Shoulders slumped; he knelt on the floor, his mind clogged with thoughts that flowed like a viscous sludge through his brain. Flickers of memories flowed across the darkness that threatened to envelop his consciousness and he found himself thinking, ironically, of his mother. There was a fine line between dreams and reality, she always used to whisper to him as he lay snuggled up in bed, on the verge of drifting off to sleep. The land between sweet slumber and bright wakefulness never spanned much territory.
Not so, Sasuke thought now, as his back bowed in a broken arch, skin streaked with stale sweat. There was a vast pasture of land between dreams and reality, and those who had the ability to exploit it did so with an inhuman mercilessness that whispered intimate promises of a cold, cruel future.
This was the first questioning of the evening; they started promptly at six o'clock, with the sealing of his chakra to prevent any sudden attempts at making an escape, then the locking of his limbs to a set of steel restraints for added means of torture. He had long gotten used to the probing and prodding, the techniques that they used to violate his mind. It had become almost a sort of routine, this form of interrogation; they had been tearing apart his psyche ever since Naruto had succeeded in bringing him back to the village.
Good, the numbness was beginning to settle into his brain. On some days it came effortlessly, and he was content with only breathing in and out like an automaton, one breath after another, counting the inhales and the exhales in an endless loop, over and over until they finished raping his mind. Other times he would resist, the resulting pain a brilliant reminder that he was, after all, only mortal, and that mortals had blood that could bleed in places he never knew could bleed at all. But it never mattered in the end, because in the end, the numbness was a welcome respite, and he gave himself over to it like a lover to his woman, content to bathe in its retardation, its reprieve.
A stone face carved of both flint and spark hovered over his watery vision; Ibiki captured his eyes with his own onyx counterparts and his mind was instantly swimming, vomiting surges of neon information that dripped down the side of his face and puddled into a mess of black and white kanji at his feet. A sliver of drool slipped down the side of his mouth and created a perfect, silvery sphere in the middle of the mess; Ibiki, nodding to himself, silently gathered up the withering conglomeration and stretched it into a string which promptly disappeared into his skin.
His spine gave out; Sasuke turned his head and barely managed to avoid the jagged edge of a crack in the floor before his temple collided with the cold concrete, sending little black lights across his vision. He felt nothing; the numbness was a soothing drug of which he gratefully partook, a substance that glossed his eyes with a glassy, porcelain sheen, slackened his limbs in a pose devoid of hope or life…
A hoarse scream cut through to his mind. It was a faint cry, distant and muffled, but his ears knew that voice, knew that grating, groaning tenor and the words that it shrieked.
"Let me in! You can't do this—I want to see—"
Sounds of a brief struggle ensued, and the voice was immediately silenced.
He sent just enough energy into his limbs to lift his head from the ground.
Naruto…?
Fingers plunged into his mind, a shinobi's iron gaze glaring cold inhumanity into his soul, and he collapsed.
xXx-------xXx
Something cool slid over his forehead. He leaned into the touch, the warm, welcoming vibrancy of intention that saturated the rough texture of the washcloth even as it was saturated with water. The fabric moved gently across the planes of his face and torso, dabbing here, stroking there, all with the same gentle, almost timid touch. It disappeared and Sasuke felt a pang of childlike want constrict his chest at the absence of contact, but the sensation was back, swiping over his eyelids with a tender reassurance, and he felt his eyes flutter open of their own accord.
A swath of moonlight reflected off twin irises of a deep cerulean hue. Naruto's countenance bore a haggard sort of hopeless concern that left deep grooves of worry under his eyes, grooves that only seemed to grow starker as the blonde swept a listless gaze over the Uchiha before him. Thin-fingered hands turned a pale, wraithlike complexion by the moonglow wrung out the washcloth with a silent, almost dutiful efficiency and laid the limp rag on the ground.
Sasuke raised his head, lips parting in a silent inquiry, but Naruto stilled the words before they formed on his mouth with a ghost of a touch on the Uchiha's lips.
"I'm not supposed to be here," The whispered words evaporated from his mouth like smoke. "They're on break right now, but they'll be coming back to interrogate you soon."
He tried once, twice, his voice cracked from abuse, seeming more like spurts of primal sound than anything coherent. "Why….why did you…"
A corner of the blonde's mouth lifted in a half-hearted smile. "What? Didn't want to see me again after all this time?" And for a moment, the old Naruto was back, he of the cheeky smiles and the edgy, backhanded jauntiness that both annoyed and endeared countless Konoha citizens with his addicting influence.
Something lurched in his heart and tied all of his veins in a knot so that, curiously, he found it almost hard to breathe. And so he did the only thing he could do to quell the foreign rush of sensation: he raised his head and fixed Naruto with a stare so dispassionate, he himself couldn't even tell if he was human or machine by his reflection in the glistening pupils of Naruto's eyes.
"You delude yourself by thinking that I care."
Naruto didn't recoil in any way, but something shattered deep inside of his eyes, and Sasuke, sensing the sudden vacuum of emotions, suddenly felt like he had, in some way, ripped the life from the blonde before him and shredded it to tatters, just like how Ibiki had shredded his own thoughts and memories into meaningless pieces of matter and dust.
"I know you do, Uchiha, don't try to hide it." A flippant façade was fully written across the canvas of Naruto's face, and Sasuke felt the sudden urge to sink his fingernails into the blonde's eyes and gouge out the false joy that Naruto tried so valiantly to maintain for his sake. "Come on. I know you've missed me."
It was a light joke, typical Naruto, but oh god, he felt his soul churn with a sudden sense of breaking down, of giving in and spewing years and years and years of guilt and anguish and despair that he had boxed up and supposedly suppressed since the minute he saw his parents' inert bodies slide off Itachi's blood-soaked sword.
Goddammit.
Naruto's sham smile of casual nonchalance began to take on the signature spark of life and sincerity that only Naruto could manage to inject into something so strained. The blonde slanted a wistful glance out of the single window of the room as the rigid tenseness of his figure ebbed slowly into relaxation. A smile curled across the edges of his mouth, genuine even if it was merely a pale imitation of his normally brilliant grin.
"Hey, it's okay." Naruto said softly. "You only have to go through two more of these sessions, and then you'll be done."
Sasuke wanted to strangle the blonde for his sheer idiocy; "two more sessions" meant that many chances to finally break his mind, that many opportunities to reduce him into a wet mess of mindless flesh without a purpose, intelligence. He strained suddenly against the locks that circled his wrists, eyes blazing with a controlled fury as he reared back to spit a derogatory comment in the blonde's oblivious face—
Naruto deftly cupped his chin and silenced the invectives that rose in Sasuke's throat. Hope (what a ridiculous emotion) glittered in his eyes, framed by all the answers to the universe as he peered deep into Sasuke's own obsidian counterparts and singlehandedly destroyed with one fell gaze all the walls of bloodlust, anger, and cold-blooded hatred hatred hatred that the Uchiha had carefully cultivated all these long, lonely years. A finger twitched and began to trace a pattern on the alabaster skin of Sasuke's cheek.
"After these two sessions are done," Naruto murmured absently, almost languidly as his finger continued its journey. "You're going to come home, and I'm going to treat you to a special new type of ramen that Ichiraku Ramen recently added to their menu. It's absolutely splendid, and I'm sure you'll be awfully hungry."
He finished tracing the heart on Sasuke's cheek, gave the Uchiha a swift, fleeting kiss on the corner of his mouth that was more like a brush of lips than anything else, and melted into the shadows just as Ibiki entered the room with Despair by his side and dispassion in his eyes.
The heart that Naruto had traced into his skin lingered in his mind as he gave himself to blissful oblivion.
xXx-------xXx
He found himself standing in front of a simple, mahogany door a week later, knuckles poised over the barrier that separated him from the being inside. For a moment, he hesitated, and then his hand moved of its own volition and connected solidly with the door in a series of hard, practical raps.
He heard rustling inside, and a minute later, Naruto opened the door and greeted him with a simple, noncommittal gaze that somehow spoke more volume than any saucy greeting could ever accomplish.
Sasuke simply stood there, his gaze betraying nothing.
And then Naruto shrugged, a whimsical smirk blooming at the edges of his mouth as he shifted his weight from side to side.
"Alright," he quipped lightly, laughter bubbling like a brook underneath the vibrations of the word.
"You're probably hungry."