KONOHA

A Little While Ago…

“I take you have no interest in this humble castle of mine,” the Uchiha said gesturing towards the little hut behind him.

Orochimaru smiled. “What makes you think that, Sasuke-kun?”

“None have you made any attempts to neutralise my teammates, or at least hold them hostage, yet. You don’t seem fools; had the hut been your target, I doubt you would have left them unmolested.”

“...You don’t seem like you want to win either,” the snake sannin replied. “Leaving weak links defenceless like that is an easy way to get eliminated you know.”

The boy shook his head. “Had you gone for them you would be dead already,” he declared with all the intensity of one commenting about the weather.

Mundane.

Orochimaru’s smile widened.

“Beating about the bush like this gets tiring,” the boy continued, brushing a strand of hair behind his right ear. “You want something, speak; if I deem it worth my time we might as well come to an agreement quickly. If not, I would rather dispose of you lot before you prove yourself a nuisance.”

The sannin tongue ran over his lips suggestively. He is so perfect, he thought to himself again.

“Very well then, but courtesy demands a proper introduction, does it not?” Orochimaru replied reaching for the skin mask on his face. Slowly, he ripped the disguise off, his fingers digging furrows through the facade. Sasuke watched, his left brow quirked in an expression of blatant curiosity. The snake sannin tossed aside the disguise, letting it fall to the forest floor as he shook his equally lustrous mane loose.

The Uchiha murmured something under his breath, recognition flickering in his gaze as he reached into the pouch by his waist. He pulled out a bingo book the next moment, flipping through it with practised ease.

“Orochimaru,” he drawled, expressionless. “Hmm… I wonder what an S-rank missing-nin from Konohagakure wants from little old me.”

The Sannin giggled with a hissing lilt.

“You Sasuke,” the sannin replied. “Or more accurately, your body. I want your body”

The Uchiha frowned. “Do I have a bounty on my head?” he asked.

“No, no, no. I need a vessel to replace my current one. I thought at first that I might need to wait a bit so you might ripen just a little bit more, but it turns out that’s unnecessary. You are ripe enough as you are; a rather fortunate discovery if I might say so myself.”

In response, the Uchiha tilted his head slightly to the side, an imaginably vast, monstrous, shadow of a disdainful ego spilling out to infect his silhouette.

Orochimaru blinked. The boy had nothing but a blank facade.

“And for some reason, you thought yourself worthy of my vessel?” The Uchiha asked, his left brow rising in an expression of amused curiosity. “Orochimaru… I hope you are aware you are nowhere near my equal?”

The sannin chuckled in response. “A bold statement from a nursling Uchiha.”

A pulse of silence.

“...Oh?” Sasuke made a sound of surprise, realisation glinting in his onyx eyes. “...You’ve met the weasel. You've fought the weasel! Now I am curious; did you manage to fight him to a draw or did you run away from him with your scaly little tail curled up between your legs?... let me guess. The latter? Got your arse handed to you, didn’t you? Nailed it.”

Orochimaru blinked.

Sasuke reached out for a leafy branch, breaking it and twirling it between his fingers. “I can’t believe the gall of that thing. Kills my clan down to the last man, then does a three-sixty and starts showing mercy to random miscreants? Where is the fairness in that? Where’s the justice?” The Uchiha’s irritated attention returned to regard the sannin. “Heh… as for you... Of course. It had to be the nursling. That’s the only Uchiha you could ever handle, is that not? The weasel was out of the question that’s why you came for me, the baby. And they say you are one of the three great sannin? I am rather disappointed. I am twelve, yet we are not even in the same league; before the Uchiha, you amount to nothing, yet you covet the body of its patriarch. You? A wretch like you? How disrespectful…

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“Let me guess, the weasel fought you using only genjutsu?... Oh, he struck you? With what? His fist? A slap? A kick to the face? A blade to the guts?... Ah, a blade it is then … but where I wonder? You know it’s amusing the way the hair on your arms discharges static electricity every time I touch upon the truth; a rather sloppy tell for a shinobi of your calibre, don’t you think?... You know what, forget all I had just said. I have a deal for you. Prove yourself capable of surviving the next three minutes and I will overlook your disrespect and even let you leave this forest alive. Deal?”

Orochimaru chuckled in response. “You arrogant little—”

The sannin leaned out of the way of a barrage of kunai that shot towards him. The projectiles followed a trajectory along a slant height towards his head, a bearing that made it harder to localise their perceptual coordinates quickly enough. A single kunai managed to stay in the sannin's cone of confusion long enough to graze his cheek, cutting a deep, bloody gash on the side of his face.

He hissed, turning his baleful glare at the Uchiha.

“Hidden Shadow Snake Hands!”

A wall of constrictors shot out of his sleeves to wrap the boy in a death grip.

Sasuke tilted his head, one brow still raised in surprise. ‘You still haven’t noticed it?—*tsk*—How disappointing.”

The sannin frowned. He touched his still bleeding cheek in confusion; the wound that ought to have healed immediately.

“Kai!”

The genjutsu broke, and Orochimaru found himself pointing an open palm at the genin, his summoned snakes nowhere in sight. His lackeys lay on the floor by his feet, their throats slit. Dead.

“You didn’t notice until the end?” the Uchiha asked, shaking his head in disappointment. “This is a waste of time. Just go,” he said, raising to his feet to leave.

Anger finally bubbled directly onto Orochimaru’s countenance. “I will not take sass from you, welp.”

There was a blur and he appeared before the Uchiha. His hands wrapped around the boy’s neck as he lifted him and slammed him violently into the trunk of the tree behind him.

Orochimaru revealed his true form; a gigantic white snake composed of smaller white snakes spilt out of his maw. Enlarged as he was, he swallowed the young Uchiha with the intention of dragging him to a separate, mental plane to envelop his mind. But something was wrong.

Something was very wrong.

The sannin stared at the entity he invited into his mindscape in mounting horror. His eyes bled as foreign memories bled into his soul, forcing him to experience pure, unadulterated…

E͈͙̻ͣ̂ͤp͍͚͎ͦ͑̚i̼͇̫͛̇̓p͍̬̩͐̓̏h̟̣͎͆͆̾ạ̟̱̏ͭ̚n̠̼̙̎̇͊y̱͇͙ͬ͂͒!

Orochimaru witnessed the birth of existence through the lens of an entity completely removed from human understanding;

The universe was much smaller then; all the matter in existence so much more concentrated. Denser and hotter.

Warm.

Comfy.

Tasty.

Back then, we were nothing more than a nascent star in its cradle. We fed. We grew. We grew. We grew. For aeons, we grew.

Then we grew too much.

Obese.

Crushed by the gravity of our own weight, our core got hotter and hotter, desperately pushing outwards but to no avail. Too much mass. Too much pressure. Too much gravity. The balance impossible to uphold. It was killing us. It killed us. We died.

We survived.

Scarred and with a blackhole for a heart, but alive.

We were too big to die, even as a cosmic parasite ate us from the inside out.

For another aeon or so the balance existed. Then we came to an agreement with our heart demon.

We merged. Our union was looked upon with disdain by reality. It rejected us. We rejected it. We died.

We survived.

We merged.

A singularity.

A naked singularity.

We became—

N̟͉̯ͧ͂̐o͈͚̞̓̔ͣs̳̤̪̈̋̆e̻̭̭̊̓́y̖̖̼͆̔̊...

Ȑ̥̩ͬ͌ͅe̘̜͚͒̇̂ŵ͈̠̖͗̅i̹̖ͦ͌ͣͅn͙͖̜̓͌ͩd̯̲̣̅̿ͮ

Ȁ̳̘̬̄ͨl̲̣̰ͬͩ̚t̻̞̪͂̓̈ë̜̳̫̇̈r͚̦͍ͪ̂̆

Orochimaru blinked.

“You didn’t notice until the end?” the Uchiha asked, shaking his head in disappointment. “This is a waste of time. Just go,” he said, raising to his feet to leave.

Anger finally bubbled directly onto Orochimaru’s countenance. “I will not take sass from you, welp.”

There was a blur and he appeared before the Uchiha. His hands wrapped around the boy’s neck as he lifted him and slammed him violently into the trunk of the tree behind him. The boy’s passive stare remained even as his body began to slough away in Orochimaru’s grasp.

“You never learn, do you?” Sasuke asked.

Orochimaru blinked and found himself back where he started, his hand poised as if grasping someone by the neck … which in reality he had not done. The Uchiha remained seated where he was. Unmoved.

Unimpressed.

The sannin retrieved his arm.

“Kai…”

The third layer of the genjutsu broke. He blinked and looked around to see his lackeys still standing by his side staring blankly into the void as they repeatedly—systematically—stabbed every organ in the guts.

Literal dead men walking.

Orochimaru looked down at the kunai lodged in his chest, just a few inches from his heart. The pain echoed dully in his torso. Judging from the angle at which the blade stuck out from his body it was obvious the wound was self-inflicted.

“Congratulations,” the Uchiha said from his seat on the tree bough. “It’s been three minutes; you get to live.”

“Three min—Ah… time dilation? You altered my perception of time? ... How many layers concurrently was that? Seven?”

“Nine,” The Uchiha replied. “You are still under the last two layers; friendly advice, you need to get that treated.”

Orochimaru looked down at the blade stuck in his chest. It wavered like a mirage before reappearing a few inches to the right, puncturing his lung.

“You’ve proven yourself useful,” the Uchiha continued. “I no longer have any interest in prematurely ending your existence. You can leave now if you want, I won’t stop you. But, should you stay, I think I can find a way that we can both leave this place with a bit more than we arrived with.”

Orochimaru’s attention was piqued.

“...Go ahead. I am listening.”