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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, yaoi
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.
He wasn’t a vegetable.
As she cared for him, and as he began to spend more and more time awake, she would speak to him. Most of it was to explain things going on in the world around them, like colours or objects or what she was going to be doing to him that particular day. Sometimes she would speak to him about her friends: Naruto, Sai, Ino, Shikamaru, Kiba, Chouji, Hinata, Shino…sometimes even Sasuke when the mood struck her.
And even though he never replied, he would watch her. He would listen and, when she looked into his eyes, she would be able to see flickers of understanding and intelligence in their golden depths.
The intelligence worried her. Orochimaru – the original – had been a genius. His clone had clearly inherited at least some of his brain power despite being kept in a coma for years and was capable of understanding human speech. It made her wonder how much of those tapes Orochimaru had made for him had been taken as gospel truth. It made her wonder how dangerous he was going to be. It made her wonder if she’d really done the right thing…
Not that, in his present state, he was in the slightest bit dangerous. He was essentially a baby in an adolescent body. He had no muscle control; he was barely even able to move by himself let alone use chakra or a weapon. So Sakura, as she bathed and fed him and led him through basic exercises – the kind of physiotherapy that was usually reserved for people who had sustained severe muscle damage or spinal injuries – talked to him and tried her hardest to reverse at least some of Orochimaru’s conditioning.
It comforted her to know that he was listening to her – not that he had much of a choice, really – even though his ability to understand her worried her.
She wasn’t his only visitor, either. Sai and Naruto visited regularly, though Sakura suspected that at least part of Naruto’s reasoning behind it was out of protective feelings for her. He seemed to trust Orochimaru’s clone just about as much as he trusted the original, which wasn’t saying much.
As for Sai’s reasons…well, if he had any particular reason to visit so regularly, she wasn’t able to fathom it. Sai’s logic was completely beyond her.
Tsunade visited too, once or twice, though mostly when Orochi-kun was sleeping. Sakura would watch her as she visited; watch Tsunade as the woman sat on a hard, plastic hospital chair and stared at the clone of her one-time team mate. It looked almost like seeing him physically hurt Tsunade, and Sakura always felt incredibly voyeuristic for watching those visits.
Tsunade never touched Orochi-kun. Naruto and Sai would, occasionally: Naruto would nudge him to grab his attention – as if anyone could ignore Naruto’s presence in a room – and Sai seemed to just lack social boundaries. He would be perfectly fine with running his fingers lightly over Orochi-kun’s face, making him twitch slightly, or lifting one of his pale hands off the coverlet to admire the tapered fingers. He seemed almost happy that they had somehow managed to discover a person their own age who lacked social skills even more than he did.
Jiraiya never visited.
“I did tell him,” Naruto had said defensively when she had brought it up. “But I don’t think the old pervert’s interested. Actually, he looked kind of freaked out so I didn’t push it.”
Amazed that Naruto had developed something resembling tact, Sakura had nodded. Then she’d thought of the expression that Tsunade wore every time she visited Orochi-kun and supposed that Jiraiya’s absence wasn’t all that hard to understand after all.
Orochimaru had hurt them all before; there was nothing to say that he wouldn’t do it again, even if ‘he’ was really a copy of the original.
Still, despite the potential danger in the situation, Sakura found herself getting attached to Orochi-kun. It was hard not to, considering how much time she spent tending to him.
Every morning, once she got to the hospital, she would enter his private room – the reasons why he was being kept in isolation were fairly obvious, she thought, considering that more than half the village would want him assassinated as soon as they found out about his existence – and open the curtains. The sunlight, as it spilled in through his window and highlighted the pallor of his face, never failed to rouse him. He would squint at her, his pupils narrowed into tiny slits, and watch her as she approached.
She would always smile at him and she would always wonder if the original Orochimaru had been such a light sleeper as well. She hadn’t asked Tsunade; she hadn’t wanted to. The memories were hard enough for her as it was, and Sakura didn’t want to trouble her by bringing up more.
Besides, she was trying her hardest to think of him as a separate person. It was hard, but she was trying her best.
As she cleaned him, she would tell him gossip from the previous night. She would ask him things, even though she never expected him to answer any of them. She would help him sit up – he could support his own head now – and she would leave, briefly, to get his breakfast.
Every time she left the room, she expected him to be gone by the time she got back. Even though she knew he was incapable of walking, she still expected him to have escaped to start wreaking havoc on the village. It was a prejudice she was trying desperately to squash; an association with the original that she knew she shouldn’t be making.
Even so, every time she walked back into his room with his breakfast tray to see him sitting just how she’d left him, with his golden eyes fixed on the door, she would relax slightly and let her smile widen. Every time he was still there, she found herself trusting him just a little bit more.
It was, she knew, completely ridiculous.
Then, one morning, things began to change. On the way to the hospital, she ran into Sai. He’d greeted her with his usual false smile, and she’d invited him along. Variety was the spice of life, after all, and she was fairly sure that Orochi-kun, if he could speak, would be telling her how bored he was with her prattling.
Orochi-kun, when they got to his room, was already sitting up in bed. Sort of. He was half propped up against the headboard, and he was breathing heavily from the exertion of moving all on his own. He heard the door open and looked up at them when they entered. Sakura, amazed, couldn’t help but stop and stare at him in shock. Sai looked at her curiously before approaching the bed. With one deft movement – which Sakura knew he must have copied from her somehow because Sai had absolutely no skills when it came to bedside manners whatsoever – he moved the pillows to support Orochi-kun better.
With a soft sigh, the clone of the snake Sannin sank back against them. He looked up at Sai as he did so, and Sakura realised with a pang that he was thanking him silently. She’d seen that look so many times, but it was only now, looking at it as an outsider, that she realised what it meant.
Not quite a baby. Orochi-kun had some idea of morals and manners, apparently, even if they had been gleaned from the voice recordings of a psychopath.
She crossed to the window and opened the curtains, letting in the early morning light. She stared out over Konoha for a moment, wondering not for the first time what on earth the people of the village would make of Orochi-kun once his presence was eventually revealed. Even incapable of speech, he was capable of gratitude; something that she doubted would have been expected from the original Orochimaru.
She sighed softly and turned back to the bed. Sai and Orochi-kun were staring at each other, studying each other’s faces, and Sakura – standing by the window – couldn’t help but think that it was one of the weirdest, but cutest, things she’d seen. Cute in a very odd way, though. Sort of like watching small children sizing each other up in the playground while holding pointed objects behind their backs.
And god help them all now that Sai had apparently volunteered to help teach Orochi-kun how to interact with humans.
She approached slowly, making sure that her footsteps were loud enough to be heard. She didn’t want to startle either of them, let alone Orochi-kun. Sai might have been the trained killer, but Orochi-kun worried her most.
“Sai?” she said, breaking their staring contest.
He looked up at her to show that he was listening. Orochi-kun turned to look at her too, and she smiled at him. “Could you go and get Orochi-kun’s food tray?” she asked. “There’s a nurses’ office at the end of the hall. We passed it on the way in. Could you go there and ask for the tray for room 226?”
Sai nodded and stood. As he walked towards the door, she noticed Orochi-kun’s gaze following him. Her smile widened.
“Time to get you cleaned up, Orochi-kun,” she said brightly. She grabbed the small basin from the nightstand and a sponge and crossed over to the sink to get some warm water. “Preferably before he gets back. Sai’s a bit weird like that, you see, and he’ll tease you if he sees me cleaning you. Oh, he won’t mean it of course, but he’ll do it…”
She watched his face as she cleaned him off, noting the curiosity in his eyes. She kept talking softly, soothingly, and imagined him filing all of the information – most of it completely irrelevant – away for later. By the time Sai returned, she was done, and was just tucking clean covers around Orochi-kun’s thin body when he slid the door open.
“This stuff doesn’t look like food,” Sai commented calmly as he entered. “But it smells better than the stuff Naruto eats.”
Sakura couldn’t help it. She giggled at the thought of Sai sniffing at Orochi-kun’s food tray and comparing it to ramen. “It is proper food, Sai, “she told him. “It’s just been mashed up with some extra vitamins to try and get his weight up.”
Sai didn’t react to her words, instead choosing to simply place the tray on the little wheeled table and sit back down in the seat he had claimed before. Orochi-kun turned to watch him as he sat and Sai gave him a tiny smile that almost, almost seemed genuine.
At first Sakura wondered if it was just the lighting or her imagination playing tricks on her. But when the expression didn’t fade, even when she started to feed Orochi-kun, she realised that he was getting just as attached to Orochi-kun as she was. The thought was comforting.
Maybe, just maybe, Sai would be able to learn things from Orochi-kun while Orochi-kun learned from them.
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, yaoi
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.
He wasn’t a vegetable.
As she cared for him, and as he began to spend more and more time awake, she would speak to him. Most of it was to explain things going on in the world around them, like colours or objects or what she was going to be doing to him that particular day. Sometimes she would speak to him about her friends: Naruto, Sai, Ino, Shikamaru, Kiba, Chouji, Hinata, Shino…sometimes even Sasuke when the mood struck her.
And even though he never replied, he would watch her. He would listen and, when she looked into his eyes, she would be able to see flickers of understanding and intelligence in their golden depths.
The intelligence worried her. Orochimaru – the original – had been a genius. His clone had clearly inherited at least some of his brain power despite being kept in a coma for years and was capable of understanding human speech. It made her wonder how much of those tapes Orochimaru had made for him had been taken as gospel truth. It made her wonder how dangerous he was going to be. It made her wonder if she’d really done the right thing…
Not that, in his present state, he was in the slightest bit dangerous. He was essentially a baby in an adolescent body. He had no muscle control; he was barely even able to move by himself let alone use chakra or a weapon. So Sakura, as she bathed and fed him and led him through basic exercises – the kind of physiotherapy that was usually reserved for people who had sustained severe muscle damage or spinal injuries – talked to him and tried her hardest to reverse at least some of Orochimaru’s conditioning.
It comforted her to know that he was listening to her – not that he had much of a choice, really – even though his ability to understand her worried her.
She wasn’t his only visitor, either. Sai and Naruto visited regularly, though Sakura suspected that at least part of Naruto’s reasoning behind it was out of protective feelings for her. He seemed to trust Orochimaru’s clone just about as much as he trusted the original, which wasn’t saying much.
As for Sai’s reasons…well, if he had any particular reason to visit so regularly, she wasn’t able to fathom it. Sai’s logic was completely beyond her.
Tsunade visited too, once or twice, though mostly when Orochi-kun was sleeping. Sakura would watch her as she visited; watch Tsunade as the woman sat on a hard, plastic hospital chair and stared at the clone of her one-time team mate. It looked almost like seeing him physically hurt Tsunade, and Sakura always felt incredibly voyeuristic for watching those visits.
Tsunade never touched Orochi-kun. Naruto and Sai would, occasionally: Naruto would nudge him to grab his attention – as if anyone could ignore Naruto’s presence in a room – and Sai seemed to just lack social boundaries. He would be perfectly fine with running his fingers lightly over Orochi-kun’s face, making him twitch slightly, or lifting one of his pale hands off the coverlet to admire the tapered fingers. He seemed almost happy that they had somehow managed to discover a person their own age who lacked social skills even more than he did.
Jiraiya never visited.
“I did tell him,” Naruto had said defensively when she had brought it up. “But I don’t think the old pervert’s interested. Actually, he looked kind of freaked out so I didn’t push it.”
Amazed that Naruto had developed something resembling tact, Sakura had nodded. Then she’d thought of the expression that Tsunade wore every time she visited Orochi-kun and supposed that Jiraiya’s absence wasn’t all that hard to understand after all.
Orochimaru had hurt them all before; there was nothing to say that he wouldn’t do it again, even if ‘he’ was really a copy of the original.
Still, despite the potential danger in the situation, Sakura found herself getting attached to Orochi-kun. It was hard not to, considering how much time she spent tending to him.
Every morning, once she got to the hospital, she would enter his private room – the reasons why he was being kept in isolation were fairly obvious, she thought, considering that more than half the village would want him assassinated as soon as they found out about his existence – and open the curtains. The sunlight, as it spilled in through his window and highlighted the pallor of his face, never failed to rouse him. He would squint at her, his pupils narrowed into tiny slits, and watch her as she approached.
She would always smile at him and she would always wonder if the original Orochimaru had been such a light sleeper as well. She hadn’t asked Tsunade; she hadn’t wanted to. The memories were hard enough for her as it was, and Sakura didn’t want to trouble her by bringing up more.
Besides, she was trying her hardest to think of him as a separate person. It was hard, but she was trying her best.
As she cleaned him, she would tell him gossip from the previous night. She would ask him things, even though she never expected him to answer any of them. She would help him sit up – he could support his own head now – and she would leave, briefly, to get his breakfast.
Every time she left the room, she expected him to be gone by the time she got back. Even though she knew he was incapable of walking, she still expected him to have escaped to start wreaking havoc on the village. It was a prejudice she was trying desperately to squash; an association with the original that she knew she shouldn’t be making.
Even so, every time she walked back into his room with his breakfast tray to see him sitting just how she’d left him, with his golden eyes fixed on the door, she would relax slightly and let her smile widen. Every time he was still there, she found herself trusting him just a little bit more.
It was, she knew, completely ridiculous.
Then, one morning, things began to change. On the way to the hospital, she ran into Sai. He’d greeted her with his usual false smile, and she’d invited him along. Variety was the spice of life, after all, and she was fairly sure that Orochi-kun, if he could speak, would be telling her how bored he was with her prattling.
Orochi-kun, when they got to his room, was already sitting up in bed. Sort of. He was half propped up against the headboard, and he was breathing heavily from the exertion of moving all on his own. He heard the door open and looked up at them when they entered. Sakura, amazed, couldn’t help but stop and stare at him in shock. Sai looked at her curiously before approaching the bed. With one deft movement – which Sakura knew he must have copied from her somehow because Sai had absolutely no skills when it came to bedside manners whatsoever – he moved the pillows to support Orochi-kun better.
With a soft sigh, the clone of the snake Sannin sank back against them. He looked up at Sai as he did so, and Sakura realised with a pang that he was thanking him silently. She’d seen that look so many times, but it was only now, looking at it as an outsider, that she realised what it meant.
Not quite a baby. Orochi-kun had some idea of morals and manners, apparently, even if they had been gleaned from the voice recordings of a psychopath.
She crossed to the window and opened the curtains, letting in the early morning light. She stared out over Konoha for a moment, wondering not for the first time what on earth the people of the village would make of Orochi-kun once his presence was eventually revealed. Even incapable of speech, he was capable of gratitude; something that she doubted would have been expected from the original Orochimaru.
She sighed softly and turned back to the bed. Sai and Orochi-kun were staring at each other, studying each other’s faces, and Sakura – standing by the window – couldn’t help but think that it was one of the weirdest, but cutest, things she’d seen. Cute in a very odd way, though. Sort of like watching small children sizing each other up in the playground while holding pointed objects behind their backs.
And god help them all now that Sai had apparently volunteered to help teach Orochi-kun how to interact with humans.
She approached slowly, making sure that her footsteps were loud enough to be heard. She didn’t want to startle either of them, let alone Orochi-kun. Sai might have been the trained killer, but Orochi-kun worried her most.
“Sai?” she said, breaking their staring contest.
He looked up at her to show that he was listening. Orochi-kun turned to look at her too, and she smiled at him. “Could you go and get Orochi-kun’s food tray?” she asked. “There’s a nurses’ office at the end of the hall. We passed it on the way in. Could you go there and ask for the tray for room 226?”
Sai nodded and stood. As he walked towards the door, she noticed Orochi-kun’s gaze following him. Her smile widened.
“Time to get you cleaned up, Orochi-kun,” she said brightly. She grabbed the small basin from the nightstand and a sponge and crossed over to the sink to get some warm water. “Preferably before he gets back. Sai’s a bit weird like that, you see, and he’ll tease you if he sees me cleaning you. Oh, he won’t mean it of course, but he’ll do it…”
She watched his face as she cleaned him off, noting the curiosity in his eyes. She kept talking softly, soothingly, and imagined him filing all of the information – most of it completely irrelevant – away for later. By the time Sai returned, she was done, and was just tucking clean covers around Orochi-kun’s thin body when he slid the door open.
“This stuff doesn’t look like food,” Sai commented calmly as he entered. “But it smells better than the stuff Naruto eats.”
Sakura couldn’t help it. She giggled at the thought of Sai sniffing at Orochi-kun’s food tray and comparing it to ramen. “It is proper food, Sai, “she told him. “It’s just been mashed up with some extra vitamins to try and get his weight up.”
Sai didn’t react to her words, instead choosing to simply place the tray on the little wheeled table and sit back down in the seat he had claimed before. Orochi-kun turned to watch him as he sat and Sai gave him a tiny smile that almost, almost seemed genuine.
At first Sakura wondered if it was just the lighting or her imagination playing tricks on her. But when the expression didn’t fade, even when she started to feed Orochi-kun, she realised that he was getting just as attached to Orochi-kun as she was. The thought was comforting.
Maybe, just maybe, Sai would be able to learn things from Orochi-kun while Orochi-kun learned from them.
