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Sasuke didn't like Orochimaru's new corpse project. Its long hair splayed flat down its back, face completely obscured by a creepy kabuki mask that didn't quite give Sasuke the chills but did make the corspe fall straight into the uncanny valley.
The others in the base had called the thing Sasuke's babysitter, for one, which left a bad taste in his mouth. The damn thing wasn't even as tall as him. It left Sasuke snapping like a turtle at anyone brave enough to jeer at him to his face, though there was little he could do to those who did it behind his back.
His position as Orochimaru's replacement body was precarious. Sasuke didn't need this horrid walking-corpse following him around wherever he went.
Sure, it was useful to have something to fetch things from across the room or to get its hands dirty with blood when Sasuke would just rather deal with something else. But Sasuke didn't need someone doing what he could do perfectly fine. It felt like Orochimaru was toying with him, giving him a gift but at the same time making sure Sasuke was seen as infantile and incapable.
At least the thing didn't speak. It made hand gestures, sometimes, complicated ones that sparked memories of Konoha's secret hand-code for stealth missions. However, Sasuke had never seen himself as needing to work on a team, and so had never learned any of it. It had seemed useless.
It made Sasuke curious what a Konoha corpse was doing in the Sound, but what was he to judge how sentimental Orochimaru was about his home village? Even if Sasuke had no love for the place beyond what was already out of reach, he couldn't exactly pretend to know what Orochimaru's twisted mind decided to care for.
One day, while Sasuke was way too busy and some grunts were way too mouthy, he ordered the walking-corpse to take care of the bastard spewing bullshit out of the wrong orifice and walked away.
It wasn't until Sasuke got to the cavernous room he practiced his sword forms at that the corpse came into view. Sasuke ran a hand over his face, about to snap at it to wait at the doorway and make sure he wasn't disturbed, when he glanced its way.
At first, Sasuke wasn't sure what he was seeing. He knew there were no mirrors in this room. But the corpse's mask was knocked off slightly, just enough that Sasuke could see the thing's right eye- or, what looked like Sasuke'e own right eye- staring back at him.
Alarmed and enraged at the possibility that Orochimaru had tried cloning Sasuke, he took two fury-fueled steps forward. The corpse didn't flinch, just let Sasuke plant a hand on its shoulder and rip the mask off.
What stared back confused Sasuke. He saw himself, yes, but he also saw something- someone- else. His expression was blank, and two creases lined his cheeks. It almost- it did- remind Sasuke of the face-lines that many Uchiha had.
And the corpse was Sasuke's age, if not younger. Sasuke blinked heavily, not sure how to handle that information.
Something trembled in Sasuke's heart. From confusion to red-hot anger. In this state, he pushed the mask into the Uchiha corpse's chest, harder than he needed to, and ran to where he knew Orochimaru was doing experiments.
All the while, he heard footsteps matching his.
"The corpse you reanimated to babysit me is an Uchiha."
Sasuke didn't mince his words, just glared daggers at the snake in front of him. As he did, the Uchiha corpse finally caught up to Sasuke, standing deferently behind him.
Orochimaru smiled. "There were a lot to go around." He rose an eyebrow, his eyes shifting over to the corpse in question. "Do you want him gone?"
Though he opened his mouth to scream, 'Yes! Obviously,' no words came out.
This corpse, the one that obediently and loyally helped him, was the only thing he had left of his people. The corpse even tried to commuicate with Sasuke, even if Sasuke had no idea what the hand gestures meant.
Yes, the corpse might be just instinct and memory puppeting around something long dead, but also, Sasuke didn't know if he could let it go.
He could even feel something radiating off of the corpse. Something like worry. Concern. Anxiety. Was he afraid to be deactivated?
In the end, Sasuke left like he entered: with balled fists and someone trailing behind him.
When they were finally alone once more, Sasuke's eyes flicked over to the corpse. He was always staring at Sasuke when he wasn't standing guard somewhere. It had always been kind of creepy, but now he just felt guilty.
He had put his mask back on. Evidently, he had put it back on before following Sasuke to Orochimaru. He must have had a reason for keeping his face hidden.
Sasuke looked at him, back and forth between his wringed-out hands and the corpse. Finally, he sighed. "I'm sorry," he finally said, shakily.
With those words, the corpse did something he had never done before. He came closer to Sasuke, outside of the ring of a respectable distance and sitting close enough that their knees were touching. The mask, ever-present, stared into Sasuke's face.
Carefully, Sasuke removed the mask once more. Gentler, this time. And he looked into the face of someone who could have been his friend, if things had gone differently.
If he had died during the massacre, at around twelve, and Sasuke had been seven back then, then this person should have been seventeen or eighteen. The age difference would explain away why they hadn't met, Sasuke guessed, but it still felt wrong that Sasuke couldn't greet this person by name.
"I'm sorry I couldn't stop Shisui," he said, his voice shaking. "I didn't know. I didn't realize in time."
Sasuke didn't know what else to say, especially not when the corpse's hands reached out and scooped up his own trembling ones.
It made Sasuke feel fragile and emotional, a way that he hadn't in a very, very long time. "I never should have trusted him," he said, looking at their intertwined hands.
Suddenly, their hands were tugged up, and Sasuke glanced to the Uchiha's face. While it was expressionless, he was slowly shaking his head back and forth 'no.'
It made Sasuke's chest feel like an empty cavern. "You must have known him better than I did," he said softly, unjoining their hands.
Very quickly, the Uchiha began making hand gestures, the same one over and over again. He did it without his expression changing, but there was a certain urgency to the movements that he made that made Sasuke think he was almost panicked.
So, Sasuke had misunderstood..? Maybe the Uchiha meant by shaking his head 'no' that... it wasn't Sasuke's fault. Maybe he was trying to comfort Sasuke. It seemed too good to be true.
Calmer than he had been, Sasuke sighed. "Why don't you stand guard? I'm going to sleep. I mean, you can't sleep, can you?"
After a moment of frozen time, the Uchiha corpse shook his head 'no.' So he couldn't sleep, then.
"Yeah, so just. Make sure I don't get murdered in my sleep or anything," Sasuke waved off. He reached behind himself and presented the mask back to the corpse. "Here. I can tell you like wearing it."
The Uchiha held the mask, looking impassively down at it, for a few seconds. Then, he put it back on, and stood up.
Things changed from there.
After a while, Sasuke, who never really had anything to say to anyone before this, began talking out loud to the corpse Uchiha.
It was a strange compulsion. The Uchiha corpse never responded to him, but stopped and turned and listened without fail. Sasuke knew that he didn't speak, but didn't know why.
Eventually, he got curious, and asked him. "Are you able to speak, at all?"
Without answering, the corpse rose his hands to take off his mask. He took care of the tie at the back of his head carefully, and then lowered it onto a table. Then, he made eye contact with Sasuke, and pulled down the high neck of his collar.
It was then that Sasuke understood how this person had died.
There was a large stitched-up cut that slashed across his neck. The skin looked grafted, probably by Orochimaru in an attempt to patch this person up. It looked awful, really. Like the person who had fixed it had no care for how it turned out beyond the functional.
"Your vocal cords were cut," Sasuke guessed. In turn, he got a response in the form of a short nod, raising the collar back over the scar.
It was a horrid reminder of Shisui's betrayal. "I'll kill him," he said, anger coursing through his blood.
The Uchiha corpse gave some sort of hand sign, and didn't react otherwise. He never did. It had never been an issue of concern when most of the time the corpse Uchiha had been wearing a mask. But now, the mask gone, it made Sasuke wonder.
Mellowing slightly, Sasuke sighed. "You don't ever show any emotion, either. Is that because you're dead?"
The corpse nodded once. Sasuke didn't know why, but the confirmation flooded him with relief. It wasn't that Sasuke wasn't trusted, there was another issue.
It made Sasuke want to give back. To return in kind. Just like he would reward Shisui's murders with death, Sasuke would repay kindness to this person. "Can I... Can I call you Uchiha-nii?" He didn't look at the corpse, feeling flustered and nervous in a way he hadn't in a long, long time. "I just- I know you should be older than me, and maybe if we knew each other when you were alive I would've called you something like that."
When Sasuke finally got the courage to look up, he was being stared at, the Uchiha corpse's head bobbing up and down even before Sasuke glanced up.
"Okay," Sasuke breathed. He felt more whole than he had in a long, long time. "Uchiha-nii it is."
"You know," Sasuke said one late night, the only other person in the room being the corpse Uchiha that never left his side. "I had an actual Uchiha-nii. My parents kept his name a secret, but he died as an infant. Way before I was born."
Sasuke didn't know why he was saying this. He didn't think anyone alive knew this- except for Shisui. But something made him want to tell Uchiha-nii.
"I always wondered what he would have been like." Sasuke closed his eyes where he had been lounging. "When I say I wondered, past tense, I mean to say that I haven't been thinking about him a lot recently. I kind of feel bad about it."
Opening his eyes, he saw that Uchiha-nii wasn't staring at the entryway the way he usually did. Instead, he was staring at Sasuke, his mask obfuscating his eyes.
Frowning, Sasuke looked over Uchiha-nii carefully. "You must have people you miss as well, right?" He had more he wanted to ask, but since Uchiha-nii couldn't speak, he had to ask questions one at a time.
Uchiha-nii hesitated, but nodded once, his gaze never leaving Sasuke.
Nodding back, Sasuke looked away from Uchiha-nii, and his eyes landed on sheets of paper and a pen laid neatly on Sasuke's desk. "Try writing their names," Sasuke suggested.
For what it was worth, Uchiha-nii did try. But the results were... not legible. As Uchiha-nii tried writing, Sasuke noticed that his fingers couldn't grasp the pen right. He realized then he had never seen Uchiha-nii perform any hand seals. The poor boy had to move his entire arm to write anything, and he wasn't having luck at that. He kept making strokes too long and too short and couldn't place those strokes in the correct place so it was a jumble of random strokes piled on top of each other.
Rigor mortis. Sasuke remembered the term from Orochimaru.
Biting his lip, Sasuke sighed. One day they would find out a better way to communicate. Just not today. "You can stop," Sasuke tried telling Uchiha-nii. When he didn't stop, Sasuke plucked the pen out of his hand. "Please," Sasuke pleaded when Uchiha-nii looked up at him, "I can't even read what you wrote." Besides, he thought to himself, It's uncomfortable to be reminded that you're a corpse.
He only got a blank stare back.
When Sasuke went to kill Orochimaru, he was worried that Uchiha-nii would... deactivate.
He still did it. But there was a pool of worry that sat in his chest, that something would go wrong and he would loose whatever Uchiha-nii was to him.
But instead of being collapsed to the ground or turned to dust, Uchiha-nii was standing, waiting for him. His head was just slightly tilted to the side as if in curiosity or surprise.
"We need to get out of here," Sasuke told him, and started running. Footsteps followed behind him and they ran out of the caverns, into the sunlight, and then some.
They finally stopped when Sasuke slowed down at the sight of a river, waltzing up to it and kneeling so that he could wash his face. Uchiha-nii did the same, taking off his mask within Sasuke's peripheral vision and splashing his face with river water.
Out of curiosity, Sasuke looked over at Uchiha-nii. A jolt went through Sasuke's body as he realized that his face was twisted up oddly- Had he been injured? It was only when he began approaching Uchiha-nii that he realized aloud, "You're smiling."
The smile was still kind of present, but Uchiha-nii's face was now screwed into a kind of confusion. Whatever jutsu that was on him to stop him from emoting, it had ended with Orochimaru's death. Eventually, though, Uchiha-nii gave a small nod. His grin was awkward, like he wasn't used to the expression, but it was still bright.