The sun was setting over Kusagakure, throwing its last rays at two men in black coats walking down a large field towards a rocky complex.
"I still don't understand why we are here.", Sasuke stated matter-of-factly, looking at the large rock structure ahead of them.
"Have faith, young Uchiha! Worst case scenario we will just have some fun!", Tobi responded, hands flying in the air.
Tobi's enthusiasm was not at all contagious, Sasuke decided, but he knew there was little point in discouraging the guy once he decided on something.
He entered the large rocky complex following Tobi and activating his Sharingan to deal with whatever that was waiting for them inside.
"Hey, who-", was the only thing the guard was able to say before he was quickly dealt with by Tobi's genjutsu. Another two men who jumped at them from behind a second later found themselves pierced with Sasuke's lightning sword.
It was nice dealing with just simple ninja, Sasuke reflected. After the last few months during which he faced the Kages, Danzo, Itachi and Deidara, it was easy to forget that most shinobi out there were way below his level and could quickly be removed if needed.
They continued down the corridor and entered what looked like the main hall of the facility. There were all kinds of tools, scrolls and blood spilled all over the ground.
"Woohoo! We will just scavenge what we can. These papers should tell us more than enough about the state of things in Takigakure!" Tobi excitedly proclaimed and started to throw everything he could get his hands on into a large bag that he carried with himself.
"These people working here were from Takigakure?"
Tobi nodded. That was a surprise to Sasuke. He had no clue how Tobi even knew about this place really, but Tobi had his own secrets and as long as he would help Sasuke get to his goal, he wouldn't inquire about them further.
"There might be something of value also in the other rooms.", Sasuke heard himself say, probably subconsciously just searching for ways to get himself some time alone as he had been stuck with Tobi for a month now without a break.
Tobi didn't even notice his comment as he was enthusiastically investigating everything he saw, so Sasuke left, back into the corridor to explore the rest of the complex.
As he was passing the hallway, he saw that there were a lot of dead, mutilated bodies in the surrounding rooms and he had to control himself to not become nauseated from the disgusting smell. Perhaps that's what the tools they found were for, to extract whatever information the Takigakure people needed from their captives, which would explain the blood as well.
The last room in the corridor didn't smell so bad though, so Sasuke decided to actually look inside properly. There was a body, just like in the other rooms, but from what he could tell, this man was either not yet dead, or just died recently. He couldn't say for certain if the man was still breathing as he was lying on his stomach, so he decided to approach. Maybe he could at least find out what these men wanted if this captive was indeed still alive and in a condition to speak.
It wasn't a nice sight. The man's upper body was bare, showing cuts and injuries in different stages of healing, but unlike the bodies in the other rooms, there was nothing rotting yet and no extremities seemed to be missing, at least not based on the little light he had to work with.
He pressed his fingers against the man's neck, and when he noticed a pulse, he turned the body around only to be left in shock.
This was a ninja from Konoha. And not just any. He was sure that this was a man who once used to be his classmate. His face was bruised and swollen in multiple places, but the marks on his cheeks were undeniably there.
He had many questions, but his thoughts were soon interrupted by a voice coming from the back.
"Sasuke! You found something interesting?"
Sasuke turned around to see Tobi jumping on his heels in the corridor, his bag full of materials. Then he pointed at the Konoha ninja.
"This one is still alive. We can question him."
Tobi came closer to see better and bent above the body.
"Well done! But let's do it at the hotel, it stinks here!", Tobi complained.
Sasuke had to agree with the latter statement.
"Should we take him with us?"
"Why not? I always wanted a pet!"
Sasuke rolled his eyes at Tobi's wording, but agreed that the Inuzuka was defenseless enough to be completely harmless, and if he did become too much of an inconvenience at a later point, they could always just kill him.
With one cut of his lightning blade, he broke the Inuzuka's cuffs and threw the man over his shoulder. Whatever treatment the man has gone through, it made him very easy to carry, Sasuke noted mentally.
An hour of walking through the grassy fields of Kusagakure later, they were in their hotel room. Despite having the statuses of international criminals, with just a simple use of genjutsu, it was laughably easy to get a nice place to sleep.
Tobi placed his big bag on the ground and started to make his way through all the different things he gathered. Sasuke decided to follow in kind and threw the Inuzuka on one of the beds in the room. Medical jutsu was always the specialty of Karin, not him and so he wasn't quite sure what to do with the man. He just checked his pulse again, put the bedsheet on and turned to Tobi to assist him, hoping that the dog-nin would eventually wake up by himself.
Tobi whistled in excitement.
"Oh dear, look at this! It seems like Takigakure is indeed going to be helpful!"
"What did you find?", Sasuke asked, trying to also quickly read through the scroll that Tobi was holding in his hand.
"They were regularly abducting the Konoha and Suna ninja to get information out of them. Though this organization probably does not represent the official stance of the village, it is clear what they think about our friends."
Sasuke smiled. This is exactly what they were after. Originally, when he decided he was going to destroy Konoha because of what they did to his clan and to Itachi, he thought he would have to do it alone. Now, finding that there are actually so many more people out there in the small villages, tired of the power imbalance and of being pushed aside, he was starting to realize that maybe destroying Konoha might not be so difficult if he found enough of the right people.
They kept reading through the scrolls, finding more and more information about the organization and its motives. Sasuke was surprised that the ninja running this facility were not even considered rogue based on the documents. They were simply Takigakure shinobi tired of the current system, ready to stand up unified against the large, authoritarian villages and preparing everything they needed for it, though hidden in a different land to protect their own village in case they were found.
Who would have known that Konoha had so many enemies.
"Should we visit Takigakure then? We can start forming an alliance through them.", he suggested.
"That will be fun!", Tobi shouted, throwing his hands again in the air.
The excitement of Tobi was interrupted by a soft wheeze coming from their back. They turned around, only to spot that their guest had finally woken up.
Sasuke stood up and handed the Inuzuka a bottle of water. The man accepted it, wincing in pain as he was grabbing it, and sipped from it slowly while looking around the room.
The Uchiha expected all kinds of reactions, but a complete apathy was not one of them.
"Do you know what happened?", he asked when the man stopped drinking.
"Mhmm.", the Inuzuka responded, clearly trying to process everything that was happening.
Tobi was soon by Sasuke's side, also apparently curious about their catch.
"What is your friend's name, Sasuke?"
"This is Inuzuka Kiba, he used to be my classmate."
Sasuke then turned his gaze back to Kiba.
"How did you get to that facility? What do you know about the people running it?"
Kiba did not reply however. Instead, his eyes drifted to the room's window, as if looking at something far in the distance, though by now, the world outside was completely dark. Sasuke got impatient.
"You know, you are here completely at our mercy, Inuzuka. So you better start talking."
To Sasuke's surprise, the Konoha ninja just shot him a look which screamed that he couldn't care less.
"Go ahead, kill me, do me a favor."
The Uchiha decided that something felt very off about this man, something more than just what could be attributed to a few days or weeks of interrogation. Something more has happened, and they were probably not going to extract any information from him until that was dealt with, to Sasuke's frustration.
"Oh, I remember you, and the big dog! We met once before, didn't we?!" Tobi shouted all of a sudden and ruffled the blood-stained hair of the Konoha ninja. Kiba just sighted in response.
A dog. Only now that Sasuke thought about it, he realized that indeed if he did remember one about the ninja, it was the constant presence of the white dog, always by his side.
"Where is your dog, Inuzuka?"
As he asked, Kiba's look instantly changed, from apathy and confusion to sadness and anger, as if something in him broke.
"Akamaru is dead.", he replied, and suddenly, Sasuke could understand the apathy he saw before. He knew damn well how it felt when someone took what you loved the most away from you.
"The Takigakure people killed him?", he inquired. Normally, he wouldn't care, but this was turning out to be quite interesting. He was used to having Naruto and Sakura annoyingly chase after him whenever they had the chance, but he wasn't used to having his life intercept his other former Konoha classmates in ways like these.
"Yes, him and also Sai and Lee… Sai you probably don't know, but Lee you should remember."
Of course he remembered Lee. Even after all the years, he still couldn't help but feel some respect towards the ninja who beat him the moment they entered the Chunin exams. Memories were starting to flood his brain.
But it made little sense to Sasuke. The Takigakure shinobi they encountered were not exactly strong. Though he had no clue about the abilities of the Inuzuka or whoever else he mentioned, he couldn't believe that someone like Lee, if he remembered correctly, would have problems fighting them.
"How did they get you?", he inquired.
It's not like he was curious about his ex-classmates, he tried to persuade himself. All of this information was important if they were to use Takigakure in their fight against Konoha. And perhaps they should know about any hidden techniques that these people might have before entering their village.
"They didn't.", Kiba laughed and with one of his hands, rubbed the back of his neck.
After a moment, Kiba could see that both Sasuke and the masked man were patiently waiting for further explanation, so he inhaled heavily and continued.
"Sakura knocked us out."
"S- Sakura?"
Now Sasuke was left in disbelief.
"That was the pink-haired girl you met a month ago?", Tobi asked curiously.
"Yes.", Sasuke replied in a cold voice, still very well remembering the encounter.
Kiba closed his eyes. So it had been a month since this all happened, he figured. He saw Sasuke was eyeing him weirdly, probably trying to connect the dots.
"She decided that we were going to kill you. But then, she changed her mind and wanted to take you out by herself and drugged us with a sleeping bomb on the way. I don't know what happened apart from the fact that Kakashi was going after her afterwards. I woke up at the facility and learnt that the Takigakure shinobi found us while we were passed out in the forest, and slit the throats of the others."
The Uchiha was speechless for a second. He could understand that Sakura, just like Naruto, was resolved to deal with him privately, but he would have not guessed that she had the guts to commit treason and leave her comrades unconscious in enemy territory to do that.
He laughed mentally. He loved it. The Konoha shinobi would always preach about comradeship, teamwork and morality, and judged him for turning on his own people. In reality, they were just as rotten. They deserved what was coming for them.
"So she got to you in the end? What happened?", Kiba asked.
Sasuke looked between Tobi and Kiba. At first, he saw no reason to be giving any information to the Konoha ninja. But if this entire hunt did indeed result in him losing his dog and his teammates, perhaps he should hear it. And if at any point Kiba learnt too much, they could always just kill him. Even if he could somehow defend himself against them, which was unlikely, it didn't look like he would put up a fight at this point.
"She did. But Uzumaki and Kakashi later showed up as well and I was out of chakra, so we had to leave."
This seemed to have satisfied the Inuzuka.
Kiba sighted again, just now absorbing the fact that all of that happened for nothing. Because of Sakura, Sasuke was still very much alive, and Akamaru, Lee and Sai weren't. He had always known that at some point, Akamaru would die. But this was not the way it should have happened. If anything, he should have gone down with him.
When he saw Sasuke and Tobi still looking at him, he knew it was now his time to tell them what they wanted to know.
"The Takigakure shinobi are going against Konoha and other large villages. They were trying to get intelligence on how Konoha works. How the defense systems are set up. What the mission roster looks like. How and when the guards change. And also, what we knew about the other villages. They saw that I was a tracker, so they knew I was deployed a lot for these kinds of information gathering missions, which is why I am still alive."
Sasuke felt himself nodding. That made sense.
"What did you tell them?"
Kiba looked at him amused.
"Nothing of course."
The Uchiha frowned. It was good to know what the Takigakure organization was after, but if Kiba indeed knew all these things about Konoha, they could also use him as a valuable source of information for their future plans. Although if Kiba didn't say anything at the facility after a month of torture, they were probably also not going to get anything out of him, at least without using some advanced genjutsu that would drain them from chakra, which they couldn't really afford at the moment.
Unless they could break him in a different way.
"Why not?", he offered, eyebrows up and staring intently.
"Why not... what?", the Inuzuka asked, confused.
"Why didn't you speak?"
"I am a Konoha shinobi."
The response sounded almost robotic. It was clear to Sasuke that this was probably the one sentence Kiba would always rely on to keep his mental defenses up while being interrogated.
"Why?", he kept pushing.
"Th- that's where my loyalties lie."
Now the Konoha ninja was starting to sound uncertain. Good.
"Do they?"
It took a moment of contemplation for the dog-nin to reply.
"I am not like you, Uchiha."
"Are you really not?"
He could see that now he had a hundred percent of Kiba's attention.
"Your fellow Konoha shinobi had you thrown to the enemies. Had your comrades killed. Your nin-ken. Would you now just walk back to the village as if nothing happened and keep serving the rotten system?"
Kiba knew that the last question was rhetorical, as Sasuke and Tobi would not let him just go at this point. But it made him think anyway. Would he?
Sasuke was satisfied when he saw that he the dog-nin was not able to find the answer to his inquiry. Remembering what the Inuzuka mentioned just seconds before about his specialization, he also realized that especially now when they were the ones gathering intelligence and scouting around smaller villages, having him on the team could be useful for tracking since Karin was out of the game.
The ninja in question was still looking perplexed moments later, so he decided to add to it.
"What is there for you in Konoha anyway?"
Kiba felt like he was just stabbed in his gut. Whatever they had done to him during the last month, this question still felt more painful. It was the one thing he was trying to not think about the entire time he was held captive.
Because he knew the answer. There was nothing for him in Konoha.
His dad had abandoned him when he was still a baby. After that, his older sister might have not abandoned him physically, but she surely did mentally and emotionally. His mum was still there, but she just became more violent, never finding a single nice thing to tell him, never once trusting that he could achieve anything.
His dream of becoming the Hokage was taken away from him the moment Naruto defeated Pain and turned out to be a prodigy.
Hinata, his only love interest, was deeply in love with said prodigy and by now, he knew that that would never change, regardless of how much the latter ignored her and how much care Kiba showed her.
Shino, his best friend, was contemplating ending his career to become a teacher and would therefore no longer spend time with him on missions.
Akamaru was dead.
There was nothing.
He was ripped from his thoughts by Sasuke clearing his throat.
"We will go out to get some food. You can take care of yourself?"
Kiba's eyes opened widely. Even without voicing the question, Sasuke knew what to answer.
"It's not like you can walk. And even if you do manage to escape somehow, I suggest you think twice before deciding to walk back to Konoha.", he said with a smirk and threw a small box at him. "This is a medical kit. I assume you know how to use it."
Kiba nodded and watched them leave the room in stunned silence.
Sasuke knew he won.
Naruto is obviously not mine.
Hey guys, so this is a bit of an experiment. I do have the idea developed, but it's not how I usually write, so I will see how people respond to this first chapter and then see. So if you have thoughts, let me know!