Cut the Strings (джен)

The woman crouches down, long hair piled up into a haphazard bun during the time he had looked away. Her eyes are level with his. “Don’t worry, Kabuto. Shimura Memorial Orphanage is a good place. If we can’t find your parents, you can stay here, okay?”
An orphanage.
He is in an orphanage and, he looks down at his hands with a familiar hollow ache in his chest, and he is a child.
He is dead, and he is in an orphanage, and he is a child.
Kabuto laughs and laughs and laughs.
...
Or, a deeply unstable Root graduate with no concept of selfhood and only the most tenuous grasp of what sanity might be supposed to look like in sterile lab conditions makes friends, does his best to figure out how independence is supposed to work, terrifies a lot of responsible adults (and less responsible "peers") who really just want to help, and carefully unhinges everyone he meets one screw at a time while somehow managing to (debatably) make their lives better for it. Depressing introspection and unfortunate perspective gaps are only to be expected. This is the best Kabuto's mental health has been ... ever, and the eighth panic attack Hizashi has had this week.