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In celebration of his fifteenth birthday, Kabuto goes to the springtime festival with his teammates.
Neither of his parents had known what to do about the subject of birth dates, and honoring a finding-day when so much of a battle had marked the occasion was morbid to their sensibilities. They had asked him in the beginning, when he was young, what he remembered of his life before Bellflower Pass. Kabuto had denied a great deal of it with shakes of his head. His original family, his home, the clothes on his back that he was found with; everything including his own birth was an unknown factor. Safer that way for the cuckoo child.
Recall was buried beneath memory of snow. When they tried to gently prod for more details, Kabuto claimed only he remembered white.
Eventually his father--one finger on the diagnostic manual, the other carefully sighting into Kabuto's eyes with a flashlight--determined that the battle had been too traumatic for a boy of eight. His mother had agreed. Even that excuse might not have been plausible to a village of Konoha's caliber, save that the Yakushis had pled patience on their child's behalf along with the claim that such memory loss proved the boy was better suited to medical practice than assassinations.
Killing, they said, was clearly not in his nature.
Kabuto's birthdays were henceforth celebrated simultaneously with the first village-wide celebration that was held after the anniversary of Bellflower passed. Kabuto had attended a winter-biddance festival once where ice was ceremonially broken over nearby streams and rivers, all to herald in the changing of the seasons. Another time, it had been a yam cooking event.
This year the weather has been unexpectedly fair, and with no real ice to shoo off, the Yakushis have defaulted to spring. Too early for the cherry blossoms, but fresh growth was starting on the fields. More than enough reason to celebrate when the village had gone restless throughout the winter.
As a second form of oddity, Kabuto's teammates have volunteered to show up early to spend the night at his house beforehand. They promised to be back from the celebrations at a reasonable hour, nodded impatiently when the Yakushis reminded them to dress warmly to avoid a chill. The weekend has not even started when the team assembles in Kabuto's room, cross-legged on the floor and doublechecking their equipment.
His parents think the reason for the meeting is because his teammates are trying to cheer him up for yet more bad grades. Neither one of them display particular genius of their own, but Kabuto has always been the laggard out of all of them. He's better suited for taking over the family practice than out on missions. With work, Kabuto might yet become a fine field medic, but no one's making any bets.
In reality there are geniuses in full in Konoha. They have been the strongest Village for many years even despite the Nine-tails attack. The latest Chuunin prodigy is only thirteen, already in line for position as an Anbu captain, leading experienced assassins over twice his age. And then there was the Copy Ninja, graduated the Exams at six; no one has been able to top Hatake's scores yet, but they are trying.
At fifteen, Kabuto is already past the age where instructors are expecting flights of high achievement. He is a write-off. The test papers come back on sheets lined with blue, saying C-average, B-normal. Blue wrappings for his scrolls, and blue grades.
If he scores A's, people might start remembering that he is adopted, and then also remember that children from the Mist regions are prone to premature homicide.
Then they might start to wonder what a child had been doing on the battlefield at all, if not to fight because he was skilled enough to kill.
These are important observations for Kabuto to avoid. As a spy, he should be able to make his face perfect. He should have learned how to school it to whatever expression he pleases. He should be a mirage of shadow dancing in the air. Changing at a whim. Where vague truths overlap, shades are created. Kabuto cannot be lax with what colors go where.
This is because Kabuto has an endless need for masks, and it is important to keep them all organized. He has so many that he made room on the spectrum just to contain them all, divided into neat subsections of pigment. He asked the rainbow to bend its arch into a wheel, flexed from end to end, so that while he's busy moving from one facade he's already entering another.
When Kabuto is debating which side of the spectrum to use, he spins the color wheel in his mind. The distorted rainbow is twisted upon itself like a moebius strip, flashing shades as it ripples by. It hides inside his teeth while he orders ramen for lunch. It fills his smile with white, green, and yellow.
But when he is with his two teammates, then he is blue. He is his shirt because that is what they see when they look at him, expecting a teenager who is dressing in the fashion of the other two with an additional flair. He is his scorecard. Inclusive of the parent-instructor conferences for his slow progress and multiple failures in the exams; Genin, Kabuto thinks, is a state also consisting of blue.
Blue is a learned defense.
It is his fifteenth birthday and he has officially failed the retake of the genjutsu tests. One of his teammates is going through his book collection out of boredom. Kabuto pulls the tins of paint from underneath his bed, unscrewing the caps in order and looking around for a glass of water to wet the brushes with.
"We're going in masks," he dictates aloud to the friends who were assigned to him, the picturesque dolls calculated to precise measurements.
"That's stupid, Kabuto."
Yoroi is the one who says that, Yoroi Akado whose kunai never hang straight no matter how many times he scowls down at the holster while he tries to rig them. He's in the middle of tying off another strip of cloth around the weapons when Kabuto makes the declaration; the immediate response is a glare.
"You wear masks later in the year, once summer gets in. We'd look out of place now," Yoroi adds in scornful rebellion, turning to the third member of the team with a snappish, "Don't you think so, Misumi?"
Misumi Tsurugu is more of a thinker, and he remains silent. He knows of Kabuto's tendency to perform elaborations. Kabuto has a willingness to risk getting caught by hinting at honesty, at giving his opponents a chance to puzzle out the challenge. Kabuto reveals too much unnecessarily in Misumi's opinion, but it is a function of his cleverness and Kabuto is acknowledged for it on his team.
In later years, this will become dangerous, this habit of careful setups which delay the actual mission. In later years, this sort of trickery will spare the life of a boy later on in a medical bed, but the present festival has no consequences of note to bid for, and should require no ruse. To request complexity is a function of blue; it is Kabuto's way of fulfilling the teenager that Konoha expects him to be, that his teammates expect.
Kabuto likes being that, the spoiled right-hand man who's an arc into arrogant and a degree into cocky. He considers that color to be a span of violet, the shade of it a perfect blend between red and blue. Orochimaru and Konoha, making purple when they overlap.
When Misumi makes no reply, Yoroi submits with an exasperated sigh of scorn. "Fine. Just because you always like getting your way, Kabuto, you can't lord it over the rest of us all the time."
Unlatching the brushes from the kit, Kabuto simply passes them out. First to Yoroi, and then to Misumi. The latter accepts the brush as gravely as if he were handed a funeral marker, dipping it in the cup of water before he lets the tip hover over the dishes of paint.
"Stop hogging all the green." Yoroi again.
"Sorry," Kabuto apologizes, saying the word and feeling it not at all.
Kabuto's teammates have been in disguise for quite some time now. With the Kyuubi's attack as established history, there were so many orphans scattered in the Fire Country and so much destruction that it was easy to slip in extras. Students coming in from smaller villages. Trickling in later, over the early teenage years, just as Kabuto was reaching the stage of being assigned to a team.
Yoroi and Misumi don't have the talent for spying; for them, masks are one layer deep. They handle the white shells of the animal shapes gingerly in their hands, expecting that the choice is whim on Kabuto's part. So much else about the teenager's behavior is spun and counted off, with only occasional explanation.
This, they decide, is only another game. Cleverness without a point.
So they give in and paint.
Their tutor is a man bought off with promises from Orochimaru of petty power. A comfortable teaching position when the Sound overran Leaf. No further ambitions. Orochimaru is planning on having the man eliminated if the opportunity arises and Kabuto is aware of it, so he studies the weaknesses of his teacher even as he keeps half a mind on his lessons.
His teacher, believing that Kabuto is privileged enough to have a head full of Sound-spied missions, lets the boy off the hook in those rare times he catches Kabuto distracted in truth instead of simply in lie.
Recently Kabuto's preoccupation stems from a very particular order. Orochimaru suspects that their tutor might be selling out to a third party during this game of variable loyalties, so Kabuto's team has been ordered to do something about this. He watched his tutor as they walked through the village and were assigned to endless D-rank missions, and now, upon the eve of his assumed birthday, Kabuto has finally decided to act.
There are a million secrets that the instructor assumes are in the heads of his students. Kabuto Yakushi has only one. It is circular. Much bigger than his tutor's forms of deception, and Kabuto knows which of them will triumph when it comes to lies.
The color wheel is the only secret Kabuto's ever needed, and the sheer mass of it has been more than he'd like to handle. It moves on its own when he isn't looking, sliding and shifting as he walks around Konoha Village. At night it likes to stretch out like a cat fattened from too much cream, splaying its paws on the framework of his room as Kabuto lies in bed and thinks about what he carries within.
The secret is a rainbow bloated so large that it has doubled upon itself in order to cram the full of its bulk inside the boy's head. Sometimes the weight of it makes him wonder why he isn't staggering, the swollen pregnancy of his brain gone to burst in summer heat.
It's a good game for him as a teenager. The challenge of balancing everything keeps his mind alert and fresh. Perspective releases him from the pressure of spinning the wheel; when Kabuto needs to concentrate on a specific lie to wear, he thinks in colors.
Later after the festival has concluded and Kabuto has finished marking his assumed natal date, the teenager undoes his waist-sash and fishes out his gloves from where he'd hidden them. He frowns at the bloodstains upon the cloth. Those will have to be replaced. Yoroi had been predictably messy while surprising their victim, and all of Misumi's careful work to hold the subject down hadn't prevented a few superficial wounds from being applied.
The body will be found in a closet of his instructor's home. Slashing wounds across the belly and torso were opened with the help of a kunai, allowed to seep so that rotting crimson will creep out from underneath the door and so alert the man if he had not already gone for an extra set of linens. A simple message, from Orochimaru.
Kabuto is pleased with himself for determining the interloper's identity. When classes are back in session, the team will claim innocence of the death to their instructor. Everyone saw them at the festival in their masks. So distinctive had the patterns been, particularly out of season. Everyone watched them, took note.
At the time of the victim's death, people wearing those decorative face-covers were openly participating at a competition involving fruit and juggling. Kabuto had made sure of that. Their alibi is secure.
A wipe of his hand over the blue cloth soaked through with a stranger's blood, and the teenager decides that it was a satisfying celebration of his birth after all. The shirt goes in the laundry. His gloves, in the trash.