This is an AU in which Orochimaru never left Konoha. He's still not a very nice guy.

WARNINGS: human/animal experiments (including on children), nonconsensual surgery and medical horror, child soldiers, body horror, emotional manipulation (again, including of children), and Sakura being a child and not necessarily realizing what's happening around her isn't right.

Cross-posted from ao3.

xenograph

Orochimaru-sama comes to the Academy and asks for the student with the best calligraphy.

"Only the girls learn it," Iruka-sensei says, and Orochimaru-sama clicks his tongue like he disapproves. "But we have several capable young kunoichi."

Sakura has the highest marks in calligraphy, higher even than Ino-chan. She has good marks in their painting class, too, and any class that involves holding a pencil. She tells Orochimaru-sama this proudly.

"How wonderful," he says, and she's giddy with praise from the legendary war hero.

He wants to see her write, so she does. They go to Iruka-sensei's desk and both her teacher and Orochimaru-sama watch her. Orochimaru-sama asks her to write smaller and smaller. She does. He praises her.

"Yes," he says, "I think you'll do."

After school and on the weekends, Sakura starts going to Orochimaru-sama's research facility. It's big but there's not a lot of people who work there.

"They annoyed me," Orochimaru-sama says when she asks. "So I got rid of them."

That makes sense. If Sakura could get rid of annoying Kiba and loud Naruto, she would. She'd kick them right out of class.

Orochimaru-sama sets her to work pulling out fish eyes. She thinks it's gross at first. They're smelly, and she doesn't like the way they wriggle desperately when she drops them in the chemical that anesthetizes them.

Sometimes after they die, they still twitch.

Taking the eye out isn't so bad. First she pulls off the cornea, which comes off like a gooey film off cooling soup. Then she has to very carefully wedge her tweezers under the eye, lift it up, and snip the white optic nerve.

There's some other goop in there that tries to hold the eye in. It's clear, or sometimes pink if the fish starts bleeding.

"The nerve is the only real obstacle," Orochimaru-sama tells her.

It's true. Once the nerve is cut, the eye comes right out. The back of the socket is white, which surprises her. She thought it would be something horrible. It's actually very boring.

Sometimes the socket fills with blood. It's not supposed to, though. The blood is messy and makes it harder to find the nerve and make a clean cut.

Sometimes she punctures the eye by accident. The vitreous leaks out then, the same in appearance as the clear goop that what holds the eye in, but it sparkles when the light hits it. Sakura thinks it's beautiful.

She gives the eyes to Orochimaru-sama and he tries to put them in different fish. He has to use chakra to connect the optic nerve, which is why Sakura can't do it herself yet.

Usually the fish dies. Rejection or infection or unknown reasons that make Orochimaru-sama frustrated.

He gets quiet when he's frustrated. He gets frustrated when he doesn't know why things are happening.

Eventually more fish live than die, though, and he starts her on other animals. Frogs, salamanders, mice and rats. It's all the same: pull up the eye, snip the nerve.

He brings in piglets one day. She doesn't want to hurt them.

"You eat pork, don't you?" he says, and Sakura pouts. She doesn't like being made fun of.

She does it, though. Only three of the piglets die, and only two of the living ones are obviously blind, and Orochimaru is very pleased. He tells Sakura she'll make a fine kunoichi, and she goes to class with her head held high.

Orochimaru-sama gives good advice when he isn't frustrated. When he is frustrated, he still gives advice, but it's usually a little bit scary, like that she should poison Ami and Ami would stop bullying her.

"I don't see why I even have to go to stupid kunoichi class anyway," Sakura complains. She's snipping the eyes out of foxes today. They're cute. When they're anesthetized and laid across the table, it's like they're napping.

"The kunoichi curriculum teaches useful skills your male classmates will miss," Orochimaru-sama tells her.

"Ninja don't need to know how to write prettily and sew," Sakura mutters.

"Hmm," Orochimaru-sama says. "Doesn't writing and sewing help you hold your tools?"

Sakura looks down at her hemostat, covered in eye goo and blood. She wipes the tips off on a paper towel.

"I guess," she says. "But the boys get extra practice!"

And Sakura needs extra practice, especially in taijutsu.

"It's true dividing the class by gender causes discrepancies in abilities," Orochimaru-sama agrees.

Sakura likes that about him. He's the only adult that ever agrees with her. Iruka-sensei and her parents compliment her when she can remember answers from books, but they rarely tell her her independent ideas are good.

Orochimaru-sama brings in monkeys, and she nearly cries.

They look human. They look intelligent. They fight the anesthetic the way people do. She doesn't like it.

"Don't you want to know what the boys do during their extra practice?" Orochimaru-sama asks. "They practice hurting each other."

He gives her a kunai. A real kunai, not like the dull ones they give them in the academy. She takes deep breaths, making herself calm down. They give them lots of calming exercises in the Academy.

"Be extra careful not to puncture anything," Orochimaru-sama tells her. "It's sharp."

It's summer when Orochimaru-sama wakes her up late at night. The moon is full.

"Hurry," he hisses. "Something's happened."

She wants to go back to bed, but she knows from kunoichi manuals that ninja have to wake up at weird hours all the time. So she follows Orochimaru-sama out the window in her pajamas.

He must really be in a rush, because he picks her up and runs. It only takes a few minutes to get to his laboratory on the other side of the village. As they approach, Sakura can see masked ninja moving in and out of the building.

They're all carrying bodies.

The ninja are like ants, really. They come one at a time, an efficient line, and drop their charge in the lab.

Anko, one of the two other workers in the lab, is there. Sakura thinks she's maybe supposed to be in charge of organizing the bodies, but the usually fierce girl is watching in confused horror as the pile of human bodies grows and grows.

All the bodies have dark hair. They mostly wear traditional clothing. Their ages vary from young children to the elderly.

"What are you doing?" Orochimaru-sama snaps at Anko. Sakura has never heard him raise his voice before. "Help Sakura."

Cold trickles down Sakura's spine as she realizes what she's meant to do. Anko's eyes are still wide but she doesn't hesitate to start heaving bodies onto their work benches.

Sakura gathers her tools in a daze. It won't be difficult, she thinks. Pull back the eyelid. Expose the optic nerve. Snip. Cut away excess tissue.

She's done it hundreds of times.

Eyes aren't really all that different, after all.

Snip, snip. Snip, snip.

Anko hurries around her, gathering the eyes to preserve them, hoisting bodies onto tables and dragging the ones with empty sockets off. Orochimaru-sama is also cutting out the eyes, a task Sakura hasn't seen him perform since she got good at it.

It only takes a few minutes to pull out an eye. Even still, they're still going when the sun starts to rise and a strange old man comes in to talk to Orochimaru-sama.

"Idiot," Orochimaru-sama chastises him. "You shouldn't have killed all of them. What if we need more?"

"They were a danger to the village," the man says, and Orochimaru-sama makes a derisive sound like he doesn't care. The man's one eye surveys the hundreds of eyes floating in jars, and then in beakers when they ran out. "Is this not enough?"

The old man sounds dubious. Sakura thinks he doesn't understand the process very well.

"Certainly it would be enough," Orochimaru-sama practically sneers, except he never does anything so undignified as to sneer. "If they were in living bodies."

They can only keep the eyes alive for so long outside a body. They need to be transplanted into a living being.

The old man is quiet for a while. Sakura goes through two more bodies. Snip, snip. Snip, snip. There's finally only a handful left.

"We have Root," the old man finally says.

Sakura has to stay for the rest of the day and into the night. She misses school.

The old man brings in children. Some of them are teenagers and some of them are as young as Sakura. They queue silently.

They form an assembly line. Anko anesthetizes the children. Sakura carefully removes their eyes. Orochimaru-sama implants the eyes from he dead bodies. Their medic Kabuto has been summoned to monitor them post-operation.

They don't have time to preserve the eyes from the children. Sakura throws them in the trash as she takes them out. It starts to smell awful, but not as awful as the dead bodies.

The old man watches them, pacing behind them. It makes Sakura feel like she really is a factory worker, and the old man is her foreman. She doesn't like it. Orochimaru-sama doesn't like it either and snaps at him to leave.

When they finish, some of the children are waking up and the masked ninja are back to escort them away. Orochimaru-sama is very frustrated and Sakura is very, very tired.

She doesn't go to school the next day, instead lazing around in bed and sleeping. She goes the day after, though, and the gossip at school is so wild no one even noticed she'd been gone for two days.

Uchiha Sasuke's entire family is dead, and he had a big family.

Now Sakura knows who the bodies were.

She's happy Sasuke-kun is still alive. She likes him. He's not mean to her and he's not obnoxious like the other boys.

She goes to Orochimaru-sama like she always does after school and gives him the good news. Orochimaru-sama isn't frustrated anymore, and he agrees with Sakura that it's great news indeed.

"Danzo isn't a complete moron, then," Orochimaru-sama muses. Then he offers to teach Sakura jutsu.

She's excited. They've only just started on chakra control in class, but Ino-chan and some of the others from ninja clans are already practicing their family jutsu. She's very behind.

In class, they practice chakra by meditating and sticking pieces of paper to themselves. Sakura can stick her paper anywhere she wants on her body, even through her clothes. She demonstrates this to Orochimaru-sama by sticking a cleaning wipe to her elbow, her face, and to the back of her calf.

"Even Ino-chan can't stick things to her leg," Sakura boasts.

"Hmm," Orochimaru-sama says. He's smiling, which means he's in a good mood. "Have you tried anything besides paper?"

He has her stick all sorts of objects to herself. Pens, a notebook, a tube rack, ten pasteur pipettes. He has her stick a round-bottom flask to the top of her head and do a cartwheel. It seems to amuse him.

A few things slip, but Sakura doesn't drop anything. She enjoys showing off.

Then Orochimaru-sama fetches one of the mice that survived the eye transplants and she flinches away.

"Come now," he says, still smiling. "You didn't mind touching it before."

Sakura hesitantly reaches for the mouse. She concentrates her chakra to the back of her arm, just like Iruka-sensei said, and gingerly places the struggling mouse on it.

The mouse's skin sticks to her. The rest of the mouse doesn't. It falls to the ground, screaming and bloody. Part of its back remains stuck to Sakura's arm, a sticky, wet patch matted with soft brown fur.

Sakura screams herself and slaps the mouse bits off her arm. Blood gets all over her fingers. The mouse bleeds out on the floor.

Orochimaru-sama laughs.

Sakura practices when she's not in school or the lab. Live animals are hard to make stick; she thinks maybe it's because of their own chakra. Their bodies repel hers.

It's easy to get one layer of foreign flesh to stick, but she needs to feel out the whole body or else the animal just slips away, leaving its epidermis behind.

Bugs are the easiest and most abundant animal to catch, but she doesn't like the idea of sticking them to herself. Frogs and newts are easy to get at the pond near her house. She doesn't like them either, but at least they only have four legs.

When she finally shows Orochimaru-sama she can stick whole animals to herself now, he doesn't seem impressed like she wants.

"See if you can move it around you," he says, dismissive. She pouts for days, but she practices shifting the mouse down her arm, little by little.

Sasuke-kun finally comes back to class. He's very quiet.

"Understandable," Orochimaru-sama says when she tells him. "He must be very lonely. Maybe you should make friends."

Making friends is hard for Sakura, and Sasuke-kun's empty eyes and brooding face don't make it easier. She thinks Ino-chan would be better at this, but she doesn't ask for help because this is something Orochimaru-sama asked her to do.

Their winter break comes, and Sakura spends most of her time playing with Ino-chan. She goes in to help Orochimaru-sama in the mornings, but he just has her help Anko take care of the animals and lets her leave after a few hours if she promises to do the chakra exercises he gives her.

Sakura doesn't like taking care of the animals. Some of them are cute– they have the foxes with their transplanted eyes, and some rabbits, and something from down south called a flying squirrel. But Anko usually just puts her in charge of the fish.

Every morning Sakura has to pick dead fish out of the tanks. They cannibalize their dead, and the dead fish come out with their eyes and pieces of their fins missing.

Afterwards, though, she can play with Ino-chan and Ino-chan's friends– and they're Ino-chan's friends, not Sakura's, because Sakura is too shy and needy and awkward to make friends by herself. The only people who seem to like her besides family are Ino-chan and Orochimaru-sama.

Sometimes boys from their class show up too. They chase away Naruto, and sometimes Kiba unless his sister comes with her dogs, but Ino-chan's parents don't let her get rid of Shikamaru or Choji.

Sasuke-kun never shows up, except on the very last day of break.

They've moved out of the park and down to a creek nearby. In the summer it's popular for children to swim here, but in winter it's abandoned except for the four girls. Sakura is starting to get bored of their game when Sasuke-kun appears out of the treeline on the other side of the creek.

He looks worried. He asks them if they know if any adults are near.

Ino-chan tells him no, there's not, and asks what's wrong.

Sasuke-kun hesitates. He looks afraid. Whatever it is, it must be really bad.

Ino-chan makes him show them. They cross the creek, and Sasuke-kun leads them past charred pieces of trees.

"Is this the bad thing?" one of the girls asks.

"No," Sasuke-kun says, "I was practicing."

He takes them to a body, collapsed on the forest floor. It's a boy who can't be much older than them. One of his legs is jutting out at a weird angle, and Sakura thinks he must have fallen from the tree.

"He's not breathing," Sasuke-kun says. His voice is steady but higher than normal.

None of the girls want to go close. Even Ino-chan looks disturbed. But Sakura has seen dead bodies before, so she cautiously approaches the boy and rolls him over.

His face is very pale. His smooth black hair is plastered to his face with sweat, and the skin around his eyes is red and puffy. Yellow-green goo leaks from his tear ducts. One of the girls starts crying.

Sakura takes off her gloves and puts on hand on the boy's chest, and uses the other hand to check his pulse the way Kabuto showed her. The boy's skin is unnaturally hot.

"He's alive," Sakura concludes, "just not breathing very well. He has a fever."

An infection, she thinks. She thinks she recognizes the face.

"I know who to get for help," she says. "But someone has to watch him."

Ino-chan stays. She knows first-aid from her parents, but she looks very nervous at the idea of having to use it on the boy. Sasuke-kun also stays, but the other two girls leave immediately.

When she tells him, Orochimaru-sama only takes a few minutes to pass the experimental surgery he's working on to Kabuto before telling her to lead the way.

She hurries through the village back to the stretch of forest behind the park. Orochimaru-sama stays on her heels, and she simultaneously feels ashamed she can't move faster and proud to have his full attention.

Sakura wishes the two girls had stayed. She knows Orochimaru-sama is an amazing man, a war hero and one of the Sannin. Everyone knows his name, and she's very proud to have such an important person as her mentor. She wants to make them jealous.

At the same time, the idea of Orochimaru-sama meeting Ino-chan terrifies her and doesn't know why.

"Ah," Orochimaru-sama says, kneeling over the boy. "You were right to come to me. Very good, Sakura."

Sakura beams. She glances over to Ino-chan and Sasuke-kun to see if they noticed Orochimaru-sama praising her. They're both watching Orochimaru-sama poke and prod at the body with sickened looks.

"He's very sick," Orochimaru-sama concludes, and lifts the boy as he stands. He glances at Ino-chan. "Yamanaka Ino, is it?" he says. "I want you to go find Shimura Danzo from the council and tell him what happened. Tell anyone who tries to stop you that I sent you."

"I'll go too," Sasuke-kun volunteers.

"No, I think you'd better not," Orochimaru-sama says, tilting his head so his silky hair falls over his shoulder. He examines Sasuke-kun the way Sakura has seen him examine the inside of animal's heads. "Go home and rest, Sasuke-kun."

Sasuke-kun looks angry, but Sakura doesn't have time to ponder why because Orochimaru-sama tells her to follow him.

They don't go to the hospital like she thought they would. Instead, they bring the boy back to the research facility.

"Kabuto's busy," Orochimaru-sama says, sounding vaguely annoyed. "You'll have to assist me instead."

Sakura's assistance is mostly just standing there quietly and handing Orochimaru-sama tools and materials as quickly as she can when he asks. He lectures her through the entire process, though, which she likes. She thinks Orochimaru-sama is a better teacher than any of the Academy instructors, because he explains everything he does so well.

Orochimaru-sama examines the boy the first, poking him with various instruments. He sets the broken leg, and the boy flinches violently. When Orochimaru-sama opens the boy's eyes, they are red. There's a strange black dot in the iris. Most of the eyes she'd pulled out that day had been red. Most of them only had one of the dots, but some of them had two or three.

Orochimaru-sama explains the boy has graft-versus-host disease. It's different from transplant rejection, he tells Sakura, because the borrowed eyes have rejected the boy, not the other way around.

He has her set up an IV drip of some type of drug while he goes and starts pulling things out of a freezer Sakura has never seen opened.

"The best thing for the boy," Orochimaru-sama says as the tubes thaw in his hands, "would be to remove the eyes. Unfortunately for him, those eyes are more important than he is."

Sakura doesn't know what that means, how eyes can me more important than a person, but she nods anyway.

"I haven't tested this yet," Orochimaru-sama goes on, holding up the tube, "but I have experimental evidence these cells will increase allograph compatibility without the use of immunosuppressants."

He sounds… excited, in a quiet way. Likes he's been wanting to do this for a while. Sakura has never heard Orochimaru-sama excited before. It makes her excited too.

She has to strap the boy down, because Orochimaru-sama runs electricity over his skin. It's supposed to make his body take up the foreign cells. They don't want the boy getting all twitchy from it.

Sakura remembers the mouse fall from her arm, its skin ripped from its back. It makes sense the cells need help.

When Kabuto comes back from his own surgery, he gets put in charge of watching the boy for an indefinite amount of time. He looks annoyed, but he doesn't say anything to Orochimaru-sama.

Later, when Ino-chan asks what happened, Sakura just says Orochimaru-sama helped the boy. She's not sure why she doesn't say more.

Orochimaru-sama decides she's ready to start doing transplants herself. Usually when he teaches things, he demonstrates one or two times, watches Sakura do it a couple times, then leaves her alone to practice. He's not mean about it, and he answers questions when she asks, but he also doesn't pay her very much attention.

This time is different. He hovers over her, fully focused on how she manipulates chakra down into the fish's eye. The first few eyes burst, vitreous leaking everywhere and the perfectly round lens exposed like a glass marble, but she gets the optic nerve ends to line up on the third one before it also explodes. Orochimaru-sama doesn't seem bothered.

She's never had his full attention this long. It makes her nervously happy. She's only seen him focus this much on his experiments before.

Her tenth try goes perfectly. Orochimaru-sama seems incredibly pleased.

"You've always been a quick study," he tells her.

He watches her do three more– two are mediocre, and one fails but doesn't burst– and then he tells her to practice until she can do it perfectly every time.

It takes hundreds of eyes. She spends days switching the right eyes of fish with their left eyes. Then she spends more days switching the eyes out between fish; that's harder, because animals don't like taking on foreign organs, and Orochimaru-sama comes back to watch her again for a few transplants.

The boy is still tied to the bed they put him on. He's recovering slowly, but Kabuto is now letting him go to the bathroom and feed himself.

The rejection reaction his body was going through goes away before Sakura perfects allographic transplants. The problem is the new cells Orochimaru-sama gave him are growing into facial tumors.

The man with one eye comes back to talk to Orochimaru-sama. Sakura has finally moved on to mouse eye transplants, and she's missing dinner with her parents to practice.

She wonders idly if the man's empty eye socket is white like the fish or red and bloody.

The man is angry with Orochimaru-sama, but it doesn't make sense why.

"Human hosts are not an easily replenishable resource," Orochimaru-sama tells him, sounding bored. "I had to save him to save the eyes."

"You mutilated him," the one-eyed man says.

It turns out lots of the children– who the man calls Root– are getting sick. Rejection from both the host and the graft. He wants Orochimaru-sama to fix it, but he doesn't understand enough about Orochimaru-sama's research to understand that's what Orochimaru-sama is doing. He keeps talking about someone named Hatake, who lives just fine with someone else's eye.

"We can move the eyes to new hosts if you bring them," Orochimaru-sama says, "and you can put your little soldiers on anti-rejection medication, like I recommended–"

"A Root soldier can't do its job while immunodeficient–"

"–which you should have considered before you murdered all the source hosts," Orochimaru-sama purs. "Hatake Kakashi has adapted to shinobi life on anti-rejection medicine. Your Root can too."

Sakura suddenly feels very cold. He means Sasuke-kun's family.

The man agrees to put the children on immunosuppressant medicine. He leaves seething.

The boy is dying again. Orochimaru-sama tsks and moves the eyes into another child from Root.

Sakura performs perfect eye transplants on pigs. They're actually easier than the fish, since the eyes are bigger. But they have fewer pigs and thousands of fish, so if she was going to waste specimens practicing, it had to be the fish.

Orochimaru-sama has set up a cell culture bench and incubator in another room, growing more and more of the cells he'd given to the boy. They're human cells, he tells her, from a man from a long time ago who healed very quickly.

He gives some to Sakura and tells her to try growing them on something else.

"Mice, perhaps," he says vaguely.

She tries it out. Since the donor and the recipient are different species, it will be even more difficult. A xenograph.

She transfers the cells to five mice and runs electricity over their skin, just like Orochimaru-sama showed her. She leaves them overnight, and when she comes back before school to check, they've all died. A thin semi-translucent film has grown over them, caccooning them and asphyxiating them.

She carefully cuts away pieces of the strange film. It has fused completely with the mice in some places.

She mounts her samples under a microscope and Orochimaru-sama peers down at them in interest.

"Skin cells," he says. "Fascinating."

The cells he gave her, he says, are pluripotent– meaning they can turn into lots of different types of cells. The ones she'd transferred to the mouse had differentiated into epidermal cells.

Sakura misses class, staying all day and into the night to help Orochimaru-sama fuse his special cells with different parts of the mice. She's helped him split them open before, but she still doesn't like it.

"You're getting used to it, though," Orochimaru-sama observes, and she supposes that's true.

Months pass, and more and more of the Root children come in dying. Danzo doesn't have enough spare children, so Orochimaru-sama stops transplanting the eyes that haven't turned red.

"We have no evidence the Sharingan can be activated by a non-Uchiha host," he tells Sakura. "We're lucky traumatic death means most of them had it activated when they passed."

Sakura nods along. She thinks it's a pity they don't have more time and resources to test the unactivated eyes, though. Maybe if they had better and more hosts that did what Orochimaru-sama says, they could get the Sharingan to activate.

She tells Orochimaru-sama as much, and he smiles at her. He agrees. He tells her she's very clever.

He passes the eyes he can't use on to her, telling her to do what she wants. She decides she should find a good way to save them, in case they do want to try and activate them later. She transplants them into pigs.

Most of the pigs reject the eyes. It's kind of gross.

"What a frightening chimera," Orochimaru-sama teases. The pigs do look kind of creepy, with their human eyes rotting out of their skulls.

Her experiment is a failure, but he tells her it's okay, because she can always learn from failure.

"Try it again," he says. "But coat the eyes in Hashirama cells first."

She does.

Sakura's experiments under Orochimaru-sama's supervision consume her time. She misses days and days of class, showing up only to take important tests.

She nearly cries when her end of the year assessment comes out, and she's almost at the bottom of the class, one place above Naruto.

"Your school marks don't matter," Orochimaru-sama says, waving her report away dismissively when she shows him. "Not in the long run."

Her parents are angry. They want her to stop. Orochimaru-sama goes himself to speak to them.

"She'll still pass the Academy course," he explains in calm tones. "The only requirement is basic jutsu use, and your daughter has perfect chakra control. It would be a waste for her to squander her talents on silly classes. Do you know what nonsense she's learning in kunoichi class?"

Sakura thinks it's weird he'd tell her parents that, when he'd explained to her how learning to sew and cook and arrange flowers had important practical applications. But her parents agree to let her continue with him, so she doesn't dwell on it.

Her parents get upset again when they want to go down to meet her cousins at a beach resort for a week, but Sakura wants to stay. They've made so much progress.

"You're nine," her mother bellows.

"I know how to cook and clean and take care of myself," Sakura says, and she does, from kunoichi class. Besides, she knows both Naruto and Sasuke-kun live alone, and no one seems to have a problem with that.

Her parents ask Iruka-sensei if he'd mind checking in on her, and he seems very stressed about it.

"I bet Orochimaru-sama would do it," she says. She's actually more certain he'd agree and then not bother checking at all, as long as she looked well-bathed when she showed up to his lab.

"Ah, no, no need for that," Iruka-sensei says, and he agrees to check and make sure she comes home and feeds herself at the end of each day.

She'd been missing a lot of dinners to work. Her parents are worried.

Orochimaru-sama seems entertained by her problem. "Go home now," he teases her every evening. "You don't want to miss curfew."

She misses curfew on the second to last night and comes home to find Iruka-sensei in her kitchen. He's started cooking dinner for her.

"Sakura-chan," he says, "does Orochimaru treat you well?"

Sakura blinks. Sometimes he teases her and she doesn't like it, and sometimes he's very dismissive of her, but she still thinks he's a better teacher than Iruka-sensei is.

"Yes, of course," she says. "He's brilliant."

"He is," Iruka-sensei agrees. She pulls the kitchen stool up next to him to help chop vegetables. "But, you know Sakura-chan, he's gotten in trouble before."

"What do you mean?" Sakura asks.

"He was… experimenting on children," Iruka-sensei says. "It's public record. I think it's important that know you."

Sakura doesn't really see what the problem is. Orochimaru-sama wouldn't waste precious resources like children if he didn't need to. That research must have been important.

Still, in the morning she looks it up in the records office at the bottom of Hokage tower. A lot of the report is redacted. There had been a very long trial, and Orochimaru-sama had spent seven months in Konoha's highest security detention facility. But the Hokage had eventually concluded that Orochimaru-sama's work to revive the First Hokage's bloodline limit was too important, especially since Konoha was at war at the time.

Orochimaru-sama had been banned from using minors as test subjects, though. He wasn't allowed to experiment on any people at all, unless they filled out all sort of consent forms or were prisoners of war.

Was Orochimaru-sama ignoring the Hokage's orders?

No, those Root soldiers must have consented. They all did whatever Danzo wanted, after all. He could make them agree. Plus, once you were a ninja, you weren't considered a minor anymore, regardless of age.

There was no way Orochimaru-sama could be a traitor.

Sakura thinks that, if she asks Orochimaru-sama about it, he'd definitely explain the answer to her. For some reason, though, she doesn't want to ask. She doesn't want him to know she looked him up. So she buys dango to cover up her tardiness.

"I'll have one later," he says, bored, when she tells him she'd left it in their lunchroom. He's currently trying to extract something from the abdominal cavity of a mouse. That's their new problem: the cells will differentiate, but then they want to make a full human organ inside a mouse, causing the mouse to bloat with a half-formed, human-sized organ and die. Removing the mangled organ is a frustrating task that even Orochimaru-sama needs to concentrate on.

When he finishes, she asks him where Anko is so she can tell her there's dango.

"She was being a gossip," Orochimaru-sama says, "so I sent her away."

"A gossip?" Sakura asks. Anko was loud and talked a lot, but she didn't really gossip.

Orochimaru-sama sighs. He looks very put-upon. "She was sharing our work with other people."

"Oh," Sakura says.

Yes, it made sense to send her away then. They didn't want the main branch of Research and Development getting in their business, or worse, stealing their research.

Sakura settles at her bench and gets to work.

They have a breakthrough with the Hashirama cells. Sakura stops going home for meals and sleeps on the couch in their lunchroom. She only goes home to wash her body and clothes, which she does at night so her parents don't yell at her.

They've successfully transplanted a xenograph to a pig. The pig stares at Sakura with Sharingan red eyes every time she goes to feed it. It is healthy and strong.

She also has a tank of fish with human skin, and salamanders whose backs are hard with human fingernails. Sheep breathe with human lungs and smell with human olfactory cells.

There are twenty-three Root soldiers with transplanted eyes left. Orochimaru-sama thinks they're finally ready to test the Hashirama cells on their precious human eyes.

Danzo disagrees. He wants proof it will work before he gives them his soldiers. But he also won't give them other subjects to test the transplant on.

It's a problem. Orochimaru-sama is frustrated and nearly silent for days.

Orochimaru-sama comes to evaluate the health of the xenograph pig while Sakura is feeding it. He stares into its human eyes, then turns to Sakura.

He is calculating. Evaluating. Sakura freezes.

"No," he says eventually. "I need your hands, and your hands need your eyes."

He summons Anko back. Sakura helps him transfer the eyes from the pig to her.

Sakura doesn't think Anko consents to it. They leave her sobbing in the lunchroom.

They show Anko to Danzo, and Danzo agrees to let them add the Hashirama cells to his soldiers. He even lets them perform surgery on his right eye, which Sakura finds strange because she thought it was missing. She's not allowed in the surgery– Kabuto assists instead– so she doesn't know.

Danzo has another demand for Orochimaru-sama, which makes Orochimaru-sama roll his eyes a lot.

They start trying to grow organs from scratch. They already have some ideas how to do it from the mice experiments, and it doesn't take long for Orochimaru-sama's brilliant mind to start growing organs and nerves and muscles and skin in all sorts of combinations.

Sakura works hard. She misses Ino-chan sometimes, and her family, but most of the time she stays focused on her hands being as def and quick and talented as possible. Orochimaru-sama praises her when she does.

Twice he takes her out for dango. The outings don't last very long, and Orochimaru-sama doesn't seem all that interested in eating dango, but they still fill Sakura with warmth. She misses her parents and Ino-chan less.

Sakura brings dango back to Anko. Anko is not doing well– Orochimaru-sama doesn't want her to leave his care, and the sharingan is draining her chakra quickly without proper meals and exercise.

Anko doesn't even look at her.

Orochimaru-sama thinks the end goal of their new project is silly, but he seems happy unraveling the puzzle to get there. They add grafts and rearrange the nervous network of countless animals. The sheep with human lungs gain human hands they can move and grasp with. The salamanders armored with human fingernails can see through eyes transplanted into their soft bellies.

Eventually Orochimaru-sama completes what Danzo wanted. They bring the Root soldiers with borrowed eyes back in and transfer the eyes into socket that pock a human arm Orochimaru-sama's engineered.

"Such a waste," Orochimaru-sama murmurs while Sakura helps him insert the eyes. She's improved so much at connecting the optic nerve and blood vessels is as easy as snipping the eyes out of their donors had been.

"Danzo wants a test host first," Orochimaru-sama tells her while they're cleaning up. Sakura stiffens. Orochimaru-sama just stares at her expectantly. For the first time, she is afraid of him.

"I'm sure Anko wouldn't mind," she says eventually.

"True," Orochimaru-sama says. "I don't want to risk your hands yet, anyway."

He takes her out for ice cream this time.

FIN.

Sometimes you've got to ignore actual science to get your daily dose of body horror.

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