Danzo sat on the cold stone bench in a flimsy prisoner's jumpsuit and stared at the man across from him, waiting. He was content to wait. Time waiting meant time not being interrogated, which increased the chances of his countermeasures getting him out before the Yamanaka broke through the hardened walls of his mind. The pain from his empty eye socket and the stump of his arm was excruciating, his head felt full of cotton and steel wool, but his first instinct was not to show it in his bearing. Shinobi who showed weakness did not last long. He learned that lesson early. Perhaps it might not be the best choice at this moment though. Sarutobi always did have a soft heart.

Sarutobi Hiruzen stared through the bars outside of the cell. In the harsh light of the prison, his face seemed riven by great crags and rocky outcroppings. An ancient thing of almost indefinable age. Danzo supposed he might well look the same. Gods and silence, when did that happen? They'd just gone along one day at a time, each trying to defend their home in their own way and before they knew it they were old and bitter, and everything was complicated. Things used to be so simple when they were young. You took a mission, you killed the enemy, you went home. None of this political bullshit.

Sarutobi was first to break the silence. "I never thought you'd fall to this." The act gave Danzo a sliver of bitter satisfaction at not being first to break, then the words registered.

"This?" A flicker of a frown passed Danzo's features before his expression smoothed out. "Oh, you think I'm a traitor. You never were good at looking at things from a dispassionate perspective."

"A dispassionate perspective." Sarutobi seemed disbelieving. "That's what you're going to go with."

"That is what I have come to believe." Danzo rumbled. "This eye." He pointed to the empty socket, once again covered in bandages. "I lost this eye fighting Rock infiltrators near the border. I walk with a cane, from holding off those two Lightning shinobi in the second world war, so you could take out the third. Do you remember?" He looked up for a moment then quirked a half smile. "Of course you do. All my days I have defended Konoha with my pride, my body, my life. Our village. I. Have. Defended." He stared off into the distance for a moment. "But it wasn't enough." His voice gained volume, weight. "My body failed me, the Kyuubi attacked and we were weak, vulnerable. So very close to the edge. Konoha stands in the middle of the map, no safe retreat for us. No convenient fortress, no great defence beyond the bodies of our shinobi. If we are not strong we will be torn down from every side. We could have fallen a dozen times. So, I gave up my pride." His words fell like stones smashing into the earth. "Because. This. Village. Is. More. Important."

"You did more than just give up your pride." Sarutobi replied, outrage written across his features in block capitals. "Don't act like this was some great sacrifice that you alone made. You defiled the first Hokage! You took from his corpse and implanted it into yourself. Against every law and custom, you betrayed my old sensei and every bloodline bearing clan who holds this place as safe!"

"He was dead!" Danzo shouted, head forward and shoulders back. Then his voice dropped with his gaze as he muttered. "He was dead. He died defending the village. His spirit went to the pure lands. What was left doesn't matter to him where he is now. He should have wanted what was left to help defend the village he made."

"And the children who died for your ambition? Thirty children, orphans who I swore to protect!" There was that old fire, that old fire that made Sarutobi so very dangerous.

"If we could have perfected the procedure! Every shinobi would have had it. Picture it, wood release in every clanless Konoha shinobi! We would have been untouchable."

"But it didn't work."

"No, it didn't work." Danzo sighed. "I wasn't expecting so many to die. I had hoped… but it didn't work, no. It would have been worth it if only it had worked. So many lives could have been saved."

Sarutobi turned away, and was that disgust Danzo saw on his face? Surely not. He'd expected that he would keep up the act in public - after all he had to keep the clans happy - but at the very least he thought he would understand in private. This… this was not expected. Perhaps there was a byakugan watching them even now? "And the eyes?"

"We could have had ten more of Kakashi. If one went to every clan, it might have been… well. It wasn't to be. The fall of the Uchiha scared them, and with the purges in Kiri they closed down completely." He sighed. "After that there wasn't much for it. I did the job that needed doing, and because of that Konoha is still here to punish me for it."

"You did not 'do the job that needed doing'," Sarutobi's voice dripped with contempt. "You took young children with the potential to be shinobi, and you made them into brothers, and then you made them kill each other as a psychological ploy! A fifty percent death rate for a training regimen is not acceptable!"

Danzo tilted up his head and fixed him with a one eyed stare. "Is it really so much worse than what we lived through? What was done to us?"

"We were at war!" He roared. "That was cruelty by necessity, this is cruelty by design."

"Five."

Sarutobi refused to rise to his bait.

Danzo waited a long moment before speaking, grinding on calmly and simply as if this was the most self-evident thing in the world. "That is the number of potential existential threats to Konoha that my forces have quietly removed. We never stopped being at war, it just moved to the shadows. And because of me, we are winning that war. The twelve years of peace that everyone attributes to your 'kindly rule'? Me. Me without the praise. Me without the adulation. Me without my face carved into a mountainside for everyone to see like some absurd testament to my ego. Just the quiet satisfaction of knowing that I did the job that needed to be done, and the crushing regret of the mistakes I made along the way. I took it all upon myself." Why couldn't he see? Why couldn't he see? It was all to protect this village. His home. "And now I am an old man, filled with regrets. Will you take that too? I've given everything else. I suppose it's only appropriate that I give my life at the end.

"Oh don't play the martyr. 'Potential threats', do you even hear yourself?" Sarutobi sounded so very tired. "How many of those were actually anti-Konoha when you took it upon yourself to kill them? Those could have been allies, strong allies. And by the gods, I've been insisting to the other Kage all this time that Konoha didn't do these things. No wonder they've been prickly, hard to deal with."

"It was necessary."

"Necessary he says. Necessary," Hiruzen raged bitterly. " I'll tell you what your 'necessary' has done. Jiraiya found a boy, a boy with the legendary Rinnegan. Oh yes. He found him, and he trained him for three years. He was going to take over Ame, and we would have had a strong three part alliance." His voice turned accusatory, dripping venom. "Then your shinobi botched his assassination and killed his teammate. Now he's gone crazy - as S-rank nin do - and got together an organisation of almost a dozen S-ranked nin on top of commanding an entire country. And do you know the best part? He hates us. He despises us for what we did, for what you did. That is the fruit of your 'necessary'."

The words hit Danzo like physical blows. Almost a dozen S-ranked nin? That was an absurd amount of power for a minor country to have. How could this have happened?

"Still, you were saying earlier about giving your life for Konoha." Sarutobi sounded contemplative. "Perhaps you can still atone for your crimes, assuming the Yamanaka don't find anything else to lay at your feet. Here is what you are going to do…"

The plan was simple and as Danzo heard it, he despaired. He had likely already been noted as missing, the failsafes had already been activated. Agents would be moving, information would change hands, plans would be put into motion. It was too late to stop it now, his only choice was to ride the wave to its finish and try to salvage something from this entire mess.

The thing about certain moves was that even if you knew about them in advance, you still had to play the game against them. There were few truly irreplaceable pieces, but then he didn't need irreplaceable, just sufficiently valuable.