The air was full of blood. From the left and from the right, the clashing of swords rang out, flashes of metal under dark night. Jounin flashing through handseals, chuunin manning barrier seals, even genin, their bodies too small, too fragile to be in battle, jumped from limb to limb, letting fly shuriken and makibishi to slow the enemy even a little. But the Iwa forces encroached, even as corpses piled us like so much dirty laundry, they came.

Orochimaru beheaded an Iwa kunoichi with a quick swipe of Kusanagi, then checked his squad – one was already down, caught in an exploding trap, while his two jounin teammates were each engaging their own enemies. He whipped his hair around, eyes roving over the genin he could see. He'd promised-

"Nawaki!" He shouted, spotting the small boy with a scroll between his teeth, blood on his shirt, dodging a barrage of exploding kunai aimed at him. Orochimaru crossed the branches in a quick dash, knocking the projectiles off path with a wave of his jian. Nawaki landed on the branch beside him, spitting the scroll in his hands and looking at him with a pout on his face.

"Nii-san, I don't need to be protected." He complained.

Orochimaru sneered.

"Tsunade says differently."

"Ehhh, nee-chan always tries to protect me, but I'm a man! I'm the-"

"-First's grandson, I know, we all know, Nawaki. Frankly, I don't care. You can tell me again when this battle's over and Tsunade tries to smother you again. Now keep a look out, and try not to set off anymore traps." He snapped, giving the boy a push. The genin grumbled, but started jumping branches again, Orochimaru keeping to the trees above him.

That's when it all went from bad to worse.

They had been running away from the Iwa forces ('Retreating' Jiraiya would always argue, with Orochimaru pointing out that they were shinobi and they really had no honour to be smirched by running away in the first place). Unfortunately it seemed they had scouted out the area thoroughly, and before he could blink, another Iwa squad exploded from the ground, making Nawaki pull up short under the explosion of mud and rocks.

Orochimaru landed in front of him just in time to catch the blade aimed at the boy's face. Unfortunately, he caught it with his hand, and the blade cut deep to the bone.

He didn't even wince, just looked into the Iwa nin's face with the smile that always creeped Tsunade out. He enjoyed the sudden look of fear in the boy's eyes, the dilating of the pupils, the last gasp of air, before he reached up with his other hand, grabbed the kunai from the boy's hand and stabbed him through the eye with it. Yelling wildly, the Iwa nin fell back off the branch, his blood splattering across Orochimaru's pale skin.

A sudden scream from behind him made him whip around.

Knife to his throat, Nawaki was held by a hulking man, scars criss-crossing up his cheek and knotting a chunk of his nose. He leered at Orochimaru, keeping a firm grip around Nawaki's throat as he pressed the blade hard enough to draw blood.

"Nii-san…" Nawaki gasped out, fists clenching at his side. All those things Orochimaru had relished a few seconds ago – the wide eyes, the heaving chest, that look of a prey caught by a hunter – he despised now, as he saw them all in the small shaking form of his best friend's brother.

He was torn.

Orochimaru was always the sceptic of his team. He didn't care much for honour, for foolish optimism, he knew the brutality of a shinobi's world. He knew that orders were everything, that if the mission was at risk, one should even abandon comrades to finish the mission.

Now, finishing the mission meant a 12 year old corpse, a traumatised Tsunade, a great failure on Orochimaru's spotless report. As though caught in a genjutsu, he couldn't get his feet to move, to leave, to carry the scroll he'd swallowed to the Hokage. He licked his lips.

"…Don't kill him." A part of him looked on in disgust as those words came out of his mouth. He was the Orochimaru, one of the Third's pupils, the last of the Yashagorou clan. He could deal with this man in a second, if only-

If only he could get the kid away from him. He swallowed the reckless impulse to blame the whole situation on Nawaki, but even he, without much love for children, knew that they really were too young to be on the battlefield. The whole system of early promotions had produced more quantity and less quality and 90% of the children dropped onto the battlefield couldn't hit a target straight. As much as Tsunade never would hear a word against her brother, he was one of those children, and right now, it showed.

The Iwa nin laughed, as he could feel Nawaki's tears splash on his arms.

"Nawaki…" He silently begged the boy to stop crying already, he needed him to be alert and ready to escape the second he saw an opening.

"Give me the scroll, okama." He spat.

Orochimaru's eye twitched and he bit his tongue at the address. He considered his options. He shouldn't, but-

But Tsunade was his best friend, and if he could spare her tragedy, he would burn down the whole of Leaf. This was nothing.

He opened his mouth, and reached down his throat, pulling the sealed scroll out of his mouth. He took a small amount of pleasure out of seeing the disgust on the other ninja's face. Orochimaru held out the scroll.

"The scroll for the boy." He proposed. The Iwa-nin grinned.

"No, Orochimaru-nii! Don't-" Nawaki shouted, trying to bite the Iwa-nin's arm. The Iwa nin put a cut on his chin to quiet him, before looking up at Orochimaru.

"Deal." He said. Orochimaru waited. "On three."

"One."

"Two."

"Three." Orochimaru threw the scroll, just as the Iwa nin released Nawaki, and pushed the boy forwards with a hand on the back of his head. The snake Sannin's eye widened as Nawaki stumbled.

"NO!" He shouted.

The world exploded.

In reality, only Nawaki exploded, the tag placed on the back of hitai-ate igniting. The explosion took off the boy's head, splattering blood and brains all over Orochimaru's already-bloody flak jacket. This was different. Orochimaru thought he would be able to pick out every drop of Nawaki forever.

It was hard to breathe as he watched the body topple of the branch, falling somewhere to the forest floor. He could only stare after it, thinking, Tsunade. He'd failed her. So much for burning down Leaf, he'd destroyed something more precious to her than anything in the world, in one, small, miss-calculation.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw the maroon flash of the Iwa nin making off with the scroll.

Suddenly, he was angry.

With a shunshin that would make his teacher jealous, Orochimaru was in front of the Iwa nin faster than he could blink. Kusanagi was out of its sheath even faster, biting into flesh, withdrawing, before striking again. The enemy didn't stand a chance, as the metal danced through muscle and bone, filleting him like a caught fish. Orochimaru didn't stop, couldn't stop, until the other man was a barely recognisable lump of flesh at his feet, his red uniform blending into the new colour of his skin.

Kusanagi hung a heavy weight on his arm, speaking of victory, but Orochimaru felt none of the joy as he looked at his defeated opponent. With a vicious kick, he sent the remains flying into the dark, where he belonged.

Where Nawaki didn't.

Sheathing his sword, Orochimaru retreated his steps, and lowered himself down to the ground where he'd seen the boy's body fall. He wasn't hard to find. The blood and viscera soaking into the ground surrounded him like a macabre field of flowers. In the middle lay the remains of Nawaki.

Orochimaru wanted to look at the body dispassionately, or with thoughts only of Tsunade, but even he couldn't. Instead, memories flashed before him, from when Tsunade had shown her baby brother to him, swaddled in shuriken-patterned blankets, when they were ten. When Nawaki had first called him nii-san, after he'd adjusted the boy's slipping hitai-ate. When Nawaki had given him a birthday present, an engraved inrou which was obviously from Tsunade, but also obviously wrapped by her brother, the paper crinkled from many miss-creases and torn in placed, the tape clumsily wrinkled and stuck at strange angles. Nawaki had looked at him with hero-worship, like he'd looked at Jiraiya and Tsunade when he'd seen them all spar before.

The memories crowded his mind, more than he thought he'd have. The boy had been a fixture of Orochimaru's life, even though he hadn't realised it. Now, he wasn't. He wasn't Nawaki, he was just a mass of lumpy flesh and rotting brain, stuck at the bottom of a forest, far away from his sister or the village he once hoped to lead. All those dreams, they died because Orochimaru had thought with his heart and not with his head.

He knelt down beside the tiny frame and reaching out, adjusted the boy's flak jacket, wiping away some blood with his sleeve. He patted him down, before his eyes spotted the necklace. He couldn't retrieve the body, it was against the policy during the war, but he could bring back something for Tsunade. She would want it.

Gently, gently, Orochimaru untied the necklace from Nawaki's neck, and dumped a scroll, slipping the necklace instead into the empty scroll pouch. He made sure he secured it – after this disaster, he couldn't risk losing this.

He stood up and took one more look at the body, burning the image into his mind. Death, it's the only companion you can expect to stay at your side forever.

He turned and ran towards Konoha.

(After two days, when a group of chuunin had got around to retrieving what was left of Nawaki, and he saw Tsunade approaching the morgue, Jiraiya at her side, and hand over her mouth, he got that feeling again, like he couldn't breathe. He stood there, had been standing there for hours since the boy arrived, taking in the face of his best friend, and couldn't help comparing it to the look on Nawaki's face – fear, trepidation, tears about to fall. Orochimaru couldn't, he couldn't just stand there and tell her that her brother was dead. He couldn't, so when the time came, Orochimaru did what Orochimaru does best; be an asshole. He gave her the necklace, along with a mouthful of sarcasm he didn't feel, and he almost wanted her to punch him, like Jiraiya no doubt expected her to. But she didn't, and Orochimaru was left with that dark hollow in his chest.)