Until Spring

I

Day 56

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Disclaimer

I do not own any of the publicly recognized figures in this Fanfiction. Naruto is owned by the destroyers of worlds and incompetent people.

Content Warning

This fanfiction is filled with the fuckery of my mind. This fanfiction is explicit and M-rated.

Chapter Warning

Medical Horror


They would never forgive her.

Head bowed in as she sat in her wheelchair, arms crossed at the wrist. Panting. Exhausted. Mystified.

Even if every day, for every single healing session, she had made no true progress. Stopping the spread of disintegration, surely, but fight it back? No. A point of stagnation. She would still be considered a traitor.

Yet, this was unforgivable. If she were ever so unlucky as to see Konoha again, it would be in a case of execution. But this was worse. The stagnancy let way by accident.

She had made progress. She had found a trail of blood and followed it. Tracing its twisted path into the depths of Orochimaru's bones and, without even thinking about it-

Without thinking about it. Without thinking about it she had carefully righted the osteoblasts and osteoclasts that had malfunctioned and progressed to a strange, unfamiliar bone cancer… and it clicked. And it stuck. And the blood that came from those bits of new, fresh, usable marrow behind still-thin compact bone…

Sakura pursed her lips, her hand resettling into the convex portion of his sternum, her fingers digging in. The breakthrough…prophetic and cruel, the snake did swirl. Elated in its brainlessness, forceful in its non-suggestion to proceed.

Go on. Go on. Continue.

Sakura's eyes slid from the shallow marks in the snake's chest to the blank expression pulled across his face. The clammy brow, the angled sweep of his eye markings, and the androgynous structure of his nose. Sallow-skinned, he hid his abominable mouth structure behind long and thin lips.

In strange, off-handed moments, she almost considered his structure artful. A talented abomination, skillfully carved.

But then, she would see the rise of his chest. The flicker of his eyes behind heavy lids, a twitch in his lips.

Then she would remember that Orochimaru was distinctly horrifying.

Within her constant prodding, scoping, and diagnosing- she had found a litany of things that made her shudder. First, and not so surprising, was the wrongness of his organs and flesh. It..wasn't his own. At least, not originally. The chakra markers left deep within cells of smooth and striated muscle were not Orochimaru's. And there were too many, too different.

Body snatcher indeed.

But then, beyond those little shows of tyranny, was his true body. Hidden in the folds, tucked in the vessels and leukocytes, his lymph nodes, and nervous system…

His bones.

His bones, at least in his arms, had traces of other chakras. But it was quickly usurped by his own anatomy. Consuming it, rebuilding it. Catabolism and anabolism worked in a circadian rhythm until, probably over a hundred, foreign chakras were swept away.

It revealed him in technicolor. A glittering map of hell embodied.

It first started with his ribs. He had too many ribs- and not enough connecting to his sternum. Floating false ribs, deceptively thin, that loosely thrummed with every twitch of his abdominal and chest muscles.

Following that, Sakura had counted far too many vertebrae. Well, that was an understatement. The common amount of vertebrae in notably-civilian families was around thirty-three. She had thirty-three.

And some with intensive bloodlines had more, furthering the flexibility of the spine. Some had fused- which often required her and Tsunade to separate them.

But this was ridiculous.

She had once heard that snakes, namely anacondas, could have up to six hundred vertebrae and it seemed like this was the desired effect of Orochimaru's spinal column. Not quite there, but Sakura had lost count. And those were his own.

Anatomical anomaly. Abomination.

His arms and legs seemed almost rudimentary compared to everything else.

Of course, his arms were the root of the issue. Not the flesh and bone itself, but the chakra and the residual effect of the Third's technique. His soul, all though it was strange to think that the man had such a thing.

A laugh echoed somewhere within her own mind. A cackling reminder that souls were apparently given out quite freely.

A frown creased Sakura's face as her eyes pinched shut. Whatever. It didn't matter.

Yet.

Yet. Sakura couldn't shake the fear she had of the man. At fifteen on her mission with Naruto and Kakashi, she had remembered the terrorism that was Orochimaru in a fight. A reminder that she was desperately weak. But memories came flush-

She had only seen him a handful of times. The worst nightmares when she was only twelve.

As a genin.

The traumatization of ninjas was commonplace. It was supposed to happen, it was supposed to iron out the deficient behavior of empathy and sympathy. And fear. That's why they started so young, that's why they all died young.

But still, Sakura wasn't her teammates. Considered soft and weak- yet she had come from a family without bloodline and without political reins, to control or be controlled. Unimportant and nameless, Haruno mediocrity.

There had long been discussions by the older generations in her family about being descendants of the moon. A shuttering claim by those who pissed their pants at the idea of anything about D-Rank, if you asked her.

But here. In this room, remembering her past: perhaps they had been correct. Correct in the way that implied leagues of symbolic treachery. The moon was associated with a rabbit. And snakes, especially large ones, could eat them whole.

And that reminded Sakura of her basis of fear regarding Orochimaru. More…instinctual, less cerebral. An itch along her veins that warned her not to look away.

When she had been exploring his bones, she had allowed it to graze that of his face. Infections of the mouth, nose, or eyes were particularly dangerous. The soft tissues and mucosal regions were easily broken down and affected by poisons and venoms and she had been trying to assess the possible damage to his brain of all things when she remembered-

Mouth jarred open, too wide. Vomiting up snakes. Vomiting up a new body. Biting Sasuke, changing Sasuke, killing Team 7.

Curiosity killed the cat. Satisfaction brought it back.

Now, was Sakura satisfied? She certainly felt something when she discovered the falseness in which she had initially perceived him. Her memory told her he had fangs, just two, fourth in from the middle like a dog.

But that wasn't it. That wasn't it at all. He had human incisors. Straight and a little discolored from sickness, but beyond that was a mash-up of viper and reticulated python. Molars nonexistent. And it was in those moments that Sakura remembered snakes did not, infact, detach their jaw.

Orochimaru's jaw was segmented. Like a snake, it had several overlapping strips of bone that could fold and move independently of one another. And musculature- the musculature!

It was so in-depth, so alien, that it fascinated her. Sickened her too, of course. Of course. That little bit of curiosity, though, had become a thrumming engrossment.

Suddenly, most ninjas seemed mediocre.

There was little information on Orochimaru's hereditary genes. His parents died, Sarutobi the Third Hokage had taken him in. He was a psychopath and blah blah blah- and it boiled down to a haughty criminal record and a death count of children. Not like every single Village out there supplemented their soils with dead children. But, Orochimaru was one man-

There were countless things. There would be more.

And here, in the crux of things, as she was satiating her curiosity- she had broken through an unexpected hurdle by healing a bit of bone marrow. Unexpectedly. Interesting.

This was bad.

Sakura's hands made it to her hair as she thought about her next steps.

Well, the next steps were actually easy. It was her morals that suffered. It was a painful jab to know that she was able to proceed. Proceed down a dark path that ended distinctly in the end. The reawakening of evil, the spark of the final flame that would burn away the wick of Konoha.

The next step was to clean up his spongy bone, red marrow, and yellow marrow. Take care to repair this strange form of osteoporosis founded simply because she found his anatomy interesting. Like lead poisoning mimicking the calcium in the bone, removing myelin sheaths from the nervous dendrites did this soul removal cripple. Only the malfunctions themselves were in the cellular ability of the osteo cells and the sheaths making up the chakra pathways.

Pins and needles erupted up and down the arm and hand that wasn't pressed into Orochimaru as the seal made its way around her arm over and over again. Insistent. She would have to take care to go through each and every bone. Head to toe-

Sakura started with his spine.


Until Spring

I

Day 58

Having been used to waking up in pain, Sakura woke up in silent agony.

She had worked overnight and into that 58th day. It was, unfortunately, not fueled by simple fear or simple workaholic tendencies. It was the intimate nature in which she observed every section of bone, learning that Orochimaru had three hundred and twenty-seven vertebrae.

Every tarsal to carpal, every inch of his iliac crest, even his teeth-

And now, she felt even more crippled than before. The muscles of her back and upper arms seized every few minutes and cramps had settled themselves into her wrists.

This had happened before. In her newbie days at the hospital and under Tsunade's tutelage, she had done it to herself many times. And she had gotten better, her chakra control perfecting itself over and over again as her body changed-

But this change was quite shocking. Quite blunt. And again, she had yet to adapt.

Sakura's back stuck to the plastic covering of her hospital mattress and the thin pillow under her head made her neck hurt worse. It had felt amazing earlier that morning. Like a dream.

Now it felt like a concrete slab.

Sakura tongued the back of her teeth, the tackiness of her mouth making her throat itch. She wouldn't be able to sit here, aching, much longer. Food and water needed to be consumed and, at some point, she needed to bathe.

Suffering her aching shoulder, she pulled at the wheelchair adjacent to her. The wheel squeaked angrily against the floor, the initial association lost in Sakura's muddled head.

Stretching her legs and unstiffening the cricks in her non-interesting spine, Sakura was already rolling into the main room where her brain fizzled and sparked. Nodes and synapses realigned and she was left to freeze post-maturely.

Why would our wheelchair be away from the bed?

Why?

The pink hair on her arms stood aggressively and the seal began to thrash against her chest and stomach- warning her to calm down. But her amygdala was lit up, fight or flight response creating a pit in her gut.

But the answer was there, crooked on the bed as if he'd just made it to the edge before reentering what should have been an induced medical coma. Yet. The chords to the machines had been unhooked and turned off, the heart monitor's silence grating into her ears. She could hear her own heartbeat echoing in her skull.

Shit.

Shit!

Sakura was reckless in her approach to the prone Orochimaru, her fingers catching painfully on the wheel-spokes more than once. It was dumb of her, in hindsight, but what was she supposed to do? Poke him with a stick to see if he was awake?

Like they would give her a stick.

Sweat slicked and moronic, her fingers slid against Orochimaru's throat as she felt for his pulse.

Lucky, lucky, for sure. Would it have been so bad if he had died and taken her with him? Well, that was an unsecured future. And she feared the experimental table, feared the unscientific way they went about testing theories…

But he was alive, his pulse sluggish but steady. And in his unconscious state, Sakura noticed, his jaw hung oddly against the headrest.

It made her skin crawl for more reasons than one; he had been right next to her while she slept and his face had the capability of looking stupid as he slept. It both dehumanized him and made him relatable in a single stroke, disturbingly.

He was kinda untouchable as a sagging meat sack, yeah?

"Or an indestructible menace."

A puff of air escaped Sakura's nose at her inner's commentary. She was sure it was a sign of insanity- some maladaptive stroke by her subconscious to make it bearable here. But really, it was just forcing stiff comedy where it didn't belong.

Because it was enjoyable to see someone who had haunted a litany of nightmares suffer. Was she so bad for wanting a monster to experience pain? Of course not.

Sakura flinched in the middle of readjusting Orochimaru's legs, catching sight of blood and a torn urinary catheter. The tubing hung limply from his equally limp genitalia. Almost sickly she wondered why he didn't have two penises, resembling the hemipenile nature of most reptiles.

It wasn't uncommon for weathered or traumatized ninjas to rip out IVs, sensors, and even catheters upon reawakening. However, the latter always made her teeth seize together in an empathetic hiss- even for the slick and vile creature.

Ignoring it for now, Sakura continued the slow readjusting of Orochimaru's almost-corpse, his torso slick with sweat and venom-laced saliva. It smelled viciously sweet and had an almost blueish tinge to it, having been traced to its source. It burned her skin slightly.

Wincing, she shoved it away as she pulled the sannin's arms into position. The skin felt moist and had a dense texture like a bloated balloon, something fetid and nasty on the inside ready to spill out. They stunk too, like necrotizing fasciitis; a sweet smell of a different sort, a deeper one that hit some node in the back of her throat.

Why not just go full snake and remove his limbs? Posterity?

Laying on top of blood-spattered sheets and back in his comatose, Sakura watched Orochimaru's limp features casually from her spot in her wheelchair. Blank, ignoring the sting in her wrists and fingers, skin and bone.

She would need to reconnect him to the machines soon and replace all the needles with fresh ones. His bladder probably needed to be reassembled, him having broken the tubing off inside his urethra-

Then, there was everything else. His body was a fragile thing and he had shambled around, for who knows how long. And she hadn't woken up through any of it-

It made her pause before her thumb pittered over the serpent rounding her ribcage. Why hadn't it done something? Choked her out, thrashed her?

Her hand fell away, exhaustion sweeping at her as she realized that she would be getting no answer. Nothing.

Maybe attach a little bell to him?

Sakura bit the inside of her cheek. Possibly to stop her from moaning, or laughing. Either one, either way. Dehumanize him more, strip away bodily autonomy.

To distract herself, Sakura rolled away from the hospital bed and to the medicine cabinet where she gracefully gloved up. A cynical movement, a practiced existence, as she began to treat Orochimaru with basic steps. Civilian steps. The aching reservoir of her chakra practically begged her to 'try it'.

Fuck around and find out.

And today, no, she didn't want to find out. Sakura hardly wanted to exist, her skinny body listless and pale. Food and water, her basic needs, would be ignored for this vile being.

Eyes glassy, mouth a line. Pink hair plastered against her forehead.

An echo of a person as she compartmentalized, dedicated and reptilian.


What do you mean that I had this finished and in my google docs for like three months?

What do you meaaaaaaan that this chapter's ending is fucking weird? And doesn't feel right? And is probably the reason I left it to FESTER? AHAHA you get this. This is all you get.

Also, I can and will play god with Orochimaru's body.