Capture and Rescue

By: Serendipity1


The room is dark, not because of the particular time of day or location of the building, but because it is completely devoid of any windows. It even seems to lack a door, as there are no tiny slivers of almost-light, and no slight flow of air and sound. It is only blackness and himself alone, with each joint, each tendon affixed to a strand of chakra.

He thinks the whole affair is like a web, or the collection of strings a puppet is attached to. He is unable to move his body. The last time he tried to perform this action, there had been a rather unpleasant jolt very much like being struck by red-hot coals, and bright colors bloomed briefly before his eyes, and he knows that even then he had not moved more than a fraction of an inch. Movement is clearly no option at all.

The air smells of nothing much. There are no discernable sounds. There are, in fact, no sounds at all.

They have been very particular in what they allow their captive to detect.

There are no other observations to make.

Sai is therefore silent, waiting for more data. He does not have enough resources, information, or ability to attempt a successful escape now. Therefore, his options are A) he must wait for his teammates to seek him out and find him, and B) he will use any opening that may or may not come his way. It does not look like he has any feasible options now.

They, and he uses 'they' because these ninja are unmarked, silent, and unidentified as belonging to any land at all, these people have tortured him before now. He thinks probably they will do so again, and they do not surprise him by proving this assumption correct.

They do so in uneven periods, slowly disturbing his sense of time. It is a common tactic Sai remembers learning in his training, meant for mental torture: he is now unable to track the passage of time. He has decided that this has as of yet failed to drive him insane. The physical torture is not excruciating, but it is repetitive: the find the weak points of his body and torment them with senbon, sharpened and electrified with lightning chakra.

They draw this out over a period of what Sai has judged to be days: days in which he occupies his mind in rehearsing facts, recalling his teammates faces, invoking images such as the light, feathered veins of leaves and the blackness of ink.

Figures pass by him and attach themselves to the web he is trapped in, and soon he feels their fingertips like razors in his skin. It is now when they ask their questions. He closes his eyes and his mouth against them, and his mind is like a paintbrush over the mindscape of his memories. Like building up layers in watercolor, he thinks of colors: flashy orange, pink in the flossy silk of hair, green with fringed black lashes and swept-blue sky.

Words pass from his lips eventually, but they are not the answers his torturers are looking for. He describes ramen to them with an amiable and friendly smile. Sai has a book about ramen at home that he has memorized for such a occasion. As a ninja he is prepared for everything, even capture and torture. They fail to appreciate his efforts, and he spends the next unfathomable amount of time in the web, his body stretched out tightly, muscles straining hard enough to break, and each nerve afire with the agony.

They tire of him eventually. He has not supplied them with information, and he is not a valuable hostage. Sai has been a member of Root, used to being a commodity: disposable, interchangeable. He is not altogether upset about this opinion. Dying does not affect him. He tells them so.

"We do not intend to kill you, Sai of Konoha," the answer is the first spoken thing he has yet heard that is not a question. The speaker is old, female, and very smug about some unknown thing. "We intend to break you. Such is the way of our people."

They crush his fingers.

Before doing so, they gave him the choice of mutilation: he will have the bones in his hands crushed, or the tendons slit, or the hands themselves cut away. The answer was no answer at all, one more response he refused to give. They chose crushing because it was more painful, because it took the longest, because it stretched out every flicker of hope and crushed it as well and as slowly as the bones.

He doesn't scream. Sai is quite likely incapable of such a thing. To be truthful, he can't remember his reaction aside from the pain and the dizzying sensation of being elsewhere and separate from this thing. The old woman's fingers, enhanced by chakra, take great care and pleasure in selecting each bone in each hand individually. Twenty-seven bones in each hand, fifty-four bones to break. She touches each nerve as she does so, and he can not escape the cracking, the grinding sounds. She rips his fingernails from his ruined fingers as a final touch.

When it is done, he can barely breathe.

Sai is silent and polite even as the web lets him go and he realizes he is not in a dark room in all, but actually blinded. He says nothing as they jeer at him, at his negligent teammates, at his pathetic Konoha. They bundle up the remains of his hands in thick silk bindings and heal them into fists. He throws up when it is done, an uncontrolled reaction.

He doesn't know why.

"You are free to go," he is told when the healers are done with him. "Wherever it is you can travel. We have no use of you now."

His hands ache down to the bone, down so deep and far it affects his chest, his breathing.

He will not hold a brush again, he thinks.

Sai goes home.