They had come in the dark of night, shrouded in shadow, their black cloaks carrying strange sigils. Hina had been home alone, it wasn't a common occurrence but one that had taken place enough to quiet the nagging in her head, the same that often twisted her gut making her feel ill at ease with her loneliness. Hina felt naked without her sister asleep in the next room, but on this night had convinced herself that all was well, that nothing was out to get her as one's imagination might insist, when left to its own devices.

There had been a knock at the door, followed by a warning bark from a dog next door she allowed to sleep inside on the mat in front of the fireplace. During the warmer months they did not light the fires, but the dog next door stretched his toes out as if he could feel the ghostly warmth of routine radiating from the moonlight. The young woman had barely had time to get out from under the warm covers of her bed when they charged in, swords and daggers drawn as if hunting down a criminal, but there were no criminals here, only Hina and the dog outside that sprinted into the house to cause a commotion.

There had been no time to dress or pack, and no food to take for the road. Hina had been captured by a group she had no idea about. She fought and struggled, but it was clear that giving them any resistance was futile. She was scooped up and set down on a horse with her hands and mouth tied, she had endured the journey in the long, white nightgown they had found her in. Upon arriving in some secret dungeon, she was permitted to bath only to return to the same gown, washed and dried at least, but wrong, it felt all wrong to stand barefoot in her nightgown when everyone around her was fully dressed.

That night she had been taken to the dungeon and went dumb like a lamb to slaughter, not knowing until it was too late where they were taking her. She spent the night on a cold wooden bench, being questioned though the iron wall of bars, to which her only reply was, "What the hell is going on here," Hina asked, “does Takao know I’m in here? I’m his assistant, if you didn’t know. He’ll come for me!” The kage had not been informed of his assistant’s prompt disappearance, nor would he be.

"Fuck her," one of the knights hissed, "you have a boat to catch, leave her to the executioner, he'll make her talk." Hina still didn’t know what they even want to know. For kidnappers they didn’t do this very well. On the next morning, she sat, arms wrapped about her legs, balled up against the wall of her prison wondering what in the world was going on. She knew nothing about where she was or why she had been captured. Each time the iron door leading to the cells was opened and light flooded the hall, Hina flinched, anticipating the worst, fear like heavy, jagged stones sat in her belly, and sweat made her palms sticky, causing her to rub her hands over one another nervously. Was she really going to be questioned by this executioner? She had all but forgotten her hunger, they had kept her fed but worry made it difficult to keep anything down, now all she wanted in the world was a glass of water, along with her freedom, even if it meant walking back to her home on bare feet.

The door flew open again and this time a tall man moved down the hall to stand in front of her cell, he wasn't wearing the same colors as the last guards had been, but she could tell he worked for the more shady branches of ANBU, and judging by the brightness of the sunlight that had followed him in through the door, she would have guessed that it was almost mid day. "Can I have some water?" Hina asked and watched as he used a long iron key with three short, narrow teeth to open her cell door. "Come on, girl, time to meet a friend of ours."

The young woman noticed a burning torch held in the man's other hand and got to her feet, assuming they were to head away from the light of freedom towards the strange, cold darkness that smelled of death and decay. She steadied her resolve, tried to hold her chin up and watched as her hands were bound, this time with iron cuffs where it had once been rope. They followed a winding staircase down into the bowels of the dungeon and traversed the narrow corridors until the smell and the anticipation of her impending doom became too much. The guard dragged Hina into the executioner's room, visibly unconscious, and let go of the chain linked between the cuffs that kept her hands bound. "All yours," he spat, "boss wants answers by tomorrow morning."

Darkness was the executioner’s invite to unleash his malice onto the world and the kind, caring mark of his labored hands had become daggers carving a memory of pain onto the hearts of his victims as they screamed for mercy. Another came to him today, a lady who had recently taken up the mantle of Kage’s Assistant. Shadows sneered from every corner of the room shrouding its emptiness, bar a single wooden table laden with a row of torture tools and a single cup, for this all that was needed was a knife. Waiting patiently for her arrival the executioner sat in blue robes, looking out at her from behind a mask and underneath lie what remained of a broken man bound by his duty to inflict pain, a duty he chose. He looked up at the young woman, if beauty held any consequence to politics then she might have been free from him, to flee with her knight in shining bullshit to live happily ever after alas fate was not so kind. Reaching out his gloved fingertips curled and gripped at her shoulder as he shook her awake. He wasted no time returning to the bench to grab his tools.

Tap, tap, tap the sound of knives tested wood "I'm going to ask you a few questions. Co-operate and this will be easier for you," he said, his voice muffled from the mask. Instructed to cut away from the more obvious areas of the woman's body the executioner use his free hand to nimbly unlace the noble's bodice and let it fall to the ground. A small wave of sadness washed over the man as he stood before her. Naked and vulnerable to his whim and clasped in iron he pressed the sharp edge of a small blade against her hips, ready to carve into her flesh "Tell me why you were accepted as his assistant. What is your lineage? Don’t think we don’t know Braveheart is just some made up hogwash.”


Startled by the sudden force applied to her shoulder, Hina jolted awake, wide-eyed and frozen with fright, she stared at the masked figure, scarlet eyes fixed on the part of his disguise that allowed him to see; was there a soul behind the mask, she wondered, and had her wordless reply moments later, gown discarded, but not of her choosing. Her nightdress caught on her wrists where it could not pass her bound hands, Hina snatched it against her with a sharp gasp, covering her full breasts and thin midsection, she had been fucked in more embarrassing positions than this but the circumstances were definitely unenjoyable.

The tip of his knife touched her hip, causing Hina to inch back against the cold stone wall behind her. What had he asked? She tried desperately to recall; kage and assistant. Her feet felt warm and her ankles stung, and it wasn't until a sharp smell assaulted Hina's senses that she realised she had lost control of her bladder. She raised her hands slowly to cover her mouth with the gown she clung to and cried into balled fists, why on earth was this happening to her?

Body trembling and breath drawn in short, shaky gasps, she tried to speak only to be swiftly betrayed by her own voice, a wheezed sigh in place of words, as if the air had been punched out of her lungs. The rasp unnerved her, perhaps more than the promise of pain, for she had never felt so out of control in her own skin. The time for pride and honor had passed, her kage was not coming to her rescue, in fact she was now quite certain that no one knew where she was or who had taken her. Hina's heart thumped so hard in her chest that she could feel the blood pulsing through her ears.

"I don't know anything about my past," she stared right at the man's mask, hot tears streaming down over her cheeks. "I swear."

Piss trickled down from the woman's legs onto the floor as she scurried with her back toward the walls, crying her eyes out. Unable to give in to his softer nature the executioner stood looming over her with a moment of regret. No, in this place the executioner was no longer a human being, he was a demon. Predator to prey the man drew closer, kneeling over her as he used his weight to fix her back against the stone "You have one chance and only one chance to save yourself from me, what do you know about your parents?" the gnarled bellow of his voice erupted into her ears.

Little achievement came from having her against the wall like this, if she moved around too much there is a risk he could catch her somewhere he was ordered not to. Discarding the knife into a small pocket hidden beneath the blue cloth of his robe, he lifted her toward the torture rack where he tied her chains above her head and bound her feet. A more brutal form of torture, he would not leave her there long. The binds on the rack were designed to dislocate limbs after long periods of time and as much as the man tried to deny it, he still had a heart.

“Give me something so I can stop this. I don’t want to hurt you more than I have to,” he whispered, retracting the fury in his explanation. “What do you know of your parent’s past? Tell me what you can do.” he reiterated, removing the knife once more he dropped his hand back to the side of her hip, slowly cutting across the skin to draw a tiny bit of blood. It didn’t take a lot for the interrogator to be convinced that she knew very little about what he wanted to know, but he needed something and torture was not about kindness. Hina hadn't gone easy to the rack, she had never seen the torture device in action but she had heard stories. None of her thrashing or wild kicks seemed to catch or deter the man, nor did gravity allow her to make herself too heavy for him to carry by throwing her weight down by going limp. Feet and hands bound, she gasped, short sharp breaths that saw her lungs deprived of what routine had taught them, every rib bone on show.

The man whispered something and for a second the woman might have almost convinced herself that he would be fair, right up until the point that he drew blood before she even had time to speak. Other than a few light scars on her knees gathered throughout her childhood, Hina's body had been left relatively unscathed in her twenty one years of life, but it seemed that was all about to change. It was difficult to tell whether the man anticipated some kind of truth he believed she wasn't sharing, or hoped to coax a satisfactory lie from her lips in order to sate his master's demands; like a hunter's dog, he did no close his jaws about the rabbit's skull for his own enjoyment, but to please his master. Her scream echoed down the narrow corridor, a sound she didn't recognize or wholeheartedly believe was born of her breath. Frantic and sure now that words like no and please meant little to the man, Hina twisted her hip away from his knife and shook her head, unable to move little else. "I know nothing, I swear. I’ve never met any other relatives and I have no proficiency with any types of clan jutsu! Please stop!!!"

Blood drew from her skin as it carved underneath flesh, sawing it from the bone. Her screams carried through the hallways like ringing church bells, echoing against the stone as she began to summon his darkness. "You think you know pain little girl?" he asked, outlining the pale flesh of her skin with the tips of his fingers "Mercy," he echoed as cool laughter drew from his lips. "Mercy!" He withdrew from her "Earn it," he sneered, wandering back toward the table. Removing a single wooden cup, he showed her the fresh, clean liquid inside and laid it at her feet "Here is your mercy, when you answer you may drink." It would only take time now until her muscles began to ache and he could confirm that he knew the truth. The renowned woman everyone knew as a proud lioness was before him as but a lamb in the face of pain, he predicted she would not last long. On another day, in a different place, at a different time he would have saved her. Battling with his inner turmoil he cursed himself, executioner or smith, man or monster. He desperately fought the urge to let her go then and there. The hand of the master’s intentions, he was to break her until she fell limp and afraid, to treat her as a sack of meat with a treasury full of sentences. Yet maybe fortune favored her, new to his trade his hands were softer than those of his superiors who remained unmoved by the woes of the suffering.

Earn mercy, Hina stilled as the words rattled around in her head, she had been dragged from her home in the middle of the night without warning, forced to endure a trip to this dungeon with her hands bound, hounded, slapped around, questioned, and made to drink dirty water from the creek if she would accept water at all. Now she was being tortured without proper question for a kage the executioner clearly hated enough to rebel against. She opened her eyes, lay still, and embraced the pain and heat as blood welled where flesh had been lifted, only to spilled down over her hip, between her legs and across her belly. The woman could still all but the persistent shivering caused by the fear locked in every muscle. Hina didn’t say anything anymore. She didn’t have anything else she could possibly say that could make this better. It was clear that the man wanted to know what her latent abilities were, for reasons she couldn’t possibly fathom.

"I will not conquer you today little lion," the interrogator’s voice softened into a gentle whisper as he moved away, somewhat impressed by her resolve. He stepped closer to her and stayed his coarse mask against her face "but we cannot stop until we are sure you are no foreign spy," his hands lifted toward the binds, taking a hold of the chains that cuffed her wrist and held her there "Not knowing the answer to my question does not excuse me from finding your lineage." He started grabbing Hina’s body and inspecting it. Every inch of her naked body was examined while he cross referenced a handbook that he had with him. He murmured as he worked and Hina deduced that he was attempting to find something, anything that would point to what clan she was. She couldn’t imagine what would happen to her if he found out that she was from a foreign nation, not that she even thought that was the case. He found nothing, even after even digging into her wound and taking out blood samples.

The executioner growled and kicked open a chest. At this point he didn’t think Hina had any bloodline of interest. Perhaps her parents had been criminals from afar who had settled down here. Well, he hoped for Hina’s sake that there was something else to their story. He pulled out some kind of container that had a series of different orbs in it. There was a small chunk of ice, a tangle of roots, a glowing rock, and several other objects that Hina couldn’t properly see. The executioner pressed each orb into her skin and observed. He went through ever single one, pressing so hard that Hina’s skin would be left bruised. He was checking for elemental nature now using a method Hina had never known was possible. He was seeing if her body reacted to any advanced element favorably yet none had worked out so far. Then, came the tangle of roots. He pressed the roots onto her bare back and let out a shocked gasp.

“You’re… a senju…” the man said shocked. This woman was related to the very first hokage and he had just done unspeakable things to her. It was a good thing that he had disguised his voice and even his face. Chances were, Hina would never run into him again with how secret this operation was. Having achieved his objective, The executioner performed a genjutsu on Hina to knock her out and suppress the memories. It was time to get Hina back home now that it was clear that there was no way Hina was a threat to this nation.

Hatred against hatred smith overcame executioner and his rage took a hold of him as he quickly gathered his things and left through the door, slamming it shut on his way out. What was he to become? Furious he stormed down the shit stinking corridor and signaled to the guard "She's in there waiting for you, get the poor fucking thing some water while you're at it." The guard took a moment to register the large executioners rage, the man himself was by no means small but even behind the confines of robes it was not difficult to the sheer mass of muscle the executioner carried in his arms. How could they have lost track of a branch off of the senju clan?

Hina woke up in her bed with a note clenched in her fists. Her wounds had been healed and there was no evidence that anything had happened to her. She remembered being in pain, but that was about it. The memories were there, locked deep inside her mind to be awakened one day if she found the means to. The note read:

“Hina Braveheart. You have senju blood in you, though I doubt you are aware. Now that you are aware, it is essential that you develop your birthright powers for the good of Konohagakure. Live on.”

“Huh? I’m Senju!?”