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“You’re weighing more than I expected,” Orochimaru-sama mutters. “Did you grow another tumour?”
You know that word: ‘Tumour’. It means coming back with scars on your body, or not coming back at all. You don’t want to be a Failure. You don’t want your body to be empty of you, like Test Subject Two, and Five, and Twelve.
Orochimaru-sama’s face seems to melt a little. It’s hard to look at it. “Stop fighting, or I’ll eat you!”
You lay limp in his arms, then. They are warm, and soft, and you desperately want to go back to your cage, where it is always cold, and safe, and sterile.
“Stop crying,” Orochimaru-sama says as he works around you. “It’s a waste of electrolytes. I’ll have to modify your drip to compensate, and I really don’t have the time to recalculate it.”
It isn’t a tumour, in the end. It’s intestinal parasites.
“Who fed you?” Orochimaru-sama growls, face transformed into something otherworldly. “Who contaminated you?”
–-
“Jiǎ chī zhège.” Orochimaru's assistant Yi-san touches your mouth and you automatically open it. “Zhè hěn měiwèi.”
The texture is odd and sticky, and loud. It’s too much. You know better than to cry, though, so try to make your face hard to look at, like Orochimaru-sama sometimes does, and she makes a sound you have no reference for. Her teeth are not as white as whatever it is she put in your mouth.
“Nǐ xǐhuān ma?”
You obediently open your mouth again. Later, much, much later, Hound-san will tell you it was probably rice. That’s the first food you ever had.
Afterward, your abdomen feels like Orochimaru-sama is pushing down on it, putting all of his weight onto it. You push against the bars of your cage and make sounds like Orochimaru-sama is cutting out a tumour.
Test Subject Six makes noises back, and so does Test Subject Ten. Everything is getting louder.
Then it feels like something’s coming out, out of somewhere nothing had ever come out of before, and your cage smells rotten like Test Subject Five’s had, before Orochimaru-sama had taken its body forever. The texture is odd, and sticky. There’s little things moving in it. Curious, you reach out and pluck them in between your fingers. They wriggle and writhe, alive and dying.
Your heart starts pounding really quickly. It feels like your body is being emptied of you, like Orochimaru-sama will never bring you back to your cage after this. You put your life back in your mouth, and don’t let it escape, even if it really wants to.
Turns out shit was the second food you ever had. Kakashi-san will eventually make a big joke about it, but you don’t ever really find it that funny.
–-
“She calls you Jiǎ, doesn’t she?” Danzo-sama asks.
You don’t answer because you don’t know. Does she? All you know is that Yi-san is crying and you think Orochimaru-sama would not like that at all. It’s a waste of electrolytes.
“ROOT shinobi do not have names unless I give it to them. Do you understand?”
You nod like you were taught to. Test Subjects are given Numbers, which are not the same as Names, though you haven’t quite figured out why. They both are used to tell you apart from Others, but you know better than to think too deeply about anything. You accept reality as it is, as dictated by those that tell you what to do.
“Show me the Shodaime’s jutsu, then. The Mokuton.”
You press your hands together, and the familiar surge runs through you, beyond you, into the ground and then above. It feels like growing a tumour, but faster, and on purpose. Yi-san’s body shudders as you pierce it with branch after branch, until it become empty like Two, like Three, and Four, and Five, and everyone else you’d outlasted until this point. You’re reminded of that excrement with intestinal parasites, all brown and pink and red. Your mouth tastes odd, and you wonder if she’d taste odd, too. If you could eat her death and shit her out alive.
“Incredible.” Danzo-sama’s cheeks are red and emitting sweat, and his voice is higher. “You’re incredible. I can’t believe Orochimaru left you to rot – you’re not a failure at all!”
To be left to rot, you wonder. Rot is a word you’ve become more familiar with, now that you’ve been taken out of the cold, sterile safety of the laboratory and flung into a louder, dirtier home. You don’t like it, but you placidly accept your lot in life as long as it means your body will not be empty of you. You are not a Failure, and that is all that matters.
“From today forth your name will be Kinoe,” Danzo-sama tells you. “Welcome to ROOT.”
–-
ROOT shinobi are not like Test Subjects. They do not cry or scream or whimper. Throughout the day they shift between two faces: their Animal mask and their Human mask, and neither express much emotion. But sometimes they talk and sometimes they bleed, and when they die they rot much like Test Subjects do.
Most things rot because they are Organic, you learn. Everything rots eventually, except for things made of Metal. You prefer metal, you think. When Danzo-sama gives you a choice between forehead protectors, you chose one that cradles your head. It reminds you of your cage: how cold it was, how safe and how sterile. Danzo-sama seems pleased about it.
“You look like him, you know.” He says quietly. “You look like both of them.”
You do not know of whom he is referring to, but even if you did you would not say anything. ROOT Shinobi only talk when given permission to do so, and thinking is reserved for missions.
That’s something new, too. Missions.
You don’t understand where you are going, or why, but you don’t need to. You follow your superiors, and imitate them. Codename Kinoto is your immediate superior. Danzo-sama tells you that he is the yin to your yang, and that you are to be by his side whenever you leave ROOT. You curl up around Kinoto-san when it is dark, and shadow Kinoto-san when it is light, and together you empty many people of their bodies, spilling their life to feed the earth. Your jutsu works best when it eats chakra, and it feels only logical that you should grow stronger when you eat them, too.
Kinoto-san reports you to Danzo-sama for it, after.
Danzo-sama expresses more emotions in his face than you’ve ever seen on another human. He speaks poorly about Orochimaru-sama. You recognize the word ‘Contamination’. When asked to explain your behaviour, you try to explain about the rot, about the chakra, about the tumours, but you don’t have much experience explaining why you do what you do. You hardly understand it yourself.
“I was wrong,” Danzo-sama says. “You’re nothing like them.”
You don’t eat anything he hasn’t approved of, after that. What he approves of is food pills and water, and, some time later, when you’re alone with him, bread and rice that he feeds to you by hand. You take it without letting your face melt, because ROOT shinobi do not scream or cry or whimper, and Danzo-sama goes quiet then, and sometimes he even praises you. You feel less empty then, though it feels more like being filled with worms.
When you show no more progress with your single-styled Mokuton, Danzo-sama takes it upon himself to train you personally. It is unheard of, if Kinoto’s words are to be trusted, and he and the other ROOT whisper about it when before they would have chosen to remain silent.
Danzo-sama runs through hand signs he remembered his own sensei using--the Shodaime himself!--and he praises you when you do them right, and has you do them again when you can’t. Again and again and again, until sweat is dripping off you in rivulets and there’s a wheeze in your lungs and your whole body is in pain. It feels a lot like growing a tumour and then cutting it off, but it’s worth it because Danzo-sama smiles at you and only you, and you are not a Failure, you are not a Failure, you are a Success and you are Incredible.
–-
When Orochimaru-sama betrays the Leaf and runs, you dutifully bow to Danzo-sama’s will and go alone to the Iburi clan to secure Orochimaru-sama’s escape.
The Iburi are a fragile people whose bloodline limit permit their bodies to turn into smoke. The merest gust of wind will tear them apart and leave nothing to bury, so they mark their dead with trees as they await Orochimaru-sama’s return. They tell you they owe Orochimaru-sama a debt, for Orochimaru-sama had altered them, given them substance enough to live a halfway decent life, even if only as ghostly wraiths below ground where the air is stale and unchanging.
Orochimaru-sama gave you life, too, but he left you to rot. From your test tube you saw the Other Subjects choke, and die, and bloat, until their bodies sloughed off in pieces, turning the water brown and black and red. You, too, would have rotted in that stagnant water, had Danzo-sama not rescued you from the fetid depths and given you a name.
“Tenzo!” An Iburi girl a head taller than you has wrapped her arms around you. “It’s me, Yukimi!”
You stand stiff in her embrace like a tree, stoic and unmoved. “My name is Kinoe.” Danzo-sama had given you this name, and you abide by it.
“No, you’re my brother, Tenzo! I know it!”
It is a mission so you allow yourself to think about that, if only for a second. Whether her belief on your origins is true or if it is false, the fact of the matter is she’s technically right. You are both alive right now because Orochimaru-sama made it thus, and so, in a way, you really are siblings.
Her smile reminds you of Yi-san’s, only her teeth are whiter.
Yukimi-san promptly turns into smoke and invades your body. You startle and struggle but it is not painful – you feel oddly full, as if before you had been empty. She moves you like a puppet and you are powerless to stop it.
“Because my body is so fragile I’ve never been allowed outside. Please, let me feel the sun!” The pull of the mission is strong, but her will is stronger.
The wind, she screeches, feels amazing on your skin. It’s just wind, you think, but to her it is beyond description. An echo of her enthusiasm bounces inside your emptiness, fills it with sound, and you feel rattled, like a sword has hit your forehead protector and the metal is vibrating against your skull. Like a near-death experience, but opposite of the familiar stifling, muffled feel of drowning.
“Hey, I smell something tasty!” Her attention to your nose has led you both to a loud, noisy gathering of humans. “Tenzo, look! It’s a festival!”
“I can’t,” you try to say, but Yukimi-san’s will is still stronger.
Yukimi-san loves the food. She loves the taste of corn, of squid, of cotton-candy. With your hands she eats and eats and eats until you feel like you’ll explode, and her happiness is overwhelming. You’ve never heard yourself laugh but with Yukimi-san’s will it is a loud, delightful thing.
“I’m so glad you came with me, Tenzo,” she admits, turning your hands in your lap. “If I had been alone, I don’t know what I would have done.”
There is something burning inside you, something wrecking havoc in your stomach, up your esophagus, giving you heartburn. But nothing comes up. Your body just hurts for no purpose, and the curse seal on your tongue hurts, and you think, absurdly, of your cage, of that cold, sterile, safe place, and then of the test tube, where you watched the other subjects and they watched you, until everyone had rotted away and only you were left, alone, slowly being emptied of you in the dark, and how you’re not alone now, how Yukimi-san has literally filled you, with the food and with her life smoke.
“When I am alone…” You bite your lip, and find the words. “When I was alone, all I could think about was dying.”
Yukimi-chan is listening, quiet. In the trees, though you do not know it yet, Hound-san is quiet, listening.
“But when you’re with me, suddenly I feel like I want to survive.”
For the first time, you want to run away from everything–from your mission, from ROOT, from Leaf itself. You feel stronger now, full of Yukimi-san’s life and Yukimi-san’s food and Yukimi-san’s confidence. You aren’t locked in a cage, and you aren’t drowning in a test tube. You aren’t underground, never to see the sun. There is only the sky above you, and dirt below, trees at your side, and you – Yukimi and Tenzo – are running.
Unfortunately, Hatake Kakashi is faster.
In the end Yukimi-san does not rot, like everyone up until that point has. She just turns into smoke. You scream, and you cry, and you try your hardest to contain her. Your Wood jutsu races after her, tries to suck the chakra of her, tries to consume her death and bring her back to life, but there’s nothing to be done.
She’s gone, and all that’s left to mark her passing is a magnificent tree, buried deep underground where no light will ever reach it, where it will decay and rot and fade away as surely as her smoke had, as surely as these feelings will, for you are a ROOT shinobi and ROOT do not have emotions, or a past, or a present, or a future.
–-
You are not a Failure: Orochimaru-sama has escaped and thus you’ve completed your mission. You tell Danzo-sama about Hatake Kakashi, and the demise of the Iburi clan, but you do not mention Yukimi-san or the name she gave you. Lying by omission feels like treason, but you are hollow again, and empty, like a proper ROOT shinobi should be. Yukimi-san had contaminated you, and now the contamination is gone. Like Yi-san, all you’ve left of her is branches. There is nothing further to report.
When you’re alone with Danzo-sama that night, you shit all over his dick. It’s strictly back to food pills and water for you.
–-
“The wood style is important to the Leaf,” Hatake Kakashi tries to convince you, a few years down the line. He, the Hokage’s ANBU, and you, Danzo-sama’s ROOT, have joined forces to investigate a lab abandoned by your creator Orochimaru-sama. “Danzo wants to keep you for himself, but you should be above ground, serving Leaf openly.”
What Hatake Kakashi doesn’t know is that your real mission is to steal his eyes for Danzo-sama.
“Tenzo,” Kakashi pleads.
“My name is Kinoe,” you snarl, and try your very hardest to kill him.
You belong to ROOT. You belong to Danzo-sama. You belong–-
This is Orochimaru-sama’s lab, so of course there’s a giant snake. In fact, it’s a huge snake made up of a lot of small snakes, and before you know it you’re writhing in a mass of them, and you remember the parasites, red and brown and black mess of it, it’s in your mouth, it’s everywhere, contaminated shit and rot and ROOT shinobi do not scream, they do not cry, but you really don’t want to die, not like this–!
Of course, Kakashi saves you.
His electricity jutsu turns the air acrid, and the snake chars from the inside out. Burnt flesh smells different from earthy rot, or watery decay, and the smoke fills your nostrils and your lungs, both similar to and nothing like Yukimi-san’s gentle air.
You cough, and gag, and somehow do not vomit.
“Are you okay, Tenzo?”
That name again. You look up at Hatake Kakashi and his sharingan eye, the mission Danzo-sama entrusted you with, and your insides hurt.
“…Why did you save me?”
“I never abandon a comrade,” Kakashi says quite solemnly. “And I wasn't lying. Your jutsu is needed in the Leaf.”
He talks about the container of Nine-Tailed Fox, now four years old, and how your Mokuton and his Sharingan are of the few things that can contain it. You are needed above ground, he insists. You are needed in the sun.
“The Sandaime Hokage will protect you,” Kakashi promises.
So you bring Danzo-sama a fake eye.
“I failed my mission,” you confess, head hung low. “I cannot kill a comrade of the Leaf, for I am of the Leaf. Tomorrow, I will go above ground and serve the Sandaime Hokage.”
Kinoto-san stares at you, confounded by this betrayal. Danzo-sama is furious beyond description. “Who contaminated your mind with this!” He howls. “Who poisoned you against me?!”
You’ve heard those words before. The old fear of being emptied of you returns, and your mouth salivates, and your stomach hurts like a pang of hunger. Danzo-sama’s hands are wrinkled and familiar, and you remember the taste of them in your mouth. You may almost miss them.
“Kill him, then,” Danzo-sama says lowly. “Or be killed.”
Codename Kinoto does not hesitate. He is the yin to your yang. You have countless days slain by his side and slept by his side for countless nights and, while he never emoted before you, for ROOT shinobi are not permitted it, you think of the ache you felt for Yukimi-san and Yi-san as you skewer Kinoto-san in fifteen places. He will not rot--you will not allow it. Your jutsu indiscriminately devours his chakra and soaks up his blood, crushing his skull and his insides and squelching the remains of him in between cracks, and impulsively you bring the wood back into you, the mess of Kinoe and Kinoto and the evidence of your presence in ROOT erased, all gone, absorbed into you, and you feel powerful, but you also feel like your face is melting, has gone hollow and hard to look at, like Orochimaru-sama’s face used to look like when he taught you not to waste electrolytes on tears.
Danzo-sama stares back at you, black hair and red eye and brown skin–-a single worm writhing in your shit, you think, easily devoured–-and Danzo-sama flinches in what is unmistakably terror.
It’s over now, though. You close your eyes and bow low, bent in half like a reed. “Thank you for everything, Danzo-sama.”
“Leave,” he hisses, and so you go.
By dawn, you are no longer a ROOT shinobi. You greet the sunrise above ground, by Hatake Kakashi’s side.
–-
Regular ANBU are not unlike ROOT shinobi. They, too, have Animal masks and Human masks. On missions, they do not cry and they try very hard not to scream. And when they die, they rot like every other organic thing. But their Human masks are flexible, and expressive, and among each other they do not roughhouse with the intent to kill, but with the intent to play. A bizarre ritual, but not unwelcome. You wonder if this is what it means to 'like’ something, a new non-ROOT concept you’ve been introduced to.
“Yo, Tenzo!”
Hatake Kakashi is a constant presence. He is your immediate superior, and you follow him doggedly as you did Kinoto-san. Non-ROOT and non-ANBU shinobi are a completely different breed of human, and Kakashi-san can metamorphose between each as easily as putting on a mask, and you strive to mimic his actions by observation. He has many comrades inside ANBU and outside it, in the Leaf itself. All his comrades remind you of Yukimi-san, for they are all so enthusiastic, so loud, and so expressive, and so full of something unnamable, indescribable by ROOT standards. It’s almost physically painful to look at, but you manage it by fusing with the trees and observing with wooden eyes. Your insides cannot churn if they are made of bark.
Kakashi-san is easier to look at. His face is often passive, and stoic, and far less fluid. But he walks among the humans lacking in chakra like he is one of them, and they greet him warmly. One day, you think, you’d like to be greeted like that, too. It’s a possibility now that you aren’t underground, and you have not forgotten the careless joy that came with being Yukimi-san’s Tenzo, that may someday come by being Kakashi-san’s Tenzo. But you also have not forgotten your primary mission: you belong to the Sandaime Hokage, and he has brought you above ground to be an asset against the container of the Nine Tails should you be so required. So you keep your anonymity by keeping to the trees and wearing your Animal mask, which you have since learned is a Cat.
Kakashi-san’s animal mask is a Hound, so on missions you call him Hound-san. Together you empty many men and women and children of their lives. When the mission calls for it, you put your hands together and your Mokuton absorbs all, transforms all, becomes all. You are powerful and terrifying and you quite like it, knowing you were once Danzo-sama’s pet and Orochimaru-sama’s creation and now you are mostly your own monster.
After missions it is customary to get food with your mission partners, another difference from ROOT. You decline the first time, and the second, but you cannot escape the third, for Kakashi-san has rough-housed you into an arm bar and you cannot break it without breaking the unspoken rule of non-lethal 'playing’.
“I can’t!” You’re frustrated, a new emotion you’ve learned and borrowed and now feel quite strongly.
“Why the hell not?!”
That’s when Kakashi-san learns that you have subsisted on food pills and water for most of your life, and he starts hounding you for details. You have no reason to lie, though the cursed seal on your tongue keeps you from divulging everything, and he learns about the rice, and the shit, and the bread.
Throughout it Kakashi-san’s face becomes hollow and still, and it feels a lot like delivering a mission report, and you fall back into the rhythm of it, the cadence of it, the dryness of the facts. Yi-san had fed you rice through the bars of your cage. Danzo-sama had fed you bread from his fingertips. Orochimaru-sama–
Then Kakashi-san interrupts with a barking laugh. “You fucking ate your own shit!”
Your face approximates a smile, because you are learning to smile, and you try a joke, because Kakashi-san is good at jokes. “Plants need fertilizer, don’t they?”
He howls with laughter, and slaps your back, and he forces you to eat twelve pieces of sushi because 'you’re not a fucking plant, Tenzo’. You have the worst case of indigestion, after, but Kakashi-san has introduced you to the modern marvels that is a toilet: a sterile, metal thing that you immediately place in the mental category of 'like’, and he brings you water and food pills after to make up for it, and you think you’ll put Kakashi-san in the 'like’ category, too, even if he does force you to eat regular food every other mission as if by his sheer bull-headedness he can tame your monstrous body into something more human.
–-
Sometimes you see Danzo-sama above ground, by the Sandaime Hokage’s side. You bow respectfully to him every time, even as he turns his nose up at you. A part of you misses him, you realize now, like a part of you misses Orochimaru-sama. They were predictable masters, masters you knew how to please and how to disappoint.
The Sandaime Hokage is different. At once warmer, for his voice is warm and his body language is warm, but colder, for he never reaches out to touch you and he never teaches you jutsu. Most especially, he never ever asks to see your Mokuton. In fact, the Sandaime Hokage actively avoids looking at you entirely when you must perform it in his presence.
You are, you come to realize, an aberration to him.
You are his wayward student Orochimaru-sama’s creation, and his wayward friend Danzo-sama’s pet, and the corroded clone of his beloved Shodaime-sama, and there is not enough of you – Jia or Kinoe or Tenzo or Cat – to ever overshadow that for him. It is, you think, frustrating, and painful, because you very desperately want to please him, but this is a mission you cannot succeed at, that you are doomed to fail from the start.
You focus on pleasing your immediate superior, Hatake Kakashi-san, instead.
–-
Kakashi-san meditates before his dead a lot. He prays to metal monoliths that symbolize his dead for hours and hours and hours.
You imitate him in that, too, but you don’t have graves to meditate to. Instead, you close your eyes and pray to yourself, for you carry your dead inside you. Your mokuton emerges then, in differing shapes, contorting around you and beyond you. You study shrines on missions and you imitate them, little miniature ones that you can pray to. It becomes your favourite hobby: observing shrines and replicating them as you pray. Soon you’re capable of replicating houses, and castles, and even more complicated architecture. It’s a productive meditation.
Another quirk Kakashi-san has is that he is, despite all appearances to the contrary, extremely orderly. He in particular likes to be clean. He cleans his hands often and frequently, especially at home. You are reminded of Orochimaru-sama’s laboratory, and Yi-san, and how she used to clean her hands a lot, too.
You take to cleaning your fingernails and scrubbing your body, sterilizing yourself as best you can. You strive to purge your body of all filth, though your jutsu often makes it difficult for it is inherently dirty, sprung from your body like a tumor or from the ground like rising rot. That’s all right, you think to yourself. Kakashi-san’s lightning jutsu makes it difficult, too, and he manages.
–-
Slowly, you learn to be more human.