[Cross-posted from AO3; originally posted there on 13/12/2014.]
.-.-.-.
Copies of the next week's schedules are already up by the time Karin gets to main office. They're pinned in neat rows to the noticeboard and labelled, just as neatly, with the names of Orochimaru's senior staff. She's bleary and foul-tempered at five-thirty on a cold, lightless morning; she finds hers, stares for a moment, then rips it from the noticeboard and slams the office door behind her as she leaves.
Kabuto's in the staff kitchen when Karin finally hunts him down, cradling a coffee mug to his chest and gazing out the window with a look of haunted weariness. "Good morning, Karin-san. You're up bright and – and, ah-h –"
The fatuous observation is overtaken by a yawn. Karin slaps her schedule to the table. "What the hell is this?"
"Bright and early," finishes Kabuto, and he pushes up his glasses to rub melancholically at his eyes. "Your schedule, isn't it? Is there a problem?"
"Yes," says Karin, and proceeds to indicate with a series of violent jabs at the paperwork just exactly what the problem is. "I'm scheduled with you here, and here – and here, again, and here, and here – and I'm off shift with you the whole of Wednesday – and here, look, and here –"
Kabuto blows steam from his coffee, not looking particularly troubled by the news. "I'm sure I enjoy your company just as little as you enjoy mine, Karin-san."
"I've never had to see you so much in one week," Karin says, and glares at him across the table until, with a sigh, he pulls her schedule towards him.
A minute passes, in what would be silence if Karin didn't spend it tapping her foot impatiently against the stone floor; and then Kabuto sighs again, and sets down his mug. "The thing is," he says, reasonably, "the thing is..."
He trails off into thoughtful silence.
Karin's patience snaps in seconds. "The thing is what?"
"I think you'll have to ask Lord Orochimaru, actually," Kabuto says, at last. He shakes his head, his expression as apologetic as his tone is rueful. "It's not up to me to decide your clearance for these sorts of things. You'll have to go and find him on your lunchbreak, I suppose. I'm sorry about this, Karin-san."
Like hell he is. She shoves up her glasses and glowers at him, incensed.
"Ah," says Kabuto. He frowns. "Except it looks rather like you'll be spending your lunchbreak with me, I'm afraid."
"What? Give that here –"
Kabuto doesn't. Karin sticks her hand out, demanding. He ignores it, running his finger down the Monday column. "And a portion of your morning, too. And – ah, how unfortunate, it looks like we have an evening session, as well –"
Karin snatches her schedule straight out from his hands. He's not lying: from nine until three, and then from seven until ten. "Oh, for fuck's sake – whoever's responsible for this is gonna regret it."
"If you say so." Kabuto picks his coffee back up, wraps his hands around it once again. He takes a sip and smiles, mild and infuriating. "I'll see you later, then. I'm sure we'll both be more pleasant company once we've woken up a little, won't we?"
If he was half-asleep when she first stormed in, he's awake enough by now to be exactly as on top of his maddening game as usual. Karin gives a haughty sniff, which she's sure Kabuto will correctly interpret as an invitation to go fuck himself, and slams her way out of the airy, above-ground kitchen into the gloom of the central base.
.-.-.-.
.-.-.-.
The prisoners of Sound don't tend to like being prisoners of Sound. They tend to slop their food about and scream incoherently through the bars of their cells, as though wearing the uniform of Sound means Karin gives a shit about their grievances with Sound – and frankly, if it was left to Karin, she'd knock them all the hell out and get on with her job in peace. Kabuto has tranquiliser strong enough to bring down even the curse seal mutant in the northern base, if he needs to: a drop of that in the prisoners' vat of breakfast gloop, and they'd be out for days.
But Kabuto's also got a problem with sedating prisoners, even though it's never Kabuto who has to fucking deal with them; and down in the dungeons, the prisoners have decided today's a good day to kick off about the quality of Hidden Sound's catering.
"I don't care," Karin says loudly, for what must be at least the hundredth time since stepping through the cellblock door. She gives the massive vat of shitty, paste-like porridge a kick. It hardly moves. She kicks it again. It rolls barely a centimetre, its wheels squeaking on the uneven stone floor. The prisoners are still making noise. Of course they are. They're never not. "I don't care," she says, louder still. "I don't care, I don't fucking care, I don't care –"
There's an unexpected sound, wet and gelatinous, as of gloopy porridge splashing against a surface. There's an unexpected feeling, wet and cold, as of gloopy porridge splashing against Karin's back.
The swarming hum of chakra all throughout the cellblock bursts open into mirth.
Karin leaves the vat where it is, stranded in the middle of the hall, and starts immediately back for the cellblock door. "I'll let the kitchen staff know you're all on hunger strike," she says, voice raised – and the instant the door slams closed behind her, the bright bubble of mirth spikes into fury.
It surges up and up, violent chaos kicking off, but the sense of vicious satisfaction is nowhere near enough to lift her mood. Karin has nine whole hours left to spend with Kabuto: if matters can get worse than this, then they will get worse.
She's halfway to the laundry room when Tayuya barges out of the showers at exactly the wrong time, barks with laughter, and launches off into theorising, at loud and vulgar length, over whether the entire prison just queued up to jizz on her or what, goddamn, that's some fucking nasty-looking shit – and a torrent of effervescently inventive cussing follows her all the way to the laundry, the echoes of Tayuya's chakra-amplified voice bouncing weird and hollow through the endless stone halls.
If matters can get worse, then they will get worse. Karin's not stupid enough to believe in rock bottom: matters in Hidden Sound can always, always get worse.
.-.-.-.
.-.-.-.
Kabuto kicks off his first session of the day with nothing but blood samples, one after the other, little glass jars stacking up against the rest of them on the shelf marked KARIN in his refrigerator.
"Dizzy?" he says, blandly sympathetic, when she gets to her feet and finds them swaying from beneath her. "I'll let you take a minute. Or – actually, now I think about it, I might have just the thing to take your mind off it. What do you think?"
Karin scowls at him.
"That's the spirit," says Kabuto, and holds the laboratory door for her as invitingly as though she has any choice whatsoever in the matter.
Three rooms down, another door opens onto the splattered aftermath of what was probably vivisection, judging by the blood on the laboratory table, and which probably happened hours ago, judging by the dank metallic stink. Kabuto indicates the mess with an apologetic wave, and begins, "If you wouldn't mind –"
"Fine," interrupts Karin. She drags the mop from the store cupboard. She kicks the cupboard shut. The echo is immediate and painfully loud. "Fine, whatever. You could have just said there was cleaning to do."
"I suppose I could have," says Kabuto, agreeable as ever. He watches for a moment, then wrinkles his nose in displeasure. "It really does smell awful, doesn't it? There's detergent under the sink. Come and find me when you're done."
It could be worse. Whoever the subject was, they haven't left any non-fluid bits of themselves behind. It could definitely be worse. She sluices the place out in a mood growing fouler by the minute, and though it's true that the worst of the dizziness has passed by the time she's done, she sure as hell doesn't mention it to Kabuto: who greets her brightly on her return, refuses her lunch on the grounds that it might interfere with his data, buckles her extremities to a chair, orders her not to move, and fucks off for the next three hours, reappearing only to remove subdermal shunts she could have removed herself.
"Oh, I'm sure," says Kabuto, when Karin testily informs him of this fact, and chivvies her on her way with a smile that falls so far short of amicable it makes her want to puke.
.-.-.-.
.-.-.-.
It's not just prisoners Kabuto refuses to sedate: it's every last one of his test subjects, too. Karin grudgingly accepts that, though. No point dragging some half-dead kid all the way back from Lightning Country only to discover, too late, that his bloodline reacts poorly to prolonged unconsciousness, and that any data gathered will be uselessly contaminated, statistics skewed, information unreliable. It's different to the prisoner situation. She gets it.
She doesn't like it, but she gets it.
"Did you know," says the subject in Basement X17, who likes to ditch his solid form every single fucking time Karin steps into the room, and on top of that likes to float his liquefied form to the very top of his tank, so that Karin has to squint up into the blinding ceiling lights every single fucking time she needs to track his chakra, too, "– did you know," he says, conversationally, while she slams her way through an endless selection of drawers looking for the exact variation of nutrient powder specified on his chart this week, "– did you know, where I come from – did you know 'Karin' is actually just slang for 'useless'?"
Karin kicks a drawer shut so hard it bounces straight back open. She kicks it again. It's learned its lesson; it stays shut.
"So, like – that's so fucking Karin," says the subject in Basement X17. "That's what you'd say in Water Country, if something was shit. Like – ugh, you're so Karin. Like if someone lost a fight. So Karin. Swear on my life."
There's a ladder against his tank, bare rungs set against the glass, leading to the gantry overhead. "If you don't shut up, I'm gonna put salt in your water," says Karin, and starts the climb.
"Literally the most Karin thing you've ever said," says the subject in Basement X17, whose chakra is moving steadily up the tank in pace with her. "I can see up your shorts, by the way. Might wanna do something about that. Or not, whatever."
The gantry clanks beneath her weight. Karin prises up the entrance of the feeding chute, unscrews the lid of the jar she's just dragged up with her, and dumps the whole thing in. Dusty beige powder swills out through the water, and dissolves in moments.
"Oh, gross," says the subject in Basement X17, sounding thoroughly repulsed. "That's fucking nasty, what the fuck is this shit –"
Karin clanks her way along the gantry to the trapdoor exit. The clang of heavy steel on steel as she slams it behind her is satisfyingly final.
.-.-.-.
.-.-.-.
"Bad day?" Kabuto says solicitously, when he arrives at his office that evening to find Karin already there, slouched down and scowling in the chair before his desk. "This probably won't make it better, I'm afraid. Could you go over to the second lab? I'll be along in a minute."
Karin lets out her most resentful sigh. "Fine," she says, and heaves herself up.
"Sterilise the surgical tray before I get there, would you?" Kabuto calls after her, which is an intimidation tactic so shameless that he obviously knows she'll recognise it for what it is: but her heart still skips a panicked beat, and she's exactly as mad at herself for allowing it to get to her as she is at Kabuto for saying it at all.
.-.-.-.
.-.-.-.
She gets back to her room before eleven, light-headed with blood loss and exhaustion; she sleeps till her alarm, and starts the whole fucking circus over again. Six hours with Kabuto on Tuesday, on and off; and then the whole of Wednesday, fourteen hours straight, though Karin spends most of that time unconscious under Kabuto's favoured application of numbing chakra to the brain – which is at least better than fourteen hours spent conscious in Kabuto's company, even if Kabuto doesn't actually warn her before he knocks her out, and then refuses to tell her what he's been doing to her all day once she wakes up on the other side of it, and only shakes his head, gently chiding, when she demands to know.
"But it's my body," says Karin, who's still far too bleary to put a better argument together yet feels, nonetheless, that this one should suffice.
"Research records are confidential information," Kabuto says, patiently, "and you know you don't have access. And in any case – technically, it's not your body. It's Lord Orochimaru's. As is mine. As is everyone in Sound's." He offers her a rueful shrug. There's fresh blood spattered on the shoulder of his scrubs. It's probably hers. "Why don't you get some sleep, Karin-san?"
.-.-.-.
.-.-.-.
Her entire body's aching by the morning. She spends a few minutes twisting around and studying herself in the bathroom mirror, but ends up with no more idea of what Kabuto might have been doing than she had before; so she zips on her uniform and shoves it to the back of her mind. Whatever it was, it's done. It's not like it's the first time he's pulled this on her, anyway. She slams her bedroom door and heads out, aching all the way down to the insides of her bones. Her temper's so brittle it's gonna snap the instant some asshole decides he's smart enough to talk shit behind her back – the instant anyone fucking crosses her, inmate or subject or Kabuto himself –
The swell of Orochimaru's chakra is abrupt. It bursts up right in front of Karin, directly in her way – and sunk in the black cloud of her own foul temper, she barely dodges it in time.
He flickers into existence seconds later, with a puff of deep purple smoke that's scattered through with snake scales. The snake scales glitter in the torchlight. There's no reason whatsoever for a shunshin jutsu to involve glittering snake scales, but Karin's not the kind of girl to begrudge her ruthless primary guardian a little theatricality. Not out loud, anyway. Not to his face. Not as long as he could kill her in half a second flat.
"Are you well, child?"
"Oh, of course, Lord Orochimaru," says Karin, dutifully saccharine, "and thank you ever so much for asking..." She hesitates. "Actually – no. No, there is something –"
Her schedule, removed from her back pocket: Orochimaru takes it delicately, between a thin white finger and a thin white thumb.
"I've got forty hours with that –" asshole, she doesn't say – stops, corrects herself, sweetens herself, "– with Kabuto-sensei, just this week. And Kabuto-sensei won't tell me why, but he said you would, Lord Orochimaru, he said you'd know all about why I have to spend so much time with –"
"You'll be leaving us soon," he says, absently. His voice isn't exactly kind, but it's never kind; the pulse of his chakra is even and untroubled, but it's rarely any other way.
Karin stops. She regroups. "Leaving?" she says, carefully controlled.
"For the southern base," he agrees. He folds her schedule back up, and she takes it. A strange feeling of remove is coming over her: the southern base is a death sentence, but it can't be hers. It makes no sense. It's Thursday morning, and her glasses need cleaning and she hasn't even eaten yet, hasn't even brushed her hair today. "Our largest prison complex," says Orochimaru, "as I'm sure you know."
She does. She nods, and then, "Yes, Lord Orochimaru," she says, mechanically.
He tilts his head, and considers her. His yellow eyes are bright in the gloom, in the shadows of the torch-lit corridor. "How old are you now, child?"
If it was anyone else, this is the bit where Karin'd quiver her lip, clasp her hands together, try to look as pitiably innocent as she can; but it's Orochimaru, and she's been primary lab assistant at the autopsies of kids half her age. "Thirteen," she says instead, and folds her arms tightly across her front.
"You are?" says Orochimaru, and then he sighs, in a way that might be wistful if there was anything warmer than cold glass behind his eyes. "You must treasure your youth while you have it, child. Thirteen is so young yet..."
And if it was anyone else, Karin'd already have snapped at them to hurry the fuck up with it – would have done it five minutes ago, would have done it the instant they didn't just up and out with it, and started wasting her time with this creepy, gentle crooning – but it's Orochimaru. When it comes to self-preservation, Orochimaru is the exception to every rule. She digs her fingers into her arms and says nothing.
He sighs again, and folds his hands over the wide sash of his kimono. "Kabuto-kun wishes to have as much time with you as possible this week. Before your departure, you understand – before it becomes impractical. Whatever it is you're covering in these sessions –" the uncurling of one long white finger, to indicate the schedule still clutched crumpled in her hand, "– would have been covered, ordinarily, over a period of weeks... But circumstances do have rather a way of interfering. Wouldn't you say?"
Through her teeth: "Yes, Lord Orochimaru."
Thoughtfully, Orochimaru nods. The snakes embroidered onto today's kimono are dark green on black, the fabric shimmering by torchlight. "The previous warden of the southern base has been found to have formed... certain sympathies." He pronounces it carefully, the word so unfamiliar it needs manoeuvring from his mouth. "With the subjects in his care. I can trust you not to make the same mistake, I'm sure."
"I don't have sympathies," says Karin. She hesitates – and then says, in a tone of calm so fragile it'll shatter if she's careless, "Are you saying I'm getting his job?"
"Why, whatever else could I have been saying?" says Orochimaru. He tilts his head, as though he considers the question a particularly fascinating one. "You thought... oh, child, you thought I would send you as a prisoner? You thought I would – dispose of you? Child," says Orochimaru, again, and he smiles, too wide – he lays his hand against the side of her head, too gentle, "not you. Never you." He taps two fingers to her temple. "Not when you remain so very useful."
The heavy sleeve of his kimono is so close it skims her glasses, a sheet of slick silk. The wrist jutting from it is bone-white and bone-thin.
"The intention always was that you'd succeed him, you understand. Although under, perhaps – less unfortunate circumstances..."
There's a note in that cool voice that rings like the whole conversation's been terribly entertaining. She shuts her eyes, but his chakra blazes just as brightly in the darkness.
"But you have places to be, I'm sure. Pass my apologies to Kabuto-kun if I've delayed you."
And then he's gone, with a puff of stale air and the rustle of desiccated snakeskin falling to the floor.
Karin stamps it under the toe of her sandal, grinds it into the stone, until it's nothing but dust and glittering scales. He hasn't gone far. Chakra runs through the narrow twisting halls of the base like blood in the veins of an organ, seething with constant motion; and at the heart of it she shuts her eyes and feels it stretching out, a network lit up by power. Orochimaru has retired to his central chambers. Kidoumaru and Tayuya have gone scurrying after him. The liquid chakra of the subject in Basement X17 is so repulsive it slimes its way into her attention, even though the chakra network down there in the labs is nothing but a crammed and turbulent mess; and deeper still, way down in the dungeon prisons, the usual chaos is churning.
Kabuto's not too far away. His signal is tranquil as ever, dull and murky green.
She removes her glasses. She cleans them in the edge of her jacket, and by then her heartrate has settled back to normal; and so she leaves.
.-.-.-.
.-.-.-.
"I spoke to Orochimaru," Karin says, as soon as the laboratory door shuts behind her.
"How nice for both of you," Kabuto says absently. He's holding a pipette between finger and thumb, half-full with something greenish; his attention seems wholly focused on the neat rows of little glass testing plates lined up on the counter before him. But where Kabuto's attention seems to be is rarely where it is, and Karin doesn't let it faze her. "You'll need to undo your jacket," he adds after a moment, without looking up.
The southern base is several hundred miles from the central base, right in the middle of desolate, uninhabited nowhere: which means it's also several hundred miles from Kabuto, and Karin unzips her uniform jacket with a feeling of grim satisfaction. "Orochimaru says it was you who drew my schedule up this week."
"Does he, now." A drip from the pipette into a testing dish. "Up on the table, please."
"I know," says Karin. Already the grim satisfaction is giving way to irritation. She hops up to sit on the examination table. "So it's your fault I've had to spend so much time with you. And you knew I was getting promoted."
"Well, I wouldn't necessarily call it a promotion," says Kabuto, eminently reasonable. He gets to his feet, his chair scraping on the stone floor. "Promotion tends to imply you're going somewhere. And it's more like a prison sentence of your own, isn't it? It's not like you'll be leaving again once you get there, after all."
Karin scowls at his back. "I might do," she says mutinously. "I might do."
"Do you think?" Kabuto says, mild as anything. He's rolling up his sleeves, surveying the contents of the supply cupboard. "The southern base is generally a rather permanent position – so if you're planning otherwise, I suspect Lord Orochimaru will have something to say about it. Are you planning otherwise?"
All Karin's planning is to do whatever keeps her useful, because if she ceases to be useful then Orochimaru will see to it that she ceases to be. She's useful at the southern base. And if she's going nowhere once she gets there, at least she'll be alive to complain about it.
"I'm planning to serve my beloved Lord Orochimaru faithfully," she says instead, unenthused.
The supply cupboard slides shut. Kabuto turns back to her, a tangled skein of plastic tubing in his hands and a note of something very like amusement in his voice. "That's probably a good idea, Karin-san."
Time passes, cold and quiet in the underground lab. Kabuto talks, because Kabuto likes to give the impression of a considerate bedside manner even when he's filtering translucent, shimmering liquid that sure doesn't look like blood into the vein beneath the dip of Karin's collarbone, but Karin doesn't listen, or respond, or acknowledge his presence in the room, and at length an almost-silence falls: the scratch of his pen, the burble of unnamed liquid. It's almost peaceful, nearly soothing, and so naturally Kabuto doesn't let it last.
"Did you know you're a member of the Uzumaki clan?"
"I don't have a clan," she snaps, instantly – nearly instantly – and it comes out sharper than she meant it. Karin's been jaded enough for long enough that it takes a hell of a lot to startle her; still, out of nowhere, Kabuto's managed it.
He's watching from his desk, chin in hand and glasses nearly blank behind a layer of reflective light. He says nothing.
"I don't," says Karin. She's in a mood at Kabuto about ninety-nine percent of the time anyway; if she's marginally more hostile than usual, it shouldn't even be noticeable, let alone incriminating. And she ditched her name for a reason – she knows what happened to the Uzumaki, just as well as he does: if Kabuto's trying to threaten her, Karin's not gonna let it work. "Are you listening? I said I don't have a –"
Kabuto sits back. The light shifts; he's looking at her with interest, and she falls silent.
"I wondered whether you knew," he says. His tone is one of fascinated curiosity, so naturally it follows that he's neither fascinated nor curious; and almost certainly he's mocking her, but Kabuto's mockery is a given in any situation. "I really wasn't sure. For what it's worth, Karin-san, you do a very convincing impression of ignorance."
"I don't know what you're talking about." She raises her voice: "And I don't care."
The butt of Kabuto's pen taps against his paperwork. He's pretending not to listen. "Uzumaki blood is really quite distinctive, you know," he offers, after a moment. "Lord Orochimaru collected plenty of specimens after Whirlpool fell, of course, and one does what one can to preserve them, but..." He shakes his head, rueful. "Well, let's just say: it's been a pleasure to work with slightly less desiccated samples."
"I guess it would be," Karin says, unhelpfully. She's rubbing at the site where his drip contacts her chest; she realises she's doing it and immediately jerks her hand away. It's easier to forget it's there when Kabuto shuts up and lets her forget. "Can you just get on with the test? Unless you've got a point, in which case get on with that, and then get on with –"
"Oh, no," Kabuto says amiably. "No, no point at all. I'm just making conversation. Don't you think it's interesting?"
Karin can deal with Orochimaru – and Orochimaru is usually a lot of fairly alarming snakes in the shape of a man, while Kabuto is only a shitstain in the shape of a man – so it's irrational that she should let him get to her. The worst Orochimaru could do to her is far, far worse than the worst Kabuto has the clearance to do; whatever Kabuto's worst is, he's probably already done it to her, several times over, and will have done it again by the end of the week. It's irrational to let him get to her; she knows it's irrational.
But the pleasant crinkle of his eyes behind his glasses tilts her stomach into nausea, and knowing it's irrational doesn't help.
Kabuto's still watching her. His pen's still tapping on the desk.
"What?" Karin snaps. "I don't care. I already told you I don't care."
"No?" says Kabuto. He studies her for a moment, and then he smiles a very particular smile: small, private. "Well, that's too bad."
She's seen him play his mindgames on people whose guts he was wrist-deep in at the time; she wouldn't put it past him to bring up the genocide of Whirlpool just to fuck with her. Everyone's got their hobbies, after all. Kabuto's just happen to be more inscrutably sadistic than most. Karin glares at him until he shrugs, still smiling, and looks away.
After a moment, the quiet scratch of pen on paper resumes. The steady, tranquil beat of his chakra hasn't changed.
It's cold in the lab, colder still with her jacket unzipped. She folds her arms tight across it. She's put up with a hell of a lot of bullshit to live this long already: she can put up with this as well. She'll be halfway across the country before the week is up: if it keeps her alive until she gets there, Karin's pretty sure she can put up with anything at all.