Gentle rocking, dark nothingness. Stabs of pain from my ankles, my wrists, and behind my eyes. A sick, roiling sensation in my stomach. I tried to cling to wakefulness, but it was no use—I dropped back into unconsciousness.

Some time later—anywhere from a few minutes to a few days, I had no idea—I woke up more fully than before. My throat felt as dry as the desert, my body simultaneously chilled and sweating, feverish and uneasy. I reached for my chakra, instinctively tried to cycle some to sooth my aching body, but it responded only sluggishly. I tried to turn over, and that was when I realized that my hands and feet were bound securely behind my back. My eyes shot open, met by intense blackness, as deep as midnight on a moonless night.

Memories came back, then—exiting the theatre at the chuunin exams, being separated from everyone (classic isolation scenario, in hindsight), the cloying chemical smell of the cloth over my face, arms holding me immobile as I passed out. A headache throbbed in my scull, but I worked to ignore it. Obviously I needed to be as clear-minded as possible to ascertain every potential detail that could be of use to me.

I tested my bindings, but there was no give. My hands were twisted and secured back-to-back, my fingers bound without any freedom of movement. I tugged them up and my ankles twisted up, telling me that there was a rope securing them together to further prohibit movement. But my mouth and eyes were uncovered, so I there was clearly no threat of me making noise to attract the wrong kind of attention for my captors.

Ah. A power play.

I was tied up, but they—whoever they were, and I had a few suspicions—were in a position of enough strength that I couldn't accomplish anything by yelling. Waking up bound, with no freedom of movement, in a secure environment, with no hope of escape or rescue, could start to break quite a few shinobi before any sort of interrogation began.

Well. Quite a few shinobi who weren't Nara.

We were born to shadow, it was a part of our identity. Waking up in it was almost a comfort, compared to many alternatives.

I tried shaking off the effects of whatever drug I'd been given, to manipulate my chakra, but it was still sluggish in its response. I could pull it, even shape it a little, but trying to force it into a sharp edge or even emit any sort of light was beyond my abilities at this point.

The muscles in my arms and legs cramped from being strained out of position for so long. I tried to move, to return feeling to them, but doing so only sent jolts of pain from my wrists and ankles. I did my best to ease the burning in my muscles without cutting off circulation to my hands and feet, but there was little I could do.

The light tap, tap of footsteps broke the monotony of quiet solitude before long. The noise grew slowly until they stopped nearby, followed by the clink of keys and tumblers in a lock. Then, the door opened, letting in the first bit of light I'd seen since I'd woken up.

Silhouetted in the doorframe was a man, dressed in robes instead of ninja garb. I blinked my eyes against the light, trying to make out as much as I could. He was tall, his head only a little bit below the doorframe, and what I could see of his face was lined with wrinkles. I could feel his chakra, that of a higher-level ninja, and that plus his age meant that he was quite capable. And this was a face I'd seen before.

I used the opportunity to take a quick glance around my room. I was lying on a wooden floor, a little dusty but otherwise clean, the walls consisting of hard-packed dirt. There was no light fixture of any kind in the room, no shelves or bedding, nothing that pointed to this room being used for any other purpose aside from storage.

"Shikako Nara," his voice cut the silence. It was strong and rough, belying his apparent age. "Genin, Hidden Leaf, 13 years of age. 17 D-rank Missions, 7 C-Rank missions, 3 B-Rank missions, 8 A-Rank missions, 1 S-Rank mission. Daughter of the Jounin Commander and Head of the Nara Clan. Student of Hatake Kakashi. Teammate of Sasuke Uchiha and Uzumaki Naruto. Finished top amongst kunoichi in your graduation class. Aside from chuunin-level capabilities in clan techniques, sports a variety of Earth techniques, as well as developing capabilities manipulating other chakra natures. Possesses the Sword of the Thunder God, the notorious weapon of the Second Hokage. Most significantly, shows signs of growing skills in Fuinjutsu."

He stopped, having clearly gotten to the end of whatever dossier his people had been able to compile on me. Perhaps this was meant to unnerve and intimidate me, but most of that information was readily available or lightly guarded. I wasn't impressed.

I drew myself up so that I wasn't lying on the floor anymore, perched against the back wall. "Yeah, that's me. And you're Matsuo, Jounin of Hidden Cloud, head of the 'Bloodline Reclamation Project.' I've seen your bingo book page. It doesn't matter, though. Soon enough, you'll regret being a part of this."

He chuckled at my show of bravado, ignoring my knowledge of his identity. "That's the most common response I find when we make a new acquisition. Unsurprising, as your mission history shows. One doesn't survive at that age without some capabilities. But you're hardly the most threatening kunoichi we've had in these cells. But don't worry about that, you won't be here for long.

"They also threaten retribution from their clan, or village. But let me tell you this, girl—no single kunoichi has ever been enough to start a war over. Soon enough, you'll just be another part of the Reclamation Project."

I digested that information for a moment as he turned to leave, continuing on as he reached for the door. "I'm not threatening any retribution from my clan or village. Mark my words: I'll make you regret this myself. When I kill you, you'll live long enough to understand the mistake you've made here today."

He grinned, showing off straight white teeth glinting in the light of coming from the hallway. "That's a good one! I'll look forward to your reaction tomorrow when the retrieval team comes for you. I'll have to ask them to take the scenic route with you." He laughed, a hideously sinister cackle that made my blood boil.

It's not something people talk about, generally, being captured. We try not to think about the possibility, but it's just negligent to ignore the darkest aspects of shinobi life. Because it's easy to consider that you might die on a mission; shinobi die every day on missions. Sometimes you run into other ninja, sometimes you make a mistake, sometimes it's just your time, and there's not much you can do aside from train and become stronger.

But death is, most definitely, not the worst thing that could happen. Morino Ibiki showed us the painful results of his own job—scars and burns, evidence of the torture being captured could subject you to. We are taught, a little, how to resist torture, but there's only so much of that you can do without actually harming someone. And that's not even talking about the more base tortures many shinobi enjoy subjecting kunoichi to. And sometimes, if the culprit is a hidden village, a kunoichi from a clan could be a prize for the children she could bear.

It's a hard world we live in. I'd considered the possibility that I could be targeted, as the daughter of a clan head, but how do you really prepare yourself for the possibility? You train, and you grow stronger, and, if necessary, you fight to the death.

Or wait for your enemy to make a mistake. Which he did; he underestimated me.

I had been frisked me for weapons, removed anything I could possibly use to free myself, and drugged me so I couldn't use my chakra for any sort of technique. But I could feel my necklace still hanging around my neck. They'd probably performed a cursory check, but obviously hadn't realized what it could do. And I might not have fine control over my chakra, but I was strong enough that I could still manipulate it enough to feed it into the Gelel stone.

I kept feeding chakra into the stone, and felt my entire body growing insubstantial. Soon, I was shadow, leaving my bindings behind, my body gliding silently to the door. The door was solid, but there were artfully disguised vents to allow for airflow—clearly it wouldn't do for your prisoners to die before they could be bred.

I focused for a moment, and narrowed my entire body to fit it through the vent. It was a strange sensation, almost mind-warping, as I stretched myself out and crawled through the vent until I was entirely outside of the door.

If you were wondering how I could make it work…well, I was from a clan of shadow manipulators, and I was made of shadow. Do the math.

The hallway was almost entirely dark, dim emergency lighting being the only source of illumination, throwing the entire hallway into shadow. I was at the end of a hallway, where five other cells were situated, clearly unused and open. I was relieved, a little, because I couldn't leave someone behind, but I didn't know if I could get someone else out of here.

I glided through the hallway, until it ended at an intersection. The ground and ceiling were all packed dirt, telling me I was underground. There were doors here and there, into other secret rooms, a few of them occupied. I thought about it for a moment, and turned towards the closest door, sneaking in through the crack of space between the door and the ground.

And yeah, that felt even weirder. But I tried to ignore it.

The room I was in was some sort of storage space. There were boxes of documents, tools and weapons lining either wall. A man sat at a desk, facing away from me, concentrating on something in his hands. A familiar fwoosh told me that he was holding my lightsaber. Well, that just wouldn't do, would it?

He didn't even hear me as I sent a shadow stitch right through his heart. He jerked and gasped, then gurgled and slumped forward, dead. I ignored the feeling of a part of my body thrusting through another person and became corporeal again, grabbed my sword, then paused.

There were a lot of documents and weapons in this room. A potential goldmine of information. I grinned and grabbed a blank scroll from the man's desk; it would only take a few minutes to seal away all this stuff.

I slinked my way down another hallway, once again in shadow, taking a few seconds at each room I discovered to do a quick check for anything valuable. Mostly, I found personal rooms, or the occasional office; after my initial success, I replicated my process and came away with several rooms full of valuable Intel for T&I to go through. Most importantly, I think, a map of over a dozen facilities run by Hidden Cloud, which told me that I was in a small trade city on the border of Land of Lightning. That had been in a room with a woman who was at most a few years older than me. She died just as easy as the rest.

It might have bothered me, killing these people indiscriminately, but they were the enemy, and a party to what Hidden Cloud planned on using me for.

I felt no guilt.

I went through the entire underground compound, and aside from the few people I came across working in offices, it was empty. I took what looked valuable and left everything else. Soon, I found a staircase leading up to a trapdoor. My chakra sense told me no one was around the other side, but I took no chances and slipped my way through the cracks into a storage space filled with crates. The door was skillfully hidden under a false crate, wedged inside a long aisle of crates in some sort of warehouse. The warehouse was clearly a front for Hidden Cloud operations.

I stopped and focused on my senses, finding only a few people anywhere nearby. One stood out as being familiar—Matsuo, the head of this operation. Not someone I was willing to let go alive.

I snuck through the aisles, slinking over and through several warning traps designed to let Matsuo know if someone unexpected was around. I turned a corner and found an office, walled off from the rest of the building. The windows were opaque, showing only shadow through, but undoubtedly clear from the other side. One chakra signature shone bright as lightning from inside—Matsuo.

I wanted him dead. And I knew just how to do it.

I stood outside the Warehouse, hidden in the shadow (but not actually in shadow) of another building across the street, coaxing my chakra through my coils and working through the last dregs of the suppression drugs still in my system. I wasn't up to a hundred percent, maybe only about ninety, but it was good enough.

The nearly-full moon told me it was about two in the morning, three days after I'd been snatched from the chuunin exams. I had no idea what everyone else was doing. By this time, the exams would have been over, and I doubt Tsunade would have stuck around for any period of time. I wondered how my mom and dad were doing, what Shikamaru was thinking, Ino and Chouji and Sasuke, too. How they must be hurting at my disappearance. I thought about all of them, and what the rest of my life would have been like had Hidden Cloud succeeded in their plans.

I concentrated, and set off the explosive seals I'd taken the time to plant throughout the warehouse.

A giant, roaring fireball burst through the roof of the warehouse, sending splinters flying in all directions. The concussive force blew out windows throughout the area, although thankfully, I was the only one anywhere nearby. The fire might spread to nearby buildings, but no civilians would be harmed.

By rights, I should have fled the scene the moment I set off the explosions, but I wanted to make sure that Matsuo was dead. And, if I was honest, there was a certain degree of vindictive pleasure I wanted to take in destroying this place. Fire illuminated the smoke pouring through the shredded roof, and I ignored the itchiness in the back of my throat from the smoke in the air.

Then, finally, Matsuo tumbled through the broken doorway. His robes were burned and torn, blood dripping from the stump of his missing left arm. He staggered into the street, clutching at his bleeding appendage, swaying in place and falling to his knees.

I could feel his chakra, flickering as he tried to grasp it, telling me that he was surely going to die. I could have left it there, but…I didn't.

I stepped up to Matsuo, until I was only a few feet away. He looked up, his eyes bleary and unfocused, but I could tell he recognized me from the clenching of his jaw. Blood dripped sluggishly from a gash in his head down his face as he glared up at me.

"I told you that you'd regret it."

Then I took my lightsaber, and cut his fucking head off.