Kabuto Yakushi is a couple years older than her, which is surprising.

"It took me a couple tries to get through organic chem," he admits bashfully. "Ended up graduating a year late, and then I had to take some time off to take care of a sick relative, too."

Sakura nods, discreetly fixing her hair. Kabuto is also… kinda cute. He's friendly, smiles easily and often, and his round glasses are charming, in a dorky, boyish way.

She's been showing him around the clinic, telling him about what duties to expect and the types of injuries and illnesses they treat and when to refer a patient elsewhere. Kabuto has been nothing but pleasantly engaged, displaying genuine interest in the work.

"Here's the stock room—we take inventory at the beginning and end of the day, so it's important to record if your using something or if something needs to be replaced," Sakura says, leading him around. "And here's the filing room—if you have paperwork issues, you can come to me or the secretary. Break room's over there, if you need coffee."

"I prefer tea," Kabuto quips lightly, a smile softening his eyes.

She huffs a laugh. "Cabinets have plenty of room," she replies.

He chuckles softly, following her readily as she finishes off the tour in front of her office.

"That's pretty much the whole of it," she says. "Not much, but I'd like to think we do good work here."

"Doesn't seem so much of a 'we' as just you," he comments, and she laughs a little.

"You're pretty much free to go—your first real shift is next week, but feel free to drop by or call if you have any questions," she says.

Kabuto smiles. "Of course. Thank you, Dr. Haruno. I'll be in your care."

—

The next few days pass with little action—Kakuzu stops by briefly to pin a talisman to her wall with a gravelly warning not to touch it, and Hidan, somehow, breaks into her apartment again, and, more offensively, steals the fucking food out of her fridge, and if it weren't for the fact that she had just stitched up his throat she very well might have punched him in it.

Kabuto, fortunately, adjusts quickly to clinic life, and her workload practically halves itself overnight—she finds herself sleeping a full eight hours for the first time since long before med school. She could kiss the man.

Of course, like all moderately tolerable things in her life, it's disrupted very quickly, and it starts with Kabuto's innocent request for a copy of some paperwork at the end of the work week.

"Oh—of course," Sakura says, like a fool. "It'll just take a sec, follow me."

She waves him in as she makes a bee-line for her desk, and Kabuto takes a seat by the door and looks around the room with dark eyes.

Sakura's brow furrows as she checks her drawers, looking for the folder, and the quartz orb she'd nearly forgotten about rolls towards her. She absentmindedly bats it away, finding the paperwork—and then she freezes. Looks again.

The quartz is pitch black.

"Dr. Haruno?" Kabuto says. "Is something wrong?"

"Hm? Oh, not at all," Sakura replies, forcing her voice not to waver. She hopes that the smile she pastes on her face is convincing. "I just remembered I need to make a call. Here's the paperwork— would you mind waiting here for a couple minutes?"

The smile that Kabuto sends her is perfectly pleasant. "Not at all."

She keeps her mask firmly affixed until she's well out the door, and even then she doesn't even let her breath hitch until she's stepped into an empty exam room and locked the door behind her.

She fumbles for her phone and calls Kakuzu, heart in her throat as it rings.

"What?" he answers gruffly, and Sakura has never been more relieved to hear his voice.

"The quartz turned black," she blurts immediately. "It's the new nurse, I didn't see it at first, but he's the only one who's been in my office all week so it has to be him—"

Kakuzu curses immediately, at nothing in particular at first, and then at her, and she can faintly hear a flurry of movement on his end.

"Idiot woman," he growls. "I'll be there. What's his name?"

"Uh—K—Kabuto? Kabuto Yakushi, he worked with my old mentor from my residency—"

Kakuzu curses again, louder this time, and Sakura flinches and holds the phone away from her ear.

"Of all the shifty bastards—" he spits, and she winces. She's seen Kakuzu when he was pissed, but this is the first time she's heard him angry.

"Do not raise his suspicions," he orders. "Do nothing to aggravate him. Understand?"

Sakura nods frantically, and then realizes her error and forces out a weak, "Yes."

The line clicks as he abruptly hangs up, and her knees give out and she slides down the wall until she on the floor.

"Oh my god," she says, which is a sentiment she's rapidly becoming familiar with.

—

She takes about another thirty seconds to stop hyperventilating and slowly forces herself up, then another forty-five to make sure her legs aren't wobbling before she finally leaves the room and makes her way back to her office. Her receptionist is already gone for the night, she notes absentmindedly. One less potential casualty, at least.

Kabuto is still reading over the paperwork when she gets back like nothing is amiss, and she sits at her desk and mechanically pulls up a stack of her own papers, staring blankly at the words before mindlessly scrawling her signature at the bottom.

"It seems everything is in order," Kabuto says cheerfully, breaking the silence. "Do you mind if I make a photocopy of these for my own records?"

"Of course you can," Sakura replies, miraculously without stuttering. "Do you need anything else while you're at it?"

"This is it, I believe." His smile is warm and entirely genuine, and even though she's looking for it, she can't find a speck of malice in his expression. "Thank you, Dr. Haruno."

She nods, not quite meeting his eyes, and he leaves her office. She slumps onto her desk as soon as he's out of sight.

Of course her one competent resident is evil, she laments. Of course he is, because that's what life has planned for her, apparently.

She straightens and throws up her facade of professionalism when she hears his returning footsteps, and Kabuto pops back in, genial as ever.

"Thank you again," he says, handing back the original copy.

She saved from a forced, cordial answer by the distant sound of the clinic door slamming open, and Kabuto frowns. "An emergency?" he asks, and peers out her door.

He ducks immediately, and a dagger sails past him, close enough that it clips the ends of his silver hair before it lodges itself in the wall.

"Oh," Kabuto says mildly. "Kakuzu. What a surprise. Here for a checkup?" He steps out of the office like he's greeting a patient, the perfect picture of the ideal bedside manner.

Kakuzu narrows his eyes. His hand shoots out, arm lengthened by black tendrils, but Kabuto sidesteps neatly and the blow lands on a nearby cart, overturning it and sending it skidding.

Kabuto clicks his tongue. "Really," he says. "I only just started my residency here, so if you could refrain from—"

"Shut up." Another swing, fist sailing through the air like a wrecking ball, forces the other man to dive to the side. "Why did Orochimaru send you here?"

The silver-haired man pops back up, glasses slightly askew. "Orochimaru? What does he have to do with this place?" He seems genuinely, if only mildly, perplexed.

Kakuzu pauses. Kabuto smiles.

"Oh?" he hums. "Is there something of interest here? Or someone?" His dark eyes flicker towards Sakura for a brief moment. "I just wanted to pursue my residency, but to think I stumbled upon something far more interesting."

Kabuto's earlier warmth is gone, eyes like chips of black obsidian. His gaze is cold and clinical, stripping her like a specimen to be dissected.

Sakura shivers.

"Shut. Up," Kakuzu growls. He shrugs off his coat with tight, stiff movements, and black threads burst to life from back, shredding through his shirt. The black surgical mask falls from his face, tentacles dripping from his mouth like live things.

Sakura breath catches in her throat. All across Kakuzu's body—arms, shoulders, chest—are covered in thick black stitches, and his tendrils burst through them like butchered seams.

It's almost like, she thinks, his skin is the human-shaped container for something far darker—a rag doll stuffed with eldritch monstrosities.

Kabuto's eyebrows rise, and for the first time, something resembling concern flickers over his face.

"Stay away," Kakuzu says, low and gravelly, and Sakura flinches, not quite sure who he's directing the order at. His voice echoes inhumanly, rough and distant like its not coming from him at all.

Kabuto tsk's disapprovingly. "Playing with commons is beneath you, isn't it?" he comments. "I'd expect it from your partner, but you? I've always figured you were more like Orochimaru in that regard, at least, knowing to separate your experiments from your tools—"

He cuts off as Kakuzu sends a volley of tentacles his way, and the other man barely manages to dash out of the way, the force of the attack shattering the linoleum.

(Distantly, Sakura bemoans the state of her clinic. Also, how the fuck is she going to explain this to Tsunade?)

Kabuto skids to a stop, grabbing a scalpel from the scattered supplies on the floor, and flings it at his attacker. Kakuzu doesn't so much as flinch, a black thread batting it away before it streaks forward and wraps around the silver-haired man's neck, who chokes out a gasp as he's lifted into the air, the tips of his toes barely brushing against the floor.

Kakuzu twitches. "I should kill you," he rumbles.

"You certainly could," Kabuto says agreeably, remarkably calm for someone with a rapidly tightening noose around their neck, "but I have it on good authority that my bounty is non-existent. Your under enough scrutiny as it is—adding wanton violence to your record would hardly be the smartest move."

The other man still doesn't move, and Kabuto's smile falters for the briefest moment.

"Perhaps," he says, faintly wheezy, "we can come to a mutually beneficial agreement pertaining to your latest acquisition."

It takes Sakura a moment to process that 'acquisition' probably means her.

"I am simply here to complete my residency," he continues. "It would be in both our best interests to divert surveillance from her, would it not? With my contacts, it would be a simple matter to shield this place from… outside interference."

She really doesn't like the way he phrases that, and equally does not like how Kakuzu seems to be actually considering the offer.

"And Orochimaru?" Kakuzu says.

"All he needs to know," Kabuto soothes, "is that I am a resident."

There's several moments of stifling silence before, slowly, the black threads unwind themselves from Kabuto's throat, and he sucks in a grateful breath, falling to his knees.

Sakura is rather distressed, because this apparent plan means that Kabuto is going to continue staying at her clinic, and while she had liked him for the five days that he had worked there, she had just been exposed to a very different side of him that she doesn't like quite as much.

"Um," she says very quietly, and is promptly ignored.

"We'll talk terms," Kakuzu says. "Tomorrow, midnight. Neutral ground." He shrugs his coat over his ruined shirt as the tentacles retreat beneath his skin.

"Of course," Kabuto replies pleasantly.

"My clinic," Sakura says despondently, staring at the broken tiles at their feet.

Kabuto smiles regretfully, and, like slipping on a mask, he's resident nurse Kabuto, not terrifying assassin Kabuto. "My sincerest apologies, Dr. Haruno," he says. "I can have it fixed by tomorrow, if you'd like."

Sakura wonders, briefly, when her life got so damn awful, and politely says, "Yes, please."

"Go home," Kakuzu interrupts. "Hidan will be there."

She glances up, but he's not looking at her, lambent eyes focused on the other man.

"...Okay," she says slowly. She backs away, and Kabuto offers a parting wave.

When she peels out of the parking lot, she can't help but look back, and dread gnaws at her stomach.

A/N: i hate to be that guy but I actually really like kabuto and orochimaru,,, kabuto is also really fun to write bc he's such a slimy two-faced bastard hrfsahkljdf