A/N:

On No-Good, Lazy Authors: It's alive...IT'S ALIVE! Somebody report this guy for necroposting, mods lock the thread.

On the Darkness of Chapters: If you've made it to this point in the story, there probably isn't anything in here that'll disturb you too much, but if you're squeamish I don't recommend reading it while eating.

Disclaimer: Love means never having to say you're Kishimoto.

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Chapter 18: Wave Function Collapse

I awoke to pain. I would explain, but there was too much. Instead, I will sum up. I had my injuries from the battle: a host of minor cuts and scrapes, torn muscles in my stomach, and two spots on my back that radiated heat and pain. In addition, both my arms and both my legs ached in a familiar way. Broken, I was pretty sure.

I kept my eyes closed and carefully regulated my breathing. I felt cold metal bands around my wrists, thighs, ankles and neck. My back was pressed against a hard, flat surface, meaning the band around my neck was probably a bar embedded in the wall. The others felt like shackles, with their chains were pulled tight, sharp edges biting into my skin. Where my fingers hung limply they touched a cold, hard, smooth surface, likely stone. Some sort of recessed alcove?

I felt terrible. Weak and in pain, it was hard to concentrate on anything. But I had to. I hurt, but I'd hurt before. Wallowing in pain or self-pity wasn't going to get me out of this situation.

I strained my ears for clues to my surroundings, channeling chakra into them to enhance my hearing. Or rather, I tried to, which was when I realized I was completely devoid of the spiritual energy. Or, well, technically not completely: If I were, I'd be dead.

I could still feel the chakra that suffused by blood, that kept me alive. What I meant was all of my free chakra, that which normally resided in my chakra coils and that I used to perform jutsu and fortify myself, was gone. Chakra draining seals. It had to be.

Fuck, this was bad. Whoever had captured me (presumably Gatō or his agents), they were prepared for holding ninja captives. Between the seals and the broken limbs, escaping these shackles was going to be difficult, even leaving aside any guards who might be watching.

I needed to think. If I could—

"As entertaining as it is to watch you slowly realize the hopelessness of your situation while trying not to react, I am a busy man," said a nasal voice.

I opened my eyes and found myself looking at a squat, thick-faced man with frizzy hair and small, round sunglasses.

Gatō.

The crime boss was standing a few feet away from me, next to a tray of sharpened implements with which I was intimately familiar. So that's how it was going to be. An involuntary shudder went through me, causing my limbs to ache and my shackles to clank. The corners or Gatō's mouth turned up slightly. What a creep.

This would likely go one of two ways. I'd been tortured before, likely worse than anything this little (in all senses of the word) man could do to me. But had that experience inured me to the pain, or would this be all the worse, every cut evoking past torment? Had I been tempered, or made brittle? Had the scars healed back stronger, or were they still open wounds?

I guess we'd find out shortly.

Still, I might as well delay that time as long as I could.. It was—remotely—possible that my team had somehow escaped and was on their way to rescue me right now. And there was a possibility I could pick up some useful information.

"So you must be Gatō. Petty crime boss, idiot businessman, terrible dresser."

Putting him on the defensive was my best bet at both delaying and getting info. People often said more than they intended when attempting to refute attacks on their character. There were more subtle ways to go about it, but waking up from injury-induced unconsciousness to the threat of torture was not a recipe for quick thinking.

Instead of the expected outraged bluster, he began to chuckle. "Idiot businessman? That's a new one. Tell me, what aspect of my business is idiocy?"

Not the reaction I was going for, but whatever, he was still talking. Who knows? Maybe I could convince him of the stupidity of destroying Waves' economy and some good would come of this after all. Yeah, and maybe afterward I'll take on Akatsuki singlehandedly. Keep dreaming, Ami.

"Your approach to the Land of Waves shipping. You've hiked the prices up so high no one can profit there but you. Which sounds great for you, but is incredibly short-sighted. It's simple economics. A system has some amount of value, from which the actors in the system generate more value. Some of the generated value gets consumed by the actors, and some goes back into the system, causing it to grow. If factors or actors—in this case, you—consume more value than the system generates, it will shrink. If that persists for long enough, there won't be any value left, the actors will leave, and the system will be empty, with no way for you to profit off it. Yes, you're making lots of money from Wave now, but in a year there won't be anyone left for you to make money from."

"Well, that's rather obvious," he said with a lupine smile. "And also the actual purpose of this whole endeavor."

"What?" I asked, surprised.

"Tell me, do you know how many tourists used to travel to the Land of Waves every year? Hundreds, despite the lack of accommodations. Beautiful mangrove swamps, incredible biodiversity, the best fishing for hundreds of kilometers, pleasant climate. All that and it's isolated from the ninja hubbub that ruins so many of our nicest landmarks." He turned up his nose slightly. "Or so my people tell me. I don't care at all about any of that. But I do care about the money people would be willing to spend to stay in such a place if it had the proper amenities.

"But the villagers refused to leave. You should've heard them go on an on. 'This is our home,' they said, 'we've lived here for generations', they said." His smile widened. "So whiny. Frankly, they pissed me off. So I figured why not rob them for everything they have, and then once they're too poor to live here anymore, take their land. The island's a little too big for a smash and grab, but that's the beautiful thing about a monopoly: There's nothing they can do except give me all their money or leave."

His smile disappeared, replaced by a scowl. "Except build a bridge." He shook his head slowly as his smile returned. "But that'll be dealt with shortly. Do you want to hear what the best part is? In a year or two I'll be building a bridge just like this one. Might even use the foundation they've built. Wouldn't want all that hard work to go to waste, would we?"

As he talked I fought down the disgust and hate that rose within me. He spoke so casually of the destruction of an entire (albeit small) nation. I knew that some of what he done was over the corpses of those who tried to stop him. He was clearly somewhere on the anti-social personality disorder spectrum: castigation or attempts to appeal to his morality would be pointless. His rapid mood swings also implied some emotional instability. Which meant I needed to be calm and focused.

His plan was more cunning than I'd given him credit for. He hadn't given much much info I could actually do anything with yet, but at least he was talking.

"I guess you're smarter than you look, not that that means much," I said.

His smile flattened into a thin-lipped line. Shit. I'd meant to say that as a compliment, but my anger snuck in t the last second and changed my phrasing.

"And you're exactly as smart as you look," he said, slowly moving his eyes up and down to take in my soiled bodysuit. I shuddered and wished desperately that I had my cloak to cover myself, but it lay in a pile a few feet away. "I was going to spend some more time explaining to you how our organization works and what your part in it will be,"—my eyebrows rose at that—"but since you're being an ungrateful bitch we'll skip straight to the fun part."

He noticed my incredulity and laughed. "Oh yes, you will be a productive employee soon enough. Konoha will pay a premium to have your teammates returned, but your value lies elsewhere. Seals truly are wondrous things, aren't they?" He reached out and ran his hand along some of the seals inscribed on the outside of my cloak. I tried to activate the knock-out tag as he touched it, but I lacked even the shred of chakra necessary to do that.

He gave a small shudder. "Oh there's that look I love so much. Impotent rage, is there anything sweeter?"

"I will never work for you." I said, and spat as much saliva as I could muster at his face. Not the wisest of moves, but I was frustrated, tired, angry and scared. I was ever one to push for the smallest opportunity, seeking to turn every situation to create any advantage, but even I had my limits.

The band around my neck restrained my movement and my impromptu projectile missed by several inches. He looked at me with a condescending smirk. He reached for the implements at his side and spoke.

"Everybody breaks."

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I will once again spare you the gory specifics. The frequency with which I have to do that while recounting the story of my life is somewhat disheartening.

The first few moments were the hardest. That was when I was still unsure of how I was going to handle being tortured again, and the fear of my psyche shattering ended up being almost worse than the pain itself.

In fact, the pain wasn't bad at all. Oh, it was mind-numbing and all-consuming, but I experienced worse in my dreams several nights a week. The horror at what was being done to my body was worse. For all that my time in Tsukiyomi had been unbelievably painful, I had known that none of what was being done to me was actually happening to my body. This time I did not have that luxury. The sense of violation, and the fear of being crippled, is difficult to describe to anyone who hasn't experienced it, but it was highly unpleasant, to put it lightly.

But, unlike last time, there was something I could do to mitigate it. As my pain and discomfort mounted, I sent my awareness away from its usual spot between my ears. I let it drift inward, down into my chakra system. Empty though it was, I could still feel and follow along the chakra that suffused my blood. While doing this I was still aware of my body, could feel the sharp pains, hear the sound of dripping and excited breathing, could still smell the blood, but my senses were muted. Distant. It made it feel more like a dream, where I was quite at home.

As my consciousness drifted along my bloodstream, following the swirls of chakra, I noticed I could still sense my blood after it left me. The chakra within dissipated, but it was a slow process, a matter of hours not seconds. The largest grouping of chakra-infused blood was under my left hand. Blood ran down my arm and dripped from my fingers, creating erratic patterns on the stone below as I shifted under Gatō's no-so-tender ministrations.

A small flicker of hope ignited in my chest as I sent my awareness into the blood. Yes, this could work. It would be incredibly difficult, and even if it worked I would be left in a fairly unfortunate situation, but it was worth a try.

My twitches of pain became more directed, the fingers of my left hand making a hundred small movements to draw lines in the blood. It was crude and slow, but order slowly emerged from the random splatterings.

As I worked I held the shape I wanted in my mind, willing the blood to flow that way. The chakra that suffused it, though divorced from my body and not in the form I normally used, should still respond to my will. And it did, somewhat. There was no overt movement, no sudden rearranging, but there were small nudges. Every time a drop could've flowed either way, based on the vagaries of a thousand tiny physical factors, it followed the pattern I'd laid out in my mind.

Slowly, a form took shape. It was rough, messy and uneven, but it should work. And not a moment too soon; all the movements had made my broken arm begin to ache almost unbearably. I settled down to muster my strength and wait for the proper moment.

An eternity later my torturer returned to working on my left arm. He leaned in, focused on his work, which left his head positioned just over my hand. This was my time to strike. I pulled my hand to the side and activated the ramshackle seal I'd constructed.

It was, on the scale of ninja, a slow, clumsy attack. Between the broken arm and the shackle, my hand took significant fractions of a second to get out of the way. The activation was delayed as well, my thoughts sluggish, my will blunt. Any genin could've dodged it, and probably even some academy students.

But Gatō was not even that. He was a portly, elderly man, who felt safe in his place of power. And when confronted with something he didn't understand, he leaned in even closer to get a better look.

A plane of concussive force shot upwards, hitting him square in the forehead. I let out a barely forced scream of pain in an attempt to cover the noise, but I still clearly heard his neck snap as his head shot backwards. His knees crumpled and he—or rather, his corpse—fell to the ground.

There were several moments of tense silence wherein I waited to see if anyone had heard the commotion. If anyone did, I was finished; shackled, injured and out of chakra, a small child could've taken me.

No one came and I sagged back into the wall, letting out a haggard breath I hadn't realized I was holding. As I relaxed I felt a familiar, comforting darkness reaching for me, but I pushed it back. Promises to keep and miles to go and all that.

I took stock of my situation. The seal's explosion had clipped my hand, but a brief examination found it and my wrist merely bruised, not broken. If the seal had worked properly there would've been no force at all out to the sides, just a vertical disk straight up, but defects were to be expected when working that coarsely.

All told, I was broken and bleeding, but not yet defeated.

I could get out of here, but first I would need the use of my chakra. I could see the chakra draining seal, etched into the floor a few feet away. I pondered it briefly before biting deeply into my lower lip. I curled it back into my mouth as it started to bleed; I had to make sure I didn't lose a drop of precious blood. After a few second I re-evaluated. It was bleeding, but not fast enough. I bit it again, harder this time. That was better.

Once my mouth was full with chakra-infused liquid I took careful aim and spat. Most of the blood landed on the seal, but not in any vital places. That would cause it to fail eventually, but I needed total failure, right now.

I let out a brief scream of pain and frustration before sucking my lip back in to try again. Normally, splashing liquid onto an etched seal would have very little effect, but the chakra in my blood meant it could interact with the chakra flowing through the seal.

I took even more careful aim, and was rewarded as some of the blood joined two disparate parts together. A critical part of the seal was essentially short-circuited, and I felt chakra begin to slowly return to me.

I settled in for an uncomfortable wait until I had enough chakra to escape my bonds. I tried not to dwell on the fact that, for the first time in my life, I had killed someone. It turned out to be surprisingly easy, undoubtedly because of the monstrosity of that someone. To distract myself, I considered my options. The first possibility that had occurred to me was to simply henge into someone smaller than myself and slip out of the restraints.

My injuries made that impractical. It was possible to henge while injured; there were some ninja who did it semi-regularly as a means of traveling while wounded. However, it was very difficult to pull off, and it made the henge extremely delicate. I shuddered to think about what would happen if I lost my hold on the henge while pulling a part of me through a shackle that was smaller than it.

No, substitution was a better option. Gatō was much rounder than me, but was still not all that tall. He weighed at most two and a half times what I did. That was on the upper end for an object with which I was capable of performing the kawarimi, but time was no factor here. Well, it was a factor, but compared to a ninja fight (which was where the speed of jutsu like this was usually judged) I had eons.

I began as soon as I had the minimum amount of chakra. It would've been easier to wait until I had some to spare, but I was agonizingly aware of every passing second. The longer I waited, the higher the chance that someone would come check on things. Besides, my grip on consciousness grew more and more tenuous with every breath I took. Speed was of the essence.

I couldn't bring my hands together to form the seals, but for academy jutsu I could just barely get away with one-handed seals. I finished the last one, painstakingly formed, and, in a puff of smoke, switched places with the man I'd killed.

I let out a scream as my weight came down on my broken legs, falling forward and trying not to land on my broken arms. I mostly succeeded, twisting around into my back, and lay there for a few seconds to catch my breath.

The relief at my freedom was overwhelming, but I couldn't relax just yet. With my legs as broken as they were, I definitely wouldn't be able to walk. Luckily, my arms were broken below the elbow (that I would consider that lucky said a lot about my life), so I could push myself along the ground on my back without too much pain.

I shuffled over to my cloak and reached into its storage seals to pull out my backup speed seal. I doubted would actually be able to use it to any effect in my current state, but its familiar presence on my wrists and forehead was comforting.

I also pulled out my grand, untested project. If ever there were a time to try it, this was it. I reverently set the large scroll down on the ground, taking in the complicated patterns which covered the entire page. Taking a deep breath, I channeled a trickle of chakra into it.

5 seconds and nothing happened.

10 seconds and nothing happened.

Fuck. I bit back a sob of frustration. That would've made this whole thing so much easier. I put the scroll back in my cloak and draped the heavy garment over my front so it wouldn't get in the way of my backwards crawl. Preparations done, I activated the silence seal sewn into my cloak and made my slow way over to the exit. The room was fairly large, and I cursed every foot of it as I crawled.

After the longest twenty foot trip of my life I arrived at the door. Once the edge of the sphere circumscribed by my silence seal passed the door I began moving as quietly as I could. This slowed my agonizing crawl to a glacial creep. As I did, I channeled chakra into my ears, hoping to discern whether or not there were guards posted outside.

"—you sure? I haven't heard anything that sounds like him for a while now," a muffled voice reached me, presumably as the ten-foot sphere of my seal encompassed his mouth. I tried to be even quieter, but pressed onward; I needed to hear the reply.

"—ant to be the one who disturbs him to check? I certainly don't. You know how he gets when people interrupt his 'me time'," a second voice said.

"But he gets even more mad when we don't check out possible security breaches. Remember what happened to Jin?"

I reached the door and began pulling my strongest explosive seals out of my cloak. I was sorely tempted to rush, but I forced myself to be slow and silent. I didn't like where this conversation was going, but there was still only a chance they would check before it was too late. Any noise I made now would make that a certainty. I cursed the destruction of the silence seal on my body suit. Its radius was much smaller than the one in my cloak and would've let me do this without worrying about noise, but one of the tears in my suit went right through it.

"I try not to." The second speaker took a long breath. "But I guess you're right, not checking is riskier." There was a beat of silence. "After you."

I started to hurry as much as I could, affixing the seals to the door and the surrounding walls. I wished I'd thought to make more shaped charges, but I hadn't thought I'd need any for this mission so I only had a couple. That wouldn't be enough for what I needed here, so I would have to rely on overwhelming force.

Grumbling reached my ears followed by the sound of shifting weight, a footstep and a doorknob turning.

I activated my speed seal and scrambled frantically to stick the last of the explosive seals, all thoughts of stealth forgotten.

There would be no time for me to get out of the blast radius. Thinking quickly, I reached back into my cloak to pull out a pair of barrier seals. The weight of the seals, trivial though it was, amplified by the speed seal hurt my broken arms abominably. I pushed through the pain and threw them hurriedly to the ground between me and the wall.

The door began to open, ever so slowly. I turned my back on the impending explosion and activated the barrier. The speed seal ran out and, offering a prayer to every god old and new, I activated the explosives.

With a deafening crash the wall disappeared in a bloom of fire and force.

The barrier absorbed the worst of it, but after a split second I felt it fail. There was a flash of heat on my back and I was picked up and thrown, rolling to a stop a few feet away. I let out yet another scream of pain as my broken bones and lacerations erupted in agony. I lay there a few seconds, wondering if there was a point where my body would simply give out and stop listening to me. I frankly wouldn't blame it all that much if it tried to mutiny: I certainly wasn't doing a good job of taking care of it.

If I'd had more time there were a million better ways I could've handled that. But I didn't. And I still don't, I thought with a groan. I pushed myself up onto one elbow and surveyed my handiwork.

The door was completely gone. So were the walls for five feet on either side. Beyond lay a pile stone chunks, wood splinters and gobbets of flesh. I pushed down my rising gorge. No time for that either. I tried to get my other elbow under me to get moving, but my left arm wasn't responding to my commands. A quick glance revealed a shoulder that I fervently hoped was only dislocated.

I let out a hollow laugh. Sure, why not? What was one more injury, one more constraint, at this point?

Peering at the rubble I selected a rock that looked like it weighed about what I did and ran through the substitution seals with my right hand.

The rocks dug into my back as I landed in a puff of smoke, but compared to the rest of my pains it was a gentle caress. I looked around and found myself in a dark corridor. On one side was a bend in the hallway, on the other two doors much like the one I'd just destroyed.

At this point my plan was simply to try to free one of my teammates and hope that they were in better shape than I was (hard for them not to be). One of them was behind that next door. I had to believe that.

Wriggling onto my back, I tried to push myself along with my right elbow, pretty much the last uninjured part of me, but it just slid along the smooth floor. I blinked in disbelief. Surely after all that I wouldn't be stopped by an inability to move myself ten feet because the floor was too slippery?

Pull yourself together, Ami. Are you a ninja or aren't you? I reached with my elbow again, this time using chakra to stick it to the floor. After a bit of movement I dropped a pair of barrier seals behind me, blocking off the corridor. I pressed onward, moving six inches at a time, until finally I was before the door. I could hear shouting in the distance, so I dropped another pair of barriers on the other side of the door. Those wouldn't stop normal thugs for all that long, and would barely stop a ninja at all, but it would probably buy me more time than my body had anyway.

Dipping my finger in the blood that was still oozing out of one of the cuts on my chest, I sketched a quick vision amplifying seal at the foot of the door. It was a simple seal, requiring little modification or precision, or I wouldn't have been able to do it. Looking into it showed me what was on the other side of the door. It was distorted and small, but I could still clearly make out one of Gatō's thugs clutching his spear in a white-knuckled grip. Behind him was…Kakashi, thank Kami. The jonin appeared to be held in a setup similar to what mine had been.

The guardsman stood just beyond the door, spear raised to instantly stab whoever tried to come through. Poor fool. If he'd been standing further back he would've been a real issue for me.

Reaching into my cloak for what I hoped would be the last time today, I pulled out the two shaped explosive seals. I reached up and attached them to the center of the door with bonds of chakra before sinking back to the floor and blowing them.

The middle section of the door shot inward, deadly splinters turning the thug into a pincushion. He absorbed most of the shrapnel, but one sliver made it past him and embedded itself in Kakashi's arm.

I pushed through the remnants of the door and began to crawl towards the chakra-draining seal on the floor. Blackness was intruding on the edges of my vision. Kakashi said something, but I was beyond hearing. The entirety of my existence was reduced to me, the floor and the seal.

Arm out, chakra, pull. Arm out, chakra, pull.

10 feet.

5 feet.

1 foot.

My strength gave out. I flopped my arm outward, aiming for the seal. As it hit the ground pain shot up from my broken forearm and the world began to fade. I sent one last pulse of chakra out through my palm, hoping desperately that I'd managed to land it on the right part of the seal, before surrendering to blissful unconsciousness.

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As always, please leave a review if you have the time. I have been very busy lately and will quite likely continue to be busy for the near future, and reviews are a major motivator. Also please let me know about any typos/mistakes/inconsistencies you find so I can correct them.

I swear I don't actually like torturing my characters. Figuratively, yes, who doesn't, but not literally. It just keeps coming up in this darn story.

Anti-social personality disorder is the name the DSM uses for psychopathy/sociopathy and the surrounding disorders.

The whole chakra-in-blood thing might seem like a bit of a stretch, but they do talk in the manga about how if you run out of chakra you die, which implies that there is some amount of chakra in your body all the time that is devoted to keeping it alive, and doesn't it seem right that that chakra would be in the blood? It does to me, thus chapter.

Am I too attached to having things go from bad to worse? Possibly.

Am I too attached to rhetorical questions? No! Because I answer the questions myself, the technique I am overly attached to is technically hypophora.

The next chapter will come out some time after I'm done writing it.