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Title: Made In His Image
Author: Evandar (yamievandar / hikarievandar)
Fandom: Naruto
Rating: R
Pairing: Eventual Sai/Orochimaru, mild hints of Naruto/Sakura
Genre: Friendship/Action/Romance
Warnings: Bizarre pseudo-science
Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto and I am making no profit from this story.
Summary: A mission to one of Orochimaru's abandoned laboratories reveals something that might give the Sannin a way to redeem themselves.
AN: This is based off a dream, which would probably explain why it's so damn weird. But believe me, it's less weird than it could have been.
The lab was dark. Sakura knew that that made sense: they were underground, after all, and the place was completely devoid of windows. What little light there was was coming from their torches since they weren’t about to trust the electrics in the underground lab of a dead madman. Well, Naruto had been about to until Kakashi had warned him away from the light switch.
All the same, Sakura wished that they had light that wasn’t torch light. The artificial yellow beams of their torches were sweeping over the shattered remains of giant glass tanks, illuminating the remains of unidentifiable, mutilated creatures that had been kept in them. As they walked, their feet splashed in puddles of cold, viscous fluid. Shivers ran up Sakura’s spine as she imagined – couldn’t quite stop herself from imagining – what the lab would have looked like when it was operational, with those creepy mutilated things floating in the liquid they were now stepping in.
The rest of the team were looking around curiously. When her torch briefly illuminated Yamato’s face, she saw that he was wearing a carefully neutral expression. She cringed inwardly. He had been one of Orochimaru’s experiments once. Had he been kept in a lab like this? Could he even remember?
Sakura tore her eyes away from him and swept the beam of her torch over the lab again. Something hiding in the shadows skittered through the liquid on the floor, making her shift uncomfortably. Rats. Probably large, glossy-coated rats that were living off the things Orochimaru had been keeping in the tanks. She shivered.
“Hey, do you think Sasuke did this?” Naruto asked, his voice – even though he was being pretty quiet by usual Naruto standards – sounded unnaturally loud.
Sakura shrugged. “He could have done,” she whispered back.
“We’ll never know for sure,” Kakashi said quietly from a few paces ahead of them.
“What’re we even doing here? This place is creepy,” Naruto complained.
Sakura would have accused him for dozing off during the briefing, but she wasn’t entirely sure what they were supposed to be looking for either. Otogakure no longer existed, Orochimaru was dead, and his experiments had been pretty effectively destroyed. Sakura’s medical knowledge was telling her that they’d probably drowned in the remains of the viscous fluid that had been trapped in their airways. Either that or the shock had killed them.
There were probably notes on his experiments, unless they had been destroyed as well, that might be interesting to look over. Or maybe they had been sent here to make sure that Orochimaru really was dead and not going to come back. But beyond that, Sakura couldn’t really think of any reason why they would be here.
Something on the far wall glinted in the light of her torch beam. She blinked and focussed the torch on it, squinting at it through the gloom. It was a heavy metal lock, holding a door shut. She bit her lip and glanced round at the others, wondering if they had noticed it too.
“Um, over there,” she said, pointing towards the locked door. “That door looks like it’s still locked.”
Kakashi nodded. “I’ll lead,” he said. “Sai, you’re with me. Yamato take the rear.”
They moved automatically into position, and began to walk away from the marked out path through the tanks. The tanks were arranged so that their path through them was slightly awkward, and Sakura was painfully aware of the skittering noises of rat feet passing them by. She kept her gaze locked on the door beyond the tanks. A glance down would show her the features of the mangled things Orochimaru had been running experiments on. Some of them looked almost human in the low lighting.
When he reached the door, Kakashi crouched to study the lock closely. He pulled a set of lock picks out of a pocket in his Jounin vest – not usually a necessity, but they wanted to be quiet in case there was something waiting for them behind the door. He fiddled with the lock for a moment, then with a click it came open. Sakura watched him twist the handle and push the door open, and it was only when nothing came charging out to attack them that she realised that she had been holding her breath. She released it in a soft sigh, and followed Kakashi and Sai into the room.
It, like the main room, was dark. Only this time the equipment that their torches illuminated wasn’t trashed. There was another large tank that Sakura tried not to look at. Instead, she directed her attention to the things surrounding it. There were heart and electrode monitors – still beeping rhythmically and showing heart rates and brain activity. There was some kind of tape player that was wired to speakers embedded in the glass of the tank, and various other bits of medical equipment that had been designed specifically for the task at hand – she didn’t recognise most of them.
“What is that?” Naruto asked suddenly, his voice shattering the quiet once more.
She turned to look at him. He had his face practically glued to the glass wall of the tank as he tried to peer through the gloom to see what it held. Sakura grimaced. Trust Naruto to go for the gore factor… But now that he’d mentioned it, she felt curiosity well up inside of her. She knew that she would hate to look – to see whatever it was that Orochimaru had been experimenting on it all its glory – but she couldn’t avoid it.
She pointed her torch towards the tank, illuminating thick green-tinted liquid that was filled with floating strands of something black. She walked closer, tilting her head to one side as she tried to figure out what the strands were and if there was something suspended among them.
Her gaze travelled up and down the tank, trying to take in every detail. But it was the bottom of the tank that held the clue. Poking out of the bottom of the mass of black was a pale, slender foot; its toes tipped with unnaturally long nails.
Sakura’s hand flew to her mouth and she looked away, trying not to vomit. Her skin felt as though it were about to crawl right off her body. She squeezed her eyes tight shut and focussed on the sound of her breathing; trying desperately to stop thinking about what the contents of that tank actually meant.
Orochimaru had been experimenting on humans. Did that mean that the mangled, mutilated dead things in the previous room had once been human as well? Had they been intended to be humans before their tanks had been destroyed and their lives ended? Had the rats been feasting on genetically modified human flesh?
“Sakura-chan?”
Naruto’s hand landed on her shoulder, warm and comforting and so incredibly alive. She fought not to lean into the touch. She had to be strong. She had to be. But…there was a person in that tank – or something that might have been human once.
How had Sasuke lived with such a monster for so long?
“It…” she said, trying to find her voice. “It’s human.”
The silence suddenly seemed so much heavier. She heard the rasping of the cloth of Naruto’s tracksuit as he turned to look back at the tank. She heard a hitch of breath from one of the corners of the room. She could practically see Kakashi frowning in her mind’s eye. And above it all was the horrible, horrible beeping of the heart monitor.
She straightened slowly. Naruto’s hand slid limply down her back as she moved, only for him to jerk it away before he touched her hip. She looked back at the tank, and shone her torch directly on the pale foot that could just be seen in the gloomy water. The shaking beam of light betrayed her nervousness.
“What’s all that black stuff?” Naruto asked. His voice sounded faint.
“Hair.”
Sakura blinked in surprise. Yamato’s deep, gruff voice had spoken her answer before she’d even had time to open her mouth. But he was right. The tangled mess of floating black strands was the hair of the person in the tank, suspended around their body like a bizarre cocoon.
“What do we do with it?” Sai asked.
She looked around for him, and then spotted him standing awkwardly next to the tape player and the collection of tapes that lay next to it on a low table. There were a lot of them. He looked almost as pale as the person in the tank, the way he stood half-obscured in the darkness. Sakura shivered. She didn’t want to think about anyone she knew being forced into such a situation.
“It’s still alive,” Kakashi-sensei pointed out, indicating the monitors that stood next to the tank.
Sakura looked around at her team mates and the horror that they were trying not to show on their faces. The person in that tank was still alive, though she couldn’t be sure for how long. How were they receiving nutrients? How were they breathing? The lab had been abandoned for a month, after all. How long would the equipment keeping them alive stay working? Her instincts surged up inside of her. She was a kunoichi – had been trained to kill from a young age – but she was a medic too. She was meant to try and preserve human life at any cost. Her fingers tightened around her torch and she grit her teeth in resolution.
Yamato had been in that situation once. Not in a tank – she hoped – and not for a long time, but he had been there. And he had grown into a good person. He had survived. She had to…
“We rescue them,” she said. The calmness of her voice surprised her.
She found herself running through different jutsu in her mind. Ways to stop shock from setting in; ways to stop a person from drowning. It would almost be like delivering a baby, she thought, and found herself wishing that she had experience in that field.
“Okay,” she said, sounding far more confident than she felt. “There has to be a way to drain this thing without breaking the glass.”
They got to work. It took the five of them a while for them to figure out the complicated controls that controlled the tank’s mechanisms. Eventually, though, they got it, and the greenish liquid began to drain away into some sort of container under the floor. They could hear it gurgling through the concrete.
Once freed of the liquid and the tubes that had been leading into the mass of hair, the experiment flopped bonelessly to the bottom of the tank. Kakashi touched a button, and the glass walls of the tank retracted up into the ceiling. Wet, slimy looking hair began to slither out of the tank’s circumference, and without its glass support the experiment’s body flopped even more.
Sakura darted forward immediately and crouched down by the person’s side. She passed her torch back to Sai and ordered him to hold it steady so that she could see what she was doing as she began to pull hanks of the long, slimy hair away from her new patient’s face.
The features she revealed were pale and feminine and achingly familiar. A wide, thin-lipped mouth, a long, straight nose and slanted eyes surrounded with thick black eyelashes. She wasn’t sure if it was the lighting or her imagination that made the person’s eyelids look almost purple. She gathered green healing chakra around her hand and used it to free the person’s airways from the residual liquid. Then, rolling them onto their back, she began to run a general diagnostic.
The person – male, she noticed, and roughly around her age – had no physical injuries, although he had next to no muscle tone at all. He was underweight and suffering from malnutrition, and he had been drugged, but other than that he seemed fine. She prised open one of his eyes and took her torch back from Sai. She shone the light into his eye only to smile in satisfaction when she saw the pupil contract, only for horror to well up in her seconds later.
The pupil had contracted into a slit. The boy’s iris was very distinctly gold. The torchlight had also highlighted the boy’s upper eyelid enough to tell her that she hadn’t been imagining things: it was an unusual – and highly distinctive – shade of purple.
“Orochimaru,” Sakura whispered.
She lowered the torch and sat back on her heels. The boy simply lay there, unmoving. She looked away from his face, and studied one of his hands instead. His fingers were long and thin, and his nails looked painfully long – long to the point where they were beginning to curl into corkscrew spirals at the ends. There was no way that those nails had grown in the month since Orochimaru was last seen. His hair too was almost impossibly long. It lay around him like a slimy black blanket, almost completely hiding him from view. It was probably longer than he was, and there was no way that that had been possible in a month.
There was no way that the boy was really Orochimaru, but he definitely looked like him. He looked almost as though Orochimaru had managed to create a shadow clone of his teenaged self, only one made from flesh and blood rather than chakra.
He had cloned himself and ran experiments on an exact copy of his own body. Sakura grimaced and turned away from him. She looked up at her team mates and sighed softly.
“He’ll live,” she said. “But we need to keep him warm and get him back to Konoha pretty quickly. He’s going to be totally helpless. I don’t even think he’s seen the outside of this tank.”
Naruto flinched slightly, but nodded. His nod was echoed by Kakashi and Sai. Yamato, on the other hand, shrugged out of his Jounin vest and pulled his long-sleeved shirt up over his head. He handed it to Sakura.
“To keep him warm,” he said.
She smiled. Of course, Yamato could – in a way – relate to this boy. “Thank you, Yamato-sensei,” she said. Then she cleared her throat. She could feel the boy beginning to shiver behind her, and she knew that she would have to be quick to dress him in Yamato’s shirt and keep him warm before he caught a chill.
“There’s one more thing,” she said. “I think he might be a clone of Orochimaru.”
Silence.
Author: Evandar (yamievandar / hikarievandar)
Fandom: Naruto
Rating: R
Pairing: Eventual Sai/Orochimaru, mild hints of Naruto/Sakura
Genre: Friendship/Action/Romance
Warnings: Bizarre pseudo-science
Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto and I am making no profit from this story.
Summary: A mission to one of Orochimaru's abandoned laboratories reveals something that might give the Sannin a way to redeem themselves.
AN: This is based off a dream, which would probably explain why it's so damn weird. But believe me, it's less weird than it could have been.
The lab was dark. Sakura knew that that made sense: they were underground, after all, and the place was completely devoid of windows. What little light there was was coming from their torches since they weren’t about to trust the electrics in the underground lab of a dead madman. Well, Naruto had been about to until Kakashi had warned him away from the light switch.
All the same, Sakura wished that they had light that wasn’t torch light. The artificial yellow beams of their torches were sweeping over the shattered remains of giant glass tanks, illuminating the remains of unidentifiable, mutilated creatures that had been kept in them. As they walked, their feet splashed in puddles of cold, viscous fluid. Shivers ran up Sakura’s spine as she imagined – couldn’t quite stop herself from imagining – what the lab would have looked like when it was operational, with those creepy mutilated things floating in the liquid they were now stepping in.
The rest of the team were looking around curiously. When her torch briefly illuminated Yamato’s face, she saw that he was wearing a carefully neutral expression. She cringed inwardly. He had been one of Orochimaru’s experiments once. Had he been kept in a lab like this? Could he even remember?
Sakura tore her eyes away from him and swept the beam of her torch over the lab again. Something hiding in the shadows skittered through the liquid on the floor, making her shift uncomfortably. Rats. Probably large, glossy-coated rats that were living off the things Orochimaru had been keeping in the tanks. She shivered.
“Hey, do you think Sasuke did this?” Naruto asked, his voice – even though he was being pretty quiet by usual Naruto standards – sounded unnaturally loud.
Sakura shrugged. “He could have done,” she whispered back.
“We’ll never know for sure,” Kakashi said quietly from a few paces ahead of them.
“What’re we even doing here? This place is creepy,” Naruto complained.
Sakura would have accused him for dozing off during the briefing, but she wasn’t entirely sure what they were supposed to be looking for either. Otogakure no longer existed, Orochimaru was dead, and his experiments had been pretty effectively destroyed. Sakura’s medical knowledge was telling her that they’d probably drowned in the remains of the viscous fluid that had been trapped in their airways. Either that or the shock had killed them.
There were probably notes on his experiments, unless they had been destroyed as well, that might be interesting to look over. Or maybe they had been sent here to make sure that Orochimaru really was dead and not going to come back. But beyond that, Sakura couldn’t really think of any reason why they would be here.
Something on the far wall glinted in the light of her torch beam. She blinked and focussed the torch on it, squinting at it through the gloom. It was a heavy metal lock, holding a door shut. She bit her lip and glanced round at the others, wondering if they had noticed it too.
“Um, over there,” she said, pointing towards the locked door. “That door looks like it’s still locked.”
Kakashi nodded. “I’ll lead,” he said. “Sai, you’re with me. Yamato take the rear.”
They moved automatically into position, and began to walk away from the marked out path through the tanks. The tanks were arranged so that their path through them was slightly awkward, and Sakura was painfully aware of the skittering noises of rat feet passing them by. She kept her gaze locked on the door beyond the tanks. A glance down would show her the features of the mangled things Orochimaru had been running experiments on. Some of them looked almost human in the low lighting.
When he reached the door, Kakashi crouched to study the lock closely. He pulled a set of lock picks out of a pocket in his Jounin vest – not usually a necessity, but they wanted to be quiet in case there was something waiting for them behind the door. He fiddled with the lock for a moment, then with a click it came open. Sakura watched him twist the handle and push the door open, and it was only when nothing came charging out to attack them that she realised that she had been holding her breath. She released it in a soft sigh, and followed Kakashi and Sai into the room.
It, like the main room, was dark. Only this time the equipment that their torches illuminated wasn’t trashed. There was another large tank that Sakura tried not to look at. Instead, she directed her attention to the things surrounding it. There were heart and electrode monitors – still beeping rhythmically and showing heart rates and brain activity. There was some kind of tape player that was wired to speakers embedded in the glass of the tank, and various other bits of medical equipment that had been designed specifically for the task at hand – she didn’t recognise most of them.
“What is that?” Naruto asked suddenly, his voice shattering the quiet once more.
She turned to look at him. He had his face practically glued to the glass wall of the tank as he tried to peer through the gloom to see what it held. Sakura grimaced. Trust Naruto to go for the gore factor… But now that he’d mentioned it, she felt curiosity well up inside of her. She knew that she would hate to look – to see whatever it was that Orochimaru had been experimenting on it all its glory – but she couldn’t avoid it.
She pointed her torch towards the tank, illuminating thick green-tinted liquid that was filled with floating strands of something black. She walked closer, tilting her head to one side as she tried to figure out what the strands were and if there was something suspended among them.
Her gaze travelled up and down the tank, trying to take in every detail. But it was the bottom of the tank that held the clue. Poking out of the bottom of the mass of black was a pale, slender foot; its toes tipped with unnaturally long nails.
Sakura’s hand flew to her mouth and she looked away, trying not to vomit. Her skin felt as though it were about to crawl right off her body. She squeezed her eyes tight shut and focussed on the sound of her breathing; trying desperately to stop thinking about what the contents of that tank actually meant.
Orochimaru had been experimenting on humans. Did that mean that the mangled, mutilated dead things in the previous room had once been human as well? Had they been intended to be humans before their tanks had been destroyed and their lives ended? Had the rats been feasting on genetically modified human flesh?
“Sakura-chan?”
Naruto’s hand landed on her shoulder, warm and comforting and so incredibly alive. She fought not to lean into the touch. She had to be strong. She had to be. But…there was a person in that tank – or something that might have been human once.
How had Sasuke lived with such a monster for so long?
“It…” she said, trying to find her voice. “It’s human.”
The silence suddenly seemed so much heavier. She heard the rasping of the cloth of Naruto’s tracksuit as he turned to look back at the tank. She heard a hitch of breath from one of the corners of the room. She could practically see Kakashi frowning in her mind’s eye. And above it all was the horrible, horrible beeping of the heart monitor.
She straightened slowly. Naruto’s hand slid limply down her back as she moved, only for him to jerk it away before he touched her hip. She looked back at the tank, and shone her torch directly on the pale foot that could just be seen in the gloomy water. The shaking beam of light betrayed her nervousness.
“What’s all that black stuff?” Naruto asked. His voice sounded faint.
“Hair.”
Sakura blinked in surprise. Yamato’s deep, gruff voice had spoken her answer before she’d even had time to open her mouth. But he was right. The tangled mess of floating black strands was the hair of the person in the tank, suspended around their body like a bizarre cocoon.
“What do we do with it?” Sai asked.
She looked around for him, and then spotted him standing awkwardly next to the tape player and the collection of tapes that lay next to it on a low table. There were a lot of them. He looked almost as pale as the person in the tank, the way he stood half-obscured in the darkness. Sakura shivered. She didn’t want to think about anyone she knew being forced into such a situation.
“It’s still alive,” Kakashi-sensei pointed out, indicating the monitors that stood next to the tank.
Sakura looked around at her team mates and the horror that they were trying not to show on their faces. The person in that tank was still alive, though she couldn’t be sure for how long. How were they receiving nutrients? How were they breathing? The lab had been abandoned for a month, after all. How long would the equipment keeping them alive stay working? Her instincts surged up inside of her. She was a kunoichi – had been trained to kill from a young age – but she was a medic too. She was meant to try and preserve human life at any cost. Her fingers tightened around her torch and she grit her teeth in resolution.
Yamato had been in that situation once. Not in a tank – she hoped – and not for a long time, but he had been there. And he had grown into a good person. He had survived. She had to…
“We rescue them,” she said. The calmness of her voice surprised her.
She found herself running through different jutsu in her mind. Ways to stop shock from setting in; ways to stop a person from drowning. It would almost be like delivering a baby, she thought, and found herself wishing that she had experience in that field.
“Okay,” she said, sounding far more confident than she felt. “There has to be a way to drain this thing without breaking the glass.”
They got to work. It took the five of them a while for them to figure out the complicated controls that controlled the tank’s mechanisms. Eventually, though, they got it, and the greenish liquid began to drain away into some sort of container under the floor. They could hear it gurgling through the concrete.
Once freed of the liquid and the tubes that had been leading into the mass of hair, the experiment flopped bonelessly to the bottom of the tank. Kakashi touched a button, and the glass walls of the tank retracted up into the ceiling. Wet, slimy looking hair began to slither out of the tank’s circumference, and without its glass support the experiment’s body flopped even more.
Sakura darted forward immediately and crouched down by the person’s side. She passed her torch back to Sai and ordered him to hold it steady so that she could see what she was doing as she began to pull hanks of the long, slimy hair away from her new patient’s face.
The features she revealed were pale and feminine and achingly familiar. A wide, thin-lipped mouth, a long, straight nose and slanted eyes surrounded with thick black eyelashes. She wasn’t sure if it was the lighting or her imagination that made the person’s eyelids look almost purple. She gathered green healing chakra around her hand and used it to free the person’s airways from the residual liquid. Then, rolling them onto their back, she began to run a general diagnostic.
The person – male, she noticed, and roughly around her age – had no physical injuries, although he had next to no muscle tone at all. He was underweight and suffering from malnutrition, and he had been drugged, but other than that he seemed fine. She prised open one of his eyes and took her torch back from Sai. She shone the light into his eye only to smile in satisfaction when she saw the pupil contract, only for horror to well up in her seconds later.
The pupil had contracted into a slit. The boy’s iris was very distinctly gold. The torchlight had also highlighted the boy’s upper eyelid enough to tell her that she hadn’t been imagining things: it was an unusual – and highly distinctive – shade of purple.
“Orochimaru,” Sakura whispered.
She lowered the torch and sat back on her heels. The boy simply lay there, unmoving. She looked away from his face, and studied one of his hands instead. His fingers were long and thin, and his nails looked painfully long – long to the point where they were beginning to curl into corkscrew spirals at the ends. There was no way that those nails had grown in the month since Orochimaru was last seen. His hair too was almost impossibly long. It lay around him like a slimy black blanket, almost completely hiding him from view. It was probably longer than he was, and there was no way that that had been possible in a month.
There was no way that the boy was really Orochimaru, but he definitely looked like him. He looked almost as though Orochimaru had managed to create a shadow clone of his teenaged self, only one made from flesh and blood rather than chakra.
He had cloned himself and ran experiments on an exact copy of his own body. Sakura grimaced and turned away from him. She looked up at her team mates and sighed softly.
“He’ll live,” she said. “But we need to keep him warm and get him back to Konoha pretty quickly. He’s going to be totally helpless. I don’t even think he’s seen the outside of this tank.”
Naruto flinched slightly, but nodded. His nod was echoed by Kakashi and Sai. Yamato, on the other hand, shrugged out of his Jounin vest and pulled his long-sleeved shirt up over his head. He handed it to Sakura.
“To keep him warm,” he said.
She smiled. Of course, Yamato could – in a way – relate to this boy. “Thank you, Yamato-sensei,” she said. Then she cleared her throat. She could feel the boy beginning to shiver behind her, and she knew that she would have to be quick to dress him in Yamato’s shirt and keep him warm before he caught a chill.
“There’s one more thing,” she said. “I think he might be a clone of Orochimaru.”
Silence.
