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The interrogation room was a small box with a ceiling that was too low and lights too bright. The plaster was flaking in places where the damp was peeking out, along with speckles of black mould.
Aburame Shigeki sat in a chair in front of a scarred, grimy wooden table bolted to the floor, facing the heavy door that was bound and studded with iron. It was his second day in ANBU custody. Since the first attempt to get a confession, no one had talked to him. He was transferred to a cell where he was unable to sleep for, by his estimate, six hours before he was shoved back into the interrogation cell.
The door opened, and two masked ANBU stepped into the room. One of them held a tray with a syringe loaded with a wine-dark compound. The spike of panic urged him to bolt, but his bindings rooted him in the chair regardless of how he thrashed. The day spent waiting, hoping for the sedated haze to rouse to no avail, had been among the worst of his life. They didn't ask questions or demand a confession. The medic simply stepped forward, gripped Shigeki by the jaw, and drove the needle directly into the side of his neck. He gasped, his eyes going wide and red. In a couple of hours, the few insects that had begun to sluggishly crawl around, fighting off the weakening effects, providing him with the comfort of their faint vibration, would once again fall into the chemically induced coma. The panic in his chest turned to ice as the dread of being alone settled into his bones.
He wanted to glare the masks to death, spew profanities, and scream at them, but did the opposite and sat there with clenched and shaking fists. That's what they wanted from him: to lose himself to anger, to get him to start speaking, so they could then trick him into talking, possibly leaking information. He wasn't going to give them the satisfaction.
They left him alone, and though he welcomed it because the situation could be much worse, he found it infuriating as well. Why hold him—presumably fight the clan for prolonged custody—only to not do anything? Enduring the silence of his hive and staying silent through his rage would at least feel worth it if they tried something, but instead, they were tormenting him without reason.
The only silver lining was that they unchained him so he could at the very least stretch his legs.
Shigeki felt sick from his core as he felt the injection take effect and unwillingly resigned himself to another day where he would be as close as he could to his hives and yet so alone as they drifted off to slumber.
It started subtly. He didn't realise it at first, but he looked up at the tube light and realised the persistent hum of the electric light was missing; he wondered if they had replaced it, but the white paint on the edge of the tube, possibly left behind during a sloppy paint job, was still there. A couple of minutes later, he was tapping his finger against the table when he noticed how the click of his nail against the wood vanished before it could spread. The squeak of his chair didn't sound as scratchy as it did the day before.
Something was wrong. He could feel it.
Shigeki straightened up, focusing himself to spot what had to be some trick by ANBU, but nothing seemed to have been changed. At least, not anything he could spot.
He cleared his throat, only to have the room swallow the sound before it could reach his own ears. 'Ha,' he shouted, but the sound seemed to vanish into nothingness.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
It was wet, heavy, carried with it a fainter whoosh with each percussive beat, and more importantly, it was coming from within him. Shigeki gasped when he realised that he was hearing his heart. Before he could wrap his mind around that, he heard another sound. A scraping wheeze filled his skull. It felt more sickening, and it took him more time to identify because he had heard the sound of his heartbeat, but he never thought he would hear his lungs expanding and contracting, the friction of tissue rubbing against tissue. He could hear it all: the wetness of his saliva, the clicking of his teeth, the sound of blood rushing through his ears.
The Aburame elder sat frozen in his chair, his eyes darting around the room. He couldn't hear the world, so his ears were picking up the sounds of the naked machinery of his body. It revealed a basic truth about himself: he was nothing more than a sack of blood and fluid, all of which gurgled in the dark.
However, none of that could compare to the harrowing realisation that he could feel better than ever the movement of his hives, or the absence of it, in his body.
They were so still they might as well be dead.
It was horrifying, but Shigeki couldn't let it bother him. Whatever was happening, it was ANBU's doing. He was a proud Aburame shinobi; It would take more than this to break him down. And yet, the sound of his heart—no longer even and calm—said otherwise.
Shigeki didn't know how much time had passed, but he could no longer stay still because in the absence of sound, he could taste the thoughts he didn't know he had. Most of them were dominated by fear, regret, and doubt; some threatened to drag him to the dark corners of his consciousness that had been festering for decades.
He couldn't take it anymore and stood up, thinking that maybe pacing around the room would do him some good, only for vertigo to shake the room like it was on a ship sailing through a storm. Without the ambient sound in his ears to anchor his equilibrium, Shigeki gripped the edges of the wooden table, his knuckles turning white, before inevitably falling into his chair that leaned back dangerously, almost tipping over.
That was only the start of the nightmare.
Over what Shigeki felt was the next hour, he shouted until his throat was raw, clapped until his skin stung, stomped on the floor until his legs ached, banged on the iron door, and ruffled his clothes, and yet, the room devoured all sound, no matter how loud, like a hungry beast. Any comfort disappeared within seconds as he couldn't fill what lacked a bottom.
He looked down and pulled the sleeve of his rough prisoner garb up to reveal his bare skin. He felt frantic, crawling itches beneath his skin. He even felt his chakra move as it would before he was arrested. He felt the familiar vibrations that had accompanied him from before he could remember. For a moment, just a moment, Shigeki eased into his chair with his entire body relaxing into a comfortable puddle. He felt he could drift off to sleep—that would be good; he hadn't slept last night—and his eyelids closed over, only for his eyes to snap open in horror when he realised that, despite all of the familiar sensations, he couldn't hear his hive.
And instantly, all the sensations were wrong. Wrong! WRONG! EVERYTHING WAS WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!
Then, the iron door opened.
The effect was instantaneous and euphoric. The bubble of silence popped, and the ambient noise of the subterranean hallway rushed in. The hum of the light. The scuff of boots. The messy but oh-so-glorious reality of the world. He was whole again. He was safe. The wrongness disappeared, though it left behind a phantom sensation and reminded him of the real state of his hive, dampening the euphoria of normalcy.
A blank-masked ANBU stepped into the room and put a tray of food on the table before wordlessly retreating out of the room and closing the door.
Shigeki sat there on edge as though he was in battle instead of an isolated interrogation room. He didn't touch the food, and his entire body was strung like a bow, ready for what had happened to repeat. Even when the food went cold and nothing happened for the next few hours, he didn't move an inch from his chair—only after he was pulled out of the room at the end of the day and moved to his cell did he relax because he was so tired that, despite his intention to stay alert, he drifted off.
If it had been a one-time occurrence, Shigeki might have recovered his dignity. He would've rebuilt himself and found his confidence.
Alas, it was only the first cycle.
On the fourth day of his capture, it was on pure instinct that Shigeki rushed towards the door while the staff exited after delivering the food. After the second and third day, he couldn't bear to be left alone in the room and go through that all over again. His hand extended towards the ANBU staff, intending to hold the man hostage to get out. However, before he could reach, the staff member was abruptly pulled out by a masked kunoichi who kicked Shigeki back into the room and then shut the door.
"No! NO! Let me out!" Shigeki screamed and banged on the door, but no one answered him for hours as he sat there in normalcy that now seemed so fragile because it could be taken away in an instant.
In the morning, as the chemical suppressants ran their course, Shigeki felt a warmth he craved from his hive rousing. Just for a short duration, he could breathe, remember his identity as an Aburame, and rekindle his hope of escaping custody as he would be transferred from his cell, where he slept, to hell.
And then the heavy iron door would creak open.
The medic. The needle. The hours of silent hell. Then, the fear that normalcy would shatter.
On the fifth day, Shigeki felt stretched thin. He sat slumped in his chair with a vacant look on his face. His forearms were covered in bandages because he had dragged his fingernails across his arms until he broke the skin and had to be healed.
He did not fear the ANBU. He did not fear the Hokage. He feared the silence. He felt terror at the thought of being left alone with his thoughts. He did not want to hear the sounds of his body, the wet thump of his heart. He despaired at experiencing things that weren't there, or maybe they really did exist, and everything else was a lie. He missed the feeling of a hive thriving within his body.
Whereas the clan? Why hadn't they gotten him out? Did they not care? He hated them. He had been betrayed even though he had done so much for them.
As the iron door screamed open and the masked medic stepped inside, Shigeki began to weep because it was about to start all over again. He didn't even notice that instead of struggling, he braced himself against the chair and his muscles locked at the sight of the needle.
As the two hours of calm before the silence came to an end, his chest heaved, his eyes wide and bloodshot, bracing despite not being ready for what he knew was coming.
Instead, the iron door swung open.
The badger-masked ANBU who Shigeki hadn't seen since the first day sat down across the table from him. He set down a stack of documents before him that hissed and crackled; the new sound felt heavenly to his ears. The operative also brought along a large tape recorder in the middle of the table.
It was the tools necessary for a confession.
"Are you ready to talk, Tokujō Shigeki?"
———
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"It worked." Ratel's subordinate flipped through the pages filled with her boss' utilitarian handwriting. Half of it had been crossed out by Shigeki, who had made changes before signing the confession.
"Not well enough," Ratel replied, sounding dissatisfied even though they weren't expecting to get anything out of Aburame Shigeki.
"He was unexpectedly tough," she said.
Ratel looked through the empty interrogation room. "He was. If only we had more time," he said. Shigeki had been released from ANBU custody as the higher-ups could no longer hold back the Aburame clan's influence. Of course, the cards had fallen according to plan. The Aburame clan had prioritised Shigeki's release, leading ANBU to retain custody of Shigeki's subordinates who had helped him spin his scheme.
"Boss, if you don't mind. What was that genjutsu?" Ratel's subordinate had been in the observation room attached to the cell for the past few days and thus had watched Ratel cast a genjutsu over Shigeki.
Unlike combat genjutsu, which were often held back by practical restrictions like time and danger, genjutsu for interrogations could be cast in peace and safety over a long period to make them stronger and more potent. Ratel had spent hours every day applying genjutsu on Shigeki to the point that it had worked over multiple days, even though the Aburame had begun to expect the abnormality but still fell under the genjutsu's thrall.
"It was silence," Ratel replied.
"Silence?"
"Osprey told me that during interrogations, Aburame Resa asked not to be injected with the serum because he hated the silence," Ratel said while organising the interrogation paperwork, notes, and confession documents. "It made sense that the Aburame who had never been alone in their own bodies would dislike silence. So, I decided to test that out on Shigeki."
She blinked because she definitely thought it was a genjutsu that he already knew, but from Ratel's words, it seemed that he constructed the genjutsu specifically for Shigeki and had done it in a day because Osprey had only returned to the village one day before the arrests.
"From the looks of it, they really do hate silence," she said.
"We'd need to submit it to the folks at R&D," Ratel said, sighing because that meant he would need to create a report, which meant more work.
"What else did you show him?"
"Nothing else."
"Nothing else?"
"I created something like an anechoic chamber. Do you know what that is?" Ratel asked when he noticed her expression of doubt. She shook her head. "In simple words, it's a place that deadens sound. Even in a quiet place, your ear is always picking up ambient sound from your surroundings. What I did was make it so that Shigeki didn't pick up any sound. It'd be unsettling for normal people, but for Aburame, who were already unsettled when we put their hives to sleep, true silence would be a different level of terrifying. And once his brain was starved for stimulation for too long, it began to fabricate it, leading to hallucinations. And he must have repressed a lot of stuff because it seemed like he really saw messed-up stuff.
"Good for us, really," he chuckled.
"You really didn't show him anything else?" she asked, still unconvinced.
"I didn't need to." Ratel turned to her and asked, "Do you want to try it? I can cast it on you. It's not bad, actually. You can relax, maybe even meditate, and it can be very calming."
"… I'll pass on that."
Though she hadn't been subjected to the genjutsu, she had seen Shigeki enough never to want to be under Ratel's genjutsu.
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