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Karin is too young to have known Uzushiogakure as it was, all sweeping shorelines and verdant mountains the way her mother describes, but she is old enough now not to believe in fairytales.
When Karin was a child, her mother raised her on stories about her homeland—of the waves that would come crashing into the shore in clouds of white froth, the feel of burning hot sand underfoot, the way that you'd be able to hear the water calling your name if you only tried hard enough. It was magnificent, she’d said, and when she spoke about it, she’d get this dreamy look in her eyes, like she was looking at something far away. For a while, Karin clung to the idea of Uzushio too, longing for a village to call her own.
She doesn’t know when exactly she stopped, but she knows eventually she made the connection—it doesn’t exist. Not anymore, and anyway, she knows better than to place her faith in dreams now. Karin’s more practical than that. Besides, it’s not like it did her mother any good when Kusagakure drained the life out of her like the parasite that it is.
So Karin’s been on her own for a while. Fine, she can manage. She leaves her mother’s dreams behind when she watches them bury her in an unmarked grave. Her family name has only ever caused her trouble, carrying a weighty legacy of illustrious sealing techniques and prodigious chakra reserves, so she throws that away too. Karin Uzumaki becomes just Karin, and that’s also fine—she doesn’t need to stand out, she just needs to be able to take whatever the world throws at her. And if following behind someone stronger means surviving, Karin’s more than happy to acquiesce.
It’s an easy decision then, when Orochimaru promises her safety and a home in exchange for her loyalty. Karin accepts immediately. There has to be a catch, but it doesn’t matter—anything that can get her away from Kusagakure is good enough.
She does menial chores around the bases for a few months, cleaning the labs and feeding the prisoners, before Orochimaru finally decides he can trust her enough to help with some of his experiments. Apparently her abilities could come in handy with some of his more…delicate medical procedures. The whole thing leaves a bitter taste in her mouth, far too reminiscent of what she’d tried to escape, but she reminds herself that she chose this, at least, that it’s different.
If she’s being honest, she’s not sure she’s ever really had much of a choice in anything. But the illusion of it is comforting, so she decides that this is better—that it has to be—and follows behind Kabuto as he shows her how to do her new job.
The Sound’s prisons are fetid with the ammonia tang of urine and bile. Karin can smell it even from the corridors outside. She wrinkles her nose when Kabuto moves to unlock the door leading to the cells. There’s a sharp jangle from the keys that’s far too harsh and metallic in the silence. She almost flinches, but catches herself just in time.
The door swings open and the haze of concentrated chakra behind it suddenly hits her all at once in waves of terror and despair. She grits her teeth, trying to stifle the nausea that comes with it. The second Kabuto steps into the room, the chakra shifts into anger—pure, unceasing hatred all boiling up to the surface. It’s overwhelming, too much at one time, but he gestures for her to follow and so she does, digging her nails into her palms to stay steady.
“They don’t like you,” she notes. Her voice comes out small, quiet. She feels small. She clears her throat; tries again.
“They don’t like you,” she says, louder now. She’s shrill and bratty even to her own ears, but that’s okay. Annoying is good; annoying is better than sounding afraid, and if she’s learned anything from the last few months here, it’s that weakness is not to be tolerated.
He stifles a dry chuckle in his throat. “No, I can’t imagine they do.”
One inmate lunges at them, grasping at the bars of his cell. She flinches, drawing back. The prisoners in the cell are bloodied and skeletal, tired eyes staring out from gaunt faces.
“You don’t… you don’t feel bad?” she asks, looking around uncertainly. Because she—well, come to think of it, she doesn’t know if she does either, actually. A younger her certainly would have. And there’s something about the whole situation that doesn’t sit right with her, but she’s not sure she even has the right to judge when she knows that she won’t do anything about it anyway. If it’s them or her, she’d choose herself every time.
Still.
She pushes back the bile rising in the back of her mouth.
“In my experience,” Kabuto begins steadily, sounding like he’s speaking to a child, “people with consciences don’t tend to last very long in this line of work.”
Karin scowls, but he’s not wrong. Maybe it’s not sympathy for them, per se, but she definitely feels something else that she can’t quite put her finger on. Maybe it’s his cavalier attitude as they walk through the cells that bothers her; he doesn’t even bat an eye when one particularly unruly inmate screams at him from behind bars.
She finally manages to wrap her head around it in the lab, while she’s busy handing surgical tools to Kabuto, who stands peering over a particularly interesting test subject. “It’s not…” she pauses, trying to think of the right word. “It’s just not fair.”
He blinks once, confused, until he seems to remember what she’s referencing. “No,” he agrees amiably, “it’s not.”
She waits for a tacked-on but life isn’t fair, but he doesn’t continue. Strange, she figured he’d take the opportunity to rub it in a bit more. Maybe because it’s implied. She can never tell exactly why with Kabuto, and that makes her uneasy. He just turns back to the task at hand, concentrating.
Maybe it’s her own inaction that disgusts her.
“Why do you do it then?” she asks, and she knows it’s dangerous to say this to Orochimaru’s right-hand man, in the middle of a dissection no less, but she blurts it out anyway.
(Because it’s not right to bite little girls or kill their mothers either, but it’s not like anybody’s ever stepped in to help her. She thinks maybe it’s the injustice of it all—the way the world crushes people like her underfoot, and the way nobody has ever lent her a hand until Orochimaru.)
He stops abruptly in the act of peeling back a bloodied membrane from whatever gelatinous organ he’s examining now. He turns his head, looking back at her from over his shoulder. She swallows hard.
She thinks that watching might as well be as good as being complicit, so it’s not like she has much moral ground to stand on, but she has to know.
“Because they’re in there, and I’m out here, aren’t I?” he replies, a question to a question—because of course he won’t give her a straight answer. It’s always hard to tell with him because half the time, he doesn’t really mean what he says, but Karin thinks she understands the gist of it: the line between prisoner and prison warden is only as thin as Orochimaru wants it to be, and sometimes, Karin thinks there isn’t much of a line at all.
As he turns back around, his right hand jerks slightly, scalpel halfway through what was meant to be a neat incision. Blood wells up from where he’s nicked the flesh. The subject beneath him makes a sound of protest that sounds more like a strangled gurgle. It writhes in its restraints, limbs twitching erratically.
Kabuto curses under his breath, irritated. “Your arm then, if you’d please?”
She mutely unrolls her sleeve and the conversation continues as though it had never been interrupted.
“I wouldn’t worry about that too much, anyway,” Kabuto says. “You’ll be fine as long as you stay useful to Lord Orochimaru.” He sounds almost bitter when he says his name, but she can’t imagine why.
The subject bites down. She winces; can feel the chakra draining out of her. It always feels so different from using the chakra herself—it feels like she’s dying a little more with every bite.
She glances down at the pathetic mass of blood and flesh beneath her. “Would you… I mean, would he ever do something like that to me?” Karin asks, eyes wide. Because that raises a good question—what will happen once Orochimaru grows tired of her?
“Is there a reason why he should?” he asks, and Karin vows to herself right there never to give him one.
That night, she dreams that she is one of them, strapped and laid bare on a gurney. There’s a light somewhere vaguely above her, a cold sort of white that’s too bright—why is it so bright?—in a way that gives her a headache.
Something moves in her gut, and even though she can’t feel the pain of it yet, she can hear squelching. She thinks she might throw up. She blinks and makes a valiant attempt to sit up, but her limbs are heavy, sluggish.
There’s a sharp tsk. She looks up to see Kabuto standing above her. This is a delicate procedure, he says, still elbows-deep in her viscera. Don’t move.
He pulls his bloodied hands away and reaches for a scalpel. She watches the blade, mesmerized, as he moves it higher, right over her heart, tracing a line up from her abdomen to her chest.
The metal is cool and clinical on her skin. And then he presses down.
She chokes out a scream. The blade burns and bites at her, sharp and deep like teeth against flesh.
Oh, look what you've done now, he sighs, displeased. She shrieks until her throat is hoarse. He shakes his head disapprovingly. I told you to stay still, didn’t I?
She scrunches her eyes tight and when she opens them, his face morphs into Orochimaru’s which shifts again, features blurring, until suddenly she’s staring up at the jonin that dragged her into the hospital the night her mother died.
She wakes up, sheets sticky with sweat, and sobs into her pillow.
“What do you want?” Kabuto asks her bluntly, several days into her training. She looks up from the mess of organs and viscera in front of her.
I want to live, she thinks, longer than anyone else. And deeper still—she wants revenge, wants to hurt the people who killed her mother and left permanent marks on her arms and legs. She’s an Uzumaki, damn it, and it’s her birthright as the last daughter of Uzushiogakure.
“I don’t know,” she says instead, because that’s the safer answer.
She doesn’t think he really knows either, but she’s not going to say that to him. She can feel it radiating off of him sometimes, that desperate need embedded in his chakra. She knows because like knows like, and they’re both lost, looking for a place to belong. The only difference is that she knows where her home is, or at least where it’s supposed to be—sunk deep beneath the waves, reduced to rubble now. She thinks his destination might be more nebulous—a feeling, rather than a place, something intangible and wholly unknowable.
She can’t decide if she pities him or fears him. Maybe both.
“Honestly,” he chuckles, “you’d have to be some kind of idiot to join without knowing what you were getting into.”
“Wouldn’t that make you an idiot too?” she asks, staring closely at him for any hint of reaction.
There’s the slightest pause, and she knows she’s got him. He scoffs, setting the scalpel down. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he says. “I knew exactly what I was doing.” She doesn’t know if he’s trying to convince her or himself.
And then, just because he’s petty, he adds, “If you have time to ask me questions, you have time to clean out laboratory three. There’s a mess in there that needs attention after this.”
She groans.
Laboratory three, of course, is the site of a particularly grisly dissection. There are two desiccated subjects lying on the operation tables. Once upon a time, she would have screamed, seeing this.
Now, she looks at this and sighs. Great. She’ll need to make two trips.
She picks up the nearest corpse and hoists it over her shoulder. Wet liquid seeps into her uniform. She tries not to think about the stench, or what that liquid might be—blood would be preferable, but certain bodily fluids have also been known to leak. She’ll need to clean that too, later.
Already, as she walks toward the door, she’s mentally adding laundry to her list of chores.
When did she stop seeing them as people and start seeing them as objects?
The subject’s head hits the doorframe and falls off her shoulder with a particularly wet crunch.
“Fuck you,” she says to no one in particular.
Sometimes, late at night, when Karin is alone, she thinks about love. She doesn’t know what love is, or if she can love the way she should—to her, love is sacrifice, love is pain, and she doesn’t know how to do it any other way. Love is sharp teeth and red-hot coppery blood bursting from her veins and giving until she has nothing left to give. Love is the way her mother threw away her life, losing piece after piece of herself to keep Karin safe.
What she feels for Sasuke might be some twisted facsimile of what love should be, but she doesn’t know. She can’t know. She only ever learned by example.
Besides—she needs some way to stay sane here, deep in the bowels of Orochimaru's laboratories. Sasuke is a welcome distraction.
“You know, he’s not like us,” Kabuto tells her conversationally one day, when he catches her staring a little too long at Sasuke. “Uchiha, I mean.”
He smiles at her, looking every inch like a friendly senpai sharing advice. She thinks maybe that’s the most dangerous part about him—the way that facade masks the underlying threat so well, it’d be invisible if she couldn’t feel the growing resentment in his chakra.
“You hate him,” she notes.
He doesn’t even bother to deny it, just shrugs noncommittally. It’s almost comical, how little he cares to hide his distaste for him when she knows he’s made some attempt at civility for everyone else.
There are politics here too, in Oto—the same types of hidden relationships and connections that she saw even as a child in Kusagakure. She feels like an outsider, looking in on some inane internal conflict as Kabuto tsks, clicking his tongue.
“Hate is a strong word,” he says mildly. “His kekkei genkai is certainly fascinating, I’ll admit.”
Karin has been here long enough to know that this is as good of a confession as he will give. His distaste for Sasuke is no great secret here—even Orochimaru has picked up on it, but silently permits it like an indulgent parent.
"So what's the big difference?" she asks.
“Isn’t it obvious?” he asks. He grins, and there's a little hint of danger and thirst in that smile, the viciousness that he tries so desperately to hide. “Everything that we have, we’ve earned.”
She wonders how many throats he’s slit with that same smile, meek and friendly at first glance but masking something so insidious beneath.
Privately, she thinks that he’s wrong. When she was young, she'd dreamt of Uzushio, yes, but she'd had nightmares too. She'd think about the fall and drift asleep with images imprinted behind her eyelids: generations of Uzumaki, old, dead, and grand, their grinning skulls picked clean by fish. We were unmatched, her mother had said, but maybe if they were so grand, they would’ve stayed alive. Still, even now, Karin carries the weight of their legacy with her. The ocean runs in her blood. She can hear the swell of the tide in her ears, remnants of the village that once was but will never exist again.
In the end, she doesn’t really like Sasuke, not in a way that matters. But Sasuke is stability—Sasuke saved her life, and in a world so quick to turn to cruelty, kindness is a rarity. Kindness, benevolence, selfishness—she gets the three confused sometimes, especially when she looks at Orochimaru.
She wonders what her mother would think if she could see her now, the last daughter of Uzushio, a pawn of the Snake. Then she flatly reminds herself that her mother is dead and her opinions will never matter again.
She tries not to look at herself in the mirror if she can help it, but every now and then she catches glimpses of herself. She hardly recognizes the girl staring back at her, all gauntness and hungry feral eyes and hard straight lines. She tries to tear her eyes away from the pale expanse of flesh that peeks out from beneath her hemlines, but she’s always drawn back to the scars—ugly, ugly, ugly, she thinks, crescent-shaped reminders of her own weakness.
She bares her teeth in a scowl, twists her face into a grimace.
I could have been someone, she tells herself, instead of being a tool, made to be used and discarded. I am an Uzumaki. Then she shakes her head. No. Maybe in another life, but Uzushio was lost and buried before Karin was even born, and she knows nothing else now save for the streets and the Sound.
She balls up her fists and the mirror shatters into infinite pieces of light and stardust, falling apart beneath her. She’s breathing hard. Panting. When she stops seeing red, blinking hard, she is acutely aware of a stinging in her palms. Little glass shards stick out of the pale meaty flesh of her hands.
Oh. Well, shit.
Kabuto is in the laboratory, the same way he always is. She comes in bleeding, her hands wet and sticky. Kabuto wraps the wound in a bandage and sends her away with barely more than a glance.
“Why can’t you just heal it?” she whines, letting the petulance bleed into her voice. She hopes that maybe it’ll soften him up. She hoped wrong.
“I have better things to do,” he says, unfazed. “If you were so concerned, maybe you shouldn’t have cut yourself to begin with.”
She picks herself up and continues along the same way she always does. She will survive. She always does.
The day before she is reassigned to be the warden of the Southern Hideout, she is called to help with an experiment one last time.
Kabuto is watching her the same way he always does, with that strange enigmatic glint in his eyes that makes her feel uneasy. "Congratulations," he says. "I suppose you proved useful after all."
She doesn't respond to that. One more day and then she'll be free—as free as she can get here, anyway. Kabuto extends a hand periodically and she hands him scalpels. There's an easy sort of rhythm to the process, born out of routine.
“Karin,” he says.
The test subject is convulsing. Mutely, she rolls up her sleeve and extends her arm. There’s work to be done.
The patient bites down, sharp crescent teeth cutting and sawing into flesh.
She closes her eyes and thinks of the waves.