Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto.
"We never change," Kabuto muttered, kicking aside a corpse from the path he was walking.
Shizune glowered at him from where she was, trying to heal a dying man who had been coughing blood and convulsing just seconds earlier. Now he laid on the ground, unconscious.
Shizune was sure that there were more corpses and dying men and women, but in the evening mist she couldn't see anything beyond a few feet in front of her.
The soft mist and heavy, acrid smoke cast a pall over the battlefield. Shizune knelt near the tree line, almost glad she couldn't see the full carnage left behind by Leaf and Sound.
She and Kabuto were stragglers, at the moment. They were probably the only combatants who were left uninjured enough to walk yet still lingered on the grassy field. Shizune's clothing was smeared with blood, nearly none of it her own. Kabuto looked about the same; he had torn off a scrap of clothing from one of the dead men on the field and was using it to clean his blood-smeared glasses.
The man she was healing would probably die. Shizune finally managed to stabilize his condition, leaving him in a bad way but well enough for her to leave him alone until a medical team arrived (which unfortunately probably wouldn't be for a while), before standing on weary feet, her legs screaming from the action. They had been fighting since before noon; it was unheard of for battles between shinobi to last for so long.
"And what's that supposed to mean?" She was still somewhat in battle mode, too drained to fight but angry enough to be belligerent. She was more than angry; she was livid. In Shizune's mind, this battle should never have taken place, and wouldn't have if the situation had been different.
She was chakra-drained; she wouldn't be able to continue on healing that man for much longer. It also meant that if Kabuto chose to fight, she wouldn't be able to defend herself. Shizune hated being put in that situation.
Her opposite gave off no sign that he had an intention of resuming the battle. He finished wiping the blood off of his glasses, and pressed them back up the bridge of his nose with two fingers.
When he fixed her in that familiar intense black-eyed stare, Shizune looked away, feeling her skin prickle slightly.
He wasn't smiling as he normally was when in a philosophic mood. Shizune took that to be a sign that could be good or bad.
"Take a look around you, Shizune," Kabuto replied evenly, his expression unreadable. "The bodies provide the answer."
Shizune bit her lip to prevent a caustic reply from escaping.
Kabuto took her tense silence, full of acerbic glances and ill thoughts, as a signal to go on. "The faces may change, the villages they fight for may change, their motivations for fighting may change and their methods may change, but if you peel back the faces of any shinobi or kunoichi, you will find inner faces that are mirror images of each other."
He was definitely in one of those moods. Oh, well. At least when Kabuto got contemplative fighting wasn't on his mind.
Shizune shook her head. "That's not true." Her scientist's rationality came in to play. "Physiologically and psychologically, everyone's different."
Kabuto smirked. "Identical twins."
The kunoichi scowled, falling into the comfortable groove the two shared. "Identical twins are, at birth yes, physiologically indistinguishable. They are not psychologically identical, despite what everyone thinks, and you of all people should know that. And as they grow, they become physiologically dissimilar, due to scars, amputations, etc."
The light began to grow dimmer, more crimson instead of scarlet. The mists thickened.
"What are you implying?" Shizune asked, beginning to search for anyone who could be saved. They were alone out there, apart from the wounded and the dying.
"We're not that different." Shizune gasped softly and started, because that voice was much closer to her ear than it had been a second ago. She picked up her pace and continued to search.
"Yes we are," she retorted unevenly, kneeling down over a kunoichi and checking her pulse. Nothing. She continued on walking.
"Oh really?" Now, it sounded like he was maybe fifty feet away from her. "Let me see. We fight for the same reasons, we have the same motivations. The only thing really different about us is that we fight for different villages." Kabuto sounded like he was getting closer with every single word.
Shizune turned around confrontationally, and he was right there. "You look like hell." The words slipped out of her mouth before she could stop them.
A faint tinge of color came into Kabuto's face. He did indeed look like he had been fighting for far longer than Shizune had. Of course, the fact that he popped soldier pills like there was no tomorrow probably had a great deal to do with it. The heavy black circles under his eyes almost made him look a little like the young Kazekage.
"That's all you have to say?" he asked her quietly.
For some reason, Shizune smiled. "Yes."
"So you think we're similar, huh?"
"Yes…"
"Why?" Shizune asked quietly. Maybe, just maybe, she'd be able to figure out everything.
He raised two hands whose palms were crimson with blood, and Shizune registered uncomfortably just how close they were to her face. "Because we are just two people resigned to our faces," he said softly. "And that, at least, will never change."
Shizune scoffed. "That's umm…a little obscure."
"Good."
Shizune could have wrung his neck at that point.
"You know, if we play a role for long enough it'll consume us. I told Tsunade-sama that and I think it applies to you too." Shizune felt her eyes grow heavy and her limbs weary. "Some of the behavior you've exhibited lately, you're only proving my point. You've gotten so caught up in the mask that you're losing yourself piece by piece, and your increasingly erratic behavior proves it."
"Erratic, huh?" he asked softly.
Shizune didn't stop; once she was on a rant, there was little that could stop her. "Yes, erratic. You skip from one subject to another, go from cheerful to morose, you'd be a psychologist's dream or his worst nightmare, and—"
What happened next only cemented Shizune's belief that Kabuto really did behave inconsistently. And it made her believe that he was probably doing it on purpose.
She stiffened in suspicion when he pulled her into a tight embrace—If you try anything Kabuto, God help me, I will put a needle through your eye and damn the glasses—and about died of shock when he kissed her.
Yep, he's behaving erratically alright.
Shizune had always wondered at what point they were taking their "relationship" too far. Was it when they saw each other in a marketplace and didn't immediately erupt into violence? Was it when they spoke civilly to each other? Was it when they became friends? Was it when Shizune found him injured one night and made sure he got back to his master with his injuries healed?
If none of those were the point at which it went too far, than this certainly was.
But she did not pull away. Her mind was saying "flee", but nothing else seemed to want to listen. Shizune could smell blood and sweat and smoke, and it was strangely…intoxicating.
For a few moments, she forgot absolutely everything. She forgot about Tsunade, Konoha, Orochimaru, wars and battles…
But eventually, sanity returned. Her fingernails dug into the flesh of his shoulder, forcing the two of them away.
"I'll be back," Kabuto told her with a odd smirk. "Just wait."
Shizune rolled her eyes bitterly, wincing at the feel of her bruised mouth. "You're still a liar," she whispered, peering around the mist and smoke-laden battlefield for moving forms. "And I'm still not a fool. That will never change."
He laughed strangely, his voice echoing around the silent field.
Shizune noticed a man at her heels. He was clearly unconscious, and fading fast, but she could see a pulse. She dropped down to the man's side, and began to try to heal him.
Before she could, Kabuto's hand caught her wrist with almost cruel tightness. "You can't save everyone, Shizune," he muttered.
Shizune would never know exactly what he was referring to.
In the distance, a crack like the sound of a paper bomb detonating split the air and sent a cloud of birds fluttering upwards in panic.
When Shizune looked up, she was alone on the blood-soaked, mist-blanketed, smoke-blasted field with the dead and the dying.
Was it ooc or wasn't it? Kabuto's a hard man to tack down.