Fulfilment
The first thing Orochimaru sees when he’s finally freed from his imprisonment is Kabuto frozen in place, the tragic and horrifying remnants of what was once his most trusted and devoted subordinate.
Well, trusted might be pushing it, Kabuto was never as trustworthy as Kimimaro for example, who was dedicated to his master like no one else, but Kabuto is still the one his mind has lingered back to the most over time.
If not for the exuberance of finally being free and no longer forced to play the role of immobilised prisoner, condemned to an existence of watching life pass by without the ability to partake in it, he would feel disheartened looking at what Kabuto has done to himself.
Kabuto always was such a lost being, arrogant to a fault and yet never truly knowing his own worth and purpose.
Admittedly those qualities were why Orochimaru pursued him back in the day when their paths first crossed, taking full advantage of his lack of belonging.
Kabuto was the constant vagrant in a world full of people ready to take benefit of a stray.
But looking at him now with his changed appearance and frozen features, it makes the whole thing seem achingly tragic, because despite having tried his very best to become a creation of his own making, all Kabuto has achieved is to turn himself into an overblown replica of someone else’s ambition.
It’s almost like looking at bad mimic of himself, the purple clan marks around the eyes and the pale skin, the golden slits in his gaze, and yet Orochimaru notes with a sense of displeasure that they are nothing more than distortions of his own features.
Everything that makes himself unique is either missing or exaggerated, and he guesses that Kabuto is fully aware of this even if he has tried to outdo his old master very ardently.
Naturally he was never bound to fully succeed in creating a true self in this manner, because this was never his dreams and ambitions, he just stole them to give himself a purpose.
Admittedly Kabuto has done an impressive job, he must have gone through a lot to become what he is now, even surpassing Orochimaru’s own capacity.
He might have strange, scaly skin where Orchimaru’s skin is smooth and unblemished, and he has horns on his forehead as well as a serpent’s tail emphasising his transformation into a creature that lacks any allure, merely designed to look intimidating. His hair has also refused to turn black and abundant like his former master’s, remaining the same ashen colour and as nondescript as it always was, but his skills are without a doubt exceeding the talent Orochimaru once possessed.
But despite all that effort, here he is, frozen in place, trapped inside his own mind by Itachi’s Izanami.
There are no words suitable to express the dismay Orochimaru feels as he looks at Kabuto so he says nothing, simply takes back his own chakra by touching the immovable figure before he turns his back and leaves.
Later, as night has fallen and he lies by a fire under a sky scattered with stars and Sasuke nearby but with a distinct distance between them, as if accidentally touching each other would break the brittle peace that currently resides between them, he contemplates his past instead of his future, which is rare for him to do.
After being trapped in a seal for as long as he has been, he finds that circumstances have changed and that he no longer has the same ambitions he used to have.
Instead of thinking about all he wants to achieve, he spends the night thinking about everything he once had.
His future is still ambiguous, he is still too weak to control his own destiny, even if he has every intention of regaining control of his own existence with time.
He has no problem with waiting, it’s was he has done most of his life, waited for the next stage of a never-ending experiment that would grant him eternal life and all the knowledge he has craved.
And in the meantime, while waiting for the future, he experienced a lot.
He remembers the white snakeskin he found near his dead parents’ grave when he was a child and how Hiruzen took him under his wing that day, wedging himself inside the small child’s heart before it had the chance to seal itself shut, thereby preventing him from becoming another lonely orphan without purpose, the way Kabuto did.
He can recall how deeply his sensei cared for him, how he taught him everything he knew, took his time to answer all his questions and held him in higher regard than he did his two other students.
Jiraya and Tsunade were more than just promising talents but he was the greatest prodigy of their era, the shining star Hiruzen was the most proud of.
That initial affection eventually turned into love of a different kind, very unsuitable for a sensei to feel for a student, especially one of such a young age, but Hiruzen was beguiled and Orochimaru remembers how he himself basked in that attention, enjoying the feeling of being that very special one Hiruzen Sarotobi favoured above anyone else, even his wife and his children.
But then the initial interest fizzled on Orochimaru’s part just as Danzo came in as a new exciting option, and he moved between them for a little while, making the most of his seductive skills until he no longer felt the need to play with any of them anymore, having gained what he wanted and desired to move on.
While his dalliance with Hiruzen and Danzo was taking place, and for some time afterwards, he also had Jiraya at his beck and call.
He can still remember that coarse white hair tangled with his own black tresses in the morning, both lying naked and spent in bed, the sound of Jiraiya’s snoring in his ear as the sun slowly rose outside the window, alerting them to the beginning of another day of being in each other’s company.
Despite never prone to feeling sentimental, Orochimaru can still sense a softness spreading inside of him at the memory.
They were both so very young and naïve back then, truly believing that they would always be together.
He looks up at the stars above him and wonders if Jiraiya has found some peace now.
While he lived, Jiraiya was the perpetually restless soul, the one who kept on travelling because he never found the right place or the right person to settle down with.
Orochimaru wonders if their fallout was the cause for that or if Jiraiya would have ended up the same anyway, but the question is ultimately pointless as the man is no longer alive to offer any answers and their relationship would never have survived his own ambitions anyway.
Plenty are those who came into his life that have since passed on to death after having served their purpose.
Sasori and Rasa flash by, both temporary pleasures he enjoyed, motivation forged with passing lust, easily discarded when they had fulfilled their roles to his gratification.
Kimimaro could maybe fall into the same category but Orochimaru feels reluctant to put him in that same box of castoffs, because he was prepared to make so much more of that young man.
He really wanted him to become this perfect coveted vessel he craved and when that dream died, he actually grieved the loss for more than a fleeting second.
At least until the next exciting specimen came along.
As the darkness of the night around him settles and the flames from the fire can no longer provide sufficient warmth, he turns his head to look at Sasuke who is curled up with his back against a rock, obviously not asleep because he would never drop his guard so easily, not even when Orochimaru is as weak as he currently is.
Their eyes meet above the flames and he can sense a mix of conflicting emotions pass by in Sasuke’s black gaze.
There is a shadow of longing there, some surviving remnant of the feelings he once had for his former nemesis turned master turned enemy and now surprising companion as the world has a way of twisting fate in unexpected shapes and turns.
The old yearning is blatant, however reluctantly felt, and then of course there is also the anger and the hurt that provided the actual foundation for Orochimaru’s downfall.
It all seems such a long time ago now but simultaneously he can still vividly recall the kiss Sasuke pressed to his lips in the kitchen of his old hideout, a testament of youthful infatuation that Orochimaru never had any interest in and didn’t know how to handle.
He isn’t sure if the outcome would have turned out differently if he had acted with more caution around the volatile teen, and it hardly matters anyway, those days are behind them.
Even if Sasuke still harbours traces of those old feelings inside his heart, the moment to act on them is long gone and spent.
It is reminiscent of the opportunity to change circumstances for Kabuto that also slipped through his fingers as Orochmaru never paid him enough attention when he needed it in the past.
This realisation actually stings a little bit, even if he knows that his former underling did what he did because he saw no other path to take after his guiding light had been snuffed out.
It’s not only Orochimaru’s lack of love for him that turned him into what he currently is, that is just a small detail in a larger, more complex picture, among so many other reasons for Kabuto making the decisions he has made.
And yet Orochimaru can’t help but wonder if it could have turned out differently if he had given Kabuto what he so desperately wanted back then.
The least he could have done was to treat him the same way he treated his other subordinates, but simply because he knew how much Kabuto desired him, it was the last thing he wanted to give, holding back on every little sign of intimacy, just because he could.
It is bound to have made some impact on a person with such a lack of purpose as Kabuto suffered from. His entire world was made up of his master and his ambitions, and when that was taken from him, there was nothing but emptiness left.
No wonder things went haywire after that.
Orochimaru turns his gaze away from Sasuke’s dark eyes, staring up at the sky instead, suddenly reluctant to look back on his past anymore.
All those people, all those feelings and memories, ambitions and dreams, they are nothing but figments of recollection now.
Why did he waste so much time chasing something that remains as unreachable as ever, more than half a century later?
More than anything, he just feels lonely now and the thought of living forever but alone seem abhorrent to him.
Maybe he should have fathered some children, made sure that his legacy was kept alive through his offspring instead of shouldering the whole burden on his own.
He is the only child of parents who died when he was very young, so being alone is what he knows and it has never bothered him before, being the sole survivor of a clan that will end with him.
But just because it is familiar for him to be on his own and tend to himself, it doesn’t mean that it has to be that way forever.
He looks at the distant sparkle of the stars and feels the enormity of the universe envelop him, all that unknown which exists around him, the knowledge he always wanted to grasp but feared he would never have the time to learn as the life of a human is so pathetically short in comparison to the time required to embrace every mystery out there.
He still wants that, the thirst for knowledge will never diminish, it is a part of his personality that will always prevail.
But he no longer wants to do it alone.
The thought of a child, someone to share his knowledge with, the way he sometimes did with some of his subordinates but never so fully that he allowed any of them to actually partake in his experience completely, settles inside his mind.
It is just a small kernel of an idea, maybe he will never allow it to grow any further than this, because the timing is certainly not the best and would he even have it in him to care for anyone but himself?
But as he closes his eyes, catching the parade of past lovers as they glimmer by inside his head, he realises that what he misses most about them is the company they gave him, the time spent with someone other than himself, however fleetingly.
All those memories they provided him with to remember them by.
He might not have valued it back then but there is still time to make different choices and he mustn’t remain alone simply because it was what he thought he wanted in the past.
Many of those people are gone now and he can’t turn back the time, but everything doesn’t need to be lost, a few of them are still around after all.
He turns his back on Sasuke, because that chapter is closed and he will probably never feel the desire to open it up again, even after having regained his strength and power once more.
If anything, Sasuke Uchiha is probably more self-absorbed than he is and not what Orochimaru wants to see when searching his reflection in someone else’s eyes.
There is still Kabuto though, if he one day manages to break the spell of entrapment he is currently lost inside.
And then there’s the thought of a child of course.
Curling in on himself to stave off the cold, with the trace of a smile on his lips and the beginning of an idea in his head, Orochimaru allows himself to fall off the edge into oblivious sleep, deciding that plans and dreams is a very good beginning but that he is no longer in a hurry to fulfil them.