They don't let me sleep.
Not because they're worried I'll run.
Because sleep is where your mind rearranges itself—where fear turns into thought, where thought turns into decisions. Root doesn't like decisions happening unsupervised.
The sealing ring hums under me, low and steady, like an insect trapped in glass. Every time I shift my weight, the script under the floor answers with a faint vibration. The air inside the circle is thicker than the air outside it, as if containment has a texture.
My chest seal keeps my breathing shallow.
Not enough to suffocate me. Enough to remind me that even oxygen is a privilege now.
I sit with my useless right hand in my lap, splint pressing my fingers straight, bandages damp with old blood. The burn under my wrist—where the suppression tag flared—doesn't fade. It's a deep ache, like the skin is trying to scar faster than it should.
And the tether—
Muted by their new regulation seal, but not gone.
Warm pressure sits behind my ribs like a palm held there for too long. Under it, cold depth stirs with patient satisfaction. Not constant laughter anymore—something quieter, more deliberate.
Like it's learned I can be used as a listening hole.
The charcoal board lies in front of me with the word **MINE** stamped in ugly letters.
I avoid looking at it.
Not because I'm ashamed.
Because looking at it makes the tether pulse, as if the thing behind Naruto's seal likes seeing its claim written down.
The door opens.
Two Root operatives enter without announcing themselves. Their faces are plain and forgettable and their footsteps are soft enough to make the room feel like it's filling with shadows rather than people.
Between them walks a third person.
Not plain.
Not empty.
He has the kind of calm that comes from knowing how to step into someone else's skull and rearrange furniture.
Yamanaka.
His hair is tied back tightly. His eyes are pale and focused, not unkind but not warm either—eyes trained to treat minds like terrain. He carries a small satchel, and the smell of it hits me before he kneels: ink, herbs, something metallic and sterile.
He stops outside the sealing ring and studies me.
Not my face. Not my wounds.
My stillness.
The way my mouth closes too fast when I breathe.
The way my wrist pulses faintly even when no one touches it.
His gaze drops to the board on the floor. To the word.
His lips part slightly, then close again, as if he decided reacting is unprofessional.
The older Root operative speaks.
"Proceed," he says.
The Yamanaka nods once.
No greeting.
No reassurance.
Just a tiny, controlled acceptance that he is about to climb into a child's mind for the benefit of someone who calls children assets.
The first thing he does is place a tag on the floor just outside the ring.
It flares faintly, and the hum in the room deepens—like a second layer of containment settling over the first.
My ribs tighten, instinctive.
The tether responds with a slow pulse, warm and heavy, then the cold depth beneath it shifts as if something inside Naruto rolls over in its sleep.
The Yamanaka's eyes flick to my chest.
"Breathing restriction," he says quietly.
One Root operative answers. "Restraint seal. Standard."
The Yamanaka's gaze slides to my mouth. "Tongue."
The Root operative's tone is flat. "Correct."
Then the Yamanaka looks at my wrist.
At the bandage.
At the seal ring under skin.
At the regulation tag layered over it.
His calm tightens by a hair.
"Not standard," he murmurs.
The older Root operative answers without emotion. "Proceed."
The Yamanaka doesn't argue.
He kneels and opens his satchel.
Inside are small things that look harmless: a strip of cloth, a brush, a vial of ink, and a short length of cord.
The cord is what makes my stomach drop.
Because cord means restraint without seals. It means they expect my body to fight even if my mouth can't.
A Root operative steps behind me and clamps his hands on my shoulders.
Careful of my stump.
Not gentle.
I don't thrash.
I can't afford to.
The tether pulses faintly, as if disappointed I'm not more entertaining.
The Yamanaka pours ink into a shallow dish and dips the brush.
He draws a symbol on the cloth strip—small, neat, precise. Then he reaches forward and wraps the strip around my forehead.
Ink touches skin.
Cold.
The symbol settles, and something in my head… shifts.
Not pain.
Clarity narrowing.
Like the world has gone a half-step further away and my mind has become a room with the door locked from the outside.
The Yamanaka's voice is calm. "I will enter."
As if he's announcing a polite visit.
He places two fingers against my temple.
I flinch.
The Root hands on my shoulders tighten, holding me in place.
The Yamanaka closes his eyes.
I feel chakra press into my skull.
Not like a punch.
Like fingers sliding between thoughts.
The room's hum deepens.
My tether gives a slow pulse—warm, heavy.
The cold depth beneath it shifts.
Attentive.
And then the world tilts sideways.
---
It doesn't look like a dream.
It looks like my memories have been poured into a dark hallway and someone is walking through with a lantern, choosing which doors to open.
Images flare—too sharp, too real—things that belong to Souta's body: Academy desks, cheap ramen smell, bruised wrists, a narrow futon in a cramped room.
Then—
A panel.
Not a memory. Not a scene from this world.
A flat, wrong image with outlines too clean, colors too perfect.
Naruto's face, drawn, smiling.
The forbidden format.
My stomach lurches even in this half-state.
The moment the image appears, pain spikes behind my eyes like someone drove a nail through my skull.
The hallway shakes.
The Yamanaka's presence stiffens, startled by resistance he didn't expect.
He pushes.
The panel flickers.
I feel my mind recoil, not out of willpower but out of *punishment*. Reality slapping the thought away like it did every time I tried to plan too cleanly.
Incomplete knowledge, my mind thinks wildly. Dangerous knowledge. Knowledge that fights back.
The Yamanaka's voice echoes strangely, distant. "Interesting."
He opens another door.
Mizuki.
The swing.
Naruto's desperate grin.
Iruka's tired eyes.
The forest clearing, shuriken spinning—
My severed hand in dirt.
Pain detonates across my shoulder stump so hard I nearly vomit. Even in my mind, my body remembers losing parts of itself. The image is too real. The smell of blood and wet earth floods my senses.
The Yamanaka's presence falters for a heartbeat as the trauma hits.
I take that moment and do the only thing I can think of:
I shove the memory toward him.
Not the meta. Not the panels.
Just the raw, human scene.
Let him drown in the obvious truth: I got hurt. Mizuki betrayed. Naruto lived. I bled.
The Yamanaka steadies himself and continues.
He searches deeper, past the forest, past the hospital smell, past the ANBU masks.
Root corridors.
Danzo's eye.
A kunai in my hand. Blood on stone. The dead spy's face.
My stomach turns over.
The Yamanaka pauses on that.
His presence tightens, like this is the kind of content he was warned about—Root conditioning, violence as compliance.
He pushes harder.
And that's when the tether reacts.
Warm weight around my ribs surges, even inside my mind.
The hallway trembles.
A cold undertow rises beneath it, vast and amused.
The doors in the memory-hallway shake as if something huge is moving behind them.
The Yamanaka's presence stiffens again.
"What is—" he begins, and the question is swallowed by something that isn't sound.
A laugh.
Low, ancient, delighted.
The red place flashes behind my eyes—bars, chains, and the enormous gaze opening like a door.
**Little.**
The intent presses against my awareness, not like speech, like pressure. Like a weight leaning closer to the crack.
The Yamanaka recoils.
Not physically. Mentally.
His chakra stutters in my head, and for one second the contact loosens.
I seize it.
Not to escape—there's nowhere to go.
To *hide.*
I shove the forbidden panel-images deeper, burying them under trauma and noise. I flood the surface with Souta's memories—school, hunger, fear, blood—anything that looks normal in a shinobi's world.
The Yamanaka tries to reassert control.
And the red gaze looks back through me again.
Not angry.
Curious.
Hungry.
As if it recognizes someone else in my skull and finds the intrusion amusing.
The laugh deepens.
The memory-hallway warps—doors bending, walls breathing.
The Yamanaka's presence strains.
He pushes anyway, and I feel his technique scrape against something sharp inside me.
Not a thought.
A seal.
Danzo's regulation tag on the tether.
Root's tongue curse.
The restraint on my chest.
Layers of ownership embedded into flesh.
The Yamanaka hits them like a man walking into invisible tripwires.
Pain explodes in my head.
I convulse in the real world—shoulders jerking under Root's hands.
I can't scream. My tongue seal clamps down and bites hard enough that the taste of blood floods my mouth.
The Yamanaka gasps—an actual sound, outside the mind-space.
His chakra falters again.
And in that falter, the red gaze presses closer.
**Mine.**
The word forms again—not spoken, but shaped so clearly it feels like it lands on the inside of my skull with weight.
The Yamanaka's presence freezes.
Not from fear.
From comprehension.
He has recognized something that no shinobi is supposed to recognize with calm.
A bijuu's attention.
And he is inside the conduit.
Inside me.
His mind brushes the tether and the tether brushes him back.
Hard.
---
My eyes snap open in the real room.
I gasp—shallow, restrained, lungs still under a seal—and I see the Yamanaka jerking backward, one hand clapped over his own temple as if trying to hold his thoughts in place.
Blood beads at his nostril.
His face is pale.
The older Root operative leans in slightly. "Report."
The Yamanaka swallows once, hard. "There is… interference."
His voice is strained, but he's still trying to be professional. "Something inside the tether—something vast—responded to my contact."
The older Root operative's expression doesn't change. "Confirm the word."
The Yamanaka's eyes flick to the board on the floor: **MINE**.
He nods once.
"Anything else?" Root asks.
The Yamanaka hesitates.
And that hesitation is the first human thing I've seen from him.
"His mind contains… foreign structure," he says carefully. "Not genjutsu. Not implanted memory. Something… formatted."
Formatted.
My blood turns to ice.
He saw the panels.
Not clearly, maybe. But he saw enough to name the shape.
The older Root operative's eyes sharpen by a fraction. "Explain."
The Yamanaka's mouth tightens. "I couldn't access it cleanly. Resistance causes pain feedback. And the entity reacts."
Entity.
He isn't calling it a fox yet.
He's calling it what it is: a presence with agency.
The older Root operative nods slowly, like he's confirming a report he expected.
"Danzo-sama will be informed," he says.
My stomach drops.
The Yamanaka looks at me one last time—something like pity flickering and being crushed back into neutrality. Then he steps away from the ring.
"I recommend no further probing without stronger containment," he says.
Root doesn't answer with words.
They answer by stepping closer.
A new tag is produced—thicker ink, heavier script.
The older operative holds it between fingers like a verdict.
"We will not probe deeper," he says calmly. "We will not risk waking it fully."
Waking it fully.
My blood turns cold.
He continues, "But we will ensure the asset cannot leak."
The tag touches my throat.
Ink bites.
Cold spreads under skin like a collar being fitted.
Not the tongue seal.
Something new.
A suppression seal keyed to intent, maybe. A way to damp thoughts before they become actions.
My ribs tighten as the tether reacts, annoyed, then dulls again under regulation.
I try to breathe.
The chest seal limits it.
I try to swallow.
The new throat seal makes it feel like swallowing past a knot.
The older Root operative speaks one last line, flat as a report.
"Prepare transport. Return him to Konoha tonight."
Return.
Back to Danzo.
Back into Naruto's orbit.
Back into a story that punishes me for proximity and now has multiple hands pulling at the tether.
As they lift me from the ring, my splinted wrist throbs and my fingers twitch uselessly.
The Yamanaka wipes blood from his nose and refuses to look at me again.
The older Root operative leans down close to my ear, voice quiet enough to feel like a secret.
"You will not mention the word," he says.
My tongue seal coils.
My throat seal tightens.
Even if I wanted to, I don't think I could.
He straightens.
"And if it speaks again," Root adds calmly, "you will be awake to listen."
They blindfold me.
The world becomes motion—stairs, turns, damp air, then the sharp scent of the sea again.
But under the blindfold, under the seals, under the pain, something else is happening.
The tether pulses once.
Warm, heavy.
And beneath it, cold depth shifts—not amused now.
Focused.
As if whatever looked back through me has learned something from the mind probe.
Learned that there are other minds touching its cage.
Learned that I am a crack in the wall.
And as the blindfold rubs against my lashes and the boat creaks underfoot, I feel a presence press gently against the edge of my consciousness—so soft it's almost tender—
and the intent that follows is not laughter.
It is a question shaped like hunger:
Who are you?