Disclaimer: The characters are the property of Masashi Kishimoto and the Naruto franchise.
Author's Note: First off, thank you again to Rain Dove and Rosebunse for your reviews! It's so good to hear from readers, whatever they think, and you guys have been so consistently supportive. I also forgot to mention MizuKukuru last time, who left a number of enthusiastic reviews but didn't log in so I couldn't PM him/her directly! Secondly, thank you to all who have favourited and followed since last time. I really do feel astonished and immensely grateful that anybody has read, is still reading and wants to read a wee bit more of this story. So a final thanks to all you readers out there! I don't know how this story caught your eye, but thank you for giving me a chance to try and entertain you. About this chapter - it's a series of interviews and negotiations, and it can get wordy. I thought I struggled before, but this really took the biscuit. I can't say I'm entirely satisfied with how it ended. However, either I did it this way or things got incredibly repetitive.
Without further ado, I hope you enjoy this installment! Best, Zen
The guard pushed open the door and, bowing, stood to one side.
In the dark viewing gallery beyond, three figures were waiting for her. From the bows slung over their shoulders and the whistles and flares at their waists, Tsunade surmised that two were members of the Quarantine Guard. The last figure leaning against the wall with his arms crossed and his chin on his chest she knew only too well. Kakashi gave her a nod of acknowledgement on her arrival.
"Hokage-sama," said one of the guards, dipping his head. "Officer Kotetsu of the Evening Watch, Group E. This is my colleague Izumo. We sent the message. Thank you for coming at such short notice."
"Officer, it is I who should be thanking you. Your message couldn't have arrived at a better time than it did." Tsunade could have kissed Shizune if they both hadn't been in such a hurry to leave the ward (she to get to the Guardhouse and Shizune to attend to Shimura Danzo). She looked intently at each of the officers. "Tell me what happened."
Six thirty in the evening the two officers had seen a white flare being sent up from one of the plague pits. When the two went to investigate, they had found a rogue who claimed to be Uchiha Sasuke pacing backwards and forwards in front of the gates, carrying what they assumed in the half-light was a sick companion on his back.
He said that he would come quietly if they promised to send a message to the Hokage, telling her that he had arrived and that he wished to speak with her. There had been no verbal threats, but the air between them had crackled as though charged with electricity.
If it wasn't for the special instructions Tsunade had put out, in case Sasuke was discovered in the Konoha area, they might have shot him down on the spot and called it a mercy-killing. Any rogue that turned up at the Konoha gates, threatened the patrol, demanded to see the Hokage and appeared to expect impunity was clearly missing several screws somewhere.
As it was, Tsunade's instructions were to bring him in alive and message the Hokage the instant they did so. They agreed to Sasuke's conditions, and he, to their surprise, allowed them to restrain him. Both Kotetsu and Izumo were more than a little relieved when he let them slip the blindfold over his eyes.
Kotetsu jutted his chin towards the panel of glass on the opposite wall. "You can see him for yourself. He's been sitting quiet like that ever since he got here."
The window looked into a small room. Sitting on the pipe-chair, with a guard at each shoulder, was a strange figure covered head to toe in road dirt. His fingers were bound in wire. Chakra suppressor seal tags had been applied to his wrists and stomach and a blindfold about his eyes. He might have been dark-haired, but there was so much filth in his hair that Tsunade couldn't tell.
He sat with his shoulders hunched under the white glare of the lights, but that posture, tense though it was, had little to do with nerves and was more likely due to the guards invading his personal space.
Tsunade stared through the glass. "Is that really Uchiha Sasuke?"
"Hatake Kakashi came here to confirm his identity for us," said Izumo.
"Well, Kakashi?"
"Ah, now that is a tough question, isn't it? Who knows who we all really are? Who am I? Who is he? What am I doing? Where are we going?" Tsunade cracked her knuckles and Kakashi stopped, blinked owlishly at her then became serious. "His appearance isn't a genjutsu, he's got two genuine fully-functioning sharingan eyes, it's not a clone and, according to Pakkun, his chakra has precisely the same smell as Sasuke's. If it isn't him, it's his twin brother."
"But something's bothering you?"
They stood side by side and peered through the window at the young man, no more than a boy really, sitting silently at the table.
There was a part of Kakashi that wanted to deny that his old student was sitting in the Guardhouse interrogation room. It was the same part that wished he had never heard Sasuke laugh on the forest road, the part of him that wanted the arrogant little bastard he had taught to still be out in the woods somewhere, somewhere remote but still within the potential reach of rescue.
But, in the end, it was so like him, wasn't it? The boy who so stubbornly trod out his own path and refused the hands of others, to come back without their help, and come back on his own whim and will? It flung every effort they had ever made to rescue him back into their faces like insults.
"He came in too quietly," Kakashi said, blowing out his cheeks.
"You think so as well?"
"The last time I saw Sasuke, we had to keep him pinned to the ground with a sword on his neck to keep him still and he blew up our restraints with some kind of chakra monster. Even if he was utterly exhausted he'd still have taken on any five of these guards. The Sasuke I knew would have forced his way into the town and gone to see you himself, not waited patiently at the gates to be admitted."
Tsunade considered the boy before them. "Let's say this is the Sasuke you knew, why would he do this the hard way and get himself caught?"
"It's good behaviour. It says that he's willing to go along with our laws; shows that he'll be happy to toe a particular line, so he expects us to do the same. He wants something, and that something requires our cooperation. He wants to make a deal."
"Kakashi, from what you told me of your last encounter with him, I imagined that Uchiha Sasuke was violently against any sort of cooperation with the village."
"That's why this situation puts me just a little bit on edge." Kakashi lowered his voice. "If Sasuke wants to cut a deal instead of coming in and taking what he wants, something's driven him into a corner and restricted his options."
Tsunade narrowed her eyes. "You think he's had a disagreement with Uchiha Madara?"
"Madara's power in his deal with the Kages rests entirely on his maintaining a monopoly over the cure. Even if he's already made a cure and doesn't need Sasuke anymore, letting the boy go would be counter-productive to his cause. Sasuke's left Madara for some reason and it can only be a bad one."
"So we might have to deal with Uchiha Madara coming after him before we start carrying out our own research?"
"Maybe, although it depends on what Sasuke exactly did that might have upset him."
Tsunade turned to the two guards behind her. "You mentioned that he was carrying a sick companion. Is he in any condition to speak?"
"Regrettably not, Hokage-sama. He's dead. Uchiha Sasuke carrying was a corpse."
"Although, not just any corpse." Kotetsu's expression darkened and Izumo looked grim. "Bits were falling off but any fool would have recognised it. It was Uchiha Itachi, plain as day."
"That can't be right," Tsunade spluttered. "Uchiha Itachi was reported dead weeks ago. Sasuke killed him."
But this was fantastic! If it was Itachi she could finally get her hands on a sample of the unmodified MK …Tsunade sucked in a deep breath. She turned back to the officers. "Where is the body now?"
"It's down in the morgue until we work out what to do with it, where its stink won't hurt anyone," Kotetsu said roughly. "Just to warn you, Hokage-sama, when you're in the room, you don't want to get too close to Uchiha Sasuke either. He stinks of the dead. I bet that smell of his will be stuck around the room for the next three weeks."
"And you don't want to see what's gone down the back of his neck." Izumo shuddered. "All those flies..."
The door hinges squealed and somebody came into the room. It was somebody big. Their footfalls were heavy, landing firmly on the floor, establishing the authority of the one who entered with the subtlety of a mallet. The guards behind Sasuke's shoulders twitched and the seams of their cloaks stretched. They were standing to attention.
The chair opposite him scraped the floor. He felt eyes boring into him that he couldn't see.
"Uchiha Sasuke." A woman's voice. It was strident, strong and vaguely familiar. "It's been a long time. Do you remember me?"
The Fifth Hokage, the medic-nin, Orochimaru's ex-teammate – yes, yes, he did remember her.
She continued. "I was told that you wanted to speak with me."
There was somebody else in the room. Another ninja had slipped in behind the Hokage, hiding the sound of his footsteps in of hers. Its presence was familiar. It made him think of dogs.
Kakashi. That was it, standing at the Hokage's shoulder. Like a dog. A loyal dog.
A gentle pressure against his eyes like probing thumbs told him there were suppressor seals stitched into the blindfold over his eyes. It seemed that the blindfold had been specifically developed with the sharingan in mind. The level of suppression would have been just enough to stop him using the three-tomoe eye, but, fortunately for him, it wasn't quite enough to suppress the Mangekyo. That the blindfold was inadequate for his eyes was not unsurprising. Data on the Mangekyo sharingan was scarce. It was a subject that had been somewhat taboo even within the Uchiha clan. Konoha couldn't develop measures against something they knew next to nothing about.
Whatever the case, it meant that, if push came to shove, he could use his eyes.
"I didn't think you were the shy type, but I could ask the guards to leave."
She had taken his silence to mean a reluctance to cooperate. Frankly, he didn't care if the guards stayed or went so long as he got what he came for.
The biting pressure of blade-tips left his back. The space behind him was clear. Two sets of shuffling steps made their way to the door.
"They're gone," announced Tsunade. "But don't think for a moment that I'm helpless - I am more than capable of pounding you into mincemeat so fine I could feed you to my toothless pensioners if you even so much as threaten me."
"You wouldn't kill me." Sasuke's voice came out in a dry rasp. He wanted water, but he wasn't going to beg for it here in front of these people. "So long as you want the cure for your plague, you can't kill me."
He could imagine the woman's nostrils flaring in the angry pause that followed. Kakashi remained silent, but he could feel the man's gaze on his face like a spotlight.
"That's quite an inflated sense of self-worth you have there," Tsunade remarked dryly. "Since you've finally started talking, let's begin. Why have you come back, Uchiha Sasuke? What do you want?"
"A deal."
"You aren't in any position to be demanding a deal," she told him. "Kakashi told me what you said to him the last time you met. I don't see why we should help you. Why should Konoha give anything to a boy who betrayed her and since then plotted to do all he could to destroy her?"
"You want to study my body to make a cure." He stared into the darkness of the blindfold. "I'm offering it to you."
"You've already delivered yourself to us by coming back to Konoha. The sentences for returning rogue ninjas are more lenient than they were, but you are still our prisoner. Konoha does not need your permission to take apart your body, Sasuke," Tsunade continued, her tone harsh and commanding. "We don't have to give you anything in return. I could have you knocked out and put into an induced coma until we're finished with you. What do you say to that?"
"If that's what you'll do then I'll destroy myself right here."
"And how do you plan to do that?"
"I'll burn myself with Amaterasu."
In the intervening silence, the door opened. Footsteps approached the table. There was a clink of glass, a slosh of liquid. Somebody had brought him water. For a moment he was thrown by the gesture but then the cynic inside pointed out that this was surely just another soft form of punishment, given that his fingers were knotted up in wires.
When the officer had gone, Tsunade broke the silence. "Do you mean the black fire they found at the Uchiha hideout?"
"I'll start with the blindfold. When my vision's free I'll move on to my body. I'll burn to ashes right here in front of you and you won't be able to do a thing about it. The fire will keep going until there's nothing left for the flames to burn except themselves."
Someone slammed their hands onto the table. The glass clinked, didn't fall over. Water slopped over its edge and onto Sasuke's fingers.
"Enough." Kakashi's voice cut through the tension of the room like a scythe. "That's enough, Sasuke."
Tsunade's chair creaked. She was leaning towards him. When she spoke next, she had lowered her voice. "What if I said, go ahead and kill yourself, you little fool?"
"Then you'd be gambling on finding other people in the world immune to the Plague." He mustered a cold thin-lipped smile before continuing to mock her. "With your gambling record, do you really think that's a good idea?"
"My bad luck only applies when there's money involved," she huffed.
"And you're going to try betting on that too? When people's lives are at stake?" Sasuke said, just for a moment mimicking that soft slyness so typical of Orochimaru, and he was rewarded with a light pop in his ears as Tsunade's chakra flared.
There was a knock at the door and a voice whispered, "Hokage-sama, a moment please."
Tsunade stood up. "Keep an eye on him, Kakashi."
She slammed the door shut behind her and Sasuke allowed himself a brief feeling of satisfaction. All he had done was echo Tsunade's old team-mate, if only for a second, and he had managed to get under her skin. It had disgusted him how easily he could mimic Orochimaru's tone, but the result had been worth it.
Kakashi was watching him closely. No book today, Sasuke noted. Kakashi was drumming his fingers on his arms, so evidently his hands were free. With a start, he realised that Kakashi had closed the distance and approached the table.
"Sasuke - " he started to say, then stopped.
What? Why did he stop there? What did he want? Sasuke waited with bated breath, readying for the verbal attack.
Kakashi tapped the table somewhere near Sasuke's right hand. The glass clinked again. "There's a straw in the glass. You can drink your water without using your hands. Drink."
As though Sasuke was going to take anything they gave him until he got what he came for. He slid his bound hands sideways and pointedly knocked the glass over.
Kakashi recognised the sour smell of decay in the air even through his visor and face mask. The closer he stood to Sasuke, the stronger it got. The boy was a mess. There was old blood flecked across Sasuke's face all the way up to his hairline. Kakashi couldn't even tell what the original colours of his clothes were, but he was willing to bet that they weren't the brown, yellow, red and black of bodily fluids and road grime they were now.
The door closed and Tsunade returned to the room, quietly grinding her teeth. She dropped into the chair, closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose.
"Let's discuss this deal." She looked up at Sasuke. "If you volunteer to be a research subject, what will you want in return?"
"I want Utatane Koharu, Mitokado Homura and Shimura Danzo at my mercy," Sasuke replied, his voice cold and so low it was almost a growl, "to kill as I see fit."
Tsunade glanced sideways to Kakashi. He seemed, somewhat obscenely in her opinion, to be pleasantly surprised. Perhaps he had expected worse. Water dripped off the table, drop by drop.
She turned to Sasuke. "Konoha doesn't trade in blood."
Sasuke threw back his head and laughed. Tsunade's cheeks burned. She raised her voice. "Perhaps in the past there were cases, but certainly not under my watch."
"Three old fools already closer to dead than alive, for the lives of everybody left and to come! I don't see what's so difficult. Isn't putting the needs of the greater good before everything else what you Konoha ninjas do best?"
"Utatane Koharu and Mitokado Homura are dead of the Plague," said Tsunade. She watched him closely for his reaction. "Only Shimura Danzo remains of the three, although as of today he is in isolation."
The tags on Sasuke's wrists and stomach glowed red in response to a particularly violent chakra flare, but even under suppression Tsunade felt the air tingle with charge and caught the scent of toasted almonds as though in the wake of a bolt of lightning.
A spark jumped across his fingers. Sasuke smiled and bared his teeth. "Then I will have Shimura Danzo."
"But why do you want him, Sasuke?" said Kakashi suddenly. "You have never had anything to do with Danzo before. He means nothing to you. It would be meaningless - "
"Wait!" Tsunade cried out, holding up her hand, and Kakashi fell silent. "Sasuke, answer this as truthfully and as fully as you are able to do so. Does your fixation on our Elders have anything to do with the Uchiha Clan Massacre?"
Sasuke went very, very still. The corners of the chakra suppressing tags smoked and curled. Tsunade wondered what his eyes were doing beneath the blindfold and was struck by a memory of a hooded hawk her grandfather had once shown her in the aviary. She remembered its poised stillness, and her grandfather tugging its jess as though determined to enrage it. "Look at her going all stiff," he had said with a big toothy grin. "She's waiting for me to slip up."
Sasuke demanding the heads of the three Konoha Elders, Danzo's grey-white arm studded with stolen sharingans, the highly suspicious death of Uchiha Shisui and his eyeball later found in Danzo's possession - the pieces of a huge puzzle began to shape into a horrible picture that Tsunade didn't want to see.
"I will do you a different deal, Sasuke," Tsunade said, when the silence began to drag. "We will give you asylum from Madara, in exchange for hearing everything you know about the Massacre."
Sasuke's jaw clenched tight with wariness then he snorted. "Madara won't come after me."
Tsunade glanced at Kakashi, who had lifted his eyebrow with interest. He stopped drumming his fingers on his arms. "How can you be sure, Sasuke? Is Madara dead? Did you kill him?"
It had been something Sasuke had been growing more and more certain of the closer he got to Konoha. There was nothing coming after him, although that realisation hadn't stopped him running. He was running from the laboratory, the freezer full of ice, the cold, heavy weight on his back, and the hands in the dark that stretched, bones clacking, and more than running away, he had begun to feel that he was running towards something instead…
"Kabuto is dead," Sasuke began to explain, "and the laboratory is destroyed. There is no point in Madara taking me back when he neither has the researcher nor the facilities to do anything useful with me anymore. Replacing everything will take too long and Madara has more important things needing his time and attention."
"Do you mean the Moon's Eye Plan?" Sasuke said nothing. That name was apparently unfamiliar to him. Tsunade caught sight of Kakashi gesturing in the corner of her eye. She needed to move on and let the subject drop. "Returning to the subject of our discussion, the Uchiha Clan Massacre - "
This was getting repetitive. Sasuke clicked his tongue irritably. "I will tell you everything in exchange for protection, but not for me."
Tsunade blinked in surprise. "Then for who?"
"For Itachi's body. I want a promise that whilst you do whatever you need to do with me - I don't care what you do –Itachi's body is burnt to ashes. Nothing is removed. No samples are taken. Nothing from him is kept in cold storage."
Tsunade shook her head. "Unfortunately, as that deal would include samples of the original MK, I can't promise you that, Sasuke. May I suggest - "
"My bag."
Tsunade raised her eyebrows. "What about it?"
Sasuke turned towards the two-way glass panel. Tsunade imagined the guards on the other side flinching. "Get the guards to bring it here."
A light knock a moment later, then a guard pushed open the door, gingerly holding a stained and blackened bag out in front of him like there was poison soaked into the hide. "Hokage-sama."
"Thank you." When the bag was in her hands, the guard backed out of the room. She balanced it on her knees. "They've brought me your bag."
"Describe it to me and I'll decide if it's mine."
"About an arm's length and half a hand width in size. Two binding straps. A bloodstain on the shoulder strap." She ran her hand along the leather and the gauntlet came away with a sticky brown stripe on its palm. "Make that blood."
"Open it," Sasuke said, and Tsunade warily undid the bindings. Kakashi peered over her shoulder.
They stared into the bag.
"Is this..." Tsunade swallowed thickly. She couldn't believe her eyes. "Is this all of Kabuto's research?"
"All I could carry."
She pulled the wad of paper out onto the desk and shuffled through the sheets. Incredible. It was utterly incredible. There were notebooks, journal articles, book lists, experimental data, graphs, images, and initial report drafts. True, some of the sheets were stained and their edges more dog-eared than an Inuzuka pack of cards, and Kabuto's writing despite its neatness seemed to border on code, but it was all there! The foundations on which to kick start their research programme!
And at the very bottom of the bag, wrapped in layers of paper – in research, in fact, which was undeniably practical but definitely amounted to a special kind of stupid (somewhat typical of the boy in front of her) – were a collection of vials.
Sasuke heard the vials rattle as Tsunade unwrapped them and said, "One of those is a pure MK culture."
"Are you sure or are you guessing?"
"Kabuto only complained about things he was working on, not things he could be doing," Sasuke replied. "And he said in his notes that it was hard getting hold of a sample of MK, so he must have tried."
"Sounds like an intelligent guess, but still a guess." Tsunade wrapped up the vial in paper again and replaced it in the bag. "What were you expecting to do with all this research?"
He fell silent, but the derisive curl of his lips was a definite unspoken, "I'm not wasting my breath on something you can work out for yourself." Then again, he had refused the water the guards had brought him and his chakra had been flaring under the tags. There was a high chance that Sasuke was starting to feel his limits and was trying to save his breath.
"Fine," said Tsunade, closing her eyes against the glare of the white light on the ceiling. "Uchiha Itachi's body will be burned, but I will take one sample – let me finish, Sasuke," she said, as Sasuke looked ready to lunge across the table with his teeth for her throat. "Just one sample and no more, with which to look for MK and it will be the last that anybody takes from your brother. When I am finished with that sample, it too will be burned. I will oversee the burning myself. The price for this promise is the information you have on the Uchiha Clan Massacre. I won't give you any other offer on that account."
The muscles around his neck were taut. His teeth were set in a furious grimace, but she could see him slowly pick over her words, measure them against his current capabilities, weigh out his options…
Then something slipped. Cold indifference flickered and Sasuke, for an impossible instant, was as open and angry-looking as a raw wound. "Why are you so suddenly interested in the Massacre?"
Bingo, she'd thrown him. Tsunade leaned back in her chair and wondered whether she ought to savour the moment. He really did remind her of Orochimaru. "Recent events brought some new developments to the case and the facts are now being reinvestigated. Let's just say that, if the first point of call when solving a crime is to work out qui bono, 'who benefits', a whole new suspect has come to light."
She let him digest her words. It hadn't escaped Sasuke's notice that Tsunade had referred to the Clan Massacre as a crime and not a tragedy. Neither had it escaped Tsunade's notice that although rumours said that Sasuke himself had killed Uchiha Itachi, the supposed perpetrator of the incident, he was fighting for his brother's dignity.
This interview, however, couldn't go on for much longer. Sasuke was getting exhausted and both she and he were reaching the limits of their patience. It was time to go all in.
"Kakashi, clear the viewing gallery and tell the guards to stop taking records." He raised an eyebrow but didn't move. Tsunade barked, "Do it now. Then stay there and don't let the guards come back."
"Okay, okay."
As soon as Kakashi had left and the door was shut, Tsunade began to speak. "We want to charge Shimura Danzo for crimes relating to the Uchiha Clan Massacre."
"In court? In front of a jury?" Sasuke sneered. "It'd be a circus. They'd let him get away."
"Given what has happened, not this time. Now, what do you make of this deal?" She clasped her hands together on the table. "In exchange for your willing participation in our research, if Danzo is found guilty, I will assign you to be his executioner."
"There won't be any 'ifs'," Sasuke replied coldly. "You will have Danzo confess everything in public, and plead guilty for everything you charge him with. I know how quickly the Plague kills. This way will be quicker."
Tsunade didn't like the idea of extracting a confession from Shimura Danzo by force. Danzo had done much to ensure the protection of the town and he had never once asked for gratitude nor glory. She doubted she even knew half of what he had done for Konoha over his long career.
Suddenly Sasuke made a small noise of pain. A vivid red stain bloomed across the blindfold. The chakra suppressor tags on his stomach and wrists crumbled and a tongue of black fire burst through the grey cloth.
"Sasuke, no! Stop!" Kakashi cried, flinging open the door as crackling black flames rushed along the blindfold encircling Sasuke's head.
"Don't come any closer," Sasuke gasped and the rush of fire diminished to a soft papery rustling. "I have it under control."
The black flames curled and licked at Sasuke's temples, but the flames spread no further. Kakashi couldn't smell anything burning.
"Three hours," Sasuke said. "That's how long I'll hold the flames for. Make Danzo confess, get it down on paper, and confirm that he will plead guilty within three hours, and I will put out this fire."
"That's impossible. How can I - ?" Tsunade started to say, but she closed her mouth when a thick line of blood slithered down the side of Sasuke's face and beaded on his chin. Her stomach turned. "How can I be sure that your chakra control will hold this black fire for three hours?"
"How can I be sure that you won't lie to me, tell me that Danzo'll plead then wait for me to put out the fire, before sealing my eyes properly and using me as you like?"
"That is a thing different entirely. I'm questioning whether you will cope, not your integrity." A charred fragment of a chakra suppressor seal tag fluttered down in front of her. She flicked it off the table, glanced up, saw the blood dripping down to Sasuke's collar and immediately averted her gaze again. "We will not lie to you, Sasuke, and we have no intention of doing so. You have my word, as a medic and a Hokage."
"Your word means nothing to me." The fire crackled over his eyes with a black light. "But, yes, I don't believe you could lie to me. The people here are soft and sentimental, and you pity me."
"True. I couldn't lie to you, Sasuke, but not for the reasons you think. Whatever has happened to you, you brought it upon yourself. I don't pity you, and if you think I'm soft and sentimental, you have another thing coming." Tsunade scrutinised him down her nose and wished that she could wring his arrogant blood-stained neck (or rather, after somebody else had wiped the blood off first). "Be thankful that I care about Naruto and Sakura as much as they still, for who knows what reason, care about you."
Sasuke made an unidentifiable noise that might have been a dismissive snort or an attempt to cover up a hiss of pain.
"Anyway," Tsunade said briskly, "we have a deal. I will return in three hours, with a draft public confession from Danzo. If he has agreed to plead guilty, you will put out your flames."
Sasuke nodded.
"But before I speak to Danzo, I need to hear what you know about the Massacre. Then once I'm done, Kakashi will fill you in on what's happened here in Konoha."
Kakashi blinked. "I will?"
"And you, Sasuke, will tell Kakashi what happened to you from the moment you left the Ageha forest road," Tsunade pressed on, as she felt suddenly painfully conscious of the time. "Are we agreed?"
Sasuke scowled, but nodded again.
"Alright," said Tsunade, breathing out slowly. She settled back in the chair and braced herself. "Let's hear about the Massacre, Sasuke."
When she was sure she had heard everything she needed, Tsunade ordered the guards to transfer Sasuke to the hospital. In the basement of the hospital there were a number of high security rooms which were used, when the occasion regrettably demanded it, to house the dangerously insane during treatment. They weren't prison cells, but they were equipped with similar functions. The rooms were tagged with surveillance seals and rigged to detect chakra fluxes.
Most conveniently for Tsunade, they put Sasuke within easy access of the research laboratories, which was no coincidence of design. It was only nine or ten years ago that Konoha laboratories officially stopped using the inmates of the prison and the 'Demon Asylum' (as that particular basement level was known as) as drug test subjects.
"Don't rush things with Danzo. Sasuke's chakra control will hold," Kakashi said to Tsunade on her way out of the room.
"What makes you say that?"
"Because it's obvious he wants to live. Sasuke could have done that little stunt with the black fire at the start to force your hand, but he didn't until the very last minute. He didn't want to do it unless he had to." In the room behind them, the guards were preparing Sasuke for transfer. "He'll keep off that black fire as long as he can."
"Good for him." Tsunade stretched and opened her mouth wide in a yawn. "Just make sure that as soon as Sasuke's at the hospital, he gets an IV drip in him. I don't want to lose a specimen because it was too stupid to keep itself hydrated before we could do the experiments."
"Don't call him that," Kakashi said, his voice dangerous soft. "It's bad enough that Sasuke's been taught to think of his body as a commodity that he can sell to get his way. Don't ever refer to him as a 'specimen' in front of me again."
Tsunade paused before the door at the end of the viewing gallery. She didn't call him out on the insubordination. She knew she had crossed a line, one that slithered uncomfortably into territories known as 'Snake-Bastard-Experimental-Ethics'.
"Make sure Sasuke behaves when they're moving him to the hospital," she instructed Kakashi and closed the door behind her.
Rippling heat brushed against his neck and the flames whispered in his ears. As the guards bundled him into a cart to be driven to the hospital, Sasuke was soaring on a high of pain. His left eye felt as though a white hot ice pick had been driven into it and an arrow dipped in acid was tangling with the nerve fibre, and from within that thicket of pain his mind sought out distractions like a giddy child snatching at dragonflies.
Where his body stayed swaying in the cart, focusing on the flaming blindfold and the chakra boiling in his blood, his mind was fleeing, seeking out the sounds and smells and chakra signatures of anything that was passing by.
Kakashi was talking to him and he knew he was talking back, but the words swam out of his mental grip as elusive as carp. Killing Kabuto, yes, he had shattered his skull, that was right, Madara could teleport, had taken his sword and the woods around Konoha had wolves, yes, promises broken, revenge plotted, and ice, blood and decay, petri dishes, microscopes and agar jelly. How much Kakashi understood of all that, Sasuke didn't care.
He was carrying nothing on his shoulders and the wind on his face had the freshness of nightfall.
The cart slipped and slid over stones and potholes and the pain sought out the smell of smoke, ash, burnt hair, soot, wet cement and freshly sawn wood like old friends in a crowd. It fed cries to his ears, people swearing as they trod on broken glass, the rattling of tumbling lumps of concrete and the thick glug of sewage leaking from pipes that had been blasted open in the explosions.
The tongues of fire lashed him. This was what he had wanted, wasn't it? A town in ruins? Ash on the street and bones in the roofs?
No, no, it wasn't, he told the fire. Because there were people still there. He could hear them. And if he had ever done it his way, gone to town with lightning in his hands and fire in his eyes, he would make sure that there would be no survivors. Everybody would be dead. All the children would be dead. There would no single surviving child slipping along red and black streets, finding everything he had known tossed open to the crows and spread across the walls.
The tongues of fire crackled at his face. Kakashi was saying something, and the pain reached out and fetched another sound for him to cling to – a laughing child.
The moment he heard the laughter, Sasuke demanded Kakashi to tell him where the child was and what it was laughing at, because the ringing derisiveness in its voice made him convinced that it was laughing at him.
"There's nobody laughing at you, Sasuke," Kakashi said to him after an unsettling pause. "Focus on holding back the fire. We're nearly there."
The child laughed on and the blood on his face, that he thought had dried, was wet and running again.
In the isolation cell, Danzo closed his eyes and took in Tsunade's words. He pursed his lips. "And you believe Uchiha Sasuke's story, when it first came from the mouth of one Uchiha Madara, the Five Nation's currently most wanted criminal? "
He sat in the chair, grey and weathered like old stone.
"You'd have to be a fool to believe him," Danzo said fiercely. "Who's to say that Madara wasn't feeding the boy this story to manipulate him into coming to his side? From what I've heard, Uchiha Sasuke is easily influenced by men cleverer with their words than he is."
He wheezed into his left fist, coughed, then reached for a tissue from the box beside him. "In this case, however, for once, such a fool would have struck lucky."
Shizune snapped the pen in her hand and glanced up from her notes in shock. Tsunade asked, "Then you admit that everything Sasuke claims is true?"
"I will admit it quite freely, since I cannot admit to other things." His expression twisted into a black, bitter grimace and his left hand drifted momentarily up towards his right eye socket, covered since the Parade by an eye-patch. "I have no recollection of anything that the Eye did whilst using my body. By my own rules, however, since I created and harboured a threat to the village I ought to be made to suffer the consequences. I would like to be tried and punished accordingly."
"The Daimyo won't allow it," Tsunade told him as he seemed to fade into his chair, spent and weary. "He says that since you are one of Konoha's most elite ninjas, naming you as the Eye of the World would bring doubt upon the whole governing class of ninjas, and that the civilians will only use your actions as validation for their cause – to say that ninjas really are oppressing chakra-less civilians, misleading them, and using them for their own ends."
"And with that, there will be further violence, and further destabilisation. Konoha will weaken and the Land of Fire will fall from its position as a world power. The Daimyo won't allow such a thing to happen." Danzo sighed. "I only ever wanted peace in the ninja world, but now it seems that my parting gift to it will be chaos and terrorism and madness."
In the neighbouring ward, an isolation patient coughed with a wet sound heavy with phlegm, mucus and sputum. Danzo listened to it with distaste. "I feared death once. I thought I needed to keep myself alive in order to help the world understand the peace I gave them, but as I have brought only violence and discord through my actions as the Eye, I can only agree to Uchiha Sasuke's deal."
"You will plead guilty and make a public confession to crimes relating to the Uchiha Clan Massacre?" Tsunade was staring, she couldn't help it, and she had a vague feeling Shizune had briefly stopped taking notes to stare in disbelief as well.
"It will be the one stone that kills a flock of birds," Danzo continued calmly. "By clamping down hard on my crimes against fellow ninjas, it will show the civilians that ninjas are just as likely to be misled and used by ninjas as they are and that Konoha does not approve of such behaviour."
"In other words, we don't approve of oppressing any Konoha individual, be they ninja or chakra-less civilian..." Shizune summarised, taking notes in the speediest shorthand Tsunade had ever seen.
"That is a suitably vague way to put it, yes. It's clear that more will be gained in Konoha's interests by my confession and execution than survival – Uchiha Sasuke, you say, is the key to a cure for the Plague and Plague latency. To have the cure…"
Danzo trailed off and pressed a tissue to his mouth. "What better way is there for me to die than believing that my death will ensure Konoha has a future, when my 'counterpart' tried so hard to destroy it?"
Tsunade could only give him with a strained smile. Anything she said rang hollow even in her ears, because here she was, a medic-nin, encouraging a man to choose the option that led to death.
"Konoha will be rebuilt. It will be everything it once was and more." Danzo looked to the window on the other side of the room, visible through the clear plastic panel in the wall of his cell. The blinds were down over the glass.
He ran his hand over the bandaged stump of his right shoulder. "How does Uchiha Sasuke intend to kill me?"
"He hasn't said yet," Tsunade replied. "Although I would imagine that the method will be quick and involve a blade."
Danzo hummed thoughtfully. "Yes, that would certainly be my preference too."
Two hours after Tsunade had left Guardhouse One, Tsunade went to Sasuke's holding cell in the hospital basement to describe her meeting with Danzo. Shizune had prepared for a first draft of Danzo's public confession. She took it with her.
Kakashi read out it out to him. When he had finished, Sasuke withdrew the black fire from the blindfold and collapsed on the floor of his cell from exhaustion.
Several floors above, Danzo asked a young medic-nin on her rounds to raise the blinds of the window for him and found that the window framed, in the distance, the blown open shell of the Academy. Under the moonlight, it was a white and black skeleton house, all ribs and gaping holes.
He demanded the blinds to be lowered and sent the medic-nin on her way.
Thank you for reading!
Best, Zen