Chapter 14 || Developments

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Sakura let Anko escort her to T&I, then marvelled as she was led far deeper into the building's bowels than she'd previously been allowed to go. She sent a curious glance at her senpai, which the woman caught and promptly snorted at. "There are over ten more levels below the one we're heading to, brat, so don't look so awed already." She remarked, and Sakura promptly gawked, then sighed internally – she wished Anko wouldn't be so... well, Anko sometimes and let her have her delusions. But she shook her head and smiled instead, grateful that the woman was willing to put up with her at all.

"I wouldn't be awed if you'd let me come here before." She grouched teasingly, as their relationship wasn't theirs without some banter. Anko made to elbow her, but Sakura, already used to sudden elbows or legs aiming to trip her up merely dodged and grinned, stepping out of the tokujo's reach and sticking her tongue out teasingly.

"Cheeky shit," Anko swore and lunged playfully, making Sakura yelp and stumble as she tried and failed to dodge and got a noogie for her troubles. "Now listen here brat, I bullied Ibiki into letting you take a shot at the Iwa-nin before we off him, so when you're there, remember that my reputation hangs in the balance. You screw up and you'll be doing dodge training with my snakes instead of sleeping for a week." Her senpai threatened and Sakura paled. Anko had made her do 'dodge training' before, and the rosette reckoned that there were few things she hated and simultaneously feared more than a repeat of that. Not only were the snakes slimy and disgusting, they were also deceptively fast and agile, and Sakura had ended up with more bruises and tiny puncture wounds all over her body than she could count, and with the rules Anko had set before she sicced her snakes on her, each 'hit' was ten sit-ups.

Sakura had not been able to move from her bed the next day.

Finally, after what felt like hours of wandering the dim corridors of T&I, Anko opened a door and gestured her in, following after and sealing the door once it closed behind them. Glancing around the room, Sakura noted Morino-san standing by the one-way window and a man she didn't know and then, once she actually took the time to peer through the window, she saw a bare cell, the walls a drab, gray concrete and a metal table with a chair on either side. One of the chairs was occupied by the prisoner – he was pale and drawn, his red hair hanging limply by his shoulders, his cheekbones far more pronounced than Sakura reasoned was healthy, his skin was sallow and of a sickly yellowish colour that spoke of weeks without going outside. There were manacles around his wrists and ankles, heavy and clearly too tight, and Sakura realised with a start that though she could see him, she couldn't sense him.

Chakra suppressants. She realised belatedly.

For a moment, Sakura felt sick. She'd seen how prisoners were held before, true, but they had mostly been low-level thugs which meant that they weren't kept for too long as they tended to break and spill any valuable information much sooner. This however... she chanced a glance at Anko, briefly entertaining the thought that her senpai had intentionally kept her away from seeing the darker side of their job because she knew it wouldn't sit right with her. Then she promptly dismissed it. Anko and concern for other people's feelings? If it hadn't been for that short time in the hospital, just after they got back from that dreaded mission where Tamaki- Sakura's thought process stalled for a minute, but she grit her teeth and barrelled through the instinctive stab of grief and guilt that came at the mere thought of the blond- where Tamaki died, she'd have thought that Anko simply didn't do emotions.

But she knew better.

Then, her gaze fell to the figure on the opposite side of the metal table and she smiled against her will. "Tonbo-san!" she breathed quietly, but loudly enough to alert Morino-san to her presence.

The Head of Interrogation scrutinised her, the man by his side merely glancing over at her then turning back to the interrogation taking place in clear dismissal, but Ibiki's eyes rested on her.

"Did Mitarashi tell you what she roped you into?" he asked calmly, his voice cold but not unkindly so.

So Sakura swallowed down her initial apprehension and nodded curtly. "Yes, Morino-san. Senpai mentioned a prisoner whom you've already been interrogating for a while." She admitted carefully, suddenly realising that Anko hadn't really told her much else.

Ibiki seemed to be thinking along the same lines as his eyebrow climbed up his forehead and he scowled, turning to her senpai. "There's such a thing as undersharing, Mitarashi. Or were you intentionally trying to send the kid in there blind?" he demanded, and his tone was far harsher than it had been with the rosette, but Anko just waved him off.

"Why should I have bothered if I knew you'd fill her in anyhow? You're far too predictable Ibiki." She remarked, smirking evilly even as Ibiki's scowl deepened and his chakra spiked. Then, he offered Sakura a scroll.

"Everything we've extracted so far." He bit out, and Sakura took the proffered scroll wordlessly, pulling it open with a flick of a finger and scanning its contents. The prisoner was from Iwagakure, he was in his late twenties, a little-known jounin but a jounin nonetheless. The team that had brought him in caught him trying to steal from a small Village by the border between Fire and Earth Country that Konoha was allied with, but due to the fact that what he'd attempted to steal was a heavily-guarded and a well-kept secret, his mere presence in the vault where the object had been kept had raised the issue of an internal leak. Yet in all of the notes that the various interrogators had made, one thing remained largely unknown – why, exactly, had an Iwagakure jounin been in the vault he had no business even knowing about?

Just then, Tonbo stepped through the door, closing it securely behind him before he turned and grinned at the rosette. "Pinky! Long time no see! What brings you here?" and his cheerful demeanour managed to put a smile on the rosette's face, and she greeted him back, albeit only half as enthusiastically.

"Tonbo-san!" she called, waving cheerily, a greeting which felt painfully inappropriate for where they were. "I've been around. You know how it is – errand here, errand there." She waved her hand dismissively. "Then senpai tried to break into my house and dragged me here." She added teasingly, getting a squawk from Anko and dodging the kunai that sailed for her head, letting it thunk into the concrete wall instead. She was getting better at dodging, however unorthodox her teachers' methods were.

Tonbo chuckled and ruffled her hair, messing up her ponytail in the process and making Sakura scowl fiercely at him from under her bangs. "I take it you're going in after me? Good luck. Remember what you told me all those months ago and you'll be fine."

And suddenly, just like that, the atmosphere changed, and Sakura grew serious. She knew exactly what Tonbo was referring to, and just like that, she knew exactly what to do.

"I'm a genjutsu specialist, Tonbo-san. I can alter reality itself . I ask you to answer this: how would you feel if, after days of the isolation you spoke of, days of starvation, of chakra suppression, you'd start to feel the walls closing in on you? Or if you saw the chains restraining you turn into snakes, or grow heavier, shorter, hotter? Or if every man who came to interrogate you was faceless, or seven foot tall? If you can't access your chakra, you can't break the illusion. What do you think would happen after weeks of this? You'd stop trusting your own mind. And who can you trust, when you're in the middle of enemy territory and at the mercy of your captors, if you can't even trust your own mind?"

She glanced at Anko one last time, got an encouraging nod in return, then flashed through a few seals, took a deep breath and stepped through the door.

What Issei saw wasn't her, Sakura made sure of that with a basic Chameleon genjutsu layered under the 'main attraction' while she kept her chakra carefully masked as she slipped into the room through the open door, shutting it carefully behind her as she focused on the illusion she had created.

What Issei saw was a man, slender and over six feet tall, dressed much like Ibiki but without the bandana, and without a face. His head was bald, his skin pale, and where his facial features would've been, there was a smooth surface.

She saw his eyes widen as she made the illusion sit down opposite him, pulling out the chair and pushing it in in tandem with the genjutsu, while she herself leant against the wall, half-way between the prisoner and the interrogator's chair, dropping the camouflage when she was sure the prisoner was fully ensnared in her technique.

Sakura took a deep, silent breath, then carefully didn't say anything, nor did she make her creation speak. After a few seconds, Issei settled back in his seat, though far more tense than before, his eyes flickering nervously from side-to-side.

That was the thing with genjutsu – if you didn't have access to your chakra, you couldn't break it even if you knew it was there. Sometimes, you couldn't even sense it.

And Sakura planned to take full advantage of that.

But she had patience.

After about three minutes passed, she carefully worked through the seals for the second layer of her illusion, making sure she could still access the first if she needed. She had already created an upsetting visual stimulus, now it was time to work on the physical.

Carefully, so as not to make the change too noticeable, she worked on his somatosensory cortex, particularly on the thermoreceptors around his wrists. Sakura could hear her own words in her head, like a mantra – what if you saw the chains restraining you turn into snakes, or grow heavier, shorter, hotter?

She intended to make the manacles around his wrists hot. Unbearably so. But not immediately. After all, a frog dumped into hot water would jump out immediately, but if it had been placed in cold water which was gradually heated... well. Everyone knew the answer to that particular scenario.

It took about five minutes of utter silence, but eventually, Sakura saw the prisoner frown, then scratch his wrist. A few seconds later and a slight twist of chakra on her part saw him try to pull them down, then, when that didn't work, he tried to force a finger between the manacle and the skin of his wrist.

But there was no give.

Just a little bit more...

Another pulse of chakra, and now Issei's expression turned from confusion and discomfort to pain. She saw his eyes dart from his cuffed wrists to the still faceless, still silent mirage of the interrogator.

And there was clear unease in his gaze.

Sakura took it a step further, carefully monitoring her chakra levels. Normally, genjutsu weren't all too chakra-taxing, as with normal area-effect illusions, she could just create it and forget about it till someone stumbled into it and dispelled it. But this time, as she created the third layer, she had to keep the other two accessible layers accessible. Then, despite her best intentions, she felt her concentration slip and the control she had over her chakra wavered. It was just a second, but her first layer flickered out of existence before it reappeared. She was lucky, insanely so, that the prisoner had been looking down at his wrists, his agitation becoming more and more pronounced as she stimulated the thermoreceptors in the sensitive skin and he didn't notice his 'interrogator' disappear.

Quickly, but carefully so as not to lose her hold over her illusions any more than she already had, she finished the third layer. A few seconds later, she saw his eyes snap from his wrists to the walls.

They were moving closer.

Of course, the actual walls were still exactly as they had been since this cell had been built, or so Sakura assumed. But her illusion carefully suggested otherwise, and it didn't seem like her victim had clocked on to the fact that she was there and it wasn't really his mind that was lying to him – in fact, it was easier for her if he believed precisely that. Weeks of solitary confinement in a cell no bigger than four by two metres, with no windows nor contact with the outside world apart from enemy shinobi who came to interrogate him didn't exactly provide Sakura with a stable mind to work on.

And, for once, that was exactly what she was counting on.

Sakura always had an idea of what went on in her illusions – that's not to say she knew what people saw in the Hell Viewing technique when she cast it on them, but anything which was an area-effect or a elicited a response from a particular individual, she roughly knew what they were seeing.

Here, in a controlled environment and with only one subject to work on, she knew exactly what Issei was seeing.

The walls were still moving closer. The manacles were still burning his wrists. The interrogator sitting opposite him was still faceless, like a puppet, and silent like a grave.

She also knew what he wasn't seeing – her.

And then, seeing the slight tremor of fear that shook his hand, a tremor which she wouldn't have spotted if she hadn't been looking for the slightest of reactions that what she was doing was working, Sakura moved onto the most experimental part of what she had planned.

A trial run, so to speak, for the technique she'd spent the last few weeks designing and the last few months mulling over.

There was a jutsu that Anko had shown her when she decided to stay at T&I, something she said every Interrogator knew how to use, but few ever achieved a mastery of it; Psycho Mind Transmission.

But from what Sakura had worked out, she didn't need a mastery.

In one of her sessions with Inoichi, she'd asked, making sure to keep her tone light, her question seemingly innocuous, whether the Yamanaka could see or differentiate between the memories of their subjects when they possessed them. Inoichi had looked surprised at the question and Sakura hastily apologised for infringing on Clan secrets, but the blond had waved her off, saying that it was hardly a secret, just an unusual question.

He then proceeded to explain that the memories weren't easily viewable like a film or a projection, but the memories with the strongest emotional attachment to them – whether the attachment was positive or negative was of little importance – were always the easiest to locate and view. When Sakura had asked why, he'd said that the body's subconscious response is to protect, and the best way to protect our insides is through chakra. Which is why we unconsciously coat our organs with chakra, and though memories aren't solid, tactile things, the same process takes place in our brains.

Which is why Sakura was certain she wouldn't need complete mastery of the Mind Transmission jutsu – she just needed to find the brightest clump of chakra and bring that to the surface, hoping that it was what she needed.

So she did just that.

It seemed as if Issei had retreated into himself, his eyes no longer flickering nervously from side to side, his fingers no longer trying to pry off the manacles, but still. His eyes were also glazed over, like he wasn't quite there. Carefully, Sakura cancelled the third layer, almost sighing in relief as her control stabilised and her attention didn't feel like it was stretched thin anymore. Then, she got behind the prisoner, and flashed through the seals.

At the stage where she currently was with the Psycho Mind Transmission, it was less like flicking through an album, which was what Anko had described it as, and more of an endless corridor of locked doors, and she only had the keys to some of them. Luckily, she didn't need his every memory – she was sure Ibiki had already been through all that was accessible. What she needed was –

A-ha!

Sakura grasped the chakra, the memory, and brought it forth. It didn't play like a film, nor was it like a storybook, but more like... snapshots. The colour, the smell of jasmine perfume, the feeling of warm skin pressed against hers, a whisper, a curtain of dark hair falling around her, quiet footsteps, a giggle, a soft weight pressed against her legs, two names, two faces...

She drew back, her heart aching.

A wife and a son.

The rosette closed her eyes, for the first time since she started working in T&I, she understood why it was called the least desirable Division.

She felt like a monster.

And she hadn't even done anything yet.

With nary a thought, Sakura cancelled the technique, then the second layer of genjutsu while she was at it.

Issei didn't even look like he noticed.

Then, she cancelled the genjutsu altogether, and pressed her hands together, gathering chakra and bringing forth the image that seemed seared into her retinas. The henge made her into a tall brunette, dark, mahogany locks framing her face and reaching down past her waist, her skin a dark olive instead of porcelain, her shinobi attire replaced with a long red dress, the sleeves billowing around her wrists, the neckline modest, but telling. Civilian. Harmless. Yuuko. A seamstress. Issei's wife.

Slowly, Sakura straightened, then walked around to the chair to sit down opposite him. There was no reaction. Although all of the genjutsu was gone, Issei hadn't seemed to notice.

Sakura sighed. Reached out so her hand gently covered his on the table.

She was out of ideas after this.

It was time for the final deception.

"Hello, Issei." She murmured, removing her hand.

The reaction was instantaneous.

"Do you think it's wise?" Tonbo asked the second the door shut behind Sakura, his face turned towards Anko. "This isn't exactly an easy job to start her off as an interrogator on."

Anko shrugged, though there was a slightly worried downward twist to her usual smirk. "The kid's good. I need to see how she'll handle herself after- after Iwa."

Tonbo was about to retort, but Ibiki twitched and turned accusing eyes to Anko. "Where is she?" he demanded, and both Tonbo and Anko turned to stare out the window and point out that 'she's right here, she just walked through those doors', only that –

She wasn't.

It took a moment, but then Anko sighed, and the corner of her lips that had been previously turned downwards now twitched upwards. "Genjutsu." She identified easily, "Area-effect. As well as something else that she must've started it even before she walked in."

Tonbo frowned and cast out his senses. "I can just about sense her, but barely. She's leaning on-" he cut off, because just then, Sakura reappeared, leaning casually on the wall, one of her legs bent and propping her up, while her hands were folded in a Rat seal, her forehead marred with a frown.

All three of them turned to look at the prisoner. He looked... spooked. Uneasy. Worst of all, he wasn't even looking at Sakura.

"That's not what I was expecting." Anko admitted quietly. Her and Sakura had worked through interrogation tactics, she'd even quizzed the girl multiple times afterwards, made her watch interrogations and identify the different methods used. But this... it depended what the

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