.yellow
Kabuto brings the springtime mask with him when the Yakushis are called to the Uchiha home. It bounces on his hip as he walks, the laces dangling over his hand as he carries the heavy medical kits for the team. Jubilance over the accomplished mission involving his instructor has caused the teenager to bring the mask everywhere this year, as a form of a good-luck charm that Kabuto savors due to its wit.
His father slides the front door back.
The Uchiha rooms are covered in red.
Red is the color of old blood waking up, and for that reason, Kabuto always associates it with pain. That's when it's hardest to conceal, the way it floods his eyes, destroying them from innocent whites framed by a pair of convenient glasses. His veins boil. Sometimes, they threaten to overtake him.
Dangerous to be found in such a state. Every time Kabuto feels the rush of heat in his eye sockets, he looks away from everyone else, walks away, until the sensation dies. It is unacceptable for him to reveal himself like that to anyone in Konoha. He is a spy. His masks should be latched more firmly in place.
The death-speckled rooms of the Uchiha home yawn like the wet mouths of beasts in his heartbeat. Crimson and white are on every wall he looks at, stamped with the clan's fan-symbol boring into his eyes and begging them to bleed.
Kabuto, mentally, spins his inner wheel and watches it land on yellow.
He blanches. Covers his mouth in an old gesture reminiscent of when he was a child, fist to chin, knuckles to lips. His father, interpreting the motion to be a sign of nausea, ushers his son out of the room with hurried bird-hands.
"You need to be able to see these things, Kabuto," he warns the boy, even as he fusses over his son, urges him to lean against the wall until he catches his breath. "But... if you're not ready, your mother and I--"
"I can do it." Swallowing forces down a lump in his throat that Kabuto is not sure is real or not, so he pretends that it exists for the time being. Reaching up with his fingers to shove his glasses firmly into place, the teenager waits for his father's concern to ebb, and then follows the rest of his family inside for the corpse examinations to begin.
Yellow is a color Kabuto uses often with his parents. It is the shade of the medical unit outfits. Yellow is also considered a nervous color, that much he's read before, along with its symbolism for earth.
Yellow is the pigment of a weak stomach, one too shaky to want to witness the autopsies exacting.
It is the third color Kabuto saw after learning about white snow and red blood. His father's medical suit was the only patch of sunflower summer in the blizzard that had claimed Bellflower Pass. The Yakushi doctor wasn't fully geared up, his puffy jacket hanging over the jump-pants and reinforced mesh jacket; the medics were mixtures of combat readiness and hospital care.
Kabuto had gone to his knees at that point in time, equidistant between two bodies and debating if he was going to join them as a third. His feet were nerveless weights attached to stumps of legs. Frostbite was kicking in. A terrible job on his part, if he died before Konoha ever took him in. He would be written on the records as yet another nameless child, found frozen in the snow.
And yellow arms went around Kabuto in a rush of warm fleece, calling out that there was a survivor. There was a survivor, someone get a blanket and bring him home.
White and yellow. Several years later when the Uchiha massacre is only a dimly crimson memory involving autopsy report sheets and paperwork, yellow remains. It is a comfortable color for their home. Kabuto's mother keeps the lights on in every corner, shuttered down with linen covers to diffuse the brilliance of the bulbs.
Kabuto at seventeen has grown into the nest of the cuckoo child. His mother has been unable to conceive another heir to replace him. Both parents are hoping that he will bring one of the older girls from his class home one day, show her to them while they nod their approvals and plot in advance for grandchildren.
That he has disappointed them in this task as well, they do not complain. Only inquire, tactfully, over the dinner table. Conversation for the family is a relaxed affair in their living room of muted yellow light, soothing infirmary colors.
"Are you going to take the test again this year, Kabuto?"
Pepper is passed, left to right.
"I should," Kabuto answers, and his nervousness is not feigned when his chopsticks clatter against the side of his rice bowl while he is receiving the spice shaker. He looks down at this with surprise. Why did his hand jerk like that? Why is he suddenly pensive? An appropriate yellow response, yes, but not one he consciously wanted.
"You'll do just fine, son. Don't tense up."
His father assumes Kabuto's bout of nerves comes from fear of the Chuunin exam, fear of failing the family once more. Six times through and no real results yet--Kabuto is always average on his paperwork, but his parents smile and defend him to other families as simply being a methodical type. Despite how he overlooks everything in homicide dissections.
Kabuto is not so at ease with the reaction he has just given that was not in his own control.
This year, Orochimaru will be watching for Sasuke Uchiha. This year, it might be the last time Kabuto has ever had to run the gamut of daily life. It's possible that his parents will be killed should the serpent-nin choose to attack Konoha; despite how his mother and father are medical staff, and so should never be directly in a fight, all things are likely on the battlefield.
It could be that this will be the final year that he will have to endure his family's pleasant smiles as they ask to pass him more fish, listen to them reassure that they still love him even if he doesn't come out at the top of his class.
This might be the end. No more.
Kabuto stares down at dinner, and realizes he has suddenly lost his appetite.
Later that night it's his turn for the bath. Kabuto steps inside the heated steam of the room, shucking his clothes off with mechanical ease. Down they go into the laundry hamper. It's half-full. His turn for doing the wash when it piles up, asking his mother where she'd stored the extra clothespins this time to get the lines up and clean.
Kabuto slides into the hot water of the tub gingerly, one hand on the wall and the other on the thick rim of the bath. He's the youngest in the house, so he goes last. His father and mother have already had their respective turns. Temperatures have wicked the heat off the surface of the water, so he reaches out and turns the knob, deciding to refill a few inches with hotter fluid.
The faucet disgorges a stream of clear liquid. Kabuto runs his fingers beneath the flow, watches it ripple and distort the image of his legs underwater.
Orochimaru has taken a keen interest in Sasuke Uchiha's class in case there is a threat to his claim on the boy's body. Kabuto has been asked to observe the members of the younger teams, those who might interact the most with the surviving Uchiha scion.
He has studied the ranks with some remote interest.
So far, all he has been able to determine is that there are a great number of youths with the determination to change fate itself. Naruto Uzumaki counts among them. The Nine-tails is beginning its ascent anew.
But there are others in the latest crop who bear notice. Kabuto knows one in particular out of the ranks after the girl's continual visits to the clinics, asking for help on herbs. Hinata Hyuuga, the weakest of a prominent clan. Her routine checkups cause his father to cluck his tongue, commenting separately to Kabuto that the girl's physicals betray the emotional pressure she is under. The cousin Neji as well; none of the Hyuugas have very stable resistances, pushed constantly under their family's milk-white eyes.
Orochimaru has dismissed most of Kabuto's reports on any potential of Sasuke's classmates thus far. The snake expects that none of them will be of any value. In the event of the Sound's attack, Orochimaru has made it clear that he expects Kabuto to simply eliminate any students the spy happens to encounter. Kill the younger generation. Then there will be no one left to come after Sasuke.
Orochimaru has a fondness for prodigies, after all; the snake does enjoy collecting them.
With the fixation that Orochimaru has for the Uchiha youngest, Kabuto does not know if it is possible to avert Sasuke from being swallowed whole. Not unless he wants to kill the boy, and if he resorted to those kinds of measures to keep someone out of Orochimaru's hands, Kabuto might as well gut half of Sound under the pretense of freeing them. Then himself, in the tub.
Kabuto's gaze tracks across the ceiling as he leans back to soak, the off-ivory tone that's distorted from the bathroom lights. Yellow.