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setepenre-set · 6 years

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Old, New, Borrowed, and Blue (chapter 9)

Megamind/Roxanne

T for language, rating increase in later chapters

Roxanne desperately needs a date to her step-sister’s wedding. Since her fake boyfriend has decided to ditch her, she ends up seeking Megamind’s help.

AO3 | FFN | chapter 8

Megamind is late the next day, which gives Roxanne more than enough time to dither over whether or not she’s chosen the best outfit for this shopping excursion.

Which is ridiculous.

It’s just Megamind! This isn’t a real date! It doesn’t matter what she wears!

“You look nice,” Megamind says, as soon as Roxanne lets him in, and Roxanne’s heart gives a stupid triumphant flip, but then he adds, “I’m supposed to say that, right?”

She forces a laugh.

Supposed to say that.

She knew she shouldn’t have bothered wearing her most flattering jeans and her cute black flats and the sky blue shirt that she’s always felt brings out her eyes.

Supposed to say that. He would have said it no matter what she was wearing; it’s not like he means it.

(god, she really needs to get back to dating if she’s letting this weird attraction to Megamind mess with her head this much.)

“Yeah, that’s—feel free to say that any time,” she says. “And you look—”

She takes a closer look at Megamind’s clothes. He’s wearing the Michael Niebieski face again, and he’s dressed in a pair of jeans and a dark blue electrician’s shirt with the collar popped up.

(Roxanne pointedly ignores the rush of affection she feels at seeing that popped collar.)

The name Michael is embroidered on the front pocket of the shirt in white.

“—you look like an electrician,” she finishes.

“Hm? Oh! Yes,” Megamind says, “that’s why I’m late, actually; sorry about that. Your, ah, doorman has been having some difficulties with the lobby wiring. Apparently he’s been calling the management about it for weeks; when I walked in, he assumed that the building owner had finally called someone to deal with it.”

Roxanne raises her eyebrows even.

“And you didn’t correct this assumption?” she says.

Megamind shifts uncomfortably.

“I mean—he seemed—really relieved to see me,” he says.

“Oh my god,” Roxanne says, realization dawning—so that’s why he agreed to this fake-dating plan so easily!— “Oh my god, Megamind, you’re a fucking soft touch!”

“Wh—no! I’m—no I’m not!” Megamind looks hunted.

“Did you even charge him?”

“Of course I couldn’t charge him!” Megamind says, gesturing, “The management didn’t actually call me; he could get into trouble if he gave me any—”

Megamind winces and then rubs a hand over his face, then hides his face in his palm with a groan.

Roxanne laughs and Megamind looks at her through his fingers, hand still on his face.

“You’re never going to let me live this down, are you, Miss Ritchi?” he says.

She laughs again.

“Soft touch,” she says, giving him a teasing smile. She shakes her head in affectionate incredulity. “Only you would think of being nice as something to live down, Megamind. And it’s Roxanne, remember?”

“Roxanne,” Megamind says, letting his hand fall and straightening his spine. “Yes. Roxanne.”

He still looks uncertain and uncomfortable, though, so Roxanne takes pity on him and changes the subject.

“Are those clothes real?” she asks, pointing.

“What? Oh—no,” Megamind says, looking down at his outfit. “That’s the disguise watch.”

“Really?” Roxanne reaches out and touches the embroidery on his chest. “That’s fascinating; I can feel the texture and everything.”

“Like I said,” Megamind says. “Hard light hologram. It mimics the physical sensation of the disguise. The Michael Niebieski disguise includes his electrician’s uniform.”

“When you showed me it yesterday, though, you were still in your normal clothes,” Roxanne says.

“Yes, the disguise watch has different layers!” Megamind says, reaching for the dial of the watch and twisting it. “See? Clothes—” suddenly he’s dressed in black leather again, although Roxanne notices that he left off the spikes and the cape and the gloves, “—body—” he turns the dial again and he’s himself again, blue and large-headed, “—there’s a voice-change layer, too, but I don’t use that with this disguise, usually, although I suppose that I could if you want me to—”

“No, I like your voice,” Roxanne says, before she can tell herself to choose her words more carefully.

Megamind blinks at her, as though he’s not sure how to process that statement.

“You can turn the layers off and on individually, in any order?” Roxanne asks.

“—um, yes! Yes, you can,” Megamind says, jumping slightly and twisting the dial of the watch again.

His body seems to flicker and blur for a second, and then he’s dressed in the electrician’s uniform again, although this time he’s still wearing his real face.

“God, that is so cool,” Roxanne murmurs, moving around him to look at the hologram from different angles.

Megamind looks sharply over his shoulder at her, an expression of shocked pleasure on his face.

The words Niebeski Electric are printed across the back of his shirt. Roxanne reaches out to trace over the letters with her fingertips, then frowns, a thought teasing at the back of her mind.

Niebeski…why does that sound vaguely familiar?

“Why Niebieski?” she asks, tapping the name.

“Metrocity has a sizeable Polish population,” Megamind says, “and niebieski is the Polish word for—”

“—blue,” Roxanne says. “It’s the Polish word for blue; I knew it sounded familiar!”

Megamind grins at her over his shoulder.

“It can also mean celestial,” he says, “which I thought was also enjoyable as a double meaning, although that particular connotation is mostly archaic, unless you’re using it in a religious sense, rather than an astronomy-sense.”

Roxanne laughs, coming around to face him again.

“Oh my god, you complete and utter nerd!” she says.

Megamind bites his lip, still grinning, his eyes sparkling.

“I like wordplay,” he says, “that’s how I pick out most of the names for my false identities, really, they’re almost always puns or plays on the different meanings of words that—”

He cuts himself off abruptly, and Roxanne remembers last night, and the way he’d said that he hadn’t meant to tell her his true reasons for fighting Metro Man. Of course—of course he didn’t mean to tell her about the logic behind his fake name choices, either.

“It’s okay,” Roxanne says, “I’m not going to tell anyone, Megamind.”

He looks at her warily and doesn’t answer.

“Really,” she says. “I’m—I want you to know that anything you tell me, anything that happens, with this, with what we’re doing together, I’m not going to use it against you, okay? I mean—that would be a really shitty thing to do, in the first place, since you’re doing this as a favor to me, and— And there wouldn’t be any reason for me to want to, Megamind; I told you, I know what you’ve done for the city, with managing all of the crime. Why would I want to make that harder for you?”

Megamind glances away, eyes avoiding hers.

“I told you, it’s not a favor,” he mutters.

“—yeah, okay, regardless,” Roxanne says. (why is he so insistent about the not-a-favor thing?) “I’m not going to use anything that happens with this to screw things up for you, all right?”

Megamind looks at her again, his expression uncertain.

“What about—what about Metro Man?” he asks.

Roxanne makes an involuntary face.

“What about him?”

“I—I mean, during evil plots,” Megamind says, gesturing, “you always—the things you find out, if they’re useful to him, if you can use them to—help defeat me, you tell him…”

“I’m not going to do that with any of this.”

Megamind frowns.

“I promise, Megamind,” Roxanne says, “I swear. This—the wedding thing is separate, completely separate from all of the—supervillain-and-damsel stuff. I’m not going to use any of this against you. Even during evil plots. I promise. Honestly—” Roxanne cuts herself off with a sigh and rubs a hand over her face.

“…what?” Megamind asks in a tentative voice.

“Honestly, I don’t know how I’m going to go back to the usual routine, anyway, with the snarky comments and helping Wayne win,” Roxanne says. “I mean now that I know why you’re doing it, I’m just going to feel—”

“We can go back to the usual routine!” Megamind says, looking panicked, “You can! We can! It won’t be—you—”

He flinches back, shoulders curving in slightly, looking as though something awful has just occurred to him.

“What?” Roxanne asks.

“I—I should, shouldn’t I?” he says, eyes fixed on the floor. “I should stop. Stop—I always thought—that being Metro Man’s girlfriend must be worth all of the kidnappings to you, so even though you hated them, you weren’t entirely miserable or anything, but if you haven’t even really been dating him, then there aren’t actually any perks for you and I should—”

“No!” Roxanne says, understanding where he’s going with this.

Megamind’s head jerks up, his eyes surprised.

“I don’t want you to stop kidnapping me,” she says quickly.

Megamind’s entire body twitches at that, and yeah, that’s not really a thing Roxanne ever expected to hear herself say, either, but—

“I mean—I get it, now, why you feel like you need to do the supervillain thing,” Roxanne says, feeling her face going hot but trying to explain because this is important. “And I would prefer that you didn’t feel like you have to. But—but if you’re going to do it, then I want to be there, Megamind.”

Megamind stares at her as though he thinks she may have lost her mind.

“But—why?” he asks.

“Because—you’re the most exciting thing that happens in Metro City,” Roxanne says.

“—oh,” Megamind says, “I—yes, I suppose a supervillain is—”

“No,” Roxanne says, “no, it’s not because you’re—you would be the most exciting thing no matter what you were doing, Megamind, I told you, you could do anything. The stuff you make is—if you were an engineer instead of a supervillain, I would still be reporting on your inventions. I just—wouldn’t be tied up while I was doing it.”

Megamind stares at her, eyes wide.

“But—but you think my inventions are stupid!” he says, “You think they’re ridiculous; you say so all the time!”

“I think what you choose to do with them is stupid!” Roxanne says, gesturing, and then grimaces, running a hand through her hair, “Or—I did, anyway, before I understood why you—” She makes a noise of frustration.

Megamind is still staring at her.

“May I kiss you?” he asks.

Roxanne blinks at him, caught off guard.

“Uh—wh—?”

“I was going to ask, before, but then we got off-topic,” Megamind says, his eyes fixed intently on her face. “After talking about the protocol for compliments. I—I thought—the kiss—it wasn’t very good last time, I know, but—I’m sure that practice—”

The kiss wasn’t very good last time.

That comment registers like a blow to Roxanne’s chest; it’s all she can do not to physically reel backwards from it.

The kiss wasn’t very good last time.

“Sure,” Roxanne says, smiling carelessly even though she wants to curl up into a ball of misery and mortification. “Practice is—yeah. Of course.”

The kiss wasn’t very good last time.

(oh god, she took it too far and disgusted him, didn’t she? or maybe he just finds her so completely unappealing that—)

“There are lots of different ways to kiss, though!” she says quickly, and hopes she doesn’t sound as desperate as she feels.

Megamind, who had taken half a step towards her, stops.

“Different ways?” he asks.

“Yeah, like, um—” Roxanne puts one hand on his chest and gives him a peck on the lips, “—quick casual kiss,” she says. “That’s—usually more what it’s like, if you’re—kissing in public, you know? Or there’s—” she kisses his cheekbone, “—a kiss on the cheek. Or a kiss—” she moves her hand to his shoulder and goes up on tiptoe to press a kiss to his temple, “—here.”

Megamind makes a startled noise when she kisses his temple, a sweet, half-smothered sort of gasp that Roxanne immediately decides she wants to hear over and over again.

She catches his face in her hands and tips his head down, going up on her toes a little more so that she can press a kiss to his forehead.

He gasps again, a little louder this time.

“Here,” Roxanne whispers. She rocks back onto her heels and kisses the tip of his nose. “Or here.”

She kisses his chin, then tips his head a little to the side so that she can press a kiss to the sharp corner of his jaw.

“—here,” Roxanne murmurs, and kisses the pink-tipped curve of his ear.

“—or here,” she whispers, lips pressed to his ear, then tilts his head a little more so that she can kiss his neck.

His pulse is racing; she can feel it beneath her lips, and Roxanne immediately lets go of him and steps back, her conscience scolding her.

Megamind isn’t used to being touched; he told her that, when they were sitting on her couch together, when she reached for his watch and he flinched away from her. She’s probably overwhelming him and making him feel panicked.

“Anyway, you get the idea, right?” she says, tone as brisk and businesslike as she can make it.

There is a beat of silence between them.

“—the—I—yes,” Megamind says, and then he swallows. Roxanne has to force herself to look away from the movement of his throat. “I—I understand the—um—general. concept. Do you—want me to—?”

He gestures vaguely at her face; Roxanne forces herself to keep her expression unchanged.

“Yeah, you can give it a try now if you want,” she says.

Megamind swallows again and steps forward. He kisses her on the cheek, fast and light, barely a kiss at all. He leans back and looks at her, an expression of nervous inquiry on his face.

“Good,” Roxanne says softly.

A look of relief crosses his face. He leans forward quickly and kisses the tip of her nose. When he glances at her face again this time, he’s still so close that the effect is somewhat comical. Roxanne smiles at him and tips her chin up, nudging his nose with hers.

The move seems to catch Megamind off guard; he gives a squeak of surprise and tries to look down at his own nose.

Roxanne laughs quietly.

“Good,” she says, grinning up at him.

He glances at her face again, and he must be able to read in her expression that she means it, because he smiles back at her and kisses her nose again, then bumps their noses together the way that she did.

Megamind leans back to look at her again, both of them smiling, and then his gaze flicks to her mouth and his smile melts away.

He catches his lower lip between his teeth—Roxanne is pretty sure the movement is unconscious and completely innocent, but it still makes her want to bite his lip herself.

His eyes flick up again, meeting hers, and he takes a sharp breath, lets it out shakily.

He reaches up to touch her face; Roxanne is expecting him to cup her cheek in his hand and then lean in to kiss her—

—but instead he brushes her hair over her forehead and tucks it behind her ear.

The movement is careful and gentle, and that, coupled with the way he gives her another uncertain look, as though he’s asking wordlessly if it was all right, does something strange to Roxanne’s heart, makes it beat faster, makes it almost hurt.

“Good,” she whispers.

He looks relieved, and then he bends forward and kisses her on the forehead.

When he pulls back this time to look at her face, Roxanne can’t seem to form words, but she nods at him slightly.

His hand is still on her face from when he brushed her hair back, his fingertips resting light against her cheekbone. He slides them down now, over the curve of her jaw. The touch is still light, but Roxanne’s entire being feels completely focused on the slow, whisper-glide of his fingertips over her skin.

Megamind’s thumb brushes over her lower lip and his eyes drop again to her mouth and that seems, somehow, more intimate than an actual kiss would be from anyone else.

He tips her face up, his thumb sliding lightly from her lip to touch her chin. Roxanne’s eyes flutter shut as he bends forward.

Her lips are parted already in anticipation of the kiss, but when it comes, he doesn’t touch his lips to hers as she expects. He kisses her skin just beneath the right side of her mouth—

—her beauty mark, Roxanne realizes; he’s kissing her beauty mark.

The touch of his lips there, like that—it goes through her in a rush of heat, dry paper touched by a match; suddenly she’s on fire.

She turns her head and catches his mouth with her own, too overwhelmed to do more than brush her lips against his and hope desperately that he understands what she wants.

Maybe he does understand, because he does kiss her at last.

It’s nowhere near as hard and fast and deep as Roxanne wants, though.

Instead, the kiss is slow and light and almost unbearably gentle, his lips moving over hers in something like a caress—her lower lip, her top lip, the corners of her mouth, as if he can’t bear to leave any part of her lips unkissed.

He grazes the tip of his tongue over the curve of her lower lip and Roxanne can’t help gasping, and gasping again when his tongue flicks against hers.

The fingertips of his right hand are still beneath her chin; he reaches up with his left hand and touches the corner of her jaw, then slides that hand down, his thumb brushing over her pulse point and his fingertips slipping just barely into her hair.

He deepens the kiss slightly, his tongue stroking over hers, slow and gentle and almost—almost reverent.

Roxanne’s never been kissed like this before, never felt like this before. She didn’t even know a kiss could feel like this. It’s like being worshipped.

When Megamind ends the kiss and gently pulls away, it takes her several seconds to remember to open her eyes.

She does, though, opening her eyes to see Megamind, still standing so close, one of his hands on her face and the other in her hair.

“Was that okay?” he asks in a low voice.

For a long moment, Roxanne’s thoughts are far too scattered to coalesce into anything like words. Megamind pulls his hands away from her and steps back, looking nervous again.

“I mean,” he says, with a quick, fluttering gesture of one hand, “I know I need more practice, and I’m sure I can do better—”

(holy hell if he gets any better, Roxanne might actually die the next time he kisses her)

“That was—” Roxanne’s voice comes out rougher than she’d like; she stops to clear her throat. “That—ah—are you—sure you’ve never kissed anyone before?”

Megamind’s eyebrows draw together slightly.

“No, just—just you, yesterday,” he says.

Roxanne swallows. Jesus. He barely even touched her, just his fingertips on her face and in her hair and his mouth against hers, and her entire body feels absolutely alight.

“You,” Roxanne says, “you are a very quick study.”

Megamind’s body relaxes visibly with relief.

“Really?” he says. “So that was okay?”

“That was—” Roxanne takes a shaky breath and runs a hand through her hair. “Yeah. Yeah, it was.”

Megamind’s face lights up and it is entirely unfair the way he looks even more attractive when he smiles.

Roxanne wants to yank out her own hair in frustration with herself. Why? Why did she have to decide to be attracted to Megamind at the worst possible moment?

“Well,” she says, and gestures at the door, “shall we?”

“Ah! Of course,” Megamind says, stepping aside to allow her to open the door.

Roxanne locks the door behind herself and the two of them start down the hall together towards the elevator.

“Miss—ah—Roxanne?” Megamind says.

Roxanne glances over at him.

“Yes?”

“Can—can we practice holding hands?” he asks.

Roxanne swallows and feels heat rise to her face. Wordlessly, she holds out her hand.

Megamind takes it, lacing their fingers together, and Roxanne feels the touch like an electric shock.

They hold hands as they walk down the hall and it’s not until they actually step into the elevator that Roxanne realizes they both forgot to turn Megamind’s disguise back on.

“Watch! Watch watch watch!” Roxanne hisses urgently, smacking his shoulder.

Megamind’s eyes fly wide and he scrambles to turn the dial of the disguise watch.

Michael Niebieski’s face flickers into visibility, brown skin over blue, and even in the midst of her relief at the potential disaster averted just in time, Roxanne still feels a pang of regret when Megamind’s real face disappears.

She half collapses back against the wall, more in dismay than in relief, and closes her eyes.

Immediately, the memory of that kiss hits her.

(god, if he kisses like that, imagine what he’s like in bed.)

(oh god)

(oh god stop imagining it! stop imagining it!)

She opens her eyes, cheeks burning, and forces herself to stare straight ahead, at the elevator buttons, but she feels all to aware of Megamind standing right next to her and—

A touch at her hand, light and uncertain, and Roxanne spreads her fingers automatically, without even thinking, so that Megamind can take her hand again.

Dear god what has she gotten herself into.

...to be continued.

Thank you all so much for continuing to be interested in this story!

I know it was a long time between updates; I got really blocked for some reason--blocked about writing in general, and then blocked with this story, specifically, for a while, too. (extremely not fun)

Finally being able to continue it was such a relief!

So! I hope you all enjoyed the long-awaited, much-belated, FINALLY UPDATED new chapter!

#megamind #megamind/roxanne #fanfiction #old new borrowed and blue #fake dating au

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nikkigrand · 7 years

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t3-V

As requested, here is the first chapter to that zombie AU!

Chapter 1 - Case #34

It all started with a snake.

Which, in retrospect, was the defining sentence in all of Sakura’s problems. See, even after the bloodiest and shortest war to date, for some ungodly reason, the Hidden Villages had decided to let Orochimaru and his cronies go free without any sort of punishment. It eluded all reason, all moral sense, and he was put into the custody of the Hidden Leaf. But, like most instances of catastrophic proportion, the Leaf did not handle it well and Orochimaru—despite having a prior experiment guard him for every minute of the hour—escaped.

Sakura still had nightmares about the man, so it did wonderful things to her psyche to see him gallivanting about the village like he’d done nothing wrong in his entire life. She had even implored Kakashi, as the Rokudaime, to pursue execution or some other punishment for all of the villainous acts Orochimaru had committed in his lifetime—preferably one where he rotted away in a cold, dark cell for the rest of his life.

She’d never forgiven him for ruining all of what Team 7 had and could have been.

Regrettably, with this new era of peace, archaic methods of punishment were done away with—and that included execution. Instead, Orochimaru was to be fully inducted as a shinobi of the Leaf and was even allowed to keep his former bases in Sound. The council deemed it prudent that they seize all of Sound’s assets under the guise of analyzing all of Kabuto’s research to make advancements in the medical field, therefore improving the longevity of Konoha ninja in the battlefield.

But Sakura would rather cut off her own hands than use Kabuto’s research to save lives when all he’d done to compile said research was torture and take them.

So when the day she’d been anticipating arrived, (because Sakura knew better than anyone else, barring Sasuke and Anko, that Orochimaru would escape) she had jumped on the opportunity to be on the Hunter team to bring him back and finally do what should have been done years ago.

Unfortunately, Orochimaru was as slippery as his namesake. They spent months upturning every rock, checking every source, every sighting, and every lead without result. They had even recruited the ever elusive Sasuke’s aid, and he—with his monosyllabic answers—was barely any help. The Hunter team had returned to Konoha after six months with the weight of failure draping itself across their shoulders, and Sakura was never able to escape a persistent feeling of dread for a future with Orochimaru in it.

Honestly, she should have known that her business with him wasn’t finished—that Orochimaru would be a constant nightmare in her life for as long as she lived. And no nightmare of hers was complete without being strapped, spread-eagle, to a table with a grotesque looking Kabuto looming over her with an ominous syringe.

War had not been kind to him, and fusing and de-fusing with Orochimaru’s essence even less so.

Jerking against the leather chakra suppressing straps binding her neck, wrists and ankles to a cold slab in one of Sound’s hidden bases—one that not even Konoha knew of, Sakura bared her teeth as Kabuto checked and annotated the dosage in the syringe in a thick file.

“What are you going to do me?” Her voice was full of vitriol and rage as she tried to summon her chakra without result.

Kabuto ignored her as he calmly tied a band tightly around her bicep, tapping her vein none too gently, before sterilizing the area with an alcohol swab. Sakura’s heart beat a frantic drum in her chest as he picked up the syringe and took a seat next to her straining form.

“Kabuto, you rat bastard, what are you doing?”

Kabuto tutted. “Language, Sakura-chan.”

Sakura almost screeched with rage, instead choosing to focus what little chakra she could feel inwards in preparation to synthesize whatever it was that Kabuto planned on injecting her with. She wasn’t stupid; she knew that Kabuto had plans to use her in one of his twisted experiments and there was no way she was going to let herself die from it.

“Well,” Kabuto hummed, as if doing her a great favor, “As a fellow medic, I suppose I should at least give you the courtesy of knowing how vital your participation in this project is.”

Remaining silent, Sakura willed away the rising panic. She was having difficulties gathering her chakra; Kabuto had left her with the bare minimum to function—not enough to perform any type of medical ninjutsu or escape. With nauseating dread, Sakura knew that she would not be able to survive whatever it was that Kabuto had planned for her—with her normal mental and bodily capabilities in tact—without some type of divine intervention.

“You see,” Kabuto started, his voice saccharine as he pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose, “Orochimaru-sama was most disappointed in hearing about your opposition to his reinstatement as a Konoha shinobi.”

“We should have executed him when we had the chance,” Sakura spat, tugging at her arm whose lack of circulation was quickly becoming painful. “As if Orochimaru would ever give up his pursuit of immortality.”

Kabuto chuckled, “Always so smart, Sakura-chan.”

Leaning back, the spectacled man toyed with the syringe in his hand as he observed her struggle with her restraints, “You’re correct. Orochimaru-sama has ambitions far too grand for the Hidden Leaf—ambitions they do not understand. They were fools to assume that he’d let it all go as easily as they let him join their ranks.”

“And you little Leafs are always so foolish.” Kabuto grinned as he stood, uncapping the syringe as he did so. “Because of his rather short imprisonment, if you could even call it that, Orochimaru-sama’s advancements in the cursed seal’s development were lost to your village’s research and war crimes department; which put me, the sole researcher of the cursed seal’s effects, in quite the bind.”

Sakura bit back a whimper as Kabuto’s steely grip came down on her arm, her wide eyes observing the needle as it dimpled her skin. She had no sense of grandeur when it came to her abilities—she knew just as well as anyone the peak of her own mortality; and the fact that he held it in his mottled hands terrified her. Her breaths came in shorts pants as Kabuto paused, his gaze turning thoughtful even as his lips curled sinisterly. Leaning back, he stroked a calloused thumb along the sensitive skin over the bend of her elbow.

“You see, I’ve had to start over,” he said conversationally, lips pursing mockingly, “I had to develop a new curse seal, one without the potential for error and rejection like its predecessors.”

Sakura simply listened warily and with curdling disgust as Kabuto went on to describe the gruesome experiments he conducted on displaced civilians while his master resided in Konoha. Orochimaru wanted a cursed seal that encompassed the same parameters of those previous but with the added advantage of immortality by soul consumption. The snake wanted a cursed seal that would leech away its bearer’s essence until it was nothing but an empty shell, until it couldn’t refuse Orochimaru’s hostile takeover. To counteract the unavoidable act of aging, Kabuto designed a sister seal that would gather the life force of its recipient until it was ready to be harvested for Orochimaru’s use.

Sakura’s disgust morphed into horror as Kabuto relayed, with mock sadness, how each trial run was met with disastrous results. He hypothesized that the seal had not had a proper conduit, nor a proper base, and test subjects either shriveled up like dried husks from the uncontrollable rapid gathering of their life force, or exploded from the strain put on their chakra pools.

“Since our latest failure,” Kabuto intoned, his brow furrowing, “Orochimaru-sama was not…satisfied with my developments and proposed something different—something revolutionary.”

He paused as if waiting for her to inquire what this grand something could be, but Sakura would do no such thing. Cat-like emerald eyes narrowed dangerously at the maniacal baring of teeth that only Kabuto could call an excited grin, and her nostrils flared at the visible giddiness rolling off him in waves.

Mad scientist, indeed.

Brushing off her lack of response with ease, Kabuto resumed his tale steadfastly, “Orochimaru-sama is quite the genius, I must tell you Sakura-chan. It was quite the surprise to know that Zetsu was the one pulling the strings in Akatsuki, wasn’t it?”

At Sakura’s sharp intake of breath, Kabuto chuckled and continued, “Yes, you were there while everyone else dreamed. I, unfortunately, was also asleep. Fortunately for Orochimaru-sama, he was not. After learning of White Zetsu’s rather admirable longevity, I was tasked with scrounging the lands for remnants of his cells.”

He leaned forward, bent elbows resting on his knees as he rolled the syringe in the palm of his hand. “With Zetsu’s DNA and fragments of Hashirama’s cells, Orochimaru-sama and I were able to develop a serum that would alter the recipient’s own DNA to increase their strength and durability tenfold.”

Bright fluorescent lighting glinted off the plastic as he held up the syringe.

“By mutating the recipient’s cells to mimic Zetsu’s own curious mutation of plant and animal cells, we have crossed the hurdle of self-sustainment and mortality. You have heard of trees living for hundreds of years, no?”

Sakura swallowed at the influx of information, the voice in the back of her head reminding her that Konoha’s dendrologists had placed the oldest tree in their village at nearly a millennium. Her mind raced at the possibility of Orochimaru living and committing unspeakable acts like these for forever.

However, Sakura was a scientist at heart, and despite the looming of her impending demise and agony, she couldn’t help but ask, “And chakra? Have you even accounted for a person’s individual chakra?”

Kabuto leered at her supine form, licking his lips as his glasses glinted, “Of course, Sakura-chan. You and I, as scientists and medics, both know that we must consider all possible angles. The recipient’s chakra would flood and nourish their cells so that it is supplemented by the production of each, therefore destroying the potential for chakra exhaustion. We produce thousands of cells each day—it’d be a never ending source of power and chakra!”

“That isn’t a serum,” Sakura hissed, her voice rising, “That is a virus!”

Kabuto lurched to his feet, circling around to the crown of her head, and she jerked when she felt his gnarled fingers comb through her dirty rose tresses as he shushed her.

“It may seem so, considering every recipient has died thus far. But that is where you come in, my dear.” Kabuto bent at the waist, his lips coming to rest by the shell of her ear, “Your Byakugou opens a world possibilities. You have such fine, subconscious control of your chakra. I don’t doubt that you, with such great chakra control would be able to counteract whatever issues you may encounter.”

Kabuto toyed with the strands of her hair as he hummed, “Tsunade-sama had been my first choice, but Orochimaru-sama is quite…fond of her and did not approve. You, however, he holds no such feelings for.”

Rising to his full height, the grey haired man calmly returned to his previous position by her discolored arm and trailed a finger down its length; it had lost circulation long ago and she felt his touch like shattered glass against her skin. Her pulse throbbed in her throat and she swallowed against the fear threatening to suffocate her as Kabuto moved the needle to her vein. She sneered at the crown of his head, thoughts and information churning over in her head until a mirthless laugh spilled from her chapped lips.

“You know that I loathe you and your master,” she spat even as Kabuto calmly lifted his head to stare at her, “And yet you give me something you hope will mutate me into something super-human with expectations that I’ll survive. Surely you know that I’ll kill you the first chance I get.”

Kabuto’s answering laugh was like ice down her back.

“I said I did not doubt that you’d survive,” he corrected, “But I never said I had intentions of letting you live.”

He leaned towards her as if imparting a secret. “See, your ability to survive this is only a hypothesis, as the survival rate in previous experiments is at a resounding zero percent. If you don’t survive, my hypothesis was wrong; but if you do, then I was correct and you’ve served your purpose. You are only a means to an end, Sakura-chan.”

Opening her mouth to let him know just what she thought of his depraved hypothesis, Sakura yelped when she felt a sting against the bend of her elbow that felt like fire coursing through her veins as Kabuto injected the serum into her body. She cursed herself for letting his words distract her. She jerked against the restraints, her chakra lashing out wildly against the foreign chemicals coursing through and invading her cells.

“Orochimaru-sama thanks you for your participation, Sakura-chan.”

Kabuto discarded the empty syringe on top of a steel tray with other medical equipment, moving to grab a file and pen to begin writing down his observations. As Sakura observed this through hazy, agonized beryl eyes, she decided that she’d receive retribution in this life or the next.

Her thoughts of vengeance were halted by what felt like molten lava coursing through her body, liquefying her from the inside out, and she screamed until she started seizing, and then she knew no more.

Kabuto observed as one of the strongest kunoichi in the world writhed uncontrollably on the steel slab, her mouth foaming as her body seized in reaction to the serum streaming through her. A scream ripped through her throat, and he adjusted his glasses as her chakra flared against the restraints.

Subduing her by use of chakra suppressors was not wise, considering the nature of his experiment, but it served a purpose in observing whether or not her chakra would break through to interact with the serum’s components.

Catching Sakura tiredly making her way back to Konoha after a long, grueling solo-mission had been a stroke of sheer luck. Kabuto was not arrogant enough to believe that he could challenge her—one of the Neo-Sannin, hero of the Great War, striker of gods—at full strength and win. He saw an opportunity in her fatigued gait and he took it.

Orochimaru had been most pleased when Kabuto had returned from his supply mission with the battered pink haired woman slung over his shoulders. As Kabuto had told her, Orochimaru held no affection for her after her rather public opposition to his reinstatement; but he respected her, he said, for recognizing a predator and keeping it in her sights.

However, as Kabuto observed the thrashing body on top of the rattling table, he determined that his master would be supremely disappointed in hearing about the failure of his hypothesis.

As he watched, Sakura’s once healthy skin adopted the ashen pallor of a corpse, the bare flesh of her arms and legs mottling, black veins spreading across her once flawless complexion like lightning as her cells died and struggled to reproduce.

Kabuto sighed as he annotated the familiar sight in his hefty file. Standing, he tucked the file under his arm as he made his way towards the woman that used to be Haruno Sakura. He gripped her head by the hair to keep her from moving, and he lifted an eyelid to confirm what he already knew.

The sclera of her eyes, like every other recipient, had bled into a bright crimson as the cells and blood vessels combusted and died. Pupils dilated to pinpricks, her once brilliantly green iris had faded to an eerily pale shade of what it once was, small crimson fibers spaced in between the green as cells reacted violently.

Stepping away, he annotated in his files his disappointing results, not bothering to glance back when he heard the tale tell expulsion of her last breath. As per Orochimaru’s protocol, Kabuto was forced to wait by her cooling corpse for an hour to see if there were any changes in her not previously seen in the others.

When the hour went by and all Kabuto observed was the onset of algor mortis, he deemed the project a loss and called for the base’s disposal team to get rid of her corpse. Within ten minutes, the man in charge for the day was throwing her body over his shoulder and making his way out the door while Kabuto made his last notes in his file labeled: Case #34 / T3-S.

On a whim, to appease the niggling feeling in the back of his head, Kabuto halted the lowly servant before he fully left. Stepping next to him, he placed two fingers on where Sakura’s pulse point should be and held it for a minute. When he felt nothing, he directed a stream of medical chakra into her body and found her void of all life. Nodding to the larger man, Kabuto went back to his file and closed it.

Haruno Sakura had died in the name of science.

Kabuto grinned; how fitting.

Five days later, thirty miles away from Kabuto and two hundred miles away from Konoha, Sakura woke up in a ditch full of rotting corpses.

What do you guys think?! I know zombies aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, but I’m obsessed with them right now.

#my fics #sakura haruno

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