“But real brainwashing? Well, keep someone helpless for a few days and you can do enough pleasure/pain conditioning to count, assuming you’ve got a strong enough stomach for that. But that’s almost impossible to arrange, and any other approach does so much damage the victim ends up a zombie. Hey, what’s wrong?”
I was thinking about Ino betraying her own clan after an afternoon in my arms. Maybe it was a good thing I’d done that on a short loop.
“Anko-sense?” I asked quietly. “How do I have a relationship with a normal person? Without making them end up addicted or brainwashed or something?”
“Like I said, you’d be better off if you weren’t so good at this. Pick strong-willed ninja, teach them the resistance techniques early and don’t get too carried away. Assuming you can find anyone who’ll even take the chance.”
Yes, I was exploring all sorts of new frontiers. Between the anonymity of the loops and my alter-ego’s constant encouragement I experimented with a lot of things I’d never had the courage to think about before, and most of my old insecurities were gradually left behind.
I spent several long loops as Anko’s apprentice, just to see what life was like for a known seductress assassin. No, it wasn’t pretty. Neither was the loop where Ino and I publicly admitted our relationship, although it could have been worse. At least her clan was liberal enough to take me in when my parents disowned me for being a lesbian.
After that experience I actually went back to boys for awhile. But Kiba was only interested in getting into my pants, and he was so easy to manipulate it got boring fast. Sasuke was as cold to me as ever, and Shikimaru somehow picked up on my new skills and avoided me like the plague. That didn’t leave many options unless I wanted to make a play for an older man.
No, I’m not going to talk about the Jiraiya incident. I was disguised as a nineteen-year-old chuunin, and there was a lot of sake and a complicated plot to get him to teach me seals involved, and that’s all I’m going to say about it. Except, my god, that technique had to be S-rank. One minute I was artfully wrapping him around my finger, and the next I was eagerly helping him take my panties off. Not only did I never even get a chance to resist, I was actually happy that he’d turned the tables on me!
But that’s all I’m going to say about it. If Naruto ever asks why I’m so respectful towards the old goat, I’ll just have to make up an excuse.
I was finally reaching the limits of what I could con Tsunade into teaching me when a hope I’d nurtured for years now finally materialized. It was the start of the loop, just after the written exam in fact, and I’d been going through the motions on autopilot while working on other things. I’d decided to spend a few loops doing jutsu research, and I was trying to decide which of my long list of ideas I’d work on first.
But instead of heading off to train on his own like he usually did Sasuke hung back while the room emptied, and came over to my desk.
“Sakura.”
I looked up into a pair of Sharingan eyes. Not the two-tomoe Sharingan he’d gained before the loop, but the black pinwheel of the Mangekyo Sharingan.
4. Broken
Disclaimer: I don’t own Naruto.
The room was gone. I was naked, tied to a rough wooden cross in a barren field with a crimson moon overhead. What the hell?
Oh, shit. I’d read about this technique in the ANBU archives.
“Sasuke, wait! I’m in the loop too!” I called frantically. “If you do this I’ll remember it.”
“I’m counting on it.” He materialized right behind me, and whispered his reply into my ear. I would have flinched, but I discovered to my horror that I couldn’t move.
“Um, Sasuke, I know I must have been kind of an annoying fangirl when we were kids, but isn’t this a little much? I’m sorry, ok? I’ll even tell you how to make her stop.”
“Shut up, Sakura. I’ve listened to your useless babble for too many years. I’ve been waiting for this ever since I met the real Naruto, and you aren’t going to talk me out of it.”
Then he hurt me.
Intellectually I knew it wasn’t real. Hell, Sasuke probably wasn’t even controlling it in any detail. Genjutsu relies on the victim’s own subconscious for that kind of thing, and Tsukuyomi is supposed to involve a serious time dilation anyway. So what I was experiencing was probably just a combination of all of my own worst nightmares, with a few nudges here and there from the real Sasuke.
Knowing this didn’t make it any less painful when my hair crawled off my scalp and burrowed into my body like thousands of giant pink maggots.
When Anko talked about pleasure/pain conditioning I thought I knew what she meant. But I’d never considered the idea of such horrifyingly personal tortures. Tsukuyomi lets the user control every aspect of the victim’s senses, and Sasuke’s mastery of it was perfect. The old me would have broken instantly. With my years of experience and my training under Anko I might have lasted an hour.
He interrogated me with ruthless efficiency, forcing me to confess every secret thought and embarrassment of my old life with blinding agony as his goad and the mindless ecstasy of a drug addict for reward. When I was reduced to shuddering compliance he questioned me about the loops, what I’d learned and how I’d grown, until all my new secrets were his as well. Then he let me move again, and set about shaping me into something useful. He ordered me to do things, punishing me when I refused and sometimes even when I obeyed. I was aged to death in front of all my friends, flayed alive by a grinning Ino, methodically dissected by Tsunade and Shizune, elaborately bound and whipped to death by a manically-grinning Anko, until finally I obeyed every order without question.
Then he gave worse orders. Embarrassing things. Disgusting things. Things I’d rather die than do. I tried to escape, but there was nowhere to go. I called on my other self for strength and he broke her too, tearing down the fragile wall between us with blades of agony. Finally my last shred of resistance broke, and I stopped trying. Stopped even thinking, and just obeyed.
I’m not sure when the technique ended. The first time I found myself back in the exam room I made the mistake of trying to signal for help. The examiners pinned me to a desk and cut me open, extracting my bones one by one until there was nothing left of me but bloody strips of flesh. The next time I quietly followed Master out the door and over to the training grounds, and was rewarded with a long stretch of mindless bliss. Eventually I stopped waking up in the exam room, and I was pretty sure I was back in the real world again.
Pretty sure. I’d gone whole hours without dying an agonizing death by then, so I wasn’t going to take any chances. It wasn’t until we entered the Forest of Death that I was sure I was back in the real world, and even then I knew he could plunge me back into that nightmare with a glance. I kept my mouth shut and did as I was told.
A few hours into the forest Naruto went off on his usual bathroom break, and Master gave me an appraising look.
“How’s the conditioning holding, Sakura? Any resistance left?”
“No sir. I’ll shut up and do as I’m told, sir.” I shivered. God, please let him be satisfied.
I met his gaze as he’d ordered me to, and he held my eye for a long moment. “Good. You’re still lazy and useless, but by the end of this loop you won’t be. I’ll teach you to work hard, and you’ll spend the loops until we meet again training to help me kill that man.”