𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑮𝒊𝒓𝒍 𝑾𝒉𝒐'𝒅 𝑩𝒆𝒕𝒓𝒂𝒚 𝒉𝒆𝒓 𝑽𝒊𝒍𝒍𝒂𝒈𝒆
Tags: Kabuto Yakushi x f!Character, experiments, mutation, a death, fluff, hurt/comfort, angst, trauma bonding, slow burn, emotional tension
Act II, Part 8 (2/2): “Whispers Between the Lines”
Authors Note: ok guys so i know it is canonically believed Kabuto injected himself with Orochimaru and the other three at the same time for the sake of this story i changed it. It is never directly said or shown to us so I am filling in some blanks. He will inject himself with Orochimaru it just wont be now. That’s it.
Kana sat on the edge of the stone balcony outside her assigned quarters, legs dangling freely above the high cliffside. Below, the valley slept, swallowed in darkness, the forests silent except for the occasional bird chirping.
She didn’t notice the wind anymore. Not the coldness of the stone. Not the way her chakra had started to pulse differently since the last time she touched Kabuto.
He had kissed her like he wanted something more than power. He had held her like someone afraid of losing something he hadn’t yet claimed. And now…
No word. No sign. Not even the soft flicker of his chakra from somewhere distant.
At first, she had waited. Convinced herself he was busy. Orochimaru demanded a lot. Then the days dragged on, and the silence became heavier than the guilt she’d buried when she first thought of turning her back on the village.
She asked around. Quietly. Carefully.
But no one spoke Orochimaru’s name anymore. Only in whispers. Rumors.
Like the air had swallowed it whole.
Kana knew then: he was dead. And Kabuto… Kabuto had disappeared inside himself.
She moved through the forest like a shadow. No flare of chakra. No sound of a step. Just the long whisper of her hair trailing behind her like smoke.
She wasn’t supposed to go there. He had only shown her once, from a distance. Just enough to leave it branded in her memory, yet always out of reach.
She remembered the way he had looked that day, standing beside her on the cliff’s edge, glasses gleaming. “That’s where the real work happens,” he had said.
Not because of curiosity.
Angry, he left her. Angry, he made her care when he didn’t. Angry, she still wanted to believe he felt things.
Kana found the entrance beneath a jagged outcropping of stone half-swallowed by ivy. It was colder here. The air stung in her lungs with every breath. She pressed her fingers to the seal etched into the rocks—chakra-based security—but it was old, fractured. He hadn’t been back to repair it.
It let her in without a fight.
The tunnel beyond was narrow, breathing with stale air and echoes. She walked slower than usual, suppressing even the instinct to listen for danger. Whatever was here, she wasn’t here to fight it.
The walls became smoother the further she went, chiseled clean by hand—Kabuto’s hand, probably. The space gradually widened until it opened into something that didn’t feel like a hideout anymore.
It pulsed faintly with life; fluorescent jars lining the walls, tubes webbing the ceiling like veins, some humming with chakra she didn’t recognize. Organic. Wrong.
And there, deeper still, something groaned.
Kana followed the sound without thinking. The heat in the air increased with each step. A strange scent—like burning antiseptic and iron—hit her nose.
Around the final corner, she saw him.
He stood hunched over a large cylindrical chamber, breathing ragged, his body trembling as a soft glow pulsed from the fluid inside. His white cloak had fallen to the ground, soaked with sweat and blood. His torso was bare, marked with serpentine seals trailing from his spine to his abdomen.
A Few Minutes Before She Entered the Hideout (then continues in the previous scene)
A thick, segmented injector coiled from his left shoulder into the vat, drawing out a luminous violet-blue mixture.
He was submerged in the ritual now, veins flaring with borrowed strength, body cracking under the fusion.
The syringe hissed as the last of Suigetsu’s liquefied DNA merged with the plasma in his spinal tap. His body jolted.
“Jūgo’s rage… Karin’s vitality… Suigetsu’s fluidity…” he gasped, sweat rolling down his jaw. “You were all incomplete alone… but within me… complete. I’ll perfect you.”
He collapsed to one knee, his hand gripping the wooden arm of the chair to stay conscious. A violent pulse surged through his chest, rippling beneath his skin like a living parasite.
Kabuto’s face twisted, teeth gritting. His chakra distorted, heavy, and warped. The laboratory trembled as if rejecting the abomination he was becoming.
He froze. Narrowed eyes scanned the darkness. Even with chakra masked, he knew. Her presence had always been different.
“You shouldn’t be here, Kana.” his voice was hoarse. Half-feral.
She ignored the warning. “I waited. For days. You didn’t come.”
“I was busy,” he hissed, returning to the panel, hand trembling as he adjusted the flow of chakra into his body. His voice had no malice—just strain. “The transition phase can’t be interrupted.”
She stared at the vat. Inside were fragments—bits of tissue, DNA strands bound in artificial chakra, blood…..fragments.
Her breath trembled. “You’re fusing them into yourself.”
He finally looked at her.
“In the shinobi world… where those without talent are nothing… those who have none can just steal it from those who do.”
The words hit her harder than she expected.
Because she understood that.
Kana stepped closer. Her eyes flicked over the veins pushing against his skin, his hands shaking from the overwhelming genetic cocktail he’d absorbed.
“You’re hurting yourself,” she said.
He laughed under his breath. “No. I’m becoming something more.”
“And what happens to you when there’s nothing left?”
She didn’t know what she expected. Tears? Anger? A glimmer of the boy she once saw behind his glasses?
Instead, she saw herself.
Broken. Fueled by grief. Willing to become something else because who they once were hadn’t been enough.
She crouched beside him as his knees buckled. His body jolted again, the mutation still working beneath his skin. The light of the vat dimmed. The ritual is nearing completion.
He collapsed to the floor.
This time, she didn’t hesitate.
She reached out, her hand brushing his cheek. His skin was fevered, damp, but still alive. He blinked slowly, his gaze swimming, unfocused.
Her thumb traced beneath his eye, wiping a bead of sweat away. Not judgment. Not fear. Just… care.
And she sat there with him, in the hollow of serpents, wondering when the line between savior and monster had finally blurred.
And why it no longer scared her.
His breathing slowed but remained unsteady, chest rising in shallow, uneven patterns. His skin glistened with sweat, clinging to sinew pulled taut under the strain of cellular war. The serum had done more than mutate his chakra—it had drained him.
Kana sat cross-legged beside him on the cold stone, her eyes never leaving his face.
The tension in his jaw. The slight twitch of a finger. The way, even unconsciously, Kabuto’s body refused to let go of control.
“Always fighting,” she murmured, brushing his damp hair back from his forehead. “Even now.”
Her voice trembled, but not with fear.
It was grief. And something dangerously close to tenderness.
She slid her fingers beneath his neck, lifting his head just enough to rest it in her lap. He didn’t stir—not really. A faint breath escaped his lips, and for a fleeting moment, he seemed… small. Not a scientist. Not a manipulator. Just a man who had buried himself in someone else’s ambition.
Her hand moved over his arm. Her chakra buzzed faintly in response to the mutation under his skin. The fusion was holding—but only barely.
“You didn’t need to do this alone,” she whispered.
She didn’t mean the experiment.
She stayed there in silence, running her fingers through his hair, grounding herself in the rhythm of his breath. The lab’s glow painted him in shades of sickly green and violet, but she could still find pieces of the man she knew beneath the monster he was trying to become.
Her anger toward him had melted.
Only something else remained.
After a while, she spoke again. Barely above a breath.
“I used to think people in the village could never understand me. I was too quiet. Too strange. Too cold.”
Her eyes lowered, her thumb stroking along his temple.
“They taught me to hate that part of myself. To pretend. Smile at the other girls. Be obedient in the academy. Numb during missions.”
“They never wanted me. They wanted a version of me they could control.”
“But you… Never asked me to change. You let me be. Even when I didn’t know what I was.”
A bitter smile tugged at her mouth.
“I thought that meant you saw me.”
She looked down at him, his eyes still closed, breath shallow. She didn’t expect a reply. Maybe it was better this way. Safer to speak when she didn’t have to see how he might twist her words into another calculation.
Her other hand, the one not tangled in his hair, moved to rest gently over his heart.
“I don’t know what you feel for me, Kabuto. If anything.”
“But I care about you. More than I should. More than I’ve ever let myself say.”
Her breath hitched, shaky now, like the confession had broken something loose inside her. She looked away, blinking quickly.
“…And I think I hate the village for that.”
She felt the weight of those words settle into the air. Solid. Irrevocable.
It wasn’t just her loyalty that had cracked.
The girl who had once bowed her head to the Hokage’s statue now sat in a lab of forbidden science, cradling a traitor in her lap, whispering secrets she could never take back.
A groan escaped him. Kabuto’s fingers twitched.
He shifted slowly, muscles protesting, eyes fluttering behind his lids. His voice came rough, groggy, pulled from somewhere between sleep and pain.
He didn’t open his eyes fully. Didn’t look at her yet.
It wasn’t curiosity in his voice. It was disbelief.
Like the idea that someone might come for him without being called was impossible.
Kana blinked slowly. She felt her throat tighten—but her voice was steady.
“You went silent. For days.”
She smoothed his damp hair from his face again, the gesture slow, unashamed.
“You left me wondering if you were even still alive.”
Finally, his gaze met hers. Unfocused, unguarded. For once, there was no clever glint in his eyes—only exhaustion and something softer, too unfamiliar to be named.
“…You shouldn’t have come,” he rasped.
He closed his eyes again, not in dismissal—but in surrender. Like the fight in him, for now, was over.
“And yet,” she added gently, “I’m here.”
She leaned down, her forehead brushing his for just a second, just enough to feel the heat still radiating off him.
“You didn’t ask me to come,” she murmured. “But you didn’t have to.”
She eased her hand back to his chest, still feeling the chaotic thrum of shifting chakra beneath his skin.
A beat of silence passed between them, deep and fragile.
“I came because I couldn’t stand the thought of losing someone else I… trust.”
The word didn’t feel right. But it was the closest she could let herself say.
Her hand stayed on his chest, grounding him. Grounding herself.
Kabuto’s breathing slowed again. Not from pain this time—but from something gentler. Something like safety. Something like rest.
And for once, Kana was the one who gave it to him.
Kabuto’s body trembled beneath her hand. The mutations under his skin were still settling, veins swollen and twitching with unstable chakra threads.
He shouldn’t have been conscious, but the pain kept him tethered.
Kana moved gently beneath him, lowering his head to a folded cloth from a nearby workbench. She rose to her knees, scanning the lab for something sterile. Her eyes found a clean towel, a small basin of water, and something that looked like a rudimentary chakra-dampening salve.
She dipped the cloth into the water, wrung it out, and returned to him.
“You’re going to feel this,” she warned quietly.
He gave a faint huff of breath. “Wouldn’t be the first time.”
She pressed the cloth to his side, dabbing where the skin had cracked and split around one of the more aggressive fusions. He flinched, but didn’t pull away.
Then his voice broke the quiet, low, rasping, but slightly clearer now.
“Where’d you learn how to do this?”
Kana kept working, her expression unreadable. “You think I was raised by medics?”
“No,” he murmured, a weak smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth. “You’re not precise enough.”
She arched a brow, but didn’t look at him. “Should I let you bleed out then?”
“Didn’t say I wasn’t grateful.”
Silence again, for a few breaths.
“I just didn’t expect you to know how to… take care of someone.”
Her hands stilled for half a second. The cloth paused against his ribs.
Then she resumed. Slower this time. More deliberate.
“I’ve always taken care of someone,” she said quietly. “Just never anyone else.”
He blinked, eyelids heavy. “You mean yourself.”
She nodded. “Since I was a child.”
She dipped the cloth again. Wiped blood from the edge of the scarring seal on his shoulder.
“There’s no jutsu in what I do. Just learning how to stop pain. Slow bleeding. Keep the cold out.”
He watched her hands for a long time.
“Most people break when they’re left alone that long.”
Kana didn’t answer right away.
Then, calmly: “Most people aren’t raised to believe being broken is normal.”
The words hung between them like incense smoke—thin, curling, full of things neither of them dared to say aloud.
Kana shifted, uncorking the salve. It smelled medicinal, sour, and pungent. She scooped some onto her fingers and smoothed it along the stretch of his shoulder. His body jerked once beneath her touch, but he didn’t push her away.
She was careful. Focused. Every motion meant to soothe, not provoke.
Kabuto let out a long breath through his nose.
Kana shrugged lightly. “You’re not the first.”
His eyes flicked up to her.
“And you’re not afraid of what I’m becoming?”
He blinked again. “Why not?”
Kana met his gaze then, firm and unwavering.
“Because I don’t fear people anymore.”
She paused, then added, softer:
“Only being used by them.”
That silenced him completely.
She finished tending to the worst of the wounds, wrapping a clean strip of cloth across his shoulder and over his chest. Her fingers brushed his skin again—warmer now, no longer trembling. The pain wasn’t gone, but it had dulled.
So had the distance between them.
Kana sat back slightly, hands folded in her lap, gaze downcast but calm.
Kana began to shift away, fingers brushing her knees as she pulled back to give him space.
But then his voice, low, almost unsure, broke the quiet.
His eyes found hers, glazed but focused, something unreadable stirring behind them.
“Just for a while,” he added, like he didn’t trust himself to ask more than that.
Kana’s breath caught in her throat. He didn’t reach for her—didn’t command or coax. He just lay there, open in a way she had never seen from him. Not in all the time they’d known each other.
Instead, she moved slowly, lying down beside him on the stone floor, her body curling toward his, careful not to press too hard against the places that still pulsed with new chakra. She rested her hand gently on his chest again, her head near the crook of his shoulder.
For a moment, neither of them spoke.
Then, almost breathlessly, Kabuto murmured, “You’re warm.”
His voice was small. Honest. Like he hadn’t meant to say it aloud.
Kana smiled faintly against his skin.
“So are you,” she whispered.
He turned slightly, enough to wrap an arm around her. It was shaky at first, but then settled. Her hand slid up to rest against the side of his neck, her thumb gently stroking the edge of his jaw. His body tensed—just for a moment. Then it melted into hers.
She could feel the way his heartbeat slowed beneath her palm.
The way his breath synced with hers, little by little.
No masks. No lies. No titles.
Two pieces of something sharp and unspoken, folding into silence.
“I won’t tell anyone,” she said softly. “That you asked me to stay.”
He let out a quiet breath—half a laugh, half a sigh.
She closed her eyes, letting herself feel it: his warmth, his breath, the faint scent of crushed herbs and old blood, the weight of his hand resting at her back.
This wasn’t manipulation.
It was something else. Something rare.
Something dangerously close to peace.
And for tonight, she let herself have it.
