Carrot Blood

Karin despised the smell he gave her. She would always hate him for it, she thought vengefully, clutching her knobby child knees to her chest.

She could feel him coming. His chakra was sickly, too overwhelming with a genuine fakeness. Tasted like bile drowned in poisoned sugar. He was bringing her more. She was tired of it, tired of taking those vials of putrid, foreign chakra into her body. It hurt, so much, much, much, much.

How many smells and colors were writhing in her now? Over hundreds, she would guess. A little bit of everyone. So much of everyone that she could distinguish between the mutant brothers with blue lips he had created: Sakon and Ukon.

People were only supposed to have one scent. Everyone in his laboratory had twothreethousandsfourmaybedozens. She knew each one of them. Her tiny, skeletal body was familiar; he was trying to see how much she could hold, how attuned to the vile life energy she could become.

Sensitive enough to recognize him on the second visit, sane enough to fear him the third.

The door shrieked open. She squinted dully, blurrily at the shadow of the half-snake half-man. She need glasses. She wanted them. Maybe she didn't. She could already tell who was who. But she wanted to see his face. So she could rip it off with her teeth.

"Hello, Karin," crooned the detestable voice.

She remained silent, narrowing her eyes as he approached. He wasn't afraid of her. He never would be, but she only had so many defenses left.

"How many more?" she demanded of him in her creaky voice.

"I don't know." He smiled, waving the syringe of carrot-blood-smelling chakra in his hand.

"I'm tired," she explained ruefully, clasping a hand over the many hundreds of small holes in her arm.

"It won't hurt a bit."

She let her hand drop, red head hanging down. It always hurt. Always never everytime eternity hurt. Liar.

He plunged the hypodermic into her bruised flesh. The hissing spirit of someone else's life signature clinked right in to the sea of the other ones. New smell. Another one. She already smelled awful.

"How many more?" she asked.

"I don't know." He smiled.

fin.

A/N: I basically wrote this in two minutes. I'm not going to let it incubate in my computer this time or wait to see how I feel about it in the morning. Going to go out on a limb here and see how laughably (I knew it was a word! but inside joking aside) the discrepancies are. Thank you for reading.