A/N: Yes! I did it! (waves at the crowd and blows kisses) It was all for you!

He hit the floor with a smack and an empty thud. Another resounding bang of the steel door and he was alone again. He tried to twitch and found that he couldn't. He couldn't roll over. He couldn't feel. He couldn't move.

Jelly and water.

That's what he felt like.

They had stuck him with a needle when they lost their patience with him, but he had tried so hard. He was doing so good, everything was going the way he wanted it to, but then he had seen a familiar face in the ward that morning and the ugly memories reared their heads in his and he lost it. He tried to hold on, but the man leered at him.

"Who do you bleed for?"

Not him. Naruto screamed and cried, not him! He didn't bleed for that man! Nobody listened to his yells of accusation, it was him! he cried, and kicked, and flailed and they stuck the needle into his neck and then…

Jelly and water.

And here he was. No padded walls, windows, light fixtures. Torture. He couldn't move. He couldn't even speak, and the temptation was nowhere in sight now. Not when his face was in the floor. He could just barely feel the drool pooling around his face on the tingling rubber that was now his skin. His eyes registered the dryness in them, but he was unable to blink.

Frozen muscles, lax nerves, breathe in, breathe out.

He had failed. All because of him. It was years ago, but not long ago enough. Like yesterday. Too close.

"Who do you bleed for?"

He couldn't even scream. His throat gurgled out saliva until he was up to his ears in it. He was angry and couldn't express it. All the rigidity of his muscles was robbed from him, his nerve endings numbed with whatever was in that drug. He couldn't do anything.

And of course, he knew that they were watching him.

What went wrong? That was what the old man would ask.

What do you care?

How the ministrations of his own staff went unknown was a mystery to Naruto. He would tell the old bastard what went wrong.

Where's the fun in that?

What fun?

He wondered if he would go to sleep with his eyes open, or better yet, if he could. Would they dry out? Would they fall out? Would he drool all the water from his body?

Where's the fun in that?

He supposed there was none.

"And why do you always hit him?"

Sakura fidgeted in her seat. He hadn't tied her up, but she still felt like she couldn't run even if she wanted to. A scarred face with arctic black eyes glared at her, so close she could smell the sickness on is breath.

Trapped.

"If I have to ask again, I'm going to have to assume that you wouldn't mind if I grinded the bones in your hands to dust. It would be difficult to punch someone without the use of your hands."

It was usually a scare tactic used on foreign ninja that only worked on weak Genin and Chuunin, but for Sakura, Ibiki knew that the threat would do it's job without him having to follow through. Which was rare.

Sakura panicked. She needed her hands! "No! Please…" she couldn't help it and started to cry.

"Stop that blubbering. If I take those pretty emerald eyes out, you can't cry for yourself. Now, answer the question, I happen to have other people whose eyes I have to cut out." Ibiki muttered in a bored tone that belied all of the threats coming from between his barely moving bisected lips.

The girl blanched a pasty white color and swallow thickly. She knew what he was notorious for, but she had never been so afraid in all of her life. Her knees shook as she wringed her fingers so hard that they hurt. She solemnly thought of the pain that made her finger-wringing feel like tickling. When Kakashi tried to assure her and Sasuke that they would be alright with this...man, she felt so stupid now for believing him. She was terrified. She knew what this was, and what it was about, but she didn't know what she was expected to say. His question had caught her off guard, as if hitting Naruto was somehow the cause of his breakdown. Her eyes narrowed with worry. It couldn't be. And it wasn't like she....

"He…he's…" she pulled her bottom lip in between her teeth and gave the interrogator the most pitiful, fearful look she could muster.

...it wasn't like she knew that.

Ibiki just looked at her.

"He's annoying…he never shuts up, and I… " She could and had told dozens of people why she never liked Naruto, but in the face of the ANBU Interrogator, she felt like she was spilling her sins to a faceless man behind a wooden slab of wall. Ibiki wasn't a faceless man, but with his lack of expression, he might as well have been.

"Spit it out, or I'm going to have to bring---

"I don't know!" She yelled shakily and put her hands around her head to keep his bored, sadistic voice out of her ears. She didn't want to be there. She didn't want to be there alone with Konoha's most feared man. She wanted to go home. She wanted to---

Ibiki stood and very slowly leaned in toward her. Sakura screamed shrilly and pushed herself back instinctively with the balls of her feet. The chair she was in toppled and fell, bringing her head to the ground with a resounding thump. She scrambled to her knees and moved as far back and away from him as she could.

Ibiki sat back down.

"Now answer the question, or I won't hesitate to use the fact that you can't escape against you." In reality, he didn't have to lay a finger on her to get the information he wanted. Besides, those methods were just so messy…

"Please! He's stupid and he never hits back so I just…I just…I feel like…I'm better than he is. Stronger. Because he's….he's the deadlast and….he's so easy… to pick on…" she sobbed the last two words and broke down crying against the wall. Ibiki ignored her and advanced on her again. Seeing this, Sakura curled up into a tight ball and tucked her head between her legs, shaking so bad that she couldn't even keep her fetal position in place because her arms kept slipping.

The man crouched down on his haunches and leaned in to her ear and whispered, "But what if he hit you back?"

She continued to shake, but the crying had slowed to sniffles. Naruto? Hit her? He would never...

"What would you do?" He asked in a voice that could have been mistaken for soothing if not for the fact that there was nothing soothing about what was going on.

"Answer me fast and stop stuttering or I'll be sure to tell your Uchiha boyfriend that the reason I'm going to nail his mind to a cross is you."

Nooooo!!!

"W-wait!" She had to speak fast while she still had the nerve to consider Sasuke's well being over her own. Because Sasuke meant everything to her.

"I would try to fight him. I think…I think I would win. He's weak and stupid and I know chakra better than he does, so he…and if he did hit me, I'm sure Sasuke-kun would---

"Don't mention his name unless I ask about him. I asked what you would do about it. And what if you fought him and lost? How would you feel about him?"

"He would be lucky." She responded with a whimper.

"Would he?"

She nodded her head and wished for the umpteenth time that she were somewhere else.

"I don't think so. But you know," he stood up, grabbing her arm and dragging her back to where they were sitting, and threw her in another chair that was leaning against a wall.

"I would think that after what the Chuunin schoolteacher said to you, you would be more inclined to keep such definite opinions to yourself, or at least modify them to be more, I don't know, understanding. I mean, the boy has had a hard life. Is it shocking to you that after being beaten for more than half of his life and not being able to fight back, that there would be a psychological reason to why he doesn't hit you back?"

She silently shook her head, hoping that he didn't expect a real answer.

"Oh come on, " he prompted, then whispered, "You're smart."

"No."

Ibiki wasn't swayed by her fear. She was flimsy in mind and in spirit. If she weren't a Konoha ninja, he would enjoy breaking her to pieces. As it were, at least he could enjoy making her feel like the guilty little bitch that she was.

"Sasuke doesn't hit him, and yet, he's strong enough to get away with it…for the most part. What could it be? Is he more…nevermind, I suppose I could make him tell me."

He brought his lips to her ear again and her eyes almost bulged out following his movements.

"Is he more stubborn? You would know…"

"I don't know…please, let me go now. I'm sorry about what ha---

"SHUT UP!"

Ibiki was not a temperamental man by any standards, nor was he angry or agitated at the moment, but a little girl like Sakura would be scared witless by his booming voice. He was right, for when he screamed, the pink-haired child shrieked and fell out of her chair again to take cover under her violently shaking arms and a brief shift of scent in the air made Ibiki stand up and grab the clipboard he had with him.

The girl had wet herself.

"We are finished here, Miss Haruno. You will be seen out and escorted to your residence."

As he walked out, two medic-nin walked in cautiously, glancing at the man when his back was turned and then looking to the cowering Genin who was still whimpering and shaking in a pool of her own urine with pity.

They gingerly picked Sakura up and dragged her outside to where a stretcher waited and laid her down. Out of empathy for her condition, one of the medic-nins reached in her pocket and withdrew a sedative to put the sobbing girl out of her misery. As she leaned forward to pull down Sakura's collar, Ibiki returned.

To the medic-nins, this was nothing to worry about. Sakura, however, started to scream.

"SASUKE!!!"

The Uchiha turned at the shrill scream of his name to see his teammate being held down on a stretcher by two medic-nins. From where she was and where he was heading, he guessed that Ibiki had finished with her. She looked terrible.

Sakura kicked and flailed wildly in until a sharp prick in her neck silenced her warnings to her dark-haired teammate.

Sasuke whirled on the Interrogator. "What did you do to her?!"

Ibiki was a bit surprised that the boy expressed any concern for his last victim.

"I didn't do anything to her. I simply asked her a few questions, as I'm going to ask you."

Sasuke glared out of the corner of his eye as Sakura was carried hastily down the hall.

"Here we are. Step inside and have a seat, please." A deadened voice droned. Sasuke looked up. The door they had stopped in front of was opened and the distinct scent of piss wafted from inside. He looked around at the dark room with only one light and three chairs. Why were there three---

"I said step inside." A heavy force shoved him past the threshold and into the room so hard that he nearly tripped and fell forward onto his face. As he spun around to give Ibiki a glare that could melt the caps off of a glacier, he was stilled by the sudden feeling that something wasn't right.

"Have a seat." Ibiki said again, but Sasuke found himself staring wide-eyed at the man and unable to move. Something about him made it feel as if the temperature in the room had dropped sharply.

Ibiki pulled a chair right-side up and put it up against the wall. Then he made his way to the centre of the room and righted the other chair, not bothering to avoid stepping in the puddle of urine. Sasuke watched his every move, even as the ANBU specialist walked over to him, hauled him up, and flung him into the chair against the wall. The chair rocked but didn't fall and before the boy could register what had happened, Ibiki was taking a seat of his own.

"I'll make this as straightforward as possible. How would you define your relationship with Naruto Uzumaki?"

Sasuke blinked and the dreadfully cold feeling of twisted fear was lifted enough so that he could hear the question asked of him. Naruto and his relationship?

"What relationship?" he sneered and Ibiki nodded, and wrote something down on a notepad he had picked up.

"I thought so," he muttered. "And how would describe Naruto as a person?"

The Uchiha sucked his teeth cheekily. Was this interrogation or therapy? Is this what Sakura was screaming to him about? What a joke.

"He was a deadlast, brainless idiot with no potential and no tact." He answered simply, wanting to get it over with as soon as possible.

Ibiki scribbled some more notes and nodded again. Sasuke repressed the urge to roll his eyes.

"So, what you're saying is, that you two weren't friends, and that he was too stupid for you to make friends with, correct?"

"Correct."

"I see."

The ANBU set aside the pen and pad and relaxed into his seat, regarding the dark-haired boy with a stone facade.

"So it is safe for me to assume that you had something to do with his current state of mental instablilty, correct again?"

"No!" Sasuke hissed. "I don't know what happened, but I'm not taking the blame for breaking his fragile little mind. I didn't do or say anything out of the ordinary on that day."

"Oh, so? His mind was fragile. You know that. But let's find out...how fragile is your mind?"

Dark eyes narrowed at the challenge. Ibiki looked away for a second to reach into his pocket for something. Sasuke's body tensed in preparation for a fight, but it was not a weapon Ibiki pulled out. It was a light. A light which he quickly flashed into the boy's eyes. Sasuke instinctively blinked with a growl.

When his eyes opened, he blinked again. Then his eyes widened in fear. He wasn't in the interrogation room anymore. The chilling familiarity of the place he was in now rapidly sank into him and he jumped out of the chair and to his feet.

No.

He looked around franticly for what he knew he would eventually see. Suddenly, the ominously dark place was filled with the sounds of a small riot. Not a battle riot, but like....cheering.

Cautiously, he made his way to the sounds and as he got closer, he anticipated seeing his clan slaughtered like animals, but when he rounded the corner of a building he recognized as the Police Headquarters that his father worked for he didn't expect to see what he had heard.

People were cheering and laughing and for a moment it looked like they were having a good time until he got closer and saw in the middle of the crowd, a sword raised high and poised to come down. Some was being executed.

"Kill it, Itachi-san!"

"Don't be hasty, Itachi-san, make it suffer!"

Itachi?

Sasuke ran over to see what his brother was going to kill and prayed that it wasn't his parents. Maybe it was an animal or something. Nobody in the crowd was paying attention to him, either that or they couldn't see him. He found a small opening through which he could see what was going on and when he looked at what his brother was aiming to bring his sword down on, his reaction was not all that different from when he saw his family lying curled around their own entrails. His heart stopped.

Naruto.

"Cut it to pieces, Itachi-san! Start with it's fingers!" Someone enthusiatically yelled, but Sasuke didn't care who it was. He couldn't take his eyes off of what he was seeing. His idiot teammate was lying on the ground in tears, his clothing torn almost to shreds hanging off of his unnaturally skinny little body with bruises upon bruises and so many cuts marring his flesh that it was wonder how he was still conscious.

There was blood everywhere.

"What the...." Faces he knew where in the crowd. Shisui. Hadako. Itachi.

"St-stop!" he yelled, pushing at the ninja surrounding the helpless blonde but his hits had no affect, his screams fell on deaf ears.

"STOP IT!!!" He looked up at his older brother and watched the smirk cross Itachi's face. The sword descended and he closed his eyes. He watched the blade sink into the child's shoulder and gasped when he realized that he couldn't close his eyes. The sword came back up and down with a whoosh and blood squirted obscenely from the area between Naruto's neck and chest. The boy fell, writhing in a fit of screaming agony and Itachi lifted the katana again to deliver another blow that Sasuke was sure would end in the blonde's death.

"Itachi! That's enough!" A voice called, and Sasuke immmediately recognized it to be their father's, Uchiha Fugaku. Itachi glanced easily to the older clan member, who was accompanied by Konoha ninja outside of Uchiha and lowered his sword. The crowd began to disperse as if leaving a party, mumbling and laughing and jeering and whining. Sasuke watched his brother casually walk past their father.

"Leave it alone. If I see you near it again, you will never acknowledge yourself as my son again."

Itachi nodded and mumbled, "Yes, Father."

The image of his brother and father faded and he turned again to look at Naruto and watched the younger boy slowly roll over onto his knees and cover his excessively bleeding wounds with his arms, sobbing so hard that he wasn't inhaling enough air, causing him to choke and cough up blood. What he did next made Sasuke drop to his knees in shock. He shakily got to his feet, stood in the pool of his own blood, and started to limp away.

All the while Sasuke's father was watching him with a disgusted look on his face.

"Filthy demon," he murmured.

The dark world was briefly lit up by an almost blinding light and Sasuke blinked. When he opened his eyes, he didn't know where he was.

"So, Sasuke-san," someone said.

His head jerked up to see Ibiki regarding him with bleak eyes. Events came rushing back to his mind and he was out of his chair.

"What the hell was that?!"

"Oh, it was just a little-

"You sonofabitch! If you think I'm going to fall for that just because Sakura did, you're wrong!"

"Fall for what?" Ibiki murmured innocently. "I didn't show Miss Haruno anything. All I did was ask her some questions. You know, she's not like you."

"I don't care! Like I would fall for something as fake and obviously---

"It wasn't fake."

Sasuke stopped and grit his teeth for a moment, almost swayed entirely by the seriousness in the man's voice. "Liar! How stupid do you think I am?! Those tricks won't work on me!"

"And yet you're getting so worked up about it. But as I said," the ANBU scribbled something on his notepad, "It wasn't fake. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, Sasuke-san, but it was all real. And that isn't even the best part. Sit down and I'll tell you." He said softly, as if inviting a small child to hear a story.

"Just hurry up and finished. I'm not interested in your games." Sasuke growled and sat back down, not out of compliance, but out of curiosity as to how Ibiki was going to explain that what he saw was real. Though he didn't show it, the genjutsu had more than shaken him up. It had felt real beyond words.

"Of course. It's very simple, what you saw was real, and though you may not tell me, I know it felt real too. The jutsu wouldn't have worked if you weren't there."

"What?!"

"You said earlier that Naruto's mind was fragile. But the things that led to the recent event concerning him was due to his mind being flooded by suppressed memories. Now, like I said, you had to have been there, and I mean that only literally. You were there, Sasuke-san. What you saw was your own memory that you have supp-

"Bullshit!" The Uchiha snapped, not ready to believe the man's lies. He would remember if something like that had happened and he was there. He would never forget it.

"But you did. You see, children, are very selective in what they choose to remember and what they chose to let effect them. This is why being a child is the safest period in a person's life. Children are resilient and quite like rubberbands. You can pull and stretch them and they can still snap back to normal. In your case, Sasuke-san, you are a broken rubberband, but the pieces of you are still rubber, and still retain mental elasticity, which means that if some memories in addition to others can make your mental environment unstable, you will naturally repress those memories to bring about as much mental equilibrium as possible. Even you are not completely mentally stable, what with the massacre of your clan."

He didn't want to hear it anymore. Ibiki was a specialist, which meant that he specialized in telling convincing lies, and Sasuke didn't want to hear it anymore.

"Shut up, old man. That isn't going to work on me."

Ibiki shrugged. "But it already has. It looks like you and Naruto aren't that different after all. You say that you are different, because of the obvious differences between the two of you, the salient ones, but what about the similarities that nobody can see?"

"There are none!"

"There really are, Sasuke-san. And you know it. Naruto has experienced unforgivable trauma, just like you have, but of course, this is where the similarites end. This is where you should be sympathizing with Naruto and understanding his plight. But you don't. You shut out the memory of your teammate getting hurt by your own clan, which essentially makes you an accessory to his mental breakdown." It was exactly true, but if the Uchiha thought that he could do no wrong, then he was sadly mistaken. If he thought that he could just go about watching things fall apart around him and act as if it didn't matter, then Ibiki would teach him that it did.

"It isn't my fault! What my clan did had nothing to do with me! It's not my fault I forgot about it! You explained yourself that repression was natural, so don't go trying to pin this on me! I would have stopped them if I could!"

Ibiki wrote another thing before putting the pad down again. "So you do believe that it was real. But you must remember, repress is not quite the same as forget. When I show you your own memories, just because you don't think about them, doesn't mean they are forgotten. You can never erase them from your mind. Now, you won't forget what I've shown you, and you cannot repress memories that are brought again into consciousness. Think of it when I ask you my next question, and answer truthfully this time."

But Sasuke didn't want to answer any more questions. He wanted to get out of there as soon as possible. The single light in the room wasn't enough to protect him from the stifling darkness and the stale scent of piss.

"Do you hate Naruto?"

He automatically shook his head no, hoping that this question was the last, but Ibiki had other intentions.

"Did you hate him before?"

Sasuke buried his fingers in his hair and shook his head again. He had to leave. He had to get out of there, and if he had to tell the man all he wanted to know, then he would, but he wasn't going to stay there all day.

"Why not?"

The boy looked up. Why not? What kind of question was that?

"What do you mean, why not? I had no reason to hate him. He never did anything to me."

"And yet, you teased him and always made him feel like he was lower than dirt around you. Why not just ignore him like you did Miss Haruno? Why not try to help him by making him feel like a part of them team instead of shunning him? Why not stop Miss Haruno from hitting him? Why not be his friend? Why---

"I DON'T KNOW!!" Sasuke screamed, slapping his hands against his ears to shut out the seemingly never-ending questions Ibiki was asking. The Interrogation Specialist had to write the reaction down only because he was amused by how much like Sakura the boy was behaving.

"I think you do know. I think you felt that there was something about him that would have set off unwanted feelings inside of you, or maybe threatened to resurface an unpleasant memory. Or maybe I'm wrong. Maybe you are just a cruel little brat who enjoyed seeing Naruto upset. Maybe you enjoyed making him feel like shit even when you knew that he was looking for a friend in you. Am I right, Sasuke-san?"

Sasuke just shook his head violently and tightened the hands in his hair. Stinging, frustrated tears slid down his cheeks and he was just another question away from screaming.

Ibiki silently watched him cry for a while and then stood.

"I'm finished here, Sasuke-san. But I would like to see both you and Miss Haruno again soon. Together." With that, he turned the small light off and left the room and Sasuke's head dropped into his hands and he sobbed angrily alone in the dark.

TBC....

Wow. I finally got it up. I'm using a community computer until I get another one. Anyway, YAY! Now, I know what some of you guys are thinking, you think this is another Team Seven-bashing fic, but it's not (right now it seems that way). Someone already assumed that, and I had to tell that person off. I still don't know where this fic is going of how it will end, but I can guarantee that you guys will like it. Again, I'm sorry for any typos, you know how I am.

Ja'ne.