Kabuto Yakushi

The round, black-framed spectacles Kabuto rarely removes are a gift from Nonō, and they remain his signature across every version of himself. Early on he gathers ash-grey hair into a ponytail above dark, onyx eyes, and dresses in a high-collared purple top over a pale undershirt, purple trousers, and a cloth sash. His Part I look adds plated fingerless gloves and a blue forehead protector.

Everything shifts once he grafts Orochimaru's remains onto his left arm: pale, scaled skin creeps outward until his whole frame turns serpentine. By the war he resembles his old master so closely that Sasuke mistakes one for the other, his irises gone yellow and slit-pupiled, ringed by purple markings, while a pale snake winds around his waist like a tail. That finished shell hides a far more reptilian true body. In his later years running the orphanage he ties the ponytail back and wears the staff uniform, though the snakelike changes never fully leave him.

Because Kabuto has worn so many faces for so many employers, his character reads as a bundle of contradictions. He can be forward and self-assured one moment, yet calls himself a private person who would rather fade into the background. He turns polite and deferential toward those he respects, sharp and mocking toward those he does not, and occasionally generous with no gain in sight.

Underneath the shifting masks runs a genuine identity crisis: a childhood head wound erased his origins, so he has spent his life assembling a self out of borrowed roles. Orochimaru urges him to build whoever he wishes from the knowledge he can steal, but Kabuto eventually sees that this only repeats his spy's habit of hiding inside someone larger. He resolves instead to outgrow every figure whose shadow he has lived under, above all Orochimaru, convincing himself he has become a flawless being. Only Itachi's Izanami forces him to admit that inventing personas has merely buried the real Kabuto, the trusted orphan Nonō once raised. Even so he keeps his respect for Orochimaru, and afterward devotes himself to the children of the orphanage.

Nonō Yakushi finds him as a boy near a razed town, his skull injured and his memory gone. She carries him to the Konoha orphanage, where a fellow orphan named Urushi fits a helmet on him, inspiring the name he keeps, and Nonō hands over her own glasses once she learns he can barely see. She trains him in medical ninjutsu, but the orphanage leans on village money, and Danzō pressures her into surrendering a child to Root. Kabuto volunteers.

Years of espionage send him masquerading as a ninja of one hidden village after another, until a mission in Iwa ends with him cutting down his pursuer, only to discover he has killed Nonō, whom Danzō fed doctored photographs so she would never know his face. Orochimaru, who has watched him for years, meets him in his grief and offers a fresh start in Otogakure along with a new backstory that lets him slip into Konoha as a genin. He uses that cover to scout the Chūnin Exams for his master while doubling as an Akatsuki infiltrator.

After Orochimaru falls, Kabuto absorbs his remains and remakes his body, then throws in with Tobi for the Fourth Shinobi World War, raising an army of reincarnated dead as the conflict's hidden engine. His defeat comes at the hands of Itachi, whose Izanami breaks his self-delusion; grateful to be shown who he is, he saves Sasuke's life and later returns home to raise orphans as he was once raised.