They put her in a body bag, closed with a privacy seal. It's… Sakura doesn't want to talk about it. She survives.
After every breath, she has to scrabble for control of her chakra again to keep it from blowing out of her and into the cuffs they've clamped around her wrists.
She learns to breathe without having to scrabble for her chakra by the time they've wheeled her out of the hospital.
She screams, scrabbles for her chakra again.
No one hears her.
She tries to release enough chakra to form a replacement jutsu, and the wood cuffs eat it.
It's… a lot of her remaining chakra.
Sakura closes her eyes and thinks.
What can she do?
What can she do?
She takes a deep breath, is forced scrabble for her chakra. She repeats the process until she can take deep breaths, just like gasping breaths.
Okay.
Okay.
The sounds outside of her change. She can no longer hear street traffic.
Sakura pushes down the fear.
First thing she has to do is reform her chakra coils. If she doesn't and she falls asleep, she dies. She's not sure she could have fallen asleep on the first try without losing control of her chakra before, and it's a lot harder now.
She doesn't know if her captors know the false sleep jutsu. Even if they do, she doesn't want to rely on them to do so. Regardless, it will eventually kill her. She's still under the effects of its prolonged usage, and these people can't be as good at managing the side-effects as Tsunade.
If Tsunade is in league with them, then—
Then.
(Where is she?)
(Why wasn't she there?)
Sakura puts it out of her mind.
She has to regrow her chakra system.
First and foremost—regrow her coils.
Sakura closes her eyes, tries not to think about where she's being taken and how powerless she is right now. She focuses only on the jagged edge of her second chakra pathway. She remembers the shape it used to be what it used to feel like. She never regrew it, but she has spent the last two years regularly meditating on the shape of her chakra coils. If she gets it wrong, well—
Her chakra coils will just explode, the cuffs will eat all of her chakra, and she'll die.
No pressure.
This time she does not have Hashirama's seal of false chakra to fall back on. She doesn't have Jiraiya there in Sage Mode to check her work. She doesn't have Gamami. It's—
Sakura takes a deep breath.
She focuses all of her attention down onto her second chakra pathway, and then down onto its edge, jagged, blown-out, and wrong.
She dissolves it and grits her teeth against the pain.
She moves onto the fifth chakra pathway, then the ninth before hearing Danzou speak from outside of the bag—
"Fuu, extract as many of Orochimaru's memories from her as you can before she explodes. I'll send down a medic who will do their best to keep her alive, but don't expect her to survive more than a couple of hours. Start with any information you get on his bases, then move onto his jutsu. If anyone comes, release a kai into her to break her concentration before removing her cuffs. Claim we tried to help her and failed."
Sakura wants to swallow in fear, but knows it'll kill her.
She cleans the edges of her eleventh and thirteenth chakra pathways, and then runs over all of her (remaining) chakra pathways again.
They're all clean.
She returns to her second pathway. She branches off a single thread of chakra, forms it into a circle, and fits it against the end of her chakra coil. She presses it into the right shape, holds it, and releases it.
It holds.
The barest fraction of an inch of a new chakra pathway.
She resists the urge to cry in frustration, and branches off another thread of chakra instead.
"Understood."
"Torune, stand guard."
"Yes, Danzou-sama."
Sakura feels Danzou leave as she adds a fourth thread of chakra to her secon chakra pathways, then a fifth.
The body bag opens, and Sakura's flinch almost causes her to lose control of her chakra.
Fuu stands over her while Torune stands against the wall. Sakura tries and fails to push down the killing intent that comes roaring up her throat. When it washes over them, and they don't so much as twitch.
They're in a stone cell. The door is inscribed with seal upon seal upon seal—locking seals, she knows from the years she spent trying to master seals because…
Why was it again?
Doesn't matter right now.
Regardless, it's locked.
Fuu lifts her out of the body bag, and she tenses, but he just sets her on a chair. The chair is heavily leaned back, so she doesn't go tumbling forward, but is left staring up in Fuu's golden eyes.
They are completely flat—like there is nothing behind them. Looks like Danzou's still up to his old tricks, then.
He forms his hands into the Yamanaka clan seal over her forehead and then tumbles to the ground. His partner doesn't move to catch him, standing resolutely halfway across the room next to the locked door.
In her mindscape, she can feel Fuu behind her. She can feel his hands on her head, reaching into it and pulling things out. He's thumbing through it, like a filing cabinet.
It makes Sakura want to scream, makes Inner Sakura want to claw him apart, but when she tries to follow him down, she can feel her chakra fray from her control, and she is forced back into her body to retake control of it.
Don't think about it.
Don't think about it.
Don't think about it.
Think of the branches.
Branch off a thread of chakra. Form it into a circle. Fit it against the end of her chakra pathway. Press it into shape. Release.
One.
Two.
Three.
Seventeen.
Sixty-eight.
She reaches her first tenketsu.
One hundred and twenty-five.
Fuu exits her mind, calls Torune over, transfers memories to him, and then returns to her mind.
Don't think about it.
Don't think about it.
Two hundred and twenty-three.
Three hundred and four.
The doctor arrives.
She doesn't recognizes him—must be a new recruit. He's got the fangs of an Inuzuka faintly glowing with chakra on his cheeks, no dog at his heels. (Damn—not even she was depraved enough to kill an Inuzuka's dog without having the decency to kill them afterwards.)
She feels him walking towards them, through the comically sealed door. There are two, she notices as he approaches.
The first opens and closes before the second door opens.
Great. That'll be fun for her to deal with once she's done with this.
(The door is more heavily sealed than the walls—she'll just punch her way straight out the walls, becuase it looks like people haven't got any less stupid in the last decade.)
Three hundred and sixty-five.
The doctor examines her, hands she's sure are glowing green. It feels all wrong—
Three hundred and ninety-one.
—nothing like Tsunade, nothing like… Kabuto.
She has two sets of memories of him laid on top of one another, one of her molding him into the monster he is today, relishing it, and the other of Kabuto, the kindly doctor who treated her like a person when even Inoichi could barely manage it.
She puts it out of her mind.
"As she grows more exhausted, she will become more likely to lose chakra control," the doctor says in that same dead, flat voice that Fuu has. "I cannot perform the false sleep technique. I will not administer stimulants, because I expect the shock to her system to be enough to break her control. I expect her to last another ten to fifteen hours."
No one responds.
Torune is silent, his chakra distressingly still, as if he's asleep, even though he's awake.
It's—
It's wrong.
It's wrong on so many levels.
She remembers it, she remembers thinking it was fascinating, wanting to cut a root member open, see what it would take to make them scream.
Now it just makes her sick.
The doctor is the same, now that he's stopped speaking—like there's nothing there—like if they're not doing something, there's nothing left.
The doctor turns away, and there's only enough chakra engagement for that action, and that action alone.
He walks to the door, and stops beside it, across from Torune.
His chakra returns to stillness.
He doesn't leave.
Sakura doesn't know if he can.
Think about it later.
Think about it later.
Four hundred and twenty-two.
Five hundred and eighty-three.
She's getting tired.
Six hundred and ninety-two.
She can barely think.
Seven hundred and twenty.
What… what was she doing again?
Oh, right.
Thread, circle, fit, press, release.
One thousand and ninety-two.
She makes another thread.
Another circle.
But… there's nothing left.
What… what was she—
Her chakra control breaks for a split second, and the blast of half of her chakra leaving her body wakes her up.
She's finished her pathways.
All that's left is her reservoir.
She's never studied her own reservoir.
She never thought to!
If the reservoir breaks, then you're dead. You lose all of your chakra in an instant, and then you die—plain and simple.
Except… she survived it. She survived it, and now she needs to regrow it before she passes out, or she really will die.
But.. what does she do?
She could use someone else's, maybe. She knows one, she studied it.
When was that again?
She tries to remember, push through the fog in her brain, and, oh.
The boy.
Shouhei.
He'd been able to regrow his chakra coils, she remembers. She can't quite remember how she found that out, but once she did, she stole him away from his people, locked him away.
She developed a seal for dissolving chakra coils, and placed him in it. She watched him scream and thrash as his chakra coils rebuilt themselves, over and over and over again.
It was fascinating. She didn't know that people could regrow their chakra reservoirs, so she spent a lot of time studying his.
She mapped his reservoir by poisoning his chakra, and then mapping it with an imaging seal. She dissolved his chakra system, and mapped it over and over again.
It was always the same shape.
Not so different from a sea shell, really.
She had wondered if everyone had the same shape coils, so she kidnapped a collection of adults and childrens, mapped theirs out.
Everyone was unique.
She closes her eyes, pictures the shape of Shouhei's chakra reserves. She could use any of theirs, but she remembers his the best. She has seen it so many times, marvelling over the elegance of it.
She'd loved it, loved him. She tried to make him into one of hers so she could keep him, so he would love her back.
He killed himself, the first time she left him unbound in his cell.
She puts the Shouhei's beautiful, dead gaze out of her mind and returns to where she is forcing her chakra reserves to spin in nothing.
She sets to work.
Thread by thread.
In from her pathways, around the slowly tightening spiral. In and in and in and in, and—
Sakura blinks.
What.
Is there—
A hole at the center?
There is, if her memory doesn't betray her (and it never has before). Except… that can't be right. All of her chakra will just drain right out of her, she has to—
She loses control of her chakra. She doesn't even try to regain it. If she loses half of her chakra again, she'll pass out from chakra exhaustion.
But… nothing happens. Her chakra spins in the reservoir she's built, and none of it leaks out.
Now… now she has to—
Sakura passes out.
As Sakura sleeps, she dreams.
Sakura can hear Kabuto's voice.
He came for her, of course.
Her "loyal" servant.
She never doubted.
He tells her exactly what she needs to hear, to make her take him as her next host.
He has always been simultaneously too interesting and too boring for that.
Too boring because he is her, younger and weaker.
Nothing new.
Nothing to be learned.
Too interesting because every day he carefully walks the line of betraying her and staying loyal.
Never has she had such a loyal servant.
Never has she had such a dangerous enemy.
He thinks he can take her.
He thinks he can resist her.
Sakura snorts to herself.
He knows that she knows, but that she has to take him up on his offer anyways.
She can take him.
But—
Sakura has learned well the price of overconfidence.
Even with a hole ripped in her, her once-future host has maintained her chakra control.
Sakura cannot take control, even now.
Truly, what a monster.
(Sakura had been so correct to choose her.)
(She had been so wrong to worry what Leaf would do if she had taken over immediately.)
(She should have worried instead what Sakura would do to her if she waited.)
So, in a hedge of a hedge of a hedge, as Sakura leaves, slipping back into the form of a white snake and having her once-future host cough her back up, she leaves a sliver of herself behind.
Her own chakra, tucked into the nooks and crannies of her once-future host's chakra system.
Sakura watches herself go, tucked safely away in her host's broken chakra pathways, controlled even in the agony of a broken seal.
Sakura waits.
Her host thinks she's gone.
Eventually, she'll get sloppy.
And Sakura will be here, waiting.
Sakura's host sleeps, with her chakra control broken.
Sakura smiles.
Orochimaru opens his eyes.
He tears through the jutsu keeping his host's body asleep easily, and sits up.
His hands are bound in wood, but with the girl's chakra control, Orochimaru easily slips his chakra out from the cracks in its suppression—a hairline along a rib in his back, a tiny hole in his abdomen, three points on the soles of his right foot—and makes Sakumo's single mental seal for the transformation technique, transforming himself into a flower petal for an instant before snapping back to himself.
Torune has noticed him, but Orochimaru puts his hand through Torune's neck before he can make a sound. His nano-insects crawl into Orochimaru's skin, but Orochimaru ignores them, mentally performing the twenty-seal long sequence for the immolation palm technique in an instant.
Torune crumbles to ash, and Orochimaru constricts his host's blood vessels to pin the nano-insects in place, before burning them out with chakra. Within his mind-stomach, Fuu realizes something has gone wrong, and tries to retreat. Orochimaru replaces himself with a flower petal he left fluttering above Fuu's unconscious body and waits for Fuu's eyes to open, for him to see his death coming before snapping Fuu's neck with a stomp of his newly tiny feet that could shatter mountains.
It feels exactly as good as Orochimaru always knew it would. Spread the chakra evenly throughout the foot, explode it out in the instant of contact.
He had tried fruitlessly for days upon days upon days after he saw Tsunade do it for the first time.
The first technique Tsunade had performed that he couldn't do better—that he couldn't steal. (It was not the last.)
Orochimaru takes stock.
The doctor is gone—it is just Orochimaru and the two bodies. That means all of the knowledge this damn Yamanaka stole from him is still out there somewhere, likely already on backups throughout who knows how many bases.
Fuck.
He sets it aside, and extends his new chakra senses. He is not at all prepared for the extent of it. He had always thought he was a good sensor (and he was), but he was not a sensor like this. It is unbelievable.
Range limited to just fifty feet or so, but in that range—Orochimaru has to take a moment. He'd heard that Hyuuga could see the colors of chakra, and he had… placed some Hyuuga into situations that strongly discouraged lying to confirm, but to see—feel?—those colors himself is really something quite different.
He can feel every strand of chakra in the two sealed doors that bar him from the outside.
(The room is rather curiously devoid of monitoring seals.)
(Interesting choice.)
(Not one he would have made.)
The rest of the body is well… less impressive. Weak, and don't get Orochimaru started on the chakra reserves.
Orochimaru has come to appreciate the female form from the inside, as it were, but, no, he does not much care for this being a child business.
He'll deal with that later, and turns his attention inward. The girl's reservoir is all wrong. He now clearly recalls building a copy of Shouhei's. They're not leaking, but he can feel his chakra drag against its walls with every spin of his chakra.
Orochimaru, thankfully, remembers what the girl's reserves actually looked like. He had been living there until Kabuto went and blasted them to kingdom come, after all.
He pulls all of the chakra in his body under his complete control with ease, and… wow.
What took Tsunade three and a half years took this body ten days.
He will not equal Tsunade.
He will surpass her.
Orochimaru can't wait.
In the meantime, he breaks down his reservoir and rebuilds it.
Much better.
He continues holding his chakra in a perfect loop because he can.
He checks his chakra levels, and finds himself in incredibly lethal territory.
Two and a half percent.
Two and a half percent!
Orochimaru has never managed to stay conscious past a hair under three and a half percent before.
He didn't even notice.
He suppresses his shivers because, you know.
He is going to die in six hours.
He checks the regeneration level and finds it, unsurprisingly, at zero.
Tsunade had never been willing to do the actual experiments needed to determine how chakra regeneration actually worked.
Orochimaru, of course, had no such compunctions.
It wasn't even a bloodline limit!
He had more than enough test subjects.
He also had… quite the motivator.
You see, Tsunade was entirely off base. Here's how it works—there is a system of reverse chakra capitallaries at the base of the spine that gather natural energy from the world. They feed natural energy into the literal hole at the center of the reservoir. The natural shape of the reservoir pulls the chakra in it into a spiral that brings all chakra in the body past that hole several times per second. (It took Tsunade a couple months to learn the spiraling donut shape she needed to hold her reserves in to regenerate her chakra properly.) As the chakra passes the natural energy bubbling up there, the natural energy has a small chance of spontaneously transforming into chakra and getting swept into the person's chakra system. The more chakra you have, the faster your reserves spin and and the faster natural energy is sucked into your body, the compounding nature of the two leading to the superlinear improvement of the rate of spontaneous chakra regeneration.
Rather fascinatingly, this means chakra regeneration is not a property of chakra, but a property of natural energy. It wants to be chakra. The implications are endless.
Infusions do not actually damage anything in the system, it is simply that natural energy abhors corruption, and that it views chakra infusions as chakra corruption. The more corrupted you are—i.e. the more of someone else's chakra you have inside of you—the slower you regenerate chakra. When you give someone a full infusion from low chakra percentages, the foreign chakra becomes the overwhelming majority, which natural energy does not care for at all. Native chakra can purify the surrounding foreign chakra over time, but the less native chakra you have, the slower it happens, and until all of the foreign chakra has been purified, the chakra regeneration rate will be depressed.
(Natural energy is not smart enough to only regenerate your chakra and ignore the foreign chakra, so you have to wait for the purification process.)
Compound that reduced purification rate with the reduced rate of regeneration proportional to the percentage of foreign chakra and you have yourself a nice little compounding problem.
Sakura, of course, had almost all of her chakra replaced—several times over. She was almost one hundred percent foreign chakra.
Toumi seemed to think it could resolve itself on a scale of years to decades, but Orochimaru has his doubts. (Although, historically, he has found betting against Toumi to be a losing proposition.)
Regardless, Orochimaru is currently possessing Sakura. Natural energy is very acutely aware of this and does not approve at all. (When he was just a chakra poison, natural energy was apparently A-okay with this, and let him regenerate chakra while Sakura completely failed to do so, which he's not going to claim to understand, but was more than happy to take advantage of.)
It took Orochimaru almost a year to figure all of this out. It then took him another a decade to find a way to deal with it. For that decade, Orochimaru's chakra failed to regenerate no matter what he did. He survived only by sucking chakra from less-than-willing volunteers.
He studied in Ryuuchi Cave in a vain attempt to force natural energy to do his bidding, and found… nothing.
Every single research path led to naught.
Ten.
Years.
Orochimaru is one of the smartest people on earth and was definitely the most motivated, and he got nothing.
And then Juugo went and waltzed right into one of his laboratories—Juugo, who had the bloodline limit that made natural energy a lot less picky about an awful lot of things.
His ability was truly extraordinary—Sage chakra, ready and waiting whenever the user wanted—but what really intrigued Orochimaru was what was hidden on that. Easy to miss, if you weren't looking for it—Juugo was able to maintain his twisted, broken sage mode indefinitely while moving.
Not the most impressive thing Juugo's bloodline limit could do, but Orochimaru saw that and thought.
Maybe…
Maybe Juugo's bloodline limit doesn't just remove the resistance natural energy has to enter a moving being, but others, too.
Thank the Sage for Juugo.
Orochimaru twists and applies the not-particularly-cursed Seal of Unity to the small of his host's back with three fingers—three black circles with a dot in their center. It will not give him free Sage chakra, but it will also not make him susceptible to Juugo's rages, nor does it rely on compatibility with Juugo's cells. It's not perfect—it feeds his body more natural energy than it can process, which if left unchecked will kill you just as dead as ordinary natural energy run wild, but it's goo enough. So long as you never let your guard down, always remain vigilant to flush the natural energy from your system, it does the job.
It let Orochimaru be a proper shinobi again.
Orochimaru feels the rush of natural energy, and is going to dismiss the excess before it can turn him to stone before he thinks—
Actually, if he is in complete control of his chakra, the exact shape of the vortex of his chakra reserves, then shouldn't he also be able to control the speed?
Indeed, he can.
Orochimaru grins as the natural energy forms itself into chakra as fast as it's getting dumped into his system. His chakra reserves swell, spin faster, sucking all the more natural energy through his Seal of Unity. What should have taken him weeks will take him thirty minutes.
Orochimaru laughs.
Oh—
Oh, yes.
As his chakra reserves regenerate, he takes a moment to confirm that there really are no monitoring seals in the room. He had felt Torune begin to form a signalling jutsu, but were those two really all Danzou had guarding Sakura?
He supposes Danzou didn't know it was him, but still—he's a little offended.
Two little Root members?
He's pretty sure even Sakura could have dealt with them. Orochimaru didn't do anything to kill them she couldn't have done herself.
Well… maybe the immolating palm technique was a bit much. Just cracking Torune's skull with a punch would have done just as well, though.
However, if they're going to be so damn lax, he's more than willing to take advantage.
He thinks on his situation as he conjures his fifth favorite snake, Nichika, who coughs up a ream of sealing paper for him in exchange for the promise of a human sacrifice two or three favors down the line.
Judging from the state of Sakura's reserves when Orochimaru awoke, he'd judge that Sakura had probably been asleep for about five hours before Orochimaru took control and woke up. Not great, considering this body is still suffering from the effects of prolonged sleep deprivation. He should address that, but currently he's a lot more worried about getting murdered in his sleep by Root agents than dying from complications of prolonged sleep deprivation.
He sketches out a quick sealing scroll, seals Fuu and Torune's ashes into the scroll before returning the sealing paper to Nichika. Nichika accepts them, on the condition of only two more favors until Orochimaru gives her a human sacrifice.
"They have to be at least twenty pounds," the snake demands.
Orochimaru does not laugh in her face. "That seems little high," he says.
"Fifteen, and no lower."
Orochimaru pretends to mull it over.
Nichika hisses, and tries and fails to sink her fangs into Orochimaru's arm.
Oorhcimaru bats her away. He's using that, thanks.
"Fine."
Nichika sniffs in disdain before leaving, and Orochimaru coughs out a laugh. It looks like he's going to have procure a four and a half month old baby. He could just hand over a grown human, but he doesn't want a reputation for being generous among the snakes—there's no way that ends well for him. People are always so touchy about stealing their babies to sacrifice them to snakes, so he might as well just take the whole family, too.
Maybe he can find those iron-boned people again. He hadn't had the tools to be able to see inside their bones, but maybe with Sakura's senses, he could glean something about their bloodline limit.
They were in, what?
Hot Water?
That sounds vaguely right.
He checks on his reserves.
Four percent.
In line with his expectations.
The biggest (and really, the only) obstacle to him getting out of this base alive is Danzou. If Orochimaru encounters him at anything less than thirty percent reserves, he's got better than even odds of being killed.
Izanagi is a real mother-fucker of a technique, and Mokuton is no slouch, either.
It's possible Orochimaru experimented a bit too much on Danzou, but he'd been so willing and so powerful. Orochimaru just couldn't help himself. He'd wanted to know if those mutations could work on him.
Thankfully, he found out what a nasty piece of work the Senju blood jutsu was before he tried implanting Hashirama cells into his own body. He hopes for Danzou's sake he doesn't go and think he can take Tsunade in a fight, or he's going to get a real motherfucker of an awakening.
As for his current whereabouts, well, if Orochimaru knows Tsunade at all (and he knows Tsunade better than everyone but maybe Jiraiya), then Tsunade either is currently ripping or has already ripped Danzou a new asshole. She's touchy and pissy and has a very good head for politics. She may not like it, but she has much more in common with her great uncle than with her grandfather. There's no way she went through that song and dance with the clan heads if she wasn't planning to add Sakura to the Scroll of the Senju if this happened—and she wouldn't do that if she didn't think she could get a seat on the council. Orochimaru has no idea how she thinks she could flip the Uchiha seat, but Shouko went and gave her blood jutsu to an outsider, so what the fuck does Orochimaru know?
This is good because Tsunade will delay the hell out of Danzou, and may just get sick of his shit and kill him for the both of them. It is bad because it means Tsunade is going to be coming for Root, and as much as Orochimaru would rather not fight Danzou in a newly-possessed body running low on chakra, he wants to fight Tsunade in a newly-possessed body running low on chakra even less.
To say nothing of Jiraiya and Kakashi, who would almost definitely come as a package deal. Maybe even Hiruzen and Guy, depending on how much manpower Tsunade can convince the village to put into ripping Root up by its, well—
Roots.
Saving grace is there are no front-line Yamanakas, but even still, if Jiraiya enters Sage mode, Orochimaru'll burn like a damn beacon to its stupid fucking corruption-sight.
Damn Sage Mode is fucking bullshit.
Eventually, he'll find a way to get it, and they'll both have nothing on him. (Except they'll still be the greatest seal-master and medic ninja in living memory. Sage damn it all.)
In the meantime, what to do?
This room is sealed—not good enough for this body's truly egregious sensor capabilities, but enough for any Root or Konoha sensor. The only chakra that passes in and out of this room is very particularly shaped charges through the keyhole. Reviewing Sakura's memories, he finds that there are no regular messages coming from the outside, which means that someone from the inside needs to notify them. Torune's message didn't make it out of his body, so no one knows that Torune and Fuu are not still extracting information from Sakura's unconscious body.
The moment he leaves this room, he'll need to consider his secret out.
Orochimaru settles in to wait.
He weaves a dense little transformation jutsu that should be able to take anything short of a Kage attack. His eyes, his skin color, his hair color. Everything else he leaves more or less in place, if advanced a decade. He'll go through the hassle of actually modifying the body to his specifications when he gets back to his lab. He weaves his proper clothes around himself while he's at it, because he has no interest in walking around in a damn dress with civilian circles on it.
He stretches his limbs, bends his bones, extends his neck, produces Kusanagi, eand sticks his tongue out nice and long. He runs through a couple forms, getting his mind used to the subtly different weight distribution of his new body.
And yes… Orochimaru thinks he might like this.
He'll give it up in three years, of course—so he'll never even get to experience this body in its prime, but it's not bad. He's had worse.
Really… his original body was worse. That thing was total crap. He's glad he left it behind.
Orochimaru runs through some small jutsu as he waits for his chakra to regenerate. Jutsu he had never before been able to execute seallessly he gets on his first try. Jutsu that had been slow now all but burst out of him.
Oh, and Tsunade used this chakra control to heal and punch things.
Unbelievable.
Such wasted potential.
Orochimaru is very much looking forward to showing her the error of her ways.
Orochimaru mentally decreases the expected amount of chakra he'll need to hand Danzou his ass.
Finally, thirty-one minutes after waking, Orochimaru stands, chakra reserves full. Not Sakura's pitiful little puddle of chakra—Orochimaru's chakra.
He could unlock the seals on the doors the old-fashioned way, but really, why bother?
It explodes under his fist, like it's made of rotting wood.
He steps through it and feels a chakra alert ripple away from him. Another punch later and he's stepping into the hallway.
Empty. Using his own chakra sensing abilities, which have longer range than this new body's by quite a bit, he searches for a way out of the complex. Straight up is an option, but you never know what kind of nasty surprises a man like Danzou would weave into the rock of one of his bases, although he supposes that Sakura's chakra senses can catch basically anything from this close.
He finds Danzou with his chakra sense in what looks like an office at the deepest, most inner catacombs of the base. Thirty-two Root members are scattered throughout the compound. Closest one's already running in his direction, about sixty feet out. No loyal Konoha ninja.
Danzou is here, but Tsunade isn't.
Excellent.
Outside, he sees nothing but an empty forest, with low-level chakra shielding directing gazes away from it.
Danzou is moving, the closest Root ninja is rounding the corner, and—
Sakura! Are you okay?
The Yamanaka girl.
Orochimaru breaks the Root member's neck with a finger, and dips into his mind stomach. Sakura and his four previous hosts lie motionless in their cocoons, and…
There, there, growing out of the flesh of his mind stomach, is a water lily.
Well, damn.
It survived Orochimaru taking this mindscape for his own. Untouched.
He never even noticed.
Maybe that Yamanaka girl has talent.
He could use that. Ever since he lost Inoka, he's wanted another Yamanaka. She's a child now, but he won't need to transfer bodies for another three years.
No, Orochimaru hears from all around him. You will not have her.
Orochimaru freezes, and almost takes a fire jutsu to the face. He dodges around the attack just in time, melts one Root member, rips the heart out of another.
Sakura? Please, say something.
Orochimaru kills two more Root members, raises the Four Point Barrier seal, weaves a notice-me-not genjutsu around it, and sinks into his mind stomach.
He sees Sakura, struggling against the flesh of Orochimaru's mind stomach around her.
Her green eyes are open and blazing with hate.
She… really shouldn't be able to do that.
She surges towards Orochimaru, ripping her hands free of the cocoon, but he easily catches her in another cocoon before she takes a step. This is their shared mind, but it is Orochimaru who has all the chakra now.
Sakura is bone dry.
To say nothing of the fact that her only advantage, her chakra control, is now shared between his as well.
In the battle of the minds, it is a battle of sheer chakra volume and chakra control. If you have one and you're clever enough about it, you can win.
Sakura has neither.
Sakura struggles, spending chakra she doesn't have, ripping free again and what the fuck?
Orochimaru grabs Sakura with his own hands, trying to force Sakura down into the flesh of his mind stomach, but his hands dissolve at the contact, sucking up and into Sakura.
Orochimaru jumps back, and Sakura stands, chest heaving.
"This body is mine!" she bellows at Orochimaru. "Give it back!"
The illusion she has wrapped around herself begins to peel, revealing long black fissures along the length of her face, her arms, her legs. That blackness twists and undulates like a living thing and what the everloving fuck?
The fleshy polyps of Orochimaru's mind-stomach rip themselves up from around her, twisting into a horrible spiral of blood and flesh which dissolves into chakra before it reaches her, and her chakra reserves visibly begin to rise.
Orochimaru takes a calming breath.
Sakura has always demonstrated the ability to suck her own chakra out of the air. It is an ability Orochimaru now shares, and one he's found in his own experiments, as well as in Sakura's memories.
What Orochimaru did not realize is that Sakura was also capable of sucking someone else's chakra from the air. Considering Sakura never knew how to do it on purpose, Sakura never noticed.
Now, Sakura has a reason to learn.
However, any ability she has, so does he.
He holds out his hands, reaches out, and…
The fleshy vortex does not stop, and Orochimaru is forced to leap away from Sakura before she can grab him and inhale him into herself.
Get out, the walls of his mind bellow in time with Sakura's lips.
Cracks spread further across her body, a black nothingness oozing from between them, and her eyes are wild with all the hate in the world.
Fuck.
Orochimaru ducks under another wild swipe, dances further back. Orochimaru tries one more time, tries to rip the chakra from her control… and fails again.
Okay.
Orochimaru very much does not like that, but his feelings aren't going to stop Sakura from taking this body back from him.
But, Orochimaru is Orochimaru of the Sannin. He can deal wit h this.
Orochimaru retreats further into his mind stomach as Sakura inhales more and more of his mind and his chakra.
He slips back into his body, burns the five elements seal into his stomach.
Fun fact:
Kakashi is shit at the five elements seal.
A proper application can seal a tailed beast, and indeed—
Orochimaru falls back into his mind, and a gate surges into existence before Sakura and slams closed.
Sakura immediately rips it to shreds.
Orochimaru remembers when he tried to take Sakura over the first time. Sakura, nothing but a child, strong enough to stand up against him. His jutsu should have equalized their footing—allowed him to manipulate her mind as if it were his own, and she still beat him.
He saw something in her eyes, in those last moments.
He sees that in her eyes now.
Whatever it is, he has not stolen it.
It doesn't matter. Further into his mind they go, a grassy knoll erupting from beneath his stomach as she passes it.
Alright, one more try—
He slips into his body for a moment, rips the soul from a Root member who is fruitlessly hammering at his barrier, and burns the eight trigrams seal into his stomach. Two four-symbol seals, layered on top of each other—one to subjugate, one to bind—and a human sacrificed to the Shinigami to seal them together.
Orochimaru falls back into his mind, and this time—this time Sakura doesn't rip the gate to shreds.
The hands of the Shinigami himself rise up and bind her. She claws at them to no avail, tries to suck the chakra from them to no effect. A gate builds itself before her, and.
Yes.
Finally.
Sakura roars in fury, and Orochimaru's whole mind shakes with it, but the gate does not break. The world twists until Sakura and her grassy knoll of a mind exist only behind the gate, and the arms of the Shinigami fall away. Sakura slams into the gate, and it holds.
She glares up at Orochimaru with green eyes glittering with hate.
"Touch her and die," she says.
Tsunade, something's wrong! She's not responding, what do I do?
(Common problem in young telepaths—saying what they mean to project, projecting what they mean to say.)
Orochimaru smiles, warps his mind to bring the water lilly before him, directly in front of Sakura. He folds himself down into Sakura's shape, crouches over the water lily.
I'm okay, I'm okay. I'm sorry, Ino, Orochimaru projects to Ino in Sakura's voice, voice quivering in fear. I don't know where I am, I'm scared.
He smiles at Sakura's impotent fury.
"Don't listen to him!" she shouts, but this flower is not a microphone, and Ino doesn't hear her.
"This is the Mind Anchor technique," Orochimaru says to Sakura. "It should only be used on allies. Do you know why?"
Sakura's eyes flick to the lily, and then widen in terror. The cracks on her skin spread, bisecting an eye and her lips and working their way into her hair.
"No." She slams into the gate, again and again, but it doesn't even twitch. Her chakra reserves begin to drop, now that she can no longer steal his.
There are other Yamanakas, Orochimaru thinks to himself, and extends his hand over it. Poison beads on the tip of his finger, and—
NO
The universe tears.
Orochimaru is looking at Sakura when it happens—all to better enjoy the look of helpless fury when Orochimaru kills her best friend because she dared to trust Sakura to not lose herself—which he means he sees Sakura break.
The cracks across her body widen and split, out from her eyes and her mouth and up her arms and then every part of her turns inside out, and what emerges from where Sakura's body once was is an unspeakable abomination with too many legs and too many arms and no eyes at all.
The force of it punches holes into the universe, revealing a nothingness that is so much worse than nothingness because it undulates and twists and rotates in impossible ways and—
DO NOT TOUCH HER the thing bellows, and its angles are all wrong, impossible and too big and too small all at the same time—it has an infinity in every elbow, stars scattered across its skin. It is before Orochimaru not because it has moved, but because the space between them has been deleted—gate and all—his mind stomach in that deleted space shattering away into nothing, and then there is a massive talon sticking out of Orochimaru's chest. The poison from his hand is still falling until everything above the lily is just wiped out of existence, half of the thing and half of Orochimaru and half of the Sage-damned world.
Orochimaru reforms himself in an instant, and the thing that had emerged from Sakura is crouched over the Yamanaka girl's water lily, now growing out of a rock that is solid and infinite and undulating and spinning in all the wrong ways.
All of it—all of its impossible bulk, uncountable narrow legs with no center of mass, just legs and arms and talons and gnashing teeth in the spaces between them where there should be nothing but air—all of it is crouched over that single flower.
"What in the hells are you," Orochimaru says, dashing back, away, further from the edge of his mind-stomach, where it gives way to a nothingness that is so incredibly full. His mind-stomach is trying to heal itself, trying repair its shattered edges but it simply can't—
Orochimaru cannot find the edges of his mind-stomach to begin to heal it.
Fear pierces Orochimaru's heart.
What is this?
What is that?
When it enters his mindscape it is a literal mountain. Even though its hind legs are still crouched over the water lily, little more than human sized, that which towers above him is mind boggling in size, growing larger with every step. His mind stomach does not tear under its teeth-feet-tentacle-talons, it shatters and breaks away into nothingness.
When Orochimaru tries to reach his mind out to the broken pieces of his mind-stomach, he finds his mind slipping, slowing, twisting—
He dodges a talon the size of Hokage tower, summons mind-flesh to surround the creature, but it is of no use. The creature has no chakra, spends none to destroy his creations.
Even if he had all the chakra control and all the chakra in the world, he realizes with terror, it wouldn't work.
It wouldn't matter.
He runs. He hasn't set in this body yet.
He dissolves all of himself that he can, back into the—
He is crushed into a rock that is not a rock and a mouth of a thousand legs screams above him.
NO
The force of the word shatters all that is left of Orochimaru's mind stomach, breaking his link to his body, leaving him alone in an infinite world where the angles are all too deep and too shallow and everything scintillates in and out of existence. He cannot feel his body, but he can feel all of his chakra, all of his coils, right in here with him.
Trapped here with that.
GET OUT it says.
"I'm trying—"
I DO NOT WANT YOU
I NEVER WANTED YOU
Orochimaru struggles, but there are bladed tentacles around his arms. He shreds them, rebuilds them, pushes away, but is pinned back down by a dozen talons to the back, pinned to the empty air in front of him that slices into him like a million razors.
Orochimaru slips out of the talons nailing him to empty air, and is now pinned to the point at infinity, his body twisting and warping in ways that make his mind rip and tear and at every point around him is the being of legs and tentacles and teeth that exploded out of Haruno Sakura's mind.
All of its mouths open, and for the first time, he processes the creature's speech. Not as screams—but as tens of thousands of mouths speaking in discordant unity, and all speaking with Sakura's voice.
I do not want your memories. I do not want your chakra. I do not want your anything.
Each word holds behind it the weight of the world, crashing and battering into Orochimaru, each piece breaking away another piece of what Orochimaru now realises is his soul.
If Sakura can do it, so can I, he thinks. He reaches deep inside of himself—if this is Sakura, then there must be something—
You are not welcome here.
He is nothing but a head, and he hits something. Reaches something. He pulls for it, and it tries to split him open, tries to peel him open to the world, every bit of him turned inside out, for the world to see—for him to see.
He flinches.
My name, the abomination declares, is Haruno Sakura.
At the force of those words, the last remnants of Orochimaru shatter away into nothingness, and his vision goes black.