No Longer Weak
Interrogation
The morning air rose goose bumps on Sasuke's skin as he stood there in the blue strip between nighttime and sunrise. He leaned against a tree, arms crossed, and waited for Juugo and Suigetsu to appear.
The weather was starting to cool just slightly, leaving a small sheen of frozen dew on the ground. Sasuke could just imagine how it would shine when the sun finally rose. It reminded him of Sakura, of how she'd look standing there next to him, taking it all in, the sun moving from her feet up. The rays would illuminate her face and smile and set her hair on fire.
Her sightless eyes sliding closed as she felt the warmth on her skin.
He ran a hand through his hair and shook his head. He had a mission to focus on and one second of distraction could cost them everything. His focus turned outward again.
The base and surrounding land was quiet, as was expected at a time like this. Even the animals were nowhere in sight. He sensed a scouting team in the distance, moving along the western edge in a wide circle.
This was his favorite time of day. The stillness made him feel peaceful. It slowed the racing thoughts in his head so that he could just be. There was never anyone up at this time, vying for his attention, and none of his teammates were ever up at this time unless it was for a mission.
Two sets of footsteps crunched behind him like a whisper.
"Ready?" he asked Suigetsu and Juugo.
They hiked their packs higher and nodded. Suigetsu looked like he desperately missed his bed and Juugo seemed more wide-awake than all three of them combined.
A sort of exhaustion settled into Sasuke's bones. Were they about to hit another dead end? The thought of being disappointed and starting over again felt almost crippling.
They headed out at moderate speed. They should reach the boat in about a week and a half at full speed, another few days on the boat, and then two more weeks carrying out the mission if they were lucky.
The base faded into the distance and then they were so far away he couldn't feel any chakra signatures. The sun was starting to come up now, pushing the chill out of the air. He glanced behind him, past Suigetsu and Juugo, and saw a massive flock of birds back near the base taking flight into the air, almost like they'd been startled by something. Reasoning it must've been a predator going after an early breakfast, he turned his attention forward and picked up speed.
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When Sakura's eyes slid open slowly, she traded one nightmare for another. Her whole body throbbed in sync with the crushing pain in her face. She lay on the cold stone floor and inch-by-inch moved her fingers along the seamless ground to better figure out where she was.
With so much pain flaring up from every part of her body, it was hard to take inventory of what injuries she had. She settled on assuming there were many serious ones. Next she focused on the fact that she still had her clothes on from the fight, but they'd taken her boots and kunai pouch she had been wearing out of habit, even though it was always empty.
It was easy to guess that she was in the dungeons, but not in the same one she had been last time when Sasuke had put her down here. No, this one was colder, damper, telling her she was further underground. There were no windows as the moldy smell that filled her lungs had settled like a thick fog in this place long ago.
And it was quiet, extremely quiet, except for the dripping that seemed to be coming from the far side of the room. Sakura tried not to focus on it, because if she did, it started to feel like each drop matched the waves of pain that coursed through her body and she hated the dreadful anticipation of knowing exactly when she was going to feel pain next.
The chakra blocking bands were hard to ignore around her wrists and ankles. Double duty just to be safe, Sakura noted with the small amount of amusement she could muster in her situation. They pressed tightly against her skin as she finally pushed herself into a sitting position with shaking arms and gritted teeth. The movement made her dizzy and nauseous and she had to lean against the wall until it subsided.
The next step was to get to her feet, but when she moved a certain way, one of her ribs screamed with white-hot needles that took her breath away. One hand shot to that spot, clutching her dirty, bloody shirt as she tried to breath through the pain until it stopped.
She was used to pain like this. She was a ninja after all and had had her fair share of injuries, but she knew that this was just the beginning. Kabuto was a sick man and she had what he wanted, which was not a good combination.
When the pain faded into a dull stabbing, she examined the chakra bands, finding no obvious opening, just smooth metal all around that she couldn't even get a finger underneath. She wasn't surprised.
She should've known it would come to this eventually and was not surprised it had come from Kabuto before Sasuke. But based on what she'd seen in Sasuke in the last few months, something was changing inside of him, if it hadn't already been there deep down.
She pushed the thought of Sasuke deep from her mind because he was currently on his way to Land of Swamp and wouldn't be back for at least two months, at the earliest. The thought made her stomach plummet.
"Not that I'll make it that far," Sakura whispered to herself with a frown and tasted blood on her lips. When Sasuke returned from his mission, either she or Kabuto was going to be dead. That was the only certain outcome she could predict and she had to admit her chances were not looking so good.
She turned her attention back to her cell to distract herself from her grim thoughts.
With no chakra and no eyesight, not that she felt any artificial or fire light on her skin anyways, she had no choice but to eventually examine the room with her hands. It made her wince at the amount of pain it was going to take to get to her feet.
Other than the chakra bands, she wasn't chained to anything, meaning she was free to roam the small cell. Judging by that alone, she knew there was no way she was going to be able to get out in her current state.
"Here goes," she muttered, one hand clutching her ribs as she used the arm on her good side to try and push herself to her feet. She blacked out immediately from the pain.
When she came to sometime later, she immediately threw out the option of getting to her feet that way. Scooting around, she searched the walls. They were mostly smooth, slightly damp and slimy, but she found small pockets here and there. She didn't want to think about what had caused them.
Digging the fingers of her good arm into one of the higher pockets she could reach, she braced herself against the wall and slowly pulled herself up. She hissed in pain, couldn't breathe, and tears ran from the corners of her eyes, but she was able to get her knees underneath her.
With her shoulder heavy against the wall, she paused to catch her breath. Sweat beaded along her face and mixed with the blood matted there. She let out a small groan and then without allowing herself to think about it, she searched for another pocket above her in the wall.
Instead, she found a ring bolted into the wall to attach cuffs to. She grimaced, wrapped her fingers around its rusted surface and managed to pull herself to her feet. It was easier this time around, but she still nearly vomited from the pain roaring through her body like an explosion.
When her legs stopped shaking from the overload on her senses and the world stopped spinning, she moved around the cell, feeling the walls. It was a decent size, bigger than most cells, but maybe it was meant for multiple prisoners for she found various rings bolted into the walls around the room.
Even though she circled the room five, six, seven times, she never found the door. No cracks, no small space near the floor with a small trickle of air flowing through, nothing that would hint that a door was somewhere in this room. There were small rocks, too small to be used as a weapon, that she threw up and heard hit the ceiling, but it was too high for her to touch. The door must be hidden, she concluded, and only could be opened with a certain jutsu.
After examining the room, she settled herself gingerly into one of the corners and waited.
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Karin walked by Sasuke's apartment three times a day at differing times, trying and failing to sense any chakra inside. She didn't stop in front of the door but instead would go around the corner and keep going before looping back around to double check that no one had followed her.
She'd hover there, sometimes with her hand on the wall, other times with her forehead on the wall in frustration, hoping for some clue as to what the hell was going on. She reached into every corner of the apartment, looking for a small spark of chakra, but came back empty each time.
Then, when that didn't work three days in, she started searching in other directions around her. She moved to Sakura's secret hiding spot on the stairs and started at the top, moving downward slowly, thoroughly.
Most people kept the same schedule so by the third day she was searching quicker, scanning through those she was familiar with and pausing briefly on those that deviated from their normal schedule, looking for anything abnormal, anything that could hint at something deeper going on here.
That revealed a lot about what people did around the base. She found out that two people had a secret rendezvous every afternoon in an empty storage room that no one had known about. Someone was stealing food from the kitchens, not that they needed it. Another went to the far west side and sat in one of the lesser-used staircases for twenty minutes at the same time every day, doing who knew what for his chakra didn't flare up.
But Karin didn't find Sakura on the upper or mid levels.
She sighed and stood, wincing at the stiffness of her legs from sitting for so long. Her stomach twisted because there was only one option left: the lower levels. Most areas of the lower levels were off limits, not that it mattered because a lot of people refused to go down there because they were afraid of what they'd come across.
Not many people went down there, but Karin noticed an abnormal increase in traffic in the lower levels. She was too high up to really investigate, for the first few lower level floors were empty or used as storage, creating a barrier. The chakra signatures of the people who went down there were faded at best from Karin's position and some snuffed out of existence as they continued their descent.
Tomorrow, Karin decided, she would venture down there and see what she could find.
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Sakura lifted her head when the door opened. She couldn't tell how much time had passed since she fell in and out of sleep in an attempt to heal. The cavern of her stomach told her a considerable time.
She heard a clicking noise and then a slab of the rock on the far wall swung open. Lifting her head, she listened to the slow footsteps that ambled into the room. Without chakra, she only had her senses to rely on. The footsteps were familiar and she clenched her fists in preparation.
Kabuto did some hand signs and she felt heat above her. Now he could see her, but she could still not see him. The thought sparked her with an old anger.
"I will not do it," she got right to the point. Her voice cracked from disuse and she licked her dry lips.
He came closer and placed something down in front of her. She didn't bother to reach for it.
"Go on," he urged her and finally, after some time, she lifted a hesitant hand and nearly knocked over a cup. Lifting it to her face, she sniffed it and then put her lips to the rim and took a small sip of water.
Right as she set down the cup, he grabbed her wrist with strong fingers.
She struggled, too weak to break out of his grip. His chakra coursed through her, healing and mending everything in its path until the only ache she had left was in her empty stomach. She took a deep breath, the first since she'd been thrown in this cell, and relished in the feeling of being pain free because she knew it was not going to last long.
"I will not do it," she reminded him in a hard voice as he stood and headed for the door.
"We'll see," he called as the heat disappeared from above her, leaving her, she guessed, in total darkness.
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Sakura didn't bother to lift her head as the door swung open. She counted in her head based on the number of times they'd come into her cell. Day three.
Based on the footsteps, she could tell it was Kabuto and one of his two assistants. Kabuto came in first, relaxed and confident. His assistant shuffled in behind him, hesitant, waiting for a command from his boss.
The other assistant was absent, but if she had to guess, he was probably somewhere outside. Just in case.
The door slid shut and sealed them inside with her. Heat flared above her.
Kabuto pushed the meal tray out of the way with his foot. He kneeled down on one foot.
Sakura held out a hand and steeled her eyes forward with a carefully constructed passive look. She wanted them to know she knew what was coming and that she accepted it. She reminded herself she was a hardened warrior and had seen worse. Then she closed off her mind from her body as best she could to prepare for what was to come next.
Fingers wrapped around her wrist, above the chakra-blocking band, and her wounds healed. The bone of her broken arm realigned and mended, her punctured lung became good as new, and all the cuts and gashes stitched back together and faded without leaving a single scar. All the pain evaporated and she felt like she could breathe again.
"Are we going to cooperate today?" he asked in a tone one would use with a friend. "Are you going to tell me where Itachi is?"
She exhaled slowly through her nose, calmed her heart rate as she shook her head. Then she closed her eyes as the first fist connected.
Never once did she speak. They broke one of her legs bone by bone, left the entire right side of her body a map of bruised and the entire left side cut up. Her nose was broken and she tried her best to breathe out of her mouth, past the blood running down the back of her throat and being coughed back up from her lungs.
She fell to the ground as the assistant let go of her. The cold floor felt like a miracle against her body and helped ease a sliver of the pain.
"Where is Itachi?"
Silence.
Kabuto stood above her and slowly pressed his boot against her left hand. He pressed harder and harder until the bones started to crack.
She grit her teeth and her body twitched as a fresh wave of pain was added to the tsunami building in her. The fingers of her right hand dug into the ground and her left hand exploded in pain with the breaking of the bones.
Still, she didn't she speak a word. She kept her jaw firmly locked. She grunted and gasped and even groaned once, but that was all she gave them. She could sense Kabuto's frustration in the way his blows grew harder. One of them just might be her death.
"Where is Itachi?"
Silence.
A foot connected with her face, knocking her out of the pleasant numbness she had started to settle into. She was on the edge of unconsciousness and she waited desperately for it.
Another kick to the ribs sent her rolling into the wall. The chill settled into her back like a soothing hand and it lulled her into blanketing blackness.
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Happy Labor Day for those in the US and here's a little something to enjoy over the long weekend.
Thanks!