Scotomaphobia
: fear of going blind in a visual field
As a child and into his teenaged years, Hyuuga Neji had been prone to migraines. These were the things he did to relieve them: warm compress, dark room, not moving, breathing through your mouth…none of which are readily available to a newly minted jounin on assignment. Which is to say, basically, that he did none of these things. In those times it's hard to function, to run in sync, to flow, to be flawless and fluid like he needs to live the life of a shinobi. In those times, thoughts come in feverish bursts of coherency, striking like dangerous children in the dark, running out of the carnival colors, spinning like tops behind his eyes, dressed in flashing reds and blues.
Thoughts hit at random; laughing assassins from the corners of his aching mind and with them comes the maddening question: Why? Why won't it stop? Demanding it softly to himself, a muffled shout, gritting it out silently while his teammates pretended they didn't notice him turning unbecoming shades of green. Pain without a source or a reason, without visible cause or motivation. It's the worse kind, the maddening kind, because you can't touch it, clutch it to you, staunch the flow or bind the sprain. There's just the after affect eating its way through your core, the untouchable pain. In those times, it's a fragile existence.
This was one of those times.
The fact his eyes were burning their way out of his skull didn't help much either.
He'd barely made his way out of Orochimaru's chambers before collapsing, puking helplessly in the hall outside. For fear or pain or guilt or all of the above, he couldn't tell. Deep in the dark recesses where jounin level logic ruled, he knew that he should be processing his conversation with Orochimaru, piecing the puzzle together, counter-reasoning his bloody God-awful arguments. Anything, but just then all his thinking machinations were gummed thoroughly by the screaming, mind-shattering fire inside his head. There was a Chinese New Year thousand pack fire-bomb going off in his optic nerve. He could barely walk. His brain was swelling in his skull. Worst of all – 'Calm down. Shit! Just – you're fine, just…' – he couldn't see.
Again the not-so-illogical dread jammed itself in the back of his throat, knotting his voice up in an impassible blockage. 'What if I go blind?' He tried to synchronize his breathing again, difficult as it developed a habit of hitching in the back of his throat. Still he tried. Just breathing, to lead himself through mediation like he had so many times before, but peace refused to come. The one conclusion to any train of thought was the careening crash down into 'What if I do go blind?'
"Easy," Kabuto's voice intruded gently on the panicked static of his thoughts, penetrating the wall of pain and darkness. "Easy, Neji. It's the genjutsu conflicting with your Byakugan, relax." A chill hand touched his temple and a burst of cool chakra spread across his face, smothering some of the gunpowder explosions tearing through his brain. Healing jutsu: dispersing the lingering effects, erasing the forced synaptic links in his head, like someone was unknotting a garroting wire in his brain. "Just breathe, Neji. It's okay." Cognition returned in inches, slowly, the furnace of his unnamed jutsu dying down to embers in his blood. He was breathing now, shivering – pathetic! – with relief.
"Can you walk?"
Neji didn't reply.
"You can either walk or I'll carry you."
He swallowed – throat, mouth burning with bile, stomach acid, unspoken screams – and forced himself to his feet. Kabuto murmured something and took Neji's wrist; after a frightening moment where the Hyuuga couldn't figure out what his guide was doing, the doctor placed Neji's hand on his shoulder. Kabuto didn't say anything, just started walking and Neji followed his hand after him, concentrating on not, not, not collapsing on the floor and knocking himself unconscious. As a result he couldn't have said for sure how long they walked. His reality was one that revolved in his vision, seeing was his primary sensation of the five and he'd just been plunged into deep, sarcophagus black. Breathe, just breathe.
His hand was shrugged off suddenly and Neji stopped, freezing. His world for a stark moment shrank to the bland, agonizing blackness that had suddenly enveloped the Hyuuga's existence. Neji swallowed. Darkness wasn't something Hyuuga grew up fearing. Children who see everything can't be frightened of monsters and imps in the closet. Now suddenly, at the ripe age of sixteen he was developing a hard core case of nyctophobia? This is unacceptable, shinobi. Get your shit together.
His hip bumped slightly against the corner of a table and he slid his hand across the edge, fingers bumping blindly against the lip of the stone counter. In accordance with Neji's rotten karma, his seeking hands slid across something cold and fleshy. He jerked his fingers back with a half-muffled hiss and only then did the stale, vaguely putrid scent assault him, crashing against his olfactory senses in a collage of nauseating odors. Dead flesh. Peroxide.
The thing he touched was a cadaver.
Kabuto chuckled.
"This isn't the infirmary. Some of the tables are…occupied." A gloved hand tapped his arm. "Over here, Neji-kun."
Hands, cold, slightly damp, settled on his shoulders, pulling him around to sit on the edge of a low table about seven feet to the left of the other one. The hands felt too big through his shirt against his skin, like they belonged to someone older, stronger, not an enemy Sound ninja. For an ugly moment of random comparison, his mind thought of his father when he was three, placing wide, calloused hands on his little shoulders, heavy and powerful while he smiled into his son's face. Neji tore himself out of the traitorous memory, disgusted with himself and ground his clenched fingers into the grainy stone beneath him.
The muggy air tasted like tap water and dirt after rainfall and he could taste the smell of the Sound. He knew it smelled like freshly tilled fields, gardens after spring showers, heavy with the tang of clay and decomposing human skin. Even the strange organic scent of his guide – the peculiar sweetness of sterilizer fluid mixed with a grainy yeast smell, some indescribable human odor. He covered his nose with his hand, praying his wouldn't accidentally breathe through his nose again as even the smell of this place set his already throbbing head reeling.
Kabuto had withdrawn.
Neji could hear the squeak of a something being twisted then the hollow, liquid roar as water thundered into the bottom of a basin.
"If you need to throw up, there's a bowl on the end of the table," Kabuto's voice said, sounding fainter from the other side of the room. "Genjutsu has that affect. It should fade in a couple hours." Footfalls marked the man's position, moving around the room with noise unbecoming of a shinobi. "You're lucky; Orochimaru's techniques usually leave ninja incapacitated for hours on end."
Neji breathed a little harder, through his mouth still. White-hot fireworks lit up the dark in his head. Just the mention of vomiting made him suddenly twice as queasy as before. He covered his mouth again and tried not breathing for a second; imagining he could taste the cold, dead air. He needed to throw up now.
He swore to kill Kabuto a couple more times.
He felt another person drawing close and quite suddenly a warm cloth lay against his aching forehead, runnels of water siding through his damp hair, finding tracks down the nape of his neck into the collar of his shirt. Neji held it there automatically, too startled to be repulsed by the medical attentions of the unpleasant Sound-nin. Kabuto took the opportunity to steal his free arm and find his pulse – slow and shallow – in the vein beneath his wrist. After a moment he made a soft sound and let go, reaching this time for Neji's face. The teen sensed the intent and recoiled immediately.
"What?" he hissed.
"I need to see your eyes, Neji-kun," said Kabuto softly.
"I can't open my eyes," the Hyuuga said coldly, caustically. "I'm fine."
"So you can't see, but you're just fine. Yes. I'm certain your medical expertise is why you made jounin. Just relax; I'm not going to hurt you."
Neji slapped an unseen hand, sensing it encroaching on his face. "Don't touch me."
"I'm afraid I'm going to have to."
"Why?" Neji hissed finally. "My eyes aren't important. Or have you forgotten it's Sasuke Orochimaru is truly interested in?"
Kabuto made a soft huff, as if exasperated. "You're a genius, Neji-kun. Think. If Orochimaru-sama didn't have interest in you, or your eyes, you'd be dead. Not many people would protest such an arrangement." Neji felt him move slightly, as if mulling this over. "Besides, if you do go blind we really would have no use for you, Hyuuga-san. I'd be obligated to uphold tradition. What's the saying? 'There are no blind Hyuuga?'"
There was a moment of tense black; Neji's whole awareness hyper-extended, quivering like a web of vaporous barriers all around him. He would have loved an excuse, any excuse to refuse to cooperate as it went against his moral code, shinobi code, generally any codes he could think of…mostly cooperating just went against his nature. But such freedoms weren't his to pick and choose. He half way suspected resistance would get him a shot of something normal sixteen-year-olds shouldn't have in their system and he didn't want to be inebriated in any way around a freak like Kabuto.
Thus, he forced himself to hold still and not use Juuken! while Kabuto slowly guided his hand away, removing the warm rag and instructing him monotonously to relax. Already his eyes seemed to sear all the more intensely, anticipating the pain of the examination. Trembling from head to foot, Neji managed something like calm even as those uncomfortably cold hands ghosted slowly, almost gingerly across the still sticky skin of his forehead. A cloth had diluted the blood dried across his brow; Neji could feel it sliding down his face in ruddy beads, tickling his temple maddeningly.
Quick thumbs wiped the droplets away and settled symmetrically at the corners of either eye, hands slightly scratchy against his cheeks as the med-nin tilted his head up. Neji swallowed, biting back the urge to put a fist in the man's gut. He tried to think about something else, something that wouldn't get him killed executioner style by the Sound shinobi's psychotic physician. A couple of fingertips brushed his eyes lids gently.
"Does that hurt?"
"A little."
"Hmm…" He could sense Kabuto frowning. "Would bright light be painful for you?"
Neji nodded slightly. Kabuto's hands vanished and Neji could feel him move away to some unseen light source and dim it. He returned a moment later and settled on hand beneath his chin, the other across his forehead like a shield.
"Try now. Take it slow."
Neij swallowed and – going against every well-meaning self-preservation instinct in his body – tried to open his eyes. Instantly the burning pain returned, zipping up out the back of his abused optical nerves into his brain stem where it proceeded to kick him in the back of the head screaming 'What are you doing, you idiot!' Neji flinched and clenched them shut again. After a breath he tried once more, focusing on ignoring the sensation of dragging sandpaper across the surface of his cornea. It was almost impossible. Like someone had weighed his eyelids with lead and he couldn't even squint, much less see.
'I don't remember it hurting this much last time,' he thought furiously, forced to close his eyes a second time. 'And I had more chakra left. I know it did. Why did I waste so much this time? Why didn't it work?' His slue of questions met a big ambiguous wall of silence in the back of his mind, blinking blandly back at him in perfect mystery: 'I dunno'. Quietly he worked through a long list of expletives while he attempted for what felt like the hundredth time to get his eyes open again. This time, using every particle of focus he possessed, he managed to get a look at the blurred, dimly lit face of his unofficial caretaker.
The floating circles of reflective glass light served to hide his eyes, though Neji saw his mouth slip open just slightly in a faint 'O' at whatever he made out in the flutter of eyelids. Neji just sat up again and, biting the inside of his cheek, forced his eyes to open again wide as he could, ignoring the tears that immediately overflowed the corners of his eyes and ran freely down his face. He choked on a breath, gritting his teeth, waiting for some kind of signal that he could close them again. Then Kabuto caught his chin suddenly, lifting his head into the dim light and inviting a bombardment of scorching heat all across the interior of his eye sockets.
"Ah!" Neji jerked free, eyes slamming shut instantly. He turned his face out of the light.
"Thank you, Neji-kun. That's all I needed," Kabuto said politely.
"And you needed what exactly?"
"To see the extent of the damage. Seems relatively mild, given the violence of such a technique." A thoughtful sound. "No. I don't think you'll be okay like this."
Then Kabuto's fingers settled on the juin seal across his forehead and that same icy alien chakra spread across his face. It swept through his system like morphine, spreading through him, invading and so intensely powerful Neji's entire body seized up. His spine arced slightly, a cry of protest aborted prematurely on the back of his tongue. ("Relax," Kabuto was saying gently, placing both hands comfortably on either side of Neji's head.) He was channeling a freezing circuit of foreign chakra through his skull, intense, focusing waves of medical ninjutsu that both burned and soothed, jolting through the higher centers of his brain and sending wild, disjointed sensations of synthetic memory through his nervous system.
He can smell perfume and cooking mochi. Someone has their hands against his stomach. There is pressure against his face and thighs. His fingers tingle. His toes curl. He can taste talcum powder and metal and celery. There is a faint ringing noise in his ear, buzzing into his temporal lobe and humming there like a chord. He's aware of Kabuto's chakra in his spine, paralyzing him with expert technique and holding him there in sensory suspension. ("I'm not hurting you. It feels strange because of the curse seal. I have to work around it. Just bear with me.") He is trapped. His head is full of ice and electricity. He is being taken over. It feels good. He is laughing. Crying. It hurts. He is falling –
"It doesn't seem to have worsened from your last use."
"…" Neji said, frozen with the after-shock.
He could see now. The pain was an ache now. He could not for the life of him be sure that just happened...but his confused nervous system was telling him otherwise. His palms were damp.
Kabuto was wiping his hands off on a damp rag nearby. "Though you have a significantly lower chakra level this time. I presume your eyes are simply unused to this kind of strain. They're trying to adjust, but it's painful. As it is, I believed you've, ah, sprained your Byakugan, for a lack of a better term. A technique like that needs to be carefully practiced, not attempted in blind moments of panic, I'm afraid. " Neji felt those objective hazel eyes tracking the signals in his face, searching. "It's difficult to say at such an early stage, but one of two things will happen: your eyes will either adjust to the new chakra fluctuations…or you'll burn out your retinas through your optic nerve, blinding yourself in the process."
Neji didn't say anything.
"What's the matter? You're pale."
Again, he didn't say anything.
"Oh." His tone became gentle, all together apologetic even. "It completely slipped my mind – putting my chakra into your system like that – that's horrendously rude among Hyuuga isn't it? My apologies. Social faux pas. I wasn't trying to be offensive, it was just medical instinct. I was wiping out the lingering synaptic trails left by the genjutsu." Neji let go the breath he'd been holding and ignored (the shaky stir in his belly or the sick heat the medic's chakra had left behind or the way his breathing had gone shallow – the familiar dread) the discourtesy. The Sound-nin smiled over his shoulder, vaguely friendly. "You're surprisingly vulnerable, Neji-kun."
"I guess I'm out of practice," he rejoined.
"You know…" Kabuto remarked ponderously, tilting his aluminum colored head, "that jutsu of yours. I'm no expert, but I'm certain Hyuuga doujutsu doesn't work like that. Furthermore, even if you are gifted with a blood-line's special abilities, a technique like that one would take months of intensive training and mentoring. It's not a Hyuuga technique. Hinata already told me you quit Juuken training with Hiashi-dono." The medic made a low, throat-deep sound of intrigue. "Now isn't that odd? Your Juuken form is poor as ever and yet you turn down the Hyuuga head's personal mentoring? How arrogant of you."
Neji kept his tone crisp. "Hinata-sama?"
"Oh yes. I spoke with her for a couple days." He smiled amorously. "She's a sweet girl. But you're being evasive. Tell me, why did you quit training with your esteemed uncle? I thought that was the very height of branch family honor, to be respected by the Hyuuga head?"
"Why would you care, Yakushi?"
"Curiosity." There was an insincere smile in his voice. "It's my personal curse and I've always found the Hyuuga blood-line to be of a particularly fascinating breed. Brothers and sisters living in perpetual terror of one another?" The physician chuckled and for once it sounded genuine. "So are you going to tell me or make me guess?" When Neji didn't offer any hints, the young physician shrugged and went on easily, "There's really only one reason I can think of and that's personal choice, Neji-kun. You spend all that time jealous of your place outside their teachings only to find that prefer your own methods to the purity of the main family's. Very strange, Neji-kun. You're a mystery all your own, aren't you?"
The addressed Hyuuga didn't say anything.
"Hinata told me something strange," Kabuto continued, unfazed. "She said you don't scream when your Cage Seal is activated. Why is that Neji-kun?"
"She didn't tell you any such thing."
"Oh no?"
"No."
"Because she's too strong for that?" A smile. "You're smarter than that Neji. Be realistic."
"She wouldn't–"
"She told Orochimaru about the blind spot."
"Not," Neji snapped, "about me."
There was an incremental pause.
"She told me the Cage Seal can be removed."
Talcum eyes narrowed. "You're lying."
"You're the best lie detector in Konoha, I'm sure. Do I look like I'm lying?"
"You're lying because I already know what you're saying is a lie."
"You're right," confessed Kabuto, dismissive, voice never once waving an iota from pleasant. "She never said that. She told me that one of her aunts wants to fuck you." The med-nin could have been commenting on the weather. His expression was inquisitive. "Tell me; are all the rumors of rape in the branch family true? Or does the head family have another word for it?"
Neji's stomach clinched instinctively, a corrosive rage welling up the back of his throat and settling there behind his teeth like a demon. But behind the instinctive, reactive, bone-deep fury there was something worse…there was uncertainty. (Because there weren't rumors, because no branch member dared speak about it, so how did he…?) Kabuto was standing close now, looking at him. His expression was a mixture of patient interest and polite curiosity, no intentions of murder or attack, just the eyes, watching, searching him. That anyone was paying this much attention to every detail of what he was presently, previously or in the near future was unnerving and – infuriatingly – confusing. Little as he liked it, he couldn't figure out the med-nin's game.
It was too…arbitrary.
The physician tossed him a bottle, Neji plucking it instinctively from the air.
"Take two of these before you go to sleep tonight," he instructed him curtly, once again a doctor. "Get something to eat before you do or it'll burn hole in your stomach. Not really, but you know what I mean."
Neji inspected the bottle. "These are psychotropic drugs."
Again, the doctor's eyes were hidden behind twin glares of light. "I've been monitoring you for a while now, Neji. Like it or not, that's long enough for any doctor to draw some conclusions. From what I can gather, someone worked you over with an extensive genjutsu. Brutal too. Your stress hormone levels are off the charts for a shinobi, blood pressure's way above normal. Then there's the imbalance of norepinephrine, and cortisol. The chemicals in your head are so grossly out of sync; you should be insane, from a purely clinical point of view."
Neji rolled the bottle between his palms, thoughtful. "You think I'm unstable."
"I think I'm qualified to prescribe you something to temper the inevitable break."
"Maybe if your mad excuse for a leader didn't try to mind fuck his prisoners, that wouldn't happen."
Kabuto's laughter had a smoky, insubstantial quality to it, the kind that said he could have just as easily slit his throat for the same words. "I'm not talking about that, Hyuuga-san. Orochimaru-sama may have used a couple unpleasant illusions on you, but that kind of damage is temporary at best, running only as deep as your neuromuscular memory. No, Neji-kun, I'm talking about the deep, deep parietal scarring I found through out your brain. It's artfully done, actually, in such a way that I'm almost certain you don't remember most of what happened. The damage is centered mostly in the sensory memory sectors, so I suppose you've got a vague, instinctive impression of what happened, but no cognitive recognition." He felt Kabuto smiling sympathetically, adjusting his glasses again. "In short, someone's been screwing with your head, Neji-kun."
Neji's face was a picture of skepticism. "Really."
"I'm just telling you what the medical evidence is indicating. Nothing more. Someone crashed your brain with genjutsu. I'm just trying to conclude whether or not this damage is what's resulted in your unusual doujutsu, or if that ability has always been there and the synaptic scarring is a separate affliction." He smiled cannily at the younger shinobi. "It'll be quite a thing, studying a Hyuuga."
"I'm thrilled for you."
"I said it before, the Hyuuga are a fascinating breed. The whole nature of your genetic structure, actually, it's quite intriguing. In fact, while I spent my time in Konoha one of my pet projects was an investigation into the clan medical records, history, etcetera, etcetera. And," he chuckled a bit, "you know what's truly remarkable about the Hyuuga? It's not your power as a clan, really, because the Hyuuga are so few. It's the genetic purity, rather. Even in simple bone structure, you can see the strength of blood. Your features, for example, are noticeably more delicate than that of your usual Hyuuga." His gaze lingered with clinical interest on Neji, tracing the lines of his face with his eyes. "Your cousin, by contrast, is actually a very fine example of Hyuuga breeding. Hinata-chan has perfect zygomatic arches. Yours are slightly elongated… imperceptibly, of course, but imperfect." He grew thoughtful. "I can almost see why they would prefer her. She is genetic perfection. You're just hybrid vigor."
"Hybrid vigor?" Neji repeated coldly. "You seem to think that should mean something to me."
Kabuto looked at him, searching for something. "Has anyone ever told you you look exactly like Uchiha Shisui when he was your age?"
And, quite frankly, Neji just stared – eyes opaque lavender-white and utterly transparent before the physician's voracious gaze.
Kabuto smiled. "We'll continue this conversation later. Mai is waiting for you in the jounin room."
- - -
"Wow." Takon didn't even move from his armchair. "You look like shit, Hyuuga."
Mai just licked the last of sesame oil from her finger tips – left over from her dumplings – and observed, "The snake-freak fucked you up proper then, didn't he?"
The room was otherwise unoccupied. Contrary to Kabuto's warning, Mai was not alone and Neji couldn't quite decide whether he preferred it that way or not – because there were phantoms in that woman's eyes, deep, scarred and raging like over eager hyenas – because Takon wasn't much a of safeguard against anything at all. As for the observation on his appearance, the young Hyuuga prodigy was willing to agree that he probably would have looked better if Lee had hit him in the face with a full-on Primary Lotus (okay, not really, but he felt pretty awful) and if the way Mai and Takon kept dividing themselves into two were any indication, his Byakugan was acting up and he could looked forward to soul-crippling migraines from hell for the next few days.
Mai was no longer in the uniform of a Sound-nin but wearing her own set of civilian's clothes, a very fashionable Stone Country style kimono that hung low on her small, glowing pale shoulders. Even in the dim track lights overhead her skin was smooth and ripe, shining on the gloss of her lips, parted just slightly in a moue of disgust and elegant contempt. She looked unassumingly beautiful. Her arms were still bound up in canvas tape to the elbows though and the unabashed hatred remained still in the back of her eyes like a pair of toxic light bulbs behind her irises. That she would have gladly skinned him alive and screaming was manifestly clear. Takon – in lazy disparity – was in his usual black sweater and cut-offs, looking vaguely sleepy and bored.
"So," he said, eyeing Neji over the fist he'd propped his chin on. "I can see that you've got next to no chakra left. Kabuto is being unnecessarily cruel, I think, making us do this when you just got done with the mind-flay, but I'm not the boss."
"His chakra isn't required for this," Mai reminded him, enunciating carefully, pleasurably. "Come here, Hyuuga."
Neji remained standing in the door way.
The corner of her mouth tweaked up. "Yes. That's it. Disobey so I have a reason to hurt you. Come here. I won't ask again."
Neji, though he didn't doubt her threat, waited a good long second or two before moving into the room. Mai stood up and crossed the floor to meet him halfway, taking his wrists without ceremony and bringing his hands up clasped in hers. She held him still, inspecting his face with ease and frank audacity that Neji found dangerous for a woman who hated Hyuuga. The loathing was a living, breathing thing under her skin, quivering inside her fingers where she touched him. He felt the killing intent wishing to manifest, her heart beating faster, excitedly through the palms of her hands and how her chakra raced eagerly to the tenketsu points in her fingertips, leaving cinnamon hot spots of heat on his wrists even after she'd let him go.
"You're just a kid," she told him, as though he might not have known.
"Yes," he said, vaguely sarcastic.
"How old are you?"
"Eighteen."
"Liar. You're sixteen. Kabuto gave me your files. Now be a good boy and don't fight me or I'll put my thumb through one of your pretty eyes, 'kay?"
She pushed him a little too gently into a sitting position on one of the armchairs, placing her lovely lily-white hands on his shoulders, moving them gingerly to the slope of his neck, her palms on his collarbones. Again, he felt her hatred like a barely constrained monster beneath her skin, straining to get out through her palms and sink needle points into the warm pulse of his jugular. Her eyes darted unnaturally eager, hyper-active over his face as she settled in a crouch before him, lips parted slightly as she murmured nonsense thoughts to herself, soundless little movements of the mouth. There was a trace of madness in her gaze, festering there like an ill-tempered ember and waiting to ignite and devour this woman whole.
"Pulse elevated," Mai murmured. "Can't tell if the pupils are contracted, but your body temperature is too low. It'll come back up in a couple hours and in the meantime, if you can't smell anything or feel unnaturally pissed off, that's normal."
"I'm surprised you can walk," commented Takon from his languid position across the room. Those intensely blue eyes flicked to him, staring through snowy bangs. "You must be some kind of masochist."
"No," said Mai a little curtly. She pressed a thumb to his forehead, directly in the middle of his Cage Seal and smiled at him. "This little baby trains you to be tough, doesn't it?"
Neji twitched his face away from the offending finger and favored her with a cool look that explained how he'd break that finger if it ventured near him again. She ignored the look went on with her examination. She briefly framed his face with her hands and studied the shape of his eyes and mouth in intense and illogical urgency. Her touches were clearly intended as clinical – Kabuto had done much of the same just minutes before – but she was lingering too long, fingers straying where there was no pulse to check, eyes moving unnecessarily over his Cage Seal.
She had him close his eyes, then open them, then activate his Byakugan, running soft fingers along the gentle bumps of raised chakra veins. Actually, that was a first. He'd never had someone touch his face while the Byakugan was activated and discovered somewhat irritably that a flow of chakra running just beneath the skin made the area around his eyes sensitive as hell. He flinched when she touched him.
Mai's expression did not indicate one way or the other how her thoughts were clicking together behind her too-soft blue eyes. Apparently she determined him healthy enough for whatever she was about to do because she let him deactivate and leaned down to his eye-level, face very near his.
"Okay," she said, voice somewhat softer than he remembered it being moments before. "We're going to play a little game, Hyuuga. I'm going to ask you a couple questions and you're going to answer. If I like your answer, I'll make you feel good. If I don't like your answer, I'll hurt you." She spoke to him like a primary school teacher might talk to a student in her classroom, a maternal mixture of affectionate and just a little stern. "Now, do you understand the rules, Hyuuga-kun? I want to be perfectly clear."
"What kind of questions are you asking?"
"Well, there are a couple things I want you to tell me," she explained readily, her voice exemplifying what honeyed comfort should be. Her fingers traced a line to his chin and tipped it up. "Tell me something about Konoha, first off, then something about the Hyuuga. After that, we'll see how you feel and go from there."
"You're torturing me then," Neji clarified.
"Only if you want me to." She smiled a little and that smile was a horror in and off itself, some terrible expressive paradox because the emotion he was reading in the back of her eyes and in the stance of her body and the pressure of her fingers brooked no smiles, just eager, unfiltered brutality.She crouched a little in front of him, to get comfortable, and met his eyes steady with her crepe-paper sanity. "So, what do you want to tell me about Konoha?"
Neji thought about it. Then, in a tone of great indifference, told her something about Konoha:
"It was founded over eighty years ago by the Shokage of the Senju Clan during the First Secret War, during which all clans of the shinobi moved to nationalize their respective countries according to their regional and marital similarities. In the central region, later to be called the Fire Country, the two major contesting clans were the Uchiha of the Sharingan and the Senju of the tree element. The Hyuuga were no longer a factor in their power struggle. During an earlier conflict with three allied clans of the Wind, the Hyuuga were decimated – though it should be noted two of the three Wind clans were obliterated unto extinction. The threat of extermination forced the clan elders to seek an alliance with the Senju, pitting genetic relatives against one another –"
Mai slapped him.
Takon snorted. He was reading another manga, one leg propped across his knee. "I thought you were going to let him go on forever."
"Go on," said Mai, while Neji blinked the stars away. "Do that again. I enjoy bruising that pretty face."
"You're failing interrogation basics," the Hyuuga pointed out. "You're leaving your question too open-ended. If I'm an idiot, then I'll get confused, then panic and you'll get nothing but disjointed blather. If I'm clever you'll get the same, but you'll never know it. If you want to know something, you'll have to be more specific."
She slapped him again.
"Mai," called Takon lazily, "the boy has just been mind-fucked. Would you mind not hitting him in the head so much?"
Mai swung around, eyes flashing meanly. "Would you please not contradict me in front of the prisoner, Takon-kun?"
"Why?" inquired the other Sound ninja curiously. "Are we sending mixed messages? Is that bad?" He looked toward Neji. "I'm not confusing you, am I? She wants to torture you, I think she's doing it wrong – you confused yet?"
"You've ruined it now," snapped Mai bitterly.
"Ruined what? The history lesson? He's numb, Mai. You can't torture someone who's just come out of a bout with the snake-freak. Anything you give him will be duckies and daisies in comparison."
"Well, then what do you suggest we do with him?" exclaimed Mai, throwing up her hands I exasperation. "This was pretty much what I was planning to do with my afternoon. Don't you tell me he's getting off with nothing because you know exactly how I feel about that, Takon."
The other jounin sighed and put his graphic novel aside. "Fine. I'll show you. Stupid girl."
And then – faster than Neji's eyes could follow – Takon flickered and slammed Neji backward into the dilapidated armchair, seizing the smaller shinobi with the same vicious motion one might seize a steering wheel. Adamantine fingers crimped his shoulders so hard he could feel the blood vessels bursting into bruises under his skin.. The Sound shinobi towered over him. Compliancy had gone from him like a cheap Noh mask, ripped off and the persona beneath was hideous and raw. A horrific clash of unfettered insanity and something so dark it didn't have a name.
"Tell me how far you're willing to go to protect your country," said the Sound-nin.
Neji was aware of blood thrumming through his head, the surge of motion creating a pressure of heat inside the furnace of his skull. Takon had him pressed back into the molding cushion, one knee jammed against Neji's at such an angle it was pinning his leg against the arm rest, forcing his knees apart. His eyes were all-consuming monsters of forget-you-forever blue.
"Tell me how much you're willing to give to keep their secrets."
The raw, un-tempered frankness of his menace paralyzed him with its purity. There was no space between them, just a humming undercurrent of white-hot potential energy. Like another inch of contact would trigger some great, unstoppable tidal wave and Neji would be utterly obliterated by its happening. Hyuuga eyes read the wordless paragraphs in body language, threatening him with every horror, every unspeakable crime, every hideous, brutal act, anything and everything one could do to another human being with the sole intention of hurting them. This was not Kabuto clinical, this was deep and personal and fucking horrific.
And Neji realized, 'He has Itachi's eyes…'
The white-haired ninja pressed his forehead to Neji's bare juin seal and murmured: "Tell me how much of yourself you've given to that fucking clan of yours, how much they've taken without asking, how much they've bartered away, how much of you they sold off for the sake of their own gain." His chakra burned white hot; humming inside his skin, only that thin layer of membrane separating their energies. So close it was practically contact. His voice was in his ears and inside his head. "Tell me, because, Hyuuga, it seems to me they've sold all of you to us…and if you don't say something – right fucking now – we're going to take that as permission."
For a fragment of eternity, Neji panicked.
Then he remembered something very important, something key, buried beneath twelve million layers of 'anything-else-I-could-possibly-think-of'. There was something, a little truth compressed between the scar tissue of his nightmares, like a tiny penlight in the dark, blinking Morse code and he remembered 'Three months should be long enough to make you hate.'
"You couldn't do worse if you tried." The Hyuuga met those crystal unbreakable eyes, eyes of shattered genius. "You're just one more in a world of terrible things."
There was a silence, a short, thoughtful one.
Then Takon smiled. "I told you, Mai," he said in a voice utterly conversational. He let go of the younger ninja and stepped back, the mask replaced and the naked horror that was Takon covered by the bored disinterest that was also Takon. The man yawned and wandered back to his abandoned graphic novel. "You can't torture this one. He's got eyes like a kaleidoscope. You'll never work through the mess. Best let Kabuto handle him for now. We'll just stick to the usual."
"Fine," said Mai, in a tone that was not at all 'fine'. She gestured sharply at Neji to stand. "Come on then. You've got a mission. You're team is waiting for you in Atrium Three. Look sharp, Hyuuga. It'll be hard with the little chakra you've got. Oh and," she tossed him a Sound hitae-ate, thumbing her forehead, "best cover that thing up. You'll frighten the children."
Even after he'd left their presence, the feeling Takon's eyes on his back – damned drowning pool blue – remained for hours afterward.
Consequently, he couldn't sleep much that night.
Author's Note:
Say thank you to my lovely beta, Lellian. If you notice a suspicious absence of typos, it is due to her hard work and fantabulousness. (Yes, it's a word, dammit!) Her stories are a new level of awesome and – often – a source of inspiration. Go read them and be inspired. Thanks to all the wonderful people who reviewed like crazy (look at all the sadists I've attracted!) and left such lovely words of encouragement. Beboots as always, you reassure me that all those little details I cram in there are not going unread. Chaosdragon82…holy shit, you wrote a lot, which is why I like you and you're right. I won't say about what, but you're very, very right. Also a shout to Alowl because you noticed exactly what I did and Monokeros because I just liked your review. Hee.
Love and Peace.