Sasuke has spent the first week since his arrival sneaking around the Sound. Orochimaru is aware of it--he's given instructions to the people who would sense the boy's presence to let it go. Kabuto is annoyed to be trailed silently while making his quick rounds in the dungeons, but he follows orders.

For the first several days. The ninth day, Kabuto locks the door to the first communal cell and then stands there, watching the people inside. After he hasn't moved for several minutes, most of the faces have turned towards him. The ones that haven't are the ones that look the most nervous.

Eventually Sasuke slips out of his hiding place and enters the corridor proper. His features are impassive bordering on insolent, and Kabuto gives him a small credit for that.

"Can I help you, Sasuke-kun?" he asks politely.

"No," Sasuke says, like it's perfectly normal for the two of them to pass each other by in here.

"Ah," Kabuto replies, and smiles. "Would you like to walk with me, then?"

It's not a question, it's a challenge, no matter how deferentially Kabuto modulates his voice. He watches Sasuke's shoulders tense before the boy shoves his hands in his pockets and says, "Whatever."

Kabuto bypasses the second communal cell--the guard hasn't reported any illnesses in there--and stops in the third one to check on a woman who'd developed a cold. Three others have caught it since the day before yesterday, and Kabuto decides to let it run through the whole cell. If any die from arising complications in-between his visits, they won't be sorely missed.

There are four single person cells at the end of the corridor; only one of them is occupied at the moment. Kabuto holds the door open and after a heartbeat, Sasuke steps in. He jerks and stills a moment later.

Kabuto doesn't hold it against him--the man in the room doesn't have much of a face left.

He unwraps the bandages and checks that the latest incisions around the eyes, where Orochimaru has been studying the effects of an extensive use of eye-focused jutsus, aren't getting infected. He does so in a way that permits Sasuke to see where they're focused, but when Kabuto glances over as he's wrapping fresh bandages, he sees that Sasuke's shoulders are tense and the boy's gaze is focused just over the man's head, at the wall.

Kabuto finishes taping the bandages and removes the credit he'd given Sasuke. Then he wonders if he's being too harsh; after all, he had years to learn and adjust to Orochimaru's methods. Sasuke has only had several days, perhaps a couple months if Kakashi told him anything while they were training for the chuunin exam, to begin building his endurance.

Then No, Kabuto thinks, he's being fair. Sasuke won't mentally last long at the Sound without bravado, but he'll last an equally short time if it's false.

He announces that he's finished a moment later, and when they're halfway down the corridor Sasuke breaks away from him, increasing his pace. His shoulders are still tense.

He's waiting outside the dungeons two days later, when Kabuto returns. He adds back the small credit. And when Sasuke shows up the third time, he makes sure that the boy sees the incisions' location. Kabuto only smiles when Sasuke asks what kind of experiment was being done.

Something Kabuto had noticed during his work as a spy was that even the most unsocial humans tended to gravitate toward the familiar in unknown or hostile situations. Orochimaru had already warned him not to fuck things up if Sasuke drifted towards him in the years he was at the Sound.

Kabuto had only nodded, and kept to himself the thought that there wouldn't be much choice in the matter since Orochimaru didn't allow his vessel be treated by any of the lesser medicnins.

Sasuke had stopped stalking people now, perhaps thinking that he had a grasp of how the Hidden Sound worked; he'd spent the last part of the month just picking fights. Kabuto had grown annoyed at having to dedicate at least an hour a day to patching people up, especially when it was meaningless. He could guess which ones would have gotten caught up by Sasuke's methods of provoking people, but a roughly half would have thrown the fight, so the boy wouldn't know how strong they really were.

It was more annoying to have to track Sasuke down in order to treat him, because he would never come to the clinic regardless of whether he won or lost.

"You know, you're making a poor first impression, Sasuke-kun," he said, sitting on a step as he healed a gouge running from Sasuke's left side around to his back, while the boy stood tensely at the foot of the stairs. Kabuto made a note of how deeply the cut had run, to report it later; it was fine if people wanted to fight Sasuke seriously, since his importance wasn't supposed to be known beyond Kabuto himself, Orochimaru, and whoever else Orochimaru had trusted with the information, but the blond who'd come into his clinic earlier in the afternoon bitching about the new psychotic Leafnin had sliced too close to the kidney. Better to get rid of the risk now.

In front of him, Sasuke snorted and folded his arms. Kabuto felt a flash of anger that the boy didn't even bother to stay much on his guard around him, as if assuming that being important to Orochimaru meant he was important to Kabuto; but he pushed it down and kept his voice pleasant if mildly chiding when he continued.

"This is your new home," he reminded Sasuke, and felt the muscles in the boy's back jump. "You might as well try to get along with them."

Another derisive noise from Sasuke. "Like you?"

Kabuto paused to consider the meaning of that--had Sasuke managed to track him at a point when he hadn't noticed?--and then smiled.

He stood up and patted Sasuke's shoulder once; the boy flinched and jerked around to glare at him. Ignoring it, Kabuto said congenially, "When you have a useful skill, instead of just more power, then you can get away with what I do."

He tugged down the torn edge of Sasuke's shirt before he could knock his hand away, and headed back up the stairs.

Kabuto caught the kunai the boy threw at his head without looking behind him, and tucked it into his obi as he called back a request that Sasuke please not pull the muscles in his side for another five minutes.

They were back in Rice Field country at the moment, in the Hidden Sound proper; the weather was hot, but most importantly, humid. Kabuto loathed the humidity, the way sweat made his glasses slip on his nose and forced him to constantly pause and readjust them before he could get back to what he was doing. He found excuses to stay in the underground as much as possible, preferably either at the cages or in his clinic, though Orochimaru's quarters would do if necessary.

He couldn't exactly ignore a summons, after all.

It was routine; Orochimaru wanted to look over the month's medical records, see who posed a threat to success and needed to be weeded out of active duty. Kabuto lived in a state of suspicion as natural to him as breathing, and knew if the man had suspected anything of his latest actions, the quality of his hand-writing would have been different. There would have been slight dips in the ink where Orochimaru paused to pick which word or phrase would leave him tense but not paranoid enough to come in overly armed.

The only irritating thing was that Orochimaru's quarters had to be reached through an entrance that was outside, rather than connected to one of the underground corridors. The walkway along the area had a splendid view of the cavern that edged part of the Sound, though Kabuto didn't see what use Orochimaru had for it besides occasionally issuing orders to his higher-ranked shinobi.

Kabuto also didn't see what use Sasuke had for the view, but the boy was there, leaning over the railing as he came down the stairs and absently fanning himself as he stared out at the formations. He was standing in a spot that was just out of view of the majority of the doorway, and partially blocked from it by a pillar.

Kabuto took a few steps past the door and stopped next to him, readjusting his glasses and rubbing away the sweat on his nose with a thumb. "Horrible humidity, isn't it?" he commented.

Sasuke grunted a reply, tone neutral but fingers pressed tightly against the wooden handle of the fan. He was waving it now in a rhythmical movement, one Kabuto could probably time, rather than the lazy motions of before when Kabuto's footsteps hadn't been audible yet.

"It's a shame we can't spend the summers farther inland," he added, gazing past the walls of the canyon. "At least then there wouldn't be the sea to deal with."

"Why is there only one base farther inland?" Sasuke asked, and there was a sharpness to his voice that belied his languid stance. He had a cut in his lip, a slightly ragged wound where he'd recently bitten through the muscle.

He knew something, or had a guess and wanted to bring Kabuto around to telling him. It wasn't subtle, but Sasuke had dropped the pretences of subtlety around Kabuto after the seventh month. It made it a little harder to tell when the boy was trying to manipulate him now, but it wasn't difficult yet.

"It's more complicated to carry the experiments overland," Kabuto answered honestly. "Shipping them brings less questions, and less risk of contact with enemy shinobi."

"Mn," Sasuke replied, loosening his grip on the fan slightly before retightening it. "What experiments are so important to him that he has to work on them even while he's dragging m--us around?"

Kabuto shrugged lightly, turning and leaning his back against the railing. "Orochimaru-sama is usually preoccupied with several projects at once."

"I meant to ask," Sasuke said, and his voice was equally as neutral and congenial as Kabuto's had been, though a harsher flatness remained, "why have all the recent experiments been eye jutsu users?"

Kabuto quirked his lips up, and pushed away from the railing. "Now, Sasuke-kun," he said as he readjusted his glasses, "there's some things I'd get into trouble for telling you. Knowledge isn't free, after all."

Sasuke's face was tilted just enough that the boy was staring at him now, trying to read him. Kabuto smiled and walked toward the doorway.

Sasuke had still smelled like sex, so Kabuto let his footfalls echo as he picked his way through the halls in the quarters. Orochimaru was dressed when he arrived in the main room, and had thoughtfully opened a window in the one beyond it.
-

Sasuke was gone by the time he returned to the walkway; he'd left the fan sitting on the railing. Kabuto resisted the urge to flick it over the rail and into the canyon as he passed, and instead made his way back to the coolness of the underground area.

It took him almost two years to do it, but it wasn't hard to tell when Sasuke finally put all the pieces together. Kabuto had been locking up and henging his scrolls for a week before the teenager didn't show to a meeting with Orochimaru; he came into his rooms to find Sasuke in one of the chairs, two cups of tea sitting on the desk he'd dragged over.

Kabuto raised an eyebrow, but after ascertaining that Sasuke didn't have any weapons in immediate reach, he sat down in the chair across from the teenager. He didn't pick up the tea.

"Why hasn't he done it already?" Sasuke said expressionlessly.

Kabuto leaned back slightly, keeping a careful eye on Sasuke's small movements. "There's a time limit he has to wait between switching bodies," he replied, equally neutral, "to prevent the jutsu from turning self-destructive and to ensure the carry-over of all his skills."

"How long," Sasuke asked, without putting enough emotion into his voice to even lift the end of the question.

"Three years," Kabuto told him.

"When did he change to this one."

"Mm . . . a day or two before you arrived here; it was lucky you took so long. Don't you remember, he still had the bandages?"

Sasuke reached out and picked up the mug closest to him, cupping his hands around the side and base.

The cups were some of Orochimaru's, Kabuto noted, allowing himself to relax again as Sasuke settled back in his chair once more. There was nothing particularly special about them--they weren't one of the sets whose color scheme was designed to disguise poisons.

Sasuke waited for the steam to dissipate, rather than blowing it away. Kabuto supposed one of his parents had taught him manners while they'd still been around; regardless of his usual attitudes, the little things remained.

". . . It," Sasuke said, quietly now. ". . . does it hurt?"

"Yes," Kabuto replied, " horribly."

Then, because he respected the fact that Sasuke was able to keep the cup still in his hands, he added: "From what I saw, it doesn't last more than half a minute."

Sasuke swallowed, and covered it by taking a sip of tea.
-

The teenager didn't say much following that, and he left several minutes later. Kabuto analyzed the tea afterward, and found that Sasuke had poured diluted acid into his cup. He made a note to start triple locking his supply cabinets.

Some of the tea got on his fingers as he dumped it out and washed the cup's inside, stinging them.

It was hard to tell when and where Sasuke was finding the chances to train alone, but he'd been doing it more and more often since learning about Orochimaru's intention--he came to Kabuto to heal wounds that Orochimaru was apparently unaware of. Kabuto hadn't directly mentioned them to the man yet, but he'd come to the suspicion that they weren't part of Orochimaru's training because lately, the majority of them were burns.

The first time he'd come in, Sasuke had listed the ingredients and measurements for a salve in a voice without emotion, and Kabuto had wondered curiously if Sasuke considered something as small as that as a betrayal of his clan.

He'd once thought of reminding Sasuke that it was the cold snakes hated, but then decided that if the teenager couldn't plan around something as obvious as that, he didn't deserve his help.

Whatever Sasuke had been practicing today, it must have been difficult to hide--there were second-degree burns on his fingers and wrists, and first-degree ones on his calves. Kabuto had healed the dermis and epidermis, not wanting the trouble with Orochimaru, but was daubing the salve on anyway.

He might have skipped it, if Sasuke had sat down when he came in. Instead, he'd stood the whole time, even when Kabuto had made an off-hand comment that it was more difficult for him to work with Sasuke's legs that way. The younger teenager had glared at him, so Kabuto shrugged a shoulder and bent a knee.

"That's the last of it," he said, as he finished with the small spot near the inside of Sasuke's right calf. Kabuto stood, rubbing the traces of salve between his fingers absently to remove the greasy feeling. "You should avoid his sight until you wash that off or wrap over it, though."

"Whatever," Sasuke replied, moving his fingers slightly and testing how the skin stretched.

"I mean it," Kabuto said with a trace of annoyance. "He'll be displeased to learn about all these new scars."

"I didn't know you cared," Sasuke retorted, looking over at him with a harsh little smirk.

"I get tired of cleaning up the bodies when he's pissed," Kabuto answered. "And it would be a nuisance to take care of you afterward, too."

The look Sasuke gave him at that was closed-off, calculating; when he spoke half a minute later, his tone was callous and dismissive, but the question was serious. "What do you know?"

Kabuto had already turned to the sink by then, to wash his hands. He kept his back to Sasuke and chuckled once, poignantly.

There was another pause, this one longer, and then Kabuto heard Sasuke shift on his feet.

"Keh," he muttered, quietly, and his voice grew quieter throughout his next sentence. "Figures you're sleeping with him too."

"No, no," Kabuto corrected pleasantly, shutting off the water. "I'm too old for him now."

A few seconds into the silence that came after that, he heard a strange noise. Kabuto glanced over his shoulder to see Sasuke staring towards the door to the clinic, biting the inside of his lip to smother a laugh.

The corner of Kabuto's mouth curled up, but then he caught it and looked forward again before Sasuke noticed.

go outside and shut the door

-

Sasuke had stopped accompanying him to the dungeons after the first year, but he'd begun doing it again in the last few months. It was sporadic at first, once every couple of weeks, but now he found the teenager waiting around the entrance almost every time he went to make his rounds.

Even though Sasuke never spoke, the reasoning was so obvious that it almost made Kabuto tired. But it wasn't his life rapidly coming to an end, so he humored it and made small talk as they crossed from one cell to another, though Sasuke's replies were rarely more than wordless noises.

"That's all," Kabuto said, stepping out of the second communal cell and locking it behind him.

Sasuke turned away, toward the entrance, but then paused a few steps later when he noticed Kabuto was walking the other direction. "What's left?"

"Just some work in one of the labs," Kabuto answered, not bothering to look back as he spoke. When he heard Sasuke start to follow, though, he glanced over his shoulder. "I don't think Orochimaru-sama has a reason for you to see it."

". . . And he has a reason for me to be here?"

Kabuto shrugged a shoulder. "He never told me to send you out." He gave Sasuke an annoyed look when the teenager caught up to his side and kept pace, but Sasuke only returned it with more vehemence.

Kabuto considered stopping and standing there until Sasuke left, but he didn't really want to waste the time; and the consequences would fall much harder on Sasuke than on himself, given his attitude of late.

Kabuto pushed his glasses back up, and turned down the corridor with the individual cells, before unlocking the door at the end. He shifted the keys to the hand farthest from Sasuke when he was finished, and pushed it open without bothering to hold it afterward.

The door led to a small room with a concrete floor, a few empty hooks--the smocks were being laundered--and a shower in the corner. Kabuto passed by it all as Sasuke glanced around, memorizing, and unlocked the second door.

Once it was open, he put the keys in his pocket, shielded his eyes, and slid his hand along the inside wall until he found the light switch.

Even with a hand half-covering his eyes, Kabuto had to squint briefly; this lab was brighter than most of the rooms in the entire complex, and the white walls and steel equipment didn't help matters. He noticed Sasuke grimace and glance at the room's floor.

Sasuke looked up sooner than he should have; Kabuto knew the light had still been blinding him, because it took the teenager a few seconds to start violently.

Most of the place had been wiped down, thankfully. The worst area was the main table where the corpse was still lying--the smell wasn't too bad yet, but sterilizing everything was going to be a bitch.

"Since you insisted on joining me, Sasuke-kun," he said, stepping into the room, "could you bring me one of those bags over there?"

Sasuke just glared at his back. Kabuto hadn't actually expected him to do anything, but he knew that speaking so casually when there was a body that been opened and nearly emptied from sternum to groin just a meter away would unnerve the teenager, even after over two years in the Sound. He got the bag himself, as well as a pair of long plastic gloves.

Sasuke hung back by the door as Kabuto shoved the bag under and around the corpse until he could zip it, and once again wished to himself that Orochimaru would just sometimes leave his experiments a little easier to clean up.

He had to drop the body in the outer room; Sasuke finally moved further in, out of his way.

Kabuto stripped off the gloves and dropped them on top of the bag, and then went to get a fresh pair and the sterilizing supplies.

"What was he doing?" Sasuke muttered, half-looking at the door to the outer room, but not actually inside. He was starting to understand Kabuto slightly, or at least to understand what actions the man considered signs of weakness and others just of humanity.

"I don't ask," Kabuto replied, scrubbing down the top of the table.

"That doesn't mean you don't know."

He let the corner of his mouth curl up.

"You're really pushing it these last weeks, Sasuke-kun," Kabuto said congenially. "You should be more careful."

"Why?" Sasuke replied, folding his arms.

"If he's angry, he might stop teaching you," he answered, offering the most innocuous possibility.

". . . He won't," Sasuke said, defensively. "You think I don't--I know it's just for muscle memory."

"'Skill memory,'" Kabuto corrected, straightening up and rolling his shoulders back a few times. "Or 'procedure memory.' There's no such thing as muscle memory; learning stimulates neurons."

Sasuke made a noise in the back of his throat. Kabuto returned to scrubbing down the tabletop.

He shifted his feet a few minutes later; just barely, but Kabuto noticed it anyway.

"If you're uncomfortable," he offered, not looking up, "you can leave."

"I'm not," Sasuke replied harshly.

"I won't hold it against you," Kabuto said, dropping the sponge and flexing his fingers. "I threw up the first time I cleaned one of these rooms."

The convenience of creating a personality that lent itself to constant distrust was that Sasuke had a very difficult knowing when he was telling the truth. The teenager watched him work for a little while longer, and then left silently.

When he returned from the training area late in the morning, there was a snake waiting outside his door. Kabuto paused a safe distance away and waited.

"You're to go pick up something," the habu informed him, uncoiling loosely. "It should be wandering the halls near the main rooms about now."

"Thank you," Kabuto replied politely, and backed away until the snake was out of sight. He had to detour slightly because of the action.
-

He found Sasuke in the long corridor parallel from the main open rooms, walking slowly down the hall with a hand braced against the wall for support. When Kabuto stopped in front of him and Sasuke looked up, he could see the leftover glaze of one of Orochimaru's genjutsus in the teenager's eyes.

"I warned you," he didn't refrain from saying, before setting a hand on Sasuke's shoulder and guiding him toward the medical clinic.
-

Orochimaru had been concealing his anger well--it took Kabuto five minutes to clear away the dregs of the older man's chakra from Sasuke's own. Sasuke flinched involuntarily, from time to time, as he worked. Kabuto didn't bother stimulating the teenager's chakra with his own; it was easier to work when he was still in a mild stupor.

The damage to his chakra system was the worst of it. Beyond that, there were only some minor skinned abrasions--from groveling, he supposed--on Sasuke's palms and knees. Not even worth bandaging, but they meant Sasuke's pride would make him insufferable once he was completely back to himself.

The pattern of the abrasions indicated they'd come from concrete rather than wood paneling, which meant Orochimaru had used the genjutsu in one of the public rooms. Kabuto was pretty sure Sasuke wouldn't realize at first that that had been a small if maybe unintentional mercy, to not be attacked in a private room--he'd just think of how he'd been humiliated.

Kabuto filled a glass with water and set it beside the cot Sasuke was laying on, and then went to eat lunch.
-

When he came back just before the few hours he had to set aside to treat the higher-ranked ninja began, he found Sasuke was still there. He'd moved to the cot in the farthest corner, and had his arms folded under his head. The emptied glass was sitting by the sink.

Kabuto pulled the curtain around the bed shut and went to open the drawer containing rolls of bandages.
-

The injuries he saw during those hours were generally the same, broken bones and severe bruises or cuts. Yesterday a student had come in after being poisoned in a sparring match with someone he didn't like and who didn't like him, but nothing today had been interesting.

Kabuto finished setting the three broken fingers on the woman he'd been dealing with, and then told the man waiting outside that he was done for the day and to go down to the regular medical clinic--he wasn't bleeding to death, so he'd make it.

"You're going to have to go back out there sometime, Sasuke-kun," he said, after he'd closed the door.

"Were your teammates spies too?" Sasuke replied.

Kabuto turned and gave the curtain a long look.

"Yes," he finally replied, moving to clean up the remains of the splint.

"And your teacher?"

"No."

"Really?"

"I would hardly be worth Orochimaru-sama's time if I couldn't deceive my own teacher," Kabuto answered, throwing away the cut bandages before picking up the metal tabs.

"He had his suspicions, though," he continued, after he'd put the tabs away and Sasuke had still said nothing. "Especially by the end. It was Misumi's fault," Kabuto added in annoyance. "It was stupid of him to agree to that surgery without hesitating. He really was an idiot."

"Where are they?"

"Some trouble occurred with a group of Leafnins on the island they were stationed at," Kabuto answered, closing the drawer. "The one Orochimaru-sama checked on a couple years ago, with the DNA experiments?"

"I remember," Sasuke said darkly, sitting up and pulling back the curtain. When Kabuto didn't continue, he added: "So they were arrested?"

"Killed," Kabuto corrected. "They were Soundnin after all."

". . . Bastard," Sasuke said, by which he meant I envy you.

They started traveling between bases on a weekly rather than biweekly basis after that, and Sasuke no longer accompanied him to the cages. Kabuto was mostly pleased by that, except for the small downside that now that the teenager was no longer at his side to be a witness, he started getting propositions again.

It was always the women, of course--Kabuto wouldn't have risked releasing anyone on sexual favors alone, but a woman who was pregnant would earn herself a couple more years of life, until she finished breastfeeding. The Sound couldn't rely completely on attracting outsiders to grow.

He'd been mildly surprised to see one of the people near the end of the cage--there was only one main cell, and one single; this was a small base--standing when he came in; but when he was a few steps closer Kabuto could tell it was a woman, and knew what was coming.

He ignored her, running quick and efficient eyes over the contents of the cell and judging that no one inside needed medical attention at the moment. They did seem to need more water, however. It was hotter here than the base they'd last been at, and the allotted amount hadn't taken that into account.

The woman at the end of the cell leaned her forehead against the bars, letting her arms dangle out over the horizontal one. "I'll sleep with you," she called, as he was making a note on his clipboard.

Kabuto made a small, wordless noise in the back of his throat, and finished writing the question mark below Check water amounts?

"Your kids would be brilliant," she continued, voice flat. He'd been told once that the definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results each time, but it was possible that this woman had been brought in after the last one who'd tried. "They'd be allowed to survive."

Kabuto hooked the pen over the edge of the clipboard and looked at her. She was dirty, the same as all the people down here, and her hair was slightly matted, but she wasn't completely unattractive. With a shower, maybe. . . .

"I have no interest in being a father," he told her, with a small smile.

Her expression didn't change, just remained in that same tired desperation that had driven her to the offer in the first place. Kabuto tucked the clipboard under one arm and stepped over to her.

The woman's arms were still hanging outside the bars; he gripped one by the wrist and then pinched the skin below the crook of her elbow.

"Ow!" She almost reflexively tried to pull back, but he felt her make herself relax a second later.

He stopped pinching after counting to three. When released, the woman's skin remained slightly tented rather than going flat like normal.

Kabuto let go of her wrist, and she hesitated, watching him warily. When he began to walk away, she jerked her arm back behind the bars.

As he left, he crossed out his previous note and wrote instead: Subjects display signs of dehydration--increase water.

The trip to the Heaven and Earth Bridge required him to travel overnight, with only two hours during the journey set aside to rest, if he wanted to make it there before noon. Kabuto had spent the last week rearranging his sleeping schedule so that he would be able to make the trip and still be awake for whatever would come after.

He was supposed to leave today, so he'd spent the entire morning and early hours of the afternoon sleeping, having already left a note on his clinic doors yesterday that he was unavailable. He'd only been awake for half an hour when someone knocked on his door.

He knew it wasn't Orochimaru; the man was preoccupied elsewhere, in case Sasori had been foolish or clever enough to send an additional spy to make sure Kabuto wasn't setting him up. The likelihood of that was very low--Kabuto had been extremely careful to conceal how much he hated Sasori, even in the time before the man had inflicted his jutsu on him. He glared at the door before schooling his face back to its usual expression.

It was Sasuke; the teenager had burns on his hands again.

He didn't have time for this; despite everything, he was tense about this mission, and trading the usual verbal barbs with Sasuke--well, the tenseness would be appropriate, but that still didn't mean Kabuto wanted to access it until the trip was at least half-way completed.

Kabuto sighed, then moved over to his dresser and picked up his small ring of keys. He slid the one to his clinic free before turning back around.

Sasuke didn't move his gaze back fast enough--he'd been looking at Kabuto's bed. The cape and hood were lying on it, along with his weapons and medical packs, and the small pouch containing a canteen and some dried jerky.

"Here," Kabuto said, holding out the key with no change in his expression, "the jar of burn cream is in the refrigerator on the back wall."

Sasuke took the key and left.

Kabuto had expected that to be then end of it--there was no way Sasuke would return without making a copy of a key as valuable as that one, which would take an hour or more, and by then Kabuto would be gone--so he was surprised and further irritated at the knock on the door twelve minutes later.

This time he dropped the hood and accessories into his closet and slid the door shut, before answering Sasuke.

"I'm going to need more of this," Sasuke said, as he rudely pushed the door open further and entered, making his way over to the chair. Kabuto narrowed his eyes, not quite closing them, and counted to two. "I'm almost out."

That made him pause--there had been half a jar left the last time he treated Sasuke, and the only part of the teenager that was burnt was his hands. That wouldn't have taken half a jar.

"Ah," Kabuto said, closing his door and walking over. Sasuke set the jar down on the desk, and he picked it up a moment later--it really was nearly empty.

The shape of the indents on the cream inside looked like Sasuke had scooped out at least two handfuls, which was far more than the amount actually on his hands.

"I'll get to it when I have the time free," Kabuto said, setting the jar back down and resting his hand on the desk. "Hopefully you won't burn yourself further until then."

"Hn," Sasuke muttered, and tapped his finger on the arm of the chair briefly. A few moments later, when Kabuto didn't speak and didn't move, he stood. He made his way back to the door, this time very nearly concealing the glance he cast at the bed. Kabuto moved the jar off the book it had been on.

"Orochimaru-sama's by the west exit," Sasuke said, abruptly.

"Did he ask to see me?" Kabuto questioned.

"No," Sasuke replied, and this time Kabuto turned and really looked at him. The teenager had his hand resting on the doorknob, and his back mostly to him. "In case you had anything to say to him. About the salve."

Kabuto stared at him for a long moment, and had to consciously keep down the impulse to let the corners of his mouth curl up.

"Hm," he replied. "I see."

Sasuke's fingers tensed slightly against the doorknob, but Kabuto had let his voice sound a touch more thankful than neutral; Sasuke opened the door and left without further comment.

Kabuto retrieved his things from the closet and began strapping on his weapons.

The Heaven and Earth Bridge was over fifty kilometers from the island base Orochimaru and a few select Soundnins were staying at. The chakra from the fight still drew everyone out.

The Soundnins, aside from Sasuke, stayed concealed even as they came out and stared at the horizon; the vantage was bad, and everything was too far away to be heard, but the feeling of Orochimaru and someone else using insane amounts of chakra was unmistakable. Even fifty kilometers away, the air was thin and electric.

"What the fuck?" the sole woman of the group whispered, when a thin line of chakra so red it seemed black stretched up into the sky.

"Is Orochimaru-sama going to be okay?" a teenager asked, half a minute later, after spitting the taste of the red-black chakra out of his mouth.

"Don't be stupid," a man replied, having rejected caution far enough to climb onto one of the rocks just below Sasuke. "Who do you think he is?"

"But . . ." the teenager said, and gestured at the distance. No one replied.

Despite what the man had said, he breathed a sigh of relief when the triple gates went up. It lasted just as long as it took the other chakra to blow them apart.

"Fuck!" a second teenager swore, from where he was perched in a tree a few meters closer to the edge of the island. "What the fuck could do that?"

The man didn't answer.

They were still receiving no sound, but the second chakra disappeared all of a sudden two minutes later. The woman hesitated from where she'd been halfway to climbing onto the rock beside the man.

". . . Should we go?" the first teenager asked.

"No," the man said decisively, and jumped down. "Orochimaru-sama's chakra was there last. Go get ready for his return. Watanabe, you and Miyuki check the borders."

"Sir," the group replied, and everyone disbursed to their various tasks.

Up on the rock he was crouched on, Sasuke's hands were shaking.