Softly Say Goodnight

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AN: Ack, such a marvelous response from everyone. Adoration to you all! I'd love to thank everyone individually, but that'd take up a lot of space (And since I tend to babble on about such things…) so I'll just gush and get it over with! Bwahah.

Written in four hours, total, and unedited.

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Now we fight.

Sometimes, he dreams like this. It's not something he pays attention to all that often, because as far as he knows, everyone dreams.

His dreams are monochromatic, streaked with crimsons and vermilions and pastel-pinks to hide the darkness. Shot through with fire and ice stained red with blood. He dreams about the way he embeds a kunai in someone's eye and how, when he pulls it out, the eyeball comes with it. He dreams about eviscerating someone, and in his dream, it's just a child. Sometimes it looks like his sister.

Those nights, he wakes up screaming.

But he's not screaming now. There's no point, so he merely functions on as low a level as he possibly can without slipping up and dying. Everything is mechanical, cleanly efficient and frighteningly fragile. Time splinters away from him like it's caught up in a shimmering net of spider silk and it's all he can do to just keep moving.

So he kills. He kicks a woman to her knees, grabs up a handful of her long hair and jerks her head back to slit her throat. The spray of blood arcs all the way to Tsunade, who scrubs a hand across her eyes to clear her vision. It's not hard at all to split open the cartilage of a windpipe, and the woman gurgles as she falls. He licks flecks of liquid life from his lips and pretends he doesn't like the taste.

And then he keeps fighting to purge his cenotaph of sins. Maybe if he bleeds enough, maybe it can wash it all away.

Orochimaru's strength and stamina are not indefinite, and one of his opponents is still fresh-faced and devoid of blood splatters. The man summons clones, kage bunshin no jutsu, and three of them together attack Orochimaru. He stumbles as one of the clone's kunai catches him in the shoulder and forces him back yet another step. Orochimaru smirks, uses the pain as a focal point, hones in on it and retaliates with an acid jutsu that dispels the clones back to nothingness. He jerks the kunai out of his shoulder, flips it until the hilt is at his palm instead of his fingertips and throws it. His opponent, thinking he's being clever, catches it and can't release it in time to avoid the explosive tag tacked to it. He falls with a guttural shriek, half of his face torn away from the force of the explosion.

Tsunade is and always will be more of a brawler than a strategist. While he's busy using trickery and genjutsu and the barest hint of ninjutsu, she's busy tearing people in half with her manic strength, or splitting the ground and causing tremors that makes her opponent's knees buckle. Orochimaru, watching her from the corner of one eye, follows her movements and reacts accordingly. When Tsunade's hand impacts against the earth, he leaps into the air to avoid the inevitable concussions.

Tsunade is now somewhere to his right, and she's making little 'ha-ha-ha' noises as she pants for breath in the midst of a hard-won reprieve, like the calm in the center of the hurricane. He covers her automatically, seeing as how he knows she can't take care of herself, and he stops a shuriken in mid-air with the loop at the hilt of a kunai, narrows his eyes and smiles. There's a tangle of intestines around his ankle and he pauses to slash through them rather than merely try to extricate himself. Time, time, time, time is the goddess here, and she deals in the only currency that matters. One more breath, one more heartbeat, one more moment to tell your secrets to the world.

Tsunade recovers enough to resume fighting and she leaps beside him. They fight back to back, tooth and nail, against the three remaining enemies that they've found, until Tsunade gets caught up in a whirlwind jutsu laced with kunai and shuriken that slash mercilessly at various key points of her anatomy. Keeping her head, she deflects as many of them as she can, but one hits her in the small of her back and immediately thereafter her movements become sluggish, less evasive.

Orochimaru blinks with realization. They're going to lose. It's a novel concept to him, because he's used to being the best and the brightest that Konohagakure has to offer, and so the fact that his defeat is now palpable makes the stakes that much higher. It's his reputation that's being tested, not just his skills.

Tsunade hits the ground when the jutsu releases her, and Orochimaru stands still a moment, watching his opponents warily. He could have caught her, but to do so would have sacrificed some of the precious ground he's gained. She coughs up blood and without the strength to scream, merely groans and tries to stand. She makes it to her knees and then collapses again, and the blood staining the back of her shirt spreads like a malignant cancer. If he leaves her there, they'll kill her. If he takes any move that is not directly to her side to protect her, they'll kill her.

His eyes flicker back to the three remaining Kumogakure shinobi, he licks his lips and starts to smile.

They're counting on him going to save a comrade, because really, who wouldn't? These are people you've trained and slept and played beside, these are people that have seen you into adulthood, that have, in Tsunade's case, patched you up when you were injured and smacked you and told you to shut the hell up when you were being an idiot.

But she, like him, is only human. And so he does not go to her side, he doesn't make any move at all to protect her like he knows she would have done for him. Instead, his hands race through a series of seals, Boar, dog, pig, ox, ox, dog… and he springs to one side, further away from Tsunade, leaving her wide open for attack. "Sanseiu no Jutsu!" Acid rain, one of his deadliest techniques, and one that requires the most precision. Everything it touches will be scoured to the bone, and there's little that can defend against it. With chakra, he directs it towards the group, and then he tilts his fist to one side and releases the onslaught once he has the target in his sights. He's a boy. A boy just a little older than him, with a deep, puckered scar down one cheek and mismatched blue-brown eyes. They're strange details to notice of someone about to die.

The acid takes his leg first, searing the flesh and taking minute rat-like bites from the bone beneath. The boy shrieks, screams and tries to run away, but he forgets that he's now missing a limb and falls heavily to the ground. Neither of his companions move to help him, either, Orochimaru thinks with smug satisfaction. He watches detachedly as the acid eats further up, to his thighs, his abdomen. The droplets punch little holes in his stomach and he screams in such an aching, guttural manner without the faintest trace of humanity.

By the time the technique has gotten to his lungs, he stops screaming, because he has nothing with which to do so.

Orochimaru is not cruel, but curious. Before his family's death, he could barely defend himself, so great was his desire to refrain from shedding blood. Afterwards, death became a fascinating phantom sepulcher that loomed just beyond his grasp. Things, and the nature of things and of their deaths gained a sort of mysterious allure.

You have nice eyes.

Those eyes are dark with bloodlust now, and as he raises them to judge his remaining two opponents, he keeps smiling.

From that point on, there is no clear right and wrong, no light and dark. Nothing exists save the blood and the hunt and the kill, and although he realizes at some juncture in time that he's crushed someone's neck with a snake's hungry jaws, he has neither the time nor the inclination to care. There's blood in his mouth, a stark reminder of that someone's mortality, but he's not the one doing the bleeding and that makes everything okay.

All too soon, there's only one opponent left, and judging by his countenance and the way he holds himself like a panther primed for a strike, he's probably the most talented. A sacrificial offering on the silver platter, the leader of a plethora of pawns. He's quicker, stronger, and Orochimaru is tired. So very, very tired…

But Orochimaru takes a step forwards, and then another. The man, gauging him, takes one step back and then shifts his left foot out and traces a half-circle with his toe as he does so he can find the center of his balance. "Who are you?" he asks at length as Orochimaru stands there and smiles like the world isn't a kaleidoscope of carnage.

"Orochimaru," he responds, not seeing a reason to withhold the information.

"Kousuiryou." The pale-haired Cloud shinobi wraps one hand about the hilt of a katana and gives him a solemn nod. He's young, too, Orochimaru realizes with something that might have been surprise in a lesser person. With him, it's merely another little detail. Absorbed like sunshine, forgotten like shade. Kousuiryou snaps the blade from its sheath and it glistens wetly, almost as if it's swathed in mist. "You fight well, so let's fight fair."

Orochimaru isn't sure why he nods back. And then, as the man kneels beside the last of his crew, the one whose throat Orochimaru had crushed, he touches her broken cheek and smiles a little, and his cheek dimples in one side as he does so. His eyes are grave and his smile is sweet and everything about him is so, too damned young and, worst of all, Orochimaru recognizes that look.

He doesn't like to think about an enemy's humanity. Sometimes it's like looking in the mirror.

Orochimaru has never, ever liked mirrors.

A short time later, Sarutobi-sensei finds him staring blankly at a mutilated corpse. Jiraiya, nursing a dislocated shoulder, looks on and tries not to act surprised. Orochimaru's hands are swathed in crimson up to his elbows. Clotted blood dangles in candy-colored strings from his fingers as he holds them out as if for a clinical study, and something about the way it all happens seems so…alien.

The man at his feet is missing his face.

Jiraiya grabs him and shakes him and shouts something about honor and fuckin' dignity but Orochimaru just smiles. "It's just a mirror," he murmurs in a tone that might have been sweet if it wasn't for the acrid enmity interlaced within it. "Just a mirror. It's broken, but it can be fixed, if you have the pieces." He giggles, a thin, high noise somehow more grating than nails on a chalkboard. Jiraiya, not knowing what to do, falls back a step and looks to their sensei. The look on his face is heartbreaking.

What's wrong? he asks with the set of his eyes and the frown on his lips. And how the fuck do I fix it?

Sarutobi doesn't know the answer, so to give the illusion of doing something; he walks with purpose to Tsunade's side. The young kunoichi is barely breathing as he turns her onto her back and presses one ear to her chest. There's a rattle from deep within, and vaguely, he wonders if she has a punctured lung. Her lips are red with a fine mist of blood.

"She'll be fine," he tells both of his young apprentices, neither of which is listening. Sandaime isn't too startled at that, because even he knows his words are made of aught but air.

It's just something to do, because there's nothing else to say.

Jiraiya's looking at him like he's killed his best friend. Dimly, Orochimaru hears their sensei announce that Tsunade will live, and he suppresses a pang of disappointment. If she died, it would mean various things. She wouldn't bother him any more, she wouldn't quarrel with Jiraiya, and he would no longer have a demi-competent comrade to fight at his side. It would also mean she wouldn't have to see the rest of this war.

He still doesn't know if her little brother is alive, and knows that the rhetoric he'd fed her earlier was not a truthful reassurance, it was meant to captivate her attention and to keep her from doing something stupid.

"…You're hurt," Jiraiya says abruptly, reaching for his injured shoulder. Orochimaru stills him with a hand to his wrist, and when the taller boy looks down and sees, sees, for the first time the sticky, congealed blood, he recoils instantly and jerks his sleeve down over the red handprint as if he wants to forget it was ever there. He rubs at the fabric of the sleeve over the mark and just looks at Orochimaru.

"You're hurt, too," the dark-haired boy returns evenly, with a hint of that selfsame smile.

"…I…yeah, whatever. Just got my shoulder knocked out of place, I'll be…be fine." Jiraiya meets his eyes, and Orochimaru doesn't even try to use his paralysis technique on him. Orochimaru notes with some amusement that standing in front of a corpse so badly mangled that it's barely recognizable as human is getting to his companion more than his eyes ever could. Jiraiya's shifting uneasily from one foot to the other, looking anywhere, everywhere but at the body or at Orochimaru himself.

"Did you do that?" Jiraiya asks finally, toeing the corpse.

"Yes."

"…Why?"

Orochimaru looks down at the body, at the crimson streaks of muscle and bone on the skinless face, at the gaping mouth and bulging eyes and at all goddamned blood. When he looks back at Jiraiya, his smile is finally gone. "…I…don't know."

It's the most truthful thing he's said in a long time.

The monument complex is a vast labyrinth created during the reign of the previous two Hokage, with many false ends and cleverly-hidden traps. The enemies that find it usually never find their way out again, because if they aren't dealt with by the shinobi within, they stumble into a trap. One might think that a stray child might stumble upon one of those precautionary snares, but these children are ninja children, and they know how to follow orders.

Sarutobi carries Tsunade to the monument, and sends Jiraiya and Orochimaru ahead to make ready a medical team. For someone other than Tsunade, it might have been too late, but she's one of the best young healers Konohagakure has to offer and losing her would be an offensive blow they wouldn't be able to ignore. So they'll work and they'll try to fix her, because of all the people she can save.

Once the medics are alerted, the two boys walk the halls in silence. Jiraiya makes some remark about how he wants to check up on the children, but his unspoken motivation lies more with his wanting to see how his younger brother has fared.

Orochimaru doesn't know much about Hatake Sakumo, because Jiraiya never talks about him. What he does know is that he's a very skilled academy student, soon to be a graduate, and that some people are already talking about how he'll be the first of his age-mates to make Jounin.

It's a war. One doesn't make Jounin, one is coerced into it, and if one has a single sense of duty or a scrap of honor, they take it because they can't not take it. They take it because if they don't, someone else of lesser talent with a smaller chance for survival will take it and they will die, and that sort of guilt is the type that eats away at a person at night relentlessly and without reprieve.

They wander along the hallways until they come to an intersection, and at the same time they both see Uchiha-sensei leaning against a wall. As far as aesthetics go, the Jounin is one of the most beautiful men around. He's in possession of a refined sort of elegance, likely accredited to his lean figure and sharp features. His hair is long and black, kept in a braid. His eyes are narrow, and there's a tattoo of a black and violet dragon on his cheek, stenciled in to cover a burn scar. He's also an avid smoker, and he's just lighting up a cigarette as the two boys make their way towards him.

"Hey, hold up," he announces, pushing himself away from the wall to stand, arms akimbo, in their path. "Name and purpose, if you'd be so kind." He looks exceedingly stern, and already his eyes are flashing with the pinwheel of the sharingan. The light from the cigarette illuminates the tattoo on his cheek. He's been lightly injured in the battle, and one of his forearms is swathed in bandages.

"Hatake Jiraiya," Jiraiya answers before Orochimaru can, a peculiar nuance of rivalry, a declaration of 'Look at me, I'm more important'.

Uchiha-sensei studies him intently for a moment, and then exhales a puff of smoke and steps back to wave a hand, allowing them passage. His eyes fade back to the deep black-brown of all or most Uchiha. "You kids have sure grown up."

"Yeah…" Jiraiya grins, and Orochimaru has never seen it less sincere. "Thanks, Uchiha-sensei."

"Youki," he corrects firmly. "Youki-senpai if you must. Didn't I teach you guys better than that? Yeesh. Hurry up and go on through, we're not really supposed to let anyone down to see the students. I take it you want to check up on your kid brother?"

Jiraiya frowns and doesn't reply, so Orochimaru seizes the opportunity to speak. "No, actually. We're here for Tsunade's younger sibling, Nawaki."

"Ah…" Youki gives them both an appraising look. Something of the way he sets his lips into a thin, amused line tells Orochimaru that he doesn't believe that, but he doesn't contest it either. "Fair enough, fair enough. But if you're not out in five or so minutes, there could be trouble, so hurry up, eh? And tell Yamada-sama," that he says with the barest tone of amusement, "I say hello. And while you're at it, ask her if she's made up her mind about going to dinner with me or not."

It's strange, but such things don't seem as callous as they could have. How many of Uchiha Youki's friends or family members have died today, that he can still joke about things? A ninja must possess a heart that never shows tears, but is the only feasible answer to do the extreme reverse, instead?

Orochimaru supposes everyone has their own unique way of coping with war. But that doesn't mean he has to like or respect or appreciate it.

"Thank you, Uchiha-sensei. I will." Orochimaru says gravely, with a half-bow.

Jiraiya merely grunts and sets off down the hall, his pace a little quicker than previously. The sensei calls after them good-naturedly, 'Youki,' and then leaves it at that.

"How long has it been since you've seen your brother?" Orochimaru asks in idle curiosity once they're out of Youki's earshot. One will never learn anything if they do not grasp after fleeting purchases of knowledge in the dark. One will never become anything without knowledge, and he's willing to dig a little if it means getting something that he wants, even if he has to tunnel straight into someone's personal hell.

Jiraiya slows, and casts him a sideways glare. "What's it to you?"

Orochimaru shrugs, and brushes a finger past one porcelain-pale cheek. Jiraiya notes the action and flinches, probably remembering how not too long ago, those hands had been drenched in blood. Are his imaginings really so horrid? Probably. Orochimaru at last puts a leash on his inquisitiveness and doesn't ask how many men Jiraiya's killed today.

Nawaki is ten years old, the same age as Sakumo. But whereas the latter is a skilled young ninja in his own right, the former is more of a prankster, like some sort of mythic Kitsune. Both of them are sitting on a crate, and Nawaki's trying to get the other, white-haired boy to play paper, rock, scissors with him. Sakumo is making an attempt at acting cool and aloof to attract the attention of a nearby girl, who every so often will lift her eyes and smile shyly at him.

Jiraiya takes in the scene and exhales in a low, long breath of barely-perceptible relief before he snorts. "Pa-the-tic," he enunciates clearly, and loud enough so that Sakumo will hear him. Immediately the younger boy's cheeks flush with crimson and he glares at Jiraiya unrestrainedly.

"What the hell do you want?" he asks, his voice a low, childish growl. He's already reaching for a kunai, but in less time than it takes to breathe, Jiraiya has him disarmed, one arm wrapped around his neck in a choke-hold that would require Sakumo's dislocating his own arm to get out of it.

"Not you, that's for sure," Jiraiya tells him disdainfully. "Fight your enemies, brat, not your betters." He releases him then, shoves him forwards and Sakumo leaps from the crate to avoid falling flat on his face.

"You bastard-!"

"Yeah, yeah, whatever." Jiraiya rolls his eyes and glances at Nawaki, who has watched the entire exchange with wide eyes. "Ah…"

Nawaki, noting the fact that Tsunade is not with her team, swallows abruptly. "Neechan…?"

"Injured," Orochimaru supplies smoothly. "Badly."

"What?" Nawaki scrambles to his feet and clenches his fists. "Where?"

Yamada-sensei, attracted by the noise, creeps over. She's a quiet sort of kunoichi with shortly-cropped blonde hair and pale blue eyes. She's four years older than Uchiha Youki, and his equal in every way a kunoichi can equal a shinobi. She's also an expert in silent assassination and can refine chakra strings to beyond the strength of any garrote Orochimaru has ever seen. She looks at Jiraiya and then at Orochimaru, and sets a hand on Nawaki's shoulder. The boy fights her grip and she flexes her fingers, holding him in place with minimal effort. "Has something happened to Tsunade-chan?" she asks softly, the pitch of her voice making everyone within her immediate vicinity strain to hear it.

"She was injured," Orochimaru says in irritation, annoyed at having to repeat himself. "I assumed that bringing Nawaki to her would have a positive effect on her…" Jiraiya glares at him, subtle and snarling with just a slight crease to his brow, and Orochimaru finishes smoothly, "Recovery."

"Leggo of me, sensei!" Nawaki growls at Yamada, who blinks like a startled animal and releases him. "I wanna see my sister! Take me to her right now!"

Jiraiya crouches down to be on the level with Nawaki, and sets a hand on his shoulder, the same one Yamada-sensei's tentative touch has just vacated. "Hey, hey, kid. Tsunade-hime is gonna be all right. She's just a little banged up, is all." He grins and ruffles Nawaki's hair, but the boy shoves him away. Startled, Jiraiya almost overbalances and topples over, but a shinobi's lightning-fast reflexes keeps him on the balls of his feet. Nawaki pushes past him and scampers off down the dimly-lit hall, and Yamada-sensei purses her thin lips.

"You always were disrupting my class, Jiraiya," she says in some sort of ill-conceived amusement. "Go after him, and see that he does not wander into any trouble, please."

Jiraiya stands and gives her a nod and a lazy salute. "Sensei." He gives one last look to Sakumo, who folds his arms and looks elsewhere. He snorts again and heads off after Nawaki, and Sakumo glares at his retreating back.

"Uchiha-sensei says hello," Orochimaru says after a moment. "And he wants to know about dinner."

Yamada-sensei blushes and touches a hand to her cheek as if her pale fingers could chase it away. "Tell him I would not go to dinner with a coward who cannot ask me himself." She smiles, slightly. "And tell him also to stop smoking."

So mundane. So human. There's death all around them and they can still look to the future. But for any number of nameless, faceless shinobi, after today there will be no future. No hope, no help, no life. Orochimaru's sure that in a year or two or five, Yamada-sensei and Uchiha-sensei will be married, they'll have children with sharingan of their own. Their family will be picture-perfect until one night; one of their parents won't come home.

Maybe it would be Uchiha-sensei, captured on a routine mission, tortured and then killed. Maybe it would be Yamada-sensei, shielding someone with her own body and taking a fatal hit that should have ended someone else's life. Or maybe one day a nameless, faceless thing will enter their home and slaughter the entire family except for one small boy, left alive to reap the whirlwind.

Yamada-sensei doesn't ask why he turns violently and sprints after Jiraiya. The answer is on his face, louder than any words.

As for the crack Hatake Jiraiya theory…blame the fact that Kimi no Vanilla and I noticed that they had the same hair, and how Sakumo was referred to as being 'On par' with the Sannin. Ergo, my brain ran itself in circles until the idea came to life.

…Criticism?