Rating: M-ish for future events

Warnings: More or less a fix-it, Orochimaru's orange-and-blue morality, his various issues/bitterness/grudges, vague angst, so much plotting, etc.

Word Count: ~5200

Pairings: Eventual Sakumo/Orochimaru, possibly Kakashi/Obito in the future because everyone knows what flavor of trash I am

Summary: For the record, this is not how his grand defection from Konoha was supposed to go. (Or, Orochimaru attempts to save the world. Hatake Sakumo may have been part of the plan, but he's also very much an unexpected complication.)

Disclaimer: Hah. I want some of whatever Kishimoto was smoking, but Naruto's not mine.

Notes: So this is about 45% ramabear's fault (go read her fics, everyone ever, because they're amazing and so is she) and 35% EmeraldBenu's fault (who is amazing and fantastic and my partner in crime and headcanons for the entirety of forever) and 20% me wanting to revisit this crack ship I'm inexplicably fond of. Through a lens of time travel, b/c that's my kink. Uh, sorry. Only not.

(The title is from the Smashing Pumpkins song of the same name. Chapter titles come from ee cummings again, this time If I Believe In Death. Don't judge me.)

Bullet With Butterfly Wings

1. where dwells the breath of all persisting stars

He comes back to some semblance of self in a meeting, with voices echoing all around. There's a rush like vertigo, like standing on the shores of the ocean, dropping a pebble into the water and watching the ripples become tsunamis half a world away.

Shift—

Twist—

Change.

He staggers, the familiar floor beneath him lurching wildly, but no hands grab for him

(he doesn't expect them to, but)

and he falls, tumbles hard to land on his knees. There's an empty aching in his chest, the taste of paradise lingering hot-sharp and rotted-sweet on his tongue, but it may as well be ashes

(he dreamed he dreamed he dreamed but it doesn't matter what he dreamed anymore does it? how many of them died in their dreams and never woke at all?)

for all that it really means. A cough tears itself from his throat, hard enough to make him gag, and he chokes on that falsely perfect dream, the one no man or woman alive would believe him capable of having ("How many would believe me, child, if I told them what you dreamed?") but which has slipped its barbed claws into his very soul. It shouldn't linger, shouldn't hurt, but oh, illusions always hurt the most, don't they?

Orochimaru has experience with that ache.

There's a familiar-forgotten voice in his ear, sharp and raised in clear concern, and that too is familiar-forgotten, remnant of another life that is no more. Remnant of a life he discarded like an old scaled skin when it failed to suit him any longer (when he failed to suit them any longer) and this man is the one who pulled the first stone from the framework.

"Sensei," he says, and it rasps in his throat, doesn't quite manage to fit his mouth. A life is a long time, after all. Long enough for habit to become entirely unfamiliar. "Sensei, where am I?"

(An act but not, misdirection that seeks direction, the opening lines of the greatest role he's ever played but maybe, just maybe, it's closer to the truth of him than any role before.)

There's a long, fraught pause, tension-tight with the beginnings of true worry, and hands that aren't nearly as aged and gnarled as he remembers them to be curl around his bowed shoulders, push him gently back. Orochimaru moves with them, allows the man who was once his world to shift him like a dazed child, and looks up through the veil of his hair into a face that lacks the liver spots and craggy lines he'd forgotten weren't always present.

"Orochimaru," Sarutobi says carefully, gently. More gentle than he's been with anyone but Tsunade in decades (months). "Tell me the last thing you remember."

A shift behind him, in the long shadows of a dying day—a woman, pretty, with long blue-black hair and pinwheel eyes, shifting scarlet and a clear reminder. Orochimaru thinks of pale skin and a stubborn jaw, a broken boy with rage and vengeance wrought into some semblance of function. (Her son, he thinks, and is startled by the realization—and startled again by the similarities he can see split between the face in his memories and the face before him. Young, proud, unbowed, ethereal in the fading light, capable of breaking into the most glorious shards when struck at just the right angle.)

"Orochimaru." Sharp, that tone—not the first time he's been called, and Orochimaru belatedly wonders at the effects that sliding back so many years could have on the human mind

(his mind is his greatest weapon, his only weapon against a world so set to hate and fear him that the only thing he could ever do was prove it right, gloriously, chaotically right—)

then drags his wayward, scattered thoughts back under control. He sinks back on his heels, pressing a hand over his face until he's sure all traces of his thoughts have been overwritten by less honest confusion.

"I—the graveyard," he says, and it rasps uncomfortably (how many decades now since he last visited his parents graves?), but the inadvertent tremor is enough to lend it credibility. "I left them—I brought them the first irises from my mother's garden."

Strong fingers, tight around his shoulder but somehow gentle in the same moment. Warm, human, not a resurrected corpse brought back by Orochimaru's own hand to aid one broken beautiful boy's quest for answers. "Spring," Sarutobi says, and there's something that's equal parts bewildered and furious in his voice. "Your last clear memory is from spring?"

"I…has it gone already?" Orochimaru asks slowly, and this is where the play shifts from plausible to damning. "It feels—long ago, but somehow like no time has passed at all."

Uchiha Mikoto kneels beside them, all coltish limbs and an assassin's grace

(Sasuke on the battlefield, raw power and desperation, torn twenty ways between what he wants and what he should do and what his burning-bright teammate friend beloved wants of him, moving with that same grace as his own ancestor tries to cut him down—)

with just enough room between the three of them for propriety, for killing if there's an attack.

(She doesn't realize he's the most dangerous one in the room.)

Her eyes are still blood and midnight, not aged enough to be wise but sharp with the bone-bare foundations of it. "There's chakra around him, but it's not like anything I've seen before," she says, quiet as though he won't hear her. "Genjutsus can distort the victim's impression of the passing of time."

Sarutobi's lips pull tight, but he doesn't respond. This gaze is weighted with age and experience, and Orochimaru meets it carefully, a calculated risk. Whatever his old teacher sees there, it makes him soften his tone as he asks, "Did you see anyone, Orochimaru? In the graveyard, was there anyone with you?"

"I…" Orochimaru casts his eyes down, shifts his expression into thoughtfulness, consideration touched with a hint of wariness. "I think—no. There was. He was…waiting for me beside the gate. It made me angry, because he had no right to see me there."

"Do you remember what he looked like?" Sarutobi makes it sound like a request for information, but it's silk bound around the steel of a Hokage's demand. "Could you identify him if you saw him again?"

Orochimaru wants to laugh, vicious and victorious.

(How do you catch a monkey? Threaten the tribe, threaten a child under his protection no matter how old that child seems. Give him a puzzle with half the pieces missing and a correct answer that will never make sense, but with assumptions that are so very easy to believe, distracted as he is with watching for a threat that will never come.)

He doesn't, traps the sound behind his teeth and shifts his expression into faint bewilderment, a studied lack of understanding. "Sensei, what do you mean? It was Danzō."

A sharp breath, a pause, and Sarutobi closes his eyes and breathes out, the sound vibrating with checked fury. "Danzō," he repeats. "You're sure?"

Sure that this is the course he wants to take? Of course he is. Sasuke is not the only one who vengeance calls to, not the first to surrender anything for one moment of bloody retribution. Orochimaru's has been too long in coming; he's not one to take betrayal lightly.

"Of course," he says, perfectly guileless, with an edge of hidden irritation at being questioned—he remembers very well how he used to be. "Should I not have recognized him?"

"No," Sarutobi says, as gentle as the first breath of a storm-wind sweeping down from the mountains to ravage the plains. He shifts back, rises to his feet with an ease that will soon be stolen by age, and brushes down his robes with absent hands. "No, Orochimaru, I'm very glad you told me. Mikoto, my dear, I believe I'll survive on my own for an hour or two. Would you help Orochimaru home?"

Painted lips pull tight, unhappiness and rebuke touching her features. She rises as well, but instead of stepping away she offers Orochimaru her hands.

(How novel, he thinks, and pretends he doesn't remember slim shoulders ahead of him, leading him into a battle that Orochimaru only joined for his sake.)

He wonders why it feels like a greater choice than any before, to take them and let this little slip of a girl pull him back to his feet.

"Hokage-sama," she says as her eyes move past him, warning and plea in the same breath. "Please remember—cornered rats bite back."

Sarutobi smiles at her, the barest quirk of lips edged with determination and old bitterness. "I'm well aware. But there's only so long one can live, and so many things that must be done. This is one of them, and it's a risk I must take."

Mikoto flicks a glance back into the shadows, where another stock-still form hovers, watchful and wary. It inclines its head, and she nods back, though her frown doesn't ease. "I don't like this," she says, bluntly honest in her worry.

"Duly noted," Sarutobi answers firmly. "Take Orochimaru home, and remain close. I'm not yet sure what the night will bring."

"War," Orochimaru says, and it's so very simple to make his voice distant, distracted as he looks out the window, judging how long until moonrise. Not for a while yet, he thinks, and is pleased. "There was…talk of Iwa, and how to escalate things. Bodies in the pass, he said. Theirs and ours, but the same beneath. Root out all hope of peace to make the village strong again."

There's fury in the lines of Sarutobi's placid face, wedged in beneath his calm façade. Quick hands reach for a cold pipe, a light; the flicker of flame is a blaze of brilliance against the seeping shadows. "Go home, my boy," he says, steady as the surf, with the threat of drowning waves in the slow retreat of civility. "Rest. Think on what you might have seen, and tell me in the morning. Mikoto."

"Yes, Hokage-sama." She bows, perfect and fluid, and straightens again.

(Orochimaru thinks of lightning from a clear sky, the burn of chakra like the edge of a storm. Thinks of dark eyes half-mad with grief and betrayal, hiding a deeper pain beneath. Of himself entranced, entrapped, and was this how Jiraiya felt, once upon a time, staring at a boy with sky-blue eyes and sunlight in his smile?)

"This way, sir," Mikoto tells him, polite and firm, but with care in her expression. She's wary of him, as everyone is, but there's softness in her concern.

(He wonders, distantly, what her son would have been without revenge riding his soul, but dismisses it; not half as interesting, he's sure.)

She doesn't ask him if he's capable of walking, and he's glad. Playing the victim grates on his patience enough as it is, no matter how necessary the act. He inclines his head to her, then bows to his teacher, and the motion is more nostalgic than he had expected. It's been years, decades, since Orochimaru last bowed his head to anyone.

He doesn't expect it to last long, but he can appreciate the novelty of it in this moment.

Konoha is another piece of memory brought to life with unexpected clarity. The streets, the buildings, the people in the dusty street—he looks at them, at the way their eyes slide past him and their bodies unconsciously turn away, and wants to laugh again. He's used to fear, to hate, but only when he's earned it. This fear is empty, of a concept more than a man. They fear his snakes, his looks, his chakra, his family. Fear the edge of madness they claim to see in him, even if there's never yet been one among them who suffered it.

(Tenzō, he thinks, and wonders how soon Sarutobi will come upon that lab. Not too soon, he hopes—there are still things that are salvageable within it, that boy most of all. His greatest success, after Anko. Anko, who's nothing but a babe right now, with parents, with a future. The thought of saving her crosses his mind but doesn't linger; Anko is a hurricane, a tempest, a battlefield with blood soaking into the grass and laughter in the air. She's the most glorious thing to ever come from his hands, and he's hardly about to refrain from molding her because morality says he should.)

A slim hand reaches for his shoulder, and he twitches away from it automatically, sliding around the touch. Mikoto hardly blinks; she simply steps aside, towards a street that meanders lazily in the direction of the forest. It's familiar, even more than the rest of Konoha, and Orochimaru sets his feet on it with a faint sense of wonder inescapably laced with bitterness. Another thing abandoned when he shed Konoha as a snake does its skin, and he wonders what happened to the house his father built in his own time. Did it simply fall into disrepair? Was it torn down? Did looters strip it to its bones in some spiteful, empty form of revenge?

Not that it matters now, he knows. But—it's a thought, that's all. Konoha truly does have a tendency to bring out the worst in him.

("How many would believe me, child, if I told them what you dreamed?"

"No one living," Orochimaru answers with certainty. Another hesitation, but he takes the proffered hand, trying not to flinch at the spark-crack of power that dances across his nerves at the brush of skin on skin, and Hagoromo doesn't pause as he pulls Orochimaru up, out of the dust and blood-clumped ash that covers the ground.)

"If you must hover, do it out here," Orochimaru says, and his unease adds bite to his voice. "The edges of the property are trapped, and I have no desire to pull you out of every seal you stumble into. Mind your feet."

A spark of hot-bright temper, a flare of indignation. Mikoto eyes him coolly, but her expression shifts to the careful blandness of understanding in the face of wounded minds and she inclines her head. "I'll keep watch," she confirms, and slips into the surrounding trees, vanishing like a ghost.

He wonders if Itachi is born yet, tries to calculate ages even though his mind is better saved for more important things. Likely not—Mikoto wouldn't still be ANBU if she were a mother.

Moonrise is still at least two hours away, so he has time to spare. More than he would like, to be honest—patience may be one of Orochimaru's skills, but this is something different. This is a bet with unknown variables, made on remembered rumor and the assumption of a chance. He believes it will come to fruition, but there's no guarantee.

Of course, there was never a guarantee that any of this would work, and so far it has. Perhaps the odds are tipped in Orochimaru's favor.

Perhaps they're not.

("Madara has won," he says, and there's no little amount of bitterness in it. Despite an entire world joined against him, Madara has won, and Orochimaru feels rather as though he's been beaten personally—his pride is a strong thing, but perhaps a bit too easily dented.

Hagoromo hums thoughtfully. "Perhaps better to say my mother is winning," he corrects. "The children are fighting her now, and have my power shared between them, but I more than any know how powerful she is. I would have a…contingency, as it were."

"And you chose me," he says, though with the memory of effortless happiness so close it takes effort to keep his voice from breaking. "How… audacious of you."

Hagoromo studies him for a long moment. "Most would say that. But you returned with your student, even though you professed to want nothing more to do with the rest of the world's wars. Why?"

It promised to be interesting, Orochimaru wants to say, but at the last moment doesn't.

The half-lie falls flat on his tongue.)

Muscles strung taught with irritation and anticipation in equal measure, Orochimaru turns on his heel, away from the empty house that his father had built as a wedding present for his mother, away from the echoes of old ghosts that linger around the steps. He's not one for regret in any form, but—

He wonders, sometimes, why things ended the way they did. More often when something happens to call those ghosts back. Jiraiya's death, whispered about in reports to Team Taka and half-heard where Orochimaru slept, suppressed and bound, in Sasuke's psyche, was one such time. It was…a shock, to hear, to understand that Jiraiya, loud and bold and shameless in all his manners, with a soft heart and a hard head and too much optimism and faith for any mortal body to contain, had—died. So simply. So ignobly.

Their days as teammates, as friends, are long since passed into memory, but the fact that Jiraiya died alone, at the hands of the students he gave so much of himself for, strikes Orochimaru as an injustice the world should never have done someone as valiant and bright as Jiraiya. It seems…unfair, and even if Orochimaru knows full well that nothing in life is ever otherwise, he can't quite shake the sentiment.

If there is one thing Orochimaru has ever feared, it's death. His own death, the deaths of those he once held dear. Belief in reincarnation and transmigration is well enough, but it means little to those left behind. It's unpredictable, unscientific. Orochimaru has never found a way to track it, predict it, and little grates at him more.

(He thinks, sometimes, that he will always be that little boy standing before a fresh grave, the papery shed skin of a white snake curled in his hand. Asking why and how and do you really think so, a sense of hope bubbling up in his chest. He's misplaced that sense so many times, lost sight of it but never truly lost it. Even at his most distracted there was always the memory of Sarutobi's words, a stray thought of how to trace reincarnations through the years.

But as with his dream, how many people would ever believe that of him?

No one, he thinks, and it's both bitter and satisfied all at once.)

But it isn't regret, not here. Not now, so many years out of time. Reassessment, more than anything, another look at the actions and reactions that led from this uneasy peace, this cold war, to the dream-dazed battlefield he came from, every shinobi from each of the Five Great Villages trapped like butterflies pinned to a card.

(Perhaps better to say my mother is winning, an offhand comment in an aged and ancient voice, but for Orochimaru it is the taste of ashes and broken dreams that can never come to be.)

He's setting the foundations of the greatest plot he's ever woven, something that will stretch to incorporate the entirety of the ninja world, or at least its future. This version of Sarutobi trusts him still, no matter how misguided that trust is, and Orochimaru's carefully unspoken claim—aided by Mikoto's presence in a way he hadn't anticipated—that Danzō laid a genjutsu on him, controlled him, will be enough to turn Sarutobi's suspicions on his old teammate. Danzō is a war hawk, after all, and though he has yet to order Sarutobi's assassination, he's been vocal and unsubtle enough about his beliefs that, with the evidence in Root's files and the labs they lead to, Sarutobi will believe the claims.

The first time, Danzō was the driving force of the Third Shinobi World War, disguising Root members as Iwa shinobi killed by Konoha, setting Hanzō against Akatsuki, pushing experiments on any bloodlines he thought might be useful, decrying any attempts at peace as an insult to the memory of those who died in the fighting. Without him to push the conflicts to new heights, Orochimaru is sure that Sarutobi will end the war far more quickly than before. And, should things go as he plans them to, the lack of Danzō's plots will make up for Orochimaru's own absence.

He hates Konoha. He'd forgotten, having been absent for so many years, but he truly loathes the closed minds and proud hypocrisy of this village, its hatred and shunning of anyone different or dangerous. Such a bright surface, such pretty gilding, but the heart beneath is as black and rotten as any other ninja village.

(He supposes, when he bothers to consider it, that that was one of his motivations in gathering the freaks, the outcasts, the undesirables when he constructed Sound. No one fit in there unless they fit in nowhere else, and…it's likely that wasn't entirely by accident.)

Sound will rise again, if his plans come to fruition tonight. Orochimaru has spent too long as his own lord and master to go back to bowing before a Kage. That dream is done with, banished to the recesses of his mind as a childish whim, and he no longer cares to look upon it.

("How many would believe me, child, if I told them what you dreamed?"

"No one living," Orochimaru answers with certainty.

And—he hasn't thought of it before, but does he count himself among their number?)

Anger quickens his steps around the edges of the treeline, back towards the large garden his mother always kept. Not overgrown, still neatly maintained, because Orochimaru could never allow himself to let it run wild. One of his clearest images of her is a woman as tall and slender as a willow wand, her long black hair caught in a loose braid and her oldest clothes stained with dirt like a common farmer. She'd carried a basket on her arm, overflowing with fresh vegetables, and his father had leaned on the gatepost and teased her about mixing poisons with the ingredients for their dinners. She would laugh, always, and lead Orochimaru by the hand, show him the white snakeroot and water hemlock and oleander, ask which flavor he wanted in their soup tonight.

For all that Jiraiya always claimed he had no sense of humor, those jokes Orochimaru understood. He'd solemnly pick one, and carefully not smile when his father protested.

In the shadows lengthened by the nearly-vanished sun, the garden is bare and empty, winter-dead, with only the faint warmth in the soil to hint at spring's approach. Orochimaru skirts the edges of the weathered wooden fence, not quite able to stomach stepping within right now. The small creek that runs through the garden's center is full, and the stones lining its banks clack under Orochimaru's sandals as he turns sharply, following the water's meandering path back towards the forest.

This is madness, all of it. How can one man be expected to stop a war? How can one man, even one as clever and skilled and blatantly powerful as Orochimaru, be expected to save an entire world?

It's possible. It has to be, because Orochimaru refuses to accept any other possibilities. But it feels far too much like being backed into a corner, given only one way out. Very much like how his deals with Danzō always made him feel, because Orochimaru is no one's pawn. He did Danzō's experiments because he was interested in the outcome, because he was clever enough to find the answer Danzō had spent decades looking for in the space of a few months. And yet, in his fall from grace, Danzō remained untouchable, beyond reproach.

Orochimaru shed Konoha like an old skin and has never mourned the change, but—that grated. That itched at him, that Danzō could be the impetus behind so many of his darker choices, and Sarutobi never blamed him. Sarutobi blamed himself before Danzō, for not seeing Orochimaru cross the lines he did, for not stopping him, but the man who led him across was never held accountable.

This time, with the evidence Orochimaru will leave and the accusations Orochimaru won't leave him room to deny, Danzō will take the blame. And if he doesn't, well. Poison is one of Orochimaru's specialties, just the way his mother taught him. He'll lace every bite Danzō eats, every drink he takes, the very air he breathes until Danzō finally gets his due.

Given what Sarutobi thinks Danzō did to him, what Sarutobi knows of Orochimaru's own nature, he won't even have to be particularly subtle about it.

What comes next—that will take subtlety. Manipulation on a level Orochimaru rarely has to resort to. Then again, he's planning to turn one of Konoha's most stalwart defenders, if not against the village, then at least to his side rather than Konoha's.

Well. Perhaps no longer quite the "stalwart defender" that he was, given recent events, but that is more of Konoha's great hypocrisy and Orochimaru feels no need to continue it.

("You are one of the few players in this game who knows where every piece falls, child. I leave it to you to rearrange them in such a way as will provide for a happier outcome.")

Those words—he'd wanted to laugh at them. Such faith in the good nature Orochimaru already knows he lacks. Such optimism, coming from a man whose legacy helped the world tear itself apart. But…not misplaced, perhaps. Not correct, but not misplaced, either. Orochimaru has never played the villain all that well, at least in his own mind. The science was always more important that petty morals, human grudges, ethical limits. Boundaries and lines make little sense to him, especially in the context of a shinobi's work; Sarutobi tried to teach him, once, but Sarutobi's own morals are skewed and sideways and tattered around the edges, and it never helped. Jiraiya has always been an optimistic fool more than anything, and his lessons would have left Orochimaru dead long ago. Tsunade—

Tsunade is broken, shattered, fractured. She's hardly a shinobi anymore, not in any way that counts. Not his Tsunade, if he could ever call her that, who was so fearless and focused and brilliant.

Sometimes, Orochimaru thinks that it was her departure that made him cease to care. Before he had pretended, at the very least, to be the same, to follow the blurred, indistinct lines Konoha sketched into the sand; after, he no longer gave a damn. Why should he? He'd been abandoned, left behind, while morals and sentiment drove his team, his one anchor in a formless world, to shatter irreparably.

He blames them, partially, for his fall. For this end, bitter and tragic as it is. Perhaps it's not fair, but then, Orochimaru's fate itself isn't fair. He was the genius, the strongest, the most cunning. Why should he be the monster as well?

Why did any of them have to be the monster?

The first feeble edge of moonlight glitters on the water before him, and Orochimaru pauses, watching it ripple and distort. He hadn't thought he had spent so much time in reminiscence, in bitterness, in planning, but his has always been an obsessive personality. It's no surprise that this isn't any different.

But it's time. Time to see if all his plans will come to something good, or if he'll be left scrabbling for a contingency. It's possible—all things are possible, and the last few months of his life have more than proven that.

Turning, he casts his senses out, searching for Mikoto's chakra signature. It's strong and bright, easy to find, and she's not looking in his direction. Outward, instead, as though some other threat will come that rivals one of the Sannin, and it makes him want to laugh. The inattention is useful, though, and he turns casually to put his back to her, bringing his hands up in the seal for a shadow clone. Its appearance is seamless, soundless, and Orochimaru darts into the heavy shadows as it continues its restless pacing around the perimeter of the garden. Half a moment to make sure there are no eyes on him, no traps beneath him, and Orochimaru calls up a shunshin, forgoing the usual distracting, dramatic swirl of leaves.

The burst of speed leaves him back near the road, hidden in the darkness and far out of Uchiha Mikoto's sight, and Orochimaru touches down lightly. There's no one to be seen, no one he can sense, so he doesn't bother with subtlety. A hand brushing down his robes, another glance at the moon, and he starts walking east, along the treeline. There's a house some distance away, set far enough back that only the faintest glitter of the porch light reaches the road.

The house of a legend, of Konoha's newest social leper and scapegoat. The key to Orochimaru's plans, should he agree with them, and for once Orochimaru isn't certain that his manipulation will resolve itself the way he wants it to.

Konoha's White Fang is anything but an average man, after all.