Butterfly to Chaos (混沌へ蝶)

Prologue: Confessions of the Snake

Year 753- Second Shinobi War

"Orochimaru?" said Tsunade in surprised when she spotted her old teammate inside a medic tent, but paled when she saw the state of his bloodied uniform. Her mind immediately jumped to the worst possible conclusion and she darted into the tent. "What happened? Where's Nawa—No…"

"It was an explosive trap. By the time I realized what happened, it was too late," said Orochimaru solemnly as she watched her eyes rest on the unrecognizable mangled corpse on the table.

"It can't be… That can't…" Tsunade shook her head slowly, unwilling to believe what her eyes told her.

Without a word, Orochimaru pulled out a familiar crystal necklace and pressed it into her shaking hands. She choked with a strangled whimper and hastily pressed a hand over her mouth to keep it from escaping. The snake sannin gave her an apologetic gaze and a consoling hand on her shoulder before he turned to leave the tent. Just as he stepped out and closed the flap behind him, Tsunade's heart-wrenching cry of agony rang out through the basecamp.

He paid no heed to the gazes that fell on him as he made his way through the camp. No one approached him, nor did they stop him when he left the safety of the camp and into the surrounding forest. To them, he had not only loss his entire team of genin, but he had to break the news to his oldest and closest teammate that he had failed in protecting her only living family. He was entitled a moment of silence to himself, to grieve.

…Except he had no interest or reason to grieve. If anything, he was elated that everyone fell for such a farce. True, his students had foolishly fallen to a well-placed explosive trap, but contrary to what others thought, it was one that he could have saved them from. He only chose not to because it provided the perfect opportunity to obtain a specimen he couldn't have prior to this misfortune.

Orochimaru sped through the forest until the camp was long out of sight and if anyone came searching for him, it would take quite some time for them to do so. He raised a thumb to his lips and hastily pierced the skin with his canines before running it through the correct hand seals for his snake summons. With a poof and cloud of smoke, a monstrous sized snake appeared and opened its mouth to reveal a relatively unharmed genin in slumber.

"…I am truly sorry Tsunade, for your loss, but I promise, I will take great care of your precious little brother," rasped out Orochimaru with a deep chuckle. "Isn't that right? Nawaki?"

"Ugh…" Nawaki groaned as he returned to the world of consciousness. At first his vision blurred at the dimness of his surroundings, but then his eyes focused and he found himself in an unfamiliar room.

The last he remembered was charging through the forest with his teammates on a mission, but then he stepped on something and… His eyes widened in horror as he jolted up and tumbled out of bed in a disheveled heap. The groggy genin panicked as he tried to untangle himself from the mess of sheets.

"Finally awake I see," rasped out her familiar voice of his jounin sensei.

"Orochimaru sensei!" shouted Nawaki in relief as he glanced to the seat next to the bed. "What happened? Where's Hiroto and Ayaka? Where are we?"

"One question at a time," reproached the older man as he got up to pull him out of the tangle of sheets. "What do you remember last?"

Nawaki frowned as he struggled to draw up a memory, but what he managed was hazy at most. "We were on a mission, I triggered a trap and then… I don't remember. Sensei, what happened?"

"As you surmised, you triggered a trap, Hiroto and Ayaka were both caught in the blast," said Orochimaru slowly as to not overwhelm him in his current state. "You were the only one I could save."

"W-what?" said Nawaki weakly as he shook his head. "No… no, that can't be true! Hiroto and Ayaka… they can't be dead! They can't!"

"They are," confirmed Orochimaru once more as he watched the guilt cross the boy's face. "You couldn't have known the trap you triggered would kill them."

Nawaki's expression worsened with each carefully chosen word he used to further rub salt into the poor boy's wound. He made sure to indict him with each word to induce the boy into self-blame and guilt.

"It's my fault," whispered the boy miserably as he reached up to clench a hand to his chest. No doubt to ease the sinking feeling of guilt rising within him. However, in doing so he realized something was missing and quickly patted himself down. "W-where is it?"

"Where is what?" asked Orochimaru calmly, inwardly enjoying his student's distress.

"Grandpa's necklace! The one sis gave me!" said Nawaki in a panic as he searched for it. "I must've lost it when… She's going to hate me!"

"I'm sure Tsunade won't be that furious. It's just a priceless Konoha heirloom," said Orochimaru soothingly.

"She's going to kill me!" Nawaki grabbed his hair, close to hyperventilating. "I can't go back to Konoha. I-I!"

"Calm down," said Orochimaru as he placed his hand on his shoulder. "Panicking will get you nowhere and running away wouldn't help either."

"Sensei… what do I do?" asked Nawaki in desperation.

Orochimaru breathed out a slow sighed as he stared down at his panicked student. "I probably shouldn't do this… but…"

"But?" urged Nawaki hopefully.

"With the war in full swing, I could likely fake your death along with Hiroto and Ayaka's, but it'd be a waste and a loss for Konoha if you decide to run away like this," said Orochimaru. "I do not recommend this path. You have such a bright and potential future ahead of you. You wanted to become a hokage, did you not?"

"But… how could I face everyone? I got my teammates killed! I lost grandpa's precious necklace! I'm…" Nawaki gritted his teeth.

The room grew silent as Orochimaru made a show of reluctance.

"…Fine," said Orochimaru as if he finally relented. "I'll fake your death, but you will work to redemption. I expect you to eventually get over this and return to Konoha one day."

"Sensei…" said Nawaki in admiration.

"I have several labs set up the outskirts of Konoha with volatile experiments I've been working on for the benefit of the village. With the war going as it is now, I could use someone to help me watch over its progress," said Orochimaru.

"Eh?" said Nawaki, wide-eyed and surprised. "You trust me to do this?"

"As I've said before, you have great potential," said Orochimaru.

"I won't let you down!" said Nawaki.

"Good," said Orochimaru with a fond grin.

Unbeknownst to the boy, he had gassed the room with an anxiety inducing compound that deters one's cognitive ability to think logically. On top of drugging his naïve student, he had also casted a mild coercion genjutsu to convinced him of his guilt and wrong-doing. It was pitifully easy to fool the boy. Had Orochimaru been moral conscious, he might've felt guilty.

The benefits outweighs the cost, the progress he could make in his research with a live Senju specimen was worth any moral damnation he bore.

Year 754- The Assistant

For a full year, Orochimaru had his young assistant tend to the various chores in his labs. In that time, he was careful to not reveal the less savory experiments while he carefully drugged and weaved the young Senju in a web of lies and genjutsu. With the ruse of exposure-risk, he drew blood and perform various tests on the clueless boy, all in claiming for the benefit of his health.

Nawaki never expected anything wrong with what he did. The blind faith the boy showed, gave him an unintended wave of glee and pleasure each time he got away with progressing in his research. He worked with what little samples he managed to steal from Tsunade in the past, but those samples were hardly viable by the time he got them back to his labs.

Not even a stasis seal could preserve the pitiful sample he retrieved. To have Nawaki was a godsend. Live Senju blood worked much better compared to the ones that's long passed its life expectancy. He had trained the boy in water and earth based jutsus in hopes that he would develop the same wood-based technique the First Hokage wielded, but the boy never showed any development in that path.

However, that never stopped Orochimaru from continuing with grafting the boy's cells in other subjects in hopes it would manifest in another body. It seemed like things went well according to his plans, but like any plan, there were hiccups along the way.

"Hey sensei… how's my sis doing?" asked Nawaki quietly.

"Do you want to return to Konoha?" asked Orochimaru, inwardly annoyed at the boy's bouts of homesickness.

"A little," mumbled Nawaki as he went through their usual training sessions. In keeping him as a subject, Orochimaru need him in prime condition. It was unacceptable to allow the boy to degrade in any manner. "But I don't think I'm worthy of redemption yet."

A bit of relief crossed Orochimaru at his words, but he made a mental note to adjust the drugs he used on the boy. He was building immunity to the initial drug and regaining cognitive reasoning. That could not be allowed to happen.

Year 755- Budding Seal Master

"Orochimaru sensei?" said Nawaki in surprised when Orochimaru returned to his lab littered in seal work.

"What are you doing?" asked the newly named sannin. He had just returned from a near death mission with Tsunade and Jiraiya after they faced off Hanzo.

"I got bored, so I went through your library," replied Nawaki sheepishly as he held up an open scroll. "Grandma Mito used to give me lessons in sealing when I was younger before she passed. I just thought I do a refresher. It seems a whole lot easier compared to what she taught back then."

Orochimaru found both his brows raised in surprise. "You understand this?"

"It's not really hard, Grandma Mito had harder seal formulas," explained Nawaki.

"Why didn't you take up the sealing arts if it's easy?" asked Orochimaru with a frown as he picked up the boy's notes and sheets of seal work.

"Well… jutsus look way cooler! And you don't need to prepare ahead of time to do it," said Nawaki as he scratched his head. "Actually, Grandma Mito also taught me how to do seals without ink and paper, but that's harder and I'm not that good at it."

"…Show me what you can do," said Orochimaru.

What he found in Nawaki was more than adequate in the sealing arts. Fury coursed through him that his idiotic student would choose to disregard such a useful talent because it didn't look cool of all things. While he himself was no master in the field, he had to grudgingly admit that his teammate Jiraiya excelled in better than him in that regard, he knew enough to guide him through the beginning of seal crafting and tasked him to create something worthwhile that he could possibly use in the future.

Year 756- Experimentation Breakthroughs

"Great," murmured Orochimaru distractedly as he concentrated on the notes around him.

The eugenic experiments with Hashirama's cells weren't going well, at least a quarter of the children he grafted the cells into died within the first week. While the war made it easy to gather test subjects for his experiments, it was not a route to rely on forever. He had a feeling that someone began to suspect the trend in missing children. He needed to find a way to stop their deterioration before they completely die.

"Sensei! I got the stasis seal to work!" shouted Nawaki in glee as he showed the man the petri-dish with a stasis seal. "It's been weeks and the cells haven't grown or died."

…How convenient.

Year 757- Adolescence

"How could you keep it from me that sis left Konoha?" snapped Nawaki furiously as he blew up sections of his lab with explosive seals.

"What would you have done even if I told you?" asked Ororchimaru as he side stepped his flying lab bench. "It's not like you would've gone back to Konoha to stop her."

"That's not the point! Why didn't you stop her?" demanded the young man.

"With what?" asked Orochimaru calmly. "Your sister has no love for the village, not with your death and the death of her lover.

"But it's our home!" protested Nawaki.

"Not any more as it seems," said Orochimaru calmly. "It's hard to fault her after her supposed losses. You did the same."

"That…" Nawaki gritted his teeth. "That's not fair!"

"Life's not fair," retorted Orochimaru. "If you're quite done with your tantrum—"

"I hate you! I hate you sensei!" shouted Nawaki as he ran out and blowing up the doorway as he left.

Orochimaru took a deep breath and let out a low and exasperated sigh. That was the fifth doorway this month… Compared to his earlier outbursts, this one about Tsunade was considered mild. Maybe he shouldn't have trained him in the sealing arts.

"Damn hormonal teenagers," muttered the man under his breath.

Year 758- Experimentation

After enduring months of Nawaki's various outbursts of anger and mood swings, Orochimaru finally found himself at his limit and decided to resolve the issue by performing experiments that he normally restrained himself from on his student.

"S-sensei, what are you doing?" asked Nawaki as he cautiously backed away from his pale mentor.

"Hold still," ordered Orochimaru as he came at him with a jar with a single eye. He had taken it from the corpse of an Uchiha that died in battle near the end of the Second Shinobi War, the other eye was unsalvageable.

"Is that a sharingan?" screeched Nawaki in horror. "Where did you even get that?"

"It'll be over soon," said Orochimaru as he pinned the boy down and dug out a single eye. Never before did he find the sound of the boy's scream so pleasant. He should've done it ages ago.

Year 759- Discarded

Orochimaru occasionally found himself humoring the thought of taking on another student when tuning out the yammering of his current ward. Preferably a young malleable mind that's not going through the hormonal changes of a teenage boy. Young children were much easier to handle and if they didn't listen, he wouldn't have to use much effort or drugs to knock them out until he felt like dealing with them again.

"Sensei! Are you listening to me?" growled out Nawaki.

After the sharingan implant, it only seem to have worsened the young man's mood swings. While transplantation isn't completely unheard of, it's not often done and even so, they usually had a low success rate. His idle whim to plant one in his student might've been highly driven by the annoyance he had at him.

Even now, as the young man rambled on whatever it was he rambled about, he found himself regretting ever faking his death in the first place.

"Sensei!" snapped Nawaki before teen's eyes widened in shock and he found a sharp pain at his neck as it split open and he choked on his own blood. "W-why?"

By the time Orochimaru realized what he's done out of his moment of annoyance, the teen had dropped to the ground and bled out.

"Tch," hissed the sannin in annoyance with a click of his tongue. He needed to learn to reign in his temper. Now he lost a perfectly good specimen.

Year 760-Regret

At first, Orochimaru had thoroughly enjoyed the silence and the absolute lack of teenage angst. However, as the lull of peace passed and the Third Shinobi War was well on its way, he found his labs surprisingly quiet and somewhat lonely. Dare he think he actually missed his annoying student?

He paused at the thought before an unsightly snort escaped him. Perish the thought, he could do without his incessant chattering.

Year 761- Specimen Shopping

As the Third Shinobi War went well on its way, Orochimaru found himself eying the budding prodigies produced from the war effort. He was in sore need of an assistant. While he regretted little over killing Nawaki, his student did have a natural talent and a reasonable work ethic that made his life easier. He supposed her could always go looking for another one, but finding one as naïve and gullible as his previous student might prove to be a bit more difficult than he imagined.

He saw Jiraiya's brat student in passing and noticed he had taken a student of his own. The Hatake prodigy, if he wasn't mistaken. From what he glanced of the child's profile, he had no kekkai genkai to speak of and excelled purely through his own skills. Orochimaru had thought of a possibility in snatching up the boy, but after seeing the silver-haired child's serious demeanor and attachment to the brat Minato, he doubt he would be able to hold much sway on the boy.

Idly, he noted that if he hadn't stolen away and killed Nawaki, his student would've been the same age as Jiraiya's brat. The idiot might've had his own students too if he hadn't left the village. His mind didn't linger on the thought for long, who needed succession if you could carry on, on your lonesome.

His experiments on cell-grafting and reproducing the wood release ability bore a single fruit, a child that Danzo hastily snatched up from his labs and renamed Kinoe for his Root Ops. The act barely even peeved Orochimaru as the experiments had wasted ample amount of his time and even then, the child showed none of the regenerative properties that Hashirama carried.

"Hmm…" hummed Orochimaru as he glanced towards the Academy in passing. Maybe it was about time he took on another student.

Year 762- Revival

Four times… he tried taking on a genin team four times in the last year and in those four times, he failed every single one of them. The quality of shinobi had gone downhill since he graduated. It might be some time before he could find a suitable replacement for Nawaki.

However, he was not the least bit downtrodden by the fact. He had wanted to test out the Edo Tensei Jutsu for quite some time. This was about as good as any other time to do so. There were enough prisoners of war around for them to not be missed.

"Kuchiyose: Edo Tensei," murmured Orochimaru as he went through the correct hand seals for the jutsu.

The man before him screamed as the jutsu took effect and his body was encased in dust and ash until it took the appearance of his once dead student.

"…Orochimaru sensei?" murmured Nawaki groggily as he blinked his mismatching eyes open. One with the sharingan and the other the familiar golden brown the young man shared with his sister.

"Welcome back Nawaki," said Orochimaru.

Year 763- Acclimation

In the year it took to get acclimated to having his dead student back, Orochimaru realized that killing his student at the height of his hormone raging adolescence was the worst thing he could've done. The brat was still emotionally unstable and prone to bouts of rage and indiscriminate destruction. To make it worse, there was no chance of him growing out of it. He had damned himself and his student.

On the other hand, he did manage to find a new student to take under his command. A young girl named Anko Mitarashi. She was still at the tender age of ten and hopefully it would be a good few years before he had to deal with her hormonal issues. He would have to wait until she was ready before he could get rid of Nawaki once more.

He supposed he could always develop a seal to wipe his personality completely, but that defeats the purpose of reviving him in the first place. He needed someone with a brain to handle his workload, not a mindless drone. If he wanted one of those, he wouldn't have to use a forbidden jutsu for it.

Year 764- Blunder

In all his years, Orochimaru prided himself to be able to reasonably predict what may happen with each of his actions, but this… He did not foresee this happening.

"Argh!" screamed Orochimaru at the loss of his arm, Nawaki had blown his arm off with a well-placed explosive seal.

"Orochimaru sensei," grounded out his student with angry tears in his eyes as he stood over him. "Why?"

With Anko as his newest apprentice, he had hoped that he could finally replace Nawaki, but the boy didn't take it well when he tried to cancel the Edo Tensei jutsu. The boy was more observant than he thought, carefully planting the seal without his knowing and blasting it off at the first sign that he would try to cancel the jutsu.

"Heh, to fall by your hand," grunted Orochimaru with a weak twitch of his lips and a soft chuckle, the rapid blood loss had already driven his vision blurry. "This was not within my calculations."

"Sensei?" called out Nawaki, his voice still filled with hurt and betrayal, but there was an ounce of confusion as well.

"You turned out to be more promising than I imagined," murmured Orochimaru. He tried using his chakra to seal off the surface of the wound to keep the blood loss at the minimum, but he was no Tsunade, he held little expertise in medical jutsus. If only he started the modifications to his body sooner. "If only I knew…"

"Sensei?" said Nawaki as he towered over him before he completely faded.

If only he knew…

"SENSEI!" screamed Nawaki.

The world turned dark.

Author's notes: And… Orochimaru is dead. How will things proceed without the infamous snake sannin in the future? Stick around to find out!