Come the Devil to Pay

Part 1

They had finally succeeded. Konoha village, the finest producer of ninja in all the lands, had finally erased her emotions. She thought it had been impossible. Hell, anyone would have thought she would have been a lost cause, as much as she tried to conceal it from those who didn't need to know. So many years. So many years had given her immense practice in hiding her feelings but hiding them and erasing them all together were two very different things.

She had been a much bigger project. Maybe even a bigger project than Naruto himself. He felt too much. But he was stronger than her. She had always been weak, and that's why she had struggled with this so much.

She thought that she perhaps was somewhat mad. Perhaps she had something of a personality disorder. It wasn't that uncommon. Lots of people with personality disorders were good at hiding it. Though she wondered how many of them where aware that something was wrong with them. She thought that maybe she was blessed that she was aware of her own weaknesses, as best to try to remedy them herself as much as she could manage. But other times she realized it was much of a curse to realize you were bat shit crazy and could do nothing to stop it.

A girl spilling a few tears from time to time was accepted of an ordinary human, but not a ninja. A child may cry, but not one of them, no matter the age. She had sobbed in front of too many people, the enemy, her comrades, pleading and begging for mercy. Weakness. She had always been weak.

Naruto was blind to such behavior and was perhaps the only one that didn't judge her for it. Her superiors were silent about it, for they didn't need to speak of her faults, just their disapproving looks made it clear that she was a mistake. The enemy never showed any mercy. She had to be rescued by her team numerous times.

She did a pretty good job at hiding it. As she got better at hiding it, the people around her assumed that she had only matured, grew out of her weaknesses, but no, her obsession had in fact grew out of control, just nobody knew it. It helped that her natural intelligence and ability to learn her job overlooked any breakdowns that she could occasionally have. She knew her stuff. She was Konoha's best medical ninja in practice. She was possibly better than Tsunade at this point, but no one mentioned so while the Sannin still breathed. Not only had she mastered her chakra control to work tirelessly for months on numerous patients without much rest or sustenance, but she was a quick thinker, steady with her hands, and had a much better percentage of success than anyone else in the village. She knew the human body like her favorite book, each and every cell like the letters of well-loved words and quotes. She could perform operations without any chakra if needed be, and what she was really good at was keeping people alive, if they wanted to be alive or not.

She had her doubts about her profession. Any day, she thought for sure Kakashi would come and tell her she was no longer needed, that she wasn't meant for this line of work, that she should just stay home. Even though she had past the academy, she had seen others dismissed just as easily. She knew, if she hadn't been as good as she was, her behavior wouldn't have been tolerated for nearly as long as it had, but she did her job, and no one said anything.

Keep the prisoners alive. That was all she had to do. She didn't need to think about it. She didn't dare to think about it.

Valuable information could be gathered from a prisoner, even if dead. The Ninja body was unique to each one, each with its own techniques and types of chakras. Specialized body parts could be taken. If the prisoner was still alive then even more valuable information could be gathered from their minds; plans of ambush, information of the enemy, the technique on the different jutsu themselves. Most prisoners would die before giving up such information. She was to save the suicidal.

Keeping the captive subdued and unconscious was the best way to prevent them from harming themselves, but sometimes, one would slip through the procedure and awake. She oversaw then saving their life. Usually it was poison. She knew every poison and could detect with just a graze of her fingertip. She checked on all of them routinely. Blood wasn't usually spilled but there was the odd man that would try to slit his own throat or wrists. She knew all their blood types and could supply a blood transfusing to anyone that may have lost too much blood before being found and healed. Keeping them alive had been what finally killed her emotions, she thought.