Naruto 20 themes: don't dry with fakes or fears

4. Edge of the knife

It's a special sort of balancing act, knowing where and when to make your move; slipping in and out of your skin with the practised ease of one who has never found out what he is meant to be, and doesn’t care.

A lot of life is waiting for the maybe to become the now. You imagine the coldness of surgical steel against the boy's skin, the spill of warmth if you were standing there and holding the blade and pressing a little too hard; but that is not your game, today, and you walk a different sort of edge.




5. Post-mortem

There is a neatness in unravelling death. Kabuto appreciates the methodical approach, even if there are few others who practise it. Later, after his own disappearance from Konoha, he tries to imagine how the dissection will go. They will look for motives under smiles and mediocre exam results, find some justification from his outsider origins. It will be, Kabuto thinks, a fruitless exercise, a clumsy post-mortem without a body to perform it on.

( He makes his own summation of what he has lost, once he has the breathing space and time, and is not even sure that anything has died. )




8. Natural selection

Sasuke doesn't understand what Orochimaru wants with someone who doesn't have a bloodline limit. Skills can be acquired, cunning learnt. Surely a sustained bloodline has greater value - implies future survival, decent standings in the genetic lottery. ( There are other things that decide the fate of families. Sasuke knows, does not want to know, does not mention it.

Kabuto does not comment. ) Kabuto says, there are other ways to survive. The smile he gives Sasuke is the same one that he gave them all at the chuunin exams. Sasuke thinks of moths in shadow, snakes in the grass, and doesn't reply.




14. Resonance

In Hidden Sound one is never entirely alone. History lies two inches thick in empty rooms, and the corridors hum with the echoes of pasts that no longer belong to anyone. For once Sasuke’s step is less than silent; in Hidden Sound even the acoustics betray you.

He doesn’t know how Kabuto moves the way he does, in tune with the background murmur of time slipping through the cracks of the walls, slipping away. Sasuke's words always fall too heavily.

In the shadows Kabuto looks older, his smile closed-eyed, his voice indifferently patronising. Sasuke does not like that echo, either.




Bonus theme 2. Conjugate

Sasuke is Orochimaru's. Kabuto would contest that verb, Sasuke thinks, would shift it into the relative uncertainty of future tense. Will remind him that he was of Konoha, and has yet to escape the absolutes of his past.

Except Kabuto doesn't talk to Sasuke, and it's not just tenses that blur, here. Kabuto's fingers run across the seal, careful and detached with practice. Sasuke wants to read jealousy in the touch; a longing for the same connection to Orochimaru, or at least for the power it brings, a cracked-mirror reflection of his own motives. He knows he will find nothing.