Orochimaru's probable [not] child (Naruto)
I'm so bored.
I admit it - my first life? It wasn't the best for sure, but I never realized how spoiled I was when it came to entertainment choices until I was taken from it.
I suppose I should give some background.
It hurts
it hurts
it hurts
it hurts
it hurts
it hurts
it hurts.
ithurtsithurtsithurstithurtstithurts
Stopitstopitstopitstopitstopitstopitstopitstopit
makeitgoaway
"mom please-"
make it go away I don't like it it hurtshurtshurtshurtshurts
stopstopstopstopstopstopstopstopstopstopstopstopstopstop
painpainpainpainpainpainpainpain
makeitgoawaypleasepleasepleasemakeitgoaway
Death is a process I found peaceful.
Birth not so much.
It was very disorientating - many refer to their parents as 'giants' at first.
I did not get such an honor - seeing as I was extremely blind. Newborns simply are not meant to see the world the moment they are born - who knew?
I don't really know much about the ones who were responsible in my explicit creation, seeing as by the time I started seeing shapes and colours somewhat clearly my mother had sold(?) me to the resident mad scientist.
Unfortunately.
I'm also equally as sure she died literally the moment she left the lab - as I felt her energy disappear. Not abruptly - but like a quick fading sensation, akin to a small fire that ran out of fuel.
Of course this wasn't what was going through my mind at the time - it was actually more along the lines of ;
"Holy shit, am I like the grim reaper or something? Can I feel people's lifeforce? Do I know the exact date of when they'll die? Is this the start of my protagonist's journey that ends with woman and fame?? Oh my god I reincarnated as a shounen protagonist, this is going to be so cool."
It was not so cool.
I'm sure you can guess what I thought to be my mother's 'energy' actually was ; context and whatnot. Sadly - I am not even a sensor. Apparently babies become most used to their mother's signature after extreme and continued contact with her chakra coils for nine months - so much so, for the first few months of their lives they will be able to pick out their mother in a crowd with relative ease. With age the conscious awareness of this sensation fades after becoming more aware of literally every other sensation in the world.
Which also meant that, specifically if your mother dies, say around three meters away from you outside of the room you are in - you probably will notice ; assuming that as a baby, you are conscious enough to care.
I unfortunately, while theoretically conscious enough to care ; in actuality was pretty delusional, and busy thinking about my apparent new life as a shinigami.
The crazy scientist I was probably sold to did not waste time entertaining the delusions of babies, and went straight to experimentation. Like literally right away - genuinely the same fucking hour.
Hurray for that I suppose. Being cut open? Real eye opener to the whole "this is the real world, you can't treat it like it's not." - even if I was still under the mistaken impression I was slated up to be a reaper, the point still drove home ; funny thing, that.
Anyhow it's been three years since then, and I've since then gained my wits about me - and decided that I really miss when I thought I was destined to be a harbinger and or omen of death.
Because that mad scientist?
Orochimaru. The snake guy.
My eye-sight clearing was pretty wild.
You know, at first I didn't actually recognize him. Cartoon to real life conversion admittedly makes it hard to understand what's happening - I just thought he was a rouge shinigami who stole promising children and experimented on them. Honestly, in my defense, he does look creepy enough to be a crazy grim reaper.
No doubt my fellow experiments would agree with the comparison, at the very least.
Oh yeah, fellow experiments. I'm not the only one who gets the dubious honour of being cut open over and over again for no real reason at random.
I got the squad - which I mostly am not allowed to talk to ; but still.
"Experiments are not encouraged to intermingle outside of social experimentation, and may be separated by force if they continue interacting for too long." I think this is to discourage escape attempts - which is fucking dumb; I was a baby - what was I going to do? Crawl away?
It wasn't all that bad for me though - children are not made to be raised in labs ; mostly because they're high-maintenance, and can die quite quickly when you aren't paying attention. To counter this, I was watched over by ROOT guards that had been experimented on by Orochimaru. I was the only one to get babysitters, mostly because I was the only baby Orochimaru ever got his hands on that he didn't personally overview.
They were actually what told me where I was, actually.
Of course, of course I spend most of my time near one of the most infamous missing-nin of my generation, and the thing that makes me figure out I'm in the narutoverse is instead accidentally grabbing the tongue of one of my socially incompetent babysitters.
Go figure.
But yeah, now I'm three ; and life is boring.
Yeah, can you imagine that? You'd think being actively experimented on in an underground lab by a mad scientist would be much more eventful than this. Of course, an actual child raised in a lab would have no reason to think their free time can be spent doing anything other the sleeping ; but as is the curse of reincarnation, you get to have context on how shitty your life is.
So I did something dumb. Reckless. Suicidal, even.
As Orochimaru was in the middle of cutting me open for maybe the tenth time this week, I looked him in the eyes and rasped out a word.
"bored."
It was clumsy - and quiet. My vocal cords were not used to speaking - it actually was assumed I had a psychological issue that prevented me from talking, but Orochimaru was too busy to look into that - so I was mostly left alone to my devices.
He was so shocked he almost dropped the scalpel into my stomach - but then he just looked excited.
And wow, did I regret talking.
Orochimaru was originally labeled as 'mad scientist' in my mind for - well mostly because of his illegal experimentation, but also because of his strange thought process. He picked up main experiments at will. There was no real way to understand the purpose of any experiment posed, and he was extremely unorganized in the way geniuses tended to be.
One minute he was cutting open your stomach to look at your organs again for literally no reason and the next you're his pet-project of the month for speaking during said dissection.
I'm sure somewhere in his head, everything he says makes perfect sense. Every move is calculated - whatever.
That really does not explain his sudden and acute obsession with playing house.
He was absolutely delighted when I started speaking, and so he took it upon himself to teach me what words to use and how to spell certain things. He even got me some kids books from konoha for me to read in my spare time.
This escalated quickly.
"what's..'otou' ?"
Orochimaru again, almost drops his scalpel in shock. Yeah, him teaching me to read does not stop the dissections unfortunately - that aside I seem to have that effect on him a lot.
"Clarify."
"book said everyone has an otou n kaa."
I can see Orochimaru's brain processing my...specific vocabulary to try and get my actual meaning out in real time. Frankly, it's fascinating to me.
My grasp on the language is - not bad. I just prefer talking as little as I can in general, which leads to me simplifying my sentences a lot. To most people the question "what's otou" would mean exactly that ; "what is the word otou?" - when I say "what's otou" I mean "what does otou refer to, why do I have one, do I not have one, should I have one, and why hasn't it been brought up before if it's as common as I've been lead to believe?"
Of course, this tends to get confusing fast because again, you really cannot expect someone to get all of that from two single words. Orochimaru ignores this, and somehow does anyway. In fact, I'd say it's because we speak the exact same way.
If my "what's otou" is "what does otou refer to, why do I have one, do I not have one, should I have one, and why has it not been mentioned before?" - Orochimaru's "clarify" is "why do you want to know, where have you heard it, and why did you take an interest in it."
Of course, while having a sort of hidden language is fun ; it also makes me worry someone who understands my exact meaning in every word so clearly without making me specify may make me build a bad habit of not properly explaining anything I say and lead to misunderstandings.
Then I short-circuit when Orochimaru looks me dead in the face and says with the utmost sincerity I've ever heard of him, to the point I automatically assume it to be fake -
"I suppose I'd be otou, in this context."
He has forcibly adopted me.
How do I respond to this.
The crazy scientist that dissects me on Tuesdays and Thursdays had decided that he wants to try his hand at parenting, and has started trial running parenthood as a whole using me as a stand-in for a child.
Well I am a child, but that's besides the point.
He's been weirdly parental since that conversation. Like I flipped a fucking switch in that mess he calls his brain. He buys me stuffed animals, and dresses, and teaches me more actively, and praises me, and I am so fucking confused because Orochimaru is not my dad.
Yeah, my dad? I know who he is. I met the guy, briefly. He died a little bit after, I know that because my mother was sad for days after that ; but he sure as hell wasn't Orochimaru.
So I do not understand where he's gotten the idea he is my father.
My 'room' - read: cell - has been redecorated into something resembling an actual room for a child. Pink wallpaper and mirrors and dressers and everything.
The weirdest thing?
Definitely has to be the new surgeries.
Yeah, dissection? I'm officially done with that. I go to into the surgery room - which I have lovingly dubbed the dissection chamber - and he gives me something and then suddenly I wake up in my room and I look different.
I used to have short ghastly blonde hair, somewhat unnerving blue eyes, a bit of a chubby face, freckles, tanned skin - close enough to my last life's dark blonde hair, grey eyes, and olive skin to not give me vertigo.
This has changed.
My hair was the first - it got longer. Normal, longer hair is fun ; I liked it.
Then it got darker - dark brown is fine. Dark brown hair isn't the end of the world.
Then it kept going, until my hair was black. Down to the very root of my hair - all black. Everything from my eyelashes to barely-grown arm hairs. Black.
Unsettling - but manageable.
Then my skin started shifting colour. It wasn't very noticeable at first ; I got paler and paler until suddenly I was the same paper colour as Orochimaru himself is.
Then, one day I walked into the dissection chamber and woke up in my room again with purple markings around my eyes. No matter how much I scrubbed them they did not go away.
Of course - before then I realized I started looking a lot like Orochimaru ; but I assumed it was a by-product of whatever Orochimaru had been actually doing. There's no real way to understand his head, after all.
I realized that - no, I was incorrect. It was not that my new look was a by-product of the desired result, but was the desired result.
Somehow, I still felt shocked when by the time I was six the only thing really left of my mother was my bone structure, sex, and eyes. Nothing else. I looked like a mini Orochimaru, down to the very fucking manner of walking even.
Once again, I short-circuited when Orochimaru brought me out of the lab.
Apparently, his teammates did not believe he could procreate when he told them about me in passing three years ago ; and he desired to prove them wrong.
So he edited my genetic code to spite his genin teammates ; as I don't really look enough like him to pass as his daughter to other people.
He quickly reassures me after the fact that I have his personality and I'm just like him when he was my age and the appearances were really just meant to make sure people didn't accuse him of stealing children - as unfortunately, he had been accused of such before without carting around a kid that looked nothing like him.
As he goes on to talk about how really he can't believe how unobservant the general population is for a shinobi village all I can think of is -
My life is a literal nightmare.
Omakes !!!!!
| Omake ; Google history
google history : what do you do when the local mad scientist seems to be under the mistaken impression he is your father
what to do when you wake up with darker hair and lighter skin after going into your self-proclaimed father's dissection lab
what to do when your forcibly self-appointed father gaslights himself into thinking you're his daughter because his teammates made a one-off comment about him probably never being able to reproduce and he took it personally
| Omake ; Parenting advice
Orochimaru :: "bonding is a good basis for a parental relationship, easy ways to bond are to find things you have in common with your child and talk with them about it."
Orochimaru :: huh, well if the book says so. I guess I can find something we have in common.
*experiments on his child and permanently changes her genes so she looks more like him*
Orochimaru :: did I do it right?
Meanwhile, said child :: this house is a fucking NIGHTMARE GET ME OUT OF HERE !!!
| Omake ; Names
"I do not know."
Sasori blinks.
She tugs on Orochimaru's sleeve.
"Hm? Oh, Isami."
"I see, thank you Otou."
Isami makes a 'well there you go' gesture.
Sasori - to his credit, accepts this gracefully. "I see, Isami-kun then."
"No."
Sasori blinks. "No?"
"Isami, not Isami-kun."
"..I see, Isami then."