Author's Notes: Hello! Thanks for the reviews! They encouraged me to get this chapter out super fast (for me)! I hope it answers some questions and brings up many more...
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(Man, I suck at exposition...)
"Aaand... it's just been hanging out in the tank for a while," the voice from the man – boy? - sitting at the computer continued, completely oblivious to Sasuke's moment of existential panic. "I dunno why. They ran like one test in December. December 4. It was... inconclusive." He leaned back – Sasuke could hear the chair creak. "There's not enough data in this file to know, like, anything."
The Chouji-lookalike sitting in front of him, on the other hand, was aware enough to be silent. His eyes, probing Sasuke's face, slowly lost their rage to develop into... pity.
Sasuke didn't even want to know what his face must look like.
Shikamaru-with-glasses whirled around in his chair, voice surprisingly chirpy. "So why do you think it's alive? Didn't all the others die when we blew the power out?"
"Shikajiro," said the older man quietly, "shut up."
Sasuke struggled to collect his thoughts in the resulting silence, feeling his heartbeat louder and louder in his ears. This... this...
Genjutsu, his mind supplied, and he clung to it with relief. Of course – he was a threat to anyone who was holding him if he had all his faculties about him. But who? his mind, his treacherous mind asked him. Who would have the ability to trick an owner of the Sharingan so completely?
Madara. Of course. Sasuke felt his heartbeat slow, his panic subside. If it came to playing Madara, well, he had been at this for a while. No one but himself knew that as soon as Danzo and the Elders' life blood spilled onto the ground, Madara was the next target of Sasuke's revenge. He merely had to bide his time until a weakness in the older – much older – ninja made itself clear.
That included playing along with this genjutsu, until he found a way to break it.
Slowly, deliberately, Sasuke increased his breathing speed, making it sound like he was close to panic. "Where am I?" he asked, and was perversely glad that his voice had reverted to cracking and warbling.
"You're in a facility in Mist," said serious-Chouji in a voice without much inflection.
"Facility number 3!" chipped in the Shikamaru lookalike, Shikajiro apparently. "We've been looking for it for, like, forever."
"Wh-what happened to me?" asked Sasuke, hating himself for sounding so pathetic, knowing it was necessary.
"That's what we're trying to find—"
"You had a head surgery on August 8, another on September--"
"Shut up, Shika."
Sasuke closed his eyes, more not to laugh than anything else. Madara had one wicked sense of humor.
He heard the Chouji-lookalike stand up, move closer. Don't strike, Sasuke told himself. Not until your hands are free...
"It'll be okay," said the other man, in a halting voice perhaps meant to be soothing. "Do you – do you remember Leaf? The Leaf village?"
Now Sasuke had to choke down his anger. Madara could also be uniquely insulting. He opened his eyes and glared at the other man.
"Of course I do. I lived there for years." Without knowing the depths of their betrayal.
Relief was obvious on the other man's face. "Good. We'll – we will take you there, as soon as possible." His eyes glanced over the ties that bound Sasuke; Sasuke allowed himself to hope--
"We're gong to keep you bound as a precaution," continued the Chouji-lookalike. Damn! thought Sasuke, though it made sense that Madara would not be fooled so easily. "You understand. These circumstances are--" He paused, shook himself. "You understand," he said again.
"Chouno," whined Shikajiro, leaning on the back of the chair so it creaked in a very annoying fashion. "I hafta download all the data on the computers here. It's the mission."
"And you will," said the man, Chouno apparently, in return. "As quickly as possible. Now. No more talking." He looked around. "I'll make one more patrol before I call in the surveyors. Hopefully there won't be any more... surprises." He glanced back at Sasuke one last time before moving with surprising speed out of Sasuke's field of vision. Shikajiro gave Sasuke one more intrigued look before turning around in the chair and making data flow across the screen at a speed too fast to follow.
Which left Sasuke, still tied to a pipe.
Genjutsu, thought Sasuke again. This is genjutsu. He took an even breath, in and out. What could he tell for sure about reality, trapped in a jutsu that seemed more real with every mote of dust in the air that floated by? Precious little, except for the fact that he, himself was somewhere still breathing.
Madara, thought Sasuke again. He knew that Madara had been involved in the Uchiha massacre. Itachi couldn't – hadn't – done it all by himself. Everything else was hearsay, illusion.. drifting just out of reach. Madara may or may not have met with Itachi, though it seemed likely. He may or may not have fought with the First Hokage Hashirama so many years ago. He may or may not really be the Uchiha Madara, though he didn't know why Itachi would have lied to him about that. There were a lot of things that hovered just on the edge of truth; he was determined to rip the shroud of history off of them.
Sasuke felt the wrench of pain, too, that accompanied every thought of Itachi these days. He pushed it away. Only cold, clear reasoning would bring him – and Itachi – the justice that their blood cried out for.
In the meanwhile, he still had an absolutely splitting headache.
A memory of the Raikage's fist smashing through Susano'o and into his cheek flitted across his mind. That combined with the usual ache behind his eyes whenever he used the Mangekyo... yes, that would approximate what he was feeling now. Sasuke let a smirk come onto his face. Not everything in this world was an illusion.
From behind him he heard the sound of rushing footsteps, more than one person. Loud, clumsy. Not ninjas.
"By the gods--" he heard the gasped exclamation, repeated more than once by the group. Chouno's voice overshadowed them, loud on purpose.
"This is the laboratory holding room. There is no need to worry, all those still in the tank are deceased." A pause. "There is one live one, but it is secured. Us ninjas will... handle it."
Sasuke closed his eyes, trying to block out the background noise. Genjutsu could be broken through expert control of his own chakra rhythms. He had merely to sense them – they had to still be there, buried deeply within the illusion. If he could just get around the splitting pain...
Footsteps near his head let him know that Chouno was nearby, but he ignored them. Suddenly, a scratchy cloth landed on top of him. He opened his eyes in surprise, looked down at the field blanket tossed over his body.
"You are going to stay there until the surveyors are finished," said Chouno, still being careful not to get within striking range of any of Sasuke's limbs. "It's for... your modesty."
Sasuke hadn't even realized he was naked.
Suddenly the floor felt a lot colder.
…
The surveyors took their sweet time doing their work, Sasuke couldn't help thinking. The bindings around his wrists made his arms go more and more numb over time, just like they would in real life. He couldn't help but wonder if he was bound in real life. Making a physical sensation pitch-perfect was one of the most complex aspects of genjutsu – Sasuke ought to know.
Chouno gave loud orders, most of them quite technical and, frankly, obvious – or would have been, to trained professionals. Sasuke wondered why Madara had decided to have civilians doing what no respectable ninja fort would ever leave to them. To annoy him? Put him off? Some other inscrutable reason of his own?
What was really annoying him, though, was the fact that this Shikajiro character, right behind him and well within hearing range, could not stop tapping away on that monitor for so much as ten seconds in a row. Tikka tikka tick, tikka tick tick. Tikketa tickketa tiktiktik---
Sasuke had gritted his teeth and counted his blessings. The brat could still be talking, after all.
Time passed in indecipherable units, one blending into another. No daylight was visible in the underground lab – only the flickering from the monitor, and a few emergency lights, both apparently powered from the generator that the squad had brought with them. Sasuke blinked his eyes several times, concentrated on his breathing. He suspected that Madara was trying to confuse him with this lack of stimulation, interrupted only when a surveyor shouted a question, or when yet another part of his body decided it wanted to take its turn as most painful.
All the physical signs indicated that there was no way he could successfully escape. His muscles, his senses told him, were weak, much weaker than he'd been in years. Pain flared in and out in a random fashion, except for his head, where it was constant. Most disturbingly, he couldn't seem to get a good grip on his own chakra. He was used to it flaring up when he so much as supposed an attack might spring from the shadows. But for whatever reason, he felt... disconnected.
That's the key, realized Sasuke suddenly, heart thumping loudly in his ears. My own chakra is being disrupted by something. But if I can just break through the blockage...
"Done!" Shikajiro shouted so loudly that Sasuke jumped. "Done! Chouno, I'm done!" He leaped out of the chair and clattered out of Sasuke's range of view. Unfortunately, he could still be heard.
"All the good files are on this one here, and I put the corrupted ones here, so that they wouldn't contaminate each other, and there was one virus, and I put it on here, and then there was an operating system and I didn't know if you wanted that but just in case I put it on here--"
"Okay, that's fine," said Chouno quickly, cutting Shikajiro off. "Tanaka-san!" he called to one of the surveyors. "Our part of the mission is complete. We are going to return to Konoha-gakure with the data and - and the specimen. Will you be able to complete the mission?"
"Get it out of here," Sasuke heard one of the others mutter.
"For Fire Country. Sir." That voice was more likely Tanaka.
Sasuke closed his eyes again and berated himself for getting caught up in the details of the genjutsu. What he needed to focus on, the truth, was strictly inside--
Before he knew what was happening, his hands had been detached from the pipe (but not each other) and he was pulled into an awkward sitting position. Every single one of the muscles that had hurt at one time before, screamed in pain again.
"I need you to get up," said Chouno, standing – still a safe distance away – and holding the other end of the rope. "I need you to walk. Can you do that?"
Sasuke had been putting too much energy into not crying out to answer that verbally. He glared.
"It's been in a tank for, like, 7 months and 2 days and 15 more hours besides," supplied Shikajiro, coming to stand right besides the taller ninja. "Are you sure it can really--"
"Don't," said Sasuke, ending that comment right in the middle. "Call me," he gathered his legs beneath him, ignoring the pain – he was Uchiha Sasuke, dammit - "It." He stood. His knees only trembled a little bit as the blanket fell to the floor.
There was a brief silence.
"Okay," Shikajiro continued. "You're a boy. Got it."
"Shika," said Chouno. "Go ahead of me and get old man Nakata with the cart."
"Are you sure you don't want backup--"
"Go." Shikajiro went.
Sasuke followed Chouno's lead, knees trembling but not giving way – they would not give way – as Chouno walked backwards out of the lab, eyes never leaving Sasuke, through the door, and out into a gently sloping hallway. Large panels of glass glinted against the wall; not broken, but perhaps meant to do repairs that would never be completed.
Sasuke caught a glimpse of himself in one of them, like a mirror.
He looked... exactly like himself.
Even his cowlick in back poked up, though a little more bedraggled than usual.
Sasuke was very careful to keep his face neutral, even when one of his legs spasmed and he nearly fell, catching himself through reflexes alone. He kept it like that as he kept walking, heading towards the light at the end of the tunnel.
But inside, he was smirking up a storm.
Madara may have thought he was baffling Sasuke by keeping his face the same. May have thought it would pull him deeper into the genjutsu.
But as long as his face and his memories were the same...
Mangekyo Sharingan, thought Sasuke, thinking of Itachi's cold eyes, the eyes that only lied because they had to. I'll have you back soon enough. Just wait.
And he walked out into the light.