Disclaimer: You know. I really only need to say it once, right?


Torture and Interrogation

"Nothing personal, mind you," she said, smiling brightly at the captive. "I'm pretty new at all this, so please bear with me if I make any mistakes. Our Torture and Interrogation Captain is on leave today, so we're filling in for him." The captive felt a little bit of his tension release. He had heard stories about Konoha Village's legendary Morino Ibiki… stories that had made his blood curdle. Not having to face that man, but a relative beginner instead, made him grimly pleased.

Her companion gestured irritably. "Let's just get on with this. We've got better things to do than to stay around here and wait for him to talk." Pale eyes glared at the man strung defiantly across the rack.

"Don't be such a spoilsport, Neji," the woman said amiably to the glowering man beside her. "I haven't gotten a chance to really practise my interrogation skills since the time I accidentally killed that old guy."

The prisoner gritted his teeth. Then again, relative beginners could make stupid mistakes like that. He had sworn a solemn vow never to reveal the information they were trying to get out of him. "I won't tell you anything. You can do anything you want to me, but I won't break!" he spat out. So there.

"No, no… I think it was because you were trying too hard," the white-eyed man was telling the woman.

"Oh really? You think so? What exactly did I do wrong?"

"Well for starters…" the white-eyed man began, but then stopped short and looked over at the prisoner. "I'm sorry… did you say something?"

The prisoner's eyes widened. They weren't even paying attention to him!

"Anyway, Neji… did you hear about Sakura and Naruto getting together?" the woman in the Chinese blouse was asking the man. The white-eyed man's attention was immediately diverted before the prisoner could respond.

"It's just a rumour," he dismissed it casually. "According to my cousin, it was just one date, and only because they had nothing else to do at the time."

The prisoner was having a strange sense of unreality. Wasn't he supposed to be screaming in agony and resisting the temptation to reveal everything under the duress of pain at the moment? He had spent months training himself for high pain tolerance, and resistance to truth drugs. Why were his would-be torturers gossiping about ninja love lives in front of him?

The moments ticked by as the prisoner became intimately acquainted with every minute bit of information regarding Konoha Village's romantic scene. He had never known – or wanted to know – how complicated shinobi love relationships could be. Now, he was being forced to listen to the incessant drone of that female's voice, chattering on and on about one pair after another. After about two hours or so, the white-eyed man – Neji – looked at his watch.

"We're going to have to cut this short… I've got a date in half an hour's time," he murmured. The prisoner almost breathed a sigh of relief. 30 more minutes, and it would all be over. Neji gestured to the woman. "Tenten."

"Right!" she bounced up brightly, drawing senbon from the pouch at her side. "Just tell me where, Neji."

The prisoner braced himself. It looked like things were finally going to become unpleasant for him. He began trying to recall all the mental procedures he had primed himself with upon entering the torture chamber, but his mind refused to cooperate. Instead, his thoughts veered off to the date between Naruto and Sakura, and how Asuma and Kurenai were caught exchanging a kiss in one of the hidden shelters, and a very interesting video tape featuring Gai and Anko's exploits in bed, and what he would do if he were in Shikamaru's position, and…

Only as the senbon entered the pressure points in his body did he realise that the two hours of gossip had been an elaborate trick to distract him and reduce his concentration. He gasped with pain, but also with the shock of it all. Then he felt his muscles relaxing.

"We knew you had been trained to withstand interrogation by normal methods," Tenten informed him smugly. "So we had to resort to unorthodox methods." The prisoner was again wracked with pain as Neji's fingers began to systematically send chakra into his system. Suddenly, though, it was all over, and the pain subsided.

"Do you know what happens when a person's chakra flow is reversed while his pressure points are blocked?" the white-eyed man asked softly. The prisoner could only stare at him as an unfamiliar feeling started to course through his body. "It's an ancient technique developed by my ancestors – on par with Konoha Village's 1,000 Years of Pain Ancient Taijutsu Technique."

The prisoner started to laugh. And laugh. And laugh. And couldn't stop laughing. Every one of his nerves tingled with ticklish sensations. He gasped and wheezed with the effort to suck in air in order to continue laughing. Neji smirked.

"Let's go," he addressed his companion over the shrieks of laughter emitted by the prisoner. "By the time he stops laughing, he'll be too exhausted to hide anything from us. No one has ever withstood the Hyuuga Hands of Happiness technique."

She arched an eyebrow. "Hyuuga Hands of Happiness?"

"My ancestor was drunk at the time he invented it," Neji grimaced. "You really don't want to know the details."

She nodded and they left the laughing captive to amuse himself.

"In retrospect, it's a good thing that we had Gai-sensei as our teacher and Lee as our teammate. I would never have been able to pull off that kind of behaviour without their examples." Tenten commented.

Neji nodded. "I learned from observing Kakashi's reactions during their contests too." He checked his watch again as they emerged from the building's doorway into the evening sunlight. "Good, we still have twenty minutes to get there."

Tenten glanced sideways at her erstwhile partner in interrogation and asked, "So which restaurant are you taking me to this time?"