Children of the White Angel, Part I (Part 2)
Previous
Leaf has way too many fucking apartment complexes, Suigetsu thought, dodging around yet another shinobi on this building’s roof. Sending a quick spurt of chakra into his feet, he jumped over a vegetable garden box (snatching a pea pod off of a vine and munching on it on the way), and landed just at the edge of the building. “Shit,” he tried to say, before choking on a piece of pea and having to phase it away before it caused him to unbalance and plummet twenty stories and splash onto the road below. It had rained recently, which was objectively awesome, of course, but meant the roads were muddy, and Suigetsu didn’t feel like spending the rest of the week sweating mud and fuck else that was on the road at the moment. Fortunately, they’d put Sasuke in a building not too far from the city center, so it only took about ten minutes on the roofs to get there from any direction.
Unfortunately, city center meant everyone was on the fucking roofs.
He jumped to the next ledge and dodged around another kid, who shouted and threw herself backwards onto her ass in an attempt to get away from him (still got it, baby), before grabbing a flagpole hanging off the roof and swinging down and around to another beam. He pushed off of this one, too, before propelling himself straight at a window on the next building over, fully intending to break the damn thing open if he found glass panes.
Fortunately, it was a screen instead of a closed window, so he just liquefied himself and phased through. Easy as shit, thank you, I’ll be here all week.
A second later, there was a sword blade resting just barely against his jugular. Behind him, his clothes plopped wetly against the other side of the screen and then fell about eighteen stories to the ground below. Suigetsu pretended to not be proud of the cries of alarm. “Sure, boss,” he said cheerfully, ignoring the blade entirely and turning to face his unwitting host. “Go right ahead. I’ll just sit here and mock the ink smudge on your cheek and the bedhead while you go at it.”
Sasuke pulled his sword back and gave him a look that would make a lesser nin dry up and crumple to dust.
“Put some clothes on, you idiot,” he snapped, and turned to stomp off towards a door that Suigetsu presumed was a bedroom. Suigetsu counted it as a win and made his way across the living room to the kitchen. Oh, look, a refrigerator! Why yes, I am a little hungry. Ooh, yogurt! He helped himself to the yogurt, and then a bottle of water and a plate of rice balls, leaning his naked thigh against the open refrigerator door as he munched cheerfully. Sasuke came back into the room and threw a change of clothes at his head over the kitchen island before grumpily stomping back to his couch. There was a scroll resting on the floor near one of the arms and a pen leaking ink slowly onto a pillow still indented from what Suigetsu assumed was an unintentional nap. Sasuke picked the scroll up and smoothed it out, scowling at the wrinkles in the paper, before visibly setting himself to read it instead of pay attention to his guest. Suigetsu grinned and sauntered over, holding onto the change of clothes but not putting them on. He put the half-eaten plate of rice balls on top of the clothes and took another swig from the water bottle. Sasuke’s eye twitched.
“Rice ball?”
“Get the fuck out.”
“Aw, man, what’d I do?” Suigetsu asked, grinning with all his teeth.
“You were born,” Sasuke snapped, eyes glued to the scroll in a very poor show of ignoring his former teammate, considering he was actually responding to Suigetsu when he said something. Suigetsu grinned even wider and leaned back against the other arm of the couch, stretching his feet until they rested firmly on Sasuke’s low coffee table and placing the clothes strategically in his lap so that Sasuke’s prudish sensibilities wouldn’t be offended.
“Meh, couldn’t be helped,” he responded dismissively, waving a hand. “You get called to get your head examined yet?”
Sasuke grunted.
“Still crazy as fuck?”
“Why are you annoying me?”
“Boredom, mostly,” Suigetsu returned easily, selecting another rice ball and biting it in half.
“Go annoy Karin.”
“Man, you’re hostile today! I already did that, anyway. She makes awesome soba! But I bet you knew that, eh?” he asked with a strategic eyebrow waggle. Sasuke was looking at the scroll like he was ready to kill something with it. Suigetsu felt very accomplished as he ate the last rice ball and considered going back for the veggies he’d seen.
“They asked me a lot of bullshit,” he told Sasuke, spinning the bottle of water lazily between his hands. “Lots of shit about what Orochimaru did and what Madara did and all. I think they were expecting to need to pull out a doll! ‘Show us where the bad men touched you!’ Hah. Like Orochimaru was interested in that bullshit, and I’d bet Madara didn’t even have a dick.” He laughed. Sasuke’s face went from annoyed to long-suffering. Suigetsu mentally patted himself on the back, then got up and lazily phased into the pants, not bothering to bend down to put them on all the way, and sauntered over for the veggies. And another water bottle. Hey, better than turning into a puddle on Sasuke’s floor, right? Right. Ooh, an energy drink!
“Got the chick that was Orochimaru’s student, though, so I guess she had reasons to be concerned the old bastard had gotten more perverted in his old age,” he called over his shoulder as he finished the drink and selected a carrot. “Karin says they didn’t ask about anything else either, though, so I dunno. Maybe they’re just really focused on Leaf deserters.”
Sasuke answered with a sigh before putting down his scroll and moving closer, presumably so Suigetsu would stop shouting loud enough to disturb his neighbors.
“It’s sorta weird, ya know,” Suigetsu continued, thoughtfully modulating his voice back to reasonable levels. “Like, do they really not give a shit about anything except their big baddies? Sound wasn’t a cake walk even without Mr. Prehensile Tongue eyeing everyone sideways.”
“Welcome to Leaf,” Sasuke responded blandly with a slight, bitter tilt to his lips.
“Aaah, don’t let your friend hear you say that about his precious village.” Suigetsu grinned and put the last piece of vegetable in his mouth. “How’d you know anyway? Bet you haven’t even gone out yet unless they dragged you.”
Sasuke raised an eyebrow. Suigetsu laughed and waved his arm dismissively. “Yeah, yeah, not my business.” He walked past Sasuke (who turned to keep him in plain sight the whole time, the paranoid bastard) and picked up the shirt. “I’m going to wear this out,” he said. “But seriously, you should go outside. Being inside is bad for you. You’re going to get flabby or something. Besides, you don’t have any food in your fridge anymore. See ya!” And he flung the screen from the window open and threw himself out, the music of Uchiha Sasuke shouting his name like a curse word following him all the way to the ground.
*
None of the information in the reports came as a surprise to Tsunade. She knew what to expect from her former teammate let loose on fucked-up kids with interesting bloodline traits, and she got it. There were a few new pieces here and there…new experiments on new people, small leads on where to find the many people and bases left behind after Sound’s collapse. She didn’t know if she would follow any of those leads, but at least they existed if anyone else felt like it. She made a note to send a few of the other Kages a quick note on the ones in their areas, and then went back to preparing for her part in this whole drawn-out spiel.
It still didn’t feel right to consider Orochimaru’s doings old news, but she shrugged it off and went through the reports fairly quickly. On the upside, the parolees seemed to be cooperative, inasmuch as people like them could be. Hopefully, that would make her job easier. Either way, it would be nice to step away from the office for a moment and get back into the hospital.
She’d made the time in her schedule to see the first parolee today and get their physical examination out of the way, but the only one who offered to come in for the first slot was Suigetsu. He wandered in half an hour late, sat down on the exam table, and nonchalantly kicked off his shoes like he expected to spend the afternoon relaxing at a bath house instead of in an exam that could determine his entire god damned future.
“So, what’s the plan for today?” he drawled, sounding kind of bored.
“You’ll address me as Godaime from now on,” Tsunade responded brusquely, taking the blood pressure cuff down from where it was hanging on the wall by reflex. “And I will just be taking a few vital signs. Maybe an x-ray.”
“Can’t x-ray me anymore,” Suigetsu said. “Can’t x-ray water, can you? Bet you can’t.” He stuck out his arm. “Can’t take my blood pressure either, but you can try if it’s what does it for you.”
“You still have a heart,” Tsunade presumed. “Or else you wouldn’t be alive right now.” He was right, though, that his circulatory system probably ran on water instead of blood these days, and that would make the cuff useless. “Right. Change of plans, then. Sit still while I take your pulse, then oxygen saturation levels.” She pressed two fingers to his wrist and counted, then clipped on the SPo2 pulse oximeter and was surprised to see the saturation at one hundred percent. She assumed his organs fell apart and then reformed when he formed the rest of himself from the water, and it seemed that his heart and lungs reformed normal and healthy. Lucky kid, or as lucky as a kid like this could be.
“Yeah, I don’t have blood anymore,” Suigetsu said, flicking his finger until the probe came off. “It’s pretty awesome. They used to inject me with that…whatever’s in that bag…see if my blood would turn into salt water. It did but I got rid of it just fine, you know? Then it all got fucked up and I don’t have blood now. Hey can I drink this anyway?” He prodded the bag of saline.
“I don’t think you want to,” Tsunade replied, mind half on her readings. “But here.” She threw him one of the water bottles she’d stacked up on the counter, figuring at some point she would be examining him and he would need them. He drank an entire bottle almost instantly, and then flopped back on the table.
“What now?”
“I’m going to take some of your body water and run a few tests,” she said. There was only so much she could do in an external exam when he was made entirely of water. “I’m just going to be running a panel on your electrolyte levels and see how that balances out compared to others. It will only take a moment, then you’re out of here.” She took a sample cup from the table and walked back up to him, taking his hand. “This won’t hurt, and I’ll give you plenty of water to drink to replenish the little bit you’ll lose.”
Suigetsu tensed up, his relaxed posture suddenly looking a hell of a lot more forced. “Nothing for you to take samples of, I told you already.”
Tsunade frowned, surprised at the sudden tension. “Godaime, please.”
“Whatever. I already told you, I’m made of water and whatever I eat. You want a sample, you might as well test the bottle of water you just gave me.”
What the hell? Was the kid scared of needles or something? Tsunade approached the table, making sure her body language was as unthreatening as she could make it. “I want to do the tests myself for the formal record,” she explained carefully. “Among other things, I want to take a look at your electrolyte level. If you drop below a certain…”
“Oh, I know about electrolytes,” Suigetsu interrupted, leaning back so he was resting his arms on the exam table-and incidentally putting more space between them. “If you don’t have enough you pass out. Can’t have a bloodline like mine and not know about electrolytes.”
“That’s… good,” Tsunade said carefully, “but I still want to do the test.”
Suigetsu shrugged stiffly. “If you want… It’s a waste of time, though seriously.” He sat up again, eyeing her like she was going to bite him. “They tried everything, you know? I can’t be cut or have bones broken or anything like that. I don’t even respond to electricity right anymore. I just puddle.”
Tsunade rolled her eyes. “I’m going to take a small sample from your hand. Just enough to fill a bottle.” She held one up. “Meanwhile, why don’t you tell me what nutrients you generally need to stay stable?” She made a show of turning her back and rummaging through a drawer.
“I dunno, they just dumped some shit in every so often, and I’d look at them and it made them really uncomfortable.” He grinned at her as she turned around and started making her way towards him again, sharp as a shark. “He didn’t like to be reminded of his mistakes.”
“And what did you do after you got out?”
“Drank lots of water, and those power drinks, disgusting but it works.”
“Hrm. It seems to have been working fine so far,” Tsunade responded carefully, not sure whether to be encouraged by the change from avoidance to aggression. “Your heart…when you have one…is in very good shape.”
“Clean living,” he said, his shoulders taking on a set that was just slightly more naturally relaxed. “That’s what it is.”
“I’m sure. Now if you won’t mind, you’re dripping all over the floor.”
“Oh! Hey, happens sometimes.” He stopped, then started to wring out his shirt, and she put the cup out to catch it. “Have any of those power drinks around here? Haven’t had one in days. Should have made Karin get me one.”
“I do, they’re in the kitchen.”
“I know where that is! Gonna go get one, thanks. Bye, lady.” And before she could say anything else, he phased through her machine and half-ran half-sauntered out the door, leaving her with the shoes he’d forgotten to take with him and a heart monitor fizzling sparks. Annoying, but easily fixed, and it wouldn’t be the first time someone broke it.
Tsunade looked down into the cup. She had managed to catch just enough water where she could run at least two, maybe three tests.
Now, if she could only figure out what set him so on edge about a fucking electrolyte test, she’d be golden.
*
Tsunade’s first impression of Karin back during the war was that she had a temperament to match her red hair and that she had a chip on her shoulder bigger than all the elemental countries combined. This impression hadn’t changed over the years, and having to literally order her into the hospital for a physical exam after she failed to show up to three appointments Tsunade’d asked her about only reinforced it yet again. She sighed inwardly and braced herself as her patient looked around the room with an air that practically leaked disdain, carefully removed her shoes as though the whole act was somehow a great inconvenience to her and thus the world in general, and daintily planted herself on the exam table as though she was concerned it would come alive and bite her.
“Wonderful that you could make it,” Tsunade couldn’t help but snark as she pulled out the correct chart and turned to a new exam page.
“I didn’t have much choice,” Karin snapped, adjusting her glasses and glaring at Tsunade like she hoped she’d spontaneously combust.
Tsunade frowned. “I don’t appreciate your tone,” she said levelly. “I am not only the lead medic-nin of this hospital, but the Godaime Hokage. Treat the damn title with the respect it deserves.”
Karin huffed and looked away. Tsunade sighed.
“Do you have any questions before we begin,” she asked wearily.
“Yes,” Karin answered immediately. “I want to know what you plan to do during this examination.”
“I was planning a physical exam-blood pressure, eyes, ears, balance, posture…” she waved a hand to indicate what else. “Then a few x-rays. The whole thing should take no more than an hour.”
“You didn’t do most of those things for Suigetsu,” Karin pointed out, eyes narrowing.
“I’m not at liberty to discuss other patients’ examinations,” Tsunade responded delicately, taking down the blood pressure cuff. In truth, she’d decided that a person who could literally change any physical characteristic about himself that he wanted given enough water needed a chemical exam more than a physical one, but that was information she had absolutely no need to give to this girl.
“Hmph. I’m practically his previous medic-nin,” she insisted. “You should be asking me about those things. Also, tell me what you’re going to do before you start to do it,” she snapped, eyeing the blood pressure cuff with sharp eyes and a twist to her mouth.
Tsunade raised an eyebrow. “I will certainly keep that in mind,” she said wryly. “This is a blood pressure cuff. I am going to wrap it around your upper arm and then inflate it to check your blood pressure.”
“I know what a blood pressure cuff is,” Karin snapped, straightening up where she sat as though she’d just been mortally offended. Tsunade sighed. This was going to take a lot longer than an hour…
*
It was after midnight several days later when Tsunade got around to looking at the x-rays. She hadn’t stopped being Hokage just because the Counsel wanted her to front the physical side of vetting the former Sound nin, of course, and the time she’d taken out to check them over had been spent making up meetings, none of them short. She was constantly annoyed to learn just how many people insisted that whatever they needed was important enough to warrant the Hokage’s attention, whether or not she actually needed to get involved or had other, more pressing things to do.
She huffed in remembered irritation as she clipped up the x-rays. No one would bother her this late, and especially when she was working in the hospital. They all knew better.
Suigetsu didn’t have an x-ray, at least not yet. She’d be relying on the lab results until she could figure out what to do about his internally formed organs. Thus far, he appeared to be a particularly nutrient rich puddle.
Sasuke’s showed many broken and reset bones, but nothing too unusual for a nin his age that had been through the war. She noted that his ribs were covered in tiny lines and the remnants of fractures, some healed well, others jagged and uneven, likely badly healed breaks gotten on the battlefield when there were no medics around. Similar marks were on his arms and collarbone, and one particularly nasty one on the base of his spine. She frowned at that one and made a quick note to look into it a little further. From the preliminary x-ray it looked like he hadn’t suffered any nerve damage, but it wouldn’t hurt to take a better look. She ought to take a better look at some of those breaks, too, make sure they didn’t heal badly enough to affect lung function. Even so, there wasn’t much past what she expected to find in an individual with Uchiha Sasuke’s history. Apparently, being Orochimaru’s favorite meant you mostly got healable damage with no lasting affects. She smirked sarcastically to herself as she switched to Karin’s x-rays.
What she found made her pause. Karin’s arms, shoulders, and back were a mess. The skin covered with thousands of tiny scarred teeth marks. There were deeper scars where no doubt someone had actually bitten out a chunk of flesh, and the skin healed oddly around it. Those she’d expected, considering the girl’s particular healing ability, and she’d noted a lot of them in the physical exam she’d performed a few days ago. The deeper tissue scan just confirmed them. But there were also scarred lines down her back, like someone had cut her open length-wise. Tsunade could make out thin, long scores on her spine and in her neck and the base of her head. There was no way those could be teeth marks.
The marks were on the other side of her body too, crisscrossing her chest and stomach and the organs below. It looked like someone had taken out her intestines and cut them open, and not put them back quite right. Tsunade could see where someone had sewn them back together.
She put her hands on her hips and hooked Sasuke’s x-ray back up, next to Karin’s. The marks on his spine looked similar to the ones on Karin’s skull. Tsunade hadn’t noticed how perfect they were before because she hadn’t been looking for them. She’d figured Orochimaru would be more inclined to experiment on Karin since she wasn’t the next vessel. Uzumaki Karin had been disposable in a way that Uchiha Sasuke had not. The fact that they both had the same types of scars on their spines was worrying. Had Orochimaru really risked his vessel in the same way as a random girl with interesting chakra?
She clipped Juugo’s up on the other side of Sasuke’s, a weird sinking feeling in her stomach. He was very cooperative in the exam, doing everything she asked for as quietly and quickly as possible, as though he’d spent a lot of time in hospitals under quite a bit of incentive to do it right the first time.
The first thing that drew her eye was his heart. There were noticeable scars around each valve, and tiny, minute scars on the heart itself. Lines spread outward from his heart into the veins in his lungs. Nearby, the veins going up his neck stood out in sharper contrast to the rest. Chakra paths did follow the nervous system, so considering the extent that the curse seal was developed over time, it wouldn’t be surprising that Orochimaru would cut through Juugo’s nervous system, but the heart... The cuts around the heart were so small and delicate…what the hell was done to this boy’s heart? Juugo had a strong pulse and normal blood pressure, so the heart was functioning. The only other time she’d seen scars like that was after heart surgery. Invasive heart surgery. Like a heart transplant. The thing was, the chakra scan she’d done during his physical would have shown if he had organs that weren’t his own. Why would someone have been cutting into it?
Tsunade stared at the markings. None of this added up. A ninja who needed that serious of a heart surgery didn’t last that long in the field, let alone a place like Sound. If Juugo was in such critical condition that his heart would give out at any moment, Orochimaru would just take as many blood samples as he could and store them for future use. He didn’t keep people alive there.
She went back over each of the x-rays again, and another time, trying to make sense of the picture she was slowly forming. Orochimaru never did surgeries, at least not in the way that medics did. Orochimaru did experiments. She remembered the glee in his eyes when he shoved his hands into the bodies of enemies and came out holding their lungs. He would inject people with strange concoctions to see what they did. He enjoyed spreading the curse seal and watching their minds erode away as their bodies grew stronger.
These kids had surgical scars, most of them around very important organs either for the body or the chakra pathways. They were rarely the type of surgeries that would interest Orochimaru, and they were too delicate to have been his work. Or at least, too delicate to be the work of the Orochimaru she had known, and what little she’d seen of him after he left had indicated that he’d become more erratic, not less. These were not the marks of someone making something awful happen to a person and then stepping back to watch the effects. These were exploratory scars.
The lines on Karin’s body, the scars on her abdomen, they looked too similar to Juugo’s. They weren’t just scars, they were surgical scars. She’d seen them countless times before in thousands of other people. She’d sewn intestines back in, hell, she’d sewn Orochimaru’s back in at one point. She’d done it because he couldn’t.
And there were too many breaks and healed rib bones on Sasuke. All ninja got broken ribs, but these were too careful, too precise to be from a battle. They looked like the breaks in Karin’s spine and skull-the ones that looked like someone had purposely broken her neck.
Tsunade startled herself out of her examination by yawning. She rubbed her eyes and looked at the clock over the door. It was almost morning now. She’d been staring at these damn things all night. She sat down at her desk and sighed, needing either sleep or coffee.
Juugo’s heart. Sasuke’s countless rib breaks and spine injury. Karin’s intestines being put back in not quite right. These kids looked like they were cut up and put back together, and none of them mentioned anything of the sort in their interviews.
There was obviously something they weren’t telling her, and she needed to figure out what.
Part II
Leaf has way too many fucking apartment complexes, Suigetsu thought, dodging around yet another shinobi on this building’s roof. Sending a quick spurt of chakra into his feet, he jumped over a vegetable garden box (snatching a pea pod off of a vine and munching on it on the way), and landed just at the edge of the building. “Shit,” he tried to say, before choking on a piece of pea and having to phase it away before it caused him to unbalance and plummet twenty stories and splash onto the road below. It had rained recently, which was objectively awesome, of course, but meant the roads were muddy, and Suigetsu didn’t feel like spending the rest of the week sweating mud and fuck else that was on the road at the moment. Fortunately, they’d put Sasuke in a building not too far from the city center, so it only took about ten minutes on the roofs to get there from any direction.
Unfortunately, city center meant everyone was on the fucking roofs.
He jumped to the next ledge and dodged around another kid, who shouted and threw herself backwards onto her ass in an attempt to get away from him (still got it, baby), before grabbing a flagpole hanging off the roof and swinging down and around to another beam. He pushed off of this one, too, before propelling himself straight at a window on the next building over, fully intending to break the damn thing open if he found glass panes.
Fortunately, it was a screen instead of a closed window, so he just liquefied himself and phased through. Easy as shit, thank you, I’ll be here all week.
A second later, there was a sword blade resting just barely against his jugular. Behind him, his clothes plopped wetly against the other side of the screen and then fell about eighteen stories to the ground below. Suigetsu pretended to not be proud of the cries of alarm. “Sure, boss,” he said cheerfully, ignoring the blade entirely and turning to face his unwitting host. “Go right ahead. I’ll just sit here and mock the ink smudge on your cheek and the bedhead while you go at it.”
Sasuke pulled his sword back and gave him a look that would make a lesser nin dry up and crumple to dust.
“Put some clothes on, you idiot,” he snapped, and turned to stomp off towards a door that Suigetsu presumed was a bedroom. Suigetsu counted it as a win and made his way across the living room to the kitchen. Oh, look, a refrigerator! Why yes, I am a little hungry. Ooh, yogurt! He helped himself to the yogurt, and then a bottle of water and a plate of rice balls, leaning his naked thigh against the open refrigerator door as he munched cheerfully. Sasuke came back into the room and threw a change of clothes at his head over the kitchen island before grumpily stomping back to his couch. There was a scroll resting on the floor near one of the arms and a pen leaking ink slowly onto a pillow still indented from what Suigetsu assumed was an unintentional nap. Sasuke picked the scroll up and smoothed it out, scowling at the wrinkles in the paper, before visibly setting himself to read it instead of pay attention to his guest. Suigetsu grinned and sauntered over, holding onto the change of clothes but not putting them on. He put the half-eaten plate of rice balls on top of the clothes and took another swig from the water bottle. Sasuke’s eye twitched.
“Rice ball?”
“Get the fuck out.”
“Aw, man, what’d I do?” Suigetsu asked, grinning with all his teeth.
“You were born,” Sasuke snapped, eyes glued to the scroll in a very poor show of ignoring his former teammate, considering he was actually responding to Suigetsu when he said something. Suigetsu grinned even wider and leaned back against the other arm of the couch, stretching his feet until they rested firmly on Sasuke’s low coffee table and placing the clothes strategically in his lap so that Sasuke’s prudish sensibilities wouldn’t be offended.
“Meh, couldn’t be helped,” he responded dismissively, waving a hand. “You get called to get your head examined yet?”
Sasuke grunted.
“Still crazy as fuck?”
“Why are you annoying me?”
“Boredom, mostly,” Suigetsu returned easily, selecting another rice ball and biting it in half.
“Go annoy Karin.”
“Man, you’re hostile today! I already did that, anyway. She makes awesome soba! But I bet you knew that, eh?” he asked with a strategic eyebrow waggle. Sasuke was looking at the scroll like he was ready to kill something with it. Suigetsu felt very accomplished as he ate the last rice ball and considered going back for the veggies he’d seen.
“They asked me a lot of bullshit,” he told Sasuke, spinning the bottle of water lazily between his hands. “Lots of shit about what Orochimaru did and what Madara did and all. I think they were expecting to need to pull out a doll! ‘Show us where the bad men touched you!’ Hah. Like Orochimaru was interested in that bullshit, and I’d bet Madara didn’t even have a dick.” He laughed. Sasuke’s face went from annoyed to long-suffering. Suigetsu mentally patted himself on the back, then got up and lazily phased into the pants, not bothering to bend down to put them on all the way, and sauntered over for the veggies. And another water bottle. Hey, better than turning into a puddle on Sasuke’s floor, right? Right. Ooh, an energy drink!
“Got the chick that was Orochimaru’s student, though, so I guess she had reasons to be concerned the old bastard had gotten more perverted in his old age,” he called over his shoulder as he finished the drink and selected a carrot. “Karin says they didn’t ask about anything else either, though, so I dunno. Maybe they’re just really focused on Leaf deserters.”
Sasuke answered with a sigh before putting down his scroll and moving closer, presumably so Suigetsu would stop shouting loud enough to disturb his neighbors.
“It’s sorta weird, ya know,” Suigetsu continued, thoughtfully modulating his voice back to reasonable levels. “Like, do they really not give a shit about anything except their big baddies? Sound wasn’t a cake walk even without Mr. Prehensile Tongue eyeing everyone sideways.”
“Welcome to Leaf,” Sasuke responded blandly with a slight, bitter tilt to his lips.
“Aaah, don’t let your friend hear you say that about his precious village.” Suigetsu grinned and put the last piece of vegetable in his mouth. “How’d you know anyway? Bet you haven’t even gone out yet unless they dragged you.”
Sasuke raised an eyebrow. Suigetsu laughed and waved his arm dismissively. “Yeah, yeah, not my business.” He walked past Sasuke (who turned to keep him in plain sight the whole time, the paranoid bastard) and picked up the shirt. “I’m going to wear this out,” he said. “But seriously, you should go outside. Being inside is bad for you. You’re going to get flabby or something. Besides, you don’t have any food in your fridge anymore. See ya!” And he flung the screen from the window open and threw himself out, the music of Uchiha Sasuke shouting his name like a curse word following him all the way to the ground.
*
None of the information in the reports came as a surprise to Tsunade. She knew what to expect from her former teammate let loose on fucked-up kids with interesting bloodline traits, and she got it. There were a few new pieces here and there…new experiments on new people, small leads on where to find the many people and bases left behind after Sound’s collapse. She didn’t know if she would follow any of those leads, but at least they existed if anyone else felt like it. She made a note to send a few of the other Kages a quick note on the ones in their areas, and then went back to preparing for her part in this whole drawn-out spiel.
It still didn’t feel right to consider Orochimaru’s doings old news, but she shrugged it off and went through the reports fairly quickly. On the upside, the parolees seemed to be cooperative, inasmuch as people like them could be. Hopefully, that would make her job easier. Either way, it would be nice to step away from the office for a moment and get back into the hospital.
She’d made the time in her schedule to see the first parolee today and get their physical examination out of the way, but the only one who offered to come in for the first slot was Suigetsu. He wandered in half an hour late, sat down on the exam table, and nonchalantly kicked off his shoes like he expected to spend the afternoon relaxing at a bath house instead of in an exam that could determine his entire god damned future.
“So, what’s the plan for today?” he drawled, sounding kind of bored.
“You’ll address me as Godaime from now on,” Tsunade responded brusquely, taking the blood pressure cuff down from where it was hanging on the wall by reflex. “And I will just be taking a few vital signs. Maybe an x-ray.”
“Can’t x-ray me anymore,” Suigetsu said. “Can’t x-ray water, can you? Bet you can’t.” He stuck out his arm. “Can’t take my blood pressure either, but you can try if it’s what does it for you.”
“You still have a heart,” Tsunade presumed. “Or else you wouldn’t be alive right now.” He was right, though, that his circulatory system probably ran on water instead of blood these days, and that would make the cuff useless. “Right. Change of plans, then. Sit still while I take your pulse, then oxygen saturation levels.” She pressed two fingers to his wrist and counted, then clipped on the SPo2 pulse oximeter and was surprised to see the saturation at one hundred percent. She assumed his organs fell apart and then reformed when he formed the rest of himself from the water, and it seemed that his heart and lungs reformed normal and healthy. Lucky kid, or as lucky as a kid like this could be.
“Yeah, I don’t have blood anymore,” Suigetsu said, flicking his finger until the probe came off. “It’s pretty awesome. They used to inject me with that…whatever’s in that bag…see if my blood would turn into salt water. It did but I got rid of it just fine, you know? Then it all got fucked up and I don’t have blood now. Hey can I drink this anyway?” He prodded the bag of saline.
“I don’t think you want to,” Tsunade replied, mind half on her readings. “But here.” She threw him one of the water bottles she’d stacked up on the counter, figuring at some point she would be examining him and he would need them. He drank an entire bottle almost instantly, and then flopped back on the table.
“What now?”
“I’m going to take some of your body water and run a few tests,” she said. There was only so much she could do in an external exam when he was made entirely of water. “I’m just going to be running a panel on your electrolyte levels and see how that balances out compared to others. It will only take a moment, then you’re out of here.” She took a sample cup from the table and walked back up to him, taking his hand. “This won’t hurt, and I’ll give you plenty of water to drink to replenish the little bit you’ll lose.”
Suigetsu tensed up, his relaxed posture suddenly looking a hell of a lot more forced. “Nothing for you to take samples of, I told you already.”
Tsunade frowned, surprised at the sudden tension. “Godaime, please.”
“Whatever. I already told you, I’m made of water and whatever I eat. You want a sample, you might as well test the bottle of water you just gave me.”
What the hell? Was the kid scared of needles or something? Tsunade approached the table, making sure her body language was as unthreatening as she could make it. “I want to do the tests myself for the formal record,” she explained carefully. “Among other things, I want to take a look at your electrolyte level. If you drop below a certain…”
“Oh, I know about electrolytes,” Suigetsu interrupted, leaning back so he was resting his arms on the exam table-and incidentally putting more space between them. “If you don’t have enough you pass out. Can’t have a bloodline like mine and not know about electrolytes.”
“That’s… good,” Tsunade said carefully, “but I still want to do the test.”
Suigetsu shrugged stiffly. “If you want… It’s a waste of time, though seriously.” He sat up again, eyeing her like she was going to bite him. “They tried everything, you know? I can’t be cut or have bones broken or anything like that. I don’t even respond to electricity right anymore. I just puddle.”
Tsunade rolled her eyes. “I’m going to take a small sample from your hand. Just enough to fill a bottle.” She held one up. “Meanwhile, why don’t you tell me what nutrients you generally need to stay stable?” She made a show of turning her back and rummaging through a drawer.
“I dunno, they just dumped some shit in every so often, and I’d look at them and it made them really uncomfortable.” He grinned at her as she turned around and started making her way towards him again, sharp as a shark. “He didn’t like to be reminded of his mistakes.”
“And what did you do after you got out?”
“Drank lots of water, and those power drinks, disgusting but it works.”
“Hrm. It seems to have been working fine so far,” Tsunade responded carefully, not sure whether to be encouraged by the change from avoidance to aggression. “Your heart…when you have one…is in very good shape.”
“Clean living,” he said, his shoulders taking on a set that was just slightly more naturally relaxed. “That’s what it is.”
“I’m sure. Now if you won’t mind, you’re dripping all over the floor.”
“Oh! Hey, happens sometimes.” He stopped, then started to wring out his shirt, and she put the cup out to catch it. “Have any of those power drinks around here? Haven’t had one in days. Should have made Karin get me one.”
“I do, they’re in the kitchen.”
“I know where that is! Gonna go get one, thanks. Bye, lady.” And before she could say anything else, he phased through her machine and half-ran half-sauntered out the door, leaving her with the shoes he’d forgotten to take with him and a heart monitor fizzling sparks. Annoying, but easily fixed, and it wouldn’t be the first time someone broke it.
Tsunade looked down into the cup. She had managed to catch just enough water where she could run at least two, maybe three tests.
Now, if she could only figure out what set him so on edge about a fucking electrolyte test, she’d be golden.
*
Tsunade’s first impression of Karin back during the war was that she had a temperament to match her red hair and that she had a chip on her shoulder bigger than all the elemental countries combined. This impression hadn’t changed over the years, and having to literally order her into the hospital for a physical exam after she failed to show up to three appointments Tsunade’d asked her about only reinforced it yet again. She sighed inwardly and braced herself as her patient looked around the room with an air that practically leaked disdain, carefully removed her shoes as though the whole act was somehow a great inconvenience to her and thus the world in general, and daintily planted herself on the exam table as though she was concerned it would come alive and bite her.
“Wonderful that you could make it,” Tsunade couldn’t help but snark as she pulled out the correct chart and turned to a new exam page.
“I didn’t have much choice,” Karin snapped, adjusting her glasses and glaring at Tsunade like she hoped she’d spontaneously combust.
Tsunade frowned. “I don’t appreciate your tone,” she said levelly. “I am not only the lead medic-nin of this hospital, but the Godaime Hokage. Treat the damn title with the respect it deserves.”
Karin huffed and looked away. Tsunade sighed.
“Do you have any questions before we begin,” she asked wearily.
“Yes,” Karin answered immediately. “I want to know what you plan to do during this examination.”
“I was planning a physical exam-blood pressure, eyes, ears, balance, posture…” she waved a hand to indicate what else. “Then a few x-rays. The whole thing should take no more than an hour.”
“You didn’t do most of those things for Suigetsu,” Karin pointed out, eyes narrowing.
“I’m not at liberty to discuss other patients’ examinations,” Tsunade responded delicately, taking down the blood pressure cuff. In truth, she’d decided that a person who could literally change any physical characteristic about himself that he wanted given enough water needed a chemical exam more than a physical one, but that was information she had absolutely no need to give to this girl.
“Hmph. I’m practically his previous medic-nin,” she insisted. “You should be asking me about those things. Also, tell me what you’re going to do before you start to do it,” she snapped, eyeing the blood pressure cuff with sharp eyes and a twist to her mouth.
Tsunade raised an eyebrow. “I will certainly keep that in mind,” she said wryly. “This is a blood pressure cuff. I am going to wrap it around your upper arm and then inflate it to check your blood pressure.”
“I know what a blood pressure cuff is,” Karin snapped, straightening up where she sat as though she’d just been mortally offended. Tsunade sighed. This was going to take a lot longer than an hour…
*
It was after midnight several days later when Tsunade got around to looking at the x-rays. She hadn’t stopped being Hokage just because the Counsel wanted her to front the physical side of vetting the former Sound nin, of course, and the time she’d taken out to check them over had been spent making up meetings, none of them short. She was constantly annoyed to learn just how many people insisted that whatever they needed was important enough to warrant the Hokage’s attention, whether or not she actually needed to get involved or had other, more pressing things to do.
She huffed in remembered irritation as she clipped up the x-rays. No one would bother her this late, and especially when she was working in the hospital. They all knew better.
Suigetsu didn’t have an x-ray, at least not yet. She’d be relying on the lab results until she could figure out what to do about his internally formed organs. Thus far, he appeared to be a particularly nutrient rich puddle.
Sasuke’s showed many broken and reset bones, but nothing too unusual for a nin his age that had been through the war. She noted that his ribs were covered in tiny lines and the remnants of fractures, some healed well, others jagged and uneven, likely badly healed breaks gotten on the battlefield when there were no medics around. Similar marks were on his arms and collarbone, and one particularly nasty one on the base of his spine. She frowned at that one and made a quick note to look into it a little further. From the preliminary x-ray it looked like he hadn’t suffered any nerve damage, but it wouldn’t hurt to take a better look. She ought to take a better look at some of those breaks, too, make sure they didn’t heal badly enough to affect lung function. Even so, there wasn’t much past what she expected to find in an individual with Uchiha Sasuke’s history. Apparently, being Orochimaru’s favorite meant you mostly got healable damage with no lasting affects. She smirked sarcastically to herself as she switched to Karin’s x-rays.
What she found made her pause. Karin’s arms, shoulders, and back were a mess. The skin covered with thousands of tiny scarred teeth marks. There were deeper scars where no doubt someone had actually bitten out a chunk of flesh, and the skin healed oddly around it. Those she’d expected, considering the girl’s particular healing ability, and she’d noted a lot of them in the physical exam she’d performed a few days ago. The deeper tissue scan just confirmed them. But there were also scarred lines down her back, like someone had cut her open length-wise. Tsunade could make out thin, long scores on her spine and in her neck and the base of her head. There was no way those could be teeth marks.
The marks were on the other side of her body too, crisscrossing her chest and stomach and the organs below. It looked like someone had taken out her intestines and cut them open, and not put them back quite right. Tsunade could see where someone had sewn them back together.
She put her hands on her hips and hooked Sasuke’s x-ray back up, next to Karin’s. The marks on his spine looked similar to the ones on Karin’s skull. Tsunade hadn’t noticed how perfect they were before because she hadn’t been looking for them. She’d figured Orochimaru would be more inclined to experiment on Karin since she wasn’t the next vessel. Uzumaki Karin had been disposable in a way that Uchiha Sasuke had not. The fact that they both had the same types of scars on their spines was worrying. Had Orochimaru really risked his vessel in the same way as a random girl with interesting chakra?
She clipped Juugo’s up on the other side of Sasuke’s, a weird sinking feeling in her stomach. He was very cooperative in the exam, doing everything she asked for as quietly and quickly as possible, as though he’d spent a lot of time in hospitals under quite a bit of incentive to do it right the first time.
The first thing that drew her eye was his heart. There were noticeable scars around each valve, and tiny, minute scars on the heart itself. Lines spread outward from his heart into the veins in his lungs. Nearby, the veins going up his neck stood out in sharper contrast to the rest. Chakra paths did follow the nervous system, so considering the extent that the curse seal was developed over time, it wouldn’t be surprising that Orochimaru would cut through Juugo’s nervous system, but the heart... The cuts around the heart were so small and delicate…what the hell was done to this boy’s heart? Juugo had a strong pulse and normal blood pressure, so the heart was functioning. The only other time she’d seen scars like that was after heart surgery. Invasive heart surgery. Like a heart transplant. The thing was, the chakra scan she’d done during his physical would have shown if he had organs that weren’t his own. Why would someone have been cutting into it?
Tsunade stared at the markings. None of this added up. A ninja who needed that serious of a heart surgery didn’t last that long in the field, let alone a place like Sound. If Juugo was in such critical condition that his heart would give out at any moment, Orochimaru would just take as many blood samples as he could and store them for future use. He didn’t keep people alive there.
She went back over each of the x-rays again, and another time, trying to make sense of the picture she was slowly forming. Orochimaru never did surgeries, at least not in the way that medics did. Orochimaru did experiments. She remembered the glee in his eyes when he shoved his hands into the bodies of enemies and came out holding their lungs. He would inject people with strange concoctions to see what they did. He enjoyed spreading the curse seal and watching their minds erode away as their bodies grew stronger.
These kids had surgical scars, most of them around very important organs either for the body or the chakra pathways. They were rarely the type of surgeries that would interest Orochimaru, and they were too delicate to have been his work. Or at least, too delicate to be the work of the Orochimaru she had known, and what little she’d seen of him after he left had indicated that he’d become more erratic, not less. These were not the marks of someone making something awful happen to a person and then stepping back to watch the effects. These were exploratory scars.
The lines on Karin’s body, the scars on her abdomen, they looked too similar to Juugo’s. They weren’t just scars, they were surgical scars. She’d seen them countless times before in thousands of other people. She’d sewn intestines back in, hell, she’d sewn Orochimaru’s back in at one point. She’d done it because he couldn’t.
And there were too many breaks and healed rib bones on Sasuke. All ninja got broken ribs, but these were too careful, too precise to be from a battle. They looked like the breaks in Karin’s spine and skull-the ones that looked like someone had purposely broken her neck.
Tsunade startled herself out of her examination by yawning. She rubbed her eyes and looked at the clock over the door. It was almost morning now. She’d been staring at these damn things all night. She sat down at her desk and sighed, needing either sleep or coffee.
Juugo’s heart. Sasuke’s countless rib breaks and spine injury. Karin’s intestines being put back in not quite right. These kids looked like they were cut up and put back together, and none of them mentioned anything of the sort in their interviews.
There was obviously something they weren’t telling her, and she needed to figure out what.
Part II