Chapter 43: Cell Call

Most of the time, Axel couldn't hear anybody outside of his small cell. He wasn't sure if that was a testament to the thick concrete walls or to the quiet nature of ninja-types, but the point remained: no voices, no footsteps of passersby (if there even were any), and certainly no voices.

Just him, and the sounds of his empty room.

Which had, until just a few seconds ago, included the soft whisper-scrape of pencil on paper.

The blank notebook had been quietly left on the floor recently—it's hard to tell how much time had passed since, but he was fairly sure it had been at least a day. He'd just woken up and found it resting inconspicuously by the wall across from him, along with a single wood pencil.

Although he was a bit suspicious of it, and more specifically, whatever reason it had been left there… but, well, Axel wasn't going to reject anything that might help pass the time.

(It was very boring in his small gray room.)

However, his doodling had to be put on pause for the moment because apparently his cell isn't actually soundproof. Or at least, it isn't soundproofed all the time. Right now, he could clearly hear a conversation happening in whatever hall was just beyond the wall-door.

One voice was definitely Orochimaru, while the other belonged to a woman that was, from the sound of it, absolutely boiling mad: not shouting, but definitely angry. A lot of it was being said too quickly for Axel to follow, and he suspected most of the vocabulary was out of scope for him anyway. What he was able to catch seemed to be demanding answers for something—he didn't recognize any of the verbs, but he thought it might have to do with sneaking or secrets.

Hearing the usual whoosh of air that signaled the concrete wall was morphing open, Axel pushed himself into a more upright position on his small cot. What was distinctly not usual, however, was the person framed by the newly-formed entrance.

The woman was facing away from him, focused on her conversation, but even so Axel was certain he recognized her; translating remembered anime aesthetics to actual real life could make it hard to identify some characters, but she was kind of hard to miss.

"You're still doing a lot of talking without actually saying anything." Shaking her head, she pointedly turned to step inside. "Just tell me—" Mid-sentence, her sharp brown eyes locked with his own probably-vaguely-alarmed blue.

At a bit of a loss for how he should react, Axel cautiously waved in greeting.

She flung a hand in his general direction. "Who the hell is this guy?!"

A young girl he hadn't noticed at first—certainly a ninja, despite her age—breathed a heavy sigh. "Please, Sensei, there's probably more important things to be worried about here…"

"He is physically unrelated to my other project, I assure you," Orochimaru said, smoothly stepping past them both. He looked generally as put-together as ever, though there was something to his expression that Axel couldn't quite place. "However, as you requested that I share the minutiae of my current activities—"

"Cut the fancy chat, Orochimaru," the woman scoffed. "You've brought us all the way here—specifically here—" she gestured to the gray room in general, "and now you tell me this guy's not involved? Just tell me what's going on already!"

Honestly, that was something Axel would like to know, too. The possibility of meeting this particular character in-person had not crossed his mind at all—let alone in this context, whatever it was. It should have been a reasonable assumption; from what he could recall from the show, she had left the village on some kind of personal exile escape-vacation.

Or, wait… had that not happened yet?

If it hadn't already, would it happen at all now?

The temporal-paradox aspect of his predicament was one he generally tried to ignore, as that train of thought tended to land somewhere between existential dread at predestined inevitability or helplessness given a plain crisis of scale. He half wondered if this meeting was, in some way, proof against the former.

Then his mind finally caught on to that last thing she said, translated it, and Axel blurted out, "Wait, you don't know?"

Tsunade—because, yes, it was definitely she—crossed her arms with a scowl and an annoyed huff. "Got all the warning labels, essentially, and little else." She was plainly annoyed, though it was hard to tell if that was due to this specific situation or a more general gripe with her old teammate. Both, probably.

"It is no simple matter to explain," Orochimaru said, one hand resting light against the wall as it sealed shut once more.

"Yeah, I gathered," she quipped, unimpressed. "That much was obvious, even before you had us sneak back into the village."

Trying to process this whole scenario felt like his brain was spinning its wheels and getting nowhere fast, turning over half-formed questions about how she was here: or why, to be frankly honest. But something in that remark found some traction.

Because even if she had still been in the village—which likely wasn't the case, which meant she came back for some reason—in order for her to be here…

Wait.

Did Orochimaru actually take his advice?

Maybe there really was something to his optimistic theory that people in this world were more receptive to that sort of thing. It had certainly worked for Naruto often enough, and it would seem that, even for a non-anime-protagonist like Axel, the pattern actually held true.

The younger ninja—he vaguely recalled that Tsunade had an apprentice or something, though he couldn't remember her name at the moment—casually took two more steps and waved a little to get his attention.

He blinked, refocusing. "Hello."

"So, who are you?"

"I'm a blacksmith, have a small store in the empty district," he replied. "I was brought here… recently. A few days, maybe? What about you?"

"Right, uhm, I'm Shizune. That's Tsunade-sensei, and that's—" she cut herself off, suddenly sheepish, "err, I guess you already know Orochimaru-san. He was on the same genin team as my teacher."

Axel knew that much, both from his own viewing experience and his memories of Adri ranting about the show—his sister had focused on them a lot, actually, perhaps because he'd seen enough episodes to already have some context for them.

He didn't say as much, of course, and instead he just nodded at the young girl's quick explanation: he was unsure if the Sannin were as famous among civilians as they probably were among ninja, so it might be weird to already know some of that.

"How'd you end up… here?"

Axel just shrugged. "I—"

"Fine." Tsunade's sharp tone cut in before he could try to put together an answer. She had her arms crossed, and a stare leveled at her old teammate that all but demanded he get talking. "If he's unrelated, then why are we here?"

Orochimaru laced his fingers together, unbothered by her almost-glaring. "As I have mentioned, it has recently come to my attention that I must adjust the course of my research in order to most efficiently reach desirable results." He made a small dismissive gesture. "In coming to that conclusion, however, I am jeopardizing my position in this facility."

Having understood maybe half of that—which is a charitable estimate—and definitely catching less than that in terms of any implications being made, Axel turned to the other ninja to try and get a better read based on their reactions. From Tsunade's darkening scowl, it was probably nothing good.

Looking between the two of them, Axel had to ask, "…Should I be hearing this?"

"Probably not."

Orochimaru, somewhat surprisingly, waved the matter aside. "Considering what you already know, this is hardly more damning."

"What he already—" Tsunade looked aghast, "Why the hell would you bring a civilian into this mess?!"

"I assure you, I had no particular ulterior motives in informing him." He paused, then added, "Other than, perhaps, a curiosity for how he might react."

That was somehow both reassuring and incredibly worrisome. For the sake of his own sanity, Axel decided to lean more towards the first reaction rather than the second. There's no use being paranoid about things he can't change, after all.

"Regardless, he was brought here for separate reasons: specifically his… unusual physical properties," Orochimaru clarified, and there was something in his voice that maybe hinted at amusement.

Shizune raised her hand, as if this was a classroom and not a containment cell. "What do you mean?"

"Perhaps you should confirm for yourself," the mad-scientist remarked, turning to Axel with one brow raised.

Axel could take a hint, so he held out his still-bandaged hand. The cut there was healing well, but it was still there: it was actually one of the few ways he knew it hadn't actually been as long down here as it sometimes felt.

Before her apprentice could move to take him up on the implied offer, Tsunade had stepped in and grabbed Axel by the forearm.

"No, I'll do it."

"Sensei?"

She just shook her head and deftly unwrapped the bandages, setting her fingers gently over the injury. Green light, the healing chakra, flickered a bit oddly as she tried to spread it across his still-healing cut. From her furrowed brow, it must take a lot of focus to hold it in place.

Axel tried to stay still despite the itchy sensation running along his palm. Even so, when she finally let go of the technique, there had only been the slightest change to the cut on his hand.

Tsunade stepped back, crossing one arm to prop the other up to her chin.

"Alright," she admitted, "that is pretty odd."

From there, the two ninja launched into a conversation that went much deeper into science and biology. Presumably. Axel couldn't really make heads or tails of it, beyond the occasional verb or noun.

He could also tell that this conversation was distinctly not about the other experiments, which he'd wager were the real reason Orochimaru had reached out to his old teammate and brought her here.

"Can I ask you something?"

"Heilige—" Axel twitched back, cutting off his startled curse: he'd forgotten about the apprentice, despite the fact that she was basically standing right next to him.

She stared, surprised and curious. "What was that?"

"Nothing," he managed. "Anyway, questions. You can ask, but I maybe would not know the answer."

Keeping half an eye on her thoroughly distracted mentor, Shizune asked, "Do you know what we're actually here to help with?"

Oh. He wasn't really expecting a question he knew the answer to, though in this case he wasn't sure if he should. For multiple reasons.

"I… do know," he replied, already wondering if he should have lied. Knowing what he did about those other experiments, both because of what Orochimaru had shared and what he remembered of the anime—they weren't exactly…

Shizune… she's just a kid.

And she's a ninja, too, so she'd probably want to stab him for thinking of her as a child first. Fine. But for all that he'd lived in this world for a year, he just couldn't accept some of its supposed 'common sense'.

Shizune tilted her head to the side with a small frown, plainly reading something from his expression that she didn't like.

Dragging a hand down his face, Axel sighed. "Look, I don't know it all," he said, "What I can say is, Orochimaru is trying to do something and it isn't going well. I'm still just surprised he actually went—"

Axel was cut off, not by any sudden sounds, but rather by a sudden lack thereof. The mad-scientist had abruptly gone silent, and while his overall countenance otherwise remained unchanged, there was something in his gold eyes that seemed distinctly annoyed.

"Now, of all times…" Orochimaru murmured to himself. There must have been some chakra stuff happening because the wall-door was already moving aside. "I must attend to something, unfortunately. Stay here, we will need to continue this later."

With that, the mad-scientist-ninja swept out of the gray holding cell.

"Oh, great," Tsunade huffed. "Just go ahead and close us in, too."

Shizune chuckled, a little nervously. "We're not, uhm, stuck here, are we?"

The doctor scoffed. "We only here for as long as I'm willing to wait."

"I don't suppose you would be willing to get me out of here," Axel said, pitching his tone somewhere between statement and question.

"I'll consider it," she allowed, after a thoughtful hum. However, before he could process the words enough to even be surprised (or hopeful), Tsunade added, "But not right now."

Well, it had been worth a shot.

Author's Note:

Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto.

Axel has an unexpected guest.

Sorry that this chapter is a tad short, it was originally going to include another section but as I was trying to sort it out… Yeah, that's gonna need a bit more time to shake out. Stuff focused on Orochimaru really tends to be that way.

I'm gonna leave this author's note short as well, since I'll probably just add other stuff after any edits I make and I'm already late enough! As always, thank you for reading!

Translations:
"Heilige—" = "Holy—"

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