A/N: Slowly doing some edits as of July 2018 to get back into the story. Maybe even finish it before we're old? Thanks for the patience.
Snake Demon Rising
Prologue
14 Years Ago
"What is this, sensei?"
Hiruzen eyed the pale thing that coiled in paler hands. "Ah, how lucky of you to find this," he chortled, not hiding a raised eyebrow. "It's the skin of a white snake."
The boy held the rent matter gently in his palms. It retained enough of its original shape to recognize the blueprints of the creature which had dwelled in it not too long ago: a small yet poisonous death adder, swift and easy to overlook.
Many questions lay lucid on the boy's cool white face as he sampled the skin between curious fingers. "I've never seen anything like it before."
Hiruzen smiled down at the orphan. In a moment of near fatherly fondness, he planted a hand atop the dark-haired head. Everything about the child bore the fragility of youth, the innocence. All but his golden eyes. Those eyes, not unlike the serpent heads they usually spied Hiruzen from, were impregnated with a depth that did not commonly belong with six-year-olds.
A heavy sigh pressed its way up Hiruzen's chest. The boy was not to blame for it, any of it.
Hiruzen felt a great sorrow every time he would walk the child to this place. What man wouldn't, when faced with the living consequence of the Nations' boundless fondness of warring?
"Actually, neither have I," Hiruzen admitted, rubbing the strained tendons in his neck. "It's a rare item that you almost never get to see."
"Why is it white?" the boy asked.
Hardly a common question. It was something Hiruzen had come to expect from this child. Young minds usually opened their questions with 'what', leaving the 'whys' for when life had forced the viridity out of them.
Examining the hazel quicksand in the boy's eyes, Hiruzen could not help but feel the prickle of an underlying question, one that had more to do with pale human skin than snake scales. Why am I this way? It was a question Hiruzen was not qualified to answer.
"Well, I don't really know," he chuckled lightsomely, stifling the pity in his voice. Pity was not what this boy needed. He needed a mentor, a father, a strong paragon to take after and one day eclipse as that spark of genius unfurled into the origins of a distinguished ninja. Hiruzen was willing to take on that role, to finally pass down the ways of his tutors, those great men who had braved war and fed their own lives to it in hopes to appease it.
He but hoped that the Will of Fire would take root in this boy too, chase away the grief from his eyes before it deteriorated into something darker. "No one asks themselves such things. But from times past, the white snake has been a symbol of good luck and renewal."
The boy cast a wistful gaze down. Stroked the threadbare skin softly, as if it were a living pet. "Good luck and renewal..." he echoed thoughtfully in his thin, arcane voice.
Hiruzen inclined his head towards the fresh pair of gravestones, and the camellias gracing their flower pots. "It must be some sort of karma for you to find it here. Perhaps your parents are now reborn somewhere. Maybe someday when you are grown up you'll meet them again."
The boy lifted his head, hope and innocence ousting the undue adulthood from his face. "Reincarnation... When will that be?"
Hiruzen wished to give him some reassurance, tell him what he hoped to hear, but he knew that nothing good would come from making false promises. "Who knows? I couldn't say." He would give this boy honesty where he could.
Wind rasped through the field. Hiruzen watched wisps of long black hair twist to it. The boy's eyes narrowed to slits, and for a moment he appeared to enjoy the gush of air on his face.
He seemed content with the half-truth. For now.
Present Day
The war has been exhausted. Realization is slowly beginning to sink in that he has taken all there is to take, and there is nothing more he can learn from it. The bodies he drags to his covert laboratories and cuts open in the dead of night under the flicker of half-dead candles no longer bleed out fascinating secrets. Now they keep whispering the same tale over and over. It rings hollow to his ears, as do the screams of the men and women who end up strapped to his table. Probing disintegrating flesh can only take you so far.
There is no newness to the red paths the carving blade travels down. The curves have become loops, and they all mock him, all those poor martyrs that are so very insignificant to him, even as they die, for their deaths give him no advantage, no headway, no meaning.
Their ghosts haunt him. Not his conscience, not his prying guilt—those things are long since deadened, if they were ever living to begin with. All those deaths ridicule him. Immortality keeps dangling just past his field of vision. He is circling the all-knowledge, never quite reaching it. He might not digress from his covenant objective, but at this rate he is not drawing any closer to it, either.
Gaping slits in human flesh laugh at him. They taunt him with rust-red smiles. Flaunt their dark saliva as they stubbornly refuse to bring any satisfaction to his raw curiosity. On some sleepless nights he doubts the bodies of his lessers—surely this cannot be all there is to them. His fingers never cease their search for things. His serpentine eyes remain glazed, dilated and bloodshot as he wills his hand to administer pointless incision after pointless incision.
For all the things he is, Orochimaru cannot say he is a wasteful man.
The days bring no consolation, either. His life-long companions keep placing their uttermost trust in his sound actions, as if he is a man to be relied on, and it frustrates him endlessly. Those two are so impossibly preoccupied with the idea of him, they have forgotten how to see him for who he truly is. Sometimes he thinks they wouldn't be able to fathom the truth, even if he spelled it out for them, hissed it in their faces. Such naivety.
Their teacher is a different matter. The old man knows his students too well. He ought to be sensing something askew with his favorite pupil as he has made it a point to keep an eye on him, going as far as to withhold the entire team from undertaking missions on the circumsphere of the war zones. As if keeping him close will do any good.
In the end Orochimaru supposes it was to be expected. Going out of his way to prevent the inevitable is precisely the thing Sarutobi-sensei would do.
Orochimaru will not have it for much longer. He is growing restless in the shadows. He is tired of masking his footprints. Has been honing his scalpel in the dark for too long. And to what end? It has all proven so very unproductive, the results meager at best, especially in light of the dead-end his recent experiments have led to. The war, Orochimaru thinks, might not be the only thing that's been exhausted.
"Be on the lookout, Tsunade, Orochimaru," Jiraiya's hoarse voice is barking now, as they enter the volatile stages of their latest mission. As if either of them needs to be reminded to keep their guard up in the middle of a buffer zone like the Hidden Rain.
"I detected a medic in their ranks," the Slug Princess says as she lands nearby. She's just arrived back from scouting the area and they need to regroup. Orochimaru huffs. Her information does not surprise. It certainly explains why some of the enemies they clash with carry familiar faces, faces they've battled and defeated as early as this afternoon. "They keep him well-protected though. I almost got spotted."
"Were you able to pinpoint the location?" Orochimaru asks procedurally. Judging by Tsunade's bleak expression, a positive answer is unlikely.
She shakes her head. "It's somewhere on the eastern outskirts of town. Someone's casting one hell of a genjutsu around the area, though. You know I'm not too great at dispersing these. I only caught glimpses."
Jiraiya swears loudly. "Those Stone pricks… 'Look at us, we're so far-out'! It seems to me they ain't batting an eye copycatting our strategies."
"It is becoming a problem," Orochimaru hisses, wanting this to be over as quickly as possible so they can return to the Hidden Leaf, back to his perennial lair, where he can indulge in more thorough researching. "We will dispose of whatever medics they have before we proceed with the mission."
His white-haired teammate gives him a look. Orochimaru is well-aware the man does not cotton to following blunt orders, especially orders to kill, least of all from his snake comrade. But they are stuck in the middle of a precarious battlefield, rain pouring down their visors and sleeking the ground beneath their feet. They are considerably outnumbered. Foes on all sides bear both the Stone and Rain sigils on their foreheads. Orochimaru's approach is warranted, so there is precious little Jiraiya can say in protest. Still, the way the man's square jaw clenches does not go unnoticed.
"It's not like they're just gonna throw them at us," Jiraiya grumbles reluctantly. "They're cowards, they won't let their healers take to the battlefield like Tsunade here."
"Injure one of their rankers, Tsunade," Orochimaru declares, already having devised a plan. His teammates never seem too keen on these, so he must fill in for them. "But do not make it fatal. Assuming they take him to their base camp, and supposing that's where they'd keep the medics, one of us will simply have to track them down and account for the healers without causing a clamor."
Tsunade nods grimly and leaps forward, her clenched fist already pumping streaks of bluish chakra. Between her and Jiraiya, she is the better option to go with for this part of the plan. She might command over monstrous strength but she also knows the human anatomy like the palm of her hand. Her control and precision over the implementation of critical strikes are flawless.
Besides, Jiraiya's inclination to go easy on his opponents could cost them a lot: the situation at hand requires serious injuries, otherwise the enemy may render first aid on the spot and not make the travel to what Orochimaru supposes must be a provisional sick-bay.
He observes as Tsunade tackles an earth style user from the Hidden Stone, punches through his mud shield and sends him hurling down the miry slope, straight into a formation of four of his fellow countrymen.
Orochimaru's tongue darts out to moisten his lips. His head tilts in appreciation of her thoughtfulness. Amidst the clutter of the battlefield, it often takes allies a while to spot an injured friend. It is no rare circumstance for the more heavily harmed to sometimes get trampled over by the fighting lot before help reaches them. Tsunade has eliminated this problem by hurtling the man directly into the arms of his teammates. It's good of her to think ahead like that.
"I'll go after him, Orochimaru," Jiraiya yells.
Orochimaru suppresses a snarl. No such virtue from his other teammate.
"You must not."
"What are you going on about?"
"Stay with Tsunade. The two of you should handle the enemy more quickly if you summon Gamabunta." That's not quite the reason Orochimaru wishes to undertake the tracking endeavor himself, but of course Jiraiya can't know that.
When his teammate does not seem convinced, he adds, "If I were to invoke Manda, he'd demand sacrifices ahead of his service, and we have no time for that."
The mention of excessive killing dips the scales and Jiraiya gives him a weary beck. "Be back quickly, you slippery snake." The touch of worry in his voice sickens Orochimaru.
He is quick to mingle with the mass of screeching metal, colliding fists and gored flesh. He is closer to a serpent than to a human male, and so he moves with the agility of the former, each movement graceful and carefully calculated. Flying shuriken and enemy blows miss his flesh narrowly but he does not let the injured Stone chunin out of sight, not even for a moment.
He sashays across the muddy field, little more than a blur as he navigates his way through the melee with expertise. His yellow eyes are fixed firmly on their prey. He briefly acknowledges the fact that, unlike when the battle began, he now steps over more body parts than solid ground.
Tsunade breezes past him at some point as she moves to rejoin Jiraiya, and they share a terse beckon as they dash in opposite directions.
A deafening bang thunders behind him, and Orochimaru turns just in time to see the explosion bloom like a bright red flower in the rain. He halts in his tracks, squinting at the sphere of smoke engulfing the area. Tsunade is the first of the group caught in the blast to reemerge from the grayness. Her left side seems badly damaged, her apparel is ruined, bits of flesh on her forearm have been burned to a crisp. The way she nearly crawls away from the crash site is indication enough of her plight.
Her most affected parts flare in pale green as she begins to heal herself almost immediately. Others are starting to pull themselves out of the small-scale crater that has formed around the place of the fulmination. The air is filling with the scent of burnt flesh and the sounds of moaning half-corpses. Some are in better condition than others, and Orochimaru sees them drawing close to Tsunade, blades in their clutches. She is still on her knees, panting as she tries to repair the damages scattered across her arm as quickly as possible.
Orochimaru squints in frustration. Across the field, the wounded Stone chunin is being yanked further away by two of his friends.
Hesitation holds him back for only the briefest of moments before he jumps after them. More is at stake than the life of a teammate; Jiraiya can handle the rest.
A/N: So the Naruto nostalgia hit me like a pile of bricks to the head and I did a thing. Feedback is always welcome! I dedicate this to my lovely beta a.k.a. ucouldbx, who, y'know, betas things for me, and generally sticks in my boring life for no obvious reason. I'm telling you, she's something else. In case you're wondering why the story picks up exactly where it picks up, I ask of you to keep in mind that I always envisioned Orochimaru's defection not so much as a sporadic event as a long-running process, and I imagine said process must have started around the climax of the Second World War. So there you go. Enjoy the read ahead!