Xenophobia

: fear of strangers

He woke up on a table next to another table, which a very dead man was occupying.

This might have been some cause for alarm, but as it was, he simply found it a good sign that he – unlike his roommate – was still breathing. The familiar figure of Kabuto was hunched over the corpse and cracking bones inside the bisected chest cavity with what looked like a giant pair of hedge clippers. Absorbed in his work, he didn't seem aware of the Hyuuga's return to consciousness and remained vigilant in his task. The pale flesh of the open belly jerked and jiggled with each moist 'crack!' of calcium, the raw inner flaps bouncing grossly. Neji cleared his throat a little.

"Ah," said Kabuto eagerly. He was wearing a pair of white latex gloves, but the blood was up to his elbows. "You're awake."

Neji forced down his inner wreckage and tried to concentrate on his outer wreckage instead. The mind-flaying agony, hours and hours frozen in pain, entire body aflame as forbidden jutsu and venom ripped through him. Already the detail were slipping away into repressed memories. Thank God for metal defensive mechanisms. In all honestly, if not for his previous built up immunity to pain (some sixteen years of domestic, legalized torture will toughen you up fast, kiddies) the shock would have killed him. It was disgusting to think he would have gone insane if he'd been unaccustomed to such pain and he had his sadistic grandmother to thank for his continued ability to think straight(ish).

Water came on and echoed in the bottom of a sink. Kabuto had pulled out of his patient's chest and tossed his gloves in a little trash can nearby. He started washing his hands, scrubbing with pinkish lather, pink with dye or blood, Neji couldn't tell.

The 'infirmary' was as cold like a meat locker...which was perhaps more fitting a name – shrouded forms lay out on the table tops swathed in neat cotton sheets, stained only occasionally by fresh crimson fluids. Neji didn't let his eyes linger, lest they tell him things he didn't want to know. Supported by four thick pillars near the corners of the roof, all the stone here had a soft orange cast to it and seemed malleable to basic earth jutsu. Raised stone platforms had been elevated on the left hand side of the room and thick slabs drawn out of the walls for what looked like dissections. He tried not to imagine what various atrocities might have occurred on the very surface was currently sitting on.

A sudden awful pain jagged through his shoulder, hot and fast and so deep Neji physically jolted back, gasping. Then it was gone, leaving nothing but heat and the memory behind. Wincing, he pulled his sleeve from his shoulder and let himself finally see what he'd known for hours and hours yesterday would be there today. Where those inch-long fangs had punched through flesh and sinew, his skin gave no sign or scar. All that remained was a dark, vividly acid green hieroglyph on the plane just beneath his collarbone; it burned sluggishly under his touch and stayed hot against his fingers until he withdrew them. Kabuto was watching.

"That was too soon for a curse seal," the young physician said disapprovingly, as though Neji had failed to floss regularly since his last check up. "Luckily, it's a lower level curse seal, mostly temporary, needs to reapplied every few months or so. If he'd given you a real curse seal, like the Heaven Seal, you would have been dead within minutes." He toweled his hands quickly and smiled genially at the Hyuuga. "Now, let's have a look at you."

Neji said nothing, just slid off the table and put it between them.

The doctor laughed; a warm, happy sound in a morgue.

"I'm curious to know why your eyes in particular seem to be so…unique," said Kabuto from the other end of the room. "I'm certain I've never seen a doujutsu like that from a Byakugan user before. It's caught the interest of even Lord Orochimaru. Previously your being here was to be an experiment of my own, to keep Sasuke occupied while we work toward another goal, but now I'm quite preoccupied with you." He tiled his head, one hand at his hip. "Aren't you curious? They are your eyes."

"I'm not," he said flatly.

Kabuto seemed absurdly disappointed in him. He just sighed and turned back to the table behind him, and picked up a calligraphy brush. "That's the problem with you prodigies," Kabuto lamented, carefully painting the characters on a small sheet of paper. He seemed lost in thought for a moment. "You're given whatever you like and achieve whatever you like without ever understanding the means. You're all about the ends and see nothing else. It's a shame. I'd rather hoped you might wish to understand yourself a bit more than this."

The medical-nin tossed him something from his back pocket and Neji caught it without thinking about wanting to do any such thing.

"Eat that," he said cheerfully. "You're in for a rough night, Neji-kun. I had you on narcotics to dull those horrendous night terrors the last couple days and the withdrawal period is going to be awful."

A pause

Neji broke the silence at random. "Why chocolate?"

Kabuto looked back at him, something like vague pride on his face. "Releases hormones in the brain to gets neurotransmitters moving faster. That clears out the last of the chakra left by genjutsu and other invasive techniques." He smiled warmly. "That and I mixed it with the same chemicals used in soldier pills." And Neji noticed something unpleasant in the otherwise pleasant curve of Kabuto's smile, hidden in the upper left-hand corner of his mouth.

He stared down at the tin-foiled wrapped rectangle. He looked toward his guide who no longer was looking at him and busied himself rinsing blood off his surgical instruments. Neji couldn't think of a time he'd ever been so utterly unable to read someone. He also couldn't think of a reason for his captor to poison him at this point so he crinkled the foil back and broke off a piece.

Neji was irritated to admit he did feel better. Though, while most of him allowed the drug to take him under, the shinobi part of his brain was having a relative psychotic break – all his previous experiences as a hostage entailed torture, screaming, blood and kunai diggingsodamndeephefeltlike…not comfort food. He chewed the candy anyway, part of him only dimly waiting for Kabuto to whirl around and crow 'HA! Fooled you! It was full of rat poison!' but somehow Neji found himself less concerned about his digestive tract and more concerned about the mark on his shoulder.

"What…does this do?" Callused fingers brushed the mark gingerly. "It's not like…"

"Nothing like Sasuke's and not like the Cage Seal, don't worry. Orochimaru-sama is cleverer than that. You won't succumb to pain, you're not the type," Kabuto remarked, dumping his scalpels in a bin of sterilizer. "That curse seal means you're going to be cooperating with our objectives faster than I anticipated. Today actually. I need to introduce you to the other Jounin."

"You're serious."

The medic tossed him another bar. "You'll need it," he said warmly. "Should clear up some of those residual images. If you eat enough, maybe the nightmares won't drive you insane for the next couple days."

- - -

If you listened to the rumors – or rather, if you listened to Koketsu – Hyuuga Neji had been putting in a whole hell of a lot more hours than his payroll said he did. Most of this stemmed from the fact that again and again the young prodigy had become casual in the art of striding right through the lobby and straight into the Hokage's office without so much as a perfunctory 'I have an appointment'. Others would call that out and out galling bad manners, others would call it impatience because when you're running errands for someone who can literally crack your skull with a flick of her little finger, you don't really want to be late.

It wasn't that he needed the money – he didn't – or that he was trying to position himself for ANBU promotion – he wasn't – but rather something like a bit of field-crazy OCD setting in and if he had to 'go on one more chuunin-rank political crap-run I'll kill myself and someone else for spite!' He'd made the suggestion far more politely to the woman who could crack his skull in, but that was more or less the idea. The unfortunate side-affect was an inordinate amount of 'need-to-know' assignments that looked suspiciously like ANBU rank missions, hastily downgraded to suit a rookie jounin. (Often the threat of her little pinky was all that kept Neji from refusing them.)

The point was: Neji had more solo field experience than his files suggested.

The point was: Neji wasn't at all ill-prepared to handle these circumstances – odd and terrifyingly dangerous as they really were.

The point was: it did absolute nothing to stop Neji's utter and complete dumb-foundedness when Kabuto quite literally introduced him to the new Sound Four.

They were all sitting in the den occupying themselves with breakfast – a display of utter normalcy so profound Neji had trouble processing – and didn't immediately register what they were looking at until four or five sentences into Kabuto's introduction. As it dawned on them, the atmospheric pressure in the room actually altered to accommodate all the killing intent that flooded the air. Apparently – as far as the bastardized disunity in the Sound went – Kidomaru had been popular among his peers and it had leaked out somewhere that a rookie Hyuuga prodigy had been his down fall. Thus his success as a genin would probably be the death of him as a jounin. The irony burned.

The young woman sitting nearest the door ceased eating her bento and didn't move or look away from the tabletop before her (she seemed to have gone momentarily catatonic). A pale, white-haired androgenous looking fellow on the stool next to her looked up from the graphic novel he'd been perusing through and peered boredly at them over the spine of his book. The other two were sitting around the TV finishing off what looked like a dumpling between them while a satellite soap opera played fuzzily in the background.

The girl holding the pastry let it drop dumbly from the fingers at the sight of him, mouth hanging slightly. Her breakfast partner – a dark-skinned ninja with a heavy winter cap jammed down around his ears and dreadlocks sticking out under the edges – didn't look overly pleased with her and snapped a hand sharply against her forehead. She protested with a loud 'Ow!' and pouted.

"Stop drooling," he told her irritably, reaching for the dropped pastry and brushing it off with male indifference.

"Didn't have to hit me!" she whined, rubbing her forehead pitiably.

"Didn't have to drop breakfast," he retorted, cramming the rest of his meal in his mouth. "When you're done having sexual fantasies about the enemy can I bother you to get another dumpling or should I get up myself?"

"Bastard!"

"Whore!"

"Juri-chan, Ban-kun, you're embarrassing yourselves," Kabuto said disapprovingly.

The boy with the cap got up with a snort, and went to procure himself another pastry from the kitchen. His wiry frame stood Neji's height, slightly taller with a hang-dog look about him, suggesting he less than liked being up at this hour. The face beneath the wooly orange cap was olive-skinned and a little scarred, hollow cheeked like most ninja from hard daily workouts that lacked a proper diet to keep the skeletal look away. Healthy, but not nice looking exactly. He selected one of the doughy blobs on the plate behind the other male jounin.

"Did we just give up on this year's crop of Sound-chuunin and decide on jacking jounin from our neighbors? Again?" He pointed fiercely with his dumpling. "Lame, Kabuto. Lame."

The medic just smiled and left Neji standing at the door. Wildly he speculated making a break for it, realized that was excruciatingly stupid and didn't. "It would do you good to remember," Kabuto said conversationally, "that despite being the only home grown member of the Sound, born and raised here in the shadow of Orochimaru-sama, you're the weakest on the team, Ban-kun. Takon, Mai, and even little over-sexed Juri are stronger than you. And, really, there's always Sasuke-kun to consider." He straightened his glasses carelessly, watching the blood in Ban's face back away from his skin, low-burning rage in his eyes.

Neji noted the girl at the counter was staring rather openly at him. Unlike her out-of-uniform companions, she wore the familiar white robes and bow-tie obi of what Neji had come to identify as Sound elite. She had bandages wound up her arms to her elbows, green-streaked hair feathered neatly around high cheekbones and Neji recognized her wide blank-eyed stare because he'd seen it countless times in dark places and bright roads and muffled hallways. Twin blue irises smoldered with murder.

A Hyuuga had killed someone dear to her.

"You drag this one in?" murmured the man beside her, indicating Neji with a jerk of his delicate chin. His voice was a low tenor, belaying the loveliness in his face.

Kabuto smiled politely. "Good morning Takon-kun. And yes we did. He's recently…come over to our side as it were."

Neji allowed himself to glower openly.

Takon snapped his book shut and propped his elbows on the counter. "So…" He eyed Neji speculatively. "You killed Kidomaru...as a genin."

Neji nodded once.

"And you beat the shit out of our Golden-Boy?"

Neji didn't nod, just furrowed his brow uncertainly.

"The Uchiha," he clarified. "You're the one that did all that damage last –"

"Yes," Kabuto cut in suddenly, sharply. He smiled a cold smile at the other jounin. "He's the one."

Takon sat back, thoughtful.

"I remember Kidomaru," Mai said suddenly, cutting into the dialogue. "He was strong. More importantly, he was brilliant." Her gaze hadn't wavered an inch from Neji's pale face, fixed on every detail of his Hyuuga features with manic hyper focus. She stood up abruptly and gazed about the room, bored. "I've got my mission. You lot can hang around and haze the new kid. Kabuto-kun, can I have a word?" Neji realized she was older than Kabuto only by the inflection she placed on the honorific. The medic himself didn't seem to take offence.

"If it's about that detail I mentioned before –" he said warningly.

"No," she replied, accompanying the physician out of the room. "I had a question regarding the genin teams –" The words faded into mumbles.

Neji glanced surreptitiously about the room, eyeing his trio of new companions and sizing them up best as he could without being overtly obvious about it. Takon yawned suddenly, lifting a hand as he did. Dressed rakishly in frayed green pants, flak-vest and wrist-length black turtleneck sweater, he was tall and slender-looking. Neji pegged him around five-six, one-hundred-thirty pounds and if first impressions meant anything – and they always did with a Hyuuga – he was strong as hell, but didn't have the same level of interest in him the other three seemed to have. Juri was sitting backwards in her chair, huddled against headrest, peering out at him, chewing mindlessly on her index finger. Ban was brooding moodily by the kitchen island, glowering intensely his direction.

"So," said Juri, breaking the silence. She grinned crookedly around the tip of her finger, wedge strategically between her teeth as she spoke, "how long are you here for?"

Takon snorted.

"Come off it, Juri-chan," Ban taunted. "If an Uchiha is too good for you, so's a Hyuuga. He's practically fucking nobility."

"Not here he's not," she told him without once breaking her eye contact. "God, look at his eyes. A hundred times better than that little girl Kabuto dragged up here before. She was a bore wasn't she, I wanted to gut that fat little bitch she was so annoying. I'm glad Kabuto traded her in."

Neji disguised an ugly emotional surge by tucking stray bangs behind his ear. "You spoke with Hinata-sama?" he asked, evenly as he could manage.

"Sama?" she echoed, tittering. Her teeth were clean and glistening white. "Oooh, is she your mistress?"

"Did you speak with her?" he repeated impatiently.

"Why? Do you love her? Was she your sweetheart? Did she kiss you after missions and…"

"She's my cousin," he interrupted her dryly.

"Dull," Juri sneered musically. "Yeah, I spoke to her. All she did was dither her name, rank and registration number."

'Good girl,' Neji thought fiercely.

"She was so useless Kabuto didn't even want her for breeding stock," she explained crassly, a spiteful little smile coloring her lips. "Not that any of our jounin would want to dick that ugly cow."

Ban and Takon exchanged meaningfully disagreeable looks that did nothing to improve Neji's mood or his opinion of the new Sound Four. Having lived most of his mature shinobi career measuring fights by the mile-long yard stick that was Kidomaru (his deadliest, most brilliantly malicious foe) he took it kind of personally that the man's replacements were so (pulling the aristocratic card here) low-class. He eyed Juri dispassionately. "Hinata-sama is a thousand times your better, Sound-nin." He shook his head unsympathetically. "You know that and so do I."

She didn't blush. She just stopped talking and her eyes went cold. Takon smirked. Ban laughed.

"Better stop while you're ahead, Juri,"

"Yeah, your inferiority-complex is showing."

Neji didn't say a thing.

"Mean one you are," the kunoichi mocked, scrunching her face and ignoring her teammates without exception. A delicate finger ran along the inside of her wrist, soft lips pulling in what wanted to be a smile, but kept shifting into something more perverse. "You know, you are the prisoner here. Better be nicer to me."

Juri slid off her armchair and ruffled her chin-length blue hair with expert fluffing fingers (Neji recognized preening because his sparrows back home did that) then she straightened her cunningly tailored skirt and flounced toward the door.

"Well, well," she yawned easily. "I'll just go wait for you boys in the Third Atrium, shall I, Takon?"

"Yeah," the other Sound ninja said softly. "Now get lost."

Ban boosted himself onto the counter next to the other ninja. "Yeah, you get him after we get him. Like Four-Eyes always says: 'Procedure, procedure, procedure.'"

"That's 'Protocol, protocol, protocol,' shit-head. Speaking of whom…" She was addressing Neji now. "Kabuto's going to break you in," Juri hissed, moving past the Hyuuga, close enough to touch, repelled by some polar element still in Neji's attitude. She lowered her voice. "I'll be waiting."

Then she was gone.

"Whore," Ban repeated with interest before turning to Takon and whispering.

They exchanged in low, murmured words with their mouths behind their hands, foiling any lip-reading Neji might have otherwise tried. They finished up and turned to the foreign shinobi with a great aura of intention. Neji braced himself, having already deduced that this was some kind of common-place procedure for Sound prisoner interrogation or something. It was clever and certainly original as far as mental ambush went, but these two didn't look like psychological giants. Neji was less worried about them, more worried about what Kabuto would do after they were done.

Ban hopped to his feet . "Shit. This'll take all damn day," he complained, reaching for Neji's arm.

"Ban…" Takon started warningly.

Too late. The Sound-nin made his grab.

Which, really, wasn't giving Neji much credit at all. Ban's fingers got about halfway wrapped around his arm before a powerful burst of chakra tore the first layer of skin off his finger tips. He yowled and snatched his hand back and he'd been bitten, flapping his hand urgently around his head. Neji shook his sleeve out and examined the cloth as if checking for stains (or exploding tags) and didn't look up at his slightly singed attacker. It was minor chakra heat-rash. Liking burning your fingers on an over-warm cocoa mug, but if he wanted to be dramatic Neji wasn't going to say anything.

"Dammit! His skin's, like, fuckin' electrified!"

Takon gave his fellow ninja a deprecating look. "That's because he's a Hyuuga, stupid. What did you expect?"

"Hey!You wanna come over here and do this, fairy-boy?"

Takon turned his pale eyes one Neji, his gaze the color of liquid drain-cleaner, anti-freeze blue. "We can do this one of two ways, Hyuuga," said Takon, voice calm and even enough to tell Neji he'd done this kind of thing before. He was the voice of brutal reason in this tripod torture method that Neji's morbid experience was sketching out for him. "You're old enough to know what they are."

"The hard way and the much fucking harder way," snarled Ban sucking on his wounded fingers.

Neji quirked an internal eyebrow. The voice of brutal lack-of-reason, obviously, these guys worked as a team because they could not do what Kabuto did. Kabuto could play good-cop, bad-cop in a room by himself. He gave the two ninja a not-so-apologetic shrug of the shoulders and his chakra reabsorbed easily to its natural flow in his veins. Takon nodded and the other ninja glowered and unwound some assassin's wire from his belt. In Neji's eyes Ban's arms seemed to vibrate, chakra molding around his thumb and index finger as he wove a cat's cradle between his fingers. The copper sang with chakra.

"Hold out your hands," Takon ordered him quietly. "And nothing funny. Kabuto's still got you on chakra suppressants. So even if you can manage a little Juuken, trust me when I say you'll need all of it to beat just one of us. Much less two."

Neji held out his hands and waited.

Ben looped the wire around his wrists and forearms like a child playing string-games, garroting wire brushing bare skin gingerly as he worked. Then he pulled them tight until the Hyuuga's arms were bound side by side, the angle forcing him to pull his arms to his chest to be comfortable. There was a lot of chakra in the bindings. The second the wires touched his skin Neji felt the metal leech his chakra. Being highly sensitive to what went on in his body the drainage was maddening, but he fought to appear as though he didn't feel it; most ninja wouldn't. The metal ions in the wire's structure seemed to have become magnetized to chakra and were literally pulling his energy into them, binding the power in his arms, stopping the flow. He hated to admit it, but he was kind of impressed.

"You guys do this often?" Neji inquired, professionally curious.

"Often enough to be annoying," replied Takon amiably, grabbing the Hyuuga's shoulder and spinning him toward the door. "Kabuto's pet projects always go through us once or twice before he takes them to pieces."

"In a few weeks, chum, that'll be you," Ban looked pleased at the thought. "Juri always gets lubed up over the soon-to-be-dead pretty boys."

"Get some couth," Takon told his comrade, disinterested.

Ban just sniggered. "I'm just saying. If we've got a Hyuuga, Yakushi's gonna make the most of him. That's all I'm saying."

"Shut up."

"C'mon," Ban complained. "Stop being such a damn prude. We both know what you'd do given the chance to – Ah! Fuck!"

Crack!

"Language," Takon said softly, lethally, having slammed Ban's head against the nearest wall. He'd moved so fast by the time Neji spun around it was over in a split-second of blurred brutality. Takon had a firm grip on his comrade's arm, having twisted up between his shoulder blades in what Neji knew to be an excruciating position. The pinned shinobi grimaced and said something through the corner of his mouth that Takon smacked his forehead into the stone for. "Either shut up or I'm going to rip your tongue out of your skull and nail it to your forehead. Understand?" A pause. "Understand?"

"Yeah," Ban muttered. "Get off me."

Having said his piece Takon let him go and stepped back. "Go. I'll take this one alone."

Ban muttered and stormed down the hall, leaving Neji and Takon behind in the dark.

Neji bit the inside of his cheek, senses humming on high alert, acutely aware of being alone with the other Sound-nin. The hallway suddenly seemed exponentially longer and darker than it had before. Very horror-show flick. This was a stupid line of thought, so Neji broke it off and made a show of tucking his hair behind his ear. He was annoyed to find his hands shook a little. He couldn't tell if it was fear, adrenaline or drugs. Damn.

After a while Takon leaned forward and murmured, "We're not going to torture you, Leaf-nin."

"Well that's rather generous of you," he said passionlessly.

He ignored the jibe. "Turn around, Hyuuga."

When Neji didn't immediately move the Sound-nin caught his arm gruffly and spun him around, grabbing his shoulder near the base of his neck. A thumb was shoved into the groove between his third and forth cerival verebra – 'Keichu Point. It'll take out the greater par t of my occipital lobe before killing me.' – just above his blind spot. There was no telling if his proximity to the first thoratic verebra was a fluke or a threat. Neji didn't say anything and assumed 'fluke'. Takon walked him down the halls with the nonchalance of someone who knew exactly what he was doing and had done it enough to be dead confident in its execution. The hum of chakra through his system felt like a pulse to Neji and he had a strong one, a very strong one.

"Do you know who I am?" Takon inquired.

Neji mentally struggled with his urge to say something really, really sarcastic (and potentially detrimental to his health) and settled for, "Sorry, no."

"I guess the family resemblance isn't as powerful," Takon sighed to himself, not really forlorn. "Sakon and Ukon were twins after all. I'm just their older brother."

Neji kicked himself. There was a mother and father rolling in their unimaginative graves, having given their three sons ridiculously similar names for this very reason. Takon, Sakon and Ukon, the Sound trouble trio or something. Nicknames would abound if only Kiba and Kankurou hadn't diced two-third of the equation to meaty, bloody bits. Neji contemplated making a mention of the fact that he hadn't had anything to do with killing the twins. He was only remotely involved. In fact, he should have more of a beef with the Inuzuka Clan than with his. He glanced over his shoulder at the vaguely androgynous ninja behind him, studying him critically, hyper aware that all the Sound elite had a reason to skin him alive and shrieking.

"Oh…I suppose you do look like them. Older though. You're…what in your twenties?"

"Twenty-two. I am – was six years older. I guess I didn't train them hard enough." He shrugged a little, as if this were merely disappointing, not necessarily an emotional and psychologically scarring blow to a blood brother. "It was a mistake letting them join the Sound Four. I should have tried harder to convince them guard duty wasn't their place. Now look: death by genin."

Neji thought about that. "The Sound Four…were just bodyguards?"

"More or less. Elite, young. Very easily persuaded. I was too old for the snake's selective tastes."

"Because you're set in your ways?"

"No, just too old, I think. I've noticed nothing but jail-bait gets into his good graces."

Neji fought in internal gag-reflex. "Oh…well, it's the young that fight the wars, they say. You're a member of the Sound Four now?"

"Orochimaru-bastard-sama needs someone to play ANBU for him. Besides you can't get much closer than Sound-Four and that's truth, but be a sweetheart and don't tell anyone I said so." He jerked Neji back suddenly pinning the smaller Leaf-ninja against his chest. "That's a secret," he whispered raspily into Neji's ear, seriously invading the young jounin's idea of personal space boundaries. Neji juggled his suspicions about this: either Takon was putting it on to scare him or he really was just that creepy. Given the Sound-country track record with creepy jounin, Neji was more inclined to believe the later.

"Naturally," Neji managed as casually as possible.

He waited tensely for Takon to let go. When he didn't the Leaf-nin cleared his throat and drummed his fingers together.

"We'll just stay here then?" Neji inquired.

Takon pulled a kunai from a hip holster. "How old are you?"

'To lie or not to lie?' Neji thought rapidly.

"Eighteen."

Takon thought about that…then sliced the wire off his arms. He resumed his death-hold on Neji's neck and they started walking again, the Leaf-nin morbidly wondering what might have happened if he'd told the truth and grimacing to himself. Some parts of the shinobi trade were better left unsaid. He hoped to God that part of his ANBU training would never tested in the field; it was traumatic enough taking that course from scary and psychologically savvy Ibiki, who knew exactly how to make you squirm.

Takon jerked him to the left. "In here," he directed gruffly.

Given little choice in the matter Neji found himself physically man-handled through a very large and unyielding door (which Takon slammed him into a couple times before Neji managed to jar it open with his shoulder) and into what looked like a cafeteria. Ignoring the new found ache in his bruised shoulders, it looked like Takon had been perfectly honest about not torturing him. This was hardly the place for it if someone was going to rip vital Konoha intelligence out of his still screaming mouth. In fact, he was about to say something of that nature to his captor when there was a great thundering of feet.

Suddenly they were swamped by an ocean of screaming activity.

Neji jerked, startled as hundreds of children poured without warning into the room and swarmed the buffet – the sound of feet running, shrill voices babbling into a cacophonous disharmony of noise, the thunder of bowls and disposable chopsticks, shrieking whistles and the familiar sticky smell of PB&J inherent in grade-school children across the world. Neji stared in open-mouthed shock.

Takon glanced at him. "What's wrong, Hyuuga? Don't like kids?"

One of them skidded to a stop and backtracked to grab Takon by the sleeve.

"Who's that?" growled the small pink-haired girl, jabbing a tan little finger at the Leaf shinobi.

Takon glanced down at her. "This is one of our new jounin," he said with a kind of kind easy familiarity that made Neji vaguely ill. "His name is Neji-san. He may be your teacher soon enough, so you'd best be nice to him. Alright, Minami-chan?"

Neji's spine went ram-rod straight and true, jolting the young jounin painfully upright all at once and he stared down at the little girl in abject horror.

The girl made a face. "A teacher, Takon-sempai? He's not old. Aren't teachers supposed to be old?"

Another pink-haired girl stopped by her side, peered at him and blushed. She whistled haltingly at the other girl who howled with laughter and whistled back, clicking and popping her tongue in unmistakable phonetic code. Then they were gone, winging off into the mob like fish into the sea.

Takon watched them go with a dead disinterest that Neji presumed he wore while killing kittens or something. "Those two are really coming along. The others can't even get the simple base words and Nishi-chan is already trying to flirt. Tch…she'll be more trouble than her sister." The Sound-nin deigned to note the younger ninja's blank irritation because he sympathetically added. "It's field-code. You can whistle can't you?"

"What is this?" Neji gritted.

"Most of these children are newly minted genin," Takon said easily, maneuvering around the perimeter of the chaos with practiced ease, dodging randomly flying students as they hurled themselves off chairs and things. One little girl, barely six, lunged off the nearest table into Neji's arms, squealing "Catch me! Catch me!" in a flailing ball of energy and legs. Neji caught her brusquely and set her down to run, shrieking happily, away. Takon didn't seem to notice. "We're currently in the process of issuing jounin-mentors, Hyuuga. We're compiling teams even now."

"You want me to lead a team?" Neji demanded.

Takon was leading him out of the dining hall now and down another long hall, the pale Sound-nin not once glancing back at his irate captive. The quiet grew more and more lengthy, the yelling chaos of prepubescent assassins fading into the distance.

"You can't be serious," he snapped at last (the tension had been too much). "You're insane if you expect me–,"

"—to be responsible for three of our genin?" interjected Takon dryly. He'd stopped at a closed side door, producing a key for the lock. "No. They're quite serious." He unlocked the door. "Kabuto may be a twisted freak but he's not a kidder. He wasn't joking when he told you we plan to make you a member of the Sound, sweetheart. Get used to it."

"You are mad," Neji enunciated.

Takon pushed the door open and walked inside. The room looked like a mistreated hotel room, single cot, desk, oil-lamp and an adjoining bathroom. It hadn't been lived in for ages if ever and Neji couldn't be entirely sure why they were visiting a bedroom. Neji's guide ignored the Leaf-nin's puzzled (vaguely suspicious) expression and crossed the room to the desk on the opposite wall, and picked up a pile of stacked manila folders.

"This is your room," Takon said dispassionately. "It'll be locked at night. During the day you'll have an escort of some fashion or missions to occupy your time. Don't try to bust out, or anything else foolish. You're branch family Hyuuga. You know what curse seals can do."

He recrossed the room with the files in hand and Neji recognized the paperwork for what they were: genin dossiers. The Sound jounin shoved the stack at the Hyuuga, as if he would absorb them by proximity alone. Failing to do so, Neji just blinked at them, not moving toward them lest it be taken as some kind of commitment to the task. Takon seemed more or less neutral about this and just stood there with his arms held out, waiting.

"Those are our newest genin profiles," Takon told him. "Read up. Three of them will be your students."

"How do you know I won't kill them all and escape?" Neji said bluntly, too impatient to banter half-truths or strategy.

Takon arched a snowy brow, tilting his head just enough to peer at Neji through his bangs. "Would you kill innocent genin for the sake of your freedom?" There was a stagnant beat of rest in which those calculating – frightfully curious – blue eyes seemed to draw every corner of the room into them.

Neji's skin prickled. Finally, Takon pushed the files into his arms.

"We've already selected a mission for you," he said shortly, turning on his heel and striding to the door. "We don't waste time with D-Class missions here in Otogakure so be prepared. You'll meet your team after Kabuto's given you a crash-course in Sound Village protocol…which will hurt, by the way."

"You're all nuts," Neji reminded his captor loudly.

"We follow Orochimaru." He said this like it was an explanation – which, really, it was – and gave him one last look in the dark. "Of course we're nuts."

He closed the door and left Neji to the silence.

Author's Note:

What the hell am I doing?Special thanks to Dayadhvam for editing my craptastic Japanese. You'd never know I took two years of it. But bah! And 'no'. No one told Itachi to do anything, he was just bug-fucked all on his own but there's a the piece of crazy in everyone. Just depends how big it gets to grow. Thanks to Beboots for being awesome and supportive as usual. I confess this fic is pretty much gratuitous Neji torture, as all my Naruto fics have been. Ahhh…not to be a sadist. What a world that must be. Hope you enjoyed the new Sound Four. May they live up to their names. More on the way. I promise, just slowing down for the sake of my real life. Stupid school…