Scent is one of those things that links directly to memory. Especially scents tied to highly emotional events. The scent of the incense at a parent's funeral. The scent of blood from a ninja's first battle. Hearing is the sense that returns soonest from unconsciousness, so the experts say, but scent was what Genma was aware of first. A cold, damp concrete scent. A scent of mildew and stale sweat. Urine and blood. Fear. The scent of fear, basted into the cement walls.

That and the sound of a man struggling against his bonds.

For half a moment, Genma was sure it was a nightmare. He knew this nightmare intimately. He was in a tiny cold cell in an Iwagakure prison, in darkness, in pain. It was a nightmare, and he could wake himself up from nightmares like this. Long practice had taught him to look for the one incongruous thing. The way, for example, in recent months, no matter how hard he tried, he could never seem to move his mouth in those dreams. Never make a sound. He'd scream and there'd be no sound, and he'd know: this is that dream again. It's a nightmare, and I can wake up from it.

He opened his mouth, and a horrible, grating cry echoed around him. It hissed to a shocked stop, as he choked, then caught his breath. Raw, rattling sounds as air rasped through his bruised and swollen larynx.

It wasn't a dream.

Raidou froze, caught mid-way between one desperate, useless jerk and the next. He knew that scream. Brittle and hoarse, snapped off halfway through--but he knew it. He'd heard it the first time he'd ever broken into Genma's room, it'd been the reason he'd broken in. And he'd heard it a hundred times since, on missions and off, twisted out with broken bones, godawful dreams, and woven into the basic fabric of ninja life.

He'd never thought he'd ever be chest-crushingly relieved to hear it.

The sound had ricocheted, but the origin was right in front of him, hidden back against the far wall, in the black shadows the glimmer of light couldn't touch. Raidou strained forwards against his manacles, fighting to see.

"G--Loverboy, tell me that's you." His voice came out too quick, pitched low with something edging close to panic. He didn't care. "C'mon, kid. I'm right here. Talk to me."

"Rai..." Genma's voice was barely a whisper. Low, painful coughs took the word away. He struggled for breath, and his eyes watered. Darkness enveloped him like dense black robes.

"Rai..." he tried again, More coughs, choking, tortured. His chest felt torn apart at the sternum, staved in at the side. His throat was agony at every stridorous breath.

Raidou was alive. Not just alive, but alive and aware, calling him Loverboy and kid, a few bare meters away. Which meant that Mist ninja with the too-short kodachi hadn't slit his throat.

Genma tested his body, found himself spreadeagled against a concrete wall, anchored by wrists and ankles with irons that burned ice cold into bruised flesh. His right ankle in particular--the one that fucking jutsu got, he thought--blazed as soon as he tried to shift his weight.

He shivered, a chill running over bare skin. Felt bandages tight around his left thigh, across his hips. The left one still felt disjointed and wrong. Alive with pain, but there were too many pains to catalog. Felt no other cloth on him at all.

"Rai, are you..." It was impossible to talk. Impossible to get more than a few syllables out, without coughing and choking and struggling for air.

"Chained to a wall? Bare-ass naked? Pissed the hell off and then some?" Raidou finished for him, easing back enough to lean against solid concrete. "Pretty much. Though hearing your voice is making a definite improvement to the landscape."

It didn't matter how raw Genma sounded, how he couldn't seem to catch a full breath or speak a complete word--he was alive. Everything else was just a temporary state of being that Raidou intended to fix, just as soon as he figured out how to break these damn cuffs.

"Bastards took my gear," he muttered, calling up an experimental seed of chakra; it fizzled in his pathways and slipped out of his grasp, snapping back with a sharp sting. He winced slightly. "And whatever they put in that fog is still messing up my chakra control. Or it's these cuffs." He rattled them and peered back into the dark, trying to catch any kind of glimpse of his friend. "Hope you're in fit state for a break out, kid. Because we're getting out of here as soon as you're up to moving."

And Raidou worked out how to pick locks he couldn't reach with his teeth.

"Bastards," Genma agreed. Sometimes a single word was more than enough. He tried to let his sense of relief--Raidou was alive, and not just alive, but still had his bleak sense of humor intact--be enough to give him the energy to push past pain. Hoped Raidou was in better shape than he was.

He made the same experiment Raidou had, cautiously trying to call up chakra. The slithering failure as it died in his coils made him almost nauseous.

No poison he knew of did that. It could be an after effect of the poison, but more likely it was the cuffs. Cuffs designed to hold a ninja. A prison three meters by three meters square, with slit windows and a scent of terror and buried concrete. It wasn't that Iwagakure cell, where the walls had been stone. But it was a place Genma had been before.

"Rai," he tried. Coughed. Maybe if he whispered, didn't try to push his voice to work, he could get past it. "I know where we are." Even whispering led to coughs, but not so many, and not so agonizing. "War bunker. One of ours."

Very gently, Raidou let his head thump back against the wall, and called himself a moron. War bunker--of course it was a war bunker. One of the many abandoned ones that fringed the border, no doubt. Where else would you take two ninja dumb enough to walk right into a trap?

But that wasn't what got him. What got him was that it was Genma--Genma, who'd been strangled and stabbed and gods knew whatever else--who was doing the thinking, while Raidou forgot all about captured ninja protocol and did nothing but bruise himself against chains. Brilliant back up.

"Don't suppose you recognize which one?" he asked, already knowing that was impossible; they didn't exactly stamp serial numbers inside the cells. But anything that kept Genma with him, awake and thinking about anything but his own hurts, was a good thing.

Anything that kept himself from thinking about why, exactly, he--and probably Genma--were both naked. He shoved the image of Yukaho's brutalized body out of his mind's eye. That wouldn't be them. He wouldn't let it.

"Very funny," Genma said with a soft snort. The best he could manage for a laugh. At least as he continued making the effort to talk, it seemed to get easier. Like walking on a blister, he thought. The first steps were brutal, and then you stopped noticing it quite so much.

There was a scent of rain coming from somewhere. A cold draft that raised gooseflesh over his bare skin, and made the heavy cloth flutter, letting in little swells of dim grey to melt the blackness. The shutters were open, then. Konoha's bunkers had all had metal shutters to cover the slits that passed for windows, open for ventilation unless there was a direct attack. Except for the interrogation room. That one had the shutters, too, but they were usually closed, so no sounds escaped. These must have been left open when the bunker was decommissioned.

Genma strained to see when the light grew, knowing where Raidou had to be, now. Across and to the left, he thought. Slightly to the left. One prisoner was closer to the window--his position--and one closer to the door, a design he'd never thought to wonder about as a genin and chuunin during the war years. He wondered about it now.

"Door should be to your right," he told Raidou. Stopped for air, and willed himself not to cough. "Toilet under the window to your left." Not that either of them were in any position to make use of it, chained as they were. Genma remembered watching a Konoha jounin from T&I preparing to interrogate a captured Iwa ninja. He'd told his partner, I'm gonna go in there and take a nice long piss, and let that bastard wet himself listening. Softens them up when they lose their dignity.

He tried very hard not to think about the ways Yukaho's dignity had been shredded.

Just for a second, as the window covering fluttered and the light strengthened, Raidou managed to catch a glimpse of his partner. Cloaked in shadows, covered in injuries, but definitely Genma--at least, Raidou hoped so. It occurred to him suddenly, horribly, that he hadn't confirmed that. He'd been so relieved to hear Genma's voice that he hadn't stopped to think about it. But he'd seen Genma get strangled, seen him collapse in a tangle of angular limbs and blood-stained armour.

Seen him not breathing.

Genjutsu and henge would be child's play to the ninja that had managed that. And the easiest way to slip some vital information out of Raidou without ever having to get a blade involved.

The light faded, drawing back and taking the brief snatch of Genma--the person who looked like Genma--with it. Raidou took a slow breath though his nose, seeing the after-image of naked skin wrapped in bandages, mud-soaked hair straggling down to edge a sharp jawline, arms wrenched high and wide by thick chains, and tried to remember that the eye was so easily fooled.

If they'd used Genma's image against him, he wouldn't stop until all of damn Mist was a smoking crater in the ground.

"Hey, kid." He licked split lips. "The first night I stayed over. You remember what we ate?"

Raidou's question snapped the remaining lethargy from Genma's brain. It was the sort of question he should have asked himself. That might not be Raidou, and no matter how badly he wanted to believe it was... It sounded like Raidou's voice, but nothing he'd said proved his identity. With their chakra damped by the sealed manacles, there was no feeling for the familiar presence of his friend. But he'd called him Loverboy. Could they have tortured that nickname out of the real Raidou, maybe with a henge of himself as bait?

"Oranges," Genma said carefully. "Early ones, so they were small and not that sweet." He remembered those oranges with aching clarity. They'd sat in his room and peeled oranges after a dreadful nightmare had woken him screaming, and Raidou had broken down his door.

If only this were just another nightmare.

He tried to think of a question he could ask in return. Something only Raidou would know, that no torturer would know to probe for.

"How about that time we first partnered up. Remember what we ate the night we finished the mission?"

This time the relief was so strong Raidou sagged in his chains and almost popped his shoulder out of joint. He straightened quickly, taking his weight on bare feet--his heels were raw, he noticed distantly, as if he'd been dragged--and gathered himself enough to answer Genma's question.

Except he couldn't remember what they'd eaten.

"You couldn't have picked a meal that was a little more recent?" he muttered, after a blank moment that lasted far too long. He could almost feel Genma's rising tension as the seconds ticked by; he snatched at the first answer that sprung to mind. "It was eight months ago. The mission with the nightclub target." The one who'd grabbed Genma's hands, he remembered, before Raidou had ever realized how much that meant. "We stayed in a hotel afterwards. I bought--fast food. Pizza, maybe? Or something with chicken."

When this was all over, he was going to make sure they had a code word in place. One he could remember.

"And cigarettes," he added hastily, as recollection sparked. "Which, by the way, I'm regretting ever quitting. If there was ever time for a nicotine boost..."

Raidou's hesitation set Genma on edge, but the answer... It was almost good enough. There were enough details. The nightclub target with his pawing, sweaty hands. The hotel. The junk food that hadn't even stayed down. It was almost good enough, and then Raidou mentioned the cigarettes, and his having quit, and Genma knew for sure.

"Pizza and chicken," he whispered. "And takoyaki." He tried to swallow, choked instead. "Rai.... Fuck." Felt like weeping. Felt like laughing.

The coughing brought tears even when he was past the sudden relief. "Fucking hell."

Raidou stared into the dark and hated it. Heard Genma's voice crack between coughs, his breathing stutter to broken, and hated that more. But mostly he hated himself. For falling at the first hurdle, breathing that damned poison, doing nothing as his partner got choked insensate--and still doing nothing now.

He drove the thought out of his head. Fuck everything if he was going to just hang around and twiddle his thumbs while Genma fell apart in the dark.

"Hey," he said, low and fierce. "Don't you do that, kid. We're getting the hell out of here. I'm going to drag you home, find that pretty nurse to bandage you up--remember her? Bayo-something. The one with all the nice curves--and then you can drink tea until you burst." He yanked on his chains, punctuating the words with a heavy clatter of metal. "I'll even let you off watching the brat for a week. Just don't quit on me."

He would have added more--would have said anything to keep Genma with him--but the room blazed with sudden light, so bright it felt like the patterns of blood vessels in his eyes would be forever scorched on his retinas, and when vision returned he found himself staring into cheerful green irises.

"Hello, pretty boy," said the mist-nin.

"I'm alright," Genma tried to say, but then lights flared to life, and the scrape of metal on concrete told him the door to their cell had been slid open. It took more willpower than Genma thought he had in him to stay in the present. Ice water ran in his veins, and aching muscles tensed, as every sense told him he was reliving the past. But it wasn't Iwagakure's prison. It wasn't a flashback.

It was worse.

In the moments before their captors entered, Genma got a look at his friend at last. Raidou hung naked and snarling. His face was bruised and cut, with a jagged set of lacerations across his right eyebrow, above a blackened eye. His lip was split and bloody, with another gash slicing across his chin. Genma remembered seeing the greasy-haired ninja holding a blade to his best friend's throat; remembered the cracked, distorted porcelain bull's face above that vulnerable bare skin. Seeing Raidou's battered face now, he couldn't help but think about the force it took to shatter an ANBU's mask and drive the shards into skin.

Raidou was bound in a posture guaranteed to hurt. Even as tall as he was, the shackles held him so that he couldn't put all his weight on his heels without straining his shoulders. Genma's fetters held him differently, with his legs splayed apart, and his arms at an angle that made every breath an effort. It was a shock to understand at last the asymmetry that had puzzled him since the war: one set of bonds was designed to hold a shorter prisoner. Since he and Raidou were nearly the same height, it hardly mattered.

He didn't have any more time to think, though, when the rogue Mist ninja came into the room. They wore the remnants of their country's uniforms augmented with basic black fatigues. The man who came in first, with black curly hair and a square jaw, wore Mist's vest over a huge frame. Mist's camouflage-patterned leggings over heavy boots. He stood just inside the door and stared unsmilingly at his prisoners. Genma was sure he'd seen him someplace before.

The next man was the same greasy-haired bastard who had taken Raidou down, Genma was sure of it. He recognized the way he moved, and the lank black hair. When he called Raidou pretty boy, Raidou's jaw clenched. Genma's urge to not just kill, but maim, dismember, destroy boiled over and he spit a curse that started him coughing again.

A third captor with a narrow-jawed weaselly face, marred by a long scar across his forehead and another across his nose stepped close to Genma. His black eyes glittered as he grinned. "Is your neck still hurting you? Poor thing. Maybe I shouldn't have tightened that wire quite so much. Shigure had to waste valuable chakra getting you breathing again so we could have this little talk, too. For Konoha's elite, you sure are a fragile little plum blossom, aren't you?"

"And you're a scum-sucking coward," Raidou snarled, jerking away from the wall; chains brought him up short, biting into his wrists. "Seven against two and you still had to use poison to bring us down. And that didn't stop you losing three of your own." A scab split as he made himself grin, baring bloody teeth, dragging their attention away from Genma. "That one with the senbon didn't go easy. Was he dead at the end, or did you have to take him out yourse--"

Blood burst into his mouth as the green-eyed ninja punched him, hard enough to make his head crack back against the wall. Red and black danced in front of his eyes for moment, obscuring his view of a face that was more grimly amused than furious. He blinked hard, shook his head, and spat a mouthful of bloody saliva full into the ninja's face.

Green-eye's wiped his cheek and examined his fingers thoughtfully. "Nice try," he said. "But no one here's stupid enough to lose their temper just because you throw a fit. You can't make us kill you." He leaned in, staying just out of biting range. "Well, not yet."

"Loose these chains and we'll see who dies first." Words every prisoner tried, but Raidou was too angry to care. Over Green-eye's shoulder he could see Genma, every naked, bandaged, hard-breathing inch of him, spread-eagled against Konoha-built concrete, and the sight made him want to break something. They'd bandaged Genma's wounds, brought him back from the edge of death--the only reason that made sense was torture.

Genma had been tortured before; Raidou would be damned if he let it happen again. He'd already heard enough nightmare-screams to last a lifetime.

"You did get the point I made about not being stupid, right?" said Green-eyes. "The only way you're getting out of those chains is if you tell us something nice and useful."

Raidou snorted. "You could really use a shower?" he suggested.

Green-eyes punched him again, in the same precise way he'd done before; just enough to hurt, not enough to knock Raidou out.

"Or a toothbrush," Raidou said, when his ears stopped ringing. "I realize Mist is a backwards place, but someone must have known about dental hygiene."

Green-eyes drew back his fist again, but paused when the ninja who looked like a weasel sighed noisily. "Enough, Rikuto," he said. "Unless you plan to punch him for the next hour, let's just make a start before we all die of boredom."

He leaned against the wall next to Genma. "We're going to hurt your friend, plum blossom," he confided, as if he were giving Genma a sweet. "Probably for a while. Then we're going to hurt you. I'd offer you the chance to talk now, but I'm pretty sure you're not going to take it." He chewed a nail thoughtfully. "Personally I'm looking forward to who screams louder. I've got a bet, you see. If it's you, I win three-hundred ryou."

"You shouldn't have cut my throat up, then, should you?" Genma rasped back.

He'd flinched with every hit he'd watched Raidou silently take. Couldn't think about Raidou screaming. It was Iwagakure all over again, but it was worse, so much worse. He'd been friends with Seijuro. Buddies. He'd hated it when they brought Seijuro in so battered his face was nearly black, and made him watch while they broke Genma's fingers. Known that as horrible as it was, he was grateful it wasn't reversed. In every prayerful apology to appease Seijuro's soul, he told him he was the braver one. That he didn't blame him for having broken. For four long years he'd wondered if he had the fortitude to hold silent while he watched a friend tortured.

And this wasn't just a friend.

They'd called Raidou pretty. Genma couldn't stomach the implications of what they planned. Couldn't stand himself for already guessing how they'd attack Raidou's scarred face.

A ninja was never supposed to prize one comrade over another, but a ninja was supposed to be a lot of things other than human. Right now Genma didn't care about any of them. He'd keep his silence because to break would betray Raidou as much as Konoha. He'd keep his silence. And then he'd find a way out of this, and get Raidou out of this, and he'd kill the bastards.

"You're wasting your time," he said. "With both of us. Rookies don't get the useful secrets." Forcing a voice out loud enough to hear felt like that wire was around his throat again. His words choked away into coughs that flecked his lips with frothy, blood-flavored saliva.

His tongue found the bottom right second bicuspid. Not his tooth. He'd lost the real one in the chuunin exams, forever ago. The first replacement had been just a prosthetic. The one there now was hollow, filled with a liquid that would burst into a cloud of poison gas with the right chakra applied. But the manacles limited his chakra, and there were too many enemies in the room. It was enough poison to kill one man, and one man alone.

"Aww, you like to talk, don't you plum blossom? Don't worry, you'll get your chance." The Mist ninja ran a hand down Genma's side, a chakra-filled caress that made Genma feel sick. "But you have to watch our show first. We know you wouldn't feel like big bad ANBU if you didn't get to suffer first." He looked at his watch as if bored. "Are you ever getting going with this, Rikuto?"

The greasy ninja turned and gave his comrade and Genma a nasty smile. "Your handsome buddy there looks a little lopsided, don't you think? Maybe we should make his two halves match."

This time it was Genma who lurched against his chains with an inarticulate cry of rage gurgling from his damaged throat. The weasel-faced man shot a hand up and closed his fingers around Genma's neck. "Hush now, we're doing this for you, you know."

"Leave him alone!" Raidou's voice hit its lowest register and bottomed out, crashing around the tiny room. Muscles stood out along his arms and shoulders as he wrenched at his chains, snatching at chakra that wouldn't come. Green-eyes--Rikuto--watched him for a moment, eyebrows raised, then turned and nodded at the silent man standing by the door.

"If you're done flailing?" he asked dryly, turning back as the man unfurled a scroll with a snap before biting his thumb and dragging a line of blood over the parchment. Smoke rolled out, surrounding him as chakra flared briefly, but when it cleared there wasn't any kind of animal summons waiting for orders; instead, two squat chests carved from dark, polished wood crouched at the ninja's feet. Seals, twisted out of gleaming metal, had been pressed into the lids.

Raidou's mouth went dry.

Mist-nin. A missing Mist-nin, whose picture he'd definitely seen before. Tall, curly-haired, unsmiling, jaw like an anvil and scrolls that summoned chests--

"Sago," said Raidou through gritted teeth. "Sago Masami. I heard you'd died."

The Bingo Book certainly thought so, and everyone who'd seen the black mark through that entry had breathed a sigh of relief. Some people only made the world a better place by leaving it.

"You heard wrong," said Rikuto cheerfully. "Your Intel is impressive, pretty boy. But I'd expect no less from a Leaf-ninja."

Sago grunted once, drawing the eyes of both Mist-nin. He crouched, flicked the lid off one of his chests with a catch of chakra, and withdrew something long and metallic. It gleamed in his hand.

Raidou forced himself to look away and back at the ninja still holding Genma by the throat. "If you don't let him go," he growled, "I'm going to snap off one of your fingers for every bruise he has and feed them to you."

"Scary," the man drawled, and patted Genma's cheek with his free hand. "Bit overprotective for just teammates, aren't you?"

Raidou lunged against his chains again, uselessly, stupidly, tearing the skin at his wrists and ankles, wrenching his shoulders--and found himself suddenly eye to eye with a pair of level brown ones, not unlike his own, beneath a mop of dark curly hair.

"Fire," said Sago quietly, "is something you never forget."

Hands twisted through seals, metal glowed cherry red, and Raidou barely had a moment to think before heat seared the left side of his face and burned sanity away.

As soon as Raidou had said the name, Genma remembered the face. A man as feared outside Mist as Shida Akumaru was outside Konoha; Sago the Butcher. Sago the Demon. Sago the Undertaker. For the first time since he'd been a raw chuunin facing his first real battle to the death, Genma felt his bowels start to loosen in fear. He went limp, utterly still, breathing shallowly through his nose. The ninja with his hand wrapped around his throat eased his fingers up, so that his grip on Genma's jaw forced his head towards his partner.

Sago's instruments gleamed.

"Don't shut your eyes, cupcake," Weasel whispered. "You don't want to miss this."

Blazing hot metal neared Raidou's skin, and he writhed away as far as his bonds would allow, terror showing the whites of his eyes all around.

Genma kept his eyes focused on his partner's. Look at me. Look at me. Keep your focus on me, he begged silently. Don't forget who you are. Don't forget I'm here. Stay with me.

A scent of cooking meat filled the room. A sizzling sound like a tepanyaki grill.

Raidou's scream was like no sound Genma had ever heard. Worse than any nightmare induced bellow. Worse than any pain had ever wrung from him before. A panicked howl more animal than human. Genma let his tongue slip between his teeth, and clamped down hard. Shook with the effort, filling his mouth with the taste of blood.

Weasel's fingers tightened further, in a grip so hard Genma thought his jaw would crack. "Keep watching. What is he, your lover? I can feel your heart racing. You don't want this for him, do you? You want us to stop, don't you? You have the power to make it stop."

Genma trembled. Swallowed against a surge of bile in his throat. Kept his eyes on Raidou's. Merciful Kanon, stop this. Come to me in my time of need. Buddha, God, Anyone, please!

"I'll start with an easy question," Weasel said. "In fact we can skip the whole name and rank bit, Shiranui Genma." The name rolled off his tongue like oil. "Just tell me, was your mission to rescue those poor unfortunate children and their fool of a sensei?"

Raidou sagged as Sago backed off. Three long red welts blistered in the scars on his cheek, making regular rows where there had been shiny plastic disorder before. His eyes blinked closed, then up to Genma's, locking on.

That's right, look at me, Genma thought, trying to convey it all with his eyes.

"Aww, it looks like he doesn't want to answer. Such a shame," Weasel said.

Sago nodded, and applied the glowing rake to Raidou's chest.

There was no thought between metal touching his skin and the scream ripping out of his throat. There was no time for thought. He was just a body, trapped without option for fight or flight, reacting the only way he had left. Chains strained as he arched, muscles rigid, trying to pull away. The wall left him nowhere to go. The steel had no give.

The instant before already brutalized nerves lost the capacity to feel completely, Sago moved his hand, dragging the delicate metal tip down Raidou's chest, following the design already laid out in the warp and weft of flesh.

For ten years measured in nightmares and memories and skin grafts, Raidou had thought nothing could be worse than acid.

He was wrong.

Pain sank into his skin, clawed through muscles, bit down to the bone. It drifted in the curl of stinking smoke that peeled away from flesh drenched in sweat. His fists clenched, tendons standing out at the wrists, fingernails digging into palms hard enough to furrow the skin away. Memories pickaxed into his skull; he was--

Fourteen, falling on a battlefield.

No.

Listening to the screams of dying genin.

No.

Feeling his skin blister away from bone.

No.

Just before it reached the ruin of his left nipple, Sago pulled the metal back, shaking away a fleck of something that hissed from the glowing tip. Raidou collapsed in his chains, and groaned when the skin across his chest pulled tight. Sweat slid down the full length of his back. Steel rattled as he shuddered, panting.

Across the room, on the edge of hearing, the third ninja asked Genma a question. There was no answer.

Sago lifted his hand again.

"Wait." Raidou could barely hear his own voice, but he forced the word out. His jaw locked with the effort. "Wait."

Green-eyes--Raidou couldn't remember his name anymore--leaned in close. "Something to say?"

Lifting his head pulled the fresh burns on his cheek; he managed it anyway and didn't care about the whimper that slipped past his lips. Looked up just enough to meet Genma's eyes, staring at him over thick-set shoulders and burning metal, bright and fierce in the pale cut of his face. Not quiting.

"I have an itch," Raidou croaked. "Right side. You keep missing it."

Genma's breath caught in his chest when Raidou made eye contact again. His seared face was contorted with pain, beaded with sweat, but his eyes were alive, insistently focused. And his words... Genma didn't know what to call the feeling that choked up under his breastbone. Pride? Admiration? But tinged with fury, because Raidou had just guaranteed himself even worse injuries.

He remembered giving similar provocation, four years ago.

You have something to tell us, now, Genma-kun the interrogator had asked, when he'd made some noise they'd interpreted as him interrupting. Being ready to talk.

You missed one, he'd replied.

The next blow had been especially savage.

Sago, it seemed, came from a more deliberate school. Was less provokable. Genma couldn't see his face, but the man didn't appear to react to Raidou's goad. He stood with his broad back to Genma, holding his glowing weapon as if in thought, stretching time out to a slender thread.

Genma's eyes were on Raidou's, bridging the gap between them with desperate intensity. Stay with me. Stay with me. They don't want to kill us, so they'll have to stop before it gets too bad. Just stay with me.

Weasel used the pause to ask another question. "Are you getting off on this? Maybe that's the kind of relationship you two have. You like watching him get hurt?"

Genma tried not to let the words have any meaning. The man had an accent. He sounded like maybe he had been a lisper as a child, and the tendency was still there. He was speaking a foreign language, nonsense syllables, Genma told himself.

Somewhere in the back of his brain, a strange possibility formed. What if he answered? Told them yes? If he said he liked it, they'd stop doing it, since the goal was to make him so desperate to free Raidou he'd break.

The thought made him sick.

Sago touched the glowing rake to the right side of Raidou's ribcage.

Raidou screamed.

The scent of burning flesh filled the air, and Genma convulsed against his bonds, retching dryly. His throat caught fire with the spasms, and for a moment he couldn't breathe at all. His eyes went wide with raw panic.

"You could put an end to this," Weasel said. "All you have to do is answer my questions, and we'll stop."

The right side of his ribcage broke the pattern, sinking mind-numbing pain into flesh without twisted, whorling scars. Nerves, undamaged and whole, were only too eager to record every scrap of sensation and carve it deep inside his skull. But it wasn't his scar, wasn't his shoulder or chest or face, and that made it easier. Just a little.

When the third line etched across his ribs, scorching a line that blistered red before it seared white, Raidou managed to bite his scream off halfway through. When the fourth came, he stayed silent.

"Almost got it," he gasped, when Sago's hand drew back. "Little higher."

Green-eyes backhanded him across the face, knuckles cracking against raw flesh. Raidou almost tore his throat raw, lost in the battlefield, before he clawed his way back to reality. When he opened his eyes again, Genma was choking across the room, throat flexing, jaw tightening as he brought up nothing but agonized noises, and Sago had the sizzling blade-tip held an inch from Green-eyes' right pupil.

"Do not interfere," he said quietly, in a voice like rocks breaking.

Green-eyes leaned back slowly, only daring to nod when the implement was withdrawn.

Raidou let his head hang and spat a bloody smear onto the concrete floor. Every heaving breath made his chest expand, stretching skin he never wanted touched again. His cheek throbbed, blood hammering beneath the surface with every rabbit-race heartbeat. His shoulders strained, taking almost his full weight.

Maybe, he thought, he'd pass out soon. Maybe it would end soon. Maybe they'd cut his throat.

But then there would just be Genma, left alone with three people who knew exactly what those scars on his hands meant. Genma who was already retching. Genma who he'd sworn to protect.

He dragged his head up, heard the tail end of a question asked across the room. The ninja leaning next to Genma, whispering in his ear, saying he could put an end to it.

Raidou bared his teeth. "Don't--tell them--anything," he grated. "Count. Backwards--from a thousand. Count."

Count, Raidou said, and Genma got another jolt of unwelcome memory. A Konoha chuunin named Taisei, in the bowels of Iwagakure, counting the blows of a hammer to an ANBU's hands, numbering the breaks. Altogether, there had been one-hundred eight, Genma remembered. Like the hundred eight names of Buddha. It had held poetic justice for him at the time. Kept him sane.

Raidou wanted him to stay sane. Needed him to stay sane.

"One thousand," Genma said, as loudly as he could. "Nine-hundred ninety-nine..."

He looked at Raidou's face. At his body. Trying to cultivate the same detachment that had let him catalog Yukaho's injuries. He'd need to apply a healing jutsu to Raidou's face first. That had to come first. Next the fresh burns on his right side, since the skin there was thinner than the thick scars where the other burns lay.

He kept counting, struggling for air between each number. Coughing again, wincing at the pain and hunger for air that brought. His throat was so raw it was in danger of swelling shut, he thought. That would be a disaster, for him to pass out while Raidou still suffered. For him to leave Raidou alone.

Another thought welled up from the same place the first had. What if that worked? What if him passing out put an end to Raidou's torture? After all, if they really were doing this to try to get Genma to talk, then there'd be no point continuing if he couldn't answer.

He tried the experiment, forcing his coughs to fall off. Letting the desperation for air overwhelm him. Sagging in his bonds. The tension on his shoulders pulled open the wounds on his chest, letting blood ooze along the parallel lines. He let his head loll.

Greasy-hair's voice cut through the room. "Shit, Daimon, don't let him lose it. We only just started."

Weasel yanked Genma's face up, smacking his head back against the wall. "Nice try. Now pay attention. Or answer my questions."

Sago put down his rake and went to his chest, pulling out a pair of slender needle-like tools with large handles. As he held them, one in each hand, they began to crackle and glow. He touched the points to either side of Raidou's jaw. Electricity arced, leaving an ozone scent.

This time, Raidou didn't scream. He couldn't, when the muscle spasms the current created held his jaws clamped shut.

"His teeth are probably cracking," Weasel-Daimon said. "Just imagine that: teeth, splintering into fragments. Have you ever had a nightmare like that?"

Genma choked out another number, eyes still locked on Raidou's.

Merciful Bodhisattva, let him pass out. Don't let him suffer anymore.

He would be damned if he abandoned Raidou now.

"Nine-hundred sixty-one..."

Holding back his screams had been a hard-won victory, the one thing he could still do when everything else seemed impossible. Then Sago pulled out two delicate wands of metal, touched them to Raidou's face, and took that away. Raidou's head cracked back against the wall, tendons standing out in the straining line of his throat. Muscle tightened against bone, locking his jaws together, squeezing.

Deep in the back of his mouth, something gave way. Then a second, with a crunch that shuddered right through his skull.

He couldn't breathe.

It went on forever, dragging him through an endless St. Vitus dance that made steel rattle against concrete and agony roll through lead-weight muscles, then, so abruptly it was a new kind of violence, everything stopped. He collapsed in his chains, unable to brace against his own weight, and drew a sobbing breath through lips gone numb. His mouth was full of blood.

Fingers slid under his chin and tipped his head gently up.

"Enough?" said Sago.

Yes. Too much. Please--

He squeezed his eyes closed and listened to Genma count. Nine-hundred fifty-three. Focused on his voice, hearing the familiar cadence in the broken rasp they'd strangled into him. Nine-hundred fifty-two. Tried to remember it laughing, singing, cheering. Barking out orders and telling him he was brave. The bravest man Genma knew. Nine-hundred fifty-one.

Calloused fingertips settled against the hinges of his jaw, heavy palm braced beneath his chin. Inside his mouth, broken edges jarred together. He didn't hear himself groan.

"You just need to say it once," Sago murmured.

Nine-hundred fifty.

Raidou snapped his teeth together, welcomed the wave of roaring black that crashed over his head, and fell away from the world.

Genma's voice was the last thing he heard.

Sago's reaction was a stiff-backed shrug of his shoulders and a low mutter that Genma couldn't quite catch. The sparks died away on his tools, and he carefully put them away, moving slowly and deliberately. Making sure Genma got a good look at the implements. He didn't say a word, just held the metal rods up as if inspecting them for damage, before silently placing them in the chest.

Genma didn't let himself look at them. His eyes were fixed on Raidou's limp form. On the bloody saliva oozing from his lips. On the rise and fall of his chest, as if by watching, Genma could keep him breathing.

"I guess we'll just have to try harder next time," Weasel said. His hand found its way to Genma's neck again, gripping just shy of a choke hold. "You really must love watching him suffer. Selfish prick, aren't you?"

Genma gagged and tried to pull away, hitting cold concrete with a dull thump.

"We'll just leave you to think about how much better cooperation would be."

Greasy-hair lifted Raidou's head, checked his pulse. "He's really out," he said.

"Why else would I have stopped?" Sago asked, fixing the other ninja with a cold stare. "Send Yuuhito in to patch him. There's further work to be done on that one." He pulled a set of dogtags from his pocket and looked at them. "Shiranui." Looked at a second set of tags with their chain tangled with the first. "If Namiashi here dies too soon, we may as well give up on getting anything out of the partner."

The knot in Genma's gut went ice cold.

"Awww, you're scaring him, Sago," Weasel said. "Poor little thing's gonna piss himself if we're not careful."

In seconds, Sago's darkly stubbled face was inches from Genma's. He looked, then turned and walked out of the room without saying a word, leaving his chests.

Weasel gave Genma a knowing smile. "He likes you. Too bad for your friend." Greasy-hair, who'd lost interest in Raidou when Raidou stopped responding, pulled out a package of cigarettes , and leaned against the wall, smoking.

"I'll leave the lights on, so you can appreciate Sago-san's handiwork. Maybe you'll be ready to give us better answers when we come back," Weasel said. He gave Genma one final jaw-cracking squeeze. "Alright, plum blossom?"

Genma stayed resolutely mute. Watching Raidou. Watching the rise and fall of his chest. Bodhisattva Kanon, thank you for small mercies. It was much too frightening to consider what would come next.

Weasel grabbed Greasy-hair's arm and dragged him towards the door. "You heard the man, go get Yuuhito." The door slid shut behind them. The lights stayed on.

Genma watched Raidou's burns oozing clear fluid, watched the blood drip from his lips, and wept.