In the darkness of his underground laboratory, Orochimaru frowned at the dead body of a little girl lying on the metal table in front of him. Her small hand lay open, fingers half-curled towards him as if she was expecting him to reach out and hold it.
He grimaced in distaste.
This was the third one in just as many months, and like all the others before her she had been a complete failure. Her frail three-year-old body hadn't even been able to withstand the first few hours of the procedure; her life had simply faded away, chakra flickering like a dying flame, then nothing.
It was annoying.
She had been a risk too, as he had taken her from Konoha's own orphanage, breaking his rule about doing everything to stay unnoticed by Sarutobi-sensei.
He should have expected this end, not just because she shared the fate of her predecessors but also because the whole thing had gone wrong from the very beginning.
Vaguely disgusted, Orochimaru looked over to his second – unplanned – test subject. To his surprise, the ugly, male, brat was still alive.
The kid had shown up unexpectedly just when he had been in the middle of carrying out his abduction of the girl. He'd delayed Orochimaru, he'd been a little pest, and Orochimaru had looked at him and thought, why not?
Now, the little boy's narrow chest was rising and falling at a slow but steady rhythm and when Orochimaru focused, he could tell that his chakra was not only strong, but adjusting to the changes he'd made.
This was unexpected.
Orochimaru had been trying to implant foreign cells into the bodies of various subjects for months, but even the ones who didn't die within hours never really managed to integrate the new material into their chakra system.
It had gotten to the point where Orochimaru had started to accept the possibility that he had to alter his original plan to create his new body from scratch by having it grow more or less naturally inside a womb, using the DNA of his choice.
It wasn't like he hadn't been forced to make adjustments before; he'd had to give up on using adult females for one, simply because they were harder to come by and generally more trouble than children, and he'd found that children were the better choice anyway because the rate of cell division of his altered material was extremely slow.
However, for obvious reasons, he'd never even considered a male subject. Until he'd had the unconscious brat on his table, that was. Then he'd begun to wonder. Maybe he'd looked at this the wrong way. Why had he been so focused on mimicking nature when what he wanted to achieve, eternal life, was completely against its laws?
The boy's body didn't have any way to nurture the cells, but he did have chakra, and chakra was pure life force.
A normal baby wouldn't be able to live on it, but Orochimaru had put a lot of effort into adjusting the DNA he'd implanted in the boy. Still, it didn't mean that he had high hopes for it.
If he was honest with himself, he had to admit that there probably was no way for him to achieve the goal he had set for himself. He would not be able to create new life the way he had planned. This was his last attempt; if it failed, he would concentrate on trying to manipulate already existing life instead.
Four days later Orochimaru admitted defeat. The cells seemed to have taken, however, they weren't dividing. Although they weren't dead, they were static, frozen.
Well, he hadn't expected much from this in the first place, otherwise he would have used more valuable DNA than some random sample from a shinobi who didn't even have a bloodline limit. Although, to be fair, Hatake Sakumo was legendary; Orochimaru wouldn't use just anyone's DNA.
This way, at least, he hadn't lost anything important.
He would simply drop the unconscious boy off in the forest somewhere so he could be found – not that Orochimaru cared, but after the girl had vanished, Sarutobi, as always pathetically protective of "his" children, needed to be put at ease.
He wanted things to quiet down before he could start his new round of experiments.
Then he would need more children.
26 years later
"Oh? What's that?" Gai couldn't remember the last time he'd heard this much delight in his rival's voice, nor the last time Kakashi's joy had made him this uncomfortable. He tried to suck in his stomach so Kakashi's prodding index finger wouldn't find its target, but there really was no hope; the gentle slope of his belly merely quivered.
"Looks like someone's been enjoying his curry a little too much lately," Kakashi teased.
end.
A.N.: Why do I suddenly want to write Sakumo/Gai? ;_; If I were to continue this, which, let's be honest, I probably really shouldn't, it'd become quite melodramatic and would be filled with body-horror... (because it's a set up for horrible, shameful mpreg, in case you didn't notice)
A.N. 2: Finally posting this on ffn because it will not be continued. Ever. Mpreg is just too evil, even for my (spectacularly low) standards.