AN: NO, the healer through which I am exposition-ing is NOT Sakura.

I will warn you, manga spoilers abound in this fic. Not always obvious, but I'm drawing most of my characterization from recent stuff.

Story beta'd by missmocha77 (thanks bunches)

000

I – The Decision

Itachi Uchiha quietly sat on the cot in his cell within the confines of the Konoha prison. He had had a chakra suppressing drug injected into his system at regular intervals. He was handcuffed to his bed. His meals were brought to him because he was considered insane, too dangerous to be around any of the others. If there were others. Without chakra running in his system properly, he could not activate the Sharingan. Without the Sharingan, he could not see.

He was also afflicted with some strange illness. The medics that had examined him and suspected it might be genetic, although the symptoms were not in line with anything they were familiar with. Itachi already knew he was ill. They asked him if he was taking medication, he supplied the names, and he was medicated. That was all they could do without further permission, and their best were working on recently returned shinobi, keeping those people alive. Not Itachi. He was not bitter, however. He had already resigned himself to being stripped of his semen, interrogated, and executed.

Konoha wanted the Uchiha line to continue, the information he knew, and for him to be another tally against the enemy. Perhaps they would not want his seed; they would debate among themselves whether or not the Uchiha massacre was caused by some err in Itachi's creation, some code that made him go insane. Itachi knew that his sanity was as intact as it could be, given the circumstances. He knew the truth, but nobody else wished to know. Itachi was not the least bit troubled. He had already decided that such things were not worthy of the anxiety normal people assigned to them.

000

One of the healers assigned to Itachi was puzzled by the young man's passive attitude toward everything involving his capture. She had heard that he let himself be captured, simply held out his hands and allowed the ANBU to bind his wrists with chakra-suppressing cuffs. She had noted that up close, Itachi was not intimidating in the least. He was thin, pale, with long hair and the lean musculature of a long-range fighter. She had, of course, heard of the skill the Uchiha used in battle, how easily he could have killed the ANBU squad.

The man that had always placidly sat on the edge of his bed, staring dreamily into the wall, was he so dangerous? She wasn't sure. She didn't want to talk with the other healers about it. They would mock her for being new to the team, would say that the craziest were always the ones you didn't suspect. At the same time, though, there was Sasuke Uchiha. He had a mean streak, rage to spare, and had been under intense care ever since he had been brought back from Orochimaru's grasp.

The younger Uchiha had been displaying severe reactions, breaking a glass of water offered to him one day. The healer recalled that she had been interned for a couple of days with one of the older people on the team, then moved to Itachi. Itachi was not as dangerous as the other, she had been told. She stopped in the little cafeteria for the staff to get some tea on the way to another check-up on Itachi.

One of the walls was mirrored, and she noted her tired eyes. She was always working round-the-clock with other subjects, not just the Uchiha boy. She strode quickly down the halls when she finished her tea, yanking on latex gloves. Itachi's cell was high-security; the guards gave her employee ID a look-over, and opened the metallic door for her.

Out of her pocket came the chakra-suppressing injection, contained in a syringe with a sterilized hypodermic needle. She talked idly to him as she went through the routine examination, not expecting a reply when she asked him what he thought of this or that, what his favorite color or weather was. Much to her surprise, he did answer her inquiry as to his favorite food.

"Anything sweet, cabbage and rice balls with seaweed," he murmured. There might have been a brief twitch of his lips, a small nostalgic smile.

"Hm. Didn't expect someone like you to like sweets," she said, smiling amusedly down at him. "Go figure, huh?"

Itachi stared blankly at one corner of the small room. "Yeah," he whispered.

000

Sasuke did not know what was happening to him. He would alternate between being unable to sleep and waking up in the middle of the night, sweat pouring from his body. Then one morning, Sakura, bright and smiling, green eyes twinkling with some joyous emotion, had given him a glass of water. A simple glass of water. For a wild moment, Sasuke thought it was poisoned and flung it away, breaking it on the whitewashed wall a few feet to Sakura's right. Then the horrified look she gave him, the trembling of her lips. He had awkwardly muttered an apology as she cleaned up the mess. It had only been water. Similar outbursts kept happening, and Sasuke felt himself slipping away from reality even as he reaffirmed himself within it.

Then there was the argument with Naruto. It had been over something petty, probably ramen, knowing that cheeky blonde idiot. Suddenly, Sasuke's hands acted of their own accord and began to choke Naruto. It was then, he thought, that he was put here, wherever that was. There had been some healer girl starting an internship at the beginning, but she was gone now. Pity. He had liked her; she was actually kind to him. Each day he was injected with a chakra-suppressing serum, each day he was subjected to medical tests.

The healer girl, she always apologized for jabbing the needle into his thigh too roughly, or hitting a nerve somehow. Sasuke nodded in acknowledgement of the mistake and stoically endured through the pain and numbness. Then she had been replaced by a man easily twice her weight, with light brown hair. Sasuke had attempted to attack him without thinking, and suddenly he was tossed back into his bed like a rag doll.

Then there were other people that came and went. Sasuke began to drift when he was supposed to be paying attention to another ranting "healer." His room was slowly purged of any sharp objects. It was then that he had it figured out. They were treating him like he was insane but not telling him their diagnosis. He began to pay attention.

Nobody would pull one over on him.