10

His stomach twisted as he and his captor reached their destination.

As soon as the scroll surrounding them receded and disappeared, Sasuke turned and growled. He expected to be faced with the arrogant man's smirking face. What he was met with instead was definitely not what he expected.

He felt the sharp edge of a blade against his throat, but he had almost expected that. The only problem with it was that it wasn't his original captor's hands that held the blade. An arm had appeared from the darkness behind Madara, who was indeed smirking arrogantly, and rested slightly above the man's shoulder. He felt the pressure of the blade increase slightly, telling him to move backwards, and he obliged.

The moment the person stepped from behind Madara, Sasuke's eyes widened. He almost stopped moving but, as his neck was cut into, he winced and took another step back grudgingly.

"Kabuto…" he hissed spitefully. "I knew I should've killed you when I had the chance." Sasuke glared as viciously as he could, which was actually pretty meaningless considering he could be killed at a whim by Madara. Even Kabuto could get the better of him in the weakened state he was in now. He had no chakra and barely any strength after the fight.

Kabuto grinned menacingly at Sasuke's statement. "But if you'd done that we wouldn't have been able to meet again, Sasuke-kun."

An involuntary shiver ran down his spine as he heard the slithering voice he remembered well come out of the man's mouth. Yep, that was most definitely not Kabuto. He couldn't say he was surprised the man was still alive. Damn snake…

"Orochimaru…" Sasuke eyed the man's hand, which he suspected held a kunai though he could not see it, carefully. He contemplated trying to escape the blade, but knew that Orochimaru probably wouldn't even need the blade to take him down at the moment, so he gave up on that thought and instead studied his surroundings.

He noted that he and Madara had arrived in a sparsely-lit cave. In the quiet that followed his recognition of his former teacher ("former" meaning: thought to have been killed by Sasuke when the fool tried to take Sasuke's body), he could hear the dripping of water off to his right, deeper into the cave, he guessed, and he couldn't see any light besides that of a small lantern a few feet away from him. This was a very deep cave.

"I'm glad you still remember me." Still holding the kunai to his throat, Orochimaru leaned close to his face. Sasuke stilled at the feeling of the man's reptilian tongue sliding up his cheek.

"Don't. Touch. Me." Sasuke ground out through his clenched teeth.

"Heheh. Don't be that way, Sasuke-kun. Orochimaru is in charge of convincing you to give up your eyes. I would prefer you gave them to me willingly. They retain more power that way, you know. You two are going to be around each other for quite a while. That is, at least, until Naruto-kun gets here." Madara stepped back into his sightline and Orochimaru leaned back from his captive with a sickening smirk on his face. Sasuke focused on Madara.

"Naruto's not coming. You'll never get what you want."

"Now, now, Sasuke. Of course he'll come after you. He promised to take you back to the village with him, remember?" Madara said in a sickly sweet voice. He closed his eyes and then reopened them to reveal his Sharingan and he paralyzed Sasuke with his stare in the moment of Sasuke's surprise.

While Sasuke glared and tried uselessly to break the gaze, Orochimaru took the kunai from his neck.

"I'm even planning on laying a bit of bait to help him find this place. Of course, by the time he gets here, I'll already have your eyes and I'll be using your life as a bargaining chip."

"You won't get these eyes." He spat. At least he could still speak. He could try for a distraction and get more information. "What about you, Orochimaru? What did this bastard offer you, for you to be helping him?"

Orochimaru smiled sadistically and humored him. "I get to pick anyone, from any bloodline, for my next body, once Madara has taken over. I don't have to go through the trouble of searching for anyone. Since you'll be unavailable I think I'll choose someone of Hyuuga blood. Of course I will also get to continue my experiments freely." The snake man shrugged. "Either way, Madara here's stronger than me. He'd kill me if I tried anything with you or your little blond friend."

"You'd better not lay a hand on him." Sasuke hissed. The thought of the snake bastard getting his hands on Naruto pissed him off immensely for some reason.

"I'm sure he'd be glad that you care, Sasuke, but you'd better start worrying about yourself." Madara said as he began to dig through a pocket beneath his cloak and, a second later, pulled two objects from the pocket. The first was a set of keys, which he proceeded to toss to Orochimaru, and the second was what seemed to be a set of handcuffs. Madara grinned and held them up close to his captive's face so that he could see them. Sasuke's stomach dropped as he recognized their function.

"Chakra repressors. I had them specifically made for your reserve level, so you can't break them or escape them. The best thing is that the cuffs don't need to be connected to each other to work and they can be pulled together and controlled should anyone, other than you of course, wish it. You're not getting out of here, Sasuke. Here, Orochimaru. Put these on him and take him to his new room. Be sure to treat him nice."

The snake took the chakra repressors from Madara's hand and he pulled Sasuke's arms behind his back. Once he closed the repressors around Sasuke's wrists, Madara released his hold on Sasuke. The younger raven pitched forward to land on his hands and knees in a sudden spell of dizziness, desperately testing his chakra flow, but where he usually could sense a type of warmth from his connection with his chakra, he now only felt an empty void.

From the ground, Sasuke glared up at Madara and Orochimaru. "When I get out of this, I'm going to kill you. Both of you. And if I don't I'm sure that Naruto will be more than happy to do it for me."

"Ah, but you'll be blind, and when he arrives here, you will only be able to lie there helplessly and listen as Naruto-kun screams for me to take his eyes and kill him."

Sasuke tried to launch himself at Madara but he was caught at the last moment by Orochimaru. His former mentor grabbed a handful of his hair and yanked back on it. Sasuke couldn't help the yelp of pain that escaped his mouth as his head snapped backwards.

"Come with me, Sasuke-kun. I think it's about time we show you your new living quarters."

Orochimaru pulled him up by the grip on his hair and pushed him towards where Sasuke had heard the sound of dripping water before. He heard laughing behind him as he was pushed roughly through what seemed to be a doorway. Sasuke guessed that Orochimaru had lent Madara one of his hideouts.

He heard the creak of metal on metal and the crash of a door being closed hard. Then he heard the click of a locking mechanism.

"Now it's just you and me Sasuke-kun. You don't know how lucky you were when you were with me before. I protected your body because it would have been mine. Now, I have no more reason to do that…"

In the darkness that surrounded him, Sasuke heard the sound of feet moving towards him. He felt two hands grab his arms and pulled them backwards so hard that they almost popped from their sockets. He grunted slightly as he was pulled bodily off the rocky floor and thrown down onto something softer. It felt like a mattress…

Oh, hell no!

"Stay the fuck away from me, Orochimaru! I am not your toy!" he'd heard all the rumors about the man's perverted fetishes but he'd chosen to ignore them while he'd been training.

I knew I should have killed Kabuto when I had the chance!

"But you are, Sasuke-kun, whether you like it or not." The snake's voice came from beside his ear and he flinched and scrambled backwards.

Sasuke knew he couldn't fight in the condition he was in, especially not with the chakra repressors on, and Orochimaru apparently knew that he knew it. The man was laughing when Sasuke's back and head hit hard on a stone wall behind him and he coughed from the sudden shock and loss of air and leaned against his knees, trying to keep himself from passing out from the blow.

Looking up at movement above him, Sasuke watched as Orochimaru's dark shape moved closer. Unfortunately, no matter how much he wished and prayed otherwise, he knew there was no escaping the man. He could only try his best to ignore what was about to happen. And fight.

He wouldn't give these men the satisfaction of seeing him give in.

Maybe he'd get a lucky blow in. A picture of Orochimaru, lying cold and dead on the floor flashed before his eyes and he smiled.