The stench of rot never left him. Not truly. Even now, years from the warfront, all it took was the faintest whiff of damp earth to recall the trenches. Not trenches of defense - no, by the war’s end they had become swollen graves, repositories for the surplus of flesh the medics could no longer tend. He remembered limbs stacked like firewood, their veins black and distended, leaking into the mud. Even the body bags had twitched sometimes, heaving faintly as blood made its last feeble attempt to cling to life. Orochimaru had stepped over them without pause. It was not cruelty, not mercy - merely efficiency. What was one more scream added to the countless that already echoed?
And yet, the memory clung to him like damp mist.
He lowered his gaze to his own wrist. Pale skin, almost translucent under the lamplight, revealed the map of veins beneath. Thin, blue-black cords, pulsing faithfully. Too faithfully. He pressed a fingertip along one, watching the flesh blanch then flush, watching the pulse continue, stubborn and relentless. It should have reassured him. Instead, it made bile rise in his throat. For he had seen too many of those pulses rupture, stutter, stop. He had seen men spill themselves hollow in the mud when one fragile thread snapped.
It struck him, as it always did, how laughably delicate the human body was. A cage of brittle rivers. Break one, and eternity ended in silence.
The battlefield had taught him that lesson well. Mortality was not a mystery - it was a grotesque inevitability. He had stared it down in the trenches, in the cries of comrades, in the bags that writhed before stiffening still. And when he looked at his own skin, he saw no exception. No privilege. Only the same fragile lattice waiting to betray him.
A thin smile slithered across his lips. Perhaps that was why the old stories spoke to him so. The White Snake. A symbol of rebirth, of immortality, of endless renewal. A creature that shed what was dying, discarded weakness, and began again. Not a prisoner of veins and flesh, but a spirit eternal.
He traced the line of blue on his wrist again, but this time the disgust softened into something else - anticipation. If veins were chains, he would unravel them. If flesh was brittle, he would molt it. The battlefield had shown him decay; he would answer with transformation. He would peel away humanity itself until only eternity remained.
Let the others rot in their trenches. Orochimaru would become the snake that never died.
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