A Difficult Trade
(i) Play
I have to stop failing examinations, Kabuto thought, folding the result slip into a crane with one hand. He smirked in the darkness of the room, I'm actually beginning to enjoy it.
There weren't any numbers or grades on that slip, just a heavy sentence, in the principal's own hand: I don't understand you. After all, not only had the talented medic scribbled hentai over the entire theory paper (I could have got full marks, Kabuto thought, If I'd wanted to), but he had also mutilated, in the worse possible manners, all 10 living specimens he had been instructed to cure.
According to the rules, he would be held back a year. Which was the real reason he wanted to fail the paper.
Kabuto waited till it was absolutely quiet before sliding a pale foot over the bed. His roommate was snoring peacefully but Kabuto paralysed him anyway; you could never be too careful, what with all these dangerous medics around.
He fished his glasses from the pocket of his lab coat and rested them on the bridge of his nose. The room came into form: two shapeless beds and a shiny, lacquered floor. He crossed over to the pile of stolen items on the table: scalpels, test-tubes, syringes, gloves. Everything sterile.
Kabuto ran his slender fingers over each one, enjoying the cold metallic touch beneath his skin. To his fellow classmates, they were instruments, tools. To him, they were toys.
I dissected my first human heart at age five, he mused, sweeping the pile into a polythene bag. I'll be dissecting my second at eighteen.