AN: Just an AU thing that I came up with for Orochimaru and Kabuto. Sorry for any mistakes – I didn't do much editing on this one.
Kabuto sat on the hard floor of the practice room and stared at his feet. He stared hard, trying to communicate his frustration to them by means of glare alone. He felt the effect was somewhat lost on them, but it made him feel slightly better so it didn't really make much difference. Hell, if wasn't the fault of his feet that his grades were slipping. He wasn't a child and he was far from an idiot. He was supposed to be a prodigy. But looking at himself in the wall-spanning mirrors he slumped in front of, all he saw was a tired, used-up dance student sapped of any talent or originality.
There were tears building somewhere behind his eyes. He pretended he didn't feel them. He didn't want to feel them. If he gave in and started crying and lamenting and self-pitying, he'd probably just give up altogether. No matter the sacrifices he'd made in his life to get to this point, no matter the fights with his family, the fights with his finances, the fights with his own fears that he had weathered to get into the academy and to stay there – to thrive there – no matter all the pain-staking work, Kabuto knew he was on the very edge of making the decision to just go. Just leave it all and quit.
There were others in the practice room. He could see the shapes twirling and dipping and stepping behind him in the mirror. No one paused to stare at him hunched on the ground. No one had the time to stare at a dance student having a crisis. Such a sight was far too common to be of any interest to anyone anyway. It was survival of the fittest in this place and, while Kabuto had heard and believed the stories of how cutthroat and grueling pursuing professional training in the arts could be, he never truly understood what that meant until he actually took the plunge into the world himself. There was no hand-holding, no time to dither and wonder if this was where he wanted to be, whether he could do this – he didn't want to be left behind. Every second he lost to his emotions, every second he lost to weakness, and every point he lost by not being good enough, was just another second, another point for someone else to grab hold of and use to propel themselves further than him.
He stared into the mirror at the unbroken wall of movement behind him – the shapes and steps and styles blurring into a sort of mass – and he wondered what he really believed. Whether he really believed in himself, whether he really believed in his own drive to succeed anymore. Once, he would have been devastated at losing even a single point during his evaluations. But now, he just felt a constant thrumming sense of foreboding and resignation. He was losing points left, right and centre these days and it felt like there was no way to stop it. It felt like every evaluation he received back was chipping bits of himself off of something central to his being, just as it was chipping bits off his average. Sometimes he wondered whether he had every truly developed a sense of self, an identity beyond the grades and beyond the evaluations, and he wondered if it was a bad thing that he was pretty certain the answer to that was a resounding no.
He supposed the world was currently answering the question for him: his grades were slipping and he felt like his entire worldview was slipping down with them. That felt like a pretty bad thing if the persistent nausea and cold sweats he had been experiencing for months were anything to go by. And the crying. The crying he wouldn't let himself indulge in.
Kabuto tensed and looked into the mirror. Something had changed. The movement had stilled, every student in the practice room stopping and moving to the side. Kabuto stared intensely into the mirror as an area of floor in the centre of the room opened up and revealed a solitary dancer.
It was a student Kabuto had seen around, walking down the hallways and in a few of his classes. He was honestly hard to miss. Impossible to guess an age; Kabuto wouldn't be surprised if Orochimaru was of an order of being not subject to something so mundane as aging. Long black hair that somehow managed to look sleek and luxurious no matter what style it was made up in, be it hasty bun, or messy ponytail, or unbrushed freedom. Unique eyes – Kabuto could have sworn they were purple and he remembers the ballet theory class he spent staring at his profile to determine whether he was wearing contacts (he wasn't) – eyelashes that Kabuto found oddly distracting and purple markings that framed the eyes and stretched down the sides of his nose. Sakura had once whispered to Kabuto that there was a rumour that they were tattoos – some kind of gang symbol, they said. Kabuto wondered what had prompted her to tell him that, hoped his staring hadn't been so obvious as that (he had a sneaking suspicion that his attempts at subtlety had been entirely unsuccessful and Sakura's smirks seemed to confirm that conclusion). Orochimaru was thin but the muscle definition was evident in his limbs and, given the fashion sense he had, Kabuto could also attest to the state of their abs and chest. And that particular brand of fashion sense was one of the major reasons for the standing out. Impossibly tight pants one day, a dress the next that billowed in the wind and dipped so low on the back Kabuto had had to walk in a different direction to keep from staring. Bright colours, then all-black; a trench coat, then a stylishly ripped tank top. Earrings that dangled and danced with every shift of his head.
Orochimaru was striking. Everyone agreed on that. Sasuke, walking into the modern dance theory class Kabuto shared with Orochimaru one afternoon, had taken one look at Orochimaru's sequined headband and promptly scoffed out a disdainful, "There goes Razzle-Dazzle again." And that was the day that the 'group of acquaintances' – which was how he, in his politer moments, referred to the oddly matched squad of Sasuke, Naruto, Sakura, Hinata, Ino, Choji, Neji, and Shikimaru that Kabuto had been roped into hanging out with regularly, kicking and screaming – had first caught wind of the existence of "Razzle-Dazzle". It was the first day of a long period of trial for Kabuto's patience. For instance, Naruto, peeking out from behind Sasuke's back, had giggled at the nickname but had seemed to follow Orochimaru's journey to the exit with a spark of interest in his eyes. Kabuto's glare technique of instant chastisement put that to an end as quickly as it had started. It only got worse from then on.
The group of acquaintances followed gossip on Razzle-Dazzle religiously and took some kind of perverse pleasure in gathering every scrap of rumour they could pertaining to the man. They found it vastly entertaining and while Kabuto could put it down to simple minds delighting in being occupied with simple tasks, for some reason he found the interest in Orochimaru distracting. Ultimately, the most interesting thing about Orochimaru was not something people knew, but rather what they didn't. What people couldn't agree on was why Orochimaru was here. He didn't attend as many classes as the rest of them and Kabuto had heard somewhere that he was a part-time student with a job and a life outside of all this. It made sense. Orochimaru obviously didn't spend as much time immersing himself in training as the rest of him. His scores were never as high as Kabuto's – often not even matching Naruto's somewhat more modest grades. Once, as Kabuto and the 'group of acquaintances' had been sitting in the cafeteria, Orochimaru had swept past in red high heels and a black pencil skirt and Kabuto had been trying to tear his eyes off his back (yes, yes, it was the back he was staring at, no way was he looking at those legs or that ass – ) without resorting to forking himself, when Sakura, sitting next to him, had said offhandedly, "I wonder why he comes here? Why would you come to an academy like this if you aren't going to give your whole self to the life?" Naruto had spluttering something through a mouthful of ramen that honestly could have been anything – stopping only when Sasuke smacked the back of his head with his perma-scowl fixed on his face – and Kabuto felt like the unintelligible gurgling was a fair representation of his brain as he tried to come up with an answer to that.
He never seemed to be able to. His whole life – his whole self – was wrapped up in dance and evaluations and success. Why would – (or how could, Kabuto's sneaky subconscious whispered) – someone enter the academy if it wasn't going to be everything to them? Orochimaru's grades were never as high as any of the other students – what was his life outside this? What measure did he use to shape his identity? What world had he sewed the fabric of his self-identity into? What did grade, pay-margin, or review system did he feed on to construct some phantom sense of self-worth?
And did it hurt him as much as it hurt Kabuto?
But watching him dance now, Kabuto's mind shut up and he felt like, deep in his gut, he was being shown on answer.
There wasn't really any way to describe how Orochimaru danced. The movements were graceful in a sinuous, slightly sinister way, and the flexibility of the lithe body was evident as he took himself through an intricate choreography of steps around the centre of the floor. He seemed entirely unaffected by the stares of the twenty or so students gathered in a loose circle. His face was serene in a subtle way, the ghost of a smile gracing his lips and the earrings flickering around his head seemed to express a quiet laughter of contentment for him. The grey dress was perfectly suited to the choreography and accented every turn, every curve of his body.
If Kabuto looked closely (and he was squinting painfully into the mirror to get as accurate a look as possible) the moves weren't very technical, didn't seem to quite fit into a category of dance he recognized from any of his dance theory classes. It was almost as if this were all improvised, inspired by some spontaneous desire to move and to express an individual set of emotions and thoughts connected to nothing but this one fleeting moment, and Kabuto felt his head shaking minutely because that couldn't be – no one could be this free and beautiful and sure of their body and their steps in front of this crowd if it were some unchoreographed, spur-of-the-moment performance –
Orochimaru's purple, slit-pupiled eyes locked with his in the mirror. It was improvised. Orochimaru's smirk as he stared right at Kabuto confirmed it, as if Orochimaru were reading his mind and answering his thoughts with a look. Then he twirled away and continued, legs flashing and dress sweeping to follow him. Kabuto didn't look away. He didn't blink. He felt as if he were having some soundless revelation, some distinct tectonic shift deep at the chipped core of his being. Orochimaru looked like the embodiment of youthful vigour, the naïve belief that everything will go your way if you pursue what you want, no matter what the consequences and no matter who you hurt in the process. The ruthless pursuit of childish fantasy and selfish desire. Unwavering self-confidence, that's what was dipping and spinning around the floor.
As he had felt during most of the afternoon, Kabuto couldn't turn from the mirror, not even as Orochimaru came to an elegant, confidant ending position – all improvised, all that improvised for Christ's sake – Kabuto just watched the room erupt in applause and Orochimaru glance around the room, unaffected by the reception. Kabuto remained as still as possible, staring intensely at the world behind his back as he stared into the mirror before him, tracking the ghosts of life as they danced across the glass. He hadn't looked away from the mirror since sitting – it had become something of a ritual for him recently: if he paused and felt like he couldn't, wouldn't go on and needed to quit, he would force himself to stare only into the mirror, cutting himself off from the reality of life, until he managed to drag himself and his motivation back to his feet and turn and face reality standing on his own two feet. It had been getting harder and harder, and believing in the philosophy behind it more and more difficult. Kabuto had a feeling he would eventually end up sitting down one day and never be able to get up, condemned by his own strategy to stare into the mirror at the cold reflection of life forever.
But now Orochimaru's eyes were on him again. Everyone else had drifted off, returning to their practice. Orochimaru hadn't moved. As Kabuto fixed his unblinking stare on the reflected face he saw that the ghost of a smile and serene expression had shifted. Orochimaru's ageless, impossible face had shifted to an expression of triumph, a trickster's grin stretching his lips and unadulterated laughter shining in his deeply intelligent snake's eyes. Kabuto felt the shift in his chest again. And that was when he realized what had happened and his eyes widened.
He realized that it was altogether possible that, far from being some callous spirit of youth and desire, Orochimaru may very well have been the devil himself.
The smile stretching wider, Orochimaru winked before turning and exiting the practice room, his hair spilling in a wave over his shoulder.
Kabuto watched him leave and admitted in the quiet of his reeling mind that he wouldn't really mind if he was.