Cold

By Insomniac Owl

-

It was a clear summer night, and the air rushing in through the windows was pleasant and warm. They were on the freeway - gold lights shining in the distance, the smell of flowers heavy in the air - and far away in the huge, black distance Orochimaru saw the intermittent lights of the air traffic signals – rhythmic, but mad and crazed as ghosts.

Sleep dragged on him, pulling his eyes closed. It would have been easy to fall asleep, there in the passenger seat of his little blue commuter car with Kabuto at the wheel, but he resisted. It was two o’clock and his sleeping patterns were almost gone (he’d just come back from a business trip in New York, nonstop flight, no sleep) but it would be rude – even if Kabuto wouldn’t care.

Orochimaru snuck a glance at the boy in the driver’s seat. They had known each other for almost a year, but Orochimaru still didn’t know much about him; oh, sure, he knew Kabuto was good at his job and that he didn’t like to be touched, but he didn’t know his strengths or weaknesses; he didn’t know what Kabuto did when he was alone for the day and all the chores were done. For all he knew the boy just stood silently for hours and hours, the light moving slowly across his body until it disappeared.

For all he knew, Kabuto –

He put his thoughts on semi-permanent halt to watch a car come up behind them, going twenty-five, maybe thirty miles over the speed limit. The left headlight was broken, wires hanging out like hair, and he swore under his breath as it passed.

“They’re going to kill themselves, the idiots.”

“Actually, it’s been statistically proven that most accidents aren’t caused –”

“Shut up Kabuto.”

“Yes sir.”

The red taillights moved farther and farther away, until the road was again plain warm concrete, nothing above it but an impossibly distant sky.

He hated that Kabuto called him sir, but the formality was something wired into his programming. Something he couldn’t change. But Kabuto had always done his job, and every so often he did something so nice Orochimaru forgot he was a cyborg at all. Most of the time, however, he was simply cold. And it was disconcerting how inhuman he could be, because despite his appearance – casual dress, glasses, silver hair; the appearance of a college student – there was something very removed, very robotic about his attitude. He could show emotion – programmed responses that looked eerily alike – but he did so only when speaking. The most heart-breaking scenes elicited no more response from him than from a household appliance.

The hills they were passing ran yellow with wildflowers, and for a long time the car smelled of their heavy, pungent aroma. (Another thing Kabuto couldn’t appreciate.) Weeks later, in his dreams, Orochimaru would smell those flowers and see them flash by outside the window, a blur of yellow that brought with them, inexplicably, a flush of terror.

“How’ve things been?” he asked.

“Fine. The dishwasher finally broke, but other than that things’ve been pretty quiet.”

“Well that’s good, I guess….”

“Yes sir.”

A slow pause, filled with the rush of air and the sound of wheels against cement.

“How long were you waiting?” Orochimaru asked.

“For what?”

“For me. At the airport.”

“Oh!” Kabuto’s eyes widened, and he bit his lip. “Um… a little over an hour.”

Orochimaru nodded, leaned his head back, staring out the window at the approaching buildings. The light reflected off of Kabuto’s glasses, sometimes sliding out of sight behind a hill but eventually, and inevitably, reappearing. Kabuto’s eyes remained on the road.

(They were actually a whim, those glasses; his eyesight was a great deal sharper than Orochimaru’s own, but they made him seem a little more human. And maybe they did their job a little too well, because sometimes Orochimaru forgot he wasn’t. He would catch himself watching the boy prepare dinner, his movements (too) precise, his speech (too) perfect, and he always felt a little guilty. A little sick with himself…. Kabuto wasn’t human, after all, and it was completely unfair to offer him affection.)

“I think, Kabuto,” he said slowly, chin in palm, “I think I’m starting to care about you too much.”

“Sir?”

“You aren’t human, just wires and metal plating and electricity. I’ve been forgetting that….”

Kabuto’s eyes peered at him from the rearview mirror – but those eyes weren’t human either, Orochimaru reminded himself; they were delicate machines and a film of gel, nothing more; there was no emotion in them.

“Pull over, please, would you?”

It was late. There weren’t many cars out, and they made it easily onto the shoulder, only a few feet away from where the land dropped off into a mess of greenery and beautiful, tangled trees. Kabuto shut off the engine, and for a long time it was silent, Orochimaru sitting with his head back and one arm out the window, his palm pressed against the side of the car. The metal was cool, and he found himself remembering an incident earlier that year, when he’d run into Kabuto coming out of the kitchen. Not hard, but enough to feel the coolness of his skin, and the metal plating that protected his insides. Switches. Circuits. Everything cold, nothing warm (nothing human) about him at all.

Just a machine.

It was important he didn’t lose sight of that.

Orochimaru sighed, then climbed out of the car, bending a little to avoid clipping his forehead on the doorframe. The muscles in his lower back protested the movement, too used to the long hours of a plane ride, and his spine cracked a few times when he stretched.

“You can get out too if you want,” he told Kabuto, kicking at the gravel with the shiny toe of his dress shoe. Hands shoved deep in his pockets, he stared toward the city. The lights were hidden behind a hill, but he knew where they were supposed to be, knew that when he got back in the car and drove toward home he would see them again, golden and hazy in the distance.

Did Kabuto know that? (Did he know he wouldn’t be going home tonight?

Probably not.)

Kabuto had gone to stand by the guardrail where he waited, patiently, hands clasped in front of him. Slim, white, scholarly hands. (The same hands that had once felt a bird’s neck for a pulse, Orochimaru peering curiously from the kitchen window. He buried it near a rosebush with all the solemnity of a child, and he never mentioned it, but Orochimaru always wondered what had driven him to do that. Which of his systems had been wired for compassion?)

“Why’d you wanna stop?” asked Kabuto.

“Hm? Oh, nothing...” He inhaled, pushed a hand through his hair.

“Are you sure? I mean, I don’t mind stopping, but we should be getting home soon. You have work tomorrow, remember?”

“Yes,” Orochimaru sighed. “Come here please, Kabuto. There’s something I want to fix before I go.”

He motioned for Kabuto to turn around, and then pried away a flap of skin at the base of the boy’s neck. The metal plating came out easily, revealing a small assortment of switches and wires, colour-coded and neatly arranged. He flipped one switch and, with glacial calm, began pulling out wires.

It only took a second for things to start shutting down. Machines began dying in his chest cavity – pop and whir of gears – the lights in his eyes went out, and Orochimaru imagined all sorts of vital transmissions going wrong in there, the entire system shorting out and going dead. Kabuto’s hands twitched; there was a brief squawk of sound and then, and then – nothing.

It didn’t take much effort to push him over the guardrail. The trees swallowed his body – crush of ferns and darkness – and then there was silence. He stood there for a moment longer than was necessary, no expression on his face, no one around to see should he try to hide it, just the moon casting long slanting shadows over the ground, everything still and peaceful as a dream. And the road, dark in both directions; no cars, no witnesses, just a long stretch of concrete going on and on and on….

It was dark out, and the air smelled of flowers.

fin