Chapter Two
It was, Kabuto claimed, purely professional interest. He had heard rumours of the girl's precise chakra control, and it was not often he was able to discuss medicine with someone he wasn't currently experimenting on. Orochimaru he might have been able to talk to, but they were hardly equal and the best debates are always among people you can freely argue with.
And besides, he had to keep in close contact with Sakura anyway, in order to continue dosing her with the poison. He knew that she had probably already come up with a plan to escape should he be even a minute too slow and a breath of movement return to her body, so it wasn't as if he was going out of his way to talk to her.
She was simply there, and conscious, two qualifications which made her better companion than most of the people in the village. The majority of the other ninjas in the compound tended to either be experiments, or true soldiers. That is, people without much interest in anything outside of their specialised fields.
Sakura was different, and could actually understand what he was saying. And, when he modified the poison to allow her to talk, and she had eventually run out of swear words to throw at him, she had been able to give him intelligent replies.
He hadn't gotten around to asking Orochimaru for permission to modify her dosage, but she never spoke when Orochimaru was around anyway. She simply watched him with too-large eyes, a terrible hunger erasing all humanity from her face.
She was breaking, bit by bit, and they all knew it.
It could take a professionally trained ninja from anywhere between a week and years to break, depending on the level of 'persuasion' applied. The only exception was with genjutsus, but they were an exception to most of the rules. Interestingly, once the torturer crossed the line between non-lethal and lethal damage, even if it didn't kill them for quite some time, the victim usually stopped talking. They were dead, and they knew it.
But Kabuto never put a knife to Sakura. He knew he could, if asked to, but Orochimaru never gave the order, and it was obvious to Kabuto that Orochimaru, garbed as he was in Sasuke's form, inflicted on Sakura the kind of pain Kabuto could only hope to emulate.
That didn't stop him though, in the privacy of the night, from imagining what she would look like if he was allowed to torture her. How her face would twist, her body involuntarily try to squirm away for his tools, the short, ragged pants, the arc of her back as he hit a nerve cluster and the screams, oh the screams that would eventually pour out of her mouth. Scream following scream, one after another until finally they would blend together and it would become one long cry, ripping from her throat, all her soul being poured into it until she was spent.
His alarm would wake him from those dreams and, dripping with sweat, he would get up and administer another dose to Sakura's sleeping form.
She was not always asleep though, and sometimes he fancied that she saw what his baggy clothing hid, and hated him for it. The days after such nights, he didn't talk to her much. There wasn't really anything to say.
Time passed, and Orochimaru began to spend more time with Sakura. Hour upon hour he would sit there, watching her. She could not move, and she did not speak, so there was really no reason for such rapt attention, in Kabuto's opinion. It would be like watching an overly large doll. Which, considering some of the outfits Orochimaru sometimes demanded she be dressed in, probably wasn't too far off the mark.
"Really," Kabuto muttered to himself one day as he was changing Sakura (she always had her eyes wide open during such procedures, and the blaze of hatred in them made Kabuto continually double-check her dosage) "if he wanted a doll, couldn't he have broken a civilian and used them instead?"
"He says it keeps Sasuke-kun happy."
It was the first time she had spoken whilst he was changing her, and Kabuto was so surprised he nearly dropped her. As it was, she slipped and he had to grab her naked waist tightly and pull her towards him. She flopped against his chest, her head resting on his shoulder in a distorted embrace.
"I very much doubt Sasuke-kun still retains his consciousness." Kabuto said quietly. Sakura needed to be bathed, he saw, and her hair washed. Her cheek felt wet against his shoulder, as if she had been crying. And yet he had never seen her shed a tear. Interesting.
"You don't know Sasuke-kun." She said simply, and that was the end of that. Something very akin to irritation rose within Kabuto. He had thought her more sensible than that. But Kabuto could hear Orochimaru making his way into the room, so he roughly shoved her arms into her new dress, and nearly threw her into place. He brushed her hair out of her eyes; a cold, clinical movement - Orochimaru was at the door now - and stood up.
"Has our Sakura been behaving herself?" Orochimaru asked, as he always did. Kabuto never knew who he was refer to in the 'our': whether it was Orochimaru and himself, or Orochimaru and Sasuke, and he did not enquire. Some things, it was better not to know.
"As always." He replied, and smiled.
