The sub-basements were markedly less sinister than Ryouma had expected. He had vague, drug-shattered memories of a cell in Kumogakure no Sato; much more unpleasant memories of a dark, airless hole in Suna, before they finally bought his ruse and opened negotiations with Konoha. Somehow he’d expected ANBU’s T&I facilities to be run along the same lines. Flickering lights, dripping pipes, cold concrete, a broken man laughing eerily, endlessly, in the cell next door…

Perhaps that was all down one level more. On this level there was drab beige carpet, thirty-year-old wallpaper, and a lingering scent of tobacco. Arakaki escorted him to an utterly ordinary-looking office, where a square-jawed woman in a blocky grey uniform was chain-smoking cheap cigarettes as she flipped through files.

“Where’s Shida?” Arakaki asked, without preliminaries.

“Lunch.” She was the first agent Ryouma had seen who didn’t stand to salute the Director of ANBU Operations, although she did tap her cigarette on the edge of the ash-tray. “He said you didn’t need him for this anyway.”

“I wanted to speak to him, but it can wait. Is Yamanaka ready?”

She pointed with her cigarette at a door in the back wall, between two neglected potted plants. “He’s just getting set up.”

Arakaki headed for the door, and the hallway beyond it. Ryouma trailed a little uneasily behind. This was the part he’d dreaded. Talking he could do; even the worst memories could be nailed down, re-framed, corralled by words into a context that made them bearable. But Konoha’s interrogation specialists didn’t always need to wait for their subject to talk. And where Ryouma couldn’t remember well enough to frame his experiences into words--where the genjutsu that had caught him was involved, and that first long nightmarish month in Kumogakure--they could open up his mind themselves, and sift through his memories to find anything that interested them.

It wasn’t rape if you consented, he told himself fiercely. And he wanted this, wanted to prove himself loyal, wanted to make something worthwhile out of his suffering. If his clouded memories could provide details that would give Konoha an edge over its old enemies and uneasy allies, his village was welcome to them.

He’d gone too far to turn back now, anyway.