The next time he visited the room that was supposed to be his, the nail polish was still sitting there, and it occurred to Sasuke for the first time that it was for him, and that his lack of using it would appear to be either hesitation or denial.

As a shinobi, Sasuke refused to allow himself the luxury of hesitation. And the fact that the nail polish was still there meant that denial was unacceptable.

Or that, in fact, someone had just left it there and forgotten about it.

Sasuke picked the nail polish up, unscrewed the cap, wrinkled his nose at the disgusting chemical smell, screwed the cap back on, and put it back on the nightstand.

Three days later he visited the room again, ostensibly because Kabuto had said he'd managed to mangle his arm too much to train on it for at least a few days, but really to see if the nail polish was still there.

It was.

So Sasuke picked the tiny bottle up with his good hand and, remembering the awful smell, cracked a window before he opened it again.

His calloused fingers were used to handling kunai, and it took him longer than he felt it should have to get the hang of the little brush and the way the nail polish kept dripping. He painted the fingernails on his bad hand, but gave up on trying to use his injured arm to paint the ones on his other.

Two days later, when Kabuto took the bandages off of Sasuke's arm and inspected it long enough to declare that it was fine, he dropped his air of smug apathy long enough to raise a single eyebrow at Sasuke.

"You seem," he said mildly, "to have spilled some kind of ink on your fingers."

Later, Sasuke wished he hadn't slammed the door on his way out, because that was letting Kabuto win.

Kabuto, actually, was the only upper-echelon Sound shinobi who didn't wear make-up, excepting Sasuke himself.

Orochimaru painted his face like a Chinese porcelain doll. Sasuke had spent more than an hour at a time standing in the corner of the room, seething, while he waited for Orochimaru to finish outlining his eyes and painting his lips, until he looked like a very different kind of monster than he did without the make-up.

Watching the man he was supposed to be learning from wasting precious seconds on appearance was enough to make Sasuke want to kill him, but he'd kept his comments to himself ever since Orochimaru had broken three of his ribs without putting down the eye-liner.

Looking down at his freshly painted nails, his left pinky smeared with black, Sasuke wondered who the fuck he was trying to fool.

The day he managed to use the Chidori three times in a row, he celebrated by locking himself into the room-that-was-not-his and fantasizing in detail about the look Itachi would have on his face as he died and knew that it was Sasuke who killed him.

The Chidori had burned all the nail polish off, and, as Sasuke re-applied it, he couldn't decide whether to be pleased or annoyed that his skill with the tiny brush had grown.

At night, Sasuke would dream about Itachi and Konoha. About his family before and after. About Sakura looking at him with that solemn/frightened/hopeful expression that he never knew how to face. About all the emotions that Kakashi could convey with only one eye, and how many of those emotions seemed to be a variation on disappointment. About Naruto yelling at him in that ecstatic way and holding out his hand for a five. About Itachi smiling and flicking his forehead and promising, "tomorrow, tomorrow."

Invariably, Sasuke woke up angry.

The first and only time that Orochimaru fucked him, it wasn't because Sasuke had been ordered to let him, or even been asked about it first. It was because he'd been exhausted after weeks of intense training, and exhilarated with finally mastering a technique he'd begun to doubt his ability to ever learn, and because he'd never been drunk before, but the sake that Orochimaru kept pouring made him dizzy and happy, and it had been so long since Sasuke had felt happy.

When Orochimaru began to touch him, Sasuke laughed and pushed the cool hands away, but then they brushed his curse seal it burned, and differently from when he activated it for battle.

And when Orochimaru pulled a mostly nude Sasuke into his lap, sucking at his neck, Sasuke made the mistake of looking up, and he caught their reflection in the mirror. He hadn't cut his hair in two years of training at the Sound, and there were dark circles and lines under his eyes. He looked down at his hands with their black-painted fingernails, clutching at Orochimaru's shoulders, and he knew exactly who he looked like.

He'd never felt so sick with hatred and self-disgust in his life.

So he did something that he'll never tell anyone about, ever, and something that he'll probably never forgive himself for, and that was to press his face against Orochimaru's and kiss him desperately. When their lips met, he could feel Orochimaru's laughter in his throat.

Sasuke woke up in the morning with his head pounding and his body sore. The room smelled like sex and sweat and cloves and sake, and the light that peeked in through the closed curtains was blinding. He moved his head very, very slowly, because it hurt, but managed to sit up. The sheets he was tangled in were a mess, but he was grateful to be alone in the small room.

Then his stomach lurched and Sasuke scrambled to his feet and stumbled to the toilet in time to vomit there instead of on the floor.

He didn't know whether to be more disgusted that some of the dried cum on his body was Orochimaru's, or that some of it was his own.

Sasuke vomited again, then rose to his feet very slowly and rinsed his mouth out with water. Between the havoc the sake had wrecked on his head and the havoc that Orochimaru had wrecked on his body, Sasuke wanted to curl into a ball on the floor and sleep forever. He moved shakily back to the room he rarely slept in, one hand trailing the wall, the other digging nails painfully into the curse seal.

He stopped at the bed and moved the sheets back and lifted up the corner of the mattress pad and shoved it away so that he could sit on the mattress without touching the sheets. He wanted to bury his head in his hands and sit there for a long, long time.

Instead, he forced himself to sit up straight and keep his eyes on the door and, very methodically, he began to chip the black nail polish off his fingernails.

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