(A/N) Thanks to DeadGirlRisen for helping me plan and name this story, all jumps in naming my stories is thanks to her. I am horrid at naming things, she is not. And most plotting is thanks to her.
Naruto was running. Again. It was just a couple of chuunin, no big deal, they weren't even fast ones. Both were coated in bright orange paint, with a sprinkling of black glitter. Naruto thought they looked very nice, but apparently, they didn't share his opinion. The four-year-old giggled happily as the chuunin shouted for him to stop running away already.
He lost them after a bit, running through a couple of alleyways.
He crashed into a man in one of the darker areas. "Oh, sorry sir! I wasn't looking where I was going," Naruto said quickly. "I'll just get out of your hair now."
The man stared at him for a bit, then the stare turned into a glare. "And where are you goin, demon?" His words were slurred, and Naruto could smell the alcohol coming off of him from a mile away.
"Uhm, I'm just heading back to my house," Naruto replied quickly, nervously backing into a wall, eyeing the broken glass shard now in the man's hand.
"You run your mouth so much," he snarled. "On and on, always talking, never stopping. I hate it!" he lashed out, and Naruto's arms moved too slowly. His throat was slashed, but not bad enough he was going to die in the next few seconds. He was losing air he couldn't breathe, he could not breathe, why couldn't he breathe!?
A head of red hair appeared in his vision. "Naruto, NARUTO! I'm going to pick you up. Not even your healing factor can take care of that." Naruto felt himself being scooped up, and instinctively curled in on himself, hands grasping uselessly at his throat, the feeling of suffocation, of drowning, of not having any air getting to him. He was getting light-headed, and there was so much blood, so much blood.
The red-headed woman looked down worriedly at him. "C'mon, hold in there for just a little bit longer. Don't you dare fall asleep on me now."
Naruto blinked at her sleepily. Why did she care? He was a demon, all of the villagers said so.
They landed in front of the hospital, the red-head racing inside. "This boy needs medical treatment."
The nurse looked up and immediately narrowed her eyes. "We don't treat his kind here."
The red-headed woman honest to Kami growled, a paper suddenly in her hand. "If you don't treat him now, I will set you on fire, and you will not like it."
The nurse quavered, and broke, gesturing them to a room. "Fine."
The red-head walked in and placed the barely conscious boy on the bed. The nurse bent over him for a bit, hands glowing green. Finally, after about 30 minutes, she sat back, nodding to the woman. "He's healed. You can leave now."
The red-head made a low growling noise again, and picked up Naruto gently, stalking out of the hospital.
"Hihana! What-what happened?" Choryu, her partner both on and off the battlefield, looking down at the unconscious blond in her arms. "Why are you covered in blood? And why on earth were you in the hospital? And is that Naruto Uzumaki, the boy we were basically told not to interact with due to a stupid war mongrel?"
Hihana sighed. "Your mouth is going to get both of us killed one of these days."
"Nah, I want kids first!" He chirped back.
Hihana rolled her eyes. "Then after a kid or two?"
"I wanna see them grow up!"
Hihana shook her head, glancing at Naruto, who'd fallen asleep during the nurse's healing. "He was attacked, some drunk took a piece of broken glass to his neck. I'm worried that the nurse didn't heal it properly, but I have no way to check. I'm not a Iyashino Shio."
"We'll just wait for him to wake up. C'mon, no reasonable person would stop us from keeping him for a couple of days. He was just severely injured, he requires watching. You take him back to the house, I'll get some changes of clothes from his house." Choryu suggested.
Hihana nodded, pushing chakra into her legs to leap away.
Orochimaru moved down the banks of the Naka River. His snakes had reported a disturbance here, and as this was fairly close to one of his more important laboratories, he decided to check it out. Not that he didn't trust his summons, but they could only do so much.
He scanned the river and did a double-take as he saw a red stain in the water. He walked up onto the water, following the red to its source, a black-haired young man, face-up in the water, barely breathing. His left arm was torn off at the shoulder, dozens of pine needles and leaves half stuck in the gaping wound. There was another chunk of flesh missing from his right side, and a good section of his right thigh was missing too, the lower leg held on by only an inch or two of flesh. The boy's eyes were most likely missing, based on the blood pouring from his eye sockets. Orochimaru gently picked up the teen, cradling the almost dead boy to his chest, trying to keep the right leg from falling off. With damage like this, he needed Tsunade. Or rather, Tsunade's apprentice. He was not so dumb as to think he could make his teammate heal when she didn't want to. For now, he would get the boy stabilized. The Uchiha crest on the back of the boy's shirt told him that maybe, he should keep his mouth shut about this. Either the teen had been pushed, or he had fallen on purpose. If he had fallen from the top of the cliff, he should have died, but it appeared that a tree, or several, had slowed his fall enough to leave him alive, if barely. He quickly tore the Uchiha crest off of the boy's shirt, leaving behind a hole in the fabric that didn't look that out of place, seeing as his clothes were already torn to shreds.
"Get him hooked up to an IV drip!" Orochimaru all but shouted as soon as he entered a room in his base. He set the teen on the bed in the center of the room, hands beginning to glow green to try and heal the boy somewhat while his doctors scrambled for their tools. They could be so inefficient at times, but they got there in the end.
A flurry of scientists and doctors rushed around, scabbing over the wounds, getting a blood replenishing pill in the teen, and setting up IV's. They hooked him up to equipment, monitoring everything. His heart rate, brain activity, and everything else they could possibly monitor.
It took over an hour, but they finally had him stable enough to live through the night. As a collective, they sat back, breathing a sigh of relief. They began putting the medical supplies away but kept him hooked up to everything. It was always better safe than sorry. He could always take a turn for the worse at any time.
"Orochimaru-sama, who is he?" The head doctor asked.
"No one you need to care about," Orochimaru said smoothly. "I will be taking leave in a few days to get this boy better care. I will leave instructions for the experiments on my desk."
The head doctor bowed and removed himself from the room. Orochimaru's other minions quickly vacating the rooms as well.
Orochimaru sighed deeply, staring at the boy in the middle of the room. He wouldn't awaken for a while, they'd found poison in his system, and Orochimaru had to admit that he had almost lost that battle. The poison was wily and didn't have a clear indicator. It was clearly made for subtle killing, as he'd found that the poison would break down after the target died. It was a fairly slow-acting poison, and from what he could tell, the Uchiha teen would have died anyway after a couple more hours due to the poison.
The boy was stable now, and that was all that mattered. Hiruzen-sensei would have skinned him if he hadn't helped the boy. Orochimaru may only be distantly related to the village and was basically half missing ninja, but he still listened to his old sensei. Besides, asking for volunteers did wonders for his experiments. He had a larger influx of failed civilian children, ones who had failed out of the ninja academy, and just wanted to be helpful, but not as a civilian. The ones who'd had a taste of the ninja life, and didn't want to let it go, just yet. Those children were oh so helpful, and often had the will to continue living. Some of his experiments, like his cursed seal, the fatality odds could be beaten by a lot of will power.
Orochimaru surveyed the boy. A very odd subject had died recently, terminal disease that Orochimaru was not able to cure in time. His eyes had been unaffected, and the boy had a dojutsu. Or rather, two of them. He had heterochromia as well, interestingly enough, one blue eye, and one green. The Uchiha very may well try and kill him when he awoke, Uchiha superiority and all, but it was worth the risk. The dead subject's eyes had been preserved, of course, mostly for further study, but there was always the risk of a subject losing an eye and requiring a new one. Orochimaru tried to preserve all of the eyes he could. Just in case.
The subject had the Sutomuburingan and the Soshigan, one in each eye. Soshigan in the green, Sutomuburingan in the blue.
They were very old dojutsu, and the clans they had originally came from were long extinct. The Soshigan was from the old Kantere clan, extinct, although some people did have the ability to awaken it in the right circumstances while others were just carriers of it, but not actually able to awaken it. There were rumors of a clan or family outside of the Elemental nations that held this dojutsu, but Orochimaru wasn't about to chase them down. The Soshigan supposedly could break things down at the atomic level, a skill called degrading. It looked very odd when activated, the top half was dark navy blue, the bottom half was light yellow. The pupil looked like a cross.
The Sutomuburingan was from the Raiu clan, extinct of course, but like the Soshigan, it was spread throughout the populace as a mostly dormant or latent gene. It was even odder to see when the Soshigan when activated, as it appeared entirely grey, pupil and iris, with the occasional flash that looks a lot like lightning.
Orochimaru rose from his chair, summoning a smaller snake to watch the Uchiha teen. He fetched the eyes, swiftly implanting them in the Uchiha's empty sockets. On the plus side, the teen would not be recognized as an Uchiha, at least not easily.
(A/N) How'd you like it? Yes, it's a good!Orochimaru. Don't kill me, please.
