He had ben interrogated mercilessly, whipped and stabbed and cut and burned and beaten and jutsu'ed until his mind was chaos, dark shadows and pain and fear. He flinched at most sounds and screamed when anyone was closer than a foot away from him.
When he was released and he was lucid and sensible and hydrated enough to understand what was going on (We're healing you, shinobi-san, so don't move or the needles currently inside you, sewing up your organs will shift and quite possibly kill you) he was told that he had broken and talked after three months. Genma remembered enough about that time-screams coming from down the hall of his small, dry, bare dark cell-to realize that his interrogators had barely asked any questions about Konoha. No questions about his home, or about security, or any other of the devastating pieces of information that he knew about Konoha and it's secret passageways and routines and protocols.
No questions about Konohagakure, focusing on him, him and his jutsu, his training and his abilities and his reasons to livesurvivekilwhore for Konoha and he had answered their questions, scream after scream.
He had tried to commit suicide seventeen times, failing each and left with fewer and fewer options after each attempt.
-------
He shivered, looking at the small shard of stone that had chipped off the wall after his interrogators had slammed his head against it. His head hurt and he was still in the chakra shackles and he was in horrible shape- bad enough that he wouldn't be able to make it back to Konoha even if he got out. Genma looked at his grotesquely swollen and twisted foot, and knew that he wouldn't make it out of the cell alive. He methodically brought the sliver to bear, gouging long, bloody furrows in his arms and legs and torso, wherever he could reach and as quickly as he could. He was certain that he would bleed out before they could find him, especially as he had already cut several veins.
He was interrupted in the middle of what would've been one of his last cuts- he was weakening fast and damn if it didn't scare him that he was happy about that- and his vision went black and he knew no more.
When Genma woke up, he was in his freshly cleaned cell with a newly reinforced steel wall with no sign of what he had done visible on his skin besides the odd faint silver line. He screamed and screamed because in that moment he knew that he wouldn't be getting out of his cell until they let him, and they wouldn't let him until he broke. And he knew what happened to broken shinobi, and Genma despaired that he would ever see the sky or breath fresh air or feel the glorious feeling of his chakra flowing through him again.
-------
eventually he ran out of ways to kill himself. Or maybe he had just forgotten them all, and since he had learned seven hundred and fifty-eight ways to off himself in the Academy, that wasn't good, was it?
They had given him over to Nara Shikamaru, the traitor that had brought him there in the first place, and slowly slowly slowly Shikamaru had pieced him together and made him sane again.
It had taken time, a year and five months and seventeen hours and twenty nine seconds of constant contact and stability and fits that could last for hours and little white pills that rattled in their paper cup. It took multiple visits to the hospital and years of therapy and many sleepless nights that were spent holding the shaking tokujou as he screamed and railed and wept at nothing, but Genma survived, a bit worse for the wear and more than a little insane, but he was the good kind of insane, the kind where they could think of ways to keep you from hurting others and yourself, with as little problems as possible.
Genma survived and clung to Shikamaru, the dark eyed shinobi who had been his rock and world for the past year. The fact that Shikamaru was also the reason for his mental instability didn't seem to register in Genma's mind. He was dead set on Shikamaru. When it was explained to the shinobi in question in careful and politically correct terms that the insane Konoha ninja that he had been bunking with for the past year and a half had decided to start calling him 'Master', Shikamaru closed his eyes, took a deep breath, blew it out, then announced that he was going to get drunk.
A year and a half after Genma was captured by Shikamaru, he was officially declared dead. Half of Konoha's jounin and chunin appeared for his wake.
