Warning: insects, torture. If you would like to skip the torture scene, you can read until "Naruto's teething troubles" and then skip to "For some reason".
Sakumo and Rin have already heard the bad news from a furious Hyaku— Yakushi Nonou will be leaving Konoha soon to spy on ROOT's behalf, courtesy of Danzou's threats against the orphanage. Their anger simmers hot on her behalf, but Nonou refuses to reveal the details of Danzou's visit to Kakashi, perhaps for fear of the young ANBU acting out. "I'm sorry I have to ask more of you, but please, keep an eye out for Kabuto. He's a smart boy, and I'm afraid to imagine what might happen if he is left alone in ROOT."
Kakashi accepts Nonou's request readily. "I will."
The faint lines at the corner of her eyes smooth out slightly. She glances out of her office's window, a small sigh passing her chapped lips as her gaze falls on the children playing outside. "Thank you," she breathes. It sounds like she is making a death wish, and Kakashi shifts uncomfortably under its weight.
"Here," Nonou murmurs, turning away from the window with a look of determination upon her face. She retrieves a thick brown folder from a locked drawer and hands it to Kakashi, who accepts with a questioning raise of his eyebrow. "These are all the notes that Snake and I have on fuinjutsu," she says, smiling. "I'm not sure how much of this you or your friends already know, but hopefully there will be something in there that helps."
Kakashi's grip tightens on the package as he inclines his head in thanks. "I will make good use of it."
"Please do. Feel free to burn it if you don't have a safe place to hide it." Her mouth twists. "I won't be needing it anymore." Before Kakashi can find his words, Nonou has shaken off her melacholy. "I suppose you'd like to visit Naruto-chan?"
"If it's not too much trouble."
"Of course not."
Kakashi tucks the folder under his arm and they head off, their conversation segueing smoothly into towards Naruto's teething troubles.
"Get away them from me! You freak, you fucking freak!"
The Kiri-nin screams in disgust and terror as the living mass of driver ants crawl en masse over his body, quickly covering his bare, bound feet and surging into his flimsy prisoner's yukata. His shouting quickly turns into yells of pain when the ants start shredding his flesh with their powerful pincer jaws, each wound a bleeding flash of fire. He jerks desperately in his bonds, rolling from side to side in an attempt to crush the dark brown ants, but there are too many of them for his uncoordinated thrashing to have any effect.
Tatsuma watches impassively from the other side of the cell as the last of the driver ants march from beneath his cloak.
"Make them fucking stop!" the Kiri-nin sobs, squeezing his eyes closed and pinching his mouth shut as the ants swarm his face. Sakumo's stomach turns as the foreign nin's muffled screaming continues, his voice rising and breaking as the stench of blood thickens in the stale air.
"Watch closely," Tatsuma murmurs to Kabuto and Kakashi, who are there to be trained in ROOT interrogation tactics. Kakashi has hidden the two of them from the Kiri-nin via a genjutsu, but Tatsuma can still see them. "Wipe those looks off your faces," he snaps.
Kakashi manages to turn his horrified look into a tightly suppressed grimace, but Kabuto continues to look more ill by the second. Sakumo thanks Hyaku silently again for making sparring days with Rin a regular event. He has heard of the Aburame's flesh-eating insects, but he has never seen them for himself until now. To be honest, he doesn't think he can take much more of the sight.
The Kiri-nin seems to reach a breaking point as well— he suddenly starts bashing his head against the floor. With a wave of Tatsuma's hand, the driver ants stop making those wet mashing sounds, and a moment later, they're streaming off the whimpering shinobi. The man's clothes are soaked with blood, every inch of him raw and bleeding profusely. Turning his head, he shudders and dry heaves, the spindly corpses of a few dead ants trailing from his swollen lips as he spits weakly.
"Tell me about your new Yondaime," Tatsuma orders. "Karatachi Yagura. Is he very different from the Sandaime?"
Their captive's wide eyes flicker from the chittering swarm - just a foot away from him - to Tatsuma, terrified. Kabuto takes out his notebook in preparation to record his words, looking equally frightened.
"Y-Yagura is alright..." The prisoner swallows, mouth working. "He's... not fond of clans with kekkei genkai. The Academy exams were abolished though, that was— good, I guess. The lower caste is happy. W-What do you want to know? Kiri has no plans for Konoha! We're messed up as it is!"
Tatsuma steps closer and crouches down. The close-lipped smile that spreads over his face makes the poor man shrink back instinctively, trembling. "You're the type of shinobi that never gives up the first time round, aren't you? Commendable."
"No, no— I swear— Fuck, what do you want to know? The Swordsmen? They're dead? I don't know! Wait! Please!"
The ants swarm him again and he screams even louder this time.
By the third round, Sakumo decides that there's no point in watching anymore, in some misguided attempt to provide Kakashi support he can't recieve. 'Sorry Kakashi,' Sakumo thinks as he walks out of the cell. The man's screaming cuts off abruptly the moment he passes through the wall and its accompanying silencing seals, and Sakumo finds himself standing in the middle of a narrow hallway with the echo of that terrible sound in his bones, shaking.
The silence is deafening, like a physical pressure in his ear. It makes him think about the ants crawling into that man's ears and he shakes his head, clenching his jaw to stave of the sick feeling in his stomach.
For some reason, his mind turns not to Danzou or ROOT, but the prisons cells elsewhere, in the Intelligence Division. There are interrogations being carried out there too. But what difference is there if pain is meted out there, or here?
"It is my Hokage's command." Every shinobi has said it before, including Sakumo. But who is the kage to justify all this? If Danzou took the hat the next day, would they be bound to follow his orders?
It's easy to imagine Danzou as the mastermind of all evil, and that Konoha will be better off without him, but perhaps they are protecting a rotten thing. The shinobi system itself is the reason why the Kiri-nin is in that cell. They have made killing and maiming their skill and the more that they are being rewarded by it in money and respect, the more they are convinced that they are justified in doing it.
All of them are part of this great tree that is Konoha, and the leaves are no more innocent than the roots.
When Sakumo ventures down into the ROOT cells again, he follows the sparse trail of driver ants that lead into the depths of the earth. His heart sinks when he draws closer and hears muffled sobs, small and frightened.
"Shh," Kakashi says softly, hunched protectively over the younger boy, who has curled up in the hallway. "It's okay. It's going to be okay." Every now and then, the boy glances down the dimly lit hallway, as if afraid someone would burst in shouting at any moment. Neither of them had their backs to the cell where the Kiri-nin had been.
A whimper escapes Kabuto as he eyes the trail of ants. "I-Is he d-dead now?"
"Yeah," Kakashi murmurs, "he's gone."
The faint, sticky sounds coming from the cell bring disturbing images back to Sakumo's mind. Tatsuma is nowhere to be seen, only his kikaichuu, which are probably eating up the Kiri-nin's corpse.
Kabuto slumps. "N-Nonou-san..."
"She's back with your friends, don't worry. I saw her just last week." Kakashi rubs the shaking boy's back, murmuring reassurances.
In a remarkable display of will, Kabuto swallows down his tears and composes himself. His nose is blocked and his lip still trembles, but he is no longer sobbing. "I can't torture my friends like this."
Kakashi's brow knits.
As if the horrors of the day have struck him all over again, Nonou's protege lets out a gasping sob, his eyes wide and wet as he looks up at Kakashi. "I'm going to become a spy. I have to make friends with enemy-nin to get close to them. Then I have to, to... interrogate them."
Sakumo can imagine how that would destroy anyone. Living amongst the enemy might lead you plots and machinations, but it might also lead you to understand the things that make them human and vulnerable. A wife. A child. A brother. A sister.
That is why there were so few spies who can go deep undercover for years— it isn't because of lack of skill or opportunity, but because living as one of the enemy shatters the pretty justifications that shinobi build up for themselves. The person on the other end of your blade isn't just a piece of meat with information that you can squeeze out like juice; the target is a person, and the enemy village is a home. Many would rather defect than to betray that realisation.
Kakashi was lucky to have infiltrated a target that kept him at a distance, as a servant rather than a friend and confidante. He was also lucky to have Snake with him, each of them acting as an anchor for the other's loyalties.
As Kabuto wipes at his tears, Kakashi pets his hair in slow, soothing strokes, like how he would comfort a puppy. "What Tatsuma did was extreme. There are gentler methods. When people are happy and careless, you'd be surprised at how much they let slip. You don't have to hurt them like that. Not always, at least."
"...I want to become a med-nin," Kabuto replies miserably. "Do you think Danzou-sama will allow me to become a med-nin? I-If I asked?"
"I don't know. But even he doesn't make you a med-nin, you can still make use of your skills. You learnt how to heal from Nonou-san, didn't you?" The boy gives a jerky nod and Kakashi eye-smiles sadly. "Then you can help the people you come by when you're undercover. A little kindness goes a long way."
Many shinobi think this way. For every drop of blood that they shed, they would try their best to balance the moral scales of their soul again by doing someone a kindness. But a question has always nagged at Sakumo.
Does it make one kinder, or does it give people leeway to be crueler, thinking that they can buy their own absolution later? He doesn't know.
A/N: Oof long A/N this chapter. I did a poll a long time ago to find out whether you guys would like to give Naruto the ability to see ghosts. For those of you who wanted to see that, I'm really sorry. I've decided to cut that part out (along with some others) so I can streamline the plot, make it more fast-paced, and perhaps actually finish this 100k+ chonker of a fic XD Sorry guys.
That question Sakumo had is about compensatory moral behaviour, i.e. where the doing one moral act seems to excuse ("license") the doing of an immoral one. For example, attempts to increase transparency in companies (e.g. declaration of conflicts of interest) is seen as moral behaviour and hence gives psychological license to people to engage in immoral behaviour, hence resulting in more unethical behaviour, instead of less.
As an aside, fines can also can create unintended consequences, though in a different way than the above. Fines remove the ethical component from the decision-making process and causing people to weight advantages (e.g. cheaper costs) and disadvantages (e.g. fine for causing pollution) instead of thinking: "is it right?" Hence, instead of deterring people, people find it easier to break the rules ("I'll just pay for it!").
It's interesting when you think about moral compensation in Naruto-verse. For every good deed that Kabuto does according to Kakashi's advice, how much moral license does it give him to cause harm? Also, I imagine the flip side of this argument is the kind of moral compensation that makes Zabuza to adopt Haku. For all the evil that Zabuza has done by killing all his classmates, perhaps he is trying to compensate by adopting and raising Haku well.
Just some thoughts.