her chakra pathways seemed to be malformed in such a way that she couldn't have used her full capacity, even if she wanted to.

"Interesting," he pronounced and sat back on his heels, gazing thoughtfully at her. This is nothing more than educated guesswork of course; without something like the Byakugan, which makes all of the hidden paths visible and traceable, the best I can do is merely speculate as to the cause and the extent of the damage. However, there are only two things I know of that could permanently erode a person's chakra paths like that: severe early illness and/or chakra-related accidents...or deliberate mutilation.

Do they know? he thought, studying the pale curve of her cheek, her delicate face and tiny hands. Do they know and not care? Probably the latter. Power was power, and someone who didn't have it--even if it was through no fault of their own--was simply worthless in the world the Hyuuga moved in. Worthless too, in eyes of many ninja.

But worth and power came in many different forms, and it was never wise to set just one on a pedestal above the rest. Lives were so easily lost that way.

Two of the fingers on her left hand had been broken at some point and reset sloppily, in such a way that she'd lost a little functionality. He swallowed a sigh, re-broke and reset them so they would heal properly this time, then returned to her torso and moved down. Digestive organs, fine; reproductive organs normal, hips were both in line and undamaged from her fight. Her upper thighs were speckled with bruises and scrapes, but nothing major; reaching her left knee, he found a torn ligament and signs of blunt trauma to the kneecap, probably from the fall she'd apparently taken while fighting Togito. Hairline fracture of the tibia in her right calf. Tissue damage in both feet. All could wait.

Lifting her to the bed, he thought of the patterns he would need, the seals for stability and healing, countersigns against poison, blindness, pain. Once she had been settled in, he reached for his brush and ink, bent and moved all the things on the floor up to higher places, and began to draw.





Kabuto had just finished painting the seals on Hinata when he felt something cold just touch his face: the flicker of Orochimaru's presence moving towards him slowly. He shook his head in wry amusement as he brushed a final character into place on her collarbone, fighting down a touch of disgust as well. Right on time, half an hour early. You're very clever, my lord, but not quite good enough.

No matter how hard he tried to disguise it, to shove it down and project sly harmlessness, Orochimaru could never fully suppress the aura that hovered around him like a palpable shadow, touching everything he passed with a chilly darkness that seemed to sap away life. For some reason (and in certain moods), Orochimaru seemed to make a game out of this suppression of self, and would try to slip up on Kabuto unnoticed at every opportunity. It had never once worked.

As if I didn't spend hours wallowing in his presence, or imbue myself with every detail, every piece of knowledge about himself and his body. Honestly.

He sat back on his heels for a moment, admiring his work. Across the floor ran tight black spirals that swung out like furled petals from the center where Hinata lay, daubed so thickly with ink that only tiny patches of her white skin showed through, scattered stars in a midnight sky. He'd even painted her eyelids and the shell of her ears with tiny graphs, leaving no place uncovered, nothing to chance. Something about the way she looked, lying there in rigid serenity with her white robes and blackened skin, reminded him of a picture he'd seen once in a book, an old woodcut illustration depicting a sacred temple virgin lying stiffly before a priest after a ritual exorcism. He chuckled low in his throat at the thought, and removed a bit of twig that still clung to her hair. It was ruining the effect.

The cold in the room deepened, despite the efforts of the coal brazier in the corner: Orochimaru was drawing closer by the second. With one hand, Kabuto re-wet his brush in the dish of ink; with the other, he tugged the neckline of her robe together to make it a little more modest, careful not to smear his seals. By the time Orochimaru actually opened the door to the room, Kabuto was already starting to back out through the clear path he'd left himself in the pattern, filling in the breaks as he moved away.

"Don't come any closer, my lord," he said without bothering to turn around or lift his head. "You'll smear the mandala. The ink's not quite dry."

To his well- hidden relief, Orochimaru simply made a noncommittal "hn" in response, and stayed where he was. That meant he was in a good mood, he mused silently as he finished up the remaining characters; Sasuke-kun must have been performing very well today. If the fancy struck him, Orochimaru was perfectly willing and able (and had in the past) to destroy things he considered trivial merely for the fun of watching them break and hang the consequences, all in the name of the chaos he held so dear. After all, it wasn't his personal research that was being meddled with and loyal Kabuto would always step in and silently restore matters to the way they were each and every time.

It really was, Kabuto thought sourly, a very tiresome and inefficient way of doing things.

"So," Orochimaru rasped after a short silence. "Yamada-kun told me a great thing had happened, drawing all your attention, but all I see is a pathetic little girl lying like a corpse before me."

"Not a pathetic little girl, my lord," Kabuto corrected gently, with a smile. "A pathetic little Hyuuga." He turned to face Orochimaru and let his grin fill out and deepen. "And not only a Hyuuga, but the Hyuuga. Lady Hinata, the current heir. It's remarkable. Almost a miracle."

"Hyuuga?" Orochimaru repeated, finally beginning to show a touch of interest. "Oh, yes, the Byakugan. Arrogant trash, worthless save for their carefully hoarded bloodline limit." He frowned suddenly, as if brushed by an unpleasant thought. "My dear boy, this is all very well, but with Sasuke-kun and his Sharingan ripening so beautifully on the horizon, I hardly need another eye-based bloodline limit at the moment." His frown changed into an amused, tolerant smile. "After all, I'm not going to abandon my precious Uchiha-in-waiting for that miserable stick of a girl, Heir or not. She looks as if a strong wind would break her."

"Well, she endures yet. Besides, if you truly wish to learn every jutsu in the world, you'll need the Byakugan at some point, my lord," Kabuto reminded him as he stepped outside and placed a hand on the door to draw it shut behind him. He snatched one last glimpse at Hinata, but she remained the unmoving center of her black and white world as the door swung shut before his eyes. "The Sharingan may be able to copy the Kaiten to an extent, but you'll need the Byakugan to successfully utilize the Gentle Fist style and any other hidden Main House techniques; I've heard rumors that there are quite a few. Unsealed Hyuuga don't grow on trees, my lord. I can't emphasize it enough, but this is a rare opportunity that should not be squandered."

"So you say," Orochimaru replied, which in Orochimaru-speak typically meant /I'll agree for now/, and tilted his head in such a way that strands of his long black hair fell against Kabuto's arms. When he failed to move away, Orochimaru rolled his eyes skyward and smiled faintly. "But then again, you've always been so very interested in people with bloodline limits, almost obsessed in a way, haven't you, dear Kabuto? I suppose I can indulge you, since it will benefit me in the end anyway."

Kabuto sighed, partly from real sorrow. "One of my true regrets is that Kimimaro fell ill before I could really start to study his bloodline, and now the Kaguya are extinct," he murmured, setting the lock on the door with his own chakra to dissuade the curious and the vengeful, like Yamada. Just to be absolutely certain, he fetched a roll of paper usually meant for scrolls, laid it out in strips against the doorway, then signed his name across the pristine surface with a flourish, mute warning that the contents of the room belonged to him and him alone. This done, he turned to Orochimaru. "Would you care to join me for some lunch, my lord? Nothing fancy, I'm afraid," he added, as if Orochimaru wasn't on a special, strictly-controlled and scheduled diet supervised and prepared entirely by himself. A snack probably wouldn't hurt though, he decided. "I usually just make some noodles."

"You're leaving her all alone now, after all that work? Heartless Kabuto."

He shrugged a little, as if Hinata Hyuuga meant less to him then the noodles. "I can't work on an empty stomach, especially when I'm going to be using huge amounts of chakra on her later. It won't matter if I leave her for a while; she's literally in a sleep on the edge of death and won't rouse until I wake her. The poison is in suspension along with her body. It can't do any further damage at this time."

So I think.




"By the way," he added as they walked to the little kitchen that only he, Orochimaru and Sasuke had access to, "there's another reason to be grateful to that girl. Without her, we wouldn't have learned that someone's been developing jutsu in secret."

He noted the way Orochimaru went rigid at these casual words with a twinge of pleasure: it was exactly the reaction he'd calculated his sentence to produce. It was one of the few hard-and-fast rules in Otogakure that anyone who managed to develop an original jutsu had to immediately bring it to Orochimaru's or Kabuto's notice, so that their lord might claim it for his own. Anyone who deviated from this edict would be swiftly and hideously punished. Though, that never stopped some from trying to bend the rules, convinced that they and they alone were brilliant and stealthy enough to hide from Orochimaru's gaze. The lure of being that "one" had really ruined a lot of otherwise promising Sound nin, he thought. Not that he really cared.

"Who?" Orochimaru finally snapped. "How?"

"Togito-kun," he admitted, unlocking the kitchen door. "It was rather clever, really; he found a way to somehow encase a poison of his own blending in a sort of chakra-shell. Injected into the victim, it could lay dormant for weeks, months, maybe even years if he so chose, until he snapped the shell and let the poison flood the victim. Double damage from both the chakra and the poison, potentially. A nice little trick for assassination."

"I'll kill him myself."

"Don't just yet," Kabuto admonished, taking down the bowls and pots needed to cook and setting them out on the counter. "Remember how I told you that some of the poisons from the general cabinet had been going missing these last few months? We now have both our culprit and a list of the poisons he took for his blend. An evidence trail so blatant a blind man could follow it. However," he added as he lit the stove and put water on for the noodles and into the kettle for tea, "if he was really clever, he would have taken from the ones he didn't use, just to throw me off track." Orochimaru still looked murderously unconvinced, so Kabuto hastened to add: "I'm sure I can reconstitute the poison from whatever samples I can pull out of Lady Hinata, but it may take too much time, and frankly, I have better things to do--" The kettle let out its cricket whine, interrupting, and he lifted it off the flame.

"I'll get the information out of him," he finished, and slanted his eyes at Orochimaru knowingly as he poured the bubbling water over the pale brown tea powder in his cup. "You needn't trouble yourself about it."

Orochimaru unbent enough to laugh as Kabuto placed the bowl of noodles in front of him before serving himself, languidly propping his chin on one hand. "Whatever would I do without you, my precious boy?"

Died a few times over by now, probably, Kabuto thought, and took up his chopsticks.

His lunch companion toyed with his own bowl of food while Kabuto ate steadily, leaving the tea aside to cool. Occasionally, he would take a tiny bite of the food before ignoring it for long stretches of time where he did nothing more than stare across the table at Kabuto, who was long accustomed to this type of scrutiny and paid it no mind. Finishing his noodles and placing the empty bowl aside, Kabuto took out his info cards--still a vital resource for him--and shuffled around for the section on the Hyuuga.

"What are you doing?" Orochimaru asked with a raised brow. "Fiddling with your cards again?"

"Refreshing my knowledge on the Hyuuga girl," he replied, as if he hadn't committed every detail about her to memory long ago. "Did you deal much with the Hyuuga when you were in Konoha, my lord?"

Orochimaru's expression darkened immediately at the simple question. "Only with that wretched Hinako," he growled, naming Hinata's almost legendary great-grandmother. "Despite her age and decrepitude, that did not prevent her from meddling in my affairs. Always asking awkward questions. Never showing the proper fear and respect a hag of her advanced years should have shown. In short, she was...a nuisance."

Meaning that she actually gave him some trouble, Kabuto translated, and nodded with just the right degree of understanding. "Well, Lady Hinata is nothing like the woman she was almost undoubtedly named for. Pity. I suppose they were hoping for another Hinako, but instead they got one of the weakest Hyuuga in the clan's history." His voice and smile held just a touch of smug superiority. "It's funny, in a way. The Hyuuga seem to have some genetic quirk that ensures they almost always bear male children first, yet on the rare occasions a female is born first, they're always very formidable: Lady Hinako and her sister before her, for example. And then Lady Hinata comes along and ruins the system, " he said, and sighed lightly, playing at sorrow. "Poor things. It almost makes me feel sorry for them."

"Weak, is she?" Orochimaru murmured, in a way that would have suggested to most people that he hadn't really been listening to anything Kabuto had just said. "Are you certain?"

"As the sky is blue, my lord."

That brought him a smirk and a short hiss of laughter. "The sky is quite capable of changing its hue, my dear. Perhaps," he added in the silky tone that came forth whenever he was couching orders as suggestions, "you should torture her, just to make sure. /Never underestimate/. Isn't that what you always say?"

One by one, Kabuto slipped cards free and laid them out in a neat box on the table in front of him, temporarily ignoring the remark. Hinako Hyuuga. Her son Hiraki, architect of his twin sons' tragedy. The twins Eiko and Aiko, Hiashi Hyuuga's aunts, exempt from the fate that had befallen him and his twin because they'd had the good luck to be born after the Heir. Their younger brothers Hiyoshi and Hiyashi. Setsuna, technically Hiashi's aunt but nearly the same age, product of her father's late second marriage; the family medic and a very frightening lady. Hiashi himself and his two dead brothers, Hizashi and Hiroshi. His younger sister Reiko, gone to the Branch House to be with her children, worthless now. Neji Hyuuga's solemnly angry face. Hanabi Hyuuga' small round one, blank as the moon. Hinata. He placed a finger on this last card and drew it towards him.

"Waste of time and effort, my lord," he finally replied with a decisive shake of his head. "Unless she misbehaves, I have no reason to torture her. I need her intact physically in order to successfully conduct my research; that should be obvious."

A twitch developed in Orochimaru's smooth white face; dispassionately, Kabuto watched it jump. "Do you think me stupid? I wasn't merely thinking of physical torture; you don't need her sanity intact to experiment on her, now do you? A little mental pressure, applied skillfully, should make her very sweetly complaisant."

The idea that Hinata Hyuuga had ever been anything other than sweetly complaisant startled a laugh out of him, but he quickly subdued the reaction down into a more neutral and controllable smile."My lord, I'm sorry to have to disagree again, but allow me to explain why that wouldn't work either."

With a raised finger, he began to tick off the reasons. "First off, psychotic people are also dangerously unpredictable people, and I am neither stupid enough nor smug enough to put myself in a situation where Hinata Hyuuga could potentially become a threat to me. That, and I don't need yet another thing to worry about on top of all the other matters I have to contend with. Secondly, she might be physically frail, but I strongly suspect that mentally breaking her would take more work than I'm willing to put in right now." He tapped her card and lifted his eyes to Orochimaru's glittering golden ones, utterly serious for once. "When you have someone whose father was emotionally abusive towards her for nearly all of her short life, culminating in him saying--to her face and in front of others--that her entire family would be better off if she were dead--what more could you possibly do to her? Anything I could say to her, she's very likely heard it all before. At home."

Not to mention that anyone who suffered through that kind of home atmosphere and yet still retained a gentle disposition, loving heart and enough mental strength to continue to push herself forward despite being judged as worthless by nearly everyone around her was someone with a inner fortitude made of solid steel, or perhaps diamond. There were ways she could be gotten to, namely through her friends and family, but she wasn't here for that and Kabuto had enough to do already without indulging Orochimaru's whims for destruction, /just because/.

Someday he'd spend a nice, long, slow time probing for the source of Hinata's inner strength, but not right now. "Besides, I don't think you quite grasp what an asset she might be to our experiments. Physically, her weakness just makes her even more perfect for my research. It's like starting from point zero, building from the ground level up. Not only that, the Byakugan can be used for so many other things: chakra research, tracking--"

He was starting to babble, he realized with a twinge of alarm, and took a drink of tea to try and cover the break in his sentence. It was still too hot and he coughed violently, running his tongue against the burnt spot on his lip. Damnit.

The Sannin's lips twisted up into an arch smile, earlier storms forgotten as he drank in Kabuto's unusual display of emotion; silently Kabuto cursed himself. He really should have known better: Orochimaru savored any moment that Kabuto's mask slipped even slightly. But at least it would distract him from the subject of torture, he thought, and if he played things right, Orochimaru might decide the whole exchange was merely one of his games anyway. "Why, my darling Kabuto, I haven't seen you this animated since I got you that new scalpel set. In fact, I might even call you...excited." Now carefully blank-faced, Kabuto merely nodded in response and blew gently on his tea to cool it; a rather gauche move, but Orochimaru was hardly someone for whom the term class had any meaning.

"I'll admit, your behavior has given me concern a time or two," his lord and master continued sedately. "You don't drink, you don't wench (or chase the boys) and aside from the occasional test foray or soldier pill, you don't even seek relief through drugs. Work, work, work, and no play. It was almost...worrisome. But I see now my worries were all for naught." He sighed theatrically, the low sound of a lover scorned. "I suppose there comes a time in every young man's life when he finds himself yearning for an underling of his own; it was bound to happen sooner or later." He paused to judge the effect of his words on his audience; getting nothing but a smile in response, he then added casually, "You may sleep with her, if you like," as if the matter was entirely in his power to decide.

Oh, as if I'd give you that much of an opening to work with, my lord. Out loud he said, "You know the reason behind my reticence as well as I do, my lord: it scarcely needs to be talked of. As for the girl, well, my research comes first, before anything else. And to be honest, she really isn't my type."

Orochimaru smiled slowly in reply, the tip of his tongue just wetting his lower lip, then stood up and reached out for him. His cool hand brushed Kabuto's cheek with a touch that was probably meant to be affectionate: he sat and smiled and endured it. "You look almost saintly when you lie, Kabuto, but that's only because you do it so well. Though, if she's trouble," the older man continued coolly, all tenderness gone, "I expect her to be dealt with as strictly as anyone else, precious research subject or no. I'm allowing you this license Kabuto. Don't disappoint or fail me. If she becomes a liability, you'll destroy her with your own hands."

Kabuto ran his fingers along the edge of Hinata's card, then held it up in front of him, considering what needed to be updated, what needed to stay. "I plan on wringing every last drop of worth out of her that I can," he said softly. "You have no idea what use she can be to us."

And maybe, just maybe/, he thought to himself as Orochimaru left the room, /I'll finally have someone to talk to around here who isn't a raving lunatic.